Justin_S wrote:I'm not a communist, and I'm not entirely sure why I'm getting into a debate about communism—maybe I'm playing devil's advocate?—but sure, why not.
Apologies, it was not my goal to pigeonhole anyone into any category of belief; the 'Communist' comment was more to demonstrate that simple swipes at someone's worldview are very easy and to playfully respond in kind.
Justin_S wrote:Not to get all metaphysical here, but if all we see is the subjective side of reality—the part filtered through our characteristically human powers of extrapolation, pattern-finding, etc.—then wouldn't a model be ideal? In history there are trends, there are material circumstances surrounding the production and consumption of ideas, and if we can match the material circumstances to the ideas, aren't we in a better place than where we'd be if we assumed history is just atomistic chaos?
The question isn't really one of whether models help to describe, explain, even predict history—as these are all possible—the question is one of which models are appropriate for which situations.
No worries, let's get metaphysical
by and large I agree with you here. Yes, models are ideal; they are the best way for us to make approximations of our environment and understand concepts. But they are also simplifications and highly limited to spheres in which they're applicable. Historicism, in my view, makes a mockery of this. The notion that there are necessarily clear-cut stages of human development that proceed in a given order (Feudalism-Capitalism-Socialism-Communism or what have you) is looking at the use of models to understand history by dividing it into eras (one could understand the history of empires in the Mediterranean, perhaps, by dividing it into the Phoenician, Carthaginian-Roman, and Roman eras, for instance) but then taking that model entirely literally and believing it to be a law of human development. It's an application of the someone else's subjective view to the objective (and not simply a subjective interpretation of the objective).
Hegel was the champion of historicism, of course, moreso than Marx, though Marx's interpretation of stages of human development is the one that's stuck. Speaking of...
Justin_S wrote:This just strikes me as a really bad reductio ad absurdum; you'll find few communists defending Rousseau, and none need to believe in what you see as his conflation of power and freedom. To say Marx's thought is based in Rousseau isn't to say that Marx is only as correct as Rousseau, because they're not necessarily making the same assertions, and in fact they're very, very different.
That's a fair interpretation. I didn't really provide good details regarding what I meant here. What I meant was that Rousseau's
Social Contract was a pivotal work in modern political theory that had some damning flaws, many of which were picked up by those he influenced and some of which, I believe, are evident in the works of Hegel and Marx after him.
I like to think of Rousseau as the ancients' answer to Hobbes. Where Hobbes bucked tradition and imagined human affairs as artificial constructs between equal beings, Rousseau's work was a return to form; human association is a very natural thing, and though it's been corrupted by unjust governments, we can work together to create a more human Commonwealth. This is a nice goal, but the way Rousseau imagines this Commonwealth coming into being has some bizarre elements and many of these elements found their way into the work of philosophers that followed him.
FreedomI think you're right that few Communists would defend Rousseau given that his work touches on the exploitation of Capitalism in only the vaguest terms, though I do believe that the essence of Rousseau's understanding of freedom, and its conflation with power, makes its way into Marx's thought. Very briefly, Rousseau's conception of freedom is positive, a belief in "freedom to" rather than "freedom from". He first mentions this in the beginning of
Social Contract when he famously asserts that "Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains". He follows up by describing how convention has the power to shape people in negative ways and that while the basic unit of the family is natural, the behemoth of the state establishes convention in which people become used to and accept servitude, though it's not natural (he writes that a person "can alienate his liberty and make himself the slave of a master" which is not dissimilar to how Marx imagines people to be alienated from their labor by the imposition of Capitalism).
Where this becomes a problem is where the nuances of freedom and power become their own, independent of the other concept. Whereas freedom is the lack of impositions in one's way, power is the ability to assert one's will over other objects and actors in their environment (I am free from any objects blocking my way, so I have the power to walk down this road). However, power becomes quite dangerous when other individuals are involved but this can be easily overlooked in Rousseau's theory. His solution is to form a Commonwealth wherein the Sovereign is simply the General Will, which everyone will recognize is in their mutual best interest to submit to and participate in; even if it goes against their personal desires for a moment. This may not be stable at the beginning and the General Will must be active to ensure that it is maintained and adhered to. Thus, when individuals desire to act contrary to the General Will, the collective must act to ensure "that he will be forced to be free; for this is the condition which, by giving each citizen to his country, secures him against all personal dependence". By refusing to acknowledge the danger that comes with accumulating power and assuming freedom to be an innate human condition rather than a lack of impositions, Rousseau has created a Commonwealth of false consensus where the coercive power he decries and claims to be illegitimate is the foundation of his rigidly homogenous social order. Anything contrary to his ideal state is coercion and everything within it is freedom. Rousseau's positive freedom is a quality, while power is a dynamic.
I would argue that this is problem is present in Marx's thought, only applied to his understanding of labor. He believes that under the Capitalist system, workers are alienated from their work, from the products of their labor, from their fellows, and from themselves. This indicates, similar to Rousseau's thought, that he believed in a fundamental state of freedom; a quality that people naturally have, but which is taken from them by the exploitative forces of Capitalism. This is not to say that Capitalism isn't exploitative-- it is-- but it's exploitative because the power dynamic between the bosses and the workers is massively imbalanced and seeks to become more imbalanced in pursuit of profit. The workers are not "free from" the whims of the boss in any meaningful way, regardless of what they would otherwise be "free to" do. However, Marx believes that the Capitalist system must necessarily give way to revolution, following which would be an ideal Socialist or Communist system and between which would be a dictatorship of the proletariat who would shape the social institutions necessary to establish and maintain such a system; very similar to Rousseau's assertion that the General Will must rule in the perfect society and that said society must find a great Legislator to lead them there. In both cases, the desire for the equivalent of a philosopher-king is present to shape the new society and lead it in its first steps forward. However, the problem of the benevolent despot is that rather than fundamentally change the system, you've simply shuffled the deck; now a new class has an inordinate amount of power and the same imbalances that led to exploitation and oppression are still present. This is why the distinction between freedom and power are important.
General WillI think I've said enough about the Rousseauian/Marxist conception of freedom that my issues with the idea of a General Will should be obvious but I'll outline them here anyway. I think the fundamental flaw in the idea of Rousseau's General Will is the simple fact of individuality: that we're all operating in our own minds and with our own conceptions of the world and reality, and unifying those things in any meaningful way requires access to what another person is thinking which is an impossibility. It is that lack of certainty which requires the existence of some form of government; a set of laws that we can agree to abide by and thus have greater confidence in the actions of our fellows. If it were possible to breach that barrier of personhood, the rule of the General Will might be possible, but ultimately, we are not ants. Any supposed Sovereignty of the General Will ultimately ends up being whatever the Legislator (in charge of guiding the society) interprets the General Will to be, which is a recipe for corruption, dictatorship, and civil war.
I think that Marx's transition from Capitalism, to dictatorship of the proletariat, to Socialism (or Communism or what have you) is in the same vein of thought. The end result is one in which social agreement and mutual empowerment are so strong that no state is needed; in the meantime, the dictatorship of the proletariat will identify and eliminate the abuses of the Capitalist system. However, the abuses of one proletarian are not the abuses of another and the method of elimination for the greater good can mean a multitude of different things. Finally, what the end goal of Socialism will look like will be different for each person and when to relinquish power is decided by those in the position of power. Again, the fundamental imbalance of power has not been addressed and the system is prone to corruption, dictatorship, and civil war.
Sovereign...well, I more or less addressed this issue in the last two brackets. My goal was to separate out the various issues I had to make my response easier to skim over, but the fact that they're interconnected made that a bit tricky. Hopefully I've fleshed out my thoughts a bit more and in a way that makes more sense.
TL;DR: To address specifically the lineage that appeared
reductio ad absurdum, that of Rousseau-Kant-Hegel-Marx, my issue is with 1) Rousseau's conflation of power and freedom where his definition of 'freedom' essentially means 'power to what is good': a more, base, primitive form of human nature that he believes exists (despite good and evil being subjective concepts), 2) Kant's argument in favor of the 'categorical imperative', or objective morality, further reinforcing the idea of a fundamental, objective good, 3) Hegel's attempt to build a perfect state and understanding of human affairs which is radically autocratic, built both off of the idea of an objective morality (Kant) and the idea of the nuclear family as a self-evident base unit of society (Rousseau), and 4) Marx's historicism, built out of Hegel's desire for a perfect state that would reach an 'end of history', and whose process is ultimately very similar to Rousseau's perfect Legislator that would interpret and unify the General Will (and Marx
was interested in Rousseau's ideas). I think that in each of these philosophers' thought you can find influence from the previous ones, all of which include an assumption about a fundamental perfect state for humanity and predict a perfect ruler (whatever form that might take) that will guide the masses to perfect harmony with one another.
Hopefully this doesn't come off as needlessly verbose and hopefully it makes sense. This was fun! It's always good to have an opportunity to review personal beliefs and be made to defend them.
Liberalism is just a more sophisticated approach to class warfare. Liberalism is basically just conscience laundering, it's skulduggery with smug.
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