Helvétius’s theory can be applied in two ways. One may interpret it to mean that the change in man’s social and political environment ought to be accomplished peacefully and gradually, through the reform of institutions and enlightenment. One can also conclude from it that this end is best attained by a violent destruction of the existing order.
Which approach—the evolutionary or revolutionary—prevails seems to be in large measure determined by a country’s political system and the opportunities it provides for intellectuals to participate in public life.
In societies which make it possible through democratic institutions and freedom of speech to influence policy, intellectuals are likely to follow the more moderate alternative. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and the United States, intellectuals were deeply involved in political life. The men who shaped the American republic and those who led Victorian England along the path of reform were men of affairs with deep intellectual interests: of some of them it would be difficult to say whether they were philosophers engaged in statesmanship or statesmen whose true vocation was philosophy. Even the pragmatists among them kept their minds open to the ideas of the age. This interplay of ideas and politics lent political life in Anglo-Saxon countries their well-known spirit of compromise. Here the intellectuals had no need to withdraw and form an isolated caste. They acted on public opinion, which, through democratic institutions, sooner or later affected legislation.
In England and, through England, in the United States, the ideas of Helvétius gained popularity mainly from the writings of Jeremy Bentham and the utilitarians. It was to Helvétius that Bentham owed the ideas that morality and legislation were “one and the same science,” that man could attain virtue only through “good laws,” and that, consequently, legislation had a “pedagogic” function.15 On these foundations, Bentham constructed his theory of philosophical radicalism, which greatly affected the movement for parliamentary reform and liberal economics. The preoccupation of modern Anglo-Saxon countries with legislation as a device for human betterment is directly traceable to Bentham and, through him, to Helvétius. In the speculations of Bentham and the English liberals, there was no place for violence: the transformation of man and society was to be accomplished entirely by laws and enlightenment. But even under this reform-minded theory lay the tacit premise that man could and ought to be remade. This premise links liberalism and radicalism and helps explain why, for all their rejection of the violent methods employed by revolutionaries, when forced to choose between them and their conservative opponents, liberals can be counted on to throw their lot in with the revolutionaries. For what separates liberals from the extreme left is disagreement over the means employed, whereas they differ from the right in the fundamental perception of what man is and what society ought to be.
In countries which excluded intellectuals from participation in public life—of which old regime France and Russia were prime examples—intellectuals were prone to form castes committed to extreme ideologies. The fact was noted by Tocqueville:
In England, writers on the theory of government and those who actually governed cooperated with each other, the former setting forth their theories, the latter amending or circumscribing these in the light of practical experience. In France, however, precept and practice were kept quite distinct and remained in the hands of two quite distinct groups. One of these carried on the actual administration while the other set forth the abstract principles on which good government should, they said, be based; one took the routine measures appropriate to the needs of the moment, the other propounded general laws without a thought for their practical application; one group shaped the course of public affairs, the other that of public opinion. Thus, alongside the traditional and confused, not to say chaotic, social system of the day there was gradually built up in man’s minds an imaginary ideal society in which all was simple, uniform, coherent, equitable, and rational in the full sense of the term.
16
It is always dangerous to seek in historical analogies explanations for historical events: the model of the French Revolution employed by Russian radicals brought no end of grief to them and many others. However, in at least one respect the example of eighteenth-century France is applicable to twentieth-century Russia—namely, in the realm of ideas, which are less affected by concrete historic circumstances than are political and social conditions. The intellectual atmosphere of late Imperial Russia closely resembled that of ancien regime France on the eve of the Revolution, and the circles of philosophes anticipated those of the Russian intelligentsia. The analogy emphasizes to what extent intellectual trends can be self-generated: it reinforces the impression that the behavior of the Russian intelligentsia was influenced less by Russian reality than by preconceived ideas.
A brilliant if little-known French historian, Augustin Cochin, first showed the peculiarly destructive intellectual atmosphere that had prevailed in France in the decades immediately preceding the Revolution. He began his inquiries with a study of Jacobinism.* Seeking its antecedents, he was led to the social and cultural circles formed in France in the 1760s and 1770s to promote “advanced” ideas. These circles, which he called sociétés de pensée, were made up of literary associations, Masonic lodges, academies, as well as various “patriotic” and cultural clubs. According to Cochin, the sociétés de pensée insinuated themselves into a society in which the traditional estates were in the process of disintegration. To join them required severing connections with one’s social group and dissolving one’s class (estate) identity in a community bound exclusively by a commitment to common ideas. Jacobinism was a natural product of this phenomenon: in France, unlike England, the movement for change emanated not from parliamentary institutions but from literary and philosophical clubs.
These circles, in which the historian of Russia recognizes many of the features of the Russian intelligentsia of a century later, had as their main mission the forging of a consensus: they achieved cohesion not through shared interests but through shared ideas, ruthlessly imposed on their members and accompanied by vicious attacks on all who thought differently:
Prior to the bloody terror of ’93, there existed, between 1765 and 1780, a dry terror in the republic of letters, of which the Encyclopedia was the Committee of Public Safety and d’Alembert was Robespierre. It mowed down reputations as the other did heads: its guillotine was defamation …
17
For intellectuals of this kind, the criterion of truth was not life: they created their own reality, or rather, sur-reality, subject to verification only with reference to opinions of which they approved. Contradictory evidence was ignored: anyone inclined to heed such evidence was ruthlessly cast out.
This kind of thinking led to a progressive estrangement from life. Cochin’s description of the atmosphere in the French sociétés de pensée of the late eighteenth century perfectly fits that prevailing in intelligentsia circles in Russia a century later:
Whereas in the real world the arbiter of all thought is proof and its issue is the effect, in this world the arbiter is the opinion of others, and the aim their approbation.… All thought, all intellectual effort here exists only by way of concurrence. It is opinion that makes for existence. That is real which others see, that true which they say, that good of which they approve. Thus the natural order is reversed: opinion here is the cause, and not, as in real life, the effect. Appearance takes the place of being, speaking, doing.… And the goal … of that passive work is destruction. It consists, in sum, of eliminating, of reducing. Thought which submits to this initially loses the concern for the real, and then, little by little, the sense of the real. And it is precisely to this deprivation that it owes its freedom. It does not gain in freedom, orderliness, clarity except to the extent that it sheds its real content, its hold on that which exists.
18
It is only with the help of this insight that we can understand the seeming paradoxes in the mentality of the genus intelligentsia, and especially
its more extreme species, the Russian intelligentsia. Theories and programs, on which Russian intellectuals spent their waking hours, were indeed evaluated in relation not to life but to other theories and programs: the criterion of their validity was consistency and conformity. Live reality was treated as a perversion or caricature of “genuine” reality, believed to lurk invisible behind appearances and waiting to be set free by the Revolution. This attitude would enable the intelligentsia to accept as true propositions at total variance with demonstrable fact as well as common sense—for example, that the living standards of European workers in the nineteenth century were steadily declining, that the Russian peasant in 1900 was on the verge of starvation, that it was legitimate, in the name of democracy, to disperse in January 1918 the democratically elected Constituent Assembly, or that, more generally, freedom meant bowing to necessity. To understand the behavior of the intelligentsia it is imperative to keep in mind at all times its deliberate detachment from reality: for while the revolutionaries can be ruthlessly pragmatic in exploiting, for tactical purposes, the people’s grievances, their notion of what the people desire is the product of sheer abstraction. Not surprisingly, when they come to power, revolutionary intellectuals immediately seize control of the means of information and institute a tight censorship: for it is only by suppressing free speech that they can impose their “sur-reality” on ordinary people bogged down in the quagmire of facts.*
The habit calls for the creation of a special language by means of which initiates of the movement can communicate with one another and, when in power, impose their fantasy on the population at large. This language, with its own vocabulary, phraseology, and even syntax, which reached its apogee in the stultified jargon of the Stalinist era, “describes not reality but an ideal conception of it.” It is severely ritualized and surrounded by lexical taboos.19 Long before 1917, Russian revolutionary polemics were carried out in this medium.
Nowhere is this penchant for creating one’s own reality more apparent—and pernicious—than in the intelligentsia’s conception of the “people.” Radicals insist on speaking for and on acting on behalf of the “people” (sometimes described as “the popular masses”) against the allegedly self-seeking elite in control of the state and the nation’s wealth. In their view, the establishment of a just and free society requires the destruction of the status quo. But contact with the people of flesh and blood quickly reveals that few if any of them want their familiar world to be destroyed: what they desire is satisfaction of specific grievances—that is, partial reform, with everything else remaining in place. It has been observed that spontaneous rebellions are conservative rather than revolutionary, in that those involved usually clamor for the restitution of rights of which they feel they have been unjustly deprived: they look backward.20 In order to promote its ideal of comprehensive change, the intelligentsia must, therefore, create an abstraction called “the people” to whom it can attribute its own wishes. According to Cochin, the essence of Jacobinism lay not in terror but in the striving of the intellectual elite to establish dictatorial power over the people in the name of the people. The justification for such procedure was found in Rousseau’s concept of “general will,” which defined the will of the people as what enlightened “opinion” declared it to be:
For the doctrinaires of the [French revolutionary] regime, the
philosophes
and politicians, from Rousseau and Mably to Brissot and Robespierre, the true people is an ideal being. The general will, the will of the citizenry, transcends the actual will, such as it is, of the greatest number, as in Christian life grace dominates and transcends nature. Rousseau has said it: the general will is not the will of numbers and it has reason against it; the liberty of the citizen is not the independence of the individual, and suppresses it. In 1789, the true people did not exist except potentially, in the consciousness or imagination of “free people,” of “patriots,” as they used to be called … that is to say, a small number of initiates, recruited in their youth, trained without respite, shaped all their lives in societies of
philosophes
… in the discipline of liberty.
21
It is only by reducing people of flesh and blood to a mere idea that one can ignore the will of the majority in the name of democracy and institute a dictatorship in the name of freedom.
This whole ideology and the behavior to which it gave rise—a mélange of ideas formulated by Helvétius and Rousseau—was historically new, the creation of the French Revolution. It legitimized the most savage social experiments. Although for personal reasons Robespierre despised Helvétius (he believed him to have persecuted his idol, Rousseau), his entire thinking was deeply influenced by him. For Robespierre, the mission of politics was the “reign of virtue.” Society was divided into “good” and “bad” citizens, from which premise he concluded that “all those who do not think as we do must be eliminated from the city.”22
Tocqueville was perplexed by this whole phenomenon when late in life he turned his attention to the history of the French Revolution. A year before his death, he confided to a friend:
There is something special about the sickness of the French Revolution which I sense without being able to describe it or analyze its causes. It is a
virus
of a new and unfamiliar kind. The world has known violent revolution: but the boundless, violent, radical, perplexed, bold, almost insane but still strong and successful personality of these revolutionaries appears to me to have no parallel in the great social upheavals of the past. From whence comes this new race? Who created it? Who made it so successful? Who kept it alive? Because we still have the same men confronting us, although the circumstances differ, and they have left progeny in the whole civilized world. My spirit flags from the effort to gain a clear picture of this object and to find the means of describing it fairly. Independently of everything that is comprehensible in the French Revolution, in its spirit and in its deeds, there is something that remains inexplicable. I sense where the unknown is to be found but no matter how hard I try, I cannot lift the veil that conceals it. I feel it through a strange body which prevents me from really touching or seeing it.
23
Had he lived into the twentieth century, Toqueville might have found it easier to identify the “virus,” because its peculiar blend of ideas and group interests has become commonplace since his day.
Intellectuals can acquire influence only in an egalitarian and open society, in which estate barriers have broken down and politics are shaped by opinion. In such a society they assume the role of opinion-makers, to which end they employ the printed word and other media as well as educational institutions. Although the intelligentsia likes to see itself as selflessly dedicated to the public good, and hence a moral force rather than a social group, the fact of its members sharing common values and goals inevitably means that they also share common interests—interests which may well clash with their professed ideals. The intelligentsia has difficulty admitting this. Its profound aversion for sociological self-analysis—in such contrast to its penchant for analyzing all other social groups and classes, especially its main obstacle to power, the “bourgeoisie”—has resulted in a striking paucity of works on the subject. The sparse literature on the intelligentsia as a social and historic phenomenon is entirely disproportionate to that group’s importance.24
Although they can flourish only in societies free of estate privileges, with egalitarian citizenship, such as have arisen in the West in modern times, such societies place intellectuals in an ambivalent position. While they enjoy immense influence on public opinion, they constitute socially a marginal element, since they control neither wealth nor political power. A good part of them make up an intellectual proletariat which barely manages to eke out a living: even the more fortunate representatives of this group are economically and politically insignificant, often forced to serve as paid spokesmen of the nation’s elite. This is a painful position to be
in, especially for those who regard themselves as far more deserving of the prerogatives of power than those who actually wield it by virtue of accident of birth or economic exploitation.
Capitalism benefits the intelligentsia by increasing the demand for its services and giving its members opportunity to practice the profession of opinion-molding:
The cheaper book, the cheap newspaper or pamphlet, together with the widening of the public that was in part their product but partly an independent phenomenon due to the access of wealth and weight which came to the industrial bourgeoisie and to the incident increase in the political importance of an anonymous public opinion—all these boons, as well as increasing freedom from restraint, are by-products of the capitalist engine.
25
“Every society of the past,” writes Raymond Aron,
has had its scribes … its artists or men of letters … and its experts.… None of these three species belongs strictly to our modern civilisation, but the latter has nonetheless its own special characteristics which affect the numbers and status of the intellectuals. The distribution of manpower among the different professions alters with the progress of economic development: the percentage of manpower employed in industry grows, the proportion employed in agriculture decreases, while the size of the so-called tertiary sector, which includes a multitude of professions of varying degrees of prestige—from the quill-driver in his office to the research worker in his laboratory—is enormously inflated. Modern industrial societies comprise a greater number of non-manual workers, absolutely and relatively, than any society of the past.… The three categories of non-manual workers—scribes, experts, and men of letters—develop simultaneously, if not at the same rate. Bureaucracies offer outlets to scribes with inferior qualifications; the management of labor and the organization of industry require more and more specialized experts; schools, universities, and various mediums of entertainment or communication employ men of letters, artists, or mere technicians of speech and writing, hacks and popularizers.… Though its significance is not always fully recognized, the growth in the number of jobs remains a crucial fact …
The Russian Revolution Page 22
