The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  It turned out, however, that most men were “dastardly egoists” with petty souls, and that the only way for morality to triumph over egoism was for the forces of morality to wage war on the forces of egoism. Virtue was to be “combined with terror”: “virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent.” In the Law of 22 Prairial (June 10, 1794), crimes punishable by death included most weaknesses of petty souls. In the forty-seven days that elapsed between the publication of this law and the execution of its chief sponsor, 1,376 people were guillotined in Paris. Condorcet had been found dead in his cell in March. “We know how to die, and we will all die,” said Robespierre. And so they did.86

  The Jacobins’ self-immolation disillusioned some believers and inspired countless alternative visions, but it did little to discredit the faith itself. The Romantic “blue flower” was to Condorcet’s redemption by progress what Christian mysticism had been to Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologica; in between lay most of nineteenth-century thought. Wordsworth, who lived to the age of eighty, moved his earthly paradise from the Jacobin “management of Nations” to “the discerning intellect of Man.” The second version promised a consummation as noble as the first one; both dispelled “the sleep of Death”; and neither, according to Wordsworth, was any less heavenly than its Christian predecessor. Both were transcendental but not supernatural.87

  The same was true of Faust’s victory over Mephistopheles (who, as “part of that power which would the evil ever do, and ever does the good,” represents Condorcet’s self-defeating anti-Progress), of Hegel’s Universal Spirit (which needs the Mephistophelean dialectic to reach full self-realization), and of the sundry “utopian” sectarians who fused the social and contemplative paradises in perfect communities of imperfect human beings (by combining needs, wants, and abilities in a harmonious balance). Robert Owen inherited the Harmonists’ settlement of New Harmony; Charles Fourier provided the mold and the foil for the Oneida Bible Communists; and Claude de Saint-Simon proclaimed himself the new Messiah and told his disciples from his deathbed: “The pear is ripe, you must pick it…. The only thing that the attack on the religious system of the Middle Ages proved is that it was no longer in harmony with the progress of positive sciences. But it was wrong to conclude that religion was going to disappear; in fact, it simply needs to conform to the progress of the sciences. I repeat to you, the pear is ripe, you must pick it.”88

  They were all priests and prophets tending to whatever lay “beyond.” In Christian societies, the tightly unified sacred realm was defined by priestly professionals, who manned the official paths to salvation, and self-appointed prophets, who policed priestly performance or proposed entirely new paths. In the post-Christian world, the universal church developed ever-widening cracks, and the sacred trickled out, attaching itself to human souls, bodies, products, and institutions. Access became more democratic but remained unequal, and most of the work of spiritual guardianship was taken up by the new entrepreneurs of the sacred, the “intellectuals.” Some of them served as priests, creating legitimizing myths and rituals for newly reconstituted communities and imaginations; others offered themselves as prophets, ridiculing the “Pharisees and the teachers of the law” and discerning new heavens and a new earth. Human life was still felt to be inadequate; “salvation,” in a variety of forms, was still the desired (expected) outcome; and prophets, as freelance guides to the sacred, were still in demand when full-time guides appeared lost.89

  Depending on the nature and language of the message, nineteenth-century prophets could be divided into artists (of many different kinds, but mostly bards), scientists (of both the falsifiable and nonfalsifiable variety, but mostly the latter), and artists who drew on science as part of their creative repertoire. Depending on how ripe they thought the pear was, these prophets spanned the range between Jesus-style urgent millenarianism and various mystical and allegorical compromises. There were no two distinct liberal and totalitarian political traditions any more than there were two distinct Christian traditions of Augustinian liberalism and Anabaptist totalitarianism. Once the intensity of expectation subsided, the Anabaptists evolved into the meekly quiescent Mennonites. Everyone expected redemption; the question was how quickly and by what means; the answers were spread over a broad continuum.90

  In other words, Christianity is inherently “totalitarian” in the sense of demanding unconditional moral submission (the coincidence of God’s will and human desires) and emphasizing thought crimes over formal legality; the rest concerns the nature and intensity of enforcement and the degree of eschatological impatience. For most of Christian history, enforcement has been slack and the last days a metaphor. The modern state of more or less equal, interchangeable, and self-governing citizens has no founding injunctions to go back to, but its two main sources were uncompromisingly total in both practice and aspiration. The Puritan Revolution was a Christian revival that sought to eradicate impure thoughts by means of mutual surveillance (“brotherly admonition”) and ostentatious self-control (“godliness”). The French Revolution was an Age of Reason revival that sought to eradicate impure thoughts by means of mutual surveillance (“vigilance”) and ostentatious self-control (“virtue”). Both required universal participation and ceaseless activism while dividing the world into saints and reprobates (and the saints, into true and false ones). Both were defeated by the non-arrival of a New Jerusalem (“liberty”) and the return of old regimes (“tyranny”), but both won in the long run by producing liberalism, the routinized version of godliness and virtue. The inquisitorial zeal and millenarian excitement were gone, but mutual surveillance, ostentatious self-control, universal participation, and ceaseless activism remained as virtues in their own right and essential prerequisites for democratic rule (the reduction of individual wills to a manageable uniformity of opinion). Novus ordo seclorum was overshadowed by e pluribus unum, and the expectation of imminent happiness was replaced by its endless pursuit.

  The history of the new order, like that of the old one, is a story of routinization and compromise punctuated by sectarian attempts to restore the original promise. One can—with Augustine—rejoice in the permanence of the temporary and claim that compromise is all there is (and that the really existing nation is really indivisible, with liberty and justice for all), but faith in progress is just as basic to modernity as the Second Coming was to Christianity (“progressive” means “virtuous” and “change” means “hope”). “Totalitarianism” is not a mysterious mutation: it is a memory and a promise; an attempt to keep hope alive.

  The relative ripeness of the pear is a matter of judgment. Millenarians are usually divided into quietists, who wait for the End in catacombs, real or symbolic, and activists, who believe that “the Deity does not cooperate in restoring liberty otherwise than by influencing man’s decision.” In fact, no one—not even a Calvinist—believes that man’s decision is of no consequence whatever, and no millenarian does nothing at all in the face of the approaching End. Jesus had to say what he said and do what he did in order for the time to be fulfilled, and his disciples had to repent, become humble like children, and, if they really wanted to rule the nations, leave behind their houses and brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers and children and fields. The quietest of prayers is a mighty weapon in the hands of true believers, and all forms of salvation are both inevitable and dependent on man’s decision. All millenarians—indeed, most human beings—believe in some combination of faith and works, fate and hope, predestination and free will, the inexorable tide of Providence and purposeful human action, the locomotive of history and the “party of a new type.” As the end nears, some people pray, some sing, some starve, some make furniture, some study genealogy, some dance the ghost dance, some don’t dance at all, some kill their cattle, some kill themselves, and some kill the forces of darkness variously defined as priests, lawyers, money-lenders, “lords and princes,” and any number of Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites
, Hivites, and Jebusites.

  Post-Christian perfection, like the Christian kind, can manifest itself within particular human beings or in chosen communities. Individuals can be saved by therapies; communities can become indivisible through a combination of “national” and “social” emancipation. The Old Testament’s chosen people were proletarians among nations, who were promised a tribal victory that was also a revolutionary transformation of slaves into masters. The New Testament equated the social revolution with the national one. Babylon (or Egypt, or Rome, or whatever imperial “whore” was oppressing the chosen people) was going to fall and receive “as much torture and grief as the glory and luxury she gave herself,” but the same thing was going to happen to the Israelites who were too fat to squeeze through the eye of the needle. “Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep.” Jesus was not casting his pearls before the Gentiles, but he was not talking to all the Jews either.91

  Depending on the nature of their “distress,” both Christian and post-Christian millenarians could represent themselves as tribes facing other tribes (like Enoch Mgijima’s “Israelites”) or as the hungry facing the wellfed (like Thomas Müntzer’s “League of the Elect”), but they were always a bit of both and usually represented themselves as such. The English Puritans’ Holy Commonwealth was England (and later America), and Robespierre’s universal happiness of free and equal men was equal to the hope “that France, once illustrious among enslaved nations, might, by eclipsing the glory of all free countries that ever existed, become a model to nations, a terror to oppressors, a consolation to the oppressed, an ornament of the universe.” The liberal descendants of the two revolutions preserved the remnants of both the priesthood of all believers (the rights of man) and the holy commonwealth (the republic of virtue). Rights were guaranteed and enabled by nationalism, and the greater the insistence on the sacred immediacy of these rights (as in the self-admiring, Augustinian America), the more messianic the nationalism.92

  The societies in which successful reformations had coincided with the defeat of old regimes (Britain, Holland, the United States, and, in a more muted form, Lutheran Scandinavia) could continue to enjoy the fruits of routinization by absorbing most forms of radical creativity into Protestant sectarianism, official nationalism, and franchise extension. The societies in which an unreformed church was subordinated to an infidel foreign state (Poland, Ireland, Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece) could continue to accommodate modern radicalism within biblical nationalism and its updated Romantic version (for as long as Babylon continued its depredations). Elsewhere, the ruins of Christendom were teeming with post-Christian prophets who, “although of no name, with the greatest facility and on the slightest occasion, whether within or without temples, assumed the motions and gestures of inspired persons.” Germany, whose new and ambitious state could never quite discipline a society split by the Reformation or a Europe divided by old borders, produced a particularly large number of such prophets. So did France, Italy, Spain, Russia, and other societies in which relatively unreformed churches linked to old regimes, dead or alive, were confronted by new urban coalitions increasingly open to post-Christian millenarianism. Russia, whose unreformed church was most closely linked to the old regime and whose old regime was both politically alive and economically ambitious, gave birth to a particularly vibrant tradition of millenarian sectarianism, “the intelligentsia.” Many of the new prophets, especially in Germany and Russia, were Jews, whose traditional legitimizing faith had collapsed along with their traditional economic role, and whose entry into nonmillenarian communities was often not welcome.93

  As the French Revolution retreated into a recoverable past, apocalyptic prophecies tended to cluster at the poles of the national-to-socialist continuum. At the peak of millenarian hope and despair, the distance between tribal and social deliverance could grow as wide as the difference between Moses and Jesus. The chosen people constituted as tribes spoke the Old Testament language of escaping from Egypt and getting to the promised land by exterminating the internal enemies who threatened the indivisibility of the nation and the external Perizzites who threatened the purity of milk and honey. The chosen people constituted as those who wept and hungered spoke the New Testament language of toppling those who were cheerful and well-fed. Both were about a particular struggle leading to universal happiness, but the scale of the universal depended on the nature of the particular. Mazzini’s prophecy that Italy was destined to hold “the high office of solemnly proclaiming European emancipation” primarily concerned the Italians, and Mickiewicz’s prophecy that “a resurrected Poland would weld and fuse the nations in freedom” primarily concerned the Poles. Marx’s prophecy of socialist revolution spoke to all those who had nothing to lose.94

  ■ ■ ■

  Marx began in the same way as Mazzini and Mickiewicz. “The emancipation of the German,” he wrote when he was twenty-five years old, “is the emancipation of man.” Or rather, as he had written a month or two earlier, “emancipation from Judaism is the self-emancipation of our time.” The emancipation of man was to proceed in stages.

  The root of all evil was private property and money. “The view of nature attained under the domination of private property and money is a real contempt for, and practical debasement of, nature…. It is in this sense that Thomas Müntzer declares it intolerable ‘that all creatures have been turned into property, the fishes in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the earth; the creatures, too, must become free.’” To become free was to abolish private property and money. “Money degrades all the gods of man—and turns them into commodities.” No one worships it more than the Jews, who are the living embodiment of egoism. “The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world.”

  What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering.

  What is his worldly God? Money.

  Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time.95

  Whether Marx wanted to abolish money by abolishing the Jews or abolish the Jews by abolishing money, the real question was how it would be done. Or, as it turned out, where it could be done. The answer was that the emancipation of man was the emancipation of Germany because Germany was “an anachronism, a flagrant contradiction of generally recognized axioms, the nothingness of the ancien régime exhibited to the world.” And what was a modern ancien régime? “The comedian of a world order whose true heroes are dead”; “nothing but wretchedness in office.”

  Fortunately for Germany, this was not all. “If … the whole German development did not exceed the German political development, a German could at the most have the share in the problems-of-the-present that a Russian has.” But Germans were not Russians: their philosophical development did exceed their political development, as well as the philosophical development of the more advanced nations. “In politics, the Germans thought what other nations did. Germany was their theoretical conscience. The abstraction and presumption of its thought was always in step with the one-sidedness and lowliness of its reality.”

  The more profound the wretchedness, the better for the final outcome. Marx’s History was Faust’s Mephistopheles—“part of that power which would the evil ever do, and ever does the good.” The lowliness of German reality had sharpened its thought, and the sharpness of Germany’s thought would help bring about the revolution, which would usher in the emancipation of man. The proliferation of people who, with the greatest facility and on the slightest occasion, assumed the motions and gestures of inspired persons and prophesied the approaching end, signified that the end was, indeed, approaching. The greatest achievement of German philosophy would be to dethrone religion (by which Marx meant Christianity): “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them
to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.”

  The performance of this task had begun—like most things in history—with an attempt to accomplish the opposite. It had begun in “Germany’s revolutionary past,” the Reformation:

  Luther, we grant, overcame bondage out of devotion by replacing it by bondage out of conviction. He shattered faith in authority because he restored the authority of faith. He turned priests into laymen because he turned laymen into priests…. But, if Protestantism was not the true solution of the problem, it was at least the true setting of it…. And if the Protestant transformation of the German layman into priests emancipated the lay popes, the princes, with the whole of their priestly clique, the privileged and philistines, the philosophical transformation of priestly Germans into men will emancipate the people.

  Just “as the revolution then began in the brain of the monk, so now it begins in the brain of the philosopher.” Much of the work had been done by Hegel; it was up to the twenty-five-year-old Marx to complete the task by bringing history and politics together. One of the two 1843 essays that launched Germany’s—and the world’s—ultimate philosopher was the introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.

  The fundamental questions were clear:

  Can Germany attain a practice à la hauteur des principes—i.e., a revolution which will raise it not only to the official level of modern nations, but to the height of humanity which will be the near future of those nations? Will the monstrous discrepancy between the demands of German thought and the answers of German reality find a corresponding discrepancy between civil society and the state, and between civil society and itself? Will the theoretical needs be immediate practical needs? … Can [Germany] do a somersault, not only over its own limitations, but at the same time over the limitations of the modern nations?