Sismondi and Third-Way Economics

I recently read some Simonde de Sismondi, previously known to me only from Marx’s vitriolic attacks. The “Communist Manifesto,” for example, praises Sismondi for his dissection of “the contradictions in the conditions of modern production,” but denounces Sismondi for representing a “petty-bourgeois socialism” that is unable and unwilling to go beyond demands for a rejuvenated form of patriarchal agriculture and guild manufacturing.

What is particularly striking about Sismondi (whose main economic work was published in 1819) is the degree to which he articulates what has become the default “third-way” position of contemporary economics. In part vindicating, perhaps, Marx’s critique, Sismondi attempts to moralize capitalism, remaining tethered to its fundamental categories, while insisting on reforms to mitigate the more brutal effects of market competition. Third way economics—which has some crude affinity with neoliberalism, Clintonite liberalism, and Blairite New Labor—remains the standard economic position for most Western liberals and conservatives. In what follows I sketchily outline the similarities between Sismondi and the third way, while noting interesting points of difference. There’s nothing systematic here, it’s more a meandering through some interesting passages.

Similarities with Third Way Economics

I see four chief areas of agreement between Sismondi and the prevailing consensus: (1) His commitment to a broadly Smithian approach to private property, the division of labor, and market competition; (2) His moralist critique of what we now call classical economics, centered on a demand to consider questions of distribution, not merely aggregate growth; (3) His defense of widespread private ownership and economic stability; and (4) His wariness of a welfare state and what has been called a culture of “dependency.”

A fine summary of Sismondi’s economic philosophy is found in a biographical essay attached to an 1847 translation of some of his writings. The translator describes Sismondi’s objection to the doctrine of laissez faire as follows:

He affirms that the object of the political economist should be, to ascertain how the happiness and well-being of the whole community are affected by the creation and distribution of wealth, not abstractedly how wealth may be created and preserved; that the principles of political economy should be extended to embrace all subjects which relate to the social welfare of man, and that this ought to be considered as the end, to which the increase and security of wealth is but a means; that the purely economical mode of considering the means apart from the end, the calculating theories in which men are too often reckoned as figures, and considered as means of production, have led to a disregard of their value of men: also that the theories of political economy and the legislation founded on them tend to make the rich, richer, and the poor, poorer. Thus the amount of a nation’s wealth being taken as the test of its prosperity without regard to its distribution … M. de Sismondi contends that one of the main objects of political economy should be to regulate this very unequal distribution of wealth, which is not only frequently a source of injustice and a cause of misery to the lower classes, but which causes national insecurity … by continually adding to that dangerous though despised class who, at any time of difficulty or trouble, are ready to revenge their own sufferings by attacking property and institutions which have afforded to them neither advantage nor protection (Political Economy and the Philosophy of Government 67-8).

In a more recent translation of Sismondi’s New Principles of Political Economy, an introductory essay by Richard Hyse confirms the similarity between this approach and the today’s prevailing economic common sense:

[His proposals] have become, 150 years later, the accepted institutions of democratic capitalism: wide distribution of share ownership in large corporations, unions and industry-wide bargaining, unemployment insurance, pensions and social security, and equalization of incomes by government-decreed minimum wages and the progressive income tax (New Principles of Political Economy xxxviii-xxxix).

Let’s consider some more specific affinities:

1.1 Smith and private property

The first chapter New Principles is an elaboration of an essay published in the (Smithian) Edinburgh Review on the history of economics. He concludes that essay and this chapter with a celebration of Smith’s genius and achievement. In particular, the labor theory of value remains the central discovery of modern political economy. Yet Sismondi continues:

After this profession of our deep admiration of this creative genius, of our keen gratitude for the enlightenment we owe to him alone, one will no doubt be astonished to learn that the practical results of the doctrine we take from him, appeared to us often diametrically opposed to those he drew from it, and that, by combining his very principles with the experience of a half century during which his theory was more or less put into practice, we believe we can show that it was necessary, in more than one instance, to draw from it quite different conclusions (New Principles 52-3).

Methodologically, Sismondi remains loyal to Smith’s historical (yet scientific) economics against the overly abstract theorizing of Ricardo et al. He writes, plausibly enough:

One would believe at first sight that in freeing the theory from all surrounding circumstances, one would make it clearer and easier to comprehend; the opposite has happened; the new English economists are extremely obscure and can only be understood with much effort, while our mind is loath to accept the abstractions they require of us (New Principles 55).

That indictment applies well, it seems to me, to fields beyond economics. But more importantly, he insists on defending the core Smithian insights concerning the role that private ownership of capital and the division of labor play in driving economic production. The early chapters of Book two on the “formation and progress of wealth” offer restrained praise for the role specialization and private capital ownership play in driving prosperity. Reversing Rousseau, he moreover celebrates the institution of private property rights for making possible unprecedented plenty:

“He who, after having enclosed a field, uttered the first This is mine, has summoned him who possesses no field, and who could not live if the fields of the first would not bring forth a surplus product. This is a fortunate usurpation, and society, for the benefit of all, does well to guarantee it” (New Principles 138).

Private property rights, however, should not be understood as any kind of natural right. They are regulated by a principle of “public utility” not justice.

Today we find an explosion of so-called “left Smithians” who want to reclaim the man from libertarian and doctrinaire free marketeers. Sismondi is helpful and harmful to that project. He, like them, finds something about the Smithian project that is capable of producing a more egalitarian capitalism. Yet unlike them, he sees Smith squarely as part of the laissez faire tradition.

1.2 Moralism and distribution

This leads to our second point—Sismondi’s familiar, moralist critique of the market. While preserving the fundamentals of a market economy, Sismondi points us to the condition of those we would now call “left behind.” The preface to the second edition of New Principles details the shocking contradiction of modern England, which has managed to combine unprecedented economic wealth with unprecedented mass, proletarian misery. We must consider distribution, not merely production. He writes that the “double goal of the science of government” consists in (1) seeking “the means of securing to [men] the highest degree of felicity compatible with their nature,” while (2) “allowing the greatest possible number of individuals to partake in that felicity” (New Principles 21). Radical egalitarians abandon the first demand, rejecting any form of inequality or distinction, caring only about the equal distribution of wealth and privilege. Classical liberals, on the other hand, call the market society “liberty, even though it is founded on the slavery of the lower classes” (New Principles 22).

Again, familiarly enough, Sismondi wants to temper competition-induced wealth with concerns for just distribution. He accepts neither the liberal nor the egalitarian extremes, both the size of the pie and the size of the slices, so to speak, are morally important. Here the gap with Marx—famously contemptuous of this kind of economic moralism—is obvious.

Yet there are few critics of the market today who would go beyond Sismondi in this regard. Third-way consensus economics accepts growth and equality to be a permanent balancing act. All economic debate in modern Western societies becomes a form of haggling within Sismondian bounds.

1.3. Property owning democracy and job stability

Another familiar refrain of third-way economics is that wealth inequality is not just morally objectionable, it is politically destabilizing. Sismondi repeats two consistent themes on this point. The first is that property ownership must be widely distributed so as to ensure the full moral development of the poor and to prevent political revolution. In an analysis that will be echoed by Tocqueville and others, he writes:

The strongest safeguard of an established order may lie in the existence of a numerous class of proprietors. However advantageous it may be for a society to safeguard property, it is an abstract idea difficult to grasp by those to whom it seems only to guarantee privation. When land ownership is taken from the cultivator, and the ownership of factories from workers, all those who create wealth, and who see it passing through their hands without end, are strangers to all its benefits. They form by far the most numerous part of the nation; they see themselves as the most useful part, and they feel disinherited. Constant envy stirs them up against the rich; one can hardly dare to discuss civil rights before them, because one must always be afraid they will go from this discussion to that of property rights, and that they will demand the distribution of possessions and land.

A revolution in such a country is frightful; the whole order of society is subverted; power passes into the hands of the multitude which commands physical power, and this crowd, having suffered much, kept in ignorance by need, is hostile to all types of law, all degrees of distinction, all kinds of property. France experienced such a revolution at a time when the vast majority of the population was a stranger to ownership, and as a consequence to the blessings of civilization (New Principles 146).

Large consolidated farms, for example, pay their workers next to nothing. Efficiency coincides with less employment and terrible compensation. Favoring Swiss and American homesteading models, he demands breaking up large farms and distributing the wealth to smaller producers:

in England the excessive consolidation of farms is often caused by the owner against the interest of the nation. England has increased its prosperity so much … that at first glance the drawbacks of its large estates are not obvious. After having admired the well-tended fields, one has to take account of the population which works them; it is less than half of what it would be in France on the same amount of land. In the eyes of some economists this is a gain, in mine it is a loss. But the smaller population is at the same time much poorer. The cottager is below the peasant of almost all the other countries of Europe in happiness, hope, and security; from which I conclude that the goal of wealth creation has been missed (New Principles 188).

The logic of efficiency favors economic consolidation, but consequently produces “an abyss between extreme opulence and extreme poverty.” It destroys “that happy independence, that happy mediocrity, which was long the object of the wishes of the wise” (Political Economy 146).

Similarly, Sismondi is wary of the precarious nature of employment under conditions of modern market competition. He writes with a twinge of feudal nostalgia, noting that modern industrial laborers are abandoned when they cease to be productive, where feudal dependents were cared for in sickness and old age:

In the entirely barbaric and inhumane society of feudal countries, of slaveholding countries, this basic principle of justice has not been ignored. Never has a lord dreamt to make his vassals, his serfs, his slaves a burden of the province in their misfortunes, their old age, and their sicknesses; he has strongly felt that it was up to him alone to provide for the needs of those who experienced them only for his own benefit (New Principles 579).

The same logic applies to manufacturing. He insists in the final chapter of the book that large firms provide more substantial guarantees to their employees. Pensions and health coverage come to mind. He goes further, suggesting that large firms are less capable or willing to provide that kind of longterm support. Favoring more radical measures (like worker co-determination) he looks for means of aligning the interests of labor and capital. In a sense, such a program restores part of the holistic reciprocity the medieval guilds provided—thus giving some credence to Marx’s charge of Sismondi’s de facto reactionary economics. He doesn’t offer a specific plan here, but he summarizes the basic vision as follows:

I wish that the industry of the towns, as those of the land, be divided among a large number of independent businesses, and not brought together under a great single head who commands hundreds or thousands of workers; I wish that the ownership in manufactures be divided among a large number of average capitalists, and not concentrated in a single man, master over many millions; I wish that the industrious worker have before him the opportunity, almost the certainty, to be a partner to his master, in order that he will marry only when he will have a share in the business, instead of growing old, as he does today, without hope of advancement (New Principles 585).

The point there about marriage and childrearing is important, and points to our next similarity

1.4. Welfare and dependency

While concerned with the moral costs of economic brutalization, Sismondi is rather wary of public charity as the solution. He fears what today is often called the “culture of dependency” that accompanies direct, state support. The poor laws have not resolved the problem of pauperization, they have exacerbated it. The key target here is irresponsible childrearing. Like with conservative emphases on the “welfare queen” trope in the 90s, Sismondi is centrally concerned that the recipients of public charity will not be driven into productive work, but will instead have too many children. Those children are fated themselves to grow up in conditions of pauperization: “public charity can be considered as an encouragement society gives to a population it cannot sustain” (New Principles 549).

Where welfare reform advocates demand work requirements, however, Sismondi again favors a more harmonious alignment of the interests of labor and capital. The solution is to abolish proletarian wage labor, and to turn the poor into part of a broader middle class of “property owners” (New Principles 550). Indeed, work requirements of the sort conservatives celebrate will only exacerbate the trend of pauperization: “the condition of men who must live by their labour, who can only work when capitalists employ them, and who, when they are idle, must become a burden on the community” (Political Economy 149). Public charity and proletarian labor are two sides of the same coin. He concludes:

there will be no happiness for the working classes, there will be no real and lasting progress towards prosperity until a means will have been found to create a community of interest instead of opposition between the entrepreneur and all those he puts to work; until the workers in the fields will have been called to share in the harvests, and the factory workers in their output (New Principles 551).

Some Notable Differences with Third-Wayism

So those are the quick similarities I find between Sismondi’s ethic and the consensus position of third-way economics. While there are quibbles within the consensus, most democratic capitalists today favor broad deference to the market, wish to constrain that market with an eye toward equitable distribution, want to promote broad property ownership, and are somewhat skeptical of welfare state measures that beget greater indigence.

But there are some points of difference, at least in emphasis, as well.

2.1 Sismondi’s Radicalism

The first is that Sismondi theorizes the contradictions of capitalism in far more radical terms than do most contemporary moralizing critics of the market. Indeed, as the helpful footnotes in New Principles are quick to point out, many of Marx’s most famous arguments come straight from Sismondi. Consider this passage, for example:

Let whatever is called progress in the arts, in manufactures, in agriculture, be examined, and it will be found that every discovery, every improvement, may be reduced to doing as much with less labour, or more with the same labour; all progress tends also to reduce the value and reward of labour, or the ease of those who live only to labour.

The fundamental change which has taken place in society, amidst the universal struggle created by competition, is the introduction of the proletary among human conditions, the name of whom, borrowed from the Romans, is ancient, but whose existence is quite new. (Political Economy 144).

We see here clearly the account of wages falling to subsistence levels and the emergence of a new proletariat class that will become the industrial reserve army.

We see a discussion of the kind of mystification arising from the new M-C-M dynamics of the monetized market:

the circulating medium simplified all commercial transactions and complicated all the philosophical observations which have these transactions as their object. As much as this invention showed everyone clearly the goal to be pursued in every transaction, by that much it made the totality of these transactions intricate and unclear, and the general direction of commerce difficult to grasp (New Politics 113).

We see also a sophisticated account of what today we call business cycles, a theory of the intrinsic proclivity of the market to produce crises of overconsumption and mass unemployment. (The topic of New Politics Book II chapter 6).

Most significantly, Sismondi clearly develops the idea of “surplus labor,” which Marx picks up and ties to exploitation. Surplus labor consists in the gap between the wealth produced by the laborer and the wage he is paid (which covers only his subsistence). Consider the following passages:

The advantage of an employer of labor is often nothing more than the plunder of the worker he hired; he does not profit because his enterprise produced much more than its cost, but because he does not pay all the costs, because he does not grant to the worker sufficient compensation for his work (New Principles 83)

the labor that the worker will perform during the year, will always be worth more than the labor during the preceding year, with which he will maintain himself. Industry provides a constant increase in wealth as a consequence of this surplus value (New Principles 92).

All of the annual product is consumed, partly by workers who, in exchanging it for their work, convert it into capital and reproduce it; and partly by capitalists who destroy it by giving their income in return. Moreover, one should never forget that labor power is incommensurable with wealth. Wages do not represent an absolute quantity of labor, but only a quantity of goods which ahs sufficed to maintain the workers of the previous year (New Principles 93).

(The translator notes that Marx cited Sismondi more than anyone else in Capital, but curiously did not cite him on these points).

So in all these respects, Sismondi goes beyond mere moralism about the plight of those left behind. He offers a far more sweeping and radical indictment of the contradictions built into capitalism than modern third-wayers are inclined to offer. Marx could learn something from Sismondi’s treatment of the market. I don’t think he could have learned much from Tony Blair’s.

2.2 Wariness of Innovation

Another break with the third-way consensus is Sismondi’s producerist wariness of technological innovation and entrepreneurial progress. Everyone in the world today favors innovation. Perhaps the fruit of that innovation should be more widely spread, perhaps (with pharmaceuticals, for example) there should be constraints on prices that might tamp down a degree of innovation, and perhaps we were somewhat too cavalier in embracing automization. But on the whole, the strong presumption is in favor of disruptive creative destruction.

Sismondi flips that presumption. Labor saving technology and more general forms of entrepreneurial innovation are expected to harm workers.

Each improvement introduced into industry, if it has not been the result of a new demand, and if it has not been followed by a greater consumption, has almost always produced the same effects—it has killed, far away, old producers no one saw, and which have disappeared unsung; it has enriched, besides the inventor, new producers who, because they did not know their victim, have regarded each new invention as a benefit to mankind (New Principles 265).

We speak today of Kaldor-Hicks efficiency to justify the costs of dislocation. Of course, that's a rather brutal standard. A cash transfer is not the same thing as gainful employment, nor is mandated retraining particularly attractive. Regardless, those transfers and retraining investments never happen. But the modern third-wayist still presumptively favors disruptive innovation. For Sismondi, that stems from a bias in favor of consumption and an incapacity to properly value producers’ welfare and moral interests. He offers the following charming story in a footnote:

It is said that the Emperor Alexander, astonished to see, in England, that the entire population that surrounded him was wearing stockings, shoes and dress tolerably similar to that of a proper burgher, exclaimed in surprise: ‘Where are the poor? Are there no poor people in this country?’ However, more than one-half of these individuals, whom custom forced to spend a good deal for their clothing, had no other property than the wages they would receive that Saturday for the entire week; and more than a tenth of them were helped by their parish. There would be more independence and more happiness for the poor, to walk barefoot, or in wooden shoes, and owning a cottage, some fields, a garden and two cows, like the majority of the peasants on the Continent (New Principles 560).

Sismondi is presumptively hostile to all advances in labor-saving technology:

if the manufacturer, without an increase in demand, and without an increase in capitals, merely converts a part of his circulating capital into machines and lays off a number of his workers proportional to the work he has done by his blind servants, and without extending his sales, only increases his profit becasue he produces what he sells at a lower price, the social loss will be certain whatever the advantage he finds there for his own account (New Principles 300).

He develops this point too with an interesting aside on what will happen to the household with the development of new domestic labor-saving technology:

Why, it says, should the housewife spin, weave, and prepare all the linen of the family? All this work would be done infinitely cheaper at the manufactory … Why should she knead the bread? … Why should she make the pot boil? (Political Economy 148)

The future promises that “omnibus kitchens” will emerge to supply all the household’s food needs. Uber Eats! Sismondi warns that the abolition of these domestic duties will harm women, destroying the grounds of their independence and authority within the home. We should therefore oppose these changes because:

reciprocal cares and duties form and strengthen domestic ties; because the wife endears herself to the family of the poor man by the solicitude with which she provides for its first necessities ; because love is often in a labouring man only a brutal and transient passion ; but his affection for her who every day prepares for him the only enjoyment which he can obtain in the day, thus increases also every day. It is the wife who foresees, and who remembers, in the midst of that life passed so rapidly in labour, and physical wants; it is she who knows how to combine economy, neatness, and order, with abundance. It is in the happiness she gives that she finds strength to resist, if it is necessary, the imperious demands of drunkenness and gluttony. When the wife has nothing to do in the house but to produce children, can it be supposed that the sacred bond of marriage is not more broken, than by the lessons and the example of the most reprehensible immorality? (Political Economy 148-9).

You definitely won’t hear that argument today.

As Sismondi puts it in a rebuke of Ricardo and today’s prevailing consumptivist ethic: “Wealth is everywhere, men are absolutely nothing? What? … In truth, then there is nothing more to wish for than that the king, remaining alone on the island, by constantly turning a crank, might produce, through automata, all the output of England” (New Principles 563).

Hopefully we are recovering a bit of this producerist instinct today, but it remains absent for the most part, it seems to me.

2.3 Population control

Our final example is a break in emphasis with today’s third-wayism. I mentioned above the affinity with contemporary critics of the welfare state who warn of dependency and reckless procreation. Sismondi offered a somewhat more extreme discussion on that theme. He like many is terrified by the growth of an indigent population, and initially proposed laws to bar the poor from marrying. He dropped that argument in the second edition, but continued to insist that steps be taken to discourage the poor from marrying young and having many children. He doesn’t share Malthus’ pessimism on the matter, and claims that the right set of economic incentives will encourage the working class to delay marriage. Indeed, he argues that one of the chief failures of a mystifying market economy is that workers no longer can reasonably predict their future economic condition. That uncertainty is partly responsible for the growth in what he sees as a parasitic excess population:

the more property is taken from the poor, the more he will be in danger of miscalculating his income, and contributing to a population increase which will not in any way match the demand for labor, and will not find any subsistence (New Principles 520).

Greater ownership within factory life, for example, will give the worker a clearer sense of his lifetime earnings schedule, inclining him to delay marriage until he has attained the necessary advancement in the firm (New Principles 573).

Again, we don’t talk in this way today. Though the third-wayist enthusiasm for long-acting reversible contraception is perhaps not so different.

Thoughts on Weber's 1895 "The Nation State and Economic Policy"

I recently had occasion to re-read Max Weber’s 1895 inaugural lecture on “The Nation State and Economic Policy” (found in the Cambridge edition of Weber's political writings). The lecture is shockingly relevant, so I thought I might write out its chief themes.

One striking feature of the lecture is that it summarizes—in under thirty pages—the core themes that preoccupy the entirety of Weber’s corpus. The lecture proceeds in three sections: First, a discussion of a particular cultural conflict between Protestant German and Catholic Polish agricultural laborers in Prussia. There we see already an early form of Weber’s famous analysis of the Protestant ethic, which in the concrete historical case contrasts with the Polish workers’ mentality. Weber’s wariness of expanding Polish migration leads to a proposal to shut down the borders and forcibly repopulate the land with German workers. But more importantly, this leads to the second part of the lecture: A broader treatment of the nature and pathology of modern economic rationality. The German state is unable to act in the interest of the great German nation because its intelligentsia have become enamored of English-style economic thinking. Finally, Weber’s third part of the lecture turns to the question of producing a proper ruling class that will be capable of escaping the iron-cage of economistic rationality.

In 28 pages we have Weber’s entire career: The germ of the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, a diagnosis and critique of anti-political, economic, bureaucratic rationality, and an insistence on responsible rulers who take seriously the task of “politics as a vocation.”

1. Catholic Poles v. Protestant Germans

Let’s start with section one, which spans the first twelve pages of the essay. The key topic of interest for Weber is the divergent mentalities Polish and German laborers bring to their work. He notices that throughout West Prussia German workers appear to be substantially wealthier than the Polish ones. How is that to be explained?

The two nationalities have competed for centuries on the same soil, and with essentially the same chances. What is it, then, that distinguishes them? One is immediately tempted to believe that psychological and physical racial characteristics make the two nationalities differ in their ability to adapt to the varying economic and social conditions of existence. This is indeed the explanation (5).

(To be clear, as Weber makes explicit in a footnote, he does not mean to make an overly biological argument about the distinction between the races. He distinguishes himself, in that regard, from the kind of scientific racism common in his day. That said, the influence of racial Darwinian themes in this analysis is unmistakable).

The key reason, Weber goes on, is a cultural difference between the two groups. The Germans embody a spirit of freedom, they are assertive and strive to be independent. It is for this reason that as soon as they can, they move to the cities where they can live free of quasi-feudal agricultural constraints:

Amongst the estate complexes of his homeland the world of the day-laborer contains only masters and servants, and his descendants will be faced forever after only with the prospect of toiling away on someone else’s land to the tolling of the estate bell. In this inarticulate, half-conscious urge towards far off places there lies hidden an element of primitive idealism. Anyone who cannot decipher this does not know the magic of freedom (8).

The Poles, on the other hand, appear content to live as serfs. They lack the “self-assertiveness” of their German rivals, and as such have accommodated themselves to a life of relatively impoverished servitude. They lack the German striving, the need for independence and freedom.

(Weber’s claim that the Catholic Poles simply have much lower life expectations, and are accordingly happy to “eat grass,” mirrors the kind of reasoning underlying early twentieth century American progressive/eugenic arguments against immigration. As Thomas Leonard points out, these arguments were full of assumptions about the Chinese laborer being content to live on rice alone in a manner no self-respecting American would do).

Weber notes that, in a sense, the Catholic Poles are winning! The Germans are emigrating out of West Prussia, and every year more Poles come in. This, again, is because they are much more willing accommodate themselves to the condition of low-paying, degrading labor than are their German competitors. The Polish serfish laborers and their capitalist landowning employers make a perfect pair.

All this strikes Weber as unacceptable. He demands that Germany close its eastern border with Poland, confiscate agricultural estates from the Pole-employing landowners, and repopulate the lands with German colonists:

From the standpoint of the nation, large-scale enterprises which can only be preserved at the expense of the German race deserve to go down to destruction. To leave them to their own devices means permitting unviable colonies of starving Slavs to come into existence by way of the gradual parceling-off of the estates (12).

All this should strike modern ears as eerily familiar. Weber’s position against (Catholic) Polish immigration is very much like the modern immigration restrictionist’s position against (Catholic) Hispanic immigration. Think how often we hear two lines in the American immigration debate: (1) Immigrants do jobs Americans are simply unwilling to do; and (2) Immigrants lack the ethos or cultural values that Americans possess.  

There’s a puzzle here: Weber and the contemporary restrictionist are PROUD of a national culture that is unwilling to do servile labor. That is what they take to be great about their nation. Yet at the same time, it is precisely this pride that leads their co-nationals to refuse to take up work they deem beneath them. Large capitalist firms step in and to employ the foreigner laborer that is willing to do the work.

There is something tragic, then, about the Weberian celebration of German freedom. It is that freedom that distinguishes the German from the serf. But it is also that love of freedom that leads to economic and cultural defeat. You might say that Weber believes the German state must force the German people to be free.

2. Nationalism Against Economic Rationality

This leads to the second portion of Weber’s lecture—his critique of economic rationality and defense of nationalism:

It is not this practical question of Prussian agrarian policy I want to discuss today. I would prefer to return to the fact that such a question arises at all in all our minds, to the fact that we consider that the German race should be protected in the east of the country, and that the state’s economic policies ought to rise to the challenge of defending it. What makes us feel we have a right to make this demand is the circumstance that our state is a nation state (13).

In the case of West Prussia, Weber thinks it is obvious that the state must step in to enforce a pro-German national agricultural policy. The market and the capitalist employers profit tremendously from the flow of low wage-earning Polish immigrants, who appear to be content to take degrading jobs. The interesting question for Weber is how it can be that this obvious political prescription has become so obscured. His explanation: “the economy way of looking at things” is to blame.

Modern economic rationality has destroyed the traditional recognition that economics must serve politics:

The science of political economy is a political science It is a servant of politics, not the day-to-day politics of the persons who happen to be ruling at any given time, but the enduring power-political interests of the nation. For us the nation state is not something vague which, as some believe, is elevated ever higher, the more its nature is shrouded in mystical obscurity. Rather, it is the worldly organization of the nation’s power. In this nation state the ultimate criterion for economic policy, as for all others, is in our view ‘reason of state’ (16-7).

The economistic mode of rationalism has no way of theorizing the importance of the nation state. It has no grounds for making value judgments of partiality for one’s own people. It thinks only in terms of wealth production and distribution, it “consists in devising recipes for universal happiness … adding to the ‘balance of pleasure’ in human existence” (14).

German politics must reject a disenchanted economic science that aims at “breeding a soft, eudaemonistic outlook, in however spiritualized a form, behind the illusion of independent ‘socio-political’ ideals” (27).

Indeed, this mode of thinking hasn’t just corrupted economics, but all the academic disciplines. Weber attacks the rise of social history at the expense of political/military history, the economization of law, and the transformation of philosophy into physiology. I quote at length:

In every sphere we find that the economic way of looking at things is on the advance. Social policy has superseded politics at the forefront of thinking, just as economic power-relations have replaced legal relations, and cultural and economic history have ousted political history. In the outstanding works of our colleagues in history we find that, where once they told us about the warlike deeds of our ancestors, they expatiate today on the monstrous notion of ‘matriarchy’, while relegating to a subordinate clause the victory over the Huns on the Catalaunian Plain. … the economic way of looking at things has penetrated into jurisprudence itself, so that even in its innermost sanctum, the manuals of the Pandect Jurists, the spectre of economic thinking is beginning to stir … we economists have ‘come into fashion.’ When a way of looking at things breaks new ground so confidently, it is in danger of falling prey to certain illusions and of overestimating the significance of its own point of view … The broadening of the subject-matter of philosophical reflection—outwardly evident in the very fact that nowadays we find many of the old Chairs of Philosophy being given to outstanding physiologists (for example)—has led many of us laymen to believe that the old questions about the nature of human understanding are no longer the ultimate and central questions of philosophy (17-18).

Much of that polemic could be reproduced verbatim today in critiques of the disciplinary tyranny of economics within the academy. (Or in more polemical attacks on the transformation of history and legal education).

But this transformation is, once again, most damaging when it comes to politics. The German intelligentsia—gripped by economic rationality—is unable to make the decisions necessary to secure the greatness of the German people. The science of economics purports to be value-free, to speak only of laws and structural tendencies, not to impose normative values. But as everyone knows, that claim to neutrality is nonsensical. The new, subjective economics does bring with it a chain of grotesque moral commitments:

The criteria of value which political economists have naively identified or given prominence to have alternated between the technical economic problem of the production of goods and the problem of their distribution (‘social justice’). Yet, again and again both these criteria have been overshadowed by the recognition, in part unconscious, but nevertheless all-dominating, that a science concerned with human beings—and that is what political economy is—is concerned above all else with the quality of the human beings reared under those economic and social conditions of existence. … Even our highest, our ultimate ideals in this life change and pass away. It cannot be our ambition to impose them on the future. But we can want the future to recognize the character of its own ancestors in us. Through our work and our nature we want to be the forerunners of that future race (15).

There are two parts to this argument, which modern readers need not embrace in full. The first is the attack on economic rationality on grounds that it occludes genuine moral considerations while imposing instead ostensibly-non-moral criteria of efficiency, production, consumption, and equality. The second is that economic policy ought to be guided by considerations of national greatness and cultural excellence. I certainly share the dislike with liberal, economistic rationality, while rejecting Weber's overly-enthusiastic anti-moralism (though I think there is a sensible way of reading Weber that separates him more fully from Nietzschean themes. A proper, moralized political theory should have no trouble building considerations of national partiality into a explicitly normative philosophical position).

Still, what is undeniable here is a resonance with contemporary complaints about the tyranny of economic reasoning at the expense of genuinely political considerations. Weber does not mean to reject the use of market institutions, but he does wish to reject the thought that markets serve autonomous ends that cannot be directed by political control:

We do not mean, as some strange misunderstanding would have it, ‘help from the state’ rather than ‘self-help’, state regulation of economic life rather than the free play of economic forces. In using this slogan of ‘reason of state’ we wish to present the demand that the economic and political power-interests of our nation and their bearer, the German nation-state, should have the final and decisive say in all questions of German economic policy, including the questions of whether, and how far, the state should intervene in economic life, or of whether and when it is better for it to free the economic forces of the nation from their fetters and to tear down the barriers in the way of their autonomous development (17).

3. The Vocation of Political Rule

This leads to the third section of the lecture. How has it has come to pass that economic rationality has taken such hold over the German state, and how that rationality might be combated? His answer centers on the failure of the ruling political class:

We economic nationalists measure the classes who lead the nation or aspire to do so with the one political criterion we regard as sovereign. What concerns us is their political maturity, which is to say their grasp of the nation’s enduring economic and political power interests and their ability, in any given situation, to place these interests above all other considerations (20-21).

A nation needs a political ruling class because the mass of the people cannot be relied on to remember and commit to the existential questions of national sovereignty or political rule. With the exception of momentary war or crisis, the mass of the people are not interested in questions of reason-of-state, but are preoccupied with more mundane questions of economic wealth and inequality.

The trouble is that political leadership and economic dominance traditionally go together. This was fine for Germany throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, as the economically dominant Junkers (and their embodiment, Bismarck) brought the political instincts necessary for capable, national rule. Yet today, in a world of industrial, globalized, capitalism, it is clear that the time for Junker leadership has passed. The person of Bismarck again typifies that obsolescence. Seeing him today is like seeing a ghost from a past life. It is as if “a ghost had stepped down from a great era of the past and was moving about among a new generation, and through a world that had become alien to it” (23).

So if the Junkers are done, what is the new, leading political class? The first candidate is the middle class. Yet Weber insists that the bourgeoisie lacks “the maturity today to be the leading political class of the nation” (23). This is clear in their failure to establish a German empire, an obvious test of their capacity to govern with an eye toward national greatness. Why is the bourgeoisie so politically incapable?

The reason is to be found in its unpolitical past, in the fact that it was not possible to catch up on a century of missed political education in a single decade, and in the fact that rule by a great man is not always a means of educating the people politically. The vital question for the political future of the German bourgeoisie is whether it is too late for it to make up the lost ground. No economic factor can substitute for such education (25).

The proletariat is even less prepared to take up the work of political leadership. The English and French working class are in better shape, Weber claims, because of their history of organized struggle. But in Germany, the proletariat falls into crude, moralistic philistinism. The working class can only lead once it establishes an “aristocracy of labor” that can responsibly govern the German nation. (Think here, of course, of the contrast between the “ethic of conviction” and the “ethic of responsibility” made famous in “Politics as a Vocation”).

The tragedy of modern Germany is that no class seems capable of political leadership. The key task of political science and economics must therefore be “political education.” It is not enough to address questions of economic growth or wealth distribution. What is needed is a ruling class attuned to the core demand of national greatness. As Weber concludes in his stirring, tragic, German way:

Even in the face of the enormous misery among the masses of the nation which weighs so heavily on the sharpened social conscience of the new generation, we have to confess sincerely that it is our awareness of our responsibility before history that weighs even more heavily on us today. It is not given to our generation to see whether the fight we are engaged in will bear fruit, nor whether posterity will acknowledge us as its forefathers. We shall not succeed in exorcising the curse that hangs over us (that of being the belated offspring of a great, but past political epoch), unless we discover how to become something different: the precursors of an even greater epoch. Will that be our place in history? I do not know, and I will say only this: youth has the right to stand up for itself and for its ideals. Yet it is not years which make a man old. He is young as long as he is able to feel the great passions nature has implanted in us. … it is not the burden of thousands of years of glorious history that causes a great nation to grow old. It will remain young as long as it has the capacity and the courage to keep faith with itself and with the great instincts it has been given, and if its leading strata are able to raise themselves into the hard, clear air in which the sober work of German politics flourishes, an atmosphere which, however, is also filled with the earnest grandeur of national sentiment (27-8).

I have recently been increasingly struck by the degree to which this preoccupation with serious, political leadership dominates late nineteenth and early twentieth century thinking. I've blogged before about its various formulations in Gramsci (and here) (who cites and is clearly influenced by Weber's critique of economism) and Frank Knight (an important Weber translator). There are also important resonances with Friedrich Meinecke's conservative nationalism.

Lukacs and Tocqueville on Democratic v. Aristocratic History

The central tension of Marxist history is summed up in a famous passage from the opening lines of the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” (I've blogged about 18th Brumaire here and on Gramsci's reading here).

On the one hand, men make their own history. History is the product of human deeds, be they conscious or unconscious. The history of emerging class consciousness is a history of achieving ever more deliberate control over the shape of that history, a deliberate control that will only be fully transparent and voluntary in a society of revolutionary communism. On the other hand, the terms by which men make their history are dictated by inherited material conditions: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Thus Marxists famously claim that history is shaped by laws of evolutionary development.

Georg Lukacs insists that a proper understanding of Marxist history must incorporate these two dimensions—history is the product of human will constrained by structural tendencies bound up with the existing conditions of society.

To take on board only one of these two dimensions—an omnipotent will OR eternal laws—is to think one-sidedly.

Those who believe that history is determined by natural laws (like the overly scientific materialist Marxists) are prone to the dangers of passivity, while those who favor a purely Promethean vision of historical change make the mistake of Great Manism.

In “Class Consciousness” he summarizes the two visions. First, against a vision of history as governed by immutable law:

In the first case it ceases to be possible to understand the origin of social institutions. The objects of history appear as the objects of immutable, eternal laws of nature. History becomes fossilized in a formalism incapable of comprehending that the real nature of socio-historical institutions is that they consist of relations between men. On the contrary, men become estranged from this, the true source of historical understanding and cut off from it by an unbridgeable gulf. As Marx points out, people fail to realise “that these definite social relations are just as much the products of men as linen, flax, etc” (49 in Livingstone)

So the problem with the law-based theory of history is that it reproduces a mistaken reification. It forgets that what we call “laws” are themselves human creations and are therefore ultimately subject to human control. By forgetting that fact, we transform something WE create into an ALIEN FORCE that constrains us. “Supply and demand” are not laws of the universe, but artifacts of unintentional human construction.

Second, against a vision of history as the putty of omnipotent will:

In the second case, history is transformed into the irrational rule of blind forces which is embodied at best in the “spirit of the people” or in “great men.” It can therefore only be described pragmatically but it cannot be rationally understood. Its only possible organization would be aesthetic, as if it were a piece of art.

Marx transcends these one-sided errors. He shows that history is both created and law-like, subject to the control of human will but characterized by certain structural tendencies.

Lukacs makes this point again in his “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat:”

As a result of its incapacity to understand history, the contemplative attitude of the bourgeoisie became polarized into two extremes: on the one hand, there were the “great individuals” viewed as the autocratic makers of history, on the other hand, there were the “natural laws” of the historical environment. They both turn out to be equally impotent—whether they are separated or working together—when challenged to produce an interpretation of the present in all its radical novelty (158). 

Many socialists—even vulgar Marxists—are too quick to accept a vision of history as governed by natural laws. So doing, they fall into a destructive fatalism. It is critical, therefore, to distinguish “fact” and “tendency” (183). The proletariat, Lukacs argues, is the true revolutionary agent, and as such embodies the dialectical solution to the central problem of German idealism: overcoming the gap between subject and object, between agency and world.

The proletariat consciously makes its own totalizing history, thus combining will and reason, the revolutionary power of the voluntarist agent and the objective reality of a rational order. Lukacs summarizes:

The self-understanding of the proletariat is therefore simultaneously the objective understanding of the nature of society. When the proletariat furthers its own class-aims it simultaneously achieves the conscious realization of the—objective—aims of society, aims which would inevitably remain abstract possibilities and objective frontiers but for this conscious intervention (149).

Very interesting.

What strikes me as also interesting is the similarity between Lukacs’ diagnosis of the two failed, one-sided visions of history, and the dichotomy Tocqueville offers between democratic and aristocratic history. Tocqueville writes in a chapter of Democracy in America titled “On Certain Tendencies Peculiar to Historians in Democratic Centuries:”

Historians who write in aristocratic centuries generally attribute everything that happens to the will and humor of certain individuals, and they are likely to impute the most important revolutions to the merest of accidents. They shrewdly elucidate the smallest of causes and often fail to notice the greatest (569 in the Goldhammer translation).

This is a mistake akin to Lukacs’ one-sided bourgeois historian who imagines that great men and contingency drive history. Historians in democratic societies, Tocqueville continues, fall into the opposite extreme:

Most of them attribute almost no influence over the destiny of the species to the individual and no influence over the fate of the people to citizens. On the other hand, they ascribe great general causes to the most insignificant particular facts (569).

Like Lukacs, Tocqueville criticizes this deterministic approach to history as yielding a pathetic, helpless passivity:

Thus historians who live in democratic times not only deny certain citizens the power to act on the fate of the people but also deny peoples themselves the ability to shape their own destiny, thereby making them subject to either inflexible providence or a sort of blind fatality. According to such historians, the destiny of every nation is irrevocably fixed by its position, origin, antecedents, and nature, and nothing it does can change that. They see each generation as firmly linked to the preceding one, and in this way they proceed backward in time, from era to era and necessary event to necessary event, all the way back to the origin of the world, forging a long, closely linked chain that encompasses and binds the entire human race (572).

Tocqueville favors the aristocratic history at least as a corrective to democratic passivity: “The historians of Antiquity taught men how to command; today’s historians teach little but how to obey.” (Fair enough, but perhaps Tocqueville's famous proclamations of the "providential fact" of democracy make him a teacher of passivity).

Still, I see plenty of truth in the joint Lukacs-Tocqueville diagnosis. We today are slaves of forces the economists purport to understand: Supply and Demand, Bond Spreads, Gresham’s Law.

On the one hand, shouldn’t we believe—with Marx and Lukacs and Tocqueville’s aristocratic historian—that these economic forces are simply inventions of human institutions? Shouldn’t that imply that we can change them should we so desire?

(I distinctly remember failing to understand in 2008 how the entire global economy could collapse all at once. I recall asking my father, an economist “if everyone is bankrupt, can’t we just reset and start over?” I know that was a stupid question, but I'm not entirely sure why).

Yet at the same time, OF COURSE these laws are real. Even if they aren’t fundamental facts of the universe, they are structural tendencies that OF COURSE constrain what we can and should do. 

Gramsci says something helpful about this. He writes about the problem of economic “laws:” how can we simultaneously recognize their existence AND their contingency? Gramsci writes:

Given these conditions in which classical economics was born, in order to be able to talk about a new science or a new conception of economic science (which is the same thing), it would be necessary to have demonstrated that new relations of forces, new conditions, new premises, have been establishing themselves, in other words, that a new market has been “determined” with a new “automatism” and phenomenism of its own, which present themselves as something “objective”, comparable to the automatism of natural phenomena. Classical economics has given rise to a “critique of political economy” but it does not seem to me that a new science or a new conception of the scientific problem has yet been possible. The “critique” of political economy starts from the concept of the historical character of the “determined market” and of its “automatism”, whereas pure economists conceive of these elements as “eternal” and “natural”; the critique analyses in a realistic way the relations of forces determining the market, it analyses in depth their contradictions, evaluates the possibilities of modification connected with appearance and strengthening of new elements and puts forward the “transitory” and “replaceable” nature of the science being criticized; it studies it as life but also as death and finds at its heart the elements that will dissolve it and supersede it without fail 

...

It is from these considerations that one must start in order to establish what is meant by “regularity”, “law”, “automatism” in historical facts. It is not a question of “discovering” a metaphysical law of “determinism”, or even of establishing a “general” law of causality. It is a question of bringing out how in historical evolution relatively permanent forces are constituted which operate with a certain regularity and automatism. Even the law of large numbers, although very useful as a model of comparison, cannot be assumed as the “law” of historical events (412).

(See here for more on Gramsci’s views of historical materialism and the balance of agency and determinism). Lukacs and Gramsci hope to make sense of a Marxist theory of history that is simultaneously historicist and rational. That is the permanent problem of dialectical history.

But I suppose the niggling fear for the communist (or any generally sane person) is that we have already reached the end of history, and that the structural regularities that govern bourgeois capitalism are, in fact, here to stay. Perhaps calling market forces mere products of reified consciousness will prove hopelessly utopian. Violently breaking things—a practice I oppose—may be the only way to find out. 

Gramsci on Historical Materialism: Political not Metaphysical

(I owe the great title to my friend, James)

A running theme through Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks is a critique of historical materialism in its more vulgar or dogmatic varieties. This shouldn’t be surprising, as the fatalistic (perhaps fideistic) character of some Marxist-inflected philosophies of history are diametrically opposed to Gramsci’s belief in the need of organized, disciplined party leadership in directing the communist revolution. As he puts it in one of many similar passages, the party must serve as a Machiavellian Prince in both channeling popular feeling and forming the conditions for the people's spontaneous power to construct a new future. The Party-Prince does not merely passively represent the proletariat, it creates the new communist citizen:

The modern Prince must be and cannot but be the proclaimer and organizer of an intellectual and moral reform, which also means creating the terrain for a subsequent development of the national-popular collective will towards the realization of a superior, total form of modern civilisation. (133)

To that end, Gramsci attacks what he terms “historical economism,” a vulgarized version of true historical materialism. Historical economism relies on a superficial, egoistic interpretation of human motivation. It suggests that men only act on the basis of conscious economic interests, not passion or emotion.

This view—which is wrongly attributed to Marxism—is synecdochally described by Gramsci as a “dirty-Jewish” philosophy. He borrows that term (“schmutzig-jüdische”) from Marx, who uses it to critically describe Feuerbach’s cynical view of practical motivation.

The dirty-Jewish approach to history is something like the Cui Bono approach—determine who profits in narrow economic terms, and you will determine who favors what policy: “It does not take economic class formations into account, with all their inherent relations, but is content to assume motives of mean and usurious self-interest.” (163)

This approach produces “comical” and “monstrous” mistakes of both sociological analysis and historical prediction. It fails to appreciate the complex relationship between economic class formation and ideological construction, and it correspondingly reproduces a version of the “What’s the Matter with Kansas” fallacy. Cultural hegemony—a program of social ideology construction and promulgation—is certainly tied to a material/structural foundation, but ideas are not merely epiphenomenal consequences of deeper material realities. The connection is more complicated given the role of elites, intellectuals, and contingencies in forming and filtering the consciousness of the people. (Gramsci offers as an example the filioque controversy. Surely it would be absurd to explain the rival Catholic/Orthodox theological positions in narrowly material terms. Though a friend informs me that Alexander Kazhdan has proposed such an explanation. He's observed that the more politically absolutist model of Byzantium had an elective affinity with the creedal faith in the clear supremacy of God the Father, whereas the more politically diffuse West favored a theological reflection of mutual interdependence). anyway, back to Gramsci:

The ‘economist’ hypothesis asserts the existence of an immediate element of strength—i.e. the availability of a certain direct or indirect financial backing … and is satisfied with that. But it is not enough. In this case too, an analysis of the balance of forces—at all levels—can only culminate in the sphere of hegemony and ethico-political relations. (167)

Beyond this form of “historical economism,” Gramsci targets a more prominent mistaken interpretation of Marx’s historical materialism. Influentially developed by Plekhanov and Bukharin, self-described orthodox Marxists take an almost metaphysical materialism as the basis of their philosophy of history. The locus classicus of Marx’s historical materialism comes in the 1859 “Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.” There Marx writes:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. 

In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. 

Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals' social conditions of existence – but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.

Gramsci complains that Bukharin and Plekhanov neglect and misinterpret this central statement of Marx’s materialist historical method. Their reformulation of Marx’s philosophy holds that “every fluctuation of politics and ideology can be presented and expounded as an immediate expression of the structure.” Such a view, Gramsci insists, “must be contested in theory as primitive infantilism, and combated in practice with the authentic testimony of Marx, the author of concrete political and historical works” (407). He cites the 18th Brumaire in particular as a model (I’ve blogged before about Gramsci’s response to that text).

Engels, Gramsci notes, has already written about the dangerous tendency to distort Marx’s macro-theory of history by finding in it a dogmatic, mechanical, deterministic monocausal explanation for everything:

The reduction of the philosophy of praxis to a form of sociology has represented the crystallization of the degenerate tendency, already criticized by Engels, and which consists in reducing a conception of the world to a mechanical formula which gives the impression of holding the whole of history in the palm of its hand” (427-8).

In these letters, Engels argues that in the final analysis material forces can make sense of the broad shape of history, but that material forces will not explain every particular development. Only "in the last resort" that economic realities drive human behavior. Leszek Kolakowski, it should be said, was (reasonably) annoyed at this caveat. How can we ever determine if we are at "the last resort?" He raises a Popperian falsifiability challenge: 

the doctrine is so imprecise that no historical investigation and no imaginable facts can refute it. Given the variety of factors of all kinds, the 'relative independence of the superstructure', 'reciprocal influence', the role of tradition, secondary causes, and so forth, any fact whatever can be fitted into the schema. As Popper observes, the schema is in this sense irrefutable and constantly self-confirming, but at the same time it has no scientific value as a means of explaining anything in the actual course of history (Kolakowski 301).

Kolakowski is careful to note the caveats that Marx and Engels provide. But he insists, nonetheless, that Marx's characteristically grand rhetoric is to blame for producing the vulgar, dogmatic interpretations that Gramsci criticizes.  

Gramsci argues that dogmatists misread Marx for two reasons. The first is that they conflate Marx’s materialism (a historical method) with metaphysical doctrines of materialism. The second is that they read Marx as providing a scientific, positivist, sociological law of human history. It is of crucial importance that Marx’s materialism be understood as a polemical reaction against German idealism, and not as an embrace of the long materialist tradition in metaphysics. This is why, for example, Marx never uses the language of a “materialist dialectic,” but instead “calls it ‘rational’ as opposed to ‘mystical’” (456-7). Breaking with Hegel does not mean embracing Lucretius. 

Marx’s true method is simultaneously rationalistic and historicist. It does not purport to have discovered master, eternal laws of history, but merely the regularities and scientific tendencies engendered by particular historical situations:

It has been forgotten that in the case of a very common expression [historical materialism] one should put the accent on the first term—‘historical’—and not on the second, which is of metaphysical origin. The philosophy of praxis is absolute “historicism”, the absolute secularisation and earthliness of thought, an absolute humanism of history. (465)

And elsewhere:

It is from these considerations that one must start in order to establish what is meant by ‘regularity’, ‘law’, ‘automatism’ in historical facts. It is not a question of ‘discovering’ a metaphysical law of ‘determinism’, or even of establishing a ‘general’ law of causality. It is a question of bringing out how in historical evolution relatively permanent forces are constituted which operate with a certain regularity and automatism. (412)

Bukharin and Plekhanov transform Marxism into sociological, metaphysical materialism. They are doing “positivistic Aristotelianism … the historical dialectic is replaced by the law of causality and the search for regularity, normality, and uniformity” (437).

One striking concession Gramsci makes is that this dogmatic, deterministic version of Marx’s historical materialism may have served an important role while the proletariat was politically immature. He weaves between theoretical discussions/exegeses of Marx and more immediately political treatments of tactics for seizing and wielding power.

When the subaltern lacks power, it draws strength from a providentialist or deterministic theory of history. It can find some solace in believing that defeats (and outright oppression) today cannot last. The arc of justice is long, that sort of thing. But as the proletariat gains power, it needs to grasp a more explicitly activist sense of its role and agency in driving history:

When the ‘subaltern’ becomes directive and responsible for the economic activity of the masses, mechanicism at a certain point becomes an imminent danger and a revision must take place in modes of thinking because a change has taken place in the social mode of existence. The boundaries and the dominion of the “force of circumstance” become restricted. But why? Because, basically, if yesterday the subaltern element was a thing, today it is no longer a thing but an historical person, a protagonist; if yesterday it was not responsible, because “resisting” a will external to itself, now it feels itself to be responsible because it is no longer resisting but an agent, necessarily active and taking the initiative. (337)

When the proletariat is politically mature and capable of seizing power, relying on a deterministic theory of history produces passivity and weakness. Fatalism ceases to be a source of solace and rejuvenation, and it becomes “nothing other than the clothing worn by real and active will when in a weak position” (337). The belief that “history is on our side,” when paired with a deterministic, pseudo-scientific theory of inevitability, saps the will of the proletariat:

in the science and art of politics [scientific determinism] can have literally catastrophic results which do irreparable harm. Indeed in politics the assumption of the law of statistics as an essential law operating of necessity is not only a scientific error, but becomes a practical error in action. What is more it favours mental laziness and a superficiality in political programmes. It should be observed that political action tends precisely to rouse the masses from passivity, in other words to destroy the law of large numbers. So how can that law be considered a law of sociology? (429)

Now that the proletariat has power within its grasp, it must move beyond the consolation of dogmatic, materialist history:

With regard to the historical role played by the fatalistic conception of the philosophy of praxis one might perhaps prepare its funeral oration, emphasizing its usefulness for a certain period of history, but precisely for this reason underlining the need to bury it with all due honours. (342)

All this is consonant with Gramsci’s emphasis on leadership, planning, and organization and his critique of undue faith in spontaneity and inevitability. Thinkers like Rosa Luxemburg and George Sorel articulate an implicit fideism in history. Spontaneism as a political program stems from:

the iron conviction that there exist objective laws of historical development similar in kind to natural law, together with a belief in a predetermined teleology like that of a religion: since favourable conditions are inevitably going to appear, and since these, in a rather mysterious way, will bring about palingenetic events, it is evident that any deliberate initiative tending to predispose and plan these conditions is not only useless but even harmful (168).

Gramsci, on the other hand, believes in the conjunction of historic tendencies and planned, political interventions. Marxist dialectical history offers a broad view of the direction of class struggle. It helps us to see the nature of the war, but it cannot tell us who will triumph in any given battle. Will, agency, and contingency make all the difference in the realm of real politics:

In reality one can ‘scientifically’ foresee only the struggle, but not the concrete moments of the struggle, which cannot but be the results of opposing forces in continuous movement, which are never reducible to fixed quantities since within them the quantity is continually becoming quality. In reality one can ‘foresee’ to the extent that one acts, to the extent that one applies a voluntary effort and therefore contributes concretely to creating the result ‘foreseen.’ Prediction reveals itself thus not as a scientific act of knowledge, but as the abstract expression of the effort made, the practical way of creating a collective will. (438)

Economic crisis (the great hope of a Luxemburg or Sorel) will not itself produce historical change. It can merely create “a terrain more favourable to the dissemination of certain modes of thought” (184). The scientific theories of history are useful, in such moments, only insofar as they contribute to a powerful political will. Such analyses “acquire significance only if they serve to justify a particular practical activity, or initiative of will” (185).

Through all this, Gramsci echoes Weber’s famous call for an “ethic of responsibility” as opposed to an “ethic of conviction.” Where Weber targets moralists unable to see the real demands of politics, Gramsci targets anti-moralist materialists who counsel passivity and overconfidence. That won’t do:

Mass ideological factors always lag behind mass economic phenomena … at certain moments, the automatic thrust due to the economic factor is slowed down, obstructed or even momentarily broken by traditional ideological elements—hence … there must be a conscious, planned struggle to ensure that the exigencies of the economic position of the masses, which may conflict with the traditional leadership’s policies, are understood. An appropriate political initiative is always necessary to liberate the economic thrust from the dead weight of traditional policies—i.e. to change the political direction of certain forces which have to be absorbed if a new homogeneous politico-economic historical bloc, without internal contradictions, is to be successfully formed (168).

"Planned struggle" is always necessary. 

Gramsci on Retributive Punishment

 Gramsci's Prison Notebooks defends a retributive theory of punishment:

If every State tends to create and maintain a certain type of civilisation and of citizen (and hence of collective life and individual relations), and to eliminate certain customs and attitudes and to disseminate others, then the Law will be its instrument for this purpose (together with the school system, and other institutions and activities). ... The conception of law will have to be freed from every residue of transcendentalism and from every absolute; in practice, from every moralistic fanaticism. However, it seems to me that one cannot start from the point of view that the state does not "punish" (if this term is reduced to its human significance), but only struggles against social "dangerousness". In reality, the State must be conceived of as an "educator", in as much as it tends precisely to create a new type or level of civilisation. ... The Law is the repressive and negative aspect of the entire positive, civilising activity undertaken by the State. The "prize-giving" activities of individuals and groups, etc., must also be incorporated in the conception of the Law; praiseworthy and meritorious activity is rewarded, just as criminal actions are punished. (246-7)

Gramsci's retributivism contrasts with the positivist criminology of Enrico Ferri, a sometime socialist who became a major supporter of Mussolini's fascist regime. Ferri, following a long enlightenment tradition, rejected retribution (and perhaps rehabilitation as well) as appropriate grounds for punishment, and he favored punishment merely as a form of social deterrence. This kind of positivist penal theory remains very much alive, in, for example, the work of Steve Levitt, who recently has proposed dramatically reducing incarceration and replacing it with constant GPS monitoring. Such proposals make sense if one takes deterrence and public safety to be the only good reason for punishment. They make less sense if one cares about retributive justice and rehabilitation.

As Gramsci notes, punishment is one crucial part of holistic social education. He rejects liberal neutrality and insists on the ethical character of the state:

Educative and formative role of the State. Its aim is always that of creating new and higher types of civilization; of adapting the ‘civilisation’ and the morality of the broadest popular masses to the necessities of the continuous development of the economic apparatus of production; hence of evolving even physically new types of humanity. (242)

Every state, knowingly or not, is what Hegel termed an "ethical state":

every State is ethical in as much as one of its most important functions is to raise the great mass of the population to a particular cultural and moral level, a level (or type) which corresponds to the needs of the productive forces for development, and hence to the interests of the ruling class. The school as a positive educative function, and the courts as a repressive and negative educative function, are the most important State activities in this sense. (258)

So a liberal, capitalist society might not take itself to be actively "forming" citizens in some deep moral sense, but insofar as it is preparing workers for a capitalist economy, it is doing precisely that. Rawls too recognized this (somewhat obvious) fact:

The social system shapes the wants and aspirations that its citizens come to have. It determines in part the sort of persons they want to be as well as the sort of persons they are. Thus an economic system is not only an institutional device for satisfying existing wants and needs but a way of creating and fashioning wants in the future. (Theory of Justice 259)

On Gramsci's particular view, this program of citizen formation is critical for producing (one might say "manufacturing") consent. Consent is not passively received by the State, but is instead a dynamic relationship between the rulers and ruled. Citizens give consent and the State actively forms the citizens to consent. This is what Gramsci terms "organic consent" as mediated by the totalitarian political party:

This is precisely the function of law in the State and in society; through "law" the State renders the ruling group "homogeneous", and tends to create a social conformism which is useful to the ruling group's line of development. The general activity of law (which is wider than purely State and governmental activity and also includes the activity involved in directing civil society, in those zones which the technicians of law call legally neutral--i.e. in morality and in custom generally) serves to understand the ethical problem better, in a concrete sense. In practice, this problem is the correspondence "spontaneously and freely accepted" between the acts and the admissions of each individual, between the conduct of each individual and the ends which society sets itself as necessary--a correspondence which is coercive in the sphere of positive law technically understood, and is spontaneous and free (more strictly ethical) in those zones in which "coercion" is not a State affair but is effected by public opinion, moral climate, etc." (195-6)

 

Gramsci on Caesarism and Napoleon III (and Trump?)

Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks have much to say about moments of crisis and Caesarism. Because I have a parochial mind, I cannot help but read these discussions (and especially the treatment of Napoleon III, pace Marx) without thinking of Donald Trump and our present political moment.

He defines an "organic crisis" as the moment when:

social classes become detached from their traditional parties. In other words, the traditional parties in that particular organisational form, with the particular men who constitute, represent, and lead then, are no longer recognised by their class (or fraction of a class) as its expression. When such crises occur, the immediate situation becomes delicate and dangerous, because the field is open for violent solutions, for the activities of unknown forces, represented by charismatic 'men of destiny.' (210)

A political crisis is a moment of partisan breakdown. The parties imperfectly represent certain social classes or groups. They wield power both through the coercive force of state authority and through more subtle forms of cultural control (what Gramsci famously calls "hegemony"). This is a dynamic process by which parties both represent (passively) the demands of certain classes, while also forming (actively) the consciousness and ideology of those classes:

if it is true that parties are only the nomenclature for classes, it is also true that parties are not simply a mechanical and passive expression of those classes, but react energetically upon them in order to develop, solidify, and universalise them. (227)

In a crisis of authority, the represented classes no longer see themselves represented by their political parties. 

Two things can happen when a crisis of this sort emerges. The first option--what Gramsci terms the "organic" option--is for a new political party to realign itself to more fully represent the interests of its old class or a new coalition of classes:

The passage of the troops of many different parties under the banner of a single party, which better represents and resumes the needs of the entire class, is an organic and normal phenomenon, even if its rhythm is very swift ... It represents the fusion of an entire social class under a single leadership, which alone is held to be capable of solving an overriding problem of its existence and of fending off a mortal danger. (211)

But parties are not always able to produce the necessary realignment to overcome a crisis: "they are not always capable of adapting themselves to new tasks and to new epochs, nor of evolving pari passu with the overall relations of force (and hence the relative position of their class) in the country in question, or in the international field" (211). 

Parties become decadent and stultified. They fail to actively build an attractive vision of politics and to form party members as committed, ideological loyalists. Again, this is partly a passive failure of the parties--a failure to cultivate a program--and an active failure--an abandonment of core class interests.

When parties fail to resolve a crisis, a Caesarist, charismatic leader steps in. The model Gramsci has in mind here is Napoleon III. A Caesarist of his sort arose from a peculiar kind of partisan crisis:

Caesarism can be said to express a situation in which the forces in conflict balance each other in a catastrophic manner; that is to say, they balance each other in such a way that a continuation of the conflict can only terminate in their reciprocal destruction. When the progressive force A struggles with the reactionary force B, not only may A defeat B or B defeat A, but it may happen that neither A nor B defeats the other--that they bleed each other mutually and then a third force C intervenes from outside, subjugating what is left of both A and B. (219)

The Caesarist comes from outside of a stale, unresponsive, mutually destructive conflict between the parties of left and right. The classic means by which a Caesarist comes to power is by military coup, but Gramsci notes that new forms of legal usurpation are more likely to be common in the modern world of parliamentary government and capitalist economics:

In the modern world, with its great economic-trade-union and party-political coalitions, the mechanism of the Caesarist phenomenon is very different from what it was up to the time of Napoleon III. In the period up to Napoleon III, the regular military forces or soldiers of the line were a decisive element in the advent of Caesarism, and this came about through quite precise coups d'etat, through military actions, etc. In the modern world trade-union and political forces, with the limitless means which may be at the disposal of small groups of citizens, complicate the problem. The functionaries of the parties and economic unions can be corrupted or terrorised, without any need for military action in the grand style--of the Caesar of 18 Brumaire type (220).

So now the Caesarist moment can operate within the institutional structures of capitalist, parliamentary society. The Caesarist can emerge from within an established if discredited political party.

All this seems to be a reasonable description of the much-discussed "populist" moment across Western politics. Trump and Brexit are often taken to have emerged from a failure of political parties to represent their traditional social classes. A sense of elite betrayal (a collapse of Gramscian hegemony, you might say), led to explosive reactions and an opening for new political possibilities. The question was whether this crisis would be resolved by an old party reforming itself to more fully represent a new social coalition, or for a Caesarist "man of destiny" to emerge to fill the void.

(I should note also that Gramsci says the Caesarist need not be a single man, which may help me brute-force Brexit into this discussion).

Gramsci sees Caesarism as dangerous, and he would prefer it if a disciplined, organized, ideological party could emerge to fill the space opened up by a political crisis. But Caesarism is not always reactionary--in certain circumstances it can serve the interests of progressives:

There can be both progressive and reactionary forms of Caesarism; the exact significance of each form can, in the last analysis, be reconstructed only through concrete history, and not by means of any sociological rule of thumb. Caesarism is progressive when its intervention helps the progressive force to triumph, albeit with its victory tempered by certain compromises and limitations. It is reactionary when its intervention helps the reactionary force to triumph--in this case too with certain compromises and limitations ... Caesar and Napoleon I are examples of progressive Caesarism. Napoleon III and Bismarck of reactionary Caesarism (219).

The Caesarist is progressive when it transcends political stalemate to advance to a new, higher form of politics. Reactionary Caesarism holds back the forces of history and represents, ultimately, only a momentary disruption. The classic distinction here is between Napoleon I and III (the Uncle and the Nephew):

The Caesarism of Caesar and Napoleon I was, so to speak, of a quantitative/qualitative character; in other words it represented the historical phase of passage from one type of State to another type--a passage in which the innovations were so numerous, and of such a nature, that they represented a complete revolution. The Caesarism of Napooleon III was merely, and in a limited fashion, quantitative; there was no passage from one type of State to another, but only 'evolution' of the same type along unbroken lines. (222)

Most modern Caesarists, Gramsci insists, are like Napoleon III. They do not represent any real transcendence, but merely a momentary distraction from a stable, underlying stalemate.

Trump represents precisely this sort of momentary, historically insignificant Caesarism. Though Oren Cass and others on the intellectual right hope to harness the possibilities revealed by Trump's political success--they aim to build a new working class, multiracial, patriotic, populist conservatism--there seems to me no indication that they are remotely serious or likely to succeed in their venture. In a Gramscian vein, we might say that they simply lack the organized, disciplined tool of a real party institution to direct spontaneous sentiments into real politics.

There will ultimately be nothing "epochal" about Trump. He will not have led to a reorganization of Republican party politics. Nor will he have successfully galvanized more ambitious progressive party politics. (Gramsci offers the Dreyfus affair as an example of a rightwing Caesarist moment having progressive historical implications for mobilizing and activating the political left). Instead, the stalemates and mediocrities of American political life will carry on basically unchanged. The Republican Party might favor giving parents 43 dollars a year in a new affordable family tax credit, but there is no question they will continue to focus on repealing Obamacare and cutting taxes as their overwhelming national priorities. Joe Biden's Democrats, for their part, will govern in a manner indistinguishable from Obama-Clinton-Blair (even if they occasionally use slightly more exciting rhetoric). From the point of view of history and Mars, nothing has changed in American politics.

I should add here that many intelligent people disagree with me. They think that we have a real opportunity for a new kind of politics. I think they are wrong. But Gramsci is helpful on this point. He points out that political prediction and political activity are not separable activities. After all, politics is distinct from the natural sciences because it turns, ultimately, on human will:

it is absurd to think of a purely "objective" prediction. Anybody who makes a prediction has in fact a "programme" for whose victory he is working, and his prediction is precisely an element contributing to that victory. This does not mean that prediction need always be arbitrary and gratuitous, or simply tendentious. Indeed one might say that only to the extent to which the objective aspect of prediction is linked to a programme does it acquire its objectivity: 1. because strong passions are necessary to sharpen the intellect and help make intuition more penetrating; 2. because reality is a product of the application of human will to the society of things ... therefore if one excludes all voluntarist elements, or if it is only other people's wills whose intervention one reckons as an objective element in the general interplay of forces, one mutilates reality itself. (171)

(I think that's a very interesting account of the connection between theory and practice. But back to the main point). 

What would a real, world-historical crisis look like? Gramsci hoped that the crisis of parliamentary politics in his day would give rise (if properly organized and led by a responsible party) to a new communist epoch. 

There's something generally quite striking about "crisis" theory. A philosophy of history which supposes that certain crisis will catapult society into a more advanced age always seems to me to retain a hint of deep pessimism. "We are living through the crises of late-stage capitalism. These contradictions are maturing. They cannot survive. The revolution is coming." Lurking behind that revolutionary optimism is niggling fear: "Maybe liberal, capitalist mediocrity actually is stable. Maybe this pathetic society will go on indefinitely."

Gramsci seems to me equivocal here. He thinks we will not go back to the old ossified ideologies, and he is hopeful that the spread of "materialism" (i.e. of communism) will finally take hold. But he is less than fully confident:

That aspect of the modern crisis which is bemoaned as a "wave of materialism" is related to what is called the "crisis of authority." If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e. is no longer "leading" but only "dominant," exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, and no longer believe what they used to believe previously, etc. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear ... The problem is the following: can a rift between popular masses and ruling ideologies as serious as that which emerged after the war be "cured" by the simple exercise of force, preventing the new ideologies from imposing themselves? Will the interregnum, the crisis whose historically normal solution is blocked in this way, necessarily be resolved in favour of a restoration of the old? Given the character of the ideologies, this can be ruled out--yet not in the absolute sense. Meanwhile physical depression will lead in the long run to a widespread scepticism, and a new "arrangement" will be found--in which, for example, catholicism will even more become simply Jesuitism, etc.

From this too one may conclude that highly favourable conditions are being created for an unprecedented expansion of historical materialism. The very poverty which at first inevitably characterises historical materialism as a theory diffused widely among the masses will help it spread. The death of the old ideologies takes the form of scepticism with regard to all theories and general formulae; of application to the pure economic fact (earnings, etc.), and to a form of politics which is not simply realistic in fact (this was always the case) but which is cynical in its immediate manifestation 

... But this reduction to economics and to politics means precisely a reduction of the highest superstructures to the level of those which adhere more closely to the structure itself--in other words, the possibility and necessity of creating a new culture. (276)