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

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

Douglas Moggach

assertion of principles, which, on inspection, often prove to derive from

an idea of absolute entitlement by an individual or group. Culture implies

perfection, the development of the best self, not the assertion of exclusive

private rights. It fosters individual self-cultivation, the wide dissemination

of talents, and also the enlightened reform of political and social institutions.

Modern industry is of value not as an end in itself, but as providing a basis

for cultural development and propagation (Arnold 1993). This is a classicism

in the public interest, but like many classical thinkers, Arnold fears disorder

and unruly political interventions from below, which he sees as stemming

from the brutality of the populace, and not from its desire to achieve a

higher or worthier standard of life.

For Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97), sordid modern economic competition

has supplanted the ancient agonal view of the self, based upon a conscious-

ness of rank and the desire to excel within the hierarchical order (J

ahnig

1979,p.180;Large2000,pp.3–23; Sigurdson 1990,pp.417–40). Burck-

hardt’s studies of classical antiquity and of the Renaissance focus on heroic

forms of individualism, which have been eclipsed before bourgeois acquis-

itiveness (Burckhardt 1860). Aesthetics affords a refuge from the intellectual

and cultural squalor of the present day. Unlike transient ideas of truth and

goodness, Burckhardt maintains that beauty is both time-related, in that art

manifests the essential content of a mode of life, and also timeless, in that its

works speak a universal language, permanently available to other cultures

(Flaig 1987,p.93;J

ahnig 1979,pp.186–7). Despite its own cultural degra-

dation, modernity offers the possibility of a comprehensive view of previous

history (J

ahnig 1979,pp.188–9). Historical knowledge elevates the observer

above the senseless turmoil of mundane affairs and interests, the upheavals

and menacing revolutions of the present. The sublime is not an injunc-

tion to participate in the struggles of the modern world, nor an invitation

to a broadened compassion, but an attitude of serenity and disinterested

contemplation (Flaig 1987,p.92).

The late nineteenth-century awareness of decadence, from Baudelaire

onward, reﬂects a deﬁnition of modernity similar to Burckhardt’s, as an

overarching standpoint that makes all past historical experience available for

reﬂection and appropriation. The self-proclaimed decadence of Oscar Wilde

afﬁrms modernity for the variety of attitudes it makes possible (Gagnier

2000,p.90). Here, late romantic occasionalism penetrates not only the

account of the outer world, but even of the subject, which can recast

itself at will. Wilde deﬁnes form as a subjective stance of insincerity, not

authenticity (Calloway 1997,pp.34–54; Gillespie 1996,pp.61–4, 70–4,

514

Aesthetics and politics

116–32). Since there is no essential content to manifest, an expressivism

like Herder’s is precluded. For Wilde’s characters, form is the multiplication

of the personality, not its integration (Gagnier 2000,p.111, citing Wilde

1962,pp.154–5). It is not singular and stable, but complex, shifting, arbitrary.

Subjects refashion themselves in endless spontaneous combinations. In this

creative self-shaping lies their freedom.

If, in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), the decadence of the

modern world appears as a danger and not an emancipation, he nonetheless

shares this ‘decadent’ idea of the multiple self. Writing of his intellectual

development in 1864, the young Nietzsche gives an occasionalist portrayal

of his past. Time refers not to a continuum, but to an inﬁnity of dis-

crete moments, each inaugurating incommensurable possible worlds. Every

instant in time provides an opportunity to break with established patterns

and to initiate a new movement, eradicating previous phases. The past is

of value only as material for the will and for the formation of character

(Nietzsche 1994a, pp. 132, 146). Even the later doctrine of eternal recur-

rence (Nietzsche 1968a) can be interpreted in this light: not as a dogmatic

assertion of inevitable patterns of history, but as an advocacy of a life lived

without resentment or regret. In his later writings, Nietzsche (1954,p.92)

recognises an afﬁnity with Spinoza, in the denial of free will and teleology.

Despite his aversion to romanticism as a sickly form of self-assertion, he

retains a fragmentary, ruptured view of externalisation, of romantic origin.

His agreement with Spinoza does not extend to the concept of substance

as continuous, ﬂowing without contingency from a single ultimate cause.

Not only is substance set in an occasionalist frame, but so too is the self.

The individual becomes an artefact, constantly reshaping itself out of its

drives and energies. Nietzsche repudiates the classical conception of the sub-

ject as a hypokeimenon or passive substrate; nor does he admit Baumgarten’s

idea of a durable subjective identity expressing itself in force. Nietzsche

conceives this self anew, after the manner of contemporary science.

In the positivistic wave of the 1860s, which supplanted the inﬂuences of

idealism, the dominant schools in physiology had effected a decomposition

of individual identity. Drawing on the Id

eologues Cabanis and Destutt de

Tracy, they developed a vitalistic materialism, postulating an unconscious

mind and a central vital core from which activity emanates (Becq 1984, ii,

pp. 834–41). Rejecting the unity of subjective consciousness as the seat of

spontaneity and autonomy, physiologists such as Th

eodule Ribot (1839–

1916) proposed a theory of the multiple self (Bodei 2002,pp.65–6).

Hippolyte Taine (1828–93), best known for his critiques of the French

515

Douglas Moggach

Revolution, was inﬂuential in propagating this view. The self is an aggre-

gation of cells or foci of energy. Its apparent unity is factitious and unstable.

The effectiveness of the organism in its environment depends on levels of co-

ordination among the discrete elements that comprise it, but in the human

organism these constituents are largely impenetrable to conscious thought.

The unity of the self is evanescent; it does not refer to a conscious and

durable subjective being, but to a momentary organisation. In perception,

too, objects dissolve into immaterial points of energy; this idea is reﬂected

in artistic movements like Impressionism (Bodei 2002,p.58). It is as though

the Leibnizian monad recurs, but in naturalised form, freed from the per-

fectionist and theological structures which contained it in the Monadology.

These views provide the background to Nietzsche’s agonal recomposition

of the self. While agreeing with Baudelaire that the constant transgression

of limits is the purview of the creative spirit, he is not averse, at least in

some of his moods, to naturalising the subject.

Repudiating Platonic and

Christian dualisms, he equates the self with the body. The body is a com-

posite. It is composed of multitudes of organisms that submit to monarchical

organisation by some central instance or drive, but only in a temporary sta-

bilisation, since any momentary weakness in this directive power becomes

an occasion to displace it as a co-ordinating authority. The monads that

make up the body exhibit no pre-established harmony, but conﬂictual and

shifting coalitions. The effectiveness of the body, or the vivacity of its life

energies, is dissipated if the directive force is split or diffused. By extension,

decadence can be understood as homeostasis, the sapping or levelling of

energies, so that no dynamic discharge occurs;

it is this stagnation of the

vital forces, the result of egalitarianism and resentment, that threatens the

modern world. Nietzsche recognises the danger of nihilism, the reﬂexive

undermining of values, implicit in the Kantian paradox of self-imposed law,

without transcendent grounding. Resolutely modern, he does not yearn

for such grounding, but presses on.

He sees himself not as a nihilist, but

as a herald of new, redemptive values.

While for Winckelmann the Greeks embody the values of order, har-

mony and proportion, and Hegel and Schiller stress classical ‘beautiful indi-

viduality’ as the concord of character and polis, Nietzsche, like Burckhardt,

29 See Taylor 1989,pp.393–418, on naturalism and anti-naturalism. The extent to which naturalism

pervades Nietzsche’s thought has not been widely remarked in recent English and French literature.

30 Bodei 2002,pp.83–116, with numerous references to Nietzsche’s texts.

31 Nietzsche’s modernism is hotly contested. See, for example, Habermas 1987; Pippin 1996; Nehamas

1996.

516

Aesthetics and politics

emphasises Greek irrationalism, competitive individualism and aristocratic

heroism, the reign of honour over both reason and material desire. The

achievement of the Greeks, as Nietzsche describes it in the Birth of Tragedy,

offers not a nostalgic escape or aspirational ideal, but a paradigm for shaping

one’s own identity out of conﬂicting elements and forces (Bishop 2004;

Strong 1996).

The Greek experience of self-formation was undermined in antiquity by

forces that continue active in the modern crisis of nihilism. Nietzsche views

both Platonism and Christianity as products of an unhappy consciousness,

the passive-aggressive resentment of slavish natures against their subaltern

status. Unable to shake this subordination in practice, they repudiate it in

theory. Platonism retreats into pallid ratiocination, preferring it to vigour

and life. Christianity exacts an imaginary revenge for the afﬂictions of

earthly existence; its heroes are martyrs, not athletes (Nietzsche 1968b

[1887]). Platonic and Christian tendencies converge in substituting, for

the older aesthetic distinction between the beautiful-noble and the base, a

new moral distinction between good and evil, intended to constrain the

powerful in their self-afﬁrmations, and to validate the sufferings of the

weak. While Chateaubriand at the turn of the nineteenth century had

endorsed Christianity on the grounds of its beauty rather than its truth,

this beauty is badly tarnished by century’s end: Nietzsche links Christianity

with asceticism and resentment, and opposes it on aesthetic grounds. His

criticisms of relig ion grow more strident through the 1880s, though he also

acknowledges a certain educative effect (Nehamas 1996,p.245). Modern

decadence, exempliﬁed in mass society or the ‘herd mentality’, is depicted

not as a failure of rational autonomy, itself delusory, but as a deﬁciency of

energy and insight sufﬁcient to found new institutions as the Greeks had

done, together with a generalised sense of indeterminacy misconstrued as

freedom (Pippin 1996,p.260).

As in Burckhardt’s conservative critique of modernity, though with

less serene detachment, Nietzsche’s classicism is an invocation of superior

natures, based upon the agon for supremacy. His early work, strongly inﬂu-

enced by Schopenhauer and Wagner, portrays the interplay of Dionysian

and Apollonian currents in the classical world, where form is a momen-

tary crystallisation constantly threatened with dissolution, including the

loss of self (Nietzsche 1921b; Tanner 1997,pp.386–7). His later writings

emphatically abandon this idea in favour of untrammelled self-assertion.

Creative spirits are artists of their own identity (Desmond 1988,pp.120–1;

Nietzsche 1921a; Tanner 1997,pp.386–7), overbrimming with creative

517

Douglas Moggach

energy, and sublime in their elevation above the banality of modern life.

This pre-eminence need not imply overt political domination, but refers

to processes of aesthetic self-shaping and self-transcendence (Tanner 1997,

p. 388), a new afﬁrmative relation to the world. Nietzsche substitutes for

Hegel’s master–slave dialectic the idea of a self-certifying mastery (Pippin

1991,pp.106–12). The old dualistic metaphysics and religion had sought

to stabilise the self as the site for the imputation of guilt and responsibil-

ity, constricting the vital energies and subordinating them to alien powers.

Freeing oneself from these emasculating attitudes is not a matter of will, but

of nature. Only some are free.

Nietzsche’s cultural critique has proven highly inﬂuential in myriad cir-

cles. Castigated as conservative irrationalism by Luk

acs (1980,pp.309–99)

and Losurdo (2002), these criticisms of modernity have been linked with

archaism and celebrated by the extreme right (on which see Strong 1996,

pp. 132–3); but they have also been expounded in left-Nietzschean radical-

democratic projects (Connelly 1989). Nietzsche has been described as the

last metaphysician, whose doctrine of the will to power (substituting for

the thing-in-itself, in Schopenhauerian fashion) is taken to be the culmi-

nation of the philosophical tradition inaugurated by the Greeks (Behler

1996,pp.311–15; Heidegger 1991). He has been greeted as a harbinger

of post-modernism (Foucault 1966); and his writings have been read as a

repudiation of the Enlightenment programme of liberation through theo-

retical and practical reason (Habermas 1987,pp.83–105), offering, in place

of universalism, more localised and contingent aesthetic judgements and

perspectival relativism (Nehamas 1996). While Nietzsche himself stoutly

opposes indeterminacy, his aphoristic writings occasion the most diverse

interpretations.

Rejecting the appeal to universals as suppressing the individual and the

noble (Losurdo 2002,p.718), Nietzsche denies autonomy, or the subordina-

tion of spontaneity to rational self-legislation. That is a slavish mentality, and

Nietzsche will have none of it. Spontaneity instead appears as unbounded

enjoyment of the self. Despite his criticisms of romantic ﬂaccidity, Niet-

zsche thus completes the disjunction, initiated by the romantics, between

spontaneity and rational autonomy.

8 A new synthesis?

Theodor Adorno observes that Nietzsche’s depiction of modern culture as

repellent, mediocre and banal might have induced in him a very different

518

Aesthetics and politics

reaction, an effort to raise modern life to a higher aesthetic and ethical

standard (Adorno 1974,p.97; Tanner 1997,p.420). That is precisely the

response of William Morris (1834–96), as it had been earlier in Schiller.

With Morris, we have described a circle, from the eighteenth-century

distinction between art and artisanry, to a new equation that might be

called the ‘technai qua artes’, inverting the older formula. If previous artists

dissociated their work from repetitive and imitative manual labour, and

considered art’s disinterestedness as a liberation from service to need, Morris

seeks instead to elevate labour to the level of creative artistic achievement.

This fusion of art and labour now appears as an answer to the fragmentation

and degradation of modern relations, the experiences described by Schiller

and Hegel. Like Marx in 1844, Morris connects labour not only with

the satisfaction of material needs, but with the expression of freedom,

securing the harmony between subjective and objective ends, between the

goals of activity and its accomplishments. To this extent, Morris, like the

early Marx, remains faithful to the German idealists’ legacy, the processual

identity of thought and being. Hegel had considered that the Kantian system

grasped this unity too formally and abstractly, and so he sought greater

concreteness and determinacy, locating autonomy in social and political

relations. Morris follows further along this path.

The central image in

Morris’ work is the free and inﬁnite personality, grasped in an aesthetic

an aesthetic reconciliation in the modern world. The aestheticisation of

labour is to have wide-ranging effects: the embellishment of the community,

the realisation of beautiful and afﬁrmative life-conditions, intersubjective

concord, harmony with the natural world. These ideas are illustrated in

Morris’ News from Nowhere (1890; see also Morris 1884, 1888).

Morris draws heavily upon British as well as German sources. Thomas

Carlyle (1795–1881) had extolled the organic solidarity of medieval life,

and denounced the reduction of all human relations to market transac-

tions and commodity exchange. The village community had acknowledged

the sanctity of labour, degraded and bestialised under modern conditions

(Thompson 1977,pp.29–32). Unlike Morris, Carlyle’s is a conservative cri-

tique, proposing heroic and charismatic leadership as a solution to social ills

(Carlyle 1977, 2000). John Ruskin (1819–1900) sustains the moral purpose

of art, and, like Schiller, defends the ideal of wholeness against modern

fragmentation; it is not labour that is divided in the modern economy, but

32 On Morris’ opposition both to state socialists and anarchists, see Leopold 2003,pp.vi–xi.

519

Douglas Moggach

the workers themselves, whose identity is warped and vitiated (cited in

Thompson 1977,pp.37–8). Surveying late romanticism, Ruskin identiﬁes

a distinguishing feature in modern art in its attention to the picturesque, or

a delight in ruin. In its best manifestations, as in the art of Turner, this takes

the form of a sublimity of tragic emotions, whose effect is to establish a com-

munity of feeling with the subject matter, and with the perceiver (Ruskin

1906). Like James Barry (1741–1806; Barrell 1986,pp.167, 171–3), Ruskin

understands the beautiful not as a single ideal form, but as distinguished

into types, each displaying a characteristic, if not absolute, beauty (Knox

1958,pp.186–7 n.9). As in Barry, this variety of types is a positive good,

and underlies a social ideal of diversity, which differs from the alienating

divisions imposed under market imperatives.

With Ruskin and the late romantics in Britain, Morris shares a powerful

distaste for the philistinism of modern culture and the degradation of urban

life. The intolerable conditions of the poor, living in the midst of abun-

dance and waste, demand redress. Morris combines these inﬂuences into

an expressivist conception of freedom, where form and subjectivity mutu-

ally conﬁrm each other. Again as in Schiller, aesthetic education, become

universal, secures a liberation from the mechanical, coercive state, and from

merely instrumental relations to others and to nature. Art and ethics forge

a new alliance under the sign of beauty. Morris’ utopianism is an education

of desire, not a mere denial of facts unassimilable to an ideal of beauty. Like

Schiller’s distinction of melting and energising beauty, it invokes a beauty

toughened by a recognition of the sublime (Thompson 1977,pp.83, 791).

The ideal that Morris espouses with his idealist and romantic precursor s

has been gravely compromised by the experiences of the twentieth century.

These experiences conﬁrm the hold of the culture of diremption, but they

do not obviate the need for concord and paciﬁcation. Aesthetics records

the travails of the modern subject, its aspirations, disillusion and the decom-

position of its unity, but it also gives voice to resurgent hopes for a more

humane life. It anticipates reﬂexive and spontaneous forms of interaction

that might yet release the thwarted potential of the free and inﬁnite per-

sonality, the emancipatory promise of modernity. If the Kantian paradox of

self-legislation still awaits solution, aesthetics intimates that such a solution

is not absolutely beyond reach.

520

Non-Marxian socialism 1815–1914

g re gory c la eys

1 Introduction: ‘political’ and ‘anti-political’ socialism

The various strands of thought which would be termed ‘socialism’ by the

early 1830s emerged from three main sources: the failure of the French

Revolution to have solved the problem of poverty, particularly by securing

an adequate food supply; its political degeneration into dictatorship; and

the onset of industrialisation. After 1848 these problems would be widely

recognised as having a characteristic ‘socialist’ solution that was broadly

democratic, collectivist and anti-capitalist, and tended towards community

of property and the rejection of ‘free markets’ as such. But the diversity of

these responses also needs to be stressed at the outset: socialism possessed

authoritarian and paternalist strands, and later in the century was sometimes

combined with various forms of individualism and anarchism (in William

Morris, for instance), and occasionally it proposed retaining elements of

capitalism (for example in Fourierism, where rewards for investment, sepa-

rate from labour, were encouraged). Moreover, the degree of centralisation

appropriate to socialist ends, and whether the ideal society should be essen-

tially communitarian, were also much disputed. For Saint-Simon and his

followers, as for Marx, the nation state, if not indeed a confederation of

afﬁliated states, was the appropriate locus, at least ad interim; for Owen

and Fourier, the small community or phalanst

ere was to be preferred. Some

writers thus decouple Saint-Simonism in particular from Owenism and

Fourierism (e.g. Iggers 1972, p. xli). Hence, too, it is misleading to oppose

‘individualism’, or laissez-faire, to ‘socialism’, or intervention led by the

‘state’ as such (e.g. Ely 1883,p.29).

The degree to which a more just

and egalitarian society could or should encourage luxury was also a divisive

issue. So too was the means, revolutionary or evolutionary, by which such

a society was to be achieved.

1 All works cited here were published in London unless otherwise indicated.

521

Gregory Claeys

Many of these issues had been explored speculatively in the utopian liter-

ary tradition, from Sir Thomas More through the 1790s, in which various

schemes for limiting inequality of property ranging from an agrarian law

through community of goods were mooted that reached back for inspiration

to Plato’s Republic, Lycurgan Spart a, concepts of ‘natural society’ and various

medieval peasant rebellions (Claeys 1994, 1997b). Morelly, Mably, Rousseau,

and particularly Babeuf, whose Conspiracy of the Equals of 1793, based largely

on Morelly’s Code de la Nature (1755) was often seen as the starting-point

for the socialism of the next generation (e.g. Ely 1883,pp.29–38), were

interpreted as having proposed a return to virtuous and often communistic

egalitarianism, via the nationalisation of corporate and public property and

the abolition of inheritance. Collectivist elements were also rediscovered

in Fichte and other writers. By the end of the nineteenth century a rich

anthropological literature detailed a variety of forms of primitive communal

property holding that could be seen as precedents for socialism (e.g. Lafar-

gue 1890;Laveleye1878), or, to their critics, evidence that an ‘acquisitive

instinct’ proved the impossibility of such communalism precisely because

of the decline of a ‘herd instinct’ in later historical stages (e.g. River s 1923,

pp. 81–94). If Marx’s theory of alienation was still unknown, countless mil-

lions had experienced the loss of village and small-scale community life, and

its replacement by anonymity, drudgery, overcrowding, intense economic

competition and widespread contempt for the poor by their notional social

betters. In Russia, where Saint-Simon and Fourier were especially inﬂu-

ential, Alexander Herzen (1812–70) was one of the most important ﬁgures

to develop the socialist tendencies in the Decembrist movement, which

focused principally upon defending the communal nature of the Russian

peasant community, or mir (Malia 1961).

From the early 1880s onwards, until the First World War, a plethora of

socialisms developed across Europe, more or less antagonistic or friendly to

the growing force of Marxism, more or less revolutionary or evolutionary

in the intended means of social transformation, more or less authoritar-

ian or democratic in political method and aim, more or less collectivist in

the ultimate design of social organisation, more or less religious in their

description of the underlying moral impulse of social reform or ideological

bond of the new society. A spectrum of positions ranging from authoritar-

ian socialism to individualist anarchism thus developed which by the 1890s

presented a rich diversity of alternatives, united by a commitment to greater

‘association’ or ‘community’, and economic justice for the working classes

(seen as the unifying principle of early socialism by, for example, Thomas

522

Non-Marxian socialism 1815–1914

Kirkup 1908,p.86). (Contemporary histories include Kirkup 1892;Rae

1891. Later studies include Cole 1954, 1962; Lichtheim 1969; Lindemann

1983. The literature on communitarianism is now large; an early introduc-

tion is Gide 1928. The sole study of the political thought of early socialism

as such is Taylor 1982.)

The relationship of socialism to the histor y of political thought in this

period is consequently a complex one. All of the leading forms of early

socialism expressed discontent about most traditional forms of polity, how-

ever, or were indeed explicitly anti-political in believing that partisan ‘poli-

tics’ emanated from the existing system of unequal property ownership, and

would largely disappear once private property or competition for scarce

resources had been abolished. (Marx’s famous prediction of the eventual

‘withering away of the state’ – which was greatly indebted to Saint-Simon’s

assumption that ‘politics’ would be superseded by the ‘administration’ of

the industrial system – shares a similar preconception, as does Weitling’s

proposal that ‘government’ would give way to ‘administration’.) In a num-

ber of instances charismatic leadership or the quest for a messiah-like ﬁgure

ﬁlled the void left by more traditional forms of politics. This ideal of a non-

governmental form of society was thus shared by Marx, most anarchists, as

well as a variety of later socialists, such as Edward Carpenter, for some of

whose accounts of primitive societies (such as Melville’s Typee) were central

to the concept (Carpenter 1917,pp.76–98). By 1900, however, this anti-

statism had also declined markedly among non-Marxian wr iters, replaced

by the view that both the local and centralised state were essential bodies for

the organisation of economic forces (e.g. Macdonald 1909, i,pp.112–20).

The state could thus become, as one leading writer put it, ‘what its people

make it’ (Hardie 1907,p.23); it was not inevitably coercive. By this time

many socialist parties had been formed that engaged in electoral politics

of a traditional sort, typically proposing universal suffrage, the abolition of

hereditary legislatures and frequent elections. Most forms of non-Marxian

socialism were anti-revolutionary (e.g. Hardie n.d., p. 109, arguing against

Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation), and some rejected Marx’s doc-

trine of the class war explicitly; in Britain, Robert Blatchford stated that

‘not one Socialist in ﬁfty, at this day, expects or wishes to get Socialism

by force of arms’ (Blatchford 1902,p.75). Many assumed that ‘All active

agitators of socialism want a democratic state, because they wish that control

of the collectivity over the economic life should be exercised in behalf of

the masses’ (Ely 1894,p.31). Many expressed cosmopolitan or internation-

alist and anti-imperialist sentiments, though a substantial number wanted to

523