Very different, but the same on one point
Liberalism is a big church. In this series we have talked – in the wake of the reflections opened by the Economist think tank on contemporary liberalism – about libertarians like Robert Nozick, interventionists like John Maynard Keynes, minimum government fundamentalists like Friedrich Hayek and pragmatists like John Stuart Mill.
But we cannot ignore the enemies of liberalism. This latest contribution seeks to refine the definition of liberalism in relation to the thinking of three anti-liberals: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a superstar of the French Enlightenment; Karl Marx, a 30th-century German revolutionary communist; and Friedrich Nietzsche, XNUMX years younger than Marx and one of the greatest dissidents in the history of philosophy. Each of them has a multiple and well-characterized range of ideas and interests. But all are united by the rejection of the liberal vision of progress.
Liberals believe that things tend to get better. Wealth can grow, science can deepen understanding of the world, wisdom can spread, and society improves from it all. But liberals are not idiots in their progressive candor. They saw how the Enlightenment, which exalted reason as the engine of humanity, led to the excesses of the French Revolution and produced the murderous terror that finally consumed it. Progress is a conquest continually in danger.
For this reason the liberals set out to define the conditions of progress. They believe that free discussion and free speech generate good ideas and help propagate them. They reject the concentration of power because dominant groups tend to abuse their privileges, oppressing others and subverting the norms of the common good. And they affirm individual dignity, which means that no one, no matter how certain they are of their ideas, can force others to give up their beliefs.
Otherwise, Rousseau, Marx and Nietzsche reject and fight all this overview and interpretation of social relations. Rousseau doubts progress itself. Marx thinks that progress is possible only if driven by class struggle and revolution. Nietzsche is convinced that, in order not to sink into nihilism, society must rely on a heroic savior, a Übermensch. Those who came after them and followed these ideas did terrible things in their name.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau (1712-1778) was the most downright pessimistic of the Enlightenment thinkers. David Hume, Voltaire, Denis Diderot and other contemporaries of Rousseau believed that the Enlightenment could make a decisive contribution to righting the many wrongs suffered by society. Rousseau, who in time became their bitter enemy, thought that the source of those wrongs was society itself.
In A discourse on inequality explains that humanity is truly free only in the state of nature. In that state, the notion of inequality is meaningless because the original human being is alone and not related to anything. The ruin of the original state occurred when a man first enclosed a piece of land and then declared: "This is mine". Rousseau writes: “Since it was realized that it was useful for only one to have provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became necessary and the vast forests were transformed into pleasant countryside which must have been wet with the sweat of the men, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to sprout, with the harvest".
Rousseau's political philosophy is an attempt to repair the consequences of society leaving the pristine state of nature. The social contract it opens with a thunderous declaration: "Man is born free and is everywhere in chains." Man is good by nature, but society corrupts him. Social order does not come from nature, but is founded on social conventions. The social contract aims to limit this original damage.
Sovereignty, writes the Genevan thinker, springs from people, understood as individuals. If then the government is the servant of the sovereign people, its mandate must be renewed periodically. If the government fails, the people can replace it. Today this statement might seem like simple common sense, but in the society of the time, founded on monarchy and aristocracy, it was a revolutionary principle.
But… society makes people selfish. “Laws are always useful to those who have goods and are harmful to those who have nothing.” Religion is another evil. He writes: "True Christians are made to be slaves".
Equality, while not conceived as a principle for its own sake, must therefore be enforced as a way of countering the selfish desires of individuals and their submission to society. He writes in chapter seven of the Social contract: "So that the social pact is not an empty formula, it must tacitly enclose within itself this commitment, which alone can give strength to all the others, and that is that whoever refuses to obey the general will will be obliged by the whole body social, which does not mean anything other than that he will be forced to be free, because it is a question of a condition which, by offering each citizen to his homeland, guarantees him from any bond of personal dependence; situation which constitutes the technique and the game of the political machine and which alone makes civil obligations legitimate, which, outside of it, would be absurd, tyrannical and subjected to the most enormous abuses".
Revolutionaries saw in this formula the justification for the tyrannical use of violence in pursuit of a utopia. Scholars, however, generally dispute this kind of reading. Leo Damrosch, in his biography of Rousseau, combines the notion of general will with Rousseau's pessimism. People are so far removed from the state of nature that they need help to become free again. Anthony Gottlieb, in his history of the Enlightenment, cites Rousseau as having "the greatest aversion to revolutions."
Yet that uninterrupted train of thought about regression and coercion, even in its mildest form, borders on liberalism itself. Whenever a person, in a position of power, forces someone else, in the name of his own good, to act against his free will, the ghost of Rousseau is invoked.
Karl Marx
Marx (1818-1883) believed that progress was not produced by philosophy and science, but by the class struggle acting throughout history. Like Rousseau, he thought that society and especially its economic foundations were the source of oppression. In 1847, just before a wave of unrest swept through Europe, he wrote: "The moment civilization begins, production begins to be founded on the antagonism of orders, property, classes and finally on the antagonism of work productivity and income. No antagonism, no progress. This is the law that has governed civilization to this day."
The surplus created by labor is seized by the capitalists, who own the factories and machinery. Capitalism thus turns workers into commodities and denies their humanity. While the bourgeois satiate their appetite for fun and food, the working people have to endure the dreary daily tram-tram and live on rotten potatoes.
For this reason, capitalism contains the seed of its own destruction. Competition forces it to spread: "It must nestle and establish itself everywhere, create bonds everywhere". In doing so, it creates and organizes an ever larger proletariat that continues, at the same time, to impoverish itself. Capitalists will never voluntarily abandon their privileges. Eventually, therefore, the workers will rise up to sweep away both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat and create a new order, an order better than the previous one. This revolutionary work will not be done by a heroic leader, but by the workers themselves, as a class organized in a party, the communist one. “It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the entire proletariat, at the moment, regards as its goal,” Marx wrote to his collaborator Friedrich Engels in 1844. It is a question of what the proletariat is and what which, in accordance with this being, he will historically be forced to do. Four years later, in the opening of Il Communist Manifesto, the two predicted the revolution: "A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of communism".
Liberals believe that all people share the same basic needs, so reason and compassion can lead to a better world. Marx thought that such a world view was, at best, delusional and, at worst, a subtle ploy to manipulate the workers.
He despised the Declaration of Human Rights, the political manifesto of the French Revolution, as a charter made especially for private property and bourgeois individualism. Ideologies such as religion and nationalism are nothing but self-deception. Attempts to bring about gradual change are traps set by the ruling class. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin, in his book on Marx, summed up this point of view thus: "Socialism does not appeal, it orders."
Yet Marx underestimated capitalism's staying power. Capitalism has been able to avoid revolution by promoting change through debate and compromise; he reformed by breaking monopolies and regulating excesses; it turned workers into customers by supplying them with goods that, in Marx's day, would have been fit for a king. Indeed, in his last years, as Gareth Stedman Jones, a recent biographer explains, Marx was defeated in his effort to demonstrate why the economic relations between capital and labor must necessarily be regulated by violence.
Marx remains a great cautionary tale against liberal complacency, however. Today, outrage is replacing debate. Interconnected industrial and financial interests are capturing politics and sowing inequality. If those forces block the development of liberal conditions for general progress, the pressure will start to mount again and Marx's prediction will come true.
Friedrich Nietzsche
While Marx looked at the class struggle as the engine of progress, Nietzsche (1844-1900) peered into the interiority of people, immersing himself in the dark territories, in the forgotten corners of the individual conscience. And there he saw that the man was on the verge of moral collapse.
Nietzsche sets out his vision of progress in On the Genealogy of Morals, written in 1887, two years before he fell mad. In writing of extraordinary vitality, he describes how there was a time in human history when noble and vigorous values, such as courage, pride and honor, had prevailed. But these values had been supplanted during a “revolt of the slaves of morality” initiated by the Jews under the yoke of the Babylonians, continued by the Romans and finally inherited by the Christians. The slaves elevated their condition, in contrast to that of their masters, above all values: “only the wretched are the good; only the poor, the helpless, the humble are the good, the suffering, the indigent, the infirm, the deformed are also the only devotees, the only pious men, for whom alone there is bliss – while instead you, you noble and powerful, you are for eternity the wicked, the cruel, the lascivious, the insatiable, the impious, and you will also be eternally the wretched, the accursed and the damned!”
The search for truth has continued to fuel man's thinking. But this search has inevitably led to atheism. This is the terrible catastrophe of a millenary thought which in the end denied itself the lie inherent in believing in a God. “God is dead! God remains dead! And we killed him! How could we, killers of all killers, feel right? Nothing was more sacred and greater in all the world, and now it is bloody under our knees: who will cleanse us of the blood? What water will we use to wash ourselves? What festival of forgiveness, what sacred game shall we invent? Isn't the magnitude of this death too great for us? Shouldn't we become gods simply to be worthy of it?"
It takes courage to look into the abyss but, in an existence of suffering and loneliness, Nietzsche never lacked courage. Sue Prideaux, in a new biography, explains how Nietzsche desperately tried to warn rationalists and positivists, who had embraced atheism, that the world could not sustain Christian slave morality without its theology. Unable to understand suffering as a religious virtue or to free itself from the leathery armor created by the virtue liberated by religion, humanity was destined to sink into nihilism, that is, into a desolate and meaningless existence.
Nietzsche's solution is profoundly subjective. Individuals must look within themselves to rediscover the lost noble morality so as to become Ubermensch, a figure outlined in Thus spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche's most famous work. As usual, Nietzsche is vague about who exactly a Ubermensch. Napoleon could be; as could Goethe, the German writer and statesman. In his lucid investigation into Nietzsche's thought, Michael Tanner writes that theUbermensch it is the heroic soul eager to say yes to anything, be it joy or pain.
It is not possible to criticize Nietzsche in a conventional way, because his ideas flow in a torrent of thoughts in continuous, passionate evolution. Both the political left and the right have found inspiration in his subjectivity arguments; in his language play as a philosophical method and in the way he connects truth, power and morality he is the father of the idea that you cannot separate what is being said from who is saying it.
Liberalism does not have the answers
The illiberal view of progress has a terrible streak of firsts. Maximilien Robespierre, architect of terror, invoked Rousseau; Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong invoked Marx; Adolf Hitler invoked Nietzsche.
The transition from illiberal thinking to terror is easy to trace. In illiberal regimes the debate on how to improve the world loses meaning: there are Marx's certainties about capitalism, Rousseau's pessimism and Nietzsche's superman to provide the necessary answers. In these societies, in the name of the common good and a higher purpose, power tends to grow and accumulate in the hands of a few, of a class like Marx's, of a Ubermenschen as in Nietzsche or through the coercive manipulation of the general will as in Rousseau. The growth of power tramples on the dignity of the individual, because that is what power does.
Liberalism, by contrast, does not believe it has all the answers. This is, perhaps, the greatest strength of liberal thought and of the democracies that have sprung up on its foundations.
