Out of Our Minds

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

In some ways, socialists were still pursuing, by new methods, the ancient Greek ideal of a state that served to make men virtuous. Wherever it was tried, however, socialism failed to achieve any noticeably positive moral effects. ‘As with the Christian religion’, as the sceptical leftist George Orwell observed in his account of his travels through the England of the 1930s along The Road to Wigan Pier, ‘the worst advertisement for socialism is its adherents’. Advocates thought they could appeal to factual evidence – economic or historical – and represent their doctrine as ‘scientific’. The work of David Ricardo, who was never a socialist but who tried, without prejudice, to identify economic laws by analogy with laws of nature, produced the supposed economic evidence. In 1817 he recognized a principle of economics – that labour adds value to a product – and turned it into a law.22

  ‘Labor’, Ricardo contended, is ‘the foundation of all value’, with ‘the relative quantity of labor … almost exclusively determining the relative value of commodities’.23 In its crude form, the theory is wrong. Capital affects the value at which goods are exchanged, and capital is not always just stored-up labour, since extremely valuable natural assets can be almost instantly realized for cash. The way goods are perceived or presented affects what people will pay for them (Ricardo did recognize rarity value, but only as a short-term distorter, citing objects of art and ‘wines of a peculiar quality’). Still, Ricardo’s principle was right. He drew from it counterintuitive and mutually contradictory conclusions. If labour makes the biggest contribution to profits, one would expect wages to be high; Ricardo therefore opined that wages could ‘be left to the fair and free competition of the market, and should never be controlled by the interference of the legislature’. On the other hand he expected that capitalists would keep wages low to maximize profits. ‘There can be no rise in the value of labor without a fall in profits.’24

  Karl Marx believed Ricardo, but events proved both wrong, at least until the early twenty-first century. I used to think that this was because capitalists also recognized that it was in their interests to pay workers well, not only to secure industrial peace and avert revolution, but also to improve productivity and increase demand. It seems more likely, however, that the terrible, menacing wars of the twentieth century imposed social responsibility on entrepreneurs or obliged them to accept close regulation by government in the interests of social cohesion and national survival.25

  Still, an idea does not have to be right to be influential. The essential features of Ricardo’s thoughts on labour – the labour theory of value and the idea of a permanent conflict of interest between capital and labour – passed via Marx to animate revolutionary unrest in late-nineteenth-century Europe and the twentieth-century world.

  Marx claimed to base his social and political prescriptions on scientific economics. But his study of history counted for more in shaping his thoughts. According to Marx’s theory of historical change, every instance of progress is the synthesis of two preceding, conflicting events or tendencies. He got his starting point from G. W. F. Hegel, a Protestant ex-seminarian who rose spectacularly in the extemporized university hierarchy of early-nineteenth-century Prussia. Everything, according to Hegel, is part of something else; so if x is part of y, you have to understand y in order to think coherently about x, and then to know x + y – the synthesis that alone makes perfect sense. This seems unimpressive: a recipe for never being able to think coherently about anything in isolation. As well as dialectical, Marx’s scheme was materialist: change was economically driven (not, as Hegel thought, by spirit or ideas). Political power, Marx predicted, would end up with whoever held the sources of wealth. Under feudalism, for instance, land was the means of production; so landowners ruled. Under capitalism, money counted for most; so financiers ran states. Under industrialism, as Ricardo had shown, labour added value; workers would therefore rule the society of the future in a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Marx vaguely delineated a further, final synthesis: in a classless society, the state would ‘wither’; everybody would share wealth equally; property would be common.

  Apart from this improbable consummation, each of the transitions that Marx imagined from one type of society to the next would inevitably be violent: the ruling class would always struggle to retain power, while the rising class would strive to wrest it. Because Marx accepted Ricardo’s argument that employers would exploit workers for all they were worth, he expected a violent reaction to follow. ‘Not only’, Marx wrote, ‘has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself: it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons – the modern working class, the proletarians.’26 Marx therefore tended to agree with the thinkers of his day who saw conflict as good and conducive to progress. He helped to inspire revolutionary violence, which sometimes succeeded in changing society, but never brought the communist utopia into being or even into sight.

  All his predictions have proved false – so far, at least. If he had been right, the first great proletarian revolution ought to have happened in America, the vanguard society of capitalism. In fact, America remained the country where Marxism never happened on any great scale, while the great revolutions of the early twentieth century were traditional peasant rebellions in the largely unindustrialized environments of China and Mexico. Russia, which Marxists saw, for a while, as an exemplary case of Marxism in action, was only very patchily and partially industrialized in 1917, when the state was seized by revolutionary followers of Marx. But even there, the master’s principles were honoured in the breach: it became a dictatorship, but not of the proletariat. The ruling class was replaced, but only by a ruling party; instead of discarding nationalism and promoting internationalism, Russia’s new rulers soon reverted to traditional policy-making based on the interests of the state. Mother Russia mattered more than Mother Courage. When bourgeois exploitation of workers ended, state oppression of almost everybody ensued.27

  ‌The Apostles of the State

  The state Marx hoped to see ‘wither’ was, for most of his contemporaries, the best means of maintaining progress. To some extent, empowerment of the state happened outside the realm of ideas: material contingencies made it unstoppable. Population growth manned armies and police forces; new technologies transmitted orders quickly and enforced them ruthlessly. Taxes, statistics, and intelligence accumulated. Means of punishment multiplied. Violence became increasingly a privilege (ultimately, almost a monopoly) of the state, which outgunned and outspent individuals, traditional institutions, associations, and regional power structures. The state triumphed in almost all its nineteenth-century confrontations with rival sources of authority – tribes, clans, and other kinship groups; the Church and other theocratic alternatives to secular power; aristocracies and patriciates; trade syndicates; local and regional particularisms; bandit chiefs and extra-legal mafias and freemasonries. In the civil wars of Germany, Japan, Italy, and the United States early in the second half of the nineteenth century, centralizers won.

  Thinkers were on hand with support for the way things were going, or arguments for driving state power further, or assertions of the desirability or inevitability of absolute sovereignty, proclaiming the idea that the State Can Do No Wrong. We can consider their contributions in turn, starting with Hegel, before turning in the next section to the ideas of dissenters from and opponents (or, perhaps, in the case of the Church, rivals) of the state.

  Hegel devised the philosophical starting point for state-worship, as for so much mainstream nineteenth-century thinking: the philosophy he called idealism. It would be easier to understand, perhaps, if it were renamed ‘idea-ism’, because in everyday language, ‘idealism’ means an approach to life targeted on lofty aspirations, whereas Hegel’s idea was different: that only ideas exist. Philosophers in ancient India, China, and Greece anticipated him. Some people have used the term ‘idealism’ to denote Plato’s superficially similar theory that only ideal forms are real (see here). Plato influenced Hegel, but the latter�
��s immediate source of inspiration was Bishop George Berkeley, whose sinecure in the early-eighteenth-century Church of Ireland provided plenty of leisure to think. Berkeley wanted to assert metaphysics against materialism and God against Locke. He began by examining the commonsense assumption that material objects are real, which derives, he reasoned, from the way we register them in our minds. But mentally registered perceptions are the only realities of which we have evidence. Therefore, we cannot know that there are real things outside our minds, ‘nor is it possible that they should have any existence, out of the minds … which perceive them’. There may be no such thing as a rock – just the idea of it. Samuel Johnson claimed to be able to refute this theory by kicking the rock.28

  Idealism, however, was not so easily kicked. Hegel took Berkeley’s thinking further. In his typical, defiantly tortuous language, he commended ‘the notion of the Idea … whose object is the Idea as such … the absolute and all truth, the Idea which thinks itself’.29 Hegel adopted a strategy unlikely to communicate yet calculated to impress: he made his thought hard to follow and his language hard to understand. Would-be intellectuals often overrate obscurity and even exalt unintelligibility. We all feel tempted to mistake complexity for profundity. Bertrand Russell told the story of how the council of his old Cambridge college consulted him about whether to renew the fellowship of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the cutting-edge philosopher, as they could not understand his work. Russell replied that he could not understand it, either. He therefore recommended renewal to be on the safe side. An anecdote popular in academia is of two researchers who gave the same lectures twice, once in intelligible and once in unintelligible English. They waited with clipboards to get the audience’s ratings of the rival versions, with depressingly predictable results. Hegel’s meaning can be simply expressed: we know what is in our minds. The only verifiable experience is mental experience. What is outside the mind is only inferred.

  How did an apparently innocuous and practically irrelevant reflection about the nature of ideas affect politics and real life? Hegel provoked a sometimes furious and still-unresolved debate among philosophers: is it possible to distinguish ‘things-in-themselves’ from the ideas of them that we have in our minds? As with many of the theoretical debates of the past – over theological arcana in antiquity, for instance, or the proper dress for clergymen in the seventeenth century – it seems hard to see, at first glance, what the fuss was and is about, since, as a working hypothesis, the assumption that perceptions reflect realities beyond themselves seems ineluctable. The debate matters, however, because of its serious implications for the organization and conduct of society. Denial of the existence of anything outside our own minds is a desperate cul-de-sac into which anarchists (see here), subjectivists, and other extreme individualists crowd. To escape the cul-de-sac, some philosophers proposed, in effect, the annihilation of the concept of self: to be real, ideas had to be collective. The claim fed corporate and totalitarian doctrines of society and the state. Ultimately, idealism led some of its proponents into a kind of modern monism according to which the only reality is ‘the absolute’ – the consciousness that we all share. Self is part of everything else.

  The doctrine sounds benevolent, but can be appropriated by power-seekers who claim to embody or represent absolute consciousness. Hegel assigned a special kind of mandate over reality to the state. ‘The State’, he said, using capital letters with even greater profligacy than was usual in the German language of his day, ‘is the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth.’30 Hegel really meant this, although it sounds like overblown rhetoric. What the state wills, he thought – in practice, what the elite or ruler wills – is the ‘general will’ that Rousseau had claimed to identify (see here). It trumps what individual citizens want, or even what they all want. Hegel saw no sense in speaking of individuals. Margaret Thatcher, the conservative heroine of the late twentieth century, is supposed to have said, ‘There is no such thing as society’, meaning that only the individuals who compose it count. Hegel took the opposite view: individuals are incomplete except in the contexts of the political communities to which they belong. The State, however, with a capital ‘S’, is perfect. The assertion was imperfectly logical, because states are part of an even wider community, that of the entire world; but Hegel overlooked the point.31

  His claims proved strangely attractive to contemporaries and successors, perhaps because he confirmed the trend, already under way, towards unlimited state power. Traditionally, institutions independent of the state – such as the Church in medieval Europe – had been able to constrain the state by dispensing natural or divine laws. But by Hegel’s time, ‘positive law’ – the law the state made for itself – was supreme and effectively unchallengeable.

  Hegel thought most people were incapable of worthwhile achievement and that we are all the playthings of history and of vast, impersonal, inescapable forces that control our lives. Occasionally, however, ‘world-historical individuals’ of extraordinary wisdom or prowess could embody the ‘spirit of the times’ and force the pace of history, without being able to alter its course. Accordingly, self-appointed ‘heroes’ and ‘supermen’ came forward to interpret the absolute on behalf of everyone else. It is hard for twenty-first-century intellectuals, who tend to prefer anti-heroes, to appreciate that the nineteenth century was an age of hero-worship. Carlyle, who did much of his thinking under a German spell, thought history was little more than the record of the achievements of great men. He advocated hero-worship as a kind of secular religion of self-improvement. ‘The history of what man has accomplished in this world’, he wrote, ‘is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here … Worship of a Hero is transcendent admiration of a Great Man … There is, at bottom, nothing else admirable … Society is founded on hero-worship.’32 Its bases are loyalty and ‘submissive admiration for the truly great’. Time does not make greatness; the great make it for themselves. History does not make heroes; heroes make history. Even the liberal-minded historian Jacob Burckhardt, whose views on the Renaissance echo in almost every thought his successors had on aesthetic matters, agreed that ‘great men’ shaped the stories of their times by the power of their wills.33

  Such ideas were hard to reconcile with the burgeoning democracy of the late nineteenth century. Such supermen never existed, so most scholars think, outside the minds of their admirers. That ‘the history of the world is but the biography of great men’ now seems an antiquated claim, quaint or queer or querulous, according to how seriously one fears despots or bullies. Carlyle evokes pity, derision, or detestation when we read, ‘We cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man, without gaining something by him. He is the living light-fountain, which it is good and pleasant to be near. The light which enlightens, which has enlightened the darkness of the world … a natural luminary shining by the gift of Heaven.’34 Democracy, which Carlyle defined as ‘despair of ever finding any heroes to govern you’,35 has made heroes seem superannuated. Nowadays we are likely to endorse Herbert Spencer’s riposte to Carlyle: ‘You must admit that the genesis of a great man depends on the long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly grown … Before he can make his society, his society must make him.’36

  In the nineteenth century, however, personality cults reshaped whole cultures. English schoolboys imitated the Duke of Wellington. Otto von Bismarck became a role model for Germans. Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte was unknown at the time of his election as president of the French Republic, but the echoes of heroism in his name inspired reverence. In the Americas, myth stripped George Washington and Simón Bolívar of their human failings. Hegel’s own hero-worship was of blood-soaked despots. Heroes serve groups – parties, nations, movements. Only saints embody virtues for all the world. As heroes displaced saints in popular estimation, the world got worse.37 In the belief that great men could save society, democracies entrusted ever more power to their leaders, becomi
ng, in many cases in the twentieth century, self-surrendered to demagogy and dictators.38

  The dangers of superman worship should have been apparent in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, a frustrated provincial professor of philosophy, who spent much of the second half of the century subverting or inverting all the conventional thinking he detested, until his critical faculty elided into contrariety, his embitterment into paranoia, and his genius into delusion – signified in letters he wrote reporting his own crucifixion, summoning the Kaiser to self-immolation, and urging Europe to war. He thought ‘the anarchical collapse of our civilization’ was a small price to pay for such a superman as Napoleon – the selfsame hero who inspired the young Hegel by marching into the seminarian’s home city as a conqueror. ‘The misfortunes of … small folk’, Nietzsche added, ‘do not count for anything except in the feelings of men of might.’ He thought the ‘artist-tyrant’ was the noblest type of man, and that ‘spiritualized and intensified cruelty’ was the highest form of culture. This sounds like ironic provocation, especially as Nero was the proverbial embodiment of both qualities: the madly egotistical Roman emperor, who became a byword for refined forms of sadism, was said to have regretted his own death because of the loss it represented for art. Nietzsche, however, was entirely sincere. ‘I teach you the Overman’, he declared. ‘The human is something that shall be overcome.’39

  Nietzsche’s moral philosophy seemed to invite power-hungry exploiters to abuse it. His ‘master morality’ was simple: he solved the problem of truth by denying that it exists: one interpretation should be preferred to another only if it is more self-fulfilling to the chooser; the same principle applied to morals. All moral systems, Nietzsche proposed, are tyrannies. ‘Consider any morality with this in mind: [it] … teaches hatred of the laisser-aller, of any all-too-great freedom, and implants the need for limited horizons and the nearest tasks – teaching the narrowing of our perspective and thus in a certain sense stupidity.’ Love of neighbour was just a Christian euphemism for fear of neighbour. ‘All these moralities’, he asked, ‘what are they but … recipes against the passions?’ Nietzsche was alone in his day but ominously representative of the future.40