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ECONOMIST
Rousseau, Marx and Nietzsche
The prophets of illiberal progress
Terrible things have been done in their name
LIBERALISM is a broad church. In this series we have ranged from
libertarians such as Robert Nozick to interventionists such as John
Maynard Keynes. Small-government fundamentalists like Friedrich Hayek
have rubbed shoulders with pragmatists such as John Stuart Mill.
But there are limits. Our last brief seeks to sharpen the definition of
liberalism by setting it in opposition to a particular aspect of the
thought of three anti-liberals: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a superstar of
the French Enlightenment; Karl Marx, a 19th-century German revolutionary
communist; and Friedrich Nietzsche, 30 years Marx’s junior and one of
philosophy’s great dissidents. Each has a vast and distinct universe of
ideas. But all of them dismiss the liberal view of progress.
Liberals believe that things tend to get better. Wealth grows, science
deepens understanding, wisdom spreads and society improves. But liberals
are not Pollyannas. They saw how the Enlightenment led to the upheaval
of the French revolution and the murderous Terror that consumed it.
Progress is always under threat.
And so liberals set out to define the conditions for progress to come
about. They believe that argument and free speech establish good ideas
and propagate them. They reject concentrations of power because dominant
groups tend to abuse their privileges, oppressing others and subverting
the common good. And they affirm individual dignity, which means that
nobody, however certain they are, can force others to give up their
beliefs.
In their different ways Rousseau, Marx and
Nietzsche rejected all these ideas. Rousseau doubted that progress takes
place at all. Marx thought progress is ordained, but that it is
generated by class struggle and revolution. Nietzsche feared that
society was descending into nihilism, but appealed to the heroic
übermensch in each person as its saviour. Those coming after them
did terrible things in their name.
Rousseau (1712-78) was the most
straightforwardly pessimistic. David Hume, Voltaire, Denis Diderot and
Rousseau’s other contemporaries believed the Enlightenment could begin
to put right society’s many wrongs. Rousseau, who in time became their
bitter foe, thought the source of those wrongs was society itself.
In “A Discourse on Inequality” he explains that mankind is truly free
only in the state of nature. There the notion of inequality is
meaningless because the primitive human being is solitary and has nobody
to look up to or down upon. The rot set in when a person first fenced
off some land and declared: “This is mine”. “Equality disappeared,
property was introduced, labour became necessary, and the vast forests
changed to smiling fields that had to be watered with the sweat of men,
where slavery and poverty were soon seen to germinate and grow along
with the crops.”
Rousseau’s political philosophy is an attempt to cope with society’s
regression from the pristine state of nature. He opens “The Social
Contract” with a thundering declamation: “Man is born free, and
everywhere he is in chains.” Mankind is naturally good, but political
society corrupts him. Social order does not come from nature, it is
founded on conventions. The social contract sets out to limit the harm.
Sovereignty, he says, wells up from the people—as individuals.
Government is the servant of the sovereign people and its mandate needs
to be renewed periodically. If the government fails the people, they can
replace it. Today that may seem like common sense. In a society founded
on monarchy and aristocracy, it was revolutionary.
But society makes people selfish. “The laws are always useful to those
with possessions and harmful to those who have nothing.” Religion adds
to its ills. “True Christians are made to be slaves.”
Equality, though not an end in itself, thus needs to be enforced as a
way to counteract the selfish desires and subservience that society
breeds in individuals. “For the social compact not to be an empty
formula...whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained
to do so by the entire body: which means nothing other than that he
shall be forced to be free.”
Revolutionaries have seized on that formula as justification for the
tyrannical use of violence in pursuit of a Utopia. Scholars generally
dispute this reading. Leo Damrosch, in his biography, couches the notion
of the general will in terms of Rousseau’s pessimism. People are so
removed from the state of nature that they need help to be free. Anthony
Gottlieb, in his history of the Enlightenment, quotes Rousseau as having
“the greatest aversion to revolutions”.
Yet that unbroken train of thought from regression to coercion, even in
its milder form, rubs up against liberalism. Whenever a person in a
position of power compels someone else to act against their free,
unimpeded will for their own good, they are invoking the ghost of
Rousseau.
Marx (1818-83) believed that progress was
produced not by inquiry and debate, but by class struggle acting across
history. Like Rousseau, he thought that society—in particular,
its economic underpinnings—was the source of oppression. In 1847,
shortly before a wave of unrest swept across Europe, he wrote: “The very
moment civilisation begins, production begins to be founded on the
antagonism of orders, estates, classes and finally on the antagonism of
accumulated labour and immediate labour. No antagonism, no progress.
This is the law that civilisation has followed up to our days.”
The surplus created by labour is seized by capitalists, who own the
factories and machinery. Capitalism thus turns workers into commodities
and denies their humanity. While the bourgeois sate their appetite for
sex and food, the workers must endure the treadmill and rotten potatoes.
For this reason, capitalism contains the seeds of its own downfall.
Competition compels it to spread: “It must nestle everywhere, settle
everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” As it does so, it creates
and organises an ever-larger proletariat that it goes on to immiserate.
Capitalists will never willingly surrender their privileges. Eventually,
therefore, the workers will rise up to sweep away both the bourgeoisie
and the proletariat and create a new—better—order.
This revolutionary job does not fall to a heroic leader, but to the
workers as a class. “It is not a question of what this or that
proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its
aim,” Marx wrote with Friedrich Engels, his collaborator, in 1844. “It
is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with
this being, it will be historically compelled to do.” Four years later,
in the opening of “The Communist Manifesto” they predicted revolution:
“A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism.”
Liberals believe that all individuals share the same fundamental needs,
so reason and compassion can bring about a better world. Marx thought
that view was at best delusional and at worst a vicious ploy to pacify
the workers.
He scorned the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a manifesto for the
French revolution, as a charter for private property and bourgeois
individualism. Ideologies like religion and nationalism are nothing more
than self-deception. Attempts to bring about gradual change are traps
set by the ruling class. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin summed it up in
his book on Marx: “Socialism does not appeal, it demands.”
Yet Marx underestimated the staying power of capitalism. It avoided
revolution by bringing about change through debate and compromise; it
reformed itself by breaking up monopolies and regulating excesses; and
it turned workers into customers by supplying them with things that in
his day would have been fit for a king. Indeed, in his later years, as
Gareth Stedman Jones, a recent biographer, explains, Marx was defeated
by the effort to show why the economic relations between capitalist and
worker necessarily had to end in violence.
Marx nevertheless stands as a warning against liberal complacency. Today
outrage is replacing debate. Entrenched corporate interests are
capturing politics and generating inequality. If those forces block the
liberal conditions for general progress, pressure will once again begin
to rise.
The will to power
Nietzsche sets out his view of progress in “On the Genealogy of
Morality”, written in 1887, two years before he was struck down by
insanity. In writing of extraordinary vitality, he describes how there
was a time in human history when noble and powerful values, such as
courage, pride and honour, had prevailed. But they had been supplanted
during a “slave revolt in morality”, begun by the Jews and inherited by
the Christians under the yoke of the Babylonians and later the Romans.
Naturally, the slaves elevated everything low in themselves that
contrasted with their masters’ nobility: “The miserable alone are the
good...the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly are also the only pious, the
only blessed...”.
The search for truth remained. But this has led ineluctably to atheism,
“the awe-inspiring catastrophe of a 2,000-year discipline in truth,
which in the end forbids itself the lie involved in belief in God.” “God
is dead…” Nietzsche had written earlier. “And we have killed him.”
It takes courage to stare into the abyss but, in a life of pain and
loneliness, courage was something Nietzsche never lacked. Sue Prideaux,
in a new biography, explains how he tried desperately to warn the
rationalists who had embraced atheism that the world could not sustain
the Christian slave morality without its theology. Unable to comprehend
suffering in terms of religious virtue or the carapace of virtue vacated
by religion, humanity was doomed to sink into nihilism, in a bleak and
meaningless existence.
Nietzsche’s solution is deeply subjective. Individuals must look within
themselves to rediscover noble morality by becoming the übermensch
prophesied in “Thus Spake Zarathustra”, Nietzsche’s most famous work.
Characteristically, he is vague about who exactly an übermensch is.
Napoleon counted as one; so did Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the German
writer and statesman. In his lucid survey of Nietzsche’s thought,
Michael Tanner writes that the übermensch is the heroic soul eager to
say Yes to anything, joy and sorrow alike.
Nietzsche is not susceptible to conventional criticism—because ideas
pour out of him in a torrent of constantly evolving thought. But both
left and right have found inspiration in his subjectivity; in linguistic
game-playing as a philosophical method; and in how he merges truth,
power and morality so that might is right and speech is itself an
assertion of strength. He is father to the notion that you cannot
divorce what is being said from who is saying it.
The illiberal view of progress has a terrible record. Maximilien
Robespierre, architect of the Terror, invoked Rousseau; Joseph Stalin
and Mao Zedong invoked Marx; and Adolf Hitler invoked Nietzsche.
The path from illiberal progress to terror is easy to plot. Debate about
how to improve the world loses its purpose—because of Marx’s certitude
about progress, Rousseau’s pessimism or Nietzsche’s subjectivity. Power
accretes—explicitly to economic classes in the thought of Marx and the
übermenschen in Nietzsche, and through the subversive manipulation of
the general will in Rousseau. And accreted power tramples over the
dignity of the individual—because that is what power does.
Liberalism, by contrast, does not believe it has all the answers. That
is possibly its greatest strength. |