Ernest Renan's Liberal Nationalism

I recently had occasion to read Ernest Renan's famous 1882 lecture, "What is a Nation?" I'm told that this is something of a canonical text in the history of liberal nationalism, and reading through it makes sense why. The lecture is beautiful, learned, and forceful. Renan's commitment to some kind of liberalism resonates all the way through, and his warnings of the terror that accompany illiberal nationalism read prophetic at times.

I take it this lecture is most famous for three points: (1) The rejection of any "metaphysical" nationalism founded on race, language, and religion (as well as economic interest, military necessity, and geography); (2) The insistence that nations must forget their origins and construct a new shared memory; and (3) The claim that nations depend on popular consent, and so can easily be redrawn or deconstructed.

Those three central claims make it easy to see a continuity between Renan's liberal nationalism and, for example, Habermas' "constitutional patriotism." Such views contain a clear hostility to tying political citizenship to any pre-political identity (race, religion, language), and hope instead for a national identity built on some other kind of shared beliefs. Liberal nationalism is always a contingent nationalism. The "homeland" only exists insofar as people continue to consciously will it into existence. Why should it be anything more!

We have driven metaphysical and theological abstractions out of politics. What remains after that? Man, his desires, his needs. Secession, you will say to me, and, in the long run, the disintegration of nations will be the consequence of a system that places these old organisms at the mercy of oft scarcely enlightened wills. It is clear that, in such a field, no principle must be taken to extremes. Truths of this order are only applicable as a whole and in a very general fashion. Human wills change; but what does not, here below? Nations are not something eternal. They had their beginnings, they will end. A European confederation will probably replace them. But such is not the law of the century in which we are living. At the present time, the existence of nations is a good thing, a necessity, even. Their existence is the guarantee of liberty, which would be lost if the world had only one law and one master. 

I think it's notable that Renan begins with the objection from secession (if the nation is just a matter of will, won't you have lots of secession?), he grants that voluntary exit is always a possibility, but he suggests finally that history well tend toward a "European confederation" rather than micro-states.

The question of referenda and national determination is present throughout the lecture. Renan makes it explicit in one famous passage: "A nation's existence is (if you will pardon the metaphor) an everyday plebiscite, just as an individual's existence is a perpetual affirmation of life."

It's tempting to read that line literally, and perhaps that's how it should be read. Perhaps Renan is arguing that provinces should just periodically hold plebiscites to determine to what nation they belong. That's probably what Renan favored in the case of Alsace! But I think that reading misses the second half of the quotation: "a perpetual affirmation of life." This is clearly a consent theory, but not necessarily a crudely majoritarian one. At least, I don't think that my daily decision to continue living just arises from a quick balance of the pros and cons. The will to remain a people emanates from somewhere deeper than can perhaps be captured by a momentary opinion poll or plebiscite.

In rejecting essentialist conceptions of the nation, Renan impressively goes through each candidate (race, religion, language, etc) to argue that none can provide a satisfactory account of what constitutes a nation. Still, if I may be pedantic, I think what he's doing here is introducing a difference between the efficient and formal cause of the nation. The form of the nation is not tied to any of these essential characteristics, but that doesn't mean the efficient cause of a national identity is always unrelated to such essentialism. This is why Renan emphasizes that we must forget the true origins of our national identity!

The act of forgetting, I would even say, historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for nationality. Indeed, historical enquiry brings back to light the deeds of violence that took place at the origin of all political formations, even of those whose consequences have been the most beneficial. Unity is always achieved brutally"

(Recall Burke on this point: "There is a secret veil to be drawn over the beginnings of all governments. They had their origin, as the beginning of all such things have had, in some matters that had as good be covered by obscurity. Time in the origin of most governments has thrown this mysterious veil over them. Prudence and discretion make it necessary to throw something of that veil over a business in which otherwise the fortune, the genius, the talents and military virtue of this Nation never shone more conspicuously." Hastings impeachment speech 2/16/1788).

So part of what it is to have a national identity is a requirement that we forget the vicious efficient cause of our nation. Yet essential for having a nation is having a new sense of shared historic memory. Here's a famous passage from the lecture:

A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things that, in truth, are but one constitute this soul, this spiritual principle. One is in the past, the other in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form. 

The reason these two things--historic memory and present consent--are really just one thing is because "A heroic past, great glory ... this is the capital stock upon which one bases a national idea."

And what kind of memories in particular are required? Memories of historic sacrifice! Those are the only memories that lead us to will to perform new glorious deeds in the future.

All this is certainly, I think, a kind of liberal nationalism. But what's so interesting about it to me is how much more demanding it is than contemporary liberal nationalisms! What liberal nationalists today would dare suggest that the nation is a "spiritual principle," or that the essence of national identity is a willingness to sacrifice oneself for others?

Sometimes, I think, language not so different from the "spiritual principle" is deployed by some of the more ambitious democratic theorists, who seek to conceive of democratic life as truly a collective venture. I have some sympathies for thinking that way. And some liberal nationalists might also be inclined to write in the language of sacrifice. For David Miller, I believe, the language of sacrifice makes an occasional appearance. But "sacrifice" has been thoroughly sanitized! No longer is it meant to evoke heroic literal death for the nation, but rather a willingness to pay higher taxes to support the poor. When most contemporary liberal philosophers speak of sacrifice, they really just mean reciprocity. But I don't think that fits the language of glory Renan insists on using.

If anything, the closest instantiation of Renanian liberal nationalism I can think of is Lincoln! The political theology of the Gettysburg Address is designed specifically to construct a new shared historic memory to ground the American national identity. The (not so political) theology of the Second Inaugural is doing something a bit different: dwelling on shared sin and divinely ordained punishment, not historic sacrificial glory. The Lyceum Address also seems relevant, as there Lincoln laments the disappearance of a shared historic memory of the founding. But there too, Lincoln thinks it is impossible to hold on to a memory of a founding, for it will be inevitably levelled by the "silent artillery of time." Still, the youthful Lincoln's solution of constitutional reverence (even if lacking in some historical rigor) fits well with Renan's account of common sacrifice creating a shared will to construct a glorious future together.

Jacob Viner on Providence and the Invisible Hand

I recently read Jacob Viner's The Role of Providence in the Social Order. The obligatory first thing to say about this work is how unimaginable it would be today to see anything like this historic erudition in a contemporary economist. That's just part of the larger tragic story of the discipline of economics abandoning its own intellectual history.

Viner wishes to bring out the connection between the founding ideas of modern economics and a long tradition of Christian providence. Frankly, as intellectual history, the lectures are a bit unsatisfactory. They lack the depth of Funkenstein's book on the topic (see here), and they lack the philosophical elegance of Hirschman's The Passions and the Interests.

The book is extremely sketchy in its grand portrayal of Christian natural theology, but that's not really its main target, so perhaps Viner can be forgiven. (I think the lectures would have been better if he just began with Newton and Leibniz. Viner is much more interesting on how they played with watchmaker metaphors of divine causation than he is on Augustine). 

The core thesis is that providentialism underwrites fundamental tenets of the modern economic worldview. The first is that a new conception of providence justifies the hitherto universally scorned practice of global commerce:

(1) providence favors trade between peoples as a means of promoting the universal brotherhood of man; (2) to give economic incentives to peoples to trade with each other providence has given to their respective territories different products. (32)

According to an ancient and venerable tradition, nothing breeds more vice than commerce. Merchants travelling to distant lands bring back threatening foreign vices. The luxury goods themselves sold by the merchants are sources of great moral corruption. And the impulse to conquer the world with trade represents the height of human hubris--just think of Ulysses' wanderlust that lands him in Dante's inferno. 

This ancient view began to be inverted in late antiquity through the influence of a Stoic pagan, Libanius, on his Christian students (St. Basil and St. John Chrysostom). The new view that emerges is that God has deliberately distributed resources in different countries so as to induce global commerce and human fraternity. 

Viner cites a wonderful example of this argument being made in 1894 as part of a Congressman's argument in favor of free trade. Unfortunately with a quick google I couldn't find the full cite:

God could have made this world, if He had wanted to, with exactly the same climate and soil all over it, so that each nation would have been entirely independent of any other nation. But He didn't do that. He made this world so that every nation in it has got to depend for something upon some other nations. He did that to promote kinship among the different people. Let us drop this unnatural business. There is no end to the ingenuity of man. You can fix up a scheme, if you want, for raising oranges in Maine, but a barrel of those oranges would make William Waldorf Astor's pocketbook sick. . . . You can raise polar bears on the Equator if you spend money enough, but it would take a king's ransom to do it. 

The providential defense of global trade was also somewhat cynically tied to interpretations of the Genesis account of the Tower of Babel. The common reading of that story--God's condemnation of cosmopolitan hubris--was used by some as a patriotic critique of the universalist tendencies of global trade, but by others as evidence for that God sought to promote global trade by dividing up the world into different nations. 

One final intriguing point here is that the entirety of Hechsher-Ohlin trade theory can be found in these providential arguments! Thomas Hutchinson, of all people, is credited with a deeply prescient account of H-O international trade equilibrium.

Hutchinson: "The great creator of the universe in infinite wisdom has so formed the earth that different parts of it, from the soil, climate, &c. are adapted to different produce, and he so orders and disposes the genius, temper, numbers and other circumstances relative to the inhabitants as to render some employments peculiarly proper for one country, and others for another, and by this provision a mutual intercourse is kept up between the different parts of the globe" (52-3).

The second contribution of providence theory to modern economics is the theodicy-based defense of economic inequality. A long tradition of British philosophy reacted against Hobbes' challenge that natural self-interest led to anarchy, and needed to be held in check by a powerful sovereign. The sentimental school--led by Shaftesbury and later Hutcheson--argued that disinterested benevolence is a far more powerful motivation than Hobbes accepted. The selfish school--led by theological utilitarians like John Gay and William Paley--reject any innate moral sense, but argued that an enlightened pursuit of self-interest will lead us to act in an ethical manner. The most blunt version of this self-interest comes not from some neo-Platonic account of the harmony of the soul, but from the explicit threat of eternal condemnation for vicious conduct. (Eighteenth century Anglican theology debates sound extremely crude on Viner's presentation).

Adam Smith's account of moral sentimentalism from TMS comes out of this tradition. For Smith, our reason is fallible, but God has fortunately planted in us natural sentiments that incline us to benefit our family, friends, neighbors, and countrymen. This is what leads Viner to conclude: "Smith's system of thought, including his economics, is not intelligible if one disregards the role he assigns in it to the teleological elements, to the 'invisible hand'" (82).

Viner finishes with some broader reflections on how the modern economic apology for inequality flows from these theodicy accounts. Since Aristotle it had been argued that communal ownership of property was deeply inefficient. A new line of argument (the one Viner claims was very rarely advanced) was that economic inequality mirrored the transcendent hierarchical order of creation. Another neo-Stoic line of argument was that inequality of wealth will not lead to the inequality of happiness, but indeed if anything the poor should be happier than the wealthy! (You can think here of Smith's parable of the poor man's son).

With that--and with some charming if boilerplate comments on how intellectual history teaches economists to be humble--Viner concludes. The lectures raise some interesting issues, and the discussion in particular of the providential tendency of trade to produce human fraternity is illuminating. But the canvassing of views on inequality is quick and somewhat superficial, and Viner doesn't do much to advance beyond my guess of what the common-sense understanding of this history already was.

Funkenstein on Indeterminacy and Law

I recently read Amos Funkenstein's chapter on divine providence and the invisible hand in his massive Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century. Funkenstein has plenty of interesting things to say--though I must confess I don't quite follow the arc of the chapter as a whole. It reads more as a series of episodic looks into distinct though connected accounts of providence and the philosophy history from late antiquity to Vico, with suggestive nods to Smith and Marx. 

One section I found especially interesting, however, was Funkenstein's treatment of the place for indeterminacy in law. Funkenstein begins this section with a discussion of Christian and Jewish attempts to deploy a principle of accommodation to understand the role of sacrifice in the Old Testament. The suggestion through all this is that modern accounts of historical progress (from Grotius/Smith's stadial theories of history, to Kantian providentialism) come out of exegetical debates over apparently inconvenient Old Testament descriptions of God and the Jewish law. The broad interpretive principle was that the "bible speaks the language of man," and that these passages must be understood as communicating to the primitive Jewish people in a way they could understand. 

Ritual sacrifice is a particularly striking example. Augustine follows a long Jewish tradition in concluding that religious sacrifice was appropriate in a particular time given the prejudices and sensibilities of the Israelites. Today, however, modern Christians have reached a stage of development  that allows them to more fully understand and worship God without reliance on such religious practices. For Augustine, the crucial break was of course the incarnation, while Jewish commentators relied on a historic narrative of religious monotheistic maturation. Here's Augustine in one of his letters (see p. 223 of Funkenstein):

The divine institution of sacrifice was suitable in the former dispensation, but is not suitable now. For the change suitable to the present age has been enjoined by God, who knows infinitely better than man what is fitting for every age, and who is, whether He give or add, abolish or curtail, increase or diminish, the unchangeable Governor as He is the unchangeable Creator of mutable things, ordering all events in His providence until the beauty of the completed course of time, the component parts of which are the dispensations adapted to each successive age, shall be finished, like the grand melody of some ineffably wise master of song, and those pass into the eternal immediate contemplation of God who here, though it is a time of faith, not of sight, are acceptably worshipping Him.

They are mistaken, moreover, who think that God appoints these ordinances for His own advantage or pleasure; and no wonder that, being thus mistaken, they are perplexed, as if it was from a changing mood that He ordered one thing to be offered to Him in a former age, and something else now. But this is not the case. God enjoins nothing for His own advantage, but for the benefit of those to whom the injunction is given. Therefore He is truly Lord, for He does not need His servants, but His servants stand in need of Him. In those same Old Testament Scriptures, and in the age in which sacrifices were still being offered that are now abrogated, it is said: I said to the Lord, You are my God, for You do not need my good things. Wherefore God did not stand in need of those sacrifices, nor does He ever need anything; but there are certain acts, symbolic of these divine gifts, whereby the soul receives either present grace or eternal glory, in the celebration and practice of which, pious exercises, serviceable not to God but to ourselves, are performed.

Ritual sacrifice has to be understood as a legal practice appropriate to a particular historic time and place. The development of appropriate religious practices is just a part of the great beauty (notice the aesthetic language) of God's providential plan for history.

Funkenstein turns to Maimonides, who further develops this philosophy of history. Maimonides emphasizes that every law is BOTH a commandment of reason and obedience. This means that the commandments of the Old Testament no longer observed by modern Jews were not instituted simply to teach obedience, but were built around a core rational principle.

This interpretive approach--that we can and should identify the underlying reason for even obsolete religious laws--combines with Maimonides' philosophy of science. (Here I don't entirely follow Funkenstein). On Maimonides' view all natural laws must contain some degree of contingency. This principle is Maimonides' way of explaining features of the dietary/ceremonial law that always had a rational purpose, but no longer bind practicing Jews. I'll quote Funkenstein at length:

What do we really look for when we ask for the reason of a commandment? Must a rationale for a specific law cover every part and detail of that law? In a preliminary answer, Maimonides draws a strict analogy between laws of nature and social laws. In the second part of the Guide, Maimonides developed one of the most original philosophies of science in the Middle Ages. There he proved that not only are laws of nature (the ordering structures of nature) in themselves contingent upon God's will; but that each of them must include, by definition, a residue of contingency, an element of indeterminacy. No law of nature is completely determining, and no natural phenomenon completely determined, not even in God's mind. To illustrate the matter, allow me to invent an example. Assume that tables should all be made out of wood; assume that the kind of wood most suitable for tables is mahogany, and that the best mahogany can be found only in a remote forest in Indonesia. A carpenter who wishes to make a perfect table has good reasons to choose mahogany and to travel all the way to the said forest. But there and then he will ultimately be confronted with two or more equally reasonable possibilities. Should he choose the tree to his right or to his left? He must choose one, and both are equally suitable. The purpose can never determine the material actualization in all respects, down to the last particular; a "thoroughgoing determination" is ruled out by the very material structure of our world. In the very same way, there may (indeed must) be a purpose to the universe, but it does not govern all particulars. The purpose of the universe may require the circular orbit of the celestial bodies. But it does not account necessarily for the different velocities or colors of the planets (Funkenstein p 229).

So if I understand correctly, for Maimonides a law as a whole has a clear rational purposes (a rational final cause, I suppose), but that purpose need not explain every detail of the law. (What I find tricky about this is that Funkenstein contrasts Maimonides' position to that of Sa'adia, who argued that many divine commandments were simply irrational in their content, but existed merely for the ultimate purpose of inculcating obedience to God. Maimonides' rejects the strong claim that any of these laws themselves were irrational, but that there is simply a degree of free, contingent choice built into the nature of law itself. I see the difference, but it's worth thinking it through).

This Maimonidean philosophy of science (and therefore philosophy of law) is an extension, Funkenstein argues, of a principle always found in Aristotelian metaphysics. It also interestingly maps onto post-Newtonian physics: "In a sense, Maimonides' principle of indeterminacy is closer to modern than to classical physics: modern physics likewise assumes a principle of indeterminacy not as a limit to our knowledge, but as an objective indeterminacy within nature itself." Miracles and special providence, on this view, are not violations of the natural law, but free occurrences within the reservoir of contingency preserved by the nature of laws.

If it is true that indeterminacy is built into the nature of laws themselves, then we must reject Paley-style divine watchmaker arguments. (Newton and Paley always go together). If the universe was indeed governed by perfectly necessary laws that necessarily explained every single event, then there would be no reason for a creator God! The very fact that there is indeterminacy built into the nature of things is evidence that the order of the universe does not derive from the nature of matter itself, but from an imposition by the Creator. (Funkestein says this argument draws from Kalam, and is repeated by Kant).

This, ultimately, is Maimonides' explanation for the rational purpose of sacrifices that are no longer required. The final cause of these sacrifices is perfectly intelligible even today. But the particular matter of the sacrifices was always less important. Again, here's Funkenstein quoting Maimonides:

We may be able to explain, in view of their purpose, why sacrifices should have been instituted in the first place; "but the fact that one sacrifice is a lamb and another a ram; and the fact that their number is determined-to this one can give no reason at all, and whoever tries to assign a rationale enters a protracted madness." Rather than looking for an always determining principle for each law, we should look for a contingent rationale. Maimonides found such a contingent rationale in the concrete historical circumstances under which these laws were given to the nascent Israel. (Funkenstein 231)

Unsurprisingly, the contingent rationale for the particular sacrifices demanded of ancient Israel was tied to their particular historical situation. The relative closeness to polytheistic sacrificial rituals was a deliberate pedagogic method to wean the Jewish people away from such idol worship.

This is all very interesting philosophy of science and intellectual history (Funkenstein goes on to sketch the various reactions to this Maimonidean hermeneutic principle, focusing on those who condemned Maimonides for relativizing the truths of the bible). But the major upshot for my more parochial interests is the connection between these debates and later conceptions of the nature of positive law.

Thomas Aquinas, for example, partly embraces Maimonides' method, both as a matter of interpreting the Old Law, as well as a method of understanding the distinction between general precepts of reason derived from the natural law, and the particular instantiations/institutions of positive law and divine law.

The ceremonial and judicial precepts of the Old Law were not rationally necessary in their particular content, but rather in their general purpose. The nature of law permitted a space for contingency with an eye toward guiding the Jewish people in their particular situation. (This is not so, of course, for the moral law precepts of the Old Testament, which are perfectly rational in themselves, and which are accordingly always binding).

As it relates to the distinction between natural and positive law, this indeterminacy in the essence of law proves quite useful to Aquinas. It allows him to make sense of the institution of private property, for example. Private property derives from the natural law itself--it is natural for man to own property. But against a Lockean natural-law theory of property, this natural-law precept remains thoroughly under-specified. It is natural that man have some form of private property for the sake of their own private development, but more importantly for the sake of the common good. (Also, if theft is a violation of the natural law, it seems necessary that some kind of ownership is required by the natural law).

Two important implications fall out of this account of the natural-law right to property. First, because the natural right to property is ultimately oriented towards the common good, whenever any positive-law right to property runs contrary to the common good, it ceases to obtain. This is the reasoning behind Aquinas' famous argument that theft for the sake of survival is, strictly speaking, not theft at all: "It is not theft, properly speaking, to take secretly and use another's property in a case of extreme need: because that which he takes for the support of his life becomes his own property by reason of that need."

And second, this account allows for extensive discretion in the positive-law imposition of private property rights. Here's Aquinas on the general principle:

But it must be noted that something may be derived from the natural law in two ways: first, as a conclusion from premises, secondly, by way of determination of certain generalities. The first way is like to that by which, in sciences, demonstrated conclusions are drawn from the principles: while the second mode is likened to that whereby, in the arts, general forms are particularized as to details: thus the craftsman needs to determine the general form of a house to some particular shape. Some things are therefore derived from the general principles of the natural law, by way of conclusions; e.g. that "one must not kill" may be derived as a conclusion from the principle that "one should do harm to no man": while some are derived therefrom by way of determination; e.g. the law of nature has it that the evil-doer should be punished; but that he be punished in this or that way, is a determination of the law of nature.

The particular determination of the form private property should take is left to the free discretion of sovereign authorities. (Notice the similarity in this metaphor of the craftsman and the house with Funkenstein's example of the table. I'm fairly confident the craftsman/house metaphor comes from Aristotle, but I'm not sure).

Anyway, this is a long way of noticing something interesting about law for Aquinas and Maimonides: The essential room for free discretion. This is an echo, in part, of the ancient principle that law is always second best, precisely because free discretionary judgment will always be necessary. Consider, for example, the Eleatic Visitor in Plato's Statesman:

Now in a certain sense it is clear that the art of the legislator belongs to that of the king; but the best thing is not that the laws should prevail, but rather the kingly man who possesses wisdom ... [This is because] law could never accurately embrace what is best and most just for all at the same time, and so prescribe what is best. For the dissimilarities between human beings and their actions, and the fact that practically nothing in humana ffairs ever remains stable, prevent any sort of expertise whatsoever from making any simple decision in any sphere that covers all cases and will last for all time. (294a-b in the C.J. Rowe translation).

Something similar is true of Aristotle's discussion of the relationship between law and convention in his treatment of justice in the Nicomachean Ethics. (Is justice like money, different from society to society, or is justice like smoke, which no matter where you are flows upward from fire in the same way?)

Also worth noting here that there's a kind of double application of this principle of indeterminacy-in-law for Aquinas: (1) There is discretion in establishing human laws to instantiate requirements of the natural law; and (2) There is discretion in the application of the human law in the interest of promoting the common good. This second caveat derives from the fact that positive laws exist for generalities, not particulars, but that particular circumstances may derive a departure from the strict letter of the law. The famous example:

For instance, suppose that in a besieged city it be an established law that the gates of the city are to be kept closed, this is good for public welfare as a general rule: but, it were to happen that the enemy are in pursuit of certain citizens, who are defenders of the city, it would be a great loss to the city, if the gates were not opened to them: and so in that case the gates ought to be opened, contrary to the letter of the law, in order to maintain the common weal, which the lawgiver had in view.

It's striking just how different all this is from the characteristically modern view of the rule-of-law (as opposed to the rule-of-men). We've already seen how Aquinas' natural-law right to property is radically unspecified compared to Locke's. The former view reserves extensive discretion to the political authorities in instituting property rights in accord with the common good. Locke, on the other hand, believes that the natural-right to private property establishes what Nozick called "side constraints" on authority.

A similar difference can be found with Hume. Unlike Locke and Aquinas, Hume thought property rights derived from convention/construction, not nature. Yet despite their artificial character, laws of justice are extraordinarily inflexible! (See my earlier post on this).

Marx and Engels on Napoleon and Babeuf

From Engels' "Progress of Social Reform on the Continent," published in the Owenite, Chartist journal The Northern Star in 1843:

The French Revolution was the rise of democracy in Europe. Democracy is, as I take all forms of government to be, a contradiction in itself, an untruth, nothing but hypocrisy (theology, as we Germans call it), at the bottom. Political liberty is sham-liberty, the worst possible slavery; the appearance of liberty and therefore the reality of servitude. Political equality is the same; therefore democracy, as well as every other form of government, must ultimately break to pieces: hypocrisy cannot subsist, the contradiction hidden in it must come out; we must have either a regular slavery--that is, an undisguised despotism, or real liberty, and real equality--that is, Communism. Both these consequences were brought out in the French Revolution; Napoleon established the first, and Babeuf the second. I think I may be short upon the subject of Babouvism, as the history of his conspiracy, [written] by Buonarroti, has been translated into the English language. The Communist plot did not succeed, because the then Communism itself was of a very rough and superficial kind; and because, on the other hand, the public mind was not yet enough advanced.

(Marx and Engels praise Babeuf in the Communist Manifesto as a rare example of someone who has "given voice to the demands of the proletariat.")

Marx and Engels elaborate further on these themes--the opposed possibilities of Napoleon and Babeuf, the immaturity of the French Revolution, the contradictions of bourgeois democracy etc.--in The Holy Family or Critique of Critical Criticism. See these passages from the critique of Bruno Bauer--in an extension of Marx's earlier "On the Jewish Question." (A professor of mine is fond of quoting these passages. He thinks they are key to understanding Marx's assessment of liberal democracy and the French Revolution.

Ideas can never lead beyond an old world order but only beyond the ideas of the old world order. Ideas cannot carry out anything at all. In order to carry out ideas men are needed who can exert practical force. In its literal sense the Critical sentence is therefore another truth that is self-evident, and therefore another"examination".  

Undeterred by this examination, the French Revolution gave rise to ideas which led beyond the ideas of the entire old world order. The revolutionary movement which began in 1789 in the Cercle social, which in the middle of its course had its chief representatives Leclerc and Roux, and which finally with Babeuf's conspiracy was temporarily defeated, gave rise to the communist idea which Babeuf's friend Buonarroti re-introduced in France after the Revolution of 1730. The idea, consistently developed, is the idea of the new world order.

... 

Robespierre, Saint-just and their party fell because they confused the ancient, realistic-democratic commonweal based on real slavery with the modern spiritualistic-democratic representative state, which is based on emancipated slavery, bourgeois society. What a terrible illusion it is to have to recognise and sanction in the rights of man modern bourgeois society, the society of industry, of universal competition, of private interest freely pursuing its aims, of anarchy, of self-estranged natural and spiritual individuality, and at the same time to want afterwards to annul the manifestations of the life of this society in particular individuals and simultaneously to want to model the political head of that society in the manner of antiquity! 

The illusion appears tragic when Saint-Just, on the day of his execution, pointed to the large table of the Rights of Man hanging in the hall of the Conciergerie and said with proud dignity: “C'est pourtant moi qui ai fait cela” [Yet it was I who made that]. It was just this table that proclaimed the right of a man who cannot be the man of the ancient commonweal any more than his economic and industrial conditions are those of ancient times. 

... 

Profane history, on the other hand, reports: After the fall of Robespierre, the political enlightenment, which formerly had been overreaching itself and had been extravagant, began for the first time to develop prosaically. Under the government of the Directory, bourgeois society, freed by the Revolution itself from the trammels of feudalism and officially recognised in spite of the Terror’s wish to sacrifice it to an ancient form of political life, broke out in powerful streams of life. A storm and stress of commercial enterprise, a passion for enrichment, the exuberance of the new bourgeois life, whose first self-enjoyment is pert, light-hearted, frivolous and intoxicating; a real enlightenment of the land of France, the feudal structure of which had been smashed by the hammer of the Revolution and which, by the first feverish efforts of the numerous new owners, had become the object of all-round cultivation; the first moves of industry that had now become free — these were some of the signs of life of the newly emerged bourgeois society. Bourgeois society is positively represented by the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie, therefore, begins its rule. The rights of man cease to exist merely in theory. 

... 

Napoleon represented the last battle of revolutionary terror against the bourgeois society which had been proclaimed by this same Revolution, and against its policy. Napoleon, of course, already discerned the essence of the modern state; he understood that it is based on the unhampered development of bourgeois society, on the free movement of private interest, etc. He decided to recognise and protect this basis. He was no terrorist with his head in the clouds. Yet at the same time he still regarded the state as an end in itself and civil life only as a treasurer and his subordinate which must have no will of its own. He perfected the Terror by substituting permanent war for permanent revolution. He fed the egoism of the French nation to complete satiety but demanded also the sacrifice of bourgeois business, enjoyments, wealth, etc., whenever this was required by the political aim of conquest. If he despotically suppressed the liberalism of bourgeois society — the political idealism of its daily practice — he showed no more consideration for its essential material interests, trade and industry, whenever they conflicted with his political interests. His scorn of industrial hommes d'affaires was the complement to his scorn of ideologists. In his home policy, too, he combated bourgeois society as the opponent of the state which in his own person he still held to be an absolute aim in itself. Thus he declared in the State Council that he would not suffer the owner of extensive estates to cultivate them or not as he pleased. Thus, too, he conceived the plan of subordinating trade to the state by appropriation of roulage [road haulage]. French businessmen took steps to anticipate the event that first shook Napoleon’s power. Paris exchange- brokers forced him by means of an artificially created famine to delay the opening of the Russian campaign by nearly two months and thus to launch it too late in the year.

Screwtape on Historicism

From C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters, letter 27:

The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer's development or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how far it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man's own colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the 'present state of the question'. To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge--to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behaviour--this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded. And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another. But thanks be to Our Father and the Historical Point of View, great scholars are now as little nourished by the past as the most ignorant mechanic who holds that 'history is bunk'

Corn Laws and Witchcraft

In his critique of the Corn Laws, Adam Smith argues that the ancient English laws against "engrossers and forestallers" derive from two fallacious popular prejudices. The first is the fear that high corn prices harm the people. Smith thinks he has already dismissed that worry with his defense of disciplinary price gouging in times of scarcity. The second related fear is that merchants will buy up the supply of corn for the sake of selling it back at a higher price in the future. Smith thinks that the equilibrating power of the market resolves that worry. Either the merchant rightly predicts a coming scarcity, in which case his higher prices will benefit the people by inculcating thrift, OR he judges wrongly, and the market will duly punish him for failing to sell the corn at a profit when he had the chance.

Neither engrossing nor forestalling pose any real threat to the domestic market. Yet these remain the object of irrational, hysterical popular opposition:

The popular fear of engrossing and forestalling may be compared to the popular terrors and suspicions of witchcraft. The unfortunate wretches accused of this latter crime were not more innocent of the misfortunes imputed to them, than those who have been accused of the former. The law which put an end to all prosecutions against witchcraft, which put it out of any man's power to gratify his own malice by accusing his neighbour of that imaginary crime, seems effectually to have put an end to those fears and suspicions, by taking away the great cause which encouraged and supported them. The law which should restore entire freedom to the inland trade of corn, would probably prove as effectual to put an end to the popular fears of engrossing and forestalling.

And a few pages later:

The laws concerning corn may every where be compared to the laws concerning religion. The people feel themselves so much interested in what relates either to their subsistence in this life, or to their happiness in a life to come, that government must yield to their prejudices, and, in order to preserve the publick tranquility, establish that system which they approve of. It is upon this account, perhaps, that we seldom find a reasonable system established with regard to either of those two capital objects. 

This is all very interesting. These passages come in some of Smith's most famous and influential arguments. His insistence on the rational, self-regulating character of market forces is explicitly set against the irrational, superstitious prejudices of religion. The superiority of free trade is a kind of economic fact. Reason (free trade) stands against superstition (the corn laws).

E.P. Thompson is attentive to this Smithian line of argument in his classic essay, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century." He notes that what Smith and other classical economic critics of the Corn Laws sought to do was "demoralize" the English economy:

By "de-moralizing" it is not suggested that Smith and his colleagues were immoral or were unconcerned for the public good. It is meant, rather, that the new political economy was disinfested of intrusive moral imperatives. The old pamphleteers were moralists first and economists second. In the new economic theory questions as to the moral polity of marketing do not enter, unless as preamble and peroration.

The free, demoralized corn market Smith favored was opposed by the prejudices of the people. As we have just seen, Smith analogizes this irrational opposition to free trade to the hysterical persecution of alleged witches. In both cases the people are moved by some superstitious frenzy to endorse a policy that ultimately harms their own interests.

As Thompson points out, however, Smith's own providential faith in the self-correcting market is at least as superstitious as whatever prejudices structured the pre-capitalist public imagination. What's more, Smith does not provide anything remotely close to a satisfactory empirical argument that the corn trade self-regulates in the manner he describes. All he has really done is lay out an elegant model.

It should not be necessary to argue that the model of a natural and self-adjusting economy, working providentially for the best good of all, is as much a superstition as the notions which upheld the paternalist model - although, curiously, it is a superstition which some economic historians have been the last to abandon. In some respects Smith's model conformed more closely to eighteenth-century realities than did the paternalist; and in symmetry and scope of intellectual construction it was superior. But one should not over- look the specious air of empirical validation which the model carries. Whereas the first appeals to a moral norm - what ought to be men's reciprocal duties - the second appears to say: "this is the way things work, or would work if the State did not interfere". And yet if one considers these sections of The Wealth of Nations they impress less as an essay in empirical enquiry than as a superb, self-validating essay in logic.

Thompson's broad aim in this essay is to uncover an internal moral logic that structured pre-capitalist social opinion. Classical economists like Smith look at the Corn Laws as exercises in brute irrationality. The occasional mob-like defenses of price controls and attacks on free-trading merchants is akin to the hysterical frenzy of a witch-trial. Not so, argues Thompson:

The men and women in the [rioting] crowd were informed by the belief that they were defending traditional rights and customs; and, in general, that they were supported by the wider consensus of the community. On occasion this popular consensus was endorsed by some measure of licence afforded by the authorities. More commonly, the consensus was so strong that it overrode motives of fear or deference. 

It is common to hear that modern economics has made progress. That Smith et al. discovered mistakes and fallacies that afflicted the minds of pre-capitalist peoples. (And indeed, that continue to afflict the minds of late-capitalist peoples). Yet that is simply not the case. The poor understood quite well that price controls on food brought costs. They understood too that there could be long-term benefits from temporary price gouging. These were not hidden, scientific truths that had to be discovered by economists. The past was not stupid, it just had different moral values. Perhaps better moral values.

The popular insistence on price stability and opposition to free trade in corn was not technical but ethical:

It is not easy for us to conceive that there may have been a time, within a smaller and more integrated community, when it appeared to be "unnatural" that any man should profit from the necessities of others, and when it was assumed that, in time of dearth prices of "necessities" should remain at a customary level, even though there might be less all round.

Of course these moral understandings were bound up in Christian religion. But that does not mean they were the functional equivalents of witch-hunting hysteria, as Smith suggests. Religious precepts and customary practices held together a paternalist, pre-capitalist moral consensus, that emphasized social cohesion and stability above all. It was these values that were threatened by abolishing customary price controls and unleashing the forces of the free market. Thompson--a good Marxist--is nostalgic for that feudal paternalism. He looks back to that complex web of mutual reciprocity and price regulation as a source of inspiration in diagnosing the evils of the modern, naked, cash-nexus economy.

Glimpses of Freedom in Marx

Marx is notoriously unwilling to describe what communist society will actually look like. (He famously quipped that it is not his place to write recipes for the cookshops of the future). In the German Ideology he gives us a glimpse, perhaps, of what an emancipated human life consists in: The freedom to hunt, fish, and critique just as we please. But that passage raises more questions than it answers.

Marx, of course, rejects the method of theorizing some ideal vision of society and then pushing practice to conform to theory. The theoretic understanding of human freedom will itself emerge from the struggle for emancipation. Still, here are two moments in which Marx gives us a fleeting look at what it might mean to be freed from capitalist exploitation.

The first comes from the third of the 1844 Manuscripts. Here Marx comments on (1) the relation between theory and practice, and (2) how socialist workers begin to experience freedom from the division of labor.

In order to abolish the idea of private property, the idea of communism is quite sufficient. It takes actual communist action to abolish actual private property. History will lead to it; and this movement, which in theory we already know to be a self-transcending movement, will constitute in actual fact a very rough and protracted process. But we must regard it as a real advance to have at the outset gained a consciousness of the limited character as well as of the goal of this historical movement--and a consciousness which reaches out beyond it. 

When communist artisans associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need--the need for society--and what appears as a means becomes an end. In this practical process the most splendid results are to be observed whenever French socialist workers are seen together. Such things as smoking, drinking, eating, etc., are no longer means of contact or means that bring them together. Association, society and conversation, which again has association as its end, are enough for them; the brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies. 

What a lovely passage. The third 1844 Manuscript is Marx at his most humanist (indeed, as he says earlier "This communism, as fully developed naturalness, equals humanism ... it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature"). He has some slightly more fantastic things to say about how communism will transform human nature, but no need to comment on those here. The key mark of communist society is a human fraternity impossible under the slavery of capitalism.

Speaking of slavery, the second passage of note comes from the Grundrisse:

 The Times of November [21,] 1857 contains a most endearing scream of rage from a West Indian planter. With great moral indignation this advocate--by way of plea for the reintroduction of Negro slavery--explains how the Quashees (free blacks of Jamaica) content themselves to produce only what is strictly necessary for their own consumption and apart from this 'use value', regard loafing itself (INDULGENCE and IDLENESS) as the real luxury article; how they don't give a damn about sugar and the fixed capital invested in the PLANTATIONS, but rather react with malicious pleasure and sardonic smiles when a planter goes to ruin, and even exploit their acquired Christianity as a cover for this sardonic mood and indolence. 

They have ceased to be slaves, not in order to become wage workers, but SELF-SUSTAINING PEASANTS, working for their own meagre consumption. Capital as capital does not exist for them, because wealth made independent in general exists only either through direct forced labour, slavery, or through mediated forced labour, wage labour. Wealth confronts direct forced labour not as capital but as relation of domination. On the basis of direct forced labour, therefore, only the relationship of domination is reproduced, for which wealth itself has value only as gratification, not as wealth as such, and which can therefore never create general industriousness.

Freed from the terrors of slavery, these Quashees know better than to throw themselves straight into the slavery of the capitalist division of labor. Their own emancipation has helped them to see into the nature of economic domination and human freedom.

These examples are quite instructive--the socialist workers who understand themselves as human and the freed slaves who understand wage labour to be slavery. Two brief glimpses into the human emancipation Marx's communism offers.