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.

General features

In this chapter we sketch a body of political thought that became predominant in the second half of the twentieth century among academic political philosophers, primarily in the English-speaking world, but increasingly elsewhere, too. To call this type of political thought ‘analytical’ may not be particularly revealing, but no other term better describes the movement in question. Sometimes ‘liberal political theory’ is used, and there is indeed a close connection between analytical theory and liberalism. But that label is in one way too broad and in another too narrow for this kind of political thinking: too broad because liberalism has assumed many different philosophical guises in the course of a history much longer than that of our subject; and too narrow because those who engage in this kind of political theory use methods of analysis and techniques of argument that are not confined to liberals.

Indeed, the political theorists and philosophers of the analytical school often disagree sharply over questions of practical politics, and some have embraced positions, such as Marxism, that have been historically hostile to liberalism. They form a school not because of a common ideological stance, then, but because of certain shared assumptions about the aims and methods of political thought. These assumptions fall under the following five headings.

Introduction

The character of Marxism in Europe during the middle of the twentieth century was profoundly marked by the collapse of the Second International in 1914 and by the defeat of the working-class movements in Western Europe in the following two decades. This collapse meant that the centre of gravity of Marxist thought initially moved east, where it was soon suppressed by the rise of Stalin. Unlike the previous generation of Marxist theoreticians, most of the thinkers grouped under the rubric of ‘Western’ Marxism were not important figures in political parties. They tended to be academics rather than activists, writing in a period of declining working-class activity and therefore in comparative isolation from political practice. Thus philosophy, epistemology, methodology and even aesthetics bulk larger in their works than do politics or economics – though all were insistent on the political implications of even their most abstruse writings. In a period when parliamentary democracy became normal throughout the advanced capitalist countries and their economies enjoyed a period of unprecedented growth, an atmosphere of resigned pessimism spread among many Marxist intellectuals – a pessimism that was not alleviated by considering the repressive nature of Soviet bureaucracy. Geographically, Marxist thought was concentrated in Germany, France and Italy, countries with large Communist parties. Whereas Marx started with philosophy and moved to economics, the typical thinkers of Western Marxism have moved in the opposite direction and in some cases sought inspiration in philosophers anterior to Marx – Spinoza, Kant and, above all, Hegel.

Since the start of the modern political era, if not longer, most people in almost all countries have believed that the incidence of international war is most likely to be reduced if countries repudiate aggression yet maintain armed forces, and if necessary also military alliances, strong enough to stop others being tempted into expansionism by the prospect of easy pickings – a deterrent stance whose credibility requires a perceived willingness to fight.

This majority viewpoint is here labelled ‘defencism’ because it regards national defence efforts as the best prophylactics against war and believes that self-defence is a sufficient justification for fighting (Ceadel 1987, ch. 5). Its rejection of aggression distinguishes it both from militarism, which glorifies fighting and believes that the conquest of weak states by strong ones advances civilisation, and from crusading, which believes that aggressive force is justified where by promoting justice it ultimately contributes to peace (Ceadel 1987, chs. 3 and 4). Frequently summed up by the Latin tag si vis pacem, para bellum (‘if you want peace, prepare for war’), defencism was generally treated by its supporters as a self-evident truth until early in the Cold War when a ‘realist’ school of academic students of international relations began to articulate its intellectual assumptions in order to justify them. However, it has long been associated with an ethical tradition which has attempted to delimit the circumstances in which a ‘just war’ can be declared (jus ad bellum) and the methods of fighting which can be used in its name (jus in bello) (Johnson 1975; 1981).

Modern social theory offers three main models of the state: an instrumentalist, a realist and a pluralist. These models can be respectively represented by the names Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. Of those three theorists, perhaps only Marx can claim to be a key originator of ‘his’ model of the state. In Weber’s political sociology the influence of political realism stretching back at least as far as Machiavelli and Hobbes is quite transparent. Furthermore, while rejecting any form of socialism and what he took to be the economic reductionism of Marxist theory, Weber nevertheless sought to retain elements of a materialist methodology denuded of its original political aim. Finally, Weber’s conception of power as an expression of will, and his view of both politics and society as increasingly rationalised (and ‘disenchanted’) and as sites of eternal struggle owe a great deal to his reading of Nietzsche. His achievement might be described as one of synthesising elements of realism, materialism and nihilism, and of translating these into the language of the modern social sciences. In Durkheim’s political sociology the influence of both French and German political theory is no less evident. His view of the state as the deliberative organ of political societies and as the guardian of their conscience collective echoes Rousseau’s general will, French socialist thought (in particular Saint–Simon’s) and Comte’s positivist approach to the study of society. Moreover, his emphasis upon the normative role of secondary associations (as both a source of identity and as a counter-balance to the growing power of the state) has precedence not only in Montesquieu and Tocqueville, but also in those German political theorists who tried to rescue elements of the ‘Standestaat’ (polity of estates) for a modern pluralist society. Durkheim’s objective was to use scientific method to show how the individual and the social, the value of freedom and the requirement of solidarity, might be reconciled.