Freedom and Its Betrayal

FREEDOM

AND ITS ileen Kelly

BETRAYA~~

Six Enemies of Human Liberty

5

ISAIAH BERLIN Edited by Henry Hardy

hed by Chatto & Windu, • 4 6 8 to 9 7 S 3

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t

Berlin Literary Trust and Henry Hardy nal matter «:> Henry Hardy '00.

'00.

~~ Berlin and Henry Hardy to be identified as the r respectively of this work has been as,ened

subject to the condition that it shall not, ~erwise, be lent, resold, hired OUI, or otherwise lisher's prior consent in any form of binding or that m which it is published and without a mcluding this condition being imposed the subsequent purchaser

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hed in Great Britain in by Chlano & Windus e, ~o Vauxhall Bridge Road, ndon SWIV ~SA e Australia (Pry) Limited Milsons Point, Sydney, 'W'1l1es ~06I, Australia Zealand Limited • Glenfield, ewZealand

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To the memory of Anna KaUm 18 96-- 19 84

CONTENTS

Editor's Preface

Introduction Helvetius Rousseau Fichte Hegel Saint-Simon Maistre Notes Index

EDITOR'S PREFACE

when the six hour-long 11ec1:ut1ISJ~ this volume were delivered, they created a broadl." tion. Never before had a speaker on this scale dispense with a prepared script, and the forty-' Isaiah Berlin was the right person to inau practice. His headlong delivery, his idio9}'l1lltll though this made it hard for some to extraordinary articulacy, his evident abso,~1ni unfamiliar but immediately exciting subje combined to create an impact that those w still remember today. People tuned in found themselves mesmerised. John B records that the lectures'excited me SIl talk, on the floor beside the wireI series was over, it was the subject provoked a correspondence: 0 contributed.2

FIFTY YEARS AGO,

bel.

uBi.

The lectures co.,._...~ man who could

ITS BETRAYAL

later to the Chichele Professoreory at Oxford.' There was a less 'ty too. one which was always a ~d he was regarded partly as a Ud indeed Michael Oakeshott if)' goes) at the London School of Jear. when he gave the first Auguste f:ctureJ there, as 'the Paganini of the 'Some foundation to this fear, for he highbrow speech - 'the only man _ki',cal- as one syllable'. But this no permanent damage to the kind recognition of his wide-ranging • 'ty to deploy them with unique of just one of the lectures may be listened to at the is the closest we can come to !I'.had in 1952, But there are ) of all six lectures, and possible once again to IU!ncy. and to feel the liberty. views made :hic:hele Professor. elfayal is by no

EDITOR'S PREPACE

means simply a crude forerunner of a more lilt. . development. The conception of freedom that infuso. lectures is in its essentials already fully formed, &IlIl less dense treatment, especially since it is presented in specific thinkers rather than as an abstract treatise, and great deal that does not appear in the inauguralllllCll1llllli significant supplement to the work he published in In my more flippant moments I have thought of this book 'Not the Reith Lectures', Anna Kamo. producer for the BBC Third Programme, had alrciad:, responsible for a number of talks of his. She knew preparing to give the Mary Flexner Lectures at Bryn College in Pennsylvania (as he did in February and M'UIlilllJl and she asked him to deliver a version of these on thewas well aware that he would be hard to plersIWI"_ customarily resisted offers of the limelight - &IlIl shMriI to be disappointed. To her delight, however. When she heard recordings (now lost) of the she had no hesitation in offering him, in addition. role of Reith Lecturer. to which he was ideall But when Kallin's superiors heard of her Cq her great embarrassment by ruling that BerellJ'.." .. Reith Lecturer. 1 have found no record oj view, It may simply have been that Ber ' established at that time. and that thlt . Lecturers were more conservati It There is no evidence, at any rate; Whatever their reasons. the Kallin had to br~ tb"",...'-e

m.

tnr;_ PI_.

oHended.1

PRBBDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

transcripts. Broadly speaking, it was similar to his e publishability of his Mellon Lec~res,. delivered l'fl~ later in Washingron, DC, and publIshed In t 999 as ~f Romanticism. He knew that the transcripts ought ....my revised and no doubt expanded if they were to be -to a state in which he could contemplate their appearchook form in his lifetime. As he wrote to Kallin on I I er I9JI, 'You will easily perceive how it is one thing to of things in a general fashion to an audience and a very one to commit words to cold print.' He certainly publish a book based on the Bryn Mawr Lectures, a so within a year or two of their delivery, but, as in .he never managed to complete the necessary work, dIaft typescript on which both sets of lectures were 'd aside and forgotten, despite the fact that he had iId:ens:ively, In 1993 I produced a fair copy of it for rating all his manuscript alterations and an introe .had written subsequently, but I do not believe 'at it. Entitled 'Political Ideas in the Romantic erwhich the Flexner Lectures were delivered), ~ooo words, and will, I trust, be published in

ijt!t draft of the edited transcript of the ~ book, but this too he could not ught it almost certain that he lie- mentioned this belief to him, Perhaps out of kindness thing would happen: :Ii suddenly pick it up ). ~ut-"-:wu

BDI

backed up my judgement than I do about the sub lectures stronger than othe:n• • now somewhat out of fasbio on almost all hands that publica it goes without saying that carrying Berlin's own full ~pJII1" fairly represents his views on will help his readers to a fuller that it is no disservice to his rql\l1l lectures to his published oe~~nuI extempore, informal nature i claims are made for this vollunJel1 The BBC lectures are not typescript prepared for the simply a re-run of the P weekly summaries in Bryn: though it is hard to itemise. transcripts or recordings sometimes said that the same - for example, in. Katharine E. McB .d I have thou

substantially . Flexner,q 100

AND ITS BETRAYAL

iderable reorganisation before and aft er ' and it wou Id In any case have bee him to deliver the same lectures twic n d beSI'des, almost alwaye, ive reviser 1 an, h on the podium, even if he drew on th: on more than one occasion. f his terror when facing an audience is a on of Lelia Brodersen (later chief psychol. d guidance clinic), who worked briefly iiWlaenhe was at the College. She was doing the time, was therefore shon of money, . wherever she could find them. In a . es the most vivid account of Berlin's seen:

tmhis' lecture on Fichte & was appalled. He lIII;JliUl'lISelf behind the lectern, fixed his eyes t & over the heads of the audience, & ~ed out. For precisely an hour, with 'm really frightful speed, he poured • 'ant lecture from the little I could airection of his gaze once, Without so far that each time one was sure • ther forward or backward. His ~m of his left hand, & for the y up lit down as if he were It was scarcely to be lItream of words, in es except for certain evident that Kant:& to

the-l4P

EDITOR'S PIlKPA,etIl.Qil

To return to the history of the present of the long typescript are entitled 'Po'lidl~ Science', 'The Idea of Freedom', 'Two Qt. Romantic and Liberal' and 'The March at chapters were written as a basis for the last not survive. Perhaps shortage of time film. drafting these, though in the case of Maistre of a typescript prepared some years before.· began as a treatment of six topics, though predominantly illustrated at Bryn Mawr (m ideas of two individuals, ended up focused named in the present chapter titles, Before die was chosen the lectures are referred to in th Enemies of Human Liberty', and I have adop subtitle. I have also separated out the first lecture as a general introduction to the w what it provides. In many ways the editing of these 1,eetlW that of Berlin's Mellon Lectures, thou more different versions of the tran tations of these, and more caches 9i not repeat here what I said a}lou preface to The Roots of Roman has been the absence of lectures.2 This has meant. conjectural restoration of

DOM A.ND ITS BETRAYAL

uanscripts made by me~bers of the BBC enough, were not famIlIar with Berlin's aner, and found the. work hard going; at "'lfeIted, and the tranSCrIpt descends into near_ just one example for fun, Saint-Simon our'.)' Almost always, though, it is clear ~ even if the actual words are occasionally been ~e1ped by experts in my search for 5 quotations, as I record m the preamble to S..(i. But my greatest debt, and the reader's _ III that to the author - is to the late Anna in Berlin's intellectual career should not be 4eterminedly pressed him, again and again, "D. She cajoled and supported him through of recording, and where necessary re- a process which, characteristically, he kecause it fed his lifelong self-doubt). She nu perform miracles of cutting, condensBerlin in the letter to her from which I he also refers to her 'magical hands'. es clear how important the personal two Russian-Jewish exiles. Berlin, ectual impresario to enable him to Kallin filled that role with 'that is why I have dedicated this

HENRY HARDY

INTRODUCTIO'I"lo.".

whose ideas I proposeprominent just before and just after the French questions they discussed were among the p'ertllld political philosophy, and, to the extent philosophy is a branch of morals, moral plbil. and political philosophy are vast subjects. BlUlIo1 to analyse what they are. Suffice it to say we can, with a certain amount of exllggluil tion, reduce the questions to one and 0 should an individual obey other individ one individual obey either other in4ivid of individuals?' There are, of c questions, such as 'Under what cir and 'When do they cease to obt~ from obedience, questions ab~~~ society, by the individuaI,- ~III purposes of political p,hj.~ political theory or socioJa be precisely this ontll The six tbiI"1kei~i!lJ RouSleaPt,-l'U"iDIIli

THE SIX THINKERS

.:.I.

M AND ITS BETRAYAL

r of the ascendan? ~f the middle class. fWe1re born at the begInrung of a period of living at the end. ~u~ whether or not this ome people think, It IS ~Iea~ tha.t these are -.11n speak a language whIch I~ .stlll directly doubt there were great political thinkers erhaps more original ones also. Plato and and St Augustine, Dante and Machiavelli, Hobbes and Locke enunciated ideas which ..:reee more profound, more original, bolder than those of the thinkers I shall discuss. ers are divided from us by history, we ther easily or with familiarity, they need o doubt we can see how our ideas derive lier thinkers, but they are not identical should like to maintain that the six eak a language which still speaks directly denounces ignorance or cruelty or ,/When Rousseau delivers his passionate lPid the sciences and the intelligentsia, peaks) for the simple human soul; rify the great organised whole, the . h they belong, and speak of national duty and the joys of uple in the performance of a ~eaks of the great frictionless in which workers and tionaI system, and all oUl: suHerings as well;'VIiU

• oMaistre give; l;atw

INTRODUCTIQ·...

thinkers. Although they lived towards ~~ century and at the beginning of the situation to which they seem relevant, w perceived, to have described with an un characteristic not so much of the nineteen twentieth. It is our period and our time analyse with astonishing foresight and skilll them worthy of our consideration. When I say that they have these curious P I should like to say that they are prophets ia Bertrand Russell once said that the impOIItaIW keep in mind when reading the theories of phers (other than mathematicians or 10 .• symbols and not with empirical facts or hlUIQ" that they all had a certain central vision 0 and what it should be; and all the ingenuitiY the immense cleverness and sometim~i" they expound their systems, and them, all the great intellectual apparatus the works of the major philosophera not but the outworks of the iI'1D.l9~ assault, objections to objectio~ attempt to forestall and refute ae their views and their theories, what it is they really want this barrage of defensiv ~ vision within, whicoh ....'g complex, but simpL single whole "V>~• •

nUl_

wi.

AUQ1A'~_•

b'

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BDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

lie asked again, at least in the fashion in which 6J\red before. Newton, for .example, was a thinker ~ered questio~s which ~ad pu.zzled many answered them wIth slmphcl ty , WIth lucidity, answer of immense power an d coherence. This ·d of Berkeley and of Hume, and of thinkers f8Icdy professional philosophers, for example of all people tof a novelist like Tolstoy. . These . are . the ancient, tormentmg questIons whIch had for many centuries, and answered them in !tror some people at any rate this seemed to be the

dUnkers who are great in another way, namely, questions which had been put before, but by of the questions themselves, by transforming from which the questions seemed to be much by solving the problems as by so the people to whom they talked as to cause a very different light', in which what had estion before no longer arose, or at any uite such urgency. And if the questions ~ons no longer seem to be required. per with the very categories, with the :which we see things. This kind of very dangerous, and can cast both Wty. I have in mind thinkers like Itoevsky, who in some special und~ 'deeper' thUlken than penetrate to a level where tmB their entire VQlOn Qlt-CODvClftCCI.

INTRODUCTI01II

conslstmg of other thinkers of whom leaders, or to whom they were merely Rather they were affected by them as one who suddenly transforms one's view of in a different relationship from that in whi In this respect, too, all six are thoroughly consideration. There is another quality, and a more CUlicl1l common to them. Although they all d·iSClIlIIfl human liberty, and all, except perhaps Mllisti~ were in favour of it - indeed some of them for it and regarded themselves as the truest they called true liberty, as opposed to imperfect brands of it - yet it is a pec:uliat their doctrines are inimical to what is rate, by individual liberty, or politicalli which was preached by the great E thinkers, for example; liberty in the conceived by Locke and by Tom Humboldt and by the liberal thinker. Condorcet and his friends, and, after and Madame de Stael; liberty in thu of it was what John Stuart Mill wlf freely to shape one's life as circumstances in which variously and richly, and, if The only barrier to this it men in respect of the security of them lJ); institution or P!=1ldiij

mm

self~ptOteetl~ Inl~fbilf1

PRBBDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

nroblem, being among the earliest to do s . r d and partlCu . Iarly simple 0, hIS h, particularIy" VIVI ''"'1ften best examined in this pristine form , bef' t .e [llII Ore It over with too many nuances, with too much 1IQM1:b too many local and temporal variations. return to the central quest~on which all political sooner or later must ask: Why should an 0 . HI" b y ne else?' By the time e venus egan writing, this been answered a1toget~er too variously. He was e when, in other provinces . of human interest , In . for example, enormous stndes had been made, the late sixteenth century and the seventeenth like Galileo and Descartes and Kepler, and that 'shed Dutchmen whose names I shall not cite ibuted so much to the subject, although thei: still relatively unrecognised. men were overtopped by Newton, whose que in the annals of mankind. Among all the 1adiation of his name and achievement really e was praised by the poets, he was praised by e was regarded almost as a semi-divine IP'ded because people thought that at last ature had been adequately and combecause Newton had triumphantly few, very simple and very easily kom which every movement and m~tter in the universe could in hich had previously -b ~JggicaUy, ~

som .

.

INTRODUCTI01f

verifying observations by means of sp ment wherever this was possible. In the sphere of politics, in the sphere of ordinating principle, no such authority, found. If it was asked why I should obey the State, why anyone should ever obey anlYU. were altogether too many and too vari01lll said, this was the word of God, vouchsafed supernatural origin; or perhaps by direct whose authority in these matters is recoplflll medium of a Church; or perhaps given by the individual himself. Or because God had great pyramid of the world - that is what said in the seventeenth century, for example; bishop Bossuet. The king must be obey order of the world, commanded by God, all. reason and faith, and the commands of G ask for the source of their authority is 1 said others, the command to obey the rul or by his agents. The law is what the rut wills it, whatever his motive, it may no is the theory of absolute monarch said, the world has been created ( uncreated) in order to fulfil a view is called natural teleology{ is a kind of gradual unrolllitg unrolling of a scroll in whi is to say, the whole of tb the gradual develapm terms of this grea:

pIKe, that iii'I~. the>taf.alIIlI

BBDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

otherwise; by obeying this rather than that Ie that is part of the pia.", part of the scheme of t do this, and of course In a mInor way I may b t the plan, then I shall be disturbing the hanno n; and frustrate others, and ultimately frustrate be unhappy. In the end the plan is more powerful I disobey it too far I shall be crushed by th out of the plan, which will sweep me aw e modified this view and said it may not a~~ ensabIe that you fulfil your part of the plan, not for the plan is not quite so tight and inevitable Fhaps it is the most convenient or economical iItIlQCi of securing that necessary minimum which a purpose of being happy, or being well, or that life should prove not too intolerable to till a plan, though you could live to some but not so well, not so comfortably, not so adjusting yourself to it. a means all the types of view which were .d that I possess certain inalienable rights, birth by nature or by God (say rights to ), which were said to be inherent in me, men to see. These rights entailed the d. the right to be obeyed by, certain l:llrtain occasions. Again, there were this or that king or government do it. This is the theory of the which I have agreed to abide in that unless I did so I should t

non and collabo,lftcQl, IlI¥ ~prQdlil',ed

INTRODUCTI0

conditioned to do so, by my education or by social pressure or by the fear of b do not. There were still others who said obey by something called the general will. called conscience, or by something called which the general will is in some way identifi a kind of socialised version. There were, apIn, that I obey because in doing so I fulfil the spirit, or the 'historical mission' of my nation CI1l of my class or of my race, or of my calling. who said I obey because I have a leader and he on me. Or else I obey because lowe it to friends, or to my ancestors or posterity. or oppressed whose labours have created me what is expected of me. Finally, it has b because I wish to do so, because I liq obeying when and as I please; or simply ~ which I feel but cannot explain. Some of these answers answer the q\1lllQ and some of them answer the question, which of course is not the same qUill drawn distinction between the two period in the history of the entire is that the entire topic had bec:Q century. If scientific method order in chemistry, in physt so forth, why did we have of conflicting opinions should some assert"ODI"l some be faithful s believe in mefa OIDe..Q

det.-

:aBBDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

lifIl!iiD had so successfully been obtained Con

Id.

. cenung

pIe who made the most determined effort d ' . to 0 thinker, HeIvetlus.

CLAUDE-ADRIEN HELVETIUS was both Frenchman of German origin - the fami!: been Schweitzer, of which Helvetius IS His father was physician to the QUeeII; himself a wealthy and gifted youth, who other connections obtained the patt some of the most talented and in Voltaire, for instance, Montesquieu sion he was a tax farmer; that is to say; part in the financial administration profits from it. He was a disposition, and had many d the leaders in his day of wh4t ment. His principal work is published it in I 7S 8, but iii. heretical, that it was c:on and was burnt by the.p than three sepal'll that, in spite of

his wife,mJ • hacbhap eQ

ba

BBDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

o g aim was the search for a single principle the basis of morality and really answer the t how society should be founded and how man here he should go and what he should do, with owof scientilic authority that Newton had disI: realm of physics. And Helvetius thought he had II therefore supposed himself to be the founder of a ence, whereby he could put in order, at long last, and political chaos. He thought himself, In shon, il.WtOJl of politics. blem should have posed itself in that way is Let me quote something from Condorcet, a opaedist of very left-wing views born somewhat . s, who died in one of Robespierre's prisons in Jan year of the French Revolution:

lIfin:

about the nature of the moral sciences [and by ~_lIIIS politics as well] one really cannot avoid the ~ like the physical sciences, they rest upon !Jc:rs, they ought to follow the same methods, tl0 less exact and precise, and so attain to the . .If some being alien to our species were to he would find no difference between these !2:amin' e human society as we do that of

HELvt

are we to reduce these sciencell to and clarity as physics and geomletr]r!lI found the answer. Let me quote wha dialogue between God and man { ously did not believe in God, is om say to man: 1 endow thee with sensibility. It is br tool of my wishes, incapable of pllum~ without knowing it, fulfil my purposes pain; the one and the other will watch excite thy aversions, friendships, tender thy desires, fears, hopes, reveal to thee and after causing thee to generate a of morals and legislation, will one day principles on the development of vi happiness of the moral world. What is this but the first clear t utilitarianism? According to this principle, the pleasure, and the only things w The pursuit of pleasure and motives which in fact act 11 physical principles are said ti' have discovered the central.: it is that causes hllUl.lllrb • characters to be what are, that is responsi passions and tb . conscious 0'" un...

Jl,BIlBDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

a tree to become a table, or to ask a rock to .. . equally ridiculous to Invite men to pursue It ~y are psychologically incapable of pursuthat they are conditioned by these two forces _ d hatred of pain - then they Will be happy if pU:::,ing pleasure, frictionlessly, efficiently and 'Pk

q1Jo, then, is this: 'Why are men not happy? Why is

misery, injustice, incompetence, inefficiency, yand so forth on the earth?' The answer is that ~ have not known how to obtain pleasure, how ;'J:'hq have not known this because they have been use they have been frightened. They have been tened because men are not by nature good and US have in the past seen to it that the great whom they have governed has been kept in of the proper functioning of nature. This is a .~canery on the part of the rulers, on the part 'us and priests and other authorities whom ;in the eighteenth century so strongly are interested in keeping their subjects in llI'Iise the injustice, the arbitrariness, the of their own rule will be altogether the early beginnings of man an ageagaj,n.st the many has been organised d1ey do this the few cannot keep

HBLViTru

investigate those further. The only philosopher, is simply to create a which men have to seek because they with the least pain, most efficiendy, ically. Helvetius says as much. He say. really the architect of the edifice (he m is there already, because it is diSCOvered seeking of pleasures and the avoidance The 'physiocratic' philosophers, who mists of the eighteenth century, similar} the making of laws (that would be 'Iegisfaction'), legislation is the transla something which is to be found in DI true ends of man are given; they can be physics have been discovered; and th why I should obey this or that king;. will simply be demonstrable in thll' physics are demonstrable. If this or greater happiness - if, that is, it co by nature - then it is good, and if . frustrates it in some way, then it . truth, and it ought to be applie Unlike some other thinker. tius did not have too high 8IJ! sense of thinking man 1m neither benevolent no't'· Tnllli pliable; a kind of na,~~ but above all eduGati. that it is of 1l!k"WIIP: argument. The p designed to

11K.

people:

J.JlBDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

d because men are what they are, because of aoD, their sad circumstances~ their poverty, mnce, fears - all the factors which have twisted trUe purpose, which have made of them natural be remedied? Only by artificial manipulation. Dot believe in automatic progress. Some celeof the eighteenth century did believe in that. The Turgot and his friend Condorcet cenainly iDlrual progress: Helvetius did not. He supposes that gress if a sufficient number of enlightened men .il·Is and with a disinterested passion to improve lIIemseJves to promote it, above all if they convert iQlllki'Dld - the kings, the ministers - and teach them .Dmlent, for government is certainly an art. It is happiness. Like other arts it requires IS a man who wishes to build a bridge has to eaI of mathematics, mechanics, physics and so l10ut to rule a State must know a considerable pology, sociology, psychology, and indeed ibe-discovers how men in fact function, what te conduct are, is he in a position to _hes to produce. Without this he will and plunge mankind into miseries ~~lier state. In the late eighteenth Ie hope that some of the rulers of 's view of philosophical advice: Il1'haps Catherine the Great in , re obviously susceptible 10

philosopher to do? ching,. becauu: ,,~an_

HELvtTll1

punish them when in fact they do tha What human motives are is totally irrelevu least matter whether people contribute they are benevolent and approve of it, • interested, base, mean motive of their 01II'D.iI whether people prevent human happineumalignant or vicious, or because they are ~1tllI idealistic fools - the damage they do wiJl b case, and so will the good. Therefore we discussion of motives, which is really neither of no use to try to operate against hlllllaII human superstitions, because they can be very long run. In the short run these and therefore, as the Italian thinker Pareto in the twentieth century, 'Do not fight p That is precisely what Helvetius says, reformers, must not try to convert people, their reason is not powerful enough, in owing to the dreadful misgovernment of what it is that we tell them. We must sufi interest', as he puts it, 'for the tone o£lin appeal to interest. 'I do not care', said Helvetius, 'if:! they are intelligent ... Laws v.riJ); judges of their own interests, pursue pleasure and avoid p purpose of government is to' true or false, rigbt or wr for which the eigbteentlri What is relatively nawJa of using men's D8

thiJ.

moral or spiritual!

BDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

tit better feelings and worthier attributes of . e ction he must make it worth men's while vea I· h h he wants them to do, not exp am W y e does do it whether they. ~a~t to or not; and then, Mwlt of the socia! condltlomng effected by the laws the enlightened philoso~hers, enough men have tlength of time done nothmg but what contnbutes in fact, they will insensIbly acquIre new and b ~t is their bad present habits which cause the Its'their new good habits which will make them 15' not know how they will be making themselves :y not, for a whi~e. at least, understand the own new ways of hvmg; but 10 fact they WIll be which will automatically produce happiness. mduction of happiness through the conditionmen who have grasped the few, necessary rules mment of mankind, rules which can only be ti6c observation, perhaps scientific experiment, of reason to nature - that is the way to the proper coercive legislation has been amn·of the educator. Now he need no longer ed by his ignorant and outraged pupils. , he will be able safely to teach them ~ineS's. He will be able to teach them &Ie to explain to them why it is ~~.to pursue pleasure and avoid it is wrong to be an ascetic or uct of misunderstanding of to be gloomy or to be r.ilWill. be driven from the and happy.

"'ter

.mous

_~ educaUlJlJ.

HIlLVhIV

for its own sake is surely absurd. Ind'ecllld1W do anything for its own sake. For the action is to render people happy - which . of utilitarianism. Similarly, the teaching of classical IlarqP1llII doned, for they are dead and of no praeti All interest is practical interest. What PeG1~ consequently, are the sciences and the ans, that of being a citizen. There is to be no nothing 'pure', without useful application, learning is simply an old, medieval sum1/: derives from the days when ignorant men men that there were certain things which their own sakes, for which no utilitarian r Nowadays there is no need to do an . can be given, and there must be a reason fi be done. The reason is the pursuit of ha One of the direct consequences of corollary about human rights. For g that every man has certain inalienable basic beliefs in the Christian tradition soul, and because he has an i trampled on by other men. Men sparks of a divine being, and . 'natura!' rights. They have the to enjoy certain things and being sentient, being rati them by God or by too talked a great d very strongly, b

.

QU~;Ol'OI<:Jl

SBDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

hich was usually recognised as being neces_ uaIs - if I have such rights then the legislator, in :die world, may find himsel.f faced with the being permitted to take somethmg away from me to take away in order to produce a smooth, mpletdy frictionless society: But for a utilitarian irrational. H the sole cntenon of action is unhappiness, these odd rights which stick OUt in :y and may not be smoothed over by the t b~ flattened out. Therefore, while of course d maintain that everything which a human being will be provided for in a benevolent State in tor is the principal moving force, yet for him rights which are absolute, which nothing may are there whether other people like it or not, by them or not, are simply so many irrational what Bentham did eventually say. Bentham ciple of Helvetius, and although the word ~aIIy associated with him, I think it is fair e - among the cardinal ideas, at least - in t stem directly from Helvetius. Bentham debts very freely and generously, and ed much from Helvetius. Even this tatement. to be organised? Certainly it pte are often stupid and often pided by public opinion we se men have dwelt in hat to do when they en are liberated p;yeo1i~

HI!Lvllnv progressive document of its time, trouble with the clerical censorship entitled 'multitude' you will find intellectual questions [the masses1 vaillii stupidity, inhumanity, perversity, prej idiotic ... Beware of it in moral qu:estiiq noble or strong deeds ... heroism in i is much praise for what was conceived,. knowledge of the facts, as the Chin1eae..q mandarins, who alone are wise, do not gradually guide them towards a happier enlightened existence by instituting laws not understand, but by whieh they are. . good direction, namely towards their The one principle to which HdvetilJl, education and laws can do anything. discussion in the eighteenth century that most effectively condition men. all the philosophes as an object in na the notion of the immortal soul; different from matter, as an obs period before the sciences had b were invented to account for po not yet been discovered. The does not tell us what the r they are. Some said that en others, the chemistry of quieu, thought that c . of soil or social iuati that those facto education \'U\hieh; hl~~

M AND ITS BETRAYAL

f'lblterest' alone that rules mankind; and this mterest of the ruler is not the same as the and the interest of men living in cold e as the interest of those who live in warm It is always interest which is the central He brings this out in an amusing little 'to imagine what the minute little gnats or high grass must feel about other animals arId. They see a large beast, to our eyes a ID-.rsiIlg in a meadow, and they say: i"peed:yand cruel animal, this monster in whose our cities will be swallowed up. Why can it and tigers? These kindly animals do not mey do not batten upon our blood. Just punish sheep for the cruelty sheep inflict

e looks to a fly in the grass. This, no is how the universe looks to every from its own peculiar point of . latar is so to transform human e preyed upon by ignorance, .de with what they think to which is the pursuit of ilib.1Pll in fact represent itself q~ regard things as .hall not, indeed, ~ tigers digni• t. They CiP

d10y

HELvtTIUs

what is good. We have become like animall that which is useful to us. In this condition Ii any licence to freewheel, the liberty to do now be able to choose even to destroy ourselves, if kind of liberty will be gradually weeded successful education. Let me dwell a little on the presuppositio system - this Brave New World (for that is w'bal'" To begin with, all questions of value are faetualt discoverable by observation and reasoning. Etbi are natural sciences. Some people are better at laws than others. There is such a thing as sp political knowledge and skill, which speciaIista IIlUlllll specialists should be given supreme power. SIlI~ mate ends are compatible with each other. This proposition has often been refuted by For example, liberty, which is an ultimate p at times been found to be incompatible witltli often an ultimate goal for others. It is honour should always and automati patriotism. The great tragedies - those dramatists as well as those of more concerned with the fatal collision reconciled. Precisely this was deDIid because the most widespread bUM as harmonious, and to say tha' to say that nothing real or anything else which is real a false analogy from logi

.geometry no true

_1l'·ttUe-prope

~

HELVETIUS OM AND ITS BETRAYAL

need is a universe governed by scientists, 'lIDaDt to be a wise man, to be a scientist, to in the end, the same thing. There is a great mch supports this view, whereby scientific t to be the best, and reformers are always, $lSkin'g angrily why we should not be governed . This attitude dates from the eighteenth happiness and virtue were regarded as since in the harmony of nature no values a all tragedy must be due to error. There is ;tragic in the world; all tragedy and conflict !posable. ·tion is that man is one with - continuous ore there can be such a thing as a science erything in nature, is malleable, plastic may be questioned, but certainly the The Baron d'Holbach tells us that Jigriculture of the mind': to govern man ence, since ends are given and man is l!Ilomes a purely technological one: way that they will live in peace, Ivtiai'nly men's interests do not have to be adjusted, and this . ess of the legislator. As e man is not necessarily ada! pressure and the ha.r - will link them. m cientists. physiocrat Le ~,~'~,uclid is a iIlig)J,~che

has

voices. She said to Spinoza that she was a losi"r~ ny a . m . 0 f souIS. Snc t.._ but to Leibruz that she was a congenes - .... system, h' . h d II 'dero t that the world was a mac me WIt cor s, pu eys to D. 1 s whereas . was an orgamc . lim... to Herder she sal'd t hat It spnng , . . whole. To Montesquieu she talked a~out ~he mfimte value To Rousseau 'ety' to HelvetiuS of unalterable uniformIty. van , . ... . declared that she had been perverted by clvllisanons, saeDCIS and the arts; whereas to d'Alembert she promised to reveal their secrets. Condorcet and Paine perceived that she implants joalieDable rights in man; to Bentham she says this is mere 'ba",'" upon paper' - 'nonsense upon stilts'. To Berkeley she reveals herself as the language of God to man. To Holbach she said there was no God and Churches were conspiracies. ~-r'_' Shaftesbury, Rousseau see nature as a marvellous harmoaf Hegel sees her as a glorious field in which great armies clash night. Maistre sees her as an agony of blood and fear and

tOO

immolation. What is nature? What is meant by 'natural'? It is a question. Leslie Stephen tells us that an eighteenth English traveller in France once remarked that it was for soldiers to dress in blue, except, indeed, the Artill Blue Horse. It is evident that nature speaks with different voices, and if we are taking instruction fr shall have too many conflicting lessons, and th fina! solution, never the beginning of one. He! c~ear about what nature taught him. He k him that the only thing which men could.. to ~ursue pleasure and avoid pain, and tanan system which, armed . ired by the purest of . t ign,0Q11lC

.

ITS BETRAYAL ,ljfe is choice for the sake of choice, not Fad, but choice as such. It is inimical ~l8lIbeen used as the justification both for lturciJ' m, for almost every enactment which t human liberty and to vivisect human ntinuous, harmonious whole, in which be devoid of any degree of individual lUiJp. well-built system; there is no room to produce happiness; but it is not clear the eighteenth century, and certainly has bsequently - that happiness is the sole 'Mi AND

ROUSSEAU

Starting from unlimited freedom I arrive at unlimited dlCSlIor,! Shigalev in Dostoevsky's The Devils

THE CELEBRATED HISTORIAN, Lord Acton, oncll' a about Jean Jacques Rousseau that he 'had produced with his pen than Aristotle, or Cicero, or Saint Saint Thomas Aquinas, or any other man who e'V' this observation, although obviously exaggerat." conveys something which is not totally untrue.::4 be cited the remark of Madame de Stae~ whQ . said nothing new, but set everything on fue'~!I:!tlII What constitutes the greatness of Ro regarded as an important thinker? What make any new or original discoveries? ' new (is Madame de StaiH right?), and ii such words as Acton's can be ap Some say that his genius li,t:SJ.~ hia hypnotic style, £or 'I'lJPt dif£icult..ful~

M AND ITS BETRAYAL

ded, man must not curb or maim his Certainly the emotions may have to be III on no account must they be suppre~sed. ibdre than any other thinkers who ever Itved, ed empiricist thinkers in the eighteenth value of feeling, of human spontaneIty and IS more passionate, and indeed at times more subject than Diderot. u's writings, to all appearance the exact flousseau is not at all in favour of unbridled ~, he says - and he has a great philosophihim - that sentiments divide people, them. Sentiments, feelings are subjective, person to person, country to country, «eason alone is one in all men, and alone this celebrated distinction, according to prophet of feeling against cold rational'dence of his writings, fallacious. to Rousseau, cenain questions about -how to live, what to do, whom to . g answers have been given by the ~inI:s, prejudices, superstitions, ~al- factors, which have made dUs, now that. But if we are .oos, then this is not the .in such terms as make e by means of reason. -scientist will be anable, so in Wurwer: the

ROUS IlAlT

men in society, in order to pres...". historically to enter some kind of comp at any rate that they behave as if they society, because some are stronger than lent than others, have had to set up 0'mill weak majority is able to prevent tbe StroD roughshod over them - that is an idea Greeks. What, then, is it, apart from minor variltU added to this theme? Some might say be between individual liberty and the authon But this was one question which had been number by his predecessors. Indeed, the occupied thinkers like Machiavelli an Locke, was this very question. Nothing . natural in the history of political thtl 'How is men's desire for liberty to be for authority?' It is clear to aU politi wish to be free - that is to say, th wish to do, without being prevell1tlRlil people, or coerced into doing softUl - and that this freedom fr011l11tl values for the sake of which peoJl the ends whose realisation i of life which most men wilJ On the other handi organised existence. or reason; and beua allowed to do WldiA way of b,tIm~

Jl~D

ITS BETRAYAL

ROUSSEAU

Iherefore drew the frontier between ,;favour of authority. He thought that a lMrtsneeded to prevent human beings from from ruining each other's lives, from which life would be perilous, nasty, II: YllSt majority of society. Therefore he ualliberty rather small. :hand, who believed that men were good ght that it was not necessary to draw the your of authority, and held that it was in which some of those rights which, possessed before they entered into i91lR in the 'state of nature' - were still civil society; and allowed men a good than Hobbes did, on the ground alent by nature, and that it was not Iid_e them and restrain them to quite 111 Hobbes in order to create that n.c enables society to survive. .is that the argument between where the frontier is to be one:. In the Middle Ages, eological. this took the •ginal sin, which made 410mething stronhich made him IIUIP- by God. In wllOJibly

8VulI&me

thinker like Montesquieu, for example, takft consideration. The original aspect of Rousseau's teaching approach WIll not do at all. His notion of libeny of authority are very different from those of p and although he uses the same words, he puts . different content. ThIS, mdeed, may be one of the his eloquence and of his immense effectiven.esf4:!1l11 while he appears to be saying things not very . predecessors, using the same kinds of sentences,alR the same concepts, yet he alters the meanings of twists the concepts in such a fashion that ."'_ electrifying effect upon the reader, who is inse the familiar expressions into wholly unfamiliar Rousseau says one thing and conveys anoth be arguing along old-fashioned lines, but the projects before the reader is something taltalM which he appears to borrow from his pred for example, such central concepts in his of liberty, the notion of contract, the n First, liberty. For Rousseau the who} liberty, of saying 'Well now, we because that will lead to anarchy complete authority, because that of individuals, despotism and tvl'llnl the line somewhere between, 'al'tlltl of thinking is totally absolute value. He looks religious concept. Pb individual himsclf;t .-'~·:IItIr_1Ill

IlDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

ROUSSIlAU

mebody else, at this moment desires - if he he is not a human being at all: for he has no e whole notion of moral responsibility, which e essence of man almost more than his reason, ill fact that a man can choose, choose between e between them freely, be uncoerced. li!t.c:ed, coerced by somebody else, by a tyrant, or circumstances, then it is absurd to say that he eau he becomes a thing, a chattel, an object in lrom which no accountability can be expected. and even animals, cannot be regarded as doing for they either do not do anything, or know :end if they do not know they cannot be said act is not to be a human being. Action is implies selection between alternative goals. choose between alternative goals because that extent not human, This would be the determined in nature, as the physicists had of nerves and blood and bones, a ch under the sway of material laws as e. Alternatively, if he is determined in nature, but in another way by a tyrant, because he is made l!.1Il~ plays upon his fears, or his 'pulated like a puppet - a capable of freedom, not ~11gli fully a human being, this condition - for ibIlI~leSS is not the Therefore, ~ppier

men. 'To renounce liberty', declares being a man, to surrender the rights of duties .,. Such a renunciation is not nature.

J

This means that for a man to lose his to be a man, and that is why a man llUIdIi slavery, for once he becomes a slave, he . therefore has no rights, no duties, and a: himself out, he cannot commit an act whose. he can commit no further acts, To do thissuicide, and suicide is not a human action-' in life'. Liberty, therefore, for Rousseau, is can be adjusted or compromised: you ani'tQ away now a little of it, now much mo~ allowed to barter so much freedom ~~!1l!J much freedom for so much happiness. 'll liberty is like dying a little, dehlumanilliJJ the belief which is most passionately the values to which he devoted more: any other, is this notion of human . ultimate crime, the one sin not to be man, degradation and exploitatio deal of his passionate rhetori other people for their own seln make the people whom theJdeform them, they make thlUP is, for him, the sin ag,lII'i1JIIIliil freedom - the cal}W~PI nomously - is fet·~1JII.l

value that it is. MjJlijl fM~1itllt-1pt;,)...I!ili

OM AND ITS BETRAYAL

ROUSSEAU

lIJfiint place there is the empirical or historical "pOD. or another, for one cause or another, men Why this happens, Rousseau never quite o slbly it is because of the inequality of gifts, men stronger than others, and enables them 1lrO~ over others, and so enslave them. Perhaps me inevitable law of social evolution, perhaps natural instinct of sociableness which drives _Mler. Perhaps, again, for some such reasons as Bncyclopaedists spoke of: division of labour the purpose of leading a life which satisfies • ~_._L human wishes, and the wishes of more isolated life of savages could satisfy. eau talks about the savage as if he was good; at other times as if he was merely s. But be that as it may, men do live in itIy have to create rules whereby human dtemselves as not to get in each other's 'lite each other excessively, not employ s to thwart too many of each other's eve faced with the problem: How mutely free (for if he is not free, be allowed to do absolutely ipped, how can he be free? ibC'\Vhat he wants, and not

_fOr

~f1Bl:her md a deeper

dlHn of Geneva, >'therefore, for

He is

obtained it - it will take the form of NI_ say 'Do thus: do not do thus', or statemlllllllUlll wrong: thi~ is right. This is just: this is un) is bad. ThiS IS handsome: this is ugly.' But once we have laws, principles, canons, OIUle of regulations which prescribe conduct, _ _ liberty? How can liberty be compatible with after all hem man in, prevent him from doing he wants, tell him what to do and what not to do certain things, control him to a c:ert:lUa Rousseau is very passionate about this• laws, these rules of life, are not conventI: utilitarian devices invented by man simpl)'l achieving some short-term, or even long~ pose. Not at all. Let me quote from him law of nature, the sacred imprescriptible heart of man and to his reason', and sa hearts of men better than all the iii power of willing or of choosing the explicable by any mechanicallawa. I man, and the subject-matter of no laws which man obeys are absoll1 knows that he must not depaq,'-lI! is a secular version of Cal . perpetually insists upon is: utilitarian devices, but . to the particular tmIe embodying sacred trIJ but eternal. UPiv.~l

o

DOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

ROUSSBAU

d, absolutely wicked, to fly against. the rules called sometimes nature, sometimes Itirl~es God - but which in any case is absolute. in which Rousseau is plunged, and it is very e problem of those previou~ .thinkers who ent, in compromise, in empirical deVIces as I' solution which would of course not be ideal, either wholly good nor wholly evil, but more mething enabling human beings to carry on nably well; something based upon common .j~ect, moderate, decent respect for most of each that people on the whole get, not indeed all tion for minimal 'rights', and more than some other system. This kind of outlook, end Locke, Helvetius and Mill, is for cteptable. An absolute value means that e, you cannot modify; and he puts this in He says that the problem for him is 'to 'on .•. in which each, while uniting a still obey only himself alone and

"""I__

dox in an appropriately paradoxido the same time unite ourselves und a form of association 'authority, of coercion r olitary in a state of l8~il1olt obey these same

by him in the ~1l8elf to all, _~41r'it

way to visit his friend Diderot in prison problem of human vice and virtue . _ blinding flash of inspiration. He felt 1ike had suddenly solved a long and tOrturing to whom a vision had suddenly been VU'lifilil who had suddenly seen the truth, th truth itself. He tells us how he sat dowu wept and was beside himself, and how thisof his entire life. The tone in which Ite answers to the ancient puzzles, both in _ in other works, is exactly that of a man: idea, of a maniac who suddenly sees a co safed to him alone, somebody who for has suddenly found the answer to a centuries tormented the whole of h great thinkers, perhaps Plato, perhap ity, had in some degree anticipated, b had at last found in its fuJI richness, so to look for the solution again. He is, at such moments, like .. found a solution which is not mer rules of such iron logic thf.t question. What is this sol geometer, with two lines w: and one only. He says t authority, and it is . arrange a compr

answer has a . ~a~~

DOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

and also the more you obey; the more

troJ.

point of intersection to be achieved? .is that, after all, freedom simply consists in things and not being prevented from having dP they want? What I ne~essa~ily want is that e _ that which alone wIll satisfy my nature. ~t know what is good for me, then when I lUffer, because it turns out not to be what I t aIJ. Therefore those alone are free who not things but also know what, in fact, will teDOUS

~t

will satisfy him, then he is endowed

on gives him the answer to the question: Dr in order that I may be - that my nature , What is trUe for one rational man will men, just as, in the case of the sciences, to be trUe will be accepted by other we reached your conclusion by a valid , using correct rules, you may be they are rational, will arrive at the :if you feel sure of the rationality _lome different solution, this ll>ssibly be rational; and you

ROUSSEAU

however upright, however clear-headecl profound and wise, I may yet Want sometlllitqld wise, eq ually good and virtuous man may will111l1 it. There will be nothing to choose between morality, no principle of justice, divine or tragedy will turn out, after all, to be due not4ll human stupidity and human mistakes, bu universe; and that conclusion neither Rouss prominent eighteenth-century thinker, with _ haps, of the Marquis de Sade, accepts. But S ously vicious madman, and when Voltaire:aut something of the kind, this was put down to one and the scepticism of the other, in nei"dIil, toO seriously; indeed neither Voltaire !lOr' anxious to stress this aspect of their tholuglmi, Consequently, if nature is a harmony, satisfies one rational man must be ofcompatible, at any rate, with whatevet: men. Rousseau argues that all that is seek the kind of ends which confli Why do they now tend to seek corrupt, because they are not ra natural; and this concept of nat\U cenain respects like the conllllp nevenbeless acquires a tone..o • knows what it is to be a n. be good, and if all men 'WI what they would thea.

make each and aJl. harmonious._~~

DOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

ROUSSEAU

point, ask what this general will is. What men in the assembly that generates somelCa1led a single will which holds for them all? is that, just as all men who argue rationally th about matters of fact (politics and morals ~r:ruths are always necessarily compatible, so ndition of nature - that is to say, unpernot pulled at by selfish interests, not pulled IRedi'!anal interests, not enslaved by fear or by !Olen not bullied, not twisted out of their e wickedness of other men - men in that that which, if it is obtained, will be equally who are as good as they are. Therefore, omehow or other to regain, to recapture ~gi'nal innocent state of nature in which to the many passions, to the many , which civilisation has bred in the !tbIIrmony, happiness and goodness will an socIety. tural man was, naturally, affected seau was a petit bourgeois from a tramp, and who was at odds the prey of many kinds of complexes. Consequently . d opposite of the kind d and disliked. He 4he powerful: few -111 the natural the-firstto ~~eans

the disturbed better than the tranquil. 1\0II1II. deep resentment of cliques, of coteries, of suffers from a deep resentment of intelllectilll1llNi take pride in cleverness, of experts or IlJ4l1li1 themselves up over the heads of the people. teenth-century thinkers :who are violendy antlin a sense anti-cultural, mdeed the aggressive p next twO centunes - whom Nietzsche called. Ka including Nietzsche himself, are the natural Rousseau. Rousseau's tormented and tortured nature with eyes of hatred upon people like Did Helvetius in Paris, who seemed to him fastidio and artificial, incapable of understanding au,:u.JI tions, all those deep and torturing feelings heart of a true natural man tom from his na man, for him, was somebody who possess~ wisdom very different from the corrup towns. Rousseau is the greatest militant kind of guttersnipe of genius, and fi some extent Nietzsche, and cert:linli d'Annunzio, as well as re-uolte, pe Hitler and Mussolini, are his heu.. It is difficult, and indeed gratui wing or a left-wing phenomen bourgeois revolt against a so excluded, Rousseau makes; rebels, the free wild ut1S of romanticism and so many Dthcm

ROUSSEAU

OM AND ITS BETRAYAL

pened, SO that men may achieve emotional unple peasant sitting under the ancestral oak -f)f what life is like, and what nature IS like, ought to be, than the buttoned-up, priggish, _ .....ted. highbrow person who lives in the city. that, he founds a tradition distinct from that eI, which then spreads aU over Europe, and States, and is the foundation of that 1It11!111ed the American way of life, in accorde simple people of a society possess a deeper eeper virtue and a deeper understanding of professors in their universities, than the . ,than other people who have somehow ho have somehow cut themselves off from !J'Qllllll is at once the true life and the true of men and societies. pression which Rousseau communicates e, and although we are told that there IiWhich the word 'nature' is used in the u's usage is unique. He goes further ture not merely with simplicity, tivilised, elaborate, sophisticated or artists nor scientists must .slikes Helvetius and the st be led by the man who is in touch with the who allows the

.lIIe,

his heart. This ~'.e live the

lJIUClya

In theory Rousseau speaks like any other agh philosophe, and s.ays: 'We ~ust employ our rea_iii deductive reasomng, sometimes very cogent, V81r\Oo~1i extremely well-expressed, for reaching his conc:lwlid. reality what happens is that this deductive r~eIllOllD strait-jacket of logic which he claps upon the iDJlIeIl,almost lunatic vision within; it is this extraordinary._ of the insane inner vision with the cold rigorous stI'lIit.... kind of Calvinistic logic which really gives his prose enchantment and its hypnotic effect. You appear to logical argument which distinguishes between ~~ draws conclusions in a valid manner from prem;"~ the time something very violent is being said to you. being imposed on you; somebody is trying to do means of a very coherent, although often a very deiGdi of life, to bind a spell, not to argue, despIte collected way in which he appears to be talking The inner vision is the mysterious assumptl dence of authority and liberty. The coinCldi from the fact that, in order to make men at on of living with each other in society, and law, what you want is that men shall moral law in fact enjoins. In shon, the as follows. You want to give peopl£ otherwise they cease to be menj want them to live according tQ love the rules, then they • b~use the rules are Q,WIII

ww

prpWeJ». is 1m

"'-,JIM.

DOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

ROUSSEAU

chains? If they are the chains of conven&ins of the tyrant, if they are the chains of _ut to use you for their own ends, then these mel you must fight and you must struggle, tand in the way of the great battle for "on and freedom. But if the chains are making, if the chains are simply the rules ~ilhYour own inner reason, or because of the while you lead the simple life, or because "!lD.ce or the voice of God or the voice of .referred to by Rousseau as if they were jf the chains are simply rules the very is the most free, the strongest, most of your own inner nature, then the you - since self-control is not control. 10 this way Rousseau gradually prooar idea that what is wanted is men who each other in the way in which the

mome form of coercion which the ;!to force you to do his will, and it ~ked1y embellished with their have so fulsomely and so encomia which they have ° But what is wanted is - I quote Rousseau th all his rights to to the whole ~ercesyou?

hich

will. It begins in the harmless notion of all is a semi-commercial affair, merely: voluntanly entered Into, and ultimately m_1II performed by human beings who come tog certain things intended to lead to their co,JlUl:C8Ii1 still only an arrangement of convenience w common misery, they can abandon. This is from the notion of a social contract as a perftlllt\llilJ on the part of individuals who remain . pursue each his own good, Rousseau gradlual~ the notion of the general will as almost the pen a large super-personal entity, of something which is now no longer the crushing leviatbaJiill something rather more like a team, sO'IDI:thibli unity in diversity, a greater-than-I, som my personality only in order to find it agaihi., There is a mystical moment in which passes from the notion of a group of . free relations with each other, each p the notion of submission to somletbilnll"i greater than myself - the whole, which he reaches it are peculiar I say to myself that there are if I am stopped from having thll the worst thing which can b is it that I desire?' I desire 0 am wise, and if I am ratie discover in what this one man cannot

man, for jf itrl:bl.

'RBBDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

ROUSSEAU

.'PJ'll¥ent them? Not because I want something that Mt,vnLDt, not because I am superior to them, not "~Duger than they are, not even because I am wiser for they are human beings with immortal souls, y equals, and Rousseau passionately believes in JuAuse, if they knew what they truly wanted, they ~I'hat I seek. The fact that they do not seek this ,:do not really know - and it is 'truly' and 'really' ..-£telll; are the treacherous words. u really wishes to convey is that every man is _ nobody can be altogether bad. If men allowed ess to well out from them, then they would t>1I right; and the fact that they do not want it they do not understand their own nature. But lor all that. For Rousseau, to say that a man ~ilthiOUgh potentially he wants what is good, is some secret part of himself which is his .rehimse/f, if he were as he ought to be, if en he would seek the good. From that it Ilfing that there is a sense in which he tdoes not know this. It is true that if the wants, he may enunciate some man inside him, the immonal ,if only he allowed nature to the right kind of life, and ulf, seeks something else. .~I.r it must seek what tlam now is my "'-<EJ'~dns notion of

ow_

Qusseau~

over my actions, but over his. TbiI Rousseau's famous phrase about the men to be free. To force a man to be free is to force rational manner. A man is free who gets 111' truly wants is a rational end. If he does no he does not truly want; if he does not wan he wants is not true freedom but false freedo certain things which will make him happy. H me for It If he ever discovers what his own heart of this famous doctrine, and there iI< West who in the years after Rousseau did nb paradox in order to justify his behavio~ pierre, Hitler, Mussolini, the Communis method of argument, of saying men truly want - and therefore by wanting it on their behalf, we are giving them 111' without knowing it themselves, theN.. When I execute the criminal, when will, even when I organise inquisiti kill them, I am not merely d o . them - though even that is quito 4 that which they truly want, tho.» times. If they do deny it, tha~ they are, what they want, 111' speak for them, on theil' doctrine, and it is a do and by this route, fro liberty, we gradu There is no real c1~tW""t:'!'IIl

BDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

towards individual legislators as towards lies which, however, were only right to the y resolved to do that which the reason inside of the assembly, their true self, genuinely

this doctrine that Rousseau lives as a political • e did both evil and good. Good in the sense :the fact that without freedom, without spontais worth having, that a society as conceived by Ihe eighteenth century, in which a few experts sleek and frictionless manner, so as to endow J)f people with as much happiness as possible, human being, who prefers wild, unruly, PWJu, provided that it is he himself who is ILttven to the maximum of happiness if that ked into an artificial system, not by his will of some superior specialist, some of society in a set pattern. did consists in launching the mytholthe name of which I am permitted to ..all inquisitors, and all the great t to justify their acts of coercion, iPpeared, to some people at any t they invoked supernatural t-ed sanctions which reason ~a.o'usseau believed that 3J11trammelled human ~Iiit nature, of actual sense of

ROUSSBAU

which a man, in losing his political economic liberty, is liberated in SOIlW rational, more natural sense, which only State, only the assembly, only the supreat that the most untrammelled freedom rigorous and enslaving authority. For this great perversion Rousseau II any thinker who ever lived. The co nineteenth and twentieth centuries need they are still with us. In that setlle 1 paradoxical to say that Rousseau, who most ardent and passionate lover of lived, who tried to throw off every education, of sophistication, of culture,; ence, of art, of everything whatever somehow impinged upon him, all arrested his natural liberty as a man these things, was one of the most silliid enemies of liberty in the whole lUI.

hu.J.

PICHTI!

FICHTE

German thinker, Johann Gottlieb me to be responsible for launching an idea of m sharp contrast and disagreement with that or liberty normally held by Western - that is English, French and American - thinkers in ,c:entury and the nineteenth century. were travelling about Europe at some time 00 and 1820. You would have discovered, -.tI1thlough the word 'freedom' was on every the West - although, if anything, the uIked about it with more passion and e in France and in England - yet the rei. differed widely between the two different sense in Germany from lor thinkers in the great AngloY OTHER

i})tincipal political writers q, for Tom Paine, for ~il!Ikers, all of whom hose ideas had 1UKl on

a

It is the individual's right to be subject IIlI1f be arrested or detained or pUt to death or the result of the arbitrary will of one or I man's right to express his opinion, to ch it, to dispose of his property, even to tIIJIUIe. and go without getting permission for it, and any account of his reasons or motives. It associate himself with others, whether to or to profess his religion, if he wishes, WIth to pass his days and hours in any manner inclination or his fancy. Finally it is ev·!Pf)'l'J'Jlf the conduct of the government whether by of its public servants, or by represeoIati which the authorities are more or lese consideration.

Then he adds that in the ancient worl although in some sense the individual affairs, he was much more controlled life; whereas in modern States, even individual seemed comparatively p sions of the political authorities; right. That is a fair sample of wha moderate defenders of it in you would find that it was v period. Fichte was always sa with which he was at-all to end, is merelYHlft~"llJ

..other ingrediC!iJt

FREEDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

of which it speaks does not exist for them' th d eyJ 0 no eBS that special faculty for which, and by which hit . '. ,aonets feet has any bemg. It IS as If one were talking to men bl" d f In rom inh; men who kn ow thmgs and theIr relatIOns only by tou h De spoke to them about colours and the relations of colouc ,and rs.

FleHn

1

o

'

.

ceason why it is so unintelligible to ordinary men is that are not endowed with the special, profoundly metaphysical ty of perceiving such invaluable truths, which are open onl 'Very few men in each generation. Fichte regards himself these few. His grasp of the essence of freedom is due to ecial penetration into the nature of the universe. Let me this a linle further. principal preoccupation of many Western European was to guard the liberty of the individual against ent by other individuals. What they meant by liberty ilA.terference - a fundamentally negative concept. Treaway, it is the subject of the great classical thesis _ the by John Stuart Mill, which to this day remains pent, the most sincere and the most convincing ual freedom ever uttered. llrty meant to Condorcet. This is what it meant those French rebels who raised revolutionary 'berate the individual, and then sent their Qrder to liberate other nations. The andividual has certain tastes, certain ~d wishes to lead his life in a lJe allowed to do so wholly, o JDU.Gh with tI:¥: simi{3f

:s

om

the ultimate authorities. Liberty m liberty therefore means non-impmgent another. Rousseau put this very clearly when things does not madden us, only being a slave to a person, not to the natute we use the word 'freedom' in various m We speak of people not merely as beIng sense in which Uncle Tom was a slave tb novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, but also in the said to be a slave to his passions, a slave this, that or the other obsession. This though widespread, is nevertheless a that there is a more literal and con~ is tied to a tree or imprisoned, he perversion of language be said to be simply suffers from other kind Ii described as a slave. There are aU 10 to do, but this does not make Die with wings; I cannot count b understand the works of He which I say I cannot do. But works of Hegel, and beeaul than a certain velocity, I do. a slave is not the same be a slave is to be p'" nature of things, but which is often it is idle to ··O"'_iII

In

give

d1e-'li't!ll'ri

FREEDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

the mterference, of other persons. When th . key Interfere . aCCI'd en. . c or mlsmana w h en t h ey do It deliberately it is called op . gernent; . , pression. All this may hold for the thinkers of the W " 'a1 pro bl em was to put an end to what est, where the pnnclp the arbItrary . individuals selfwere regarded ' ru Ies of cenam . as " constitUted th au ontIes over the vast majority. But there i I as " f f · s a so another notIon 0 reedom, which blossomed among the G . ermans, and to this we must now turn our attentIon. The Germans were worried evidently not so much b ill ill on which Rousseau laid stress, as by the nature of thin:S, w~ch Rousseau had pronounced irrelevant. To them freedom seemed lP mean freedom from the iron necessities of the universe _ not much from wicked or foolish persons, or social mismanage_ DiI9lt, as from the rigorous laws of the external world. o some extent this is due to the political state of the Germans ~e eighteenth century. The Germans were, throughout this suffering from the appalling humiliation inflicted upon y the victories of Richelieu and Louis XIV of France in eenth century; and from political divisions, economic -and the general obscurantism and backwardness of eQllan citizen in the century which followed the ar. Another factor of genuine importance dependence of the German on the arbitrary will gave him a sense of being a humbler citizen the triumphant French or the free and

A_" t h e Iac k 0 f freedom is due to bad lu wuy,

"t mean to be free?

H you are Ii~g

whim impinges upon y..lIQ( ~~"

QUIf.-JI!i~

PICHTIl

The reaction to this situation, which history of humanity, was to say, 'If I eatdlfil~ then perhaps by depriving myself of the my life happier. Evidently I shan not be to get what powerful persons or adverse c:irtlll let me have. But perhaps by killing WIthin these things I shall achieve that calm and tha good a substitute for owning the things wb!£JII found in this vale of tears.' This was the mood in which, when the declining, the Stoics and the Epicureans mood in the first century AD in which the period, and indeed the early Christi.ans aIsor sermons. This is indeed a truth which b for the Germans of the eighteenth cen things which I want, but circumstan them. Well then, I must defend universe, I must somehow contract the to these adversities. Instead of trylllfl! obtain things which I cannot get, destroyed in the process, I must go to a place where the tyrant an If I do not expose so much of adverse factors, perhaps I sh1dI! This is psychologically, responsible for the doctrine contract myself into iiit tyrant wants to dlepr.~ ment, the tyrant him do so - thIli~

bhn IfIte;

nCMCI

BBDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

what is out of his reach - my inner spirit, my the source of the re-emergence of the doctrine, ts deep both in CI~ristiani~ and in Judaism, of dle spiritual, inner, Immatenal, e.ternal soul; and uter, physical, material self, which IS a prey to which is subject to the Iron laws of the !rom which no man may escape. 'entists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centume of the phi/osophes of the eighteenth century, whom man is but a coUection of molecules like in nature, and subject to the unalterable laws molecules), to protest against nature is folly, pmg,e the material laws of the universe, the oppressive we may find this. And there is ..enemies from which I must escape. One is laws that govern matter; and the other is of wicked men, the caprice of fortune, .~9. I escape these by what I should like ~ very grand form of the doctrine of lMp.1l,ot have these things, then I do not .Jall the desire in myself, the nonIn short, it is a doctrine which ~e killed come to much the p~doxes. Is a man happier ~ilfi!lS only ten, or if he has bRth? If freedom means ~'N!G!freer - who wants _"w,h,q wants more

PICHTE

killing the tyrant, or by .making myself imPllr1lt by not thinkmg about him, by giving him all all desire to keep anything of which conceiva the wildest aberration, he might want fa essentially the doctrine of the inner self as so to any possible attack on or invasion of the about which I no longer care, and which ind through space governed by the laws of physl of wickedness or blind chance. In Kant's case this led to cenain very impo which had a profound influence on Fichte German romantic philosophers and thereby sciousness generally. Among these is the doc: thing which is valuable in the universe IS a e true inner spiritual self. Happiness is some may not get: it is out of my reach. It dep material circumstances. To say therefore happiness is to doom man to perpetG destruction. The true ideal cannot r depends on external circumstaneesi inner ideal, and the living up to . something which my true self a ideal is to obey the laws of m some outside force, then I am' order myself to do these tliih said, I am no longer a slave, of my own condUCI1 notion is that what··...value for us (and b sake, not iii j~~

BDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

for what else could be sacred, what else I do what I do for the sake of fulfilling the upon myself. Utilitarians say that the proper IS to make as many people happy as possible, that is the goal, then it may be possible to 4Jeings, even innocent human beings, for the Others again say that I must do that which • religion, or God, has ordained, or do that ordered me to do, or that which I find myself Lich my moral system (which I inherit or llstIoning it) permits, makes possible. a kind of blasphemy. For him the only m the universe is the individual human that it is valuable is to say that it is an something which a human being - as a - orders himself to do. To what could a ? Only to something which is superior ore valuable than, that human being. valuable than the principle which a say of a thing that it is valuable is towards, or identical with, fur its own sake, wills for its t l;1.ow important it is to

w;t~ough what he meant by

3t least to some among l&?lI!;AA1.~oJW men would ./UQ4 of conduct. DDt here ask:

FICHTE

human being of the possibility of choice. 'th. is an ultimate sin is to degrade or hunilliate being, to treat another human being as if he WIllallll of values; for all that is valuable in the universe honour for its own sake. To deceive somebod to use another human being as a means for my to say that this other human being's ends are n sacred as my own; and this is false, because to say it is valuable IS to say that it is an end, the end human being. Hence this passionate doe:trulej which I must respect other human beings, the 0 universe to whom lowe absolute respect, b only beings which create values, fulfil valu whose activities are that for the sake of whi worth doing, for the sake of which life is wo be, sacrificing. From this it follows further that monlI something which I can discover as I can affairs. The whole of the eighteenth c the eighteenth century, almost the wh with the exception of the theal Christians - insists that moral qu way in which other factual ques tried to explain earlier ho: preached exactly that. For for his successors it bec~ To discover what I voice. The voice . which I m1l$ •

~~W!EDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

be wicked or virtUous, they may be intelli"ble, but they do not describe anything. They IIJl and they stimulate. IJDportant moment in the history of European Morality is seen to be not a collection of facts to by special faculties for discovering moral facts, as BlIelS:, from Plato to our own day, have believed to "ty is rather something which is ordered, and be discovered" It is invented, not discovered , ID this respect it becomes akin to anistic o speaks of objective, universal rules in some by the right use of reason, certainly does not ,;aesthetic conclusion; but he moves us towards 1UUversal rational criteria that hold for all men: J:b.e language of inner voices - can point time we get to the German romantics of the J:bis becomes more explicit. When the artist what is it that he does? He obeys some be expresses himself. He creates someinner demand, he projects himself, he aets in a certain way, behaves in a thing. He does not learn, discover, ers, you could say that to f9r example, that happiness is s IS not a worthy goal for S~lt1"tual in character, or a f@hion analogous to laws which the is he

PICHTE

the inner impulse is the realisation of of which he lives, that to which he dedi as his mission and his calling. It is imponant to remember that, al this conclusion, he did lay the foundab regard to ethics. It has two central el morality is an activity. The French Enc:y: figures of the German Enlightenment discover the truth in such maners, then" effectively. But according to this new 'Vi theory, then practice, but itself a kind o£ element is that this is what is meant Human autonomy, human independ not the prey of some force which you already quoted Rousseau's dictum does not madden us, only ill will do force of things even more than the omy, which is the opposite of au independent. I am not independ passions, because I am oven:omff, which force me to do various • deeper sense, wish to do, w repent of, which I say that, if I would not be doing. He way subject to, a slave control. Autonomy • act as you act becaus not being acted u This 'you' W ~tQ

DOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

PICHTll

ch a source of value, and for this reason bsuevery other human being. That is why . :beings, 'getting at' them, shapmg them, things to them in t~e :"ame of principles (that is, outside - ~~hd mdependently of du:way in which ~eIvetl~s wanted todo thmgs of happiness, IS forbIdden. That IS why all rlHiltirJe. The execution of the plan I am not that is something in which physical laws be responsible for doing something of which . 'Ought' implies 'can' - if you cannot do ot be told that you ought to do it. hues. if there is a morality, if there are ends, . which I ought to do, and others which must be in some region which can be utside interference. That is why it cannot ppiness, for happiness is out of my (lJl1y that which I can wholly control, e attempt - the setting myself to do onl in the fastness of my own

uce

£rom this view which had very e first, immediate effect was a s,hould be promoting is his Dnly thing which counts DOnsible for is his own t be truthful, that he happen to the the relion of ouwde ,,~.>~-

'I am wholly my own creation,' he say law of what nature offers me because 1 I will. ",.1 He says that the important (that which is given) but das Aufgege imposed upon me, that which is my ordained, that which is pan of my mission this law is not itself drawn from the reabn. own self, the pure, original form of the I creating, the shaping, the forming of thi·.td according to my ideas and aims, for it is master, that they must serve me." Hence notion that the most important thing in dedication. This is so imponant an idea that 1 I on it. In all previous ages of man _ person who was admired, the perlon 111' the sage. The sage was a man whopeople thought the sage was in can told him what to do and what the sage was somebody in a laborato or again someone who discov than empirical investigation, b special insight. Morality was process of discovery of c thing to aim at was to b you could not perc; specialist; and to be seer, the scientis the p.ersQD.

thii.

PICHTB

.PIUIRDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

the man who got things right, who could l!jir:mCl answer, who knew. cases where it is necessary not merely to live for hIDing these goals that you want, in the light of which you have, but also to die for them. im:vrs died; but what they died for was the truth. use they desired, by their example and by their witness to those truths, that knowledge, that had been vouchsafed to them or to the people in ItUlted. But the mere act of self-sacrifice, the mere r your conviction, the mere act of immolating inner ideal because it happens to be your ideal 's - that was not hitherto admired. If a Muslim died for his faith, you did not spit upon his 1Jbt mock him. You admired his courage and ght it was the greatest of pities that a man so .oaturally so good, should die for so absurd a did not admire him for his dedication to "'-'l1lllUl

to the early nineteenth century all this has what is admired is idealism as such. But An idealist is a person who throws t attract baser natures - wealth, ,Jpr the sake of serving his inner f which his inner self dictateso romanticism, and of its eir youth, the Russian ~th century, who of Europ~ was lII1:et;, po§)r,

only thing which makes life worth IliWld the only thing which makes values vralu.things right and others wrong, the only conduct, is this inner vision. The important thing about this ainU..,. height in the early nineteenth century, relevant, indeed it no longer means much;. these people are seeking is true or false. man who hurls himself against the Wllllla", against immense odds without asking biroIIIIlI will be victory or death, and who does tbiII otherwise. The favoured image is that of he cannot move, because he serves his UOIlUlliIi meant by integrity, devotion, selfis what is meant by being an artist, a good man. This is quite novel. Mozart and exceedingly surprised if what was _ ...... , spiritual impulse; they were artists'w. which were beautiful, and these patrons and admired by audien They were craftsmen who ~~ they were not prophets, they. tables, others purvey symph good symphonies, still 1118 the persons who write By the time we becomes a hero -tlill

hia life. YOUL·debtil tina and the

PICHT!! 'RBBDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

diaoned by, things or circumstances other than hlW"treate out of your own inner self. . confined to anists this is a noble ideal which no ubJidy spurns; indeed the moral consciousness of moulded by these romantic notions, in terms of ljillmiJre idealists and men of integrity, whether we ideals or not, sometimes even when we think a way in which in the eighteenth century and in es they were not admired at all, and thought But it has a more sinister side to it. Morality mething which is not found but invented; .a set of propositions corresponding to certain discover in nature. Indeed, nature is nothing to for Kant, nature for Fichte, is simply a Ii,/!Jlltter upon which you impose your will. We indeed from the notion of copying nature, ".".turam sequ; - being like nature. On the ,fnould nature, you transform nature; nature >it simply the raw material. If this is so, if jeeting yourself in some way, it may be Q a kind of self-projection. Napoleon, 'ty across the map of Europe, who lle, in Germany, in Italy, in Russia, ~ as the composer moulds sound IllPn is the highest expression of , ,personality, he is asserting .~ drives him on and on. .In. Fichte's thought e ..ubject or self.

move towards the notion that selves are not; beings at all, that the self is something to do perhaps the self, the human self, is really product of history and of tradition, but human beings by Burke's myriad indislotuli that it existS only as part of a general patterD, an element. So much so that it becomes mist self is an empirical individual born in a c certain kind of life, in a certain physical elI'vi.in a certain place at a certain date. Fichte begtQl a theological conception of the self; he says is not the empirical self which is clothed in a and a place," it is a self which is common super-self, it is a larger, divine self which U identify, now with nature, now with G now with a nation.' Starting with the notion of the isola some inner ideal which is out of reach Fichte gradually adopts the idea that nothing, that man is nothing wi nothing without the group, that the all. The individual, he begins to 5tl vanish. The group - Gattung It begins innocently ena endeavour to repay his debt among men, he must strive humanity, which has 'only becomes IIlaI:t! destined to live'

to

PICHTE

IIBDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

llontradicts his own nature, if he lives in came to believe something of this kind. But er. The real self of Fichte's fully developed you, nor I, nor any ~articular individual, nOr up of individuals. It IS that whJch IS common personified, embodied principle which, like a iIdJILil'tv, expresses itself through Ii ni te centres, ugh you, through other people. Its emhodime true society, conceived as a collection of ~~er metaphysically, like small flames issuing traI fire. It is the great central Ii re towards ..tends in the process of being aware of the c:h are impulsions, flame-like strivings - of its IIWp.cologicai doctrine, and Fichte clearly was logian, and so was Hegel, and no good pposing that they were secular thinkers. enced by the Christian tradition, and it tbJ:y were heretics in it. But theologians .cal than what is called philosophical

r moves from

the group to the true individual, whose act of 'tr in history - the imposi.,.~.an~, flexible nature - this being at his most selfd." This was the

,:;tCl~th;e German

IlIl

the troops he told the

opposite. All those who have within them a life, or else, assuming that such a gift has hem at least reject what is but vanity and aWalt th& are caught up by the torrent of original life. os: yet at this point, at any rate have some co freedom, those who have towards it not ha feeling of love - all these are part of the p considered as a people they constitute the p the people. I mean the German people. All tDlllCt.., who have resigned themselves to represent oDly hand products, who think of themselves in this in effect such and shall pay the price of their an annexe to life. Not for them those pure api before them, which still flow around them; coming back from a rock of a voice which IS people, they are excluded from the p strangers, outsiders. A nation which to German (or simply the people) has not creative and original activity in most . come at last when philosophy, peneua self-awareness, will hold to this na recognise itself with a clear perrceJlti.!lgfj become quite clearly aware of thI had but a confused premoni imposed upon that nation; an to it today to labour in freed itself according to the nq1:l! accomplish the duty wbi And everyone who people whose fwJ~JJQ believe on die

FICHTE DOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

the nation were not led, if it were not e quasi-divine leadership of the Zwingherr. it we need is a leader; what we need IS a man to " he suddenly cries 'Zwingherr zur Deutschlfwill compel us to Germanism]. We hope, of be our King who will perform this service, e may we must await him till he comes and mes and makes us.' come full circle. We started with the notion person, anxious not to be impinged upon, absolute freedom, obeying only the inner inner consciousness, of its own inner we say: Life is art,life is a moulding, life is ~bi'ing - self-creation - by a so-called ere are superior beings and there are within me a higher and a lower nature, igllts in a moment of crisis, and crush ,and perform heroic acts of selfprinciple which raises me; which, as :>flow of life. If I can suppress that '!:he leader or the race can suppress spirit does the sinning flesh. d fatal analogy between the c metaphor which leaves the ek1Jlarised by Burke and by Webte. Fichte contrasts mbipation, and totum, o~c, single, J the higher b JJJ of

e

we spoke earlier, which the British and the defended, the freedom of each man to be allowed.. limits at least, to live as he likes, to waste his tune o to the bad in his own way, to do that which he' ~ecause freedom as such is a sacred value? Ind which in Kant has a sacred value, has for Fichte b made by something super-personal. It chooses choose it, and acquiescence is a privilege, a duty, It kind of self-transcendent rising to a higher level. morality generally, is self-submission to the su dynamic cosmos. We are back with the view submission. Fichte himself largely thought in terms of so tal, idealistic will-power which had relatively Ii actual terrestrial life of men, and only towards did he perceive the possibility of moulding conformity with these transcendental desires. translated it into more mundane terms. The from reason to will created that notion of the notion of non-interference, not the I man to have his choice, but the no \ notion of imposing yourself upon freedom as the removal of obstacl~ remove obstacles by subjugatin understanding; in material life, conquest. That is at the heart victorious nation, that freed freedom are one. To show what thiI

e

PICHTE

M AND ITS BETRAYAL

BDth° of thought, who in humble stillness of e men f . M"1i our most definite plans a aClion. axnlli en UPthingY. b the hand of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, no ut . hand that drew from the womb of lime the body cau had ercated . . . the Critique of Pure Reason esword WI°th which deIsm was beheaded .. 0

0

well paraphrased by the American philosodreame~ Out thus: 'The world is the poem If we th our worlds are literally Idifferent ,en, II oser a banker' a robber itera y create camp, not he was thinking of thIs, Heme feels er~ ... f re this attitude, and had a genume vISIOn 0 'ans will appear, who in the world of mere g sacred, and ruthlessly with sword and the foundations of our European life, and ast remaining roots. Armed Fichteans will wills neither fear nor self-interest can epantheists, will fight recklessly for their t1pJes are absolute, and their dangers ~, Naturphilosophen will identify rces, which are always destructive. il his gigantic hammer and smash 'ty was the only force which with its naked vioterrible cataclysm will break ch] to suppress or to our fingers.' Above twbl\JtJ.onary fancies. 0

0

0

0

mans

0

The French are warned not to clap this which will begin in Germany. 'Por yOU; 'liberated Germany is more dangerous Alliance, with all its Cossacks and its Germans forget nothing', and pretexts for The French are warned, above all, not to dis... says to them, that upon Olympus, 'amidst th6 feast upon nectar and ambrosia, there is one all this merriment and peace keeps her arm and a spear in her hand - the goddess of wu.... This prophecy was destined to be fulfilled" anyone thinker, anyone philosopher multitudes in history. Nevertheless it is odd, is a direct line, and a very curious one. liberalism of Kant, with his respect for sacred rights, and Fichte's identification assertion, with the imposition of your removal of obstacles to your desires, ous nation marching to fulfil its des demands given to it by transcend~ material things must crumble. W way from the Anglo-French n each man his own circle, tha,t within which he can do as good, choose for the sake. choice as such is regardecl; These are the two D Europe at the bl~!Il of them is trq

HEGBL

HEGEL

that originated during the period which 1 egeIian system has perhaps had the greatest omy thought. It is a vast mythology ther mythologies, has great powers of great powers of obscuring whatever it fonh both light and darkness - more light, but about that there will be no it is like a very dark wood, and those om come back to tell us what it is hen they do, like those who are iottllr, their ear appears permanently the older, simpler and nobler :to listen to. As a result it is not rlrJiltough the new terminology In them, what their vision

claim that, whereas

'1M.'de. :wtheymerely now see the theiDner

enable us to describe and predict th. say something about their past also. happen as they do, there are two sens one sense natural science does anSWer 'Why does the table not fly upwards, but the ground ?', a great many physical facta about molecules and their relations, and 1 physical laws which operate on these mol however, is to give me very general laws ab of objects which resemble each other ,•.-...._ showed themselves to be men of gemua. minimum the number of formulae in _ . classify the behaviour of objects. SO economically and manageably as possibl But suppose 1 ask a very different so say, 'I perfectly understand what you describing what this table does; all you table does not, for example, fly u ground, because it belongs to a cll~,g general subject to the laws of gravi something rather different: 1want sense in which I ask what the m rather what the purpose is of Vl arranged in such a way that ~ Why do trees, for examp 'Why?' is not answered. b providing very pow~ the position and mo why things happ

.

qUI~~\¥k'

EDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

that end. He did it in order to avenge himself; to obtain the satisfaction of giving pain to the struck. It seems quite clear that, whereas we of question about persons, perhaps a little less 'mals, much less certainly about, say, trees, it is Mi..:alik such questions about material objects, or l!Ii;'lnv entities in the universe which do not appear

the great German romantic philosophers, the th-century science, and to some extent of science too, or anyway of their philosophito amalgamate these two kinds of explanaere was only one kind of explanation, namely plies to material objects; to say that, in asking we only mean to ask for facts. Weare ? When does it happen? Next door to ? What happens after what, and before t' purposes does it pursue? What goals? e sense in which I can ask 'Why does a It is why Descartes said that history se there were no general laws which • The whole thing was much too I'MJ- was far greater than the number Ie to collect so unstable a subjectknown, where there were so into any form which could frirmulae. Therefore he ultimately, of gossip, r1Ii~il" of the name of teenth-century ~':AIi~

HEGEL

eighteenth century who was unjusd a bold and original genius - began : that to treat human beings as objects~: trees~ was absurd; that we knew more abcl1ll!l certam sense, than we knew about natural. whole of the prestige of the natural sciienca
tha::

~.Il?:

1hllg

HEGBL

iillBDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

German songs, likes the way in which (ldDK,Jikes the way in which they live, the way their laws and the way in which they tie oneself a German is to have a certain er Germans which cannot be exhausted by a physical description of outer behaviour, as a record it. When I say of someone that he is a e thrills to the sound of German songs, or when he sees a German flag fly, the very jl!DJlIgII' are not to be analysed in a purely tific, physical fashion. To be a German song certain way by cenain people with cenain itself must, I will not say 'possess a ,must possess a cenain kind of expressiveor express a cenain kind of character, This attitude to life, this specific resses, will also be expressed by much t institutions - by the German system "lical system, by the way in which they 1lIlt. by the shape of their handwritthey do and are and feel. "w which makes a people German? ging to a certain individual 'iial? Herder's point was that _,......eed not and should not lJI.n.i::J'(Iu ask why so and so ,psychological terms .>I;PO' But you can also !Why do the do not?'

_:h

i:b. mpr.e

course, is the beginning of a mythology mythology, for otherwise we cenainly' do speak about groups and societies. When w a peculiar genius - that the Ponuguese from the Chinese genius - we are not sa~yin.d! portuguese is a man of genius and clift Chinese man of genius. We are trying to which the Portuguese build their ships, the express their views, have something in COIIlUDOIDI resemblance or family face which pervada it is quite different from the corresponding the Chinese; and this indication of the famiI what it consists in, we call historical expllall_~ says 'Why does so and so write as he does answer if you reply that it is betalu",,'" Ponuguese family of nations, because he group of persons who live in Brazil or P have a cenain outlook, cenain kinds of with cenain kinds of experience but of experience are wholly alien to th question 'Why?' which is quite . by the sciences, and this is the . Herder dealt with. It is this w . view being that all queslti'AQl~ answered in this 'deeper's He formulated this by self-devdopment of the like an individual Slp"i.J!it&I with the whole 1QQ.d..Qf aniq

PI_

loI AND ITS BETRAYAL

esses a certain purpose and a certain hat is the evidence for this? Certainly e anything which can be called empirical Ultimately it turns out to be a case of an act of faith. If what he says were not ere would be too many 'brute' facts. You stones are as they are, why plants are as PP'G' would be, 'In your sense of the word are asking who intended them for what, "uestion.' Vico had already said that only can truly understand their nature. The -'rerJrtI!J'ing there is to be understood about e creates them; there is nothing there • because he has made them. In this 'Dnly God can understand the universe, ::we can understand only those finite "",,_tchmaker understands a watch as a t about other human beings? Can ere is obviously a sense in which, they show certain moods, when happy or gay or fierce, we are t; in a different sense from lIS and tables. We do not lIB of tables. In short, we 1iPJ1fltI1ey are what they are. absurd because it 't appears to make

Blltwe mn ask It*c~lomantiC8

HEGEL

story of human creation, human imagllli intentions, feelmgs, purposes, evel'}'thing do and feel, rather than what is done to thmu.. something which we create by feeling, by.> active in some fashion, and therefore, by to understand it, which is why the undentan~. 'inside' view, whereas our understanding of an 'outside' view.' This being so, Hegel is able to say that; universe is an enormous sentient whole, we stand what each part of it is doing, proVi'idccll4Jl sufficiently clear degree of metaphysical iI·. . .~ possessed, for instance, by the most pow~ penetrating intelligences. If it were not so, 'mere' facts which could not be explained I is this stone lying on the ground, whereas through the air?' I should have to reply ~ is not asked in the case of stones; it just- . But for Hegel and for all the metaph thinking the brute fact is an offence 'accept' brute facts because they are no lie there as a challenge to our und relate them to a purposive system; a pattern, they remain unexplain pattern is something which a pI because somebody planned i pattern because that a1oD.!=l· 'make sense'; because phony subserves. 'Vi composed it, w or on the,pj

cre_

1lllDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

HIIGIIL-

This is the sense in which we understand Germ an, what it is to be a Frenchman. To be a I: an of a general German pattern, a pattern ~ergoing German experiences, German hopes in which a German walks, the way in which !I/llY Y in which he holds his head - everything ::'en ask 'Well, what part docs he play in the f which the entire universe consists?' the answer cmly be discovered by som~body who sees the the whole, if it were conscIOus of Itself, would ole. We are confined to seeing parts. Some see e smaller ones, but it is in perceiving things as things that any degree of understanding is DS.

further question, 'How in fact does the spirit mechanism, what is the pattern?' Hegel d the answer to that. He said that it worked e called the dialectic. The dialectic for him y in terms of thought or artistic creation; e universe because he thinks that in the et of thought, or a kind of act of selfthere exists nothing else.! In what It works in a way rather like that in ey try to think of answers to in my mind, then this idea is not stay. Other ideas come e collision and conflict of ($;and the criticism of the ,ne falling upon it, bi'ch is neither the :tbfl fult Idea;

lj;tbVt,.jQt:ihJ

So for example (though Hegel dlmYILlil metaphor) in a symphonic work you a phrase of music or a melody, then yclUlj. it were runs against it, and something called the cancellation of the first them continuation of the first into the second, of fusion which destroys the first something which is half familiar because out of the collision and conflict of th something new. This, according to Heg works. It works like this because that 15 thought and in every kind of consci know anything - and he distinguishes scious and self-conscious and uncons Plants and animals are conscious; purposes of some kind, they have I grade thoughts perhaps. Human hein because they not only have thou dialectical process in thetnselves. Th this collision of ideas, the irregul how they first do one thing, th doing and the not-doing fus doing. They can follow this: selves. He tries to explain wll point is that in the eiigh1tet explain differences but Ilg was very convincinlf affected people, ~~ explaining how ~ eighteenth-'cSll11 betw.ecur;

OM AND ITS BETRAYAL

HEGEL

lIl;1Iegetation. Yet modern Italians are utterly eat Romans. 'c thinkers of the eighteenth century maindue to human development. It was the result government; and it was because (people like t) human beings were governed, or rather :great many knaves, or perhaps a great many eel a great many fools - that the disasters all history up to the beginning of the rational .-sis'tence was so full. This, for Hegel, is plainly H human beings are as much under the causes as eighteenth-century science, needC, must maintain, then the vast differences, development, cannot be explained. This can y the dialectic, namely by some process of iI4;1ms'm of some sort, This collision of thesis erual clash of forces, is what is response forces are not merely thoughts in incarnate themselves' in institutions, in IlOiIStitutions, perhaps in vast human peoples, in revolutions, for example, plDents, where the thesis and lliihual mutual inner tension grow JliK\ the synthesis comes to be ashes of the thesis and

m(l

fQAlDS. It need not take only take the form or some

But

until the tension again grows to a dim occurs. For Hegel, that is history, that discontinuities ~nd tragedies. The tragedies of ineVItable confltct, but unless there were these nation and nation, between institution and ins one form of art and another, between one and another, there would be no movement; friction, there would be death. That is why shallow, for hIm, something inadequate m century explanation of evil, sorrow, sufferma simply due to mistakes, bad arrangements, in the efficient universe all this would be smOOlthlll would be complete harmony. But for Hegel symptom of development, growth, sometbAI stream of life beating against the shell of so from which it will presendy burst, thus reI slag-heap of those bits of experience, those are done with and are now consigned to Sometimes this development oc activities; sometimes there are individ: these leaps - Alexander, Caesar, individuals destroyed much; ce . suffering. That is the inevitable advance. UnIess there is mctio Hegel, Kant, and before hiJ;)J. Vico, had already said some Now the question ' history is a rational l"JtioDal is to 5"}':' Q1laqill

prq_

YOIl~eveu:~~

HEGEL

OM AND ITS BETRAYAL

irm'!'¥, a dogma which it is his task to learn and hen he has learned the axioms and the rules he realise that twO times two not merely IS be other than four. He need. no.t repea~ It by orne part of his natural skill m addmg or w:--hen we study history, Hegel supposes, we itt rational level, we rise to a certain stage of ~V1Yn'ch we begin to understand that historical t happened as they did, but had t.o happen. as y; not in the sense of the mecharucal causalIty deals but rather, for example, in the sense in the stages of a mathematical argument, where riJles; or perhaps even of a symphony, where such fixed rules, but we can say that each it, as it were, inevitable, or, as Hegel might sor' of the previous portion, so that we say lifeB not make sense' unless the later stage is 4n the way in which the pattern of the IltAl'ben we have learned arithmetic and '1D.ove freely in the mathematical or becomes identified with our own d action. We no longer feel it to I or that there are grim de fado ~ must adjust ourselves, but W'hat we want - of our own

-which one approaches .n·what you wanttteI''"'' and, on the

:bD;.just by

pattern of your thought. The rules of lated into the general rules of reaso1Ulllt you think and act. This notion of assimilation is vital in If of laws not in the way in which science tend to think of them, namely as g happens, but rather more as rules, patteJ:m,; which arithmetic proceeds by rules - or t music. To think of a general law as som want to be otherwise than as it is, is to which you identify yourself, the method naturally think, or which you naturally ap law discovered to operate outside you, an able barrier against which you beat JJJ methods presuppose users of them - pen or apply them, or live by them; and if is not far from this to the idea of it as • characters fulfil parts assigned to them. dramatist; and if you can now . confidence of the dramatist, unders will arrive at something like the world functions. It is an old theological or meta at first seem barriers, somethin work themselves into your purposes, and you begin Thus, when you becom matical terms almil's1~ correcdy aher }" without £aeling

JiUl WIJ

..,,.,....llDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

Dn in ponderous, obscure and occasionally . Prom it he derives his notorious paradox that gnition of necessity. d t problems of politics, as it is in life, in morals and everything else, is this: if I am ed, if some omniscient observer can foresee which I make, how can I possibly be said to riltbiIlll!: I have done in the past, am doing in the do m the future can be accounted for by ows all the facts and all the laws which govern :sense of saying that I can do what I want? Am rigidly determined element in some block ought that this perennial problem was one eel. The world, according to him, as we have which develops, now gradually and cumulaby explosions. The forces whose conflicts hose final clashes are cataclysmic leaps into e dIe form sometimes of institutions , legal systems - sometimes of great . tic masterpieces, sometimes of indipersonal relationships. This is the . :J understand it, how can I oppose ~ science - logic or music or flADlething which goes against it? :to but actively to want what 1[IP:!Q,d is to become part of QUI, his goal and his • • not an empirical !lAD falsify this ~F!ln. which

HEGEL

contrary can be absorbed as the nereel'-II ety.' For this reason it is not a scientifR: in the sense in which, say, the Darwinilllt are rational, because one could conceive them; they can be tested, but the diallectiri framework of things in general. In this metaph~sical vision, what happ Hegel IS very tnumphant on this point. doing what I wish to do, getting what I from life what I am seeking for? I can 0 run against the laws which govern the shall be inevitably defeated. To wish to b principle of rationality. It is irrational to' to wish to cause a state of affairs in whi wishes, no further goals. If I want to d defeating to behave as if twice two did to build an aeroplane, it is suiet aerodynamics. If I wish to be effectl myself against the laws which gove tions. This non-defiance is not an sciously adopt with resignation, al To understand why things canrtd not to be otherwise, because to stand the reasons for them. what they rationally must lie to be other than what it is to be seventeen. If the essence of my own to want them 0 also differeJ1,t

ll:RBBDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

twpagne to live after Louis XIV, and to think that well have lived in the nineteenth century, and II seventeenth, is not to understand how the world t a contradiction, to be irrational. Therefore I l'iol""W' be that which I am anyway forced to be; and to e wants is to be free. For everything to go as you ever to cross you, is absolute freedom, and the roch has that is the absolute spirit - everything world as a whole is totally free, and we are free to which we identify ourselves with the rational the world. A free mathematician is a person who mathematically, and a man free in history is a y proceeds according to the rational laws .~manlives, which govern history. To be happy, erstand where one is and when one is; where and to act accordingly. If you do not act, you u become historical stuff, you become, as e dragged by the Fates, and not the wise man In Hege~ we do see history through the rtainly not through the eyes of the victims. way in which those who, in that sense, seen it; the Romans were victors, they be on the right side of the historical ocians whom the Romans defeated 0Jlt things, understood the universe stood it correctly they would use they were defeated they

HEGEL

happiness are blank pages in it'. How is hit by the few, of course, and. b~ human beinp, rational creatures. But It IS not necessaril conscious wishes and desires. The great heroes of history, the people climaxes, at the moments of synthesis, are peap that they are merely pursuing their own part! Alexander were ambitious men, and their p~ aggrandise themselves, or to defeat their en wiser than they; history uses them, uses them as its weapons. This Hegel calls 'the cunning of it is history that 'sets the passions to work fa which develops its being through such penalty and suffers the loss'. In shon there embracing reason, or what he calls the spinto which is all that occurs. It is a development there exists nothing else; it is a self-develop else can develop it. If we understand it we we do not understand it we struggle Not to like what you see to be ratin it, is mere suicidal mania, ultimate grown-up-ness, a failure to be adult. • extreme term of opprobrium. Wh thinks of the theory of Euclid or of Einstein? To dislike the umv to find it not to your taste. to facts are against you, that til you which you cannot Pas the result of falling 11 a form of being • ~di~ud.

.

EDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

e it becomes yours, just as, when a piece of :..bounds to you, then by purchasing it, Or by ntake it yours and it is not out of bounds, and .bi·ing absurd and crazy, for Hegel, in praising or

the vast process in terms of whICh everythIng is aware of the whole objective march of history, some parts of it because we like them, and to because they may seem to contain cruelry or te. is a mere indulgence in subjective moods. ty to rise beyond what he calls 'civil society', economic desires of men, the ordinary private prosperity or comfort or a happy life, which shallow thinkers like Locke remained. To eaval and then to condemn it because it is is unjust to the innocent is for Hegel d contemptible. It is like condemning the 1!Ji,1~1!e has no rational square root. Who can or that man feels about events of cosmic . factions are trivial facts about somebe truly worthy of the occasion is to t something immense and critical is historic occasion, when perhaps ,humanity which will automatiboth facts and systems of

:which runs through his the subjective, the :middle-class, the i!illl1Il&l in human 1IIN1Il!"e~en.

HEGBL

remorseless march of history. For him, whether the great man, the earth-shaker. just are absolutely meaningless, and indeed implied by these words are themselves by those very transformations of which Herculean agent. For him the question of lIh. just or unjust belongs to the particular sya particular sphere of action, to the panicula occurring in history at a given time. These are' men themselves have made in the past; but generation are often the lawgivers of the Delltai that something is bad, wretched, wrong, IlIlIIIIlJ! tion-provoking in a given age is to say that ~ which the great rational process has readullk moment. But by the very transformatiOJl..; some immensely heroic act, by a revolu appearance of some vast hero who alters thr, mankind, the values of the previous III superseded, and what seems abominahl virtuous in the next. Therefore let u history will make real that is going to all, if you want it to be real, mu means that which the world intends, that which it supplies ment, the unrolling of the se; Hegel calls 'God's march ultimately is the activity The pattern matters individual? The indi would be a paJllk.

ere_

~the·smlb

HEGEL DOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

of my race and religion and country, to the and those yet unborn. I am a kind of nodal en infinite number of strands which centre in, me and everyone else who enters with me into patterns, groups of lesser or greater tightness e great society of the living and the dead of spoken. To understand a man, you must hlli'li'ell, his friends and relations, his superiors and e'lioes and what is done to him, and by what merely because this throws light on him, but y does not exist except as part of this total than a sound in a tune exists (except in some as a mere physical event) save as a particular articular tune, played on a particular instructtnilill' context in which the music is played. orated reduction of the individual to an a 'concrete' social pattern; his denial that tlii'e MraIlgements of society, that the State al devices designed for the convenience of tence that they are networks of which ey will it or not, are the organically :rxence the celebration of the authority _!_mess of the State as against the DB of this or that citizen or bility in the view advanced by ~lJ,IliJ'ts, who said that legal _."orders of kings or lnvented to procure but rather part ~1liI'=ties, and

traditions, or the will or destiny of the natlOli world is, after all, composed of things and nothing else. Societies or States are not thIDI' ways in which things and persons are or COIU social patterns have no likes, no wills, no d,emiUIIl'4; no powers. But Hegel does speak as if pattemt. Churches, are more real than people or things; as houses that make the street, but the street that the houses - which it does in a celebrated fmy Christian Andersen. Among all the patterns the State is supreme. It all the patterns because, like the iron ring of w it integrates them all; because it is humanity a conscious, at its most disciplined and its most believe the universe to be a march, we mus marching in an intelligible direction, we must patterned order; and the State is the most Whatever resists it is bound to be annihila what is right and wrong is what history pI' sole objective source of right is the themselves, not individual judgement; no laws, not any set of moral princip history itself, the demands of perpetual talk about what historY condemns, and the way we talk t a nation or such and such a history is a typical piece of and worship of power. ~ sake. This force is. {QJ.:

whatever is mClllll

HEGEL

PREEDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

which Hegel is perpetually tracing between great ary human beings, between fighters who hack d raise humanity to a new level and the mere ants of -anthill who perform their task without effectively whether to carry such burdens is necessary. It e distinction we still draw ourselves between (what tlc and unrealistic. 'Realistic' often means harsh AOt shrinking from what is usually considered I: swayed by soft sentimental moral considerations. very strong about the necessity for violent action condemned by the more prudish moralists in e', he says, 'is not cured with lavender water.' work of heroes; heroes who stand above the '£1, because they embody the human spirit at high a level, at so mighty a pinnacle, that can hardly discern what goes on at so draw, he says, 'not from the peaceful time• but from a spring whose contents are .nlner spirit still concealed beneath the virtues do not apply here. Sometimes "",,out heroes: Alexander dies young, eon is sent to St Helena. Sometimes What he says about heroes, he es are always performing the upon them, and when them. Peoples are like '.'!.,~...... process now dons, uaffed the bitter

_gs

with infinite 't

dies. A It

happened in the way that it did automat! SO very much against the losers, the vict1llW Don Quixote? Against the people who wheels of progress? Do we think it so WI to have. protested aga~nst the vulganty, immoralIty, the shoddmess of the factSs however foolishly to erect a more noble Id burke this problem. For him the visions of merely pathetic, not merely weak, not m him they are vicious too, in a sense. The onl: is to resist the world process. For the incarnation of reason - when he says iI'u:ariii the literal sense - and to oppose it is despises the utilitarians, the sentimenltaliS't&i lent philanthropists, the people who wan who wring their hands when they see revolutions, the gas-chambers, the all which humanity goes. These pers contemptibly blind to the movem immoral, because they resist that pitting against it their subject". like subjective mathematics, obstruct the process for a . pulverised. Power alone is w~ poetical prose. There is-

clear. In 18Q6 H firsl: great ~

living inl~ OA..~

OM AND ITS BETRAYAL

men and things with its mailed fist. This is of objective history. iliio!ll'lSay about this? One can only say that this on of what is good and what is successful is e:average human being rejects. It is not what we and the right. It is impossible to say to us that elf against superior force is in itself immoral. ~ink it is immoral if you are ultimately going to of today is the hero and the lawgiver and the w; but he thinks that to be good and to be ultimate, vast, world-historical sense, are political pragmatism, this kind of successBannai moral feelings; and there is no J;f:egel which is really effective against that that in Hegel's vision there is a vast tory, with which he identifies his own }pm true values. True values for him are ; history is the big battalions, marching ~ all the unfulfilled possibilities, all the ;wiped out; and morality is really a we the facts. This identification of of what is right with what resistance, with that which is the sure hallmark of the . to politics. An unsuc[b.Y It is not perhaps very of the censorship t to free speech sent for to t:$ire for

HEGEL

was really he who made it plain tha history was the individual and the t w umqu . hi t hat III t S respect history was de I from the natural sciences. Hege::: Y SCiences are often ludicrous - both i dogmatic. But he did show great insight that the natural sciences always search for to all the objects under observation, so _ umform III many different things, ato earthquakes, they can formulate laws w' .••. number of similar instances of atoms, tables is the last thing that one seeks from bU'b\!1 Robespierre or Napoleon, I do not wish to Napoleon had in common with all other other emperors; I do not wish to know resembled all other lawyers and revol~ discover is that which is uniquely iw teristic of these two men. I want character and acts 'brought to 1if individuality. When I read abou~ Renaissance, I am only interestedi great episodes of human c' developments in Babylon Of interest to sociologists, it. ing, but the business o~ . than similarities, tQ specific set of ev~t;Qtl~ Hegel appIi.e4ot:lWli1Ul

~"'JJ9J!U

Hl!Gl!L DOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

other thought, not as a loose succe~sion sJrs tern, then another - but as .a contmuous iIt4_ from one generation of thinkers to the related to economic or social or other kinds ~ety or culture. All this is now so much taken Hegel's originality can scarcely be realised seemed to place immense stress on history ry, and the fact that everything in it matters tters at all. More emphatically even than if facts could not be clearly distinguished relevant and irrelevant; since the way in eir clothes or eat their food, sail the seas or handwriting, their accent, may be more of their more official acts - their wars, titutions. There is no telling what may Jainiog the total process of history, in yed its part, appeared on the stage at y left it after its hour had struck. moralising history which looked errors and vices, his condemna, ntation to rational men to ving forces as such, while power, to a peculiarly iUlJ11tribute to making all bl.e value. For the . $ty - a priori ;.-J:iistory

lIIIW II

laying bare the essence of that unique oetw tion of elements which forms the indivIdual case the universe, of which men are elem~ Furthermore, Hegel drew attention to UIIl:Q history: the dark forces, the vast impersonal to think of as the semi-conscious strivings of realise its being, but which we may calI unconscious forces, the occult psychological now think at least as imponant as the CODI generals or kings or violent revolutionaries. de-personalise and, if I may put it so, de-m There is a further respect in which Hegel' namely in its application to works of art,.t.o greatness and beauty, and to the aestheti thought he was reducing the confused laqJlIfl to something disciplined and rigorous. form acquired a specious kind of tee~" remained thoroughly dark. Despite remain loose. All the romantic te German metaphysicians and poets notions of transcendence and in forces which at once desuoy: other; the notion of a unity w~ principle, the pattern and 1;b,e which is at the same time becoming - all this, wbi nonsense, when appll unique part to objects, PSI •

DOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

HEGEL

growth - a tune which clashes with and ~sicaI phrases, leading to their mutual not: also to their transcendence, to the nflicting forces into something richer and, if ore perfect than the original ingredients. Here obscure semi-conscious growth of forces ddenly in some splendid, golden shower. The suggestive language of Hegel, and still more philosophers, of Schelling, the brothers ad mdeed of Coleridge and to some degree does at moments penetrate by its use of cal imagery to something like the heart of uch language can do something to convey e development of a pattern is like, the mterrelation of sounds and feeling - and m a symphony, or an opera, or a mass; 1:louding the issue, such a semi-poetical a:fv more vivid sense of the contours of school of artists or philosophers, the mething not to be analysed by the coherent, more tough-minded its standards of integrity and clarity in fields amenable to and in the history of lItiillVsis of civilisation, in 'II well as prose, the rMilt<m1ethod, the deIts opposite,

me

forces iIV">1mdl,:,·:its

persons, long before and after his d " d H' ay, oavll-tll reJecte. IS great crime Was to h h" h ave cr " myth0 Iogy III W lC the State is " apeno~ person, an d there IS the one single a " . hid" ptternlll IllSlg ta one can Iscem. He created a school which Ignored the ordinary faclS because th with superior insight, can deduce what h ep " I d ou bl e VISion, "" ratlona a kind of c1airvoy app "h anee", to te II III a mat ematically certain way what opposed to the sadly empirical, imperfect, fuu~ the ordinary historian has to proceed. In spite of all his vices Hegel created which for a long time dominated the ~ liberty, there can be none in a tight pattallM; liberty where obedience to the pattern . expression, where what you call liberty acting within some kind of vacuum, ha for your own personal choice, in whi with by others. Hegelian liberty sim possession of that which obstrllCl"4 quered and possessed eve . with the master of the univers,.. best that you can do is to try you must be, and instead ~ plaining about the app . joyously. But the joyop There have always. in some tight lIS SOQ1e rig4l

ND ITS BETRAYAL

resist, to be .unpopular, to stand up ,.erely because they are your convictions. INRi without it there is neither freedom of "illusion of it.

SAINT-SIMON

is the prophets of the twentieth century. His wQ'DIIl.... confused and even chaotic. He was regarded as an inspired lunatic. He wrote badly-wi mingled with immense tracts of naive aa4 His reputation grew posthumously. .u1l~ who borrowed so much from him, relep Utopian socialists, so called, did a impression that, although a gifted map, foolish and too monomaniacal to b prophecy is laid along prophe.cy Marx are compared to those turn out to be more than favo All his life, Saint-Simon was the great new MessiI1i earth, and he lived at a under that pec:u1iat compare with tb COMTE HENRI DE SAINT-SIMON

DOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

n, his dedication, to open to humanity those bt have been prised half or a quarter open by but which it was his privilege to fling open er. dy the same impression when you read Hegel, e was the summation, the complete synthesis, of t that had gone before, finally, in an immense position which at last was the sum of all human buman knowledge, so that, after him, all that his deed humanity, would have to do was simply to ts and apply them. Similarly in France, with ~iliil socialists, Saint-Simon, Fourier and even d and Leroux, you get the impression that course, there are predecessors; there was crates, there was Christ, there was Newton, tmponant thinkers, even geniuses. But all adumbrated, they merely hinted; they er of the truth. The final revelation is to you: In spite of that, Saint-Simon indeed marvellous, thinker. some of the doctrines of which he anlone. It is very difficult ever to ~ 10 one person and one person nU.Q1ane sciences. Nevertheless, 'ction say that Saint-Simon !tIore than the Germans; the unhistorical ;JJ;d an interpre--

~~o:l-tI!-e great

SAINT-SJMotf

history. This is not quite the same as thll'IiIIl tion of. histo:r which we associate with does he at Its root, and in certain fell_iii original and tenable view. Saint-Simon define classes in the modem sense, as eccJ1ll dependent in a direct way upon the prop~ll!IIf" progress of machinery, the progress of the obtain and distribute and consume prodlUCI~ fi rst person to draw serious attention to the history. Moreover, wherever there is society, about a planned economy, about-,n necessity for what the French call dmigilmill'l. wherever there is a New Dea~ wherever favour of some kind of rational organisa commerce, in favour of applying society, and, in general, in favour of e'fll!lf now come to associate with a planned State - wherever there is talk of this bandied saw the light originally scripts of Saint-Simon. Again, Saint-Simon more notion of the government of s morality. There is of course previous thinkers, but Saint who comes out and say governed not demoC1'8U understand the teeM bilities of their . beings are stupid;.

SIae..

whatt:b.e"

SAINT-SIMON

M AND ITS BETRAYAL

the point of attaining - if only it will trenchant attackers of such eighteenthcivil liberty, human rights, natural rights, , individualism, nationalism. He attacks e first person to see - as the thinkers of the ~n=rdid quite clearly see - the incompatibilthat wise men ought to direct society and Qlht to govern themselves; the incompatia society which is directed by a group of w towards what goal to move and how .move towards it, and the notion that it is elf, even than to be governed well. He favour of good government. But he is . means the impossibility of selfperson to make that clear, and that is cherished liberal ideas of the eighteenth )lineteenth and twentieth centuries, but something truly original about ihe first person to feel the logical ;l:iich seem to be held so comfonltes in the far shallower and f the great thinkers of the d in Germany. tor of what might be FJ.lll'.t person to see that De; that something emotions, the -not cold-

"*'

t

.itl.m.@li

Saint-Simon a claim to be regarded as "1 One fh most ongma one ate , and one of the IIlCllt'lid - if not the most influential thinker - of 0lIl_ _ other thinkers whom I have been discussing, to our own century than he was to the oi·ine!... to show. Let us begin with the notion of hiStoricia say, he. was largely. responsible. The probleIll Samt-Slmon and hiS contemporaries wu French Revolution. Saint-Simon Was bom in 1825, and I ought to say something about . explain how his views came to be what they, member of the great family of Saint-Sim duced, about a hundred years before, the author of the Memoires, and he was very p traced his descent from Charlemagne. Let subject: I write because I have new ideas. I

which they have taken shape in my ~"'" writers to polish them. I write as a g Counts of Vermandois, and as the Saint-Simon. All the great things done and said by gendemen: Co Newton, Leibniz - they were:ill too would have written d them, had he not happened

This is a fair example:DfllII said that he got his-: wotds: 'Riseji_.

DOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

SAINT-SIMO

ght would revolutionise trade in those e the idea was very premature and nobody lItJ1nni'ce of it. From there he went to Holland, tunulate an attack on British colonies; from erene tried to get a canal dug between Madrid Was preoccupied with the notion of making , getting something for nothing - getting a letting the water, nature herself, perform the laboriously and so wastefully performed by lftonnie· of this came about; indeed the Spanish went through, was overwhelmed by the

of course, he sympathised most warmly had been a pupil of the great mathemati'tor of the Encyclopaedia, d'A!embert. Encyclopaedists of the end of the 're well personally and he was, at that cycle of the century's enlightened men. tie of Count, and he called himself ok part in the Revolution on the onde. Presently the Revolution amt-Simon, as an aristocrat, was ut in his name. Somebody else , n, very characteristically, lU' in order to liberate the ~~1i:'raculously survived tihnaelf with undimin~~ being that he

IWY'Pvcly _tl~id_

experiences as possible. One must touch possible. In short, one must live, In orrdelHii have money. But Saint-Simon's estate bad the Revolution. Consequently, he thee9/' speculation, took part in the sales of the the nobility, made an enormous fortune, by his German partner Baron Redem, begun in the Revolution - penniless, By this time he had lived. He had giv parties to which he invited those he l!'em!JlJl interesting men of the time - the phy'si·icis-. physiologists, the mathematicians - from ~ to learn about the secrets of their craft. already knew through d'Alemben, He that these scientists consumed his food thing under the sun except the sciences li to question them. Nevertheless he did fragments of this and that, and blec:aldl autodidact. His head was a perpe:tuIIUUl dinary confusion and chaos, In,·bi" greatest depth and brilliance alt:emllt You begin, for example, rea,di·.tli freedom of the seas, about whi suddenly, without knowing are in the midst of a disquisi: ' gravitation in Newton,"s~·.u1lDl which affects the inteU think that you ~

'ap.

Ages and y.ou..u@!~

man =8Q,~iI4I ..

ITS BETRAYAL

SAINT-SIMO

fantastic, nai've and the ludicrous hypothesis about why the French haps the most original by then put _lIai'oed the disaster in accordance with the Revolution fail? The liberals said, lIGther words, because the Revolutionaugh - did not respect human rights px and religious and conservatives said, away from tradition, or from the word o£;God was sent to visit those who had ~rPded human reason to the divine faith. people like Babeuf - said, because the .far enough, because equal distribution occurred, because, in short, though , that liberty was nothing without other explanations were also put tion in a sense resembled Hegel's .~ more concrete, infinitely more to eings and real history as opposed lical ideas, like the shadows of a .Hegel seemed permanently to cause he was not understood, itO put forward his own view er of the quasi-materialist 'story is a story of living ;mebly and many-sidedly IirIIJDj'itmature; in order to IliQI!'.QiUpons. Conse_lev.«lr:yt1llin' g that _uponthe

•

_latme

certainly more than from anyone else:. association on the part of the able, the have invented tools and weapons by w more, by which they can extract more no., the others gradually find themselves dOlmiJlICfi elite. They are not dominated for long, b become rebellious, they become disconltelll1llil~ they too, if only they allowed their ill'ugiJ~ reasons to work, can invent something WIth only get more from nature than they are overthrow the elite. The elite gradually, becomes obsolete, their ideas become Olsm'~ realise that invention and discovery are gail. them, among the lower class; and gradually for too long to weapons of production (if terms), or anyhow to economic forms of life suitable to the new weapons, to the new which the recalcitrant, indignant, active. slaves are in the meanwhile perfecting, by this lower class, which itself then gradually to be ousted and made obs:.jJ they exploit, whom they use, In a way this looks exactly like tho history, but Saint-Simon does not that all ideas are dominated by, _ production, by economic falCtl:.only at the time when they. people make inventions tD invent mathematics OJ' response to the ga_~ kind of thing s:lII:iI.tj•

gili"

themsellves:i:oJlI QDRlPQ

D ITS BBTRAYAL

SAINT-SIMON

period when people realised they if they could make slaves do their n of slavery was not so much the omic circumstances, because it had e laves, which is the typical Marxist but because of the rise of Christian." have something to do with the c:h it was born; nevertheless it was were primarily religious, spiritual, . hed slavery, when it need not have e birth of these ideas. Hence Saintphasis on the role of genius in history, are men of genius and unless they functioning, unless, in short, the ho perceive and understand the time with a deeper insight and scope, progress will be retarded. !ltfA:lDllItic, by no means depends on of the clash of classes or 4mtion that history must be ~mankind in the satisfaction on where the needs are nt. Therefore the dogtury was so fond of _~periods as periods -ages of empti. m companson • •'gbteenth

.

be approved of or disapproved of, Pl'lIled great or smal~, progressive or reaction~ whether It satisfied the needs of its time, IIdI later period completely alien to its own tune. We always hear about this idea of progress, about what progress is? What is this inevi: which the eighteenth century is better than th the seventeenth better than the sixteenth, aml: better than all the preceding ages? We are told men learn from nature, and because men ap; something about more being done for the colmn~ these, he says, are very vague terms; we do people mean by reason, what they mean by na you some criteria for progress, he says, whi and which we may be able to use in writing is as good as his word. He gives four crite very interesting they are. The first is this: The progressive society the maximum means of satisfying the of the human beings who compose it. which does this, which satisfies the that is the central idea of Saint-Sima end. Human beings have certain happiness, not necessarily for wisd sacrifice or whatever it may be .... them. These needs should beanything which gives a l'i these needs, which assis many directions as $;1. The second cd gwo the OPI~@l!

ITS BETRAYAL

SAINT-SIMON

g things to sink, who are against gs. on the whole, to descend, ach the condition of complete progress is the provision of the for the purpose of a rebellion or an terion is conduciveness to invention D. For example. leisure conduces to was seen. in his own time, as a the invention of writing, or whatever

'-'e1'}'

J:eiliPJ'Imd, Saint-Simon says, if you judge picture changes very deeply from lJl,ttid to us by the dogmatists of the IIIlt. The dark ages cease to be eumple. Pope Gregory VII or St e men, after all. built roads, they pitals, they taught vast numbers ove all, they preserved the unity ~lders of the East, they civilised 'on people lived in a unitary regime. and were able to . y no means a dark age; far less frustrated for . h followed. An age is 1iM:d people can do as t as is possible -ef :the richest ~llld,.in

that

_"things pcu:;

them over. That is a revolution • A rev0 Iuuon somebody or other must arise for the pUIpore what has become a completely antiquated. institution which has outlived any possible go conceIvably once have done. Therefore histo ! is .a kind of rhythm of what his disciples cnttcal penods: OrganIc periods are periods w umfied, when It develops harmoniously, when are in charge of it on the whole foster progresssense of provIding the maximum number of maximum of opportunilies for satisfying the ma:1im of their needs, whatever they are. Critical per~Lol when these arrangements are becoming obsol institutions themselves become obstacles to human beings feel that what they want is . which they are getting, when there is a new sp to sunder the old bottles in which it is still Un for example, as Saint-Simon thought of his 0 industrial age which is still ludicrously and within obsolete feudal frameworks. The critical age is an age when destrulitio construction. It is something inferior in S nevertheless it is inevitable and neceBII discussion of the eighteenth century Revolution he says the French & lawyers and metaphysicians. Th. ers, What do lawyers do? La: absolute rights. natural rigb negative concept. The iII: body is trying tQI..caJ~1G tbllll U'Y to ill'~~

:u

. .

I114i~D ITS BETRAYAL i!lIi!~ho are

engaged in inventing good venting the old, worn-out machinery bsolete tradition which is stifling vast on; and metaphysicians are people, th century, who perform the very Iltfnining the old religions. Christianity, great thing in its own day, as was cll!Ve1op, it must advance. If it remains be ovenhrown. That is why, of all the , he dislikes Luther the most. Luther to to his panicular faith, which was no 'Purpose of overthrowing Catholicism, ilI'll~'t was becoming somewhat old.Ii'vle in Luther's day. For that Luther Bible, a single book. No doubt the semi-nomadic Jewish tribe living in ~emterranean,butitcannotcope

. Flexibility is wanted, perpetual "E,u.,Roman Church, whatever may 'ble element. No doubt it is sive and oppressive in others, Gtions, by assening that the terable printed text but an ,all consists of generations t from those of the past, ble to guide humanity s. This is precisely topean unity, he private, abso..deteSts it

SAINT-SIMON

simply a revolution which occurred at the long elaboration. The development of lind_... and economic c~anges of a very violent and been occurnng since at any rate the beginning century. Too little notice had been takenoftbil. business it was to govern mankind. Duly mismanagement on the part of people who tional past and did not understand that a new dawning or that the middle classes were now the the real power (and Saint-Simon is nowhere more penetrating than when he is discussing w real power, and the people who really win t government, like those of other nations, did accordance with these changes, did not shift accordingly. Consequently the Treasury Iwl when they called upon the State to assist th,emUli in whose hands by this time the real pOWCl! not know it, suddenly realised that it did mise. It had the power: all it had to do wu they pay for what they could take? persuasion when they could use fo occurred. In shon, Saint-Simon interprets the middle class to class-consciou place and the fact that it could blowing away the few simple out earlier classes - the clergy:. which had been sitting OIl with no raison d'ltr& lawyers, what put.

slogans to .tb.e.p

'-Ifhj

SAINT-SIMON

I'rS BBTRAYAL

ctive abilities, not people trained gging, in writing pamphlets under which you say one thing and mean 'iJltimately small-minded lawyers with ig consttuctive task of the future. But nly people the lower classes trusted, wrote the revolutionary pampWets and ."riI1rolution was lost. The revolution iltlred by the people who really were the men:hants, the great new captains of ;.bllbliers, the people who belonged to the most original, penetrating and ftttliHery age there is a distribution of ho matter and the people who do 1m represent what is coming, the ip'c:Stnt what is dying away, the old. s represented the principle of the peasants, who were then the t! needed by humanity. They of their work, and in general lilItillU1ar order, Soldiers were (;hristianity in its day was as it was a progressive rogtessive men, people needs of their time •I1n or the Jewish mIete, they have 1eft'Jl'..bot priests, a.-quite a '8

mng

Saint-Simon is very extraordinarily obsened> tance of bankers, because he is so committed playing historical analogies, so deeply affected .".. history, by the notion of development and evolludlfli that nothing stands still and. that everything til correspond to something (which is never identtticalMllii age. He often asks who corresponds in his own age who were responsible for unity and centralisation Ages, say, or in the Roman Empire. The Romans because they reigned over almost all mankind ana were universal. The Middle Ages were great becalJSe' disciplined the whole world, civilised it, and thlenlfm*, strife, prevented provincialism, prevented the Wll_Mi Saint-Simon the worst of all crimes - the IlllCJllint complete destruction of human resources in is'• • individual directions. Who is like that now? credit is the great octopus, the great universal Eo everybody together, and people who slight it; it, people who think they can do without it The greatest power in the world is the-' international finance. But far from attac against it as an oppressive system which the people (as for example Cobbett or ev do at about that time), he welcomlldl centralising, connecting force, beca thing. The only way in which hLWliIQIl rational concentration of its res which is possessed, every aspiration which peopll~~ best way. din:cItCtl

bDifieai-'i·""_

J) ITS BETRAYAL

SAtNT-SIMOH

of industrialists, bankers, men of of society as an enormous business e ICI or General Motors. The State '" though needed at one time for the qainst the power of the encroaching observes that of course the clergy . but now that the clergy have been et need for protection against them, the creative part of the State, which and social and spiritual development t,the dead hand of the no longer living tate itself has become dead, oppressive (he says very firmly) what we need bas become a kind of industrial all members, a kind of enormous or unlimited liability, perhaps, ke, who was also historically .not merdy what Burke calls 'a ~;nlili'p in all art; a partnership in in that, of course, passionl;lst literal sense (in the sense not meant as a partner- exactly what Burke .industry, in the sale of 'thout which men ~ii\Dt-SimoD, we

. .~ 'VagUe. The . ty is MCl!~.

of

scientists and industrialists, because theJrlll.......... knowledge and the needs of today are to be people who get things done. These are the regime we do in fact live, although we do not do not know it. They themselves stupidly obIlP't which they do not realise they could flick off fi~ger. But why should we s~ffer this to happen history IS the tale of the sordid exploitation of h human beings, which is a most dreadful waste. human beings waste their energies on explomng beings, when they might be exploiting nature? WI__ being oppresses another, too much energy IS . oppressor and by the oppressed, who resists. t . . cease to oppress; let the resister cease to remt; throw themselves into the sacred task of explloitiq mankind - nature - building, creating, making Hence all those paeans of Saint-Simon orgarusanon. As for rights, 'right' is an empty interests. Interests are that which humam any given moment. It is the business of them, Humanity divides into two vas industrious, the oisifs and the pro'","_ times - the indolent and the w'orkllfr., seem to mean manual workers anybody who works, including bankers, industrialists. Abo e all, we must III: Po erty is alwa due ppalling waste

ptlil.

t IS

oMi.

n's BETRAYAL f human emotions, human pass that which the present age makes d of vast self-effecting industrial will have enough, nobody will be will disappear. In order to conduct elites, because the people have .so create it - here he talks like an lU:1l~edist - and to run it themselves. plites consist? Saint-Simon's view life. First he thinks it ought to be his view and thinks it ought to be l1n early life he has mysterious bodies iwl»n - these are a kind of international _14emy, administered by public suba.JlrAliem of voting, in which artists and p~ combine in some inscrutable a,diament consisting of three parts. ber of Invention, which is • tB - painters, poets and so forth . east men who, whether in the have flashes of genius. The I< consists of mathematicians, 1'h,e final chamber consists p.egple who really know ~~:-tand the nature of the ,sheer struggle for taught them

SAINT-SIMON

must be abolished; harmony between the flIUMI .• must be introduced. The spirit cannot work 'Wi material development; no material development out a great spiritual awakening, without the ideuaf genius, without general human advance in all POlliliWiliil It is a picture rather like Tintoretto's notion of p happy conglomeration of humanity holding handt; endless dance of gaiety and joy in which all their their desires, all their inclinations are richly _ OV'I"-' satisfied in the great cornucopias which only the and the bankers, now no longer oppressed by am• • tions and ludicrous laws which hem them in, can p About the elite he sounds a very modem nore, that they must practise two moralities. What was about the priests of Egypt, for example, who w and original elite, was that they believed one population with another. That is good, that things should be conducted, because the p expected to face the truth at once, but 1IliliiJ, educated. Consequently we must have a small alists and bankers and artists who gradually gradually condition them to take theirindustrial order. That is a familiar kind> great phrase, indeed, on which Comm everyone according to his capacity Simon and the Saint-Simonians........,. artists - novelists, for example that their business is applied, D! itself, but the moul.d"ing-«dlilqlJ that is a Saint-SimIODi_-l4I!

engineer, wheth~ dJil
D ITS BBTRAYAL

SAINT-SIMON

ne. and experts will never be over~l1b::v,olution, whose result was bloodlItbliln:an retrogressIOn. ludicrous slogan. Liberty is always -always something negative, against Il. But in an advanced regime where there is no oppression, there is nothing ~ to use a battering ram. Liberty is '.which will blow things up, but in a IJ'lIiiNtive era as against a destructive one, - not for that kind of purpose at any that individual liberty is dangerous and

l#issez-faire, At one period he believed 'pIe of the man whom he calls 'the 'e. again, leads to absolute chaos; it ything done unless we plan things, Consequently we have the terrifyaI hierarchy, with bankers at the ~ them, engineers and techni:and painters and writers. Every something to offer is some.new feudal regime in which r. This is the way in which !Way in which an army of history is an army,

1bat. I_wm~e regards as

.,Wl1U'ch should ~_govern­

P,ipll:lUfdtf

the end of his life that a cult was needed, that done, because we do not know by techno~ beliefs of me,n must be fixed upon something. the age of Cicero; the Romans' religion was d,yiallill temples were still visited, and Cicero believed ID outer husk of the Roman religion although he beheved In ItS mner essence. This cannot be plenty of people now who do not believe in Christianity or in Christ or in any of the dogmat4 a good deal of use for the Church because they tbUIldlIiI evil instincts of men. But it is no use when the away, the Church will collapse, The shell caI:1IIOIl\:l without the yolk. We must therefore create a new faith which will respond to the needs of the time. is before us: it is a blind tradition which places It are marching towards it with rapid step, Our there; it is for us, he says, to trace the path. How are we to trace the path? He is notvety Above all, by association and by love. If h stand each others' needs, identify themsel their creative imaginations will pour tlnidai direction of the greatest and most haIma~ those goods which will go to everyone' Enfantin, the leader of Saint-Simon's; 'You are an aspect of me, and I aIIlPai!~~ when the sect - for it became a re:Ii'plQ.t outskirts of Paris, a special tuIIlt: be buckled on from behind, Saint-Simonian sect was d a symbol of co-operatto

HIt_ biJi_

dbl.

cbil.

an exquisittr PIB:'~~,

FilicienD. '

"

MiiNlD ITS BETRAYAL ~.Jution of

human problems - not as in _$eill it is a question of the solution of are always the same, and in terms of fa the same, which never alter, because iIlIJlhC human heart, or because they are y metaphysical insight or by whatever IlJocf'll'lues which themselves evolve with the lioiIm:ntion affects which other invention, III1lt which other human beings, and the lldIlI8ir.e human society coherent, that one -,d',planned single entity out of it, and not fRe-wheel, not allow them to do what pKlecause they want to do it, because this . , . of affairs in which many more of ll!lI1i11:d, if only they knew - that is the mild and humane forms in the case New Deal, or the post-war t takes violent, ruthless, brutal, ,directively planned Fascist and linillll.Se the notion of a new secular pt~ for the masses, urging them ,not intellectually be able to ~Jm·Saint-Simon also. So too l! are part of the historical there are no absolute in terms of its own ...,.....!ent needs, not the ·~t history is IIpresents ~di¥ided

SAINT-SIMON

elite cannot but practise a double morali one for others. Liberty democracy L ty .~ " " ..IISlZ""/. feudalism - all these metaphysical notio01,110 • do not mean very much, must go in order somethmg clearer, bolder, newer: big busmeu, SCIentIfic orgamsatlOn, an organisation of u, wor_ " I parIlament, a wor d federation. All this is S Saint-Simon did not believe in revolutiollS, seen one. He believed in powers of persuasIOn. need not be the means. The one thing that he deeply was that humanity itself should at Jut. satisfaction of its wishes. On his death-bed disciples, 'There is one thing 1 wish to say to other and help one another. My whole life can one single thought - to assure all men the has their faculties.' And 'The party of the workem "workers" he meant those who were produetl: with us.' It was, but perhaps not quite in Saint-Simon, who was the most liberal, g ultimately naive man, believed. In all this talk about fraternity and loYi organisation with which the dying S friends and humanity in general, w about liberty, not perhaps in the emp the eighteenth-century lawyers against the survival of feudalislDo the liberty of human beings limited sphere? On this p which strikes a chillier really was against it.

or how oppressivd:

leo;nor*

'N BETRAYAL ~iDi'ty can

occur - these people ey are bored by justice, as the tfb.~er Chemyshevsky was to say people want is not parliament, the cravings of the bourgeoisie. this cry for bread, boots and not a then becomes the staple refrain .ing parties up to Lenin and Stalin. may also be traced to the gentle, on.

MAISTRE

was a very frightening his contemporaries - frightening becaure rather than because of what he was. Indeed had not very much chance of meeting Iiinlll!'l important years of his life were spent in· tll,_ of Sardinia, and at the court of St Petenb appointed as diplomatic representative. them because of the violence, the Iii extremely uncompromising and harcl-h which he wished to strike down th disapproved. The normal view of him is ~ perhaps the most accurate '8Ildt Maistre in France in the nine fierce absolutist, a furious' ill!_ aposde of a monstrous Hangman, alway~ an~ narrowest and most .

JOSEPH DE MAISTRE

the Middl A eeeu\1i01lJi~

r

BETRAYAL

MAlSTlUI

him, largely invented by Sainte"arious other thinkers in the is painted, always, as a fanatical tical supporter of papal authority; a strong will and an unbelievable m dogmatic premisses to extreme ; brilliant, embittered, a medieval , vainly seeking to arrest the current 'iUlomaly, formidable, hostile, solitary liut a tragic patrician figure, defying vulgar world, into which he had t worst an unbending, self-blinded the marvellous new age whose see, and too callous to feel. interesting and outre rather than effort of feudalism in the dark PII_s, He is described either as a lost cause, or as a foolish or 1Dore heartless generation, e .nineteenth-century critics :whether for or against him, that his world has no 's is the point of view Lamennais, by Sainteorley, and panicuhim in which he a played-out _~,enth

Maistre's task, in his own eyes "" , was to which the eighteenth century had built " up AdlllIII he came by t hIS state of mind. He Jgd. .~ Chambery in Savoy, then part of the liWll.iJ' Sardinia. This Kingdom, of which Maistre life, was relatively enlightened in the eigb-~ abolished feudalism a good many years before Like other liberal aristocrats, Maistre was a miI4 particularly reactionary and not panicuIarly blllOt.-IJ grown man when the Revolution finally broke thirty, and like others who went through the.l.\c.~ Saint-Simon, like Schiller, like Hegel - he took against it. The spectacle of the Jacobin Terror which he never forgot for the rest of his life, turned him into an implacable enemy of ~'IlII1 liberal, democratic, high-minded, everythiug intellectuals, critics, scientists, everything w'bill'" the kind of forces which created the French he talks about Voltaire he talks about personal enemy. Being a Savoyard, Maistre entered the~. . writing pamphlets, after the French.mq Savoy, against the Revolution. These.~~ they had a peculiar fresh.ness, indeed ately attracted attention. But the-KiJ. an uncomfortable man to _ very small, very limited, l'aIU!llll_ brilliant, too active, toG:u'QII be altogether comk_~

him..,,,

and he attAGtCCl

D ITS BETRAYAL

on very well with the immediate eed, that Emperor used him as a oments during his reign. apoleon was over, for some reason . .~II;' it may be that he had converted to the Roman Church. Several of to playa very large part in Catholic Possibly he interfered a little too th so strong a personality; at any rate, tared to his throne, was induced to cit to Turin, the capital, was given a tPiiilkJralble honour but with no kind of ¥ other kind of power, in 1821. His ddressed himself most vigorously, ~ilbteenth century, and the thought . a mistake to assume that the tury was a seamless garment; ~l1tuJry thinkers were divided by ~tta:in things which are common _ljev,e in progress; they might t not all believe in the ~~ believed in intuition; eved in spontaneity and J~!itnlce and sophisticaItIliIltdlBt men were by _itiaIJy: benevolent, interests and D.d: b¥ knaves ~~Ies "It

MAISTRE

knew them. They believed that all things that true and virtuous and free were necessaril indeed more than that, that they were in~'IIIIl"lIII empirically-minded among them were sure that human nature could be developed no less than tblltlIIl things, that ethical and political questions, p'rorid., genu me - and how could they not be so? _ could no less certainly than those of mathematics and as_ _ that a life founded upon these answers would be happy and wise. They believed that the miIIennmm reached by the use of faculties and the practice, oi which had for over a century, in the spheres both ol and of action, led to triumphs more magnifi~ hitherto attained in human history. That, roughl the common belief, the general temper and rational thinkers of the eighteenth century. All this Maistre set himself to destroy characteristic of the eighteenth century of determined to root up so that it should stand on this enormous task because he believed which the innocent had suffered was an 1IJlP had loved and admired France from pu margins of it in Savoy) with the pec:ulie'__ on the edges of countries have for th wish to be identified with them - ~ this in history. With the peculiar • to demolish a really golden ideal; forces which in his opinion of his dream. TherefOft1. idealistic sociology. history ~'-1oUW

of prop

·~f'J~s BBTRAYAL

«l equality, of common interests lIt!-uncorrupted natural man about ~ insisted that what was important el1tJi'ct of interests - those were the duals and of nations. He denied all ~....... as Nature, Man, Natural Rights. ~lItmtradicted everything which Conthe great scientists of the eighteenth e. He tried to breathe new life into the Divine Right of Kings. He mystery, of darkness, almost of bonality, as the basis of social and .,. effectiveness and brilliance he dity, every form of rationality. ~ ruthless and as extreme as his he had something of their faith revolutionary, remarks that 792 was the wonderful comeire old order. He says that buull its virtues too. They wanted to destroy the in order to build up ~ey wanted to make debt to that upon • Maistre was the ~l}' rationalism Wllt and the ......~Ited to Ili'f!/iof the

l.tJ"'lIIll

MAISTRE

approach of someone like Augustine, or WIth 'Rl"1II and the Illunumsts among whom Maistre's Y di Maistre's..fundamental doctrine is this: ng I and caw, It IS a vast scene of carnage and destrulCCil:lJ&"I of the eighteenth century turn to metaphysics to 1dIIi&! geometry, in order to find out what nature is like. nlNllt' the sources of our knowledge of nature. H they Wi about nature, let them be serious. They speak ~ ...._ observation as a weapon, using our eyes, not ace:eptiQJ many dogmatic truths merely because a lot of p1n!llCb• • spoken to us about them. Very well then, they must be their word. Let us look at what is going on round US; says, let us not look at books, let us look at nature. a let us study history, yes, and zoology. They are the to nature. What do we see if this is where we look) what Maistre says:

na:

In the vast domain of living nature there reigns _ kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the common doom. As soon as you leave the W1iillatfl find the decree of violent death inscribed on life. You feel it already in the vegetable ki'~1l catalpa to the humblest herb, how many plait are killed! But from the moment you enter law is suddenly in the most dreadful md once hidden and palpable ... has m animals appointed a certain num Thus there are insects of prey. of prey, quadrupeds of J'rey:. creature is not being races of animals nothing that Ihrl!~~ iJi'

OM AND ITS BETRAYAL

_are.... a I'agneau [il demande] ses entrailles harpe ... au loup sa dent la plus meurtriece legers de l'an, a l'cHephant ses defenses pour .enfant: ses tables sont couvertes de cadavres ~e (dans Ie carnage permanent] exterminera e tous? Lui. C'est I'homme qUI est charge t .. Ainsi s'accomplit ... la grande loi de la des etres vivants. La terre entiere, continuellen'est qu'un autel immense OU tour ce qui vit ans fin, sans mesure, sans relache, jusqu'a la es, jusqu'a I'extinction du mal, jusqu'a la

and kills to clothe himself. He kills lWliills in order to attack. He kills in order to tills in order to instruct himself. He kills to order to kill. Proud and terrible king, r,hing can resist him From the lamb M~' harp resound from the wolf trifling works of art, from the p-r his child: his tables he covers IlQeral carnageJ will exterminate IJ He will himself. It is man FP ••• Thus is accomplished • of living creatures. The lS nothing but a vast ced without end, of things,

non

MAISTBIl

virtuous, God-fearing, polite persollS w fly - go into battle in order to kill O~ 10 themselves, without any demur? Whereu is the man, after all, who, under instrue:ti.oD; the whole are presumably not innocent _ and other criminals - and kills many fewer soldiers do, is nevertheless regarded as a SOt:iJl,c; shakes him by the hand; he is regarded with not as an ordinary member of society. Is there strange in admiring the shedding of innocent b ing before the shedding of guilty blood? It Maistre, because war is in some sense divine m the law of the world. This is a central dOClDn!l! rationalist notions do not work. If you really people behave as they do, you must seek the. of the irrational. This is a mysticism w~ other world, not in this one. Maistre is fascinated by the spectacl says, a battlefield. People imagine ilia where things happen in a planned gives orders, the troops march into !:fa lost in accordance with the prepan skilful instructions issued by the g true. Consider an actual battle. textbook, look at life: zoology If you find a battlefield, wlia at all an orderly proCtsSl of eye-witnesses, or evl~ ans. What you will-4in death, ruin, the. the,Yi'ioW~

IUJOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

.. It is not like a duel between two human strength of one is obviously greater or than the strength of the other. Battles are won aWes are won by acts of faith. What happens t of some kind of mysterious inner force not rational calculation or the careful applicadk set of rules, some kind of elaborate rational which wins or loses battles. describing the Battle of Borodino in War and JIowed this account of Maistre's. Tolstoy read mtre lived in Petersburg during the period in ted, and he echoes his description of what a c:ribing the experience of people present at than giving the orderly, tidied-up account eye-witnesses or historians. For both too, life itself is a battle of this sort, and c:ribe it in rational terms is a dreadful over, tidying up, ordering of something ly irrational, deeply untidy, and obeys gr:..lUI,es. .n against the assumption that reason gs: It is impossible to govern men or reason. He says: What do you imply a feeble faculty in men ~ fitting means to ends. You pi mankind are rational ofan institution is to is to govern. Every ery government must contain

that-is

MAI:I'l1l1~

greatest number. Well, clever m tion, and still cleverer men in th;: full of holes, can completely d. . . superior, their still subtler, still c1m. reasoning. Nothing can stand p other than reason builds up, fore:'hat will pull down. Man is by nature vicious, wicked, Roman Church says, what ChristiianbitE guilt, original sin, is the truest psychol nature. Left alone, human beings will Here Maistre is completely opposed human beings, unless clamped with II'OD means of the most rigid discipline, as He regards human nature as fun and needing to be curbed and can which is reliable, the only thing w man-made; for if it is man-made 1 man. What did the eighteenth centu us that society was founded u as well as a historical absurdi~. a promise. So we have a lot 0 - says Maistre in a mo arranging a peacefulli£ worldly goods, or s it is they may happ state of 1l3QIre. S~easolU!

eve

t;~Q:

ld:mtlM AND ITS BETRAYAL called a social contract, are already furorate and ophisticated ocial notion as ch other, obligation, duty, enforcement of have all this ready to put into the intellectual ~lUe logical ab urdity. People who are armed of a promise, the notion of respecting each lloaon of punishment, the notion of reward, do the are in it already. Quite clearly, therefore, osed by the notion of a contract. Furthermore, b man, for if it had been created by man it d up to the ravages of centuries. It lies in the anaquity; and for Maistre (here he is deeply =--__) anything which goes back to the mists of by God and not by man. rtaJllgUage. M. Rousseau, he says, tells us that he t the origins of language. Well, of course M. answer all questions, can answer this language constructed? Why, of course, ~:nu. A lot of rationalist persons, seeking ftDtage, cosily gathered together and ago, says Maistre. The first generation and the next generation of men said the nominative, and the Medes ow grammar was made. propriate. Maistre was one eighteenth-century notion by rational men for untrue to human )Ii and of course employed a

of

MAl T

Maistre's response to Rousseau m. seau's claim, he says, is as if one were sheep, who were born camivoroua, where be nibbling grass. Maistfe all-explaining entity which is dignifi by the Encyclopaedists. Who is this hears so much? Nature, so far trQ_ provider of all good things, the soun:e and happiness, is to him an eternal methods, the principal source of CNeIl7i serving God's inscrutable purpose, bllt comfort or enlightenment. Rousseau had preached a return to noble savage. What noble savage? Maistre, not noble at all but sub-h brutal. Anyone who has lived among are the refuse of mankind. So far fromted prototypes, early exemplu n.', .... morality, virtuous, high-minded, tion has perverted the nations of failures of God's creative p missionaries who have been SIen:Fd1 for example, speak about the they are good priests who __ to any of God's creator these people were in ~.lQIilflJ testimony that the In language of sav'"6~""..._ with the beauty o£ ugliness of dlClltlli.

DOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

monty. As for the famous abstract Man in t revolution was started, in whose name the were organised, in the name of whom Iaughtered: 'In the course of my life,' says een Frenchmen, Italians, Russians ... I know, tesquieu, that one can be a Persian. But as for t I have never met him in my life; if he exists, me.."

:ys Maistre, what has happened as a result of empty words and empty formulae is that 'the ety - religion and slavery - having failed at moment, the ship was carried away by the fjiIlrecked'. That is why, in his advice to the he was always saying: There are only two society rests, by which wicked man can be .£rom his blindly self-destructive impulses. and the other is slavery. The Christian 1lWl~ because it was powerful enough to herself, but if you in Russia, where the if very highly regarded by the populace, OI,JI' advisers tell you, liberate the serfs, . be plunged into the most vicious il)harism into anarchy. Nobody can WAllt, and once you allow all , -as he calls them, all these and scientists and sophisthen your kingdom _ ...."'\l1lt rest, upon faith

MAIS ••,• . ,

a war, in which many innocent me~ which many hundreds of thousands wives and children, then people p cannot tell; it is irrational. Maistre really makes two points things cannot be fathomed by the men; the other, that the only things example, he says, take the institution what could be more irrational? Why s equally wise son, or indeed a son whet institution of a patently idiotic nature, can be given, and yet it lasts. It has and upon it the foundations of the Wi far more rational, far more logical abolish such a monarchy and see wba to the unhereditary, elected monarch and ruin followed almost immediatel system had been adopted. Take the' could be more irrational than _ because they happen to love each should be together with each om no better reason than that nothing is more shon-lived; becomes so hateful as the from institution to institu . ever is irrational lasts, collapses because an be pulverised by rcu critical faculties

thingwhiGb ~.

aDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

eanswer, and the answer to that question on asking for the why of the why of the to get people to live in so~ietie~ at all is to questioning, and the only way In :which you can ~uestioning is by terror. Onl»: If the hean of mysterious, impenetrable, will people obey. penettated the heart of things, and once it is . something which they can understand, they of it. They will not be in awe of it, they will -.0 it will collapse. What we need, therefore, is d unintelligible. bJem of language, says Maistre. Language is IPlJrght. The eighteenth century, which thought i l human invention, was mistaken on this . vent you have to think, and in order to ploy symbols; to say that language can be lolute absurdity. M. Condorcet wants to U1~le which will be clear and intelligible, ong all the nations - a kind of scientific uld be more disastrous. It would be edt was clear, precisely because it was , '0/ must be put out of court, must which create unrest, criticism, t..Pyerturning of ancient instituand chaos. . It teach our children. Why? dalW'Mt prejudice, against _~. ~e beliefs of the Mwl~ all, the only 1I!o;;lJ,ll!'UU}', Here ~.~ in

.'11

faith, unconscious experience, C!9 against. That is why it is the langu. for there are only two things which one is antiquity, and the other is irra nation of these two creates a force suffi the corrosive influence of the critics, tll8 scientists. Against whom are we trying to pres enemies of the social order, whom MlIIidi very interesting collection of men. They and Calvinists, and all Protestants in G sicians, journalists, writers, Jews, intellectuals, scientists, critics; in sb everything which belongs to it. This iii'. of critics, of all kinds of people whci abstract truth, of people who do premisses of society - was compiled Maistre, and by now it is familiar. It of every violently reactionary, Fas But of all these Maistre hates s . people who have the least cap~ for government, and he warned' solemn tones, not to commi arts and the sciences to do greatest nation that ever government, the Ro,inarJ1r merely make fools of because they 1u;lew tried to do the erm

a.

MAISTRIl OM AND ITS BETRAYAL

~JdJllgdom? Good men - family men, men

_tlaith, religion, respectable morals - do not Only the feckless and the restless and the ;UI the first real sermon against refugees, . _ spirit, against the circulation of humanity made in violent and intelligible and, indeed, oaety rest upon? Society is part of the vale

cannot understand the sources of things, us in an inscrutable way. It rests upon obedience, blind obedience to authority. become chaotic and restless, and go down . What represents this element of terror? • most paradoxical observation, and writes in all his writings. He says that the person lire of It all is none other than that hated • Let me quote the famous passage 10

1... He is like a world in himself ... l'O his proper dwelling-place ... when elsewhere ... In the midst of this th his mate and his young. who human voice. But for them he • ny •.. One of the lowest tfIb him that his services • 1Jare where people are ~Jm'~,~oner. a parricide. ket. He seizes on the

broken

man breaks on the wheel better than I ' scaffold and holds out his bloody hand _l"i an official flings a few gold pieces. The berween rwo rows of human beings who horror. He sits down to table and eats, he but when he awakes next morning his but his occupation of the day before. Is he him to enter his shrines and accepts his pra: and yet no human language dares to virruous, honourable or estimable ... Nev power, all social order depends upon the terror of human society and the tie that ho away this incomprehensible force from the moment order is superseded by chaos• pears. God, who is the source of the power source of punishment. He has suspended poles, 'for the Lord is the lord of the twin sets the world revolving'. This is not a mere sadistic meditation ment. Lamennais said of Maistre who is so noble should have only crime and punishment. 'It is as if the scaffold.' But my quotation It is the expression of a gen • rest of Maistre's passionate only be saved by being They must be remind frightening mystery purged by perpl~

conmQus of

MAISTIlI! SBDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

te'. the disturbers, the subverters, the secular teIIectuals, the idealists, the lawyers, the perfectpie who believe in con~cience, or equality, or the ation of society, the liberators, the revolutlonthe people who must be rooted out. ~~thiJ't1J! very extraordinary about a man who, in possible manner, speaking a language which is l:'Iear and as beautiful as that used by anybody In the bUy, says things which are the precise opposite of r of that century. Yet Maistre is also in a sense a lJ!9lbUy, precisely because of the extraordinary liilt:p;n which he meets every single thing that the HJWlt-Simon believed that there was something in Maisue and the people whom he most ~ted, the followers of Voltaire - indeed, even V.oltaire was the enemy, and Maistre talks with out the perpetual hideous grin of this dreadlint-Simon says that perhaps the future of fn the combination of Maistre and Voltaire. -:wild paradox. How can there be such a rands for individual liberty and Maistre for more light and Maistre for more e Church so violently he denied it e; Maisue liked even its vices and ~camate. Yet there is something odd as it may seem, because, •nboth Voltaire and Maistre ugh-minded tradition of strictly to contradict ~~ingly similar. 1leJ:!~. or .eH-

a

• They

glossy surface even Stendhal's prolle - mlWl great deal from Mais~re - seems r01Dal1llQ. Lenin - they are their true succesSOR. This tendency to cast a cold look upon deflate and to dehydrate, to submit po genuinely rutWess as opposed to a merely this is what has entered modem political degree, and it has entered them equally fnmi those of Voltaire and of Maistre. The atmosphere of Voltaire was responsible sentimental popular values. Maistre SUell. political pragmatism, and has a low eatiiaiilfll capacity for goodness, plus a belief that the craving for suffering and sacrifice and this Maistre's belief that government repression of the weak majority by R rulers, hardened against all temptation humanitarianism, we are gradually RIPPIAlili tarianism. Voltaire can be made delusion, Maistre to provide the n bare world which results can be aulifrb like either despotism or decep,ti'08lit need for both. 'The principle ~ says Maistre, 'is so dangeroU& be necessary to conceal it.' paradoxical after all. The • ruthless totalitarianism, twentieth century.

lUI.

What really fasaiilDll divine. It ia the'StDIillll &,mxar' the

FRBBDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

MAJIT

ID8trument of such laws. To resist power is criminal and folly, directed against the human future. preached the doctrine that all events must be studied IbU, if we are to understand the workings of the divine toicism and relativism, his interest in nature and the [bon of power over human beings - these constitute deeply considered view, and that is why, strangely, he :Of the Jacobins, which did not make him any more emigre circles. Maistre said: When there is a vacuum, 1IIv'11l1ust enter it. The King failed dismally. King Louis miserable liberal advisers, and still more miserable rmers, were simply human dust, weak, optimistic, no understanding of human nature, obviously ad subverters of society. Then, at a moment of iaoobins did at least do something. At least they udy. They set up guillotines; they performed Ily let blood flow. That Maistre approved of, .::11I1 exercise of power, because it held society it made things cohere. He believed in soverithe Jacobins were the scourge of God, sent to i08eDeration for betraying the faith of their better to do what the Jacobins did and hold ~Ite it II powerful kingdom and resist the osition of the feeble Prussians or the t:than a lot of intellectual jabbering. •

~rsican monster; he was a

him. Yet he was a ilIiIIl-"'.comes from God, and recognise

~m
of Hanover. t:QD

course he would not meet Napal him to, but nevertheless he thOUgh sighted policy. He said: I see that Y8Il" very surprising. Well, I shall serve for I believe that the throne is more 11II As for not surprising you - I Cannot Maistre stresses tradition, the palIlJio'l forces, not the amiable imaginaty altuil~ did its enthusiastic champions - the champions of the simple life (which he the contrary, he stresses the stability, impregnability of the authority that half-conscious memories and tradin power of institutions in exacting ob to the supernatural. He lays great absolute rule succeeds only when 1 and detests science, precisely heel and so dissolves the mystety, the.sceptical enquiry. In a sense, then, Maistre . preacher of Fascism, and UlI~'" Behind the classical mask, b air of the Grand Seigneul\ behind the official campI day, which was nothing Maistre something m more terrifying. Hen Nietzsche - net resembled logical Sitrai~

lieI.

AU_

lunacy;

RBBDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

Illdloil. At the end of positivist, optimistic periods "1l'Uction, in which men rise up and say they are ..n the world's ills by some economic or social then does not work, there is always a penchant on the part of ordinary people, satiated by so much m. so much pragmatism, so much positive idealism, discredited by the sheer pricking of the bubble, t all the slogans turn out to be meaningless and e waH really comes to the door. Always, after this, lO look at the seamy side of things, and in our day • sides of psychoanalysis, the more brutal and of Marxism, are due to this human craving for the something more astringent, more real, more people's needs in some more effective fashion 1rt'1l1lVlll'-mechanical, over-schematised faiths of the • •tMaistre provides for his own generation, too. -by the ideals he opposed, and Maistre's violent antidote to the over-blown, overgether too superficial social doctrines of the ilJQMliis' trtI earns our gratitude as a prophet of ~UOllt destructive forces which have threat_11,- the libeny and the ideals of normal those who are in favour of life and ~ those who are against it there Iltmbng people who are too ~Qpelessness of spontaneity, . :who wish to live their "PiOD pattern. Among . . ._ doctrine, and

IIt.qtjecll )iblldiy.

As in the case of The Roots o/RDfJ4j reasons (see pp. 148~ in that vol ces for quotations together here a ing the passages to which th opening words, The reader should be warned languages other than English merge into paraphrase. I have them more accurate, since resonant, but I have occasio the note, In a few cases, w a reference for a close plU'll; quotation marks in the Once again I have ostensible quotations. I readers who can book I shall in Theref~ whomlam~

of every apolow!:Ill

NOTE

nOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

bairn. Steffen Gro13, Samuel Guttenplan, Hausheer (whose general support remains ~Dfnlllc Holford-Sueveos, Andrew Hunwick, Richard Lebrun. Ray Monk, T. J. Reed, Philip teffen and Ralph Walker. multi-volume editions are by volume and page

Page

Reference Introduction

3

9 6.

Bertrand Russell once History of Western Ph Berlin greatly enlivens &

,_"''''''' editorial remarks interspersed among the Helvetius I2

'As one meditates' Discours prononce dalll fevyier 1782, afa receptIOn. i 392 in Oeuvres de Co nor and M. F. Arago 'As mathematics ancf Condorcet, EsqulSII ~ I'esprit hurnain: p. 2:l Yvon Belaval (pans, 1 'Morality i. the • Halbach, System

NOTES TO "

rapports avec les Instltut (Geneva, 19S9), ii dO-I

:people are cattle' htiaced, but d. Oeuvres compleres de Voltaire red. Louis IIDd] (paris, 1877-85) xix 208, 623, XXIV 413. PossIbly m a secondary source?

flee from those greedy and cruel animals' l'espnt 2. 2.

'slavery .•• is against D Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Gagnebin, Marcel Raym [hereafter oq, iii 243

UI

33

ature binds by an unbreakable chain' oreer, op. cit. (note to p. 12 above), p. H8.

'death is not an event in 1ifet Ludwig Wittgenstein, T~ don, 19H), proposition Ii

cation is simply' loc. cit. (note to p. u above).

iI .. veritable despot' Paul Fran~ois Joachim Henri Le Mercier de la L 'Ordre naturel et essentiel des societe. politiques J7(7) i 311.

upon paper' ~JlIltham, Rights, Representation, and Reform: on Stilts' and Other Writings on the French Philip Schofield, Catherine Pease-Watkin :Blamires (Oxford, 2002), p. 187.

'To renounce liberty' OC iii 356.

35

'the law of nature' OC iii 973'graven on the hearts of OC iii 1001; similarly morality and public op marble or brass, but ti'Jf 'to find a form of OC iii 360.

'in giving hinu OC iii 361.

NOTES TO PAGES fRBBDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

t lome point after he had broadcast his lecture on Fichte Berlin annotated the transcript with a view to incorporatii'Jg numerous additional quotations from Fichte's works. He probably used this annotated version, and the sheets of quotations to which his annotations refer (though only some of these sheets, it appears, survive), in lecturing on Plchte on other occasions. When I came to edit the tnnsenpt, 1 discussed the annotations and quotations with Gunnar Beck, an expen on Fichte, who with Berlin's ~ment checked them, and suggested further rele~;:t~qu~ otations. He also recommended a reordering of the ~ pt at one point so that it would follow Fichte's Iil1IllCtUaI development more perspicuously. Berlin accepthis recommen~ation, which is therefore adopted here; he did not revISe the text to include more quotations. \Ie not attempted to incorporate the additional ItiPPl myseH, if only because this would unbalance re by comparison with the others, and indeed on terms; it would al;so go beyo~d the limits of my ed general renut. But 1 gIve the quotations by the last few words of the passage on which An asterisk in the text at the relevant point ~pplementary quotations are given hereunder. :Pichte's works are to the following ediFlChte's siimmtliche Werke, ed, 1. H. ~Johann

Gottlieb Fichte's nach-

II: Fichu (Bonn, 1834-5). These as SW and NW.

'The nature of things' OC iv }20: more literally 'It patiently to endure the necessity will of others'.

'I am whoIly my own creation' SW ii 25 6 . 'I do not accept what my nature ibid. Cf. 'Every animal is what it nothing. What he ought to be, he he must be a being for himself, he himself' (SW iii 80).

they must serve me 'I want to be master of nature, I want to have causal power>' none over me' (SW ii 192.-3) independent, whereas ev",ruum the self. Hence what is re stimmung] of the object wi: determination by the II 'absolute independL~15 'Autonomy, our ul" affairs in which not dependent upp. . occurs ID my. so, just as in absolu~ai

my

til AND ITS BETRAYAL NOTES TO P

cal puriJication of our convictions' (SW vi 14). law is revealed to each man by his conscience Each man possesses this basic moral faculty, .lIIlt:nands him to will this and not that, and this d of his own accord, independent from all external

necessary epochs of the . .. the life of the G. roughly group, commum '[ The plan of history) is f transform itself through h'il!iJli1 reason' (SW vii 17). 'IndividuaJ.; from the view of the philOlOp the one great community ~ thinking self is 'not that of the ual, which could never be it·~lii eternal thinking in which all . (SW vii ss). 'Religion colllisl5 viewed and accepted as the one, authentic, perfect, mo Gattung], (SW vii 140-1).

{SWvi II).

e but silly eIlin's The Roots of Romanticism (London and n, 1999), pp.9- IO, 139-41. Indeed, in general these lectures usefully expand the views on romanticism _led here thirteen years earlier. simply II coUection of dead matter U-IJ.

ftltJui Dature·. the Stoic principle: see, e.g., Cicero, 6, Seneca, Letters 66. 3. 9.

The group - Gllttung- a10n SW vii 37-8: 'Looking at the we find 'that the individual count for anything, but mui~ tung alone exists.'

NM upon by anything else /lam of our self' alone 'is wholIy opposed to the .....lD!ee· (SW vi 59). Man's will is governed by • jt is 'something original [ein Erstes] which utely itt itself and in nothing outside the :,1)as Wollen, als soIches, ist ein Erstes, und itt nichts ausser ihm Gegriinde[Gliickseligkeit] on this earth ... tivity [Selbstthatigkeit], activOIJI' own causal power [eigener tImlllilends' (SW vi 19). '[Man] lialJillo!authority may prescribe IlIWIr-[the moral law _ .and it contragoverned by

. ated and vi n).

'Man only becomes mlaD:'::JIl!l SW iii 39.

68

NOTES TO PAGBS

II: AND ITS BETRAYAL

IIIJIAIl earthly perspective, into a multiplicity of

cd therefore appears in its totality only in the the whole Gattung' (SW vii 2S). 'It is the and the true basis of all other errors ... when lIDagines that he can exist and live, think and elf, or when someone believes that he himself, mdar person, is the thinking in his thought, since y a single thought in the one general and thought' (SW vii 23-4). 'Reason is manifest e one life of the Gattung; if reason does not life, only individuality and selfishness remain. iQUmallife consists in this: that the individual forgets the Gmung, ties his life to the life of the whole ces his life to the whole; and irrational life JIl this: that the individual thinks of nothing but m relation to himself, and seeks nothing but his ".. so that there is but one virtue - to as an individual - and only one vice - to • . Whosoever seeks enjoyment for himGf himself and of a living and being apart d for the GmNng is merely ... a base, little, man' (SW vii 34-S). 'To devote one's life IllIDS to devote one's life to the idea [by JDterchangeably, to reason or freedom] . . only rational and thus right, good . ~ in man forgetting himself in the :'1lkiI"II no other enjoyment than pleasures for the sake of the

itself; everything vii '3). 'The bythefac:t ~y. by

68

'Either you believe in an ori • Sw vii 374-S· Berlin, as so 0.-.._ quotation, though in essence W accurate. Cf. 'To have character indubitably the same' (SW VIi 446l 'What we need is a leader' sw vii S6S (somewhat amplified). the knowledge and the power does but the sacred duty, to subject men force; a single man [coercing] the wh happens' (SW iv 436). 'Who has the . .. The man with the greatest ra and people' (SW iv 444). 'Some must come who, as the most ngh also their leader; he wiu find the succession of the best' (NW U '3$ by a so-caUed 'organic' proces 'The multitude of individuals indivisible organic whole' (SW art, Fichte says, lies in 'its olrglliiilfi that is of genius, limitless and The creative, moulding p wishes as an individual are ethical vocation is placed b State. 'The absolute StI direct all individual fo fuse them into one wi State is ... none other> itself, namely tha to the law of 'the indiVlduUi

..

~"C ~

tlu.

'

NOTES TO PAC

D M AND ITS BETRAYAL

~nl 'th conception not merely of an imagined

but of a genuine totality ... not merely of all dlviduals, but of their indivisible union [nicht blop ondem einer AUheit]' ( W iii 202). In and through ttl 'III flow together into One, united 110 10llger ill an Cl conception, a a composirum, but truly united, as a • Reason is only one, and its representation in the DU orld is also only one; mankind is one organised orgamsing totality of reason. Reason was divided into mdependent parts, but already the natural instituof the late ends this independence provisionally and the eparate parts into one whole, until finally ty recreates the whole species into one. posited conception [of the State] can best be ted by the conception of an organised product of lor InStance, that of a tree ... [Each part], as much wills Its own preservation, must will the preservation :bole tree, because on that condition only is its own on possible .•. The whole, therefore, is to be first and foremost' (SW iii 203). Each single u part of the greater organic whole of the State: _~c body each part continually preserves the preserving the whole, preserves itself; in this t~~'IZ,en rei tes to the State: ... every part, and preserving himself in the position assigned 1IIf~"""Dl.. preserves the whole in its position; ~.4!lI~ itself, and preserves itself' (SW iii

'Thought precedes action' ibid.

73

'For you liberated Germany ibid., Jl3-4· 'amidst the nude deities' ibid., 314.

Hegel a slave dragged by the Pata Seneca, Letters 107. II, adapting Cl 'slaughter-bench' Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hermann Glockner (Stuttgart, IlIZ XI 49.

HeeeJ.

'history is not the theatJe HSW xi 56.

91

'the cunning of reason' HSW passim, e.g. xi 6). 'sets the passions to

HSW xi 6J. ction'

,_........,llpJn lind Philosophic in Hemrich Heines siimtl,rr-20).

of

NOTES TO PAGBS

ND ITS BBTRAYAL

I"

ed. (Paris, 1864)· It also appears in M

:e dtlld and those yet unborn

Simon: sa vie et ses travaux (Paris,

Reflections on the Rt!fJolution in France o are living, those who are dead, and those bom' - p. 147 in The Writings and Speeches e, General Editor Paul Langford (Oxford 8, The French Rt!fJolution, ed. L. G. Mitchell

94-1

110

He had been a pupil Or so Saint-Simon claimed. According to P

The New World of Henri Saint-SII1IOrJ call1iil

195 6 ), p. 13, 'there is not a scrap of eviide:lI£ot~

Therefore (he says very firmly) This sentence and the next, which are ClrllellJliI lematic in the BBC transcript, presented reconstrUction sufficiendy severe to ijUSltil·~,I. them here in their original form: • Dot cured with lavender water' ConstjtHtion [not in HSW]. § 9: p. 313 in Wilhelm Hegel [sic], Schriften Zur Politik ~sophie [Siimt/iche Werke, ed. Georg Las-

_iiII

ind ed. (Leipzig,

192}).

~eful time-hallowed tradition'

~tter draught of world history XI 119.

rid .oul' er, I} October 1806: i 120 in Johannes Hoffmeister (Ham-

and so he says very firmly what we IIIlIII\l State which has become a kind of ind of which we are all members, a ~ limited liability company, unlimited precisely what Burke who in a sensr. cally minded, St. Simon demanded ship in all virtue, a partnership in all in all art, although he believes that ately, but also a partnership in the the sense in which Burke stattemq! was not a partnership - a partlli calico, exacdy what Burke d~ in commerce, a partnership in • industry and in the sales 0 knowledge, without whisli done at all.

I am unconfident ~ passage, but I ho seriously . solution I

NOTES TO PAGES I1S-) D ITS BBTRAYAL

WIllY capacity according to its work' lID each according to his needs' in the • ee Georg G. Iggers, The Cult ofAuthore, 19S8), p. lSI, note ).

127

129

uman souls' "on the role of Soviet writers made at Maxim lISe on 26 October 19)2, recorded in an unpubilKdpt in the Gorky archive - K. L. Zelinsky, relei 5 I. V. Stalinym' ('A meeting of writers ') - and published for the first time, in A. Kemp-Welch, Stalin and the Literary r"zB-J9 (Basingstoke and London, t99 I), fpr this phrase see p. 1)1 (and, for the Russian ery chelovecheskikh dush', I. V. Stalin, Ukow, 1946--67) xiii 410). Gorky used the t 'human') in a 19)4 speech to the Writers' letarian State must bring up thousands of of culture·, Dengineers of the soul"'. 'the phrase dates back to the early 1920S, made analogies with engineering in :DE the writer.

'You are an aspect of me' Literally 'you are an asp~ct of my L1~, aIIlU. . . of yours'. See P. Enfantm .and H. S~nt:-lilllll'" I'homme: physi%gle relJgleuse (Pans, 18SI), p 'There is one thing I wish to say to you' All except the first sentence of this 'quotlUUlll: next is taken from Reybaud, op. cit. (note to p I 'Ris~, M. Ie Comte'), p. 84· See also 'Notices biIIllII1I Saint-Simon', Oeuvres i 121-2. (The fim injunction in the first se.ntence. see~ to be Christian pnnclple, which Samt-Sunon endlOll" which appears not to have been anributed to biD death-bed.)

Maistre 1)1

'a fierce absolutist' Emile Faguet, Po/itiques et moralistes siecle, 1st series (Paris, 1899), p. 1 'his Christianity is terror' ibid., p. 59·

"on,.

.pm, but of things y of putting it is due • drich Engels, Werke m the translation in Works (London, : 'In 1816, ence of proof politics

..

'a slightly touched-up paganism' ibid. ('un paganisme un peu -netlllJ1 'Praetorian of the VaticQ;' ibid., p. 60.

'Christianity of t:!.I'1l~

S. Rocheblave, ~,tUll''''; d'histoire et de ph

NOTES TO PAGES

ITS BETRAYAL

oE

'Ia secte' i 4°7, vUi 91, 222, 223. 268. 283, 191 d':~estable qui ne don jamais'), 311 - 12• 336, 34f, ,

the eighteenth-century philos o_

(New Haven. 1932) by Carl L. Becker.

'Who is this inexplicable being?' iv P-3' The reference for the Biblical quotation at of this passage IS I Samuel 2: 8.

aiD of living nature' otations from Maisue are to Oeuvre; de M"utre (Lyon, 1884-7 and later IOns). The reference for this quotation is

'It is as if aU his works' Letter of 8 October 1834 to the Comtesse de Senf&: 2)38 in Felicile. de Lam~nnais. Correspo".tl4nce I ed. Louis Ie GUlllou (Pans, 1971-81). at VI 3°7.

of intoxication' ISO

lSI carnivorous sont nes carnivores. et panout ils ~t aussi juste.' op. cit. (note to absolutist'), p. 41.

13 6-P

the perpetual hideous grin iv 208-9: 'Ce rictus epouvantable. courant d'une I'autre, et ces levres pincees par la crueUe maliu'. 'The principle of the sovereignty of the people' ix 494·