Defining postmodernism

In the last quarter of the twentieth century the concept of postmodernism, and the associated notion of postmodernity, became a principal focus of discussion in philosophy, cultural analysis, and social and political theory. The notion of ‘postmodernism’ had originally emerged in an aesthetic context, at least as long ago as the 1930s, but the term was only used sporadically until the boom in its scope and currency from the mid-1970s onwards. This popularisation began in the domain of architecture, where the adjective ‘postmodern’ was employed to characterise the rebellion against the technocratic functionalism of the ‘international style’ which was then under way (Jencks 1991 [1978]). But from here its use spread rapidly, first to describe new developments in literature, painting and other artistic media, and then to characterise a whole range of social and cultural developments which were assumed to represent a break with the defining practices and styles of thought of the modern era. Indeed, for some of its more enthusiastic proponents, the emergence of postmodernism signalled nothing less than the transition to a new historical epoch, beyond modernity.

This epochal significance of the postmodern was given an influential pioneering formulation by the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in his book, La condition postmoderne (The Postmodern Condition), first published in 1979. Part of the success of this work, which presented a series of provocative and fertile ideas rather than a carefully constructed argument, was due to the compactness with which Lyotard defined his key term. For Lyotard, the postmodern condition was characterised by the delegitimation of ‘grand narratives’, or ‘incredulity toward meta-narratives’ (Lyotard 1984, pp. 37–41, xxiv). On his account, the grand schemata of historical progress and social development stemming from the Enlightenment, whether liberal or Marxist in inspiration, had finally lost all credibility.

There is a widely shared albeit arguably mistaken view that ‘ecological’ or ‘green’ political thought is of relatively recent vintage, being a product of the political turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s which saw the emergence of die Grünen in Germany and green parties in Britain and France, the publication of important environmental exposés and warnings, and symbolised by the first Earth Day in 1970. But modern green thought is older still, representing a confluence of several different streams of thought and sensibility. Some have detected the first stirrings of environmental concerns as early as the sixteenth century (Thomas 1984). Others trace the first glimmerings of a green sensibility to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Romantic movement, with their acute appreciation of mountains, dark forests and wild nature. Others find the first stirrings of an ‘ecological’ perspective in the writings of the young Marx, with his vision of the symbiotic interdependence of man and nature (Parsons 1977). Or, more broadly, one might take note of the ecological emphases of German thinkers since the time of Goethe who, with his holistic, anti-reductionist view of nature, so greatly influenced not only German Romanticism but the biological sciences, as well as later German greens such as Rudolf Bahro and Petra Kelly. British environmental thinking was spurred by reactions to the industrial revolution, with its ‘dark satanic mills’ threatening to overtake the green countryside, and has also been greatly influenced by such Romantic nature-poets as William Wordsworth and by the naturalist Charles Darwin, amongst others whose thinking has influenced modern British greens.

Four points of clarification are needed about the theme of this chapter and the title itself. First, from a non-Western perspective the twentieth century could be said to begin in 1905 when Japan defeated Russia, an event that destroyed the widespread myth of European invincibility and was celebrated by millions from China to Peru, or in 1918 when the savagery of the First World War, or what non-Europeans call a European civil war, shook their lingering belief in the cultural superiority of Europe. From a non-Western perspective, the twentieth century has not yet ended and would only do so when their agenda of cultural and economic decolonisation is completed and full equality with the West is attained. Since the beginning and the end of the twentieth century are matters of historical judgement and hence contestable, I have taken the safer route of defining it in strictly chronological terms.

Second, the lives of non-Western political thinkers do not all fall neatly within the twentieth century. Some of them continued to live well into the twentieth century but published nothing or little of substance after 1900. I ignore such writers and concentrate on those who published most or at least some of their major works in the twentieth century and participated in its intellectual life.

The twentieth century witnessed the birth of the first global order the world has known. Few would dispute that the forces of imperialism and nationalism have played a major part in bringing this world into existence. The role played by political ideas about these concepts is more contentious, if only because there has seldom been agreement about what they mean, let alone their practical importance. It is the purpose of this chapter to suggest some of the ways in which ideas and events have interacted in the making and breaking of modern empires and nation states.

In outline, the story is quickly told. At the end of the nineteenth century the world was dominated by a few major powers, whose governments were engaged in territorial, economic and ideological expansion. In the United States and Russia, expansion involved consolidating their control of the North American and Eurasian continents respectively, without significant opposition, at least until the Russians were stopped in their tracks by Japan in 1904. Elsewhere, imperial competition brought the great powers to the verge of war, although in the end they drew back from the brink, most famously in the case of Africa, where the continent was divided at the 1884 Congress of Berlin, in the interests of preserving the balance of power and European peace. This phase of international history ended with the First World War. For the previous century, however, European energies were engaged in every corner of the globe, with little regard for the interests or cultural sensitivities of the local inhabitants.

In this concluding chapter I ask what story can be told about the overall framework of political thought across the twentieth century. I shall explore Hobsbawm’s suggestion, cited in the epigraph above, by applying it to politics and asking how political issues and conflicts over them were thought about in the course of the century. In particular, I shall focus on the idea, or metaphor, of political space as divided between left and right, examine its formal features, trace its history over the span of the last century and ask whether, and if so when and why, the old left–right maps and charts have lost their applicability.

A preliminary word should be said about Hobsbawm’s cartographic analogy. ‘Maps and charts’ do not, of course, relate to our singular and collective lives as geographical maps and nautical charts relate to landscapes and seas. They enter and partly shape such lives.We live and act by them: they partly constitute what they map and chart. Furthermore, ‘left’ and ‘right’ are classifications that are both cognitive and symbolic: they promise understanding by interpreting and simplifying the complexities of political life and they stimulate emotions, awaken collective memories and induce loyalties and enmities.

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.