Throughout the twentieth century, the feminist movement has been made up of shifting and more or less closely connected groups, united by the conviction that women are unfairly disadvantaged by comparison with men. While this minimal consensus contributes to an understanding of feminism as an enduring position, it exists alongside great internal diversity. The normative conception of disadvantage around which consensus revolves stands in need of analysis and has in fact been interpreted in strikingly divergent ways, giving rise to a variety of feminisms, some of them with conflicting goals and theoretical commitments. Feminism is therefore internally complex, but the divisions within it can be traced to enduring disputes and differences.

One of these sources of conflict concerns the relation between theory and practice. During the first quarter of the century, feminism gained much of its identity from a series of political campaigns aimed at improving the lives of at least some women, and in many quarters it has continued to represent itself as a practical programme striving for social and political reform. Like any movement which challenges the status quo, it depends on a critical kind of theorising – on an ability to expose the limitations or inconsistencies of established principles in order to undermine the practices that flow from them. Within feminism, however, critical theorising of this sort has sometimes developed a degree of autonomy that has separated it from practical politics, and this in turn has led to divisions between feminists concerned with immediate political change, and those with more abstract philosophical interests (Barrett 1980, pp. 201–19; hooks 1984, pp. 17–31; Yeatman 1994, pp. 42–53). But although the balance between these two preoccupations varies, they are rarely completely disjoined.

The analysis of fascist political thought is a difficult task for several reasons. The political genus of fascism is itself poorly defined, and the conclusion has sometimes been advanced that fascism primarily represented a form of praxis, inherently non-ideological and without formal thought or programme. Moreover, as early as 1923 there developed a growing tendency to generalise beyond the initial Italian example and apply the term ‘fascism’ or ‘fascist’ to any form of rightwing authoritarian movement or system. More broadly yet, Soviet Stalinists began to apply the term, usually hyphenated with some additional adjective, to any and all rivals. By the 1930s fascist had sometimes become little more than a term of denigration applied to political foes, and this usage as a very broad and vague pejorative has continued to the present day.

A limited consensus has nonetheless emerged among some of the leading scholars in the study of fascism, who use the term to refer to a group of revolutionary nationalist movements in Europe between the two world wars, first in the cases of the Italian Fascist and German National Socialist parties and then in the cases of their clearest counterparts in other European countries. This limited consensus tends to agree that specific movements bearing all or nearly all of the same common characteristics did not exist prior to 1919 and have not appeared in significant form in areas outside Europe or in the period after 1945 (Griffin 1998, pp. 1–16).

New ways to comprehend and control politics have been prophesied for the last half-millennium. Machiavelli blazed a ‘new route’ to traverse Renaissance statecraft. Hobbes constructed a new ‘civil science’ to pacify the revolutionary 1640s. Hume anticipated the novelty of the Enlightenment enterprise ‘to reduce politics to a science’. Adams conjured a ‘divine science of politics’ to consecrate a constitutional order without precedent. Hamilton heralded the ‘vast improvements’ and ‘wholly new discoveries’ in ‘the science of politics’ for post-revolutionary republics. Tocqueville foresaw ‘a new political science … for a world itself quite new’. The pattern continues into the third millennium, marking more than a century since the academic discipline of political science emerged in the 1880s. A ‘new science of politics’ was anticipated in the 1920s and 1930s, and was followed by a ‘behavioural revolution’ in the 1950s and 1960s. The conceptions of science backing these anticipatory ‘new’ schemes varied considerably, as did the political contexts within which they developed and the political projects to which they contributed.

The twentieth-century chapter in the venerable new science of politics is best understood, in its political dimensions, as a species of democratic theory, marked by increasingly technical methods and a healthy dose of realism about power, propaganda and public opinion. It is less famous than those grand ‘isms’ that have dominated twentieth-century political thought. But it intersects them, especially modernism, positivism, liberalism, socialism and fascism.

The gradual extension of the suffrage to all adult men and ultimately women too during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries transformed the politics of Western Europe and North America. Many contemporary theorists attributed these reforms not to any improvement in ordinary people’s political judgement because of better education and higher living standards, nor to a progressive appreciation of the right of all adults to be considered full citizens, but to a new social and economic reality having made such measures unavoidable. Quite simply, within a mass society political power could only be exercised with mass support. In spite of the inevitability of a widened franchise, many theorists believed deep tensions existed between the concepts of the ‘mass’ and ‘democracy’, rendering a ‘mass democracy’ almost a contradiction in terms. For the ideas of the ‘masses’ and ‘mass society’ were embedded within accounts of social organisation and behaviour that challenged the models of individual agency and rationality traditionally associated with democratic decision-making. Consequently, even democratically minded thinkers found that a coherent conception of mass democracy required a radical rethinking of the norms and forms of the democratic process (Femia 2001). This chapter traces the development of the new sociological and psychological languages of mass politics and their deployment in the construction of a modern theory of democracy. As we shall see, though still widely accepted, this theory incorporates empirical and normative assumptions arising from contentious and anachronistic views of human nature and society few would wish to espouse today.

Although conservatism in the twentieth century has yielded a diverse body of literature, it is unified by a common object of hostility: namely, the progressive view of humankind and society. The main conservative objection to this view is that it vastly exaggerates the directive power of human reason, on the one hand, and the creative power of human will, on the other. Reason, as the British conservative Michael Oakeshott maintained, is always parasitic on tradition, which it can only ever ‘abridge’ (Oakeshott 1991 [1962]). So far as the relative impotence of human will is concerned, the American thinker John P. East strikes a characteristically conservative note when he writes (in the course of a sympathetic exposition of the thought of Leo Strauss) that: ‘man is not the Creator, he is the creature; he is not the potter, he is the clay. It is then man who adapts to creation, not creation to man – to propose the latter is to propose perverting the natural order of things’ (East 1988, p. 265).

This critique of rationalism and voluntarism is supported by the conviction that twentieth-century politics is dominated by a conception of human nature which mistakenly implies that humans are malleable and perhaps perfectible creatures of infinite possibilities. Such a view permits any existing social order to be portrayed as a system of oppression, regardless of the fact that a majority of its members may support it. If conservatives generally agree on what they reject, they are less united on what they support. Traditionally, they have favoured an organic theory of society, in which individual reason and will do not construct but are produced by the social order.

Historical context

Marxism, initially the product of reflection upon the economic, social and political consequences of the industrial revolution, is firmly anchored in Europe. Its application to Asia, therefore, has been problematic – except on the view that ‘the more advanced countries simply hold up to the less advanced the mirror of their own future’ (Marx 1995, p. 12). In effect, Marxism could only make progress in Asia by adapting to two factors. First, Marxism had to come to terms with indigenous cultural values. Although not every Marxist would agree with U Ba Swe, secretary general of the Burmese Socialist Party, who claimed in 1951 that ‘Marxist theory is not antagonistic to Buddhist philosophy. The two are, frankly speaking, not merely similar. In fact they are the same in concept’ (Trager 1959, p. 11), at least some adaptation to cultural patterns and beliefs was essential. The words of Mao Zedong, ‘for the Chinese communists who are part of the great Chinese nation, flesh of its flesh and blood of its blood, any talk about Marxism in isolation from China’s characteristics is merely Marxism in the abstract, Marxism in a vacuum’ (Mao 1965–77, vol. I, pp. 209ff.), applied mutatis mutandis to all Asian Marxism. Second, Marxism arrived in Asia in support, ostensibly at least, of anti-colonialist and nationalist aspirations. Although in Marx’s more simplistic statements, the workers were considered to have no fatherland, Marxist analyses of imperialism and of nationalist movements in the non-European world became more urgent as the twentieth century progressed.

Introduction

In its nineteenth-century heyday, Marxism was an avowedly internationalist doctrine promising universal human emancipation; its twentieth-century fate, though, was to splinter under the pressure of more local concerns, and to be forced into restrictive national boundaries. In the East, Marxism became an ideology of the state; in the West, it remained outside the portals of state power, in some countries relegated to the margins of public life, in others achieving a certain cultural centrality. In France, the latter was emphatically the case.

Of all these national forms taken by Marxism in the West, the French species developed comparatively late. It came to prominence after 1945 – almost three decades after the wave of revolutionary upheaval had swept other parts of Europe. Yet after the end of the Second World War, France – or more precisely, Paris – almost overnight established itself as the most important forging house for Western ideas of revolution. The theories and ideas that emanated from the French capital gained a spectacular eminence in Marxist thought across the globe, and provoked developments that took Marxism into areas quite remote from its founding preoccupations. The history of this intellectual episode is, therefore, a vital and vivid fragment of the history of twentieth-century radical thought.

Introduction

In 1889 the Second International Working Men’s Association was formed at a congress in Paris of trade unionists and socialists from several countries. In the following decades this organisation became the forum of major debates between different kinds of socialists. The Second International was not simply a talking shop for intellectuals, however; its membership embraced mass organisations, such as the Austrian, German and Russian Social Democratic parties, the Belgian Labour Party, the French socialists, who united in 1905 to form the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvriére (SFIO), and the Italian Socialist Party (PSI). Between 1889 and 1914 Marxist intellectuals were not detached from practical party politics: socialist theory flourished hand in hand with the growth of the labour movement. Eighteen eightynine, for example, was a year of massive strikes, including the great London dock strike and industrial action on the part of thousands of miners in the Ruhr. In the next fifteen years millions of workers joined unions; a third general strike led to the introduction of universal male suffrage in Belgium; in the wake of the Dreyfus affair a socialist (Millerand) actually entered the French government; Russia experienced revolution in 1905; and the PSI gained control of local government in several cities in northern Italy shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. War. In 1910 the British Labour Party secured forty-two parliamentary seats; and just two years later the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) mobilised four million voters and over one million individual members.

The Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 marked the beginning of the global conflict between communism and capitalism that was to dominate the politics of the twentieth century and redraw the map of modern ideologies. On the mainstream left a bitter schism developed between gradualist ‘Western’ social democracy and revolutionary ‘Eastern’ communism. On the peripheries a host of splinter groupings emerged whose identities revolved around their conflicting interpretations of the Soviet experience. Socialism was, hereafter, organisationally and ideologically fractured: at war with itself.

The revolution and the Soviet experience also became, of course, the Other for many ideologies of the right and a cautionary tale for their seminal thinkers. The lapse into authoritarian or totalitarian practices was variously attributed to the pretensions of socialist states to eliminate the free market economy (Hayek 1976), their contempt for the civilising restraints of the rule of law (Friedrich 1954; Schapiro 1972) or their reckless pursuit of messianic patterns of thought that lie deep within the Western intellectual tradition (Talmon 1961; Popper 1980; Walicki, 1995).

It is clear that for both left and right the fate of revolutionary Marxism and that of the Russian Revolution were closely entwined. This chapter concerns itself with the manner in which the Bolsheviks redefined revolutionary Marxism in the twentieth century. It examines some of the disputations that surrounded the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 and the theories that were developed to justify the state-building process that then ensued.

Introduction

It is common among intellectual historians to conceive of distinct historical periods in terms of the values or world views to which these periods seem to give expression. Thus the eighteenth century is sometimes called the Age of Reason or Enlightenment, and the nineteenth the Age of Ideology or the Age of History. Raymond Aron, in a book of the same name, dubbed the twentieth century the Century of Total War (Aron 1955). Like all historical generalisations, this one seeks to capture what is fundamental – in this case, the organisation of prodigious violence and destructiveness – at the expense of developments deemed less than fundamental, however important they may be. Of course this involves certain judgements of significance. Aron was far from being alone in his assessment of what distinguishes the twentieth century.

The twentieth century has seen the perfection of revolutionary new technologies – petrochemicals, electronics, nuclear power, a ‘world wide web’ of computer networks. It has seen the emancipation of women in many parts of the world; the rise and fall of empires, the organisation of national independence movements and wars of ‘national liberation’; the rise and fall of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe; the establishment of the United Nations; the creation of the modern welfare state; and the emergence of a ‘third wave’ of liberal democratic transformation in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In the face of all of these developments, many of them undoubtedly beneficial, all of them consequential, why think of the century as a century of total war?

Introduction

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) is one of that small group of social scientists who may be said to have had a profound influence on the development of their subject as well as on the conduct of political argument and public policy. His work is accorded the singular accolade of having an entire branch of economics named after him, and his impact on the theory and practice of politics and public policy is such that we speak of ‘the Keynesian revolution’ and ‘the age of Keynes’. ‘Keynesianism’ came to prominence in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s as an approach to economic policy which focused on the management of the demand side of the economy so as to secure full employment. However, by the 1970s, the dominance of Keynesian economics in government and academia faded in the face of persistent high inflation and unemployment (‘stagflation’, as it became known). James Callaghan famously confessed to the annual conference of the Labour Party in September 1976 that the option of ‘spending your way out of recession’ no longer existed. By the 1980s, as Robert Skidelsky observed, ‘Keynes, who was praised for having saved the world from Marxism, had joined Marx as the God that failed’ (Skidelsky 1996, p. 107). This chapter shows that Keynes, despite becoming an ‘ism’, was not as dogmatic a thinker as those in the vanguard of the counter-revolution against ‘Keynesian’ economics chose to depict him. Rather he fashioned his theories from his philosophy and beliefs in response to events and problems of the day.

This, the final volume of the Cambridge History of Political Thought, attempts to provide an overview of the main currents of twentieth-century social and political thinking. It is difficult to narrate the history of political thought in any period; but to attempt to survey the history of twentieth-century political theorising in all its variety and diversity presents particular difficulties, if only because the century just ended was marked by a pervasive scepticism about the ways in which histories are narrated and an acute awareness of the many and alternative ways in which they may be constructed. The influence of Marx and Freud, amongst other theorists, has fostered ‘the hermeneutics of suspicion’, according to which nothing is ever as it appears to be, and this suspicion extends to the writing of histories, including the present one. For a start, suspicions about ideological bias are bound to arise, and these are only compounded because our contributors are narrating the history of their own time.

Born of the aspiration of Saint-Simon and Comte to cleanse science of metaphysics, ‘positivism’ came to signify the nineteenth-century desire to make natural science the sole model of knowledge, even for inquiries into human history and culture. Many thinkers, while not hostile to science or intellect as such, began to chafe at this restriction (Collingwood 1946, p. 134). In contesting the hegemony of natural science, anti-positivists typically appealed to two important forms of human experience which fell outside its domain. Some pointed to the consciousness and self-consciousness which soared above the phenomenal domain of natural science, while others unearthed the unconscious or pre-conscious aspects of mental life which lay below it.

Consciousness was celebrated by idealist philosophers as the indispensable basis of both knowledge and freedom, practically a substitute for God. Pragmatists, on the other hand, saw experience not in conscious concepts but in the ‘blooming buzzing confusion’ of the pre-conscious mind experiencing the world. Even more subversive of the consciously rational agent presupposed by idealists and positivists alike were the inquiries of writers like Nietzsche, Bergson and Freud, who evoked the many and subtle ways in which unconscious motives influence behaviour. Whether appealing to consciousness or unconsciousness, then, reactions to positivism stressed aspects of the human mind which mechanistic pictures of natural science were unable to grasp.

Three characteristics of identity politics

‘Identity politics’ came into vogue in the late twentieth century to describe a wide range of political struggles which occur with increasing frequency and constitute one of the most pressing political problems of the present. The range of political activities ‘identity politics’ refers to comprises struggles over the appropriate forms of legal, political and constitutional recognition and accommodation of the identities of individuals, immigrants and refugees, women, gays, lesbians, linguistic, ethnic, cultural, regional and religious minorities, nations within existing nation states, indigenous peoples, and, often, non-European cultures and religions against Western cultural imperialism.

The forms of recognition and accommodation sought are as various as the struggles. Feminists, gays and lesbians demand formal and substantive equality and equal respect for their identity-related differences, in opposition to dominant patriarchal and heterosexist norms of private and public conduct. Minorities seek different forms of public recognition, representation and protection of their languages, cultures, ethnicities and religions. Immigrants and refugees struggle not only for the rights of citizenship but also for freedom from assimilation to a dominant culture and language; for culturally sensitive modes of integration. Various models of regional, federal and confederal forms of self-government are advanced by suppressed nations and indigenous peoples within existing constitutional states. Nation states in the Arab and third worlds aim to overcome the continuing Western cultural imperialism of the international system of nation states and of the processes of globalisation. Many of these demands are not only for legal, political and constitutional recognition within existing nation states, but also in supranational associations such as the European Union, international law, the United Nations and by the creation of novel ‘subnational’ and ‘transnational’ institutions.