Lecture 11:(cont) On Historical Knoledge & Lecture 12; Critiique

17. Nietzsche is especially skeptical of the massive accumulation of knowledge in the historical sciences. We cannot know just how things occurred. What is more, even if this were possible, it would impair the creativity of the knowledge constitutive of real history. The living moment is alive with possibilities generated by present memory. The past always depends on the present. History takes its lead from the creative energies of the present. Against Hegel, history has no accumulative immanent meaning, no spiritual telos; humans are just another animal driven by instincts and will to power. This makes history a random process with no immanent meaning other than chance combination. Nietzsche maintains ‘man is not progressing as a species, higher types may well be reached but they are not enduring. The level of the species is not being raised’. More succinctly: ‘”Mankind” does not advance, it does not even exist”(WP, 55). With Nietzsche there is a loss of historical optimism; he expresses the disappointed hopes of and growing pessimism of bourgeois civilisation in the last quarter of the 19th century. History is fragmentary; there are solitary achievements in various domains by great individuals but no cumulative unity:

‘These individuals do not carry forward any kind of process but live contemporaneously with one another, thanks to history… one giant calls to another across the desert intervals of time and, undisturbed by the excited chattering dwarfs who creep about beneath them, the exalted spirit-dialogue goes on. It is the task of history to be the mediator between them and us again and again to inspire and lend the strength for the production of the great man. No, the goal of humanity cannot lie in its end but only in its highest exemplars’ (UM, 111)

He goes on in another place: ‘humanity grows only through veneration of what is rare and great. Even something that is merely imagined to be rare and great, something miraculous, for example, has that effect. Fright is the best part of humanity,’ (CW11, 30). As we have seen with his account of the master and slave, Nietzsche views the masters as the creators of society. Mores are forged by the actions of powerful individual personalities, not by the immanent social rationality of communal practice. This is the basis for his critique of the Enlightenment ideal of humanity. This ideal is an abstraction. Achievements are never of equal value: the ascent of humanity is represented only by superior individuals and any hindrance to them, like misguided ”humanitarianism”, is a crime against humanity. The ethical corollary of this account of history as a series of peaks, incommensurable and impossible to rank, is the rejection of all herd ideas of the common good that find expression in the fiction of humanitas. As we have seen already, Nietzsche argues that the normal dynamics of society favoring stability, security and material well-being further undermine the possibilities of great achievement: ‘Has it been noticed that in heaven all the interesting men are missing? —Just a hint to the girls as to where they can best find their salvation’ (WP, 467) Nietzsche’s aim is to expose social ideals that support only the sickly and the botched and to point to the conditions and creative devices that allow peak achievements to be not just sustained but encouraged. This is the idea of culture as “improved physis”

18. While Nietzsche views individuals as the bearers of culture, this does not signify historical evolution: this does not mean that history has a goal or a supra-individual meaning. Life is open-ended, achievements are just way-stations not to a single pre-determined telos but to still higher stages. What is the meaning of life in a world where "God is dead", where we can no longer tolerate appeals to transcendent meanings, where the challenge is to live without illusions, where the only purpose must be immanent? Nietzsche's answers to these questions all centered around the notion of the individual or, more precisely, the noble, higher individuals. In a completely de-mythologised vision of life, only the activity of the higher man striving for self-overcoming, striving for cultural perfection and the creation of higher values makes life worth living at all.

Lecture 12: Nietzsche Critique

19. I now want to briefly consider his attitude to nationalism. This is particularly interesting in so far as its in his time that Germany finally achieves unification in 1866 and founds the Second Reich after Bismarck’s triumphant diplomatic and military victory over the French in 1871. The belated character of the German development to nationhood had meant that the idea of nation had primarily a cultural meaning in the German context. Nationhood referred to language and the classical cultural achievement of the late 18th century. The importance of culture in this constellation gave it an unprecedented role in thinking about the nation. This was especially the case for the Bildungsburgertum, the cultured bourgeois class to which the intellectuals belonged. Against this background it is not surprising that somebody like Nietzsche, primarily concerned with questions of culture, should conceive the question of German nationhood intimately connected to cultural expectations. As a young man during the wars of unification he had affirmed the idea of the German nation-state and expected that new political epoch engendered by the unification of 1866 would bringa about its cultural blossoming. While initially surprised by Bismarck’s achievement he is not opposed to even the new militarism. The strategy that achieved German unification involved little in the way of devastation or comparative loss of life. It was easy to hold on to Hegel’s relatively benign view of war. War turns the individual away from private concerns, it tests the great man and generates the energy and inspiration for cultural achievement. Initially, war fitted neatly into Nietzsche’s own paradigm of agonal context in social and cultural life where great vitality and achievement is a product of tension, struggle and comparability. This allows him to celebrate and aestheticize war associating it with martial virtue, spiritualisation and manliness. Nevertheless, Nietzsche increasingly expresses concerns about the disappearance of the flower of the new generation and its cultural costs. However, it is still no surprise to find that Nietzsche was very popular in the trenches of the First World War. Incidentally, after being discharged during officer training from a horse raiding accident, Nietzsche volunteered to serve as an ambulance officer at the front against the French despite his various illnesses and even after he had renounced his German citizenship to take up his Professorship at Basle.

2o. However, his attitude to German Nationalism changes after 1871. The triumphalism of the founding era and worship of victory threatened the basis of his elitist and tragic neo-Hellenic program for cultural renewal. He came to believe that the scale of the German victory and its new European hegemony had undercut the limits and agonal tensions of balance of power Realpolitik. German unity soon appeared to be more about business, taxes and military obligations than illusory cultural renewal. In its place came the pseudo-democratic spectacles of imperial grandeur and a heightened sense of relative European cultural inferiority. Now Nietzsche repudiates his initial equation of national unity with cultural effervescence. He argues that the political growth of the nation induces intellectual impoverishment, lassitude and diminished capacity for specialised works like cultural production. This feeling was compounded by his break with Wagner and his realisation that he could not be the bearer of a new religion of art. Post-war German culture is unworthy of his former ideals and nationalism is denounced as the bearer of barbarism and backwardness. He increasing comes to view it as an ideology functioning only as a weapon to ward of the threat of social revolution. Although himself no stranger to social anti-Semitism, he rejects the use of heightened anti-Semitism as a political tool of Nationalism. His final stance is that of the good European. In his last decade he becomes the representative of a sort of aristocratic cosmopolitanism. But he is an aristocrat of the spirit not of birth. The coming ruling class is justified not on the basis of race or of national greatness but of European unity. He comes to believe that a world economy would inevitably bring a world literature and the European unity formerly envisaged by Goethe and Napoleon. Increasingly alienated from German events, he finally projects himself as speaking for the handful of European thinkers who really matter or to a posited future audience of European “free spirits”. He senses that Germany and the West are in a spiritual trough but anticipates that he can lead the avant guard of an envisaged new height.

21 . To reinforce the stark and uncompromising foundation on which he requires life to be affirmed, the mature Nietzsche introduces a new myth. While the Christian faithful found solace in the promise of the eternal afterlife, Nietzsche has recourse to a reworked version of the pagan idea of "eternal recurrence" not in order to comfort but to reinforce the absolute necessity to take this earthly, immediate life with both hands. Although there are several formulations in Nietzsche, the first comes in the Gay Science (341):

‘This life, as thou livest it now, as thou has lived it, thou needst must live it again, and an infinite number of times; and there will be in it nothing new; but every grief and every joy, every thought and every sigh; the infinitely great and the infinitely little in thy life must return for thee, and all in the same sequence and the same order.’

The idea of the eternal recurrence is a metaphysical hypothesis about the fundamental structure of the world put into the service of empowering the individual will to become a law unto itself. As we have seen, Nietzsche rejects all alternative views of freedom like Kantian autonomy or modern liberalism as too ascetic or egalitarian. If the highest thing in the good life is the absolute liberation and supreme empowerment of the creative will, the individual cannot remain prisoner of the past and of time. His interpretation of eternity maintains that all things are knotted together. The mastery in the present moment of willing allows the mastery of the whole because here the past, present and future form an essential unity. A genuine assertion of will in the present simultaneously affirms and conquers both past and future.

23. The sole purpose of life is the perfection of higher individuals as the expansion of life itself: its fecundity, vitality and diversity. Nietzsche views nature as an inexhaustible infinitude. The “highest” is a goal only in the purely formal sense as what is meant is the multiplication of goals along with the individuals capable of value creation. This can be viewed as Nietzsche’s response to the false homogenisation of the abstract philosophical ideal of humanity. Yet Nietzsche own alternative is not without real theoretical problems. His own heroes are “lucky throws”; rare and unique fusions of instinct and reason in a unity that is truly beautiful. As such, these individuals transcend history and are self-contained consciences programmed only by their own perfection. To such an individual, “everything is permitted” that is in accord with the attainment of their own individuality. In this sense, man is not a goal but a bridge, but without something higher than the individual human there can be no morality and the results may well be an affront to every moral standard. Nietzsche does himself discriminate between these “lucky throws”. He could not abide a purely formal ethics of personality and tends to impose his own order of rank on the qualities of the self-created types: nobility, authenticity, strength, generosity and spontaneity. His order of rank is based on his own elitist, strongly historically embedded values. This means that Nietzsche’s ethics is either too broad and undiscriminating (referring simply to higher types) or too narrow and overloaded with his own personal values (the aristocratic, martial values of pre-Socratic societies). In the end he vacillates between an open-ended and non-existent alternative to ascetic ideals or merely affirms the values of his own personal hierarchy that are so tied to specific social conditions that many seem obsolete in contemporary conditions.

24. As regards the socio-political domain, Nietzsche’s vision of the future remains fragmentary: he considers numerous possibilities; European unification, centuries of cataclysmic wars, the rebirth of elites and the dissolution of the state with its replacement by new institutions. As his hopes for cultural renewal dissipated, his focus turned more to the future and anticipation of the philosopher of the future and the higher man. Democracy and nihilism may be culturally disastrous but they may also contain the seeds of rebirth. Disorientation may render the masses willing to subordinate themselves to a new caste of masters. For most moderns, it is hard to draw anything really positive from his social vision. Not because it is too fragmentary, but because it reaches back to classical social models. In some fundamental respects these are deeply morally problematic. They sacrifice too much of the central values of a modern liberal democratic society like formal equality.

25. Despite the backward looking and external impetus of this critique, Nietzsche’s philosophy is very much future directed. Life is dynamic, constantly projecting into the future. Only creative dynamism makes life bearable and possible for Nietzsche to affirm it. This is very much in accord with Nietzsche’s understanding of freedom as an absolute creative liberation. His noble individual demands mastery not only over the future but also the past. Yet, as we have seen, by absolutising this will to unconstrained creativity his model becomes entrapped in a sort of eternal necessity and losses all the characteristics we normally associate with freedom. In pursuing freedom to its extreme Nietzsche seems to succumb to its opposite. The same paradox ultimately also haunts the idea of the higher individual. Such an individual is supposed to be a product of a will that produces its own noble morality. Yet at the same time, this will itself is the expression of something that pre-exists, that is only discovered and not made.

26. This sense of paradox also persists in Nietzsche’s vision of modernity. On the surface, one finds a blistering attack on almost every civilisatory achievement of modernity. This has made him the inspiration for all those who are sceptical or weary of the underpinning value system of this society--reason, equality, democracy, science and humanity. Nietzsche also poses very uncomfortable questions about the relationship between culture and violence. He is also amongst the first to pose the problem of the coherence of modern cultural values. We have already seen this with Tocqueville in the political domain. Nietzsche goes further in questioning the compatibility of truth and beauty. Yet, despite this thoroughgoing critique, Nietzsche can neither escape modernity nor does he want to. Remember that nihilism is both sickness and opportunity. The latter is the prospect of the rebirth of a culture of higher individuals going beyond asceticism and nihilism in a constant revolutionising and overturning of values. It is this prospect of ongoing dynamism that renders Nietzsche a prisoner of modernity. This mean both that 1/ Nietzsche’s affirmation of higher creativity and the higher individual presupposes the dynamism that is the product of the society he despises. He wants his Ubermench to possess all the highest cultural trappings of civilisation without all the complicated dependencies and mediations on which they ultimately rest. 2/ Even Nietzsche’s higher individual is not the aristocrat of Homeric Greece but, strangely, in the most general sense also the product of bourgeois liberalism. Ancient individuality remained always embedded in roles whereas Nietzsche wants his higher individual to assert themselves against all previous bonds. Again here Nietzsche fails to acknowledge his reliance on the values of modernity he so comprehensively rejects.

27. Nietzsche represents a further instalment in the saga of modern attempts to find a new critical and undogmatic ground for modernity after the collapse of tradition and religion. I have charted the story from Kant’s notion of transcendental subjectivity, through the Hegelian concept of spirit to the Marxian critique of philosophical ideas of history and humanity in favour of concrete social actors like the proletariat. Yet, even this latter turned out to be a dogmatic myth. Nietzsche, like Marx, criticises the philosophical notion of humanity but for partly different reasons. His complaint is not against the impotence of thought or its abstraction from concrete social relations but against the repressive, homogenising character of this idol, this fiction. Such an ideal represents a real obstacle to historical creation because it sacrifices the great individual to the herd and signifies a deep fear and resentment of independent creativity. Against the leading modern ideals of freedom, justice, equality, Nietzsche wants to affirm a completely original notion of individual autonomy—self-responsibility and self-overcoming in the figure of the Ubermensch. This figure signifies an entirely new basis for the self-grounding of modernity that will rest solely on the creative energies and instincts of the new master individuals. Nietzsche clearly believes he has stripped away all dogmatic dependencies and crutches leaving only the strong creative few to supply a transitory meaning and shape to life itself. Thus the highest individuals are the sole purpose of life that is otherwise a bountiful and amoral chaos.

28. Yet, here Nietzsche’s determination to avoid all illusions falters. He clearly underestimates the importance of society even in the development of individual values. A clear instance of this is the tension between his belief in a dynamic revolutionising culture of the Ubermensch built on relatively static social models drawn from the past. Nietzsche’s attempt to affirm without illusions the contingency of modernity in the shape of creative individuality rests on too narrow a foundation. With the death of God, Nietzsche believes that the highest individuals will take his place. The philosophy of self-overcoming signifies the deification of the individual. This may be historically understandable. Nietzsche consciously reacts against modern society. He has a keen sense of his age. Even more than Tocqueville, he is aghast at the tendencies of mass society and the threat posed by supra-individual economic, political and cultural organizations and processes to the possibility of real and authentic individuality. However, to turn the individual man into God is no solution to the problem of human contingency in a de-anthropomorphised world. Omnipotence is dangerous indeed. We know that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Nietzsche wants his Ubermenschen to possess all the cultural trappings of civilisation yet he fails to fully acknowledge all the complicated mediations and dependencies on which it rests.

Take Home Exam (Due: Mon 13th June).

Late take-home exams WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED without a satisfactory excuse. All applications for the later should be addressed to (John.Grumley@sydney.edu.au) by Monday 13th June.

Submission: All Take-home essays are t0 be submitted through the Turn-It-In automated system

Instructions: Read Carefully

Answer two questions only. Each answer should be no more than 1,000 words on the basis of the Theorising Modernity booklet.

Questions:

1. Arendt believes that Marx was too much a prisoner of the modern age. Reconstruct her reasoning and consider how Marx would respond to her critique? Who is the most convincing?

2. Compare and contrast Hegel and Marx in their analysis of civil society. Who has the most adequate analysis and why? (Students who have attempted Essay Question 3 should not do this question.)

3. Both Tocqueville and Nietzsche see modernity defined by a great contemporary struggle between the values of freedom and equality. Who is the most convincing and why? (Students who have attempted Essay Questions 4 or 5 should not do this question.)

4. Nietzsche's maintains that ‘a higher culture must give man a double brain, two brain chambers, as it were, one to experience science, and one to experience non-science’. Explain the reasoning behind this vision of culture? Is it compatible with Marx vision of socialism? Who has the most plausible view and why?

5. Hegel tells us in ‘Realisation of Spirit in History’: ‘A cultured man is one who knows how to impress the stamp of universality upon all his actions, who has renounced his particularity, and who acts in accordance with universal principles.’ Explain Hegel’s reasoning for this view and consider how Nietzsche might respond to it. Is either view of culture viable today?

6.  Nietzsche explains that each age is characterised by its own ‘fruit of the season’. What are the implications of this line of thinking? To what extent are these ideas relevant to Tocqueville’s analysis of democratic culture?

7. “The master thinkers of the 19^th century no longer have much to offer us today in the second decade of the 21^st century”. Using the excerpts in the Reader discuss why the ideas of at least two thinkers in the course are no longer adequate today.

Lecture 11: Nietzsche's Critique of Christianity, Democracy and Bourgeois Society.

6. For Nietzsche, traditional philosophy and morality invert ends and means. They are means but they are transformed into ends that suppress life and distort instincts. The sickness of modern man is not an argument against life but against a form of truth that induces sickness. Nietzsche’s main objection to Christianity is its life denying impact and consequences. Christianity is a set of ascetic ideals: it demands surplus repression of instincts. Repression is an indispensable cultural agent. Man must be humanised, socialised and resistance is crucial for creative overcoming and expanding power. For Nietzsche, this was the original goal of the Christian church, the spiritualisation of man. However, he argues:

‘… from the time of the Reformation the concept of hierarchy in the church was destroyed. The destruction of faith and its spirituality was undermined by surrendering biblical interpretation to conscience, by allowing priests sexual intercourse and taking away their confessional role. With the slogan “Everybody his own priest” Luther expressed Christianity’s inherent hatred of superiors and gave the vital push to a egalitarianism that gradually gave birth to the oppressive and life-negating fictions like equality and the idea of the autonomous and responsible individual subject.’

Christianity also dramatically escalates the quota of suffering producing guilt and denying vital instincts. Nietzsche traces this ascetic impact back to Christian morality and its conceptual foundations. Concepts like ”the immortal soul”, “sin”, ‘free will” and the immaterial “beyond” are fabricated to despise and torture the body, to confuse our instincts, to impose unity on essentially divergent passions and desires. Nietzsche points out the impossibility of a morality of denial. ‘What does it mean when the human being, in full consciousness, says, “no” while all his senses and nerves say “yes” and every fibre, every cell resists,’ (CW 11, 63) Christian doctrine implies the unity of the person (soul) and their responsibility (sin, conscience) but the body is a plurality of senses and states of which consciousness is only one. We do not have only one self but a multitude of drives and passions and health requires the unfettered competition between them for the ultimate supremacy. Nietzsche assumes the truth of the Hobbesian notion of the “war of all against all” but internalises it. This ongoing dynamic struggle is the manifestation of power and health and the basis of everything great. Christianity also rejects this natural, sensuous, true reality and invents a “beyond” to devalue it. However, the vilest lie of all is the “good person” characterised by self-sacrifice, humility and compassion; most dreadful in this is not the fiction itself but the fact that this lie supports everything that is feeble, sick and botched. The proud and well-fashioned man gives way to humility, self-denial and asceticism; is transformed into the “evil one” and the healthy expenditure of instinctual power is repressed and distorted. In short Christianity is a millennial catastrophe. It is the penultimate chapter in a sequence of worldviews that have deformed instincts and promoted decadence in modern man. Nietzsche complains about the typical Christian. ‘He combats evils as if one could dispense with them; that he will not take the one with the other--that he wants to erase the typical character of a thing, a condition, an age, a person, approving of only one part of their qualities and wishing to abolish the others’. (WP470) For Nietzsche, instinctual outlets--even depravity and brutality—are manifestation of our animal instincts and power, vital both for health and culture. Life is essentially the will to power. Life is infinitude; it wills incessant growth, domination, the overpowering of the alien and weak.

7. In this worldview, conflict and exploitation are inescapable: they are co-terminus with social and political life.

‘ “Exploitation” does not belong to a corrupt or undeveloped and primitive society: it lies in the essence of living things as a basic organic function’.

Social life is not the issue of collective interests or a social nature but the product of an order of rank imposed by the ruler on the ruled. Nietzsche uses this imposition of social unity to explain the origins of morality. The origins of social life in struggle and exploitation is expressed in two forms of morality: that of master and slave. Interestingly, the motif of master/slave was initially made famous by Hegel. For him, it is also identified with the beginning of social life. It is the first form of recognition, albeit requiring subordination. However, in Hegel, it is the slave that is the real bearer of historical development who comes to represent a higher form of freedom and the possibility of equal recognition in the form of bourgeois legal personhood through their discipline and labour. While Nietzsche is also prepared to concede that the slaves and their morality comes to dominate the present, he adamantly rejects the idea that this is progress. In Nietzsche’s account, the master determines values. As a result of their own inherent power they are active and value creating and do not require approval. They act instinctively, spontaneously and without guile. Their own distinctive qualities, that which is agreeable and useful for them, becomes the good. Slave morality, on the other hand, is ostensibly passive but really reactive. They are propelled by resentiment: the angry desire to punish and surpass those who are better and more powerful: the good is defined in terms of opposition to power that inverts its evaluations. Thus the typical Christian values are patience, kindness, humility, industry and pity. Interestingly, Nietzsche clearly sees an active will to power operative in these passive creeds. Their worldviews are powerful illusions that overcome the meaninglessness of life. For him, history is a record of the triumph of this slave morality. Masters create and build societies but in the more sedentary and artificial conditions of civilisation tend to succumb to the multitude and assimilate the morality of slaves. Under “normal conditions” the “weak” will always be victorious; they have numbers and they flourish in the calm of the everyday in pursuit of prosperity and security. Nietzsche struggles to find explanations for this victory of the slaves that threatens the highest values. On the one hand, he speculates that the conflict between master races is too costly and civilisation must return quieter waters to rebuild its strength, on the other, he views it simply as a result of decadence and the over-spiritualisation of the masters.

8. Modern morality is a product of a decadence that goes back to Socrates. This destroyed the dictatorship of elites based on competitive struggles. The latter was healthy, a doctrine of relations of supremacy affirming will to power and the becoming of life. Nietzsche deplores the official disappearance of slaves; ‘A higher civilisation can only come about when there are two social castes: that of the working people and that of the leisured, those capable of true leisure: or, to put it more strongly, the caste of forced labour and the caste of free labour’ (H all to H, 211). However, because he believes that the natural order of rank cannot be suppressed by social engineering he continues to hope that is will reassert itself, as you will see, in a new form. Nietzsche speaks with an insider’s knowledge of modernity but from the outside. His spiritual home is the cultural achievement of the aristocratic elites and he mounts his critique of modernity from this perspective.

9. The contemporary demise of the unhealthy, ascetic Christian worldview does not immediately see the reassertion of a master morality. As we have seen, for Nietzsche the ideological struggle between Christianity and Enlightenment is superficial. Behind the contest of reason and faith is continuity and an abiding affinity. Equality in the sight of God is easily translated into the rights of man and popular sovereignty. Contemporary bourgeois liberalism with its democratic creed is Christian insofar as it makes a sovereign of the mediocre, uncultivated individual of the herd.

10. The democratic ethos declares domination immoral; it defends the interests of the mediocre herd that cannot form, create or dominate. The preference for egalitarianism as mutual toleration is a prejudice for the mediocre and a disbelief in the possibility of the great human being. The idea of making the people sovereign means a devaluation of civilisation and of a society orientated to greatness. The masses are give permission to choose between a few opinions creating the impression of individual autonomy and the struggle of opinions. But this is a charade that obscures the main issue. The masses are simply incapable of creating new values. The call for equality, freedom and security in reality legitimates the anarchy of the base instincts of private individuals. It fails to recognise that inequality of rights is the first condition for the existence of all rights. In economics, this means the pursuit of self-interest and, in politics, the oppression of the superior individual and the overturning of natural inequality. The “rights of man” are a shabby product of slave morality. The “common good” is another fiction corresponding neither to individual instincts nor to any real social telos. It is an oppressive and constraining weight of mediocrity on the few. For Nietzsche, society has no other end than to be a means to the creation of the great.

11. These democratic slogans are against nature that is boundless and wasteful. Its infinite plenitude has only one law: inequality and domination. This is why political revolutions (past and present) are also superficial. They cannot transform the natural basis of inequality. Nietzsche explicitly rejects the proposition that society can ignore the fact of human inequality. Liberal democracy and socialism hold to the illusion that natural endowment is either significantly malleable or socially constructed. This perpetuates the basic principle of humanist rationalism since Socrates that it is possible to transform human nature through knowledge. However, the task of culture is not to resist nature but to take what it has supplied and through cultivation to augment it. Ironically, Nietzsche also views himself as an advocate “justice” but this is the justice of life itself: of nature and the “higher pity” of great and healthy individuals. No two individuals are equal and natural justice demands an order of rank.

12. This critique of democracy spills over into a wholesale assault on bourgeois life and its values. Its focus is on money and equivalence. The bourgeois world is a world of utility, calculation and trickery aspiring to obtain value cheaply. Nietzsche wants to dissolve this relation between value and cost. The highest values must be pursued irrespective of expense. This is a total repudiation of utilitarianism and the profit calculations of the bourgeois world. The latter’s world is that of possessions but its existence is insubstantial. He believes that “he who possesses is possessed”(GM.III,8) Possession is not a goal but merely a means. Only those with spirit have the right to possess--this is the doctrine preached by life itself. Nietzsche’s individualism is not one of “having’ but of “being” and “becoming”, of striving for self-mastery, of creating values and qualities.

13. Like Marx, he believes that the bourgeois reduce everything to money, even culture. ‘The value of a man...does not reside in his utility...And why could not that man who produced the most disastrous effects be a pinnacle of the whole species of man; so high, so superior that everything would perish from envy of him (WP 469). Culture requires spiritualisation and the contempt for material possessions. But the bourgeois world is one obsessed with acquisition, selfishness, production, work and haste. Is it little wonder that the workers despise those who exploit them! This is one of Nietzsche’s strongest convictions: that the herd willingly submits to whose superiority is manifest in natural bearing and noble manners. The multitude is content in its mediocrity and its happiness from mastery of a single competence in the division of labour. However, the dominance of the bourgeoisie has eroded the natural order of rank. The notorious vulgarity of the bourgeois reinforces the impression that it is only luck that sees them in the elevated social position. Socialism is a further consequence of the death of authentic hierarchy. The struggles of the workers are a product of the dissolution of hierarchy and the universalisation of bourgeois values. The workers are allowed to live too well and educated to be masters. Yet, these aspirations have already been contaminated by bourgeois values.

14. Nietzsche is disdainful of material values. Real creativity demands an absolute freedom that cannot abide any encumbrance. The higher individual must conquer lower needs in order to create. Bourgeois production is caught in the web of low needs, of consumption. However, creation must be an end in itself and not a means to an end. For Nietzsche, creative play and leisure have priority over work and acquisition. Bourgeois society has inverted these values by losing the class distinction between leisure and labour. The higher individual must have the time to find himself without trivial impediments. However, the process of self-discovery is made more difficult because modern man is increasingly subsumed in a variety of masks and roles to the extent that he has no center. This is partly a product of commodity exchange where we evaluate not through our own eyes but through those of another. It is also a product of the increasing dynamism of this life. This is a dynamism of impersonality, objectivity and over-stimulation that has stripped the superior individual of their self certainty and unconscious instinct. Nietzsche sees the mark of nobility as confidence in spontaneous, instinctive judgement without the constraints of self-doubt. Yet, just this spontaneity is disappearing with modern dynamism. As our knowledge becomes unprecedentedly vast our capacity for action is disabled, because it is derivative and second hand. Against this, a culture of leisure is only possible through a social domination. This makes possible a leisure class devoted to culture. While ancient society was destroyed by slavery, Nietzsche considers modernity is dying from its lack.

 
15. This leads to the fundamental point of Nietzsche’s critique of the bourgeois world. Modern bourgeois freedom is a freedom to live well; of mediocrity, security, selfishness and passivity. Nietzsche’s definition of freedom is aristocratic.

“For what is freedom? That one has self-responsibility. That one preserves the distance that divides us. That one has become indifferent to hardship, toil, privation, even to life. That one is ready to sacrifice man to one’s cause, oneself not excepted. Freedom means the manly instincts that delight in war and victory gained in mastery over other instincts—for example over the instinct for ‘happiness’. The man who has become free…spurns the contemptible sort of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats. The free man is a warrior—how is freedom measured, individuals as in nations? By the resistance which has to be overcome, by the effort it costs to stay aloft” (TI 92)

In comparison to this, the freedom of the bourgeois is permeated by internal conflicts. No single instinct can become masterful and impose itself on the others. (Despite this devastating critique, the industrial component of bourgeois society has a saving grace. It has dynamic potential and the capacity to discipline the herd. Industrial specialisation creates the conditions for the possible reintroduction of the distinction between work and leisure. It imposes a flexible but routine organisation that renders the worker docile but intelligent. They become malleable material for strong individuals. To attain a great height, a building must have a broad and strong base. But this is only one prospect amongst others).

 

Lecture 9: (cont) Marx on Science, Democracy and Nationalism & Lecture 10: Nietzsche on Diagnosis and Nihilism

15. (Cont) Now I want to focus on Marx’s attitude to three of the leading tendencies of modernity: science, democracy and nationalism. Marx was impressed by the immense productivity of bourgeois industrialisation. He is hostile to its bourgeois form but not to technological progress based on science. In fact, he views science, increasingly, as a major force of production. Science becomes the exclusive worldview of modernity. At the same time, Marx is the first sociologist of knowledge. Other knowledge is tainted by its social commitments. They serve the interests of domination. This leads to a pluralism of truths tied to social interests. But natural science is domination free knowledge. Science is of the base not the superstructure. It never occurred to Marx that it could be considered as a worldview of domination.

16. Marx’s own self-understanding wavers between critique and science. This explains the interpretative disputes that have raged around the status of his theory. The former is socially conditioned but universal because it serves a universal interest. Whether Marx’s own identification of his critical theory with the consciousness of the proletariat is valid is essentially an empirical question. Irrespective of whether Marx worked out the theory before he discovered the workers or not, the vital point is whether or not the workers empirical consciousness can identify with class consciousness. On this question, the historical evidence is against Marx as only a minority of workers have ever completely identified with the theory.

17. This raises the potential problem of political substitutionalism clearly linked to this theoretical distinction between these two levels of consciousness and opens up the question of Marx’s relation to democracy. However, this cognitive gap was compounded by Marx’s scepticism towards bourgeois parliamentary institutions. He viewed the bourgeois parliaments of his time either as a facade masking the contemporary equilibrium of hostile classes or nothing more than an instrument of the ruling classes. While Marx espoused democracy as a fundamental value and saw the attainment of universal suffrage as a key goal in the movement towards socialism, he was so focused on social revolution that he failed to investigate the logic of politics, tends to reduce it to an instrument and fails to specify what shape and role it may have in a socialist society. He remained sceptical as to the potential of mere political revolution in the shape of Republicanism to eliminate the material constraints on freedom in the modern bourgeois world. Marx did not live to see the full democratisation of bourgeois society leading to the welfare state compromises of the 20th century. This was undoubtedly the main factor in softening the most brutal aspects of capitalism and placating worker discontent and incorporating them into bourgeois society.

18. Marx gives priority to social revolution over political revolution. The latter does not achieve full emancipation. This is a critique of the formalism of bourgeois political emancipation that does not address the social inequalities of this society and the persisting consequences of alienation. Marx is not interested in politics in its own right. This neglect of politics and its democratic institutionalisation was to have profound consequences for 20th century modernity. It is the very radicalism of Marx’s project that leads him to reject piecemeal reform. This is his unacknowledged utopianism. Marx affirms modern individuality but provides no institutional means of sustaining its dynamism in complex societies. Here specialisation and representation play a vital role in the economic and political domains despite their limitations and need for supplementation. Marx’s concept of social revolution requires a once and for all solution to alienation. What will be the motor of dynamism in socialism? Marx lapses into another form of historical finalism that is opposed to true open-endedness and the essential unpredictability of modernity.

19. We have already seen that Marx equates capitalism with the era of a single world market and World history as such. This being the case, it is no surprise that a sort of cosmopolitanism (in the shape of proletarian solidarity) looms larger in Marx’s thinking than nationalism. This preference was supported in his own mind by the radical plight of the proletariat and the inadequacy of mere bourgeois political solutions to put it right. In the first instance, Marx notes the extreme polarising and homogenising dynamics of capitalism. Not only is the population divided between the increasingly small bourgeois class of capitalist and those reduced to the proletariat by the increasing functionalisation of economic roles. The latter, are also largely reduced to the role of wage labourers who begin to share not only a common location, similarly de-skilling as a result of the advanced division of labour but more generally the common interests of a shared place in the new social hierarchy. We should remember that Marx initially viewed the proletariat as a class of bourgeois society that was yet deprived of all its benefits and therefore not fully a member of it. As a consequence, he felt justified in arguing that the normal ties that bind the individual to the community—family, religion, patriotism- were in the process of being eroded by dynamics that left the workers with no other primary allegiance than their collective solidarity. The fact that capital was a trans-national phenomenon that reproduced the same basic conditions where ever it became established meant that workers all over the world would now see a collective fate and collective interest in struggle against the new enemy. For this reason, Marx located the world historical struggle of his own time as one that required an international solution. His participation in the First International Working Men’s Association (1864-1872) was the practical expression of this theoretical insight. This was to be an association for education, knowledge, contact and strategic action amongst workers. Already at this time capitalist had employed international labour as a means of strike breaking and undermining the conditions of domestic workers. Against an enemy with a trans-national profile and power, Marx thought the only feasible strategy was a response of international proletarian solidarity. However, it would be a mistake to believe that Marx ignored the emerging nationalism of his times. Quite to the contrary, he was especially supportive of struggles for national emancipation like that of Poland in the early 1860’s which he saw as weakening the most reactionary forces of the European Ancien Regime and advancing the cause of democratic politics. However, his general view was that the cause of the nation-state was never going to bring about the sort of social emancipation that he felt could only come from social revolution and that the success of the latter largely depended upon simultaneous victories across the main centers of bourgeois power. Of course, one of the main disadvantages of this view from the standpoint of strategy, is that it tended to subordinate all other political causes to those that advanced the project of social revolution. Even if other political issues where more accessible or galvanising more support, the Marxian scenario tended to view them merely instrumentally in terms of the revolutionary project.

20. It was common twenty year ago to begin a book on Marxism by explaining that any doctrine that served as ideological worldview of one third of the world’s population could not be ignored. Today after the demise of the Soviet Union and its central European satellites and the Chinese return to capitalist economics, it might be argued that Marx can be confidently consigned to the dustbin of history. Personally I think such a judgement is both premature and ill-founded. It is true that the most forceful claims Marx made for his theories have been refuted by the developments within liberal democratic societies in the twentieth century. But facing the novelty of an entirely new historical situation and in light of unprecedented extremes of social conflict, it is hardly surprising that he made exaggerated claims for his own theory. His most basic mistake was to simplify the phenomenon of modernity before him and reduce it to the logic of capitalism and the immanent struggles engendered by it. This is why he tends to minimise the important of other factors like political democracy and nationalism and views them as subordinate issues in his diagnosis of the present. On the other hand, capitalism remains a crucial, if not often the dominant, element in the overall dynamics of modernity in the era of globalisation. In the era of Neo-liberalism, we have seen many of the constraints imposed on capitalism as a result of historical crises, worker’s struggles and their effective political organisation relinquished in the quest for economic efficiency and profitability. This has produced increasing inequalities and a diminishing middle class within liberal democratic societies and generally increased the insecurity of life conditions. These developments culminated only a few years ago in the most spectacular economic collapse in three generations and clearly we are still coming to terms with its consequences and what to do about it from the standpoint of rebalancing the relationship between economics and politics in the contemporary world. The scale of the crisis points to the sort of problems that initially fuelled the Marxian critique of capitalism. While these tendencies remain we can hardly ignore Marx and the insights that his theory lends to the understanding of contemporary modernity even if he is unable to provide us with an adequate solution.




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Lccture 10: Nietzsche (1844-1900

1. Tocqueville articulates his doubts about democracy in order to make it fit to serve as the basis for the future of modernity. Marx is more sceptical of the potential of bourgeois parliaments but ultimately concedes that in the most advanced bourgeois countries democracy may offer the proletariat an avenue to assume political power. For Nietzsche, however democracy is the manifestation of a profound sickness and crisis. For him, it is a signature for everything that is wrong with modernity. He wants to confront modernity at the level of foundational values. But Nietzsche is no mere conservative. His refusal to deny life saves him from mere negativity. He is orientated to the future and pursues the fundamental question of meaning after the collapse of tradition. Unread in his own time, it is the intensity of Nietzsche’s questioning, of his repudiation of modern values that has made him the inspiration of many late 20th century postmodern critics of modernity.

2. Biography. Born at Röcken in 1844, son of a Lutheran minister. His father died when Friedrich was five from a degenerative brain disease. He was a brilliant student and a talented musician. He was brought up by his mother and elder sister and educated at exclusive Prussian boarding Schulpforta; at 25 the Professor of classical philology at the University of Basle. It was at this time that he became friends with Wagner who, for a short time, served as his paradigm for a possible cultural rebirth in Germany. Resigned at 35 on the grounds of illhealth and was pensioned off. He spent roughly the next ten years living the life of a wandering private scholar between Southern Italy and Switzerland. Nietzsche never married and struggled his whole life with chronic sickness, repressed homosexuality and, in his later years, isolation. He finally had a total mental collapse in 1888. This was usually attributed to syphilis but more recently it has been argued that it was the result of a manic-depressive psychosis. He was subsequently cared for by his sister Elizabeth who set up the Nietzsche Archiv in Weimar where she falsified his writings to propagate a version of his work that later served the ideological needs of German nationalism and racism. A more balanced view of Nietzsche’s work only emerged after the Second World War.

3. Modernity is exhausted and sick: lost all rigour, sense of hierarchy and creativity. It is a society that ‘no longer has the strength to excrete’ (WP32) This society has chosen comfort, tolerance, equality, humanitarianism and Truth with a capital "T". The affirmation of these values, based largely on Christian compassion, breeds ill-health and decadence. The decadent is one who consciously chooses that which is harmful to his vital instincts. Decay is part of a process but modernity has chosen to deny the process. Decay is rejected and masked by critical socialist labels like “oppression”. Nietzsche’s famous declaration that “God is dead” signals both a predicament and an opportunity. Firstly, the unsustainability of the worldview and values that had underpinned the West for almost 2, 000 years. The Christian worldview collapses internally from the critique of science and a new realism. The demise of religious faith allows contemporary society to unburden itself of the decadent Christian morality that still constrains and deforms its human potentials. Man is a value creating animal, needs horizons and unconditional beliefs to provide meaning. This atmosphere had formerly been supplied by religion and Christian philosophical synthesis but this was no longer believeable.

4. Nietzsche endorses Hegel’s account of the triumph of reason. The Reformation emancipates individual conscience only to see this turn into religious doubt. But, unlike Hegel, this does not produce a new secular culture of reason and freedom. This decline creates an ideological vacuum that cannot be retrieved by the values of the enlightenment. These are also dogmas. They turn out to be illusions born not out of truth but out of fear of meaninglessness. The task before modern man is the question of whether humans can face this fear and live without illusions, or at least with the recognition that these meaningful frameworks are only their own creations. Thus the project of enlightenment turns out not to be opposed to Christianity. Both science and religion are forms of ascetic values that require too much instinctual repression and the subordination of life to life-denying values. Nietzsche calls the contemporary cultural condition of exhaustion and meaninglessness: nihilism. This is caused by the demise of hierarchical societies that were inexhaustible, creative and did not require metaphysical values. Modernity transfers its faith to reason but nihilism means too much faith in reason. This encourages us to seek after coherence, unity, a goal and meaning at the expense of vital instincts. But when this quest bears no fruit we become listless and discouraged. This leads to disorientation, weariness and indifference. We are no longer the centre of things but nor can we abide our own necessary egotism which Christian morality has taught us to disgust. We also come to realise the shabby origins of our own decadent highest values. However, nihilism also has a potentially positive side; maybe it is a sign of strength, self-control, a capacity to live without illusions. The 19th century is more realistic, honest, vulgar and animalistic. It may be able to overcome the fear that arises from the recognition of natural inequality, order of rank and instinctual barbarism that is all too human and an inseparable constituent of all civilisatory achievement.

5. Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity does not accuse it of being a system of false beliefs. All religions and philosophies are the same. Frameworks of illusion required in order to live. ‘Truth is a type of error without which a particular type of living being could not exist’ (WP para 493). The Socratic-Christian worldview created the illusion of a true world and end for man-this spiritualised and suppressed meaninglessness. For Nietzsche, this “truth” is just an agreement reached about what lies were to be counted as true. Christianity is not the truth but a “necessary” lie; just another framework of illusions to render the suffering of the masses meaningful and deliver power to the priests. However, in modernity this quest for transcendental truth has gone too far. The denial and asceticism integral to the Christian worldview is taken over into the Enlightenment ideals of knowledge and science. Christianity seeks truth in transcendence but the quest for truth ultimately displaces the very idea of transcendence and with it the rest of the Christian edifice. Nietzsche does not judge in terms of truth or falsity, goodness or evil. His test of an adequate philosophy turns on whether it can be lived. Absolute values do not exist. All we have are fictions useful or not in the struggle of life. Truths enable us to act in a chaotic world. But they should not become idols nor be mistaken for reality. The “will to truth” should serve not truth but life. Not surprisingly, Nietzsche has often been interpreted as a relativist. Yet, he clearly thinks that insight into what actually serves life is a “truth” transcending the frameworks of illusion. This is a tension that points to other tensions

Lecture 9: Marx(cont) The Dynamics of Capitalism

 

7.While celebrating the historically progressive role of capitalism, he argues its dynamism is ultimately self-defeating: irrational and dehumanising. Historical progress comes at a tremendous human cost. Capitalism views the workers as labour power, as only a factor of production while ignoring their total personality and human needs. For Marx, the key category is alienation. History can be conceived as a process of continuing augmentation of the productive forces in the shape of general social wealth but this is typically the outcome of an organisation of production in which the great majority did not benefit. Paradoxically, Marx argues that in bourgeois society, the generally uneven character of historical progress gains a new intensity. Some workers are reduced to living in a state of deprivation worst than the ancient slaves while the general social wealth expands in geometric proportions (Quote MER, 483). In this respect, Marx argues that the bourgeoisie is the most inadequate ruling class in history because it is unable to provide to those it rules even the barest necessities.

8. Aspects of alienation. Rationalisation of work process according to intrinsic rules of the object lead to a more efficient modern division of labour. But efficiency is bought by devaluing the skills of individual workers. Workers become detached from their own activity, they have no control and are reduced to a mere means. This leads to crippling one-sided development and poverty: species wealth and individual de-humanisation. This process also impacts on social interaction. The modern worker is posited as a contracting individual and finds herself in competition with other workers for employment. The existence of a pool of unemployed workers keeps the price of labour power low. While the complex system of need satisfaction increases the level of social inter-dependence necessary in the economy, this potential solidarity remains latent until the struggle against the resulting individual atomisation assumes collective forms. At this point, the system begins to produce its own grave-diggers. Marx views the process of the proletariat’s historical self-formation as a gradual development of class-consciousness. The new working class soon develops a trade union consciousness that stems from their collective life situation and interests. This consciousness is primarily concerned to increase wages and gain incremental improvements in conditions of work. 

9. However, Marx makes a clear distinction between this form of empirical worker’s consciousness and the more enlightened form that he designates as “class consciousness” and derives from a theoretical understanding of the totality of bourgeois society and its historical dynamics. Thus the communists have ‘the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement’ (MER, p484). Marx argues that this latter form of consciousness demands an appreciation of the “political” source of current economic struggles and the need to attack not just the symptoms of these problems but their underlying causes in bourgeois property relations and their manifestations in classes. The development from the more naïve to the enlightened form of consciousness is a product of the proletariat’s historical struggles and gradual accumulation of experience and insight into the dynamics of Capitalism. Marx believed that this process of struggle would be assisted in its later stages by the assistance of bourgeois intellectuals who, like himself and Engels, understood the general direction of historical dynamics, had abandoned their own class to assist the workers in their struggle. Much later dispute in Marx interpretation has centred around the question of these historical dynamics. Is the development of capitalism an inevitable process determined by necessary historical laws or the product of collective human struggles and contingent human actions? What role is played in this process by ideology and educations of consciousness? Without wanting to enter these long standing debates in any detail, all I will say is that, in my view, Marx views the structural dynamics of bourgeois society conditioning but not determining the final outcomes. Marx was himself actively engaged in political struggles and clearly thought that such activity was indispensable to the realisation of Communist goals. For him, a range of structural factors and their dynamics like a large working class, class polarisation and economic crisis generate the objective possibility of certain forms of political action. However, they cannot determine the consequences of these actions, how strategically wise they may be, the degree of resistance and a millions and one other contingent ingredients of the final outcome.

10. The impact of alienation is not confined to the economic sphere. It also invades other dimensions of the lifeworld. Marx speaks of the schizophrenic division between bourgeois and citizen. We have already seen the way this plays out in Hegel’s distinction between the particular and the universal in civil society and in Tocqueville it assumes the form of the tension between individualism and externally orientated civic commitment. For Marx, the bourgeois is a self-interested rational maximiser of own needs focused on possession and accumulation. But this creates an internal conflict within the civic commitments of the same person who is also a bearer of common interests and the common good. In modernity the tension that stems from this division is internalised.

11. Alienation also has cognitive consequences. Detached from community and tradition, the modern individual is often without guide or rule. The modern social world seems an autonomous world of commodities and things involved in complex relations independent of their creators--an opaque objectivity that Marx designates reification (Verdinglichuung) is alien and difficult to comprehend. The collective experience of the power of the proletariat as a political agent works as cognitive resistance to this reified worldview by indicating that it rests on social processes that are subject to struggle and change. So the idea that the education of the proletariat is a historical and political struggle allows Marx to posit the practical/cognitive possibility of overcoming reified appearances that would otherwise be utopian.

12. All the manifestations of alienation will be transcended by the abolition of capitalism. For Marx, this follows after the proletariat’s revolutionary seizure of political power. While he thought that in the most advanced bourgeois societies this might happen through the ballot box with the gaining of universal suffrage, he was generally sceptical of the bourgeoisie’s preparedness to concede their ruling power without some level of violent confrontation. He viewed the dictatorship of the proletariat as a short period of transition in which the old power relations would be destroyed and the state as a external, centralised bureaucratic and military power would gradually fade away. Socialism means entry into the realm of freedom. This is a classless society: Its pre-conditions are material abundance, the abolition of bourgeois property relations, reduced working time and simplified work. However, the realm of freedom must still contain a sphere of necessity. The material reproduction of society at a given societal level requires a certain amount of necessary labour. Decisions about production will be under the control of the associated producers. Marx wants to demarcate these two spheres (production and control) to ensure that an individual’s role in production does not ensure them differential access to resources or control. Yet the level of material abundance required to make this possible was realised neither in Marx’s times not our own. While scarcity remains an issue, command of resources will always be exercised by those with power and knowledge. Marx gives few details regarding Socialism as it must be a free creation of historical actors. Despite Marx’s critique of the so-called “Utopian Socialists”, there is a strong utopian dimension in his own critique. I will explore this utopianism suggesting it permeates his whole notion of critique.

13. Bourgeois society must be transcended because it is irredeemably alienated. The associated producers must regain control of their collective creation. Yet the expansion of human capacities and technique requires functional differentiation, more complicated social organisation and administrative machinery. The survival of mass populations depends on all this. All of this complicated social infrastructure cannot be abolished in a way that would reassert direct control. We cannot regain direct control over an organisation apparatus that requires indirection: mediated by specialists, officials, functionalism, bureaucrats and subsystems. Clearly modern impersonality is one of the costs of a large complex, globalising society. But it must also be remembered that it has benefits: the modern sense of personal autonomy, freedom and individuality. When Marx says that the state will fade away, he does not imply that the functional needs that give rise to the state will disappear (although he does believe that an armed citizenry would dispense with the need for a standing professional army). Yet, he doesn’t explain how direct associational control and social complexity could be managed. And his idea of the overcoming of alienation tends to obscure this as a problem.

14. All this is not to say that alienation is an illusion. Yet, not everything Marx called alienation could be abolished, nor would it be desirable that it be overcome. It should be made more efficient, humanised and made more responsive to democratic control and oversight. What is needed is a more discriminating account: we want to minimise mere functionalisation, bureaucracy, impersonality and exploitation in a way that is consistent with contemporary standards of economic and technical efficiency, freedom and human dignity.

Lecture 8: Tocqueville (cont) Theoretical Tensions & Lecture 9: Marx---Biography and Disgnosis

9. This refusal to give due weight to the trends that endanger his own political dreams is also evident in his reaction to the 1848 revolution, the emergence of working class politics and a socialist movement. At this time, Tocqueville was both a prominent political actor and a member of the committee charged with drawing up the new republican constitution. In the period after 1830 the bourgeoisie had emerged as the dominant economic class but, to Tocqueville’s mind, had yet to reveal the capacity to be the leading political class. It was too interested in prosecuting its own class interest to develop the disinterested perspective of political leadership. The revolution was at least in part a reaction to bourgeois interest politics of the Louis Phillip and an attempt to further extend political rights with a new republican Constitution. In France, workers had neither political rights nor the opportunities to acquire property that were available to their counterparts in America. In 1848 they seized their opportunity to extend their political rights, to struggle to extend the boundaries of the political and to address their social disadvantage. For the workers, the “social question” was the question of structural disadvantage and poverty and the designation “social” connoted the project of dealing with this question collectively. Tocqueville refuses to concede this collective action the status of political action in the truest sense. The revolutionaries are not heroic actors attempting to contest and reshape the limits of the political but indistinguishable, anonymous agents of a formless mass. He sees behind the worker’s demand for equality of political rights, the mass passion of an amorphous social force those demands are without limit. He fails to offer a theory of justice and hides behind the conventionalities of bourgeois political economy rather than really attempting to answer the question of whether the bourgeois economy is to be subject to considerations of justice. He displays an instinctive fear of the masses and abhors collective action because he believes inflamed passions and lack of political experience make the masses prone to violence. He invokes the distinction between the political and the social where the latter is encumbered by connotations of material interest, private property, class distinctions, while the former stands for the ideal, legal, civic spirited and all that it encourages. In this respect, he remains completely dismissive of the role that interests might legitimately play in politics. But in reacting in this way, he also overlooks the political possibilities of social conflict and the changing nature of the political that follows in the wake of the French Revolution. The politics of the future will be less a politics of individuals and their actions and more one of masses, classes and large social and economic interests and forces. In doing so, he narrows the meaning of political participation and the circle of its participants. Paradoxically, his ideal of participatory politics dims just at the moment when comparable developments emerge in this new working class form and acquire a crucial importance in contemporary France.

10. Nevertheless, of all the great 19th century diagnosticians, Tocqueville might still seem the least dogmatic and strangely the most prescient. His image of egalitarian society, for all its idealisation and symptomatic lacunae, most closely approximates the social condition of the majority in the developed West. For example, take this quote from a article in the Herald by John McDonald: Spectrum April 6/7/02 pp4/5 Quoting from Democracy in America:

‘ “There is little energy of character but laws are more humane. Life is not adorned with brilliant trophies, but it is easy and tranquil. Genius becomes more rare, information more diffused. There is less perfection, but more abundance, in all the productions of the arts”
Tocqueville’s diagnosis could serve as an accurate summary of Western democracy at the dawn of the 21st century. Despite our ongoing problems, for the great majority life is much easier in these societies than it is for those living under more repressive regimes. The price, perhaps, is solipsism and complacency—A sense that the rest of the world doesn’t impinge on one’s consciousness for longer than the duration of the evening’s news. This kind of complacency had drawn some of the blame for the events of Sept 11. The subsequent hysteria is a measure of how deeply we were immersed in this more comfortable and stable view of the world. Tocqueville’s point about democracy leading to 'little energy of character' is borne out by the political and cultural landscape of Australia, which may claim to be the world’s most agreeable and stable society. Regardless of whether our leaders demonstrate little energy, their characters seem to have undergone a form of moral atrophy. The treatment of asylum seekers, the shameless political exploitation of public xenophobia, the Governor General’s reluctance to take the tap for his own moral cowardice—these are all signs of a society that has lost touch with civilised, humane qualities. “Character”, per se has been replaced by a set of expedient norms: admit nothing, mouth empty slogan, be dispassionate.’

11. After an initial period in the first part of the 20th century when his worst fears regarding the future were vastly surpassed and his own ideas subsequently went into relative neglect, it seems like we might have entered a time when just these fears appear to have some basis. Yet, while Tocqueville often speaks with a prophetic tone, he never claimed to provide a philosophy of history. As we have seen, he is generally suspicious of grand intellectual constructions being imposed on socio-political life and hopes rational political action can avoid dangers and build on strengths. Nevertheless, because he studied modernity from the standpoint of difference and of loss, he was supremely sensitive to the inhospitable aspects of the modern world and able to see further into it than most.

12. To the extent Tocqueville got it wrong, his image of modernity is too backward looking and rests on too narrow a foundation. In his account of both democracy and equality: there is no poverty and little inequality. As we have seen, he ignores the “social question”. Because his political vision of the future has stark poles--independent individuals and dependent masses, he found it difficult to integrate the working class, Tocqueville abstracted democracy out of modernity and constituted it as the historical process. In this respect, he is like Marx who will make a similar move with capitalism. By contrast, for Tocqueville, the bourgeois revolution is a political revolution. Politics always takes priority over economics. This lack of attention to the other forces of dynamism levels out his understanding of bourgeois social life in terms of uniformity and accentuates his fears of social ossification.

13. Yet, despite these failings, today Tocqueville is even more contemporary than ever. After the Cold War, liberal democracy appears as the last remaining viable socio-political model in the West. Here Tocqueville is our master: he offers us a glimpse of a post-political democratic world. A culture of political participation is replaced by one of privatism, isolation and consumerism. Without an engaged citizenry and disinterested politics, democracy can become all-purpose and infinitely plastic, a new form of despotism where the leading question is: Who controls the meaning of democracy and thereby its fate? Increasingly as the economic discourse of neo-liberalism gains ground, where the consumer is “sovereign” and we “vote” through our consumption choices, there is a commensurate translation of the political into economic terms. The concept of popular sovereignty easily collapses into theories of “rational choice”, “voter preference” and “consumer opportunity”. The question that seems to be emerging today is whether the political moment in democracy can be preserved or whether democracy will gradually shed its civic potentialities to be transformed into a cultural ideology and myth that serves merely as an instrument in the functional reproduction of modern power. Tocqueville provides us with a provocative and troubling hypothesis and an investigatory template. He placed the careful analysis the liberal democratic social condition at the top of our critical agenda and this remains, even for us, a burning issue.

Lecture: Marx (1818-1882)

 

1. Marx rejects Hegel’s view of modernity as the realisation of reason and freedom or Tocqueville’s equation of it with the institutions of bourgeois republicanism. Contemporary society is not the “end of history” but the arena of a monumental social conflict that will decide the fate of the present: eliminate class oppression and usher in the realm of freedom. Nor is theory either a contemplative expression of its age in thought or the neutral instrument of the art of politics. Marx is a revolutionary. His theory is not philosophical reflection but the enlightened self-consciousness of historical actors: the proletariat.

2. Marx’s biography. Born in Trier to an assimilated Jewish family, university educated, Young Hegelian, journalism, political exile, marriage, Paris where he meets Frederick Engels and the proletariat for the first time, Brussels, revolutionary activity in Brussels, Cologne and Paris until 1849. Further exile to London where he lived for the rest of his life engaged in theoretical work towards hi major work the unfinished Kapital (1867). For the early years in London he lived in poverty and relied on Engels for financial support. He was also the major theoretical force behind the International Working Men’s Association (1864-1872).

3. To understand Marx, we must begin with his critique of Hegel. Hegel equates existing institutions with rationality. But these institutions are irrational. Thus Hegel is 1/ ideological 2/ impotent. Criticism must become a material force, seize the masses. Hegel critiques Kant, Feuerbach Hegel, Marx Feuerbach, each successively charged his predecessor with philosophical abstraction. The only really concrete historical actors are the social classes of capitalist society. But Marx only finds the proletariat in 1844. Already he had defined the task of his own critical theory. Reason exists in the world and the task of philosophy is to clarify for the social actors this rational meaning and its immanent direction. Marx then only had to align this immanent rationality with an existing social force. Aligned to the proletariat his theory becomes the enlightened expression of the consciousness of the working class.

4.The fundamental contradiction of modernity is the struggle between capital and labour. This is an exploitative relation of mutual need and antagonism. These classes have opposed interests. But the working class is growing in functional importance and in numbers. This situation of structural disadvantage but growing power provides both the motive and the capacity to radically challenge this order. In their struggles, the workers gain in solidarity and self-consciousness. This would lead to trade unionism and then on finally to abolish class society.

5. This account is striking in its sociological radicalism. The dynamic of modernity quickly refines bourgeois society into only two classes. Of course, other classes continue to exist and can even play a decisive role in deciding the political outcome of historical struggles. However, these classes are anchored in the social relations of the past and can offer no fully coherent perspective for the comprehending the contemporary dynamics of bourgeois society. Membership of these bourgeois classes is determined not by birth but by function. This means that their significance is not obscured by tradition and religious interpretation. It therefore becomes possible to perceive their social foundations and contemplate the possibility of their social reconstruction. Of course, the very radicalism of Marx’s sociological reconstruction of capitalist society soon generated criticism that it might be too simplified. Probably the most significant critique came from Eduard Bernstein in the 1890’s who used contemporary sociological observations to suggest that Marx’s projected class polarisation of bourgeois society has not occurred and, in fact, contemporary societies were beginning to evidence a growing middle class.

6. While underlining its antagonistic character, Marx acknowledges the historically progressive character of Capitalism. This society is insatiable and future-orientated; it has destroyed tradition but is inherently dynamic creating both new productive forces and values; (Quote p476 Marx/Engels Reader). Bourgeois society tolerates no limitation either externally or internally. The world market is formed and individual need structures expanded and characteristics transformed. Human richness and freedom are Marx’s highest values. Like Tocqueville, he accepts European imperialism on this basis while remaining completely skeptical as to its claims to a higher civilisatory mission. For all its brutality and hypocrisy, the destruction of parochial worlds engenders gains in universality and freedom. It is common misinterpretation to think of Marx as a champion of equality alone. In fact, he rejected contemporary versions of Socialism that maintained substantive equality as its overriding goal was ascetic and backward looking. He endorses modern individualism insofar as it is an expression of freedom and human many-sidedness. However, he rejects its bourgeois form that requires exclusively one-sided development and the dehumanisation of the great majority.