Chapter 54 Part II Results Chapter 13 Ideology: The Secular World 4

4 Now, all that remains to examine is the set of ideologies that hover oddly between the progressive and the anti-progressive, or, in social terms, between the industrial bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the aristocracy, the Between the two groups of people, the merchant class and the feudal group.Their most important adherents were the radical "little people" of Western Europe and America, and the humble middle classes of South-Central Europe, who were comfortably, but not entirely content, within an aristocratic and monarchical social structure.Both of these believe in progress in some ways, but neither intends to follow the liberal or socialist orientation that progress naturally leads to.The former because these fates would doom small artisans, shopkeepers, farmers and merchants, either to capitalists or to labourers; Terrified, he could not challenge the power of his princes, because many of them were officials of these princes.The views of these two groups thus combine liberal (the former also implies socialism) and illiberal elements, progressive and anti-progressive elements.Moreover, this inherent complexity and contradiction gives them a deeper insight into the nature of society than the liberal progressives or anti-progressives; it also forces them to adopt dialectics.

The most important thinker (or rather intuitive incapacity) of the first group of petty-bourgeois radicals died as early as 1789: Rousseau.Torn between pure individualism and the belief that man is himself only in groups; between rational ideals of the state and anti-"emotional" rational skepticism; between the recognition that progress is inevitable and that it destroys "natural Between the two, Rousseau expressed his personal dilemma and that of his class, which could neither accept the factory owner's conviction of liberalism nor the proletarian's conviction of socialism.This difficult, neurotic, but rather great figure need not be explored in detail, since there is no exclusive school of thought or politics of Rousseauism-except for Robespierre and the Jacobins of the Year 2.The influence of Rousseau's thought was quite pervasive and strong, especially among the Germans and the Romantics, but it was not an influence of systems, but an influence of ideas and passions.His influence was also enormous among the populace and among the petty-bourgeois radicals, but he dominated perhaps only among the most vaguely minded, such as Mazzini and his fellow nationalists.On the whole, it is more often fused with adaptations of 18th-century rationalist orthodoxy such as Jefferson and Paine.

The recent academic fashion has increasingly misunderstood Rousseau.They satirized the tradition of ascribing him, along with Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, among the forerunners of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, for Rousseau was their critic.But it was indeed seen at the time as part of the Enlightenment for those affected by it, and those who reprinted his work in small factories in the early nineteenth century automatically associated him with Voltaire, Holbach (Holbach) and others as part of the Enlightenment.Recent liberal critics have attacked Rousseau as the originator of left-wing "totalitarianism."But, in fact, he did not affect the major traditions of modern communism and Marxism at all. (In nearly forty years of correspondence, Marx and Engels mentioned Rousseau incidentally and rather negatively only three times. Incidentally, however, they rather appreciated the dialectical method he had exemplified for Hegel in advance.) He Typical adherents of the Jacobins, at the time of this book and after, were petty-bourgeois radicals such as the Jacobins, Jeffersonians, and Mazzini, who believed in the practice of democracy, nationalism, and the equal distribution of property and Small independent regime with some welfare system.During the period covered by this book, he is generally regarded as an advocate of equality; of liberty as opposed to tyranny and exploitation (“Man is born free, but everywhere he is in fetters”); as an advocate of democracy as opposed to oligarchy; The simple "natural man" polluted by the sophistication of the rich and educated; advocates "emotion" and opposes ruthless calculation.

The second group, perhaps best called the German philosophical community, is much more complex.And, since its members have neither the power to overthrow their society nor the economic resources to carry out an industrial revolution, they tend to concentrate on building elaborate general systems of thought.In Germany, classical liberals are quite rare.Wilhelm von Humboldt (Wilhelm von Humboldt, 1767-1835), brother of the great scientist, is the most famous one.The belief in the inevitability of progress and in the benefits of scientific and economic progress combined with enlightened patriarchal or bureaucratic administration and a sense of upper-class responsibility was widespread among German middle- and upper-class intellectuals, Quite fitting for a class of professors with so many civil servants and government employees.The great Goethe, himself Minister and Privy Councilor of a small state, has articulated his views admirably.The demands of the middle classes—often described philosophically as the inevitable outgrowth of historical trends—enforced by an enlightened government were fully representative of Germany's moderate liberalism.The German states, at their best, have always come to vigorous and effective initiatives to promote economic and educational progress. Radical laissez-faire was not a particularly favorable policy for German industrialists, but it was. Nor does that diminish the appeal of this view.

But while we can draw analogies between the pragmatic worldviews of German middle-class thinkers (considering the particularity of their historical position) and those of other countries and those who stand against them, we are not sure that we can do so in this way. Explain the apparent indifference to classical liberalism throughout German thought.The clichés of liberalism (philosophical materialism or empiricism, Newtonian, Cartesian analysis, etc.) were not at all to the taste of most German thinkers; they were clearly attracted by mysticism, symbolism, and the interest in organic wholes. Generalize broadly.It is possible that this Teutonicism in German thought was reinforced by the antipathy towards French culture of German nationalism, which was dominant in the early eighteenth century.But this is more likely a continuation of the ideological climate from the previous century, in which Germany was economically, intellectually, and to some extent politically superior.For the decline of the period from the Reformation to the latter part of the eighteenth century preserved the antiquity of the German intellectual tradition just as it preserved the sixteenth-century appearance of the small German towns.In any event, the basic atmosphere of German thought (whether in philosophy, science, or art) was clearly different from the dominant traditions of the eighteenth century in Western Europe. (This reasoning does not apply to Austria, which has had a very different history. The main feature of Austrian thought is that there is nothing worth mentioning, although in the arts (especially music, architecture and theater) and certain applications In science, the Austrian empire was outstanding.) This archaism gave German thought certain advantages at a time when classical views in the eighteenth century were reaching their limits, and helps explain its growing intellectual influence in the nineteenth century.

Its most enduring form of expression is German classical philosophy, that is, between 1760 and 1830, a set of ideas created together with German classical literature and closely related (it must not be forgotten that the poet Goethe was an outstanding scientist and "Natural Philosopher", the poet Schiller was not only a professor of history but a distinguished author of treatises on philosophy).Kant and Hegel are two of the most outstanding greats. After 1830, as we have already said, the simultaneous process of disintegration within classical political economy (the intellectual bloom of eighteenth-century rationalism) also arose in German philosophy.Its product was the "Young Hegelians", and finally Marxism.

It must always be borne in mind that German classical philosophy is a thoroughly bourgeois phenomenon.All of its leading figures (Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling) cheered the French Revolution and, in fact, remained faithful to it for a long time (Hegel remained support Napoleon).The Enlightenment is the framework of Kant's thought and the starting point of Hegel's thought.Both men's philosophies are imbued with ideas of progress: Kant's first great achievement was the hypothesis of the origin and development of the solar system, while Hegel's entire philosophy was evolution (or, in social terms, historicity) and necessity Philosophy of progress.Therefore, although Hegel hated the extreme left of the French Revolution from the beginning and eventually became a thorough conservative, he never doubted for a moment the historical inevitability of the revolution that was the basis of capitalist society.And, unlike most later academic philosophers, Kant, Fichte, and especially Hegel did some economics (Fichte studied the economics of the Physiocrats, Kant and Hegel Carle studied British economic theory), and there is reason to believe that Kant and the young Hegel saw themselves as being influenced by Adam Smith.

The bourgeois leanings of German philosophy were evident on the one hand in Kant, who was a lifelong liberal leftist—in his last writings (1795) he made a noble call for to achieve a universal peace—but on the other hand it is more ambiguous than in Hegel.The social content so unique in English and French thought became a grim, if sublime words) abstraction, especially the moral abstraction of "will". (Thus Lukacs shows that Adam Smith's very concrete cessation of the "invisible hand" becomes in Kant a purely "non-social sociality" abstraction.) As all readers have painfully recognized, Hegel's thought was abstract enough.However, at least initially, his abstraction was an attempt to come to terms with society (capitalist society); and indeed, in his analysis of the fundamental element of human way, using the same tools that classical liberal economists had used, and inadvertently providing the basis for Marx's teaching. (As he said in his lectures of 1805-1806, "Man makes tools because he is rational, and this is the first expression of his will.")

From the very beginning, however, German philosophy differed from classical liberalism in important respects, more so in Hegel than in Kant.First of all, it is a mature and rigorous philosophy of idealism, denying the materialism or empiricism of the classical tradition.Second, the basic unit of Kant's philosophy is the individual (even in the form of an individual conscience), while Hegel's starting point is the collective (that is, the community).He clearly sees that under the influence of historical development, the collective is dissolving into the individual.And in fact, Hegel's famous dialectic, the theory of progress (in any field) through the never-ending resolution of contradictions, probably derives its meaning from this profound feeling of contradiction between the individual and the collective. initial inspiration.Furthermore, the marginality of German philosophers in the encroachment of whole-hearted bourgeois liberals, and perhaps their complete inability to participate in this progress, made it easier for German thinkers to understand its limitations and contradictions.This is undoubtedly inevitable. When it brings huge gains, doesn't it also bring huge losses?Doesn't it in turn have to be replaced?

Thus we find classical philosophy, but especially Hegelian philosophy, strangely similar to Rousseau's dilemma world view; although, unlike Rousseau, philosophers made great efforts to contain their contradictions in a single, all Excluded, in a theoretically rigorous system (Rousseau happened to have a great emotional influence on Kant. It is said that Kant broke his fixed afternoon walk only twice in his life, once because of the fall of the Bastille , once [for several days] for reading Rousseau's "Emile").In practice, these frustrated philosophical revolutionaries were faced with the problem of "conforming" to reality, and Hegel, after years of hesitation, took the form of an idealized Prussian government.Until the fall of Napoleon, like Goethe, he had no interest in the war of liberation and remained half-hearted about Prussia.The theoretical transience of societies destined to be destroyed by history is also embedded in their philosophy.There is no absolute truth.The development of the historical process itself takes place through the dialectics of contradictions and is understood in a dialectical way, at least this is the conclusion reached by the "Young Hegelians" in the 1830s.Just as after 1830 they were ready to retrace the revolutionary path which their predecessors had either abandoned or (like Goethe) never took, so they were ready to follow the logic of classical German philosophy, and in this respect they even went beyond Where its great teacher Hegel himself wanted to stop (because of his somewhat illogical haste to end history with the knowledge of the Absolute Idea).But the question of the revolution of 1830-1848 was no longer simply a question of the conquest of the liberal powers of the middle class.And the thought revolution that emerged from the disintegration of German classical philosophy was not a Girondist or a philosophical radical, but Marx.

Thus, the period of the dual revolution saw both the triumph of the ideologies of middle-class liberalism and petty-bourgeois radicalism in their most elaborate manifestations, as well as their self-established or at least popular Under the impact of the regime and society, it collapsed. The year 1830 marked the resurgence of the major revolutionary movements in Western Europe after their post-Waterloo lull, and the beginning of the crisis of liberalism and radicalism.They will survive this crisis, albeit in a shrunken form.At the later stage, there is no classical liberal economist with the sophistication of Adam Smith or Ricardo (except of course the younger Mill, who has become representative from the 1840s onwards). British liberal economist and philosopher.), and no German classical philosopher has the vision and talent of Kant and Hegel. 1830. The French Girondins and Jacobins of 1848 and after were mere dwarfs compared with their predecessors in 1789-1794.Because of this, the Mazzinis of the mid-19th century cannot be compared with the Rousseaus of the 18th century.But this great tradition (the main movement of thought since the Renaissance) did not die, it became its own opposite.In both depth and method, Marx is the heir to the classical economists and philosophers.But the society of which he wishes to be its seer and architect is very different from theirs.