Rediscovering Americanism: And the Tyranny of Progressivism

by Mark R. Levin

  Hegel proved Popper’s position when he, among other things, disparaged natural law, external truths, divine rights, etc., as fundamentally mythological and superficial. “Concerning [a] constitution, as concerning reason itself, there has in modern times been an endless babble, which has in Germany been more insipid than anywhere else. With us there are those who have persuaded themselves that it is best even at the very threshold of government to understand before all other things what a constitution is. And they think that they have furnished invincible proof that religion and piety should be the basis of all their shallowness. It is small wonder if this prating has made for reasonable mortals the words reason, illumination, right, constitution, liberty, mere empty sounds, and men should have become ashamed to talk about political constitution. At least as one effect of this superfluity, we may hope to see the conviction becoming general, that a philosophic acquaintance with such topics cannot proceed from mere reasons, ends, grounds, and utilities, much less from feeling, love, and inspiration, but only out of the conception. It will be a fortunate thing, too, if those who maintain the divine to be inconceivable and an acquaintance with the truth to be wasted effort, were henceforth to refrain from breaking in upon the argument. What of undigested rhetoric and edification they manufacture out of these feelings can at least lay no claim to philosophic notice.”25

  Hegel then denounced the doctrine of separation of powers, the purpose of which is to contain the power of the state and protect the individual from the tyranny that typically arises from the centralization of power. “Amongst current ideas must be mentioned . . . that regarding the necessary division of the functions of the state. This is a most important feature, which, when taken in its true sense, is rightly regarded as the guarantee of public freedom. But of this those, who think to speak out of inspiration and love, neither know nor will know anything, for in it lies the element of determination through the way of reason. The principle of the separation of functions contains the essential element of difference, that is to say, of rationality. But as apprehended by the abstract understanding it is false when it leads to the view that these several functions are absolutely independent, and it is one-sided when it considers the relation of these functions to one another as negative and mutually limiting. In such a view each function in hostility to or fear of the others acts towards them as towards an evil. Each resolves to oppose the others, effecting by this opposition of forces a general balance, it may be, but not a living unity. . . . To take the negative as the point of departure, and set up as primary the willing of evil and consequent mistrust, and then on this supposition cunningly to devise breakwaters, which in turn require other breakwaters to check their activity, any such contrivance is the mark of a thought, which is at the level of the negative understanding, and of a feeling, which is characteristic of the rabble. . . .”26

  Consequently, despite his extensive argument about conscious freedom (reason and spirituality), a community of the whole (egalitarianism), the ambiguity of the practical form of the final end (the eventual perfect state), and the condemnation of constitutional republicanism (as disparate parts of the same organ devouring itself), Hegel finally revealed himself as a monarchist. “The legislative corresponds to universality, and the executive to particularity; but the judicial is not the third element of the conception. The individuality uniting the other two lies beyond these spheres. . . . The function of the prince, as the subjectivity with which rests the final decision. In this function the other two are brought into an individual unity. It is at once the culmination and beginning of the whole. This is constitutional monarchy.”27 Hence Hegel’s final end is an all-knowing, all-powerful monarchy. “The perfecting of the state into a constitutional monarchy is the work of the modern world, in which the substantive idea has attained the infinite form. This is the descent of the spirit of the world into itself, the free perfection by virtue of which the idea sets loose from itself its own elements, and nothing but its own elements, and makes them totalities . . .”28

  To the critics of monarchy, Hegel wrote: “The conception of monarch offers great difficulty to abstract reasoning and to the reflective methods of the understanding. The understanding never gets beyond isolated determinations, and ascribes merit to mere reasons, or finite points of view and what can be derived from them. Thus the dignity of the monarch is represented as something derivative not only in its form but also in its essential character. . . . If by the phrase ‘sovereignty of the people’ is to be understood a republic, or more precisely a democracy, all that is necessary has already been said.” Hegel is talking about his previous denunciation of separation of powers, etc. In defense of monarchy Hegel added: “When a people is not a patriarchal tribe, having passed from the primitive condition, which made the forms of aristocracy and democracy possible, and is represented not as in a willful and unorganized condition, but as a self-developed truly organic totality, in such a people sovereignty is the personality of the whole, and exists, too, in a reality, which is proportionate to the conception, the person of the monarch.”29

  Popper saw the danger inherent in Hegel’s historic dialectic: “I have tried to show the identity of Hegelian historicism with the philosophy of modern totalitarianism. This identity is seldom clearly enough realized. Hegelian historicism has become the language of wide circles of intellectuals, even of the candid ‘anti-fascists’ and ‘leftist.’ It is so much a part of their intellectual atmosphere that, for many, it is no more noticeable, and its appalling dishonesty no more remarkable, than the air they breathe.” Popper went on: “The Hegelian farce has done enough harm. We must stop it.” Condemning the intellectuals and teachers who ignore the warnings about Hegel’s thinking, Popper declared that “they neglected them not so much at their own peril (they did not fare badly) as at the peril of those whom they taught, and at the peril of mankind.”30

  This brings us unavoidably to a concise examination of Karl Marx, since his effect on American progressivism, among other intellectual and political movements in other societies, is undeniable. Marx, who was also a German philosopher, carefully studied Hegel’s writings, as did his frequent partner, Friedrich Engels. “Marxism’s” intellectual starting point is nearly indistinguishable from Hegel’s. Marx also saw history as the past and the present washed away through the perfecting of society. However, Marx argued that Hegel’s idealistic historicism, and its emphasis on legal and political conditions, failed to account sufficiently for the most important characteristic of historical progress—economics. Marx insisted that economics is the key to society and life, or what would be defined as material historicism or dialectical ma­terialism. Mankind starts with needs, which evolve into conscious production; Marx contended that man is not about the natural individual, the rational individual, or the political life but rather man as he exists, thereby attempting to distinguish his own philosophy from, say, Rousseau, Hegel, and others. Marx asserted that man’s life revolves around labor and production, and conditions external to himself, to which he must adapt. Thus the conditions of production determine economic relations, and history shows that these economic relations have been about class struggle.

  In The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx wrote about material historicism accordingly: “All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change, consequent upon the change of historical conditions.”31 More specifically, “[t]he history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. In earlier epochs of history we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the middle ag
es, feudal lords, vassals, guild masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all these classes, again, subordinate gradations.”32 Thus Marx’s focus on the “division of labor,” the “fragmentation of productive forces,” and the “mode of production” of the “species-being” known as human beings. Along with private property rights, he claimed that they create alienation and the artificial sense of individual purpose and private existence.

  Let me suggest, however, that the history of man and his struggles is diverse and mixed, well beyond materialism and economics. Struggles within societies, struggles between societies, struggles among and between groups of individuals in societies, and struggles between individuals in societies may be based on race, religion, tribalism, mysticism, geography, or wealth, or some combination of factors, including those that may not be known to or understood by contemporary man. They are rational and irrational, intentional and accidental, historic and modern. Furthermore, all of life is not about struggles among and between people or forced associations, economic or otherwise. Individuals can choose their own fate; they can choose to associate with whom they wish and in a variety of ways, unrelated to production, materialism, or satisfying their own economic needs.

  Nonetheless, Marx wrote, “The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonism. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeois, possesses, however, this distinctive feature; it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie [the capitalists, the owners of property and the means of production] and Proletariat [the laborer, the industrial working class] . . . Modern industry has established the world’s market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. The market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation and railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages. We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.”33

  Marx asserted that it is the bourgeoisie that benefits greatly from the status quo, and the proletariat that suffers from it. “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous ‘cash payment.’ It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.”34

  Moreover, wrote Marx, the bourgeoisie must continually expand its holdings and reach, all the time exploiting the labor of the proletariat to enrich itself. “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. . . . Constant revo­lutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeoisie epoch from all earlier ones. . . . The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.”35 Consequently, capitalism replaces feudalism, the former even more reprehensible in Marx’s eyes than the latter. Feudalism’s productive forces were “burst asunder” and “[i]nto their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted to it, and by the economical and political sway of the bourgeois class. A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange, and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”36

  For the proletariat, there is no escaping the bourgeois state as it covers and controls all corners of the society. “In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed; a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market. . . . Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State, they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-seer, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is. . . . No sooner is the exploitation of the laborer by the manufacturer so far at an end that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie; the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.”37

  Consequently, the property owner, businessman, landlord, etc., are cast as the evil, cold-blooded, plundering taskmasters, and the employee and laborer are portrayed as noble, compassionate, powerless, abused, etc. Of course, human beings are not so easily assigned to such ranks and classes by such preconceived and stereotypical characteristics. In fact, most “proletariats” do not feel terrorized by the “bourgeoisie” and therefore do not spontaneously rise to the revolutionary cause; also, most bourgeoisies are not terrorizing their employees or tenants. On the contrary; industrial society is not inherently wicked. It has improved the standard of living for most of the population in a complex society—“bourgeoisie” and “proletariat” alike—where the comforts of a developed economy are available to virtually all who participate in it.

  Indeed, the entire nomenclature and class identification devised by Marx is terribly flawed. For example, is there a monolithic, alienated class of workers, or proletariat? French philosopher and journalist Raymond Aron (1905–1983), in his book The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955), wrote of the myth of the proletariat: “Why is it so often considered difficult to define the working class? No definition can trace precisely the limits of a category. At what stage in the hierarchy does the skilled worker cease to belong to the proletariat? Is the manual worker in the public services a proletarian even though he receives his wages from the State and not from a private employer? Do the wage-earners in commerce, whose hands manipulate the objects manufactured by others, belong to the same groups as the wage-earners in industry? There can be no dogmatic answer to such queries: they have no common criterion. According to whether one considered the nature of the work, the method and the amount of the remuneration, the style of life, one wil
l or will not include certain workers in the category of proletarians. The garage mechanic, a wage-earning manual worker, is in a different position and has a different outlook on society from the worker employed on an assembly-line in a motor-car factory. . . .”38

  Aron illuminated further: “The contempt with which the intellectuals are inclined to regard everything connected with commerce and industry has always seemed to me itself contemptible. That the same people who look down on engineers or industrialists profess to recognize universal man in the worker at his lathe or on the assembly line, seems to me endearing but somewhat surprising. Neither the division of labor nor the raising of the standard of living contributes towards this universalism. . . . Philosophers have the right to hope that the proletarian will not become integrated with the existing order but that he will preserve himself for revolutionary action; but they cannot [in modern times] represent as fact the universality of the industrial worker.”39 “Not all proletarians have the feeling of being exploited or oppressed.”40 “In countries where the economy continues to expand, where the standard of living has risen, why should the real liberties of the proletariat, however partial, be sacrificed to a total liberation which turns out to be indistinguishable from the omnipotence of the State?”41