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POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY - RECENT |
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Select: George Clemenceau -- Prince Peter Kropotkin -- Georges Sorel Bernard Bosanquet -- Pavel Borisovich Axelrod -- Vladimir Soloviev -- V.I. Lenin Johan Huizinga -- Nicholas Berdyaev -- Giovanni Gentile -- Benito Mussolini José Ortega y Gasset Georges Clemenceau (1842-1929) When Woodrow Wilson promulgated his famous Fourteen Points, Georges Clemenceau (picture) remarked that "Our Father in Heaven would have been content with ten." This and others of his sayings caused Americans to regard his character as that of a cynical politician, narrow-minded French nationalist, advocate of power politics, and victim of French propaganda. The Germans did not like him. In 1871 he had protested against the peace dictated by Bismarck; he always expressed a hope for the return of Alsace to France; during World War I, he encouraged the French to resist and vanquish the German onslaught; and he was held responsible for the harsh conditions of the Treaty of Versailles. Clemenceau was feared and detested by a large group of the French people, by the majority of the deputies, and by those of the radical part, to which he himself belonged. French rightists hated him because as a defender of the Republic, he was also an opponent of clericalism; French leftists hated him because he crushed strikes and persecuted defeatists. Clemenceau was not only the most striking and vigorous of the French statesmen of his time, a formidable enemy, and genius of invective; he was also sincerely and fanatically devoted to the ideals of reason and freedom, which he regarded as compatible with his stern patriotism. He always remained a democrat. One of the last acts of his administration was the introduction of the eight-hour day for France. He had also been a resolute defender of Alfred Dreyfus. It was Clemenceau who formulated the title of Zola's famous letter, J'Accuse, who fully rehabilitated Dreyfus, and who appointed Colonel Picquari (who had been persecuted because he was a witness to the innocence of Dreyfus), to the post of minister of war. Clemenceau, a highly educated man, had lived in the United States, and intimately knew Latin America and many European countries. He was a trained art critic, a successful dramatist and novelist, and a profound thinker who meditated on the meaning of life, the charm of illusion, and the destiny of mankind. Almost all of his plays and novels are imbued with a philosophical spirit; so is his historical study, Demosthenes (1926). His great work, In the Evening of My Thought (1929), stands as proof that he overcame those temptations which make for lulled minds among many aged philosophers. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Prince Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) Prince Peter Kropotkin (picture) was born in Moscow on December 21, 1842, and was a Russian political philosopher and anarchist whose work inspired European anarchist groups in the late 19th century. Administrative experience and Utopian vision became confused in the mind of Prince Kropotkin, the founder of communist, or, more precisely, commualist anarchism. For free communities are the political form which he thought social revolution should assume. At the age of 19, Kropotkin, who had attended the Imperial Military School for Pages, became an officer of the Cossacks, and went with his regiment to Transbaikalia and Manchuria. In this capacity, he undertook numerous exploring expeditions and was also entrusted with administrative tasks. It was in this latter activity that he became imbued with animosity toward centralized government. Although he was decorated by the Tsar for his exploration and governmental services, Kropotkin became an ardent revolutionary. He professed socialist views, but was as opposed to the centralist systems of Saint-Simon and Marx as he was to centralist Tsarism. In 1874, Kropotkin was arrested by the Russian police because of his revolutionary activities. However, in 1876, he escaped to England. After a stay in Switzerland, he was expelled from that country at the request of the Tsarist police. In 1883 he was imprisoned in France, also at the instigation of the Russian police, but was released in 1886 at the personal order of President Jules Grevy. Thereafter he lived in England. Kropotkin made valuable contributions to geology, geography, chemistry, economics, sociology and history. Without systematic erudition, he proved to have vision in all fields of his scientific activities. He especially succeeded in elucidating important stages of the French Revolution in his book The Great Revolution (1909). His social system is explained in his book Mutual Aid -- A Factor in Evolution (1902). The First World War isolated Kropotkin, who sided with the Western Allies against Germany and his anarchist followers. In 1917, he supported Kerensky against the Bolshevists. He died on February 8, 1921. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
The name of Georges Sorel (picture) has been connected with the history of both bolshevism and fascism. Jean Jaurès called him "the metaphysician of syndicalism." But, in fact, Sorel was a metaphysician of industrial production, and tried to utilize the working class and its ideologies as the instrument for attaining his aims. By vocation an engineer and always very bourgeois in his conduct of life, Sorel turned to social and economic studies only after his fortieth year. From 1893 to 1897, he adopted Marx's ideas; thereafter, he professed animosity not only toward Marx but also toward democracy, rationalism and intellectualism, expressing his views in his principal books, The Decomposition of Marxism, Reflections on Violence (both 1908) and Illusions of Progress (1911). Inspired by Henri Bergson, whom he respected despite his constant animosity toward the Jews, Sorel heralded the "Myth of the General Strike," and took great care to distinguish between the Utopia and the myth. The latter term was used by Sorel as the image of a fictitious, even unrealization future that expresses the sentiments of the revolutionary masses and incites them to revolutionary action. "Violence," Sorel protested, is not meant as "Jacobinic" action but as "psychic warfare" whose means are sabotage, strike and the boycott of workers who decline to participate in that warfare. For a time, Sorel succeeded in winning over the French syndicalists. But very soon, the militant workers turned against him who, with his pupil Georges Valois as intermediary, negotiated with the royalist Charles Maurras, the leader of the "Action Française." The outbreak of the war, in 1914, prevented their alliance. After the war, Sorel built his hopes upon bolshevism, but Lenin rebuked him in his polemics against empiriocriticism. Only Mussolini acknowledged Sorel and frequently proclaimed his indebtedness to him. Sorel was not interested in socialism, communism or any other politico-economic system but in the increase of industrial production to the highest possible degree. His experiences as an engineer had convinced him that capitalists or industrial entrepreneurs would be incapable attaining this goal. He therefore entrusted the employees and workers with the fulfillment of the task. This idea of Sorel's might have impressed Thorstein Veblen, who expressed similar views on the incompetency of capitalists. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Next to Francis Herbert Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet (picture) is the best known of the British idealist philosophers. Bosanquet descended from an old Huguenot family. For eleven years he lectured on Greek history and philosophy at University College, Oxford. The he left this to devote himself to charity and the study of ethics, logic, and aesthetics. His interests, later shared by his wife, included the London Ethical Society (later known as the London School of Ethics and Social Philosophy) and the Charity Organization Society. This work was not the hobby of a leisure-class gentleman, but the practical application of Bosanquet's philosophy. His emphasis was on the importance of the individual, the fruition of a cosmoramic view which could only be realized in the individual. Accordingly, he defined the Absolute (and in this he was profoundly influenced by Hegel) not as a personality lacking coherence and unity, but as a whole being. Similarly in his logic, he defined truth as a cohering, comprehensive whole. He perceived ethics as the endeavor towards a unity of pleasure and responsibility, all the while emphasizing the importance of the individual in his relationships with others. His philosophy may be said to bear the stamp of conciliation. His personal charm, his sympathetic attitudes, and his "critically appreciative powers" were hallmarks of his warm personality. His writings include Knowledge and Reality, A History of Aesthetic, The Essentials of Logic, The Psychology of the Moral Self, and The Philosophic Theory of the State. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Pavel Borisovich Axelrod (1850-1928) Brought up in a small provincial town in Russia, the son of a poor Jewish innkeeper, Pavel Borisovich Axelrod (picture) realized that his quest for knowledge was inseparable from the struggle for human progress; that his desire for self-education was only an aspect of his desire to educate the masses of the people. In his youth he was a disciple of Bakunin, and he remained an idealist even after adopting the Marxist concept of historical materialism. With his lifelong friend, Plekhanov, he became one of the founders of the Russian Social Democratic Party. Plekhanov was the leading theorist of the movement, and Axelrod directed its propaganda and applied the theories to practical politics. It was largely due to his efforts that the labor movement of Russia participated in the political struggle against Tsarist absolutism instead of concentrating their activities upon economic improvement. He took a leading part in directing and formulating the policies of the Menshevist Party, and was elected a member of the executive committee of the Second Internationale. One of the principal aims of his activities was to organize the Russian worker and make him as politically active as his Western European counterpart. He was often referred to as the great Westerner among the Russian Socialists. From 1903 until his death, he and Plekhanov combated Lenin and the Bolshevists. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Vladimir Soloviev (picture) has been called "the Russian Newman" or "the Russian Carlyle," and he could easily be called "the Russian Kierkegaard" with equal, or even more justice. For the struggle against the established Church, against the alliance between Church and State, which, in his opinion, meant domination of the Church by the State, and the effort to take the doctrine of Christ seriously was Soloviev's great purpose just as it was Kierkegaard's. Soloviev protested against the division of mankind into a Church which claimed to possess divine truth and to represent the will of God, and all the rest. This division, as it has been developed in the history of Christianity, was deplored by Soloviev and regarded by him as seducing the Church to abuse its lust of power. Deeply convinced of the truth of Christianity, Soloviev asserted the idea of "Godmanhood," bequeathed to humanity, and the ideal of universal theocracy, which he conceived as absolutely incompatible with the claims of the Orthodox Church. Soloviev was the son of the noted Russian historian Sergius Soloviev, who was devoted to Tsarism, the Orthodox Church and Slavophile ideas. His career promised to become brilliant, but he renounced it, in 1881, after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, when he publicly asked for mercy for the assassins. He always was a strong adversary of capital punishment. Then retired to private life, Soloviev became one of the greatest Russian philosophers of religion. It is not so much the originality of Soloviev's ideas that makes his works important as rather their connection with fundamental trends of Russian thought, and his view of the crisis of European civilization. Soloviev's hostility against nationalism, especially Russian nationalism, is no less ardent than his opposition to the claims of the Orthodox Church. At the end of his life, he recognized Rome as the center of Christianity, without, however, converting to the Roman Church. His positive doctrine culminated in the "justification of the good," founded upon a psychology of human conscience and upon his strong belief that man cannot be entirely wicked. He was a man who lived in accordance with his ideas, and was revered as a saint by people of all classes. His tombstone became a place of pilgrimage. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
V.I. Lenin (picture) was a Russian revolutionary leader and Marxist philosopher with a striking gift for single-minded, vitriolic polemicism. When, under the leadership of Lenin, the Bolshevik party seized political power in Russia on November 7, 1917, a new chapter was opened in the history not only of Russia but of the whole world. The character and effects of the Bolshevist revolution and of that party's regime are a matter of endless dispute. There is, furthermore, no agreement concerning Lenin's personality and the part played by him in the Russian revolution. But there is one fact that seems to be certain -- that without Lenin, Marxian socialism in its rigid shape would not have been established and maintained as the exclusively ruling creed in Russia. Whether or not the governmental practice of the Bolshevist State remained in accordance with the official creed is another question. However, it was Lenin, and he alone, who was responsible for the inauguration and continuance of a governmental course which, although in practice is sometimes ready to accept compromises or deviations, insisted on the exclusive authority of socialism of the Marxian stamp and suppresses any attempt to express, let alone to practice, heterodox views. For this reason, Lenin is frequently considered, even by non-Bolshevists, as the greatest thinker of the Russian revolution. But his undisputed authority as leader of his party and as ruler over his country does not mean that he was equally superior in the realm of thought. It is true that Lenin had spent about twenty years in preparing a theoretical and organizational basis for the Bolshevist revolution, and, undisturbed by delays and reverses, he had elaborated the main features of his governmental program when the moment came for seizing power. Lenin, whose original name was Vladimir IIyich Ulianov, had studied the strategy of civil war, the tactics of sabotage, the weak points of dissenting groups, and the malleability of the mass of the Russian people. But, in his general ideas, he depended upon Marx. According to Lenin, Marx had sufficiently explained the world, and left to him the task of changing this world. He was not even interested in the philosophical foundation of Marxism. Lacking intellectual curiosity, Lenin was unwilling to indulge in thinking activity for its own sake. Materialism and Empiric-Criticism (1909), Lenin's only work on philosophical principles, abounds in misunderstandings. Its aim is to deter socialists from reading Avenarius or Mach rather than to refute their arguments. Lenin's book on Imperialism (1916) is not an original analysis of political, economic or sociological facts, but it is, instead, a collection of comments on quotations from the German socialist Rudolph Hilferding's Finanzkapital. In his numerous disputes with dissenting socialists, Lenin contented himself with producing a text from Marx or Engels in order to crush his adversaries. This confidence in his masters was a source of strength for Lenin, the party leader and statesman. Apart from his Marxian orthodoxy, Lenin remained versatile and resourceful, not in the least because of his lack of philosophical interest. On the other hand, he was far from considering any of his collaborators as efficient if the latter was only an orthodox Marxian. Noncommunist foreigners were often impressed by Lenin's sarcastic remarks on incapable communist zealots, and took his frankness as a proof of his freedom from prejudice. But, although he judged men and their faculties with acuteness and almost without any bias, he remained fanatically devoted to his creed, and he was aware that he owed his leadership not to bis theoretical thinking or his practical ability but to his fervor, bis energy, his commanding glance, his educational talents and his skill in maintaining discipline. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Johan Huizinga (picture) was a professor of philosophy at the University of Leyden, Holland. He has been a pronounced advocate of the philosophy of culture which he describes as a condition of society in which there is a harmonious balance of material and spiritual values and a harmonious ideal spurring the community's activities to a convergence of all efforts toward the attainment of that ideal. After Huizinga had become internationally renowned as a historian of the civilization of the later Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Humanism, he began to develop his own philosophy of civilization. His books which deal with problems of contemporary culture, especially his Shadow of Tomorrow (1936), show clearly that the historical phenomenon of the Waning of the Middle Ages, as his most popular work is entitled, deeply influenced his thoughts about the present and future state of humanity. Although Huizinga regarded history as an irreversible process, he protested his belief in absolute principles of ethics and in eternal truth, which subsist "above the stream of change and evolution," and he regretted the loss of an universal authority, as was represented by the Medieval Church, bound to guide mankind in accordance with unchanging principles. Culture was defined by Huizinga as cooperation of social life with spiritual productivity. He later abandoned this definition as too narrow, and, while retaining the emphasis on cooperation, tried to introduce the concept of human vocation into it. As the principal symptoms of the present cultural crisis, Huizinga recognized lack of mental concentration, weakening of judgment, renunciation of rationality, worship of life and lack of charity. The last-mentioned symptom became of increasing importance to Huizinga who was induced by the events of contemporary history to lean more and more upon Catholic moral moral theology. In a letter to Julien Benda he declared that the doctrine of the seven mortal sins is a better direction for human life than all of modern psychology. In The Radical Academy
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Nikolai Berdyaev (picture), born on March 6, 1874, was a Russian Orthodox religious philosopher and one of the major spokesmen of contemporary Christian existentialism. He was educated in the military school of the Tsarist cadet corps. Later he studied political economy at the University of Kiev, where he became a Marxist. He was arrested in 1898 for his socialist activities, and banished to the north of Russia for three years. Around 1905 he reverted to the Christian faith, but was accused, in 1914, of insulting the Holy Synod. His trial in 1917 was ended by the Russian Revolution. The Bolchevist government had him arrested in 1920 and then again in 1922. He was expelled from the Soviet Union because of his persistent support of faithful Christians. After expulsion from Russia by the Communist government in 1922, he settled first in Berlin, then in Clamart, near Paris. His remaining years were spent in France, where he died on March 23, 1948. Berdyaev regarded himself as the prophet of a new world about to be born; the eventide of history whose means of research, adequate as they might appear for the sunlit day of rationalism, would be completely inadequate for the new era. He predicted a "New Middle Ages" which would spell the end of humanism, individualism, formal liberalism, nationalism, socialism, and communism. It would be the beginning of a new religious collectivity, which would not be ruled by an ecclesiastic hierarchy, but would imbue knowledge, morality, art, and economic and political institutions with a religious spirit free from external constraint. Berdyaev's philosophy conceives of man as the conjunction of the natural and divine world. Man, created by a creator, must necessarily continue the creative process in order to prove the creative character of his cognitive faculties and use them for the perfection of true civilization. Berdyaev arrived at this point of view after consideration changes in his personal philosophy. Berdyaev wrote numerous books, many of which have been translated into English -- such as Dream and Reality: An Essay in Autobiography (1949) and The Destiny of Man (1931). He was also the editor of an influential Russian periodical, Put' (The Way), and remained prominent in intellectual and theological dialogues between Eastern and Western Christians. The central idea of his thought was contained in his understanding of freedom. For Berdyaev, freedom is at the very heart of personal life; it is the condition for creativity, ultimately preparing a new world transformed into God's kingdom. In The Radical Academy
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Giovanni Gentile (picture) was the self-proclaimed official philosopher of Italian fascism and a major figure in the rise of Hegelian thought in Italy in the early decades of the 20th century. A professor of philosophy at the universities of Palermo and Pisa, he lectured at the University of Rome from 1917 until his death. Gentile was Benito Mussolini's minister of Public Education from 1922 to 1924. Then he became a senator of the kingdom, and was entrusted with what Mussolini called "reform of the educational system." In this position, he dismissed all teachers who were suspected of being liberals or democrats; but, since he was not a member of Fascist Party, Gentile did not satisfy all demands concerning the curriculum. Benedetto Croce, a fellow Italian philosopher, critic, and historian, protested against Gentile's purge with vigor but without result. Gentile's principal works, General Theory of the Spirit as Pure Act (1916) and Logic as a Theory of Knowing (1917), develop a philosophy that he called "actual idealism." While denying that any philosophy can transcend actual human experience through either an appeal to matter or a realm of timeless forms, he defended the view that human experience is fundamentally mental or spiritual. Human spirituality finds its fulfillment in the creation and defense of the state. Philosophy isolated from life and life isolated from philosophy are equally symptoms of cultural bankruptcy. Philosophy must penetrate into human life, govern and mold it. Thought is all-embracing. No one can go out of the sphere of thinking or exceed thought. Reality is not thinkable but in relation to an activity by means of which it becomes thinkable. Every experience occurs between a subject which is one, a center, and of spiritual nature, and a multitude of phenomena which lack such a center. The Real can be thought of only as posing itself, not as being. Reality therefore is spiritual. The spirit is both unity and multitude, and is recognized in the pure act. Gentile added that the "one-multiple" spirit is the same as the ineffable one of the mystics. Fascism is merely another variety of Socialism, albeit combined with some other specific doctrines and policies. Classical Liberalism is, of course, opposed to Fascism, whatever form it takes and wherever it occurs. Giovanni was also a neo-idealist, a philosophical position which is opposed to Classical Realism. In The Radical Academy
Benito Mussolini (1883 - 1945) Benito Mussolini (picture), known as Il Duce (the "Leader") was prime minister of Italy from 1922 until 1943 and an infamous dictator. He was born in Predappio, Romagna, from a poor family and was expelled from two schools for knife-assaults on other students. He soon became one of Italy's most intelligent and menacing young Socialists. He broke with the Italian Socialist Party after advocating Italian intervention in World War I. In 1919 he helped found the Fasci di Combattimento as a would-be revolutionary force, and in 1922 became prime minister, his success symbolized by the March on Rome in October of 1922. By 1925 he had established himself as dictator. His rule saw the replacement of parliamentarianism by a "Corporate State" and an officially totalitarian system; the establishment of the Vatican state in 1929; the annexation of Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia) in 1935, and Albania in 1939; and the formation of the Axis with Germany. His declaration of war on Great Britain and France exposed Italy's military unpreparedness, and was followed by a series of defeat in North and East Africa and in the Balkans. Following the Allied invasion of Sicily in June of 1943, and with his supporters deserting him, Mussolini was overthrown and arrested in July of 1943. Rescued from imprisonment by German paratroopers, he was placed in charge of the puppet Italian Social Republic. In 1945 Mussolini was captured by the Italian Resistance and shot, his body being exposed to insult in Como and in Milan, the old headquarters of Fascism. Mussolini, although it was famously bragged that "he did make the trains run on time," was a brutal dictator whose life was ended when his own people rose up and killed him, hanging his body unceremoniously upsidedown from a post on a public street. Fascism is merely another variety of Socialism, albeit combined with some other specific doctrines and policies. Classical Liberalism is, of course, opposed to Fascism, whatever form it takes and wherever it occurs. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) Although Ortega y Gasset (picture) disagrees with almost every important Spaniard of his time, he is generally acknowledged as the representative thinker of modern Spain. No wonder that he became an exile. He is strongly opposed to Franco's dictatorship; however, he had little sympathy with the government of the Spanish republic and its supporters. As the editor of the Revista del Occidents, he acquainted the Spanish public with the spiritual life of the Anglo-Saxon countries, of France and Germany, and he gave readers in foreign countries a striking presentation of the main features of Spanish thought and Spanish cultural tradition. But, above all, he has proved to be an original thinker who, rooted in Spanish civilization, universally cultivated, has developed personal ideas of great consequence. Ortega y Gasset was educated by the Jesuits and studied at the Central University of Madrid, where he became a professor of metaphysics in 1910. Earlier, he had been a disciple of Hermann Cohen, but he became more interested in the philosophy of Husserl and Dilthey. The final result of his preoccupation with German thought was an opposition to idealism. He adopted Dilthey's concept of historical reason, but tried to avoid his shortcomings and went far beyond Dilthey's views. He insists that human thinking is much less logical than it is generally supposed to be, that man is born at a definite date, formed by a definite tradition, and that his environment is equally determined by historical factors. Therefore, he concludes, whoever aspires to understand man, must throw overboard all immobile concepts and learn to think in ever-shifting terms. Because human life is radical reality that includes any other reality, history, and not physics, is the highest science. Concerning the idealistic philosophy that starts from a concept of reality in which the subject, the ego, exists enclosed within itself, within its mental acts and states, he objects that such an existence is the opposite of living, whose meaning is to reach out of oneself, to be devoted to what is called the world. Consciousness is historical but the importance of history is not exhausted with the past. Historical knowledge is valued as a preparation for the future, and this conception involves a new appraisal of thinking. For, to Ortega, action without thought means chaos. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
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