Understanding Marx is key to understanding the political and economic waters that have gotten us to where we are today, and leads to a big question: do we still live in Marx’s world?

He was a towering intellect. One contemporary said, ‘Imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel fused into one person . . . and you have Dr. Marx’.

Another said, ‘Marx himself was the type of man who is made up of energy, will and unshakeable conviction.’

Marx’s life was one of exile, secret societies, intense study, and poverty. Without judgement or bias, we’ll try and unpack his most important ideas, before returning to some common criticisms at the end.

Because many misunderstand Marx or at least don’t understand what he was truly saying. Many associate him with communism, about which he actually had little to say. What he really sought to understand was capitalism, commerce, markets, industrialisation and technological progress, and questions about what makes us truly human.

Marx absorbed and thought through all the trends and ideas around him. But what was most new in Marx was that it wasn’t thinkers that would change the world, but action by ordinary people.

To understand what that really means we have to go on a journey across history – from churches and fields to factories and cities. We need to understand where he was coming from.

Contents:

• Inverting Hegel’s Ideas
• Alienation
• The Economic Turn and Dialectical Materialism
• The Communist Manifesto (1848)
• Capital
• Use and exchange/Commodity
• Labour Theory of Value
• Money: Commodity Fetishism
• Surplus Value
• Forces, Relations, Bases, and Superstructures
• Technology and Productivity
• Class Struggle X Revolution
• Communism
• Conclusion

Inverting Hegel’s Ideas

Marx was a great synthesizer of the trends, movements, and ideas around him. He was born in 1818 in Prussia, modern day Germany, just after the French Revolution, Napoleon, and the spread of new liberal ideas about rights and freedom. New science, industries and factories were spreading across Europe. It was a time of unprecedented dynamic change.

Change is key to Marx. And to understand change there was no better person to turn to than Georg Hegel. He had argued that all previous moments in history were the unfolding of ideas, concepts, truth, dialectically, moving us forward.

I’m simplifying here, but for Hegel, this truth was an idea – idealism – images and words and concepts that led, slowly across history, to a greater understanding of the world and the universe, better political systems, more freedom.

The source of all of this, ultimately for Hegel, was god.

Hegel was still alive when Marx was young. But to young radical admirers, Hegel had become a dull conservative figure. He believed in progress, in rights, in freedom, but he also believed in order, in monarchy, and in religion. To a younger generation, these were oppressive forces.

A loose group of young intellectuals called the Young Hegelians emerged, who were influenced by Hegel but sought to go further than their old master. They were much more republican, liberal, and democratic.

Over time, they mostly got more radical, tending towards revolution rather than reform.

This was a century of reform and revolutions – minor and major, successful and failed, from America to Germany. The problem was many radicals in Europe didn’t really know what to replace the old aristocratic system with.

The Young Hegelians started with religion. They attempted to remove god from Hegel’s system. Two thinkers in particular – Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach – were the most influential critics of religion of the time.

Hegel had argued that the unfolding of history was the product of God revealing himself through time. That we are all products of, the creation of, god, and slowly come to know the universe, science, the world better and so, in a way, return to god expansively.

But to the Young Hegelians, this positions ideas as kind of up there, above us, transcendent, unfolding down to us.

In other words, we imagine a god that is the creator of us, all powerful, that directs and guides us, but is also unreachable. 

Feuerbach argued that when people did this, they were projecting. God is the sum total of the imaginative powers of our species projected onto some all powerful being. Instead, we should recognise this for what it is – our imagination. Religion is ‘the dream of the spirit’ he said. It actually disempowered us by displacing all our thoughts onto some supreme being, instead of attributing them to us as a powerful species.

In his book on Marx, political theorist Alexander Callinicos writes, ‘Feuerbach argued that Hegel had turned something that is merely the property of human beings, the faculty of thought, into the ruling principle of existence. Instead of seeing human beings as part of the material world, and thought merely as the way they reflect that material world, Hegel had turned both man and nature into mere reflections of the all-powerful Absolute Idea.’

In other words, by attributing our ideas to something outside of the world, particularly as supernatural religious phenomena, we alienated something within ourselves. It means our thoughts are not ours – it falsely presents them as coming from god – in the form of commandments, origin stories, church and political authority. It holds us back.

Fredrich Engels – Marx’s lifelong friend and collaborator – wrote that Feuerbach “placed materialism on the throne again”. He reminded us that ideas are the products of real human lives.

Bruno Bauer was even more radical. He argued that by asserting that the world was the product of god’s will, we justified the world as it was. Poverty? God’s will. King’s and despots? God’s will. Religion obstructed change.

From Bauer, Marx would develop his famous idea that religion was the opium of the masses. It says yes life is hard but that’s gods will and you’ll be rewarded in the afterlife, rather than encouraging a more progressive idea of history.

Now, here’s the important part. These young Hegelians were still Hegelians, meaning they were interested in ideas, they believed in the power of ideas. You just need the right ones, the better ones, the more truthful ones, to battle the old, repressive, wrong ones.

Another young Hegelian – the early anarchist Max Stirner – argued that bad ideas were spooks – bad thoughts that haunt the mind.

Marx criticised this approach. There are two significant early works here – On the Jewish Question published in 1843 and The German Ideology published in 1845. 

It’s all well and good advocating for religious freedom, property rights, liberal ideas like freedom of speech– but all of it, in the end, leaves the real physical, material lives of ordinary people untouched.

For Marx that wasn’t enough because, ‘once the holy form of human self-alienation has been unmasked, the first task of philosophy, in the service of history, is to unmask self-alienation in its unholy forms. The criticism of heaven is thus transformed into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.’

Many – including Hegel and Rousseau before him – thought the state could be above society, neutral, general, negotiating fairly between different interests. But like the Young Hegelian critique of religion being too up there, Marx saw the same argument applying to the state.

The French and American Revolutions had made the claims that everyone was equal – in freedoms, before the law, in speech – and that this political equality emancipated people.

As the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski puts it in his book on Marxism: ‘purely political and therefore partial emancipation is valuable and important, but it does not amount to human emancipation.’

But what does emancipation really mean if some had nothing, were starving, had no land or means or resources, were taken advantage of?

Marx wrote that a liberal revolution would liberate only as, ‘an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprices, and separated from the community’. Instead, a social revolution could offer “human emancipation”.

He thought that the Declaration of the Rights of Man was a ‘big step forward, but is not the final form of human emancipation.’

He continued: ‘just as the Christians are equal in heaven, but unequal on earth, so the individual members of the nation are equal in the heaven of their political world, but unequal in the earthly existence of society’.

Politics must become concrete. Marx asks how can liberty just mean the right to not be interfered with, to acquire as much property as possible? What does this kind of liberty mean if you have nothing?

Marx writes: ‘None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society, that is, an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, and separated from the community.’

In our time, all of the inaccessibility of politics, the talking in parliaments, the debates and the distractions, the dramas and sensationalist press, all pull away from the real material issues in people’s lives. This is what Marx was starting to get at.

He was beginning to, in his own words, invert Hegel – bring his ideas down to the gritty, dirty, physical, hard earth.

In The German Ideology Marx criticised his Young Hegelian contemporaries for believing that ideas can change the world. This was ideology – it distorted thinking and concealed the real issues.

Kolakowski writes: ”Ideology’ in this sense is a false consciousness or an obfuscated mental process in which men do not understand the forces that actually guide their thinking, but imagine it to be wholly governed by logic and intellectual influences.’

Again, it ignores material, sensory, physical life.

For Marx, freedom, progress, should be understood as “power, as domination over the circumstances and conditions in which an individual lives”.

Ridiculing idealism, ideology, the idea that ideas are dominant, Marx quips that, ‘Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to get this notion out of their heads, say by avowing it to be a superstitious, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water.’

Summing up his critique of the Young Hegelians, Marx famously wrote: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’

Alienation

The Romantics were another influence on Marx. They had argued, just a generation or so before him, that much about modern life, industry, and politics seemed to separate us from what they saw as a kind of natural wholeness.

In fact, Marx was a romantic in his early years. Like many others now and then, he wrote bad romantic poetry in his twenties. He came to the Romantics primarily through Hegel.

Hegel took the idea of unity and completeness from them. That a person should be able to develop themselves fully – three dimensionally – in relationship with the world around them, rather than feel disconnected from it.

In another words, Romanticism was about a striving towards completeness, towards being at home in the world.

The opposite of this was alienation, feeling estranged, disconnected from the world. Hegel said that individuals are in a “torn and shattered condition.”

Marx had a complicated relationship with this idea. He hated Hegel when he was young, accused him of mystification and obscurantism. But he came back to him, turned him upside down, and some say, as we’ll get to, abandoned him later on.

Either way, understanding alienation is fundamental as it was central to Marx’s development, and to many of the critiques of the modern world at the time and since.

So what is it? In his book on alienation, the philosopher Richard Schacht points to several definitions. According to one, alienation is ‘avoidable discontent’. Another is that it’s a feeling ‘which accompanies any behavior in which the person is compelled to act self-destructively.’ Another is that alienation points to ‘some relationship or connection that once existed, that is ‘natural,’ desirable, or good, has been lost.’

But the word that comes up most in the early Marx is ‘estranged’ – hinting at something that is no longer close.

It comes up in several ways. First money is alienating because it’s a stand-in for the real social relationships that are hidden underneath. It disconnects us from them and hides them. It becomes an ‘alien medium’ instead of people being the mediators – it separates us. Money is ‘men’s estranged, alienating and self-disposing species-nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind’.

But labour is ‘estranged’ and alienated too. What workers do all day is for someone else on something for someone else. What they’re doing is out of their control, they are estranged from it.

Even their own bodies can become alien to them, as they’re forced to sell their own labour to stay alive. I like to think of it as a zombified state, on the factory line, doing something for no good reason except to afford to stay alive. Marx says the object the labourer produces ‘confronts’ as ‘something alien’ something ‘independent’ which stands ‘over and against’ them.

Kolakowski writes: ‘the alienation of labour is expressed by the fact that the worker’s own labour, as well as its products, have become alien to him. Labour has become a commodity like any other’.

On top of that, the division of labour means workers don’t even work on or understand the entire product. They’re divided into small, disconnected parts. 

Marx writes: ‘Not only is the specialized work distributed among the different individuals, but the individual himself is divided up, and transformed into the automatic motor of a detail operation, thus realizing the absurd fable of Menenius Agrippa, which presents man as a mere fragment of his own body’.

Capitalism he says, converts the ‘worker into a crippled monstrosity.’

In On the Jewish Question Marx writes that while humans are supposedly equal in the political realm, in everyday life, the worker ‘degrades himself into a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers.’

But – and here’s the key – according to Hegel we produce, project, and create the conditions of our own alienation as a species, so then by recognising that condition, we aim and work to overcome it. In other words, that progress arises out of the discontent of alienation itself. The bad becomes the good. Negativity drives us forward.

Kolakowski writes: ‘The greatness of Hegel’s dialectic of negation consisted, in Marx’s view, in the idea that humanity creates itself by a process of alienation alternating with the transcendence of that alienation.’

But, remember, Marx flips Hegel on his head. For Hegel that process was in the realm of ideas. For Marx, it’s material – it’s about the real conditions on the ground. Who is doing what, where, for who, in what ways. It’s how alienation confronts us in physical objects and processes like money, labour, in bricks and mortar. Kolakowski writes that the ‘true starting-point is man’s active contact with nature.’

And Petrucciani says that, ‘man is not only a natural sensuous being, but that specific being which self-produces itself through historical labor, and through the dialectic of estrangement and re-appropriation that characterizes it.’

In his early writings, Marx leant heavily on the concept of alienation. Some argue he abandoned it later on as it wasn’t a rigorous enough economic concept. Some – like Louis Althusser – argue that you can divide Marx into an early stage and a latter mature one. Others like David Harvey disagree. Petrucciani, for example says that while the early ideas become more ‘precise, reformulated, and filled with contents’, they’re never abandoned.

Callinicos writes that in the early work, ‘everything is built around the contrast between human nature as it is—debased, distorted, alienated—and as it should be.’

But this begs a question: how do you know what human nature should be? Surely everyone’s different? How can you get an ought – a moral claim about the world – out of an is – how the world is. And isn’t that idealism? Exactly what Marx sought to critique in the young Hegelians?

Marx’s problem with alienation can be imagined like this. You say capitalism alienates us. I say from what? You say from our natural selves. I say, like Adam Smith did, that capitalism is natural because human beings have a natural desire to trade, exchange and barter. You say it’s not natural to work in a factory all day. I say it’s not natural to farm or wear clothes.

This is called the naturalistic fallacy. That we place an arbitrary dividing line between something natural and something not natural, when in fact, everything comes from the earth, everything changes, everyone is different.

Marx tried to get around this problem with the concept of species-being.

For Marx, there isn’t a magical spiritual natural human essence that’s repressed by modern society. Instead, he imagines human society as a whole at any given time – everything humans are doing, arguing, being – and then contrasts individuals with that. 

Marx wrote ‘the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations’. Our essence as a species – our species-being – is the totality of our economic systems, cultures, politics, our history.

What he’s saying is that we have an idea of our species in our head, our relationship to it, what’s possible, and so we can become estranged and alienated from that.

A natural society isn’t something cooked up by philosophers – like Plato did in The Republic – designed, laid out, engineered. Society is a process that’s happening right now, it’s always happening, it’s about the development of it and how we relate to it.

The philosopher Lloyd Easton writes: ‘Marx particularly warns against establishing “society” as an abstraction over against the individual. The individual is a social being as the subjective, experienced existence of society.’

What you need then is to find a process that moves from alienation to a world in which everyone is connected to, has some control over, is served by our species-being. That the individual and society are not estranged, but in development with each other. And it’s around this time that Marx starts calling himself a communist.

In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 – a set of notes not published until 1932, and maybe the least catchy title of all time (if it was a Youtube title it would be something like ‘You wont believe these 10 secrets about wealth and wisdom) – Marx wrote that communism was ‘the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being’.

Communism is the achievement of a “real community”. Under communism the “contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or individual family and the interest of all” will, according to Marx, be overcome.

Communism should be ‘the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species.’

Again, many argue the language of alienation and species-being was abandoned in the later works. Although most of the most influential commentators disagree. Kolakoski holds ‘there is no discontinuity in Marx’s thought, and that it was from first to last inspired by basically Hegelian philosophy.’

Social-being estranged, alienated, individual development repressed, then recognition, reconciliation, return, and emancipation.

The Economic Turn and Dialectical Materialism

For Marx, this new focus on material conditions, social relations, and physical life demanded a new method to understand capitalism. The old philosophy wouldn’t do. He’s fascinated by stuff not adequately captured by reflecting on ideas – wood, machines, protests. He borrows from Benjamin Franklin, for example, the notion that we’re a tool making species. That that’s what separates us from animals. Engels studies the working conditions in and around his father’s Manchester factory where he works. Both are working to bring philosophy down from the heavens.

For a long time, peasants in rural France and Germany had a traditional right to collect wood and twigs from the forest for their fires. But in the 1820s, as enclosures were happening and capitalism and property rights were expanding, laws were passed that ended these ancient rights.

Remember, Hegel and Rousseau had argued that the state, the government, could be the neutral representation of the general will, of all interests.

But in these new wood theft laws, Marx saw the obvious problem with that logic. The government, in banning the collecting of wood to keep warm by poor peasants, were taking the side of wealthy landowners over ordinary people.

In other words, the state became the vehicle for the propertied class who held economic power above all else, against ‘the poor, politically and socially propertyless.’

Engels later wrote, ‘I heard Marx say again and again that it was precisely through concerning himself with the wood-theft law and with the situation of the Moselle peasants that he was shunted from pure politics over to economic conditions, and thus came to socialism’.

It was in wood, in tools, in material that the truth of alienation could be found. If peasants and labourers were kicked off the land, if all of the countryside was enclosed in plots to farm, if the peasants had no tools or machines or money of their own, what would happen? They’d be forced to sell their own labour.

Here was a key and classic distinction – between those that had and those that had nothing. That the exclusive ownership of the tools, the means, of ownership and production was one of the keys to prosperity, to flourishing, to overcoming alienation.

This, again, was what was special about humans: we make tools – and that projection of an idea onto a material object that helps us to survive is key to our historical development.

Marx wrote, ‘The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life activity. Man makes his life activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness’.

We till, sow, fence, build, we enslave with chains, we engineer, we innovate. These are the things our lives are quite literally built around. They make up our material lives, they help us overcome our limitations, and they have a dynamic history.

Marx writes: ‘Men have history because they must produce their life, and because they must produce it moreover in a certain way: this is determined by their physical organisation; their consciousness is determined in just the same way.’

This is the basis of Marx’s materialism. That it’s our material, physical, sensory, social, productive life that matters. This may seem accepted, at least in large part, today, but when economics as a field was very new, all of this was very novel.

Most would have argued it was leadership or intelligence or great thought that determined the course of history and people’s lives – Napoleon a great military strategist, Plato the great philosopher, religion as the teachings of divine scripture. Marx was arguing to the contrary – the economy mattered most.

He wrote, ‘Men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their actual world, also their thinking and the products of their thinking. It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness’.

This led him to the nascent field of economics. His brilliance would be to combine economics with philosophy. The newspaper he had edited in Germany had been shut down, he’d moved to Paris but had been kicked out, and now he was in exile in Britain. He spent months in the British Library pouring over Adam Smith and David Ricardo, recording whatever he could find, filling notebook after notebook.

He borrowed several concepts that we’ll come to, but he was immediately critical too. From his Hegelianism Marx believed everything was connected, that no man was an island.

Adam Smith – trying to understand the logic of the new commercially driven societies developing across Europe and America – started from the assumption of natural, individual self-interest. That ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest’.

Marx hated this. He wrote ‘Production by an isolated individual outside society . . . is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without human beings living together and talking to each other’.

He called them Robinsonades – that they assumed each person was a Robinson Crusoe on his own little island.

Callinicos writes, ‘Marx criticized the political economists because they tended to treat society as a collection of isolated individuals lacking any real relation to one another, so that “the limbs of the social system are dislocated’.

Another point that immediately dissatisfied Marx was their tendency to naturalise commercial society. Smith, for example, thought humans had a ‘natural tendencies to truck , trade, and batter,’ and so the market was the natural result of that.

Again, drawing on Hegel, Marx saw this as absurd. History changed across time.

He wrote – ‘Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions; those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions.’

They failed to see how there was nothing natural about them – human societies changed over time and human life was embedded in that societal context.

He wrote ‘the sensuous world around him is not a thing given direct from eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of industry and of the state of society, and, indeed [a product] in the sense that it is a historical product, the result of the activity of a whole succession of generations, each standing on the shoulders of the preceding one’.

So this was how Marx proceeded: economics plus Hegel.

This idea of development, change, progress was the fashion of the day. In 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species.

Marx later wrote ‘Darwin has directed attention to the history of natural technology, i.e. the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which serve as the instruments of production for sustaining their life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man in society, of organs that are the material basis of every particular organization of society, deserve equal attention?’.

The key was to understand how history unfolded as a system. It wasn’t that the lion and the deer or the worker and the capitalist were just in competition with each other, separate from each other, but that they were part of the same totality, the same system, and that system had to develop and change in a connected way dialectically.

He summed up his method like this: ‘My dialectical method is, in its foundations, not only different from the Hegelian, but exactly opposite to it. For Hegel, the process of thinking, which he even transforms into an independent subject, under the name of “the Idea,” is the creator of the real world, and the real world is only the external appearance of the idea. With me the reverse is true: the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man, and translated into forms of thought’.

The Communist Manifesto (1848)

Ok, there’s a final influence that we haven’t talked about much: the utopian socialists. These were varied movements and thinkers that emerged out of the Enlightenment ideal of progress, reason, and rights – that you could, in short, plan and design a society in which the needs of everyone could be met fairly.

The first was Francois-Noel Babeuf and his conspiracy of equals. Babeuf and his followers planned a coup during the French Revolution.

His Conspiracy of Equals planned to implement absolute equality in France, with the manifesto reading: ‘We aspire to live and die equal, the way we were born: we want real equality or death; this is what we need. And we’ll have this real equality, at whatever the cost’.

Spoiler alert, Babeuf’s conspiracy didn’t end well for him.

After the French Revolution there were Saint-Simonians and Fourierists.

Henri de Saint-Simon, distrusted democracy and the ‘mob’ but was an Enlightenment figure who believed society could be organised in everyone’s interests by men of science – that the state could technocratically plan society from the top down.

Charles Fourier on the other hand argued for rational communes organised around universal principles of psychology based on different personality types who would perform different jobs. Fourier was an eccentric and influential character who thought that ideal communes would have exactly 1620 people.

In Britain and then America, Robert Owen argued that our character was influenced by our environment, and so focused on education, reform, and cooperatives.

It was in Owen’s Cooperative Magazine in 1827 that the term socialist was likely used for the first time.

Finally, during the 1848 revolutions Louis Blanc argued for a ‘dictatorship of proletariat’ – without which the forces of reaction – foreign, aristocratic, monarchical, etc – would simply retake power. He wrote that the provision government should ‘regard themselves as dictators appointed by a revolution which had become inevitable and which was under no obligation to seek the sanction of universal suffrage until after having accomplished all the good which the moment required’.

What made all of these utopian? That you could conceptualise, idealistically, a rational planned commune or society – a utopia, and build it like an engineer designing a building. This ‘utopianism’ is what Marx rejected, but he still had one foot in this tradition.

In 1836, a group of German exiles in Paris and then London formed a Communist League of the Just. Marx joined them and they changed their name to the Communist League in 1847. Marx and Engels worked up a manifesto in 1848. At almost exactly the same time, by complete coincidence, a revolution broke out in Paris, which spread across Europe. These revolutions differed from place to place and were mostly liberal, but communism was just beginning to be taken more seriously.

The Communist Manifesto began with these now famous lines: ‘A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.’

It continued: ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes’.

The Manifesto is short, the best introduction to Marx you can find, pretty easy to read, written to be popular, and contains most of Marx’s most important early ideas, ending with the famous lines: ‘workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains!’

In this early period Marx discovered the next big piece of his puzzle: the proletariat.

The bourgeoisie and the ruling classes could never be philosopher kings or just leaders in Plato’s or Hegel’s sense. No-one stands above and separate from the system like god looking down pulling the stings. The rulers are part of the system, they benefit from it, and so change has to come from elsewhere.

The proletariat – workers who must sell their alienated, estranged labour, who understand money as alienation, who work materially physically at the ground level – they are the force of change.

Petrucciani writes: ‘The proletariat is the class that lives through the most complete negation and which therefore becomes itself the subject able to deny all existing relations.’

This is why the call of the manifesto and the Communist League’s slogan was ‘Working men of all countries, unite!’ It was through this that Marx argued that the material conditions produce ideas, but then ideas can then influence material change.

Marx wrote ‘The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.’

For Marx this wasn’t a moral argument. It was a historical, economic, dialectical one – a scientific one, a matter of forces. One class was getting richer, the other immiserated. Reactionary, aristocratic, monarchical, despotic governments were holding on to power across Europe and using increasing suppressive tactics. The continent was a pressure cooker. Marx believed that real revolution would come.

He wrote, ‘revolution is possible only in the periods when both these factors, the modern productive forces and the bourgeois forms of production, come in collision with each other. . . . A new revolution is possible only in consequence of a new crisis. It is, however, just as certain as this crisis’

The Manifesto brought all of these early themes together. However, while it was initially printed thousands of times it fell into obscurity for over twenty years before becoming more influential in the 1870s. And in those twenty years, crises and slumps would come, Marx kept thinking revolution would happen, but capitalism, railways, factories, steamships, and capitalist colonialism kept on spreading.

Trade unions organised for the first time, having been banned in many countries, socialists and anarchists formed the International Working Men’s Association in 1864 – the first International.

As he waited for revolution, Marx settled down to write his magnum opus – an analysis of the entire system.

Capital

At this point, Marx is juggling quite a few of the modern ideas around him. He knows he wants to ground his work materially, but he needs a concrete place to start.

Because for him, capitalism is dynamic, dialectical, in motion. He knows it’s transformative – all that is solid, he writes, melts into air.

For this reason, it’s important to remember that Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, or Das Kapital, or simple Capital, published in 1867 is not meant as a universal truth, but a snapshot of the European capitalism of the period, and the laws that Marx thinks emerge from it.

It’s a hugely ambitious, diverse book, full of references to literature, economic and philosophical ideas, the politics and culture of the period. Furthermore, it’s the first of three volumes, the second and third left in notes at the time of Marx’s death and compiled by Engels. And on top of that, there were meant to be six volumes, looking at land, the state, and the world market.

So its impossible to do it justice. Even most of Capital’s detractors don’t deny it’s a masterpiece. Agree with its conclusions or not, reading it and understanding it is indispensable for understanding the world we live in.

The themes are varied, but the most important are these: The question of what we value, and why, what gives things their monetary value. Labour, work – what motivates it, what’s at the root of it – capital and wealth – how they function and circulate – and the forces, movements, and contradictions that arise from the relationships between all of these.

The simplest way to think of what Marx is saying is this: that capital is an impersonal force – like gravity or meteorology or mathematics – with a life of its own.

Which is why Marx believed what he was doing was science. It wasn’t speculative in the sense of philosophers thinking up ideas in dusty studies. Capital is full of references to statistics, factory routines, rich and dense descriptions of how craftsman use different instruments, pamphlets and parliamentary debates. In this sense, it’s a very modern history – drawing on lots of evidence – of 19th century capitalism.

Marx is a man of the Enlightenment. Maybe one of the last great Enlightenment ‘system builders’, inspired by people like Newton – the idea that there are scientific forces, laws of motion, at play both in the natural world and in human societies.

The key for Marx was to search around, peel away, zoom in, interrogate – like astronomers and scientists do – to find the kernel, the secret hidden truth at the core of history.

Use and exchange/Commodity

So where does Marx begin? With something that’s all around us, that’s at the core of capitalism and all of our lives, that we cannot do without and may contain some secrets – the commodity.

What is it? It’s not obvious from the surface. They’re all so different. Theres almost nothing that unites them – a bus ticket so different from an iphone, a movie on DVD from a carefully crafted table. But Marx wants to find a concept that unites them all.

He realised that first, despite all of their differences – one being food, the other being a toy – they all have a use to someone.

All commodities are useful to someone – they have a ‘use value’.

But they also have a price, an ‘exchange value’.

What Marx finds immediately interesting is that neither of these are in the commodity. They can’t be found anywhere by simply examining it, taking it apart. They’re not inherent in it. So these values must come from elsewhere. Where?

He writes: ‘We may twist and turn a single commodity as we wish; it remains impossible to grasp it as a thing possessing value.’

Ok, everything has these price tags on. So that’s where the price comes from? But where does that come from? Maybe just from that use value – how useful we find each commodity.

But everyone finds different things useful. Diamond rings aren’t that useful but are expensive. Water is very useful but is cheap. I might hate Picasso and not find his art useful, but I wouldn’t turn down someone giving me a free Picasso painting. Because I know it’s worth something else.

So what is the mysterious exchange value based on? Marx points out that if I offer my three apples for your three onions there must be some metric, some common idea, that we’re basing our appraisal of what each thing is worth on. Why is that all commodities are comparable, if they have nothing else in common. We need a kind of ruler, a measuring tape, to understand them.

The simple answer is that the price tag, or the exchange value, is the cost of producing the item. A phone costs more than apple because it’s harder to make, it takes more infrastructure, more machines, more attention, more supply chains.  If I sell you a cake I add up the cost of all of the ingredients.

But we get into an infinite regress. What determines the cost of the flour? The cost of the machines at the phone factory.

Marx says that at the base, what all of the commodities have in common is that they’re ‘products of labour.’ Commodities are ‘congealed quantities of homogeneous human labour’.

Commodities have values ‘only in so far as they are all expressions of an identical social substance, human labour’.

What he means is, yes my cake is based on the cost of flour, sugar, bowls, etc. But at every stage in their production, human labour produced each part. Even the factory walls at the phone machines were built by someone. The sugar cane had to be farmed. And so exchange value is the totality of all of that put together.

What Marx has immediately reached is the social value hidden behind the price tag. He says the object has a ‘phantom-like objectivity.’

In his great guide to Das Kapital, David Harvey writes, ‘Value is a social relation, and you cannot actually see, touch or feel social relations directly; yet they have an objective presence’.

We can bring this back to Marx’s idea about species-being. The value is something social, not individual, otherwise how would you ever get to a ‘fair’ price, a correct price, something to judge what your offer is made on. When you reject the price of something you often say something like ‘I could have made that for less than that’.

It’s a kind of hidden pattern, that connects me to the rest of society.

Like Hegel before him, it isn’t the thing that has an essential truth within, but it’s the relationships between things that matter.

Labour Theory of Value

Why does this matter? Value is a difficult idea to grasp, but it’s at the heart of almost everything. What we value is what we want more of, what we’re less likely to give away. Does how we value  food differ from how we value friendship or democracy? Does value differ across different political and economic systems? If we can get to the bottom of how and why we value things we can use that as a basis for good arguments, philosophy, economics.

Marx came across the labour theory of value when reading the classical economists. The Scottish economist Adam Smith had first used the idea to describe how wealth came from production and industry rather than land, but that it came from capitalist investment and rent too. Then the British economist David Ricardo went further, arguing all value comes directly from the amount of labour time needed to produce a good. Ricardo, though interested in making sure land and industry was productive rather than wasted, didn’t take the next logical step in asking why, if labour creates value, did capitalists get rich and labourers stay poor? This was left to Marx.

Ok, so for Marx the more effort, the longer and the more difficult it is to produce something, the more people it takes, the more work and labour it takes, the more value it has.

But there’s a problem here. I might be very slow at making this, I might be bad at it, and a competitor might be better, quicker, and do it easier. Despite this, they will likely sell it at a higher price. So despite my labour time being higher, the outcome of my shoddy work is worth less. Surely this contradicts the labour theory of value?

For Marx, remember, value is a social phenomenon.

Things might have different use values – I might find this useful and you useless, but when we’re thinking about what its worth to society, to everyone, on average, what price we can get for it, what’s going on behind the scenes of the calculation?

Value, he says, is ‘socially necessary labour-time’.

Which is, Marx writes, ‘the labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society’.

Petrucciani puts it like this: ‘Why socially necessary? Because, empirically, it can happen that a slow or incapable producer takes more time than a skilled and quick one to make the same object, say a chair. It would make no sense to say that an inefficiently produced chair is worth more, and thus Marx makes value equal to the average labor time which is needed to produce a given good’.

When we come together to judge value socially, we’re not interested in how long it took the individual manufacturer, say. Like walking along a line of market stalls selling the same products, we’re comparing them in the aggregate.

Marx writes: ‘The sum total of the labor of all these private individuals forms the aggregate labor of society. Since the producers do not come into social contact until they exchange the products of their labor, the specific social characteristics of their private labors appear only within this exchange.’

That value is socially necessary labour time forces producers into a single system. Each has to compare with one another, compete in the market, keep up with the latest innovations. If I take too long to make an inferior product it’s not going to sell, I’ll be undercut by the person on the market stall next to me.

This is precisely Marx’s method, that dialectical reversal, the turning of Hegel on his head. He’s gone and looked at the world materially, at the work, products, physical goods and factories, and from that empirical study taken lots of diverse heterogeneous exchanges and identified one single homogenous abstract concept: the labour theory of value.

He writes ‘concrete labour becomes the form of manifestation of its opposite, abstract human labour.’

And remember, labour itself has a value. If I employ ten workers I need to pay them enough to feed them, shelter them, make sure they have enough energy to work, then that amount paid them has to at least be the price of the product. Their labour goes directly into the product.

So the value of labour is the cost of maintaining it. If all of their food, getting to work, rent cost £100 and I produced 100 mugs, then all other things being equal, the mugs are worth £1 each.

Marx writes ‘if the workers could live on air, it would not be possible to buy them at any price. […] The constant tendency of capital is to force the cost of labour back towards this absolute zero.’

It’s only through the fact that labourers need things, that their ‘labour-power’ costs a certain amount, that the value of it is passed through into a commodity.

Money: Commodity Fetishism

Once there’s a universal measure that unites all commodities – the amount of labour embodied within them – then that unit, that appraisal, that number – can be represented or symbolised by something else – money.

Just like in Hegel, as one shape develops into another, the idea that an object can have an exchange value based in how much labour went into it, can develop logically into the idea of money to represent that value. Importantly, what we have here is movement, dynamism, development.

Marx writes: ‘the money-form is merely the reflection thrown upon a single commodity by the relations between all other commodities’.

But money does something else too. It measures value, but it also provides a kind of lubricant that enables exchanges to happen easier.

Money is both a measure of value and a ‘means of circulation’.

However, just like there’s a contradiction between use value and exchange value, between what an object’s useful is to you and how much it’s worth on the market, there’s also a contradiction within money itself.

It being a measure of value is different to it being a means of circulation. Because money can be saved up, hoarded, hidden and stashed. I could take it all, and there be no ‘means of circulation’ left. 

Harvey writes: ‘what happens to the circulation of commodities in general if everybody suddenly decides to hold on to money? The buying of commodities would cease and circulation would stop, resulting in a generalized crisis.’

Sure you can hoard grain or save up X, but money is different. It’s more efficient, you can do more with it, everyone wants it, and it doesn’t spoil (as much).

It’s here for Marx that capitalism really starts to take off. People want money not just to pay for the necessities of life, but want it for it’s own sake.

Modern society, Marx writes, ‘greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of its innermost principle of life.’

Here we have accumulating, the root of some being able to lend money to others, to command interest rates, to get richer – we have what we calls primitive accumulation – the building of capital itself – large amounts of disposable money.

Petrucciani says: ‘The same attitude which appeared manic in the hoarder becomes iron clad rationality in the capitalist. The capitalist incarnates an insatiable desire for gain.’

Marx uses a formula. It used to be that a commodity would be exchanged for money to buy another commodity. Sell an apple to buy a chair. C (for commodity) – M (for money) – into C (for a new commodity).

But under capitalism that starts to reverse. Money can be used to buy commodities to sell for a profit, for more money. Instead of C-M-C we have M-C-M. Instead of a new commodity being the goal – selling the apple to get yourself a chair – money itself becomes the goal.

But Marx points out that if you’re swapping an apple for a chair they can both be worth the same and you get what you want out of the deal. He says, ‘Where equality exists there is not gain.’ But if you’re using money to buy commodities to make a profit, where does the extra money from?

Why would you do it if some gain wasn’t going to come from it? If C-M-C – cup for money to buy food is zero sum – each are worth the same, why is M-C-M positive sum? That the goal of the last M is more than the first M?

Marx says that under capitalism this appears as if a mystery.

He writes, ‘Capital is money, capital is commodities. By virtue of being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or at least lays golden eggs.’

Now, remember, all value must come from labour – people putting work into things. But when we start really using money, value becomes mysterious, as if taken over by money, as if money has magical powers and is the source of value itself, rather than being meaningless pieces of paper or chunks of gold.

Marx calls this commodity fetishism. He says there’s a ‘magic of money’ that conceals what’s going on underneath, that conceals the human work. Marx calls it a ‘riddle’ to be solved. With Marx there’s always something going on under the surface of things. He’s always moving from particular stuff to broader universal social phenomenon. Commodities he says are ‘sensuous things which are at the same time supra-sensible or social.’

He writes, ‘The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists . . . simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things’.

Under capitalism, you can buy a fancy new shirt, but the objective conditions of production can be very hidden – sweatshops, unethical business practices, the devastation of the environment are all happening elsewhere, under the surface. But money can hide it. And commodities can appear on the shelves as if by magic.

Petrucciani: ‘Fetishism would be that attitude according to which commodities are endowed with value as if it belonged to them by nature, rather than because of the specific modality of their production.’

Commodities and money are hieroglyphs to be decoded and understood. They are curtains to be drawn back. There’s always something real, something understandable behind them. But we too easily forget this.

Marx writes: ‘It is however precisely this finished form of the world of commodities-the money form-which conceals the social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly.’

So what’s behind the curtain? How does the capitalist lay a golden egg? Why does the last M of the M-C-M magically contain more money that the first M?

Surplus Value

To uncover the secret, to peel back the layers, to dispel the illusion of commodity fetishism, we have to go somewhere philosophy doesn’t ordinarily tread. Marx says we have to enter ‘the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there hangs the notice ‘no admittance except on business”. We have to go behind the factory doors.

It’s only here that the riddle of profit can be solved, how value can be miraculously created from nowhere, emerging like a golden egg. After all, value can only be made from people doing work.

If someone has a hoard, a stash, a windfall of money, what can they do with it to increase it? How can they increase that last M in M-C-M.

The capitalist searches around for a commodity that can expand in value and they find it, most obviously, in people themselves.

If I’m putting together a new product, out of wood, nails, wires – whatever – I need labour to help do it too. In this sense, labour-power is a commodity like any other. I can go to the market and buy my wood and I can go to the market, under capitalism, and hire labour.

Marx writes ‘The possessor of money does find such a special commodity on the market: the capacity for labour . . . in other words labour-power.’

To buy labour-power, the labourer must be free to sell it. They must be freed from servitude as peasants or slaves. They must then have nothing and need something, need a means of subsistence.

On the one hand, there are those who have access to estates with vegetable patches and fields and forests with wood, and then, after feudalism and slavery is abolished, we have those that are forced from the land, prohibited from collecting wood or using common land to grow food.

Marx writes: ‘Nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or commodities, and on the other hand men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no basis in natural history, nor does it have a social basis common to all periods of human history. It is clearly the result of a past historical development.’

Capitalism isn’t natural, but historical. 

Now, here is the core of Marx’s argument. It is that labour-power is a commodity like any other. The labourer, wandering, looking for work needs a certain level of sustenance – food, shelter, welfare – that itself is provided by other labourers.

So the value or cost of labour-power is the value or cost of all producing all of the energy that energises and sustains that labour-power in the labourer. Meaning labour-power is comparable to any other commodity. It has a value and that value is determined by the labour theory of value – how much labour – food production, building shelter, collecting water – goes into energising the worker doing the work.

So the capitalist has capital, and they can spend that money on raw materials, supplies, and they can buy labour-power. They can combine it all together.

And Marx assumes that all of this is purchased at the correct price – that the value of everything is determined by how much labour went into making it. If it cost me $5 to get the energy/sleep/shelter to hammer the nails for one hour, that’s how much the labour-power is worth – $5ph.

That labour-power is combined with the wood and nails and then the capitalist sells. But again, he sells for a profit. He sells for more than the combined value of the labour-power and materials. The second M-C-M must be greater. Where is this extra, this surplus, coming from?

If the labour theory of value is right it can only come from labour.

So here’s the key.

Marx argues there is a gap between what it costs to sustain the labour over, say, a day, and what the capitalist gets out of the labourer in labour-power over the course of that day – and this is where surplus value comes from.

So in the first part of the day, as an example, the labourer is working in return for wages that cover the cost of sustaining them, or what Marx calls reproducing the labour, and in the second part of the day, the labourer is also covering the cost of sustaining the capitalists needs – their food and shelter. But it is here, Marx argues, that the capitalist can suck more value out of the worker than they’re being compensated for. That they can extract surplus value and make a profit.

He writes ‘Wherever a part of society possesses the monopoly of the means of production, the worker, free or unfree, must add to the labor time necessary for his own maintenance an extra quantity of labor time in order to produce the means of subsistence for the owner of the means of production’.

He argues that humans are just capital like everything else – material, muscle, machinery that can be bought, sold, or hired and their energy put to use. But that humans are a special type of capital – variable capital.

Humans are fleshy, muscly, malleable, mouldable and innovative things that are highly variable in the ways they can perform. So the capitalist can push a human to work harder, faster, differently, so as to squeeze more energy out of them.

Unlike nails or buildings, humans have more variability.

Machines, on the other hand – spinning wheels, hammers, lathes, factory equipment, buildings, metals and raw materials are ‘constant capital’ in contrast to ‘variable capital’. They move, spin, weave, hammer, and screw and a pretty constant steady inflexible rate.

So their value is the amount it costs to produce them and they can pass that value into the end product. The nails contribute to the total value of the table. But they cannot magically create value out of thin air – the value they transmit is constant.

New value must come from somewhere else. And it’s human labour that’s variable. It can change in speed, efficacy, length, strength, and dexterity.

Machines don’t vary, or go on strike, or get sick. They can’t be shouted at or disciplined or threatened. They are predictable. But if you can get more work out of a worker, or workers, then you can get more value into the final product. You can extract more surplus value.

Labour – variable capital – can be organised in different ways. They can be made more productive by dividing them up and getting them to perform smaller more repetitive tasks. Working out ways to improve efficiency. Their lunch breaks can be shortened or you could even provide meals if you think it will give them more energy. The point here is that it’s variable.

Harvey writes, ‘Surplus-value arises because workers labor beyond the number of hours it takes to reproduce the value equivalent of their labor-power. How many extra hours do they work? That depends on the length of the working day.’

As we’ll come back to, Marx spends many pages in Capital describing the English working class’s struggles to shorten the length of the working day. In the nineteenth century, the capitalist class in factories here in the Midlands of England did everything they could to lengthen them, to employ women and children in dirty unsafe factories, to cut costs, and to get the most out of labour that they possibly could. Marx calls them ‘small thefts’ of the workers time, the ‘petty pilfering of minutes’ or the ‘snatching of minutes’.

If one capitalist gets more end product – more tables say – from their workers in one day for the same amount of wages, they can either sell them cheaper than their competitors or for the same amount and keep more profit.

But the logic of capitalism – of competition – is such that if you don’t do it, your competitor will. This is fundamental to Marx.

He is not so dogmatic to argue that this happens all of the time, everywhere, or that capitalists are purposefully cruel and evil, only that there is a logic, a motivation, a force, that compels capital to operate in this or else someone else will do it elsewhere and make a cheaper product.

He writes, ‘The influence of individual capitals on one another has the effect precisely that they must conduct themselves as capital’. In other words, capital has a logic of its own, independent of individual capitalists.

There is downward pressure on wages and pressure to increase productivity not to get rich but just to keep up. Marx writes ‘the minimum wage is the centre towards which the current rates of wages gravitate.’

There might be some cultural expectations about the minimum wage, about safe working conditions, there might be regulations and oversight and nosy journalists here and there that push wages up slightly, but ultimately, there is a force putting downward pressure on wages.

If the capitalist pays the labourer more than all of his competitors out of the kindness of their heart then the end product costs more and they go out of business. If they shorten the working day while his competitors lengthen it and become more productive and so make a cheaper product, they go out of business. This is why ‘capital’ becomes an inhuman force, it has a magical effect on all those under its spell, forcing them into the logic of capitalist production.

Capital is full of literary references – Shakespeare and Romantic influences pop up everywhere. 

Marx writes things like, capital has a “voracious appetite,” a “werewolf-like hunger for surplus labor”.

And ‘the vampire will not let go’ while there remains a single muscle, sinew or drop of blood to be exploited’.

And that “Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks’.

He’s calling machines ‘dead labor’ because their value comes from the living labour that was transferred into them. Das Kapital is a book of flows, of energy transfer, of how value moves dynamically through the world dialectically, how the workers’ ‘labour-power’ is alienated – taken from that – and how, as we’ll see, that flow of energy and value keeps moving inexorably from the worker into the capitalist class.

Forces, Relations, Bases, and Superstructures 

Ok, we’ll return to that relationship between labour and capital – because that is the crux of it, that is the Hegelian contradiction, one pulls on the other creating discord – but we need to supplement it with a few more basic concepts.

Remember, Marx is trying to be scientific. He looks around and sees what happens a lot, then builds this from the ground up into broader concepts – specifically looking at nineteenth century capitalism.

Two main concepts he identifies are the forces of production and the relations of production.

The forces of production are the material, the buildings, tools, technology, instruments and factories of any given society.

And the relations of production are the social relationships that underpin the division of ownership and division of labour in any given society. The classes, the relationships between them, who owns and who doesn’t, how a society is organised.

Combined, these make up a mode of production.

In The German Ideology, Marx writes, ‘a certain mode of production, or industrial stage, is always combined with a certain mode of co-operation, or social stage, and this mode of co-operation is itself a “productive force”.’

Importantly, Marx points out how these modes of production have changed across history.

There was primitive communism, where tribes and primitive societies held resources broadly in common. There was slavery. Where one class is held in bondage to labour and another is free to trade them. There was a feudal mode – where peasants are tied to the land and produce their own means of subsistence but are obliged to provide for their lord in return for hypothetical protection. Then there’s bourgeois capitalism.

Each, he writes, ‘is replaced by a new one corresponding to the more developed productive forces and, hence, to the advanced mode of the self-activity of individuals.’

As contradictions appear one mode is replaced by another in a Hegelian way.

This is why Marx is a materialist, not an idealist. When he looks at the development of societies through history, it’s not the ideas of individuals that matter to the majority, but the type of economic system, the mode of production that has the biggest influence on how they and we live our lives. And classes – peasants, lords, slaves, proletariat, kings, bourgeoise – are at the root of this.

Callinicos writes: ‘Classes arise when the “direct producers” have been separated from the means of production, which have become the monopoly of a minority.’

But what about ideas? They’re everywhere, surely they have their place? Marx calls all of this the economic base, but argues that there is a superstructure over the top. So the base is the economic relations and forces of production – slaves, tools, farming, computers, serfs – the forces and the class divisions. And the superstructure arises from that in the form of norms, political assumptions, laws, even culture and art, and so on.

Marx writes: ‘The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.’

The superstructure aims to justify the economic structure. Wages being kept low? We have to be productive or else China will beat us! Capitalism is harmful? Read Ayn Rand! I had no choice but to shoplift the baby food. I understand that but property is property – have you not read your Locke, young lady.

Marx writes: ‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental production, so that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are on the whole subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations, the dominant material relations grasped as ideas.’

And one of the biggest ideological superstructural myths, Marx says, comes from the bourgeoise having the power to tell tales about their thrift, ingenuity, creative genius – producing the idea that value comes from their endless revolutionising of technology.

Technology and Productivity

Like money, like commodities, we often see machines as magic, we fetishise them, think they can do things, create things, produce things out of thin air. We forget that they conceal social processes and relationships, physical lives underneath.

One compelling advantage Marx’s theory of history has is that it explains technological development. It explains why the industrial revolution seemed to take off at the same time as capitalism. Other theories – that innovations like the X are the result of genius individuals struggle to explain the wider historical trends of technological progress. Instead, technological development is fundamental to Marx.

We’ve seen that one way for the capitalist to extract surplus value is by trying to lengthen the working day, to improve the efficiency of labour by dividing workers up to perform smaller tasks, or to increase the intensity of work through discipline. In short, in finding ways of making labour more productive; by getting more out of workers in the same amount of time. But there’s another way of increasing productivity: technology.

All of the spinning wheels and water frames and engines of the industrial revolution were making labour efficient. You could make more jumpers in the same amount of time, employing fewer workers.

Now, importantly, the machines still need labour. They’re all built by people, need attending, need loading, needs maintenance, need correcting if something goes wrong. But they’re all what Marx calls ‘labour-saving devices.’  They make work more productive and so more surplus value can be extracted from the same amount of work.

Marx writes ‘machinery is intended to cheapen commodities and, by shortening the part of the working day in which the worker works for himself, to lengthen the other part, the part he gives the capitalist for nothing. The machine is a means for producing surplus value’.

Through technological innovation, we get more or better end product out of less labour-power. Less labour-power means lower wages have to paid. Competitors can then be undercut and more profit can flow to the innovative capitalist relative to the others in that particular industry.

Marx says, ‘The individual value of these articles is now below their social value; in other words, they have cost less labour time than the great bulk of the same article produced under the average social conditions’.

Now though, something interesting happens. The competitors either have to copy, keep up, innovate themselves, or go out of business.

When the competitors bring in the new machinery, the first capitalist can no longer undercut them, and they compete for the best price again, bringing the profits back down to where they were originally. So the first mover capitalist has the advantage when they innovate, but this doesn’t last long, and so the search for a new innovation, new technology continues.

Marx writes: ‘This extra surplus-value vanishes as soon as the new method of production is generalized, for then the difference between the individual value of the cheapened commodity and its social value vanishes.’

We can see the dialectical influence at play here. The particular actions of one lead to a generalised universal process that draws all in, which again returns to effect the particular individual, which returns to the generalised universal, and so on.

Marx then says: ‘capital therefore has an immanent drive, and a constant tendency, towards increasing the productivity of labour, in order to cheapen commodities, and, by cheapening commodities, to cheapen the worker himself’.

Again, this shows how capital becomes an inhuman, alien, vampire-like force. It compels people to act in a certain way, to search out labour-saving methods, to improve technology, to innovate, to compete, to try to underpay. And it compels others to follow or copy and keep up or go out of business. If you don’t search for productivity, for efficiency, your competitor will. Capitalism becomes a race against the clock.

It’s all about incentives within the total system, which is why Marx believed what he was doing was science in the same way Newton studied gravity – laws of attraction, forces that act on people pushing them to act in certain ways.

Even after the machine is paid for, there is an incentive to use it as much as possible unless it wears out, rusts away, gets replaced by better machines. Imagine the complexity and ingenuity of getting a water frame running or a steam engine working properly in a factory. Once it’s working 24/7, the reflexive impulse to find workers to man it as much as possible, to get as much from the machine as possible, must have been huge.

Marx writes, ‘competition subordinates every individual capitalist to the immanent laws of capitalist production, as external and coercive laws. It compels him to keep extending his capital, so as to preserve it, and he can only extend it by means of progressive accumulation’.

But notice a new stage of development. As they compete to keep up, we have larger, bigger, more technological advanced companies. As technology improves any industry requires more capital, more initial ‘outlay’ to even get started. The barriers to entry get higher. Some can’t keep up, can’t copy machines, can’t innovate and either go bust or get bought out and incorporated into the more successful bigger business. And importantly, fewer workers are needed to produce the same amount of product as they get replaced by machines.

Callinicos puts it like this: ‘Concentration takes place when capitals grow in size through the accumulation of surplus value. Centralization, on the other hand, involves the absorption of smaller by bigger capitals. The process of competition itself encourages this trend, because the more efficient firms are able to undercut their rivals and then to take them over. But economic recessions speed up the process by enabling the surviving capitals to buy up the means of production cheap.’

I think Marx answers a fundamental question about modernity here. Why does technology – which should save us all time – not make our lives easier? Better? Why are not all fishing and playing guitar while machines do our bidding?

Because machines, owned by a few, extract productivity from the rest. And the motivation to increase productivity is the desire to sell more and sell cheaper. So while capitalism makes some things cheaper, workers – and that’s a lot of us – are also commodities, subject to the same forces, same pressure of wages, on hours, on improving productivity. It’s a vicious circle.

Marx writes simply: ‘the machine is a means for producing surplus-value’.

He compares the old way of handicrafts, pointing to how the worker – like a woodworker – would ‘make use of a tool’, while in the factory ‘the machine makes use of him.’ Machines ‘dominate and soak up living labour-power’.

Technology is a double-edged sword. It can improve our lives but spurs competition, leads to concentration, increases barriers of entry, makes it harder for start-ups to compete, and can put more and more out of work. Where capitalism starts in small scale artisan workshops, it ends in highly advanced, labour trampling, surplus value extracting global technological conglomerates.

Capitalism preys on whatever it can find, sucking surplus into bigger piles, larger factories, seeking out new markets, anything that can be commodified. In short, all that is solid melts into air.

Class Struggle X Revolution

We too often think of history as causal or linear. That one thing causes the next like a row of dominoes. Dialectical thinking takes a different approach. Instead of a linear axis – calculator, microchip, computer, smartphone, say, – or slave, peasant, proletariat, bourgeoise, etc – we have a dialectical one where at any given moment in time – there’s a mutual relationship between elements and that when there is incongruence or incompatibility or friction between them transformation is forced – what Hegel called sublation.

What we’ve seen is how the interests of the proletariat and the bourgeoise are at odds – they contradict one another. One wants higher wages, the other wants lower, one wants to get home, the other wants higher productivity.

In the Grundrisse – an unpublished manuscript and notes of his economic thinking – Marx wrote: ‘The growing incompatibility between the productive development of society and its hitherto existing relations of production expresses itself in bitter contradictions, crises, spasms’.

The technology owned by the bourgeoisie is at odds with the wages of the worker. Machines put people out of work and create a reserve labour force. ‘The instrument of labour strikes down the worker’, Marx writes. Even if its transitional and more work is found eventually, there is a period of unemployment, a period of crisis for displaced workers.

Not only does this happen because of technology, but this can be good for the capitalist. If there’s a ‘reserve labour force’ then it makes it harder for workers to negotiate for higher wages because there’s always someone over there willing to do it for less just to work.

Capitalists get more and more value out of fewer and fewer workers. Workers are displaced and squeezed.

Now, the bourgeoise can keep revolutionising, building different machines, finding new markets, so new jobs might be created. So it’s not the case that absolute poverty for proletariat is inevitable – although it’s possible. What will happen is that as the bourgeoise acquire more and more capital, machines, technology and as many are put out of work, then the proletariat will be relatively immiserated.

Petrucciani puts it like this: ‘Marx can thus conclude by claiming that the ‘absolute general law of capitalist accumulation’ is to constantly produce, ‘in the direct ratio of its own energy and extent’, an excess of workers, a reserve army whose poverty increases as the power of wealth grows. These conclusions are of course very bleak, appropriately so because Marx aims to show (among other things) how capitalism is socially unsustainable’.

This relative immiseration means there’s more concentration into larger monopolies on the one hand and more fragmentation and discord on the other. Each are incompatible.

Engels wrote: ‘productive forces are concentrated in the hands of a few bourgeois whilst the great mass of the people are more and more becoming proletarians, and their condition more wretched and unendurable in the same measure in which the riches of the bourgeois increase.’

Map on top of this the unpredictability of capitalism, its booms and busts, crises, overproduction leading to crises, gluts, market instabilities, contractions, further bankruptcies and buy-outs, mass unemployment, and you have an explosive situation.

All of this is the apex of the argument in Capital: a tendency towards catastrophe.

A key concept here is that the rate of overall profit falls. If value and therefore profit comes from labour and there is increasingly less labour – less people – doing the same amount of work because there’s more and more machines, technology, infrastructure, and so on, the rate of surplus value being extracted decreases over time. Doing business gets harder. Being a proletariat gets harder still.

Again, a contradiction, an irony – that by improving productivity and investing more and more the capitalist class are sowing the seeds of their own destruction.

Marx writes: ‘What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable’.

What we have is a pressure cooker on a societal scale.

Let’s just recap and look at the ingredients thrown into this explosive pot:

• Division of labour – workers are fragmented into performing meaningless single repetitive tasks.
• The downward pressure on wages and relative impoverishment.
• A reserve labour army with no work at all.
• Booms and busts – overproduction, layoffs, takeovers, recessions.
• Bigger, more monstrous companies that are impossible to compete with – concentration and monopolies.
• The tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

All of this pulls on two poles. On the one, ‘Accumulate, Accumulate!’ Marx says. On the other, though, is something that emerges out of the chaos – a class consciousness – meaning a privileged perspective – arising out the material conditions of all of this – a perspective, a consciousness, that understands their place in history: the proletariat.

Harvey puts it like this: ‘This is typical Marx: there are countervailing tendencies at work: concentration on the one hand, subdivision and fragmentation on the other. Where is the balance between them? Who knows! The balance between concentration and decentralization is almost certainly subject to perpetual flux.’

The capitalist will outsource, subcontract, layoff, divide and conquer. If the proletariat doesn’t join together all of this will ‘mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy any remnant of attraction in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities[…]; they distort the conditions under which he works, and subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his lifetime into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital.’

The only option for the proletariat is to join together and fight. Engels wrote ‘for ‘protection’ against the serpent of their agonies, the workers have to put their heads together.’ They have to co-operate, join in union. It is not inevitable, but forces, incentives all push workers into uniting – they will have the numbers, after all, and to overthrow the current system.

There are longstanding debates about whether Marx was a determinist – whether he believed in inevitability – of immiseration, of revolution, of human history itself – that we’re all just puppets on a grander stage. I think he walks a fine line but later on he largely tries to avoid writing in these terms. As Harvey says, there’s not much causal language in Capital, just incentives, pressures, dialectical relationships that create these interesting pressure cookers – but map on culture, politics, or many other things – and it creates a rich but complex picture of history.

Marx says: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’.

But none of this is a universal inevitable schema that we all live under, there’s too much dynamism, too much change, too many variables and contingency.

Marx himself complained of those that tried to turn, ‘my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into an historico-philosophic theory of the general path every people is fated to tread, whatever the historical circumstances in which it finds itself’.

True to dialectical form, he says, ‘circumstances create people in the same degree as people create circumstances.’

However, the circumstances, the pressures, the forces are all pushing the proletariat to overthrow the current state of affairs, and replace it with something new.

Communism

Marx famously didn’t write much about what a communist society would look like. He was only emphatic that the proletariat needed to organise and overthrow the current system. He believed that this would likely require revolution, but that it might be peaceful in places. But for much of the rest he left scant details of his thoughts, and there was a particular reason for this.

As we’ve seen, he believed the proletariat had a particularly unique point of view that no-one else in society had. Capitalists are compelled to act in the ways we’ve seen by the imperatives of the market. Politicians are compelled to act by the power of big capital. But the proletariat, in factories, can see all of this, feel their own immiseration, feel their alienation and understand what negates them, understand industry and science, and importantly, because of their proximity to one another, have the capacity to organise.

Because of this, Marx believed that it should be left to the proletariat to establish the best course of action.

He was in a sense a rationalist – with the idea that a better society should be organised rationally to the benefit of all instead of few. But he didn’t believe that a rational society could be planned in advance, like the utopian socialists did. This is another expression of his dialectical thinking. He didn’t believe in dogmatic, rigid systems.

Engels criticised those who did otherwise and tried to reduce, ‘the Marxist theory of development to a rigid orthodoxy which workers are not to reach as a result of their class consciousness, but which, like an article of faith, is to be forced down their throats at once and without development’.

The proletarian had to develop on their own. In The Communist Manifesto Marx wrote that communists should, ‘not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement’, because, ‘They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole’.

And Engels wrote that, ‘The masses must have time and opportunity to develop, and they can have the opportunity only when they have a movement of their own — no matter in what form so long as it is their movement — in which they are driven further by their mistakes and learn to profit by them’.

However, they did leave some clues as to what they thought a communist society could look like.

Marx stated simply that: ‘We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present stage of things’.

First, Marx and Engels famously argued for a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.

The proletariat would need to establish, ‘the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally’.

Dictatorship has a particular connotation today that it didn’t have at the time. Their reading of revolution was dependent on the French Revolution, which was attacked by reactionary forces both domestic and foreign, by the Church, the aristocracy, civil war, and the monarchies of Europe. The bourgeoise also held political power, so any immediate popular democratic vote would – and had in places – often just brought the old regime back to power.

Which is why Marx and Engels believed in a limited emergency dictatorship – not of one person, but by the proletariat as a class.

Looking at how revolutions and democratic procedures were repressed across Europe, Marx believed that a bloody revolution was very likely. But he did equivocate and change his mind on this. He wrote for example that, ‘there are countries such as America, England and Holland where the working people may achieve their goal by peaceful means’.

Ok, but what would happen once the revolution was secured? There are a few clues but it should be remembered these are comments here and there – the overarching image is of the proletariat working it out depending on their particular experience from place to place.

Marx pointed to the short lived Paris Commune that existed for a couple of months in 1871 when Parisian workers took control of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War.

Importantly, Marx wrote it should be like the Paris Commune: ‘The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms’. He continued: ‘Like the rest of public servants, magistrates and judges were to be elective, responsible and revocable.’

Wage-labour and capital should be abolished. Marx knew it would be difficult because, ‘in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges’.

Because of these, he believed communism would develop in stages. At first ‘Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society—after the deductions have been made—exactly what he gives to it. . . . He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such and such an amount of labor . . . and with this certificate he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as costs the same amount of labor’.

Petrucciani identifies the first steps throughout the writings like this: ‘landed estates are to be expropriated, inheritance rights abolished, strongly progressive taxation instituted, credit and transportation nationalized, public factories built, and ‘equal liability to work for all members of society’ imposed together with ‘education of all children […] in national institutions and at the expense of the nation’’.

So there are a mix of social democratic reforms, equalising of labour and reward for work, and the planning of industry in the interest of all.

Calinacos writes, ‘the decisions about how much social labor would depend, not on the blind workings of competition, but on a collective and democratic assessment by the associated producers in the light of the needs of society’.

But after a while, a higher stage of communism should be developed, which Marx puts like this: ‘In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!’

He thinks that at this point people will want to work, instead of being compelled to or incentivised to by monetary rewards – that’s ‘each according to his ability’ – and that each will take only what he needs from the common stock – ‘to each according to his needs’.

The state would then wither away.

Engels wrote: ‘As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a state, is no longer necessary’.

Finally, it’s important to note that Marx never wanted to promote absolute equality over individuality. He believed having access to resources and contributing to how they were produced would mean individuals could flourish and their true creative individuality reached.

He called it, ‘an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’. In Engels’s words, ‘it is humanity’s leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom’.

Conclusion

After the First International collapsed in 1876, Marx withdrew from political life, spending his time on further volumes of Capital, which he would never finish but would be published from his note by Engels.

In 1883 his daughter died, Marx caught a cold, and died quietly in his sleep. Engels wrote, ‘Mankind is shorter by a head, and that the greatest head of our time’.

Summing up, analysing, or critiquing Marx’s legacy is a huge task that’s beyond the scope of this video. His influence on the world is testament to the breadth of his insight. Much of it I think is due to the meticulous way he analysed the relationship between labour, capital, and technology in Das Kapital, as a lot of the other insights on alienation, revolution, and socialism were much more common. So what you think of Marx should depend on appraising those big ideas in Capital, and if anything, the jury is still out.

I’ll publish a more comprehensive appraisal on the second channel soon, but for now I’ll point towards some of the most common points of contention. 

First, the labour theory of value is probably criticised the most. Neoclassical economics emphasises the subjective nature of value, to put it simply, and there’s a famous transformation problem in Marxism of ‘transforming’ labour value into actual profits and prices, which should work if the labour theory of value is true, but doesn’t.

All of this means that the labour theory of value is wrong at worst and limited at best. However, even with the criticisms, it’s undeniable that labour is at the core of production and so how much labour goes into making something is at least one part of the answer to value.

Harvey writes, for example, ‘I have lost count of the number of times I have heard people complain that the problem with Marx is that he believes the only valid notion of value derives from labor inputs. It is not that at all; it is a historical social product. The problem, therefore, for socialist, communist, revolutionary, anarchist or whatever, is to find an alternative value-form that will work in terms of the social reproduction of society in a different image.’

The falling rate of profit has also relatedly been criticised. This is a key marker of whether capitalism can sustain itself, and Marx’s contention was that because more technology would extract profit from fewer workers, the rate of profit would fall and capitalism would veer from crisis to crisis. The debate over this rages on, as, of course, does capitalism.

And Marx wouldn’t be surprised. Capitalism’s ability to transform is, as we’ve seen, one of its most distinctive features. Yet despite the dynamism, I think Marx would still recognise it today – which goes a long way to showing the enduring influence of his work.

Inequality, crises and banking crashes, squeezed wages, the speed of technological change, automation, global corporations, alienation – were very much in Marx’s world.

There’s also the debate over actually-existing socialism, the failures of centrally commanded economies, the USSR, state-capitalism. Many who follow Marx today would argue these were not socialist in Marx’s sense.

Marxism, Callinicos writes, ‘was socialism “from below.” It foresaw the working class liberating itself through its own activity, and remaking society in its own image. “Really existing socialism” in the Eastern bloc, however, is based on the denial of the self-activity of the workers and the denial of popular democracy’.

There are also criticisms about how little Marx said about the practicalities of communism, how societies could function without money or any state apparatus at all.

But Marx’s relevance is difficult to escape from. And if you drop the idea that you have to be a Marxist or an anti-Marxist, a capitalist or a socialist, it’s undeniable that his work contains still-relevant insights and still-useful analyses of still very present forces. He would want his readers to read and critique, he would want to inspire not followers, but change. In other words, he was emphatically not a dogmatist. He wanted to inspire a different fluid, active, creative thought, and importantly, action. Towards the end of his life he said, ‘All I know is that I am no Marxist, God save me from my friends!’.

I’ll end with a quote from a letter – ‘for a ruthless Criticism of Everything That Exists’. He wrote, ‘we do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to’.

——

READING LIST

In the past, I have made reading lists and bibliographies public, but for Marx, I put some time into curating one with comments and a reading order for supporters of the channel on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/marx-reading-112803954

The post Marx: A Complete Guide to Capitalism appeared first on Then & Now.

Proudhon was not an orderly writer, despite ironically arguing that ‘anarchy is order.’

So what does he mean by that – ‘Anarchy is order’? There are a few themes – orderly ones – found throughout Proudhon work, that began what is now referred to as mutualism – a type of libertarian socialism.

The tension between liberty and order is always at the heart of Proudhon’s politics.

He intended his mutualist philosophy to be an approach to political life that could be a ‘synthesis of the notions of private property and collective ownership,’ a synthesis of liberty and order.

Both private property and collective ownership had major flaws; so what could the solution be?

As we saw in What is Property? Justice is at the heart of the solution.

Fairness, right, morality, should be the premise of economic, social and political arrangements.

But at the same time Proudhon argued that the only law people should follow is the law they choose for themselves. Why would people voluntarily follow any law? And where would it come from?

For Proudhon, ‘justice, equality, equation, equilibrium, and harmony’ are all synonymous terms, they are laws of the universal, laws of humanity.’

Morality is part of the universal order of things. If we work out the correct, the right, the moral way of doing things then there we will achieve a peaceful equilibrium.

Knowing this means using our reason, being rational.

Imagine I’m angry at someone in the street and have an impulse to shout at or even punch them. It’s by using my ability to logically think through the events that might happen afterwards that I know it’s not a good idea.

The reason we don’t steal, fight, murder is not, mostly at least, to do with the threat of arrest, but because we know – through our reason – the repercussions that follow from acting immorally. We’ll be ostracised, disliked, met with retribution, and so on.

This is a moral law. We act in an ‘ethical’ way because we can rationally calculate the consequences. It’s a metaphysical law of order than sort of hangs above us.

I use the same type of reasoning to avoid the impulse of eating cake or getting drunk all the time.

Following the moral law, then, means not being a slave to my immediate passions but following what’s rational, logical, reasonable.

Proudhon says: ‘in society as well as in the individual, reason and reflection always triumph over instinct and spontaneity.’

For Proudhon, it’s not the actual law, the juridical law, that stops us stealing, it’s the moral law, our own reason.

He says: ‘It is by our reflective and reasoning powers, with which we seem to be exclusively endowed, that we know that it is injurious, first to others and then to our­ selves, to resist the social instinct which governs us, and which we call justice. It is our reason which teaches us that the selfish man, the robber, the murderer— in a word, the traitor to society— sins against Nature, and is guilty with respect to others and himself’.

It’s had a number of names: the voice of conscience, enlightened self-interest, the innate love of others. But as societies, individuals, cultures, humans, progress, we will become better at understanding what is right and what is wrong, what’s going to lead to a social equilibrium overall.

He says: ‘In living with their reason, man first follows a chief, the father, the patriarch, the elder – the good and wise.’

The more ignorant we are, the more we rely on obedience to received norms and passed down wisdom, but as we become more educated, have a better understanding of the world, the more we can rely on our own judgement.

Proudhon writes: ‘If he obeys no longer because the king commands, but because the king demonstrates the wisdom of his commands, it may be said that henceforth he will recognize no authority, and that he has become his own king.’

Ultimately, ‘By means of self-instruction and the acquisition of ideas, man finally acquires the idea of science, — that is, of a system of knowledge in harmony with the reality of things, and inferred from observation.’

Now, you can probably see where this is going.

Anarchism is the absence of any authority, any master, any sovereign, that a person chooses to follow themselves through their own reason and calculation, their own volition.

Proudhon writes that anarchism will be: ‘The sovereignty of reason having been substituted for that of revelation; the notion of contract succeeding to that of compulsion; economic critique revealing that political institutions must now be absorbed into the industrial organism: we fearlessly conclude that the revolutionary formula can no longer be direct government or any kind of government, but must be: no more government.’

Anarchism is moral self-direction. This is what he means by ‘anarchy is order.’

‘The freedom of which we have reason to be proud does not consist in liberation from the laws of truth and justice; quite on the contrary, it grows in the measure to which we come closer to justice and truth; on the other hand, it declines in the degree to which we recede from them; so that the greatest amount of freedom coincides with the greatest recognition of right and duty, and the greatest unfreedom with extreme ignorance and corruption’

Now, this all sounds well and good but it’s all very abstract. How would societies organise in a world where individuals only follow their own moral law?

As Proudhon argues in What is Property?, thinking about the logic of property will lead any ‘reasonable’ person to conclude that all possession is, if we are not using it, communal.

So, does communism follow from this realisation?

In short, no. Proudhon thinks communism dictates the moral law to the individual.

He writes: ‘the doctrinaire, authoritarian, dictatorial, governmental, communist system is based on the principle that the individual is essentially subordinate to the collective; that from it alone he has his right and life; that the citizen belongs to the State like a child to the family; that he is in its power and possession, in manu, and that he owes it submission and obedience in all things.’

Instead, Proudhon wishes to preserve the freedom of individualism.

He writes, ‘Man is very willing to obey the law of duty, serve his country and oblige his friends; but he wishes to labour when he pleases, where he pleases, and as much as he pleases. He wishes to dispose of his own time, to be governed only by necessity, to choose his friendships, his recreation, and his discipline; to act from judgement, not by command; to sacrifice himself through selfishness, not through servile obligation. Communism is essentially opposed to the free exercise of our faculties, our noblest desires, to our deepest feelings.’

In conclusion he says, ‘Property is the exploitation of the weak by the strong. Communism is the exploitation of the strong by the weak.’

But Proudhon thinks that communism does contain the seeds of truth, he says it’s the first basic revolt against rampant individualism. It’s a crude expression of sociability.

This sociability, he says, is what gives rise to our sense of justice – ‘the recognition of the equality between another’s personality and our own.’

Property wishes for ‘independence’ and communism seeks ‘equality and law’. Is there a third way?

Yes, liberty!

Fundamentally, Proudhon argues, politics is a matter of association, of people coming together on an equal footing.

Association leads to equality, he argues. Two men fishing share their catch. Two merchants in business share their profits. Gardeners share their tasks. As we saw in What is Property?, if one hundred people landed on an island they would claim equal occupancy.

This is the core of mutualism: mutual reciprocal association.

A mutualist society would be organised by agreements between individuals and groups.

Each individual has a right to participate in the means of producing, and to the product of their association, their town, their village.

What’s important is the principle of mutual respect, tit for tat, treating others as if you wish to be treated – this is reciprocity, and it should simply be extended to the economic and political spheres of life.

It’s a formula for justice that requires us to ‘promise and guarantee each other service for service, credit for credit, measure for measure, security for security, value for value’, and ‘liberty for liberty.’

In practice, mutual contracts between individuals would build into associations and organisations, and these would contract together into ‘political contracts’. Society would be arranged from the bottom up into communes and federations with the high subordinated to the lower.

Proudhon does then, accept some kind of central federation or government if necessary but it should be minimal and subordinate to the communes, associations and federations within it. Anyone has a right to secede at any time.

But how would justice be assured in an anarchical society? By what measure would contracts and associations be considered just?

For Proudhon, if morality and justice is rational there must be some way to measure whether something is in fact just or not.

The idea of value and justice are interlinked; if things – wages, exchanges, prices – are judged correctly then equilibrium could be found across society.

Everything has its just price, but the wage labourer bargaining to increase wages is not negotiating from a position of fairness, because they’re forced to sell their labour.

Proudhon writes: ‘How many nails is a pair of shoes worth? If we can solve this appalling problem, we shall have the key of the social system for which humanity has been searching for six thousand years. In the presence of this problem, the economist recoils confused; the peasant who can neither read nor write replies without hesitation: “ As many as can be made in the same time, and with the same expense.’

If all were paid depending on how much labour they’ve contributed, then there would be balance.

This is the labour theory of value.

He argues that the value of any thing arises from three contributing factors: land, innovation, and labour. But because both land and innovation are communal and shared by all, value should be measured by how much labour has been contributed, and payments and contracts decided accordingly.

Proudhon says: ‘The price of every product in demand should be its cost in time and outlay’.

I thought I’d conclude this with some personal thoughts. I like Proudhon, a lot. He’s challenging to read because he comments on the politics of his day as much as political philosophy, but you learn a lot from that. I like him because he provides a really important and timely challenge to our view of property today, one that I think needs to be demystified and talked about culturally in an accessible way. I think he was prescient about communism, dictatorship, and authoritarianism.

And while his anarchism relies on a kind of rationalist utopianism – in that he puts utopian hopes on our ability to be rational all the time – I think a return to some kind of utopian thinking is needed, and he paints a picture of  a society – both just and free – that I think is really important we continue to move towards. At the very least, he should challenge your assumptions about what society could look like.

The post Proudhon: Introduction to Mutualism and Anarchism appeared first on Then & Now.

What is property? Property is theft. Although, not all property, as it turns out.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was the first self-declared anarchist. He wrote What is Property? in 1840. He was not a wide-ranging and difficult writer, he wasn’t a system builder, he was critical of utopianisms, and was fascinated with contradictions.

For Proudhon, the ideal society was a contractual one – where individuals are free to arrange their relationships under conditions of justice. But for justice to flourish, its laws had to be known to all.

To understand his theory of property, then, it’s important to start with his idea of justice.

He wrote: ‘Justice is the central star which governs society, the pole around which the political world revolves, the principle and regulator of all transactions. Nothing takes place between men save in the name of right, nothing without the invocation of justice’.

‘Justice, nothing else; that is the alpha and omega of my argument’

Human interaction is guided by laws which are the product of calculations, feelings, or facts about what we perceive to be right. We live, in other words, by socialised rules. We queue, we say thanks, we pay tax, we drive on one side of the road, we have the right of free speech, up to the point of causing disturbances.

If ten people stumbled across a bag of diamonds in the forest there would be a conversation about what the correct thing to do was.

These rules are rules of justice. They are intended to make us all freer in the long term.

One of them is property. We can own stuff. It’s ours exclusively.

But, Proudhon asks, what if property was a miscalculation? A misunderstanding of the moral law? A mistake that we’ve been paying for ever since? An original sin that has led to many of our problems?

Let’s really think about it. What is property?

Property, normalised as it’s been, seems to be natural to us. Buy why? Is it a natural right? A natural law? A right of the strong against the weak? It seems like an absolute right. The right to hold property, like the right to life, liberty, or equality before the law.

But take a look at the right to life and liberty.

Rights are the question of what is absolute. Equality before the law is absolute, it cannot be sold, nor can your life or liberty. This would seem perverse to us.

But property isn’t absolute in the same way. It’s taxed, for example; some of it is taken by the government. Surely it can’t be absolute, then.

Proudhon says that surely if, ‘my possessions are my own; no one has a claim upon them’.

Think of that list of socialised rules and rights. Behind all of them – behind any law – is the idea of justice. What is correct? Right? Moral? From a social point of view. So what is the justification (note just at the beginning of justification) for property?

Philosophical justifications for property usually come in two types: arguments of occupation and arguments of labour.

We’ll start, as Proudhon does, with occupation.

He writes: ‘The right of occupation, or of the first occupant, is that which results from the actual, physical, real possession of a thing. I occupy a piece of land; the presumption is, that I am the proprietor, until the contrary is proved’.

In a state of nature, I stumble across some land, with an apple tree on, for example, and put up a fence, and occupy it. The land is my property.

But, Proudhon argues, if this is the case, occupation is simply toleration. In other words, it requires the consent of others. It must be mutual.

If it’s a right, it must be reciprocal. ‘The theatre, says Cicero, is common to all.’

The occupation argument implies equality. Proudhon says that, ‘thine and mine are signs and expressions of personal, but equal, rights. In other words ‘the right to occupy is equal to all’.

The earth is given to us in common to sustain life, so portioning it up must ‘wrong no one’.

This, of course, has important repercussions today, when much of the land is divided.

Proudhon asks, ‘if the first occupants have occupied every thing, what are the new comers to do? What will become of them, having an instrument with which to work, but no material to work upon?’

Each man needs to occupy some area to live, some material to work with. If 100,000 men settle on an island with no inhabitants, does each not have a right to 1/100,000 of the land?

Proudhon writes: ‘Not only does occupation lead to equality, it prevents property. For, since every man, from the fact of his existence, has the right of occupation, and, in order to live, must have material for cultivation on which he may labor; and since, on the other hand, the number of occupants varies continually with the births and deaths, consequently, occupation is always subordinate to population.’

So property cannot be absolute, cannot be ours. We are simply possessors, temporary holders, under the supervision of society. Land, a requirement of our very liberty, cannot be appropriated. Property, then, is theft.

He asks: if water, fire, and air cannot be appropriated, why should land?

Comte said that: ‘If a man should be deprived of air for a few moments only, he would cease to exist, and a partial deprivation would cause him severe suffering : a partial or complete deprivation of food would produce like effects upon him.’

Man needs light from the stars, the earth’s atmosphere, fresh water, and land!

‘A man who should be prohibited from walking in the highways, from resting in the fields, from taking shelter in caves, from lighting fires, from picking berries, from gathering herbs and boiling them in a bit of baked clay, — such a man could not live’

So we are justified in using these things, as long as we guarantee others the use of them. We come back, again and again, to a type of equality.

Proudhon writes: ‘equality of possessions, equality of rights, liberty, will, personality, are so many identical expressions of one and the same idea, — the right of preservation and development; in a word, the right of Life’

But we still need to possess some things, we must have the right to use. If this right does not come from occupation, where does it come from?

Proudhon now turns to those who have argued that property is justified by labour. John Locke’s theory is the most well-known of these.

Locke said that a person has a right to an object as property when they have laboured upon it. Without this right, how would people live, after all?

If I come across an apple tree, I labour by plucking an apple from it and I have a right to that apple.

Proudhon’s criticisms of this come in a few different forms. First, he says, labour might give you a right of possession – the apple – but not of the means.

Take the farmer who tills the field or looks after the orchard and so makes it their property. Does the fisherman owns the river because he fishes in it? No.

While the farmer and the fisherman might have a right to the product of their labour they do not make property of the means to that product. There is a distinction here between the means of production and the value added.

So you could say that the labourer adds something to the land and so has a right to what is added. If I make a shovel from ore and wood from resources I find can I justifiably says it’s mine?

Firstly, no because the ore and the wood come from occupancy and as we’ve seen, this can change. As more people are born, for example, more have a rights claim on raw materials that I used. From this perspective, I can possess it, borrow it, use it, as long as it’s not harming anyone.

But still, surely part of it is mine? The part I added value to through my labour?

Fine, says Proudhon, but most value is added socially. He writes: ‘There is not a man, then, who does not live off the products of several thousand industries; not a labourer who does not receive from society at large the things which he consumes.’

‘One product cannot exist without another; an isolated industry is impossible. What would be the harvest of the farmer, if others did not manufacture for him barns, wagons, ploughs, clothes, etc.? What would the scholar do without the publisher, the printer without the type-setter and the machinist, and these in their turn without a multitude of other industries?’

It might seem hyperbolic, but his point to remember is that if labour is what produces rights to property then all those that contributed to any object must be compensated. It is their right, after all; that’s what the theorists of property say.

There are then, by their standards, social property rights. Proudhon asks those that argue that property is the result of labour: if that is true, then why do so many who labour not have property? In fact, most labour, and so this should lead to some kind of equality. How is it that some labour and have enough to secure their entire futures and others labour and cannot feed themselves for more than a day? Furthermore, he says if labour is the basis of property then the proprietor gives up his field as soon as they receive rent for it from another. As soon as they’re idle and someone else is using it.

Ultimately, this line of thinking leads Proudhon to a loose equality.

He writes: ‘The limited quantity of available material proves the necessity of dividing the labor among the whole number of laborers. The capacity, given to all, of accomplishing a social task, — that is, an equal task, — and the impossibility of paying one laborer save in the products of another, justify the equality of wages.’

And, more than this, the obvious conclusion is that usury, rent, and wage labour becomes immoral. If I am forced to rent because all of the land has been taken, to borrow money because I have no capital, or to sell my labour because I have no product to work on of my own, then I am being stolen from. Property is theft.

Proudhon writes: ‘The field which I have cleared, which I cultivate, on which I have built my house, which supports myself, my family, and my live­ stock, I can possess: 1st. As the original occupant; 2d. As a laborer; 3rd. By virtue of the social contract which assigns it to me as my share. But none of these titles confer upon me the right of property. For, if I attempt to base it upon occupancy, society can reply, “I am the original occupant.” If I appeal to my labor, it will say, “ It is only on that condition that you possess.” If I speak of agreements, it will respond, “ These agreements establish only your right of use.’

From these two lines of criticisms – occupation and labour – Proudhon has ultimately argued that all possession has a dual nature. A part that is ours by virtue of needing it for the flourishing of our own liberty, and a part that is society’s who have contributed to its value, and still has a right to it based on need. Another way of saying this might be that everything is only borrowed.

Ultimately, his theory of property can be summed up by his phrase, ‘The right to product is exclusive – jus in re ; ­the right to means is common – jus ad rem’.

Proudhon is one of the most important figures in the history of socialist and radical thought.

As George Woodcock writes, ‘property is incompatible with justice, because in practice in represents the exclusion of the worker from his equal rights to enjoy the fruits of society.’

With what Proudhon has said in mind, ask yourself this: is landlordism justified? Is rent? On capital? On loan?

Is the very idea of ownership as simple as you first thought?

The post Proudhon: What is Property? appeared first on Then & Now.

Of course, doctors make these decisions all of the time. We have limited resources, limited space, limited time. Who gets prioritised? In what ways? Using which methods?

One answer is to maximise results: prioritise the most possible good for the most possible people. Prioritise those with the best chances of survival, with the best quality of life.

But even this is fraught with problems.

Prioritise the young over the old? The immature over the wise? How do you quantify quality?

Maybe a lottery is fairer?

These are philosophical questions; ethical questions.

And the more you explore them the more one unavoidable truth becomes obvious: there is no absolute truth, no answer that doesn’t have its alternatives.

The situation is absurd. Definition: unreasonable, illogical, or inappropriate.

Albert Camus was an early twentieth century French philosopher whose works expressed a philosophy of the absurd.

In the Myth of Sisyphus, published in 1952, Camus challenges the idea of reason, logic and rationality, describing the limits of our understanding of the world as humans, protesting that philosophy itself is an almost useless and self-negating task.

Camus is always asking that age old question – what is the meaning of life?

Because if we knew the answer to that question we’d know how to act.

The question of acting is an ethical question – what should we do?

The traditional answers to these questions have, for millennia, come from religion. Religion tells us what we should do and why we should do it.

We should not kill because we’ll go to heaven if we don’t.

Answering these questions secularly, without the aid of a higher celestial authority, is more difficult.

For Camus, in fact, it’s almost useless.

How can we ever know what to do with any certainty when even the clearest questions have exceptions?

I shouldn’t kill? What about in last resort? What about to protect? What about to save the lives of millions? Do we kill through inaction?

This is a caricature, but every single action we take is laden with these problems. Every decision could be the wrong one, every movement has an infinity of alternatives.

Philosophy is often the search for absolutes, universals, guarantees, but when we stop to think, no guarantee of absolute truth can be found.

Should I eat this toast now or wait half an hour? Should I eat bread or cereal? Should I start this job or that one? Should I ring my friend now or later? Should I make this move or that move?

In everyday life, we usually act through habit. We wake up, eat breakfast, get on the bus, do the job that’s been taught to us. We rarely have to really think. Only when we forced to do we contemplate ethical problems. A heart attack? Maybe I should change breakfasts. Global warming? Maybe I should cycle.

Thought requires force.

Is my boss being unfair requiring me to come into the office? Should I shut my small business and lose my ability to live or open and risk infecting others? Should I visit my grandma even if I have no symptoms? Should divorced parents still share custody? Should governments even ban exercise outside?

When we try and work through these problems there’s often no right answer, only bad choices with limited information. Decisions often have to be made at random – with a gut feeling, not a rational calculation.

‘The absurd’, Camus writes, ‘is lucid reason noting its limits’.

We’ve been playing a lot of chess on holiday and the game really demonstrates Camus’s observations, the limits of reason. I can scan the board and see where each piece can move, comparing my possible moves with my opponents, and can just about consider a couple of moves ahead, but very quickly I reach the limits of calculation. Frustration sets in and one move becomes as good as another. You could stare at the board for ever. 

You just have to move.

New York department of health ventilator guidelines state that during an epidemic patients should be prioritised on a first come, first served basis. But if there’s is a choice between two patients, all else being equal, likelihood of survival is the basis for allocation.

But what variables are included here? The young are more likely to survive than the old, but what’s the cut off? Advanced cancer patients don’t make the cut, but how advanced?

And it gets darker.

The rich are statistically more likely to survive than the poor because of healthier lifestyles.

And in America, this means that statistically, white Americans are more likely to be prioritised over black Americans who have health conditions that are the product of poverty.

Even the first come, first served basis prioritises the urban over the rural.

History is always complicit in ethics. No good deed goes unpunished.

‘what is absurd is the confrontation of the irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart’.

During the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone families had to wait for ‘safe burial’ teams to arrive after relatives had died. Often this took days, disregarding religious beliefs about a timely burial. At other times, families weren’t allowed the religious cleansing rituals required after death because of the risk of spreading the disease. Sometimes the distress and social friction communities experienced as a result of this could be as bad as the disease itself.

Social distancing presents a similar dilemma. How long can societies isolate before the economic slowdown kills more than the virus?

For Camus, the absurdity of habit and the limits of any transcendental reason are illustrated by the image of Sisyphus – condemned by the gods to roll a rock to the top of a mountain every day, only for it to roll back down for him to repeat all over again.

In Sisyphus, Camus sees the human conditioned at its starkest.

But he highlights the moment when Sisyphus returns back down to the bottom of the mountain towards the rock – it’s in this moment that he is most aware, and in an awareness of the truth everything becomes clear, we acknowledge our fate and return to it anyway.

Acknowledging the problems of acting and acting anyway takes courage. Knowing that absolute truth is unavailable and being resolute anyway is a demand of being human.

Camus writes, ‘All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols’.

We become most human – most free – when we acknowledge this.

We must live with an awareness of this absurdity or risk falling into a numb and frozen immobility – our fate is to act without being sure of how to act.

The important thing, Camus writes, ‘is not to be cured but to live with one’s ailments’. Life is ‘unjust, incoherent and incomprehensible’. We must live anyway.

In a pandemic, or other global emergency, the ethical imperative to act, to help, to think about what one should do becomes clear and urgent. We must act now. But we – people – live under the dark cloud of emergency conditions daily. Pandemics only serve to illuminate what might normally go hidden and ignored. Mothers go without food, fathers without jobs, children without the right to play, grandmothers going cold. The question is not how to act, but simply to act. Until we continue to solve these problems, like we have the injustices of the past, only inaction is immoral. Complacency and indifference are inexcusable. It’s the absurdity of enjoying the lack of clarity and acting anyway that’s integral to the human condition.

There’s a line in The Myth of Sisyphus that strikes me: ‘In the time of the absurd reasoning, creation follows indifference and discovery. It marks the point from which absurd passions spring and where the reasoning stops’.

In other words, when our reasoning stops, our body – its movements, its ability to create something new, to makes its mark on the earth – starts. When we’re all in conditions antithetical to our social nature, when we’re locked inside and have to work in new ways, when we have to make tough decisions about how to help people and the ways we can support our communities, it’s this – the limits of our minds but the power of our capacity to act – that might be worth reflecting on.

To create, to be hopeless, to not know.

We’re under lockdown in France right down, and at 8 every night as you can hear, people cheer, shout, and hit pans and drums from the balconies in solidarity. Here, the supermarkets are full and the weather’s better than London, and we’re luckily able to work from home, but the British Foreign Office has just advised that all citizens abroad return home before flights are grounded completely. We don’t want to risk being stuck here if we need to get back for whatever reason and we can’t, but we also don’t want to return to London where shelves look empty and social distancing hasn’t been adhered to. There is no good answer.

Sources

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-camus-plague.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/21/us/coronavirus-medical-rationing.html

https://qz.com/1821843/ethicists-agree-on-who-should-get-treated-first-for-coronavirus/

Ronald Aronson, Albert Camus, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/camus/

AMA Journal of Ethics, Culture, Context, and Epidemic Containment, https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/issue/culture-context-and-epidemic-containment

The post Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus appeared first on Then & Now.

Do these things exist outside the realms of reason?

If they’re unreasonable how can they be understood by reasonable means?

And what if, long ago, the mad led better lives than they did now? What would it mean for our society if fools were once closer to kings?

We think of science and medicine, including psychiatry, as improving gradually over time.

But is this really the case? Or, as societies and cultures shift and change, do we just create a different kind of madness?

How do we draw these lines?

Take one of those lines. The line that was drawn around leprosy in the middle ages, a contagious disease with visible marks that might invoke fear or the hand of god.

For a long time, leprosy was one of the most feared diseases in Europe.

In the high Middle Ages there were some 19,000 leper houses across the continent. England had a population of just 1.5 million but had 220 leper houses.

Lepers lived in colonies – some with their own currency – segregated from society.

But by the 14th century, all across Europe, they were beginning to empty. And by 1627 Saint Bartholomew, what was once the biggest in England, had closed altogether.

We’re not certain why leprosy disappeared but it was likely the result of segregation and the end of the Crusades – quick migrations between Europe and the Middle East.

Now, the Leper colonies stood empty, a lasting symbol of exclusion and fear.

Some years later, during the Renaissance, strange ships wound their way along the canals and rivers of Europe. They existed maybe only as an idea in literature – a ships of fools, transporting the mad away from the cities where they might find their sanity.

While it’s unlikely these ships existed, madness during the Renaissance was often dealt with by expulsion. Towns banished the mad from inside their walls, leaving them to run wild or entrusting river boatmen to escort them away.

But to Renaissance Europe the mad held a special place, potentially considered unique sources of wisdom. Madness was the underside of man, it magnified frailties, dreams, illusions, an imagination gone wild, but it was still a kind of truth.

If madness was the sign of god’s hand then there must be good reasons.

The Renaissance also led to new interpretations of madness – as old knowledge from the ancients was rediscovered there was a growth of meanings to madness, a web of connections that became more complex.

Foucault wrote that, ‘Screech owls with toad-like bodies mingle with the naked bodies of the damned in Thierry Bouts’ Hell, the work of Stefan Lochner pullulates with winged insects, cat-headed butterflies and sphinxes with mayfly wingcases, and birds with handed wings that instil panic. While it fascinates mankind with its disorder, its fury and its plethora of monstrous impossibilities, it also serves to reveal the dark rage and sterile folly that lurks in the heart of mankind’.

If madness is linked in literature and art to the devil or to the end of the world or to hubris, emotion or pride then it contains divine wisdom.

Then the age of reason began. The discovery of science, of rationalism, and careful study. Ironically, this didn’t lead to the study of madness but a fear of it. The age of reason was to reduce madness to silence.

When Descartes – the father of rationalism, of reason, of the Enlightenment – considers in his famous Meditations whether he might be mad instead of reasonable he outright rejects the idea.

During the age of reason, if men are reasonable then madness must be banished. Madness became a problem.

In the seventeenth century, madness was placed into a zone of exclusion, a threat in theory and philosophy that the period didn’t know what do with.

‘It is well known,’ writes Foucault, ‘that the seventeenth century created vast houses of confinement, but it is less well known that in the city of Paris, one out of every hundred inhabitants found themselves locked up there within a matter of months’.

In 1656 (six years after Descartes died) the Hospital General was opened in Paris.

Further houses were opened for invalids ‘of both sexes, whatever their age or place of origin, regardless of their quality or birth, and in whatever state they present themselves, able or disabled, sick or convalescent, curable or incurable’.

‘The Hôpital Général was a strange power that the king set up half-way between police and justice, at the limits of legality, and forming a third order of repression’.

These general hospitals spread across France.

They were ‘curious’ institutions, somewhere between assistance and imprisonment, often built in or on the sites of the leprosy communities. Foucault writes that, ‘Together with a desire to assist was a need to repress, a duty of charity and a will to punish’.

The authorities declared that, ‘To that end the directors will have the following at their disposal: gallows, iron collars, prisons and dungeons inside the Hôpital Général and dependent buildings, which they may use as they see fit’.

Madhouses were not medical but ‘semi-judicial’ institutions of segregation where the poor, sick, idle, and mad were separated from healthy, reasonable, and rational society.

‘Confinement,’ writes Foucault, ‘the signs of which are to be found massively across Europe throughout the seventeenth century, was a ‘police’ matter’.

Who was designated for isolation, for segregation from reasonable society, was a product of how reason itself was interpreted. Where that line was drawn and why it was drawn in the way it was, was directly related to the moral, social, and religious beliefs of the day.

In other words, reason had to contain a trace of madness.

At the turn of the eighteenth century, just as the madhouses were being opened, workhouses appeared across England. In 1607 a pamphlet circulated in France that argued that a hospital for the poor should be founded so that the unfortunate might find ‘life, clothes, a trade and punishment’.

Punishment. Because poverty was deserved. It was the sign of wrongdoing in the eyes of many religious. The devil’s poor. Work and labour were the way back to god and health.

The devil’s poor were, ‘Enemies of good order, lazy, deceitful, lascivious and given over to drink, they speak no language other than that of the devil their father, and curse the Bureau’s teachers and directors’.

In 1532, Paris authorities rounded up beggars and forced them to work in the sewers.

‘it is expressly forbidden’, it was announced in Paris, ‘to all persons, regardless of age, sex, birth, social standing or place of birth, their capacity or inability to work, sick or convalescent, curable or mortally ill, to beg in the city and outskirts of Paris, or in the churches, at the doors of churches, at the doors of houses or in the streets, or anywhere else, publicly or in private, by day or by night’.

‘All the poor who are able should do a day’s work, both to keep them from the idleness that is the root of all evil and to get them used to working, while enabling them also to earn a portion of their food’.

These institutions weren’t correctional, medical, or humanitarian, but moral institutions. That is, they were defined and organised by the moral and ethical attitudes – religious or otherwise – of the time and place.

They were ‘granted full powers where authority, direction, administration, commerce, policing, tribunals, correction and punishment are concerned’.

If only the social, moral, and religious norms of society were followed, the poor, idle, infirm and mad might find their reason again.

Nicolas de La Mere, in A Treatise on the Police, declared that, ‘If men were sufficiently wise to comply perfectly with its requirements, it would be the sole matter that the police should treat. Then there would be no more corrupted morals, temperance would ward off sickness, hard work, frugality and prudence would ensure that man never wanted for anything, charity would banish vice, and public order would be assured’.

If reason determined what was unreasonable what reasons were there for dealing with insanity in a specific way? During the age of Enlightenment, when the mad were confined, it was primarily justified for the reason of avoiding public scandal.

Scandal, and therefore, disorder, was a special type of evil and so must be avoided at all costs. Social disorder, of course, is the opposite of an ordered society, and so scandal, along with idleness and poverty should be locked away.

The insane were also likened to animals.

It was rationality, as Aristotle had argued, that made man something more than animal. The lower beasts had passions, fears, desires, but not reason.

But animality could still be traced in ‘civilised’ man. It sometimes got the better of people.

This is the righteous divide between the passionate, emotional, ancient and unreasonable animal side of man – the dark underbelly – and the logical, rational, reasonable and enlightened side, the modern, the civilised.

Madness was born from animality. Writers noted how madmen and women could lie on beds of straw without covering.

Phillipe Pinel, the French physician, admired the ‘constancy and the ease with which certain of the insane of both sexes bear the most rigorous and prolonged cold’.

But, contradictorily, there was logic to the animality. One farmer in Scotland claimed he’d found a cure to insanity.

Pinel writes that, ‘his method consisted in forcing the insane to perform the most difficult tasks of farming, in using them as beasts of burden, as servants, in reducing them to an ultimate obedience with a barrage of blows at the least act of revolt’.

In pure animality madness was to find its truth and its cure since madness becomes reason and humanity becomes unreason. ‘Unchained animality could be mastered only by discipling and brutalizing’.

Foucault writes that, ‘Madness threatened modern man only with that return to the bleak world of beast and things, to their unfettered freedom’.

It is in the logic of animality that madness finds its commensurability with unbridled and untamed passion, insanity links to emotion, drives, and ultimately, morality.

A disequilibrium of the passions and emotions could lead to madness. City life, for example, in its unnatural rhythms and ‘multiplicity of excitations’, could drive men insane.

But how that disbalance was conceptualised determined not just who was considered mad, but how, Foucault argues, madness itself was experienced.

And again, rather than being outside of reason it had a logic to it. ‘the ultimate language of madness is that of reason’.

One man suffers from melancholia – a depression and a fixation on a single idea, an obsession.

He believed that a demon was haunting him from the crime of killing his own son.

On investigation the doctor found that the man had taken his son to the beach where he had drowned. As a father he was responsible. And homicide is punishable by god.

There is a logic, a belief that becomes so powerful that it manifests its truth in all experience – ‘a delirious discourse’, Foucault writes.

If I imagine that I am made of glass I am not mad, but if I reason from this that I am fragile, in danger of breaking, that I must not be touched, that all my words are transparent, then this way madness lies.

The diagnosis of unreason and the experience of madness is found through reasonable means.

Take hysteria.

‘It attacked women more often because they had more delicate constitutions, not used to hard labour and are more inclined to luxury and softness. Those with too much sympathy for others or the world develop a softness in the nerves’.

It is here that morality is introduced into the unity of interpretation. The elements of the interpretation form a complete and universal theory.

‘Women who have “frail fibres”, who are easily carried away, in their idleness, by the lively movements of their imagination, are more often attacked by nervous disease than men who are “more robust, drier, hardened by work.”’

Treatments also operated in this unity of logic, meaning and interpretation. Iron cures because it’s strong. Bitterness, having the qualities of sea water and because sea water corrodes, cleans and purifies. Soap because it eliminates.

But it was what you did, saw, how you acted and lived your life, that mattered.

This had a damning result: all of life and illness could be judged by moral questions. Things that were not natural, which novels were read and plays were watched, what passions desired forbidden things. In all of this a deeper guilt – a moral fault – could be found.

Remember that 1 in 100 people were locked up in Paris. The idle, the poor, the infirm, and the mad were placed, in abstract and in practice, in a box, a question mark. But in the middle of the 18th century a fear began to spread. A fear of sickness, of prison fevers, an ulcer on the body politic, an evil blot on the landscape, a rottenness. The cities were at threat of contagion. In 1780 an epidemic spread through Paris and rumours said that it started in the General Hospital.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century this fear led to a concern across Europe. Too many were locked up. There must be other ways.

Was this a humanitarian advance? It had typically been interpreted this way. But Foucault argues it was more political, more social, more cultural than simply an advance in philanthropic awareness.

So many were condemned that ministers, police officers and magistrates received endless complaints that ‘decent’ men were being forced into confinement. The elite’s own.

At the same time people who could labour, who could work and contribute, were being forced into chains. Mirabeau asked, ‘why are these people not employed at those tasks which might prove harmful to voluntary workers?’

At this time an economic interpretation of poverty was beginning to supplant a religious interpretation. Where once the pauper was condemned and had no place, now one could be found for him.

It is in this context that the firm asylums opened their doors.

‘This house is situated a mile from York, in the midst of a fertile and smiling countryside; it is not at all the idea of a prison that is suggests, but rather that of a large farm; it is surrounded by a great, walled garden. No bars, no grilles on the windows’.

The retreat was run by a Quaker, William Tuke.

But beneath the myths of humanitarian intervention, of philanthropy and liberation, there was an ‘operation’ of organisation that continued to aim to entrap madness by moral reason.

Tuke placed responsibility on the patient’s shoulders, on their own consciences. Instead of simply being locked up they must become aware of their own guilt, conscious of themselves as free and responsible subjects, reasonable subjects.

For Quakers, work was the first moral treatment. Patients were observed and judged; authority replaced repression.

Madness was confined ‘in a system of rewards and punishments, and included in it the movement of a moral consciousness’. ‘Everything was organised so that the madman would recognise himself in a world of judgement that enveloped him on all sides; he must know that he is watched, judged, and condemned’.

This wasn’t unreason liberated but madness mastered. Moral uniformity was expected. ‘The asylum sets itself the task of the homogenous rule of morality, its rigorous extension to all those who tend to escape from it’.

This is where reason and unreason meet most acutely. The doctors were not medical doctors, not scientists, but ‘wise’ moral doctors; arbiters of the rules of society.

Everyone who has worked on the history of psychiatry since has worked in Foucault’s shadow. He revolutionised the field.

He looked at history not as a history of administration, of records or politics, or what the psychiatrists said happened, but as a question of how something was experienced, and how what we think of as timeless actually changes over time.

Foucault introduced difficult and exciting questions in both history and philosophy. Where might the voice of the excluded and silenced be heard? To what extent is madness a product of society’s attitudes towards it?

‘how,’ he writes, ‘can a distinction be made between a wise act carried out by a madman, and a senseless act of folly carried out by a man usually in full possession of his wits?’ ‘Wisdom and folly are surprisingly close. It’s but a half turn from the one to the other’.

What does it mean to transgress? And how is it possible to reach something out of reach, something beyond reason?

‘We could write a history of limits’, Foucault writes, ‘of those obscure gestures, necessarily forgotten as soon as they are accomplished, through which a culture rejects something which for it will be the Exterior’.

And that’s what he’s looking at – the limits, the dark edges of reason, which of course says a lot about how we define reason too.

But Foucault has been criticised by historians and philosophers. Did the ship of fools really exist? Were the mad really excluded from any idea of reason? These are questions I’ll return to next time.

The post Foucault: Madness & Civilization (History of Madness) appeared first on Then & Now.

You’re probably already a stoic in some way. It’s part of our culture. Influenced by Socrates and emerging in Ancient Greece in the 3rd century BC, it’s one of the foundations of Christianity, is maybe the first psychology, it contributed to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, guided a Roman Emperor, and has become increasingly popular in recent years, through events like Stoicon, Annual Stoic Week, and a flurry of new popular books and articles.

Could it really be a guide to the best possible life?

This introduction to Stoicism will mix two things: what the Stoics of Ancient Greece and Rome actually said – the original doctrines – and how this might be interpreted and be useful today.

Stoicism tries to answer the question of what philosophy is.

Epictetus writes that, ‘Philosophy does not promise to secure anything external for humans, otherwise it would be admitting something that lies beyond its proper subject matter. For just as wood is the material of the carpenter, bronze that of the statuary, so each individual’s own life is the material of the art of living’.

What is fundamental for all of us is to work towards and discover how to live life in the best possible way – to stop making faulty judgments or to avoid being the slave of negative emotions and thoughts, to be virtuous and tranquil.

Stoicism then is about understanding and changing your entire approach to life.

There were a number of notable stoics. The first stoic was Zeno (333-261 BC), and the stoic school was made popular by Chrysippus after Zeno’s death.

Unfortunately, most of what the Ancient Greek stoics said has been lost, and what we know of Stoicism we know from the Romans – Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius in particular.

I’m going to concentrate less on figures, though, and more on ideas.

The default way of thinking for many people is probably something akin to hedonism: that life is best approached by maximising pleasure, whether in the short term or the long term. This is Epicureanism, a school that was around at the same time as the Stoics

Another school, the Cynics, argued that because desire leads to a longing and a pain, and things desired can’t always be had, then the only way to live a happy life is to not desire anything and live an ascetic lifestyle.

The Stoics argued that both were misguided.

According to Seneca, what the Stoics seek is, ‘how the mind may always pursue a steady and favourable course, may be well-disposed towards itself, and may view its conditions with joy’.

The Greek stoics divided Stoicism into three parts: logic, physics, and ethics.

None of these terms, though, meant what they do today.

Logic was formal logic, but also rhetoric, language, poetry.

Physics mostly meant the study of God and the world – essentially how things work.

They also broke all of this into two parts: theory and practice.

Philosophy, importantly, needed to be both studied and practiced, learned and executed. Exercises, reflection, and self-improvement were fundamental.

For Epictetus, studying logic, physics, and ethics were all necessary to living a good life.

He wrote that we should study ethics because, ‘That concerning the impulse to act and not to act, and, generally, appropriate behaviour; so that he may act in an orderly manner and after due consideration, and not carelessly’.

We should study logic because it is, ‘concerned with freedom from deception and hasty judgement’ and therefore acting in error.

For this introduction though I’m going to focus on the ethical part of the system, and hopefully this will demonstrate why the other two parts are necessary.

In other words, Stoic ethics is the central and most influential component, both for the Romans and for us today.

For the Greeks, the words ethics and virtue have slightly different meanings than they do now. Ethics is concerned not with what is explicitly right or wrong, but on cultivating a ‘good spirit’, to live a good or ‘excellent’ life and cultivate moral wisdom.

And all the Greek schools of thought agreed that to live a good life was to be virtuous.

But this, again, had a slightly different meaning.

For the Greeks, to be virtuous is to live according to nature. Our nature, the nature of the world, the nature of others – it’s to live as was intended for us.

Why?

Zeno divided things in the world into three categories:

1. Things that are good for us
2. Things that are bad for us
3. Things that we are indifferent to

But it’s hard to find things that are universally and unerringly good for us.

Take food. It is sometimes good, but it is not always good, it’s sometimes bad for us or unhealthy or consumed as a result of greed. We can eat too much, we eat the wrong things.

So it must fall into the category of indifferents.

The same applies to drink, sex, work, company.

In fact, the only thing that can always be universally good is our rationality.

Our rationality can tell us when food is good and when it’s bad.

We can use it to live according to nature and virtue – and the only sole guide to this, the only absolute good, is our rationality.

Now, it’s obviously rational to eat food sometimes. If it is in front of us and we are hungry our rational impulse is to eat it.

But as a concept, an idea, we have to be indifferent to it. We could take it or leave it.

Virtue and rationality are the only things up to us, they are internal to us. Everything else is not, and so to crave and need these other things is irrational; the only way to tranquillity is to be indifferent to them – to accept when they come and not dwell on them when they don’t.

In other words, to expect the external world to be good all of the time is to be irrational – and to have an emotional reaction over something external to us and not in our control is also irrational.

Take this cake.

I should, according to Epictetus, be indifferent towards it. I should not crave it, be excited by it, or be angry that I can’t have it.

But can we enjoy it? Yes!

Marcus Aurelius wrote that, ‘You must consider the activity which is possible for you to carry out in conformity with your own nature as a delight – and that is always possible for you’.

And Diogenes tells us that: ‘They say that there are three good emotions (eupatheiai): joy (charan), caution (eulabeian) and wishing (boulēsin). Joy, the counterpart of pleasure, is rational elation; caution, the counterpart of fear, is rational avoidance, for though the sage will never feel fear he will still use caution. And they make wishing the counterpart of desire, inasmuch as it is rational appetency’.

If I can rationally justify having this cake – if I’ve abstained for a long time, or need sugar, or it’s someone’s birthday and it brings everyone joy – then I can have it and should enjoy it.

For the Stoics rationality is akin to the soul – the only thing we have control over, and that makes us who we are.

For our soul to align with the world and its demands is the only true and universal good.

Quick emotions – especially negative emotions – and uncritical desires are irrational because they’re in conflict with the external world, which is ordered in a natural way and out of our control.

Marcus Aurelius wrote that: ‘You have the power to strip away many superfluous troubles located wholly in your judgement, and to possess a large room for yourself embracing in thought the whole cosmos, to consider everlasting time, to think of the rapid change in the parts of each thing, of how short it is from birth until dissolution, and how the void before birth and that after dissolution are equally infinite’.

In his book A Guide to the Good Life, William Irvine outlines a number of psychological techniques the Stoics used.

As we’ve seen, to be virtuous is live according to nature and it is natural that misfortune is everywhere. Everything is perishable, we want and need things we can’t have, friends and family get ill and die. The world is in a state of impermanence. What is is destined not to be.

To expect fortune at all times then is irrational – it is not living in accordance with nature.

We also become unappreciative of the things, like friends and family, that we do have in our lives. We can become ungrateful, wish we had more, and be difficult to please.

The Stoics argue we can come to accept the worst and be more appreciative of what we have through what Irvine calls negative visualisation.

To live according to nature, which can deal us a bad hand at any moment, we should be prepared – we should imagine the worst happening.

We should imagine that the food we’re about to eat, the shelter over our head, the person we love, all of these things – even our own lives – could be gone tomorrow.

Fortune, fate, the natural order of things, will lead to things happening to us outside of our control, so in order to live virtuously, we must accept them.

Not only this, in order to acknowledge these difficulties, according to Seneca we should occasionally live as though they’ve happened.

We should endure cold weather and forgo food occasionally. We should practice self control.

Imagining and sometimes living the worst will lead us to be more appreciative of what we do have, rather than always wanting more.

Epictetus wrote that, ‘It is impossible that happiness, and yearning for what is not present, should ever be united’.

Some things are out of hands and not in our control and so we must concentrate on the things that are.

Epictetus’ handbook begins by telling us that, ‘Some things are up to us [eph’ hêmin] and some things are not up to us. Our opinions are up to us, and our impulses, desires, aversions–in short, whatever is our own doing. Our bodies are not up to us, nor are our possessions, our reputations, or our public offices, or, that is, whatever is not our own doing’.

We must distinguish between things in our control – internals – and things outside of our control – externals.

To worry about and hope we can influence things outside of our control is irrational and contrary to nature and virtue.

There is a problem though.

There are things in our control – some choices – and things outside of our control – such as the weather. But there are also things that we have some control over – like a tennis match, for example.

Irvine calls this the trichotomy of control, and even the things we have some control over can be broken down into the parts we can control and parts we can’t.

In the tennis match, we have no control over whether we win or lose, but we do have control over our concentration, our swings, our training.

This is what is called internalising your goals.

At work we can separate the job at hand from the concern about whether our boss thinks it’s good work.

It involves living in the present and concentrating solely on the things we think are rational in the moment.

Finally, to be prepared to live according to nature, we should reflect on Stoicism itself. This is why Marcus Aurelius wrote his meditations.

We must cultivate our rational minds.

We should think about, or write down, the things outside of our control that have annoyed us, or the things we took for granted. We should decide what we should negatively visualise to appreciate things more. We should imagine the unfortunate things that will likely happen to us before we start a task. Think about what we’ve taken for granted or when we let our desires get the better of us.

I talk a lot on this channel about the fallacy of the mind-body dualism, the impossibility of detaching yourself from your emotions, and your environment. And while this is of course true, there is also obviously a way in which we are able to separate ourselves from those things, even if it’s temporary, or limited, or an illusion. Stuart Hall said that, ‘this experience of, as it were, experiencing oneself as both subject and object, of encountering oneself from the outside, as another – an other – sort of person next door, is uncanny’.

Stoicism is a good way to begin to cultivate a better framework for experiencing yourself, your own life, your own attitudes and goals.

And I think what attracts me is that it’s flexible – it doesn’t mean resigning yourself to a stoic pessimism, but thinking more effectively about what’s in your control and what’s not.

I was always worried Stoicism is too cynical – that it’s about tidying your room and not changing the world.

But you do have control over changing the world too – you have control over how effectively you speak, how well thought out your ideas are, where you want to direct your efforts.

And I think that overall, thinking about the way your own mind functions, and having models to improve its disposition, a framework for recalibrating its perspective, is something that in a secular world, or a world that devalues the humanities, is sadly lacking.

Sources

William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

John Sellars, Stoicism

Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy

Brad Inwood, Stoicism: A Very Short Introduction

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Epictetus, Handbook and Discourses

The post Introduction to Stoicism appeared first on Then & Now.

Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains.

– Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762

Whate’er its mission, the soft breeze can come
To none more grateful than to me; escaped
From the vast city, where I long had pined
A discontented sojourner: now free,
Free as a bird to settle where I will.

– William Wordsworth, 1799

Romanticism is notoriously difficult to define.

It is often described as a literary movement that took place during the age of Enlightenment – somewhere between 1770 to 1850 – but it’s not just a period in history, and it’s not just about literature.

It’s also a philosophy, a mentality, an attitude to life.

One with profound lessons for today.

There are a few key figures in the history of romanticism, and a few key movements. There were the English poets – Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge. The French revolutionaries, particularly Rousseau. And the German philosophical romantics, Schlegel, Schelling, Tieck, and others.

And while they’re all different, there are number of key characteristics that they share and that through which can be pieced together a romanticist manifesto.

Romanticism is in some ways part of, and in other ways a revolt against, the Enlightenment – the movement that critiqued authority and put the individual at the centre of political, social, and moral ideas.

It’s always difficult to start a genealogy, but it was Descartes who was central to changing the idea of thought itself, from the attitude that truth was revealed externally to the idea that the person – the subject – was the centre of everything.

Without Descartes, the Enlightenment would never have proceeded in the same way, if at all.

Descartes leads to Hobbes, Hobbes to Locke, to Rousseau, Voltaire, countless others, and eventually, the French Revolution.

This new way of thinking challenged the dominance of kings, the Church, and the nobility, and emphasised the inviolability of all.

Many thinkers of the Enlightenment argued that this inviolability was the product of something important that all humans possessed.

This can be seen in this important introductory statement to Rousseau’s The Social Contract, published in 1762: ‘Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains’.

Men – in a state of nature – Rousseau argued, lived in harmony with each other in natural freedom. They had two important qualities, the drive for self-preservation and a natural desire to help others. This led to a natural harmony that the modern world had corrupted – modernity made men selfish and competitive to the expense of all and so men were everywhere in chains.

Modern society alienated humans from their true selves.

Which brings us to the first thing the romantics shared – an emphasis on the individual.

Romantics privileged the experience of human life, praised what each person was capable of with their own faculties, their own imagination.

This was sacred, inviolable.

The belief in the inviolability of each individual and their thoughts and passion leads to a natural empathy – as Rousseau argued, a pity, for each – that leads to a humanitarian impulse.

The English Romantic poets all embodied this emphasis on natural man, on individuality corrupted by modern life, of Rousseau’s chains and the imagination of the French Revolution.

We can see all of this in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Dungeon, published in 1798 while the French Revolution was still ongoing:

And this place our forefathers made for man!
This is the process of our love and wisdom,
To each poor brother who offends against us –
Most innocent, perhaps -and what if guilty?
Is this the only cure? Merciful God!
Each pore and natural outlet shrivelled up
By Ignorance and parching Poverty,
His energies roll back upon his heart,
And stagnate and corrupt; till changed to poison,
They break out on him, like a loathsome plague-spot;
Then we call in our pampered mountebanks –
And this is their best cure! uncomforted
And friendless solitude, groaning and tears,
And savage faces, at the clanking hour,
Seen through the steam and vapours of his dungeon,
By the lamp’s dismal twilight! So he lies
Circled with evil, till his very soul
Unmoulds its essence, hopelessly deformed
By sights of ever more deformity!

But what’s also important about the inviolability of each individual is that it is natural, and if it’s natural it is – or should be, at least – in harmony with all else that is natural.

The three main social contract theorists of the period, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, all reflected on the qualities man had in a state of nature. How they lived when there were no institutions affecting them.

Hobbes thought that life in a state of nature would be ‘nasty, brutish and short’, but, as we’ve seen, Rousseau idealised natural man – the noble savage.

The English Romantic poets also romanticised nature; their love of places like the Lake District is well known. Philosophically then, there is a universal, transcendent, undeniable line that runs from the natural world through man’s senses into his sentiments – man feels nature, needs to be at one with it.

Wordsworth wrote during an early spring:

I heard a thousand blended notes,

While in a grove I sate reclined,

In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts

Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link

The human soul that through me ran;

And much it grieved my heart to think

What man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,

The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;

And ’tis my faith that every flower

Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopped and played,

Their thoughts I cannot measure:—

But the least motion which they made

It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,

To catch the breezy air;

And I must think, do all I can,

That there was pleasure there.

If this belief from heaven be sent,

If such be Nature’s holy plan,

Have I not reason to lament

What man has made of man?

There is a link between each person’s consciousness and nature that’s so important that we crave its fullness – it must be complete for us to live a complete life.

The Romantics thought the answer to this question – what man has made of man – was that men were alienated from nature, themselves, and one another. And that the cold calculating reason of the Enlightenment was partly to blame for this.

Where many Enlightenment philosophes emphasised reason, the Romantics emphasised feeling.

And almost a century before, Lord Shaftsbury in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times had criticised Hobbes’ Leviathan for arguing that the fundamental principle driving all men was calculated self-interested – reason.

Shaftsbury and, of course, Rousseau later, argued that men also had the important capacity to feel as well as think – to feel joy, sadness, fear, both for oneself and for others.

So again, when we are affected by nature it is through sensations and sentiments, we feel it before we think about it rationally. Hume had said, for example, that reason could only ever be the slave of the passions.

Literary critic M.H. Abrams has written that, ‘A work of art is essentially the internal made external, resulting from a creative process operating under the impulse of feeling, and embodying the combined product of the poet’s perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. The primary source and subject matter of a poem, therefore, are the attributes and actions of the poet’s own mind; or if aspects of the external world, then these only as they are converted from fact to poetry by the feelings and operations of the poet’s mind’.

Imagination then is fundamentally important too. We might think of it as part of the triad of past, present and future. Nature exists, precedes us, is in the past. In the present we, as individuals, feel it, sense it. And through our imaginations we project it and us into the future. How we think about this process determines our futures.

In the Romantics we see a line from nature through the individual and their senses into the imagination. Commenting on Wordsworth, R.L. Brett and A.R. Jones write that, ‘The material of consciousness is made up, firstly, of sensations or (as modern philosophers would say) sense-data; secondly, simple ideas which are copies of sensations, or sensations which remain after the objects which cause them have been removed; and thirdly, complex ideas which are compounded of simple ideas. These three stages, as we may call them, correspond roughly to sensation, memory and thought’.

Deleuze would call the relationship between the natural world, the human senses, and the imagination a line of imminence. Spinoza would emphasise how we’re all, including nature, made up of the same stuff, material that runs through everything – a pantheism.

In, This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, Coleridge laments how this relationship is misaligned but is optimistic about the power of the imagination to correct it. The narrator is forced to stay alone while his friends go for a walk.

Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,

This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost

Beauties and feelings, such as would have been

Most sweet to my remembrance even when age

Had dimm’d mine eyes to blindness!

He imagines his friend’s appreciation of nature and how one of them must cherish it even more because of the corrupting influence of the modern city where he has to live:

My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pined

And hunger’d after Nature, many a year,

In the great City pent, winning thy way

With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain

And strange calamity!

In the end though the poet’s own imagination saves him:

A delight

Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad

As I myself were there! Nor in this bower,

This little lime-tree bower, have I not mark’d

Much that has sooth’d me. Pale beneath the blaze

Hung the transparent foliage; and I watch’d

Some broad and sunny leaf, and lov’d to see

The shadow of the leaf and stem above

Dappling its sunshine!

So we’ve focused on the English Romantic poets and the French revolutionaries.

But the attitudes of both can be clarified if we look briefly into the German Romantics, a group of thinkers – Schelling, Schlegel, Novalis – who, at the end of the 18th century, were part of a period referred to as Frühromantik.

They too were concerned with the corrupting influence of modern life which tended to alienate, divide, separate, and estrange people from each other and their natural condition.

The German Romantics were particularly concerned with a dilemma. If romantics emphasise their own individual feelings, then there can be no theory of what it really means to be a romantic, seeing as everyone differs in their unique perspective on the world. The term then seems useless. How can nature be both transcendental and universal, and particular and unique to each person?

They argued that Romanticism was not just an approach to poetry or literature, but an approach to life itself.

In Critical Fragments, poet and philosopher Fredrich Schlegel theorises how the romanticist philosophy applies to everything. If the romantic emphasises his own personal, sentimental view on what he senses, then why should this not be applied to the family, to politics, to shipbuilding, to cooking. All things can be romanticised.

Philosopher Frederick Beiser puts it this way: ‘For if what the artist creates is also what nature creates through him, then his activity reveals, manifests, or expresses nature itself; it is indeed the self-revelation of nature. Art thus becomes, as Schelling famously argued, the organon and criterion of truth itself’.

The German romantics argued that everyone should make their lives into a novel – a beautiful story that fits in with their place in the world and their own imaginative expression of it.

Keats wrote, ‘I am certain of nothing but the holiness of Heart’s affection and the truth of Imagination. What imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it existed before or not’.

So Romanticism, as a philosophy, is more than just poetry. It’s a way of life that emphasises living with nature, appreciating our senses, sentiments, and feelings, and projecting both, with a humanitarian impulse, into building a better future.

In this way it asserts itself in a certain tone that is meant to be convincing, is meant to move people.

And anything can be written in this tone – arguments about climate change or poverty might benefit from a certain romanticist prose today.

How we describe the world, who writes about the world, has a profound effect on what world we will produce in the future. Academic writing is notoriously dry, and the dominance of scientific discourse attaches importance to describing the world in a detached way, ignoring our feelings.

The Romantics, it has been most aptly concluded, took Descartes’ dictum, ‘I think therefore I am’, and reformulated it: I feel therefore I am.

Shelley wrote:

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves.

Sources

Aidan Day, Romanticism

Miljana Cunta, The Romantic Subject as an Absolutely Autonomous Individual

Frederick Beiser, The Romantic Imperative

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

Ceri Crossley, French Historians and Romanticism

The post Romanticism: Introduction, Poetry & Philosophy appeared first on Then & Now.

Because it’s not just the past – as James Baldwin said ‘History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us’ – it’s the totality of how you feel, your routines, what you’re doing, how you perceive people, friends, family, the world, what our cultural perspectives our – right now, and tomorrow. We use the past to answer questions about the present that guide us into the future.

But at the moment I have a different reason for thinking about modern life.

And after living in London for quite a long time now, we’re thinking of leaving. So I find myself thinking about the city with an urgency. What have I learned?

Modernity is a battleground for historians.

Some – most, in fact – would probably agree with historian Joel Mokyr when he says that material life is ‘far better today than could have been imagined by the most wild-eyed optimistic eighteenth-century philosopher’, and that most economists today ‘would regard [the industrialisation of the 19th century as an undivided blessing’.

But that phrase ‘undivided blessing’ has attracted criticism. What about social inequality, alienation, environmental degradation, pollution, stress, loneliness, the decline of traditional community and religious ties, mechanised warfare, imperialism?

Of course, science, industry, and technology have given us so much, but when factoring in the whole package, as historian Jeremy Caradonna points out, ‘It begins to look like, at best, a mixed blessing’.

That our shift to a modern world contains at least some downsides should be obvious to anyone who has been stressed by monotonous, cramped commutes, been disheartened by the sight of sludge in a once beautiful river, or had a front row view of the first nuclear bomb being dropped on Nagasaki.

This shift to modern life really began at the turn of the 1800s. And what’s useful about searching out the first critics of that shift is that they had one foot in a past that is now irretrievably lost to us, retained only faintly, a shadow of real agrarian lives who could rarely write about themselves – they left behind hints of what those lives felt like in words that contain worlds within them.

To look at what critics of modernity argued is not to idealise a simpler pre-modern life – one thing that stands out from diaries of the period is that people were often thankful for the new work in the factories and industry that were beginning to spring up, and they describe work in the field as irregular and difficult. One working class diary recalls, ‘As a miner I did very well’.

But as we know from the emergence of the internet, historical shifts bring surprises – both blessings and curses.

In the 1880s Arnold Toynbee wrote of the period 80 years before: ‘We now approach a darker period – a period as disastrous and as terrible as any through which a nation ever passed; disastrous and terrible because side by side with a great increase of wealth was seen an enormous increase of pauperism’.

These critics weren’t all doom and gloom – they often struggled with the relationship between the benefits and problems of modernity. They weren’t just blind critics of the ‘satanic mills’, in the poet William Blake’s words.

In fact, Blake himself was critical but forward looking. He didn’t idealise the green and pleasant lands. He strangely argued that, ‘where man is not, Nature is barren’.

He went on: ‘Nature is miserably cruel, wasteful, purposeless, chaotic, and half dead. It has no intelligence, no kindness, no love and no innocence’.

How can Blake say this when he is also known as one of our most fervent critics of dirty and dehumanising factories?

In fact, Blake chose to never leave London – he was buried here in 1827 in an unmarked grave – and until his death he believed London could become a new Jerusalem – a heaven on earth.

He said: ‘I will not cease from Mental Fight I Nor shall sword sleep in my hand I Till we have built Jerusalem, I In England’s green and pleasant land’.

I think this makes Blake a unique critic – set apart from many other thinkers of the period – but before we return to Blake’s solution, let’s look at what others were saying about the emerging modern life.

Marx’s long-time collaborator, Fredrich Engels, was sent by his father from Germany to manage a factory in Manchester, and complained of how badly industrial towns were built – the ‘foul courts, lanes, and back alleys, reeking of coal smoke, and especially dingy from the originally bright and red brick, turned black with time’.

He wrote about how the foul-smelling stream was full of debris, coal-black, with blackish-green slime pools and the bubble of gas producing an unendurable stench.

John Stuart Mill, while applauding the progress of industry, also said that: ‘I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind’.

But both were criticising industry that was beginning to look like this, around the middle of the century. About fifty years before, others were beginning to notice and comment on the signs of what was to come.

The smoggy coal and steam powered factories that we associate with the industrial revolution hadn’t quite gone up, but signs of the new way of life were developing – new inventions, more watches and clocks, new methods of managing the mines, basic steam engines, the spinning jenny and the use of water mills to spin yarn, canals were being dug. These new technologies of enlightenment, it seemed to their critics, were changing people’s psychologies.

People, many noted, were beginning to look at the world and relationships not as sacred, not as ideals or guides, not as valuable in themselves or for reasons unseen, but primarily in terms of usefulness – enlightenment philosophers and mathematicians like Francis Hutchinson and Daniel Bernoulli believed that usefulness could be, in Hutchinson’s word, ‘computed’.

The German novelist, philosopher and poet Fredrich Schiller said that, ‘Utility is the great idol of the age, to which all powers are in thrall and to which all talent must pay homage. Weighed in this crude balance, the insubstantial merits of Art scarce tip the scale, and, bereft of all encouragement, she shuns the noisy market-place of our century’.

Art shuns the noisy marketplace of our century – in other words, real art, mysterious art, something beyond mere use cannot keep up, is pushed out, and its returns aren’t deemed useful enough.

The poet and novelist Ludwig Tieck wondered what utility even meant. Is everything just about food, drink, clothing, running better ships and building better machines, only to eat better?

He says that actually, ‘what is truly exalted neither can nor should be of use’.

In his novel Franz Sternbald’s Journey, Tieck’s protagonist argues that the divine is not of use, and some things aren’t for humanity’s vulgar needs. He says that utility often just means more material gains at the expense of the mind. He reminds us that the mind shouldn’t be the servant of the body. It’s why art, culture, religion – which often teaches us something deeper – should be a response to a society based on utility. Art is the pledge of our immortality, he says.

Novalis said that modernity converted, ‘the infinite, creative music of the universe into the uniform clattering of a monstrous mill’.

And Ernst Hoffman wrote a novel in which the science and industry of the enlightenment was brought to a small country that was a splendid garden full of fairies. Then ‘the forests are being cleared, the river made navigable, potatoes planted, the village schools improved… roads laid down and cowpox inoculated’.

But the fairies couldn’t be converted into useful citizens because ‘they practice a dangerous trade in the miraculous, nor do they shy away from spreading, under the name of poetry, a secret poison that renders people completely unfit for service in the Enlightenment’.

What was emerging, many thinkers thought, was a one-dimensional existence that prioritised the pursuit of usefulness and commerce over all else. But this leads to a question: what was it that was being excluded and why?

When the poet Wordsworth said that, ‘The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers’, he was saying that some part of our potential was being wasted.

Dickens was getting at this too when he began his novel Hard Times by complaining that Victorian England’s schooling was about ‘facts, facts, facts’, at the expense of all else.

Shelley also said that real art was being ‘concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes’.

Here was the point: something about art and nature shouldn’t be reduced to utility. But why?

The German Romantics complained that the new style of architecture taking over Europe was supplanting architectural styles to the point that everywhere looked the same.

They toured and loved the old medieval towns and cities. They got lost in the alleyways and admired the crooked buildings. Is this why we love to go to those old European towns with narrow labyrinths alleys – the feeling of getting lost, or stumbling upon a view, a bar, a musician, a quirky building?

What all of this has in common is that doing everything by utility means going in a straight line, building on a grid, forgetting something that makes us human: play.

What seemed to them to be being sacrificed at the alter of modernity were poetry, art, spirituality, community, tradition, and something that’s the opposite of utility – uselessness. Play, whimsy, randomness, creative experimentation with no point, sitting around and daydreaming. Schiller believed that play was what art was about.

Ludwig Tieck said that ‘the straight line, because it is always the shortest distance between two points, because it is sharp and definite, seemed to me to express requirement, the primary prosaic fundament of life’. Crooked lines represent ‘inexhaustibility of play, of adornment, of tender love’.

What’s ironic is that these things aren’t anti-utility – the utility of being creative might just take longer to develop, its dividends longer to appreciate, its harvest longer to reap.

Anticipating Nietzsche some decades later, Novalis said where there are no gods, ghosts rule. Sacrificing these importance things would leave a gap in people, a longing, an illness, waiting for something monstrous to speak to it, waiting for someone to take advantage of it.

People, they thought, felt alienated – the pursuit of money pushed out all other needs.

Shelley said that, ‘Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, The signet of its all-enslaving power Upon a shining ore, and called it gold’.

In the Mask of Anarchy he argued that:

For the tyrants’ use to dwell:
So that ye for them are made,
Loom, and plough, and sword, and spade;
With or without your own will, bent
To their defence and nourishment.
’Tis to be a slave in soul,
And to hold no strong control
Over your own wills, but be
All that others make of ye.

At the same time, these thinkers noticed that the world was becoming overstimulating, moving faster and changing quicker. Wordsworth noted that ‘a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor’.

Torpor meant lethargy – again, he was pointing to this idea that keeping up with being productive – in the factory or city – and being surrounded by new demands, blunted – in his words – a part of the mind.

These thinkers believed – and its interesting that there are now lots of studies that prove this – that the city, factories, being indoors too much, living with excessive noise, overstimulates and deprives us of a more harmonious state that we get from being in nature.

Novalis complained that, ‘the restless tumult of distracting social occasions’ leaves no time for ‘quietly gathering [one’s] thoughts or for the attentive contemplation of the inner world’.

This was not to say that they all believed that the natural world was Eden – as we’ve seen Blake was critical, and no-one was denying that nature could be harsh, dangerous and cruel. But as Keats said, ‘Oh ye! who have your eye-balls vexed and tired, Feast them upon the wideness of the Sea’.

This combination of a one-dimensional focus on utility and the speed of sensations and stimulation and change led to one metaphor being used again and again, in multiple countries – the great wheel of modernity.

The wheel is the perfect symbol of modern life – the new spinning jenny, the cogs of factories, the wheels of trains and later cars, the spinning of the newly abundant clocks and pocket watches – and it’s a useful metaphor because it contains so much – endlessness, infinity, flow, the spinning of growth, the continuous line of improvement. The circle is both perfect and monotonous at the same time.

Blake said that:

Endless their labour, with bitter food. void of sleep,
Tho hungry they labour: they rouze themselves anxious
Hour after hour labouring at the whirling Wheel
Many Wheels & as many lovely Daughters sit weeping

Anticipating Marx, Fredrich Schiller wrote that modern life meant that, ‘chained to a single little fragment of the Whole, man himself develops into nothing but a fragment; everlastingly in his ear the monotonous sound of the wheel that he turns, he never develops the harmony of his being, and instead of putting the stamp of humanity upon his own nature, he becomes nothing more than the imprint of his occupation or of his specialized knowledge’.

In Germany, the Romantic Wilhelm Wackenroder pointed to the ‘ceaseless turn of the eternal wheel, the uniform whirring on of time to an unvarying tempo…gearwork in which they themselves were enmeshed and pulled forward’.

Eichendorff wrote that the great cities had ‘caught the old, powerful stream in the gears of their machines simply to make it flow faster and faster. There in its dried-out bed, the wretched life of factories spreads its haughty carpets, whose reverse side is nothing but ugly, bare, colorless patches’.

If Eichendorff had lived to see the extent of industrialisation, climate change, deforestation, and the like, he would have been dismayed to have been proven right.

He said that man had ‘gone ahead and set the world up for himself as a mechanical, self-running clock’.

For Novalis nature itself had been ‘demoted to the level of dull machinery’.

What they all had in common was that they were beginning to anticipate the idea that industrialisation wasn’t just about the external world, but about what it was doing to our psychologies – the mechanisation of the human soil.

This being taken along like a wheel or a clock, endlessly spinning, predictably, some external ideal of mathematical utility the ultimate master of man has another side – of being managed – of routines being predictable, to be a slave stood at the controls, overseeing a system devoid of life, being managed by the system itself.

In his poem on London, Blake said that he ‘wander thro’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe’.

He’s careful to purposefully use and repeat the word chartered.

It means that the rights to the streets and river are sold off – freedoms to use them, to be in them, are for some but not for others – and they’re chartered under the auspices of utility.

Blake goes on to describe ‘in every voice, in every ban the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ – manacles being another word for hand cuffs – people are being trapped, managed, controlled – but not physically – mentally – moved on, told where and when they can trade, banned from begging, banned from the common land which was being enclosed and sold off. Policing was growing. Permission was required to beg and the impoverished could only do so in the parish they lived in. The 1714 Vagrancy Act began to manage people on the street: the act banned things like charitable collectors, entertainers, jugglers, minstrels, men who had abandoned their wives and children, anyone sleeping or begging, and so on.

In short, all life was to be subsumed under the great wheel of utility, or to move out of its way.

So let’s go back to why, despite it all, Blake believed in the city.

I’m at St Pauls and about a mile that way is Westminster Abbey. Both of these buildings appear multiple times in Blakes works.

Take a look at this image from his poem Jerusalem: St Paul’s in light behind what Blake describes as Jerusalem’s naked beauty, and St Paul’s in darkness to the left behind the shadowy figure of Vala.

Blake thought that this building in its neo-classical style – geometrical, repetitive, symmetrical – was everything that was wrong with the one-dimensional mathematical thinking of the time. What was called neoclassicism. While it certainly looks impressive, many like Blake were critical of its flatness, simple pale colour, its uniformity, and the vast wealth that went into building it, surrounded by poverty.

But moving down the road, he loved Westminster Abbey – an older gothic building. Many of the Romantics idealised older architectural styles that they thought more in keeping with nature.

Inside old churches they likened the pillars to tree trunks, the architecture to overgrown forests, the asymmetry. The French romantic Francois-Rene Chateaubriand likened the experience of being in a cathedral to the sublime labyrinths of a dark forest. Cathedral architecture, he said, ‘originated in the woods’.

Unlike other Romantics, Blake places his ideas about redemption squarely in the middle of London. In this way, he’d despise how the traffic in London developed but would probably be happy with some emerging trends – solar and wind energy, low traffic neighbourhoods, city farms, prioritising parks and green areas.

In other words, nature and civilization, nature and culture, natural and artificial, shouldn’t be antithetical to one another. It’s not even that they should coexist – they should be one and the same. Synthesised. The same side of one coin even. It’s a reflection of the beautiful romantic notion that the romantic writers weren’t people, thinkers, reflecting on nature, but were nature reflecting on itself.

The post The First Critics of Modern Life appeared first on Then & Now.

This is American philosopher Robert Nozick’s bold pronouncement at the beginning of Anarchy, State and Utopia, a 1975 book that is a largely a response to Rawl’s 1971 A Theory of Justice, which I’ve covered here.

For Nozick, the rights that individuals have are natural, of fundamental importance, and completely, universally, unequivocally inviolable.

These rights, he argues, must be respected at all costs.

They aren’t designed by institutions, or dreamed up by revolutionaries, written into contracts and protected by lawyers. They are part of being human.

This is the basis of Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

For Nozick, there is only the individual.

There might also be such a thing as the state, as society, as culture, but these phenomenon are only the product of individual humans coming together. The individual is primary.

In this, Nozick follows the 17th century English philosopher John Locke, who argued that individuals have natural rights and that, ‘no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions’.

Infringing upon and violating these rights for the sake of others, for the benefit of society, is then immoral.

But this hints at a problem.

How could the state possibly be justified?

Taxation, the rule of law, a system that forces its citizens to pay for roads, schools and hospitals, is surely a violation of an individual’s natural rights as a human to be free to make their own choices.

‘Boundary crossing’, as Nozick calls it, crossing the line and infringing upon a person’s freedom, is surely only permissible with consent.

This, loosely, is the position of the anarchist.

The anarchist argues that because of the inviolability of individuals, no state can be justified.

For Nozick this is the fundamental question of political philosophy: whether there should be any state at all.

He wants to justify what he calls a minimal state. One that simply protects an individual’s right to freedom, and nothing else. He wants to argue that this is both justified philosophically, and could develop from a state of nature historically.

Against Rawls’ redistributive state, he also wants to argue that this is where it would stop, with any further redistribution of wealth being a violation of natural morality.

The question is how, if it is morally impermissible to violate individual rights, would a state still develop over time with ‘no morally impermissible steps’?

Imagine a state of nature.

The state of nature has no state, no political institutions, no culture, just pre-state humans living ‘naturally’.

As we’ve seen, in Nozick’s state of nature, individuals have ‘natural’ rights.

He borrows this argument from Locke and, briefly, it looks something like this: Individuals are born with their own lives, their own faculties, their own choices, and thrown into a world which must be made use of. If an individual plucks an apple from a tree in a state of nature to eat, by mixing his labour with it they make that apple their property, all of which arises out of man and the earths nature. This, in brief, is natural rights theory.

If someone violates these rights, by harming another, for example, or stealing from them, they’ve violated the law of nature.

So how would these violations be dealt with in a state of nature? How would troublemakers be dealt with?

People would, of course, defend themselves, or they’d band together in defence of each other. But some would be too weak and secure, by exchange, protection from the stronger.

In short, ‘in union there is strength’.

Nozick argues that protection agencies would develop, security firms, mutual protection cooperatives, et cetera.

Within these agencies, certain mechanisms would develop to resolve disputes without leading to violence. Norms and procedures would develop, courts and codes.

You’d have, ultimately, a free market of competing and varied security and dispute companies.

But what would happen when two agencies come to different decisions in a dispute?

In some cases, this would lead to bitter disputes, and in some, to violence.

Nozick notes that the larger an agency is, the more able it would be at protecting its clients. The more successful agencies would attract more clients. Disputes would be resolved internally without resorting to violence. Costs would decrease. The geographic area being protected would both increase in size and become more safe. Some agencies would simply be better are protecting their clients than others. Slowly a monopoly of kinds would develop in an area.

Nozick writes that, ‘Out of anarchy, pressed by spontaneous groupings, mutual-protection associations, division of labor, market pressures, economies of scale, and rational self-interest there arises something very much resembling a minimal state or a group of geographically distinct minimal states’.

This idea of a natural historic development he calls an ‘invisible-hand explanation’ for the emergence of society.

Max Weber famously defined a state as a community that has a monopoly on force in a given geographic area.

At this point Nozick has outlined a kind of anarcho-capitalist society.

But he argues a state would continue to naturally develop.

At this point, though, Nozick says: ‘There are at least two ways in which the scheme of private protective associations might be thought to differ from a minimal state, might fail to satisfy a minimal conception of a state: (1) it appears to allow some people to enforce their own rights, and (2) it appears not to protect all individuals within its domain’.

In other words, a person might take the law into their own hands without violating the law of nature. Setting up their own protection agencies or arguing they have the right to enforce the law of nature themselves. Others would opt out of paying for security completely.

A state, of course, would not allow this.

Nozick’s justification for a state arising is centred around risk and fear.

Consider threats.

Nozick argues that if someone was threatening to either murder or harm someone, or take their personal belongings by force, the protection agencies would have the right to step in without violating that individual’s rights.

He argues that lone rights enforcers, a kind of wild west gunslinger, or an unreliable or mentally impaired interpreter of the natural law, would be a risk to the safety of others, and that the dominant protection agency would have a veto on whether their claim to be able to practice independent law was justified or not.

Nozick writes: ‘an independent might be prohibited from privately exacting justice because his procedure is known to be too risky and dangerous’.

The dominant protection agency may judge the right of any procedure being applied to its client and punish anyone who judges their client unfairly.

It might, for example, publish a list of procedures, codes, practices, laws it deems fair and reliable.

This leads to a monopoly over the right to practice the law. The dominant agency becomes the final arbiter of rights and justice in the geographic area.

This is a de facto monopoly on violence.

The minimal state.

Nozick argues that this is the only philosophically just state. Any further move into taxation or redistribution is a violation of those individual natural rights, a state coercing citizens by taking their property.

He argues that philosophers like Rawls, or proponents of the welfare state, for example, have a conception of justice that is ‘patterned’, and that enforcing the pattern leads to coercion.

The only just distribution is one where property – or holdings – have been passed from person to person voluntarily, without coercion, without a violation of rights.

He calls this a ‘theory of justice in holdings’.

He writes that, ‘the general outlines of the theory of justice in holdings are that the holdings of a person are just if he is entitled to them by the principles of justice in acquisition and transfer’.

He continues: ‘If each person’s holdings are just, then the total set (distribution) of holdings is just’.

As long as the holding is acquired fairly, and that transfers between people are consented to and voluntary, then the resulting pattern is, by virtue of natural rights law, just.

In contradistinction to this, any attempt to redistribute according to a pattern like ‘from each according to his ____, to each according to his ____’ is a violation of liberty, of people’s right to choose, and to the just transfer of property over time.

Nozick illustrates his argument about patterns being unrealisable with his Wilt Chamberlain example.

He asks us to imagine a society in which justice is meant to be achieved by a pattern, like Rawl’s difference principle. The pattern is achieved through redistribution.

In this society the famous basketball player Wilt Chamberlain charges 25 cents to his fans to watch him play.

Over the season, he earns $250,000.

This is so much more than anyone else in the society that it disrupts the just pattern.

But all of the fans have freely, of their liberty, given Chamberlain their 25 cents. So how can the new distribution not also be just?

Nozick’s answer to Rawls is the most influential articulation of libertarian theory developed in the 20th century.

But there is plenty of room for criticism.

Both Rawls and Nozick provide little justification for their foundations. The choice between the contractarian position of Rawls and the natural rights position of Nozick are based on intuition, leaving both open to criticism.

Anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard has also criticised Nozick by asking, if his theory is true, why has no such state developed naturally and historically? He should, he argues, advocate for anarchism and wait for his ‘minimal state’ to develop.

I’ll return to criticisms and a critique of Nozick in a later episode, but it is undeniable that he provides a unique challenge to many areas of political thought.

As David Boaz has written, Nozick ‘defined the ‘hard-core’ version of modern libertarianism, which essentially restated Spencer‘s law of equal freedom: Individuals have the right to do whatever they want to do, so long as they respect the equal rights of others’.

The post Robert Nozick: Anarchy, State & Utopia appeared first on Then & Now.

I want you to close your eyes. Focus on how things enter your mind. Where are you? Notice the sounds around you as they appear in your consciousness. Concentrate on my voice, on how it’s guiding you to do something. Now direct your attention to whatever sensations you can feel – the feeling of the chair you might be sat on, your feet on the floor. Focus on your emotions: you might be happy, sad, tired, energetic. All of these things are like objects to concentrate on. They’re almost separate from your consciousness, as if your conscious focus selects them, shines a light over them, like a torch. Now return to focus on my voice – it has entered your head, motivated you, prompted you, driven you to do certain things.

Now say the first thing that comes into your head. Was that really you? Where did that word come from? A memory, an idea, a conversation. Is anything really originally you? How about this: focus on how you feel – you might be sad, happy, angry, tired. But again, don’t you feel like your conscious you is separate from these things; that you’re overcome by them, involuntarily. Doesn’t it feel like we’re all tugged, pushed, and pulled around? Are we really free?

Okay, open your eyes. What can we find that is really ours? Authenticity might be thought of as ownership or self-possession. Today, we’re going to take a short historical and philosophical tour of the inner you.

Today, ostensibly, we’re free. Free to do what makes us happy, to be anything we strive to be, to choose our own paths. We even feel free from parts of ourselves – that our emotions are something separate from us, that there’s a real us beneath them, a supra-inner rational core that transcends everything outside of it, that is somehow higher than fleeting emotions that make us do things that aren’t really us.

We might think of an onion. The outer layer is the outside world, then we have emotions, beliefs, our bodies. Then we have our thoughts, our consciousness interacting with all of that. And then? Unconscious desires? What’s at the centre? Is there a centre?

The history of the search for authenticity has sought to understand this onion. It has been approached in many ways. Sometimes as a revolt against the outer layer, against standards given to us by society. Other times as taking off a mask. Or rejecting reading a script someone else has written for us, whether god or the bible or society and its rules.

Philosopher Jacob Golomb writes that, ‘the concept of authenticity is a protest against the blind, mechanical acceptance of an externally imposed code of values’.

The idea of an original self, a primordial condition, a personal or truthful way of living has been a persistent – maybe universal – feature of human history. Christianity’s original sin, fall from the Garden of Eden, the idea of utopia or paradise are all searches for a type of authenticity. And today, the idea that there is a true self behind the curtain, outside the matrix, or to be found on a backpacking trip is a powerful, maybe central modern idea.

But around 200 years ago, a monumental paradigm shift occurred. For millennia, it was believed that the cosmos was ordered. Knowing oneself meant knowing one’s place in the universe. You were born to be a butcher, a king, or a slave. For the pre-moderns people had a function within a wider plan – God’s plan. So there was no sense in ‘making oneself’ or crafting a personality. Identity was bound up with the rest of universe.  Modernity changed this.

The reformations and revolutions and enlightenments that marked the beginning of the modern age put the individual front and centre. And science demystified the universe, secularising Europe. If I’m not born into my place in the world, if God doesn’t define who I am, then who am I?

We all want to live organically, truthfully, want our identities to be ours.

Is it any wonder that Hamlet – the story of a young man wrestling with the question of ‘to be or not to be’ – is maybe the most famous and most retold tale of our time? Its themes – individuality, inner turmoil, right and wrong, cowardice – are universal ones.

As Polonius tells his son in Hamlet

This above all- to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

But what or where is this authentic self that we must listen to? Does it even exist? Maybe ‘follow your heart’, ‘be yourself’, and ‘listen to your gut’ are as ambiguous and meaningless as they often sound. To find out, we’ll begin with a question the great French Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau asked: are we all wearing masks?

Rousseau was interested in the difference between our modern society and that of the hunter-gatherers. His most important observation was that hunter-gatherers lived in face-to-face, direct, unmediated communities. Everyone knew each other, and everyone, more or less, performed similar tasks and were self-sufficient.

In modern society, however, we divide our tasks between us and each specialise our skillsets. We have a much more distinct division of labour.

This has one important consequence: we need things from each other.

Moreover, we’re constantly asked to prove that we can deliver, that we’re up to the job, that we have the required skills. Modern life is a constant job interview.

Not only this, many of us, in seeking the status required to prove we have value, will bullshit. We’ll attempt to create an image of success by exaggerating the stories we tell, putting filters on our Instagram posts, by editing what we display of our lives and embellishing the truth.

So ultimately, the competitive nature of modern life forces us to wear masks that aren’t really us.

Rousseau’s solution is a classic one: ‘Follow your heart’. Don’t edit – do what feels right. But what does that really mean?

He thought that when we embellish the truth we selectively draw upon certain facts. We omit certain details or do something because we think it will please someone.

But if we focus on our feelings rather than the facts, we might find that we were selective of certain facts because we felt a certain way – ashamed, insecure, jealous.

Rousseau wrote the first modern autobiography – Confessions – which encapsulated this idea: write confessedly, unedited, warts and all, about the things you’ve done and the feelings that motivated them. In doing this you’ll get to the truth.

He says: ‘I have only one faithful guide on which I can count: the succession of feelings that have marked the development of my being…. I may omit or transpose facts, or make mistakes in dates; but I cannot go wrong about what I have felt or about what my feelings have led me to do; and these are the chief subjects of my story’.

So we see two key concepts in Rousseau that we might find parallels with in later things: the importance of emoting, and the need to express that emotion in writing.

What we see in Rousseau is a type of expressivism; that we should take our inner experience and express it outward into the world, turn it into art, literature, into creativity. Life should be turned into a great novel.

Rousseau had a thunderous impact on European culture, on the Enlightenment, on Romanticism. Painters, novelists, philosophers all quoted Rousseau and the idea of emoting.

He was the first to psychologise the idea of alienation – that we live in chains, distanced from our true selves, dissatisfied by our work routines and social and political life. We don’t feel like us. Alienation is a common theme in the history of authenticity. Marx argued we were alienated because, among other things, we lived to produce products for others to sell, commodities that we only contribute to in pieces on the factory line. We have creative essences that need to be exercised, life is meant to require fullness, a range of activity, and a social and political life that we all contribute to.

While both Marx and Rousseau were both interested in how we were meant to live, neither of them used the term authenticity. But at around the same time, the Danish philosopher Christian Soren Kierkegaard began trying to think clearly about what it would really entail.

In his diary, the 22-year old Kierkegaard wrote that, ‘the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die’.

He argued that life’s real calling was to take leaps of faith towards what we feel is the truth, turn it inward, and live it through passion and action.

Kierkegaard agreed with Rousseau that authentic life required emotion, but he was also concerned that too much reflection, an excess of naval-gazing and a wandering mind, would kill action. To live was to do things passionately.

In The Present Age he wrote that, ‘Our age is essentially one of understanding and reflection, without passion’.

Kierkegaard knew that the truth that really matters is the one we decide to hold for ourselves, and that thinking, logic, and reason are all good enough tools to aid us in getting there, but cannot take us all the way. There are no exterior reasons that can be given to convince you to make a particular choice, to decide whether a reason given has force for you.

Deciding how to live – whether to be a parent, a schoolteacher, a liberal, a painter – required a careful study of the facts followed by a resolute and passionate leap of faith. We must dive head first into what feels right.

He calls this subjective truth.

For Kierkegaard, intention + commitment + passion = authenticity.

Moreover, a rigid dedication to science, facts, or ethics won’t produce progress; for that something must be created, creatively, from within – again passion + action.

Kierkegaard wrote that, ‘With every turning point in history there are two movements to be observed. On the one hand, the new shall come forth; on the other, the old must be displaced’.

Kierkegaard confronts us with a powerful question: why is it that we try to be rational? Why learn and read? It’s usually and ultimately, as Rousseau argued, because of our passions, our feelings, our gut.

As Hume said, ‘reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions’.

Passion is not about certainty, it is about faith, about diving into them for good or bad, and seeing where they might lead you.

Kierkegaard and Rousseau both lived through a period of unparallel scientific and industrial advance. Many of these advances challenged the Christian framework of European life. To many, nowhere did this seem more dangerous than regarding ethical questions: standards about right and wrong.

The scientific view is built around causation. That I work because I want to eat, I eat because I’m hungry, I’m hungry because I need energy. But ethical values – be good to one’s neighbour, give to charity, show courage, be modest and frugal – were traditionally said to come from God – he commands them, encourages them, they’re written in the Bible. What would happen if we decided that they weren’t God’s will but instead were something more terrifying: human, all too human?

How do we define our values? We’re often presented with values as if they’re dogmas, standards we’re expected to live up to. I value being kind, for example.

Now it’s easy to assume that we value being kind because it’s good for our communities, for human flourishing, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes people need tough love, sometimes kindness kills, sometimes we just don’t feel like it. In those circumstances, when we irritably ask, ‘why should I be kind?’, the 19th century reply might have been: because God tells us to in the Bible.

But people were increasingly questioning this view, and an unknown German philosopher, Fredrich Nietzsche, realised something powerful: if God wasn’t the source of our values, then we were.

Where would they come from, would they become, in a secular world?

Kierkegaard had already pointed to the difficulties of these kinds of questions: shall I pursue happiness? Duty? A project? A family? Which political principles?

One answer is that we find the answers out in the world, and another is that we create the answers ourselves. Nietzsche wrote that, ‘all evaluations are either original or adopted—the latter being by far the most common’.

Most people, he thought, adopted their values, beliefs, and worldviews from others. We were sheep and Christianity had encouraged this, priests literally adopting the metaphor of the shepherd and the flock.

However, the flock had forgotten their creative power. That not only could values be adopted from the shepherd, or commanded by God, but could be created by all of us.

For Nietzsche, to do this was an artistic act. It meant taking our pathos – our sentiments, emotional states, temperaments, and dispositions, and organising the chaos of a godless world into a harmonious whole.

For Nietzsche, we must ‘give style’ to our characters, progressively integrating our traits and habits and patterns into a creative force that is for us.

In this sense, our lives are like novels – we embark on projects with beginnings, middles, and ends – we think of chapters, we give ourselves and the people we encounter characteristics, and ultimately, the meaning of our life story is down to us.

Creativity is power, if we know how to use it.

For Nietzsche, the values, lessons, skills, and histories we all draw from are like ladders. We use them to climb, and it’s part of our fate to have to draw upon them. We must love our fates, acknowledge what we’re best at, know our environments, but ultimately, at the top of all the ladders, there is only us. He wrote, ‘And if you now lack all ladders, then you must know how to climb on your own head’.

‘To accomplish means to unfold something into the fullness of its essence… to lead it forth into this fullness—producere’.

Unlike Rousseau, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who were concerned with the way society forces us to be something we’re not, for Heidegger it is our own anxiety and the prospect of our own death that elicits the desire for an authentic life.

Why is this?

For Heidegger, death is an ontological fact of life, and becoming aware of it is an awareness of our limited finitude; an acknowledgment that our lives are temporary.

Most people inauthentically avoid reflecting on this. But if we do we become acutely aware of something: in facing our own death we are forced to choose how to live.

We often put off plans like learning a language or doing charity work or travelling or painting with the excuse: ‘I’ll get to that later’, when I have time.

If our lives were infinite this would be honest – we could do anything, go anywhere, be everything. It’s only because our lives are finite that we’re forced to choose, that we have to fit a finite amount of things into it. Death forces us to confront our choices.

Now, certain things do continue on after our deaths. Children, our work – we might have written a book, taken some great family photos, created a unique cake recipe.

So authenticity involves acknowledging that we have limited time to do something lasting. It’s a relation between the finite and the infinite.

Heidegger asks to think of the average person, the statistical ‘anyone’. Socially, they cannot die because they can simply be replaced. The average baker in a town is replaced with another, fathers are replaced by sons, one employee replaced with another. But think about the way the world mourns when ‘great figures’ die. Or even when that incredible little irreplaceable bakery in town closes down.

There’s a sense that we’ve lost something unique, that their life was finite, that they’re gone and cannot be replaced.

Living authentically means making choices with this in mind – not delaying them or acting them out ‘averagely’.

This doesn’t mean you have to be a great figure or die for some noble cause. The baker can also be irreplaceable – so friendly, talented, original, creative in such a novel combination that the town would mourn their loss.

What’s unique to Heidegger is he says this psychology is within all of us, and that if we ignore it, it will result in an anxiety, and we’ll float through life haunted by an existential guilt.

So there’s a sense in which authenticity is an owning of one’s choices, but as we can see from the baker and the ‘great figure’ examples, there is something social about Heidegger’s conception of authenticity too. We are not isolated, authenticity is not just something within, because we are ‘beings-in-the-world’, and this is unavoidably ‘being-with-others’ in a social context.

Heidegger’s account of authenticity is a journey. The world is presented to us first in its averageness, its everydayness – the statistical average baker. We make idle chat, discuss the weather, we ‘fall’ into what others are saying, we’re seduced by people into becoming average. We’re tempted to go along with the world, to ‘fit’ in.

Dasein ‘compares itself with everything’, and ‘drifts along towards an alienation in which its ownmost potentiality-for-Being is hidden from it’.

But this is always accompanied by guilt and anxiety – I should be doing something, being someone. We’re always offering excuses, ‘isnt it too late?’ Confronting this – acknowledging our finite time – forces us to acknowledge that we have a unique contribution to make.

We can see some parallels with Heidegger in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Conrad saw a confrontation with extreme situations, like the prospect of death or the danger of the jungle, as a way to test of your authentic self when the support of society is ripped away:

Mr Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts…. But the wilderness had found him out early, and… had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude—and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.

Okay, let’s pause a moment. What do we have so far? ‘Know thyself’ or ‘to thine ownself be true’. We have taking off our masks and searching through our own emotions – something that’s turned since Rousseau into modern psychology. We have passion, action, creativity, defining our own values, confronting our own deaths, challenging ourselves.

But all of these things are still given to us, I’ve read them in books and I’m relating them to you. Our emotions and passions push and pull us around – they sometimes feel like they overcome us. Are we ever really free? Free to really choose, to become something just for ourselves?

Remember at the beginning when I suggested that your consciousness – shining a light on objects, ideas, sounds or words – is like a torch. For Jean-Paul Sartre, the 20th century existentialist, our true free selves is that torch. It’s completely free, transcendent, spontaneous, unencumbered by everything – emotion, masks, scripts written by others. For Sartre, we are always free – and that’s at the heart of authenticity.

Sartre’s difficult to summarise but I’ll try to give a brief overview. Close your eyes again.

Think of all the things we’ve covered. Think of your hobbies and passions. Think about you.

For Sartre, consciousness – like the torch – highlights these things, but it’s always separate from them. Focus on the idea you have of yourself; you are now consciousness focusing on yourself. But it’s an idea of yourself – made up of biases, observations, reflections – and your consciousness focusing on it is something different. Sartre writes, ‘The ego is not the owner of consciousness; it is the object of consciousness’.

Consciousness has no content of its own, no character traits, no personality, it flits about spontaneously focusing on this and that.

Sartre says: ‘To be is to fly out into the world… in order suddenly to burst out as consciousness-in-the-world’.

This means that no matter who you are, what your beliefs are, what society tells you to do, or what emotional state you’re in, you’re always free to do otherwise, and this freedom is authenticity.

Let’s take an example.

I’m 6 foot 2 inches tall and I’m 34 years old. I’m never going to be a professional basketball player. And it makes no sense for me to try. I’m not good at it, there are no basketball courts, I’m never going to be accepted onto a team. I might even hate basketball. These might all be absolute facts, but none of them can stop me from trying to be a professional basketball player. In this sense, its not my identity that determines what I do, but what I do that determines my identity.

We’re not born to do anything, there’s no such thing as fate, we’re not controlled by our emotions or told what to do, we always have an option: to say no. I am always free to do otherwise from what is expected of me.

That means that the transcended consciousness – the torch – cannot be defined by anything. It is just movement, just light. It is not determined by beliefs, your IQ, your sexuality. It can always escape from these things. For Sartre, ‘the past history of the world is of no use’ – I am always on my own.

Philosopher Jacob Golomb puts it like this: ‘Sartre’s characterization of consciousness as free spontaneity reflectively positing its own transcendent objects, as active rather than reactive, as neither caused by nor causing external objects and as transparent to itself, calls to mind the attributes of authenticity: spontaneity, lucidity, activity, reflectiveness, self-sufficiency and originality’.

For Sartre, the result of not using this freedom properly results in what he calls ‘bad faith’. Consciousness spontaneously darting and flitting around sees the world in lots of different ways. We see the world in a way that’s relative to our own lives, our own projects.

Take an orange. When I look at it, when I create an idea of it in my head, I might look at it because I’m hungry. I might be a chemist researching vitamin C. I might be an artist painting fruit in an 18th century scene. Or I might be making a Youtube video thinking about it in relation to authenticity.

The ways we look at and think about objects are unlimited.

But that also means we can ignore things that we shouldn’t. It means I might avoid looking properly, or look ambiguously, emphasising certain parts or ignoring others.

Take the way I look at and think about this cigar. Like the orange, there are many ways I could look at it. But I see it as a source of relief, a way to relax with a drink, a crutch maybe. I ignore its effects on my health, its costs, how other people dislike it.

This is bad faith: I’m not considering all sides. We might think of comfortable half truths or ignoring the elephant in the room. And, of course, we look at our own characters in bad faith too. Telling us convenient stories about why we can’t do this or shouldn’t do that.

Bad faith is finding comforting excuses. Authenticity means looking lucidly, freely, piercingly, with that torch, at every nook and cranny of myself and my life.

There’s a disagreement with Kierkegaard here; where Kierkegaard argues too much reflection prevents us from acting, Sartre thinks that reflection is key: as long as it’s honest.

Okay, lets return to our list. To it we can add clear, lucid, no-excuses thinking. Exploring all sides of an argument, trying to understand our biases. We’re back at know thyself. Digging down. Exploring. Finding something within that we’ve ignored. Now, this is a complicated list. How might we think about what we’ve learned from these philosophers?

It’s often said that authenticity can be equated with childhood. That in childhood we’re like Rousseau’s hunter-gatherers, unmoulded by society, free to express ourselves naturally.

In Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the main character realises he gradually became unhappier as he grew up.

‘It is as if I had been going downhill while I imagined I was going up. And that is really what it was. I was going up in public opinion, but to the same extent life was ebbing away from me’.

More recently, the psychoanalyst Alice Miller argues in the bestselling Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the Truth Self that many unhappy people didn’t receive the parental support they needed growing up. She says, ‘every child has a legitimate need to be noticed, understood, taken seriously, and respected by his mother’.

When they don’t, the child develops a ‘false self’ to please their parents, burying the feelings that were discouraged and developing traits encouraged by parents.

According to Millar, the key to overcoming this is learning to express emotions and ideas without shame and guilt. In this sense, Rousseau was right; we feel shame or guilt because we’ve been taught that something is shameful or guilty. If we tear off the mask we might ask why we care, or who we are trying to please.

Some are critical of this, though. Of the idea that there’s a true inner creative authentic pure child waiting to come out.

It supposes that there is a real ‘me’, a concrete I, buried beneath the surface. Take this 1890 description of the self from the psychologist William James: ‘Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are [groups of] individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind…. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups…. We do not show ourselves to our children as to our club-companions, to our customers as to the laborers we employ, to our own masters and employers as to our intimate friends. From this there results what practically is a division of the man into several selves’.

Many like James are critical of the idea that authenticity comes from within. Authenticity is a social phenomenon as much as a psychological one. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz argued that humans are cultural animals, writing that, ‘man is, in physical terms, an incomplete, an unfinished animal;… what sets him off most graphically from non-men is less his sheer ability to learn (great as that is) than how much and what particular sorts of things he has to learn in order to function at all’.

In The Authenticity Hoax, Andrew Potter notes that, ‘We don’t find our authentic self by peeling away the shell of civilization until we reach the hard nut of the natural self at the core. The self is more like an onion; there is no “natural self” to be found at the center because there is no center’.

It’s an odd choice of metaphor, because an onion does have a centre. But we can understand roughly what he means. How is it possible to think about an authentic self when the idea is so ambiguous? Moreover, critics argue that the pursuit of authenticity is a self-centred ambition, egotistical, individualistic and self-absorbed.

Ultimately, having a theory of authenticity is impossible because that would contradict the idea of authenticity itself. Authenticity cannot have a meaning, definition, otherwise it falls into its own trap of being a ‘script written by others’, something that’s not really yours. As Nietzsche said, ‘I mistrust all systematizers and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity’.

So where does this leave us? First, while Nietzsche distrusted systematisers he did, as we saw, encourage ‘giving style’ to our characters, integrating patterns, knowing our traits. There are similarities here with Sartre, who used the metaphor of a ‘melody’ to describe how consciousness constructs a self, and Rousseau, who advocated for expressive, confessional writing.

Most of these thinkers wrote in many different styles and mediums – philosophy, fiction, film, poetry, autobiography.  So there’s, maybe, a first stage of exploration, experimentation, a tugging at seams, a lucid investigation of one’s character. Rather than being prodded, pushed, and pulled around, we can at least prod, push, and pull at our own selves, our intentions, our beliefs, our reasons for doing things.

And a second stage that they all seem to have in common is an emphasis on doing, on taking action, decisively and passionately, creating – our own stories, values, art, literature, our own worldviews.

To return to our opening statement, we might say that knowing thyself is one part of being authentic: but creating thyself, and the world, is just as important too.

Sources

W. R. Newell, Heidegger on Freedom and Community: Some Political Implications of His Early Thought

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

Andrew Potter, The Authenticity Hoax

Charles Guignon, On Being Authentic

Maiken Umbach and Mathew Humphrey, Authenticity: The Cultural History of a Political Concept

Jacob Golomb, In Search of Authenticity: Existentialism from Kierkegaard to Camus

Steven Churchill and Jack Reynolds, Jean-Paul Sartre, Key Concepts

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity

Rousseau, Confessions

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

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