Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought

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K. Steven Vincent

social revolution would eliminate the state and fulﬁl humanity’s quest for

freedom.

The social and moral foundations of Kropotkin’s vision remained con-

stant. But he did change his views concerning the appropriate means to

achieve anarchism. In the late 1870s and early 1880s, he assumed that Europe

would soon be in revolution, and he advocated revolutionary self-sacriﬁce

by committed anarchists to stimulate revolutionary action by the masses.

Though at ﬁrst opposed to trade union activity, he also came at this time

to see revolutionary potential here if the workers were sufﬁciently radical –

meaning, for Kropotkin, that the workers needed to be committed to the

expropriation and collectivisation of property. Kropotkin by the early 1880s,

therefore, advocated a combination of individual and collective revolution-

ary actions that focused on socio-economic change and the elimination

of traditional political institutions. Proposed actions ranged from militant

strikes to violent revolt and economic terrorism. He insisted that, in addi-

tion to oral and written propaganda, violent revolutionary action was as

necessary as it was inevitable (Kropotkin 1992). Much of this reﬂected the

inﬂuence of Bakunin and his followers, who also recommended actions

over sterile doctrines which could ‘kill life’. And like Bakunin, Kropotkin

imagined revolution as a popular revolt in the broadest sense, including

elimination of all governmental bodies and the expropriation of property

for utilisation by communal groups and workers’ associations.

Where Kropotkin differed from Bakunin was in his opposition to tight

conspiratorial organisations. Drawing from his own populist convictions and

inﬂuenced by Elis

ee Reclus’ belief in the spontaneity of the masses, he saw

anarchist violence as a catalyst for broadly based popular struggle. He did

not wish to see a ‘vanguard elite’ taking a secretive directive role. Anarchist

leaders should lead popular social revolts; they should not encourage sense-

less terrorist violence or secret conspiratorial organisation. In this regard,

Kropotkin’s vision for change reﬂected his generally mild and benevolent

personality. As Paul Avrich has put it, ‘he lacked Bakunin’s violent temper-

ament, titanic urge to destroy, and ir repressible will to dominate’ (Avrich

1988,p.71).

In later years, Kropotkin seems to have had more reservations concern-

ing terrorist violence, brought to public prominence by the assassinations

and bombings of the early 1890s. He refrained from condemning individual

anarchist terrorists, but he did insist that it was necessary to distinguish indis-

criminate terrorism, which he opposed, from spontaneous mass violence

which he believed was necessary for fundamental social change. This was a

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Visions of stateless society

position which paralleled that of Jean Grave, the editor who took over Le

evolt

e from Kropotkin in 1883.

Through his many writings,

Kropotkin was arguably the most promi-

nent anarchist thinker in the years before the First World War. His call for

a stateless society serves as an appropriate ﬁnal manifesto:

Breaking the chains of the state and overthrowing its idols, mankind will march towards

a better future, no longer knowing either masters or slaves, keeping its veneration for

the noble martyrs who paid with their blood and suffering for those ﬁrst attempts

at emancipation which have lighted our way in our march towards the conquest of

freedom. (quoted in Avrich 1988,p.239)

9 Conclusion

Nineteenth-century visions of stateless society seem unrealistic to the early

twenty-ﬁrst-century mind because we are more pessimistic concerning the

efﬁcacy of science, more anxious about the supply of natural resources,

more cynical about beliefs in human progress and more despondent about

the effect of local decisions on the complex environmental and social prob-

lems that confront modern humanity. The ﬁrst three factors separate us

from almost all nineteenth-century political thinkers, for it was common

before the First World War to assume (as we do not) that scientiﬁc reason

could chart trajectories of socio-political change, and it was customary to

feel assured (as we are not) that informed human effort would lead to social,

economic and moral progress. The fourth factor – concerning the efﬁcacy

of local decisions – also separates us from anarchists and proto-libertarians

of the nineteenth century and later. Most of us now believe that the highly

structured and intensively interdependent nature of modern societies tran-

scends the reach of local groups, though many of us despair that national,

regional and global organisations have proven to be no more capable of

containing the destruction and violence of the modern age.

What remains appealing in anarchist thought is the recognition of the

danger of states – states that, unchecked, have continued to expand, to

intrude and to control. Anarchists viewed as na

ıve the liberal idea that

the state would be correspondingly reduced in importance as ‘civil soci-

ety’ ﬂourished. They considered ridiculous the Marxist prediction that the

dialectical conﬂict between the forces and relations of production would

39 In addition to his many books, Kropotkin was associated with such prominent anarchist journals as

Le R

evolt

e (in Paris) and Freedom (in London).

475

K. Steven Vincent

lead to the progressive withering-away of the state. As these hopes and

prophecies have evaporated, it is difﬁcult not to credit the anarchists with a

profound insight. States have proven to be more powerful than ever, and at

times more terrible than our worst nightmares. Anarchists took seriously the

power of the state as a coercive, irresistible, bureaucratic machine – not as

a super-structural manifestation of a more basic socio-economic structure,

nor as a benign impediment to the g rowth of ‘civil society’, but as a threat-

ening reality. Anarchists shared with Marxists the belief that socio-economic

change was more important than politics, and they shared with liberals the

notion that the growth of civil society was more valuable than the growth

of the state. But they cogently perceived a central problem: that some of the

worst oppressions and the most hideous injustices in the modern age have

been carried out by the continually self-reproducing secular bureaucratic

organisations that we call states.

476

III

Modern liberty and its critics

Aesthetics and politics

doug las moggac h

According to Hegel, the central discovery of the Enlightenment is that

everything exists for the subject (Hegel 1971,pp.332–3). This theoretical

shift, from ideas of a ﬁxed natural or social order towards subjective utility

and freedom, occurs in conjunction with political challenges to the old

regime in Europe, and the emergence of modern civil society. While the

underlying social changes can be treated only allusively here, the intellectual

legacy of the Enlightenment is that values and institutions must be critically

authenticated as cor responding to subjects’ own insights (C. Taylor 1991,

pp. 81–91), and that traditional forms of life must cede to relations sanctioned

by reason, whereby subjects attain a growing ascendancy over natural and

social processes which inhibit their autonomous self-determination.

The subject as source of values has been conceived in a variety of ways

across the disciplines of modern thought. In the eighteenth century, aesthet-

ics arises as a ﬁeld of enquiry, and as a programme of political and cultural

criticism, in connection with new understandings of subjective activity; it

retains a pivotal role in nineteenth-century thought. The history of aes-

thetics is closely intertwined with the emergence and an eventual eclipse

of modern subjectivity, contributing multifaceted images of subjective self-

awareness, and of objective, formative action.

Most explicitly, aesthetics, deriving from a Greek term for perception or

sensation, is concerned with the apprehension of beauty and the sublime,

with the nature of art and with the workings of the senses in relation

to the understanding. Beyond this already ambitious agenda, it examines

fundamental aspects of the new subjectivity, such as spontaneity, creativity

and action, asking how subjects engender objective forms, and further,

how they relate to and distinguish themselves from their externalisations in

the world, viewing these as manifestations or as limitations of themselves.

Friedrich Schiller, one of the foremost theoreticians and practitioners of

the new aesthetic, deﬁnes this simultaneous relating and distinguishing as

the problem of reﬂection, the reciprocal relation of self and world (Schiller

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Douglas Moggach

1967, Letter xxiv. 2), which is one of the principal issues in aesthetic

thought, and which can be taken as a hallmark of various tendencies within

it, helping to discriminate among varieties of romanticism, for example. It

is in analysing concepts of subjectivity, formative activity (Pareyson 1974)

and reﬂection that the political charge of modern aesthetics can best be

discerned.

While early eighteenth-centur y thinkers continued to stress an objective

‘reason and ﬁtness of things’ (Bate 1949,p.160), a given order of values

and relationships, sanctioned by tradition, with which subjects’ aims and

actions must comply, the focus gradually shifts towards subjective spontane-

ity and self-deﬁnition, and the possibility of directing this freedom through

self-legislation or rationally binding law. The emergence of aesthetic subjec-

tivity is connected to the important cultural and theoretical developments

initiated in the Enlightenment: a shift from the object as constituted to

the creative subject, from mimemis, or reproduction of a natural order,

to spontaneity and imagination, and from the transcendent and absolute

grounding of values to their subjective authentication. The turn to sub-

jectivity from the late eighteenth century onwards is not equivalent to

afﬁrming individualism, though this is prominent among its ﬁgures. Forms

of subjectivity may rather be taken to delineate types or groups (Barrell

1986,pp.3–10). This commonality or uniformity among subjects is fre-

quently stressed, but the value of the individual and the personal also attains

growing importance through the Enlightenment (Taylor 1989,pp.286–94).

Nor does the focus on spontaneity entail an unconditional denial of all

transcendence, or of the divine; what now becomes vital, even within more

traditionalist currents like pietism, is the personal relation which subjects

assume towards the ultimate source of value, even if it remains external to

them.

Illustrative of changing relationships between art, subjectivity and the

social order are conceptions of what is involved in aesthetic creation. The

baroque style of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had depicted

the work of art, in the language of classical rhetorical theory, as an inscriptio

or inventio, which is less an act of free creation than an acknowledgement

of existing religious and political standards (Raulet 1992,pp.148, 154).

Inventio here bear s the sense of a coming upon or a discovery, rather than of

a creative, imaginative act, because it refers to the normative order in which

the work is to be inscribed, and which it is to illustrate and embellish.

In eighteenth-century neo-classicism, too, the aesthetic is construed as a

canon of rules for the production of objects, in which the imagination is

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Aesthetics and politics

downplayed.

The differentiation between ‘artes qua technai’, or artisanal

production (depending upon accepted rules and procedures), and the ﬁne

arts as spontaneous and innovative, is effected slowly throughout the eigh-

teenth centur y (Scholtz 1990,pp.12–29; Barrell 1986,pp.7–8, 78–9;Becq

1984, ii,pp.802–9; Mortensen 1997). This process involves the institution-

alisation of art as a sphere of value and activity, and the recognition that

artistic production is distinct from labour;

only later, in the nineteenth

century, when working activity is itself interpreted in an aesthetic register,

will their synthesis again be sought. The idea of a relatively autonomous

aesthetic order depends on conceiving the activity of the artist as an inventio

in a new sense, as an act of a free and imaginative consciousness (Becq

1984, ii,p.513; Starobinski 1964,p.13) or of a spontaneous modern self.

This change occurs very gradually, and is not yet complete at the beginning

of the period under investigation here. In J. W. Goethe (1749–1832)orin

Joshua Reynolds (1723–92), the ideal of artistic excellence stands for the

mimetic reproduction and puriﬁcation of essential natural types (Becq 1984,

ii,pp.522–3; Benjamin 1986,pp.165–77); though Goethe’s contributions

to the new romantic sensibilities and ideas of alienated subjectivity, espe-

cially through his Werther (1774), are highly signiﬁcant. His Faust (1808–33)

depicts the conﬂict between the modern overstepping of bounds, and the

classical preservation of measure and place. Similarly, in the romanticism

of William Blake (1757–1827), inventio retains its reference to a transcen-

dent order. His term ‘original’ refers to the eternal pattern or model to

be grasped in aesthetic vision, and reproduced in the work; the original-

ity of artists consists in their having access to these models (Barrell 1986,

pp. 225–31, 244–53), not in their creation of something without prece-

dent. At the turn of the nineteenth century, other varieties of romanticism,

together with German idealism, issue a challenge to these views of mimesis

in the name of spontaneity and creation.

As a facet of this modern selfhood, the idea of spontaneity that typiﬁes

nineteenth-century thought refers to the capacity of subjects to initiate and

validate changes in themselves and in the external world. The forms of their

manifestation, and the establishment of appropriate limits, no longer tend to

be ﬁxed with reference to a natural order. Though this order had been fre-

quently challenged, the Enlightenment delivered a decisive attack on it, and

1 Bate 1949 interprets neo-classicism as such a canon, but Butler 1981 sees it as essentially critical of the

waste and excess of the pre-revolutionary order. On imagination as a response to a crisis of artistic

and theoretical representation, and of culture, see Whale 2000.

2 Eagleton 1990 relates aesthetic subjectivity to the rise of capitalist relations of production and exchange.

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Douglas Moggach

began to think through the corresponding concepts of the subject, setting

the stage for nineteenth-century developments. In opposition to the ancient

ethic of circumscribed place,

with its view of hubris as the transgression of

legitimate limits, and nemesis as the restoration of a violated natural order,

the constant overstepping of bounds is a manifestation of modern freedom.

The injunction in Goethe’s Faust, never to bid the passing moment stay,

exempliﬁes this attitude; and Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre of 1794–5,inasim-

ilar vein, prescribes the conformity of the world to reason through inﬁnite

approximations. In the new, dynamic subjectivity, are these transformations

to be seen as capricious and arbitrary, or are they governed by rules of some

general validity? How can spontaneity and autonomy (or self-limitation)

be reconciled, or need they be? The problem of enlightenment assumes

pointed formulation in the ‘Kantian paradox’: ‘How can subjects them-

selves be the authors of a law which binds them?’ (Pinkard 2002,p.362).

This ethical question is equally at the heart of aesthetics, from its earliest

formulations onwards, late into the nineteenth century. The autonomy of

art, as a distinct value sphere, though only relative throughout much of the

period under investigation, poses a number of signiﬁcant issues. Where is

truth to be found in an art no longer interested in reproducing or imitating

naturally given forms? How does art relate to morality: by illustrating and

evoking freedom, by indifference, or by making manifest the illusory quality

of subjectivity itself , and thus the nullity of the moral law?

In his powerful characterisation of ethical and aesthetic subjectivity, Hegel

himself provides two distinct images of modern culture. He maintains that

the great achievement of modernity is the idea of the free and inﬁnite per-

sonality (Hegel 1991,pp.20–1). This ﬁgure is constructed from two vectors.

One is a centrifugal, vigorous outpouring of particularity, a growing differ-

entiation of function in civil society, together with increasing demands for

individual recognition. This is counterbalanced by a reﬂexive movement,

or a self-aware return to unity in political institutions and ethical relations.

This pattern can be described in aesthetic language as an extensive clar-

ity or multiplication of meanings, conjoined with an intensive clarity, a

distinct, shared, univocal meaning. The new afﬁrmative self-consciousness

of modern subjects permeates juridical relations, with the unprecedented

expansion of the scope of interests and activities, and the increasing divi-

sion of labour. Correspondingly, the rights to satisfy private purposes, to

refashion objectivity in light of subjective ends, and to asser t an autonomous

3 The Epicurean version of hedonism as the minimising of pain can be seen in this light.

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Aesthetics and politics

moral conscience, gain acknowledgement as the perquisites of the modern

subject. But, according to Hegel, to witness only this unfolding partic-

ularity is to have a one-sided vision, to miss the reﬂexive turn. Modern

solidarities are also constituted by acts of freedom and recognition, which

express the new understanding of the self (Hegel 1991,pp.282–3). Reﬂec-

tion here assumes the sense of reconnecting the multiple into a unity, not

forcibly, but in mutual afﬁrmation.

This prospect is afforded by political

institutions in which subjects appear as an ampliﬁcation, and not only as a

limitation, of one another’s freedom. For Hegel, the rational state, towards

which modernity tends, combines spontaneity or freedom with autonomy

or self-legislation consistent with this underlying diversity.

This mutual-

ity is preﬁgured in aesthetics, and even if, in Hegel’s mature thought, art

can no longer secure a genuine reconciliation among modern subjects, the

background of his theory of shared ethical life is provided in aesthetic ideas

of reﬂection deriving from Enlightenment sources.

Yet Hegel also describes modernity as a culture of rigid opposition,

fragmentation or diremption (Hegel 1964,pp.88, 90–1), an assertion of

unbridled particularity, which dangerously undermines the potentiality for

rational autonomy. In this image, the expansive and the reﬂexive motions

of modern subjectivity do not harmonise with each other. They remain in

stubborn opposition, and any momentarily achieved unity is highly fragile.

The centrifugal forces threaten constantly to overwhelm the integrative

capacities of modern institutions and relations. This image is one of mutual

antagonism and separation, between understanding and sensibility, freedom

and form, subject and subject, subject and object.

Hegel ﬁnds evidence of

these intractable contradictions in the philosophy of Kant, who nonetheless

struggled to resolve them, and in his own romantic contemporaries,

whom

he saw as irresponsibly extolling the tensions and conﬂicts of the modern

world. After Hegel, the ideal of rational self-determination is increasingly

4 Reﬂection will assume several different meanings in the authors examined here: the movement

from division towards unity (Hegel); the projection of a subjective content into objective existence

(expressivism); and, conversely, the withdrawal of the subject from external objects back into the self

(irony). This ambiguity is unavoidable; it is present in the texts under discussion, and illustrates the

central role played by reﬂection in this body of thought. In each case, the speciﬁc meaning will be

indicated.

5 For various recent per spectives on these issues, see Siep 1997.

6 Bernstein 1992,pp.1–65, sees in aesthetic theory a nostalgia for lost unity, but overstates the separation

between aesthetics, ethics and scientiﬁc reason by the time of Kant.

7 Hegel 1964 uses the term ‘romantic’ to designate post-classical, Christian ideas of the subject generally,

while stressing the new forms emerging from the Enlightenment. On various current deﬁnitions of

romanticism, see Butler 1981,pp.3–10.

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