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Adventures in Philosophy |
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Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) Of all socialist theorists of the 19th century, Proudhon (picture) was the most abounding in ideas but the least capable of mastering them. He was a vigorous but poorly trained thinker, often very original and independent, but sometimes haunted by prejudices and whims. To him philosophy was only a means of changing the thoughts of men. Karl Marx, who met Proudhon in Paris, and admired him greatly though he shortly thereafter vilified him, adopted Proudhon's view that the philosopher has not only to interpret the world but to alter it. Marx learned much from Proudhon, and gave him information about Hegel that confused Proudhon rather than inspired him. Proudhon, as Marx did after him, criticized his socialist predecessors with no lesser severity than the classical economists. He rejected any Utopian system and also communism as forms of government. He was fundamentally not a revolutionary but a reformer who intended to improve the existing methods of production and distribution instead of overthrowing them. His often quoted saying La propriété c'est le vol ("Property is theft") is not meant as a definition of property but as a condemnation of what he considers an abuse of it -- namely, the power to provide unearned income. Apart from the right of escheat and lending on interest, private property, the disposal of the results of labor and savings, was declared by Proudhon as the essence of liberty and a necessary stimulant to labor and energy. Proudhon's philosophy maintains that solidarity is a natural and original characteristic of human beings, and egoism the result of a deviation from natural conditions. Man must be guided back from his present isolation to a community in which the equilibrium between the rights of the individual and "public" or "collective" reason must be established anew, and too great inequality of wealth must be prohibited. He was opposed to the assumption that ideas of justice and morality are dependent on economic or social conditions. In this regard he professed to be a Platonist. Proudhon was the son of a poor cooper who had not the means to give his children a higher education, and who died in misery because he refused to earn more than the medieval theory of the "just price" allowed. Proudhon therefore had to earn his living as a printer, compositor and proofreader before he became a freelance writer. The first studies he made as an economist concerned his father's fate. From it he drew the conclusion that the world must be altered although he maintained his father's belief that no one should be permitted to earn beyond the "just price." In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
For nearly thirty years, Michael Bakunin (picture) was an active participant in all European revolutions. Neither failure nor defeat could discourage his anarchistic spirit. To him, revolution meant the destruction of a corrupt and doomed society, and the desire for destruction served as a creative outlet for him. He detested the quiet life and often reiterated: "We need a tempestuous lawlessness to secure a free world." A lawless world seemed both possible and good to Bakunin. It would produce "the free initiative of free individuals within free groups." It would destroy the uniformity of the social order (which to him meant death) and create the variety which is considered identical with the life spirit. He was a grim adversary of all contemporary governments and of the socialism advocated by Karl Marx. Bakunin, the prophet of destruction, who exalted radicals as the most honorable enemies of decadent institutions, was a nobleman and former officer of the Tsar's imperial guard. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Karl Marx (picture), the founder of international Communism, was born in Trier, Germany. He studied law at Bonn and Berlin, but took up history, Hegelian philosophy, and Feuerbach's materialism. He edited a radical newspaper, and after it was suppressed he moved to Paris in 1843 and then to Brussels in 1845. There, with Engels as his closest collaborator and disciple, he reorganized the Communist League, which met in London in 1847. In 1848 he finalized the Communist Manifesto, which attacked the state as the instrument of oppression, and religion and culture as ideologies of the capitalist class. He was expelled from Brussels, and in 1849 settled in London, where he studied economics, and wrote the first volume of his major work, Das Kapital. He was a leading figure in the First International from 1864 until its demise in 1872. The last decade of his life was marked by increasing ill health. He is buried in Highgate Cemetery in London. To the impact of Marx's doctrine on political and social ideas and the subsequent changes of social structure there is no parallel in the whole history of philosophy. Only religious reformers have produced similar changes. What distinguishes Marx from other philosophers who more or less deeply influenced political and social ideas is the simple fact that his teachings directly affected the mind of the masses of working people in various nations, not only by appealing to their material interests but even more so by imbuing them with an apparently imperturbable confidence in the absolute truth of his statements and predictions. In his Theses on Feuerbach (1845), Marx, who had turned from the political radicalism of the Left Hegelians to what he then called communism and later scientific socialism, declared that the question of absolute truth is not one of theory but a practical one, and that the reality and power of thought must be demonstrated in practice by both interpreting and changing the world. But he always insisted that a vigorous theory is as indispensable to the destruction of a corrupted society and the construction of a new one as is drastically disciplined action. When, in his Critique of Political Economics (1859), Marx called his method empirical, he did so in order to mark his opposition to abstract spiritualism. But he continued to sneer at pure empiricists. He turned Hegel's dialectic upside down because he thought that Hegel's way of proceeding from the abstract to the concrete, from the ideal to the real could reach reality, and that Hegel's conception of the dialectical motion as the development of consciousness was bound to miss human totality. But when Marx declared in opposition to Hegel that it is not consciousness that determines the existence of man but that the social existence of man determines his consciousness, he nevertheless, was regarding dialectic as the only infallible method of scientific thinking to which all empirical knowledge of facts is subordinated. He reproached Feuerbach for having abandoned not only idealism, of which he approved, but also dialectics of history which, to Marx, meant renouncing scientific exactness. In the same way, although he applied his theory mainly to economic and social life, and devoted much of his energy to the direction of political movements, Marx remained the philosopher of the dialectical movement who retained both Hegel's conviction that the real is rational and Hegel's dialectical concept of becoming. He continued to agree with Hegel that reality is a process, that life means itself and its contradiction, and that as soon as contradiction ceases to act, life will come to an end. The fundamental characteristic of Marx's doctrine is not his theory of the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few powerful capitalists, or the condemnation of the "exploitation of man by his fellow-man." These views are borrowed from Saint-Simon, Sismondi and Constantin Pecqueur. Nor is it his theory of class struggle, borrowed from French historians of his time, or his theory of surplus value, owed to English economists. What really dominates the unity of his thinking is his conception of history, according to which the forms of economic production determine the formation of human society and the consciousness of its members so that ideas, moral values, aesthetic standards, political and social concepts, educational and religious systems are to be conceived as produced by the economic situation. As long as the "ideological superstructure" remains in accordance with the conditions of economic production, civilization is healthy. But, since these conditions are changing more rapidly than the superstructure, cultural crises are unavoidable, and, when people, incapable of understanding the laws of history, resist the changes dictated by it, revolution becomes necessary. In his principal work Das Kapital (1867 and later) Marx developed his philosophy by applying it to modern economic life, demonstrating by a historico-sociological analysis of economics that that which he calls the bourgeoisie has accomplished its historical task by great performances but that it is not capable any longer of adapting itself to the changed conditions of production and must give room to the proletariat. Marx tried to regard phenomena as incessantly changing, life as continual movement of growth and destruction, so that nothing immutable remains except movement itself. For that reason, said his intimate friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels, Marx refrained from offering in his principal work any fixed and universally applicable definition. Marx even criticized the German Social Democratic Party which, in its program of 1875, mentioned the "present-day State." Marx maintained the "present-day State" to be a fiction since it differed from one country to another. Although, in his later years, Marx became more and more reluctant to define concepts, because he was afraid lest he should admit in this way any fixed existence, he maintained his belief in the dynamics of economic change as the prime mover of historic life. He presented this conviction as an eternally valid law of nature, as the highest tribunal from which no appeal to another court is possible. He did it by an inexorable diction, fond of disillusioning and with dry irony, sneering at moralists, Utopians, reformers who, as he said, tried in vain to escape the compulsion dictated by historical laws, such as are revealed by the right use of dialectics. He, on his part, claimed to teach how to cooperate with the due course of historical evolution. When each science will have become perfect, philosophy will be useless except formal logic and dialectic. Of these two disciplines, dialectic is declared superior, as a method of advancing from the known to the unknown. According to Marx, dialectic forces the way beyond the narrow horizon of formal logic, because it contains the germ of a more developed view of the world. He was fond of dialectic because he conceived of it as of constant fermentation. Marx's search for the causation and end of the historical process, which assumes that men, while producing the means of material existence, enter human relations independently of their will and change these human relations independently of their will when the way of production changes, has been much disputed. But many philosophers, historians and sociologists who contradict him, are ready to admit that he has created a working hypothesis. In The Radical Academy
Elsewhere On The Internet
Jakob Burckhardt (picture) taught history and lived quietly, frugally, undisturbed, and independent of the good and evil of modern civilization in his native town of Basle. His Kultur der Renaissance (1860) made him famous in all civilized countries, but his dislike for publicity was so great, that even though he continued to study and collect ample material to fill many more volumes, he refrained from publishing any further works during his lifetime. His skill as a teacher, his gift for narrating facts and events and integrating them with all branches of knowledge and cultural activity as part of a continuous evolutionary pattern attracted students from many countries. After his death, his lectures were edited, and those entitled Reflections on History have been acknowledged as a major contribution to modern historiography. Burckhardt, the historian, was an austere judge of morality. He often condemned morally that which he admired aesthetically. He regarded history as the best means for ridding the world of its illusion, for though he saw beyond the superficial veil, nevertheless he loved and admired its fallacious charm. His sympathy was always with defeated minorities; their defeat confirmed his conviction that success had little to do with merit insofar as active life was concerned. However, he did admit that in poetry and art, greatness and success were often identical. His disapproval of results never prevented him from studying their causes. In The Radical Academy
Elsewhere On The Internet
Friedrich Engels (picture), born on November 28, 1820, was the descendant of a dynasty of German industrialists who adhered to religious orthodoxy and political conservatism. He had planned, in his youth, to become a poet, for he was an enthusiast of German romanticism, the historical past and beauty and nature in art. When a new Oriental crisis threatened to cause war between France and Germany in 1840, Engels, still an excited nationalist, dreamed of German military victories. A sojourn in London and military service in the Prussian army made him revise his beliefs. He abandoned German nationalism and became a socialist who collaborated with Karl Marx in developing the revolutionary social philosophy known as Marxism. Engels was educated to follow in the footsteps of his father, a German textile manufacturer. In 1842 he went to Manchester, England, to serve as an apprentice in his father's factory there. By that time, however, he had already shed the fundamentalist Protestant faith of his youth and passed through Hegelianism to radicalism. In Manchester, Engels combined business with journalism, writing on social topics for Robert Owen's New Moral World and Karl Marx's Rheinische Zeitung. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, a searing criticism of social misery among the factory workers of the industrial cities. He was greatly indebted for this to Constantin Pecquer, who also wrote a pamphlet dealing with the same subject. Engels and Marx met in 1844 in Paris, and found themselves in complete agreement on all basic social questions. A close relationship began that was to last until Marx's death 40 years later. Marx contributed his considerable analytical skills, while Engels supplied erudition, quick intelligence, and first-hand experience of the conditions of the British working class. Engels also helped support Marx's family. Their first joint work was The German Ideology, not published during their lifetimes, in which they criticized the ideas of nonrevolutionary German socialists. In 1848, Engels collaborated with Marx on the Communist Manifesto, a stirring call for revolution that summarized their views on history and the class struggle. Engels devoted his life to the fight for the rights of the working class and for the realization of Marx's plans. Engels' collaboration with Marx was so close that it is impossible to define his part in it with exactness. In his later years, Engels blended dialectical materialism (as Marx had conceived of it) with philosophical materialism. He also tried to expand the meaning of Marx's terminology. He developed a great interest in ethnology in order to attack social conventions with arguments that demonstrated the relativity of social values. Until his death, he remained the executor of Marx's will. As long as Karl Marx lived, Engels was his intimate friend, collaborator, and supporter. Though he remained in the background, were it not for Engels' money, moral encouragement, and innumerable other services, Marx would have perished. Several of the writings were the collaboration of both; Engels was always ready to recognize Marx as his superior. After Marx died, Engels edited the second and third volumes of Marx's Capital; when socialists disagreed about the meaning of the work, or adversaries distorted it, Engels untiringly interpreted his late friend's meaning. Engels died on August 5, 1895. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-1864) It was one of the many paradoxes in Ferdinand Lasselle's (picture) life that he was mortally wounded in a duel, although he constantly struggled against obsolete institutions and conventions. He often perplexed both his admirers and his adversaries by the contradictory traits in his character. But it was just his inner contrasts that were the main constituents of the brilliancy and fascinating power of his personality. August Boeckh, one of the most famous philologists and historians of that time, worded the epitaph of Lassalle's tombstone in the Breslau Jewish cemetery: "Here rests what was mortal of Ferdinand Lassalle, the thinker and fighter." Lassalle, when engaged in a conflict, fought recklessly and with relentless audacity. As a thinker he destroyed illusions but not ideals. While vindicating the rights of the working people, he appealed to the brutal facts of economic and political power as well as to humanitarian ideas. He was a profound scholar, whose work on Heraclitus is still consulted by students ninety years after its appearance, and whose System der Erworbenen Rechte (1861) contains remarks of great consequence for the philosophy of law. He was also a great organizer who created the first political party of workers in Germany, and a popular leader whose oratorical campaigns enraptured the masses. Adolf Hitler, despite his rabid anti-Semitism, studied Lassalle's public speeches, and tried to imitate some of their effects. But Hitler could grasp only the passionate, hypnotizing power of Lassalle's behavior. He was capable of understanding Lassalle's clarity and mental culture, and his steady endeavor to raise the intellectual level of his audiences. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Although for many years, from 1904 until his death, George Plekhanov (picture) strongly opposed Lenin and the Bolshevists, and was arrested by them after their victory in 1917, Lenin did not deny his spiritual indebtedness to his adversary and the rulers of Soviet Russia acknowledged the value of Plekhanov's works and permitted them to be reedited by the Marx-Engels-Institute. Plekhanov was the founder of the Russian Social-Democratic party which was subsequently divided into the Menshevik and Bolshevik parties. He was the son of a noble, but not wealthy, landowner who treated his serfs ruthlessly. When, after his father's death, his mother tried to cheat her peasants, the son prevented her from doing so by threatening to set fire to the paternal home. As a student, Plekhanov joined the Narodniki (Friends of the People) who advocated immediate socialization of Russia. But in 1880 he was converted to Marxism, and, on the ground of his interpretation of this doctrine, he opposed the Narodniki by arguing that Russian economic conditions had to ripen before socialism could be introduced into that country. Because of his revolutionary activities, Plekhanov was exiled in 1882. In the following year he founded the "Union for Emancipation of Labor," the germ-cell of the Social-Democratic Party of Russia, whose program was elaborated by him. At the request of the German Social Democrats, he wrote Anarchism and Socialism (1894); in the following year he wrote against the Narodniki in On the Question of the Development of the Monist View in History; and in 1986 his Essay on the History of Materialism was published, which, like his Fundamental Problems of Marxism (1908), was generally acknowledged to be an authoritative interpretation of Marxism. Plekhanov fought the socialist revisionists in Germany and France but sided, in 1904, with the Russian Mensheviks against Lenin. When Plekhanov returned to Russia after the overthrow of Tsarism, he was hopelessly suffering from tuberculosis but struggled against Bolshevism to his last gasp. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
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