Socialism, Feminism and Philosophy: A Radical Philosophy Reader

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SOCIALISM, FEMINISM AND PHILOSOPHY A RADICAL PHILOSOPHY READER

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SOCIALISM, FEMINISM AND PHILOSOPHY A RADICAL PHILOSOPHY READER

Edited by Sean Sayers and Peter Osborne with an introduction by Christopher J.Arthur

London and New York

First published 1990 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge a division of Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc. 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1990 Radical Philosophy All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Socialism, feminism and philosophy: a Radical Philosophy reader. 1. English philosophy I. Sayers, Sean II. Osborne, Peter 192 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Socialism, feminism and philosophy: a radical philosophy reader/ edited by Sean Sayers and Peter Osborne: with an introduction by Christopher J.Arthur. p. cm. Essays previously appeared in the journal Radical Philosophy between 1984 and 1989. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Feminism. 2. Women and socialism. 3. Philosophy, Marxist. 4. Human ecology. I. Sayers, Sean. II. Osborne, Peter. HQ1206.S665 1991 305.42–dc 20 90–34954 ISBN 0-203-41198-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-72022-9 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0 415 05627 6 (Print Edition) ISBN 0 415 05628 4 pbk

CONTENTS

Notes on Contributors INTRODUCTION Christopher J.Arthur

vii

1

Part I Feminism and philosophy 1

2 3 4

5

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT AND THE TENSIONS IN FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY Jean Grimshaw

9

HEGEL AS LORD AND MASTER Christopher J.Arthur

27

MORALITY, MASCULINITY AND THE MARKET Ross Poole

46

FEMINISM AND THE LOGIC OF MORALITY: A CONSIDERATION OF ALTERNATIVES Susan F.Parsons

69

FROM VIRGINIA WOOLF TO THE POSTMODERNS: DEVELOPMENTS IN A FEMINIST AESTHETIC Pauline Johnson 100

Part II Socialism and philosophy

vi SOCIALISM, FEMINISM AND PHILOSOPHY

6

7

8 9

PROLETARIAN PHILOSOPHY: A VERSION OF PASTORAL? Jonathan Rée

125

MARXISM AND THE DIALECTICAL METHOD: A CRITIQUE OF G.A.COHEN Sean Sayers

140

ANALYTICAL MARXISM: A NEW PARADIGM? Joseph McCarney

170

SOCIALISM AND DEMOCRACY: BEYOND STATE AND CIVIL SOCIETY Roger Harris

179

Part III Nature and human nature 10 WOMEN, HUMANITY AND NATURE Val Plumwood

213

11 HUMANISM=SPECIESISM? MARX ON HUMANS AND ANIMALS Ted Benton

237

12 THE HUMAN BODY IN SOCIAL THEORY: REICH, FOUCAULT AND THE REPRESSIVE HYPOTHESIS Russell Keat

277

Index

307

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Christopher J.Arthur is Lecturer in Philosophy at Sussex University. He was educated at the Universities of Nottingham and Oxford. He is the author of Dialectics of Labour: Marx and his Relation to Hegel (Blackwell, 1986), and editor of Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (Lawrence & Wishart, 1970) and of E.Pashukanis, Law and Marxism (Ink Links, 1978). He was a founder member of the Radical Philosophy Group. Ted Benton teaches sociology at the University of Essex. His previous publications have included books on the philosophy of social science and structural Marxism, as well as numerous articles on realist philosophy of science, history and philosophy of the life sciences, and Marxist theory. His current research focuses on the relationships between socialism and environmental issues. Jean Grimshaw teaches philosophy and cultural studies in the Department of Humanities at Bristol Polytechnic. She is the author of Feminist Philosophers: Women’s Perspectives on Philosophy (Wheatsheaf, 1986), and of various articles and reviews. She is a member of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy. Roger Harris has taught philosophy at Middlesex Polytechnic since 1968. He is active in NATFHE, the Further and Higher Education Teachers’ Union—formerly a branch and regional officer, and currently a delegate to the association’s National Council. Pauline Johnson is a Lecturer in Sociology at Macquarie University. Her research interests include feminist theory, ideology and art, and contemporary critical theory. She is currently writing a book on main intellectual trends in modern feminism. Russell Keat is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Lancaster, and Director of its Centre for the Study of Cultural

viii SOCIALISM, FEMINISM AND PHILOSOPHY

Values. He is the author of The Politics of Social Theory (Blackwell and Chicago University Press, 1981) and, with John Urry, of Social Theory as Science (Routledge 1975, 2nd edn 1982); and has recently co-edited with Nick Abercrombie a collection of papers on ‘Enterprise Culture’ (Routledge, forthcoming). He has been a member of the Radical Philosophy editorial collective since 1975. Joseph McCarney teaches philosophy at South Bank Polytechnic, London. He is the author of The Real World of Ideology (Harvester, 1980), Social Theory and the Crisis of Marxism (Verso, 1990), and of various articles on the philosophies of Marx and Hegel. Peter Osborne teaches philosophy and history of ideas at Middlesex Polytechnic. He is the editor of Socialism and the Limits of Liberalism (Verso, 1990). He has published a number of papers on Adorno’s philosophical and cultural theory and is a contributing editor, with Andrew Benjamin, of Philosophy and Art: ICA Documents (Free Associations Press, forthcoming). He has been a member of the Radical Philosophy editorial collective since 1982. Susan F.Parsons is Principal of a part-time course in the Department of Adult Education, leading to a Certificate in Theological and Pastoral Studies from the University of Nottingham. She has taught philosophy as part of the humanities degrees of Nottingham Polytechnic and in a variety of evening classes. As a result of this experience, she is committed to adult education, to the serious discussion of feminism, and to the exercise of philosophy in an interdisciplinary setting. Ross Poole was educated at Sydney University, Australian National University, and Oxford University. He has published articles in academic and radical journals in Australia and in England, and is completing a book entitled Morality and Modernity to be published by Routledge. He teaches philosophy in the School of History, Philosophy and Politics at Macquarie University, Sydney. Val Plumwood is a research associate of Sydney’s Macquarie University where until recently she taught courses in philosophy of social theory, environmental philosophy and feminist theory. She has published widely in these areas, and also on environmental areas such as forestry, and has been a long-time activist on both environmental and women’s issues. She now makes her home in the rainforest near Braidwood on the southern tablelands of New

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ix

South Wales where she is completing a book on ecofeminism. She is a frequent contributor to public discussions, including radio, TV, newspapers, conferences, workshops and community talks, on this and related topics in green theory. Jonathan Rée teaches philosophy and history of ideas at Middlesex Polytechnic, and has been a member of the Radical Philosophy collective since its formation. His books include Proletarian Philosophers (Oxford University Press, 1984) and Philosophical Tales (Methuen, 1987). He is now working on a study of the human voice. Sean Sayers teaches philosophy at the University of Kent. He was one of the founding editors of Radical Philosophy. His publications include Reality and Reason: Dialectic and the Theory of Knowledge (Blackwell, 1985) and, with Richard Norman, Hegel, Marx and Dialectic: A Debate (Harvester Press and Humanities Press, 1980). Together with David McLellan, he has recently edited a volume of papers on Socialism and Morality (Macmillan, 1990). He is currently writing a book on work and human nature.


INTRODUCTION Christopher J.Arthur

Original versions of the chapters in this anthology appeared in Radical Philosophy; it represents very well the concerns of the magazine. Radical Philosophy first appeared in January 1972 and has come out three times a year since then. The founders and most of the early contributors had been students in the 1960s. Our intellectual formation was characterised by a disjunction between the ferment of radical and critical ideas coming out of the student revolt and the narrow sterile orthodoxy pervading the academic system in which we were trained. In those days professional philosophy was dominated by the analytical approach in its most philistine form—so-called ‘ordinary language philosophy’. The Radical Philosophy Group was formed in 1971 to organise publications and conferences which would provide a forum for the discussion of ideas excluded from the existing institutions. We were the first of the radical subject-based groups that emerged around that time to answer a need felt right across the spectrum of learning. (For more about the intellectual context, and original objectives, of Radical Philosophy see the Introduction by Roy Edgley to Radical Philosophy Reader, London, Verso, 1985.) Since those days much has changed: analytical philosophy is in decline and no new paradigm has established itself; the thinkers previously excluded from the curriculum (such as Hegel, Marx and Sartre) are now generally taught. Nonetheless, the continued success of the journal shows it still fulfils a felt need. But what exactly is the project calling itself Radical Philosophy? The Radical Philosophy magazine reaches a more diverse readership than any other philosophy journal. This is because RadicalPhilosophy turns its face partly towards the philosophy departments, but also 1

2 SOCIALISM, FEMINISM AND PHILOSOPHY

partly towards the radical left. In the first case it is concerned to contest the terrain of establishment philosophy, e.g. to redefine the ‘canon’ to be studied. In the second case it is concerned to improve the philosophical awareness of radical movements and to contribute to socialist theory. This has been all the more necessary in recent years because so much of the left in the academy is prone to espousing uncritically the latest ‘French fashions’. Radical Philosophy has generally been characterised by a sceptical and tough-minded scrutiny of overblown claims and language. ‘Clarity is not enough’, as someone once said of analytical philosophy, but it is certainly desirable. We commend the present papers to the reader in the hope that they are both radical in their concerns and rigorous in their argument. A recent debate in The Times Higher Education Supplement (7 April 1989 and 12 May 1989) on the character and achievement of Radical Philosophy brought out one important ambivalence in the definition of these radical concerns. Ted Benton and Sean Sayers quoted from the founding statement: ‘that the Group will not attempt to lay down a philosophical line’. In response Joseph McCarney claimed that such a negative definition seems to allow that anything excluded by the existing establishment might be considered radical. He pointed out that Radical Philosophy has not in fact treated Marxism as a position on a par with all others in ‘a boundless receptivity to ideas’. Certainly Marxism is inescapable for critically minded people: one has to take account of it, if only to reject it. But the journal has never taken a formal position for or against Marx, still less elaborated any particular Marxism (although, again as McCarney pointed out, the more dialectical tradition going back to left-Hegelianism has been present in much of the work). The pieces included in this book reflect this: the influence of Marx is present in some, but by no means all. At the same time, the journal has remained responsive to new ideas and debates in philosophy and on the left. In recent years, feminist and green ideas have been influential and given rise to controversy. They have been discussed in Radical Philosophy, and this is reflected in the present collection. An uncontentious definition of our project would be that Radical Philosophy is a journal of socialist and feminist philosophers. ***

INTRODUCTION 3

For this book the papers have been organised into three parts in accordance with the most important current concerns of radical circles, and hence of our magazine. First there is a section on feminism and philosophy. We are pleased that Radical Philosophy has been an important forum for the discussion of issues in feminist theory. Second we have a section on socialism and philosophy which reflects important current debates about the renewal of the Marxist tradition. Finally we have a section called ‘Nature and Human Nature’. We begin with some pieces related to feminist issues. The discussion that has gone on in feminist thought involves a number of related strands. One elementary task is the recovery and interpretation of the past, either in the form of rescuing the voices of women themselves (see Grimshaw below) or of a critical scrutiny of what the (male) luminaries of the philosophical tradition have had to say about women (see Arthur). Another task is to bring a feminist perspective to bear on the standard philosophical domains, such as ethics (see Parsons), as had earlier occurred with Marxist influenced social-structural perspectives (see Poole for both). The same need applies to the new theoretical problematics that emerged coincident with the rise of feminism, such as critical cultural theory (see Johnson) and ecology (see Plumwood below). Grimshaw discusses readings of that prototype feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. She emphasises the need to situate her work in the eighteenth-century context, and shows how its tensions arise (in ways familiar to modern feminism) from using, and at the same time contesting, the moral and political perspectives out of which it comes. Arthur takes up a debate on the role assigned to women in Hegel’s philosophy, notably his admiration for Antigone’s moral quality. Poole argues that modern conceptions of morality, markets and masculinity exist on the same terrain and cannot be understood except in relation to each other. Parsons assesses the understanding of morality that emerges from feminist writing. She distinguishes three broad trends: liberalism, naturalism, and ‘social constructionism’. She thereby sheds light on both moral philosophy and feminist concerns. Finally, in this part, Johnson subjects to critical scrutiny the supposed appropriateness of post-modernist aesthetics to feminist art theory and practice. In the second part, papers are presented relating to Marx-


ismand socialism. Ever since Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach (‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point is—to change it.’), the status of philosophy for Marxism has been controversial. Marx ceased doing ‘philosophy’ in favour of ‘science’; yet it seems clear a philosophical ‘moment’ is necessary in situating Marx’s project. The problem is especially acute when one considers the needs of the proletariat charged with ‘changing it’ (see Rée). The need for contestation on the philosophical level is illustrated, negatively at least, by the perennial attempts by well-meaning souls to ‘give Marxism a philosophy’ drawn from sources alien to it, such as Kantianism, functionalism, or, today, ‘rational choice theory’ (see Sayers’ and McCarney’s rebuttals below). As far as the more specifically political is concerned there is a perennial tendency to assimilate socialism merely to a form of liberalism. Bernstein started this one, and it is running again today under such banners as ‘pluralism’, ‘civil society’, etc. (see Harris). Rée meditates on the ambivalences of ‘philosophers’ to ‘the people’ outside the institutions, and of the proletarians who set out to ‘philosophise’. He begins with a report on a new visit to Jock Shanley, a participant in the movement whose history was investigated in Rée’s book Proletarian Philosophers (OUP, 1984). Sayers and McCarney are both concerned to criticise influential variants of self-styled ‘analytical Marxism’, in the former case G.A.Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (criticised for its undialectical method), and in the latter case Jon Elster’s Making Sense of Marx. Harris conducts a searching examination of the most important moments of philosophy down to contemporary appeals to the concept of ‘civil society’ in order to argue for a conception of democracy that steers a course between romantic individualist pluralism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the tension that has plagued the left between spontaneous mass-mobilisation and Spartan discipline. The final part, on ‘Nature and Human Nature’, concerns the complex interdeterminations, the continuities and discontinuities, of culture and biology, of humans with other natural beings. Of course the topic of human nature is as old as philosophy, but today it is seen to present more complex problems than ever; there is the problematisation of gender stereotypes which are themselves articulated with the supposed humanity/nature dichotomy (see Plumwood); likewise new theories of the self still

INTRODUCTION 5

have to contend with the self’s embodiment (see Keat); while even a theory like Marx’s which always claimed to be a naturalism needs re-examining in the light of new ecological thinking (see Benton). Plumwood presents a conceptual framework in which to locate the considerable variety of responses to the traditional dichotomy of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ and its association with others— mind and body, humans and animals, ‘man’ and ‘nature’. The masculine ideal of the rational control of nature has thus been intertwined with the domination of women by men. She argues for an eco-feminism transcending such oppositions. Benton argues that we must take a fresh look at Marx in the light of the concerns of so-called ‘new’ social movements. He concentrates here on how the early work of Marx relates to ecology and animal welfare. He concludes that Marx’s conception of the human relationship to nature and to other species is problematic and needs substantial revision, because it relies often on an over-sharp human/animal dualism. Keat argues that both Reich and Foucault help us to understand the distinctively ‘human’ character of human bodies, by removing them from the category of exclusively biological entities. *** The reader is invited to take other pathways through this book than that indicated by the editorial arrangement. Thus those interested in feminism can take Val Plumwood’s piece together with the first section; those primarily interested in ethics may turn first to Poole and Parsons; and so on. As noted above, an earlier Reader was published in 1985: it was based on issues 1–36. The present collection covers issues 36– 52. The selection was made by Chris Arthur, Jean Grimshaw, Peter Osborne and Sean Sayers, and approved by the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy. We have chosen to avoid reproducing pieces already reprinted elsewhere, or that substantially overlap with other such publications. Among those ruled out by these criteria are the following: Susan Easton, ‘Hegel and feminism’ (RP 38)—see Hegel and Modern Philosophy ed. David Lamb, London, Croom Helm, 1987, pp. 30–55.


Ruth Levitas, ‘New Right Utopias’ (RP 39)—see her The Ideologyof the New Right, Cambridge, Polity, 1985. Joseph McCarney, ‘What makes theory critical?’ (RP 42)—see his Social Theory and the Crisis of Marxism, London, Verso, 1990. David Macey, ‘Lacan in Context’ (RP 35)—see his Lacan in Contexts, London, Verso, 1988. István Mészáros, ‘Marx’s “Social Revolution” and the Division of Labour’ (RP 44)—see his The Power of Ideology, Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989. Jerry Ravetz, ‘Ideology in the Philosophy of Science’ (RP 37)— see his The Merger of Knowledge with Power, Mansell (forthcoming). Barry Richards, ‘The Eupsychian Impulse’ (RP 48)—see his Images of Freud: Cultural Responses to Psychoanalysis, Weidenfeld Dent, 1989. Sean Sayers, ‘The need to work’ (RP 46)—see On Work, ed. R.E. Pahl, Oxford, Blackwell, 1988, pp. 722–41.

Part I FEMINISM AND PHILOSOPHY


1

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT AND THE TENSIONS IN FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY Jean Grimshaw The history of the reception and interpretation of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a complex and fascinating one.1 It was praised by many of her radical contemporaries, including Tom Paine and Mary’s husband, the radical anarchist philosopher and social theorist, William Godwin. It was condemned, sometimes vitriolically, by other contemporaries, including, notoriously, Horace Walpole, who called Mary a ‘hyena in petticoats’ and refused to have her book in his library. The Historical Magazine declared, in 1799, that her work should be read ‘with disgust by any female who has any pretensions to delicacy; with detestation by everyone attached to the interests of religion and morality’. It was not only men who condemned it. Many women disliked it intensely, including Hannah More, who felt justified in condemning it without even having read it. The fate of the Vindication cannot be separated from views of Mary’s personal life, nor from the fate of radical political ideas in the wave of repression and political reaction that dominated English politics in the years after the 1790s. Mary’s name and her work were tarred with the brush of French-style liberty, free thought, free love, irreligion, the undermining of family life, and all those things that were anathema both to conservative political orientations and to nineteenth-century evangelicalism. Apart from the memoir published after her death by her husband William Godwin,2 obituaries were mostly ambivalent or condemnatory, and no biography was published until 1884, nearly 100 years after her death. One gets the impression that few people in the nineteenth century can actually have read the Vindication, and that Wollstonecraft’s reputation was an embarrassment to the 9


bourgeois, evangelical and philanthropic modes in which much Victorian feminism was cast. Some contemporary judgements are hardly less damning. Lundberg and Farnham, in their book Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (1959) wrote: Mary Wollstonecraft was an extreme neurotic of a compulsive type. Out of her illness arose the ideology of feminism, which was to express the feelings of so many women in years to come. Unconsciously…Mary and the feminists… wanted to turn on men and injure them. …Underneath her aggressive writings, Mary was a masochist…as indeed all the leading feminist theorists were in fact. By behaving as she did Mary indicated… that she was unconsciously seeking to deprive the male of his power, to castrate him.3 In the Pelican History of England, the historian J.H.Plumb writes about what he calls the ‘self-conscious intellectual bohemianism’ which deliberately set out to live in defiance of accepted moral codes. Men and women had lived in sin frequently enough in the eighteenth century, but they had felt no compulsion to justify their acts on the highest ethical principles. The intellectual bohemians, Godwin, Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft and their circle, sinned for the sake of revolt rather than for enjoyment and then justified themselves by the principles of liberal philosophy. Squalid as their lives were, they had important consequences for English literary tradition.4 This is perhaps one of the most egregiously ignorant and prejudiced judgements on Wollstonecraft that I have come across. Most nineteenth-century critics, then, and some twentiethcentury ones, seem scarcely to have read the Vindication, and thus failed to notice that not even on the most casual reading could one find in it an apology or justification for loose living or sexual libertinism. It was Wollstonecraft’s life and reputation which largely determined how she was perceived. Ironically, however, if Wollstonecraft was often perceived by earlier critics as a radical and libertine, contemporary perceptions of her, often by feminist writers, have been very different. One of the most recent essays on Wollstonecraft is by Cora Kaplan.5 Kaplan’s critique

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT AND FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY 11

concentrates on the text of the Vindication, and from its pages emerges a very different Wollstonecraft. Kaplan argues that a central theme of the book is a deep ambivalence about sexuality, even a violent antagonism to the sexual; an exaggeration of the role of the sensual in the lives of women which recapitulates that of Rousseau, and a fear of the disruptive power of female sensuality. In the Vindication, Wollstonecraft turned against feeling and sensibility, and they are seen as reactionary and regressive. As Kaplan puts it: Sexuality and pleasure are narcotic inducements to a life of lubricious slavery. Reason is the only human attribute appropriate to the revolutionary character, and women are impeded by their early and corrupt initiation into the sensual from using theirs.6 Wollstonecraft’s programme for women, far from being that of ‘free love’ or sexual libertinism, is that of a strenuous programme of renouncing the sensual; her ideal is that of a life in which Reason is triumphant, but at the cost of the death of female pleasure and sexuality. Rather similarly, Diana Coole’s7 discussion of the Vindication stresses the way in which the book seems at times to require of women an almost ascetic dedication to duty, and a rejection of passion or self-indulgence. Both Kaplan and Coole and other commentators suggest that Wollstonecraft’s feminism could really only apply to middle-class women; the Vindication is, in essence, a liberal or bourgeois feminist tract which, while indeed calling attention forcefully to many aspects of sexual injustice and inequality, failed to address the lives of working-class women or even to challenge in any fundamental way the norms of bourgeois marriage and family life. Coole suggests that Wollstonecraft basically shared much of Rousseau’s idealised vision of the patriarchal bourgeois family, away from the corruption and ‘false manners’ of the city. And Kaplan writes that in Wollstonecraft’s text, with its stress on the potential virtues of those in the ‘middle’ class and on the importance of Reason, idealised humanity appears as a rational, plain-speaking bourgeois man. In one sense, I do not think that these judgements are wrong; they represent the ‘Wollstonecraft’ who appears in the pages of the Vindication far more adequately than those judgements which


have seen Wollstonecraft as a libertine. But if many earlier critiques of Wollstonecraft failed to pay any attention to the text of the Vindication at all, I think that some contemporary discussion, in focusing so closely and sometimes exclusively on the text of the book, has failed fully to see the ways in which Wollstonecraft’s work resists easy classification. The Vindication has often been criticised for being rushed, hasty and repetitive. There is some substance in these criticisms; it was written in six weeks, in the heat of a political situation. But it is not just that the text itself sometimes appears rushed; it should, I think, be read as provisional. In other words the ‘Wollstonecraft’ of the Vindication does not adequately represent, all by itself, Mary Wollstonecraft’s thinking about the situation of women and the response she thought that they should make. Virginia Woolf wrote of Wollstonecraft: ‘Every day…something was born in her that thrust aside her theories and forced her to model them afresh’.8 The Vindication needs understanding not only in the context of Wollstonecraft’s life, but in the context of her other writings and the ways in which these wrestled with the dilemmas thrown up by eighteenth-century politics, both radical and reactionary, and by contemporary views on literature and philosophy and on the nature of femininity. These dilemmas were of course cast in an eighteenth-century form, but they are ones which, in altered shape, feminism still continues to encounter. Wollstonecraft never had an answer to any of these dilemmas that could satisfy her for long; and it is perhaps the restless and provisional quality of her work that often makes it speak most strongly to those who, nearly 200 years later, often encounter similar dilemmas. Her struggle was formed around a number of features of eighteenth-century thought and politics. Central, of course, were the radical political ideas of her time. Mary herself became part of the circle of radical London intelligentsia, including Tom Paine, Thomas Holcroft, her publisher Joseph Johnson and her husband William Godwin, who believed passionately in the cluster of political ideas which centred around the critique of autocratic government and hereditary privilege, belief in the natural right of individuals to self-determination, and belief in the perfectibility of human nature and institutions if only corruption and privilege could be swept away. Mary was also heir to a steady stream of writing in the eigh-


teenth century about the nature and situation of women. She had almost certainly read feminist writers such as Catherine Macaulay; but there were men too, such as some radical teachers in Dissenting Academies, who had written about the social oppression of women. As Barbara Taylor points out, in her history of Owenite socialist feminism, it was not too hard to see an analogy between a critique of aristocratic government and a critique of the despotic power of men in families.9 Wollstonecraft herself drew such analogies frequently; she also compared the idle and corrupt state of the aristocracy to the state of degradation into which she thought women had fallen. Not all of the radical circle to which she belonged were by any means fully committed to feminist analysis or goals, but lip service at least was paid to questions about the oppression of women. The eighteenth century saw, in fact, a growing interest in questions about femininity and female consciousness. This was importantly related to changes in the social situation of women. The precise nature of changes in eighteenth-century family patterns remains a matter of historical dispute, but what is at least clear is that, increasingly, for middle-class women, the home was no longer also the workplace, and married women were not generally seen as independent economic actors or helpmates. The home of the nouveau-riche bourgeois was becoming a display case for affluence, and his wife’s role was being reduced to that of a decorative accessory in this display. The only route to security (of a sort) for a woman was a marriage in which she was wholly dependent, and for the woman who was not married, the prospects were bleak indeed: the often humiliating and penurious ‘careers’ of governess or lady’s companion (both of which Wollstonecraft experienced), or a dependence on the charity of some male relative. This total dependence of women on and within marriage was a central target of nearly all feminist critique in the period. But the eighteenth century also saw the beginnings of an idealisation of family life and the married state that remained influential throughout the nineteenth century. The eighteenth century moved away from the cynical and overtly sexually exploitative views of women which had tended to characterise the Restoration period; but moved away, also, from those religious views which had seen women simply as Eve the temptress, the occasion of man’s sin. Women became, as Janet Todd puts it, ‘the fair sex’, the Protes-


tant virgin.10 And there are two related aspects of eighteenthcentury thought about women which are central to understanding Wollstonecraft: the idea that virtue is gendered, that it is different for women and for men, and that it is female ‘sensibilities’, women’s particular psychological characteristics, which fit women for a specifically female type of virtue (but also disqualify them from that type thought appropriate to the male, and render them weaker and potentially easily corruptible). The overt disparagement of women displayed, for example, by Lord Chesterfield in his letters to his son, was displaced by the musings of writers such as Addison and Steele, in new journals such as the Tatler and the Spectator, on the virtues of the ‘fair sex’; a sentimental vision of the gentle, feeling, but subordinate wife and mother. But it is above all the philosophy and other writings of Rousseau which form a backdrop to Wollstonecraft’s work, and central to this is Rousseau’s account, in Emile, of female nature, his prescriptions for female upbringing and female virtue. Emile is Rousseau’s account of the sort of upbringing that would help to form the model citizen and enable him to develop the qualities of autonomy and self-determination; and the book portrays, too, Rousseau’s vision of the rural family and simplicity of life which alone would enable the citizen to remain uncorrupted by the evil manners of the city. Emile’s virtues are to be those of selfsufficiency, hardiness and independence of mind. Above all, he is to learn to make his own judgements based on his own experience, and to be beholden to no-one else for his opinions; Rousseau even suggests that Emile should not learn to read whilst still a boy. But when we turn to the education of the girl Sophie, who is to be Emile’s companion, it is a different story. Just as Emile is to be truly a man, so Sophie is to be truly a woman. ‘But for her sex,’ Rousseau writes, ‘a woman is a man.’ Yet where sex is concerned man and woman are unlike; each is the complement of the other; the difficulty in comparing them lies in our inability to decide, in either case, what is a matter of sex, and what is not.11 Rousseau’s own conclusions were that almost everything was a matter of sex; and he paints a broad picture of female psychology, female sensibility and female virtue which underly his pre-


scriptions for Sophie’s education. Resemblances and differences, he argues, must have an influence on the moral nature. The female is a female always, the male only a male from time to time, and the characteristics of woman will always inflect our conception of her virtue. What then are her characteristics? Woman, Rousseau believes, has a power over men, the power of charming and captivating them and of inflaming their senses. Women ‘so easily stir a man’s senses and fan the ashes of a dying passion’ that were they not to be carefully contained and controlled, ‘the men, tyrannised over by the women, would at last become their victims, and would be dragged to their death without the least chance of escape’.12 It is in their beauty, their wit and their wiles that women exercise their influence over men; attempt equality with men, and they will simply lose that power—they will become inferior. Women have their own skills, characteristic of the sex. Observe a woman, Rousseau says, and see how she exercises her skills of sympathy and sensibility, see how acute her observations of other people are, see how she knows how to charm and even get her own way by her wiles. She is not capable of abstract reasoning or of general principles; but her skills will complement those of men. Undermine these by the wrong education, and she will not become equal with men, she will simply become an inferior woman. Remove her from male control and conceive of her as independent, and she will lose those very qualities which make her estimable and desirable. Woman not only possesses a different nature from man; she is also bound, by the constraints of her life, to different principles of virtue from those which apply to men. Above all, she has a responsibility to her husband, and to her children, to ensure that her reputation is above reproach (Rousseau, like many others, regarded doubt about the paternity of one’s children as the ultimate indignity and shame for a man). Hence, he writes: You must follow Nature’s guidance if you would walk aright. The native characters of sex should be respected as nature’s handiwork. You are always saying, ‘Women have such and such faults, from which we are free.’ You are misled by your vanity; what would be faults in you are virtues in them; and things would go worse if they were without


these so-called faults. Take care that they do not degenerate into evil, but beware of destroying them.13 Thus, for women, unlike men: Worth alone will not suffice, a woman must be thought worthy; nor beauty, she must be admired; nor virtue, she must be respected. A woman’s honour does not depend on her conduct alone, but on her reputation…. ‘What will people think’ is the grave of a man’s virtue and the throne of a woman’s.14 Women must therefore, above all, learn to be obedient, dutiful, modest and chaste, accustomed to pleasing men and submitting to their will. But Rousseau does not wish women just to be servile slaves of men, or dutiful drudges. He is wholly enamoured with a romantic vision of idyllic marriage based on idealised complementarity of the sexes. And he is afraid that women’s sensibility and desire to please can easily be corrupted and turn into infidelity, coquetry and false refinement of manners. His prescriptions for female education are largely a response to these worries. Little girls, he writes, should be allowed to romp and play: ‘Everything which cramps and confines Nature is in bad taste.’15 They should develop what Rousseau really sees as ‘natural graces’, unspoilt by the artificialities, ‘deceitful’ pleasures and corruption of fashionable city manners. But while they are developing this ‘natural’ grace and charm, they should also be closely confined and taught from an early age to please, to be docile and to obey, to submit to injustice without complaint. And, he writes, ‘the genuine mother of a family is no woman of the world, she is almost as much of a recluse as the nun in her convent.’16 The charms of a (rural) family life are enough for her; she may, under certain circumstances, be shown the corrupt pleasures of the city, but only so that she will come to despise them and that they will not have for her the fatal attraction of the totally unknown. In the Vindication, it was perhaps above all the idea that virtue was gendered, that it should be different for women and men, that Wollstonecraft attacked. ‘The first object of laudable ambition,’ she writes, ‘is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex.’17 Virtue should mean the


same thing in a woman as in a man. And it is Reason, she argues, that is the foundation of virtue: It is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason. This was Rousseau’s opinion respecting men. I extend it to women, and confidently assert that they have been drawn out of their sphere by false refinement, and not by an endeavour to acquire masculine qualities.18 Women have indeed been degraded, Wollstonecraft argues, by the sort of femininity to which they have been required to aspire. They have become ‘insignificant objects of desire’, and their training in coquetry, sensuality and sensibility has undermined both their strength and their usefulness. The minds of women, she writes, are not in a healthy state, and she compares the state of women to the state of false refinement, vanity and immorality into which the aristocracy, especially in France, had sunk. The list of pejorative words and phrases she uses to describe women is long and striking; a few examples will convey the general impression. Women are enervated, their feelings are false and overstretched, they have factitious and corrupt manners, a romantic and unnatural delicacy of feeling; they are prone to sensuality, sentimentality, artificiality, coquetry, doting self-love, vapid tenderness, and a deluge of false sentiments. They languish like exotics and supinely dream life away. Wollstonecraft’s response, in the Vindication, to her own critique of the degradation of women does indeed at times seem to fall into the ascetic denial of female pleasure and the strenuous searching for virtue of which Cora Kaplan writes. Thus the degraded female is contrasted with the chaste wife and, above all, the serious and enlightened mother; ‘false’ sentiments are contrasted with things such as the ‘dignity of conscious virtue’ and the qualities of perseverance and fortitude. Wollstonecraft argues that love and sensual passion are usually incompatible with mutual respect and friendship. She even at one point suggests that an unhappy marriage may be advantageous for a woman, and that the neglected wife may make the best mother. She argues that women often waste their lives looking for a husband who will love them with fervid affection, and that if a woman is not satisfied with her husband, she is less likely to ‘model her soul to suit


the frailties of her companion’, and more likely to devote herself wholeheartedly to the acquisition of reason and virtue and the exercise of these in bringing up her children. If this were all that she had to say on the subject, her vision of life for women would indeed be depressing. But these sorts of statements in the Vindication represent only one ‘pole’ of an unresolved dilemma to which Wollstonecraft constantly returned and never solved to her satisfaction, which is that of how women are to combine feeling and sensibility with the life of reason, independence and virtue to which they should also aspire. Rousseau did not suppose that the strict confinement and dependence of women which he recommended would lead to the denial of women’s sensibility or sexuality. He thought, rather, that only if women were confined could these things flower in natural and uncorrupt ways. In his depiction of the relationship between Emile and Sophie he ascribes great importance to the maintenance of a sexual relationship between them, in which Sophie is to take as much pleasure as Emile, and never to be coerced by him into sex against her will. Nor, as I have said, did he want women to be just servile drudges. He distinguishes between corrupt ‘artificial’ charms and ‘natural’ unspoiled graces, and sees the former as the consequence of allowing freedom to women. In the Vindication, Wollstonecraft does not in fact always draw a simple opposition between a life of reason and one of feeling and pleasure. Rather, like Rousseau, she often contrasts ‘natural’ emotions of the heart, or simple or ‘reasonable’ pleasures, with those which are degraded or corrupt. But whereas Rousseau sees the dependence and confinement of women as a remedy for this corruption, Wollstonecraft sees these as its cause. And if at times in the Vindication she appears to recommend what Cora Kaplan calls ‘a little death’—the death of female pleasure and sexuality, this is somewhat out of line with much of the rest of her work (as well as with her own struggle with the sexual and emotional aspect of her life, which is vividly portrayed in her letters). Despite the strenuous assertion in the Vindication that virtue in a female should be the same as in the male, Wollstonecraft remained attracted to the idea that women did have special qualities, which, while not in themselves virtues, could lead to virtue. In 1787, whilst a governess in Ireland, she wrote a partly autobiographical novel, Mary: A Fiction. It is written in the style of eigh-


teenth-century ‘sentimental’ fiction, with a repertoire of rhetorical devices which aim to convey pathos and to arouse emotion in the reader, and a central theme is that of ‘sensibility’, a capacity for exquisitely intense and refined feeling, and for compassion with the sufferings of others. Yet in the novel Wollstonecraft is ambivalent about sensibility. Her heroine writes about it as follows: Sensibility is the most exquisite feeling of which the human soul is capable; when it pervades us, we feel happy; and could it last unmixed, we might form some conjecture of the bliss of those paradisiacal days, when the obedient passions were under the domination of reason, and the impulses of the heart, did not need correction…. Softened by tenderness, the soul is disposed to be virtuous…. Sensibility is indeed the foundation of all our happiness; but these raptures are unknown to the depraved sensualist, who is only moved by what strikes his gross senses.19 Here, again, Wollstonecraft is drawing a distinction between true sensibility, which leads to virtue, and depraved sensualism. ‘The passions are seldom properly managed,’ she writes; ‘they are either so languid as not to serve as a spur, or else so violent as to overleap all bounds.’ Wollstonecraft wrestled throughout her work with the problem of whether and how women could achieve sensual and emotional happiness in a way that was compatible with their independence and recognition as rational beings, and with the problem of how they could express and use qualities of feeling and sensibility, which she often implicitly sees as particularly theirs, without becoming mere coquettes or creatures of sensual impulse alone. Her heroine, in Mary, cries out: Every cause in nature produces an effect; and am I an exception to the general rule? Are desires implanted in me only to make me miserable? will they never be gratified? shall I never be happy? My feelings do not accord with the notion of solitary happiness. In a state of bliss, it will be the society of beings we can love…that will constitute a great part of our happiness.20 In Mary, there is no resolution of this dilemma. ‘I cannot live


without loving,’ the heroine says, ‘but love leads to madness’;21 and the novel ends with a recommendation of resignation, fortitude and the suggestion that death would be a desired end. In common with other critics of her time, Mary often sees the sentimental novel itself as helping to trap women into illusive reveries of romance. In Mary, the heroine ‘read all the sentimental novels, dwelt on the love scenes, and had she thought while she read, her mind would have been contaminated’. In the Vindication, Mary is highly critical of novel-reading. In her unfinished novel, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, it is the reading of Rousseau’s sentimental (and best-selling) novel Julie which enlivens the captivity of the heroine and gives her hope, yet also serves to trap her further back in inertia and illusion. In her own life, Mary seems to have achieved some measure of reconciliation between the need for love and happiness and the need to be independent in her relationship with William Godwin. In her fiction, she may adhere at times to the model of the chaste heroine, common in the eighteenth-century sentimental novel, and in the Vindication, she appears at times to see sexuality as a dangerous and diversionary force, to be overcome as quickly as possible by the power of reason. The heroine in Mary, married young against her will to a husband from whom she then lives apart, displays nothing but fear and disgust at the idea of sexual relations with her husband. But again, despite these strands in Wollstonecraft’s work, the picture of relationships between women and men which emerges in her life and work is not one which excludes or marginalises sexuality. Sexuality is a problem for women because it is so often seen to define their very being, and because it is so often associated simply with pleasing men and with the denial of female integrity or independence. Yet Mary was not really happy with any ideal of a sexless, companionate marriage (like that of John Stuart Mill); there is certainly evidence from her letters that in her own life sexual desire and satisfaction were both known and welcomed, and there is not a hint in the letters of anything like Mill’s relegation of sexuality to a ‘lower’ or merely ‘animal’ pleasure. The problem Mary wrestled with and never found a solution to was how to conceptualise and to satisfy female desire and pleasure in a world in which women were indeed, to use her own phrase, often regarded merely as ‘insignificant objects of desire’, and in which sexual pleasure


could often only be had at the expense of the sacrifice of independence or reputation. Wollstonecraft’s dilemmas were of course cast in eighteenthcentury form. Her thoughts on the situation of women were expressed in the language of eighteenth-century political theories which stressed Reason and Autonomy. Her writings were shaped and coloured not only by perceptions of the oppression of women, but also by the sentimentalisation and idealisation of women, and some of Mary’s own writings were deeply influenced by the style and rhetoric of eighteenth-century sentimental fiction. Yet the dilemmas she encountered continued to be important in feminist thinking and writing, albeit in a changed shape. Mary, as I have said, developed a stringent and polemical critique of female socialisation. Women, she argued, are taught merely to please, to be flattered and to obey. This both undermines their capacity for leading useful or rational lives and channels their desires and pleasures into vain and trivial objects and modes such as fashion and fiction. She often pictures women as sunk into a state of degradation for which there is nothing good to be said. A similar picture of women’s socialisation has been quite common in feminist writing. An influential book by Elena Belotti, for example, written in 1976, entitled Little Girls, draws a depressing picture of female socialisation which is strikingly similar to that of Wollstonecraft.22 Belotti sees the ‘natural’ lively and active ‘self of the little girl as crushed by the overwhelming weight of a training in dependence, passivity and triviality. And she, like Wollstonecraft, sees women as trapped in passive and illusive dreams by such things as romantic fiction, and as constrained in their very selves by the importance laid on female appearance. An even more striking picture of the ‘degradation’ to which women have sunk is offered by Mary Daly. In Daly’s work, almost everything that women learn to desire is ‘wrong’ in the sense that it undermines female creativity and autonomy, and almost every facet of female socialisation helps to channel female desire into these ‘wrong objects’. Women often appear in her work simply as passively shaped or moulded by the malign forces which conspire to trap them, and their supposed passivity is emphasised by some of the language Daly uses to describe ‘unregenerate’ women; words such as ‘puppet’ or even ‘fembot’.23 Yet other feminist critics have seen something skewed or dis-


torted about this sort of picture of women’s lives and of female desire. What sense can we make, for one thing, of the idea of a ‘natural’ or ‘regenerate’ female self if this is seen as something wholly distinct from the real historical lives and desires of women? Doesn’t the picture of women as simply passive victims of a malign and misogynistic culture misrepresent the relationship women have to cultural forms such as fashion or fiction? Is it not the case that women have, despite their frequent oppression and enforced dependence, developed particular strengths and capacities and priorities which might be built on rather than just rejected? A central problem in feminist critique has been that of how to conceptualise the oppression of women in ways that do indeed recognise how that oppression may be internalised and may limit or constrain women’s aspirations for themselves, whilst at the same time not lapsing into either a puritanical critique of all female desire, or a derogatory view of women’s lives which sees them as having little that is of value in them. At times, especially in the Vindication, Wollstonecraft can seem to lapse into both; yet there are other strands in her work which move in a different direction. The picture of the ‘regenerate’ woman which dominates the Vindication stresses above all the importance of independence. Rousseau argued that if women were independent they would lose their power over men. That, writes Wollstonecraft, is her very point. ‘I do not wish them to have power over men, but over themselves.’ But the ‘independence’ of the Vindication often seems to be a matter of a lone and strenuous mental struggle to cultivate Reason and fortitude and reject desire. In Wollstonecraft’s fiction, however, embryonically and tentatively, other themes emerge. Central to both her novels was the theme of female friendship. In Mary: A Fiction, the friendship between the heroine and another woman ends in death and disillusionment. In The Wrongs of Woman, however, the relationship between women is portrayed rather differently. The heroine of the novel, Maria, has been incarcerated in an asylum by her husband, and a central theme of the novel is the relationship between Maria and her jailor Jemima. Jemima has led a life of brutal poverty, squalor and oppression. An insulated being…she loved not her fellow creatures, because she had never been loved…. Thus degraded, was


she let loose on the world, and virtue, never nurtured by affection, assumed the stern aspect of selfish independence.24 Jemima’s energy has all been devoted to survival; her role in the novel is often to temper the feverish excesses of sensibility to which Maria is prone. Yet ‘independence’, in conditions of brutality and squalor, can only be achieved at the price of the death of human love and affections. And if Jemima’s reason tempers Maria’s sensibility, it is Maria’s female qualities of compassion, empathy and tenderness which allow Jemima for the first time to experience joy in human intercourse and pleasure in a relationship with another human being. Wollstonecraft’s work, then, taken as a whole, does not simply imprison feminist thinking in a puritanical denial of female pleasure, nor does it simply consign ideas of female virtues and strength to the flames. It wrestles, rather, often in uncomfortable and problematic ways, with the problem of how women can achieve sexual and emotional happiness in ways that do not require them to sacrifice their independence or integrity; and with the problem of how female ‘sensibility’ can be detached from its destructive forms whilst still continuing to inform human relationships. The other main strand of modern critique of Wollstonecraft is that which sees her, despite her impassioned plea for the equality and independence of women, as speaking only to middle-class women, and recommending only a form of ‘equality’ which accepts uncritically both class divisions, the institution of marriage and norms of rationality which are closely related to bourgeois ideals of masculinity. Again, there are aspects of the Vindication which give substance to these criticisms. In it, Wollstonecraft sees the urgency of her critique of femininity as lying largely in the fact that it undermines the seriousness with which women undertake the task of motherhood. She does not question the responsibility of women for motherhood, nor, apparently, the institution of marriage; and she makes few suggestions as to what else might be needed to change the situation of women other than strenuous efforts at achieving a mental independence. Yet this sort of judgement on Wollstonecraft’s work as a whole is inadequate. In The Wrongs of Woman, for example, Maria is led, by her devastating experience of marriage, to reflect on its


nature, and, whilst claiming that, with proper restrictions and safeguards for women, she would revere the institution, she declares that, as presently constituted, it simply leads to immorality. Relationships between men and women should be based on fidelity, and mutual affection, but not on the arbitrary power and caprice of the man. The view of marriage in The Wrongs of Woman begins to shade into that characteristic of many Owenite socialist feminists, both men and women, who commonly maintained that marriage was a central site of female oppression and that relationships between women and men should be voluntary and based on love, and on a simple and easily retractable agreement to live together. Nor was Wollstonecraft unaware, of course, of the sufferings of poor women; she may have sometimes assumed that middleclass women would have servants, but, as in her own life, this was often not much more than a pragmatic response to necessity, and she was well aware of the destitution and poverty which afflicted many women. Jemima, in The Wrongs of Woman, was one of her vehicles for vividly depicting these. Wollstonecraft’s work, whilst remaining in many ways within a framework bounded by bourgeois liberal political ideas and by conceptions of femininity and women’s nature which were characteristic of her time, nevertheless constantly tends to undermine or run up against the limits of these. She lacked any profound or adequate analysis of the social and economic situation of women; yet hers was not a narrow or blinkered view which conceived of emancipation only for a bourgeois female elite. Many of her aspirations were broad and radical and closer to Owenite socialist feminism than to bourgeois reformism; the tensions and uncertainties in her work often arise from what Barbara Taylor has called the ‘dialogue between reformist premises and utopian aspirations’ which characterised much of what she wrote.25 She is very critical of the oppression of women in marriage, yet committed also to an ideal of emotional fulfilment in a sexual relationship, and her writings experiment with views of this relationship, none of which finally satisfy her. She is bitterly critical of male behaviour, and of the power which enables men to tyrannise over women, yet also, in the Vindication, describes the virtues to which women should aspire as ‘manly’, and wishes that women could become more ‘masculine’. It is tensions and problems such as these which have characterised a great deal of feminist philosophy. Feminist per-


spectives both use and commonly at the same time challenge those moral and political perspectives which form the background to their birth. Mary Wollstonecraft was neither simply ‘reformist’ nor ‘radical’, she was both, and it is the tension between these which makes her work still so poignant, readable and relevant.

NOTES This chapter was first published in Radical Philosophy 52 (Summer 1989) 1 Pelican, 1975 (referred to as the Vindication throughout). 2 Godwin’s memoir, and his motives for writing it, have been the subject of considerable discussion. The memoir stressed Mary’s personal life rather than the achievements of her writing, and it is arguable that Godwin bears some responsibility for the ways in which Mary’s work has often been denigrated, or eclipsed by discussion of such things as her liaison with Imlay. See, for example, Alison Ravetz, The Trivialisation of Mary Wollstonecraft: A Personal and Professional Career ReVindicated’, Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 6, No. 5, 1983. 3 Quoted in Dale Spender, Women of Ideas, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982, p. 113. 4 J.H.Plumb, England in the 18th Century, Pelican, 1950, p. 165. 5 Cora Kaplan, ‘Wild Nights’, in Cora Kaplan, Sea Changes; Culture and Feminism, Verso, 1986. 6 Kaplan, ibid., p. 35. 7 Diana Coole, Women in Political Theory, Wheatsheaf, 1988. 8 Virginia Woolf, Women and Writing, ed. Michèle Barrett, Women’s Press, 1979, p. 99. 9 Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, Virago, 1983. 10 Janet Todd, Sensibility: an Introduction, Methuen, 1986. 11 Rousseau, Emile, Dent, Everyman’s Library, 1974, p. 321. 12 Rousseau, ibid., p. 322. 13 Rousseau, ibid., p. 326. 14 Rousseau, ibid., p. 328. 15 Rousseau, ibid., p. 330. 16 Rousseau, ibid. 17 Wollstonecraft, op. cit., p. 82. 18 Wollstonecraft, op. cit., p. 103. 19 Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary: A Fiction, Oxford University Press, 1976, pp. 53–4. 20 Mary Wollstonecraft, ibid., p. 40. 21 Mary Wollstonecraft, ibid., p. 62. 22 Elena Belotti, Little Girls, Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, 1975.


23 See, for example, Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology, The Women’s Press, 1978, and Pure Lust, The Women’s Press, 1984. 24 Mary Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman, Oxford University Press, p. 82. 25 Taylor, op. cit., p. 7.

2

HEGEL AS LORD AND MASTER Christopher J.Arthur

INTRODUCTION The feminist interrogation of philosophy can take two forms. It can examine what philosophers have had to say about the nature and destiny of woman: here the record is one of almost universal sexism (Kennedy and Mendus, 1987). In addition, it may ask if this is merely a local problem or if the entire discourse of philosophy should be subject to feminist critique (Lloyd, 1984; Plumwood, 1988; Grimshaw, 1986). I will touch on the second question only briefly at the end. But in this paper I shall be concerned mainly with what Hegel says about woman and gender relations. In the first part I shall look at what he says about Antigone. In the second part I shall look at the master-slave dialectic and the possibility of applying it to marriage. Here I shall draw on Hegel’s own marriage. In the final part I shall consider if it is—in general—possible to save Hegel for feminism. Throughout I am in part responding to an excellent recent paper by Susan Easton (1987) in which she brings forward a wealth of evidence designed to absolve Hegel of the more serious charges against him. Certainly there is much that stands in need of defence. It might have been expected that Hegel’s anti-naturalistic idealism would have saved him from the grosser forms of sexism; but, just as private property and monarchy turn out to incarnate necessary moments in the actualisation of freedom, so also does Hegel endorse the bourgeois family and its gender divisions as ethically necessary to social cohesion. The absurdity of his stereotyping is revealed in such remarks as that in conception the female provides the mate27


rial element and the male the spiritual (more exactly: ‘the subjectivity’ §368 addition, Philosophy of Nature p. 175). Although he met brilliant self-educated women (see below on the two Carolines) his official philosophy accepted and vindicated gender stereotyping and included a vigorous assertion of gender associations with the public/private distinction in social life. I shall show below that Hegel’s relegation of women to a secondary role in social life is not disturbed by his evident fascination with the heroic figure of Antigone. How, then, can someone be a feminist and a Hegelian? To begin with one can argue that Hegel is not as sexist as he looks— Susan Easton defends Hegel in this way. She thinks, also, that one could usefully draw on Hegel’s master-slave dialectic for an understanding of the position of women. Finally one could argue that his prejudices are inconsistent with the fundamental principles of the system and the latter should have led to their abandonment (see Hodge’s trenchant 1987 paper). Easton believes that Hegel cannot be accounted a vulgar sexist who ascribes roles and behaviour to women in virtue of some supposed naturally given predisposition, or functional relation to the male order. In the section on the family in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, he contrasts man and woman in terms of rationality and feeling, and uses this to exclude woman from the public domain. Easton suggests that on closer examination the Philosophy of Right ‘reveals a tension between Hegel’s conservative reductionism and a more progressive anti-reductionist standpoint’ (p. 34). This is because ‘the family provides a means of escape from the subjectivism of the state of nature through an institutional commitment to an ethical universal’ (p. 34). The family transcends rather than instantiates the merely biological. Easton, through close textual analysis, has no trouble in establishing this. She concludes that Hegel’s conception of the family does not ‘devalue women’s biological existence’ but it does ‘subvert it from its prime position as the principal determinant of their social and political lives’ (p. 36). Certainly it is true that Hegel situates gender attributions within ‘ethical life’, i.e. the roles are derived from socio-cultural determinations. Women also are ascribed an ethical capacity to recognise objective duties of their own inscribed in this order. Easton has grounds for claiming that Hegel does not present a naturalistic reduction of women’s role in society. But I want to argue

HEGEL AS LORD AND MASTER 29

that in one respect her claims are overstated (Antigone), and in another area omit some useful texts, in which Hegel discusses the family, and which document his own marriage. Finally I will come back to the question of how exactly the mediation of family structure is supposed to supersede the natural and cast doubt on Hegel’s account.

I ANTIGONE Antigone is mentioned in both the Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Right. Easton claims that Hegel recognises her as a genuine developed moral agent. Her main concern is to show that Hegel’s analysis of woman does not restrict her simply to the realm of the subjective but that she has a rational and ethical capacity. Antigone is brought in to demonstrate this. The immediate difficulty here is that Hegel does indeed use the term ‘subjective’ of her. In the paragraph in his Philosophy of Right on sexual difference in the family he says: Family piety is expounded in Sophocles’s Antigone…as principally the law of woman, and as the law of substantiality at once subjective and on the plane of feeling, the law of the inward life, a life which has not yet achieved its full actualisation. (§166) He refers us to his treatment of Antigone in his Phenomenology of Spirit, but without remarking that the dialectic there has a somewhat different strategic purpose (see below). This is illustrated in the fact (more favourable to Easton’s thesis) that the term ‘subjective’ does not seem to appear in the Phenomenology treatment. Hegel locates Greek tragedy in the context of the emergence of political forms to regulate archaic tribal society, a situation combining behaviour based on ties of kinship with that based on more abstract considerations of political authority. The play in question concerns the refusal of Antigone (representing the old family certainties) to bow to the dictates of political reason espoused by Creon. Hegel believes that it is not accidental that this contradiction explodes around the question of death, given


its different meanings within the two value systems. I cannot do better here than quote at length from Bernard Cullen’s (1987) illuminating exposition of this theme: In one sense the death of any citizen is a contingent event that could happen to anyone, especially anyone involved in political or social struggles; it remains external to that struggle and does not modify its content significantly. But in another sense, as a moment in the life of a family, such a death is a fundamentally significant and necessary milestone…. Thus people can be model citizens, can work for the good of the city, can risk their lives in defending the state; but…when death strikes, their spiritual home is with their family, who will receive their body and will strip death of all its inessentials—death in some cause or another, in one manner or another, against this or that enemy—and return them directly into that ontological continuity maintained by the religion of their ancestors. It matters little to Antigone that Eteocles was struck down while defending the city and that Polynices, his brother, was a traitor to the city. As far as she is concerned, they are both her brothers, and they are both entitled to a proper funeral in accordance with tradition. (p. 17) Hegel’s analysis opposes divine law and human law to each other as equally valid and he says that it is in this opposition that ‘tragedy in the realm of the ethical’ arises (Natural Law, 105; Phil. Right, §166; Phen., 449; History of Philosophy I, 446). The fates of Antigone and Creon are supposed to be strictly symmetrical. Antigone expresses the standpoint of divine law—as she does in the play, telling Creon: I did not think your edicts strong enough To overrule the unwritten unalterable laws Of God and heaven, you being only a man. They are not of yesterday or today, but everlasting, Though where they came from none of us can tell. (lines 450–5; p. 138) Creon is supposed to represent the standpoint of human law. This


sexual distribution is not accidental but flows from ‘the opposing nature of man and woman’ (Phil. Right, §166; also Phen. 280). It is, however, essential to Hegel’s account that these standpoints be distributed because he argues that the protagonists must not choose between them (Phen. 279). The positions need to be adopted unthinkingly in the first instance; one does what one has to do in accordance with one’s sex; only in the attempt to live out its principle does each consciousness clash uncomprehendingly with the other which it regards as an unfortunate obstacle thrown up by reality. Since it sees right only on one side and wrong on the other, that consciousness which belongs to the divine law sees in the other side only the violence of human caprice, while that which holds to human law sees in the other only the selfwill and disobedience of the individual who insists on being his own authority. For the commands of government have a universal public meaning open to the light of day; the will of the other law, however, is locked up in the darkness of the nether regions, and in its outer existence manifests [itself] as the will of an isolated individual which, as contradicting the first, is a wanton outrage. (Phen. 280) In the realm of actuality, where both principles are valid, the protagonists are humbled and destroy each other. It is in this alwaystoo-late awakening to guilt that the tragic dénouement exists. What are we to make of this as an analysis of the Antigone? Anyone who reads Sophocles, and then reads Hegel’s Phenomenology, is led to wonder if he has read the same play as Hegel. (This is a common reaction. Kaufmann’s 1971 defence of Hegel is mere bluster.) As a reading of Sophocles it is perverse; but perhaps Hegel can be saved from conviction on this count if one assumes that his treatment of the issues is an independent one conducted with the benefit of historical hindsight, and supersedes that of the uncomprehending playwright. Sophocles is not, nor could he be, a dialectician. Hegel, by contrast, attempts to force tragedy in general, and the Antigone in particular, into a shape of dialectical reciprocity which is peculiarly rigid. What he says about divine law is roughly correct but his claim that the standpoint of human law is equally valid does not apply.


Sophocles clearly takes the standpoint of Antigone. At no point does she experience any guilt for her actions or any tragic awakening. She is clearsighted throughout. She never accepts her punishment is merited; she experiences only a Christ-like moment of doubt, as explained below. Hegel leads us up the garden path by citing: ‘Because we suffer we acknowledge we have erred.’ (Phen. 284. Easton, p. 37, does not notice this ‘quote’ is spurious.) This passage is an adaptation (to put it politely) from the play by Hegel and used to support his general position. But reference to Antigone’s speech reveals that the statement in question is a hypothetical one. It forms part of an agonised plea beginning ‘What law of heaven have I transgressed?’ (Not ‘human law’ notice.) In this context she says: ‘But if it is the will of the gods, and I have sinned, I will acquiesce in my fate.’ (line 926, p. 150; see also Kaufmann’s discussion.) ‘If I am wrong…’ she is saying. She finishes by saying that, if the guilt is Creon’s, may he learn the truth ‘in suffering as great as mine’. And he does of course, thus vindicating Antigone’s position. (For an acute analysis of Antigone’s final speech see Steiner Antigones 277–83.) In the opinion of Siegfried Melchinger (1974), ‘Antigone is not guilty, and she does not feel so. Nor does Sophocles think her guilty. To be deserted by the gods is man’s lot in tragedy; it is part of the human condition.’(82) But in truth Antigone’s dreadful fate (to be walled up in a cave to die) is legitimated for the audience in terms of a tragic story line indirectly in the sense that she is fated to suffer for her family; as the chorus says at one point: ‘This is the expiation you must make for the sin of your father [Oedipus].’ (line 852, p. 149) But for Antigone to suffer such ‘cosmic justice’, as a result of her daring to defy the state, does nothing to vindicate Creon’s edict of course. Indeed it should be observed that for the Athenian audience the tragedy is as much—or more—Creon’s. Through Antigone the gods teach him a lesson. For her death provokes the suicides of Haemon and Euridyce (Creon’s family). As the chorus concludes at the end, failing to hold the gods in awe, his pride has brought him down. According to Melchinger (1974), ‘certain of Creon’s traits, in Antigone, were unmistakably meant to suggest Pericles’ (19). (‘His title was strategós, and this is Antigone’s designation for


Creon.’ (86)) Sophocles was warning Pericles not to overstep the mark. Melchinger concludes: It is not (as Hegel thought) the conflict between the good of the state and love for the family as two ideas of equal importance that is so relevant. The essential moral is in the warning to those in power not to transgress those unwritten rules that set limits to political action. (86) It is not accidental that of all Greek tragedies it is the Antigone that appeals most to the modern romantic consciousness; we identify with Antigone as an existential figure, and perceive the suffering of Creon subsequent to her death as a rather insignificant coda. The Athenian audience, however, would relate strongly to this vindication of divine law. It is noticeable, by the way, that the indictment by the blind prophet concentrates on Creon’s treatment of the body of Polynices; his treatment of Antigone is added on just to fill out the charge sheet as it were.

ETHICAL ACTION So much for Hegel’s reading of Antigone. The main point at issue is not this but Easton’s reading of Hegel—of what Hegel thinks Antigone is about. So let us turn to that. Easton’s claim is that Hegel does not dismiss Antigone’s rebellion as ‘subjective’ but sees it as ‘rational’. This is a false dichotomy. There is a third way. Let us first look more closely at Hegel’s contrast between Antigone and Creon. The difference between them is not a contingent one. It is grounded in the fundamental character of the epoch. The basic split in the ethical order is that between self-conscious human law, openly enacted by the community, and, confronting this, divine law representing ‘the simple and immediate essence of the ethical sphere’, whose substance is unconsciously present as ‘a natural ethical community—the Family’ (Phen. 269). In it the man represents the family in the public sphere while the woman remains ‘the guardian of the divine law’ (p. 275). Their relationship mediates the extremes of spirit: universal self-consciousness


is chiefly manifest in the man, unconscious individualised spirit in the woman (p. 278). Easton notes that ‘Hegel sees tragedy disappearing with the development of modern society predicated on individualism, being replaced by romantic art concerned with the “boundless subjectivity” of passion rather than the clash of ethical principles’ (p. 40). She concludes that it follows from this that ‘while Antigone’s choices are governed by love, Hegel does not perceive love as mere subjectivity but rather sees subjectivity as alien to tragedy’. Thus the focus on love in his Antigone ‘does not in itself entail a reductionist position provided it is clear that this quality is not biologically based’ (p. 40). Easton is quite right to insist that Hegel regards Antigone’s behaviour as informed by ethical considerations rather than merely natural feeling or a subjective emotional reaction. Her rebellion is not the caprice of natural wilfulness. She knows what is her duty. But Easton is wrong to characterise this consciousness as a self-reflective rational consideration of ethical principles and their consequences if acted upon (p. 37). For Hegel associates her with the ethical substance only as it is ‘implicit’; ‘unconscious’; ‘immediate’ (i.e. unreflective); ‘the law of weakness and darkness…of the underworld’ (p. 286). This is explicitly contrasted with the known, accessible, positive law of the polity, self-consciously promulgated and justified. Antigone doggedly rejects all the ‘political’ arguments of Ismene and Creon. When Creon points out that it is illogical to give equal honour to good and bad Antigone replies ‘Who knows? In the country of the dead that may be the law.’ (p. 140) Such human verdicts are of no moment in Hades, she holds. One feels that Antigone would share Rousseau’s suspicion that reason is the enemy of true morals (Inequality, 68–9). Of course Rousseau relies on the immediacy of natural compassion, Hegel’s Antigone on the imperatives of traditional culture. This is why Antigone is assigned by Hegel to represent the immediacy of the ethical substance. This standpoint is not a subjective one because, although its articulation appears in actuality as an individual commitment, it is grounded in the objective order of meanings in a (disappearing) tribal society. But equally it is not the standpoint of self-conscious reason. Creon is assigned that; although he does not appreciate that the traditional meanings are still a power to


be reckoned with, presupposed by the community in its essential fabric, and guarded by its gods and women. Easton brings forward in support of her reading the following passage: ethical consciousness is more complete, its guilt purer, if it knows beforehand the law and the power which it opposes, if it takes them to be sheer violence and wrong, to be a contingency in the ethical life, and wittingly, like Antigone, commits the crime. and Hegel continues with the earlier-cited spurious quotation (Easton, p. 37, quoting from Baillie’s translation 491=Miller 284) This passage is rather aberrant however. It does not cohere very well either with Hegel’s earlier stress on the necessary character of the actions, nor with the particular stress on Antigone’s unreflective representation of ‘the law of darkness’. In general, Easton’s reading of the Antigone, and hence the reading she tries to find in Hegel, is too modern, I feel. We moderns commit an anachronism when we retell Antigone’s story as one of heroic individualism (e.g. Anouilh). We don’t admire her for burying dead brothers (content) but for her moral quality (form). For the real Antigone family duty is of the essence. It is relevant here to remark Hegel’s distinction between Sittlichkeit and Moralität. Moralität refers to the form of all genuinely moral action, namely the conscientiousness of the individual agent but it is considered in abstraction from any concrete content. Sittlichkeit, conversely, refers to the concrete ethical life of an objective social order which provides in its customs and institutions a content for its members’ convictions. The Phenomenology discusses Sittlichkeit as spirit in its immediacy, as a social form to be historically superseded, while Sittlichkeit in the Philosophy of Right is a fully actualised self-mediated whole within which the moment of the family represents the ‘natural immediate phase’ (§157), hence, as against the more mediated whole, one of subjective feeling. As was remarked above, the Philosophy of Right (§166) situates Antigone at this level. But at the same time the family is not so much a natural unit as an ethical one, as Hegel’s stress on the institution of marriage shows. While Hegel asks us to read into Antigone the standpoint of Sittlichkeit what we tend to do is to celebrate her as the representative of


Moralität, a phase in Hegel’s system either post-Sittlichkeit (Phenomenology) or pre-Sittlichkeit (Philosophy of Right), but in either case a self-mediated rather than socially mediated ethic. Moralität seeks to moralise a non-moral world (Phen. p. 365). We like Antigone precisely because for us she represents conscience in the face of a wicked world. In the Philosophy of Right,Moralität is reconciled with the world in that in the ethical order of the modern state it finds itself and has objective principles provided to it on which to act. But in the Phenomenology Hegel had not yet worked out such a modern verison of Sittlichkeit. At this stage in his thinking it appears only as a world of ethical harmony pre-dating the questionings of conscience and forever lost. This immediate identity of nature and spirit breaks down under the weight of its own contradictions—illustrated in the Antigone. For him—and I think he is broadly correct here— Antigone’s actions are informed by this original Sittlichkeit which is prior to the more reflective standpoint of Moralität, which arises only in the modern world in Hegel’s history. He there explains it as follows: For self-consciousness, its knowledge…is…like the ethical consciousness which knows its duty and does it, and is bound up with it as with its own nature; but it is not [a fixed] character, as that ethical consciousness is which, on account of its immediacy, is a specifically determined spirit, belongs only to one of the ethical essentialities, and has the characteristic of not knowing [i.e. Antigone]. (p. 364) For it is essentially the movement of the self…to become conscious of itself as a universal…It is bound only by duty, and this substance is its own pure consciousness, for which duty cannot receive the form of something alien [e.g. as the will of the gods?]. (pp. 365, 366) In conclusion let us note that the powerful figure of Antigone breaks through the dialectical web spun about her by Hegel. As Hodge (p. 135) points out, so far from accepting the ‘passive’ position assigned women by Hegel (Phil. Right §166), Antigone, in taking her stand, rebels against the patriarchy—to the despair


of Ismene, who chooses differently: ‘O think, Antigone; we are women; it is not for us to fight against man; our rulers are stronger than we.’ (p. 128) So far from internalising human law and accepting guilt she defies the tyrant to the last. Walled up alive ‘she dares to escape that punishment by taking her own life, an act of civil disobedience quite unlike that of Socrates’ (Hodge 152). Interestingly, in making the same comparison Hegel reverses all the terms of Hodge’s account: neglecting Antigone’s deviance, he presents her as passively acquiescent (and to be praised on that account); while Socrates, for refusing to make a choice of punishment when it is offered him, is convicted of dumb insolence. (History of Philosophy Vol. I, p. 441.) Yet when Hegel compares them on the question of reason he elevates Socrates above Antigone on grounds we have already explored. Socrates has to find truth within himself through thought ‘as truly objective as subjective’; but objectivity here has the significance of substantial universality, and not of external objectivity; thus truth is now posited as a product mediated through thought, while untrained morality, as Sophocles makes Antigone say (vers. 454–7), is ‘the eternal law of the gods; and no one knew from whence it came’. (History of Phil 386) (Today’s Greenham woman is curiously reminiscent of Antigone. For a start, after a nuclear exchange there certainly will not be enough people to bury the dead. This is why it is virtually sacrilegious, and the ‘public reason’ of Mrs T is dismissed as sheer violence and wrong in ethical life, and the laws of the state can be broken. The legitimation is not in terms of the shades of the dead but of the yet unborn. Also feeling rather than reason is appealed to in some statements, and their essential duties as women, potential mothers, etc., rather than a universal code.) For Hegel Antigone is ‘the noblest of figures that ever appeared on earth’ (History of Phil. 441). Nevertheless, I conclude that, although Hegel finds in Antigone a paradigm of ethical commitment, within his scheme of ethical development she does not achieve the level of self-conscious universal reason. This is to be actualised in the modern state within the public sphere by men.


II LORDSHIP AND BONDAGE One area which has suggested itself to some as peculiarly relevant to women’s liberation is the famous analysis of lordship and bondage in the Phenomenology. Simone de Beauvoir attempted such a project in her Second Sex—but it has to be said that it isn’t really Hegel’s view, but Sartre’s master-slave dialectic, which influenced her. De Beauvoir has been ably criticised by Genevieve Lloyd (1983). This has not prevented Susan Easton from reasserting the validity of the original project in her paper on Hegel and feminism. Both Lloyd (pp. 298–9) and Easton (see her 1986 review of Lloyd’s Man of Reason pp. 73–4) say that women do not enter into Hegel’s account of the master-slave dialectic and that he does not make any connection between the latter and the family. Both seek to make such connections. But what both have missed is that, although these discussions are widely separated in the Phenomenology, in Hegel’s manuscript System der Sittlichkeit of a few years earlier he explicitly relates them. What I want to point out is that when Hegel himself makes connections between lordship and marriage it is to legitimate the subordination of women. In this early manuscript, written in Jena in 1802–3, he conceptualises the family on the basis of the development of lordship and bondage. The relation of master and servant is rooted in natural facts (p. 125) but it can acquire the stability of a social form, it can be ‘ethical’ (p. 126): this is seen in the family (p. 127). The family is ethical even though in it the man is the authority. H.S. Harris, in his introduction to the text, sums up thus: In the household it is the ‘difference of living might’ that makes itself evident, so that the master’s word is law. But the obedience involved here is ethical obedience. The family members are not the father’s servants, he gives orders, and they obey, in the interests of the family as a whole. (p. 42) So internalised oppression is fine it seems. Against this ideological legitimation it is enough to point out that internalised slavery is still slavery. Easton (1987) argues that Hegel’s master-slave dialectic is very relevant to the situation of the woman condemned to domestic


labour (pp. 49–50). It is precisely one of the defects of Sartre’s appropriation of the master-slave that he leaves out the mediation of labour, she points out (1986), following Lloyd (1983, 300). In fact Hegel himself failed to develop the idea of the objectification of the slave in his work in the Encyclopaedia version of this dialectic. He speaks only of ‘fear of the lord’, and ‘community of need’, holding the relationship together. This latter rather puzzling concept is perhaps based on the System der Sittlichkeit version of the dialectic: The master is in possession of a surplus, of what is physically necessary; the servant lacks it, and indeed in such a way that the surplus and the lack of it are not single [accidental] aspects but the indifference [identity] of necessary needs. (p. 126) Hegel makes then the transition to the family but insists that the surplus is now ‘common’. ‘Difference is the superficial [aspect] of lordship. The husband is master and manager, not a property owner as against the other members of the family’ (p. 127). (In the Philosophy of Right, §170, he goes so far as to link the origins of marriage with property.) He forgets that the necessity of patriarchal marriage lies exactly in the above necessary need, namely the woman’s lack of economic independence; and this continues to shape its dynamic as long as she cannot leave it, for the same reason. But what of the key thing in the Phenomenology version, namely liberation through production? According to Hegel’s analysis a dialectical reversal takes place whereby it is the servant rather than the master who achieves the more human being because, whereas the master’s satisfactions are only fleeting, albeit continual, the servant in realising himself through work becomes aware of himself in the permanence of its results. The analogy between slaves and subjugated women as unpaid, low status workers is obvious. Easton has no trouble developing this point. At the same time she finds cause for hope in the dialectical reversal implicit in Hegel’s analysis. Nevertheless, in so far as the argument in the Phenomenology relies on the idea that the slave achieves a sense of self-worth through objectification in labour, there are problems about this model where housework is con-


cerned. Hegel abstracts from the determinate social forms of forced labour, but if we situate labour in its contemporary context what do we see? Although modern wage-labourers have no identification with their work in the capitalist labour-process they do know that this work is worth something; it is objectified in value, than which nothing is more permanent in the capitalist accumulation process. But household labour is not thus socially recognised and valued. So, in spite of the genuine objectification involved, domestic labourers do not experience much sense of selfworth through it. At best in some obscure way they sense the fetishism involved in value and regard their own contribution as more ‘real’. Much of the present wave of feminism started from terminally bored housewives, but if Betty Friedan and company had a sense of self-worth it probably came from an education. In short, no Hegelian dialectic of women’s liberation can be based on housework. The disintegration of the family may rather be consequent on women’s recognition outside it, in suffrage, wage work, etc. reacting back on it. Certainly Hegel signally failed to draw radical lessons from his own explicit linkage in his System der Sittlichkeit of the master-slave relation and marriage.

HEGEL’S MARRIAGE This gives us the occasion to consider that Hegel himself married. How did he assume the role of lord and master? Mind-boggling though it is to speculate about a love-affair with Hegel (der Anstrengung des Besgriffs is just not in it), he courted and won a well-born lady named Marie in Nuremberg in 1811, when he was 41. Indeed we have two surviving poems sent to her. Here is a taste: Narrow bands dividing us fall away! Sacrifice alone is the heart’s true way! I expand myself to you, as you to me. May what isolates us go up in fire, cease to be. For life is life only as reciprocated, By love in love is it alone created.


To the kindred soul abandoned, The heart opens up in strength gladdened. Once the spirit atop free mountains has flown, It holds back nothing of its own. Living to see myself in you, and you to see yourself in me, In the enjoyment of celestial bliss shall we be. (to his fiancée, 13 April 1811. Letters p. 237) However, it is worth noting that, although Hegel had become friendly with the romantic circle in Jena when he lived there, his views were not theirs. (Ursula Vogel, 1987, has given a fascinating portrait of this group and especially of its revolt against gender stereotypes.) At the centre of the group was the remarkable Caroline Schlegel-Schelling but the leading propagandist was Friedrich Schlegel whose novel Lucinde (1797) created a public scandal. Hegel charges Schlegel with making marriage a superfluous ceremony if all that matters is love. Hegel argues that love is only a feeling while marriage is a substantive ethical tie (Phil. Right §164 and additions pp. 262–3). Marie seems to have expressed the typical romantic conception that where duty enters love is lost; but Hegel tried to impress on her that marriage as a ‘religious bond’ meant more than any earthly happiness. This sort of thing offended Marie, and he had to write a couple of letters trying to persuade her that he wasn’t running down their feelings in elevating the spiritual side of the matter. With the marriage at last on the agenda, Hegel wrote (13 July 1811) to his friend Caroline Paulus, the novelist (not to be confused with the other Caroline whom she and Hegel disliked), about his happiness, and Marie interjected comments in the margin. Where Hegel refers to Caroline’s husband Professor Paulus as ‘the lord and master’ (Letters p. 247) Marie appends the following fascinating comment: Despite the length at which my lord and master goes on in his epistle, and as humble as the little corner he assigns me may be, I nonetheless know that the good Caroline Paulus will not lose sight of me. I have already raised my little voice in the course of my master’s discourse. But each time I


respectfully silenced myself again, though I would gladly have confirmed many a thing at greater length. (p. 248) The irony expressed here captures beautifully the paradox that marriage meant to a woman of spirit. There was no doubt that it meant acceptance of subordination: the best that could be achieved was an ironic acceptance of the female condition, an internal transcendence—but in reality a capitulation to inequality of recognition.

III NATURE AND SPIRIT The figure of Antigone, and the question of gender generally, is bound up with, and has to be situated within, Hegel’s treatment of the arising of spirit from nature, from the life of feeling to that of self-conscious reason (ethics). Easton (1986) argues that the family is a fundamental mediating moment between unconscious nature and pure self-legislating reason. This certainly accords with Hegel’s first philosophy of spirit (1803/4) in which he described the evolution of spirit out of the natural bases of human existence along three fundamental dimensions: a) the family, b) labour (see part 1 of Arthur, 1988), c) language. The problem in Hegel’s understanding of the family as such a mediating moment is that it is precisely the woman who is assigned to represent one dimension, and the man the other, and, even in ethical relations (such as the family is understood to bear) there is repeated the master-servant structure. We saw that both the master-slave and family dynamics are given an original role in the growth of spirit out of nature. The master-slave struggle is a lower stage than the family because although it raises consciousness from natural desire to self-consciousness it is not yet ethical as it will be when translated into the family. (The master-slave dialectic is really about consciousness in general as against immersion in nature; it does not deal with social situations of ethical import.) But the conflation of the two in Hegel’s early work facilitates gender stereotyping even in the ethical realm. The two ‘crunch’ quotations from the main works considered are as follows: From the Phenomenology (280):


Nature, not the accident of circumstances or choice, assigns one sex to one law, the other to the other law; or conversely, the two ethical powers themselves give themselves an individual existence and actualise themselves in the two sexes. From the Philosophy of Right: 165. The difference in the physical characteristics of the two sexes has a rational basis and consequently acquires an intellectual and ethical significance. This significance is determined by the difference into which the ethical substantiality, as the concept, internally sunders itself in order that its vitality may become a concrete unity consequent upon the difference. Both of these passages exhibit the extraordinary ambiguity of Hegel’s dialectic. Is it a top-down or a bottom-up movement? First we have the mystical idealist notion of the concept sundering itself and seeking to actualise its elements. Secondly we have the naturally given concrete difference raising itself to social significance. Hegel seems to combine the worst kind of idealism with the worst kind of naturalism. He presents a conceptual argument for gendered social roles while at the same time attributing these to the two sexes in virtue of their supposed essential characteristics. For example, it is obvious that the distribution of the ‘two laws’ is not a contingent one. The structure of my argument has been as follows: a) Is Hegel’s sexism rooted in naturalistic assumptions about the female essence? b) It cannot be: because in his social theory he opposes strategies which base themselves on what is natural to man. In his theory natural determinations are superseded (aufgehoben) within the realm of freedom established in the modern state through spiritual self-determination. c) But in the mediations elevating the structure of reason over nature it turns out that the moment of transcendence is achieved mainly within the male sphere and the female represents mainly the moment of continuity with the natural ground of human life. This happens precisely in virtue of her


essential affinities with nature. Thus Hegel reproduces the nature/reason split within the social, in spite of his insistence that the social cannot be reduced to the natural. Hegel, in endorsing the conditions of women’s oppression according to ‘the necessity of the concept’ is of course only being true to his method of providing a rational reconstruction of the existing order; he accommodates within the state all the contradictions of the present state of things including those involved in the situation of women. Is this conservative prejudice to be corrected by a more faithful, and critical, application of the fundamental principles (Hodge)?—or must such a ‘Young Hegelian’ move be wanting (Marx)? Throughout this discussion of Hegel’s sexism I have accepted the terms of his gender stereotyping, in which the masculine is clearly closer to the human ideal than the feminine in virtue of the male’s greater scope for rational self-determination in the objective realm of spirit. However, to finish, let us recall that the entire tradition of Western philosophy may well be defective, not just in identifying the masculine with the human, but in identifying the human with the masculine (Lloyd, 1984; Plumwood, 1988). If this is the case Hegel’s account of transcendence may presuppose a distorted vision of the human and the natural.

REFERENCES This chapter, now revised, was first published in Radical Philosophy 50 (Autumn 1988) Arthur, C.J. (1988) ‘Hegel’s Theory of Value’ in M.Williams, ed., Value, Social Form and the State, Macmillan, Basingstoke. Cullen, Bernard, ‘Hegel’s Historical Phenomenology and Social Analysis’ in Lamb (1987). Easton, Susan M., ‘Hegel and Feminism’ in Lamb (1987) (an expansion of her paper in Radical Philosophy 38, 1984). Easton, Susan M., Review of Lloyd (1984) in Explorations in Knowledge Vol. III, No. 1, 1986. Grimshaw, Jean (1986) Feminist Philosophers, Wheatsheaf Books, Brighton. Hegel, G.W.F. (1892) History of Philosophy, trans. E.S.Haldane and F.H. Simpson, Routledge, London.


Hegel, G.W.F. (1984) Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christine Seiler, Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Hegel, G.W.F. (1975) Natural Law, trans. T.M.Knox, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. Hegel, G.W.F. (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V.Miller, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Hegel, G.W.F. (1970) Philosophy of Nature, trans. M.J.Petry, George Allen & Unwin, London, Vol. 3. Hegel, G.W.F. (1965) Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M.Knox, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Hegel, G.W.F. (1979) System of Ethical Life and First Philosophy of Spirit, trans. H.S.Harris and T.M.Knox, SUNY Press, Albany, NY. Hodge, Joanna, ‘Women and the Hegelian State’ in Kennedy and Mendus (1987). Kaufmann, Walter (1971) ‘Hegel on Tragedy’ in W.Steinkraus, ed., New Studies in the Philosophy of Hegel, New York. Kennedy, E. and Mendus, S., eds (1987) Women in Western Political Philosophy, Wheatsheaf Books, Brighton. Lamb, David, ed. (1987) Hegel and Modern Philosophy, Croom Helm, London. Lloyd, Genevieve (1984) The Man of Reason, Methuen, London. Lloyd, Genevieve (1985) ‘Masters, Slaves and Others’ in R.Edgley and R.Osborne, eds, Radical Philosophy Reader, Verso, London (previously in Radical Philosophy 34, 1983). Melchinger, Siegfried (1974) Sophocles, trans. D.A.Scrase, Ungar, New York. Plumwood, Val (1988) ‘Women, Humanity and Nature’ in Radical Philosophy 48. Rousseau, J.-J. (1973) Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, trans. G.D.H. Cole, Dent. Sophocles, Antigone (1947) trans. E.F.Watling, Penguin, Harmondsworth. Steiner, George (1984) Antigones, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Vogel, Ursula, ‘Humboldt and the Romantics: Neither Hausfrau nor Citoyenne’ in Kennedy and Mendus (1987).

3

MORALITY, MASCULINITY AND THE MARKET Ross Poole

Two conceptions of morality dominate contemporary discussion: utilitarianism, which specifies the content of morality in terms of the maximisation of total happiness or want satisfaction, and Kantianism, which defines morality in terms of formal principles of consistency. One purpose of this paper is to locate these conceptions in a larger discursive context; that provided by a conception of the market as the primary mechanism for the distribution of social goods. The claim that there are conceptual linkages between utilitarianism and a concept of the market is not, perhaps, very controversial. After all, there are well known historical associations between utilitarianism and both classical and neoclassical accounts of market behaviour. Despite these affinities, I will argue that it is not utilitarianism, but a form of Kantianism which supplies a morality adequate to the market, though a Kantianism which is informed by much the same conceptions of individuality and relations between individuals as utilitarianism and which retains most of the substantial moral content of utilitarianism. Indeed, from the perspective provided by the market, the common ground between utilitarianism and Kantianism appears much more significant than their differences. The concept of the market defines an important aspect of a ‘public’ sphere of social existence: as such, it is contrasted with a ‘private’ realm of domesticity and personal relations. This contrast plays an important role in the construction of gender. The public realm of the market, with its associated conceptions of individuality, purposive action and rationality, is a male domain; the ‘nether world’ (Hegel) of the family, with its associated principles of relationship, care, and emotion, is one in which female 46

MORALITY, MASCULINITY AND THE MARKET 47

identity is constructed and contained. These two realms exist in a relationship of mutual presupposition and exclusion; and the nature of each is determined by what it excludes.1 Thus, to the extent that utilitarian and Kantian moralities are conceptually linked to the public—and male—domain of market behaviour, they too are characterised by the exclusion of the personal and emotional—and female—from their domain. The various figures which are constructed in this paper—of utilitarianism and Kantianism, of the market, of masculinity, and so on—are discursive ones. What I wish to argue is that these figures exist within the same conceptual terrain, and that we will not understand any of them very well unless we locate them in relation to each other. Of course, the conceptual structures displayed are historically specific ones, and have real (extra-discursive) causes and effects. But it is not my intention to explore these. At most, I will occasionally assume that the various figures constructed play an important role, not just in moral philosophy and our ordinary moral consciousness, but also in defining for us certain aspects of our own identity and that of the social world we inhabit. But the extent to which this assumption is justified must be left to the judgement of the reader.

THE MARKET We may construct a concept of a simple market economy out of three elements: 1) The individual (whom I will assume, for reasons which will emerge shortly, to be male). This individual must be supposed to have a variety of wants which are largely self-directed (i.e. the conditions for their satisfaction do not make essential reference to the wants of other individuals). The objects required to satisfy these wants are ‘goods’. 2) The social division of labour. The various processes by which goods are produced are distributed amongst distinct individuals or groups of individuals. Since individual wants are various, individuals exist in a situation of interdependence, in the sense that any given individual is dependent for the satisfaction of his wants on the productive activity of others. 3) Private ownership. The goods produced, and presumably the


means of producing them, exist as private property. Hence they are not available directly to satisfy the wants of those who do not own them. This tension—between interdependence and private ownership—is resolved through exchange: individuals exchange goods which they own but do not want for goods they want but do not own. Thus, goods become commodities. We may also suppose that money exists as a medium of exchange, where money is a good which both measures the exchange value of other commodities and is exchangeable with them. In a market situation constructed in this way each individual will strive to further his interests, i.e. maximise the satisfaction of his wants. In order to do so he must participate in exchange relations. But in order to do this, he must possess, and presumably have produced, goods that other individuals want. Thus, selfinterest must become socially productive. Again, each individual will strive to further his interests by exchanging his own goods for as much as possible and by purchasing the goods of others for as little as possible. However, so long as coercion is not brought to bear, each must accept a price determined by market forces, that is, by the ratio of the supply of similar goods to the effective demand for them. Those who are fortunate or skilful will benefit, and those who are unfortunate or stupid will suffer. However, as fluctuations in supply and demand are reflected in the price of commodities, those individuals who are able to relocate their productive activity will use this information to move away from areas of over-production to those where demand exceeds supply. Hence, there will be a tendency towards an equilibrium of supply and demand. At this happy point, those wants which find expression in the market, that is, the wants of those engaged in socially productive activity, will be satisfied by the market. Further, since it is not possible for individuals to determine the selling price of their goods, the best way to maximise the satisfaction of their wants through market activity is to improve their productive efficiency. Thus, the market will tend towards maximising the quantity of goods produced by given amounts of human productive activity. These results may be called ‘invisible hand’ theorems (after Adam Smith) where the point of this phrase is to pick out the fact that under certain social conditions, results are achieved which


may be desirable but which are not brought about by actions which are designed to bring them about. Rather, they are achieved by indirection: individuals pursue their own essentially self-directed goals; but, as a consequence of their activity, the wants of many others are satisfied. There is, in other words, a hiatus between the intentional content of individual activity and its overall social significance.2 If the commodities exchanged include the capacity to perform productive work (‘labour power’), i.e. the scope of the commodity market is extended so as to include a labour market, then the concept of a simple market economy becomes that of a capitalist or ‘possessive’ market.3 While this transition affects the detail, it does not affect the substance of the invisible hand theories outlined above. The wages of labour will also be determined by market forces; some will benefit and some will suffer as a consequence; but so long as there is free movement in the market place, those involved will be able to move from one kind of production to another, and the tendency will be for labour to be employed in those areas where there is a demand. If the commodity labour power were produced in the same way as other commodities, then there would also be a tendency for there to be an equilibrium between the supply of labour and the demand for it. However, there are, as we shall see in a moment, good reasons not to make this assumption. Neither of the concepts of a market economy that I have outlined corresponds in any simple way to any past or present social reality. In every society there are positions, e.g. of status, which carry with them entitlement to social goods independently of the market; there are also goods, such as prestige, honour, attractiveness, which only roughly correlate with those goods distributed through market activity. Still there is no doubt that the market has been a pervasive feature of modern social life, and it has been the construction of a concept of a market which has seemed to many social theorists from the eighteenth century on to provide the key to the understanding of much that is characteristic of, and specific to, the advanced societies. There is, however, one dimension in which the concept of the market is not just incomplete with respect to, but also parasitic on, another aspect of social existence. The social relations constituted by the market presuppose a sphere of social life in which the individuals who participate in the market are themselves pro-


duced and reproduced. For a market society just as I have described it would not reproduce itself. To do so it would require that purely self-interested individuals enter into relationships with each other in order to produce, nurture and care for other selfinterested individuals just like themselves. To make sense of the apparent sacrifices of self-interest involved here we would at the very least have to assume the existence of goods of a quite different kind to those involved in ordinary market transactions. To comprehend the social processes necessary, we also need to suppose that there are human relationships—certainly those between parent and child, probably those between parents—which are conceptually distinct from the contractual and voluntary engagements for mutual benefit typical of the market.4 In other words the motivations and relationships required here are qualitatively quite different to those characteristic of market behaviour. So it is necessary to assume the existence of a sphere of social life other than that of the market and constituted by quite different kinds of relationships. This is the realm of personal life, and will consist principally of the family, though it may also contain other intimate relationships. The relationship between the two spheres is a complex one. Clearly, at least some individuals participate in both. It is plausible —and realistic—to assume that those who participate in market relationships are paradigmatically male heads of households (thus, the male personal pronoun is appropriate to refer to them) who represent their families in that sphere. Thus, the self who participates in the market does so both as an individual and also as a representative of the household unit. This male individual will also represent the wider public world of order, rationality and work (of which more in the following section) within the family. In which case, it will be the woman (mother, wife) who embodies in her existence the principles of family life and the practices of nurturance, love and support that it requires. Thus, the duality between public and private also infects the private sphere itself. Indeed, that this must be so is clear from the perspective of reproduction. For if the private and domestic realm is to reproduce not just the physical individuals but also the structure of individuality required by public life, then it must contain within itself an embodiment of that public individuality. In this way, the private realm supplies the principles of its own transcendence.


THE INDIVIDUAL It is now time to develop the structure of individuality required by the market. So far, the market individual has been minimally characterised: as male, and with a variety of largely self-directed wants. Now, for such an individual to participate satisfactorily in market relations, he must be capable of moving from one kind of productive activity to another. Thus, he must conceive of himself as having an identity which is quite distinct from any specific kind of production that he is involved in. He is not, for example, defined by his occupancy of a given social role, except the highly abstract one of worker, and, perhaps, that of husband/ father/ head of household which pertains to his private responsibilities. The relationship between an individual and any particular kind of productive activity is a contingent one. This contingency is even more marked in the possessive market model, where the individual is an owner of his capacity to work, and this particular item of property must be alienated regularly in market transactions.5 Thus, the market requires a conception of individuality which is abstracted from specific kinds of productive activity, though the capacity to perform productive work must be assumed to be part of the individual essence.6 In a similar way, the goals of individual activity take on an abstract and non-specific character. Each individual undertakes a given activity of production, not to achieve ends which are intrinsic to it (‘internal goods’, in MacIntyre’s phrase7), but as a means to an end which is equally achievable in other ways, and is thus external to any particular kind of activity. Indeed, the market itself is a complex mechanism which provides an indefinite variety of means for individuals to pursue essentially the same goal. It is a matter of some nicety to specify what that goal is. It must be conceived of as being sufficiently non-specific to be produced equally by a wide variety of activities and at the same time having sufficient substance to move individuals to action on its behalf. In certain narrowly defined contexts, it is possible to identify this goal simply as the acquisition of money—which is quantifiable, additive and universally desired. But this merely postpones the problem. In the last resort, it is its exchangeability with other commodities that makes money desirable, and we still need to know in general terms what it is that makes the possession and consumption of commodities desirable.


This problem was resolved by earlier utilitarians by positing pleasure or happiness as the ultimate object of all desire, and pain as the ultimate object of all aversion, where these were conceived as measurable psychological states distinct from the activities which produced them. The pleasure/pain continuum was, on this account, the analogue of the possession of money; and, indeed, according to Bentham, precisely correlated with it.8 Later utilitarians have sought to avoid the empirical implausibility of this account in various ways: perhaps by the thesis that each individual has, as a kind of meta-desire, the desire maximally to satisfy all his other desires, or by a formal characterisation of the nature of preference behaviour. The point of these manoeuvres is to provide an absolutely general way of specifying what it is to want something without being committed to the idea that there is one substantive thing (psychological state or whatever) which is always wanted. The precise solution to this problem is of no great importance here. Often I will adopt the jargon of speaking of individuals seeking to maximise their ‘utilities’, without pretending to have a precise account of what this means. The major point to bear in mind is that however we characterise the final goal of individual behaviour, it must take on a highly abstract and nonspecific character, and thus correspond to the equally abstract character of the goal-seeking individual. Mediating between these two abstractions are the various determinate activities which individuals undertake to achieve this goal: the production and exchange of commodities. In general terms, these are characterisable as ‘work’, where that word is used to specify activities which are conceived as having only instrumental value, i.e. where the only purpose in undertaking them is that they are necessary to achieve the required goal.9 This context determines a highly specific form of rationality which is identified with seeking and finding more efficient means of achieving given ends. On this account, the rational agent is the one who minimises the work required for the goals pursued. I have mentioned that the desires of these individuals are largely self-directed. The point of this condition is to preclude certain kinds of altruistic behaviour which, if pervasive in the market, would interfere with the operation of the invisible hand. Thus, if participants in market transactions were moved by the circumstances of those with whom they were bargaining, they would not enforce the competitive price; if employers were moved


by the plight of their unproductive employees, they would not introduce more efficient methods of production; if entrepreneurs were more sensitive to the feelings and aspirations of their debtors, they would not enforce bankruptcies; and so on.10 Of course, if actuality corresponds to concept, in the long run it is non-altruistic behaviour which produces the most beneficial result, but that run can be very long and the suffering of many specific individuals remains uncompensated as far as they are concerned. Widespread sensitivity to the plight of individual others would react to this, and the long-run tendencies remain unactualised. Hence, the proviso of pervasive self-interest. This proviso is not arbitrary, but meshes with the concept of individuality constructed so far. According to this concept, the identity both of the individual and of his goals is given independently of the activity he undertakes to achieve these goals. But it is not just the activity of production and exchange which must be conceived instrumentally; so too must the other individuals with whom the individual enters into relationship. These can only be conceptualised as a means to the already conceived end of utility maximisation. Thus, the self-directedness which is required for optimal market behaviour emerges as part of the very structure of purposive activity. Within these structures, it is impossible to conceive of activity which is genuinely other-directed, i.e. which takes the well-being of another as the goal of one’s activity. Of course, this only applies within the public sphere: the structure of personal life is quite different. Indeed, the male self who occurs in the market already, qua head of household, represents the women and children comprised by it. Family relations and those between friends and lovers presuppose different principles from those involved in the market; however, to the extent that they do, they will require different conceptions of individuality and of the relations between individuals. Thus, for example, the relationships that hold between market individuals are both impersonal and universalistic. That is to say, individuals occur in these relationships only through the medium of the property (including property in labour-power) they own; and the extent of possible relationships is limited only by the extent of the market. A morality which is appropriate to these relationships will be equally impersonal and universalistic: it will concern relationships between unknown others, and it will specify rights and duties which hold between owners of property and makers of contracts.


On the other hand, the relationships involved in family life are essentially particularistic: they involve a differential evaluation of those tied by bonds of kin; and the commitment and responsibilities which it engenders do not hold generally. The particularity here is not necessarily that of specifiable characteristics; it is picked out through the personal possessive pronoun; thus the commitments are to ‘my child’, ‘my wife’ or whoever. Paradoxically, the impersonal and universal sphere is also that of rampant egoism; the sphere of family life, thus egocentrically demarcated, is one in which egoism is—in principle—transcended. This does does not mean that the private and the personal has a better claim to moral centrality than the public and the impersonal. They are indeed both sides of the same coin, with the nature of each defined by what it excludes. The public sphere of production and exchange excludes the emotional, insofar as this is transformed by the operation of reason into ordered and calculable self-interest. The private sphere of domestic life excludes reason, except insofar as this is represented by the males who also figure in market relations; femininity is constructed in terms of emotion divorced from rationality. Since production and work are defined in terms of public activity, these are excluded from the private sphere, which becomes the sphere of consumption. Universality is excluded, so the domestic becomes a sphere of limitation. It is within this framework that masculinity and femininity come to be constructed as different, opposed, but essentially parasitic on each other. So too, morality will come to have a dual character: one appropriate to the public and male domain; another to the private and female sphere.11 The claims of these moralities are different, and may even be opposed; but they too are dependent upon each other. I will return to the relationship between the spheres of social existence and their attendant moralities later. For the moment, however, I will concentrate on the morality appropriate to the realm of public life.

MORALITIES AND SOCIETIES The concept of morality is not, except perhaps in the most schematic sense, a universal, but needs to be constructed for every form of social life. This is not just a matter of the content of


morality but also of its form. Thus, according to a certain (highly idealised) account of the ancient Greek polis, this form of political life defines a situation in which there is no systematic dissonance between the conditions necessary for the flourishing of the (adult, male, citizen) individual and the well-being of the community as a whole. Indeed, individual flourishing is in part definable by the contribution made to social well-being, because the identity of the individual is constituted as such by participation in the life necessary to sustain the polis. In this situation, an appropriate morality—indeed, if we are to believe Aristotle, the appropriate morality—is one concerned primarily with excellence of character. In a market society, on the other hand, the identity of the individual is given independently of any social relationship wider than the sphere of his private domain. Others with whom he comes in contact in the market exist either as means or as impediments to the furtherance of his own ends, not as fellow citizens united by joint participation in a common project. The interest of each individual is conceptually quite distinct from those of others and though the various invisible hand theorems locate a systematic relationship between the conditions for the satisfaction of one individual’s wants and the satisfaction of the wants of others, nevertheless there is a significant discontinuity between the motivational content of individual behaviour and its overall social significance. The link between individual self-interest and the interests of others is only maintained if certain limits are placed on the expression of self-interest. Thus, for example, the market requires the institution of private property, so that individuals may use or exchange goods which they have acquired in appropriate ways, e.g. by production or exchange. However, a purely self-interested individual will as soon steal as produce or exchange; indeed, will do so sooner if this is a more efficient way of maximising his utilities. Again, exchange relations presuppose a framework of contract, so that obligations incurred are honoured when the time is appropriate. However, self-interested individuals will break contracts just as soon as it is in their interests to do so. But unless individuals have some assurance that property will be respected and contracts kept, they will have no motivation to involve themselves in production and exchange. So without some constraints on the operation of self-interest, the market would soon collapse into brutal chaos.


The problem is in part resolved by the existence of a body of law which defines the institutions of property and contract and provides sanctions for infringements. However, this does not address what is at the crux of the matter. Law itself stands in need of justification, i.e. of an answer to the question ‘Why should one obey the law?’ Further, the stability of a legal system requires that there be a widespread belief in its legitimacy, i.e. the belief that what is proscribed by law ought to be proscribed. Thus, the existence and functioning of law presupposes that there is an extra-legal justification for it. It is the task of morality to provide such a justification. Nevertheless, though the role of morality requires that it be distinct from law, it will bear a close conceptual resemblance to it. Morality will, like law, be concerned to regulate relationships between individuals whose only bond is mutual self-interest; it will, like law, not be concerned primarily with motivation or character, as these are already defined by the market and thus must be taken as given; like law, the major concern of morality will be to specify the limits on individual behaviour necessary to make social life possible; and finally, morality and law will both confront the individual as something other, as a restraint on the exercise of his natural inclinations. Which is to say that morality, like law, will take the form of duty which is distinct from, and opposed to, the material world of self-interest. The content of morality—the range of duties which it specifies —is not difficult to describe, at least in general terms. Morality will consist of just those restrictions which are necessary for the market to operate: property, contract, and so on. Unsurprisingly perhaps, most modern moral philosophers have simply taken that content for granted, and turned their attention to what they conceived to be a more difficult and important task: of locating this content within a coherent and rationally based morality.12

UTILITARIANISM AND THE MARKET The most familiar and obvious morality for a market society is utilitarianism. After all, the glory of the market is the extent to which it claims to maximise production in just those directions in which human wants exist and to minimise the effort involved. If the satisfaction of wants can be equated with happiness, and


effort with pain, and the ratio of happiness to pain with utility, then utility seems to be just what the market provides, and utilitarianism just what it needs. There are many conceptual linkages between this account of the market and utilitarianism in its modern (i.e. post-Bentham) versions. First, there is the conception of happiness or utility as something distinct from the various activities which give rise to it. As we have seen, this concept of a final goal is implicit in the account of individual motivation presupposed by the market. It is equally involved in any systematic presentation of utilitarianism: various happinesses must be conceived as commensurable and even quantifiable items, and thus distinct from the range of qualitatively distinct activities which individuals participate in. Further, both utilitarianism and market theory display the same notion of rationality: ends are given, and all that reason can do is to minimise the costs involved in achieving those ends. And finally, the utilitarian calculus makes no essential reference to such contingencies and particularities as friendship and love. To be sure, these have their instrumental value or disvalue as sources of pleasure or pain, but then so too do other forms of consumption. And utilitarianism strictly enjoins us to count all subjects of happiness and pain as equal; and not to give any particular consideration to those near and dear to us. Utilitarianism as a morality is as impersonal as the market in its distribution of rewards and punishments. Nowadays, psychological hedonism is—correctly—assumed to be logically distinct from utilitarianism as a moral theory. However, if the self-interest characteristic of market behaviour is conceived to be the way in which pleasure-maximising behaviour is translated into the currency of commodities and exchange, then psychological hedonism is causally linked with the goal of ethical hedonism. Further, from the assumption that generalised utility is the source of moral obligations, and the thesis of pervasive selfinterest, it is an easy matter to deduce just those limitations on individual behaviour which are necessary for the market to survive. Thus, the union between utilitarian morality and market theory seems an appropriate and happy one. There is, however, a crucial problem. A utilitarian morality may specify just the limitations required by the market; however, for these to exist as duties or as obligations, they must have some purchase on the motives of those subject to them. If the general


happiness is the ground of obligation, it must provide or imply a reason for those subject to the obligation to act in the ways prescribed. I use the notion of a ‘reason’ here very broadly. It is intended to capture the idea that when one knows what one ought to do one has ipso facto some motivation (not necessarily a sufficient one) so to act. To inform an individual that he ought to do something is, in this broad sense, to provide him with a reason for so acting. Thus the account provided by utilitarianism of what is morally obligatory must be such as to explain, or to link with an explanation of, its purchase on the motives of those subject to it. Clearly, this generates problems for utilitarianism. The content of a utilitarian morality is the general happiness; but the psychological basis of market behaviour is concern for oneself. Is there a place there for this other concern which now seems necessary? There are two ways in which a place might be made. The first is to postulate, as part of the psychological equipment of those subject to utilitarian morality, a sentiment of generalised benevolence: the capacity to desire the happiness of others and to feel an aversion to their suffering.13 Given that such a sentiment exists, perhaps in a latent form, then the function of moral discourse will be to activate it. There are, however, a number of insuperable difficulties facing this move. Empirically, experiences of benevolence, fellow-feeling and the like are familiar enough, but these are of their nature directed towards particular and usually specifiable others. This is reflected in the account of the market constructed here, in that the operation of these sentiments is channelled into the private sphere where they may take as their objects those with whom individuals share their personal life. But the obligations necessary to regulate market behaviour concern unknown others, or those for whom one has no personal feeling. These obligations come into play in just those areas where benevolence is lacking. Further, the conceptualisation of the market from which the invisible hand theorems derive is one which precludes benevolence. This is not to say that it requires active animosity; on the contrary, it operates on the basis of a rational concern for one’s own well-being and a disinterest in the well-being of others. Indeed, as argued above, the structure of purposive behaviour which is implicit in the conceptualisation of the market only has a place for the interests of others insofar as these are rationally assessed as means to maximise the independently conceived utility of the individual.


The second way in which an attempt may be made to secure a motivational basis for a utilitarian morality is through the structure of rational self-interest. After all, it is in the interests of individuals that the structure of private property and contract on which the market depends is maintained in existence. For this to be the case, it is necessary that individuals by and large restrict the operation of self-interest in various ways (e.g. to respect the property of others and to keep contracts even where there is a good chance of profiting by not doing so). Thus the obligations derivable from the principle of generalised utility turn out to be in the rational self-interest of those subject to them, and the apparent conflict between duty and obligation turns out to be the conflict between long- and short-term interests.14 However, the concept of rationality derived from the market is not strong enough to sustain this position.15 On any given occasion when self-interest prompts a breach of obligation, a selfinterested individual will reason as follows: While I depend on this institution (property, contract) and its existence depends on people generally respecting it, it is highly unlikely that my not doing so will make a significant difference. It may be the case that if everyone reasons as I do, then the institution on which they and I depend will break down, and this will be a pity. But again, the fact that I reason this way is of negligible relevance to how other people reason. Hence, I will breach the obligation. But everyone will reason in this way: if so, then the institutions on which the market depends will collapse. One response to the free-rider’s reasoning16 is to propose a system of coercion which is so efficient, with sanctions which are so terrible, that it will never be rational to reason in this way because the probability and the extent of punishment will always outweigh the probability and extent of gain. However, this merely postpones the problem. The morality in question must also apply to those who must enforce the law and punish breaches of it. But it is easy enough to generate free-rider problems for them: cases where their own rational long-term selfinterest conflicts with the obligations they must respect if market society is to endure. And this problem cannot, on pain of regress, be solved in the same way.


I conclude, therefore, that despite—or even because of—its conceptual linkages with market theory, utilitarianism does not provide an adequate morality for a market society. Utilitarianism combines a theory of motivation and of rationality with the claim that generalised utility is the ground of obligation. The accounts of motivation and rationality are both derivable from a theory of market behaviour; and, given that theory, there is some reason to suppose that utility is maximised. However, if one adheres to the theory of motivation, the account of rationality is not strong enough to yield the motivational restrictions necessary to sustain market society.

KANTIANISM AND THE MARKET17 The nub of the free-rider’s reasoning is that he wants to make use of an institution and yet he also makes himself an exception to the principles embodied in that institution. That he reasons in this way is precisely what is required by the form of rationality— reason as instrumental—with which he is equipped. The role of reason in this sense is to seek out the most efficient means of attaining given ends. It places behaviour in a causal milieu, and works out the consequences of alternative courses of action. That action which maximises the ratio of happiness to pain for the agent must be selected. The free-rider estimates, correctly, that the consequences of any of his actions on the institutions on which he depends are near enough to nil; hence he can, and does, ignore them. But if everyone so reasons and so acts, and they will do so if they are equipped with the same notion of rationality, then the institutions on which they depend must collapse. This line of reasoning does, however, offend against some notion of rationality, even if it is not that so far discussed. To make oneself an exception to a principle to which one is otherwise committed involves a certain kind of inconsistency. In certain cases, there may be principled grounds on the basis of which an exception can be made. But this is not the case for the freerider. His only ground is that it is in his interests to make himself an exception to the principle, and it is incompatible with the adherence to any principle that it may be breached whenever selfinterest prompts a breach. Further, it is just the potential use of this ground for exemption from the principle which engenders a


multiplicity of exceptions, and leads to the collapse of the institution which embodies that principle. Let us assume then that a requirement of consistency can be imported into the operative concept of reason. This has some independent motivation: it is, after all, a principle of reason which is often employed in the realm of discourse and argument. In the present context, it supplements the concept of instrumental reason by providing a constraint on the way in which goals may be pursued; it provides that, if an agent makes use of an institution, e.g. that of property or contract, then, if all things are equal, he must not make himself an exception to the principle embodied in that institution. Nor does the ‘ceteris paribus’ clause provide an automatic exemption. The ground appealed to must be such as, when it is allowed to others, to be compatible with the continued existence of the institution. Further, it must be such that a self-interested agent be prepared to allow it to all other selfinterested agents. He cannot, in other words, make himself an exception just because he is himself. There is an important corollary to this line of reasoning. The place of other agents in the calculations of instrumental reason is purely as means (or impediments) to independently conceived ends. However, a principle of consistency applies as much to agents as to actions. If one’s self-conception is as a property owner, a maker of contracts, and, in general, as an individual free to participate in a wide range of productive activities, this selfcharacterisation must also form part of one’s conception of others. It is not just one’s principles of behaviour which must be available to others, but also those principles which constitute selfidentity. Thus, other individuals must figure in one’s reasoning and one’s behaviour, not just as means, but as agents (property owners, contract makers, radically free individuals) in their own right. Rationality as consistency conceives of the activity and even the identity of self-interested individuals in the market place as related, not just causally, but also conceptually via principles of which they are all instances. It commits the agent to acting on the basis of principle and thus to taking into account not just the effects of what he does, but the principles which his behaviour instatiates. This may also involve a calculation of effects, but not so much the actual effects of behaviour as the hypothetical effects of the adoption of a certain principle by all agents in relevantly


similar positions. If such effects are incompatible with the existence of the institution on which the agent depends, then the action is precluded. It is often argued against moralities which rest on an appeal to formal principles of universality and consistency that they lack determinate content. This complaint may be justified if the principles are conceived of as supplying the entire content of morality. However, in the way in which such a morality is presented here (and, perhaps, for the more plausible versions which have been argued for in the literature), it takes as its field a pre-existing conceptual content: the concept of property, contract and the dominance of self-interested motivation may be taken as given. The role of the formal principle is not to provide an alternative content to morality; but rather to restrict the operation of those principles of behaviour which already exist. Self-interest is not so much over-ridden, as constrained, and—what is more— constrained in just the ways necessary to preserve the market structures within which it operates and flourishes. The constraints imposed by this concept of rationality will be experienced as the demands of duty as opposed to the natural thrust of inclination. But on one condition: the principles of reason must be supposed to have a motivational presence in the individual. If this were not the case, reference to such principles could not constitute reasons for the individual to act in the required way, nor could they have any influence on those subject to them. Hence, the individual subject to this morality must be supposed to be equipped with a form of rationality other than that of purely instrumental reason.18 The relationship between a morality of this kind—which I will, without further argument, characterise as Kantian—and utilitarianism is a complex one. Clearly, they provide quite different and incompatible accounts of the basis of morality and the nature of moral obligation. Still, at another level there are similarities and complementarities. Adherence to the formal principles of a Kantian morality will preserve the market structure, allow for the operation of the invisible hand and thus maximise the utilities of those involved. Thus, these formal principles do serve a utilitarian goal, even though they are not justified by an appeal to that goal. Again, the motivations which Kantianism assumes to move individuals to action, apart from considerations of duty, are just those of maximising one’s own utility which form the motiva-


tional basis of utilitarianism. From the perspective of a market society, Kantianism plays the role of a necessary complement to utilitarianism, rather than something essentially opposed to it. Utilitarianism corresponds to the psychology and the morality which operates within the market; Kantianism is needed to define the structures within which the market operates. However, for these complementarities to exist, utilitarian considerations must be subordinated to Kantian ones.

HOME FROM MARKET The market presupposes a qualitatively separate sphere of social existence within which the individuals who participate in the market are themselves produced and reproduced. As I have mentioned, these two realms may be defined in terms of a number of converging contrasts: between public and private; between reason (now in an extended sense) and emotion; between work and consumption; between self-interest and altruism; between universality and particularity; and finally—constructed out of such contrasts— the distinction between male and female. These contrasts form the basis for two distinct conceptions of morality. Male individualiy, at least in its public representation, is constructed as an abstraction from particular activities. It is free in the sense that no particular kind of market activity is essential to it. That morality must take the form of duty is a necessary counterweight to such radically free individuality. The content of duty is provided by the reason of these individuals, a reason which requires that those abstract individuals subject to it recognise the equally abstract individuality of those with whom they have market transactions but not personal relations. This entails a requirement of equality, perhaps of justice. Even utilitarianism which, as is well known, has problems with the concept of justice, does recognise the basic moral equality of all those subject to pleasure and pain. Kantianism, here, as always, more insightful into the requirements of market society, demands equal and mutual recognition of radically free but rational individuals. Within the private sphere, matters are very different. If, on this conception of public life, male individuality involves the radical freedom not to be tied to specific roles, the complementary conception of female moral identity is constructed out of the


woman’s role in reproduction and in terms of the associated responsibilities of nurture and care. If male individuality seeks ends which essentially pertain to self (and, perhaps, to those represented by self), women must take the interests of others as sufficient basis for action. But not, of course, all others: only those within the same private sphere (husband, child). Even the structure of motivation is different. What moves men to action are emotions which have been transformed by the requirements of reason into channels of efficiency and consistency; feminine emotions, devoid of reason, are everywhere infected by excess and particularity. Hence, the lack of proper regard for what is due to impersonal and unknown others; the lack of a sense of justice, which has—notoriously—been supposed to be characteristic of women.19 This lack, if such it is, should not be confused with a lack of morality as such. Women figure in a different arena of moral discourse to the one in which the public conception of justice is constructed.20 The two arenas are not independent; indeed, each Requires the other. But the two conceptions of morality exist in a state of tension, making incompatible demands and relating in different ways to the motivations of those subject to them. Hence, their essential complementarity is only ensured where the private sphere is properly subordinated to the public conceptions of reason, order and justice, which are, in principle, embodied in the male head of household. There are a number of further ways in which the two moralities may be contrasted. For example, the morality of the market place manifests itself in the form of duty and, as such, imposes itself on the unmoral inclinations of those subject to it. Transgression of duty is an ever present and conceptually available possibility. The individual is aware that the path mapped out by self-interest passes through the boundary defined by morality. To cross that boundary may involve punishment or guilt, but that is all. The self of the transgressor remains intact. The corresponding conception of female identity is, on the other hand, defined much more tightly in terms of existing within certain relationships and performing certain associated activities. Withdrawal from these relationships or failure to carry out these activities is, of course, always possible, but such failures will take a different form, and have different consequences, from a transgression of public morality. Failure must involve, not just punishment and guilt, but a real threat to individual identity. To conceive of such failures in sys-


tematic terms is to envisage not a mere infringement of the moral law, but a loss of self. In this sense, the morality of the private realm is part of the identity of those subject to it in a way that the morality of the public world is not. The realm of the private also infects male identity. If qua market individual, male identity is that of abstract individual, it is also constituted in relation to the domestic world as head of household/husband/ father/ breadwinner, and failure to perform the tasks associated with these roles may well threaten male self-identity. This is not the place to explore these and other contrasts between public and private morality and the conceptions of male and female moral identity constructed out of these. For present purposes it is sufficient to note that each, by excluding the other, relies on an impoverished conception of human life and relationships; and that since each presupposes the other, neither can claim a self-sufficient moral status on its own. But how the tensions between them are to be resolved is another matter.

BEYOND MARKET MORALITY To return to the main theme: in general terms, what I have been concerned to show is that the two most influential modern accounts of morality occupy the same conceptual terrain as a certain account of market behaviour. To locate utilitarianism and Kantianism within this larger discursive context may do something to explain, if not the strength, at least the persistence of these two accounts of morality. If anything lies at the centre of modern thought about social life it is the concept of the competitive market constructed by the great tradition of political economy in the eighteenth century. But to locate utilitarianism and Kantianism in this context should also expose the limitations of these two moral traditions. Despite its theoretical and ideological significance, it is dubious whether this concept of a market has ever been an adequate model of the economies of advanced societies. It ignores or downplays the significance of class and power, of corporation and monopoly, and of the relationships between state and the economy. But more important than the question of its empirical adequacy is the need to develop a moral perspective on the basis of which the representations of human nature, human relations and human goals supplied by this model can be


evaluated. If the argument of this paper is correct, these representations also form part of the implicit content of Kantian and utilitarian moralities; which lack, therefore, the requisite independence to provide a critical perspective on them. I have already said something of a different limitation to utilitarian and Kantian moralities. To the extent that they provide moralities appropriate to the market, they presuppose a distinct sphere of social life in which the individuals who participate in the market are produced and reproduced. Insofar as they provide moralities appropriate to a certain conception of public life and the conception of male identity constructed in terms of it, they are inappropriate to the associated conception of private life and the conception of female identity constructed out of it. To do better than utilitarian and Kantian moralities it is necessary to discover or construct a morality which is informed by quite different conceptions of social existence. We must be able to envisage a form of life in which the competitive market is not the dominant mode of distribution and where there is no systematic hiatus between the intentional content of individual behaviour and its overall social significance. Further, we must be able to conceive of a society in which the divisions between two spheres of social life (public and private) and between two kinds of human existence (male and female) are overcome. And these are not small matters.21

NOTES This chapter was first published in Radical Philosophy 39 (Spring 1985) 1 Cp. Genevieve Lloyd, ‘Public Reason and Private Passion’, Politics 18, 1983, pp. 27–37, esp. p. 28: ‘what has happened has not been a simple exclusion of women, but a constitution of femininity through that exclusion…. Femininity has been constructed, through exclusion, as a necessary “complement” to maleness.’ See also Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason, London, Methuen, 1984, esp. Ch. 7. 2 See Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R.H.Campbell and A.S.Skinner, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1976, Vol. I, Book IV, Ch. ii, p. 436. The theorem about private interests and public benefits is stated particularly clearly in Book I, Ch. ii, pp. 26–7, without, however, the phrase ‘invisible hand’ being used. The modern versions of this theorem show that the equilibrium state of a competitive market is Pareto optimal. See, e.g., the account in


3

4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12

13

14

D.M.Winch, Analytical Welfare Economics, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1971, Ch. 3. The term ‘possessive’ is due to C.B.Macpherson. See the two models of market society provided in The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, London, Oxford University Press, 1962; reprinted 1972, pp. 56–61. See also Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 1944; reprinted Boston, Beacon Press, 1957, esp. Chs 4–5. On this theme, see Carole Pateman, ‘Women and Consent’, Political Theory 8, 1980, pp. 149–68. A point emphasised by Macpherson in his account of ‘possessive individualism’. See The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, p. 3 and passim. Cp. Marx: ‘Indifference towards specific labours corresponds to a form of society in which individuals can with ease transfer from one labour to another, and when the specific kind is a matter of chance for them, hence indifference.’ Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1973, Introduction, p. 104. See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, London, Duckworth, 1981, pp. 175–6. See Jeremy Bentham, Principles of the Civil Code, Ch. 6, a selection from which appears in C.B.Macpherson, ed., Property, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1978, pp. 46–9. Cp. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1958, on the distinction between labour and work. See the discussion in Christopher McMahon, ‘Morality and the Invisible Hand’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 10, 1981, pp. 247–77, esp. pp. 252–3, 262–3. Thus the well known ‘double standard’. For a recent discussion, see Frigga Haug, ‘Morals Also Have Two Genders’, New Left Review 143, Jan–Feb 1984, pp. 51–67. Cp. Nietzsche: ‘[Philosophers] wanted to furnish the rational ground of morality—and every philosopher hitherto has believed he has furnished this rational ground; morality itself, however, was taken as “given”.’ Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R.J.Hollingdale, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1976, Part Five, #186, p. 90. See, for example, J.J.C.Smart, ‘An Outline of a System of Utilitarian Ethics’, in J.C.C.Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1973: reprinted 1983, p. 7 . This seems also to have been Hume’s position in his later writings; see, for example, ‘An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals’, Section IX, in Hume’s Enquiries, ed. L.A.Selby-Bigge, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1966, pp. 268–84. Hume was at least tempted towards some such position as this in his earlier writings; see, e.g. A Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Part II, Section (ii), ed. L.A.Selby-Bigge, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1967, p. 492: ‘For whether the passion of self-interest be esteemed vicious or virtuous, ‘tis all a case; since itself alone restrains it.’ See also the discussion in Genevieve-Lloyd, ‘Public Reason and Private Passion’, pp. 29–30, and in The Man of Reason, pp. 54–6. However, he had certainly rejected this


15 16 17 18

19

20 21

view by the time of the Enquiry, see Section V, Part II, pp. 218–19; and also the discussion of the ‘free-rider’ (not using that term) in Section IX, Part II, pp. 282–3. The standard modern treatment of the free-rider is Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1963; reprinted 1977, esp. Ch. 2. This response was that of Hobbes, whose ‘fool’ is the seventeenthcentury ancestor of the free-rider; see Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott, Oxford, Blackwell, n.d., Part I, Ch. 15, pp. 94–6. In this section, I make use of some arguments presented in Ross Poole, ‘Reason, Self-Interest and “Commercial Society”: the Social Content of Kantian Morality’, Critical Philosophy 1, 1984, pp. 24–46. In Rawls’s ‘original position’ agents reason about the structure of society behind a ‘veil of ignorance’, i.e. they do not know what position they will occupy in society. This device provides a way in which the use of instrumental reason will yield much the same result as the application of a more universalistic concept of reason in an epistemologically less exiguous context. Still, this does not resolve the motivational problem, and Rawls must suppose that the rational individuals subject to the rules of justice are also equipped with a ‘sense of justice’. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1971, especially Chs I, II, VIII. A number of theorists of morality have remarked on the failure of women to achieve the moral standards of civilised society, e.g. Rousseau, Hegel, Freud. For discussion, see Carole Pateman, ‘“The Disorder of Women”: Women, Love and the Sense of Justice’, Ethics 91, 1980, pp. 20–34; Genevieve Lloyd, ‘Public Reason and Private Passion’, ‘Rousseau on Reason, Nature and Women’, Metaphilosophy 14, 1983, pp. 308–26, and The Man of Reason, esp. Ch. V. For a fascinating account of the differences in moral awareness between men and women, see Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1982. Thanks to Tony Skillen and Genevieve Lloyd for comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

4

FEMINISM AND THE LOGIC OF MORALITY A consideration of alternatives Susan F.Parsons As a feminist and a moral philosopher, I have for some time been interested in the understanding of morality which emerges from the great variety of feminist writing. It has, first of all, been intriguing that the shift from liberal to radical and socialist feminisms has been paralleled by developments within moral philosophy generally and this process reveals many of the same concerns and disillusionments with liberal morality in particular. Part of what I want to do here is to outline the reasoning which lies behind this move away from the prevailing tradition of thinking regarding morality, so that it is more clear to us exactly what difficulties the question of gender raises in the process. However, it seems to me that the alternative approaches also are not without their problems. The moral arguments of some feminists raise again the spectre of naturalism in which critical distance is sacrificed and the point of being particularly ‘moral’ seems to be lost. Likewise the arguments of others suggest such a thoroughgoing social determinism that the person who decides or is responsible for her behaviour and values is lost. Thus the other purpose of this piece is to try to understand the problems inherent within these non-liberal approaches to feminist morality. I think I am probably a ‘sceptical feminist’ but of a different variety to Janet Radcliffe Richards. My scepticism is not based on the belief that an unbiased examination of the ‘facts of life’ will yield the obvious solution to our problem, if we only would choose to view them rationally. Rather, mine is based on a concern that feminist issues are challenging moral philosophy in such radical ways that we need to tread with care over the ground in front of us. We should be more clear than I think we now are 69


about what new beliefs regarding morality will be required of us, and ought really, I think, to be questioning quite seriously whether and in what sense we are ready to adopt a much-altered view of what morality is, how it works within the individual’s own decision-making, and what moral imperatives might finally mean. It would be ironic indeed if the moral enthusiasm with which feminists have, throughout the years, pleaded their case were to result in such a total revamping of the moral enterprise that the possibility for future changes of this kind became more remote. I would finally like to argue, therefore, for an understanding of morality in which the elements of attachment and imagination are balanced, a view which I think is a more constructive way forward for moral philosophy, and which also illuminates feminist concerns more sensitively.

LIBERALISM In moral philosophy, liberalism is characterised by a particular approach to moral issues which has provided the rhetoric for political thinking about social and legal policies, and its influence in this regard is so widespread as to pass almost unnoticed in our society. Its history reveals its central concern with rational behaviour. Thus the belief that we can by the reasonable acceptance of principles control our actions to conform to what we know is good or right is the keystone of its construction of morality. What is required of the moral person is the choice, in a moment of freedom and detachment, of the principles for behaviour which one is prepared to live by, and a corresponding commitment to some ideal or value which is believed, felt or held to be important. Nothing necessarily limits this chosen commitment, and it is viewed as an entirely personal matter in which the mature individual engages in reflection upon those abstract directives which could form the basis for responsible choices. One’s principles then become general, universalisable statements which serve as the first premise in a practical syllogism and it is up to each moral agent to guide future decisions in accordance with these. Rational behaviour is understood to be the control of choices, that is, reaching practical conclusions by calculating the best means to one’s chosen end, or the best way of carrying out one’s general principles. Living with other agents within a liberal

FEMINISM AND THE LOGIC OF MORALITY 71

society should present no difficulties for the majority of evaluative decisions, since we are free to choose how we wish to live, but this freedom can become the rallying cry of liberation movements which seek to extend social and political tolerance of personal choice. Problems emerge when it becomes clear that there is no limit, on this account, to what can be chosen as a first principle, since the description of these is formal and empty of particular evaluative content.1 This argument would be incomplete, therefore, without some suggestion that there are bounds to the kinds of things which may be chosen and that these limits are a feature of the nature of rationality. From the writings of Kant to those of Rawls, Gewirth, or Nagel, the argument is that the structure of our moral thinking in itself furnishes the necessary criteria for values, which those who are rational recognise and conform to. Those who seek for the autonomous self-legislation which this view of morality supports, discover the implicit demand for consistency and noncontradiction, at the very least, in their moral reasoning or, more than this, may realise the basis for altruism inherent within our capacity for generalised, universal thinking.2 The hope here is to discover the basis for an absolute morality, which is universally applicable and relevant, and which can serve as the basis for a sense of justice beyond the particular interests or backgrounds of any group of individuals. This absolutism is predicated on the assumption that such universal standards will not be found as part of the world, that moral values are not part of the ordinary furniture of our social or physical environment, but rather are uniquely discovered as rational necessities which require our obedience. On this view, rationality is more than a method for solving problems but yields substantive moral principles which are self-justifying and authoritative. These cluster around the notion of the equal worth of persons. The judgement of equality is founded on the capacity for reasoning about what is good (Kant), or an innate sense of justice (Rawls), or the fact that persons are prospective agents with intentions to fulfil (Gewirth and Singer). In this way, a kind of common denominator is indicated to which social and practical problems can be referred for solution and the basis for a liberal society is laid. The liberal understanding of morality relies on the belief that each of us is capable of transcendent consciousness, that we can withdraw from the impulses of the body, the conditioning of our


social milieu, and the limits of the natural environment in order to reflect upon what is the case and what ought to be done. This faculty for self-knowledge and criticism is central to liberalism, the only question being whether the principles for behaviour upon which morality relies are chosen or discovered by the free rationality of the moral agent. Morality is understood to be a special human activity both because its objects are epistemologically unique and ontologically autonomous, and because its activity of practical reasoning epitomises the control which knowledge can have over behaviour. Liberal moralists are concerned to provide a description of moral reasoning which best represents these distinctive elements and thus retains the peculiar character of human consciousness in its relation to the world.3 In the early work of Simone de Beauvoir, the emphasis on this type of freedom of choice is applied to feminist concerns. Like the Sartrean ontology upon which it is built, de Beauvoir’s understanding of the life and consciousness of woman is divided between a concern for the material embodiment of her self, and for the nihilating capacity of her human consciousness. Insofar as the body is concerned, ‘the data of biology’ demonstrate that certain physical facts ‘cannot be denied—but in themselves they have no significance’.4 The human body may be ‘the instrument of our grasp upon the world’, by means of which we develop a peculiar perspective upon our environment, but it does not ‘establish for [woman] a fixed and inevitable destiny’.5 Thus, the ‘body is not enough to define her as a woman’,6 but furnishes only the material stuff of existence upon which the transcendent consciousness works. The activity of this nothingness, pour-soi, is to distinguish itself from being, en-soi, and it does so by refusing to abandon its unique identity as freedom and by constantly determining the meaning or value of whatever comes its way. The risk of choice which this constant freedom entails brings dizziness, but women can accept, in the same way as men, a resolve to avoid all forms of bad faith, mauvaise foi, in order to lead an authentic life. Woman is the victim of no mysterious fatality, the peculiarities that identify her as specifically a woman get their importance from the significance placed upon them. They can be surmounted, in the future, when they are regarded in new perspectives.7


To remain fully human demands the constant tension of being and nothingness in which the individual projects herself into being by means of her intentions and schemes for living, and it is in this process that values are created by human agency. The ‘enormous burden’ of such creative responsibility has, so far, only been bearable to men, but it is her belief that women will come one day ‘to regard the universe as [their] own…to justify the universe by changing it, by thinking about it, by revealing it’.8 It is thus consistent with the understanding of humanness which this type of existentialism represents that women are understood to have fundamentally the same requirements of rational moral behaviour as men. Janet Radcliffe Richards, in The Sceptical feminist, searches for the rational principles by which such feminist moral thinking could be guided. Like de Beauvoir, she argues that women have the same capacity for judgement and valuation as men, and that, to be consistent with this, women must discover independently of their biological nature what principles best encapsulate and protect the worth of persons. After a careful and detached scrutiny of ‘the proper place of nature’, Radcliffe Richards believes that reason alone can reveal the necessary precepts for use in solving the practical issues of women’s lives. She suggests: ‘The first of these principles is that the most important purpose of society is to improve the well-being of sentient things, which should all be as well off as possible.’9 With this rational guide, we are saved the problem of the utterly free choice which continually plagued Sartre’s attempt at moral philosophy, and find the missing link between the insistence upon personal decision and the recognition that we live with other persons in society.10 In addition to this statement of the end which moral judgements should be seeking to fulfil, there is also a principle regarding means, namely: ‘everyone’s wellbeing is to be considered equally; when social structures are planned no individual or group is to be given more consideration than any other’.11 Radcliffe Richards argues that these principles are ‘intuitively acceptable’ to rational persons and their consistent working out is the project of the critical feminist as she seeks for the distribution of equal rights in her society. Thus, the history of feminist thinking in the modern world reveals some very close links with this type of moral reasoning.


From the early days during the Enlightenment through to the development of utilitarian thinking in the nineteenth century, feminists have made use of this understanding of rational moral behaviour in order to plead the case for women’s rights. It has been a strong point of their arguments that the liberation of women is not merely consistent with liberal views of morality but that opposition to such extensions of justice is self-defeating in that it contradicts its own presumptions. Liberal feminists thus persevere in their application of universal principles and assume that biological facts can get no purchase here. The insistence upon the special character of moral values means a rejection of naturalism of any kind. If values are not part of ‘the fabric of the world’,12 if good is a non-natural property, then morality relies upon the human acts of willing, choosing, valuing, practically reasoning. And the logical extension of this, as feminists saw, was that descriptions of their physical or psychological natures could in no way entail evaluations of the meaning or importance of these facts. Valuing is personal and, accepting the abstract definition of what constitutes such personhood, feminists find no grounds for the exclusion of women from this special human activity, nor from its natural outcome in the revision of society.13 However, such a view of reason may prove to be itself the victim of the genderedness which it seeks to overcome by its transcendence; its very abstractions may be implicitly formulated in a gendered way. Instead of presenting an understanding of reason which is in fact available to both men and women, Western thinkers have predicated their descriptions of this human faculty on two assumptions: first, that nature is understood to be feminine and it is nature which reason transcends in order to function at all, and, second, that women are understood to be more bound by their embodiment while reason is capable of thinking itself beyond this prison: ‘Rationality has been conceived as transcendence of the feminine; and the “feminine” itself has been partly constituted by its occurrence within this structure.’14 The irony is, as Lloyd suggests, that ‘Gender, after all, is one of the things from which truly rational thought is supposed to prescind’,15 so the discovery of ‘the maleness of the Man of Reason’ will not come as a welcome insight to those who believe that reason is beyond such relativities and determinations. If woman is the being who is formed as one of the terms in the dualism, if she is ‘the Other’ which it is the project of free rationality to elude,


then participation in moral reasoning, understood in this way, becomes an implicit recognition of the superiority of the male, and particularly inappropriate for a feminist project. This genderedness of our concepts is embodied by liberal societies in the division of public from private areas of life. The presumption that human beings are rational, metaphysically free, prudential calculators of marginal utility—and all think alike in this regard in the public sphere of politics and understanding—is used as a contrast model for the qualities and activities in a private world from which the public sphere is bifurcated theoretically.16 The difficulty is not just that the moral principles appropriate to the public realm may not fit the needs and realities of the private,17 but, more than this, that they may no longer be workable at all, once the separation upon which they are founded has been exposed. Liberal feminism works so long as its devaluation of the private sphere is acceptable to women, so long as women view their problem as restriction or confinement which can be overcome by transcendence, by entering the public realm on the same terms as men. But when the private realm is itself asserted to have important insights into the nature of good and to provide a fund of moral values unavailable in the public, then the method of reasoning founded upon such contradictions breaks down. It is thus dishonest at that point to claim the irrelevance of gender in the formulation of these principles in the first place. Many current moral debates conducted in liberal terms, like those involving abortion or new fertilisation techniques or even our treatment of animals, suffer, I think, from exactly this kind of difficulty in applying rational principles. It becomes clear in the course of these arguments both that abstract principles, like equal worth or respect for agency, may not be full enough for all our moral needs and thus distort to some extent our understanding of the issues, but also that to use them at all relies upon an acceptance of a dualistic framework which may no longer be tenable. As liberal feminists try to make use of this approach to moral decision, they may find that the transcendence of reason around which it revolves turns out to be illusory. Is it really possible for us to discover a ‘decontextualised and ahistorical’ definition of justice which all “‘right-minded people” would accept’?18 The


claim that such abstractions are self-verifying may be merely disguised prejudice, for they only seem convincing within the sociohistorical context out of which they emerge. The moral and political recommendations of liberal feminists could, therefore, be viewed as culturally relative, not universally sound as they believe, and to be unaware of this determination of our moral ideas and values is to promote the illusion that the rational person can utter and believe timeless truths. The case becomes ‘enfeebled’ because it recognises no perspective from which its own can be challenged. The attempt at complete objectivity results in isolation and estrangement from the real lived conditions which feed the moral consciousness in the first place and it is an awareness and sensitivity to these which may provide us with the grounds for social and political change. Liberal thinking is thus characterised by a longing for objectivity, but it does not escape the suspicion that its construction of rational moral precepts is context-dependent. The intention of providing such a picture of rationality is to assure us of a kind of aloof perspective from which to comprehend and judge particular cases, so that values come to reside in the world and attach themselves to facts wherever we consider them appropriate. However, the adopting of moral onlooks may not really take place in such a neatly segregated way.19 Our acceptance of particular values may have a great deal to do with our sensitivity to certain facts which take on importance as we reflect on our situation, and our attempt to encapsulate these values into condensed generalisations may only disguise their attachment to the facts from which they emerged. The proponents of this model may be attempting to escape the inevitable vertigo of moral reasoning by promoting a ‘consoling myth’ of transcendence which is unsuitable and illusory. It is only an illusion that our paradigm of reason, deductive argument, has its rationality discernible from a standpoint not necessarily located within the practice itself…. The cure for the vertigo, then, is to give up the idea that philosophical thought, about the sorts of practice in question, should be undertaken at some external standpoint, outside our immersion in our familiar forms of life.20 Abandoning the myth may help us to avoid the simplistic moral


psychology which divides desires or commitments from beliefs and struggles to reattach them in some way.21 And it may also encourage us to appreciate the presence of moral realities within our world, in and amongst the ordinary facts we perceive.

NATURALISM An alternative style of thinking about morality is available in naturalism and, while in many ways its proponents’ values overlap with those of liberalism, nevertheless its view of decision-making is distinctive and it presents another interpretation of rationality. The structure of naturalistic morality is built up around human nature; some description of this nature forms the central core from which the motives for moral behaviour spring and to which moral actions are directed. Under the influence of Aristotelian thinking, naturalism views the moral project as teleological, its raison d’être being to bring to fulfilment those features of our humanness which are present as potentialities within us and which constitute our uniqueness as human.22 To act rationally is to train oneself in the choices which will allow the realisation of one’s nature. Thus rationality is not transcendent in the same way as in the previous model, for human nature is not considered something confining or restricting which must be overcome in order to discover what is good. Rather, rationality works within the boundaries set by what we are. In general, because this nature of ours is multi-faceted and multi-layered, there is plenty of space within it for self-transcendence to occur, in moments of thoughtfulness or self-reflection. Butler considered this to be the primary function of the conscience, knowledge shared with oneself about one’s attitudes or behaviour, and it requires no metaphysical detachment in order to function as a critical yet sympathetic judge of our selves.23 What is needed, therefore, is some understanding of our nature, since this furnishes the entire context of moral thinking, and as we develop and deepen this knowledge of ourselves, so our moral reasoning becomes more relevant and fortunate. Naturalism thus warrants the grasping of moral issues ‘from the inside out’.24 Moral decisions are related ultimately, not to the first premise of a syllogism which sets out some universal imperative or principle of action, but rather to some characterisa-


tion of our selves, our problems, our possibilities. This characterisation is both evaluative and descriptive; it is formulated both as a set of beliefs about our basic human needs, interests, and distinctive properties, and as an implicit appraisal of the relative importance and desirability of these features. Some hierarchical ordering of these makes the act of choosing what to do more clear, for decisions become a matter of discerning, considering, discriminating within the context of these priorities what is to be done in given circumstances. The understanding of human nature provides a more or less elaborate and detailed specification of the kinds of things which are held to be true of oneself and which one ought also to make true by one’s choices. Thus, morality is as much a matter of being a certain kind of person as it is of doing certain kinds of things. It requires the development of those qualities of character by which moral discernment also improves, and reciprocally, the ability to distinguish the important features of a situation is what the attainment of a virtue consists in. In moral upbringing what one learns is not to behave in conformity with rules of conduct but to see situations in a special light, as constituting reasons for acting; this perceptual capacity, once acquired, can be exercised in complex novel circumstances, not necessarily capable of being foreseen or legislated for by a codifier of the conduct required by virtue, however wise or thoughtful he (sic) might be.25 The circularity of this process is unavoidable since naturalism claims no standpoint outside our natures from which we could view the progress of morality or make any sense of its activities. It represents therefore an alternative moral epistemology. Feminists have also used this model in order to express the special nature of women’s lives. Radical feminists, in particular, have asserted the uniqueness of woman, the positive qualities of her character, the important insights which she brings to moral considerations. Rather than appealing to some abstract understanding of what constitutes personhood, radical feminists assert the necessary link between biology and personal identity, so that, in particular, men and women are understood to be two different kinds of person. The biological makeup of each is claimed to be more than a mere factual description of external properties, since any such description is, at the same time, an assessment of rele-


vant features which have moral import. What has been mistaken in the past, according to this view, is not what the liberal feminists argue—namely that woman’s value has been tied to her embodiment, a tie which rational thought and judgement can finally detach—but rather that the understanding of the meaning or value of that embodiment has been wrong. And this reassessment can only take place from within gender, not from outside, from within the onlook regarding one’s embodiment, not from without. The inappropriateness of the evaluative descriptions of women’s nature from our tradition is increasingly felt by women who now, on the basis of their own lived experience, call for other features of their natures to be given credit, to be considered ‘salient’, to be rendered meaningful within a new onlook. It is the point of radical feminist writings to offer this new vision of woman and, through their utopian fictions, to provide some happier prospect for the renewal of society in which women’s morality predominates. In the work of Carol Gilligan on the moral development of women, a subject which had always remained hidden within studies of the purported moral development of human beings, she illustrates the pervasive maleness of the model of moral maturity which has so far been used in work of this kind. Men have described morality in terms familiar to them and have thereby considered boys, in their development, and men, in their later life, as the ones who develop most fully, while girls never reach the final crowning stages and are thus classified as ‘morally immature’. Freud already had proclaimed this in his observation that women refuse ‘blind impartiality’ in decisions and thus have an inadequate sense of ‘justice’,26 an observation which Gilligan’s discussions with women confirm. The result has been a lived contradiction, expressed by Virginia Woolf as ‘a mind which was slightly pulled from the straight and made to alter its clear vision in deference to external authority’.27 Women experience this in self-doubts, and in a divided conscience, when their ‘public assessment and private assessment…are fundamentally at odds’,28 and the resulting confusion constitutes the major hurdle in women’s moral development. What emerges from Gilligan’s study is that women consider moral issues in quite a different way to men, that indeed the liberal model of morality, which is so widely assumed to belong to humanity in general, is alien to women, fitting uncomfortably to their lives and misrepresenting their ideas


and interests. Thus, ‘a morality of rights and noninterference may appear frightening to women in its potential justification of indifference and unconcern’.29 Women seem much more concerned, in their definition of what constitutes morality, with relationships, interdependence, intimacy. To question the belief that this latter is a deformed or immature morality is to begin to undermine some fundamental assumptions about what the logic of morality is. Gilligan herself begins to interpret this in terms of rejecting ‘the Greek ideal of knowledge as a correspondence between mind and form’, in favour of ‘the Biblical conception of knowing as a process of human relationship’.30 Her challenge is that the essence of morality may, in fact, be its perspective-bound, relational quality. This point is pressed home most vehemently in the writings of Mary Daly, and her work reveals the extreme implications of taking such an ‘inside’ view of morality. The critical part of her analysis is a methodical investigation of man’s creation of woman, a vivid and gruesome study of the way in which man makes woman into ‘the Other’. Man’s understanding of woman as less human, as imperfect or deficient in relation to himself, as incapable of transcending nature, as an object or possession requiring his moulding and direction, reveals the fundamental link between his moral ideas and his own embodiment. He is revealed as the one who seeks domination, who attempts to control nature, who makes and produces things, who creates culture and its images, and he does these things as the natural expression of his physiological makeup. His morality is bound up with his interpretation of his own biology, and is thus labelled ‘phallic morality’ and its social outcome, ‘patriarchy’. Daly’s critique is intended to be sweeping and general, for she wants to expose the entire worldview which has been built up around male nature as it expresses itself in every place and time. As her positive suggestion, she urges the expression of woman’s own embodiment, by means of reclaiming the language of misogyny. All words are to be rewritten with feminist meanings foremost and, by means of this simple trick, the domination by the alien body-mind of man will be broken.31 These new insights come, not from some external perspective, but from looking hard at the words which women have, up until now, been willing to utilise for their own self-understanding, until the penny drops and they see their own oppression. Likewise, this freedom is gained by


a reinterpretation of actions, which once again does not rely upon women abandoning what comes naturally to them. Those activities which have been kept in their place within patriarchal societies, which have been mistrusted and labelled ‘sin’—most importantly women’s spirituality and communion with nature—these are to be freed from determination by male priorities and fears, and allowed full freedom of expression and realisation as woman’s superiority. Woman’s own self-image is restored to her by means of finding within her place and her own nature those qualities by which she can experience the joy of living and the world, hopefully, can be freed from its devastation by man. She then can see the various features of her life which have been distorted and misjudged, and, viewing them in a new light, come to evaluate herself positively. Daly’s feminist recreation of woman is naturalistic reasoning about moral values; the meaning of the moral imperatives in her scheme is to be discovered within her reinterpretation of the meaning of gender. Her portrayal of the situation as a struggle between female and male, life and death is separatist, dualistic, and uncompromising, for there is no possibility of one seeing the other point of view by leaving their own nature behind.32 What is called for here is the reconsideration of our view of gender ‘from the inside out’, and it reveals just how deeply these issues may cut into our moral epistemology. To reconsider moral concerns in this area is to look more closely at what exists within the terms of our available moral vocabulary until we recognise something new and discern a different reality. The issue which radical feminism finds at the heart of morality is the need for such renewed vision. However, it is the logic of this moral vision which constitutes the central problem facing a naturalistic account. This is the root of the challenge, by liberal thinkers, that such moral reasoning is guilty of committing the naturalistic fallacy.33 Women who identify goodness with whatever a woman does, and assume evil to be by definition what is of male origin or intention, are committing this fallacy and the problem with engaging in his fallacious reasoning is that moral language becomes either contradictory or redundant. Since, according to the liberal model, it is by means of our rational distance from embodiment that we are capable of evaluation at all, ‘naturalistic’ feminists seem to depend upon an objective principle of judgement which their description of good, as ‘equivalent to what is female’, cannot accommodate. If good is


defined as a natural property, then the use of the word ‘good’ becomes unnecessary; if it has some special meaning, then it is contradictory to define it in purely naturalistic terms. Naturalism therefore seems self-defeating. Morality which prides itself upon being intrinsically partisan leaves no room for getting outside by means of increasing generalities or abstractions. The notion of a transcendent rationality has been one way of avoiding the narrowness, and ultimate circularity, of this concern by indicating to us the rational necessity for discovering independent criteria by which to assess particular actions or policies, criteria which can be applied to any circumstance at any time. Naturalism runs the risk of being so deterministic in its description of the basis for moral evaluation that the force of ‘ought’ is lost in its moral prescriptions. Many radical feminist arguments seem to reiterate what has previously been said of women in a new guise, namely that ‘biology determines destiny’. The response of radical feminists to the history of male determination of biology is to urge a reversal of values, but within the same overall confines of physical determination. The landscape is still dominated by sexual differences; biology is both the problem and the solution.34 What is in danger of being lost from such an account is the fact that how biological realities shape our thinking and acting is partly, at least, up to us. This argument does not demonstrate well enough how our interpretations of biology interact with physical realities in the first place. Is the force of one point of view overcome by the force of another? Does the change from one view to another occur without language and thought? If the vocabulary of our oppression is utterly alien to the new one of liberation, then how do we recognise its presence or appreciate its importance to life? If the process of this reevaluation of biological facts does not occur on the basis of some detached criterion, which radical feminists seem intent upon debunking, then how it does take place needs more careful examination. Otherwise we are left with the need for some conversion to a new point of view, a conversion shaped by realities more powerful than our consciousness of them. While naturalism makes it easier to understand the attachment of an onlook to its natural grounding and context, which is essential to its construction of morality, it makes more difficult the prospect of coming to find a common ground by means of each individual leaving behind the particular aspects of her perspective.


If rational considerations are bounded in the way that naturalism suggests, then this affects relations between women and men very deeply. The notion of two separate moralities can result in a distortion of our full understanding of what morality is. There are instances of imperatives for men’s lives which require of them also a concern for relationships, for sacrifice of their personal interests to benefit the group and these suggest that morality is one, though it may be bisexual.35 There are increasing numbers of men who believe themselves to be genuinely in sympathy with the values and qualities of life which radical feminists admire. Thus, they also decry the elimination from public life of the values traditionally consigned to the private realm, and it seems particularly inappropriate to call their concern self-centred, or deviously power-seeking, merely because they are biological males.36 Male writers have been just as damning of phallic morality, seeing in it all the fears and insecurities which plague the psyche of man and encourage his pretentious destruction of nature.37 How are we to understand these moral arguments if the gulf between men and women is so wide? Surely we do find ourselves in sympathy with some of what is said; we can at least make sense of it and appreciate its impulses. Naturalism makes plain to us the discreteness and particularity of vision which is characteristic of both moral and aesthetic values, but it also requires some description of the hinges which remain for the door between two points of view to be opened successfully. The emphasis in naturalism on the particularity of moral onlooks can mask the presupposition which nevertheless seems to be essential to morality of any kind—namely, that its impulse is towards the general and inclusive. Without such transcendent appeal, moral language may become superfluous and the claim of feminists no more or less important than those of anyone else looking after their own interests. Naturalism furnishes this by means of a conception of shared human nature, thus confining the spaces in which moral thinking takes place. Its description of this, however, can become just as decontextualised and ahistorical as the liberal emphasis on universal rationality. Unless we recognise our participation in the creation of this context, we will be left with a preconditioning of life too heavy to be shifted by creative thought. Particularities of embodiment may shape our evaluations, but these are, in the end, what we make of them. How such generalisations regarding the essence of human nature


actually work in our moral reasoning becomes an important matter, therefore, and one which we should handle with care.

SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM Yet another way of understanding morality is available from those who would claim that moral ideas and values are a construct of various social conditions, including both material and ideological elements. Rather than emphasising the autonomous person who freely decides how to act as in the liberal approach, and rather than assuming that human nature by itself can form a sufficient background for choices, this approach presumes the priority, both historically and epistemologically, of the social over the individual. The distinctive features of this approach are, firstly, the moral significance which is given to roles and relationships within a certain social order, and, secondly, an observation that our language and therefore our thought are confined to the parameters of the socially defined. The first aspect is expressed by the claim that the general moral principles and particular practical guidelines which we use for decision-making are the products of the needs and interests of the social group. They are already established as possibilities when we reflect upon a given situation or problem. We learn our behaviour and our self-identity in the first place as members of a group and in the process of this practical education, a way of life in which we also share is imposing itself upon us. Once again, Aristotle is the seminal figure here in demonstrating the link between value and social function, and, according to this case, in suggesting that practical decisions can be related non-syllogistically to statements of one’s role, rather than to general principles or universal imperatives.38 Our understanding of ourselves as moral beings is fundamentally shaped by networks of relationship and institutional customs, and we are therefore acting out these pre-existing patterns in our personal choices.39 Values are thus part of the fabric of society into which we are woven; they embody social concerns and they confirm the social ordering necessary for a way of life to continue. Without such foundation, they lose their attachment to the very realities to which they are intended to bring meaning.40 The second aspect of this approach is expressed in the Wittgensteinian notion of language games, which suggests the limits of


our rational transcendence and the concurrent determination of consciousness and behaviour. We are always thinking within one strand of language or another, and there is no place altogether outside these which can provide us with a pivotal point. Thus, once again, the supposed objectivity of liberal principles collapses into particular context-dependent concerns of particular groups or individuals.41 Morality cannot therefore be a matter of leaving or transcending some world in order to discover what one ought to do, nor does it require us to return to impose this advice upon ourselves. Rather it is a matter of learning how to play the game and discovering within the rules what one is expected to do in order to qualify as a player. How we see ourselves and how we learn to act within various social contexts are parts of the same process, and their interdependence makes the link between thought and behaviour real.42 What is creative about our moral reasoning must then be the construction of new variations which are possible within these bounds, and they are tested by whether or not they work successfully in these terms. There are feminist writings which rely upon this social constructionist model of morality, and its distinctiveness becomes more clear when we consider the way in which gender issues cut across its field. These feminists have tried to demonstrate the determination of women’s lives by the various role models and opportunities for expression which society makes available, and have shown how women’s consciousness and morality is an internalisation of such outward social necessities. When young, women are taught their self-identity in terms of certain expectations and possibilities, and learn to relate moral decisions about behaviour to these directly, from statement of role to evaluative conclusion. Thus, de Beauvoir is again used, this time for her belief that women are made, not born; it is the intention of this view to disclaim ‘biological essentialism’ of any kind which would materially and physically determine what woman is. Social roles and relationships not only define women’s lives and become deeply carved into their self-understanding, but they are learned as behaviour patterns which have moral importance and which express, in a social way, what women understand themselves to be personally. It is the task of the critical feminist to become aware of these determinations by using available language and thought, and by means of this description of the nature of women’s lives, to test the fit between any particular set of social


institutions and some notion of what would be more fulfilling for women. There is no attempt here to discover universal principles which apply to all persons regardless of gender, nor to find some ahistorical understanding of women’s nature that can be used as a permanent foundation for revision. Rather, these feminists believe that within present realities lie the seeds of change, which the women who understand the morality of the present order can nourish, by their critical insights, into a healthier new society grown out of the past. Juliet Mitchell is a good example of this type of feminist thinking, particularly in her early book, Women’s Estate. It is important for women to be precisely aware of the economic functions which their lives are meant to perform, to see how the four social structures of Production, Reproduction, Sexuality, and Socialisation oppress their lives and build upon their supposed biological weaknesses and proclivities. The second step is to understand the ideological covering of these functions, since it is this which women take into their consciousness and are thereby produced as women. Ideology provides the sense of historical continuity and gives the illusion of a permanent, autonomous source of value. In each of these areas, women are exploited by cultural necessities and made to believe that these functions are essential to their nature. To understand this is to become critically aware of the imperfections, or contradictions, of the present social order, and it is in the gap between these and her own self-awareness that woman’s new understanding is to make its impact.43 Thus we begin with the factual questions: ‘What is the situation of the different structures today? What is the concrete situation of the women in each of the positions in which they are inserted?’ and we discover there the sources of change. A revolutionary movement must base its analysis on the uneven development of each structure, and attack the weakest link in the combination. This may then become the point of departure for a general transformation.44 Mitchell understands this change as the breakup of ‘an oppressive monolithic fusion’,45 after which each of these functions can begin to discover a new identity and express themselves as ‘lifegiving’, rather than as institutionalised death. It is her hope that a new social order can be devised out of the antipathies and alien-


ation of the old, which will more adequately express the ‘biosocial universal’ of human existence, and it is this which furnishes the basis for the moral consciousness to pry open the oppression of any given order. Rosalind Coward, on the other hand, rejects the ‘base/ superstructure’ model of Mitchell’s analysis, in which revolutionary morality can get a grip, and offers instead a description of the tightly knit relation of consciousness to culture. Like radical feminists, she claims that women’s consciousness is produced and structured by an ideology which expresses the biological and psychological needs of men. The interest of men in promoting their particular perception of sexuality and in developing a culture which expresses this phallic superiority, has so far dominated human history. This universality of cultural production demonstrates the way in which biological realities are mediated via social constructions and discourses. Therefore, unlike radical feminists, she claims that there is no way to get back through all of this to a pure or unstructured conception of what the reality underlying it all might be. As a result, she is more pessimistic about changes within the terms so far established. Her book is an attempt to demonstrate, that various accounts of the family or the history of the family rely on a notion of the sexual drive as a given, which has as its aim sexual reproduction. Concomitantly, men and women are theorised as having radically different aims and pleasures; sexual relations and sexuality are seen as the same thing, both deriving from absolute sexual difference in the service of reproduction.46 This determination of our categories of thought is so profound that Coward believes all of the discourses so far used to understand ourselves have relied, with the exception of psychoanalysis, ‘on a notion of sexuality identity (and therefore sexual regulation) as pre-given’.47 It thus becomes ‘virtually impossible’ for us to break out of this circle and understand ourselves in any other way. Discourse analysis, however, does provide for Coward a critical basis, for it helps us to find what is invisible or hidden within what exists. In the fullness of the discourse, there are oversights, lacunae,


the ‘blanks on the crowded text’. To see these blanks, something more than close attention is needed. What is required is a new gaze, an informed gaze, itself not the product of any one individual, but made possible by changes on (sic) the exercise of vision, changes in social and political conditions.48 The unique challenge of feminism is to ask unasked questions and, in so doing, to make the gaps in present structures more obvious. In this task of deconstructing what is given, new possibilities can emerge, but these are understood, not as somehow more adequate to an underlying humanness which might lie outside our discourse, but rather as more adequate to the particular discourse of feminism itself. Having untied the link between our language and some foundational reality, there is left only our language, in one form or another, and its relative values and moral expressions. Freudian analysis at least provides a critique of sexual constructions from the standpoint of an ‘initial bisexuality’, but Coward herself goes further into eradicating ‘the individual’, who is supposed to go through such sexual developments, from discourse altogether. The result of her version of social constructionism is that the idea of a coherent subject who is either the outcome or the origin of social roles is seen as ‘a fantasy’. Thus, ‘not only is identity a construct, but it is also continuously and precariously reconstructed’.49 In the end, male and female are constructions of social identities relying upon this notion of a centred self which has instincts, dispositions, anatomical characteristics, and behavioural patterns, and it is only in finally coming to terms with, and rejecting, this that feminism can carry through its radical argument for getting beyond dualism. This view of morality understands values, therefore, to be fundamentally expressive both of social requirements in themselves and of the human exigencies around which the society is formed. Values are created out of material conditions; they constitute the meaning that has been constructed out of the lives and circumstances of the participants in society.50 Their authority is thus understood by those within the system, as it were, and cannot be grasped independently of this. What becomes more problematic here is to explain, without reference to a transcendent rationality, how a society could ever imperfectly express its required values, or vice versa, how any values could ever be used as critical of the


society from which they emerged in the first place. Without reducing itself to a blind tautological statement that what a society values is what it values, this view must both maintain that values are intelligible within a way of life, and that social and historical changes occur on account of the imperfect fit of values to the realities which they supposedly serve. The dialectical method of resolving this problem suggests that, due to the historical (i.e. nonstatic) character of human social life, it is always conceivable for the individual or group awareness to stretch beyond its horizons into future possibilities. However, either these must rely on some unrealised potential which exists now within the order of things, and that requires some ‘base’ which the ‘superstructure’ imperfectly mirrors, that is, a non-linguistic reality against which the language of values can be measured. Or this method needs some view of the outer reaches of imagination or thought which would have to be, to some extent, free of being fixed by social realities, and indeed be capable of judging or criticising them; and this thought might then be considered ‘unreal’ and lose its character of immanence because we could not get a handle on its meanings. Part of the case which is made here is the same as the one the liberals hoped to make, namely that biology and value are not necessarily linked in any authoritative way. Women who realise this can thus be freed to reconsider the meaning of their biological existence in ways that may be felt as more authentic, and this view seems to suggest that it is possible for us to do this. Indeed, it is the responsibility of the reflective woman to do so. On the other hand, its description of the social character of language and values makes it plain that whatever those links have been thought to be, however the ties between biology and value have been knitted, has served and continues to serve as an expression of some underlying need or reality. While we would like therefore to fly as birds into imaginative new principles of judgement, we discover our feet of clay which fix us in an even more rigidly determined reality. In turning to Freud, both Mitchell and Coward find evidence for this universalism of patriarchy. While the former believes that Freud is describing women in a particular society— namely under the conditions of advanced capitalism—which might ultimately be overthrown so that their ‘true’ natures could be realised, the latter considers such optimism to be naive, since the base in human nature upon which the revolution could be constructed is believed to be deterministic.51 The freedom which


is supposed to be produced by this realisation of our social determination seems therefore to be elusive. We are still not the makers of ideology, no matter how unattached it may be from natural realities, and thus the totality of women’s oppression seems more unassailable than ever.52 One wonders why we are thinking about it. Ultimately, social constructionism can become too concerned to debunk our notion of what is ‘real’ by claiming that our handle on reality is linguistically shaped. Thus, ‘the categories through which we appropriate “the real” in thought are discursively constructed rather than given by the real’. At one level, this insight is ‘tautological to the point of banality’, since it only serves to indicate that ‘our knowledge of the real cannot exist outside discourse’. Admitting that this is the case, however, does not require us to sever the bonds of knowledge and reality altogether, so that all becomes discourse or varieties of language use.53 We can avoid the dogmatism of distinctive viewpoints, and the determination of moral values by non-moral realities, not by doing away with these distinctions altogether, but by making wiser and more careful use of them. Indeed Barrett, quoting Timpanaro, calls this a kind of ‘extraordinary arrogance’ which conjures away external reality by claiming the only valid object of study to be our knowledge of objects of study.54 Giving us the perspective of the divine but without any of its power seems of little point. To focus so exclusively on how our thought understands itself is to lose the initial attachment to natural human activities which language must have in order to be learned, and to overlook the discernment of ‘salient’ features of reality which it is the concern of morality to represent in some overall pattern of meaning. What is challenged by these issues is the nature of the moral agent. While the initial enthusiasm for this approach was surely fired by personal experience and concern, it ends by threatening the existence of a person at all who might have lived this or could alter it. On the one hand, this is a way of describing our complicity in the structures that shape our lives such that no individual guilt is incurred. Since we are utterly the products, mind and body alike, of material or ideological conditions, it is more easily understandable that so many women live out their lives in perfect conformity to their situation, without question or even unhappiness. If we are what we have been made to be, then no disruption can or need occur, and personal responsibility is absolved. Here is


the passivity of the consciousness which only receives from its surroundings the material it requires for moral reflection. On the other hand, the extent of this impersonal determination makes us feel the hopelessness of our circumstances even more keenly, but without giving us the necessary grasp of some reality by which to shift the present one. No longer may a revolution be effected by a poem,55 since even this will be shaped by prevalent meanings and existing possibilities. This viewpoint encourages us to look back upon ourselves, our language, and our values in a way which might be consoling, but which leaves us with no way to grasp the future that is not yet determined because it has not yet happened. How that future is to come about may not be predestined, and it is certainly part of our moral experience to sense some risk, some responsibility, some decision by which it may be realised. The phenomenology of the moral consciousness reveals the active attempt of individuals to grasp or make sense of their situations in ways that are novel, and indeed it may be this very activity upon which future hopes inevitably must be founded. What this suggests is that we need to find some balance in this perspective between the inner and the outer points of view. One of the things we can do is to examine the windscreen of the car we are driving so that we can notice its cracks, see where it is smudged, observe the way in which the particular material of which it is made distorts our vision of what is around us, or find the clear spaces by which we can get a good view of what lies ahead. In this way, we become aware of our finitude, our limitations, our unique perspective which constitutes our identity as persons with a point of view. But it is quite another thing actually to drive the car, an activity in which staring at the windscreen would be a serious liability since it is what we need to use in order to be able to get anywhere at all. Unless we desist from the activity for which windscreens were originally devised and found practicable, we must sometimes merely use them to go forward without noticing them. So with our moral concepts and language. It is the human activity of making sense of life which gave rise to these in the first instance, albeit in a social environment, and they retain what meaning they have in the context of human purposes and pursuits, interests and intentions. Examining them to see just how limited and proscribed they are, finding the bits of dirt that blur our moral vision, criticising the criteria which are used for judgement, is necessary for moral clarity, but is not the end in


itself. The point of such refinement of moral vision is to move forward towards a closer approximation of language and reality, or of social mores with the human activities from which they spring. Feminist challenges in this area may turn out to be an instance of Williams’s claim that ‘reflection may destroy knowledge’, since what we find here is, ultimately, the inability to provide moral knowledge or guidelines when one is so heavily sedated by an overdose of self-reflection.56

CONCLUSION Feminist writings, by contributing to the present criticisms of moral epistemology, have left in their wake a great number of issues which now call for some imaginative and sensitive handling if we are to develop in our understanding of the moral enterprise. We need to consider an account which is not only more satisfactory in its understanding of feminist concerns, but also more adequate as a rendering of the logic of moral reasoning, for these two are inextricably bound up with one another. From the liberal perspective on morality, feminism seems to provide no unusual or disturbing challenge, since its requirements are believed to fit comfortably with the general principles for just treatment and considerations of equal rights which are central to its moral prescriptions. Continuing dissatisfaction from feminists in this area seems inappropriate since their needs are so easily accommodated. Feminist issues are either treated as trivial because their resolution seems, on liberal grounds, so patently obvious; or they seem to be irrelevant to liberal principles, because any attention paid to the uniqueness of the women’s issue, as opposed to any other, is an unnecessary fuss for such abstractions as justice and equality; or they are considered to be uninteresting for any ‘real’ concern of morality since feminist demands are personal or partisan. There are presumably many who believe that the theoretical moral issues raised by feminism have therefore been resolved and nothing further remains to be said, though there may be a lot more to do to clear away the remnants of injustice. The way in which liberalism expresses its concern for women’s issues is to emphasise what it takes to be the obvious need of any morality, namely, some general principles regarding what ought to be done. These are understood to have a


rational necessity which enhances the human freedom by means of which they are discovered and, thus, they are believed to be the best hope for retaining distinctively human qualities. Having distilled this essence of morality, liberalism need only pursue the practical business of applying its principles in an even-handed way. This is what moral reasoning requires and, in its exercise, there are no gender distinctions. The trouble with both the naturalistic and social constructionist accounts is that the temptation to generalisation is once again present, although the lines are drawn in slightly different ways. In the first case, the move towards finding a common denominator in human nature leads to a tension within its account of morality. Beginning with an analysis of the way in which decisions are tied up with our understanding of ourselves, it helpfully illuminates the particularity of moral choices. Yet it increasingly presses for the description of the foundation for morality and in so doing conjures up abstractions of another kind to liberalism, but which are nonetheless ahistorical and essentialist.57 The recognition of this natural grounding becomes a statement of such overall patterns that it lends itself to an endless search for counter-examples. In this case, what begins as a genuine reconstructive task using feminist insights ends as either hopelessly separatist or too vague for the derivation of any helpful guidelines. Indeed, unless analysis of the logic of onlooks regarding our humanness is handled with more care, there will be nothing to prevent the traditional, long-lasting descriptions of the male-female relationship from being trotted out once again, with a reactionary sneer of disdain. Likewise, in social constructionism, the effect of feminism has been to make us aware of the very deep consciousness and symbolic value of gender as it seems to express itself over and over again in the construction of social organisations, roles, and relationships. As a critique of the way in which value is expressed and ordered in social groups, this perspective challenges us to be more self-aware of the determination of thought and language by these gender categories, but its conclusions seem morally selfstultifying. Feminist questions arose in the first instance, presumably because of some gaps or imperfections in the fit between moral injunctions, with all their underlying assumptions, and lived experience. To raise questions about the confinement of women’s lives by social definitions was to discuss something about which women cared and which was therefore understood


to be more than a bland factual analysis of what does and does not exist. However, not only the original morality, but now also one’s concern about it are viewed as instances of the unintentional construction of meanings; for the spaces which we think we have ‘chosen’ to occupy as social revolutionaries are in fact the ones laid out for us by the available options. What reality there was to begin with, against which the present order of things seemed to measure up so badly, now turns out itself to be fabricated, as a projection of present meanings. Once we understand this, there is nothing available to us for moral awareness, and moral sensitivity becomes reduced to the one-dimensional phenomenon of thought thinking about itself. Such generalities require detachment to be grasped but there is nothing further to be done with them; morality can be abandoned as ‘humanistic’ or ‘essentialist’. My concern with these tendencies in naturalism and social constructionism is for the loss of the person, which becomes either a particular instance of general human essence or a decentred self. It seems to me that this is not only too high a price to pay for the feminist insights which may be derived from these accounts, but also an unnecessary abstraction for any development of practicable feminist morality. And this is the task which really now should face us. Perhaps I could just begin to sketch out such an account. Morality is a matter of personal development in sensitivity towards ourselves and the others with whom we share life, a sensitivity which is practised by deepening one’s insights into present social realities, by learning to discern the nuances of meaning in the language and thought which confront us, and by committing ourselves to realising some possibilities as more fulfilling than others. As in artistic creation, we can hear more harmonies or visualise more arrangements, the more attuned we become to what is already there; our innovative contribution comes as we make those real, and we are fortunate when they do in fact work. Human nature provides the overall context in which the reasoning mind searches for its possible courses of action, and it does so within the confines of social structures. Moral thinking comes up against social and natural realities that are not entirely of our own making and these are subject to continuous historical changes. This can be seen, not as a limitation to our moral questioning, but rather as a source of its purpose and significance, since ultimately there are choices which will or will not succeed,


in the here and now, in creating human fulfilment. We understand what these might be as our sensitivity to particular instances and realities develops. The active dialogue between the changing aspects of our humanness amidst various social interactions and our enquiring imagination is what shapes moral questions and their answers. Reality and imagination are bound together. We can form our new self-understanding imaginatively out of the materials given to us by taking advantage of the spaces within what is there. In this process, new meanings will emerge as the dimensions of our insight are opened out, and we will discover the sources of moral inspiration for use in the future.58

NOTES This chapter was first published in Radical Philosophy 47 (Autumn 1987) 1 See the discussion of this problem in Sartrean ethics by Mary Warnock, Existentialist Ethics, London, Macmillan, 1967, pp. 18–52. For the issues raised by the prescriptivist account see J.L.Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1981, esp. part 4 on ‘Universalization’. Mackie states: ‘On this view there are only formal, but no material, constraints on what can count as moral. The form, universal prescriptivity, is determined by the logic of moral terms, but the content is entirely a matter for decision by the person—or of course it may be a group of persons—who makes the moral judgements or subscribes to and adopts the moral system’ (pp. 85–6). 2 H.J.Paton, The Moral Law, London, Hutchinson University Library, 1969, pp. 67–8 [The categorical imperative]. See also Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1970. 3 See Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, London, Fontana, 1985, for a discussion of the impasse between two aspects of moral thinking: on the one hand the risk of free choice which morality implies and, on the other, the attempt to ground this choice in some limiting facts about rationality. 4 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, New York, Bantam Books, 1974, p. 31. 5 Ibid., p. 29. 6 Ibid., p. 33. 7 Ibid., p. 685, my italics. 8 Ibid., p. 671. 9 Janet Radcliffe Richards, The Sceptical Feminist, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1982. 10 See de Beauvoir’s recognition of the insufficiency of freedom alone to resolve the problems of women, op. cit., ‘It is not to be supposed, how-


11 12 13

14 15 16 17

18 19

20 21 22

23 24 25 26

ever, that the mere combination of the right to vote and a job constitutes complete emancipation.’ (p. 639). Her thinking in response to this, however, creates problems for the liberal model; see Ann Foreman, Femininity as Alienation, London, Pluto Press, 1978, Ch. 8. Radcliffe Richards, op. cit., p. 121. Mackie, op. cit., p. 15. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Dublin, 1793: ‘Let woman share the rights and she will emulate the virtues of man; for she must grow more perfect when emancipated, or justify the authority that chains such a being to her duty—if the latter, it will be expedient to open a fresh trade with Russia for whips’ (p. 256). Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason, London, Methuen, 1984, p. 104. Ibid., p. ix. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman, Oxford, Martin Robertson, 1981, p. 118. See Marjorie Weinzweig, ‘Philosophy, Femininity and Feminism’, Philosophical Books, Vol. 24, No. 3, July 1983, for a discussion of the inappropriateness of the notion of freedom as ‘self-control’ which is possessed by both men and women, particularly in the areas of sexual relations and of pregnancy and childbirth. See also Radcliffe Richards’s reply. Jean Grimshaw, ‘Feminism: History and Morality’, Radical Philosophy 30, spring 1982, p. 3. Donald Evans, The Logic of Self-Involvement, London, SCM Press, 1963: ‘if I do deliberate concerning the formulation or acceptance of a typical onlook, it is misleading to depict the logical structure of this deliberation either in terms of a decision—that and a decision—to which are completely independent, or in terms of a decision—that which is totally dependent on a decision—to’ (p. 137). John McDowell, ‘Virtue and Reason’, The Monist, Vol. 62, No. 3, July 1979, pp. 346 and 341. John McDowell, ‘Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?’ The Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. LII, 1978, p. 18. See G.J.Warnock, Contemporary Moral Philosophy, 20, London, Macmillan, 1967: ‘if it were not the case that there existed a certain range of considerations, having to do in general with the welfare of human beings, about which most people cared very much some of the time, and cared to some extent much of the time, then not only would moral argument, however conclusive, be pointless and ineffective; moral discourse would simply not occur’ (p. 71). Bishop Joseph Butler, Sermons (1726), edited by W.R.Matthews, London: Bell, 1969. See the very clear discussion of this matter in Mary Midgley, Beast and Man, London, Methuen, 1980, pp. 266–74. McDowell, ‘Virtue and Reason’, p. 331. McDowell, ‘Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?’, p. 21. See also his description of ‘salience’ in ‘Virtue and Reason’, pp. 344–5. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1982, p. 18. See Sigmund Freud, ‘Femininity’, in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, New York, W.W.Norton & Co, 1933: ‘Women have but little sense of justice…. We also say of women


27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34

35 36 37 38

39 40

41

that their social instincts are weaker than those of men, and that their capacity for the sublimation of their instincts is less’ (p. 184). Quoted by Gilligan, op. cit., p. 16. from Virginia Woolf, A Room ofOne’s Own, New York, Harcourt, Brace and World, 1929, p. 76. Gilligan, op. cit., p. 16. Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., p. 173. Mary Daly, Pure Lust, London, The Women’s Press, 1984; see the entries in ‘Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language’. Thus Daly abandons hope for a Tillichian overcoming of dualism by means of increasing abstraction, in favour of a more gnostic, and Jungian opposition of forces. Compare Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father, Boston, Beacon Press, 1973 in which there is a ‘beyond’ described in Chs 3, 4 and 7, with Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, London, The Women’s Press, 1979, and Pure Lust, in which no such ‘place’ exists. See especially Radcliffe Richards, op. cit., pp. 25–9 passim. Alison Jagger, Feminist Politics and Human Nature, Sussex, Harvester Press, 1983; see pp. 98, 107. Cf. Janet Sayers, Biological Politics, London, Tavistock, 1982, p. 188. This problem also seems to be characteristic of the feminist writings of Luce Irigaray, as discussed by Margaret Whitford, ‘Luce Irigaray and the Female Imaginary: Speaking as a Woman’, in Radical Philosophy 43, summer 1986. Frigga Haug, ‘Morals also have Two Genders’, New Left Review, Vol. 143, Jan/Feb 1984. For a good example, see Robert Paul Wolff, ‘There’s Nobody Here But Us Persons’, in C.Gould and M.Wartofsky, eds, Women and Philosophy, New York, G.P.Putnam’s Sons, 1976, pp. 128–44. See particularly Brian Easlea, Science and Sexual Oppression, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981, and Fathering the Unthinkable, London, Pluto Press, 1983. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1962, trans. Martin Ostwald. See Book One, Section 7 in which goodness is related to function. See also Dorothy Emmet, Rules, Roles and Relations, London, Macmillan, 1966; Philippa Foot, ‘Goodness and Choice’, The Aristotelian Society, Suppl. VI. XXXV, 1961; and G.E.M. Anscombe, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ and ‘On Brute Facts’, in Analysis, Vol. 18, 1958. F.H.Bradley, ‘My Station and Its Duties’, in Ethical Studies, 2nd edn, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1927. See A.C.McIntyre, A Short History of Ethics, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976, for a description of the history of ethics from this viewpoint. See also his argument that unless such community is restored in the modern world, morality will have lost its meaning for us. The confusion of moral perspectives in our day leaves us with no way of choosing between available alternatives without a meaningful social context. After Virtue, London, Duck worth, 1982. See Williams, op. cit., Ch. 2 on ‘The Archimedean Point’. See also McDowell, ‘Aesthetic Value, Objectivity, and the Fabric of the World’,


42

43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50

51

52 53 54

55 56 57 58

in Eva Schaper, ed., Pleasure, Preference and Value,Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983 for a critique of this possibility. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1969, trans. G.E.M.Anscombe and Denis Paul: ‘It is our acting which lies at the bottom of the language-game’ (para. 204). See also Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, London, Hutchinson, 1949. Juliet Mitchell, Woman’s Estate, New York, Vintage Books, 1973. See particularly Chs 5 and 6 which illustrate these conditions of women’s lives and consciousness. Ibid., p. 122. Ibid., p. 150. Rosalind Coward, Patriarchal Precedents: Sexuality and Social Relations, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983, p. 188. Ibid., p. 259. See also her article on ‘Psychoanalysis and Patriarchal Structures’ co-authored with E.Cowie and S.Lipshitz in Papers on Patriarchy, Lewes: Women’s Publishing Collective, 1976, in which she describes more fully the acquisition of gender consciousness in children. For an anthropologist’s analysis of this universal gender construction, see Sherry B.Ortner, ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’ in M.Z.Rosaldo and L.Lampher, eds, Woman, Culture and Society, California, Stanford University Press, 1974. Ibid., p. 1, quoting from Althusser. Ibid., p. 265. See also her book, co-authored with John Ellis, Language and Materialism, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977, esp. Chs 1 and 5 which offer a critique of humanistic reification. Karl Marx, The German Ideology, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1974: ‘language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men…. Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product’ (pp. 50–1). Coward, ‘Re-reading Freud’, Spare Rib, May 1978. She also criticises the limitations of Marxism for its economic determinism, which tends to yield a universalist thesis regarding the necessary ideology of women’s oppression. See ‘Re-thinking Marxism’, m/f 2, 1978. See the critiques of both Mitchell and Coward in Sayers, op. cit., pp. 134–45 and Foreman, op. cit., pp. 48–51. Michèle Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis, London, Verso, 1984, pp. 34–5. Ibid., pp. 35–6. See also the review by Howard Feather, ‘Reconstructing Structural Marxism’, Radical Philosophy 43, summer 1986, in which similar epistemological problems are discussed with reference to Althusser, particularly p. 35. Attributed to Virginia Woolf. See how this problem is described by Joseph McCarney, ‘What Makes Critical Theory “Critical”?’, Radical Philosophy 42, winter/spring 1986. Williams, op. cit., especially Ch. 9, ‘Relativism and Reflection’. See my initial attempt to formulate this in ‘Feminism and Moral Reasoning’, Australian Journal of Philosophy, special issue on Women and Philosophy, June 1986. My thinking throughout this piece has been greatly stimulated by Sabina


Lovibond, Realism and Imagination in Ethics, Oxford, Basil Black well, 1983. While I have not quoted directly from this work, I want to acknowledge her provocative analysis of moral epistemology and to express a hope that one day I can investigate her suggestions in a more full and direct way. My thanks also to the members of the Radical Philosophy Group for very helpful comments on the first draft of this paper, which has benefited from their careful attention.

5

FROM VIRGINIA WOOLF TO THE POST-MODERNS Developments in a feminist aesthetic Pauline Johnson Contemporary feminist art theory and practice has, by and large, turned away from a modernist affirmation of the autonomy of art from life towards a post-modern problematisation of the specific category of the aesthetic. The modernist assertion of the freedom of the autonomous work is held to be inconsistent with feminism’s requirements for a committed art responsive to the needs of a determinate public. To a contemporary feminism concerned to establish the specificity, the legitimate difference, of the feminine, a post-modern ethos which repudiates any hierarchisation of world-views and endorses a democratic pluralism as the only defensible value appears as the more attractive option. The following paper interrogates the supposition of the radical inappropriateness of a modernist aesthetic to the critical requirements of a feminist perspective and challenges the supposed appropriateness of a post-modern standpoint to these needs. Part I of the paper considers a specific case of modernism’s relevance to a feminist art practice. I examine the, admittedly not unambiguous, support Woolf’s feminism finds in her allegiance to a modernist aesthetic developed by the Bloomsbury group. The second part of the paper considers the unacceptable consequences of a radical, indiscriminate jettisoning of the main aspirations of modernist art theory for a feminist aesthetic. Several attempts at constructing a post-modern feminist art are critically evaluated and the fundamental inadequacy of these enterprises is traced to an underlying incoherence in the objectives of a post-modern feminism.

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FROM VIRGINIA WOOLF TO THE POST-MODERNS 101

I WOOLF’S FEMINISM AND A MODERNISTIC AESTHETIC Leading feminist interpreters of Virginia Woolf’s aesthetics have identified two seemingly incompatible perspectives in her work. Woolf’s feminism is, they argue, a product of a penetrating sociological analysis of the material and psychological constraints which have traditionally worked to inhibit women’s capacity to produce great art. On one level, then, Woolf disavows any romantic, idealist convictions, fully acknowledging that works of art are not ‘webs spun in mid air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings and are attached to grossly material things like health and money and the houses we live in’.1 For Michèle Barrett and Simon Watney,2 Woolf’s feminist recognition of the politics of art production and reception cannot be reconciled with her equally solid allegiance to the modernist aesthetics of Roger Fry and Clive Bell which unequivocally repudiates any conception of the political character of art. Woolf’s commitment to an aesthetic purity and ‘freedom of mind’ represents a seeming romantic disregard for the sociological reality of the class and gender specific influences which condition all creative and receptive activities. On this point of view, Woolf’s feminism appears to leave off where her ‘materialist critique of the social position of the writer in the prevailing conditions of literary production’ ends and her modernist picture of the freedom and purity of the aesthetic begins.3 Whilst by no means attempting a full defence of the unambiguous appropriateness of modernist art theory to a feminist aesthetic, my aim here is to contest the idea that there is a radical incompatibility between Woolf’s feminism and her allegiance to a modernist aesthetic. In place of the idea of a fundamental rift between Woolf’s feminism on the one hand and her modernism on the other, I argue for the existence of conflicting possibilities and tendencies within the aims and methods of modernism upon which a discriminating account of its essential relevance for a feminist aesthetic can be based. In the present context it is not possible to embark on a comprehensive account of the main characteristics of modernist art theory and practice. Accordingly, I merely propose to examine the relevance of aspects of the specific modernist aesthetic elaborated by Woolf’s Bloomsbury colleagues, Bell and Fry, to the construc-


tion of her feminist perspective. I suggest that elements of the aims and techniques formulated by Bloomsbury art theory are essential to the articulation of this perspective. The modernism of Bloomsbury aesthetics Barrett and Watney’s influential critique of Woolf’s modernism rest, I suggest, on the failure to distinguish between two conflicting implications which attend the conception of the radical autonomy of the aesthetic proposed by modernist art theory. Although Marcuse’s seminal essay on The Affirmative Character of Culture’ is specifically concerned with the twofold implications of a humanist-realist tradition in autonomous art, we can, I hope to show, usefully employ the most general outlines of his analysis to assess the several possibilities and significances of a modernist art practice.4 Baldly stated, this analysis holds that an art practice which asserts the autonomy of the work from life can both sustain an elitist and conservative withdrawal from the ‘bad’ reality of the everyday while at the same time retaining an emancipatory significance by virtue of its critical distance from an oppressive present. The essential conservative spirit of a modernist disavowal of all human concerns and interests as fundamentally irrelevant to the purity of the aesthetic is nowhere more apparent than in the cultural aristocratism of Ortega y Gasset’s dehumanisation thesis.5 To Ortega, the dehumanised focus of modernist art offers a means for arresting the degenerate, levelling cultural egalitarianism of modern society. Because the appreciation of modern art requires a sophisticated audience capable of raising itself above the merely narrow, sectarian philistine interests of contemporary society, the aesthetic becomes the arena in which the cultural aristocrats of the modern era posit their own positive social identity. In the works of the moderns: ‘We have…an art which can be comprehended only by people possessed of the peculiar gift of artistic sensibility—an art for artists and not for the masses, for “quality” and not for the hoi-polloi’.6 Whilst lacking the radicalism of Ortega’s formulations, a similar cultural elitism is apparent in the Bloomsbury group’s attempted justification of modernist art. For Fry and Bell also, the ability adequately to appreciate post-impressionist art distinguishes a cultural elite from the irredeemably philistine masses.


Any discussion of content, the politics of reception and conditions of cultural production is, to them, irrelevant to the aesthetic, which appears only as ‘significant form’.7 The art work does not, they maintain, properly concern itself with any reality which exists outside it but constitutes its own hermetically sealed selfreferring ‘world’. Watney rightly points to the romantic and elitist conception of the ideal audience which underlies this aesthetic doctrine.8 On his view, Bloomsbury aesthetics appears as an idealist attempt to reduce the appropriately equipped viewer to a mere aesthetic sensibility from whom all determinate sociological characteristics have been effectively effaced. Moreover, their advocacy of the radical disengagement of the work from all human commitments and social interests seemingly involves Bell and Fry in an elitist appeal to an audience which considers taste and its cultivation an absolute end in itself. Watney suggests that for all Fry’s strictures against Victorian culture, Bloomsbury art theory with its proposed radical separation between art and life does not leave behind the middle-class values of snobbery and social conventionalism. In Bloomsbury aesthetics, the capacity to appreciate the ‘right’ pictures appears as the supreme social arbiter.9 At this stage in the discussion it would appear that the conception of the radical autonomy of the aesthetic formulated by Bell and Fry is entirely unsuited to the requirements of a feminist art theory, which inevitably proposes an explicitly ideologically committed aesthetic and expresses a profound interest in the character of the relations between art work and a determinate life experience. Yet at another level, it would appear that modernist art theory does not serve in any total, unambiguous sense a fundamentally conservative and elitist politics. In a provocative essay entitled ‘Modernity—An Incomplete Project’, Habermas points to the survival of vestiges of the essential emancipatory aspirations of Enlightenment thinking within the temper of modernism.10 According to Habermas, a modernist consciousness has inherited aspects of the Enlightenment’s interrogation of the controlling impact of tradition and the authority of the merely conventional. Modernity, he comments, ‘revolts against the normalising functions of tradition: modernity lives on the experience of rebelling against all that is normative’.11 This rebellious spirit, this aspiration towards a new, free subjectivity not constrained by the crushing, levelling norms of social convention, is arguably evident also in Bloomsbury art theory.


Alasdair MacIntyre—who is a strong supporter of this reading of the significance of Bloomsbury aesthetics—suggests that Bell and Fry developed a critical dimension implicit in the moral philosophy of their associate, G.E.Moore.12 A central proposal of the Principia Ethica is that the ‘good’ be viewed as a simple, indefinable property and propositions declaring something to be good as aesthetical ‘intuitions’ incapable of proof or disproof. MacIntyre argues that Bloomsbury absorbed the radical aspect of this ethical system which, by making the ‘good’ a natural, unanalysable property discernible by the ‘sensitive individual’, appeared to offer a release from the oppressive moral conformism of the earlier generation.13 A balanced picture of the spirit of Bloomsbury would emphasise the twofold, conflicting implications of the attempt to construct an account of the disengaged purity of the aesthetic. Hence the persuasive force of Watney’s suggestion that the radical autonomy thesis simply establishes a new basis upon which a cultural elite is able to recognise and affirm the quality of its judgement and taste against the philistinism of the uncomprehending masses. Yet this conception of the radical autonomy of the aesthetic also seemingly expresses a revolt against the normalising function of tradition and articulates an aspiration towards the construction of an aesthetic consciousness liberated from the shackles of entrenched social convention. On this account, the modernist thesis of the purity of the aesthetic is able to sustain an essentially critical perspective on the present for it is precisely this disengagement of the work from the interests, commitments and norms of the everyday which enables the autonomous work of art to articulate an alternative, critical reality. I suggest that, in this latter aspect, the modernists enter into essentially sympathetic relations with a feminist interrogation (itself rooted in Enlightenment thinking) of the apparent inevitability of established tradition and the merely received social norm. The modernist no less than the feminist aims to break with the repressive function of the traditionally sanctioned norm. Like the feminist, the modernist refuses to credit the merely traditional with the authority of a ‘second nature’. Both, in their various capacities, offer a provocative challenge to the supposedly self-evident certainties of an unquestioned existence. It is in the light of the twofold conflicting implications funda-


mental to a modernist aesthetic identified above, that the complex character of Woolf’s feminism can best be understood. The modernism/feminism connection in Virginia Woolf In her major study of Woolf’s feminism, Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision, Nancy Topping Bazin argues that Woolf’s protest against existing forms of appropriate feminine subjectivity is informed by a vision of an androgynous subjectivity which, to her, corresponds to the real possibilities of the self.14 This vision of a transcendent androgynous self is conceived as a mediated unity in which presently constituted norms of masculinity and femininity are fundamentally transformed. Neither existing masculinity nor traditional feminity is, to Woolf, appropriate to her vision of ideal subjectivity which can only be realised in the freedom of the aesthetic sphere. This critical perspective on the norms of appropriate femininity and masculinity is powerfully developed by Woolf both in her fiction and in her essays and letters. A well-known piece entitled ‘Professions For Women’ usefully summarises her discoveries about the condition of psychic and emotional subordination required by modern conventions of the feminine.15 Woolf stresses that women are continually haunted by a debilitating image of an ideal feminine type: an ideal she expresses in the motif ‘The Angel in the House’. ‘The Angel in the House’ requires women to sacrifice their own judgements and desires, enforcing their adoption of a totally empathetic perspective which subordinates itself to the desires and wishes of others. To Woolf, this emotional enslavement must be unequivocally repudiated if women are ever to attain the ‘freedom of mind’ necessary to the elevation of the aesthetic attitude. While lacking the independence of mind necessary to the freedom of the aesthetic consciousness, the fundamentally egoless, empathetic feminine consciousness provides an essential counterpoint to an equally debilitated, unfree masculine selfabsorption. Whereas feminine subjectivity finds itself overwhelmed by and assimilated into the point of view of the other, the masculine ego must attempt to subjugate and absorb the perspective of the other. Woolf’s ironic attitude towards the foibles of masculine self-preoccupation is clearly evident in the following passage from The Years where Peggy is talking to a male writer at a party:


Her attention wandered. She had heard it all before, I, I, I,— he went on. It was like a vulture’s beak pecking, or a vacuum-cleaner sucking, or a telephone bell ringing. I.I. I. But he could not help it…. He could not free himself. ‘I’m tired’, she apologised, ‘I’ve been up all night,’ she explained. ‘I’m a doctor’—The fire went out of his face when she said ‘I’. That’s done it—now he’ll go, she thought. He can’t be ‘you’—he must be ‘I’. She smiled. For up he got and off he went.16 To Woolf, neither presently constituted femininity nor traditional masculinity represent forms of consciousness suited to the purity and freedom of the transcendent aesthetic attitude. Woolf’s fiction suggests, however, that the unconstrained aesthetic consciousness represents not so much a negation of the feminine and masculine attitudes but rather a synthetic unity of aspects of both. As Bazin points out, Lily Briscoe’s efforts in To The Lighthouse to produce an aesthetically satisfying painting are represented by Woolf as a struggle to reconcile the feminine with the masculine attitude.17 To Lily, Mrs Ramsay appears in the inhibiting guise of the ideal feminine; as ‘The Angel in the House’. Yet Lily’s final liberation involves more than the negation of this oppressive ideal of an empathetic, subordinate, self-denying femininity: it is not to be sought in a conversion to the self-absorbed male egoism of Mr Ramsay. Woolf holds that the androgynous aesthetic consciousness combines the principle of the feminine, an anonymous, selfforgetful world typified by a generalising, abstract consciousness, with a characteristically masculine orientation towards the world of immediate, particular appearances. On this account the authentic, complete awareness of ‘reality’ requires a pattern of perception which synthesises a peculiar ‘feminine’ sense of the harmonious generality, with a typically masculine attention to the ceaseless passing of the specific details of immediacy. Only when Lily is able to respond positively to both modes of perception can she complete her painting with an aesthetically satisfying design. Lily’s painting finally draws together the solid triangular shape which represents the figure of Mrs Ramsay with the taut, linear distinct form expressive of the masculinity of Mr Ramsay. Woolf’s search for an elusive, ideal androgynous self which transcends the traditional, gender-differentiated experience of the everyday draws upon a modernist aesthetic which posits a tran-


scendent sphere of aesthetic purity and freedom. For Woolf, the emphasis of modernist art theory on the radical autonomy of the aesthetic from the everyday, gives expression to her feminist call for a new form of self-awareness which does not simply articulate but radically transcends presently constituted gender-specific forms of subjectivity. Woolf’s repudiation of realism—her turn from narrative and from naturalistic characterisation towards a highly contrived, self-reflexive structure—appears, then, as a search for an artistic form adequate to her vision of a transcendent, androgynous aesthetic consciousness. Woolf’s modernist experimentations in style and form are, I suggest, subordinated to, rather than obstructive of, her feminist objectives. In her interpretative piece on Woolf’s fiction entitled ‘Thinking Back Through Our Mothers’, Marcus points out that: ‘What some readers have seen as her incapacity to create character is not an incapacity at all but a feminist attack on the ego as male false consciousness. She will not supply us with characters with whom we may egoistically identify’.18 Woolf’s refusal of an egocentric idea of character, the despised I, I, I of masculine subjectivity, rests, in the first instance, on a belief in the transcendent truth of an androgynous consciousness which totalises a feminine awareness of the general and eternal with a supposed typically masculine consciousness of the empirical, of the immediate particularities of surface appearances. The transcendent, autonomous realm of the aesthetic which permits the suspension of naturalistic representation and characterisation apparently offers Woolf the ‘freedom of mind’ necessary to her experimental vision of an androgynous subjectivity. It appears, then, that we require a more balanced assessment than that proposed by Barrett and Watney of the relevance of Woolf’s modernist allegiances to her feminist objectives. Just as the modernist conception of the transcendent, autonomous character of the aesthetic permits expression to Woolf’s critical vision of an ideal, androgynous consciousness, so the modernist experimentations in literary technique prove, as Marcus suggests, highly appropriate to Woolf’s specifically feminist critique of established conventions of characterisation. Yet, whilst acknowledging the relevance of a modernist aesthetic to the feminist purposes of Woolf’s fiction, we should not overlook the real obstacles also presented by a radical autonomy thesis to the construction of a fully plausible feminist aesthetic. As previously noted, there is, following Marcuse’s profound analysis


in ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’, a twofold significance to the assertion of the autonomy of the work of art. On the one hand, autonomous art, with its conception of the radical separation between art and life, allows expression to the desire for a better life: for a life which transcends the oppressive, unfree conditions of the everyday. Woolf aims in her fiction to construct a vision of reality from whose vantage point we may understand both what is oppressive about the present, and how it should be changed. Yet, as previously indicated, there is a reverse construction to be put upon this aspiration towards a transcendent reality preserved within the autonomous work. Given that the modernist’s autonomy thesis involves the radical severing of art from life, the progressive, emancipatory desire for a better, a freer life is rendered in merely abstract, ideal terms. It could, on this point of view, be argued that in Woolf’s fiction a real, concrete dissatisfaction with a repressive, patriarchal life experience receives only an abstract, aestheticised and, hence, inadequate response. Locked within the autonomy of the pure work of art, Woolf’s proposal for a new form of human subjectivity can appear only as the striving after a new, alternative androgynous mode of perception. The concrete desire for a better, freer life is rendered abstract. In the language of Marcuse, it appears only as the desire for an enriched soul. For Woolf, the ideal androgynous subjectivity appears merely as a pure, complete aesthetic sensibility. It does not articulate any real prospects for the fundamentally altered life experience of the emancipated personality. The merely aesthetical, abstract character of the ideal, androgynous consciousness to which Woolf’s fiction aspires is nowhere more evident than in her biographical fantasy Orlando. Orlando appears in the form of a pure transcendent subjectivity unconstrained by history, time or determinate personality. Woolf introduces Orlando as a young male living in the sixteenth century and leaves the character a mature female located in the twentieth century. Orlando’s main task, the realisation of his/her true, complete, androgynous self, is conceived in purely psychological terms. Woolf here presents the aspiration towards the completed, emancipated personality not as the concrete demand for a transformed, enriched life experience but as the psychic journey of the self towards a new, authentic, unified state of consciousness; a quest which occurs essentially outside history and quite independently of any determinate life experience.


It is necessary to stress at this point that, as a major study on the specific character of art in modernity, Marcuse’s essay on ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’ primarily concerns itself not merely with a content analysis of particular genres but also with an investigation of the structural relations instituted between recipient and autonomous work. On this analysis, the great realist tradition of autonomous art no less than the anti-realism of a modernist art practice appears as a merely aestheticised portrait of an alternative life experience.19 Marcuse’s critique of the ambiguous ideological significance of art in modernity is, therefore, on no account to be confused with a Lukácsian defence of realism in the face of the aestheticist, abstract perspective presented in the specifically modernist work. Marcuse’s analysis would not allow us to attempt to overcome the twofold conflicting implications of Woolf’s adherence to a modernist aesthetic by simply advocating a turn by feminist aesthetics to a realist art practice. According to Marcuse, the aesthetic transfiguration of the radical demand for a new, emancipated, life experience into a merely consoling, affirmative portrait of an alternative, ideal state of mind or condition of the soul, hangs on the dynamics specific to the tradition of autonomous art itself. Accordingly, the great realist works are considered by Marcuse to be firmly implicated in the affirmative character of art in modernity.20 Although Woolf’s commitment to the main spirit and doctrines of a modernist aesthetic is by no means wholly inconsistent with her feminism, it seems that serious obstacles confront any attempt uncritically to adopt her work as the model for an appropriate contemporary feminist aesthetic. As already noted, the radical autonomy thesis she adopts means that, in Woolf’s hands, all feminist aspirations towards a radically reconstructed life experience become merely aestheticised. They are rendered into the abstract demand for a new sensibility or way of looking at the world. There appears, then, good reason to look well beyond the limits of a modernist art theory to locate the main lines of an adequate contemporary feminist aesthetic. As already noted, the turn today in feminist art theory is, in the main, away from a modernist affirmation of the autonomy of art from life towards a post-modernist problematisation of a distinct category of the aesthetic. For the remainder of the discussion I propose critically to consider some of the leading characteristics of this post-modernist turn in contemporary feminist art theory


and practice. In particular, I suggest that the adequacy of this trend towards a post-modern feminist aesthetic depends on its ability to negotiate an important and challenging task. From the preceding discussion of the import of Woolf’s commitment to a modernist aesthetic for her feminist objectives, it seems that the main index to the adequacy of a feminist post-modern alternative to a modernist art theory rests on its ability at once to preserve the critical stance available to modernism’s confrontationist separation between art and life while at the same time overcoming the merely abstract, aestheticist character of Woolf’s representation of an alternative life experience.

II TRENDS IN A POST-MODERN FEMINIST AESTHETIC Despite the fact that there is, as yet, no fully established body of theoretical literature on the issue of a post-modern feminist aesthetic, it appears that the ethos of a post-modern perspective has permeated many important currents in contemporary feminist art theory and practice. I propose to begin the discussion with a very general outline of the main tenets of a post-modern perspective. I then consider ways in which the general spirit of a post-modern viewpoint has influenced, in more or less explicit terms, a variety of recent experimentations in feminist art practice. Finally, I consider the ways in which the various problematic aspects of these experimentations reflect upon the viability and coherency of the underlying project and philosophy of a post-modern feminist aesthetic. The spirit of the post-modern In an influential work entitled Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Buerger makes a useful distinction between main aspects of modernism, the avant-garde and post-modernism.21 We saw earlier that a leading dimension of a modernist aesthetic concerns the attempt to create an hermetically sealed autonomous sphere of the work of art. The modernist characteristically refuses to accept contents given outside his/her art from social tradition but aims at constructing a wholly self-referential world of the work of art. From the outset, modernism regarded itself as a very radical


movement which aimed to dispense with all merely conventional perceptions and to construct a ‘pure’ art not bound by the normalising function of the merely traditional. As Buerger reads it, there is a significant difference between the main lines of a modernist aesthetic and the phenomenon of the avant-garde. Whereas modernism with its characteristic self-reflexivity represented the culmination of the historical development of the notion of the autonomy of art, the avant-gardists saw themselves as mounting a provocative challenge to the whole conception of the specificity of the aesthetic. They protested against the apparent uselessness of an art which regarded itself as an end in itself; as having a value separate from the concerns and interests of everyday life. As Jochen Schulte-Sasse puts it: The historical avant-garde of the twenties was the first movement in art history that turned against the institution ‘art’ and the mode in which autonomy functions. In this it is different from all previous art movements whose mode of existence was determined precisely by an acceptance of autonomy.22 Yet there remains a sense in which the avant-gardists carried on the essential spirit of a modernist aesthetic. Even though they repudiated the core modernist concept of the autonomy of the art work, the avant-garde shared with the early modernists a rebellious repudiation of the merely traditional and an affirmation of the untried, the experimental, the new. Only with the appearance in the 1950s and 1960s of the postmodern phenomenon has a serious challenge to the central values and principles of modernism as a totality been mounted. Unlike the avant-gardists, the post-moderns do not share the modernist’s conception of the new and unconventional as primary values. Against ‘high’ modernism, the post-modern’s claim is that it is simply not possible to shake off all merely conventional, traditional perceptions and perspectives in the attempt to create a ‘pure’ work of art. Contemporary theorists of this school point to the inadequate ahistoricism of a modernist project which aims, in the name of the experimental and the new, to transcend the normative conventions of all particular, historically specific, culturally circumscribed worldviews. For the post-modernists, to recognise such


historical character is to acknowledge that any attempt at radical transcendence of the norms and perspectives given by historical circumstance is implausible.23 They characteristically refuse any attempted privileging of worldviews and endorse a democratic pluralism as the only possible value. Post-modernism holds that the standardisation of any particular perspective or value is to be definitely avoided. It affirms a pluralism of values and outlooks which are considered reducible to a mere plurality of styles and genres. As we shall see, it is this easy acceptance of a relativist outlook and the suspension of the search for any perspective from which the present can be evaluated, which is strongly contested by Habermas and the other leftist critics of the post-modern standpoint. Its characteristic refusal to elevate any one specific value, perspective or mode of representation to the level of a normative standard makes the post-modern ethos immediately attractive to several leading trends in contemporary feminist art practice. Although, as already indicated, the theorisation of the relevance of post-modernism to a feminist aesthetic remains largely undeveloped, the influence of the post-modern spirit is nevertheless evident in many contemporary feminist experiments in the arts. Attracted by the relativisation of all social experiences, by the absence of normative standards and by the affirmation of a nonhierarchical ordering of differences, a number of otherwise very distinct forms of feminist art practice appear to have been powerfully influenced by the general ethos of the post-modern. The post-modern and feminist art Laura Mulvey’s often cited paper entitled ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ represents a seminal contribution to the development of a contemporary feminist aesthetic.24 Perhaps more than any other work in the field, this piece marks the turn away from a conception of the appropriateness of the universalising aspirations of a modernist aesthetic to feminist art theory and practice. Mulvey appears as one of the precursors of the so-called feminism of difference which has in recent years become dominant in many areas of women’s studies. To Mulvey, a feminist aesthetic must proceed from a fundamental awareness of the gender-specific character of all human subjectivity in a patriarchal society. Its most important and challenging task is, she intimates,


systematically to refuse all attempts to represent as universal the specific interests, perceptions and desires of a patriarchally socialised masculinity. According to Mulvey, a feminist aesthetics is faced with the hitherto largely unrecognised necessity of constructing a qualitatively new experience of pleasure which does not merely reflect the scopophilic nature of masculine desire. In a certain loose sense, then, Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ articulates central features of a post-modern outlook. Mulvey limits the appropriate task of a feminist aesthetic to the construction of a mode of representation which corresponds to the specific difference of the experience of femininity in a patriarchal society. In keeping with the spirit of post-modernism she is content to define the project of a feminist aesthetic as the attempt to eradicate the universalising standardisation of a specifically masculine social experience and mode of perception. There is, I suggest, a fundamentally problematic aspect to the whole project of a post-modern feminist aesthetic as formulated by Mulvey and others. A post-modern feminism has conflicting allegiances which render its aspirations incoherent and selfdefeating. As an historically determinate phenomenon, feminism articulates, in the name of an Enlightenment evocation of the possibility of an emancipated, rational social life, a protest at the unfreedom, at the psychic and material constraints which ensure a subordinated femininity. Historically, feminism appears as a protesting consciousness made possible by a critical humanist interrogation of a repressive ideology which strives to attribute a natural status to all socially constituted phenomena. The critical consciousness of Enlightenment thinking is, it seems, a precondition of the historical appearance of a feminist repudiation of the traditional tasks and psychologies attributed to women. Yet, whilst a feminist protest has its roots in Enlightenment thinking, the relationship of the post-moderns to an Enlightenment aspiration towards the free, rational construction of social life is, as Habermas stresses, an equivocal one. To the post-moderns, the Enlightenment’s hopes for the emancipatory power of reason involve the attempted universalisation of a cultural and gender-specific construct: man conceived as a free, reasoning consciousness. On this point of view, the attempt to project conscious self-determination as humanity’s main historical task appears to rest on a culturally constituted and ultimately implausible conception of a fundamental opposition between the


constrained, unfree world of social tradition and the unconstrained realm of a constitutive rational faculty. This sphere of a valorised rationality is, as Lloyd and other contemporary feminists point out, characteristically equated with the masculine while the constrained world of the uninterrogated passions is typically tied to the feminine.25 The point of the present argument is not to attempt to marshal support for the ideal of androgyny against the assertion of the positive difference of the feminine, for there is, as the so-called feminists of difference point out, every reason to suppose that androgyny only appears as an ideal objective from a specifically patriarchal standpoint according to which the feminine appears as, in the words of Aristotle, ‘a certain lack of qualities’. The positing of an androgynous subjectivity as an ideal suggests an assessment of the feminine as an incomplete subjectivity to be augmented by valorised, alien ‘masculine’ attributes. Contemporary feminism’s insistence on the necessary assertion of the legitimacy of the feminine as a positively different subjectivity emerges, then, as a significant advance in the development of feminist thought. Yet there remains an ever-present danger here that, rather than positing this positive difference as the goal of a conscious, practical, collective struggle, a feminism of difference will be tempted to assert the legitimate difference of a presently constituted, patriarchally circumscribed femininity. This temptation cannot be resisted, I suggest, by a feminism which uncritically allies itself with the relativism of a post-modern outlook. To the extent that the post-moderns consider the critique of the universalistic character of its formulation grounds for a repudiation in toto of the Enlightenment’s aspiration towards the construction of a free, rational, social life, it appears unable to posit the emancipated personality as the task of progressive social movements. To a post-modern feminism the affirmation of the positive specificity of the feminine characteristically appears not as the lack of a movement determined to make a specific identity for women through collective social action, but rather as an assumption of the identity which has been made for women by a patriarchal cultural tradition. This lack of any substantive critical orientation towards the terms of a received patriarchal social identity, which I am claiming to be typical of post-modern feminism, will be illustrated shortly by a brief discussion of several contemporary experimentations in a feminist art practice.


A critical feminist consciousness cannot, it seems, adopt a simple one-sided orientation towards the aspirations articulated by Enlightenment thinking. While the universalistic claims made on behalf of a cultural and gender-specific conception of reason must be interrogated, the dependence of feminism as an historical phenomenon on the Enlightenment’s hopes for a free, rational social life must also be acknowledged if feminism’s character as a protest against the received norms of a patriarchal femininity is to be retained. Against the various post-modern feminisms, I suggest, therefore, that the Enlightenment project which looks to the constitution of the emancipated personality as humanity’s main historical task must be embraced and reformulated by feminism. Without the critical assumption of this project, feminism is, as already indicated, left with no perspective from which a present, repressively constructed femininity could be challenged. My aim here is to show that any attempt to affirm the positive difference of the feminine which considers this difference, not in the light of a task to be achieved but as an already arrived at specificity, can only offer a conservative collaboration with a patriarchal construction of the feminine. Experiments in a post-modern feminist art practice: an assessment From amongst the wide range of recent experimentations in a feminist art practice, three stand out as the more typical bearers of a post-modern spirit. All of these apparently very diverse trends in women’s art see the attempt to find a mode of representation able to express a feminine specificity or difference, while undercutting the traditionally negative positioning of such representations, as the primary task of a feminist aesthetic. One formulation of this enterprise which has its significant advocates both in the fine arts and in feminist literary theory suggests that a non-subordinated image of the feminine requires the development of new, experimental forms of representations. Some of the work of the important American feminist Judy Chicago exemplifies this attempt to construct a specifically feminist visual form. In their well known test entitled Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock critically evaluate Chicago’s Female Rejection Drawing in the light of her professed attempt to find an abstract form appropri-


ate to the expression of a non-subordinated, specific experience of female sexuality.26 In this particular work Chicago endeavours to produce in an abstract form reminiscent of a flower an image of the distinctive character of women’s desire as a decentred, multiple, diverse pleasure of the body. Chicago says of this picture: I couldn’t express my own sexuality by objectifying it onto the projected image of a man but only by inventing an image that embodied it. This is basically a feminist posture but I don’t think it was possible before the development of abstract form.27 As Parker and Pollock point out, however, Chicago’s strategy of using abstract form in an attempt to produce a new, positive image of feminine sexuality, an image not regulated by patriarchal representations, is necessarily a failure. Chicago’s work is inevitably inserted into a system of established representations about the sexuality of women. Her evocation of a flower-like image as a graphic illustration of women’s sexuality is readily received and accommodated by a pre-existing set of oppressive, negative images of the alluring, dangerous character of women’s desire. Parker and Pollock formulate their objection as follows: Within male-dominated culture, its language and its code of representation, it is not possible to produce in any simple way an alternative, positive management of the image of women. The image of women is the spectacle onto which they project their narcissistic fantasies.28 The attempts made by Chicago in the fine arts and by Hélène Cixous and others in literature to identify new modes of representation adequate to the expression of the positive specificity of the feminine appear as an inadequate realisation of a critical feminist outlook in the arts. Limiting their objectives to the construction of an image of the non-subordinated difference of the feminine, these art workers inevitably find their work inserted into and given significance by a system of patriarchal representations. The attempt to formulate a mode of representation adequate to the positive specificity of the feminine is an ambition shared also by the feminist advocates of women’s traditional creative practices. In her essay entitled ‘Is There A Feminist Aesthetic?’ Silvia


Bovenschen critically assesses a trend within contemporary feminist art towards the assertion of craft works: embroidery, weaving, sewing and so on, as not merely artistically inferior to the socalled ‘high’ fine arts but as different, as specific, kinds of creativity which have been grossly devalued in a patriarchally arranged ranking of creative achievements.29 This strategy of asserting women’s traditional craft skills as of value equal to the so-called ‘high’ arts quite evidently participates in the anti-universalising spirit of the post-modern ethos. This feminist project has, moreover, assimilated the post-modern’s refusal of the historical separation between the arts and crafts essential to the modernist’s assertion of the autonomy of the pure art work. It is, however, not at all clear that the attempt to re-evaluate the worth of the so-called feminine crafts contributes to the construction of a feminist consciousness critical of a patriarchally ascribed femininity. One should not, as Bovenschen points out, ‘foster the false illusion that our sewing teachers indeed pointed in the right direction’.30 In a patriarchally organised modern society, the traditional feminine skills of embroidery, weaving and sewing have been the mark of the subordinated, domesticated, privatised experience considered appropriate to women. To attempt merely to assert these activities as positively different, as specific creative practices rather than negatively different from valorised masculine achievements in the ‘pure’ arts, is to surrender the real sense of a feminist protest at the constrained, restricted nature of the experience and opportunities available to women in a modern patriarchy. Not only is the scope of this ambition extremely limited; its specifically critical feminist character is very doubtful also. Without the demand for the radical abolition of gender-specific limits to ‘appropriate’ creative activity, the repressive ideology of a gender-based nature remains secure and ineffectively contested. Whilst on the one hand admitting the cultural, merely traditional, character of the construction of feminine attributes and skills, the feminist celebration of these achievements seemingly attributes to them the status of a peculiarly feminine property. The proposed re-evaluation of traditional feminine creativity does not, in any practical sense, disturb the convictions of a repressive, essentialist ideology of the feminine. Finally, I turn to a brief consideration of a trend within contemporary feminist aesthetics which has, more explicitly than the


options considered so far, adopted a post-modern perspective. This trend towards a theorised use of post-modern ideas is described by Craig Owens in an essay entitled ‘The Discourse of Others: Feminists and the Post-Modern’.31 According to Owens, a feminist post-modern strategy in the fine arts strives at once to embrace or affirm the image of the feminine as different, as specific, and to resist the domination or control of this image by the voyeuristic, normative gaze of the masculine spectator. The photographic exhibitions of Cindy Sherman are presented as one of the main examples of this explicit post-modern feminist strategy in the arts. These photographs, which typically depict Sherman herself as a 1950s film star, attempt to impede and subvert the voyeuristic look characteristically courted by this genre. Sherman’s own obvious, underscored awareness of the predatory nature of the look from which she seeks to shield herself is seemingly designed to compel the spectator to become conscious of the voyeuristic character of his/her reception of the feminine. An unproblematic relation between image and receiver is impeded. Sherman presents a highly conventional image of modern feminine subjectivity while refusing to permit the easy regulation of this image in accordance with patriarchal norms and standards. Sherman, the ’50s beauty, refuses to exist for the benefit of the normative masculine gaze. The exaggeratedly conventional image of the feminine strives to emancipate itself from the normative gaze of any other merely culturally constituted mode or style of human subjectivity. According to Owens, Sherman’s photographs underline and parody the conventionality of the traditional norms of the regulation feminine ‘type’ in modern Western society. In this sense her work affirms the anti-essentialism which marks the post-modern outlook. For Sherman, as for the post-modern feminists in general, emancipation apparently means only a liberation from the normative privileging of any specific, culturally constructed mode or ‘style’ of human subjectivity. All that is proposed is an affirmation of the particularity of gender-based norms and the refusal of a repressive universalisation of the standards of a peculiarly masculine, culturally constituted subjectivity. Conclusion It appears that contemporary feminist aesthetics confronts a signif-


icant dilemma. On the one hand, as the discussion of Woolf s feminism has suggested, there are serious obstacles to feminism’s wholesale adoption of the aims and methods of a modernist aesthetic. On the positive side, a modernist aesthetic which articulates a conception of the radical disjunction between art and life is very appropriate to Woolf’s vision of a transcendent, androgynous ‘real’ self which empowers her fiction with a profound critical perspective on the oppressive, inauthentic character of existing gendered subjectivity. Drawing on the modernist conception of the transcendent nature of the aesthetic, Woolf’s work articulates a conception of the ideal, emancipated self which presents a critical alternative to the oppressive, restricted experience of femininity encountered in everyday life. At the same time, however, and again a feature of Woolf’s commitment to a radical autonomy thesis, her vision of an emancipated, androgynous self is conceived in terms of a mere aesthetic sensibility. Locked within the autonomy of the work of art, Woolf’s proposal for a new form of human subjectivity appears as a mere striving for a new androgynous perspective. Androgyny is for her most aptly described not in terms of its concrete realisation in a new emancipated personality but as a mode of perception most fittingly evoked in the form of the abstract, visual representation. Thus Lily’s final authentic vision in To The Lighthouse culminates not in a changed practical orientation towards life but in a mere aesthetic satisfaction at the momentary realisation of her more complete, androgynous mode of perception in a fitting visual design. Hence, although the ideal subjectivity posited by Woolf empowers her fiction with a strongly critical standpoint, the merely aesthetical character of this ideal means that her critique ultimately fails to project a practical imperative. As already suggested, the alternative vision proposed in her art functions as a compensatory, substitute gratification which siphons off and renders harmless the radical need for changed gender relations to which her works, in their passionate critique of existing relations between the sexes, also give expression. Whilst Woolf’s critique of the truncated character of given gendered subjectivity finally appears as a call not for a changed life but as only the demand for a new mode of perception, at least her art does preserve the protest at an unfree, subordinated femininity essential to a feminist outlook. This critical impulse is, as we have seen, sacrificed in the relativist perspective assimilated by a post-


modern feminist aesthetic. Its characteristic repudiation of the Enlightenment project which looks upon the emancipated personality as the task of historical activity, means that, for a postmodern feminism, the attempt to construct a conception of the positive specificity of the feminine cannot appear as the practical goal of a social movement. Rather, the attempt to identify the positive difference of the feminine appears as the mere attempt to assert the specific, positive identity of an already ascribed femininity. To a post-modern feminism, the ‘feminine’ appears as merely one ‘style’ of subjectivity amongst others which must be protected from the normative encroachments of other ‘styles’ of subjectivity. Any radical dissatisfaction with the repressive conventions of a patriarchal femininity is, to all intents and purposes, lost to a pluralistic ‘recognition’ of the legitimate specificity of the various modes of a gendered social existence.

NOTES This chapter was first published in Radical Philosophy 45 (Spring 1987) 1 Woolf, V., A Room of One’s Own, cited in M.Barrett, ed., Virginia Woolf: Women and Writing, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York and London, 1979, p. 5. 2 See Barrett, M., ibid, and Watney, S. ‘The Connoisseur as Gourmet’ in Formulations of Pleasure, Dennett et al., eds, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985. 3 Watney, S., ‘The Connoisseur as Gourmet’, op. cit., p. 79. 4 See Marcuse, H., ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’, Negations, Penguin University Books, London, 1972. 5 See Ortega y Gasset, J., The Dehumanisation of Art, Princeton University Press, 1968. 6 Ibid., p. 7. 7 See Bell, C., Art and Fry, R., Vision and Design. 8 See Watney, S., ‘The Connoisseur as Gourmet’, op. cit., p. 77. 9 Ibid., p. 77. 10 See Habermas, J., ‘Modernity—An Incomplete Project’, The AntiAesthetic Essays on Post-Modern Culture, Foster, H. ed., Bay Press, USA, 1983. 11 Ibid., p. 5. 12 MacIntyre, A., After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Duckworth, 1981. 13 Ibid., p. 16. 14 See Bazin, N., Virginia Woolf and The Androgynous Vision, Rutgers, 1973.


15 Woolf, V., ‘Professions for Women’ in Barrett, ed., Virginia Woolf: Women and Writing, op. cit., p. 58. 16 Woolf, V., The Years, quoted in Barrett, ed., Virginia Woolf: Women and Writing, op. cit., p. 21. 17 See Bazin, op. cit., for a discussion of the feminist politics of To the Lighthouse. 18 Marcus, J., ‘Thinking Back Through Our Mothers’, in Marcus, J., ed., New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf, University of Nebraska Press, 1981. 19 Marcuse does not specifically refer to a modernist tradition and my usage of his analysis involves an adaption of only the most general outlines of his diagnosis of the conflicting implications of autonomous art. 20 Indeed it is the implications of a tradition of an autonomous realist art with which Marcuse is particularly concerned. 21 Buerger, P., Theory of the Avant-Garde, University of Minnesota Press, 1984. 22 Schulte-Sasse, J., ‘Foreword’ to Buerger, op. cit., p. xiv. 23 See Lyotard, J.F. ‘What is Post-Modernism?’ in The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Bennington and Massumi (trans.), University of Minnesota Press, 1984; and Jameson, F., ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, The Anti-Aesthetic, Foster, H. (ed.). 24 Mulvey, L., ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16:3, 1975. 25 See Lloyd, G., The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy, Methuen, 1984. 26. Parker, R. and Pollock, G., Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. 27 Ibid., p. 130. 28 Ibid. 29 See Bovenschen, S., ‘Is there a Feminist Aesthetic?’ in Weckmueller, trans., Feminist Aesthetics, Ecker (ed.), The Women’s Press, 1985. 30 Ibid., p. 47. 31 Owens, C., ‘The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism’, in The Anti-Aesthetic, Foster (ed.), op. cit.


Part II SOCIALISM AND PHILOSOPHY


6

PROLETARIAN PHILOSOPHY: A VERSION OF PASTORAL? Jonathan Rée

I write in and about an embarrassment: how should I, a philosophy teacher, respond to people who are also committed to philosophy, but cut off from official philosophical institutions? It was partly to focus my attention on this problem that I revisited a much-respected acquaintance a few days ago. He is Jock Shanley, a former upholsterer and trade union leader, now 83 years old and retired to a suburb near where I work in north London, where he reads, watches TV, and leafs through Marxism Today, wondering facetiously whether he is the only Marxist left in Britain. Shanley is happy to be described as a ‘proletarian philosopher’. His acquaintance with philosophy began when, as an apprentice in Aberdeen in the early 1920s, he attended university extramural classes in economics. Of the theories surveyed in the course, the only one which made sense to him was Marxism, and he plied the tutor with questions about it. The tutor first reacted by accusing Shanley of being a ‘plant’ from the National Council of Labour Colleges, a Marxist organisation for independent working-class education, of which Shanley had not in fact heard at that time. But eventually the tutor was sufficiently pleased with Shanley to arrange for him to be offered a scholarship to Aberdeen University, on the understanding that he would spend two years working for the Liberal Party once he got his degree. Shanley rejected that offer and, with a grant from the Amalgamated Union of Upholsterers, spent two years (1924–6) as a full-time student at the Central Labour College, the residential counterpart of the NCLC, in Earls Court, London. It was there that he learned the

125


ideas about materialism and dialectics by which he still organises his life and thought. As he talked to me about his analysis of current politics— Reagan’s raids on Libya, the British Communists’ amnesia about the working class—he constantly referred to its philosophical foundations, playing back sections from an indexed taperecording of key philosophical quotations from Marx and Engels, and paying homage to Tommy Jackson as ‘the proletarian philosopher of the 1920s and 1930s, whose wit I cannot match’. Shanley does not ‘believe in philosophy’, however; he regards himself as an ‘anti-philosophical philosopher’. But his anti-philosophy, he is convinced, is indispensable for enlightened and effective social and political action.1 My own opinions, for what they are worth, do not disagree with Shanley’s. The embarrassment is that they don’t correspond to them either. If I have more patience with the intricacies of technical philosophy, this may merely reflect the luxurious ideology of a professional; so too may my belief that philosophy can validly and valuably lead to utter uncertainty, rather than to firm conviction. But it would be facile to discard the problem by trying to separate popular from academic philosophy, and praising the former for its vital engagement with reality, whilst scorning the decadent aestheticism of the latter. For, on the one hand, popular philosophies may turn out to be modelled mainly on academic ones; and on the other, academic philosophies characteristically involve an image, a ‘wild idea’ as Hegel put it, of something called ‘the people’.2 The idea of an autonomous ‘popular philosophy’, therefore, may be no more than a wishful projection of the academic imagination.

VINDICTIVE ARTISANS It seems obvious that philosophy has traditionally been antidemocratic. In the Republic, Socrates conjures up a lurid vision of what would happen if ordinary craftspeople were permitted to ‘take a leap out of their trades into philosophy’. Such artisanphilosophers might be ‘the cleverest hands at their own miserable crafts’; but if they dabbled in philosophy they would be no better than a ‘bald little tinker’ who comes into money and ‘takes a bath and puts on a new coat’, grotesquely fancying that he might be

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able ‘to marry his master’s daughter’. For the dignity of philosophy, according to Socrates, has an attraction even for those who are unable to understand it—‘whose natures are imperfect and whose souls are cramped and maimed by their meannesses, as their bodies are by their trades and crafts’.3 But Socrates’s attitude is not unambiguous: if he associated sophistry with ‘the public’, he also went out of his way to demonstrate, in the Meno, the innate wisdom of a slave. And Christian high culture has often elaborated this sort of story into resonant fables about enfeebled learning being revived on its death-bed by self-taught peasants, or pure fools, or street-wise kids, amazing their sophisticated seniors by their information or their uncluttered insight. The original is presumably Luke’s story of the 12year-old Jesus running away from his artisan home, to be found three days later ‘in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions’ so that ‘all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers’.4 Such intellectual David-and-Goliath stories must have helped thousands of outsiders to conceive and even to fulfil an ambition of entering into an intellectual elite—like Dirk Rembrantsz, the Dutch cobbler and amateur astronomer who, after much discouragement, won acceptance as part of Descartes’ circle;5 or AntonWilhelm Amo, the Ashanti slave who made a career for himself in eighteenth-century German academic philosophy.6 But there will always be a mean-minded suspicion that people moved by such ambitions are just social climbers—traitors to their class, not champions of it. After all, stories which celebrate and romanticise the wisdom of outsiders or the oppressed are standard elements of elite cultures, rather than straightforward alternatives to them. They are versions, in fact, of pastorals—that is to say, of idealised stories which, as William Empson put it, are ‘about’ the people, but not ‘by’ or ‘for’ them.7 Anyone who might be thought to ‘represent’ the people in such a scenario will naturally be suspected of betraying them. But during ‘the scientific revolution’, things began to change. It became possible to give a militant and vindictive interpretation to the role of the artisan-philosopher and to make it more proletarian than pastoral. Francis Bacon attempted to rewrite the history of philosophy by praising the down-to-earth artisanal practicality of the pre-Socratic philosophers at the expense not only of the Sophists but also of Plato and Aristotle with all their ‘professorial


pomp’.8 A possible model for the heroic Baconian ‘workman’ was Bernard Palissy, a sixteenth-century Parisian potter whose quest for a perfect white glaze led him to write and lecture in Paris about his technical discoveries, in gleeful rivalry with the official philosophers. Palissy introduced himself to his readers as follows: How can a man understand and discuss the workings of nature if he has not read the Latin books of the Philosophers? So it might be asked of me, for I prove by experiments that the theories of many philosophers are fallacious…. You will learn more about natural philosophy from the instances contained in this book than you could learn in fifty years reading the theories of the ancient philosophers.9 In many ways, it is the same voice, more than two centuries later, which heralds a brave new world of working-class socialist revolution. In the Jura in 1807, Charles Fourier (1772–1837) hailed the imminent demise of two and a half millennia of misbegotten philosophical time-wasting: To complete the humiliation of these modern Titans, God has willed that they should be confronted by an explorer who is a stranger to the sciences, and that the theory of universal movement should end up as the property of a man who can hardly even read or write. It is a mere shopassistant who is going to destroy all those libraries of political and moral philosophy, the despicable fruit of charlatanries ancient and modern…. This will not be the first time that God has made use of the lowly in order to humble the proud, or that he has chosen a man of extreme obscurity to deliver an all-important message to the world. Fourier saw himself as an outsider whose destiny was to dispose of ‘the idiocies of the philosophers’ at last. I—who know nothing about the mechanism of ideas and have never read a word of Locke or Condillac—haven’t I had sufficient ideas to be able to discover the entire system of universal movement?


After twenty-five centuries, he declared, ‘nothing remains for the philosophers but confusion and despair’. Do we really have to deck ourselves in long black mourning robes in order to inform the political and moral philosophers that their fatal hour is sounding, and that their vast libraries of books are all going to sink into nothingness; that Plato, Seneca, Rousseau, Voltaire and the rest, with all their choruses of doubt, ancient and modern, are going to be swept away by the great river of oblivion?10 There are some striking ambivalences, if not paradoxes, about the role which Fourier designs for himself here: the proletarian who is uncontaminated by official philosophy, and determined both to excel in it and to overthrow it. The character was to have hundreds, if not thousands, of real-life embodiments in nineteenthand twentieth-century Europe and America. The most notable, probably, is Joseph Dietzgen (1828–88), the Rhineland tanner and Social-Democrat whose name became a byword for ‘proletarian philosophy’ from St Petersburg to Chicago and New York, Glasgow, Liverpool, South Wales, the Netherlands and on to Petrograd again.11 There were also fictional versions, such as Earnest Everhard, the exigently named ‘proletarian philosopher’ hero of Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908). The proletarian philosophers are robustly evolutionist, materialist, and socialist; what is hard to make out is why they saw their revolutionary project as requiring them to pay any attention at all to philosophy. Why didn’t they just ignore it, as one of the most insignificant of all the elements of the old immoral world?

PHILOSOPHY AND HERO-WORSHIP The history of philosophy is not just a matter of doctrines, positions, and arguments. It also involves the aspirations, the passions, and the disappointments of those who set their heart on being a philosopher, even though they may have only a remote idea of what such an existence might mean. Philosophy’s past, in other words, belongs not only to intellectual history, but equally to a field which might be called history of intellectuals. This deals with organic intellectuals as well as traditional ones; with autodi-


dacts and non-academics, whether plebeian, petty-bourgeois, middle-class or patrician; and with women as well as men, children as well as adults. The history of intellectuals is not a wholly positive discipline: its subject-matter includes idealised and unreal figures which people fall in love with, and hate, and aspire to embody in themselves or impress upon others. It deals with ‘subjective careers’ as much as with objective ones; the history of intellectuals, in short, is a story not only of facts and probabilities, but of dreams and fantasies too: adventures of humiliation and exultant hero-worship, rather than accumulations of impassive theory. A main source of information for any history of intellectuals is provided by the regulations of academic institutions. These certainly help to explain the quite special prestige which has often been associated with the idea of philosophy. In the universities of late medieval Europe, the term ‘philosophy’ referred paradigmatically to three texts of Aristotle—the Physics, the Ethics (Nicomachean), and the Metaphysics. Under the title of ‘the three philosophies’ these had been added to the older ‘seven liberal arts’ to complete the provision of the arts faculties. This ideal curriculum had an essentially temporal sense: philosophy was to be studied after the seven arts, and it was upon an examination in philosophy that graduation to the rank of Master in the arts faculty would depend. Only after that could you become a student in one of the small ‘professional’ faculties—traditionally, law, theology or medicine. Thus philosophy was the name of a stage, rather than a subject: it was the culmination, normally the last year or two, of a liberal or pre-professional education. There was the same ladder for teachers too: they would begin by lecturing on junior subjects, the philosophy class being reserved for the senior and best paid masters. Thus the figure of ‘the philosopher’ was institutionalised as a kind of supreme symbol of liberal culture, a cynosure for the ambitions of all those wishing to improve their mind for its own sake. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, increasingly sharp distinctions were made between ‘secondary’ and university education—distinctions which involved both epistemological discriminations between levels of knowledge, and moral ones between levels of ‘maturity’. The philosophy class found itself torn in both directions. In Germany and especially in France it became mainly secondary; in Scotland and America mainly university; and other countries developed intermediate arrangements. Philosophy’s posi-


tion at the divide between secondary and university education seems to have enhanced its popular image as the crown of liberal culture. At the same time, it encouraged directly political hopes to be attached to it—from the conscientious concern with the propagation of civic virtue in Scottish and American philosophy classes, through the famously progressive rhetoric of the French philosophes, and the quasimilitary organisation of French philosophy teaching in the nineteenth century, to the radical teenage dreams of Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling, looking forward to the ‘revolution that will be made by philosophy’. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in other words, the idea of philosophy was associated in many people’s minds not only with intellectual majesty, but with political power as well.

THE PEOPLE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS The values and procedures actually promoted by the philosophy masters in their classrooms, however, did not entirely correspond to their splendid and dignified public image. The purpose of the classical philosophy class, as defined by its traditional place in the curriculum, was to reflect on the earlier years of the students’ education, to form a unified view of them, and to draw out their implications for the conduct of life. There would also be classroom discussions based on textbooks and the master’s lectures, and a background of reference to a philosophical canon, which was established in its present form in the seventeenth century: a set of classics organised into a three-part history of ancient (pagan); medieval (pre-Renaissance Christian); and modern (eclectic). These factors placed a very significant constraint on the kind of education given in the philosophy class, beneath and beyond the differences of explicit doctrine amongst leading authors which are the stock-in-trade of orthodox histories of philosophy. For the philosophical canon has a structure which sets it apart from those of other academic subjects. The difference is that the philosophy class is willing to treat its classics as erroneous as well as indispensable; indeed it can be their exemplary failure to live up to philosophical ideals which makes them canonical. Hence a main task of the philosophy master would be to use the classics not as examples to be emulated but as warnings about the terrible worm


of abstraction or ‘metaphysics’ which always threatened to attack sound thinking and reduce it to the inanity of a philosophical system.12 The peculiarly negative character of the philosophical canon has given the philosophy class an attractive tinge of diffidence, and a tendency towards anti-academic populism. The philosophy class has had the vocation of undermining academic pretentiousness and intellectual vainglory, and has hence been capable of seeing itself as the people’s fifth column in the academy, the professoriate’s enemy within. So Malebranche’s Search after Truth (1675– 8) is actually a guidebook to scholarly error, and even includes a grudging commendation of the minds of women and children, whose exclusion from academic institutions was supposed to keep them free of metaphysical debility.13 The same theme was taken up, at least in prefaces and asides, by many of the celebrated philosophical writers of the eighteenth century. In 1710, for example, Berkeley presented his own Principles as offering the educated the opportunity to rejoin ‘the illiterate bulk of mankind that walk the high-road of plain, common sense’.14 In the Treatise, 30 years later, Hume explained how it was philosophy’s task to expose the ‘fictions’ of ‘false philosophy’ and lead its errant students, humbler and wiser, back to common sense; for, as he put it, ‘the true philosophy approaches nearer to the sentiments of the vulgar, than to those of a mistaken knowledge’.15 The same theme was enthusiastically promoted by the self-styled ‘Common Sense Philosophy’ of Reid and Stewart, which soon spread not only to America but to France as well.16 And Kant’s case for the public usefulness of philosophy classes was that they would show up the ‘arrogant pretensions’ through which scholars impose their ‘endless controversies’ on ‘the great mass of humanity’.17 It is not surprising, therefore, that the philosophy masters who have been most revered and adored within the philosophical world have been celebrated for their hesitant sincerity and their tongue-tied self-doubt, rather than for their positive doctrines. Even Hegel was famed for his perplexed stammering when he lectured. And Jules Lachelier, who dominated the highly centralised national corps of philosophy masters in France at the end of the nineteenth century, was noted not for his magnificence but for his sweet simplicity. Emile Boutroux recollected his teaching as follows:


He would size up the difficulties. He would stop to think and cast around. He hesitated, started up again, and then stopped. One day he said: ‘I think the best thing for you to do, will be to forget everything I have ever told you.’18 Such stories of heroically diffident philosophy masters suggest that the profession has been marked by a horror of intellectual assertiveness: their patron saint would not be Aquinas, but rather Socrates; not Pangloss, but Candide. Their hero would not be the robed professor, but the good plain artisan and man of the people, and their politics would be not elitist but pastorally democratic.

SILENT PHILOSOPHERS: THE CASE OF ENGLAND The institutional situation of philosophy means that the philosophical class was bound to look very different from the outside than from the inside. Outsiders would think of it as majestically concentrating all the virtue of liberal culture within itself, or at least as pretending to do so, and would expect the philosophy masters to be eloquent, confident and superb. But viewed from within, the class would harbour an upside-down intellectual culture of self-deprecation, hesitancy, and pastoral democracy. Youngsters moving up into the philosophy class could be expected to experience some disappointment; but the situation of real outsiders—‘proletarians’ like Fourier in the Jura, or Dietzgen in the Rhineland, or Everhard in Jack London—was even more awkward. As working people with a longing for science, or poetry, or music, or art, they were desperate to get away from the ‘simplicity’ and ‘purity’ and ‘common sense’ in which, as a class, they were supposed to be submerged; they did not wish to glory in the dignity of labour, whatever bourgeois socialists or democratic philosophy masters might say.19 And by focusing their desires on philosophy, they were embracing a particularly acute form of this contradiction. They might hope to take the subject by storm, as the pinnacle of the academic culture of an oppressive ruling class; they might hope to commandeer and transform it in the name of the dispossessed. But then, owing to the sceptical, pastoral and anti-academic tendencies already implicit in philosophy, they would find the philosophers either welcoming them and


applauding them for their good sense, or criticising them for straying from the paths of the masses whom they claimed to represent. (I am referring to a predicament peculiar to philosophy, not repeating the old and unconvincing story about academic knowledge inevitably ‘incorporating’ its benficiaries into the ruling elite.) I shall now offer an illustration from the history of English philosophy. Philosophy classes of the kind common in Scotland, Europe and America in the eighteenth century were not established in England till the second half of the nineteenth century.20 The first English professional philosophy journal, Mind, introduced itself in 1876 with the observation that philosophy in England was ‘distinguished from the philosophical thought of other countries by what may be called its unprofessional character’. The editor, George Robertson, went on to explain that ‘except in Scotland … few British thinkers have been public teachers with philosophy for the business of their lives’. But when he resigned the editorship 15 years later, he was able to observe that ‘the avowed “professors” are now there in no small number, south as well as north of the border, and in the sister island’.21 From the beginning, English professional philosophers have exhibited that streak of hesitancy which is such an important (and amiable) part of traditional philosophical institutions. The first of them was T.H.Green (1836–82), who transformed the lives of dozens of influential students at Oxford by his strenuous social idealism. He was notoriously hard to understand when he lectured, but his ‘speculative impulse’ was said to glow so intensely that ‘when it touched minds of the same temper, it struck fire’. The ‘enthusiasm’ of his students was ‘not for any definite project or idea’, but still they all believed ‘in philosophy’, and ‘the belief was not the less real because it was vague’.22 Cambridge soon had several professional philosophers cast from the same mould. James Ward (1843–1925), the first Professor of Mental Philosophy and Logic at the university, was admired by his students (as G.E.Moore recalled) ‘because of his extreme sincerity and conscientiousness, but partly also because of his melancholy. He was a man who found things very difficult…. He talked; and, while he talked, he was obviously thinking hard about the subject he was talking of and searching for the best way of putting what he wanted to convey.’ F.W.Maitland recalled his teacher Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900) as ‘a supremely


great teacher…. I sometimes think that the one and only prejudice that Sidgwick had was a prejudice against his own results.’ And Moore said of his teacher McTaggart (1866–1925) that ‘what influenced me most was his constant insistence on clearness…on asking the question “What does this mean?”…. What immense pains he always took to get clear, even though he did not always succeed’.23 G.E.Moore is the paragon of the second generation of professional philosophers in England. Moore was a silent man. Quentin Bell recalls a discussion of ‘Moore’s famous taciturnity: he was accused of silencing a generation. “I didn’t want to be silent,” he replied. “I couldn’t think of anything to say”’.24 Roy Harrod said that Moore ‘was the mildest and simplest of men…. If the veneration which his young admirers accorded him matched that due to a saint, we need not think that they were mistaken’.25 Leonard Woolf described Moore as a ‘simple’ and a ‘silly’ of ‘extraordinary beauty of character and of mind’. His achievement, according to Woolf, consisted in ‘substituting for the religious and philosophical nightmares, delusions, hallucinations, in which Jehovah, Christ, and St Paul, Plato, Kant and Hegel had entangled us, the fresh air and pure light of plain commonsense’.26 On the evidence of these testimonials, the orthodox idea of Moore as a revolutionary is extremely near-sighted. On the contrary, the intellectual virtues which drew such praise on Moore are precisely those which had always been fostered by the classic philosophy class; the words of admiration which he evoked from his acquaintances are the same as those which had been used to describe ideal philosophy masters for two centuries and more: common sense, simplicity, and, above all, silence. The continuity extends to political attitudes too. Moore did not give direct expression to political views, in spite of his connection with well known opinion-holders like Woolf, Keynes and Russell. But his philosophical ideals involved the traditional philosophical reverence for ‘the people’. He gave expression to it, for instance, in a diary entry in 1893, when he was still a student. He is describing a meeting in Cambridge addressed by a member of the London County Council: He was a genuine workman, like Tom Mann, but not fiery, or with a strong understanding and great power of speech. He was simple and gentle, as could be…. He was a steady


Liberal and Progressive; and I could not help thinking much better than before of the London labourers, seeing that they chose him as their candidate.27 It is striking that what Moore loved in this ‘genuine workman’ was precisely those qualities for which Moore himself was to be loved: simplicity, gentleness and quiet reticence. Presumably, though, the councillor would have been unhappy with the circle of identifications which Moore made: he would have expected a philosopher to be more impressive than Moore, and would surely have been uneasy at the patronising pastoralism through which he gained credit for the people he represented purely through his reassuring lack of ‘a strong understanding and great power of speech’.

THE PHILOSOPHER OF THE PEOPLE: PROLETARIAN OR PASTORAL? My argument so far has been that, if you consider philosophy as a European institution going back to the seventeenth century and beyond, rather than as a set of universal doctrines going back to Socrates, you will notice a constantly repeated (but seldom remembered) set of themes, images, and words, connecting the ideals of the philosophy class to the supposed virtues of ‘the people’: common sense, simplicity, and a silent reproach against excessive theory. This ‘pastorally democratic’ attitude, as I have called it, prepares a perplexing reception for any members of the ‘people’ who manage to force an entrance into the philosophical world. Now there is a distinction, as has already been noted, between the relatively docile, pastoral figure of ‘the philosopher of the people’, and the vindictive and militant ‘proletarian philosophers’ such as Fourier, Dietzgen, or Earnest Everhard. But this distinction between proletarian and pastoral may not go very deep. If the proletarian philosopher refuses to play the part of sweet simplicity in the philosopher’s pastoral romance, he will be consigned to a mock-heroic subplot, like the tinker in Plato who gives himself airs and hopes to marry his master’s daughter. The basic lesson was pointed out half a century ago by William Empson, when he examined the idea that ‘proletarian’ literature differed from


pastoral in that it was not only ‘about’ the people, but ‘by’ and ‘for’ them too. The difficulty with ‘proletarian literature’, he confessed, was that ‘when it comes off I find I am taking it as pastoral literature’.28 The proletarian philosopher, I think, is always in danger of reverting to pastoral type. What begins as a subversion of pastoral, ends as another version of it. Of course no philosophers—whether popular or proletarian or professional—are entirely confined by the plots I have described. Certainly Jock Shanley isn’t. I am sure he will rebuke me for the ideas I have tried to set out here, as he has rebuked me in the past, for what he sees as my typically academic evasions, all part of the ‘world-wide search for a Marx without dialectics and even a doubtful materialist’. ‘What an excellent self-portrait you have written,’ he told me; ‘you have studied everything and understood nothing.’ But fortunately, he went on, the world is still being transformed—‘in a real, as distinct from a philosophic, sense… [by] practical men who believe that the “positive outcome of philosophy” is science, though they have never heard of Dietzgen— or for that matter Marx.’ I respectfully challenge you—write a positive explanation of your own philosophy and see where you get to. At least we Proletarian philosophers failed while trying…. You may feel I am rude. Well, I come from a robust school. The University (Aberdeen) I failed to enter had a motto: ‘They say, what say they, let them say.’ That is my reply to my critics. A few weeks later, Shanley wrote again: As I write, I give my attention partially to a T.V. programme. Some people are tidying up Highgate Cemetery, cutting down the undergrowth, exposing the tombs of the Victorians, and making the cemetery a pleasant place for the intelligentsia of Hampstead and Highgate to take a stroll. I think you do just that, in philosophy, with your account of ‘Proletarian Philosophers’, but, alas, you only dig amongst our dead bones—our tombs—and miss the spirit in which we lived. Sad! But life goes on: the crisis Marx foretold, in Chapter 32 of Capital, is upon us. Except that the working class has not yet found the unity he saw as necessary. It will be built, I


expect, by proletarian philosophers of whom we know nothing at present. I do not expect the philosophy, or the practice, will mature in our Academic Institutions—if British Capitalism lets them exist that long…. Only ten years ago I would be trying to break into your philosophy class to challenge them to state what philosophy they have found to challenge the dead—as I am politically— the ‘Proletarian Philosophers’.29 I really do not know how to respond to that challenge. Every time I read it, it reduces me to silence.

NOTES This chapter was first published in Radical Philosophy 44 (Autumn 1988) 1 Jock Shanley, interviewed, 25 April 1986; letter to the author, 19 June 1986. 2 ‘Die wüste Vorstellung des Volkes’, Philosophy of Right, Para. 279. 3 Republic, VI, 495 d-e (Jowett translation). 4 Luke, II, 46–7. 5 See Baillet, Vie de M.Descartes, II, 555; cited in Descartes, Oeuvres, eds Adam and Tannery, V. 265–7; XII, 470, 480–1. 6 See Paulin Hountondji, African Philosophy, London, Hutchinson, 1983, 111–30. 7 William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral, London, Chatto & Windus, 1935, 6. 8 Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon, From Magic to Science, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968, 52. 9 Bernard Palissy, Discours admirables (1580), cited in Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon, 8. 10 Charles Fourier, ‘Théorie des Quatre Mouvements’ in Oeuvres Complètes, 3rd edn, Paris, 1846, I, 102, xxxv, 191, 15, 14. 11 See Jonathan Rée, Proletarian Philosophers: Problems in Socialist Culture in Britain, 1900–1940, Oxford University Press, 1984. 12 So Marcuse went wrong when he suggested that ‘academic sadomasochism, self-humiliation and self-denunciation’ were introduced into philosophy by Wittgenstein and Austin; they are, rather, a consequence of structural constraints on the philosophy class. (See Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964, 179.) 13 Nicolas Malebranche, De la recherche de la vérite (1675–8), ed. Genevieve Rodis-Lewis, Paris, Vrin, 1946, III v. 14 George Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction, I.


15 David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), ed. P.H.Nidditch, Oxford University Press, 1978, 222–4. 16 In 1833, Victor Cousin claimed that ‘there can be hardly any college (collège royal) in France which does not teach Reid and Stewart’. See Nicholas Phillipson, ‘The Pursuit of Virtue in Scottish University Education: Dugald Stewart and Scottish Moral Philosophy in the Enlightenment’, in Nicholas Phillipson, ed., Universities, Society and the Future, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1983, 82–101, 84. 17 Critique of Pure Reason, A viii; B xxxiii. 18 Cited in André Canivez, Jules Lagneau, Professeur de Philosophie, Strasbourg, 1965, 257. 19 See Jacques Rancière, La Nuit des proletaries, Paris, Fayard, 1981; introduction trans. as ‘Proletarian Nights’, Radical Philosophy 31, summer 1982, 10–13; and Le Philosophe et ses pauvres, Paris, Fayard, 1983. 20 See Jonathan Rée, ‘Philosophy as an Academic Discipline: the changing place of philosophy in an Arts Education’, Studies in Higher Education, III, 1978, 5–23. 21 Mind I, 1876, 1; XVI, 1891, 557–60. 22 R.H.Nettleship, Thomas Hill Green, A Memoir, Oxford, 1906, 97. 23 Paul Levy, Moore: G.E.Moore and the Cambridge Apostles (1979), Oxford University Press, 1981, 59, 82, 108. 24 Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf, London, Hogarth, 1972, II, 215. 25 Levy, op. cit., 10. 26 Leonard Woolf, An Autobiography (1960–69), Oxford University Press, 1980, I, 40, 87, 93; II, 405. 27 Levy, op. cit., 51. 28 Empson, op. cit., 6, 21. 29 Jock Shanley, letters to the author, February and April 1984.

7

MARXISM AND THE DIALECTICAL METHOD A critique of G.A.Cohen Sean Sayers The dialectical method, Marx insisted, was at the basis of his account of society. In 1858, in a letter to Engels, he wrote: In the method of treatment the fact that by mere accident I again glanced through Hegel’s Logic has been of great service to me…. If there should ever be the time for such work again, I would greatly like to make accessible to the ordinary human intelligence, in two or three printer’s sheets, what is rational in the method which Hegel discovered.1 But he never did find the time for this work. As a result, Marx’s dialectical method and the ways in which it draws on Hegel’s philosophy remain among the most controversial and least well understood aspects of Marx’s work. My purpose in this paper is to explain some of the basic presuppositions of this method and to bring out their significance for Marx’s theories. I shall do so by focusing critically on G.A.Cohen’s account of Marxism in Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence.2 In this important and influential work, Cohen contrives to give an account of Marxism in entirely non-dialectical—indeed, in anti-dialectical—terms. By criticising Cohen’s views I will seek to show that the dialectical method is the necessary basis for an adequate theory of history and an indispensable part of Marx’s thought. The major purpose of Cohen’s book is to develop and defend a particular interpretation of historical materialism, the Marxist theory of historical development. Cohen claims that his account is an ‘old-fashioned’ and a ‘traditional’ one (p.x); and, indeed, in certain respects it is. For, in contrast to the tendency of much 140

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recent Marxist writing, Cohen strongly emphasises the materialistic and deterministic character of Marx’s theory of history. He insists that the development of the productive forces is the primary motive force for historical change, and portrays Marxism as a form of technological determinism. However, there are various different forms of materialism, not all of them Marx’s. In particular, it has been a standard part of ‘traditional’ Marxist philosophy to criticise mechanical forms of materialism and to insist that a dialectical form of materialism is needed in order to comprehend the complexity and richness of concrete historical processes. Cohen manages to ignore this aspect of the traditional picture almost entirely, and what little discussion he devotes to dialectic is hostile and dismissive. The basis of this hostility is not far to seek. It is revealed by another major purpose of Cohen’s book. For, as well as presenting an interpretation of historical materialism, he is attempting to vindicate the analytical method in philosophy; and although he does not say it in so many words, it is apparent that he regards this as irreconcilable with the dialectical aspects of Marx’s work. Cohen is right about this, I shall argue: dialectical philosophy does, indeed, involve methods and assumptions which are ultimately incompatible with those of the analytic approach. However, against Cohen I will argue that dialectic is the necessary basis for a satisfactory theory of history and an indispensable part of Marx’s thought. Cohen’s use of the analytic method and his rejection of dialectic leads him to give a systematically distorted account of Marx’s theory of history, which is neither faithful to Marx’s own thought, nor adequate for an understanding of the concrete reality of history. This is what I shall try to show.

THE ANALYTIC VS. THE DIALECTICAL METHOD What, then is Cohen’s analytical method? Unfortunately, Cohen himself never spells this out, although it is an important part of his purpose to defend and vindicate it. First, it should be noted that a philosophy can be described as ‘analytical’ in two distinct senses. One may mean by this term simply that the philosophy is part of the twentieth-century tradition of analytical philosophy. Cohen’s work is certainly ‘analytical’ in this sense, and this is immediately apparent from its outward style: the use of formal


logical notation, abstract symbols, numbered sentences, and so forth. Cohen himself talks of ‘the standards of clarity and rigour which distinguish twentieth-century analytical philosophy’ (p.ix). However, these virtues are not peculiar to twentieth-century analytical philosophy; indeed, they are not even particularly characteristic of it. Anyone who has read a representative selection of work in this tradition will be well aware that, all too often, it is needlessly obscure in style, cloudy in thought and not noticeably more rigorous in argument than the work of any other major school of philosophy. Clarity and rigour are the virtues of good philosophy, of good thought in all fields; they are no monopoly of analytical philosophy. Cohen’s work has these virtues to a high degree; but that is because it is good philosophy, not because it is in the analytical tradition. Twentieth-century analytical philosophy has been a diverse tradition and it is not easy to make generalisations about it. However, that is not my purpose here, since Cohen’s philosophy is also ‘analytical’ in a further and deeper sense. It is analytical not merely in its style and form, but in its very presuppositions and content. And it is analytical in a very traditional sense. For, like the philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Cohen relies on the method of analysis. He insists upon analysing the whole that he is considering into its component parts. He insists upon separating and isolating the different elements and aspects of the given concrete totality, and considering and defining these in isolation. The effect of this method is to produce a fragmented and atomised picture of reality. Underlying this method, as Cohen makes clear, is what could be called a logic of external relations.3 For, according to Cohen, things are what they are, and have their essential nature in themselves, quite independently of the relations in which they stand. In general, things—or ‘terms’ in Cohen’s language—are not affected by their relations or context. In other words, relations are external to, and independent of, the things or terms related: ‘the terms bound by relations do not belong to the structure these relations constitute’ (p. 35). One is reminded of Locke’s view that relation is ‘not contained in the real existence of things, but [is] something extraneous and superinduced’.4 Things are what they are; they have their being purely in themselves and quite independently of the context of their relations. ‘Everything is what it is and not another thing’—Bishop Butler’s


slogan5 admirably sums up the logic of this sort of analytical approach. This logic is rejected by dialectical philosophy. Dialectic insists that in order to understand the concrete nature of things it is vital to see them in the context of their interconnections with other things within a wider whole. For dialectic, concrete and particular things are always and essentially related, connected to and interacting with other things within a larger totality. This context of relations is internal and essential to the nature of things, not external and accidental. By contrast, the analytical approach, with its logic of external relations, has the effect of removing things from their context and producing an abstract account of them. It has the effect of fragmenting the world into a disconnected series of atomic particulars and, thereby, producing a mechanical account of reality. To substantiate and illustrate these points let us now turn to Marx’s theory of history and Cohen’s account of it.

FORCES AND RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION Cohen’s account of Marxism is very closely based on Marx’s 1859 ‘Preface’. In part, this reads as follows: In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis, on which arises 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.6 An important and valuable part of Cohen’s work consists in the careful and detailed accounts he gives of the various theoretical terms that Marx here uses. However, although Cohen’s analyses


of the meanings of particular terms are often very helpful and instructive, the general picture that emerges of Marx’s theory is more questionable. For example, Cohen’s discussion of the notion of the productive forces is full, useful and important. The productive forces of a society are composed mainly of the means of production (i.e. instruments of production and raw materials) and labour power (i.e. ‘the productive faculties of producing agents: strength, skill, knowledge, inventiveness etc.’ (p. 32)). The relations of production are the economic relations of society. The set of economic relations prevailing in a particular society constitutes its economic structure, its economic basis. So far so good. However, Cohen insists that forces of production and relations of production be regarded as entirely distinct and separate from each other. The productive forces are one thing, the relations of production another: ‘productive forces are not part of the economic structure’ (p. 28); ‘production relations alone and not productive forces constitute the economic structure’ (p. 29). The separation of the different elements and aspects of society is certainly an essential part of any scientific account of it. Analysis—the distinction of different things—is without doubt an indispensable feature of all understanding and all knowledge. Dialectic does not deny this. Indeed, dialectic goes further and insists that analysis should not be regarded as a merely intellectual and mental process, as a purely conceptual and logical activity, the work of thought alone. For in the concrete historical process itself, different aspects and features separate themselves. The division and conflict between forces and relations of production, for example, is a real historical distinction, a part of the process of actual economic development; and only subsequently does it come to be grasped and reflected accurately in economic thought. Nothing is cloudier and less helpful than the attempt to merge all distinctions together and insist that, in reality, ‘all is one’. ‘As though’, in Marx’s words, ‘this separation had forced its way from the textbook into real life and not, on the contrary, from real life into the textbooks’.7 Dialectic does not deny the reality of distinctions, nor the need for them in thought. But it does insist that in concrete reality different and opposed things are also in unity. It rejects the exclusive, rigid, absolute, either/or distinctions of analytical thought. In particular, forces of production and relations of production are


different and conflicting aspects of a single process: the productive activity of people in society. These different aspects exist in unity. Their unity as well as their difference must be recognised if their nature is to be properly understood. Thus productive forces are productive forces only in the context of certain relations of production. A machine, for example, requires people to build, operate and maintain it—only given these is it a productive force. A machine is a productive force only in the context of certain relations of production in which it is employable productively. No doubt it is possible to remove a machine entirely from its surrounding social relations and consider it purely abstractly and in isolation. This is what Cohen does in his account of productive forces. But then one is no longer considering it as a productive force, but merely in its abstract material aspect, as a physical object. A machine is regarded in this way by the physicist or the engineer. This is perfectly valid and legitimate, if your interest is confined to its material properties, since a machine is indeed a physical object—a certain configuration of metal and other materials—and remains so, whatever the social context in which it is placed. The historian, however, is interested in the machine not merely as a physical object, but as an instrument of social production, as a productive force. And a machine becomes a productive force only in certain social contexts, only in certain relations of production. These relations are essential—that is to say, internal and not merely external—to its being as a productive force.8 Similar remarks apply to labour-power, the other major constituent of the productive forces. Labour-power—‘the productive faculties of producing agents’ (p. 32)—cannot be understood if it is abstracted and isolated from the social relations in which it is exercised. Man is an essentially social creature, and his powers and capacities are essentially social. In particular, to consider labour power in its abstract and isolated individual form is to blind oneself to one of the most significant means for its development: social cooperation. Cooperative production—that is, socially coordinated, as opposed to mere individual, production— not only increases the labour power of the individual in a variety of ways, but also brings a ‘new power’ into being: ‘the social productive power of labour or the productive power of social labour’.9 As Marx says, ‘not only have we here an increase in the productive power of the individual, by means of cooperation, but


the creation of a new power, namely the collective power of the masses.’10 This new collective power is something more than the sum of its parts. An observation by Napoleon, cited by Engels, well illustrates this. The French cavalry were poor riders, but well organised and disciplined; the Mamelukes, on the other hand, were excellent horsemen, but undisciplined. The result, according to Napoleon, was that Two Mamelukes were undoubtedly more than a match for three Frenchmen; 100 Mamelukes were equal to 100 Frenchmen; 300 Frenchmen could generally beat 300 Mamelukes, and 1000 Frenchmen defeated 1500 Mamelukes.11 Labour-power cannot be defined in isolation from social relations, since social cooperation itself is a powerful productive force. Modern labour, in particular, is essentially social labour. In engaging in it, man develops his powers and capacities as social powers and capacities, for ‘when the labourer cooperates systematically with others he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species’.12 So, here too, the conclusion is that productive forces and relations of production cannot be entirely separated and abstracted from each other. The productive forces are what they are only in the context of the appropriate relations of production. These relations are thus internal and essential to them, not purely external and distinct.

NATURE AND SOCIETY Cohen supports his account of the forces and relations of production with a very interesting discussion of the distinction between nature and society. According to Cohen, ‘The… distinction between forces and relations of production is, in Marx, one of a set of contrasts between nature and society…. The matter or content of society is nature, whose form is the social form’ (p. 98). Cohen’s account of these contrasts is among the most valuable and illuminating parts of his book. However, here again, there is the same analytic tendency to make absolute and rigid distinctions between these opposites where a recognition of their essen-


tial relations and unity is also needed. Cohen, in fact, sees that in concrete circumstances society and nature always exist in unity. However, his method and logic preclude him from incorporating this insight into his theory; and he insists that these aspects are logically or ‘conceptually’ distinct and must, in thought, be held apart. Viewed physically, production appears stripped of its social form…. Production in its asocial aspect is ‘material production’, this being the content…of production. And that content may be described in illuminating abstraction from the form with which it is integrated…. So if we look through the social form we discern something conceptually separate from it:…material production. (pp. 98–9) It is certainly vital to make a distinction between the material and the social. Moreover, Cohen is right to stress that Marxism, as a form of materialism, sees the material level as basic and as the primary determinant of historical development. But Cohen makes it an either/or matter. Society and nature, form and content, are portrayed as exclusive opposites, with the social form made entirely external to and logically independent of the material content. The dialectical view, by contrast, is that these opposites, as well as being different and opposed, interact and interpenetrate; and it rejects any rigid antitheses here, ‘as though’, in Marx’s words, ‘these were two separate “things” and man did not always have before him an historical nature and a natural history.’13 At times Cohen himself sees this. For example, he says, The material description captures a society’s underlying nature. In this sense of ‘nature’, nature is of course a product of history, changing in and as a result of social forms. Humanity in social organisation thrusts itself against its environment, altering it and its own human nature, for it develops its own powers and needs in the course of the encounter. (p. 96) But at other times (and these are the more characteristic ones), he ignores this interaction and describes history as a process of


‘adjustment to nature’ (p. 285), as though nature were a purely external and immutable constraint to which society had to conform. This is not a satisfactory way in which to interpret Marxism. Nature and society are not purely external to each other; on the contrary, they interpenetrate and mutually transform each other. Society not only adapts itself to nature, but also, and on an everincreasing scale, society adapts and transforms nature to its needs. The rigid, analytic separation of the natural from the social tends to blind Cohen to these facts. Like Feuerbach, he tends not to see ‘how the sensuous world around him is, not a thing given direct from all eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of industry and the state of society’.14 These problems come out clearly in Cohen’s attempt to assimilate Marx’s theory to that of the Sophists. He writes, Social arrangements cannot alter physical necessities, but social arrangements can be altered. When they are confused with the necessities they arrange, they appear to partake of the immutability of the latter. The Sophist’s distinction between nature and convention is the foundation of all social criticism and Marx’s distinction is a development of it. (p. 107) Physical necessities—if by that is meant the laws of nature— cannot be altered. That is true. But nature can be altered by human activity—it is not ‘immutable’. The development of human productive power enables man to control nature and to overcome the constraints of his environment; not by transcending or abolishing the laws of nature, but by using them. Freedom, in the Marxist view, is based upon ‘the recognition of necessity’.15 For Marx, social revolution is not just a matter of changing the social form on the basis of an unaltered and unalterable nature. The Sophists indeed said: nature is fixed, but human conventions and social forms are alterable. But Marx is profounder than this. He maintains that social forms are not merely ‘conventional’ and not changeable just at will. Definite material conditions of production impose definite social forms, and it is through the development of material conditions that social relations change. Man, through labour, alters nature in accordance with his needs and is, in the process, altered by it. There is an interaction here.


Labour is…a process in which both man and nature participate…. He opposes himself to nature as one of her own forces…in order to appropriate nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature.16 Marx’s social criticism, therefore, has an entirely different basis from that of the Sophists. For Marx, socialism is not an alternative form of society, an ideal which it is possible to realise because social forms are merely conventional and alterable. Socialism, for Marx, is the outcome of a real and present social movement, which is the product of the material forces at work in present, capitalist society. The social criticism he talks of is a material and a practical one. Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.17

RELATIONS AND PROPERTIES At the basis of Cohen’s account of Marxism, as I have emphasized, is the philosophical theory of external relations. It is now time to focus attention upon this theory and to criticise it. According to Cohen, society is made up of people and productive forces. These are the ‘terms’ of society, the substantial entities—the material elements—related by social relations to make up society: ‘persons and productive forces are the only terms bound by production relations’ (p. 31). These relations, Cohen insists, are external to, separate and distinct from, the terms related: ‘the terms bound by relations do not belong to the structure those relations constitute’ (p. 35). Cohen discusses these views with reference to the following passages from Marx. A negro is a negro. He only becomes a slave in certain relations. A cotton-spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cot-


ton. It becomes capital only in certain relations. Torn from these relationships it is no more capital than gold itself is money.18 But Marx also writes, To be a slave or to be a citizen are social determinations, the relationship of man A to man B.19 And also, Capital is not a thing, but rather a definite social production relation, belonging to a definite historical formation of society, which is manifested in a thing.20 Commenting on these passages, Cohen writes, Marx describes capital, slaves, etc., in two divergent ways. On the one hand, he insists that capital is a relation and not, like a machine, a thing; on the other hand, he allows that it may be a thing, for example a machine placed in certain relations…. The two forms of speech are incompatible. (pp. 89–90) He then goes on to argue that it is incorrect to talk of capital, or a slave, as a relation. Capital, he insists, is a particular sort of thing (a machine, say) placed in certain social relations; and, likewise, a slave is a different sort of thing (a person) in certain relations. To make this point, Cohen appeals to the notion of a ‘relational property’. A husband is a man related by marriage to a woman: he is not also a relationship of marriage. Being a husband is a property of that man, one he has in virtue of that relationship, and commonly styled a relational property. Being capital and being a slave are, similarly, relational properties of means of production and men. More specifically they are social relational properties, whereas being means of production and being a man are not. The latter are possessed inde-


pendently of the social form. Remove the social form in thought experiment and those properties persist. (p. 90) Cohen here wants to distinguish ‘relational’ from other properties. The idea is that some properties—those material properties which make a man a man and a machine a machine—are more basic and essential (i.e. internal) than the ‘relational’ properties. The social relations, the social form, that these things assume (slave, capital) are, by contrast, inessential and external. This whole picture needs questioning. Productive forces are productive forces only in the context of the necessary relations of production—in the absence of these they are mere useless objects. A spinning jenny, therefore, is a machine for spinning cotton only given certain relations of production. Transferred to a stone age society it would be a mere physical object of no productive use. Likewise, a stone axe has no place in our society as a productive force but only as a museum exhibit. If, by ‘thought experiment’, the social form is removed from capital, what is left is not a productive force but a mere physical object. Similar arguments apply to the other example discussed by Cohen. People are essentially social animals. Their social relations are not external and inessential to their nature as human beings. This was certainly Marx’s view: The further back we trace the course of history, the more does the individual…appear to be dependent and to belong to a larger whole…. Man is a zoon politikon (social animal) in the most literal sense: he is not only a social animal, but an animal that can be individuated only within society.21 If, by ‘thought experiment’, a human being were entirely removed and abstracted from all his social relationships, he would be unlikely to survive the first few days of infancy; but, even if he did so, he would emerge as a mere animal of the human species, without any individuality or other distinctively human characteristics. The upshot of this discussion is, again, that concrete things exist in relations; and the essential point that dialectic makes is that these relations are not merely external, but internal to the things related. The notion of a ‘relational property’ to which


Cohen appeals is no help to his case, it only confuses the issue. Nonetheless, a word should be said about it since it was introduced by G.E.Moore22 to combat the Hegelian philosophy of internal relations and has since become a standard part of the orthodoxy of analytical philosophy. Relational properties are supposed to be those properties which a thing has simply by virtue of the relations in which it stands to other things; and such properties are contrasted with the nonrelational properties, which are supposed to be intrinsic to a thing, regardless of its relations. The assumption underlying this distinction is our old friend, the doctrine of external relations: the view that relations are extrinsic and external to things. According to this theory, as we have seen, things are what they are and have the essential properties that they have, intrinsically and quite independently of their relations to other things. Thus, the properties which things have in virtue only of their relations are supposed to be merely accidental and inessential properties. A man is a person in himself and essentially; only accidentally does he occupy a particular social role and relate to others. At first sight, this distinction looks simple and clear-cut, but these matters are by no means as straightforward as the advocates of the notion of relational properties suggest. The problem is that all properties are relational; all the properties which things have exist by virtue of their relations. As Hegel says, properties are ‘the determinate relations of the thing to another thing; property exists only as a mode of relationship between them’.23 He gives the following illustration: By properties of herbs, for instance, we understand determinations which not only are proper to something, but are the means whereby this something in its relations with other somethings maintains itself in its own peculiar way, counteracting the alien influences posited in it and making its determinations effective in the other.24 The language Hegel uses here is doubtless strange and unfamiliar, but the idea that he is expressing is surely a clear and a profoundly important one. A thing reveals the particular properties it has only through its relations to other things; indeed, only through its opposition to and negation of them, its ‘counteracting’ them. As Spinoza said, ‘omnis determinatio est negatio’ (all


determination is negation). Only by reflecting light in a certain way does a thing manifest colour; only in and through its mechanical interactions with other bodies does an object manifest mass; only through its relations to other things in space does a thing show its shape, and so on and so forth. In short, all properties are ‘relational’, and the concept of a ‘relational property’ gets us nowhere. But this is not the end of the matter. The problem still remains of whether there is a useful distinction to be drawn between the intrinsic and essential properties and relations of things, their internal relations, on the one hand, and their extrinsic, external and inessential properties and relations, on the other. The strong Hegelian view is that all relations are internal. However, it is not my purpose to defend such a position here. All that I am arguing is that the opposite extreme—Cohen’s position—that all relations are external and extrinsic to the nature of things, is incoherent and unsatisfactory. Some, at least, of the relations of a thing must be internal. And, in particular, historical materialism maintains that their social relations are internal and essential features of the nature of both people and productive forces. Things and relations are not purely external to each other, not absolutely distinct and separate. These are not either/or exclusive categories. In concrete reality these opposites pass into each other, they exist in unity. This sort of language no doubt has a mysterious sound to it and may well appear ‘cloudy’ and ‘evasive’ as Cohen charges, but it is not so. On the contrary, it embodies the crucially important idea of dialectic that concrete things must be understood in the context of their relations and in a dynamic fashion. For how opposites can be united is intelligible only when we see that the relations between them are not fixed and stationary, but that opposites interpenetrate and pass into each other. To see here an abstract, isolated, individual person or thing, there a disembodied structure of social relations, in the analytic manner, is no way in which to understand society. In concrete social reality it is rather the case that people are active. They enter into social relations, they interact with other people and things according to more or less set patterns, they are active in their social roles; and, in so being, they produce and reproduce their social relations. Conversely, too, their social relations enter into them, and give shape and form and structure to their activities and thoughts and intentions. There is a constant process of interaction


and interpenetration between a person and his social relations; and hence unity as well as conflict between these opposites. The same is true of the interaction of the forces and relations of production. These opposites also interact, interpenetrate and pass into each other. The concentration of the instruments of production and the division of labour are…inseparable one from the other. … As the concentration of instruments develops, the division develops also, and vice-versa…. Every big mechanical invention is followed by a greater division of labour, and each increase in the division of labour gives rise in turn to new mechanical inventions.25 The general point is this: relations do not remain external to terms. There is no absolute division or opposition between things and relations. Things do not remain merely ‘in themselves’, shut up, closed off and isolated from other things. Things enter into their relations, act and interact with other things, manifest their properties. And, conversely, its relations and properties enter into the thing and are its properties. This is what Hegel is saying when he writes, The inadequacy of the standpoint at which this philosophy stops short consists essentially in holding fast to the abstract thing-in-itself as an ultimate determination, and in opposing to the thing-in-itself…the determinateness and manifoldness of the properties; whereas in fact the thing-in-itself essentially possesses this external reflection within itself and determines itself to be a thing with its own determinations, a thing endowed with properties.26

CAUSALITY AND NECESSARY CONNECTION I have been arguing that terms and relations, productive forces and relations of production, the material and the social aspects of society, must not be regarded as entirely distinct and separate from each other. In concrete conditions these are contradictory opposites which interpenetrate and exist in unity. In response, no doubt, the objection will be made that I am misrepresenting the


analytical approach and being unfair to Cohen in my criticisms. Analysis, it will be said, is a tool of thought; and it is the peculiar power and privilege of thought to be able to abstract and to separate in theory things which in reality are inseparably united. Indeed, Cohen defends his method in just these terms. Given a certain level of development of the productive forces …a certain set of production relations, or social form, is appropriate…. But we may always abstract from the social form and display the current state of the relation between man and nature, and the material relations between men underlying their social relations…. The relationship between man and nature is ‘mediated’ by the social form: it does not occur outside it. The development of nature, described in socio-neutral terms, is therefore an abstraction. But it is a theoretically important abstraction. (pp. 97–8) Elsewhere, Cohen describes such abstractions as ‘illuminating’ ones. And indeed they are, so long as it is remembered that they are abstractions, and that in concrete reality matter and form, nature and man, are also essentially related. The analytic approach, however, and its underlying either/or logic, requires that each term is isolated from its opposite, and that an impassable logical gulf is created between them. This method produces ‘abstractions’ to be sure, but not ‘illuminating’ ones. According to Cohen, there is no ‘logical’ connection between terms and relations, form and content, the material and the social levels: the relations between them are purely external and contingent; they are ‘conceptually separate’ (p. 99). He illustrates this by saying, We may envisage a complete material description of a society—a socio-neutral description—from which we cannot deduce its social form. It will provide extensive information, detailing the material abilities and needs of persons, the resources and facilities available to them, their scientific knowledge. But ownership patterns, distribution of rights and duties, social roles will go unremarked. (p. 94)


Here we are being presented with the atomised and fragmented picture of the world which is the necessary outcome of the analytic method. There is no necessary connection between the material aspects of society and its social forms. This is Hume’s picture of the world: ‘All events seem entirely loose and separate. One event follows another, but we never can observe any tie between them: they seem conjoined, but never connected’.27 According to this logic, there are no necessary connections between events. Any event could follow any other; it is ‘logically possible’ for any sort of society to be associated with any sort of material means of production. Marx’s idea was different: ‘The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord: the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist’.28 The necessary connection between a society’s productive forces and its social relations was one of Marx’s great discoveries. It may seem possible to have any sort of society—a socialist society even—based upon the hand-mill. Indeed, a large and influential body of romantic and utopian thinking is based upon just this idea. According to Marx, however, this is not possible. It is not, that is to say, a real, historical possibility. A scientific understanding of events involves a knowledge of the laws and necessities governing them. Hence it involves a knowledge of the real and concrete possibilities inherent in a situation, as opposed to the merely apparent and abstract, or ‘logical’, possibilities. Cohen, like other philosophers in the analytic tradition, devotes considerable time and ingenuity to exploring various unreal but ‘logically possible’ cases.29 However, to say that something is ‘logically possible’ means only that it is not selfcontradictory; and, as Hegel says, Every content can be brought under this form, since nothing is required except to separate it from the relations in which it stands. Hence any content, however absurd and nonsensical, can be viewed as possible.30 For this reason, questions of ‘logical possibility’ should be of no interest to philosophers, historians, or anyone else concerned with the real world. The proper subject-matter of philosophy, as Hegel says, is actuality; and Marx would surely have agreed, at least with the spirit of this.31 As one comes to understand reality scientifically, one comes to


grasp the real connections between apparently unrelated events. A knowledge of the concrete nature of things involves a knowledge of the laws governing them: their necessary processes of development and their connections with other things. Usually we regard things as unaffected by each other…. Everything is thus put outside of every other. But the aim of philosophy [and science, n.b.] is to banish indifference and to ascertain the necessity of things. By that means the other is seen to stand over and against its other.32 Conversely, The less education a man has, or, in other words, the less he knows of the specific connections of the objects to which he directs his observation, the greater is his tendency to launch out into all sorts of empty possibilities.33 As I have been arguing, the analytic picture of the world and the logic of external relations have precisely the effect that Hegel here describes. This philosophical method separates things from their relations. It portrays things as ‘loose and separate’, merely contingently and externally related. This is Hume’s picture of the world; and, as Hume himself was well aware, it leads to a total scepticism about science. For, on this account, there can be no valid basis for scientific theories of the lawlike and necessary behaviour of things. In other words, this philosophy provides a logical framework which undermines scientific knowledge. It is therefore incapable of illuminating Marx’s theory of history, which claims to be a scientific theory. This fragmented, Humean picture of the world is the underlying basis of a great deal of contemporary analytical philosophy. It is the underlying basis of Cohen’s account of Marxism, as I have shown. Cohen, of course, knows perfectly well that there is a connection between the material productive forces and social relations, and that it is the purpose of Marx’s theory of history to describe this connection. Cohen himself does not believe that there could be a socialist society based upon hand production. Nevertheless, he insists that the connection between the forces and relations of production is not a logical or ‘deductive’ one. Rather, he maintains, the relation is a purely contingent, external


and Humean causal one. Cohen, in other words, accepts Hume’s premises: he accepts Hume’s fragmented picture of the world; but he is unwilling to accept Hume’s sceptical conclusion: ‘Though we cannot deduce social relationships from a material description, we can infer them more or less confidently, by dint of general or theoretical knowledge’ (p. 95). Given Cohen’s premises, however, this is just what cannot be done. Starting, as Cohen does, from the analytical picture of the world as composed of discrete and unconnected, ‘loose and separate’ particulars, it is not possible to infer anything beyond the immediately given. If ever a philosophical result has been demonstrated conclusively, it is surely this one, by Hume’s celebrated arguments. Uncritical and unsupported talk of ‘inferences’ will not do here. Hume, by contrast, spells out the sceptical implications of the analytical view with uncompromising clarity: It is evident that Adam, with all his science, would never have been able to demonstrate that the course of nature must continue uniformly the same…. Nay I will go further and assert that he could not so much as prove by any probable arguments that the future must be conformable to the past.34 Marxism claims to give an account of the laws of historical development. It maintains that there is a necessary connection, an internal relation, between the development of the productive forces and changes in the relations of production and in the political and ideological superstructure. This theory cannot be understood in terms of a logic which has the effect of fragmenting social and historical processes into isolated parts and denying the connections between them.

THE MECHANISTIC OUTLOOK So far I have been concerned with the philosophical and logical assumptions which are at the basis of the analytical approach. Now let us look at the effect of this method when it is applied. This effect is simply stated. The analytical approach produces a mechanistic picture of the world. The reasons for this are not hard to see.


Analysis involves dissecting and decomposing a given whole into its constituent parts. Underlying this approach, as we have seen, is the doctrine of external relations. The assumption is that the whole is merely a collection of externally related parts, which are not essentially affected by their relations to each other in the whole. Thus in the analytic division of the thing into its component parts, the parts, it is claimed, are not altered: nothing is lost; clarity and precision are gained: ‘In thus dismembering the thing, it is understood, we disintegrate and take to pieces the attributes which have coalesced, and add nothing but our own act of disintegration.’35 These methods and assumptions seem particularly satisfactory and appropriate in the case of mechanical objects and systems. For mechanical action is external action; and a mechanical system appears, at least initially, to be a mere assemblage of parts, indifferent to each other and in purely external relation. ‘In its superficial form’, as Hegel says, ‘the mechanical nexus consists in the parts being independent of each other and of the whole’.36 A clock, for example, appears to be a mechanism in which the parts are related to and act upon each other purely externally. Analysis of the clock, taking it to pieces, does not affect the parts: they are self-subsistent objects, indifferent to their relations to each other and to the system as a whole. However, although this account may appear satisfactory for purely mechanical systems, it is clearly not adequate to describe higher and more complex material forms. In a living organism, a plant or an animal, there are also differentiated parts and organs; but these parts are not in merely external relation to each other or to the organism as a whole. The different parts or organs of an organism are internally and essentially related to the whole. The single members of the body are what they are only by and in relation to their unity. A hand, e.g., when hewn off from the body is, as Aristotle observed, a hand in name only, not in fact.37 The severed hand ceases to be a living organ—it dies and putrefies.38 In other words, its relation to the living organism is internal and essential to its nature as a living thing. It may seem that the advent of transplant surgery has refuted these ideas, but I do not think it does so. There are important dif-


ferences between such surgery and the process of dismantling and re-assembling a clock. A bodily organ, unlike a mechanical part, is not a self-subsistent entity. Artificial means must be used to preserve it during the time when it is severed from the body. Moreover, the parts of the body cannot simply be re-assembled after surgery: the organ must be grafted on to its new body, and steps taken to ensure that the graft is not ‘rejected’ and that the living whole of the organism re-establishes itself. Essentially similar processes occur in plant grafting. In talking in this way of ‘organic wholes’ and ‘vital unity’ it may seem that I am appealing to idealistic and mystical notions; but there is no basis in what I have been saying for such criticisms. The point I am making is a simple one and does not in any way transcend a purely materialistic understanding of biology. I am merely insisting on the fact that living organisms cannot adequately be understood as systems of self-subsistent and merely externally related parts. That is to say, biological phenomena cannot be successfully comprehended in purely mechanical terms. This point is made by Hegel with great clarity as follows. The limbs and organs…of an organic body are not merely parts of it: it is only in their unity that they are what they are, and they are unquestionably affected by that unity, as they also in turn affect it. These limbs and organs become mere parts only when they pass under the hands of the anatomist, whose occupation, be it remembered, is not with the living body but with the corpse. Not that such analysis is illegitimate: we only mean that the external and mechanical relation of whole and parts is not sufficient for us, if we want to study organic life in its truth. And if this be so of inorganic life, it is the case to a much greater extent when we apply this relation to the mind and the formations of the spiritual world.39 As Hegel here says, the analytical approach and the associated mechanical worldview is a wholly unsatisfactory basis for understanding social and historical phenomena. It labours under a delusion, if it supposes that, while analysing the objects, it leaves them as they were: it really transforms the concrete into an abstract. And as a consequence of this


change the living thing is killed: life can exist only in the concrete and one. Not that we can do without this division, if it is our intention to comprehend…. The error lies in forgetting that this is only one half of the process, and that the main point is the reunion of what has been parted.40 The analytic method is closely associated with the mechanistic world-view, as I have stressed. It thus seems to have a legitimate sphere of application to mechanical objects. The problems appear to arise only when it is applied beyond this sphere. But this is not in fact so. The dialectical idea that things are essentially and internally related applies, in some respects, even to inorganic things. It is particularly important to emphasise this fact in order to avoid the creation of a dualistic divide between the organic and inorganic worlds, and in order to avoid any temptation to posit a ‘life force’ in living things which transcends the material world. Even in the realm of purely inorganic, physical phenomena, the mechanical view is an abstract and metaphysical one. It portrays physical objects in an idealised fashion, as unaffected by their relations. Mechanics, as Wittgenstein says, ‘describes the movements of the mechanism on the assumption that its parts are completely rigid’.41 But real mechanical objects are not like this: ‘Do we forget the possibility of their bending, breaking off, melting, and so on? Yes; in many cases we don’t think of that at all’.42 The pieces and parts of a real clock, for instance, do not remain indifferent, but gradually ‘wear in’ to one another; and eventually wear out altogether, as with all machinery. But such facts play no part in mechanics, which views things in an abstract and idealised form. Of course, the mechanical outlook has played an extremely important role in the development of the scientific understanding of nature, and it is not my intention to reject such methods and assumptions altogether The error comes when such methods and assumptions are made into a universal philosophy and emphasised in an exclusive and one-sided fashion. Their abstract character is forgotten and they are employed as though they alone formed an adequate basis for understanding reality. The result is an abstract and metaphysical view of the world.


HISTORICAL AND DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM We have reached the conclusion that society is not a mechanism: it is not like a clock, in which separate and self-subsistent parts act externally on each other. Society is an organic whole, in which the different parts and aspects exist as such only in relation to each other and in relation to the whole. I shall finish off by briefly pointing to some of the implications of this account for Marx’s theory of history. In doing so, I shall at last be emerging from out of the undergrowth of abstract logical and philosophical argument into what, for most Marxists at least, will be more familiar terrain. In his account, Cohen places strong emphasis on Marx’s materialism. He rightly argues that Marx gives primacy to the development of the productive forces in his theory of history. However, Cohen’s analytic method leads him to stress the role of technological development in a one-sided and exclusive fashion. The development of the productive forces is made into the sole active force in historical development. Marxism is reduced to a form of technological determinism. Historical change is portrayed as a linear causal process. Movement always comes from ‘below’, as it were, from the material level; and it is transmitted ‘upwards’ in a causal and mechanical fashion. ‘The productive forces,’ writes Cohen, ‘strongly determine the character of the economic structure while forming no part of it’ (p. 31). The economic structure in turn determines the character of the political superstructure. Economic relations and political forms are the mere effects, the mere outcome of a particular level of development of the productive forces. The relations of production and the superstructure are thus regarded as inactive results, with no independent life or internal dynamic of their own. This is a mechanical interpretation of the historical process. For it is characteristic of the mechanical outlook, as we have seen, to regard causal action as purely external: motion and change always come to things from outside. Mechanical things are thus inert and passive: they have no internal activity of their own, but can only transmit motion which comes to them from elsewhere. As Locke puts it, A body at rest affords us no idea of any active power to move; and when it is set in motion itself, that motion is


rather a passion than an action in it…we observe it only to transfer but not produce motion.43 A distinctive feature of Cohen’s interpretation of Marxism is his insistence that it is a sort of functionalism. ‘History,’ he writes, ‘is, fundamentally, the growth of human productive power and forms of society rise and fall according as they enable or impede that growth’ (p.x). According to Cohen, Marx gives a functional explanation of the character of the relations of production and of the superstructure. These are explained in terms of the fact that they are conducive to the development of production: ‘Economic structures are as they are because, being so, they enable human productive power to expand…superstructures are as they are because, being so, they consolidate economic structures’ (p.xi). It is true, as Cohen stresses, that this functionalist account involves the idea of an ‘interaction’ between the forces and relations of production in the historical process. Not only do the productive forces determine the relations of production, but also the relations condition the forces: ‘First, they promote the development of the forces…. Second, they help to determine the particular path development takes…. Finally, the relations influence the rate of productivity development’ (p. 165). At first, it may appear that these views do not accord with the idea, which I have just attributed to Cohen, of history as a linear causal process; but there is no contradiction here. Mechanical things do both interact and also transmit motion in a linear fashion. For example, I strike a billiard ball with a cue and this ball hits another and sets it in motion. In the process, the motion of the first ball is changed. Each ball acts on the other—an interaction occurs. But it is an interaction between passive and merely inertial objects, that are not in themselves active, but which merely transmit the motion imparted by my shot. For this reason such mechanical systems are said to be ‘lifeless’. The same principles are at work in Cohen’s account of history. Despite the interaction of forces and relations, the sole dynamic element in history, according to Cohen, is the development of the productive forces. The master thesis of historical materialism puts the growth of human productive powers at the centre of the historical


process, and it is to this extra-social development that society itself is constrained to adjust. (p. 285) Economic relations and political forms are merely ‘functional’ to the prevailing level of technological development: in themselves they are inactive and inert. Social processes are thus lifeless, without any independent development or internal activity of their own. The dynamic of history comes from outside of history; and, without this external push, the social mechanism would grind to a halt. It is for this reason that Cohen needs to posit a transhistorical tendency for the productive forces to develop: his socalled ‘development thesis’ (Chapter 6). To explain this transhistorical tendency, he appeals to an equally trans-historical human nature. People are ‘somewhat rational’ and have ‘compelling needs’ (p. 152), and both these features of our nature, it is suggested, are pre-social, biological endowments. It is these purely biological needs which are the ultimate motive principle of history, the active force which is transmitted through the system— the mainspring, as it were, that keeps the historical mechanism in motion. Thus far, Cohen. We are a long way from Marx. Indeed, all this is barely recognisable as Marxism, for Marx’s account is the direct opposite. First of all, Marx does not attempt to deduce history from human nature; on the contrary, he argues that human nature and human needs are the product of history. Needs lead to production, but also production leads to the creation of ‘new needs’.44 There is a dialectical interaction here, in which neither term is inert or passive, and in the course of which social productive activity and human nature are both transformed. However, ‘the essential point to emphasise’, says Marx, is that…production and consumption…appear as moments of a single process in which production is the actual point of departure and accordingly the predominant moment. Consumption, as a pressing necessity, as a need, is itself an internal moment of productive activity.45 In other words, in so far as the development of production can be understood in terms of meeting needs—as, indeed, it can, in that production is completed in consumption—it is not abstract, trans-


historical needs which are in question, but needs which have developed historically in a particular form of society. Furthermore, Marx does not see society as a lifeless structure, merely functional to external developments. Historical materialism is the opposite of this mechanistic theory: it gives a dialectical account of historical development. Social processes have their own internal dynamic, their own inner contradictions. The different aspects of society—forces and relations of production, base and superstructure—are aspects of a single whole, internally and organically related, in dialectical interaction and conflict. It is these interactions, these conflicts, these contradictions—which are internal to society—that lead to historical change. In the process, none of these aspects is inert or passive: the forces and relations of production and also the superstructure are all transformed and developed. ‘The conclusion we arrive at, says Marx, ‘is that production, distribution, exchange and consumption…all constitute members of a single whole, differences within a single unity…. Interaction takes place among the various moments. Such is the case with every organic unity’.46 This is the dialectical account of history given by Marx, and it differs entirely from Cohen’s mechanical interpretation. The differences are clearly spelled out by Engels in the well known series of letters that he wrote towards the end of his life. In them he insists that the economic system and the superstructure are not simply the immediate and direct products of the prevailing form of production. Although their character is certainly conditioned predominantly by the development of the productive forces, it cannot be reduced to this factor alone. On the contrary, the economic system, for example, acquires its own distinctive character and its own inner dynamic. Through the division of labour, trade and commerce become areas of activity increasingly independent of production. They acquire, in short, a degree of ‘relative autonomy’. Where there is division of labour on a social scale, there the different labour processes become independent of each other. In the last instance production is the decisive factor. But as soon as trade in products becomes independent of production proper, it follows a movement of its own, which, while it is governed as a whole by production, still in particular respects and within this general dependence fol-


lows laws of its own:…this movement has phases of its own and in turn reacts on the movement of production.47 The same is true, even more clearly, of political and legal institutions and of art, religion and philosophy. None is purely ‘functional’ to the development of production. Each of these spheres, while in general being determined by the development of production and by economic forces, has its own relatively autonomous process of development, its own relative independence. Each affects the others and the material base. Political, juridical, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc., development is based on economic development. But all of these react upon one another and also upon the economic basis. It is not that the economic condition is the cause and alone active, while everything else is only a passive effect. There is, rather, interaction on the basis of economic necessity, which ultimately always asserts itself.48 Here we have the concept of a ‘relatively autonomous’ sphere, distinct from other areas of social activity, yet essentially related to these and interacting with them within the social totality. This idea is by now a familiar one. It is the idea of an organic part of an organic whole. This notion is an essential part of Marx’s theory, and indispensable for a genuine understanding of society and history. But Cohen has no comprehension of the dialectical basis of Marx’s thought. When he comes to discuss these ideas he can only caricature them. He talks, for instance, of ‘that zig-zag “dialectic” between forces and relations, with priority on neither side, which is widely favoured’ (p. 138). This sort of thing doesn’t deserve a response, except to emphasise that Marx, when he talks of the ‘interaction’ and ‘contradiction’ between forces and relations, does not regard these moments as having equal weight. On the contrary, like Engels, he makes clear throughout his work that he regards production and the development of the productive forces as the most powerful and as the ultimately decisive forces. In short, he is a materialist. But never a mechanical materialist after the manner of Cohen. Marx’s materialist theory of history is quite distinct from the abstract and metaphysical views propounded by Cohen. It cannot adequately be understood using a


purely analytical approach. This is what I have been arguing. As Engels says, What these gentlemen all lack is dialectics. They always see only here cause, there effect. That this is a hollow abstraction…that here everything is relative and nothing absolute— this they never begin to see. Hegel has never existed for them.49

NOTES This chapter was first published in Radical Philosophy 36 (Spring 1984) 1 Marx to Engels, 14 January 1858: Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, n.d. p. 121. 2 G.A.Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1978. Otherwise unattributed page references in this article refer to this work. 3 A.C.Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey, Methuen, London, 1934. Chapter 4 gives a clear account of the idea of ‘external’ and ‘internal’ relations in the Hegelian tradition. For an application of these ideas to Marxism, see B.Ollman, Alienation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1971. 4 Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 11.25.8. 5 This saying was used by G.E.Moore as the motto of his Principia Ethica (1903), and thereby achieved modern currency as one of the slogans of the analytic movement. 6 Marx, ‘Preface’ (1859) to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, in Preface and Introduction to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1976, p. 3. 7 ‘Introduction’ (1857), ibid., p. 17. 8 Cohen’s attempt to portray productive forces as mere material entities denies this. However, he tacitly recognises the point I am here making in the definition he offers of ‘productive forces’. ‘To qualify as a productive force’, says Cohen, ‘a facility must be capable of use by a producing agent in such a way that production occurs (partly) as a result of its use, and it is someone’s purpose that the facility so contributes to production’ (p. 32). The first clause of this definition is consistent with Cohen’s general views. That a thing is capable of productive use refers solely to its material features. However, the second clause, with its talk of people’s purposes, clearly brings in a reference to the way in which people relate to the productive forces, and hence a reference to relations to production. This is further evidence that the productive forces cannot be defined independently of the relations of production. (I am indebted to Prof. Howard Smokler for pointing this out to me.)


9 Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1961, p. 329. 10 Ibid., p. 326. 11 Engels, Anti-Dühring, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1962, pp. 176–7. 12 Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 329. 13 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Part I, ed. C.J.Arthur, International Publishers, NY, 1978, pp. 62–3. 14 Ibid., p. 62. 15 See, for example, Engels, Anti-Dühring, Part I, Ch. XI; C.Caudwell, ‘On Liberty’, in Studies in a Dying Culture, Bodley Head, London, 1938. 16 Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 177. 17 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, pp. 56–7. 18 Marx, ‘Wage Labour and Capital’, Selected Works in One Volume, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1970, p. 79. 19 Marx, Grundrisse, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1973, p. 265. 20 Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1962, p. 794. 21 Marx, ‘Introduction’ (1857), pp. 9–10. 22 G.E.Moore, ‘External and Internal Relations’, Philosophical Studies, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1922, pp. 281ff. 23 Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A.V.Miller, Allen & Unwin Ltd., London, 1969, p. 487. 24 Ibid., p. 114. 25 Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1955, p. 121. 26 Hegel, Science of Logic, p. 490. 27 Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1955, p. 85. 28 Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 95. 29 See, for example, Chapter 3, Section 2. 30 Hegel, Logic (Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Part I), trans. W.Wallace, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 3rd edn, 1975, Section 143z, p. 203. 31 ‘Actuality’ is a technical term in Hegel’s philosophy with distinctly idealistic overtones. See S.Sayers, ‘The Actual and the Rational’, in D.Lamb (ed.), Hegel and Modern Philosophy, Croom Helm, London, 1987. 32 Hegel, Logic, Section 119z, pp. 173–4. My bracket. 33 Ibid., Section 143z, pp. 203–4. 34 Hume, ‘An Abstract of A Treatise of Human Nature’, in Enquiry Concerning Human Nature, p. 188. 35 Hegel, Logic, Section 38z, p. 62. 36 Ibid., Section 136, p. 192. 37 Ibid., Section 216z, p. 280. The reference is to Aristotle, Politics, 1253a, 19ff. See also, Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M.Knox, Clarendon Press Oxford, 1952, Section 270 (add.), p. 283. 38 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature (Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Part II), trans. A.V.Miller, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1970, Section 248z, p. 18.


39 Hegel, Logic, Section 135z, pp. 191–2. 40 Ibid., Section 38z, p. 63. 41 Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1st edn, 1964, Section 1–120, p. 37. 42 Ibid., Section 1–122, p. 37. 43 Locke, Essay, II.21.4. Cf. Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge, Section 25: ‘The things which we perceive…are visibly inactive; there is nothing of power or agency included in them.’ 44 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 49. 45 Marx, ‘Introduction’ (1857), p. 23. 46 Ibid., pp. 29–30. 47 Engels to C.Schmidt, 27 October 1890, Selected Works, p. 684. 48 Engels to W.Borgius (H.Starkenburg), 25 January 1894, Selected Works, p. 694. 49 Engels to C.Schmidt, 27 October 1890, Selected Works, p. 689.

8

ANALYTICAL MARXISM: A NEW PARADIGM? Joseph McCarney

I agree with a great deal in Gregor McLennan’s review of Jon Elster’s Making Sense of Marx (Radical Philosophy 42), and most of all with his idea of the book’s importance. He may well be right in thinking it ‘likely to dominate discussions of Marx and Marxism for the next decade’. There is also likely to be widespread assent to his view of it as ‘the flagship for a new armada of Marxist analytical scholarship and reassessment’. The names of the other captains in the armada would have to include those McLennan mentions of G.A.Cohen and John Roemer. Here, one might suppose, is the long-awaited marriage of analytical philosophy and Marxism. Elster’s book may not be the last word on all, or any, of the themes and findings of the new school, but it is surely the best general guide and compendium. As such, its publication does not simply mark the height of current academic fashion, but is an event of real importance on the intellectual scene. Against this background there is one aspect of McLennan’s review with which I would like to take issue. It is his tribute to the ‘fair-minded feel’ to the book, and his claim that Elster is ‘sympathetic to the Marxist project’. The book does not feel in the least fair-minded to me. On the contrary, it could serve as an anthology of varieties of critical unfairness. On the evidence of it, Elster could be regarded as sympathetic to the Marxist project only in so far as that is compatible with a marked lack of sympathy with the project’s founder. In amplifying these remarks, I shall not be engaging directly with the central theses of the book. It cannot be too strongly emphasised that nothing here is a substitute for that vital task. It will, however, be necessary to point to 170

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flaws in the details of some specific arguments. What is at stake in those cases is not for the most part of great moment in itself. Nevertheless, they provide clues as to the author’s relationship to his subject which can supplement what is gained from formal statements of his programme and conclusions. In particular, they offer an invaluable perspective on issues of fairness and sympathy. Views on these issues must in their turn have implications for the book’s reception, for they help to shape the context in which it is located and discussed. The simplest kind of unfairness in Elster’s reading is misrepresentation. Again and again the line of Marx’s argument is bent, and always in the direction of making it untenable. A couple of examples will have to suffice here. Elster dismisses Marx’s views on the antagonism between English and Irish workers with the remark: ‘Ruling classes can exploit prejudices, but they cannot create them’ (Making Sense of Marx, p. 22. All page references are to this work unless otherwise indicated). In the passage in question, however, Marx’s claim was not that the antagonism was ‘created’ by the ruling classes but that it was ‘artificially kept alive and intensified’ by them (pp. 21–2). The difference is crucial in its setting. The desire to refute what, on Elster’s own showing, Marx does not hold is found elsewhere. Thus, for instance, he cites Marx’s defence of Fourier and other ‘organizers of labour’: it ‘was not their view, as Stirner imagines, that each should do the work of Raphael, but that anyone in whom there is a potential Raphael should be able to develop himself without hindrance’. This defence relies for its point on the assumption that the potential to be a Raphael is not universal. Yet Elster interprets it so as to fit with his belief that Marx’s corpus as a whole never ‘refers to differences in natural talents’ (p. 88). Later the point is caricatured further. Elster attacks the ‘Utopian’ idea that ‘everybody could be a Raphael’ while referring to the earlier discussion in a way plainly meant to imply that the idea was held by Marx (p. 201). Yet the distinction between it and his actual view that everybody who could be a Raphael should be allowed to does not need labouring. Another kind of unfairness, all too familiar when analytical philosophers turn to Marx, is the Stalinist smear. Elster notes that Marx found himself compelled, in his own words, to ‘say to the workers and the petty bourgeois: it is better to suffer in modern bourgeois society, which by its industry creates the material


means for the foundation of a new society that will liberate you all, than to revert to a bygone form of society’. Elster comments: ‘Substitute the peasantry for the petty bourgeoisie and primitive socialist accumulation for modern bourgeois society and you have the classic justification for Stalinism’ (pp. 116–17). This procedure is so useful it seems a pity to stop there. Thus, substitute the unemployed and market forces and you have the classic justification for Thatcherism. The point is not just that Elster is indulging in the kind of uncontrolled analogising he castigates when he thinks he finds it in Marx (see e.g., pp. 508–10). It is also that the analogy in this case is singularly inept. Stalinism did not, as Elster is well aware, rely on ‘saying’ to the peasants in an effort to persuade them of the need for sacrifices. It typically worked through coercion and terror. Moreover, its programme has to be conceived as pure loss of life and the amenities of life on the part of those who suffered it for the sake of a hypothetical future. The impression that Elster wishes to link Marx with such projects is strengthened a little later by a reference, on the basis of the same discussion, to his ‘philosophy of history that allows one to regard pre-communist individuals as so many sheep for the slaughter’ (p. 118). Some account should, however, have been taken of Marx’s apparent belief that his recommendations will be of benefit to his audience themselves: their outcome ‘will liberate you all’. It is understandable that someone writing at the present time should be oppressed by a sense that such an outcome is only to be won, if at all, by the travail of generations. But this would not have been so obvious to Marx writing in January 1849 in the midst of a European revolutionary upheaval. Elster’s treatment of the case points to some of his chief weaknesses as a commentator: his abstract, formalising style of thinking and lack of feel for the specificity of the contexts in which intellectual positions are advanced; more generally, his lack of an active historical sense. This blind spot may help to explain another feature of his method, the tendency to treat all of Marx’s writings as one vast text to be assessed primarily for internal coherence. Thus, he assembles a number of passages in order to exhibit the inconsistencies in Marx’s references to Christianity (pp. 506–8). The sources extend in time from the 1840s to the 1870s. They range from private notebooks to preparatory outlines to material published by Engels to works whose publication was overseen by Marx himself. Given this provenance, it is hardly surprising that


inconsistencies can be found. The absence of any could only mean that one’s subject had stopped thinking about the topic at an early stage. Elster shows no feeling for the heterogeneity of his evidence, nor any of the caution it should induce. This is all the more surprising since he had earlier quoted a remark that might have given him pause. It comes in a letter to Engels: ‘Whatever shortcomings [my writings] may have, they have the advantage of forming an artistic whole, which can only be achieved through my method of never letting them into print before they lie wholly before me’ (p. 42). This gives grounds for attending to the distinction between what Marx let into print and what he did not, and even between those categories and what was never intended for print in the first place. In this connection one may also note Elster’s comment that Capital II is ‘certainly one of the most boring works ever written by a major author’ (p. 142). He is, of course, aware that the work we know by that title was put together by Engels, exercising considerable editorial discretion, from manuscripts left after Marx’s death, and was not written by Marx to be read in its present form. In view of this, his comment is surely something of a cheap gibe. The meanness of spirit shown here and elsewhere in the book will surprise those who know Elster’s other writings. The various ‘Replies’ to critics, for instance, have a remarkable balance and liberality, being always ready to reshape a thesis in the light of objections, conceding a point where it seems necessary and holding the line firmly where it does not (Inquiry 23, 1980; Theory and Society 12, 1983). They are, in short, a model of how to conduct intellectual debate. It is true, and mildly amusing, that an astringent note tends to creep in when Elster is responding to critics outside the inner circle of the new ‘Marxism’. Then one finds also the same favourite devices of the analytical movement as were applied to Marx. There is, for instance, the ingenuously pained admission of inability to understand: ‘I confess my inability to make any interesting sense of Marx’s article “On the Jewish Question’” (p. 504 note). In dealing with Anthony Giddens in particular, this device is made to work overtime (Theory and Society 12, 1983). Even in these cases, however, everything proceeds well within the conventional bounds of academic discussion. No doubt the contrast between them and Marx owes something to the decencies appropriate to arguing with contemporaries. But it would scarcely be to Elster’s credit to take this as a complete


explanation. Something must be due to the fact that in these debates he is confronting thinkers he respects as he does not respect Marx. At this point one comes near the heart of the problem of his book. For the attitude it reveals to its subject is best characterised as a kind of intellectual contempt. To say this is not itself to criticise either Marx or Elster. The fact must nevertheless be acknowledged. The nature and basis of Elster’s contempt are sufficiently shown in the tenor of his complaints. Marx has ‘a cavalier attitude to the canons of explanation’ (p. 35). There is an ‘omnipresent bias of wishful thinking’ in his work (p. 438). Most revealing and persistent of all is the charge of ‘lack of intellectual discipline’ (pp. 317, 390, 508). These habits of mind are naturally enough reflected in the detailed analyses, which are variously characterised by Elster as ‘rambling’, ‘arbitrary’, ‘confused’, ‘incoherent’, ‘rather absurd’, ‘downright silly’ and ‘a conceptual jungle’. It may be said that he shows himself somewhat insensitive to the comic possibilities that arise, against this background, when he turns to authors of whom he approves, as when we are assured that ‘[G.A.] Cohen’s approach is characteristically lucid’ (p. 244). The incongruity here may oblige the reader to pinch herself to get things back in their true proportions, with Cohen as one of our ablest professors and Marx as what he professes. The low regard Elster has for the subject of his book has a more serious aspect. For it may well be thought an odd qualification for the author of a study of more than 500 pages. Moreover, the overwhelmingly negative tone of the study must give rise to the question of how such an intellectual pygmy could merit attention on this scale. It may be surmised that, in the course of the writing, Elster gradually became alive to the pressure of this question. At any rate, the final paragraph tries to strike a positive note, by indicating the sense in which he regards himself as a Marxist: speaking now for myself only, I believe it is still possible to be a Marxist in a rather different [i.e. non-traditional, JM] sense of the term. I find that most of the views that I hold to be true and important, I can trace back to Marx. This includes methodology, substantive theories and, above all, values. (p. 531)


This is a useful check-list, and it should be asked how far the items on it will bear scrutiny. Elster’s account of Marx’s methodological achievement is prominent among the aspects of his book that merit full-scale independent treatment. Even a brief glance is, however, enough to show that what he says about it amounts to the faintest of praise and what he could claim to have derived from it in a personal way is wholly mysterious. Marx’s central contribution is taken to be the idea that uncoordinated actions may come to grief through the mechanism of unintended consequences (pp. 44, 48). This is the phenomenon which Elster, borrowing from Sartre, calls ‘counterfinality’. It is one of the two main species of social contradictions discussed at length in his earlier work Logic and Society. The second is called ‘suboptimality’, and involves the kind of intentional production of suboptimal consequences of which the Prisoner’s Dilemma is the paradigm. The contrast lies in the fact that, while suboptimality is a game-theoretic notion presupposing strategic rationality on the part of the players, counterfinality can arise only at a pre-strategic, pre-game-theoretic stage. This stage is, for Elster, the true home of Marx’s methodological expertise. Thus: ‘Although strategic interaction is crucial in economic life, both within and between classes, Marx took little explicit account of it’. Moreover, what he says is ‘hardly more coherent and systematic than what may be discovered in Hobbes, Rousseau or Tocqueville’, and he is ‘sometimes confused’ with respect to a ‘crucial’ element of it (pp. 14–15). Indeed, he scores badly for game-theoretic competence in general. Thus, he commits the cardinal error of violating the principle of ‘mutual rationality’ (p. 298). His inadequacy also shows itself in less basic, but still important, areas, as in his ‘narrow pre-strategic conception of power’ (pp. 406, 421). To see the force of this assessment, one has to invoke an idea that runs through Elster’s work and is made most fully explicit in one of the sets of ‘Replies’ to critics referred to earlier. It is that the conceptual distinction between counterfinality and suboptimality ‘corresponds to’ the ‘historical divide’ between traditional and modern societies (Inquiry 23, 1980, pp. 216–17). It follows that while Marx’s methodological contribution may be of use to the anthropologist or ancient historian, it can have little to offer the student of capitalism. It follows also that he himself lacked the conceptual tools needed to do justice to a central object of his


social science, the formation and interaction of classes in modern societies. What actively interests Elster, as any acquaintance with his writings will show, is the application of game-theoretic insights to those societies, not the parametric predicaments of traditional actors. It now becomes difficult to see what could be of personal significance for him in Marx’s method. Indeed, one might ask how Elster could possibly respect Marx, since he is a complete duffer at game theory. The truth of this matter is surely not hard to discern, and the only puzzle is why Elster should wish to deceive himself about it. Faced with the claim that Elster finds some of Marx’s substantive theories to be ‘true and important’, one can only ask ‘what theories’? On almost any medium-sized topic one chooses, his verdict will be found to be harshly dismissive. Fleshing out some of the epithets listed earlier, one may note that Marx’s views on ‘man and nature’ are said to be ‘either rambling and incoherent, or inherently trivial’ (p. 55). His discussion of religion is described as ‘arbitrary and largely incoherent’ (pp. 493–4). Going beyond the list, one may cite the assertion that the writings on international politics are ‘largely devoid of theoretical interest’ (p. 17). It is true that occasionally a less hostile conclusion is revealed, but even then what is chiefly remarkable is the grudging and patronising way it is framed. To take a representative case: Marx’s ‘sociology of economic knowledge was quite an impressive achievement, in spite of being flawed by its reliance on functional explanation and the labour theory of value’ (p. 504). It would be easy to give further instances at this level. Instead, however, it may be more rewarding to deal in broad strokes with the two main divisions of Marx’s substantive theorising, as conceived by Elster. The first, the theory of history, is on Elster’s presentation comprehensively vitiated by ‘the a priori nature of his reasoning—the speculative, teleological strand in his thought’ (p. 432). The position as regards the second, economic theory, is sufficiently indicated by noting that the two ‘main pillars’ of the analysis of capitalism as an economic system, the labour theory of value and the theory of the falling rate of profit, have both, according to Elster, ‘conclusively been shown to be invalid’ (p. 119). In general, his view of Marx’s status as an economist is fairly caught in McLennan’s focusing on the phrase ‘a minor post-Ricardian’ (p. 513). If one steps back from Elster’s own account to ask what elements of


substantive theory he could reasonably claim to take over from Marx, there seems only one serious candidate. It can be argued that he accepts some version of Marx’s conception of classes and of modern society as structured by class divisions. The use to which he wishes to put these elements is accurately described by McLennan: ‘he recommends that classical formulations be conceived anew as various possibilities and strategies in a gametheory-based model of collective action.’ What is valuable in Marx is the grist the picture of classes supplies for the game theorist’s mill, material he was incompetent to process himself. This is the substance of Elster’s claim to be indebted to his social science. In addition, one must acknowledge the truth contained in the phrase ‘above all, values’ which was quoted earlier. Herein lies what is undoubtedly Elster’s strongest link with Marx. ‘Selfrealization through creative work’ is, for him, ‘the most valuable and enduring element of Marx’s thought’ (p. 521). The genuineness of Elster’s attachment to this ideal is not in question. Neither, however, should its significance for his view of Marx be overstated. The theme may serve to establish Marx as a minor post-Ricardian whose heart is in the right place, but it can add little to his stature as a thinker or social scientist. The comparison with Kolakowski, Elster’s predecessor as the chief interpreter of Marx to the academy, is instructive here. Without wishing to propound any cheap paradoxes, it should be pointed out that McLennan stands the truth on its head when he remarks that Elster ‘does not, Kolakowski-like, give the sense of delighting in finding fault’. This essay has tended to suggest that such delight may be seen as the main motive force of Elster’s discussion. It would be quite unfair to view the first volume of Main Currents of Marxism in that way. It is true that the later volumes, on Marxism after Marx, are an accelerating intellectual disaster, but that is another matter. Kolakowski’s reading, in contrast to Elster’s, makes intelligible the claim of Marx’s work to be an important intellectual achievement. In itself this is, of course, hardly surprising since the reading had been taken over wholesale from Lukács. On it, Marx clearly emerges as a first-rank figure in the history of thought, as, at least, a major post-Hegelian. Moreover, it is plain that even, or especially, at his most hostile Kolakowski is struggling with what he believes to be a powerful and insidious poison whose effects he cannot be entirely sure of having eliminated from his own system. The condescending air,


lit with flashes of irritation, that characterises Making Sense of Marx betrays no such inner struggle. There is normally little point in arguing about who is or is not a ‘Marxist’, and yet the term may not, even now, have lost all determinacy. That the book is the work of someone who regards himself, and is regarded by others, as in some sense deserving the label is just the kind of farcical touch in which Marx himself would have delighted and to which his pen could have done justice. The truth is that Elster treats Marx as a ‘dead dog’ and the most intriguing question that now arises is how well he gets away with it. If Making Sense of Marx fails to provoke sustained and systematic attempts at rebuttal, it can only be a sign that Marx’s work has, for the time being at least, ceased to be a living force in the West. That is the best measure of the book’s significance. This chapter was first published in Radical Philosophy 43 (Summer 1986)

9

SOCIALISM AND DEMOCRACY Beyond state and civil society Roger Harris

INTRODUCTION This was written as an article for Radical Philosophy, before the recent startling changes in Eastern Europe, to take issue with views presented in John Keane’s Public Life and Late Capitalism —Towards a Socialist Theory of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 1984). It begins with a brief account of this important book, and goes on to try to trace the source of what I take to be the unhelpful political implications of Keane’s book, and of the critical theory of Habermas on which it largely builds. Keane argues for the need to deepen and strengthen the division between, on the one hand, a ‘socialist Civil Society’ as the sphere of the autonomy of conscience, and, on the other hand, the unavoidably bureaucratic and effectively impregnable bureaucratic state. In contrasting such a state with a socialist civil society, I argue, the contents of Hegel’s notions are reversed. For the ‘state’ is claimed by Keane to be a sphere of heteronomy, not universality, while ‘civil society’ is the only sphere in which he allows that the autonomy of conscience may be exercised. Such a state would be the focus of the oppositional critical conscience exercised in civil society by the free individual. Recent events, I think, have made it clear that it is not helpful to imply, as this view seems to do, that it is inappropriate to attempt to conduct political activity within such a state. For it is now all too clear that the bureaucratic state is far from impregnable. So too is the unavoidable responsibility of the successful critic to move from the expression of private opinion (in 179


‘civil society’) to the exercise of public duty (in the ‘state’).1 I try, below, to sort out the confusion engendered by using Hegel’s terms both of the actual state and the state as it ought to be— following Marx’s critique in taking it that no actual administrative state of any existing society succeeds in embodying the realm of ethical universality which Hegel had supposed would comprise the ‘state’. Outside the pair ‘state’ (=bourgeois administration) and ‘civil society’ (=bourgeois property relations), I argue, is a third sphere which I prosaically term ‘the alliance of progressive forces’. This is the sphere of yet-to-be-actualised-rights—i.e. those rights whose hopeful establishment comprises the focus for the activity of progressive democratic organisations, the nature of which must be to strive to move from potentiality into the sphere of actual ethical universality. Marx’s identification of the proletariat as the sole agency within this third sphere, and the interests of the proletariat as its sole contents is ‘correct’, but fails adequately to address the question of what, in particular, such ‘yet-tobe-actualised-rights’ actually are, and which types of organisations might all be on the same side in virtue of their politics. Taking a cue from Keane’s own discussion (at the end of his final chapter) of the problems with the concept of democracy bequeathed to the modern world by Rousseau, I look briefly at the attempt Hegel made to harmonise the tensions which lay within political philosophy at the close of the classical period of contractarian thought. Marx’s demonstration that Hegel’s synthesis could not be sustained, I then argue, has led socialists to ‘retreat’ to a position much like Rousseau’s. This is so even though it was not Hegel’s advances on Rousseau and Kant in the formulation of ethical and social objectives for political philosophy that Marx rejected, but Hegel’s attempt to show how their achievement within the state could be compatible with bourgeois property relations, sustained and exercised within civil society. Marx saw private property in the sphere of social wealth as a logical, not merely a contingent obstacle to the achievement, within the state, of Hegel’s interdependent and complementary objectives of ethical universality in collective social life and ethical autonomy in the life of the individual squared with individual satisfaction and cooperative order in the realm of needs. This was because of the incoherence of Hegel’s theory of the political relation of representation between state and civil society, and because

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of the exclusion of the propertyless from one half of the state/civil society couple. The force of such a critique, however, rests on the appropriateness of those Hegelian objectives the achievement of which is necessarily frustrated by the institution of private property in the sphere of social wealth. If we accept Marx’s critique of the institution of private property, therefore, we accept those objectives, and with them Hegel’s demonstration that individual ethical autonomy and ethical universality in collective life are logically interdependent, not achievable independently of one another, and not, as Rousseau left them, two polarities in irreconcilable tension (the tension between unanimous direct democracy and Spartan discipline) and in a different universe from freedom to satisfy needs in a state of nature. Hegel gave the appropriately ironic title the ‘beautiful soul’ to the tendency to fly to that extreme of this tension which neglects ethical universality and allows total precedence to the ethical autonomy of the individual. The logic of this position, I argue, underlies an ‘elective affinity’ between varieties of romantic individualism, hostility to bureaucracy and to instrumental activity per se rather than to any malign interests such activity might serve, and a political view of democracy which locates this notion exclusively in individual autonomy and self-expression (‘discursive will-formation’ in Habermas’s phrase) irrespective of the substantive content of the ‘democratic decision’. This, I argue, leads quite naturally to the suggestion with which Keane concludes his book, namely to defend what he terms a ‘socialist civil society’. In contrast I suggest that socialists need to theorise the notion of a ‘democratic cause’ which requires the political discipline of solidarity, and in which the form of decision-making is not an ethical carte blanche for the content of the decision, yet which neither substitutes mere spontaneity for organisation nor puts the decisions of the central committee in the place of the conscience of the individual. To steer a course, in other words, between pluralist notions of democracy, on the one hand, and, on the other, the neo-Rousseauian tension on the left between spontaneous mass mobilisation and (Spartan) party discipline.


KEANE—PUBLIC LIFE AND LATE CAPITALISM John Keane’s book is largely concerned with the theorisation of problems that bureaucracy poses for late capitalist society. Keane begins by identifying a number of features of the present crisis of welfare state capitalism. The widely trumpeted ‘failure of Keynesianism’ he sees as combining with accelerating difficulties in the administration of the mechanism of social control embodied in welfare state capitalism. This has produced a situation in which states cannot square the opposed imperatives of legitimation by the administration of social tranquillity, through state welfare, and of stimulation of the necessary levels of investment to generate revenue to fund that welfare provision (which, it had been previously assumed, could occur without any radical redistribution of wealth). This, he argues, has provided the opportunity for the ‘new liberalism’ to attack state bureaucracies in the name of the freedom of the (economic) individual. Parallel with, although ostensibly opposed to, this tendency, he identifies a neo-corporatist trend which argues not for less but for greater and more efficient state direction of resources. (Both, it may be noted, can be found in the rhetoric and actions of the present government, subjecting welfare provisions simultaneously to the inroads of privatisation and of Draconian central control). Keane accordingly identifies as the problematic of his book the delineation of spheres of autonomy in public life oppositional to both these tendencies. His introduction, however, sets the scene for an extended account of the evolution of theories of bureaucracy, since he sees the justification of autonomous spheres of public life as primarily to be accomplished by counterposing them to the bureaucratic control of society. Beginning with an excellent essay on Weber’s contribution to the theory of bureaucracy, Keane, looking for an alternative to Weber’s pessimism, gives equally good accounts of the subsequent attempts by Adorno, Offe and, principally, Habermas to theorise these matters. Despite his originality and philosophical sophistication, Adorno appears to Keane to be no less pessimistic than Weber, while adding far greater weight to the spectre of a ‘totally administered society’ under late capitalism. Habermas is taken to task for his nostalgia for an anachronistic and probably inaccurate conception of the freedom of early bourgeois public life. Finally examined is the proposal of Haber-


mas and Offe, that there exist self-defeating, crisis-provoking tendencies within modern bureaucracies. Keane then turns his attention to Habermas’s philosophical doctrines, beginning with a critical exposition of the theses associated principally with Knowledge and Human Interests, regarding the illegitimate universalisation of technical/instrumental rationality to those realms which are properly the province of the communicative and critical knowledge-constitutive interests of reason. He goes on to examine the basis of Habermas’s later exploration of a theory of communicative competence, and concludes his discussion of Habermas by raising some problems for the latter’s account of natural science. There are, first of all, the difficulties which arise as a consequence of those accounts of natural science —e.g. Kuhn—which contest the hegemony of positivism over science, effectively conceded by Habermas. Lastly Keane raises the provocative question of the ‘oppositional’ character of the natural science of ecology. All in all, his discussions of Habermas—of his various and numerous influences and antecedents, his critiques of his predecessors, and of the thrust of his grand theory—are penetrating and exceedingly well informed. In the final chapter Keane complements his preceding themes by situating the problems they raise within the historical framework bequeathed by the intellectual failure of contractarian liberalism, and its practical supersession by the bureaucratic state. He concludes that a retrieval is necessary of the valuation of the realms of privacy and autonomy, unsuccessfully defended by contractarian liberalism, in the face of the universal bureaucratising tendencies of modern states and corporations. Rather than the abolition of the distinction between the state and civil society for which Marx argued, Keane sees the need to deepen this divide, as a bulwark against state and corporate bureaucracies. Without wishing to raise any doubt as to the merits of John Keane’s book, it strikes me that the difficulties with modern critical theory, many of which Keane himself sharply identifies, add up ultimately to decisive objections, rather than mere ‘anomalies’ in its development as a viable paradigm for political practice. In what follows I will try to set out a few of my reservations.


SOME ‘ELECTIVE AFFINITIES’ AND THE ‘OPIUM OF THE INTELLIGENTSIA’ It is abundantly clear, from Keane’s analysis, just how much subsequent theories of bureaucracy, including that of Habermas himself, owe to Weber. Weber’s general account of the puritan secularisation of asceticism and its elective affinity with capitalist economic rationality, yields the notion of the modern ‘calling’—with its devotion to the performance of tasks for their own sake— shorn of all its original religious or moral dignity, and ready to be bent to the formal-rational imperatives of bureaucracy. To that ‘formal rationality’ Weber contrasts the notion of ‘substantive rationality’—based upon immediate and personal judgements of value, which, because they are individual, turn out to be pluralistic, contingent and based on irreconcilable standards, when seen from a social perspective. Habermas takes over this bifurcation of rationality, strengthening and deepening it in turn, by locating it in the ontology of human action. There is, however, another relation of ‘elective affinity’ which we should not fail to notice. It is between this account of ‘substantive rationality’ in which the individual’s own authentic value judgements are in play (as opposed to ‘formal rationality’ whose objectives are externally imposed) and the continuity of the moral stance of romantic individualism, intensifying from Rousseau, through Kant to Nietzsche, and culminating in Sartrean existentialism. This counterposes the absolute authority of conscience to all that is outside the self. Keane traces to Nietzsche, through Weber, and on to the Frankfurt School (note 58 to the final chapter) the idea that the acceptance of a discipline extraneous to the self is antithetical to true moral autonomy, and that it is in becoming a means to some other end, rather than an end in one’s self that the moral failure lies. The iniquity of instrumentality and of the domination of the individual by a realm of (apparent) causality—governed by technical instrumentality—resting ultimately on the promptings of inclination rather than duty, underlines the Kantian provenance of the notion of autonomy at work here. It only remains to add Nietzsche’s vision of the utterly trackless moral landscape of the modern world in which we (science) have ‘killed God’. This, in sociological terms, becomes the relativity, contingency, and pluralism of Weber’s ‘substantive rationality’. It is the ulti-


mate meaninglessness of such moral freedom that Sartre so acutely diagnosed, and from which he himself finally recoiled. Nor is it stretching interpretation too much to identify this with the fate Hegel identified for the ‘beautiful soul’—the consciousness for which individual ethical autonomy is de-coupled from substantive ethical universality, and for which all turns on purity of intention. I worry that the popularity of theories critical of bureaucracy, from Weber onwards, rests, at the end of the day, on bureaucracy’s moral repugnance to bourgeois intellectuals that stems from their moral disapproval of bad faith—lack of authenticity. In Keane’s book, perhaps as forcefully as anywhere, are catalogued, summarised and articulated all those reasons intellectuals have found to loathe and despise contemporary bureaucracy, and yet, by abjuring all its works, to do absolutely nothing about it. The style of critical theory, and the milieu in which it flourishes seem to me to add to the ideological strength of existing bureaucracies, much in the way that the aristocratic disdain for ‘trade’ helped leave the way clear for the commercial classes to prosper. The intellectual’s distaste for the ‘bureaucrat’ is a sort of Chekhovian folly. While the very word has become the epitome of the modern insult on their lips, many intellectuals on the left seek to present their own fractious ineptitude as a sign of their moral distinction: ‘We never compromised!’ If, however, anything is ever to be done, it will demand uncomfortable compromises of conscience, domestic routine, presentation of self to others, and of other aspects of one’s pure and autonomous privacy so jealousy guarded by intellectuals. The morally fastidious disinclination to ever make those compromises is, in effect, the refusal of all moral discipline. But then…it is so much better always to have been in the right—even when you changed your mind—than actually to have bruised your own authenticity and autonomy deciding that you ought to agree with other people, rather than always to insist that they agree with you. The philosophical and ideological bankruptcy of the tradition of explicating moral autonomy as unconditioned ‘authentic’ selfdetermination of moral decisions, however, does nothing to diminish its contemporary appeal to a certain fraction of the intelligentsia (including Habermas, as Keane notes). Ideal-typically they are those who nurture a romantic nostalgia for that mythic time when the emancipation of the individual was the heroic ideal of


those intellectuals who, we read in our (hi)story books, bestrode the world—or at least the coffee houses and salons—like colossi. This was the age when an intellectual did what an intellectual had to do—flee the king’s displeasure, get his head chopped off, starve in a garret, go mad, leave his children at the foundlings’ home, or something equally striking. (There cannot have been so many of these ‘men for all seasons’ either, because the really nice thing about the (hi)stories was that they all seemed to know one another, just like the Knights of the Round Table, and the gunfighters of the Old West!) We should need no Cervantes or Peckinpah to debunk this particular myth—yet another high-minded gloss for class rapacity—the equivalent in our age of the chivalry of Quixote. Today the better parallel is with disillusioned Westerns—Guns in the Afternoon, The Wild Bunch, etc. The railroad and the Maxim gun arrived long ago in the ‘Wild West of ideas’. This essay, this magazine, John Keane’s book, the Cambridge University Press, our jobs…are all part of the commodification and professionalisation of intellectual production; and as for the Maxim gun—‘commodification’ alone has 18 entries in the index of Keane’s book, and his Chapter 2 boasts no less than 170 bibliographical notes. I do not deplore this—indeed, I applaud it— Keane’s sheer competence in exegesis, synthesis and scholarship is daunting, to me at least. My point is this: competence of this ilk is a virtue of ‘formal’, not of ‘substantive’ rationality—in the ‘calling’ of the academic no less than in that of the ‘bureaucrat’—so perhaps ‘formal’ rationality need not be all bad! I think, however, that the myth of the ‘chivalry’ or the ‘Wild West’ of ideas is all bad, along with the preposterous notion of moral autonomy peddled in its wake. According to this myth, there can be no accommodation between authenticity and moral discipline. Discipline is for bureaucrats, party hacks, apparatchiks, union time-servers. It can always be made out to have extraneous and demeaning instrumentality—‘Buggin’s turn’, if nothing else. It is here that we find the intellectual source for the self-indulgent sectarian rot of the left—the preference for being able to say ‘I told you so’ over the risk of only partial success, the impulse symbolically to break oneself on the wheel of the state over Bank Holidays, but not to get involved in any organisational responsibility because of one’s detestation of administrative competence as the mark of the ‘bureaucrat’, and so forth. In short, the


‘opium of the intelligentsia’—an ideology for the selfmarginalisation of the disaffected romantic bourgeois intellectual. The ‘refusal of all moral discipline’ is at the root of this. The ‘moral discipline’ I have in mind is solidarity—not the ‘solidarity’ of sentimental gesture, but a disciplined and binding life-time commitment not depending on individual vagaries, which is antithetical to the conventional rhetoric of ‘conscience’. For today it is almost always against the solidarity of collective action that the degenerate ideology of ‘conscience’ is directed—to make heroes out of scabs, while those devoted to a just cause are implicitly disparaged as a ‘mob’ in the grip of nothing more than ‘bad faith’. The farrago of ‘conscience’ needs to be disentangled from the overall fabric of ‘bourgeois rights and liberties’—most of which retain their genuine value. The emptiness of ‘conscience’, by contrast, derives from taking nothing more than a trivially necessary condition of any moral action—namely that an individual has to choose to perform it in order to be the responsible agent—to be a self-sufficient virtue of moral action in its own right. So your joining with others is seen somehow to detract from the virtue of your action. While this once harmlessly over-emphasised the virtue of pioneers of individualism, it now serves to allow reactionary hacks to ‘discover uncommon virtue’ in mere perversity, as though there were something praiseworthy about bucking the view of a majority and standing alone, like Luther, irrespective of what it was on which you actually took your stand! (This, by the way, is no attack upon Amnesty International’s defence of ‘prisoners of conscience’: the grounds for not coercing people who threaten no one are valid irrespective of the virtue or silliness of their opinions. My point is that such opinions do not become more virtuous the fewer the people who share them!) This thread of ‘elective affinity’ is by no means broken when we come to the view of Habermas. In his attempt to formulate and ground a notion of rational autonomy he does try to move decisively beyond the dead end of contingency and arbitrariness. By shifting the arena of autonomous reason from unconstrained individual moral decision to the rule-governed public realm of communication, Habermas is able transcendentally to derive a non-arbitrary order for autonomous reason from the necessary presuppositions of the act of communication. It is, however, only order at the level of discourse—not a substantive order—and


Keane, in Chapter 5, notes a number of difficulties: with the resulting contrast between ‘distorted’ and ‘undistorted’ communication, in relation to the Marxian notion of ideology; with the abstractness of the ‘communicating subject’; and with the activity of proclaiming what ought to be without paying heed to how it can be. There is the further difficulty, noted by Lukes (in his contribution of Habermas: Critical Debates, ed. J.B.Thompson and D.Held), that, in effect this approach, like Rawls’s ‘original position’, and that of Kant before them, gives the form but not the content of autonomous reason. For the abstraction from the ‘ideal speech situation’, envisaged by Habermas, of all those motives participants bring from their social lives, so that ‘all motives except that of the cooperative search for truth are excluded’ (Legitimation Crisis, p. 108) abolishes the very subject matter—the conflicts in social life—to which we seek to apply the truths autonomous reason must be used to discover. Habermas rebuts the accusation of abstractness and unreality (in his ‘Reply’ in HCD) by arguing that, empirically, participants could not suppose they were taking part in an argument were they not sufficiently to presuppose themselves to be aiming cooperatively for the truth. That may be granted. However, it is not enough to make each right about the others. Moreover, even if participants did enter an argument in ‘good faith’—setting aside all motives of theirs they acknowledged as being in conflict, in favour of the aim of cooperatively arriving at truth, this would not guarantee their setting aside, or even discerning, those motives other than cooperatively arriving at truth, which they shared. (Look in academic journals, where this illusion of the cooperative search for truth is most prevalent, and remember the injunction ‘Publish or perish’!) It is not, however, in the empirical unrealisability of the ‘ideal speech situation’ that its fundamental weakness lies, but in its sharing that variety of contractarian illusion involved in supposing that it is subjects who constitute the social contract, rather than the other way about. It is in this respect, too, that the thread of ‘elective affinity’ with romantic individualisms is maintained.


HEGEL’S ATTEMPT TO TRANSCEND THE DILEMMAS OF CONTRACTARIANISM Keane’s survey of the vicissitudes and decay of contractarian liberalism, though excellent, is concerned principally with liberalism’s practical demise, rather than with its intellectual weakness. In the latter regard, however, the problems we face, in Keane’s view, are those bequeathed by Rousseau, for it was he, as Keane notes, who was the first really radical critic of that variety of contractarianism which, I will argue, is still to be found in Habermas. (Even though, in other parts of his work, he was the originator of romantic individualism—as opposed to the ‘possessive’ variety—according to which the individual’s ‘realm of freedom’ lay in the sphere of conscience rather than of property.) The infamous (to liberals) remark that the recalcitrant should be ‘forced to be free’, which Keane quotes, is indicative of a different ordering of logical priorities in relation to the social contract from those customarily labelled ‘contractarian’. (And, while Rousseau himself may have equivocated somewhat on this reordering, his heirs amongst functionalist sociologists do not.) The notions of ‘discursive will-formation’ (Habermas) or of ‘publicly negotiated consent and obligation’, which Keane attributes to the contractarians, presuppose that moral subjects pre-exist, or at least may be transcendentally constituted independently of any such process. By contrast, if we do not regard him through Kantian spectacles, Rousseau, in the Social Contract, is seen to propose that the realm of consent and obligation is logically prior to and constitutive of human beings as moral subjects. The moral freedom that the recalcitrant (i.e. every child) may need to be forced to accept is thus antithetical to the state of nature of both Hobbes and Rousseau, characterised by that freedom from obligation which Kant identified with the heteronomy of inclination. Rousseau, however, unlike Kant, sees the moral subject emerging from this state of nature socially, not as being transcendentally constituted. Hegel concurred with Rousseau, rather than Kant, on this last point. Otherwise, in seeking to harmonise moral freedom and freedom from obligation respectively in the state as the realm of ethical universality and civil society as the realm of private liberty, Hegel adopts the Kantian attribution of autonomy to the former and heteronomy to the latter. (The heteronomy may either


be that of the subject’s own inclinations, or of those of another making the subject a means to some end.) What is surprising about Keane’s closing plea for the deepening rather than ‘the abolition of the (contractarian) distinction between Civil Society and the State, as Marx would have it’ is that the total reversal of these attributions has taken place. Civil society has come to be seen as the realm of autonomous public (not private) life, while the state (though public) has become the realm of heteronomy, principally through its bureaucratisation and consequent subservience to instrumentality. (It is worth noting, too, that for Hegel, the noncontractarian character of the state/civil society distinction was crucial in the ascent, through the state, to ethical universality above the level of agreements struck between individuals in civil society.)

MARX’S CRITIQUE OF HEGEL’S SYNTHESIS For Marx, Hegel’s synthesis failed not because it sought the wrong ethical objectives but because it could not accomplish them. The state, as the realm of ethical universality, can only be so in so far as it embodies the political life of the citizenry who comprise it. The ‘citizenry’, however, are identical with the individuals who comprise civil society, and Marx saw insuperable contradictions inherent in the ‘representation’ of the latter in and by the former: The object of representation is not the particular interest but man and his citizenship of the state, the universal interest. On the other hand, the particular interest is the material of representation, and the spirit of this interest is the spirit of the representation. (Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State, Penguin edn, p. 197) This contradiction is side-stepped in the Philosophy of Right (paras 309, 310) by a move in which Marx finds ‘Hegel’s mindless illogicality and “managerial” sense are really nauseating’ (CHDS p. 195). ‘Confidence’ in political representation is the guarantee for those represented that their ‘interests are made good in the assembly whose business is the general interest’ and


‘that their deputy will further and secure this general interest’ (PR addition to para. 309). However, Hegel maintains (PR para. 310) that, through experience of ‘the actual transaction of business in managerial and official positions’ the deputy ‘also acquires and develops a managerial and political sense, tested by his experience, and this is a further guarantee of his suitability as a deputy’. As Marx notes: ‘Imperceptibly this guarantee required by the electors has been transformed into a guarantee against the electors’ (CHDS p. 195). But it is precisely the bogus character in fact of the purported ethical universality of the state that is tacitly acknowledged by Hegel’s sleight of hand in citing the expertise of the deputy as a guarantee of suitability (as Marx put it, against the electorate). (Marx makes over-much of the Prussian character of this cast of thought. It is ironic that the same idea emerges in Brecht’s tart comment, at the East German Communist Party’s expression of ‘disappointment in the people’, that it should perhaps dissolve them and elect another.) Hegel’s ‘managerialism’ is a consequence of the entailment, by the central contradiction Marx identified in the notion of representation, of the drift of the apparatus Hegel called ‘the state’ into a condition of heteronomy ‘divorced from Civil Society’ for which, Hegel falsely claims, it represents ethical universality. The alternative to this, as Marx saw it, was that civil society should turn out to be ‘the real political society’ (CHDS p. 189).

MARX’S ‘RETREAT’ TO A POSITION MUCH LIKE ROUSSEAU’S It is important, in discussing the conclusions Marx draws, to distinguish ‘the state’ qua political society from ‘the state’ qua administrative apparatus. It is the distinction between the former notion and that of civil society which, Marx argues, is incoherent at the point of the relation of representation which is supposed to mediate between these two spheres, so that the actuality of the state is that of an administrative machine separate from society. This actual machinery is an instrument for the domination of society, which is ideologically legitimated at two levels—the more superficial being that of bogus claims to ethical universality, while the more sophisticated (Hegel’s ‘managerialism’) is that of bogus


claims to neutral technical administrative competence. This actual instrument of domination by the ruling class is the state which must be ‘smashed’. On the other hand, were the state the true realm of ethical universality, Marx argues, then it could no more be distinct from civil society than the individuals who were members of civil society could be distinct from themselves as citizens of the state. It is the state in this latter sense which will ‘wither away’ once established—there being neither the need nor the basis for its continued separation from civil society. (C.f. On the Jewish Question, Penguin edn, p. 234—see especially the quotation from Rousseau. See also Colletti’s introduction to this edition.) On the political theory that emerged in CHDS and was still being applied in CWF, those forms of ‘representation’ which fall into contradiction in respect of general and particular interests will never suffice for true ethical universality to emerge from civil society, no matter how widely the vote is distributed. They must be replaced by the direct involvement of the people or of their mandated delegates in the management of affairs. This requires there to be a true ‘universal class’ to wield a power that overcomes that wielded by the bogus ‘universal class’—the servants of the bogus ethical universal—the actual state. On this theory, of course, the only candidate to wield such power will be the proletariat—which is genuinely a potential universal class not because of its commitment to the bogus ethical universality of the actual state but because of its unmitigated ‘all sided’ (Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction, Penguin edn, p. 256) opposition to it. This is because the proletariat, as the propertyless class, have no place in the civil society of property owners, and so are excluded from the purportedly general, but actually sectional interest represented in the bourgeois state. It is only by the abolition of particularised private property that the potentially universal class can enter the arena of interests from which it had been excluded, and at the same time abolish the basis for antagonistic class relations, so as to become the universal class that it had potentially been. This must entail the abolition of civil society—the realm of private property—no less than that of the state delineated in contradistinction to it. However, while that bogus but actual state—the mere pretender to ethical universality which is no more than the machinery for capital’s suppression of labour—has to be ‘smashed’, a


true state, in the sense that it is the true bearer of the ethically universal, must be established to supplant it. This latter, true state will ‘wither away’ in the sense that there is neither the need nor the basis for its continued separation from civil society, but not in the sense that there will be no need for organisation, democracy or ethical universality. Thus Marx writes approvingly of the Paris Commune: The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organised by the Communal constitution and to become a reality by the destruction of the state power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excrescence. While the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power were to be amputated, its legitimate functions [my emphasis] were to be wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself, and restored to the responsible agents of society. (CWF p. 210) As Colletti has argued, and Marx himself makes clear (OJQ p. 234) this political theory takes us back to Rousseau, except that Marx has a particular identity in mind for the agent to take on the task set the ‘legislator’ by Rousseau: Whoever dares to undertake the founding of a people’s institution must feel himself capable of changing so to speak, human nature, of transforming each individual, who in himself is a complete and solitary whole, into a part of a greater whole from which he somehow receives his life and being, of substituting a partial and moral existence for physical and independent existence. He must take man’s own powers away from him and substitute for them alien ones which he can only use with the assistance of others. (OJQ p. 234, quoted from SC Bk II, Ch. VII, 3rd para.) It is not to be a mythical legislator separated from society, but the proletariat which will do this, not by separating humanity’s moral and physical existence, but by restoring their unity, and so unify society too, at both the material and moral levels. I want to argue


that Marx’s retreat to this position, which is far more akin to that of Rousseau than that of Hegel, has bequeathed to the left ever since a number of deep-rooted problems regarding democracy, leadership and mobilisation. In order to do so we need to return our attention to Hegel once more, in order to see in what sense Marx’s theory was a ‘retreat’.

FINDING OUR WAY ABOUT IN THE WRECKAGE OF HEGEL’S SYNTHESIS Hegel, aiming to harmonise public duty and private interest in his theory of the state, had also sought to reconcile two supplementary lines of tension within contractarianism which threatened it with incoherence. The first, to which I have already alluded, lies between the notion of pre-existing moral subjects constituted a social contract and the notion of their being constituted as moral subjects by a pre-existing social order. (Hegel erroneously saw Rousseau as having concerned himself exclusively with the former —see PR, remark to para. 258.) The second line of tension involves the determinants of rational moral autonomy: on the one hand, the individual’s autonomy would seem necessarily to have to be a state which was both unconditioned and self-sufficient (what Hegel calls ‘conscience’); yet, on the other hand, it seems that ‘conscience’ must either accept heteronomy or complete emptiness and abdication (what Hegel calls the ‘beautiful soul’) unless it accepts its participation in and being conditioned by the collective ethical life (PR para. 139). (Hegel’s characterisation of the ‘beautiful soul’ reveals that there is after all a rational connection between the moral predicaments of the varieties of romantic individualism, not a merely contingent ‘elective affinity’.) The reconciliation of both these tensions in Hegel’s theory is inextricably linked in the apotheosis of the collective ethical life in the state. If this reconciliation fails, then a great deal comes adrift. It seems to me that Marx does succeed in showing that this reconciliation fails on two counts—in respect of the incoherence of Hegel’s conception of representation, and in respect of the exclusion of the propertyless both from the freedom from obligation exercised within civil society with respect to one’s property and from the proper harmony of rights and duties within the state which comprise citizenship. It is not that they simply have all the duties and


none of the rights, but that, having no property (to speak of), all their duties are actual but all their rights are merely formal (see (d) below). If this fundamental harmonisation of freedoms founders on the inadequacy of the institutions of representation and of private property, then so, too, do the attempts to reconcile the two supplementary tensions mentioned above. The first consequence must be that it is no longer coherent to suppose that the ‘state’ and ‘civil society’ are two distinct realms of operation for these two freedoms which exhaustively divide society. Hegel specifically conceived of the distinctiveness of the state as the political arena as that which marked it off from civil society. The ‘political’ for Hegel, however, was the pursuit of the universal interest (what is colloquially called ‘statesmanship’ as distinct from ‘politics’ today). The sort of contention of particular, sectional, antagonistic interests which constitutes contemporary pluralistic ‘politics’ would properly belong to what Hegel would have termed ‘civil society’. Yet that latter sphere itself has swallowed all the ‘politics’ that actually exists because none of it measures up to the standard of ethical universality Hegel set. So the ethically universal (with which the particularistic as a distinct realm in actuality needs to be contrasted in order to pick out ‘civil society’ as Hegel understood it) is not to be found in the state as it actually is, or anywhere else for that matter, for the reasons set out above. The best that Marx could accomplish was the identification of a potential fulfiller of the ethically universal in that class which is unconditionally opposed to, because wholly excluded from, the bourgeois civil society and state. (With the advent of universal suffrage, in which Marx initially placed great hopes— see end of CHDS—the total exclusion of the proletariat from citizenship was breached. But the actual state does not come to embody the true ethical universal just because everybody is a citizen. Because of the relation between state and civil society, such ‘citizenship’ is purely formal—comprising actual duties but only notional rights—as a consequence of the exclusion of such citizens from property ownership and, hence from membership of the actual civil society—see (d) below.) If we tried to be clear, then we might say that: (a) Hegel’s rational ‘state’ does not exist in actuality;


(b) the actual state is no longer distinct from Hegel’s rational ‘civil society’; so that (c) Hegel’s rational ‘civil society’ does not exist in actuality; and (d) the actual civil society does not contain as individuals enjoying freedom in their property all those people whom the self-styled state subjects to the obligations contained in its laws; with the further consequence that (e) actual society is not exhaustively divided between the actual state and the actual civil society—there is a third sphere of yet-to-be-actualised rights which would flow from true ethical universality, but are not granted by actual states, nor fulfillable in actual civil societies. (In general, these are not exercisable by individuals with respect to private property within civil society as Hegel envisaged it, but may only be exercised collectively, in concert with others. This is the sphere within which what I want to identify as ‘democratic causes’ belong—see below.) The collapse of Hegel’s synthesis directly or indirectly set in train a number of developments in the self-understanding of modern societies, in addition to those for which Marx was responsible. Those who control states still, to this day, pretend that the state as an institution constitutes that ethical universality which demands an absolute duty from individuals to belong and an absolute right over them in consequence. But they would, wouldn’t they? This is transparently ideological, and seldom believed even by those who do not understand the term ‘ideology’. While the purported ethical universality of the state is actually as changeable as the chameleon skins of politicians, two other aspects of the state as Hegel envisaged it are far more concrete, and recognisably tally with features of social life with which we are familiar. These, however, have come adrift from the failed synthesis by which Hegel had bound them up with the ethical universality of the state. One of these, of course, is the disinterested administration of the state. The other is the function of the state in the constituting of the individual as a moral subject (see PR, remark to para. 258: ‘Since the State is mind objectified, it is only as one of its members that the individual himself has objectivity, genuine individuality, and an ethical life.’). Cut off from any bona fide ethical universality, the forming and sustaining of the individ-


ual by the integration of collective social life come to appear as a given, alienated set of social relations, independent of any will, general or individual. (Indeed, the idea that it has any ethical content at all has been progressively drained out of the notion of the ‘integration of the social system’ in both ‘right’ and ‘left’ forms of functionalism.) Equally, Hegel’s account of the disinterested administration of the state, originally rested on the commitment of the ‘universal class’ of civil servants to the universal interest, and was only secondarily supplemented by the idea of neutral expertise and technical administrative competence. If, however, the former basis for this notion is without substance, as we have seen it is, then this supplementary prop for the idea becomes definitive of an ethically neutral descriptive concept of the state—this is what Hegel effectively concedes at the point where Marx upbraids him for ‘managerialism’. The appearance of instrumental neutrality of the administrative apparatus of the actual state, however, is rightly criticised as an ideological appearance masking a contradictory reality. Instrumental decisions are never innocent of normative content. Indeed, it is just the objection to bureaucracies, characterised in terms of their instrumentalism, that it is the pretence of ‘mere’ neutral instrumentality which serves to justify the removal of their tacit normative commitments—their political intent—from the arena of democracy where it ought to belong. The ‘contradictory reality’ masked by this ideological representation of neutral instrumentality is de-politicised politics—the administration of the state in the absence of anything corresponding to its ‘general will’, its ethical basis of legitimacy (hence the entirely correct concern with processes of ‘legitimation’, which stands to ‘legitimacy’ in the same relation that ‘rationalisation’ stands to ‘rationality’). This ideology is nicely complemented, too, by the de-coupling from the sphere of ethics of the notion of the integration of the social system. For the latter is then simply reified and comes to appear to be ‘how social systems work’—the given framework of social regularities with respect to which the neutral technical expertise of administration is deployed. Just because the purported neutral instrumentality of the bureaucracies which comprise the state as it is picked out by this descriptive concept is an ideological self-representation, the view that ethical autonomy and democracy are in some sense ‘counter-


bureaucratic’ and antithetical to administration is equally ideological. It is that ideology for the self-marginalisation of the disaffected romantic bourgeois intellectual decried above, which exactly complements the ideology of technocratic neutrality by which the actual state conceals the exercise of its far from disinterested power. It is a consistent development of this ideological position to propose the erection of a notion of ‘civil society’, as a sphere defined in contradistinction to, and to be defended against the bureaucratic state, within the security of which can take place the practice of autonomy and democracy. The only ‘democracy’ of a civil society whose underlying principles are privacy and individual autonomy is ‘consumer sovereignty’. Setting up a notion of civil society in this way, however, explains how the ethical natures respectively of the state and of civil society as Keane conceives them are the reverse of what Hegel took them to be.

IDEOLOGICAL APPEARANCES IN ETHICAL ‘TOPSY TURVY LAND’ The point of freedom as Keane imagines it might be defended in what he terms ‘civil society’ is the opposite of what the freedom from obligation allowed by the privacy of individual property was for, in Hegel’s conception of civil society. The two senses of the term ‘autonomy’ or freedom become fatally confused. So Lockean ‘human rights’ (to do as you wish with what is inalienably your own) originally operated within the realm of instrumental private freedom from obligation—heteronomy—in respect of property. Modern ‘human rights’, by contrast, are concerned with the exact opposite—the individual’s right to a moral conscience, to affirm autonomous moral obligations. The two principles of freedom here—respectively the freedom from obligation, and the freedom to have obligations—are diametrically opposed to one another. Ironically, in the modern world, it is your conscience, not your property, which seems to be inalienably yours. The contradictory reality here (the counterpart, at the individual level, of depoliticised politics at the collective level) is conscience de-coupled from ethical universality and hence from reason—what Hegel termed the ‘beautiful soul’—masked by the ideology of ‘conscience-as-private-property’. Your conscience, to be sure, is


inalienably yours, but, like your true private property, you can do with it what you will, so it can ‘tell’ you whatever you like, and ceases to be distinguishable from its supposed exact opposite—an inclination in Kant’s sense. Moreover, it appears that any imposition upon it from outside of a form of discipline—be this rational or coercive—must be a threat to dispossess you of your conscience. Your conscience appears to be wholly and authentically yours—‘you are your own man’ (sic)—just in so far as no other influence but you yourself has determined the content of your conscience. (If it made sense, such a notion of ‘conscience’, since it is no better than an inclination, would properly belong in the sphere of civil society. But it is a nonsense: you are no more selfsufficient in determining the content of your conscience than you are in the exercise of your rights over your property.) The components of the principal and of the supplementary tensions Hegel had sought to reconcile have all come adrift from one another. The state is no longer the locus of ethical universality, and that aspect of it which was constituted by pre-existing moral subjects—its willed aspect—has become an administrative machine divorced from ethical considerations, while that aspect of it which pre-existed as social order and constituted moral subjects has become the ‘integration of the social system’—the given set of social relations, independent of any will, within which administrative expertise is exercised. Equally, the very idea that human beings possessed an ethical autonomy distinct from the freedom from obligation enjoyed in respect of private property depended on the participation of the former in the rational discipline of ethical universality. While that distinction breaks down with the individual’s conscience apparently becoming inalienable private property, the assertion of proprietary autonomy over the conscience (even more than over real property) involves denying and blinding oneself to the obvious truth that social order provides its content. This exempts that content from critique or willed alteration. (‘How can I change what I believe by an act of will?’ is the rhetorical question asked in defence of this position—the answer is, of course, that you can do this by giving a moment’s thought to how silly your beliefs are!) Ironically, it seems to us that we are administered by and have to obey a social power over which we have no control, while that obedience (to Weber’s ‘formal rationality’) is contrasted to obeying our own consciences (‘substantive rationality’) as though the


latter were somehow superior and more authentic because it was less a social product than the former. For example Jehovah’s Witnesses have to decide between obeying their own consciences which tell them not to allow their children to have blood transfusions, or obeying the state which tells them they must (yet, weirdly, asks them to sign a form giving the permission they are then prosecuted for refusing). Talk of ‘autonomy’ and ‘control’ here seems to have lost its point: who controls what, and to what end, and are any of these ends any better than any other? This question is just not answered by asserting the value of freedom of conscience and self-determination, independently of the content and direction of social decisions. It is interesting to see how these issues emerge in Habermas’s engagement with Luhmann (Legitimation Crisis pt III, ch. 5), whom he quotes (p. 131), speaking of public decisions: ‘To demand an intensive engaged participation of all in them would be to make a principle of frustration. Anyone who understands democracy in this way has, in fact, come to the conclusion that it is incompatible with rationality.’ In relation to administration and social integration, the ancestral notions of the social contract and the general will have become progressively denatured in respect of their ethical content. These notions retain (what Marx sees as their fictitious) ethical universality in Hegel’s notion of the state, but, though still ethical in character, lose their claim to rational universality through relativisation to a given social system in Durkheim and Parsons. With Luhmann, however, as Habermas remarks (LC p. 131), ‘Complex societies are no longer held together and integrated through normative structures… System integration, treated from the steering perspective, becomes independent of social integration accessible from life-world perspectives.’ So Weber’s characterisations of ‘formal’ and ‘substantive’ rationality accurately describe the subjective reality of the world of moral confusion in which we find ourselves: a world in which heteronomous interests dominate the purported sphere of ethical universality; and the ethically autonomous is driven into (and only appears defensible within) the realm of what is purportedly inalienably particular, namely individual conscience. I hope that I have indicated how neither ‘state’ nor ‘civil society’ any longer remotely resemble what Hegel purported to mean by them. Indeed, the incoherence of both of these notions which Marx iden-


tified has now come home to roost in the flight of moral autonomy from the ‘state’ that Hegel envisaged to ‘civil society’ as Keane envisages it. Moral autonomy has been expelled from Hegel’s ‘state’ by its bureaucratisation—its invasion by the heteronomy of ‘civil society’ as Hegel envisaged it. At the same time the heteronomy of the ‘state as it has become’ has taken on the state’s collective character, while the moral autonomy that has fled into ‘civil society as it has become’ has lost its universality. This is just what Weber’s descriptive categories reflect. ‘Deepening’ the division between state and civil Society, as Keane recommends, thus seems to me emphatically not to be the appropriate response, even if it were clear which version of the state/civil society division we were being urged to ‘deepen’.

SOME PROBLEMS SOCIALISTS HAVE WITH DEMOCRACY Opposition to a state which no longer represents the ethically universal, but a sectional interest, in the name of ‘autonomy’ and ‘democratic control’, must involve opposing that sectional interest not by another sectional interest, but by the universal interest. In contrast to Habermas and Keane, I would contend that the proper direction for a critique of the ‘bureaucratic state’ lies in the attempt to theorise a notion of ‘collective substantive rationality’—collective rational autonomy. To seek, in other words, to locate the notion of autonomy concretely in the realities of collective social life, rather than abstractly in the conscience or discursive conduct of the individual; and to restore to it the dimension of universality, without which it must remain subjective and decoupled from reason. Autonomy, however, is not like gold, which lies passively waiting to be stumbled upon. Rather, it has to be constructed. A theorisation which aims to locate a notion of autonomy concretely in social life does not tell us where to find it, but must be an account of the method of political practice by which collective rational autonomy is produced. If we just look for it, then we should not expect to find it to be very common if I am correct in claiming that Weber’s account of ‘formal’ and ‘substantive’ rationality is apposite to the modern world. They describe the topsy-turvy moral world in which a heteronomous collectivity is comple-


mented by autonomy divorced from universality (and, hence, from reason); but it is important to stress that mere description will not do here. It is as though the objective features of situations of apathy or of confusion were to be described in ways which omitted to mention that commitment or clarity ought to have been found there, but was not. The problem for Marxism has been the weakness of its attempts at such a theorisation of ‘collective rational autonomy’, which remain at the quasi-Rousseauian point from which Marx initially criticised Hegel’s doctrine of the state. The problem is— what to do with the notion of the proletariat as the potential universal class. If Marxists have at all got beyond ‘the proletariat selfconsciously making history’, they have simply and disastrously surrendered the torch of collective rational autonomy to the trusteeship of the ‘vanguard party’. These ideas are central to what Marxism can mean by ‘democracy’, and the poverty of its theorisations has led, respectively, to the idea that democracy is no more than ‘mass mobilisation’, or to the idea that democracy is realised in the decisions of the Party’s central committee. These positions merely parallel the dilemma inherited from Rousseau, the two horns distinguished by whether the problems are seen in terms of moral subjects pre-existing and constituting the social contract, or whether they are seen in relation to a realm of consent and obligation that is logically prior to and constitutive of moral subjects. In relation to the role marked out for the proletariat, the former implies that the potential universal class puts democracy into effect when, on the universal realisation throughout its ranks that it is the potential universal class, it puts an end to capitalist social relations by its own concerted and unanimous self-activity. By contrast, the latter horn of the dilemma leads to the view that the consciousness of the proletariat will never spontaneously rise to the point where it will act as a totality to grasp its inheritance—it must rather be led by those whose scientific grasp of the democratic objective of the class obviates the need to arrive at it by any overtly democratic procedure. This is because individuals are seen not only to be constituted as moral subjects by their incorporation within a pre-given sphere of consent and obligation, and so dependent upon it for the very possibility of their own rational autonomy as moral subjects, but also to be bound into it by relations of interdependence which, far from having been decided upon by some process of ‘discursive


will formation’, have to be accepted as a social given—‘definite relations which are independent of their will’. Although this is Marx’s phrase, the dilemma this poses for Marxist perspectives is particularly acute. For class relations are seen both as the prospective motor of emancipatory social change and as the principle of stasis of the social system. One response, reflecting the dominance of the former aspect, is to relegate the spheres of ideology and the actual practice of politics to the position of a sort of ‘epiphenomenon’ of systemic processes. The other is to seek grounds for optimism in pointers towards tendencies of the system to self-destruct, allowing a ‘window of opportunity’ for autonomous moral subjects to throw off their social shackles and to gain control of the runaway train that the system has become. The notion of democracy itself loses its substance within both positions sketched above. For those who see actual political practice as a mere ‘epiphenomenon’ of the interplay of components of the system, the manner in which a decision was reached by any given organisation is irrelevant to the outcome of the clash of class forces in which it is engaged. For those waiting for the ‘window of opportunity’, democracy in a real sense will only flower once that window opens on the new dawn of mass mobilisation. The possibility of discovering ‘actually existing democracy’ is not helped when our contractarian heritage persuades us to look for a solution in the wrong direction—towards formal, universalistic principles of democracy (of ‘discursive will formation’), applicable irrespective of the content of the democratic decision. (As though a policy of ‘racial purity’, for instance, could be democratically decided upon, when, I would contend, the content in this case is antithetical to democracy as such.) So we ask, in the abstract, how the pursuit of any (unspecified) goal could be collective, yet preserve the pre-given autonomy of the individuals who pursue it. We are then led inexorably back to the absurdity of unanimous direct democracy as the only model which could fully respect the autonomy of the individual. (This sounds like radical anarchism but, given the unlikelihood of unanimity on any particular issue, it leads easily to unanimity on one general issue—to maximise the freedom of each individual to pursue his/her own goals, i.e. market liberalism.) This is a profound problem for democratic theory. Without a substantive notion of collective rational autonomy it is impossible


to account for the moral as opposed to the procedural force of a majority decision. Democratic centralists construe its force as absolute, like that of the general will, while romantic individualists render it null and void—you answer only to your own conscience. Both empty all content from the notion of a voluntary association with a political cause, requiring moral discipline from its adherents. Democratic centralists believe they are morally entitled not to allow ‘dissidents’ a view which differs from the analogue of the general will. For romantic individualists, on the other hand nothing extraneous to the individual, be it a person or a majority, is morally entitled to any command over that individual’s conscience. In other words, either the Party is your conscience, or the Party is no more than the contingent alignment of individual sentiments, and not itself the focus for any obligation individuals did not already have. The analogy is of the loyalty of a soldier contrasted to support for a charity. Liberal pluralist considerations regarding democracy, concerned with ‘society as whole’, from which you cannot opt out, do nothing to solve this problem. They do not apply to voluntary associations with political purposes because they trade on the involuntary character of your ‘membership’ of society. Moreover the backing democracy gets from utilitarianism or from Rawls’s ‘original position’ rests on prudential and not on moral grounds. You cannot opt out, so you insure against the possibility of at some time being in a minority and/or at a disadvantage by agreeing on global principles to acknowledge but limit the rights of the majority and/or the fortunate. So Mill’s principle of liberty can be seen as such an insurance, in everyone’s long term interest, to preserve as much as possible of one’s freedom on finding oneself in a minority over some issue. Prudence in Rawls, on the other hand, is universalised by the expedient of hypothetical ignorance of your lot—so all will agree to there being no ‘dirty end of the stick’ in society, for fear of getting it themselves. Such accounts of democracy are thus unable to explain its moral force in voluntary associations such as political parties.

‘DEMOCRATIC CAUSES’—A PRELIMINARY CHARACTERISATION I would contend that the moral force of democracy within an


organisation derives not from abstract principle but from the moral rightness of concrete political objectives which are, in their very nature, necessarily collective in character, i.e. components of a substantive ethical universal. So the objective to which you are committed is, in your judgement, morally right; it is an objective which can only be achieved collectively; it has as its aim a right which can only be exercised collectively; and the organisation engaged in pursuing that objective, to which you belong, is the only organisation to which anyone hoping to work for that objective could feasibly commit their efforts. Your commitment to the objective of the organisation would therefore keep you in it even if majority decisions within it went against you, for there is nowhere else to go to pursue these objectives. These are democratic causes—the ‘democracy’ which characterises them is neither the mere procedural protection of the individual’s autonomy, nor the wholesale alienation of the individual’s powers of normative decision to the superior ethic of the party line. Working for associations such as political parties, trade unions, etc. is voluntary but not optional—they are not charities, and involvement in them is not an ‘ultra-obligation’. Members of a voluntary association pursuing a ‘democratic cause’ are in this position: as a party to a collective decision, where you fail to win the vote, you have a duty not to betray the cause, but to give the same loyalty you would have demanded of the minority had you been on the winning side. This is not an absolute duty, however, as democratic centralists suppose, for the decision could be so wrong that you must resign, or even actively denounce it; and you are certainly not morally debarred from continuing, within the organisation, to seek to win it over to your view. By the same token, you, and its other members, do not merely belong to such an organisation just for so long as you are in complete agreement with all that it does—following no other duty than to your own conscience. Equally, however, you and its other members are not bound to stick with that organisation no matter what it does, in contrast to the sentiment ‘My country, right or wrong!’ which a soldier might be encouraged to believe. This moral framework derives from two interlinked features of a ‘democratic cause’: the first is that, in pursuing such a cause, instrumental and moral considerations are logically inseparable because they are mutually necessary; and the second, connected reason is that the goals of such a cause are not goals to which an


individual can subscribe in interpersonal moral action—they are not just shared individual goals, they are goals which only a collectivity can have, and on which it must agree. Within such organisation some at least of the components of Hegel’s synthesis are put back together. ‘Discursive will formation’ is not an abstract be-all and end-all, but is directed towards and conditioned by the objective of changing the other moment of social agreement, namely the integration of the social system which forms us as moral subjects. At the same time, the autonomy of the individual is neither wholly unconditioned and de-coupled from both ethical universality and reason, nor is it wholly subservient to the dictates of a self-styled (but, for that reason, certainly bogus) actualisation of ethical universality—rather the aim of individuals’ agreeing to work together for such a cause is for them to work collectively towards actualising some part of the ethically universal. This implies that such goals will be achieved only when society, to some measure, changes its social relations (ultimately of production). It moreover implies that the nature of the objectives of democratic causes—socialist political parties, trade unions, feminist, anti-racist, environmental, etc. movements—cohere (or ought to cohere) to the extent that the means by which, instrumentally, they are pursued, are logically of a piece with the collective moral outcomes they seek to establish. This is ‘the method of political practice by which collective rational autonomy is produced’ (above)—i.e. how collective rational goals are autonomously pursued. Means and ends must interpenetrate here, in order that particular wills can be re-coupled with universality, and hence with reason, in the pursuit of collective objectives. Human moral freedom is vitiated if there are no rational ends to choose, while rational ends can only be the ends of rational action if they are chosen, not compelled. There may well be a minority who may have to be forced to comply with such changes in social relations, but the collective objective of a democratic cause can only be realised when the majority freely agree with it, and autonomously participate in its implementation. The way in which a society does this is part of what it is—it is not just procedural propriety, nor merely ‘distributive justice’, though they are part of it, because it concerns personal relations as much as the conduct of formal organisations and the distribution of consumables. All this, you may say, is trite. But it is not false, and my overall


point is that, in order to go beyond these truisms towards more adequately theorised notions of ‘socialist democracy’, ‘the alliance of progressive forces’, of ‘the left’ even, requires more than the recommendation of a ‘retrieval’ of what are undoubtedly ‘bourgeois’ values through the strengthening of civil society against the state. I have already suggested that, whatever the state/civil society distinction means today, it does not exhaustively divide society into two spheres. Marx saw the proletariat as debarred from both state and civil society by its exclusion from ownership of significant amounts of property. Separated from both it was seen by Marx as the sole actor in the sphere of the potential bringing into being of ethical universality, so this sphere was given no name of its own. It is their belonging within this sphere which unites progressive movements—democratic causes—into a coherent totality. So let us call this sphere ‘the alliance of progressive forces’. It is a travesty of the idea of such an alliance to refuse to see that it must contain differentiated parts, and so to demand that it should consist of, or comprise a collection of mere ‘fronts’ for, some single organisation. Equally, it is not pluralistic in the sense established in the ‘democratic pluralism’ of Mill and Rawls—an alliance based on prudence rather than on shared underlying purpose. Finally, membership of this sphere is not going to be determined in some essentialist fashion—by having the right formal objectives, or the right antecedents—because the form of political practice is no less important than avowed (maybe only ostensible) objectives or past glorious history. The concrete contents of this sphere are not, of course, simply proletarian people—class members—but the specific causes which, by collectively contending against both state and civil society, advance the actualisation of ethical universality in human social life. (Not all may do both, but it is as important to fight against private medicine in civil society as it is to oppose state nuclear bureaucracies.) This may be a ‘broad church’, but it is not pluralist. The boundaries between what is and what is not a ‘progressive cause’ have become blurred in recent years. Some oldstyle socialists have identified the scope of what is progressive with interests limited to some ‘actual proletariat’ (defined in terms of cloth-cap wearing, surplus value extraction or the like) neglecting the political role Marx allocated to that class, namely to actualise ethical universality. This has led some to absurd


refusals to recognise progressive organisations staring them in the face; but it has also led others into pluralist alliances of all the groups old Stalinists and/or right-wing Labourites do not like, under the illusion that incurring the hostility of political dinosaurs suffices for a group to be ‘progressive’. The adversary of the alliance of democratic causes—all the groups within the sphere of yet-to-be-actualised ethical universality—is the totality of the social relations of production of capitalism—civil society and the state—within which ethical universality cannot be actualised. What we need is a dialectical perspective in which the two moments are the democratisation of organisations within the state and the organisation of democracy within civil society. This is not to disparage those ‘bourgeois values’ on which our civil liberties rest—especially not at a time when these are seriously threatened. Rather, it is to recognise that, in modern societies, the critical areas of normative decision require collective action, not merely the opportunity to voice dissent. The ‘dissident’, who proclaims what we ought to do without addressing the problem of how we can—how we organise to bring it about—is all too quickly shunted down that track of moral exasperation which leads to contempt for the mass of humanity and the nihilism either of apathy or of terror.

NOTES This chapter was first published in Radical Philosophy 45 (Spring 1987). It has been revised for this publication. 1 As Vaclav Havel did shortly after this was written.

REFERENCES References are all in the text. I have referred to the following works by their initials after the first citation: HCD Habermas—Critical Debates, J.B.Thompson and D.Held (eds), Macmillan, 1982. LC Legitimation Crisis, J.Habermas, Heinemann, 1976. CHDS Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State OJQ On the Jewish Question (Page nos for this and CHDS from Early Writings, Penguin, Marx Library, 1975.)


CWF The Civil War in France (Page nos from The First International and After, Penguin, Marx Library, 1974.) PR The Philosophy of Right, Hegel, trans. T.M.Knox, Oxford University Press, 1967. SC The Social Contract, Rousseau.


Part III NATURE AND HUMAN NATURE


10

WOMEN, HUMANITY AND NATURE Val Plumwood

There is now a growing awareness that the Western philosophical tradition which has identified, on the one hand, maleness with the sphere of rationality, and on the other hand, femaleness with the sphere of nature, has provided one of the main intellectual bases for the domination of women in Western culture. There are plenty of good reasons for feminists to distrust both the concept of rationality and the notion of links with nature and the concept of nature. Both of these concepts and their contrasts have been major tools used to inferiorise and exclude women (as well as other groups). The main function of the concept of rationality, which has a confusing array of senses in which it is often hard to discern any precise content, seems to be a selfcongratulatory one for the group thought to possess the prized quality and the exclusion and denigration of the contrasting group which does not. Thus the sphere of rationality variously contrasts with and excludes the sphere of the emotions, the body, the passions, nature, the non-human world, faith, matter and physicality, experience and madness. The masculine rational sphere of public life, production, social and cultural life and rational justice is contrasted with the feminine sphere of the private, domestic and reproductive life, the latter representing the natural and individual as against the social and cultural.1 Again, the rational masculine sphere is a sphere where human freedom and control are exercised over affairs and over nature, especially via science and in active struggle against nature and over circumstances. In contrast, the feminine natural and domestic sphere represents the area of immersion in life, the natural part of a human being, the sphere of passivity, acceptance of unchangeable human 213


nature and natural necessity, of reproduction and necessary and unfree labour. In these cases there is not merely a contrast but an unfavourable one; the sphere associated with femininity and nature is accorded lower value than that associated with masculinity and freedom. In all the senses of rationality, the ‘rational’ side of the contrasts is more highly regarded and is part of the ideal human character, so that women, to the extent that they are faithful to the divergent ideals of womanhood, emerge as inferior, impoverished or imperfect human beings, lacking or possessing in a reduced form the admired characteristics of courage, control, rationality and freedom which make humans what they are, and which, according to this view, distinctively mark them off from nature and the animal. Feminine ‘closeness to nature’ in this sense is hardly a compliment. The ideals of the masculine sphere and those of humanity are identical or are convergent. Those of femininity and humanity are divergent. To put the point another way, the ideals of the rational sphere give us a character model of the human which is masculine. The concept of nature too has been and remains a major tool in the armoury of conservatives intent on keeping women in their place and supporting a rigid division of sexual spheres, or worse. It is allegedly nature, not contingent and changeable social arrangements, which determines that the lot of women will be that of reproduction and domestic arrangements and which justifies inequality. Women have been seen as connected with nature in both its two major contrasted senses, that of nature in contrast to culture or society, the realm of necessity in contrast to that of freedom, of controllable human cultural and social arrangements, and that of nature in contrast to the human world, or what is distinctively human in the world. The first sense, in which what is natural is what is not open to explanation or change, inspires the following conservative comment: Nature isn’t fair, and never will be—it is not concerned with justice. Nature has made Man with more Assertion, so that he will not willingly let Woman take first place. If she tries to he will always feel his manhood affronted, and he will not like her so much. It isn’t fair, but it is a fact. Without women men will always fight and drink and live like crows—they are really little savages. It’s women who

WOMEN, HUMANITY AND NATURE 215

are the homemakers, the civilisers, the gentle, the beautiful ones—and all they require of men is Security and Love. But they get more enjoyment out of the Arts, more fun out of being creative, more love out of little children, more depth out of life. To ask to be equal as well—is it really fair?2 (No, it’s not a contemporary of Rousseau’s. That appeared in a book published in 1985.) As Genevieve Lloyd has noted in her book The Man of Reason, however, the attitude to both women and nature resulting from the identification has not always been a simple one, and as Carolyn Merchant notes, it has not always been purely negative.3 The connection has sometimes been used to provide a limited affirmation of both women and nature, for example, in the romantic tradition. But the dominant tradition has been one in which the connection with nature accords women a lower status (even if one that is sometimes accorded some virtue as a ‘complement’), and has been used to confine them to limited and impoverished lives. Given this background, it is not surprising that many feminists regard with some suspicion a recent view, expressed by a growing number of writers in the ecofeminist camp, that there may be something to be said in favour of feminine connectedness with nature, and that there are important connections between the oppression of women and the domination and destruction of the natural world which feminism cannot afford to ignore. The very idea of feminine connection with nature seems to many to be regressive and insulting, summoning up images of women as passive, reproductive animals, contented cows immersed in the body and in unreflecting experiencing of life. It is both tempting and common therefore for feminists to view the traditional connection between women and nature as no more than in instrument of oppression, a relic of the bad old days which should simply wither away once its roots in an oppressive tradition are exposed. After all, this is 1990. It seems obvious enough that women must now claim full and equal participation in the sphere of humanity and rationality from which they have been excluded, and to which their traditional sphere of nature has been opposed. Freed of traditional prejudice and of the traditionally enforced tie to the natural, women can at last take their place simply as equal human beings. The connection with nature is best


forgotten. Women (especially modern women) have no more real connection with nature than men. What I want to argue in this paper is that there are several reasons why this widespread, ‘common-sense’ approach to the issue is unsatisfactory. There are several reasons why the question of a woman/nature connection can’t just be set aside, why the question should be examined carefully by feminists. The first of these, which is developed in the first part of the paper, is that it is essential to give critical examination to the issue both because of its repercussions for the model of humanity and for the treatment of nature. The second reason, which is developed in the later part of the paper, is that it is essential for feminism to address the issue because the ecofeminist argument reveals an important ambiguity in feminist theory itself. Examination of the ecofeminist argument can throw valuable light on questions at the heart of feminism itself, and has significant implications for distinguishing different strains of feminism and different associated strategies. The common-sense approach might better be called the ‘naive’ approach on analogy with naive realism in epistemology, since like naive realism it takes to be unproblematic what is not unproblematic. According to the naive view, the connection of women with nature should simply be set aside as a relic of the past, the problem for both women and men being that of becoming simply unproblematically and fully human. But the question of what is human is itself now highly problematic, and one of the areas in which it is most problematic is in the relation of humans to nature, to the non-human world. Another problem is that what is in question is not just a model of feminine connectedness with and passivity towards nature, but also a contrasting and complementary one of masculine disconnectedness from and domination of nature. But the assumptions in the masculine model are not seen as such because the masculine model is taken for granted as simply a human model and the feminine as a deviation from that. Hence to simply repudiate the old tradition of feminine connection with nature and to put nothing in its place, usually amounts to implicitly endorsing an alternative masculine model of the human and of human relations to nature and to implicitly endorsing also female absorption into this model. It is not, as it might at first appear, a neutral position, because unless the question of relation to nature is explicitly put


up for consideration and renegotiation, it is already settled—and settled in an unsatisfactory way—by the dominant Western model of humanity into which women will be fitted. This is a model of domination and transcendence of nature, in which freedom and virtue are construed in terms of control over, and distance from, the natural sphere. The critique of the domination of nature developed by environmental philosophers in the last ten years has shown I think that there are excellent reasons to be critical of this model.4 Unless there is some critical re-evaluation of this masculine model in the area of relations to nature, the old female/nature connection will be replaced by a dominant model of distance from, transcendence and control of nature which is masculine. Some critical examination of the question then has to have a place, and an important one, on the feminist agenda if a masculine model of the human and of human relations to nature is not to triumph by default. There is another reason then why the issue cannot be set aside in the way the naive view assumes. As a number of ecofeminists have observed, feminism needs to put its own house in order on this issue. If women do not have to fight the battles of other groups in a display of traditional altruism and self-abnegation, to carry the world’s ills in recognition of motherly duty, as some arguments from peace and environmental activists suggest, it is also true that they can’t base their own freedom on endorsing the continued lowly status of the sphere from which they have lately risen. Moves upwards in human groups are often accompanied by the vociferous insistence that those new recruits to the privileged class are utterly disassociated from the despised group from which they have emerged—hence the phenomenon of lower middle-class respectability and the officer risen from the ranks. Arguments for women cannot convincingly be based on a similar putdown of the non-human world. But much of the traditional argument has been so based. For Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, what is valuable in the human character ideal to which women must aspire is defined in contrast to the inferior sphere of brute creation. Thus she begins her Vindication by asking: ‘In what does man’s pre-eminence over the brute creation, consist? The answer is as clear as that a half is less than a whole, in Reason.’ And she goes on: For what purpose were the passions implanted? That man


by struggling with them might attain a degree of knowledge denied to the brutes. Consequently the perfection of our nature and capability of happiness must be estimated by the degree of reason, virtue and humanity that distinguish the individual and that from the exercise of reason, knowledge and virtue naturally flows.5 In her argument that women do have the capacity to join men in ‘superiority to the brute creation’, the inferiority of the natural order is simply taken for granted. It is certainly no longer acceptable for feminists to argue for equality in this way. *** Several critiques converge to necessitate reconsideration of the model of feminine connectedness with nature and masculine distance from and domination of it and to problematise the concept of the human. They are: a) the critique of masculinity and the valuing of traits associated with it traditionally; b) the critique of rationality; relevant here is not only the masculine and instrumental character of rationality, but also its overvaluation and use as a tool for the exclusion and oppression of the contrasting classes of the non-human (since rationality is often taken as the distinguishing mark of the human) and of women (because of its association with maleness). The overvaluation of rationality is deeply entrenched in Western culture and intellectual traditions, not always taking the extreme form of some of the classical philosophers (for example the Platonic view that the unexamined life was worthless, or the Augustinian one that rationality was the ultimate value to which all others were instrumental)6 but appearing in many more subtle modern forms, e.g, the limitation of consideration to rational moral agents. c) the critique of the human domination of nature, human chauvinism, speciesism, of the treatment of nature in purely instrumental terms and the low valuation placed on it in relation to the human and cultural spheres. Included in this is a critique of the model of the ideal human character and of human virtue, which points out that the Western human ideal is one which maximises difference and distance from the animal and the natural;


the traits thought distinctively human, and valued as a result are not only those associated with masculinity but those unshared with animals.7 Usually these are taken to be mental characteristics. An associated move is the identification of the human with the higher, mental capabilities and of the animal or natural with lower bodily ones, and the identification of the authentic human individual with the mental sphere.8 The critiques converge for several reasons. A major one is that the characteristics traditionally associated with masculinity are also those used to define what is distinctively human, e.g, rationality (and selected mental characteristics and skills), transcendence and activity, i.e. domination and control of nature as opposed to passive immersion in it (consider the characterisation of ‘savages’ as lower orders of humanity on this account), productive labour, sociability and culture. These last characteristics are assumed to be confined to humans but also associated with the masculine sphere of public life as opposed to the private, domestic, and reproductive sphere assigned to women. Masculine virtues are also taken to be human virtues, what distinguishes humans from the sphere of nature, especially the qualities of rationality, transcendence and freedom. Some traditional feminist arguments also provide striking examples of this identification of the human and the masculine. Thus Mary Wollstonecraft in the Vindication appeals strongly to the notion of an ungendered human character as an ideal for both sexes (‘the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being’),9 but this human character is implicitly masculine. The human character ideal she espouses diverges sharply from the feminine character ideal, which she rejects, ‘despising that weak elegancy of mind, exquisite sensibility, and sweet docility of manners’. Instead she urges that women become ‘more masculine and respectable’. The complementary feminine character ideal is rejected—both sexes should participate in a common human character ideal (p. 23) which despite some minor modifications (men are to become more modest and chaste and in that respect to take on feminine characteristics) coincides in its specifications with the masculine character. A single ‘unsexed’ character ideal is substituted for the old two-sexed one, where the old feminine ideal was perceived as subsidiary and sexed. The key concepts of rationality (or mentality) and nature then form a crucial link between the human and the masculine, so that


to problematise masculinity and rationality is at the same time to problematise the human, and with it, the relation of the human to the contrasted non-human sphere. The naive approach mistakenly takes the concept of the human to be unproblematic and fails to observe its masculine bias. This dual connection is then another reason why the issue of the traditional connection of women and nature can’t simply be ignored, why the problems raised must be considered. The concept of the human is itself very heavily normative. The notion of being fully or properly human carries enormous positive weight, and usually with little examination of the assumptions behind this, or the inferiorisation of the class of nonhumans this involves. Things are deplored or praised in terms of conformity to a concept of ‘full humanity’. But the dignity of humanity, like that of masculinity, is maintained by contrast with an excluded inferior class.10 The concept of the human plays an important but somewhat shadowy role in the problem, and assumptions about the ideal nature of the human often stand silently in the background in discussion on masculinity and femininity, as well as in other areas. Thus for example behind the view that there is something insulting or degrading about linking women and nature stands an unstated set of assumptions about the inferior status of the nonhuman world. Behind the view that the traditional connection between women and nature can be forgotten stands the assumption that women can now be fitted unproblematically into the current concept of the human, and, again, that this concept itself is unproblematic. Once these assumptions are made explicit, the connection between the stance adopted on the issue of the woman/nature connection and the different possibilities for feminism becomes clearer. In terms of this framework the main traditional position— the point of departure for feminism—can be seen as one in which the ideal of human character is not, as it often pretends to be, gender-neutral, but instead coincides or converges with that of masculine character, while the ideals of womanhood diverge. Included, and indeed having pride of place in this character ideal are the ideals of rationality, self-expression, freedom and control via transformation and domination of the natural. Womanly character ideals of emotionality, passivity acceptance and nurturance stand in contrast. Thus, as Simone de Beauvoir has so pow-


erfully stated, the tragedy of being a woman consisted in not only having one’s life and choices impoverished and limited, but also in the fact that to be a good woman was to be a second-rate human being.11 So that to the extent that these ‘neutral’ human character ideals were subscribed to and absorbed and the traditional feminine role also accepted, women must forever be forced to see themselves as inferiors and to be so seen. Because women were excluded from the activities and characteristics which were highly valorised and seen as distinctively human, they were forced to be satisfied with being mere spectators of what the distinctively human business of life was all about, the real business of the struggle with nature. De Beauvoir’s solution to this tragic dilemma was stated with great force and clarity—change was to come about by women fitting themselves and being allowed to fit themselves into the dominant model of the human, and women were thus to become fully human. The model itself, and the model of freedom via the domination of nature it is especially based on, are never themselves brought into question, and indeed women’s eagerness to participate in it confirms and supports the superiority of the model. Similarly for others, e.g. Harriet Taylor and Mary Wollstonecraft. As this earlier feminism saw it, the tragedy of women was that they were treated as less than fully human, or that, prevented from becoming fully human, they were kept at the level of the brutes. This has been called the first, masculinising, wave of feminism.12 The problem for women was to claim full humanity, i.e. to conform to the main human character ideal, defined by traits characteristic also of the masculine, and to fit into, adapt themselves to, the corresponding social institutions of the public sphere. These might require some minor modification but basically it was women who were to change and adapt (sometimes with help), and women (or what society had made of them) who were the problem. The position can be summed up as that of demanding participation by women in a masculine concept or ideal of humanity, and the associated activist strategy as that of demanding equal admittance for women to a masculine-defined sphere and masculine institutions. Central to these was the domination of nature. Women, in this strategy, are to join men in participation in areas which especially exhibit human freedom, such as science and technology, from


which they have been especially strongly excluded. These areas are especially strongly masculine not only because their style strongly involves the highly valorised masculine traits of objectivity, abstractness, rationality and suppression of emotionality, but also because of their function which exhibits most strongly the masculine virtues of transcendence of, control of and struggle with nature. In the equal admittance strategy, women enter science, but science itself and its orientation to the domination of nature remain unchanged. This masculinising strategy is the one which is being implicitly adopted when the problem of the woman/nature connection is simply side-stepped or set aside. It is assumed that the solution is for women to fit into a masculine model of human relations to nature which does not require change or challenge. In the last decade this first, masculinising strategy of feminism has come under strong criticism from several feminist quarters and a number of its problems identified. One problem is that the masculine model of the human and corresponding social institutions has been arrived at precisely by exclusion and devaluation of women and feminine characteristics. Because it has been defined by exclusion, it is loaded against women in a variety of subtle and less subtle ways and women will not benefit from admittance to it as much as they think. As Genevieve Lloyd notes, ‘Women cannot easily be accommodated into a cultural ideal that has defined itself in opposition to the feminine.’13 Absorption into the masculine model is not likely to be successful. Other major criticisms come from those who see the need to reject or modify the masculine character ideal as well as (or in some cases instead of) the feminine character ideal rejected or modified in the masculinising strategy. There are several different angles from which this criticism is directed. One is from difference theorists, who reject the masculine character ideal as a model, at least for women and in some cases for both men and women. Another is from ecofeminists, who reject the masculine model especially in the area of human relations to nature, and argue more directly that this masculinising strategy amounts to having women join men in belonging to a privileged class in turn defined by excluding the inferior class of the non-human; that is, it is a strategy of having women equally admitted to a now wider dominating class, without questioning the structure of, or the necessity for, domination. The conceptual apparatus relating supe-


rior to inferior orders remains intact and unquestioned.14 What is achieved is a broadening of the dominating class, without changing or challenging the basis of domination itself. And the attempt to simply enlarge the privileged class by extending to and including women not only ignores a crucial moral dimension of the problem, it ignores the way in which different kinds of domination act as models for and as support and reinforcement for one another, and the way in which the same conceptual structure of domination reappears in very different inferiorised groups, e.g. women, inferior humans, slaves, manual labourers, ‘savages’, people of colour—all ‘closer to the animals’.15 What seems to be involved here is often not so much an affirmation of feminine connectedness with and closeness to nature16 as distrust and rejection of the masculine character model of disconnectedness from and domination of the natural order. The masculine character ideal is similarly rejected by the broader ecofeminists and by some theorists of non-violence, who link the masculine character ideal (and in some cases biological maleness) to aggression against fellow humans, especially women, as well as against nature. They reject the absorption of women into this mould, which is perceived as yielding a culture not of life but of death.17 *** One thing that has emerged from the disscussion so far is that a critical and thoroughgoing contemporary feminism is and must be engaged in a lot more than merely challenging and revising ideals of feminine character, that it is and must be engaged in revising and challenging as well the ideals both of masculine and of human character. The masculinising strategy is unsatisfactory and superficial precisely because it does not do this. In the light of this understanding it seems worthwhile to try to compare and evaluate some alternative strategies for revising the human character ideal and to try to spell out more clearly what alternative model the ecofeminist argument is really appealing to, and especially how it differs from conservative positions it is often confused with. It seems clear that the basic common ground of the ecofeminist and non-violence argument is rejecting the masculine model of the human as a character ideal, at least for women, but


beyond that there is confusion, ambiguity and indeterminacy, and a number of different alternatives are possible. Perhaps the most obvious way to interpret the ecofeminist argument is as one which replaces the masculine model of the human character by a new feminine model. That is, if the masculinising strategy rejected the feminine character ideal and affirmed a masculine one for both sexes, this feminising strategy rejects the masculine character ideal and affirms a feminine one for both sexes. The masculinising wave of feminism is succeeded by a new feminising wave. Several slogans sum up this feminising strategy, e.g. ‘the future is female’, ‘Adam was a rough draft, Eve is a fair copy’ (courtesy Macquarie University toilet door). There are several different forms the assertion of a feminine character ideal can take, and it is important to be clear about the difference. First, a feminine character ideal can be affirmed not as a rival to the masculine character ideal but as a complement. The masculine model is not really challenged at all in this strategy and may in fact be affirmed and supported, although there may be some degree of upward revaluation of the relative worth of feminine traits. For example, the romantic tradition often does this, affirming the value of the feminine but in a way that does not really challenge the masculine ideal, but rather complements it or adds a separate feminine model. An associated strategy is that of affirming a traditional model of feminine character obtained by reversing the values, so that traits previously regarded as lowly and despised become instead virtues and are given a high value: e.g. closeness to nature, previously used to put women down, is recast as a virtue. There is a fairly strong tendency for a position which thus simply reverses the value of traditional feminine traits to collapse into a complementary position, and conversely for a complementary affirmation of feminine character to affirm traditional traits. One reason for this is that really traditional feminine traits include appropriate attitudes of subservience or self-abnegation which require a masculine complement. Thus where feminine virtues are developed in a situation of exclusion and complementation there is a problem about how they can stand on their own.18 The associated social change strategy is that of separate spheres—recognising and revalorising traditional femininity as a complement to masculinity. This is a conservative pre-feminist or anti-feminist strategy, and is included here for completeness of


alternatives, and so that it can be seen in relation to other positions. A different strategy is that of affirming a feminine character ideal as a rival ideal, attempting to replace the masculine ideal, not merely to complement it. To be a genuine rival, it has to be affirmed as a rival model of the human, displacing or competing with the masculine model of the human. The human ideal then becomes a feminine rather than, as traditionally, a masculine one, and human virtues are now feminine virtues and character traits rather than masculine ones. Thus a feminine ideal is seen as desirable for both sexes, although there may be doubts as to how far biological males can ever approximate to it. Thus, according to Sally Miller Gearhart, it is time to dare to admit that some of the sex-role mythology is in fact true and to insist that the qualities attributed to women (specifically empathy, nurturance and cooperativeness) be affirmed as human qualities capable of cultivation by men even if denied them by nature.19 The ‘primacy of the female’ (i.e. of feminine character traits, not necessarily biological femaleness) would be acknowledged ‘as primary, the source of all life’.20 What has come to be called ‘difference theory’ can involve the celebration and articulation of woman’s difference from the ideal and actuality of masculine character, and, in some forms, can represent another strand of this feminising strategy. In contrast to the sort of position discussed above, which assumes that the identification of feminine traits is clear and that they can be known to include such traditional traits as nurturance and empathy, this alternative strand takes the form of the celebration of what is proclaimed as the genuinely feminine, which may be ‘a feminine principle not to be defined’.21 The project of the discovery and emergence of the genuinely feminine, is conceptualised not as something whose character has been formed by exclusion from the masculine sphere, but as an independent force, silenced and unable to reach expression under patriarchy, but ready and able to emerge once the barriers of phallocentric society to its expression are removed. Women’s bodily experience is often taken as the starting point in the attempt to give expression to the silenced and unknown feminine.22


If the strategy associated with the first, masculinising model is that of equality (in masculine institutions), and the strategy of the second, complementary feminine form is that of separate (but equally valued) spheres, the strategy of the third, feminising form is that of separatism, in which feminine virtues can be developed and come to dominate, or the unknown and yet to be discovered true feminine can emerge. There seem to be numerous difficulties in both strands of the position. This paper is mainly concerned with understanding the motivation for and structure of the ecofeminist argument, the range of options available and which account of the human character ideal it appeals to, rather than with the detailed elaboration and critique of these positions which is undoubtedly required in feminist theory. Nevertheless, some critical comment on the third ‘feminising’ approach seems to be in order, if only to motivate the examination of alternatives. Much of the problem turns on the question of what the characteristics of the alternative feminine ideal are, and of how the desired traits can be identified as feminine. If the position of the first strand is adopted, some virtues (e.g. nurturance, empathy in Gearhart) are identified as feminine or feminine-associated and put forward as the new ideal for the human. But how is this identification of these traits as feminine arrived at? Are the traits in question taken to be characteristic of all women in all circumstances (which is not very convincing), or only under traditional and complementary circumstances, in which case how can we know that they will survive translation to a different nontraditional and non-complementary context? Or is there some other alternative? Are they really traits of all actual women (or only some?) arrived at by examining what actual women are like, or are they traits simply traditionally attributed to women? So if traditional traits are affirmed, there is the problem Lloyd points to as to how traits developed in a complementary context (e.g. nurturance) can stand alone as a human ideal. Gearhart skirts the problem by referring to the relevant traits as ‘feminine-associated’, an expression which is neatly four-way ambiguous between ‘attributed to women’, ‘attributed traditionally to women’, ‘occurring with women’, and ‘occurring with women in the traditional context’. The ambiguity enables her to assume that those traits attributed to women in fact occur with them unproblematically in a non-traditional context.


Gearhart also conveniently overlooks numerous negative traits associated with women under patriarchy and in the traditional feminine, such as subservience, and does not explain what ensures that we will get the desirable characteristics but not the undesirable ones. Are the undesirable ones assumed to be produced by a patriarchal context, and the desirable ones somehow not? There are a host of problems. If we examine the second difference theory strand we encounter a different set of equally serious problems, now turning on specifying what the characteristics of the alternative feminine ideal are. Independent criteria for selection and identification of feminine traits are lacking. Since these are not traditional virtues or character traits associated with the feminine, what are they? There has to be some way of determining which are to be affirmed in opposition to masculine traits. Usually they are not identified or taken as identifiable (e.g. because of silencing), or are treated as to be discovered. The genuinely feminine is either unknowable or as yet unknown, to be brought into existence. In this case there seems no way of showing whether the desired characteristics, e.g. alternatives to domination of nature, will or will not be present among the group of traits. Arguments from psychoanalysis may suggest that they will be but are hardly conclusive as they stand; and as Claire Duchen suggests, relying solely on them appears to involve denying the importance of other non-individual and social influences and bases of character.23 The problem, then, is how to say what this concept of ‘the feminine’ is, and what the ideal human character being affirmed is like. Obviously its character cannot be determined by examining the sorts of characteristics actual women now display, since these have been determined by exclusion under patriarchy. Thus for example it is hardly convincing to suggest that passivity, insecurity, and the poorly developed sense of self and of independence many women are obliged to develop under patriarchal conditions are genuine but unrecognised human virtues. Again it seems impossible not to recognise that the oppression of women has produced undesirable as well as desirable character traits. So, since it cannot be actual existing women whose character forms the basis for the ideal, this position sets off a search for some sort of feminine essence which eludes expression in present societies, but appears as an unrealised potential, so much unre-


alised that it is, in some versions, almost essentially inexpressible. Since it seems that this character can never be instantiated by actual women in existing oppressive societies, the position has difficulty in explaining exactly how the ideal character appealed to ‘belongs to’ women, and which women it belongs to, i.e. what makes it feminine. And it seems inevitably either nebulous or circular, since we are asked to undertake a remaking of the human in the mould of a set of ‘feminine’ characteristics which cannot be specified unless and until that remaking is achieved, and whose relation to actually existing women is, at best, unclear. And the suggestion that we should thus blindly swear allegiance to the nation of the female body, and to whatever characteristics it may develop or display, seems a mere piece of nationalism. The body is sometimes thus introduced in an attempt to solve the problem of identifying the feminine, in what appears to be a form of reverse dualism. The position apparently accepts the mind/body division and its correspondence to masculinity and femininity, but replaces the masculine notion of identity as based in the mind or in consciousness with the supposedly feminine one of identity as based in—and apparently reducible to—the sexed body. To the extent that bodily difference is taken as determining of the feminine, that the feminine is endorsed as the ideal of human character, and that what is involved is the assertion of a rival human ideal which men will necessarily never be able to participate in, the position seems to have built into it another hierarchy, another exclusion. There may be difference here, but too much remains the same. In brief the position, whether interpreted according to strand 1 or strand 2, faces a dilemma as a base for the ecofeminist argument. If it follows strand 1 and specifies the traits, selecting only desirable ones such as nurturance, it faces the problem of explaining how these relate to existing women and how they are feminine. If it fails to do so, specifying them only in their relation to female bodies or to the emergence of an unspecified ‘genuine femininity’, it needs to provide a basis for believing, what is needed for the ecofeminist argument, that the desirable traits are included or will emerge. In neither case, it seems, can the ecofeminist argument be adequately based on position 3. Is the argument therefore to be abandoned? I want to argue that it doesn’t have to be, although this particular form of it needs to be. Initially it seems obvious that the


ecofeminist and peace argument is grounded on accepting a special feminine connectedness with the natural or with peaceful characteristics, and then affirming this as a rival ideal of the human (or as part of such an ideal). But on closer examination this is not so clear. The argument doesn’t have to take this form. The ecofeminist argument basically involves the rejection of the masculine model of the human and of the aggression towards and domination of nature seen as part of that model. But to reject the masculine model of the human is not necessarily to affirm a rival feminine ideal, nor to accept any other special connection between nature and the feminine. To free the concept of the human from the connection to the masculine which has lain behind its guise of neutrality doesn’t mean that it has to be replaced by a rival feminine ideal specified in reaction to the masculine ideal. The choice between the masculine model of the human and its feminine rival is, fortunately then, a false choice. This can be seen clearly if we examine the logical options for the human ideal and its relation to a masculine or feminine ideal. They can be set out as follows (using the symbol ‘R’ to mean ‘reject’ and the symbol ‘A’ to mean ‘accept’): 1) 2) 3) 4)

A masculine model, R feminine model A masculine model, A feminine model A feminine model, R masculine model R masculine model, R feminine model

This set of alternatives is exclusive and exhaustive of the possibilities for an ideal if the categories are treated as wholes, but of course a further set of options can be generated if they are not or if the necessity for a human character ideal itself is questioned, viz. no character ideal at all.24 It is apparent from this set of alternatives that the assumption that an alternative to 1) (the traditional model) or 2) (the romantic complementary or separate spheres model) must be 3) (the feminine model) is wrong. Thus it is open to an ecofeminist to agree in part with the common-sense view and assert that women are in fact no more significantly or essentially connected to nature than men (except in so far as an alleged connection has been used to inferiorise both and has involved exclusion of women from technology and culture) but that what is needed is an account of the human ideal for both


sexes, which accepts the undesirability of the domination of nature associated with masculinity. This would be a strategy which rejected the masculine concept of the human, but because it denied any special significant connection between nature and the feminine, was not committed to a rival feminine ideal. The fact that the concept of the human is up for remaking doesn’t mean that it has to be remade in the mould of either the masculine or the feminine. Not only can an ecofeminist argument appeal more satisfactorily to the fourth model than the third, that is clearly what it often does. For example, Rosemary Ruether, one of the pioneers of the position, is clearly appealing to model 4, not model 3, when she writes Both men and women must be resocialised from their traditional distorted cultures of masculinity and femininity in order to find that humanized culture that is both selfaffirming and other-affirming. It is precisely in this creation of a humanity that is truly affirming of all life, both one’s own and that of others, that the writers seek to find the deepest connections between feminism and non-violence.25 In some writers the adherence to model 4 over 3 is even more explicit, e.g. If the masculine character ideal supports militarism, what can support peace? Femininity? No, for that character ideal also has been shaped by patriarchy and includes along with virtues such as gentleness and nurturance a kind of dependency which breeds the passive-aggressive syndrome of curdled violence.26 The rejection of the masculine character ideal does not imply acceptance of corresponding feminine traits, and a critique of both masculinity and femininity and their complementary characters may be involved. Further, the rejection of both the masculine and feminine character ideals is linked with the rejection of the traditionally associated dualisms of mind/body, rationality/ emotionality, public/private, and so on, which are also rejected as false choices, so that the transcendence of the traditional gendered characters becomes part of, is linked with the systematic


transcendence of this wider set of dualisms.27 These dualisms are subject to independent criticism in the ecofeminist literature. From this perspective, the model which simply replaces the masculine by the feminine is a reactive model which fails to take adequate account of the way in which gender is structured as a dualism. It shares the general inadequacy of the ‘reverse-value’ strategy for dealing with dualisms which simply affirms the underside —that to do so is implicitly to accept and to preserve, rather than to challenge, the dualistic structure. The fourth model for demasculinising the human character may be developed in various different ways. One of the most obvious and popular ways to develop it is in terms of androgyny. Thus Kokopeli and Lakey continue: We are encouraged by the vision of androgyny, which acknowledges that the best characteristics now allocated to the two genders indeed belong to both; gentleness, intelligence, nurturance, courage, awareness of feelings, cooperativeness…. Many of these characteristics are now allocated to the feminine role which has led some men to conclude that the essential liberating task is to become effeminate. We don’t agree, since some desirable characteristics are now allocated to the masculine role (for example initiative, intelligence).28 But androgyny is not the only construction to place on the fourth model, and it in turn has its problems. The concept of androgynous human character suggests a recipe analogy, in which the new human ideal is put together from existing ingredients: take good points of each gender and place in bowl, mix gently, throw bad points into dustbin. But such a model is far too simple and shallow, ignoring relations of exclusion, complementation and so on between traits and suggesting that their allocation to their respective sex is arbitrary. It treats the problem as if it could be solved by an amalgam of certain existing characteristics thrown together, just as the androgynous human is pictured as a physical composite of male and female organs. Similarly the androgynous terminology suggests that no significant character differences should remain between masculine and feminine characteristics, that there will be


a single model for both sexes composed of the same set of character traits. These assumptions are both unsatisfactory and unnecessary, and are not an inevitable part of the fourth model. The androgynous way of developing the fourth model should be distinguished from other ways, e.g. where what is involved is not an amalgam of genders leading to identical gender roles, but a transcendence of the dualistic gender characteristics to produce a third set of characteristics that will often be different from either. The androgynous model overlooks the fact that the gender contrasts of existing character traits are often false contrasts. In fact the gender categories and associated institutions can be seen as a systematic and related network of false choices. A good example is provided by the egoism/altruism contrast, associated with masculinity and femininity respectively. If egoism is taken as consisting in pursuit of a person’s own selfish interest, and altruism to consist in a person’s denying or setting aside their own interest in favour of that of others, the false contrast standardly presented between the two overlooks the alternative of interdependence of interest, the situation where interests are not discrete and disconnected but where a person’s interest essentially involves the interests of others.29 Similar points can be made for most of the other gender-related dualisms. There are several further ways of developing the fourth model. One of them is degendered, in that selection of characteristics to be affirmed is not based on association with one sex or the other or exclusively on traditional gender characteristics, but aims to transcend them. Another one might be thought of as regendered30 in that it does not aim to eliminate gender and gender difference as such, but rather to reconstruct it so as to free it from dualistic construction and in particular to dissolve particular dualisticallypaired traits such as the pairs dominant/submissive and overemphasised/under-emphasised ego boundaries. The regendering alternative would not need to deny difference or assume the neutrality of the body, to deny that differently sexed bodies might give rise to different experiences and different orientations to the world, although it would resist the attempt to treat such difference as lacking a social context and as giving rise to fixed essences not open to change.31 Nor does it have to try to create a unique human character ideal, as opposed to a multiplicity of such ideals.


Such a position can also allow room for certain ways of affirming or valuing the feminine, in at least some senses of this highly ambiguous phrase, that is for affirming as humanly valuable certain traits previously treated as of little consequence, confined to women and excluded from the masculine character or from more prestigious areas of human life. Such upward revaluing of traits such as nurturance is an important part of the ecofeminist position. But it is important to note the ambiguities and the difference between, first, valuing all and only feminine traits and valuing them because or on the grounds that they are feminine, regardless and in ignorance of what they will actually turn out to be (the position corresponding to the feminising strategy discussed earlier), and, second, revaluing, on a selective basis, certain important traits which have been devalued because of their association with the feminine and with nature. It is important to note the difference too between affirming feminine traits as part of a dualised and patriarchal structure, and affirming them in a way which challenges such a structure. For example affirming feminine traits as confined to women and as exclusively possessed by them leads to an essentially conservative position, and it is important for a radical ecofeminism to show how its position differs from this conservative affirmation of feminine traits and roles, which may involve showing how in affirming them it gives them a different significance from the one they had in a dualised, patriarchal context. Nurturance, for example, a trait often affirmed in ecofeminism, has been devalued because of its links to both femininity and animality, and in a patriarchal context where it has been confined to women and the private sphere, is such that women’s exclusive nurturance confirms and supports male control of the world. But a critical and nonconservative ecofeminism must affirm it in ways which do not do this, which remove it from the dualised context, making it a virtue for men as well as women, and giving it the significance of nurturing the natural world and others not confined to the nuclear family. By such transformations of context and significance, feminine traits arising from a patriarchal context can develop into real and radical strengths in a non-patriarchal context.32 But although such traits can develop from traditional feminine traits given an appropriate transformation of social context, they are not identical with them, and representing them as the same traits (as ‘affirming the feminine’ suggests) can be mislead-


ing about the sense in and extent to which they are feminine. For they are neither the same as those in the traditional context, and hence ‘feminine’ in that sense of being part of the traditional characteristics and virtues of womankind, nor feminine in the sense that it is not possible for men to share them or aspire to them. Where does all this leave the ecofeminist argument and the notion that women are ‘closer to nature’? Women have been treated historically as aligned with nature, and this has shaped the characteristics of feminine identity. But there are problems in embracing such a feminine alternative, to the extent that it has involved the confinement of women to activities such as reproduction and denial to them of capacities for reason, intelligence and control of life conditions, that is, their exclusion from the valued features of human life and culture. So a different concept of closeness to nature from the traditional one has to be invoked. But on the other side of the dualism, women’s alignment with nature has been matched by the development of a masculine identity centring around distance from nature and such ‘natural’ areas in human life as reproduction, and around control, domination and inferiorisation of the natural sphere. Such distance is obtained by the location of value in the area of human character and culture that has been taken as both masculine and distinguishing of humans from the non-human world. This is the model of human life ecofeminists reject, as a model both for men and for women liberated from the constraints of the traditional position. Neither model is acceptable, and an acceptable ‘androgynous’ solution cannot be obtained by somehow combining the two unsatisfactory ones. What is needed is a regendered model, which realigns the gender power structure, reconstructs the gender identities and challenges the dualisms on which they have been based. Thus a sophisticated ecofeminism based on the feminist critique of gender and of dualism challenges nature/culture dualism, and the dominant masculine model of human culture and the human self as separated and maximally distanced from the natural world, and from features of the human self shared with the natural world—‘nature within’. On such an alternative model of the human we would not overemphasise or overvalue the characteristics that set humans apart from the natural world nor attempt obsessively to maximise the differences as the main source of virtue. We would be able to see value not only in the natural world but in the characteristics which we as humans share with


it, which have been allocated to the feminine and treated as culturally problematic.

NOTES This chapter, now revised, was first published in Radical Philosophy 48 (Spring 1988) 1 The sex/gender distinction is important in stating ecofeminist positions but has been under attack recently. It remains, I believe, both defensible and useful, although often loaded with additional less defensible assumptions. As used here it carries no dualistic implications, e.g. that the character traits involved are purely mental (physical and integrated characteristics can and normally will be included), or that biological sex is a brute fact involving no element of social or cultural determination. For a defence of the distinction and elaboration of some of the issues surrounding it see my ‘Do We Need A Sex/Gender Distinction?’, Radical Philosophy 51, spring 1989. 2 p. 297 Dr C.McT.Hopkins, As You Take It, Neptune Press, Geelong, 1985. 3 Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason, Methuen, 1984, and Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, Wild wood House, 1980. 4 See e.g. R. and V.Routley, ‘Against the Inevitability of Human Chauvinism’, in K.E.Goodpaster and K.M.Sayre, eds, Ethics and Problems of the 21st Century, University of Notre Dame Press, 1979. 5 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Dent, London, 1982, p. 15. 6 For some account of this see Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought, Princeton, New Jersey, 1979. 7 See, for example, John Rodman, ‘Paradigm Change in Political Science’, American Behavioural Scientist, Vol. 24, No. 1 (1980). Also Mary Midgley, Beast & Man, p. 40, Methuen, 1979, Ch. 11. 8 These points are developed in more detail in V.Plumwood, ‘Ecofeminism: an Overview and Discussion of Positions and Arguments’, in Janna L.Thompson, ed., Women and Philosophy, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Supplement to Vol. 64, June 1986, pp. 120–38. 9 Wollstonecraft, op. cit, p. 5. 10 For examples see Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World, Penguin, 1983, p. 41ff. 11 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, Foursquare Books, 1965. 12 Ariel Salleh, ‘Contribution to the Critique of Political Epistemology’, Thesis Eleven, 1984, No. 8. 13 Lloyd, op. cit, p. 104. 14 For example Elizabeth Dodson Gray, Why the Green Nigger: Remything Genesis, Roundtable Press, Wellesley, Mass. 1979. 15 See Rosemary Radford Ruether, New Woman New Earth, Seabury


16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30

31 32

Press, New York, 1975, and Susan Griffin, Women and Nature, Harper & Row, New York, 1978. Although this may be involved in some cases, e.g. Elizabeth Dodson Gray, op. cit. See e.g. Leonie Caldecott and Stephanie Leland, eds, Reclaim the Earth: Women speak out for Life on Earth, The Women’s Press, London, 1983, and Pam McCallister, ed., Reweaving the Web of Life: Feminism and Non-violence, New Society Publishers, Philadelphia, 1982. On complementation see Genevieve Lloyd, op. cit., Ch. 7. Sally Miller Gearhart, ‘The Future—If There is One—Is Female’, in McCallister, op. cit., p. 271. Ibid., p. 272. Christiane Makward, ‘To Be or Not to Be…A Feminist Speaker’, in Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine, eds, The Future of Difference, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, 1985, p. 96. Chantal Chawaf, cited in Makward, op. cit., p. 96. in E.Marks and I.de Courtivron, eds, New French Feminisms, Harvester, Brighton, 1980, p. 103. Claire Duchen, Feminism in France, Routledge 1986, Ch. 5. This seems to be what is being suggested in Moira Gatens, ‘Feminism, Philosophy and Riddles Without Answers’, in C. Pateman and E.Gross, eds, Feminist Challenges, pp. 28–9. Quoted in P.McCallister, op. cit. Bruce Kokopeli and George Lakey, ‘More Power Than We Want: Masculine Sexuality and Violence’, in P.McCallister, op. cit., p. 239. For an account of these linked dualisms and of how they are treated in the ecofeminist argument see V.Plumwood, ‘Ecofeminism: an Overview and Discussion of Positions and Arguments’, op. cit. Kokopeli and Lakey, op. cit., p. 239. For more details see R. and V.Routley, ‘Against the Inevitability of Human Chauvinism’ in K.Goodpaster and K.Sayre eds, Ethics and Problems of the 21st Century, Notre Dame University Press, Notre Dame, 1979. The difference between regendering and degendering is explained in more detail in my article ‘Do We Need a Sex/Gender Distinction?’, op. cit. For telling criticisms of androgyny see Hester Eisentein, Contemporary Feminist Thought, Unwin Paperbacks, London, 1984, Ch. 6. See Plumwood, op. cit. As explained in Jean Baker Miller, Toward a New Psychology of Women, Penguin Books, London, 1986.

11

HUMANISM=SPECIESISM? Marx on humans and animals Ted Benton

INTRODUCTION This paper1 is intended to form part of a more extended exploration of some key texts of Marx from the standpoint of the socalled ‘new’ social movements (though some of these pre-date the Marxist tradition itself!). Here, I shall be focusing on the early work of Marx—especially the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844—and with the concerns of two closely related recent radical movements in mind. These movements are modern environmentalism and a spectrum of groupings which share concern about human mistreatment of (other) animals—animal welfare, rights and liberation groups, as well as the more specialist campaigns against vivisection, factory farming, the fur trade and so on. The valueorientation which underlies both movements, and which informs their critique of modern industrial societies, is radically at odds with a merely utilitarian, or instrumental relation to the rest of nature. Other animals may be sufficiently like human beings to be properly considered as moral subjects, and as the bearers of biographies. Ethical considerations must therefore enter into our dealings with them. It is evil to continue to treat them merely as instruments or resources to be exploited for specifically human purposes. In the perspective of ‘deep’ ecology,2 this argument can be extended to the whole of nature, which is regarded as having an intrinsic value, independent of human purposes and requirements. Concern for the environment, on this view, is properly rooted not 237


in a ‘speciesist’ enlightened self-interest (i.e. the recognition that short term benefits from ruthless exploitation of the environment will be paid for in the longer term by the destruction of our own ‘life-support systems’) but rather in a respect for the independent value of the other species with which we share our planet, and, indeed, for the whole complex of physical and chemical conditions for their existence and well-being. At first thought, it seems that there is much in common between this view of our relationship to the rest of nature and that of the early Marx. Both perspectives share a vision of humans as part of nature, and as dependent for their well-being on unceasing interaction with nature. Consider, for example, Marx’s striking metaphor for nature as man’s ‘inorganic body’: Nature is man’s inorganic body—nature, that is in so far as it is not itself human body. Man lives on nature—means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.3 And Marx is by no means stating merely a shallow-ecological, enlightened self-interest of the species. The view of communism which structures the whole of the Manuscripts gives a central place to a proper ethical, aesthetic and cognitive relationship to nature as inseparable from true human fulfilment. In his later works it sometimes seems as if Marx has retreated into a view of the overcoming of the opposition between humanity and nature as merely the main historical means by which humans are enabled to achieve fulfilment. This is very much the kind of picture of Marx’s argument presented in Gerry Cohen’s very influential defence of Marx’s theory of history.4 But the Marx of the Manuscripts is by contrast clear in his recognition that a transformation of our relation to nature is a key aspect and content of the process of human emancipation itself. This indeed is something I would like to hold on to as a fundamental insight which Marx reached in the Manuscripts. But—and this is the topic of the rest of this paper—it also seems to me that there are fundamental ambiguities and conceptual tensions in the overall philosophical position adopted by the early Marx as it bears on this range of problems. These ambiguities and tensions

HUMANISM=SPECIESISM? 239

threaten to undermine what is of value in Marx’s achievement and have sustained readings of Marx which have been deeply inimical to environmental values. A serious effort of critical restructuring and revaluation of the most basic philosophical ideas and arguments of the early Marx is necesary if their ‘rational kernel’ is to be extracted. At best, I can accomplish only a tiny fragment of that task in this paper, but, as I shall try to show, this tiny fragment does have very far-reaching implications. There are two elements in the argument of the Manuscripts which seem to me to sit very uncomfortably alongside the naturalism of the above-quoted passage and its possible ‘deep-ecological’ reading. These elements are, first, the use of the human/animal contrast as Marx’s central device in the ethical critique of the estrangement of labour under regimes of private property, and, second, the specific content Marx gives to his vision of human emancipation as involving the ‘humanisation of nature’. I shall say most about the first of these elements, leaving what I have to say about the second rather underdeveloped. With regard to the human/animal opposition the argument is, very roughly, as follows. The estrangement of labour is supposed by Marx to have disastrous effects on human beings, their relations to one another, and their relationships to their external, material world. These disastrous effects can be summed up by saying that the estrangement of labour reduces human life to the condition appropriate to that of animals, and, within human life, inverts the relation between the human and the animal. The overcoming of estrangement means restoring to human beings their properly human status, and relationships to one another and to the rest of nature. But what is the rest of nature? Does it include other animals? Marx’s use of the metaphor ‘inorganic body’ suggests not. On the other hand, nothing Marx says in connection with that metaphor can be sustained unless animals are included. A human life dependent upon the forces and mechanisms of inorganic nature, unmediated by other forms of life, is impossible. There is no reason to think Marx actually thought it possible. And notwithstanding the arguments of some that the possibility now exists of a satisfactory human life which does not rely on the consumption or exploitation of other animals, the phrase ‘man lives on Nature’, written in 1844, must have included within its reference a whole range of uses of animals as a source of energy


in agricultural and industrial labour processes, as well as for food, entertainment and companionship. Now, if, for Marx, human emancipation involves a qualitative transformation of our relationship with the rest of nature, a ‘humanisation’ of nature, and if nature includes other species of animals, then human emancipation must involve a transformation in our relations to other animals. But what could this transformation be? A literal ‘humanisation’ of them in the sense of ‘rendering them human’ by selective breeding (or, for us, genetic engineering)? Or, as with the rest of nature, a deliberate alteration of their character so that they better fulfil human purposes (i.e. a continuation of those breeding and ‘husbandry’ practices whereby farm animals have been rendered more productive and docile, pets more ‘domesticated’, companionable, child-like in appearance, and so on)? If either of these were intended by Marx, his critique of the estrangement of humanity from nature would lose all its force: the ‘humanisation’ of animals (as part of nature) in either of these senses would be a continuation and augmentation, not a transcendence of the treatment of animals under capitalism, and indeed, in pre-capitalist societies too. Moreover, Marx draws on an absolute and universal, not a provisional and historically transcendable opposition between the human and the animal in grounding his ethical critique of the capitalist mode of life. If what is wrong with these societies is that humans are reduced to the condition of animals, then the transcendence of capitalism, in restoring humanity to the human, simultaneously restores the differentiation between the human and the animal. If what is wrong with capitalism is, essentially, that it does not differentiate the human and the animal, then the antidote to capitalism must offer to restore the proper differential. But this is precisely what the notion of ‘humanisation’ seems to deny. The ontological basis of the ethical critique of capitalism (embedded in the notion of estrangement) appears to be inconsistent with the coherent formulation of its transcendence (in particular, the notion of ‘humanisation’ in relation to animals as part of nature). As I shall suggest later, this dilemma can be resolved by a revision of the ontology of the Manuscripts which nevertheless leaves intact a good deal of the ethical critique of capitalist society. However, before I move on to that task it is worth spending some time investigating in rather more depth the sources of the dilemma, and, in particular,


looking at some of the implications of the way Marx draws his contrasts between the human and the animal.

HUMANITY AS ‘SPECIES BEING’ Central to Marx’s account of human nature is the claim that man is a ‘species being’. The term is derived from Feuerbach, but Marx gives it a new and richer philosophical meaning: Man is a species-being, not only because in practice and in theory he adopts the species (his own as well as those of other things) as his object, but—and this is only another way of expressing it—also because he treats himself as the actual, living species; because he treats himself as a universal and therefore a free being.5 This ‘universality’ of human theoretical and practical activity distinguishes humans from (other) animals. The sensory, cognitive and transformative powers of other animals are exercised ‘under the dominion of immediate physical need’. They produce ‘in accordance with the standard and the need’ of their species. Humans, by contrast, who know how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, only truly produce in freedom from immediate physical need, and take the whole world of nature as the object of their practical, aesthetic and cognitive powers. Whereas animals produce to meet the needs of themselves, or their young, the activity of individual human beings is, at least potentially, a part of the activity of the species as a whole. Not only, then, is human activity ‘universal’ in the sense that it takes the whole world of nature as its object, but it is also universal in the sense that it is a species-wide activity. The activity of each individual is not a mere instance of its type, but, rather, a living part of an interconnected whole—the activity, or ‘life’ of the species. In his exposition of the concept of the estrangement of labour, Marx lays great emphasis on this aspect: In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active functions, his life activity, estranged labour estranges


the species from man. It changes for him the life of the species into a means of individual life. First, it estranges the life of the species and individual life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form.6 In separating individual life from the life of the species, and inverting their proper relationship to one another, the estrangement of labour imposes upon humanity a mode of existence in which its distinctive species attributes cannot be manifested. Human potential remains unactualised, development is stunted, powers are exercised in a distorted or inverted way. The character of ‘man’ as a species being, then, is not a manifest, empirically detectable feature in contemporay societies. It is, rather, an as yet unachieved potential. The achievement of this potential is the work of the human historical process. So, implicit in the idea of humanity as a ‘species being’ is also the idea of humanity as a historical being. And by this is meant not simply a being whose activities and forms of association change through time. In addition, these changes of manifest activity and forms of association have a cumulative and directional character, an overlying pattern in terms of which we can make sense of each successive phase or period. To say that the human species is historical in this sense is to say that the species as a whole undergoes, in the historical process, something analogous to the development undergone by both individual human beings and other animals in their transition from embryo through infancy to adulthood. Only in the adult are the potentials of the infant fully actualised. The development of the individual is the process of its self-realisation. So, in the case of the human species, communist society is the form under which what was merely potential in earlier historical phases becomes actual. The historical process is the ‘developmental’ process of humankind, through which its species-powers are fully developed, its distinctive species character is realised. The analysis of the estrangement of labour shows that there is no necessary or universal connection between the ‘developmental’ process of the species and the developmental process of the individual. Where labour is estranged, the ‘development’ of the species occurs at the cost of individual development: It is true that labour produces wonderful things for the rich


—but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces—but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty— but for the worker, deformity…. It produces intelligence— but for the worker, stupidity, cretinism.7 On the other hand, the historical ‘development’ of the species is a precondition for the development of the distinctively human powers of individuals: Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form—in short, senses capable of human gratification, senses affirming themselves as essential powers of man) either cultivated or brought into being. The forming of the five senses is the labour of the entire history of the World down to the present.8 Humans are different from other animals, then, in that they undergo ‘development’ at the level of the species (historical development) as well as at the level of the individual. In the human species, the ‘development’ of the species may take place at the cost of stunting or distorting the development of individuals, but, in the long run, full development of the individual with respect to the most distinctively human characteristics is only possible on the basis of a high level of ‘development’ of the species. None of these considerations apply to other animals, which, for Marx, have a fixed, species-characteristic relationship between need, instinct and transformative powers, each producing ‘in accordance with the standard and need of the species to which it belongs’.9 What makes possible this supra-individual ‘development’ in the human case is the distinctive character of human activity as ‘free, conscious activity’: Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is lifeengendering life. The whole character of a species—its species-character—is contained in the character of its life activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s speciescharacter.10 A being who freely and consciously engages in a practice is able


to reflect critically upon that practice, to change it in line with its existing, or newly formulated purposes. Free, self-conscious transformative practice, then, has within it a potential for change and development which the direct and instinctual need-meeting activity of (other) animals does not have. And since this ‘productive life’ is the life of the species, to characterise its ‘development’— the development of human productive powers—is to characterise what is essential to the formative process of humanity itself: It is just in his work upon the objective world, therefore, that man really proves himself to be a species-being. This production is his active species-life. Through this production, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labour is, therefore, the objectification of man’s specieslife: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created.11 And, again: But since for the socialist man the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labour, nothing but the emergence of nature for man, so he has the visible, irrefutable proof of his birth through himself, of his genesis.12 Of course, this self-creation through labour, through the augmentation of human transformative powers, should not be confused with self-creation through mere economic, or industrial activity— an ‘economistic’ view of history. Certainly Marx recognises in industrial production ‘the exoteric revelation of man’s essential powers’,13 but full human historical ‘development’ will involve a transcendence of the prevailing fragmentation of human activities— The positive transcendence of private property, as the appropriation of human life, is therefore the positive transcendence of all estrangement—that is to say, the return of man from religion, family, state, etc., to his human, i.e. social, existence.14 The historical ‘developmental’ process, then, is to be understood


as a multi-faceted and progressive augmentation of human transformative powers vis-à-vis nature. This process can be understood as one of human self-creation, or self-realisation, in that the bearer of these powers is transformed along with the object of their exercise (nature). In particular, human cognitive powers (‘science’) underly the development of productive powers, and are themselves developed through reflection upon the outcomes of productive activity. Human sensory powers are likewise (see above quotation) developed along with the transformation of the objects of human perception: the power to create beautiful objects and the growth of aesthetic sensibility in the human subject are internally related to one another. And, finally, the purpose of transformative activity is itself historically transformed as humans acquire new needs in the course of their historical self-development: We have seen what significance, given socialism, the wealth of human needs acquires, and what significance, therefore, both a new mode of production and a new object of production obtain: a new manifestation of the forces of human nature and a new enrichment of human nature.15 Central to Marx’s notion of this historical transformation of need is the idea that self-realisation comes itself to be the object of need: It will be seen how in place of the wealth and property of political economy come the rich human being and the rich human need. The rich human being is simultaneously the human being in need of a totality of human manifestations of life—the man in whom his own realisation exists as an inner necessity, as need.16 The historical self-creation of humanity, then, is a process in which human transformative, sensory, aesthetic and cognitive powers and liabilities are transformed and augmented, along with a transformation of the structure of human need itself. But this process is not one which takes place ‘in vacuo’, so to speak. It would make no sense to speak of these powers, liabilities and needs without some notion of their object: ‘nature’ (including human nature).


HISTORY AND THE ‘HUMANISATION OF NATURE’ The species-wide and communal project through which humanity creates itself is summed up by Marx as the ‘humanisation of nature’. Nature as an external, threatening and constraining power is to be overcome in the course of a long-drawn-out historical process of collective transformation. The world thoroughly transformed by human activity will be a world upon which human identity itself has been impressed, and so no longer a world which is experienced as external or estranged: On the one hand, therefore, it is only when the objective world becomes everywhere for man in society the world of man’s essential powers—human reality and for that reason the reality of his own essential powers—that all objects become for him the objectification of himself, become objects which confirm and realise his individuality, become his objects.17 And this applies not merely to the objects of human practical, transformative powers, but also to the world as object of human sensory and cognitive powers: The manner in which they become his depends on the nature of the objects and on the nature of the essential power corresponding to it; for it is precisely the determinate nature of this relationship which shapes the particular, real mode of affirmation. To the eye an object comes to be other than it is to the ear, and the object of the eye is another object than the object of the ear…. Thus man is affirmed in the objective world not only in the act of thinking, but with all his senses.18 These quotations, and others like them, suggest a certain view of the transformation wrought by human history in the relationship between human beings and their natural environment. An external, limiting, conditioned relation between the two is transformed in favour of an internal, unlimited, unconditioned (i.e. ‘universal’) relation which amounts to a fusion of identities. The ‘conflict’ between humans and nature is overcome in favour of an incorpo-


ration of the natural into the domain of the human without residue. Only when the whole world is appropriated cognitively, aesthetically and practically can humanity itself be fully realised: This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is 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. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be the solution.19 This historical vision is clearly incompatible with the content of Marx’s metaphor, elsewhere in the same text, of nature as ‘man’s inorganic body’, the insistence upon the permanent necessity of the ‘metabolism’ between humans and their natural environment as a condition of survival. The reality of nature as a complex causal order, independent of human activity, forever sets the conditions and limits within which human beings, as natural beings, may shape and direct their activities. These materialist theses about the relationship of humanity to nature, which are elsewhere, and more especially in later works, also assented to by Marx, are absent from this Utopian and idealist vision of human emancipation. The important value-content of this early view of history is also put at risk by its residual idealism. Marx insists that the proper relation between the human species and its natural environment is not reducible to instrumental, need-meeting activity (important though this of course is). A properly human relationship with nature is a many-faceted relationship in which aesthetic, cognitive, practical and identity-forming aspects are communally realised. This multi-faceted, properly human relationship to nature is one which not only meets need, but has itself become the prime human need. These ideas are powerful, persuasive, and very much in line with modern environmentalism. But when we turn to Marx’s specification of the kind of relationship to nature which would realise these values their critical potential is vitiated. If we can be at home in the world, be properly, humanly, connected with the


world only on the basis of a thorough-going transformation of it in line with our intentions, then what space is left for a valuing of nature in virtue of its intrinsic qualities? If we can ‘see ourselves’ in, or identify only with a world which we have created, then what is left of our status as part of nature? Nature, it seems, is an acceptable partner for humanity only in so far as it has been divested of all that constitutes its otherness, in so far, in other words, as it has become, itself, human. This view of a properly human relationship to nature is certainly far removed from a utilitarian, instrumental one, but its value-content is no less anthropocentric. It is, indeed, a quite fantastic species narcissism.

THE OPPOSITION BETWEEN THE HUMAN AND THE ANIMAL I shall here leave aside the question of how far what is acceptable in the value-content of Marx’s view of a fully human relationship to nature as a whole can be supported on the basis of a critical revision of his ontology. Instead, I shall return to the rather narrower question of the human/animal contrast. We have seen that for Marx (other) animals are characterised by a certain standardised fixity in their mode of life. In so far as they are able to act transformatively upon external nature they do so in accordance with a definite ‘standard’, characteristic of their species, and their activity is oriented to the meeting of their individual needs (also fixed, and characteristic for each species) and those of their offspring. By contrast, human beings act upon the external world in a way which is free, self-conscious, and socially coordinated. Because of these distinctive features of human life-activity, their forms of association and modes of practical engagement with the world are subject to directional historical transformations. Only an account of the human mode of life which took into account the place of any specific phase of activity in the overall historical ‘development’ would be capable of adequately specifying what was, in the full sense, ‘human’. What distinguishes humans from animals, in other words, is something which only becomes manifest in the course of human history itself. As we saw, this historical-developmental process, peculiar to the human species, consists in an augmentation of our transformative powers vis-à-vis nature, amounting to a residueless ‘humanisation’ of nature; an associ-


ated augmentation of our knowledge both of ourselves and of nature (towards a synthesis of the two); a transformation of our sensory powers, equivalent to the ‘humanisation of the senses’; and a transformation in the structure of need. The contrast between the human and the animal is, then, a contrast both between humans and other animals, and between fully developed humanity and undeveloped humanity: ‘History itself is a real part of natural history—of nature developing into man.’20 The process of historical development is a movement from animallike origins to a fully human realisation, and this is so with respect not only to our powers and liabilities, but also with respect to need. Even when human transformative powers are well-developed but the estrangement of labour has not been overcome, truly human needs are not manifested. The worker experiences need, and is constrained to meet need in a manner which belies his true human potential, resembling, rather, the animal mode of experiencing and satisfying need. Underlying both Marx’s concept of historical development and his critique of estrangement, then, is a contrast between what he variously calls ‘crude’, ‘physical’ or ‘animal’ need, on the one hand, and ‘human’ need, on the other: ‘It [the animal] produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom’.21 And again: The sense caught up in crude practical need has only a restricted sense. For the starving man, it is not the human form of food that exists, but only its abstract existence as food. It could just as well be there in its crudest form, and it would be impossible to say wherein this feeding activity differs from that of animals.22 Speaking of estranged labour, Marx says: ‘It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it’.23 Needs, in this sense, determine the worker’s share of the product of labour, ‘as much, only, as is necessary for his existence, not as a human being, but as a worker, and for the propagation, not of humanity, but of a slave class of workers’.24 Marx’s attempt, in passages such as these, to provide an account of human nature in terms of a thorough-going opposition between the human and the animal is very much in line with the


mainstream of modern Western philosophy and such more recent disciplines as cultural anthropology and sociology. The conceptual oppositions nature/culture; animal/human; body/mind play a foundational, structuring role in the theoretical edifices which dominate these disciplines. For each of these disciplinary matrices, an opposition between the animal and the human implies also an opposition within the human between what is animal(-like) and what is ‘truly’ human. In the paradigm dualist philosophy of Descartes, for example, the contrast between persons and animals implies a contrast within the person between a spatially extended bodily mechanism and a self-conscious ‘thinking’ substance. What is distinctive and valued in human nature is emphasised and its unsullied autonomy preserved, but at the cost of rendering unintelligible the connections between humans and the rest of nature and, within persons, between those aspects which are and those which are not distinctively human. Now, Marx’s utopian vision of an eventual reunification of humanity with itself and with nature seems, at first encounter, to promise a way out of the dilemmas posed by such dualist ways of thinking. However, the systematic use of human/animal contrasts in his early work tells against this. These contrasts are not presented as historically transcendable. On the contrary, the human potential for historical transcendence is precisely what differentiates us from animals. Whatever changes take place in our human relationship to nature, animals are, and will remain, mere animals. Many of my readers, of course, will be now saying ‘well, so much the better for Marx’. The main historical alternatives to philosophical dualism—materialist and idealist ‘monisms’—are the object of well-rehearsed and seemingly decisive objections. Idealisms have great difficulty in sustaining plausible or even coherent accounts of those aspects of our experience in which the mind-independent reality of our world is manifested. Materialisms have a symmetrical difficulty in accounting coherently or plausibly for the existence and nature of human consciousness and experience itself. Materialisms have, more often than not, begun with the aim of explaining some supposedly distinctive and highly valued human characteristic or potential, and ended with explaining it away. In our day, biological reductionist accounts of human nature are the best known culprits. If these were, indeed, the only available options, then the case


for dualism could be made to appear relatively strong. But they are not the only available options. The philosophical and ethical difficulties of the dualist aspects of Marx’s early writings are quite formidable, not only in their own right, but also in terms of other aspects of Marx’s overall intellectual and practical project.

AGAINST MARX’S HUMAN/ANIMAL DUALISM Consider, first, Marx’s ‘external’ dualism of the animal and the human. I’ll deal, in turn, with each of the characteristics through which Marx elaborates the opposition: 1 Animals are mere ‘instances’ of their species, whereas humans relate also as ‘part to whole’ to theirs. This is Marx’s reference to the open-ended capacity of humans for social cooperation. For Marx this is potentially, though not yet actually, a species-wide cooperation in a common species-specific project. But the very cultural diversity which Marx’s notion of ‘free creativity’ also recognises must render implausible his historical projection. What grounds are there for expecting a spontaneous merging of geographically discrete and culturally diverse lines of historical ‘development’ and visions of the future? What reasons are there for supposing that humans have the potential to evolve noncoercive forms of social coordination on the gigantic scale required? On the animal side of Marx’s contrast, subsequent ethological study has revealed a wealth and complexity of social life in other species. In the case of such animals as dogs, cats, and herd animals such as sheep and cattle, their very sociability was a necessary initial requirement for their distinctive human uses. So also was a degree of malleability, and ‘openness’ in their forms of sociability. If we leave aside, then, what is merely speculative in Marx’s contrast—his as yet unfulfilled historical projection—the picture is one of highly differentiated and species-specific capacities for and forms of sociability between animal species. The extent and form of human sociability is, indeed, distinctive, but this is no less true of any other social species. The capacity for and disposition to social coordination of activity as such is not a distinctive feature of our species. 2 Humans take the whole world as the object of their activity, whereas animals appropriate the world only partially, and accord-


ing to the fixed standard of their species. Again, the human side of this opposition is misleading. Certainly it is a plausible extrapolation from the past expansion of the geographical scope of human activity to suppose that one day the whole surface of the globe may bear the imprint of human intentional activity—the last of the rainforests and wildwoods destroyed or cultivated, the poles populated and industrialised, the oceans farmed or rendered sterile by accumulation of toxic wastes, and so on. But what is now supposed to be true of the large-scale, immensely complex and interacting mechanisms of chemical and physical cycling and energy transfer in the biosphere suggests that our species would destroy itself (and many others) by the unintended consequences of its own activity long before such a ‘utopian’ possibility were actualised. All transformative activity presupposes a distinction between those attributes of its objects which undergo alteration and other attributes of the objects, conditions and agents of the activity whose persistence, unaltered throughout the process, is indispensable to it. Because of this, even if we suppose a limitless increase in human technical powers in any imaginable direction, the notion of a residueless subordination of the world intensively or extensively to human purposes is incoherent. On the animal side of this contrast, again, ethological studies reveal great diversity among other animal species with respect to the extent, nature and intra-species variability of their interaction with their environments. As Marx notes, birds build nests which are to a considerable extent species-specific in the materials used, site chosen, and ‘design’. Nevertheless many species show considerable adaptability in all respects, especially if confronted with non-standard environmental conditions. Inventing, making, using, and inter-generational teaching of the use of tools are now well recognised as powers of non-human primates, notably chimpanzees. That there are profound differences in these capacities between humans and other species is clear, but it remains true that such profound differences also separate non-human animal species from one another. For his intellectual purposes, Marx exaggerates both the fixity and limitedness of scope in the activity of other animals, and the flexibility and universality of scope of human activity upon the environment. At the same time he abstracts from diversity among non-human animal species, and obscures human ecological diversity by way of a global historical extrapolation. Each of these ‘intellectual tactics’ contributes to


the formation of a dualistic categorial opposition instead of a recognition of complex patterns of species-specific diversity. 3 Humans possess historical potential, whereas animals exhibit fixed standardised modes of activity, from generation to generation. This contrast presupposes the first two, but goes beyond them in important respects. To get clear about how the contrast works, and to see the difficulties in the way of sustaining it in this form it is first necessary to ‘unpack’ the notion of ‘historical potential’ and that of ‘historical development’ with which it is closely connected in Marx. First, it is important to distinguish between powers, or capacities, on the one hand, and potentials on the other. To attribute a power or a capacity to, say, an organism, is to say that it is able to do something (even though it may not be in fact doing it—it may never have done it). To attribute a potential is to say that it has the capacity to acquire some future capacity or power which it presently does not have. We may distinguish different kinds of potential on the basis of the natures of the processes in virtue of which they are progressively acquired, on the basis of the natures of the external conditions which enable their acquisition, and on the basis of the natures of the bearers of the capacities concerned. In its infancy an animal, human or non-human, can be said to have capacities, or powers, specific to its stage of development. A one-year-old child may be able to crawl but not stand, a little later to stand but not walk, and so on. The infants of most mammal species are less helpless when born than the human infant, and they tend to acquire the species-specific capacities of adults more quickly, but basically the same considerations apply. If we know what capacities are characteristic of adults of the species then we can say of normal infants which have not yet developed these capacities that they have the potential to do so. The nature of the organism is such that given satisfaction of minimal external conditions it will undergo development resulting in the acquisition of the characteristic capacities of adults of its species. Such potentials of infants may be termed ‘developmental potentials’. Again, at any stage in its development, an organism may be said to lack certain capacities—‘skills’ are the paradigm here—not because it lacks the necessary organic constitution, nor because it is insufficiently mature, but because it has lacked appropriate learning experience. Of such an organism we can say it lacks the capacity (to, for example, catch its own prey, fly long distances,


understand long words, do simple arithmetic, depending on the species concerned), but has the potential to acquire it. Such a potential might be termed a ‘learning potential’. Both developmental and learning potentials are potentials of individual organisms. Within the whole range of potentials of individuals we may distinguish between those potentials the fulfilment of which constitutes a species-wide characteristic, and those potentials which are fulfilled only in virtue of the exposure of (a sub-population of) the organisms to a distinctive set of environmental conditions. The former I shall call ‘individual speciespotentials’, the latter ‘individual context-potentials’. In the human case, the potential (in small infants) for language acquisition is an individual species-potential, whereas the potential to acquire the French language would be an individual context-potential for infants reared in French-speaking cultural environments. Pet dogs can learn to respond to human commands; captive chimps can acquire a degree of competence at learning sign-language. The potentials to do this in the animals acquired for the appropriate training are, in my sense, individual context-potentials. But Marx’s notion of an historical potential includes at least the idea of potentials as possessed by associated groups of individual organisms. Humans characteristically produce means of subsistence, for example, through some form of more-or-less stable pattern of combination of the activities of more-or-less numerous individuals. The productive powers of the group are certainly different in degree, and might indeed be argued to be different in kind from those possessed by individuals. This distinction between individual and group capacities can also be sustained for other social species of animals. Social bees and wasps, beavers, predators such as lions, hyenas and others are all species in which sub-populations form more-or-less stable groupings which possess capacities not possessed by individuals independently of their grouping. But can we speak of group-potentials as distinct from mere group-capacities? Are there, for groups, analogues of the processes of development and learning at the level of individuals which might serve as the foundation for a cumulative acquisition of powers through time? Do groups augment their powers of coordination of their own activity, or of transforming their environments? To the extent to which they do we may speak of ‘collective potentials’. In fact, collective potentials are probably pos-


sessed in any significant degree only in some mammalian social animals, and to a high degree only in the human case. Where the acquired capacities (the fulfilled potentials) of groups can be transmitted from generation to generation in such a way as to enable a continued augmentation of powers of the associated group which is independent of preservation of the identities of the members of the group I shall speak of collective historical potentials. The acquisition of a written language, for example, can retrospectively be recognised to have been a collective historical potential of some pre-literate civilizations. Literacy, like the wheel, does not have to be re-invented in each generation, but, unlike spoken language, it is not a collective possession in all cultures, or in all historical periods. I think that the notion of collective historical potentials is required if we are to adequately understand historical processes, but I also recognise that there are serious difficulties in the way of coherently specifying the concept. Not the least of these is the problem of securing identity of reference to the ‘bearers’ or possessors of such potentials. In the case of simple collective potentials this is relatively unproblematic. As long as the group stays together, and continues to interact, it can be identified and re-identified as ‘the same’ group. Identifying and re-identifying ‘the same’ collectivity of human beings through prolonged expanses of historical time is another matter. However, for (the early) Marx, the problem is compounded, since he attributes to the human species alone yet another type of collective potential: the potential for species-wide coordination of activity. The potential is not, here, attributable to any empirically delimitable socially combined population of human beings, but to the species as a whole. For Marx, then, over and above simple collective potentials, and collective historical potentials, there are also what we might call ‘species historical potentials’. Finally, for any species capable of historical potentials of either of the two kinds so far distinguished (‘collective’ or ‘species’) the conditions exist for a further kind of individual potential to be distinguished. To the extent that collective (or species) historical potentials are fulfilled, the environmental contexts in which individuals realise their individual developmental and or learning potentials are transformed. In other words, for species susceptible of collective historical ‘development’ (cumulative acquisition of collective powers across generations) we can distinguish within the category of individual context-potentials a subclass of individ-


ual historical potentials. Individual historical potentials are capacities which individuals are able to acquire in virtue of their membership of a collective in which cognate collective historical potentials have been fulfilled. The individual potential for reading or writing, for example, is an individual historical potential in this sense. It is a potential which can be realised only by individuals who belong to a culture which possesses the institution of a written language. The importance of the idea of collective historical potentials is that it is necessary if we are to understand the extent to which the possibilities for individual development and fulfilment are dependent upon the historical achievements of the culture in which they find themselves. Clearly, a good deal needs to be said by way of elaborating and defending these distinctions. But enough has been said to enable me to at least state my case against Marx’s use of the concept of historical potential in sustaining his opposition between humans and animals. On the human side of the opposition, it seems to me that the attribution of species historical potentials to humans is, to say the least, highly speculative. Certainly this is so if we try to follow Marx in saying which potentials these are (humanisation of nature, and so on). Further, the normative connotation which the notion of potential generally carried in Marx does not seem obviously to carry over into historical potentials, whether individual or collective. The individual historical potential to deliver ‘megadeaths’ at the press of a button is dependent upon the realisation of the collective historical potential to construct hi-tech. weaponry. But how do we value this historical achievement? Do we recognise in it just one aspect of the historical unfolding of human nature, a dimension of human fulfilment, along with our increased capacities for curing the sick, making the deserts bloom and so on? If we take this option, then it entails recognising that humans have, as part of their nature, a potential for destructiveness, for evil. In this event, human well-being, the pursuit of happiness may require us to find ways of suppressing, or blocking off some of our potentials. Well-being, the ‘good life’ cannot be identified straightforwardly with the fulfilment of our human potential. The alternative option would be to keep the positive normative connotations of the notion of ‘potential’, refusing to recognise as potentials those historical possibilities whose realisation would be undesirable—evil, destructive, and, ultimately, self-destructive. This option strikes me as a particularly indefensible form of


‘speciesist’ special-pleading. The temptation towards Utopian blindness to the causal importance of those individual and collective historical possibilities denied the status of ‘potentials’ is both strong and dangerous. As Mary Midgley has eloquently shown, the human/animal opposition has served as a convenient symbolic device whereby we have attributed to animals the dispositions we have not been able to contemplate in ourselves.25 The point of these considerations is to suggest that if Marx turns out to have been right in supposing that only humans have historical potentials, it does not follow directly from this that any great gulf stands between the animal and the human with respect to their moral status. The significance of this point becomes clearer if we look at Marx’s contrast from the animal side of the divide. As we have seen, many animal species display a complexity, diversity and adaptability in their behaviour which is denied in Marx’s view of them as rigidly stereotypical in their species-characteristic modes of life. For many non-human animal species it is possible to speak defensibly of developmental and learning potentials, of simple collective powers, and even to a limited extent of collective potentials. Some evidence exists of cultural transmission of learned skills in the cases of some species of primates but not (as yet, at least) of any generation-by-generation cumulative direction in these collective skills.26 This does seem to be a distinctive feature of humans by contrast with all other animal species currently inhabiting the earth. It is, however, worth noting that this is a purely contingent matter. There is no a priori reason for supposing that some other species might not evolve these potentials in the future, and there are good empirical grounds for thinking that our planet has previously been inhabited by other primate species which did have historical potentials. Now, the moral contrast which Marx draws between the historical potential of humanity and its estranged, distorted, stunted, merely animal mode of existence under the dominion of estranged labour is only effective on two conditions. First, it is necessary to equate the fulfilment of human historical potential with the wellbeing, the flourishing, of humans in their forms of association with one another and their material environment. I have just suggested that this equation is not justified.27 Second, it is necessary to attribute to human beings the capacity to exist in two contrasting states: as merely existing, or surviving, as beings whose


‘crude, physical’, or ‘merely animal’ needs are met (as mere bearers of the capacity to work, and to physically reproduce that capacity), or, by contrast, as flourishing, as fulfilled, as ‘fully human’. But the place of the reference to ‘animal needs’ here, and the associated use of the human/animal contrast to sustain the ethical critique of human estrangement require a denial of this capacity in the animal case. Animals, we must suppose, merely exist. As animals they have merely animal needs and the satisfaction of these needs is both necessary and sufficient for the existence and reproduction of the life of the individual and its species. But if, as we have seen, (some) animals, too, have developmental, learning, species, context, and collective capacities and potentials then here, also, it must be possible to distinguish between mere existence, on the one hand, and flourishing, well-being, and the fulfilment of diverse potentials, on the other. The mere fact of distinctively human historical potentials does not obliterate either the ethical distinction between flourishing and merely existing for other animals, or its ontological presupposition. The point here is not just that Marx was simply wrong about animals.28 It is rather that he was wrong in ways which undermine his own view of the desirability of a changed relationship between humanity and nature in the future communist society. Connectedly, he is also wrong about animals in ways which cut him off from a powerful extension and deepening of his own ethical critique of prevailing (capitalist) modes of appropriation of nature. Let us adopt a ‘weak’ interpretation of ‘humanisation of nature’ and allow that it may include, not the literal ‘humanisation’ of animals, but, rather, an alteration of our relationship to animals—perhaps a rendering of that relationship more consistent with our ‘humanity’, a more humane relationship. This is the very least that would be required to make Marx’s notion consistent with his own professed naturalism. Now, whatever content is given to ‘a more humane relationship’, it presupposes that ‘crude, physical need’ and the needs of animals are not equivalent. Only if there is a difference between mere existence of animals at a level which minimally satisfies their human utility, on the one hand, and thriving or well-being, on the other, can we distinguish between ‘inhumane’ and ‘humane’ ways of treating those animals


whose conditions of life are dependent upon the exercise of our powers.29 Moreover, the pathological distortions from the properly human mode of life which Marx attempts to capture in his concept of ‘estrangement’, or ‘alienation’, are in important respects paralleled in the modes of life imposed upon animals by precisely the same structures of social action. The treatment of animals as mere means to external purposes, the forcible fragmentation of their life-activity, and the dissolution of their social bonds with one another are, for example, features of commercial foodproduction which have become progressively intensified since Marx’s day with each technical reorganisation of production. The ethical critique of such practices should not be seen as an alternative to a Marxian critique of modern capitalist forms of labourdiscipline, but, rather, an extension and a deepening of it. But Marx’s contrast between the human and the animal cuts away the ontological basis for such a critical analysis of forms of suffering shared by both animals and humans who are caught up in a common causal network. 4 Marx’s attribution to animals of a fixed and standardised mode of activity in relation to nature, and his apparent failure to recognise in any significant way the social life of non-human animals are both at work in his use of the phrases ‘physical need’ and ‘animal need’ as if they were equivalent. This suggests a denial of the complexity and diversity of the emotional, psychological and social lives of other animals. Such a denial renders merely rhetorical Marx’s characterisation of history as ‘nature developing into man’, and cuts off two significant sources of insight into human nature and history. The first, which would require giving serious theoretical content to the idea of ‘nature developing into man’, would be an inquiry into the prehistorical origins of the human species, and the processes of our differentiation from other primate lineages. The second, in part dependent for its rational justification on the first (i.e. a recognition of the kinship of humans and other animals), would be a comparative psychology and ethology in which what is genuinely distinctive about human beings could be viewed in the light of what is shared between human and non-human animals. That these lines of enquiry have a long post-Darwinian history of politically tendentious and methodologically suspect misuses30 is not a sufficient reason for a wholesale abandonment of the enterprise.


Whilst there is certainly plenty of room for legitimate controversy within modern evolutionary theory it is no longer reasonable to deny the main claims of the evolutionary perspectives in relation to human ancestry in some primate stock, and our kinship with contemporary primates. Unless social scientists wish to stand with the flat earthers, the Inquisitors and the Bible-belt creationists they have no choice but to engage with the questions posed by our animal origins and nature. Marx and Engels themselves enthusiastically embraced this perspective after 1859.31

AGAINST MARX’S DUALIST VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE Perhaps, however, the most telling arguments against the dualist aspects of Marx’s early work relate to the dualism within human nature which follows from the external dualism of the animal and the human. It is characteristic of dualistic approaches, baulking at the prospect of a comprehensively idealist view of our nature, to recognise an animal component, layer, or aspect, within the human. The human is an animal, but an animal with a special ‘something’ extra which makes all the difference—soul, mind, will, self, reason, and so on. Marx’s early writings, as we have seen, still fall within this tradition. In so far as humans work only to meet their subsistence needs, and do not experience their work as a need in itself, their activity is mere animal activity. In so far as their leisure activities, their eating and drinking, their ‘dressing up’ and so on are ends in themselves, segregated from the wider species project, they are mere ‘animal functions’. When the starving man is fed ‘it would be impossible to say where in this feeding activity differs from that of animals’.32 This reproduction of the animal/human opposition within the domain of the human involves a sequestering of certain of our needs, powers, functions and activities as animal, or animal-like, from others (generally more highly valued and assigned a more fundamental ontological status) which are designated ‘human’. The main objections to this broad strategy for understanding what humans are can be usefully placed into three groups. 1 Those powers, needs, activities, functions (etc.) which fall on the human side of the divide, are represented as a self-sufficient,


sui generis, autonomous complex which is thus rendered unintelligible in relation to the rest (the animal side) of human life. But what sense could be made of, for example, human powers of reasoning in abstraction from the bodily needs and activities in which they are exercised? In Marx’s own case, the ethical ideal for humanity is a mode of being which integrates the diverse activities of persons within a coherent communal project. This notion of integral self-realisation remains incompatible with the residual dualism of the Manuscripts. 2 Those powers, activities, needs, functions (etc.) which fall on the ‘animal’ side of the division are correspondingly profaned as, perhaps, rather shameful residual features. Their continued, uncomfortably insistent presence, eruptions and interruptions are demeaning and rob us of the full sense of self-respect to which we feel entitled. A combined dread and contempt for bodily existence and function is barely disguised in much philosophical dualism. It provides grounding and sustenance for the valuation of mental over manual labour, of masculinity (‘cultured’) over femininity (‘natural’), of reason over sentiment, of ‘mind over matter’, and of the ‘civilised’ over the ‘savage’. It makes for a culture that is guilt-ridden, fearful and confused over such fundamental features of the shared human and animal condition as sexuality and death. 3 The dualist philosophical heritage is at work in many of our most problematic contemporary institutional forms and practices. The development of modern ‘health-care’ as a form of organised, hi-tech ‘body mechanics’, (at its best) detecting, diagnosing and correcting defects in the bodily machine, has an unmistakable Cartesian legacy about it. The pertinence of the psychological, emotional, cultural and socio-economic aspects and contexts of the person to both the causation of and recovery from disease has been widely understood only in recent years.33 It has yet to gain the central place it deserves in policy disputes and health-care reform. In other areas of public policy, too, a segregation of ‘basic’ (=physical) needs from ‘higher’ (emotional, cultural, selfrealising) needs underlies priorities of welfare state provision in such areas as housing, the setting of nutritional standards and even in education.34 A great deal of overseas aid policy, too, neglects the cultural, socio-economic, and environmental contexts within which such ‘basic’ needs as food and shelter are met. The sequestering of classes of need from one another, often wellmotivated, equally often is disastrous in its consequences. Needs


which are inseparably interconnected both in the way they are experienced and in the interweaving of their causal conditions of satisfaction are all too often abstractly ‘targeted’ in single-priority interventions which bring extended chains of unintended consequences in their wake. The environmental and social cost of the export of ‘green revolution’ technologies to large parts of Asia and Latin America is a case in point.35 I have tried to show that much of Marx’s thinking in the early Manuscripts is governed by two closely related dualistic oppositions: between humans and animals, and between the human and the animal within the human. I have advanced some considerations which I believe tell against these dualisms, both as they appear in Marx, and as they are present more widely as a constitutive dimension of Western cultures. I have also suggested that human/animal dualisms are incompatible also with key features of Marx’s own intellectual and practical project. But if this is so, then it follows that there are other elements or aspects of Marx’s thinking, even in his pre-Darwinian days, which cut against the dualist aspects upon which my proffered reading has so far been based.

NATURALISM WITHOUT REDUCTIONISM OR ‘SPECIESISM’? In what remains of this paper, I shall offer a sketch for an alternative reading and re-construction of Marx’s early Manuscripts, centred on those elements which tell against both philosophical dualism and idealism, and which favour, rather, a naturalistic, but still not reductionist view of human nature. A view, that is, which gives due place to the specificity and distinctiveness of the human species, but does so without compromising what remains defensible in Marx’s assertion that ‘man is part of nature’. Some of the most promising textual materials for his alternative approach are to be found, not surprisingly, perhaps, in the manuscript entitled ‘Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole’. Man is directly a natural being. As a natural being and as a living natural being he is on the one hand endowed with natural powers, vital powers—he is an active natural being.


These forces exist in him as tendencies and abilities—as instincts. On the other hand, as a natural, corporeal, sensuous, objective being he is a suffering, conditioned and limited creature, like animals and plants. That is to say, the objects of his instincts exist outside him, objects independent of him; yet these objects are objects that he needs— essential objects, indispensable to the manifestation and confirmation of his essential powers…. Hunger is a natural need; it therefore needs a nature outside itself, an object outside itself, in order to satisfy itself, to be stilled.36 In this passage, Marx is asserting the status of humans as ‘natural beings’, a status they share with (other) animals and with plants. As natural beings there are three interconnected features which humans share with other living beings. First, they have natural needs whose objects lie outside themselves, independent of them. All living things, for example, have nutritional needs. The objects of these needs—foodstuffs—exist independently of them. Second, all living beings have natural powers which enable them to satisfy these needs, and natural tendencies (‘instincts’) to exercise them. Third, this need-satisfying activity in relation to external objects is essential to the ‘confirmation’ or ‘manifestation’ of the essential powers of the species. In other words, interaction with external nature is necessary for the survival of all natural beings. Each species of natural being has its own distinctive mode or pattern of interaction with nature —its own ‘species life’. And finally, (a member of) each species only fully manifests its essential nature—only becomes what it has the potential to be—in virtue of its participation in this distinctive species life. ‘But’, Marx goes on to say, ‘Man is not merely a natural being: he is a human natural being. That is to say, he is a being for himself.’37 Having begun to speak of human nature in a thoroughly naturalistic way, Marx appears, again, to pull back and reestablish a dualistic opposition, this time between the ‘human’ and the ‘natural’. However, there is no necessity for such a reading. The ‘human’ here can be understood as a qualification, a specification, or subdivision within the natural, rather than its opposite. This remains a form of naturalism, in that what humans share with other ‘natural beings’ is regarded as ontologically fundamental, and is accordingly given priority for purposes of under-


standing and explaining what humans are and how they act. But it is not a reductionist naturalism in the sense that it allows for a full recognition of the specificity and distinctiveness of humans, their forms of sociability and their potentials within the order of nature. Whereas dualist and idealist accounts of human nature fix upon features which are held to distinguish us from (other) animals and elaborate their views of human nature upon that basis, a naturalistic approach begins with the common predicament of natural beings and moves from that basis to render intelligible their specific differences in constitution, structure and modes of life. In Marx’s account all living beings have needs whose objects are external and independent. The satisfaction of need, therefore, requires interaction with and appropriation of the environment of the organism. The particular content of need, the mechanisms which mediate between needs and forms of activity, and the nature of need-meeting activities themselves are, of course, almost unimaginably diverse—from the chemistry of photosynthesis through the hunting of the tiger to the ‘biting’ of the mosquito. The point, however, is that the common framework of analysis enables us to recognise the significance of all these detailed specificities of biochemical, neuro-physiological, anatomical, ethological and ecological facts and processes within the overall ‘mode of life’ of the species concerned. Each species has its own characteristic species life. Organisms can ‘confirm’ or ‘manifest’ their essential powers only within the context of their species life, and so can be said to flourish only when the conditions for the living of the mode of life characteristic of their species are met. For each species, then, we can distinguish conditions for mere organic survival—the meeting of minimal nutritional requirements, protection from predators, and so on—from conditions for flourishing, for the living of the species life. But how this distinction is made, the specific survival conditions and flourishing conditions which are identified, will vary from species to species. The empirical determination of such conditions is at least part of the content of the sciences of ethology and ecology. So far, then, my alternative, non-dualistic reading of Marx’s early Manuscripts has yielded a significant shift in the conceptual means for dealing with Marx’s central theme in this text: the estrangement of labour. Under regimes of private property, condi-


tions which enable the survival of workers are provided but the conditions for them to confirm their powers and potentials in the living of their characteristic ‘species life’ are denied to them. A distorted and pathological mode of life is the consequence. This theme can be further specified and elaborated with little if any loss of the ethical power of Marx’s critique, but with the double gain that precisely the same framework of analysis can be applied in the critique of the mode of life imposed upon many of the other living species caught up in this distorted mode of human life, and that Marx’s highly speculative notion of a distinctively human ‘species historical’ potential is rendered redundant. I will conclude with some brief indications as to how the form of naturalism I am advocating might offer a preferable way of understanding the relation between the ‘human’ and the ‘animal’ within the human, how it might, in other words, displace dualism without falling into reductionism. A naturalistic specification of ‘human nature’, I have suggested, would be a matter of differentiating out and then elaborating our specific features from an initial recognition of the common core of ‘natural beinghood’ which we share with other living creatures. But this process of differentiation, of saying what is specifically human, can all too easily fall into a dualistic mode. If it becomes centred on a specification of those powers, potentials, requirements, etc. possessed by humans ‘over and above’ those they share with animals, the approach falls short of naturalism. This is not to deny that there are things (reading, writing, talking,38 composing symphonies, inventing weapons of mass destruction and so on) which humans and only humans can do. Rather, it is to say that those things which only humans can do are generally to be understood as rooted in the specifically human ways of doing things which other animals also do. It is this feature that I want to emphasise as the hallmark of a naturalistic approach. What this approach might mean in practice can, perhaps, be illustrated by way of a study of Marx’s treatment of the concept of ‘need’ in the Manuscripts. As we have seen, Marx speaks variously of ‘crude’, ‘physical’ or ‘animal’ needs, contrasting them with ‘human needs’. In some passages it seems as though human needs constitute a separate, sui generis class of needs, set over and above our ‘animal’, subsistence needs, and peculiar to us as humans. We may distinguish two broad types of human need in this sense. First, what might be called ‘self-realisation’ needs: ‘The


rich human being is simultaneously the human being in need of a totality of human manifestations of life—a man in whom his own realisation exists as an inner necessity, as need.’39 Marx seems to suggest that such inner needs for self-realisation, for the fulfilment of potential, are possible only for self-conscious beings, and even then are only fully acquired on the basis of an extended process of historical ‘development’. The second class of distinctively human needs is similarly linked with our status as self-conscious beings, but not necessarily with our historicity. Marx speaks of the elements of our external environment (‘plants, animals, stones, air, light, etc.’)40 as constituting ‘spiritual nourishment’ in so far as they are objects of human science and art. Over and above the need (which they share with other animals) to physically appropriate nature, humans have spiritual needs to aesthetically and cognitively appropriate nature. This reading is strongly suggested by such passages as this: ‘It [the animal] produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom’.41 There are, it seems, two possible kinds of human practice in relation to nature: one, physical need satisfaction, which we share with animals, the other, spiritual (aesthetic, cognitive) need satisfaction, which is special to us, and constitutes production in the ‘true’ sense. This distinction reappears in the later works as a distinction between the realms of ‘necessity’ and of ‘freedom’. However, an alternative, naturalistic reading of the passage is also possible. To qualify as properly human, it is necessary not that production have no relation to the satisfaction of physical need, but rather that it should not be performed under the dominion of immediate physical need. Leaving aside Marx’s apparent equation of the animal with the ‘not-properly-human’, Marx can plausibly be read as making a distinction not so much between practices which satisfy different needs, as between different modes of satisfaction of common needs. The satisfaction of aesthetic and cognitive needs does not require the performance of further practice, over and above the practices through which physical needs are met. In a fully human, or ‘true’ practice of production, physical needs would be met in a way that was aesthetically and cognitively satisfying. For at least this subclass of ‘human’ needs, then, we can say that they are not a sui-generis complex of


requirements, over and above the physical needs, but that they are, rather, requirements which bear on the manner of experiencing, identifying and satisfying the physical needs. Let’s take the physical need for nutrition as an example.42 This need is common to both humans and other animals. Some non-human animals, but not all, have sufficient psychological and behavioural similarity to ourselves for us to speak non-metaphorically and unequivocally of them as experiencing hunger, searching for, and consuming food. For all such animals the objects and substances which can count as ‘food’ are a subset only of the total range of objects and substances which would satisfy their nutritional requirements. Moreover, only some modes of acquiring and consuming these objects and substances are characteristic of the ‘mode of life’ of the species concerned, or are activities in which their specific powers and potentials are exercised or fulfilled. The feeding activities actually engaged in by such animals are the overdetermined outcome of inherited predispositions, learning and environmental opportunity structures. All this is true of humans and many other species of animals, especially mammals and birds. So, in the passage quoted above, Marx’s parallel between the feeding activity of the ‘starving man’ and that of animals is undermined. Neither for humans nor for other species can we simply equate the mere satisfaction of nutritional requirements with the feeding activity characteristic of the species. The distorted, or pathological relation to food induced by starvation in humans is not an animal or animal-like relation to food, but a specific distortion or pathology of human feeding activity. But, this mistaken equation of the pathologically human with the animal aside, Marx’s comment is susceptible of an illuminating and naturalistic interpretation. What makes the relation of the starving man to food a pathological one is that the object of hunger exists merely as food, its sole significance is that its consumption will satisfy the hunger. Such feeding activity is performed under the ‘domination’ of ‘immediate’ need, to quote what Marx says elsewhere. This feeding activity is means/ends activity, not activity with its own intrinsic satisfaction. It is also activity in which the aesthetic, cognitive, and ‘spiritual’ dimensions of human activity are missing. On this naturalistic reading, then, what makes the difference between a ‘fully’, or ‘properly’ human way of satisfying hunger, and a less than human, or pathological way of satisfying the same


need, is the presence or absence of intrinsic cognitive and aesthetic satisfactions in the activity through which the need is satisfied. We can now get closer to answering the question, what are the enabling conditions for the satisfaction of hunger to take a properly human form? In addition to the availability of nutritional items in the environment and the technical powers on the part of persons to appropriate them, these enabling conditions must also include appropriate aesthetic and cognitive rules and resources. But if we ask the further question, under what conditions can these aesthetic and cognitive rules and resources exist?, then the short answer is: within the context of a human culture. That this reading is in line with Marx’s thinking is indicated also by his use of the word ‘immediate’ to specify the non-human relation to physical need satisfaction. Properly human feeding activity is symbolically, culturally mediated need satisfaction. All cultures contain classifications which define (well within the range of all possible means of meeting nutritional requirements) what are and what are not to be counted as food, often with severely sanctioned taboos against the consumption of some items. Similarly normative regulations govern the mode of appropriation of culturally recognised foodstuffs, their preparation for consumption, their distribution within the community, the order in which they are consumed and so on.43 To say that there is an aesthetic, cognitive, normative, ‘spiritual’—in other words ‘cultural’—dimension to the way in which humans meet their physical needs, and that this is indispensable to their meeting of these needs in a ‘properly’ human way might look like a covert return to dualism. But this is not so. The key point, here, is that the starting point for the analysis is the recognition of a need which is common to both humans and non-human animals. The specification of the distinctively human then proceeds not by identifying a further, supervenient class of needs possessed only by humans, but rather by identifying the species-specific way in which humans meet the needs they share with other species. This leaves open the door to making further illuminating contrasts and comparisons between humans and other species, and it avoids the effacement of the manifold differences among non-human animals in their ways of satisfying their physical needs. But if this strategy can be defended from the charge of ‘dualism


at one remove’, is it not susceptible to the contrary charge of reductionism? Surely not all of human cognitive and aesthetic activity is displayed in the practices through which physical needs are met, nor yet even in those practices through which we meet the whole range of needs which we share with (some) other animal species? What of those needs—self-realisation needs—which appear to be peculiar to self-conscious and historical beings? Again, it is not required by the form of naturalism I want to advocate that the reality of such needs should be denied. Rather, the commitment is to viewing them as in some sense consequential upon those needs which are common to natural beings, or upon the species-specific ways in which those common needs are met. Explanatory strategies in relation to such supervenient needs would be to make them intelligible in terms of the (ontologically) more fundamental common needs. It is beyond the scope of this paper to provide the further elaboration and defence that these remarks clearly require. Suffice it, for the moment, to say that the broad naturalistic but nonreductionist approach advocated above would provide the beginnings of a methodological defence for some already existing explanatory strategies (but not, of course, grounds for accepting as true any specific social-scientific explanation). Marx’s attempt to explain the fragmentations and distortions of human personal and social life under capitalism as consequences of a pathological relationship to nature is clearly one such strategy that would be defended. An interesting and provocative comparison here would be with the genre of explicitly ethologically rooted social pathologies, of which Desmond Morris (1969) is perhaps the best known example. Such sociological/anthropological strategies might usefully be compared and complemented by psychoanalytical approaches which operate at the level of the human individual. What Freud does with the concept of ‘sublimation’ is a clear case of an attempt to explain in a non-reductionist way the rootedness of some distinctively human activities (aesthetic and scientific, for example) in needs and propensities (sexuality and affectivity) which we share with other species. Finally, at the level of phylogenetic explanations, S.J.Gould (1980) and others have shown how the concept of natural selection can be used in the explanation of human origins (as with other species) without in any way denying the specificity and distinctiveness of human powers and poten-


tials. The notion that biological modifications which are adaptive may bring in their wake a train of consequences which are nonadaptive in evolutionary terms is an important concept for this strategy.

NOTES This chapter was first published in Radical Philosophy 50 (Autumn 1988) 1 I would like to thank participants in the sociology seminar at Sussex University, the political philosophy seminar at the University of East Anglia, the third Conference on Realism and the Human Sciences, and the third year philosophy/sociology seminar at the University of Essex, as well as Jean Duncombe, Jean Grimshaw, Roy Edgley, Joe McCarney, Chris Arthur and Oriel Sullivan, for helpful criticisms of earlier drafts of this paper. Many of their comments have been incorporated into, or taken account of, in this version of the argument. I would also like to thank S.Horigan for many stimulating conversations on issues related to the topic of this paper. 2 The distinction between ‘deep’ and ‘shallow’ ecology is generally attributed to Arne Naess. See A.Naess (1973) and also R.Sylvan (1985). Although I have treated the perspective of ‘deep ecology’ as an extension of moral concern about the well-being of (other) animals, the two positions are sometimes argued from different, and conflicting premisses. There is an implicit anthropocentrism in those advocacies of ‘animal rights’, for example, which argue for the status of animals as moral subjects on the basis of, and to the extent that they share, certain ‘human’ attributes. A ‘deep ecological’ perspective attributes intrinsic value independently of any such likeness to humans. Although I avoid direct argumentation on these issues in the present paper it may prevent some misunderstandings if I briefly outline my position. It is that the beings and relations that constitute the system of nature are properly assigned a value in virtue of their intrinsic character, independently of their utility, aesthetic appeal, or likeness to humans. However, I differ from some ‘deep ecologists’ in holding that (contingently, of course) humans are the only kind of being capable of assigning value in this way. Having assigned value to the whole system of nature and its elements, the further questions as to what conduct is or is not morally acceptable with respect to particular beings or subsystems may get a diversity of answers depending on the relations of those beings to human agents, and their diverse intrinsic characters. An animal which can feel pain and experience fear makes different moral demands upon us from a plant, which cannot. But this does not mean that the destruction of plants is a matter of absolute moral indifference, and nor does it mean that the moral value of (other) animals is equivalent to that of persons (as is held by some animal rights and liberation activists).


3 K.Marx and F.Engels (1975b), p. 276. 4 G.A.Cohen (1979), see especially pp. 201–7 and 322–5. 5 K.Marx and F.Engels (1975b), p. 275. The secondary literature on Marx’s early writings is, of course, voluminous. I have included a small selection in the bibliography. See especially C.J.Arthur (1986), A. Cornu (1957), G.Markus (1978), R.Norman and S.Sayers (1980), B. Ollman (1971) and A.Wood (1981). N.Geras (1983) is an important source on Marx’s later view of human nature. Almost all commentaries mention in passing Marx’s contrast between the animal and the human, but few give it sustained critical attention. J.Elster (1985), Ch. 2, and G.Markus (1978) are exceptions. 6 Ibid., p. 276. 7 Ibid., p. 273. 8 Ibid., pp. 301–2. 9 Ibid., p. 277. 10 Ibid., p. 276. 11 Ibid., p. 277. 12 Ibid., p. 305. 13 Ibid., p. 303. 14 Ibid., p. 297. 15 Ibid., p. 306. 16 Ibid., p. 305. 17 Ibid., p. 301. 18 Ibid., p. 301. 19 Ibid., pp. 296–7. 20 Ibid., pp. 303–4. 21 Ibid., p. 276. 22 Ibid., p. 302. 23 Ibid., p. 274. 24 Ibid., p. 239. 25 See for example M.Midgley (1980), Ch. 2. 26 Some of the most fascinating evidence of cultural transmission comes from the more than 25 years spent by Jane Goodall and her associates observing a wild chimpanzee colony at Gombe, in Tanzania (see J.Goodall, 1974 and 1986). Chimps are frequently observed using sticks as ‘tools’ to ‘fish’ termites from their mounds. They first strip off leaves to make the sticks suitable for the purpose, and juveniles learn the appropriate skills by observation and imitation of their seniors. See, however, S.J.Gould’s interesting discussion of Goodall’s interpretations (S.J.Gould, 1987). 27 This is not, of course, to deny that there are connections between wellbeing and the fulfilment of potentials. Marx is, I think, right to argue that the opportunity to fulfil one’s potential is, for humans, a need. It follows that the fulfilment of potential is a necessary constituent of wellbeing. But not all potentials can be actualised within the timespan of an individual human life, or within the context of any particular culture. Some potentials must simply remain unactualised. Moreover, as I have suggested above, the actualisation of some human potentials would be undesirable. In other cases, the simultaneous realisation of two contrast-


ing potentials may be impossible or undesirable, even though there may be nothing problematic about either taken separately. These considerations show that the concepts of human potential and species being are by themselves insufficient to establish a defensible view of human well-being. A good society would encourage the actualisation of some potentials and discourage others. Its institutional framework would include enabling conditions for the fulfilment of a diverse range of potentials amongst its citizens, but it would also set limits to this range and establish constraints on the actualisation of undesirable potentials. Further ethical principles and reasoning are required to establish and defend the outlines of such a society. A theory of human nature is an essential part of the rational grounding of any view of human wellbeing, but it cannot be substituted for an adequate moral theory. 28 Here, as elsewhere in this paper, I might be accused of anachronistically criticising Marx for lack of awareness of an ethological literature produced a century or more after his death. In fact, I am less interested in showing that Marx was empirically mistaken, than in exposing and making constructive uses of some of the conceptual tensions and contradictions in his text. However, Marx’s writings of the early and mid-1840s contrast interestingly with Darwin’s notebooks (unpublished, of course, at the time) on Man, Mind and Materialism. These were written in 1838 and 1839 and are studded with observations and speculations on intelligence, emotional expression and sociability in other animals, and also remarks on the striking analogies between humans and other animals in these respects. For example: ‘Plato says in Phaedo that our “imaginary ideas” arise from the preexistence of the soul, are not derivable from experience—read monkeys for preexistence. 1. The young Orang in Zoological Gardens pouts. Partly out (of) displeasure…. When pouting protrudes its lips into point. Man, though he does not pout, pushes out both lips in contempt, disgust and defiance’ (Gruber, 1974, p. 290). This contrasts very sharply with Marx’s virtually contemporaneous position in his 1839 notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy: ‘If a philosopher does not find it outrageous to consider man as an animal, he cannot be made to understand anything’ (Marx and Engels, 1975a, p. 453). It would be a worthwhile exercise to investigate the transition from this unequivocal anti-naturalism through the unstable ‘humanist naturalism’ of the Manuscripts to the unequivocal pro-Darwinian stance of 1859. 29 It may be argued that this point does not apply to controversies about, for example, cruel sports or inhumane methods of slaughter. In these cases, ethical concern is not founded on a distinction between mere survival and well-being, but upon the imposition of unnecessary suffering, or, indeed, in the human vice of taking actual pleasure in the causing of suffering to other beings. I think there is some force in this argument, though my main concern in the text is to work out a framework for thinking about the quality of life which is possible for those animals (domestic, agricultural, etc.) which are incorporated into human society. 30 A useful introduction to the debates surrounding biological determinism is A.L.Caplan, ed., 1978. Trenchant critiques include M.Sahlins (1977)


31 32 33

34

35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42

and S.Rose, L.J.Kamin and R.C.Lewontin (1984). Feminist perspectives on the issues are given in J.Sayers (1981) and L.Birke (1986). I have commented elsewhere on Marx’s, and, especially, Engels’s later responses to Darwinism. See T.Benton (1979). Marx and Engels (1975b), p. 302. An important figure in the development of this new understanding was the late T.McKeown (see his (1976) The Role of Medicine). See also the essays by L.Rogers and G.Bignami in S.Rose (ed.) (1982) and L.Doyal (1979), esp. Ch. 1. Somewhat paradoxically, an important source for such views of need has been the work of A.H.Maslow (see Maslow, 1943 and 1970). Though advocating a ‘holistic’ and anti-dualist view of human nature, Maslow’s hierarchical classification of needs (physiological, safety, love, esteem and self-actualisation) has been open to interpretations which, in effect, restore a dualism of ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ order needs. Important recent discussions of the concept of need with a direct bearing on my argument in this paper are K.Soper (1981) and L.Doyal and I.Gough (1984). A very useful introduction to the literature on this is M.Redclift (1984), pp. 107–10. See also W.H.Matthews, ed. (1976). K.Marx and F.Engels (1975b), p. 336. Ibid., p. 337. Recent studies have even called into question the distinctiveness of the human capacity for language. Although earlier attempts to train captive chimpanzees and other primates to speak were not successful, R.A. and B.T.Gardner did manage to teach the chimp ‘Washoe’ to use signlanguage to some degree. E.Linden’s experiments with plastic symbols have also been adduced as evidence of an intellectual capacity for language in some primates. Of course, language can be defined so as to exclude these as genuine cases of language-learning and all such experiments have methodological weaknesses. Nevertheless, it is hard to read this literature without being convinced of a much greater continuity between humans and other primates with respect to their reasoning and symbolising powers than has been widely assumed. See R.A. and B.T.Gardner (1975) and E.Linden (1976). Good, balanced accounts of the debate are given in S.Walker (1983), Chs 9 and 10 and S.Horigan (1988). Ibid., p. 304. Ibid., p. 275. Ibid., p. 276. The use of this example might be misleading. In this case we are, indeed, dealing with a physical need which is common to humans and animals as ‘natural beings’. However, as I hope the above discussion has made clear, I am not committed to the view that all needs common to humans and (other) animals are physical needs. On the contrary, my view would also include affective, sexual, reproductive (etc.) needs as common needs in this sense. They are needs which we share with other animals, but, at the same time, they are needs which we experience, identify and seek to satisfy in ways which are distinctively human (and, at a more concrete


level of description, in ways which vary from one human culture, historical period and social grouping to another). 43 See C.Lévi-Strauss (1970).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arthur, C.J. (1986) Dialectics of Labour, Blackwell, Oxford. Avineri, S. (1970) The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Barker, M. (1983) Review of K.Soper (1981) in Radical Philosophy 33, spring 1983, pp. 31–4. Benton, T. (1979) ‘Natural Science and Cultural Struggle: Engels on Philosophy and the Natural Sciences’ in J.Mepham and D.H.Ruben (eds), Issues in Marxist Philosophy, Vol. 2, Harvester Press, Brighton. Birke, L. (1986) Women, Feminism and Biology, Harvester Press, Brighton. Caplan, A.L. (ed.) The Sociobiology Debate, Harper, New York. Carpenter, E. et al. (1980) Animals and Ethics (report of ‘Animals and Ethics Working Party’), Watkins, London and Dulverton. Clark, S.R.L. (1977) The Moral Status of Animals, Clarendon, Oxford. Clark S.R.L. (1982) The Nature of the Beast, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Cohen, G.A. (1979) Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Cornu, A. (1957) The Origins of Marxian Thought, Thomas, Springfield, Illinois. Darwin, C. (1974) ‘Notebooks on Man, Mind and Materialism’, in H.E. Gruber (1974). Doyal, L. with I.Pennell (1979) Political Economy of Health, Pluto, London. Doyal, L., and I.Gough (1984) ‘A Theory of Human Needs’, Critical Social Policy 10, pp. 6–38. Elster, J. (1985) Making Sense of Marx, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Gardner, R.A., and B.T.Gardner (1975) ‘Early Signs of Language in Child and Chimpanzee’, Science, Vol. 187, pp. 752–3.


Geras, N. (1983) Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend, Verso, London. Goodall, J. (1974) In the Shadow of Man, Fontana, Glasgow. Goodall, J. (1986) The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behaviour, Harvard University Press, Harvard. Gould, S.J. (1987) Review of J.Goodall (1986) and other texts in New York Review of Books, 25 June 1987, pp. 20–5. Gould, S.J. (1980) Ever Since Darwin, Penguin, Harmondsworth. Gruber, H.E. (1974) Darwin on Man, Wildwood House, London. Heller, A. (1976) The Theory of Need in Marx, Allison and Busby, London. Horigan, S.D. (1988) Nature and Culture in Western Discourses, Routledge, London. Le Gros Clarke, W.E. (1970) History of the Primates, B.M. (N.H.), London. Le Gros Clarke, W.E. (1978) The Fossil Evidence for Human Evolution, Chicago University Press, Chicago. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1970) The Raw and the Cooked (trans. J. and D. Weightman), London. Lindon, E. (1976) Apes, Men and Language, Penguin, Harmondsworth. Lukács, G. (1978) The Ontology of Social Being 2: Marx (trans. D.Fernbach), Merlin, London. McMurtry, J. (1978) The Structure of Marx’s World View, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Markus, G. (1978) Marxism and Anthropology, Van Gorkum, Assen, The Netherlands. Marx, K. and F.Engels (1975a) Collected Works, Vol. 1, Lawrence & Wishart, London. Marx, K. and F.Engels (1975b) Collected Works, Vol. 3, Lawrence & Wishart, London. Maslow, A.H. (1943) ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’, Psychological Review, London, pp. 370–96. Maslow, A.H., (1970) Motivation and Personality, Harper and Row, New York, Evanston and London (2nd edn). Matthews, W.H. (ed.) (1976) Outer Limits and Human Needs, Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, Uppsala. Midgley, M. (1980) Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature, Harvester, Brighton. Midgley, M. (1983) Animals and Why They Matter, Penguin, Harmondsworth.


Montefiore, H. (ed.) (1975) Man and Nature, Collins, London. Morris, D. (1969) The Human Zoo, Cape, London. Naess, A. (1973) ‘The Shallow and the Deep, Long-range Ecology Movement’, Inquiry, 16, pp. 95–100. Norman, R. and S.Sayers (1980) Hegel, Marx and Dialectic, Harvester Press, Brighton. Ollman, B. (1971) Alienation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Plamanatz, J. (1975) Karl Marx’s Philosophy of Man, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Premack, P. (1976) Intelligence in Ape and Man, Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale. Redclift, M. (1984) Development and the Environmental Crisis, Methuen, London. Redclift, M. (1987) Sustainable Development, Methuen, London. Rockmore, T. (1980) Fichte, Marx and the German Philosophical Tradition, Southern Illinois Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville. Rose, S. (ed.) (1982) Against Biological Determinism, Allison and Busby, London. Rose, S., L.Kamin, and R.C.Lewontin (1984) Not in Our Genes, Penguin, Harmondsworth. Sahlins, M. (1977) The Use and Abuse of Biology, Tavistock, London. Sayers, J. (1981) Biological Politics: Feminist and Anti-feminist Perspectives, Tavistock, London. Singer, P. (1976) Animal Liberation, Cape, London. Soper, K. (1981) On Human Needs, Harvester, Brighton. Soper, K. (1986) Humanism and Anti-Humanism, Open Court, La Salle, Illinois. Sylvan, R. (1985) ‘A Critique of Deep Ecology’, Radical Philosophy 40, pp. 2–12, and Radical Philosophy 41, pp. 10–22. Walker, S. (1983) Animal Thought, Routledge, London. Walliman, I. (1981) Estrangement, Greenwood, London. Wood, A. (1981) Karl Marx, Routledge, London.

12

THE HUMAN BODY IN SOCIAL THEORY Reich, Foucault and the repressive hypothesis Russell Keat 1 ARE HUMAN BODIES HUMAN? A recurrent issue in both philosophy and the human sciences has been the possibility of identifying distinctively human characteristics—such as the capacities for language, purposive action and conscious experience; sociality, historicity, and cultural diversity; and so on. Some of these proposed differentiations have taken the relevant contrasts to be between humans and the ‘physical’ or ‘material’ world; others, between humans and the ‘biological’ or ‘organic’ world. But what has been accepted in nearly all proposals is that it is not human bodies that are distinctive of humans. Rather, it has typically been assumed that the bodily features of humans are precisely what is non-distinctive about them. Correspondingly, those who have denied the existence, or at least the significance, of distinctively human characteristics have typically supported their position by emphasising the essentially bodily (either physical/material, or biological/organic) character of human beings. Both the general issue of human distinctiveness, and the shared assumption of the human body’s non-distinctiveness, have had important implications for social theory; and it is with these that this paper is primarily concerned. Here the possibly relevant differences between the human and non-human worlds have usually been taken as holding between humans and the (rest of) the organic, or biological world, especially that of (other) animal species. (In at least many areas of (human) psychology, by contrast, the possibly relevant differences have been taken as holding 277


between humans and the physical or material world.) Hence, the question of whether the bodily characteristics of humans have a legitimate place in the object-domain of social theory has typically been identified with the question of whether the biological characteristics of humans should have such a place. That they should not be thus included has been maintained by those who insist that social theory should restrict itself to what is distinctively human. Conversely, that they should be thus included has been maintained by those who believe either that there is nothing distinctive about humans, or that social theory should be concerned with both the distinctive and non-distinctive features of the human world. But the assumption shared by these otherwise conflicting views of social theory—that human bodies are non-distinctive and, more specifically, belong to the biological world—is mistaken. To show the many respects in which this is so, and why, would require an extremely complex set of (broadly) philosophical arguments which I shall not attempt here. Instead I shall draw attention to some important ways in which the work of two particular social theorists, namely Wilhelm Reich and Michel Foucault, can be seen to challenge that assumption. Both of them, I shall argue, are concerned to identify various social processes involved in the ‘construction’ (i.e. the actual shaping or forming) of human bodies; and hence, at least implicitly, to demonstrate in this respect the distinctively ‘human’ character of human bodies, by removing them from the category of exclusively biological entities.1 In other words, both Reich and Foucault can be understood as rejecting the view that human bodies belong to the object-domain of social theory only to the extent that biological entities belong there. More positively, they can be seen to contribute to what is, I believe, the important theoretical project of understanding the various complex ‘mediations’ that obtain between biological and social processes. For the conduct of this project must, I would argue, recognise that human bodies are themselves, in the very character of their development and consequent patterns of activity, a central ‘site’ or ‘location’ for these mediations. That is, the (admittedly problematic) relationships between biological and social processes are not to be understood as occurring between ‘the bodily’ and ‘the social’, but rather as internal to the human body itself.

THE HUMAN BODY IN SOCIAL THEORY 279

Whatever the merits of these general claims about human bodies, however, it may well seem highly implausible to link the work of Reich and Foucault in this way. For, as normally interpreted by both their respective critics and admirers, the two supposedly represent utterly incompatible theoretical standpoints: for instance, ‘biological essentialism’ versus ‘discursive constructionism’. But it will be a further aim of this paper to question this orthodox contra-positioning of the two. I shall begin by presenting what is an apparently strong case for this orthodox view, in the form of a schematic account of Foucault’s critique of ‘the repressive hypothesis’ in Volume I of The History of Sexuality, and of its seeming applicability to Reich’s account of ‘sexual repression’. But I shall then propose certain interpretations (and at times, reconstructions) of their work, which should serve to undermine this orthodox contraposition by indicating the overall compatibility of their respective insights concerning the social construction of human bodies. In doing so, however, I shall also suggest that, despite these shared insights, there can be found in each of them a residual (quasi-biological) ‘naturalism’ about human bodies, especially in their articulation of critical ideals. Further, and partly on this basis, I will suggest that, instead of regarding Reich and Foucault as entirely opposed with respect to ‘the repressive hypothesis’, the two can in some ways be seen as proposing different variants upon a single, more generally specified, theory of ‘repression’.

2 ‘THE REPRESSIVE HYPOTHESIS’: FOUCAULT CONTRA REICH? In the opening sections of The History of Sexuality (Vol. I; henceforth HS), Foucault sketches an ingenious critique of what he terms ‘the repressive hypothesis’: very roughly, that in the course of European history, and especially since the seventeenth century, there has been an increasing repression and confinement of (natural) human sexuality. Thus, according to its proponents, says Foucault, At the beginning of the seventeenth century a certain frankness (about sexuality) was still common…. Sexual practices had little need of secrecy…. It was a time of direct gestures,


shameless discourse, and open transgressions, when anatomies were shown and intermingled at will, and knowing children hung about amid the laughter of adults: it was a period when bodies ‘made a display of themselves’. But twilight soon fell on this bright day, followed by the monotonous nights of the Victorian bourgeoisie. Sexuality was carefully confined; it moved into the home. The conjugal family took custody of it and absorbed it into the curious function of reproduction. On the subject of sex, silence became the rule. (HS, p. 3) By emphasising in this initial depiction of the hypothesis its supposed implication of increasing silence and secrecy about sexuality, Foucault is immediately able to present an apparent difficulty facing its advocates. For, he claims, it was precisely during the hypothesised major period of repression that there emerged ‘a veritable explosion’ of discourses about sexuality; in, for example, medical, psychiatric and educational theories, and the practices that were both informed and presupposed by these discourses —the investigation and declassification of deviant sexualities; the sexual diagnosis of mental and physical illnesses; the concern with childhood masturbation; and so on. Never, in effect, had there been so noisy a silence, so public a secret, as this ‘repressed’ sexuality. Yet it would be a relatively simple matter for an advocate of the repressive hypothesis to deal with this apparent paradox. After all, if it is assumed that sexuality is a powerful human drive seen by its enemies as a danger to moral and political order, one would surely expect them to display great vigilance, and to arm themselves with every item of theoretical and practical equipment they could muster in their self-appointed role as repressive legislators. In other words, the silence and secrecy whose absence is presented by Foucault as a problem for the repressive hypothesis is no problem at all: if anything, this absence strengthens the support for that hypothesis. But although Foucault’s rhetoric at times seems designed to obscure this obvious rejoinder, it is not one that need unduly concern him. For his critique of the repressive hypothesis does not essentially depend upon contesting its supposed implications of silence and secrecy.2 It depends rather upon arguing that its advo-


cates necessarily accept a number of fundamentally mistaken assumptions about the character of power, truth, and sexuality; and that when these are rejected and replaced by others, the ‘veritable explosion’ of discourses about sexuality takes on a quite different theoretical and political significance. In particular, it emerges that the repressive hypothesis should itself be seen to form part of the discursive armoury of ‘modern’ power.3 What are these supposedly mistaken assumptions? First, there is what he terms a ‘negative’ conception of power, according to which the exercise of power typically involves prohibition, limitation, restriction, removal, and such like. ‘Negative’ power is thus thought of as operating upon something that exists prior to, and independently of, the exercise of such power; and its exercise involves various forms of limitation of the pre-existing ‘object’. The concept of repression, says Foucault, assumes this (mistaken) view of power. Second, advocates of the repressive hypothesis assume that ‘truth’ is essentially liberating: they accept an Enlightenment conception of knowledge as something that can free one both from error and illusion, and from the patterns of domination and subordination that depend upon these. The repressive hypothesis is thus itself conceived as emancipatory knowledge or truth. Third, there is the assumption that sexuality is some kind of instinctual force or drive which lies at the root of much, or even all, human experience and activity, and which can express itself more or less directly in a great variety of (often necessarily disguised) forms. These varying forms may well be sociohistorically specific—including, of course, those that result from (historically specific) patterns of repression. But the drive which is thus repressed is itself a-historical, and in some sense ‘natural’. That assumptions at least reasonably similar to these are in fact (and quite likely inevitably) made by proponents of the repressive hypothesis is a relatively uncontentious claim. Certainly their presence is identifiable in the work of one such proponent whom Foucault seems to have in mind, namely Wilhelm Reich, especially in his so-called ‘Sex-Pol’ writings of around 1930, such as ‘Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis’, The Sexual Revolution, and ‘The Imposition of Sexual Morality’. Consider, for example, the following (characteristically grandiose) account of human history provided by Reich in the last mentioned of these: From earliest gentile [clan based] society to the present capi-


talist state the distinctive phrases of societal development have always exhibited two interacting processes. The first process, spanning from the stage of primitive economic communism to the capitalist state, has to do with the development of the instruments of production, with the expansion and increase of production, and with the correspondingly awakened human needs. Ultimately this process leads to a concentration of the ownership of production in the hands of a dominant social group, the capitalists. On the other hand, another process leads from natural sexual freedom, and from the gentile [clan-based] family based upon consanguinity, to the ideology of extra-marital asceticism and permanent monogamous marriage. It moves along the lines of a continuous confinement, repression, and distortion of genital sexuality. (p. 226) Further, according to Reich it is this repression of ‘genital sexuality’, of the ‘natural’ form in which instinctual sexual energy is expressed, that lies at the root of neurosis. For Reich was one of several writers who have attempted to combine (some version of) psychoanalytic theory with (some version of) Marxist theory, so as to produce an overall account of human history which, amongst other things, relates the development of sexual repression to that of capitalism—thereby constructing (some version of) ‘the repressive hypothesis’.4 In addition, as a theorist and practitioner of psychoanalysis he was committed to the emancipatory value not only of the truth of this repressive hypothesis and of the political practices based upon it, but also of a therapeutic practice in which the general truths represented in psychoanalytic theory come to be recognised by patients in the painful recovery of their long and deeply repressed pasts. In Reich, then, one seems to have an exemplary advocate of the repressive hypothesis, and of the particular assumptions about power, truth and sexuality which Foucault is concerned to challenge. Against these assumptions he makes the following claims. It is a central feature of modern European societies (i.e. roughly since the late eighteenth century) that power becomes increasingly ‘positive’ or ‘productive’ in character, by contrast with its earlier, predominantly ‘negative’ forms.5 Modern power operates through the construction of ‘new’ capacities and modes of activ-


ity, rather than through the limitation of pre-existing ones. This productivity of modern power is achieved by, amongst other things, a vast array of more or less institutionalised practices, which are typically informed by various theoretical discourses, especially those of the ‘human sciences’—including, for example, psychoanalysis and the ‘discourse(s) of sexuality’. Such discourses represent themselves as aspiring to, and at times achieving, the status of ‘truth’, of systematically established and rigorously validated knowledge. Yet whilst these discursively informed practices (or ‘discursive practices’) legitimate themselves at least partly by reference to the epistemological status of their respective discourses, the situation is, in crucial respects, rather the reverse: namely, that these discourses actually presuppose their respective practices, and therefore equally belong to the weaponry, tactics and strategy of modern power.6 Thus, advocates of the repressive hypothesis are to be seen not only as making false assumptions about power and truth, but also as engaging in a discourse of sexuality which is intrinsically tied to practices, such as psychoanalysis itself, that are exemplary instances of modern power. In psychoanalytic theory, ‘sexuality’ is conceptualised in such a way that it is only through what Foucault views as the quasi-confessional nature of psychoanalytic therapy that patients can recognise this ‘truth’ about themselves. An instinctual force, yet equipped with an indefinite variety of possible disguises, it resists discovery by almost every means. Only through the insightful application of psychoanalytic discourse by the analyst can these disguises be penetrated, and freedom through knowledge be gained. In an interview around the time of publication of HS, Foucault is reported as making the following remark, which perhaps encapsulates as well as any other his opposition to the repressive hypothesis: ‘“Sexuality” is far more a positive product of power, than power was ever a repression of sexuality’ (‘Truth and Power’, p. 120). Much later in this paper, I shall draw attention to some possible ambiguities in this claim. But for the moment it can be taken to indicate the apparently fundamental opposition between Foucault and advocates of the repressive hypothesis such as Reich, who regard sexuality as a biologically grounded drive that has been subjected to various socio-historically specific forms of negative power. For Foucault, by contrast, ‘sexuality’ is itself what is socio-historically specific, and is in some sense the prod-


uct of discursive practices characteristic of positive, modern power. Given this systematic opposition between Foucault and Reich with respect to the repressive hypothesis, it may then seem implausible to suggest that the two can be seen as adopting mutually compatible, indeed potentially complementary, accounts of the human body and its place in social theory—especially if, as is commonly assumed, there is some very close relationship between the human body and sexuality. But this is the suggestion for which I shall try to argue; and in doing so I shall also, at least implicitly, be querying the ways in which that relationship between the body and sexuality is often conceptualised. I shall proceed as follows. In the next two sections, I shall give an account of Reich’s views about the human body and argue that, far from being a ‘biological essentialist’ or ‘reductionist’, his work provides important resources for a theory of the social construction of bodies. In particular, I shall show that there is a good deal more to his views of the body than the theory of instinctual sexual energy for which he is best known; and that this can quite easily be abandoned without loss. In Section 5, turning to Foucault, I shall note briefly his account in Discipline and Punish of the construction of ‘disciplined bodies’ as an important aspect of modern power. I shall then propose a possible interpretation of certain elements in HS, according to which one outcome of the discursive practices of sexuality is the construction of ‘sexualised bodies’; and that this should, or at least can, be understood as just as ‘real’ or ‘literal’ a construction as that of disciplined bodies, and not as a (merely) ‘conceptual’ construction in discourses. Interpreted in this way, then, Foucault’s social theory of the human body is compatible with, and indeed potentially complementary to, the (partly reconstructed) theory discernible in Reich. But I shall also suggest, in Sections 4 and 6, that the two share a residual (though eliminable) ‘naturalism’ about the human body, and that this partly undermines the extent of their apparent opposition with respect to the repressive hypothesis, especially if, in addition, the legitimacy of Foucault’s contrast between negative and positive power is questioned. Nonetheless, it must be emphasised that I am not attempting to argue that ‘properly understood, there is no real disagreement between Foucault and Reich about the repressive hypothesis’. At the very least, their respective views


of ‘power’ and ‘knowledge’ are quite irreconcilable, and I shall not address the issues raised by this. For my main aim is to draw attention to the ways in which Reich and Foucault can contribute to a more adequate conception of the human body in social theory and philosophy.

3 THE TROUT MAN: CHARACTER-ANALYTIC VEGETOTHERAPY AT WORK Reich’s account of the human body can best be understood by examining the theory and practice of what he termed ‘characteranalytic vegetotherapy’. (As Reich later acknowledged, this rather unwieldy phrase has the unfortunate effect of making the English reader think of vegetables. But the term ‘vegetotherapy’ derives in fact from the ‘vegetative nervous system’, now more commonly termed the ‘autonomic’ system, which controls the operation of the glands and internal bodily organs.) The main features of this form of (quasi-) psychoanalytic therapy were presented in Reich’s two main works on psychoanalytic theory and practice: The Function of the Orgasm (1927; henceforth FO), and Character Analysis (1934: henceforth CA).7 Some initial grasp of what is involved in character-analytic vegetotherapy can be achieved by considering briefly one of the case histories in FO, which I shall call, with due deference to Freud, ‘The Trout Man’. Reich’s account goes like this. The patient was a 27-year-old male alcoholic, with an unhappy marriage and a general sense of listless superficiality in his social contacts. Always polite, friendly, and unaggressive, he had an awkward, forcedly jaunty walk, an expressionless face, a small tight mouth, and a general air of submission, ‘as if he were continually on his guard’ (FO, p. 278). Reich says that he was initially faced with the decision of whether to ‘first consider his psychic reserve or his very striking facial expression’ (p. 279); and opting for the latter, he persistently described this expression to the patient, who eventually responded with twitchings of the mouth that built up until ‘his lips began to protrude and retract rhythmically and to hold the protruded position for several seconds…his face took on the unmistakable expression of an infant’ (p. 279). This was followed by a tearless crying, uttering sounds ‘like the outbreak of a long-suppressed, painful sob’ (pp. 279–


80). Reich hypothesised that the patient’s constricted mouth was a ‘muscular defence’ against this infantile crying. Some weeks later, following a similar initial sequence, the patient’s mouth ‘became distorted, the musculature of his jaws became stiff as a board, and he grit his teeth’, sat up shaking with anger, and ‘raised his fist as if he were going to strike a blow, without, however, following through…. The whole action dissolved into a whimpering kind of weeping’, expressing the ‘impotent rage’ often experienced by children (p. 281). This episode evoked previously long-buried memories of the patient’s early relationship with his brother, the aggressive feelings towards whom had been curbed through fear of parental displeasure. In a subsequent session, the patient began talking of the joys of trout-fishing. He gave a lengthy and detailed description of this activity with just one significant omission—the moment at which the trout bites into the hook. One month later, as Reich continued to work on the patient’s muscular defences, a strange set of bodily movements emerged. Spontaneously, the patient said that he felt like a fish. ‘His mouth,’ says Reich, ‘was spasmodically protruded, rigid, and distorted. His body jerked from the shoulders to the legs. His back was stiff as a board’ (p. 287); and, ‘with each jerk of his body, the patient for a time thrust his arms forward, as if embracing someone’ (p. 288). Discussing this episode, the patient recognised how he himself had represented the trout in his previous story; and he connected this to his relationship with his mother, whom he saw as having neglected and disappointed him, often unexpectedly punishing him when he had hoped for something from her. Reich comments: ‘His caution became understandable now. He did not trust anyone; he did not wish to be caught’ (p. 288). The main thesis that underlies this (perhaps) seemingly bizarre therapeutic practice is that the patient’s body somehow contains and expresses their emotionally problematic life history; that, as Reich himself puts it, ‘every muscular rigidity contains the history and the meaning of its origin’ (FO, p. 269). In order both to understand and to elaborate this thesis, one needs to explore its basis in three important areas of Reich’s theoretical work: his concept of character analysis, his theory of sexual energy and orgastic potency, and his account of ‘the physiology of repression’. ***


The starting point for the first of these was Reich’s dissatisfaction with orthodox psychoanalytic technique. He was struck by the ability of his patients to produce plentiful material in the form of dreams, memories, associations, and so on; to accept the interpretations offered; and yet to remain quite unmoved and unaffected by the therapeutic process. This, he believed, was due to the patient’s resistance to the analysis, and he decided that identifying and overcoming this resistance must become the primary therapeutic task. Resistance, he believed, was rooted in the patient’s character, ‘the person’s specific mode of existence’, ‘an expression of the person’s entire past’ (CA, p. 53); and its nature was indicated not so much by the content of the material presented, but rather by the manner of its presentation. In particular, Reich emphasised the importance of such features as tone of voice, facial expression, hand-clasp, ‘quality of silences’, posture, and bearing; and he would often proceed, therapeutically, by drawing the patient’s attention to these ‘characteristic’ forms of behaviour, and to how they represented attitudes which kept the analyst at bay. Having initially introduced the concept of character in response to the problem of resistance, Reich soon went on to employ it more generally in his account of the neuroses. He rejected the orthodox distinction between symptom neuroses and character neuroses, according to which the unconscious conflicts and defences that typically led to the formation of neurotic symptoms might in some cases appear instead in the form of character traits or personality structure. Against this Reich claimed that ‘the symptom neurosis is always rooted in a neurotic character’, which ‘is formed, at least in its principal features, by the time the Oedipal stage comes to a close’. The symptom neurosis is merely that special case in which ‘the neurotic character also produces symptoms, has become, so to speak, concentrated in them’ (CA, p. 50, my italics). The neurotic character, he maintained, is itself a compact defence-mechanism, serving as what he termed— initially, in a metaphorical sense—an armour: It is as if the affective personality armoured itself, as if the hard shell it develops were intended to deflect and weaken the blows of the outer world as well as the clamouring of the inner needs…the ego has become less flexible and more


rigid; and…the ability to regulate the energy economy depends upon the extent of the armouring. (CA, p. 374) This energy economy was, for Reich, an economy of sexual energy. Unimpressed by Freud’s radical revision of his earlier theory of instincts, involving the introduction of the death instinct in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), and strongly opposed to its apparent political implications in Civilization and its Discontents (1930), Reich maintained that this theoretical shift by Freud led to ‘a complete liquidation of the psychoanalytic theory of neurosis’: Until this point, a neurosis was looked upon as the result of a conflict between sexual demand and fear of punishment. Now it was said that a neurosis was a conflict between sexual demand and demand for punishment. (FO, p. 112; my italics) For Reich, the instincts were exclusively sexual; instinctual energy was sexual energy; and neurosis resulted from the repression of instinctual impulses, and hence from the blocking of sexual energy. Further, it was only through genital sexuality that satisfactory discharge of this energy could be achieved. Thus, the severity of psychic illness was related to the severity of genital disturbance, and its cure required, and in some sense consisted in, establishing the capacity for full sexual gratification, or what he called ‘orgastic potency’, defined as: ‘the capacity to surrender to the flow of biological energy, free of any inhibitions; the capacity to discharge completely the dammed-up sexual excitation through involuntary, pleasurable convulsions of the body’ (FO, p. 90)—a process which Reich described, together with various pathological deviations from it, in loving detail. In talking about the instincts, Freud had himself distinguished between their (as yet unknown) somatic sources; their aims; and their highly variable objects.8 Reich believed it important to identify the first of these; and recently published work by neurophysiologists on the operations of what was then called the ‘vegetative nervous system’ convinced him that this could be done. The vegetative system controls the operation of the internal bodily organs and glands, including the heart, blood vessels, digestive tract, geni-


tals, and so on.9 It is divided into two ‘branches’, the parasympathetic and sympathetic, whose respective activation has antithetical effects upon these: for example, decreasing v. increasing the heart-beat rate, and expanding v. contracting the blood vessels. Reich maintained that parasympathetic activity corresponded to sexual excitation and pleasure, whilst sympathetic activity corresponded to anxiety; and that this anxiety itself resulted from the repression of sexual pleasure, the failure to discharge sexual energy. Further—and with each step here, he departed increasingly from orthodox (both then and now) scientific views of the autonomic system—he claimed that the respective activation of each branch of the autonomic system was itself somehow produced by the flow of ‘sexual energy’, a quasi-electrical force that was, in his later work, to be reconceptualised as cosmic, orgone energy.10 What, though, happens to the anxiety supposedly produced by the repression of sexual impulses? Reich’s answer was that it becomes ‘bound’ in the form of hypertonic rigidities in the skeletal musculature, and hence, as he put it, ‘the spasm of the musculature is the somatic side of the process of repression, and the basis of its continued preservation’ (FO, p. 271). These muscular rigidities, the organism’s way of dealing with the unpleasant anxiety resulting from the blocking of sexual energy, are to be understood as the bodily constituents of the character armour that Reich had identified in his analysis of resistance. Psychic defences correspond to muscular defences, and character rigidity to bodily rigidity. Thus, the initially metaphorical concept of character ‘armour’ had now acquired a far more literal sense. But Reich did not talk of bodily defences only in generalised, quantitative terms, with ‘degrees of rigidification’ corresponding to ‘degrees of repression’. His descriptions of character armour also involved far more specific, differentiated accounts of what he called ‘the physiology of repression’. This has already been seen, to some extent, in the case history of ‘The Trout Man’. Elsewhere Reich tries, for example, to identify particular bodily processes through which children may defend themselves against emotionally problematic situations. Thus, he describes how they may learn to suppress or control the expression of feelings made dangerous through anticipated parental responses, by holding or reducing their breath; and how this pattern may lead to more permanent, physiologically grounded blocks upon complete exha-


lation, involving abdominal tension, prevention of the head falling back, and a raising and tightening of the shoulders. He suggests also how certain facial and vocal characteristics may be generated by the inhibition of crying: there is a mask-like facial expression. The chin is thrust forward and looks broad; the neck just below the chin has a lifeless appearance…the floor of the mouth is tense. Such patients often suffer from nausea. Their voices are usually low, monotonous, or ‘thin’. This attitude can also be tested on oneself. Imagine that you are suppressing an impulse to cry. The muscles of the floor of the mouth become very tense, the entire musculature of the head will be put in a condition of continued tension, the chin will be thrust forward, and the mouth will be tight. (FO, p. 273) There is nothing obviously sexual about the feelings being controlled in these ways, and even when Reich does talk more directly about bodily controls over sexual feelings, his descriptions are (at least at their best) in terms not of generalised rigidity, but of specific patterns of immobilisation and postural fixity. He focuses, for example, on the formation of what he terms ‘the dead pelvis’ (FO, Chapter 8, Section 5), involving its inability to move independently of the thighs and upper abdomen, and often associated with a sense of ‘emptiness’ or ‘weakness’ in the genital area. This he presents as part of a more general pattern of the body’s being ‘held back’, with the back arched, the shoulders pulled back, the abdomen and chest arched forward, and the pelvis withdrawn—the whole syndrome being a way of controlling problematic sexual excitation; and he connects this to what he regarded as the sexually suppressive nature of the typical military attitude or bearing: ‘The neck has to be rigid, the head stretched forward; the eyes have to stare rigidly straight ahead; the chin and mouth have to have a ‘manly’ expression; the chest has to be thrust out’ (FO, p. 323).

4 REICH WITHOUT SEXUAL ENERGY Most commentators on Reich, whether sympathetic or hostile,


have assumed that what he says about human bodies, their muscular ‘armouring’, and the origins of this in childhood experiences, stands or falls with his theory of instinctual sexual energy. As a result of this assumption, those who—in my view quite rightly— find much that is objectionable about his sexual energy model, tend automatically to reject also the other elements in his account of the human body. But this is mistaken. Reich’s theory of sexual energy is quite independent of the rest of this account, and hence the rejection of the former does not entail the rejection of the latter.11 That this is so is supported by the following considerations. Although Reich tries to provide a theoretical explanation of muscular rigidities by reference to their supposed function in binding the anxiety caused by undischarged sexual excitation in the autonomic system, none of the descriptions he provides of the origins of specific muscular formations actually depend upon this theoretical claim. This is most obvious in those cases of problematic feelings that have nothing apparently ‘sexual’ about them; for example, his account of the bodily processes involved in the suppression of crying. But the same is also true in those cases where the problematic feelings are of a specifically sexual kind. For Reich’s descriptions of the bodily defences involved in the repression of such feelings do not entail that the feelings are themselves the result of sexual energy ‘flowing’ through the autonomic system; nor that these muscular formations are a response to the postulated ‘overloading’ of the sympathetic branch of that system supposedly caused by undischarged energy accumulations.12 I shall not attempt here to articulate what I regard as the failings of Reich’s theory of sexual energy, since my main concern is to note that his actual descriptions of what he calls ‘the physiology of repression’, and of the ways in which the muscular structure of bodies may partly thereby be formed, do not depend upon this theory. My suspicion is that the widespread tendency on the part of Reich’s critics (and admirers) not to see this is due to their assumption that to be concerned with human bodies is to be concerned with human ‘biology’, in the sense of what is supposedly innate, instinctual, or suchlike; and hence that if instinctual sexual energy, a ‘biological force’, is rejected, so too must the rest of Reich’s account of human bodies.13 But this, I am suggesting, is precisely to miss the overall theoretical significance of his work: the recognition that human bodies, far from belonging exclusively


to the ‘biological’ (as distinct from the ‘social’) realm, are themselves a major site or location for the interactions between biological and social processes—that they are, as it were, ‘biosocially’ formed or constructed. Once this is recognised, a considerable number of significant theoretical possibilities are opened up. For instance, it could be the case that the historical reproduction of specific structures of social relationships involves, amongst other things, the ‘biosocial’ reproduction of appropriately constructed human bodies— of bodies, that is, which are ‘equipped’ to enter into those relationships. Hence one might expect there to be bodily differences corresponding to different structures of social relationships, as distinct from there being more or less identical, biologically reproduced, a-social bodies which then enter into a variety of sociohistorically differentiated structures.14 As an example of this general theoretical possibility it could, I think, plausibly be argued that the acquisition and (historical) reproduction of socio-historically specific gender differences typically involves the gender-differentiation of male and female bodies. That is, assuming the standard (though not unproblematic) distinction between biologically determined ‘sex’ (male v. female) and socially determined ‘gender’ (masculine v. feminine), specific forms of masculinity and femininity will involve the construction of masculine and feminine bodies: the development of characteristic differences of bodily structure, patterns of movement, and so on—including, I would argue, related differences in forms of experience and perception. There may well be, in other words, an embodiment of gender. More specifically, to the extent that there are gender differences with respect to ‘sexuality’, these may themselves be connected with characteristic bodily differences acquired through the operation of differentiated social processes upon male and female bodies.15 Whether or not this is actually so, the important point is to recognise its theoretical intelligibility, and this requires one to reject the normal assumption that any account of bodily differences between men and women is ipso facto concerned with their biological differences. For this is to rule out the possibility of gendered bodies, of socially constructed bodily differentiation. Further, it must be emphasised that the concept of ‘social contruction’ I am employing here is to be understood in a fairly straightforward, ‘literal’ sense. In particular, I do not mean by this some


kind of conceptual ‘construction’, involving the socially determined ascription of ‘meanings’ to male and female bodies, their social ‘interpretation’ as gendered. No doubt, this also occurs, and has some significance. But it is entirely distinct from the ‘real’ construction of bodies with which I am concerned, and to the understanding of which, I have been arguing, Reich’s work can be seen to contribute. In the next section of this paper, I shall try to show how Foucault’s work can likewise be interpreted as contributing to this. But before leaving Reich, there is one further issue about his account of human bodies to be addressed. This is what I referred to earlier as his ‘residual “naturalism”’. Despite what I have claimed to be his positive insights about the bio-social character of human bodies, there is a recurrent tendency in Reich’s work to lapse into naturalistic, biologistic language, especially where he is attempting to articulate and apply critical norms or values. In particular, frequent appeals are made to the ideal of ‘natural’ bodies, with their ‘natural’ sexuality, which turns out to consist in a rather closely specified form of heterosexual genitality. There are, I believe, two different, though connected, senses of this naturalistic vocabulary employed by Reich. In the first, and most obviously unacceptable, the ‘natural’ is at least implicitly defined as that which is non-social; and hence, for example, ‘natural sexuality’ is that which is exclusively biological in its origins. Yet it should already be clear that Reich’s own account of the human body makes this conception of ‘the natural’ quite unacceptable. For, if a ‘natural’ body is one whose formation involves no social processes, then there simply are not, and could not be, any such natural bodies; and ‘naturalism’ as an ideal is therefore absurd. The source of Reich’s error here is, I think, fairly clear: a tendency to identify the category of ‘the social’ with that of ‘the repressive’, and hence to identify ‘the non-repressive’ with ‘the non-social’ and ‘the natural’. It is the first of these identifications which is primarily at fault; for unless the concept of repression is to be given an almost unlimited sense (and thereby rendered almost meaningless), what is repressive cannot be taken to include all that is social. However, once this fault is noted, one can also understand the second sense in which Reich uses this naturalistic vocabulary: namely, such that ‘the natural’ is whatever results from processes marked by the absence of repression. In


this latter sense, what is natural is not identified with what is nonsocial, but only with what is not brought about by repressive social processes. ‘Naturalism’, in this sense, becomes the ideal of non-repressed bodies. Yet this latter version of Reich’s ‘naturalism’ is also highly problematic, despite avoiding the absurdities of the former version. The central difficulty is this. Even if the concept of (social) repression is reasonably clearly defined (and Reich hardly achieves this), there is every reason to expect that the category of the nonrepressive is extremely heterogeneous; and that within this heterogeneity, there will be a good number of normatively relevant differentiations to be made. In other words, the normative ideal of ‘natural’ bodies is at best a negative one, which leaves open a vast array of possible forms of non-repressive bodily life, about which additional normative questions may arise that have nothing to do with ‘repression’.16 But Reich seems not to recognise this. Instead he talks as if what is ‘natural’ in the sense of non-repressed represents a single, determinate ideal; and hence, in particular, maintains that there is a single mode of ‘natural’ sexuality, namely genital heterosexuality, whose ideal-ness is supposedly (but mistakenly) grounded solely in the absence of repressive social determinants in its development. Nonetheless, neither of these two problematic forms of naturalism are entailed by the account of the human body I have claimed to be present in Reich’s work, and hence they, along with the model of sexual energy, can be removed without loss. And it is this partly reconstructed version of Reich’s position which, I shall now argue, is in many respects both compatible with, and complementary to, the conception of human bodies to be found in at least some parts of Foucault’s work.

5 DISCIPLINED BODIES AND SEXUALISED BODIES As noted in Section 2, one of Foucault’s main objections to the repressive hypothesis is its reliance upon a negative conception of power as prohibition or limitation. Against this he maintains that since the eighteenth century power has become increasingly positive or productive, involving the careful construction of new capacities rather than the repression or removal of pre-existing ones. Hence, for example, ‘power over life’ comes to consist not


so much in the threat of death as in the management of life itself; and this management takes as one of its central concerns the human body: ‘its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase in its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls’ (HS, p. 139). In order to produce these docile and useful bodies, says Foucault, a real and effective ‘incorporation’ of power was necessary, in the sense that power had to gain access to the bodies of individuals, to their acts, attitudes, and modes of everyday behaviour. Hence the significance of methods like school discipline, which succeeded in making children’s bodies the object of highly complex systems of manipulation and conditioning. (‘Truth and Power’, p. 125) A striking example that Foucault uses to illustrate this thesis in Discipline and Punish (henceforth DP) is that of military training. In the course of the eighteenth century, he says, a major transformation took place in the nature of the military body. Previously, the physical characteristics already acquired by a man marked him out as suited to this profession—the breadth of his shoulders, the strength of his hands, the thickness of his thighs. But by the end of that century, the soldier has become something that can be made; out of a formless clay, an inapt body, the machine required can be constructed; posture is gradually corrected; a calculating constraint runs slowly through each part of the body, mastering it, making it pliable, ready at all times, turning silently into the automatism of habit; in short, one has ‘got rid of the peasant’, and given him ‘the air of the soldier’. (DP, p. 135) To illustrate this transformation, he quotes from various military training manuals which specify, for example, the precise details of the marching step, or how recruits shall become accustomed to holding their heads high and erect; to standing upright,


without bending the back, to sticking out the belly, throwing out the chest and throwing back the shoulders…. Likewise, they will be taught never to fix their eyes on the ground, but to look straight at those they pass…to remain motionless until the order is given, without moving the head, the hands, or the feet. (DP, pp. 135–6) Military training, that is, came to involve the construction of military bodies—of bodies which are controlled not by external threat or coercion, but by their acquired, internalised modes of automatised operation. And Foucault claims that similar processes of training and regulation of human bodies emerged during this same period in a wide range of specific institutional locations —in schools, factories, prisons, and so on. The overall outcome of these disciplinary practices were bodies that were both useful and docile, both productive and subjected—bodies that had, amongst other things, been enabled to provide the labour-power for capitalist enterprises. Whether or not any of this is actually true (and the ‘evidence’ provided by Foucault is far from conclusive),17 the sense in which power is here being claimed to be positive or productive in relation to bodies seems fairly straightforward. This is not to deny that there are problems with what often appears to be, in Foucault’s work, a dubious reification of ‘power’ itself, but only to say that the specific processes of bodily construction being described, and the idea of ‘control through the acquisition of bodily capacities’, are reasonably intelligible once one accepts the possibility of socially constructed bodies. Nonetheless, it should be noted that the interpretation I am adopting here of Discipline and Punish is by no means the only possible one. In particular, it may be argued that DP should not be read in this simple-minded, ‘realist’ manner, but rather—and in this respect consistently with many of Foucault’s other, especially earlier, works—as essentially concerned with various (modern) discourses, including those of ‘military training’, ‘punishment’, and so on. These exegetical issues cannot be pursued here; but, briefly put, my position is this. I believe that the interpretation of DP I am adopting is at least defensible, as an interpretation. But if I were wrong about this it would not greatly concern me. This is because my more general philosophical commitment to realism, as against


most forms of discursive conceptual constructionism/ conventionalism, is such that ultimately I would only be interested in those elements of Foucault’s work that were open to a realist (re-)‘interpretation’, even if this is strictly (i.e. exegetically) speaking a mis-interpretation of the relevant texts.18 The preceding remarks were addressed to the problems of interpreting DP, but they are equally applicable to the final stages of this paper, which concern mainly Volume I of The History ofSexuality and other closely associated writings. For what I will suggest is that one important theme in HS is ‘the sexualisation of bodies’, understood so that bodies are being said to become ‘sexualised’ in a sense closely analogous to that in which they are said in DP to become ‘militarised’, ‘disciplined’, and so on: that is, that a ‘real transformation’ in the character of human bodies is being claimed to have taken place, thereby displaying another facet of the productivity of modern power. That Foucault is claiming, or can be read as claiming, something along these lines is supported by the following textual considerations. First, there are several passages in which he talks of the various practices supposedly aimed at investigating a sexuality that exists independently of those practices, as themselves involving sustained and subtle forms of sexual excitement and incitement. For example, he says that ‘the power which thus took charge of sexuality set about contacting bodies, caressing them with its eyes, intensifying areas, dramatizing troubled moments’; and that it ‘implied a physical proximity and an interplay of intense sensations’ (HS, p. 44). Second, Foucault emphasises that his concern is not primarily, or at least exclusively, with identifying the development of sexualised ‘interpretations’ or ‘conceptualisations’ of the human body, with the ‘meanings’ that came to be ascribed to it. Rather, he says, the purpose of the present study is in fact to show how deployments of power are directly connected to the body— to bodies, functions, physiological processes, sensations, and pleasures…. Hence I do not envisage a ‘history of mentalities’ that would take account of bodies only through the manner in which they have been perceived and given meaning and value; but a ‘history of bodies’ and the manner in


which what is most material and most vital in them has been invested. (HS, pp. 151–2) In other words, and employing the distinction I made earlier between ‘real’ and ‘conceptual’ construction, Foucault can be taken here to be declaring his concern with the former, rather than the latter—though, as will shortly be seen, there is an important connection between the two, the crucial mediation being performed by discursive practices, and in particular the discursive practices of ‘sexuality’. Finally, in the interview already referred to, discussing The History of Sexuality, Foucault says this: in the pedagogic and medical manuals of the eighteenth century, children’s sex is spoken of constantly and in every possible context. One might argue [in line with the repressive hypothesis] that the purpose of these discourses was precisely to prevent children from having a sexuality. But their effect was to din it into parents’ heads that their children’s sex constituted a fundamental problem…and to din it into children’s heads that their relationship with their own body and their own sex was to be a fundamental problem as far as they were concerned; and this had the consequence of sexually exciting the bodies of children while at the same time fixing the parental gaze and vigilance on the peril of infantile sexuality. The result was a sexualizing of the infantile body, a sexualizing of the bodily relationship between parent and child, a sexualizing of the familial domain. ‘Sexuality’ is far more a positive product of power than power was ever a repression of sexuality. (‘Truth and Power’, p. 120) I will now elaborate the character of the thesis here being ascribed to Foucault, and its relationship to his views about power, truth, and sexuality noted earlier (Section 2), by considering how the last sentence in the passage just quoted may best be interpreted. There are, I suggest, three distinguishable, mutually consistent ‘layers’ or ‘levels’ of meaning that can be identified. First, one may interpret this sentence as expressing the claim that the concept, and more generally the discourse(s), of sexual-


ity, are to be understood as a positive product of (modern) power; and that it is a mistake to think of this concept as referring to an a-historical entity which has been subjected to the repressive effects of negative power. Second, one may add to this initial level of interpretation by taking Foucault’s use of the term ‘sexuality’ as including not only the concept and/or discourse(s) of sexuality, but also the discursive practices which are informed and presupposed by these—medical, pedagogic, psychiatric, and so on. The third level of interpretation can be arrived at by pursuing the following line of thought. In Discipline and Punish (according to my reading of this) Foucault is concerned with the actual production or construction of disciplined bodies, regarding these as the effects or outcomes of various (discursively informed) practices such as military training and school discipline. What, then, corresponds to these bodily outcomes in the case of the discursive practices of sexuality? The answer would surely be: sexualised bodies. Hence Foucault can be taken to be claiming, in this sentence, that amongst the products of positive power are human bodies which are ‘equipped’ with the characteristic features of (modern) sexuality. ‘Sexuality’, that is, does not refer to an ahistorical drive with the various characteristics ascribed to it in the modern discourse(s) of sexuality. Rather, sexuality is not only historically specific, and of an at least partly somatic nature: it is also a product of those very practices which present themselves, through their self-informing discourses, as directed at something that exists a-historically and independently of them. Whether this claim is actually true is, of course, another matter, and one which does not concern me here—though I think it unlikely that the discursive practices of sexuality are the major social determinants of whatever is distinctive about modern, embodied, sexuality. What is important here is the theoretical intelligibility of the claim, and this, I believe, is quite wellgrounded in the more general view of human bodies and their susceptibility to processes of (real) social construction which I have been advocating, and ascribing to both Foucault and Reich. Their positions are, then, in this respect mutually compatible and potentially complementary. Compatible, of course, not with respect to the actual truth or falsity of at least some of their specific, substantive claims—especially, perhaps, those concerning sexuality—but rather in their shared rejection of exclusively biolo-


gistic, a-social conceptions of the human body. Further, it should be noted that ‘even’ in the case of sexuality, their apparent substantive disagreement is significantly reduced if one accepts the following points: first, that in rejecting Reich’s model of instinctual sexual energy, one is not thereby committed to rejecting any kind of ‘biological’ component in human sexuality; and second, that Foucault’s view of the historicity of ‘modern’ sexuality does not commit one (and is probably not intended by him to commit one) to regarding every feature of this sexuality as historically specific.

6 FOUCAULT’S ‘REPRESSIVE HYPOTHESIS’? In Section 2 of this paper, I outlined an apparently strong case for the orthodox contra-positioning of Reich and Foucault with respect to ‘the repressive hypothesis’. To the extent that this opposition might reasonably be expected to affect their respective concepts of the human body, what I have so far argued about the latter may be seen partly—but only partly—to undermine the contrapositioning of the two. I shall now try to take this ‘undermining’ process a little further, by suggesting that in certain respects Foucault too can be seen to endorse a ‘repressive hypothesis’, which mirrors Reich’s in an unfortunate manner. Nonetheless, as noted earlier, I am not proposing a ‘complete reconciliation’ of the two, above all because of their radical differences about the relationships between truth, power, and discourses. There are two main steps to be taken here, each of which will be sketched only very briefly. First, I suggest that there can be found in Foucault, as in Reich, a ‘residual naturalism’ about the human body. Second, I doubt that Foucault’s contrast between positive and negative power can do the theoretical work required of it. Whilst Reich’s naturalism (in both its versions) is most evident in his normative judgements, it also occurs in his historical claims about the development of sexual repression, specifically in his descriptions of ‘early, pre-repressive’ societies, where natural bodies and their sexuality supposedly flourished (see, e.g. the quotation from Reich in Section 2above). Of course, the historical claim that ‘once upon a time there were natural bodies’ is not required by his normative naturalism—as such the latter is


equally compatible, for example, with a more ‘optimistic’, ‘progressivist’ account of the history of human bodies. Nonetheless, the making of this historical claim does require commitment to the theoretical-conceptual assumptions of naturalism which, I argued in Section 4, are highly problematic (though also eliminable, ‘without loss’ to the rest of his account). Now, according to Foucault (according to me), sexualised and disciplined bodies are amongst the outcomes of modern power. So one may reasonably ask of Foucault the question, ‘What were human bodies like before this—in, as it were, pre-modern times?’. And one answer which he occasionally seems to give is, in effect, that they were ‘natural’. Consider, for example, the following passage, from a lecture given in the early 1970s: It is false to say…[as does Marx] that the concrete existence of man is labour. For the life and time of man are not by nature labour, but pleasure, restlessness, merry-making, rest, needs, accidents, desires, violent acts, robberies, etc.… And this quite explosive, momentary and discontinuous energy must be transformed by capital into labour-power, something which implies compulsion. (‘Power and Norms’, p. 62; my italics) Furthermore, it is apparently this same natural body, with its ‘discontinuous energy’, that is invoked in The History of Sexuality as Foucault’s alternative to the normative conception of sexual liberation associated with ‘the repressive hypothesis’. Thus: It is the agency of sex that we must break away from if we aim—through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality—to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counter attack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures. (HS, p. 157) Or, as he put it in a later interview, ‘one should aim instead at a desexualization, at a general economy of pleasure not based on sexual norms’ (‘The History of Sexuality’, p. 191). In other words, Foucault at times has his own ‘repressive


hypothesis’ which, incidentally, has a somewhat similar historical dating to the one he opposes. Once upon a time there were natural bodies; then they became ‘repressed’ through discipline and sexuality; and now we have to overturn this repression and regain our natural bodily condition. It’s a similar story to Reich’s with (merely) a different specification of the ‘natural’ characteristics of bodies, and it is open to similar objections. I shall not spell these out here. But they could, for example, be developed by considering the significance of the fact that the pre-militarised bodies of the eighteenth-century armies were themselves ‘already’ sociohistorically formed, albeit through processes that did not, at least in Foucault’s view, display the characteristics of modern power. The second main step can be introduced by responding to a possible objection to the first: namely, that what I have called ‘Foucault’s (version of the) repressive hypothesis’ is quite wrongly so called, since he rejects the exclusively negative conception of power typically assumed by its advocates. But I doubt that this objection can be adequately sustained, for the following reasons. First, to the extent that there is a reasonably clear distinction between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ power, it seems implausible to claim that Reich—or, indeed, most other advocates of a/the repressive hypothesis—conceives of repression in exclusively ‘negative’ terms. What, after all, could be a more ‘positive’ product of power than a Reichianly armoured body? For, although Reich does not approve of this muscular apparatus, it could hardly be said merely to limit or reduce one’s capacities—it also makes possible many ‘new’ patterns of movement, experience, and suchlike. And similar points could be made about the ‘positive’ character of the ‘repressive’ processes and outcomes that were the concern of other advocates of ‘the repressive hypothesis’—for example, the ‘authoritarian personality’. Second, it is far from obvious that Foucault’s distinction is a reasonably clear one; or, at least, that his own examples of modern power are distinctively ‘positive’. After all, he himself talks frequently of the ‘subjugation’ of bodies, of the ‘controls’ imposed upon them, of their being rendered ‘docile’; and also, of their (?‘natural’) capacities for ‘resistance’ to such exercises of power over them. These terms seem surely to belong to the vocabulary of negative, repressive power.


NOTES This article started life in some papers written in 1982 whilst a visiting fellow at the Humanities Research Centre, Australia National University, and since presented in too many places to be mentioned. It was first published in Radical Philosophy 42 (Spring 1986). Amongst the numerous people who have helped with their comments and responses, I am especially grateful to Paul Connerton. 1 Other social theorists whose work has, I think, a similar significance include Norbert Elias, Marcel Mauss, and Margaret Mead (see Bibliography). Philosophically, the most important contribution is perhaps Merleau-Ponty’s in Phenomenology of Perception. 2 My account of Foucault omits consideration of how his quasiNietzschean ‘genealogy’ differs from other forms of ‘critique’. On this issue see Smart, especially Ch. 4. 3 Here, as throughout, I rely mainly on my own readings of Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, and the essays collected in Power/Knowledge. But see also Dews, Dreyfus and Rabinow, and Smart. 4 On these various attempted ‘syntheses’ by Reich, Marcuse, Roheim, and others, see e.g. Robinson, Sedgwick, Poster, and Weeks. 5 Here I ignore the complexities surrounding Foucault’s (various) ‘periodisations’ of history, and adopt the rather loose concept of ‘modernity’. 6 This is a very simplified account of Foucault’s view of the relations between ‘discourses’ and ‘practices’, even restricting oneself to his 1970s writings. On this issue, see e.g. Dreyfus and Rabinow. Note, in particular, that I do not mean by ‘discursive practice’, the practice of ‘discourse’ as distinct from other, non-discursive practices. 7 Note that the work cited in the Bibliography, The function of the Orgasm, from which the quotations that follow are taken, is not a translation of the 1927 Die Funktion des Orgasmus but a quite distinct work of intellectual autobiography published (in translation) in 1942. The passages I quote from FO are restricted to those which, as far as I can judge, accurately reflect Reich’s theoretical position in the late 1920s. Similar remarks apply to my quotations from the third, 1949 edition of CA, in relation to the first, 1933/4 edition. 8 The metapsychology of Freud’s instinct theories has been variously interpreted. My view on this is presented in Chapter 4 of The Politics of Social Theory, which includes some relevant bibliographical material. 9 On the autonomic nervous system, and its relation to the ‘voluntary’ system controlling the skeletal musculature, see any standard work on the human nervous system, such as Noback and Demarest, upon which I have relied at various points in what follows. 10 On Reich’s later work, see e.g. Boadella, Rycroft, and Sharaf. From my standpoint, there is a crucial theoretical ‘break’ around 1934–5, with his proclaimed experimental discovery of ‘bions’, to be followed by ‘orgone


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17

18

energy’, the construction and sale of ‘orgone accumulators’, and his eventual death in prison in 1957. Sympathetic commentators include Boadella, and Sharaf. His most sophisticated critic is perhaps Mitchell. All three tend to assume what I am rejecting here; whilst Rycroft only partly avoids it, since he ties vegetotherapy to ‘the orgasm reflex’. By far the best and most discriminating brief account of Reich’s work is the article by Edwards. There is, in any case, a flaw in Reich’s neurophysiology here: he assumes a probably non-existent ‘linkage’ between the autonomic and voluntary subsystems (see note 9 above; and Rycroft, Ch. 5). Here, as throughout, I ignore the complexities in the conceptualisation of ‘the biological’, ‘the innate’, ‘the instinctual’, etc: on this, see e.g. Reynolds, passim. On some general problems with energy models, in psychoanalysis, see e.g. my discussion in The Politics of Social Theory, Ch. 4. Unfortunately, Reich’s own main attempt to use his theory of character formation in relation to historically specific social structures, viz. The Mass Psychology of Fascism, hardly engages with the bodily aspects of character armouring. Two interesting accounts of gendered bodily differences are Connell, and Young. Examples of the normal tendency to identify bodily with biological differences are Nicholson, Ch. 2, and Reynolds, Part III. For anthropological material on significant bodily differences that do not obviously map on to the ‘repressive v. non-repressive’ dichotomy, see e.g. Mead, Part Two. Another fruitful area to consider would be the differences between various contemporary dance techniques—Graham, Laban, Cunningham, etc. An obvious problem is Foucault’s almost exclusive reliance on the dicta of ‘the disciplinarians’ as distinct from ‘the disciplined’—though of course this is only a problem for a realist reading of DP. For an excellent discussion of the corresponding problems with Foucault’s earlier work on the history of ‘madness’, see Sedgwick, Ch. 5. The so-called ‘British Foucauldians’, such as Heath, and Weeks, seem often to endorse the kind of discursive-constructionist ‘reading’ of Foucault which I am here opposing. Dreyfus and Rabinow argue that there was a major shift away from this in Foucault’s work in the 1970s.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Boadella, David (1973) Wilhelm Reich: The Evolution of His Work, Contemporary Books, Chicago. Connell, R.W. (1983) ‘Men’s Bodies’, in Which Way is Up?, Allen & Unwin, London. Dews, Peter (1984) ‘Power and Subjectivity in Foucault’, New Left Review, No. 144, pp. 72–95. Dreyfus, Hubert and Rabinow, Paul (1982) Michel Foucault:


Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Harvester Press, Brighton. Edwards, Paul (1967) ‘Wilhelm Reich’, in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. P.Edwards, Macmillan and The Free Press, New York, Vol. 7. Elias, Norbert (1978) The Civilizing Process, Vol. I: The History of Manners (trans. E.Jephcott), Blackwell, Oxford. Foucault, Michel (1975) Discipline and Punish (trans. A.Sheridan), Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1979. ——(1976) The History of Sexuality, Vol. I (trans. R.Hurley), Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1978. ——(1977) ‘The History of Sexuality’ (trans. L.Marshall), in Power/Knowledge, Ch. 10. ——(1979) ‘Power and Norms’, in Power, Truth, Strategy, ed. M.Morris and P.Patton, Feral, Sydney. ——(1980) Power/Knowledge (ed. C.Gordon) Harvester Press, Hassocks. ——(c. 1977) ‘Truth and Power’, (trans. C.Gordon), in Power/ Knowledge, Ch. 6. Heath, Stephen (1982) The Sexual Fix, Macmillan, London. Keat, Russell, (1981) The Politics of Social Theory, Blackwell, Oxford; and University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Mauss, Marcel (1935) ‘The Techniques of the Body’ (trans. Ben Brewster), Economy and Society, 2, 1972, pp. 70–88. Mead, Margaret, (1962) Male and Female, Pelican Books, Harmondsworth. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1962) Phenomenology Perception (trans. C.Smith), Routledge & Kegan Paul, London. Mitchell, Juliet (1975) Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Penguin, Harmondsworth. Nicholson, John (1984) Men and Women, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Noback, Charles R. and Demarest, Robert J. (1972) The Nervous System, McGraw-Hill, New York. Poster, Mark (1984) Foucault, Marxism and History, Polity Press, Cambridge. Reich, Wilhelm (1976) Character Analysis (1st edn 1933/4), 3rd edn (1948) (trans, V.R.Carfagno), Pocket Books, New York. ——(1972) ‘Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis’ (1st edn 1929), 2nd edn (1934), in Sex-Pol, ed. L.Baxandall, Vintage Books, New York.


——(1975) The Function of the Orgasm (1942), (trans. V.R.Carfagno), Pocket Books, New York. ——(1972) ‘The Imposition of Sexual Morality’ (1st edn 1933), 2nd edn (1935), in Sex-Pol, op. cit. ——(1972) The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1st edn 1933), 3rd edn (1942), (trans. V.P.Carfagno), Souvenir Press, London. ——(1972) The Sexual Revolution (1st edn 1930), 4th edn (1949), (trans. T.Wolfe), Vision Press, London. Reynolds, Vernon (1980) The Biology of Human Action, W.H.Freeman & Co., Oxford and San Francisco. Robinson, Paul, (1972) The Sexual Radicals, Paladin, London. Rycroft, Charles (1971) Reich, Fontana/Collins, London. Sedgwick, Peter (1982) Psycho Politics, Pluto Press, London. Sharaf, Myron (1984) Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich, Hutchinson, London. Smart, Barry (1983) Foucault, Marxism and Critique, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London. Weeks, Jeffrey (1981) Sex, Politics and Society, Longman, London and New York. Young, Iris Marion (1980) ‘Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Bodily Comportment, Motility and Spatiality’, Human Studies, Vol. 3.

INDEX

Addison, J. 13 Adorno, T. 182 Amo, A-W. 126 Aquinas, T. 133 Aristotle 54, 83, 113, 126, 129, 159 Bacon, F. 126 Barrett, M. 89, 100–101, 106 Bazin, N. 104–105 Beauvoir, S.de 37, 71–73, 84, 220 Bell, C. 100–103 Bell, Q. 134 Belotti, E. 21 Bentham, J. 51, 56 Berkeley, G. 132 Boutroux, E. 132 Bovenschen, S. 116 Brecht, B. 190 Buerger, P. 109–110 Butler, J. 77, 142 Chesterfield, Lord 13 Chicago, J. 114–115 Cixous, H. 115 Cohen, G.A. 140–157, 161–166, 170, 173, 237 Colletti, L. 191–192 Condillac, E.B.de 127 Coole, D. 10 Coward, R. 87–88 Cullen, B. 29 Daly, M. 21, 79–80

Descartes, R. 126, 249 Dietzgen, J. 129, 133, 136–136 Duchen, C. 226 Durkheim, E. 199 Easton, S. 27–27, 31–35, 38–38, 42 Elster, J. 170–177 Empson, W. 126, 136 Engels, F. 125, 140, 146, 164–167, 171–172, 259 Everhard, E. 133, 136 Ewing, A.C. 166 Feuerbach, L. 148, 240 Foucault, M. 277–284, 292–302 Fourier, C. 127–129, 133, 136, 170 Friedman, B. 39 Freud, S. 78, 88, 287 Fry, R. 100–103 Gearhart, S.M. 224–226 Gerwith, A. 70 Giddens, A. 172 Gilligan, C. 78–79 Godwin, W. 9–9, 11, 19 Gould, S.J. 268 Green, T.H. 133 Habermas, J. 102, 111, 179, 180–184, 186–188, 199–200 Harrod, R. 134 Hegel, G.W.F. 1, 27–44, 46, 125, 130–132, 134, 140, 152, 154,

307


156–159, 166, 179–180, 184, 188–199, 202, 204 Hobbes, T. 175, 188 Hodge, J. 27, 36–37, 43 Holcroft, T. 11 Hölderlin, F. 130 Hume, D. 132, 155, 157 Jackson, T. 125 Johnson, J. 11 Kant, I. 70, 132, 134, 179, 183, 187–188, 197 Kaplan, C. 9–11, 16–17 Kaufmann, W. 31–31 Keane, J. 179–185, 187–189, 197, 199–200 Keynes, J.M. 134 Kokopeli, B. 230 Kolakowski, L. 176 Kuhn, T. 182 Lachelier, J. 132 Lakey, G. 230 Lloyd, G. 38, 73, 113, 214, 221 Locke, J. 127, 141, 162 London, J. 129, 133 Luhmann, N. 199 Lukács, G. 176 Lukes, S. 187 Macaulay, C. 12 MacIntyre, A. 50, 103 McLennan, G. 170, 175–176 McTaggart, J. 133 Maitland, F.W. 133 Malebranche, N.de 132 Marcus, J. 106 Marcuse, H. 101, 107–108 Marx, K. 1–1, 3–4, 43, 125, 136, 140–140, 142–151, 155–157, 161–166, 170–177, 179–180, 182, 189–196, 199, 202, 206, 237–268, 300 Melchinger, S. 31 Merchant, C. 214 Midgley, M. 255 Mill, J.S. 19, 202, 206

Mitchell, J. 85–87, 88 Moore, G.E. 103, 133–134, 151, 166 More, H. 9 Morris, D. 268 Mulvey, L. 111–112 Nagel, T. 70 Napoleon 146 Nietzsche, F. 183 Offe, C. 182 Ortega y Gasset, J. 101 Owens, C. 117 Paine, T. 9, 11 Palissy, B. 126–127 Parker, R. 115 Parsons, T. 199 Paulus, C. 41 Plato 126, 129, 134–136 Plumb, J.H. 9 Pollock, G. 115 Radcliffe Richards, J. 69, 73 Rawls, J. 70, 187, 203, 206 Reich, W. 277–279, 280–294, 299–302 Reid, T. 132 Rembrantsz, D. 126 Robertson, G. 133 Roemer, J. 170 Rousseau, J-J. 10, 13–15, 17, 21, 34, 129, 175, 179–180, 183, 188, 191–193, 202, 214 Ruether, R. 229 Russell, B. 134 Sartre, J-P. 1, 37–38, 73, 175, 184 Schelling, F.W.J. 130 Schlegel, F. 41 Schlegel-Schelling, C. 41 Seneca 129 Shanley, J. 125–125, 136 Shelley, P.B. 9 Sherman, C. 117 Shulte-Sasse, J. 110 Sidgwick, H. 133

INDEX 309

Singer, P. 70 Smith, A. 47 Socrates, 36–37, 125–126, 133, 136 Sophocles 28, 31–31 Spinoza, B. 152 Steele, R. 13 Steiner, G. 31 Stewart, D. 132 Stirner, M. 170 Taylor, B. 12, 23 Taylor, H. 220 Timpanaro, S. 89 Tocqueville, A. 175 Todd, J. 13 Vogel, U. 39 Voltaire, F.M.A.de 129 Walpole, H. 9 Ward, J. 133 Watney, S. 100–103, 106 Weber, M. 182, 183–184, 198–200 Williams, B. 90 Wittgenstein, L. 159 Wollstonecraft, M. 9–24, 216, 218, 220 Woolf, L. 134 Woolf, V. 11, 78, 100–109, 118

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