[This is the Introduction to Murphey’s book Modern Social and Political Philosophies: Burkean Conservatism and Classical Liberalism (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, Inc., 1982).   The intended title was “Burkean Conservatism and Classical Liberalism: Modern Social and Political Philosophies,” which has the advantage of not making the sub-title the beginning portion.]

 

INTRODUCTION
A "MEDIATED" REALITY

Although often in everyday life we act on incomplete information, most of the time we have enough information and insight to go ahead on a practical basis. We attempt to "find the facts" and think our way through to a conclusion. 

It is a serious methodological error, however, to assume that any such directness and simplicity is available in the study of larger social phenomena. Another professor unwittingly provided a good illustration of this error a few years ago when he told me sharply that "there isn't any reason to talk about classical liberalism or Marxism or Burkean conservatism in a course on ‘Law and Society.’ Why don't you just discuss the facts and the issues?"  He was sure that such things can be directly perceived -- without the intermediation of complex theory. The result was that he held a simplistic and naively unfair view of social reality. He did what most people do when he permitted himself to absorb uncritically the conventional wisdom of a certain time and place. Directly and without questioning it, he "knew" that the current views shared by the intellectual community of which he was a part were tantamount to reality itself. As a result, he adopted an intellectual provincialism as Truth.

For my present purposes, I will want to pass over the complexities of ontology and simply say that, however defined, "reality exists."  I wouldn't deny for an instant that there is such a thing as a stable reality. I agree with Ayn Rand when she insists on its vital presence. And this is as important with social phenomena as elsewhere, since reality is the common touchstone for humanity and is, in fact, existence itself. When rightly understood, the many problems relating to how to know reality and of perspective among observers shouldn’t be taken to negate reality. An appreciation of them should, in fact, make possible a more sophisticated approach to it.

            It may be that the other professor's views are all correct. We would have to consider them on their merits before deciding about that. But there is immense danger in automatically accepting what he considers to be a direct perception of the truth. His explanation isn’t reality itself. It is neither more nor less than what it is -- an explanation. It is a system of interpretation. The reality he expresses is a mediated reality. It is mediated through his selection of facts, his mental organization of the material into a theory, and his choice of values. We are naive if we don't recognize that his explanation is a product of human perception and thought.  And we should be sensitive to the presence of alternative systems.

 

Although this awareness is of the utmost importance to the study of society, I am afraid that an abstract statement of it may not seem too meaningful. Here are some examples that I hope will bring it to life:

1. The way we interpret the present is conditioned by how we view the past. One of the main battlegrounds among the modern ideologies has had to do with conditions during the early Industrial Revolution. Even today, it makes a lot of difference how we view those conditions. If we think they were horrible, we tend to blame capitalism and to see a confirmation of any theory of  “exploitation" [Note in 2003: This has come to be called ‘victimization’ in current parlance] we may hold. In turn, our perception of exploitation affects our attitudes about social policy and legislation. We will favor ideologies and programs that continue, even in our own day, to address the problems raised by such perceived conditions.

On the other hand, if we think that the severity of those conditions has been exaggerated during the past century and a half by anti-capitalist ideology, and if we also see those conditions as having been a substantial improvement over still earlier conditions, we will have a very different view of things. This will cause us to approach even a number of contemporary issues from a somewhat different standpoint.

If we ask "What were the facts, really, about England in the first half of the nineteenth century?," we quickly discover something of major importance: that there is no universally accepted view of those facts.  What we are confronted with is, instead, widely varying systems of interpretation. In the following passage, for example, the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, who lived in those days, compares his perceptions with those of Robert Southey:

It is in the same manner that Mr. Southey appears to have formed his opinion of the manufacturing system. There is nothing which he hates so bitterly. It is, according to him, a system more tyrannical than that of the feudal ages -- a system of actual servitude -- a system which destroys bodies and degrades the minds of those who are engaged in it.


            Mr. Southey does not bring forward a single fact in support of these views, and as it seems to us, there are facts which lead to a very different conclusion. In the first place, the poor-rate is very decidedly lower in the manufacturing than in the agricultural districts . . . As to the effect of the manufacturing system on the bodily health, we must beg leave to estimate it by a standard far too low and vulgar for a mind so imaginative as that of Mr. Southey -- the proportion of births and deaths. We know. . . that there has been a great diminution of mortality -- and that this diminution has been greater in the manufacturing towns than anywhere else.

 

            The labouring classes, however, were, according to Mr. Southey, better fed three hundred years ago than at present. We believe that he is completely in error on this point. From the household book of the Northumberland family, we find that in one of the greatest establishments of the kingdom the servants lived almost entirely on salt meat, without any bread at all. A more unwholesome diet can scarcely be conceived.  Our parish poor now eat wheaten bread.   It is true that the lower orders have an obstinate prejudice against fish. But hunger has no such obstinate prejudices. If what was formerly a common diet is now eaten only in times of severe pressure, the inference is plain.  The people must be fed with what they at least think better food than that of their ancestors.1    

 

When men who were as prominent as Macaulay and Southey differed so much on this subject, is it wise to permit ourselves to absorb uncritically the twentieth century attitude about it (which is that conditions were horrible)? We are forced to do some thinking for ourselves and to probe into the differing interpretations.


            2. Another illustration pertains to the causes of the depression in the 1930s.  If we think that the depression was caused by a basic instability in capitalism, or by a stagnated "mature economy," or by underconsumption, or by a "lack of purchasing power," we will draw conclusions that will lead us away from a pro-capitalist rationale. One of the possibilities will be to support a Keynesian increase in governmental intervention.

But instead we may interpret the depression to have been caused by other factors. These may include the unwise inflationary policies that were pursued during the preceding decade, the disastrous policy followed by the Federal Reserve Board in reducing the total volume of money and credit by a third during the depression years, and the continuing uncertainty in business brought about precisely by the government's intervention. If we interpret the causes this way, we will probably oppose Keynesian prescriptions and work for a revamped monetary framework more serviceable to, and compatible with, capitalism.

 

It is evident in this context just how much of an illusion it is to "discuss the facts and the issues" as though they exist in clear form for everyone to see. Instead, there are opposing systems of interpretation.

3. George Steiner's book Business and Society contains a sentence that shows his interpretation of National Socialism and Fascism as having been the result of business domination of government.  "It is possible, too, as happened in Germany and Italy prior to World War II, that business domination of government can lead to authoritarian government which eventually dominates business.”2

May we take such a statement at face value as an expression of fact? Certainly not. It is mediated reality. And it is a fantastically distorted mediated reality at that, despite its widespread currency, when we consider the many antecedents of National Socialism and Fascism that had nothing to do with business domination of government: a century of anti-bourgeois intellectual alienation and of repudiation of the Enlightenment; the youth movements and the anti-Semitic philosophy going back over several decades; the rise of Volkish attitudes; the psychology of the "mass man" who had burst into existence in Europe; and a great many other significant forerunners.

We could all cite many more examples. Since each social philosophy is a system of interpretation, we will have many opportunities to notice their varying perspectives as we study them in this book and my future writing.

 

John Stuart Mill commented on the significance of social interpretation in his essay On Bentham and Coleridge. He spoke of "a lesson given to mankind by every age, and always disregarded -- to show that speculative philosophy, which to the superficial appears a thing so remote from the business of life and the outward interests of men, is in reality the thing on earth which most influences them, and in the long run overbears every other influence save those which it must itself obey.”3 Samuel Coleridge said much the same in his "Lay Sermons.”   "To the immense majority of men, even in civilized countries, speculative philosophy has ever been, and must ever remain, a terra incognita. Yet it is not the less true, that all the epoch-forming Revolutions of the Christian world, the revolutions in religion and with them the civil, social, and domestic habits of the nations concerned, have coincided with the rise and fall of metaphysical systems.”4


THE PHILOSOPHIES

This and my following books will examine each of the main social and political philosophies in modern thought. Such a discussion could begin at any of a number of starting points. I have chosen to discuss Burkean conservatism first not because it is the philosophy I prefer (it isn't) or because it is the most important today, but because chronologically it was of enormous importance in the history of Western civilization. This is the form of conservatism that honors hierarchy, tradition, religion, landed property and powerful government.  It towered over Western civilization in one institutional and cultural form or another for at least twenty five hundred years, remaining predominant until almost the middle of the nineteenth century.  The theory of an organic, tightly-knit and yet nonegalitarian society was important among the Greeks, where such intellectuals as Plato and Xenophon preferred the Spartan model over the open society of Athens. It was the political, cultural ideal of the Romans, who for many centuries looked back wistfully to the Republic as their best time. The mos maiorum of the Republic, hammered out of the pressures of war, included the basic factors that are involved in Burkean conservatism. The Middle Ages later had a social structure that outwardly appeared very different from the Roman, but it combined the same factors: Christianity and the Church were the religious center for a landed society based on authority and hierarchy.

            This mixture came under challenge from the other philosophy I will examine in this book. Liberalism in its classical eighteenth and nineteenth century sense represented the rising middle class in its aspiration for individual liberty, the Rule of Law, political and legal equality, the market economy and secular rationalism. Those of us who have lived through a period in which this philosophy has been poorly understood and has been disparaged as an unworthy rationalization for greed will find it hard to realize that classical liberalism went forward at one time with fervent idealism as a new and refreshing view of man. It offers many insights that are missing from our current understanding. I will be candid to tell you that it is my own philosophy. I believe that if it were fully developed it would offer the best vehicle for a reconciliation of human values and that it is an adequate and uplifting view of man and society. I also believe the alternative systems involve the greatest dangers to important human values. The crisis within Western civilization is in part a crisis brought about by the rejection of the classical liberal worldview.


            Classical liberalism and even Burkean conservatism have left substantial underlays that help mold contemporary society. But for the most part the concepts and ideals of the Left have prevailed in the twentieth century mind. To limit the length of this book, I will need to leave the discussion of this third philosophy, the Left, to the next volume. It is perhaps the most fascinating to analyze because instead of being an internally consistent paradigm for society it is an amalgamation of ideas reflecting an alliance of diverse interests. Many of its ideas are tactical in origin, born out of a coalition of forces. Egalitarian collectivism may persist as an alternative model in all future ages, since the idea of sharing or pooling is naturally one of the approaches that come to mind when we consider how things could be organized; but the Left as we have known it during the past two centuries has been a unique product of its own time. The coalition of the intellectual with the have-not has produced a philosophy that is majoritarian and elitist, compassionate and yet alienated from the great run of average humanity, and fervently moralistic while at the same time relativistically committed to destroying bourgeois norms. All of these aspects and more have been wrapped together in a broad set of perceptions and attitudes that may continue to dominate our civilization for generations to come or that may disappear tomorrow. The Left's system of interpretation is so important in modern society that acting men who don't take the time to understand it necessarily resign themselves to being the pawns of the forces it unleashes and of the ideas it places before them.


            The fourth philosophy I will discuss (in yet another volume) will be modern American liberalism. We will see that there is room for disagreement about its origins, content and direction. Some liberals see it as a practical response to the demands created by modern urban and industrial society. I agree that it is partly this, but I believe it is primarily an adapted form of the Left. Modern liberalism really can't be understood without a careful study of its origins in the alienation of the American intellectual from commercial culture and in the migration of thousands of American doctoral candidates to German universities to study under the Historical School there during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Although modern liberals have usually been carefully non-socialist in espousing their ideas for

public consumption, they share the same conceptual base as the Left. Because of its nature, this liberalism shares the internal inconsistencies of the Left. It isn't a thorough and permanent system of ideas, and its future is problematic in the same way as is the Left's. But presently its worldview predominates in the United States. We need to know a lot about it if we are to understand contemporary American politics.


            A fifth philosophy, the New Left, has been widely misunderstood. Instead of being new, as its name suggests, it is a resurgence of the many varieties of the Old Left. This has occurred in America, where the continued alienation of the intellectual subculture produced an eventual desire to throw aside the gradualism and dissimulation of liberalism in favor of an avowedly socialist and, for some, even revolutionary creed. It has also occurred in the rest of the world, and there it has been attributable at least in part to the Soviet Union's inability to maintain control over Marxism after Stalin's death.  This loss of control has allowed the entire spectrum of nineteenth-century Leftist thought and action to be revitalized in all its variety. Given the factors that make up modern thought, the New Left arose out of the logic of events.

Needless to say, these five philosophies don't exhaust the ideas that have been influential during the modern age. The reader will notice that I have said nothing, for example, about religion. Nor have I mentioned science. In this and my later books I will certainly not be making an exhaustive review of all thought. The examination of the five major social and political philosophies has the more limited purpose of trying to throw some light selectively onto at least the main systems of social thought.

SUMMARY OF THE PRECEDING VOLUME

The examination of these philosophies is to be understood as a continuation of my book Understanding the Modern Predicament. In that book, I discussed some of the main factors that have been at work in the dynamic of modern society. I pointed to the unique composition of current ideology as one of the principal consequences of those factors.  It didn't seem to me that the ideologies can be understood without reference to those dynamic factors. At the same time, though, I indicated that the ideologies are vastly significant social phenomena in their own right, and that they react back upon the underlying intellectual and cultural factors, affecting them in turn. I urge each reader who wishes to follow the continuity of my thinking to reread Chapter 1 of that book to place the current discussion in the context I expressed there.

In the remainder of this Introduction I will summarize the analysis I made in the first book.  My hope is that we will later be able to see the main ideologies in the context of the "sociology of modern thought" that I spelled out earlier:

One of the main facts about human life at its present stage of evolution is its cosmic immaturity.  If the world has been here for from four to six or even eight billion years, which is what scientists are variously quoted as telling us, the million or two years of human existence is almost nothing by comparison. And of that million years, the five to ten thousand years of recorded history are themselves a small part. If we look back over this infinitesimally small portion, we see that it has been marked more by the characteristics of something that is struggling out of its cocoon than by those of a mature and settled civilization. In daily life and in the great public affairs of a people, there are the evidences of continuing immaturity.  We have come far, but an adequate perspective of the human condition has to include a potent awareness of the residual barbarism that is so basic to our natures. This realization has been shared by many thoughtful men and is in no sense original with me.  Such men have found it impossible to reconcile the conflicting tendencies within human life without appreciating that we live in a mixed condition, something of a "twilight zone."

 

An understanding of what was once popularly called "human nature" lies at the heart of each philosophy. If we see mankind as primarily depraved, this leads us to a set of conclusions that will stress the need for order and guidance by an elite.  If we see men as almost entirely benevolent and rational, we will be led toward utopian visions, often of an anarchistic variety.  If we view man as having a mixed nature, we will tend to oppose both a tight organic hold upon him and a throwing off of all bonds. One of the philosophies that can result from this mixed view is that of "ordered liberty.” Classical liberalism favors a system of individual voluntarism -- but within a framework of ethics, culture and law. In this way, it hopes to combine centrifugal and centripetal forces.

 

Differing views of human nature also affect political method. Someone who fears human "will and appetite" will tend to prefer a conservative method that will retain much of what is already present. Those who believe in a ready perfectibility of men (if only certain "warping influences" are removed) may opt for a utopia and may be willing to smash the unworthy present to gain it. Those who hold to a mixed view of human nature will be neither strictly conservative nor nihilist.

The immaturity of mankind is also reflected in the fact that no previous civilization has handed down a satisfactory paradigm in almost any area of life. The West enjoys a rich heritage from Greece and Rome and the Middle Ages; we entered the modern period with innumerable contributions from those societies; but it is also true that they did not give us “the answers.”  With a suggestive but non-paradigmatic heritage, modern Western civilization wasn't prepared to become settled. Existentially indeterminate, it has been pulled and tugged in many directions.

 

The Greeks were diverse and exuberantly childlike. There is little the Greeks might suggest to us that isn't contradicted by some other part of the Greek experience. We look to them not for a paradigm, but for fertilization. To see that they didn't provide a model, it is enough simply to recall that they were warring city-states that were based on a slave economy and that lived on a scale and with a technology that are dwarfed by modern conditions.

The Romans provide a paradigm of sorts to the Burkean conservative, but those who don't share those values are left with the conclusion that Rome wasn't a satisfactory paradigm for mankind in general. The mos maiorum of the Republic was welded together during the wars with Carthage. It was a society based on tightly-knit social cohesion, dedication to community, austere gravity and discipline, strong morality, social hierarchy, reverence for tradition and for religion, and insularity from outside ideas. As such, it didn't last long. The wars were no sooner over than the bonds began to unravel. The morality loosened, self-service took the place of dedication, Greek ideas flooded in with relativistic suggestions about values, the economic base changed when large numbers of slaves were brought in. In these and still other ways, the mos maiorum became shattered. We may regret this, but good sense tells us that such a circumscribed humanity could hardly be held in place for long.  The Romans went through almost a century of civil war and wound up with a military dictatorship.  This led to the drying up of the Roman spirit, a process that took centuries but that led men into a dark reversal of the high civilization they had enjoyed.

The Middle Ages, that followed, offers one of the best illustrations of my earlier point that our view of something depends upon our system of interpretation. There are those since the early nineteenth century who have praised the Middle Ages and have denied its darkness. They have done this for several reasons, not the least of which is the tendency of the Left to bolster the image of the precapitalist period. Although he was a conservative rather than a socialist, Thomas Carlyle, for example, compared the nineteenth century factory system very unfavorably with a supposedly idyllic twelfth century.

I am personally much more inclined, though, to view the Middle Ages the way the Renaissance historians did. To them, it had been an age of superstition and repression. After all due credit is given to several countervailing aspects, it seems to me that the Renaissance historians were pretty well on the mark. The Middle Ages came close to repealing the mentality of civilization.  A severe mental authoritarianism was the most obvious characteristic of the time.

 

As feudal society came crashing to an end, Edmund Burke in England formulated a philosophical defense, praising the principles and ideals upon which he thought it was founded. But his model of an organic, pious, hierarchical and yet benevolent society is about as gnostically distant from the hard realities as anyone's model has ever been.  The reality is to be found, instead, in the fact that for twelve centuries Galen's anatomy, based on monkeys, was insisted upon as a source that simply could not be questioned.

With such a background -- rich and varied but manifestly not paradigmatic -- it is not  surprising that we entered the modern age of secular reason existentially lost. All the old human problems and opportunities (plus a good many new ones) press in upon us and find us, in our immaturity, only partly competent to deal with them. This is why we have no consensus on ideas, and no agreement about values and institutions.  Our starting point was a lack of consensus rather than a stable “normality.”  This may not seem so apparent in the small things of everyday life, but in the broader context it is a salient fact about our civilization.

If at this point we move our attention toward additional aspects of our own age, we see that still another salient fact is the enormous increase in population -- an increase that has displaced all aristocracy and has filled the world with "the average man," the man whom many authors prefer to call the "mass man."   In the nineteenth century there was considerable doubt among thoughtful men, including Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill, about the ability of this average humanity to sustain an advanced civilization.   As they looked ahead, the qualitative question loomed large.   The question mark has not even now been removed -- in fact, it has been underscored -- in the twentieth century.   The age swells with potential and humanity lives on a scale that has never been dreamed of before.  But, to use Ortega's words, there are “palpitating dangers” that now and again culminate in frightful horrors.   And aside from the more noticeable lacerations of all the Gulags and Buchenwalds, the intellectual, moral and spiritual tone is so mediocre that it is depressing.   It is a quizzical time, with a great many excellent things done in the midst of a general clamor and mediocrity.

Our affluence combines with this predominance of the average man to produce a psychology similar to that of a spoiled child.  We take our civilization and its products for granted.  It is one of the peculiarities of spoiledness that instead of appreciation the overriding tone is one of chronic resentment.  Such a state of mind lends itself to types of politics and ideology calculated to take advantage of it.

There is an enormous middle class for the first time in history.  This is a class that the intellectual subculture has been criticizing since their mutual inception.  Sensitive men find it shallow, hypocritical, lacking in deeper sensibility, given to trivia.  There is a lot of merit to the criticisms, but considerably less in the proposed remedies.  The shallowness of the “bourgeoisie” isn't just a result of the “rise of the masses” to that station.  It is also the result of a type of cultural structuring.   A commercial culture tends by the very nature of sales contacts to accent a functional trivialization of human relationships.   The extroverted amiability of the salesman becomes the standard social nexus.  This is genial in its effect, but it also shunts the soul into a "radical solitude" that can hardly be communicated through a medium of triviality.   For a century and a half there have been complaints by intellectuals about the dullness, emotional and aesthetic barrenness, conformity and hypocrisy of our society. These complaints are a direct response to the shallowness and the commitment to externals.  The existential structuring that causes this trivialization is both a source of spiritual deficiency and a cause of the alienation of the intellectual.

The alienation has probably been the most important feature of Western civilization during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  In the brief review I am making of these things in this Introduction, I have no way to illustrate the depth and extent of this alienation enough to do it justice.  Nineteenth century European thought was a miasma of the most intense dislike for modernity and the bourgeoisie.  The thorough-going disdain that aristocratic authors felt for capitalism and the middle class passed over into the same deep alienation felt by socialist authors.  Nietzsche was expressing a common attitude when he  wrote: “To leave no doubt concerning what I despise, whom I despise: it is the man of today, the man with whom I am fatefully contemporaneous.”5

In the United States the alienation began as early as the generation of Emerson and Thoreau.  The country had barely begun, but there were many, according to Emerson, who felt that the world had grown “unreal and fantastic by too much falsehood” so that the “scholar (flew) for refuge to the world of ideas."   The "soldiery of dissent" brought with it "a fertility of projects for the salvation of the world.”6

It is a serious mistake to compartmentalize this early alienation and treat it as though it were something unique to the first half of the nineteenth century.  It flowed unabated into the second half of the century, where it produced militantly anti-capitalist books such as Jack London's The Iron Heel, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy.   By this time, the alienation was coalescing into an ideology.

This coalescence of it into a school of thought eventually known as American "liberalism" came about when thousands of American doctoral candidates attended German universities under the German Historical School.  The Historical School was closely aligned with Bismarck's welfare statist Sozialpolitik. Although it was neither Marxian nor revolutionary, it was at the same time intensely anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist.  Its argument with the Austrian School of Economics over the possibility of economics as a science was raging at that time.

This was adapted to America with fervor but without candor.   The program and concepts were similar to those of the Fabian Socialists in England and of Bismarck, but the American intellectual rarely labeled himself a socialist.  He opted for a dissimulated style of pragmatism and gradualism.  We only need to read the history of the United States from 1932 on to see how successful this has been.  And yet, the dissimulation and welfare statism were not ultimately enough to "scratch the itch" of those who remained intensely alienated.   Their continued and dissatisfied presence within American liberalism was the sine qua non of the later rise of the New Left, with its militant countercultural alienation, its explicit socialism and its support (within some of its factions) for revolution.  For contemporary readers, I doubt whether it is necessary to describe the intensity of the alienation that was expressed against American society during the New Left years.

So strong and lasting a division must have had powerful causes.   In part, the alienation is the result of envy; it is the resentment of the writer and artist against the man who has reaped a personal fortune from pursuits that the intellectual doesn't consider nearly as worthy as his own.   In a broader sociological sense, applying the sort of group-interest analysis that has been so much a part of modern thought, it must be said that the large intellectual group that arose in Western civilization after the invention of the printing press has had to compete with the acting man of commerce and industry for status and power.  I call this the "displacement" theory for the reason that the intellectual has been displaced from the top-most position in society to one of at least rivalry for power and prestige.

Envy is the "micro," displacement the "macro," part of this explanation.   But there is a third aspect that complements them, and it pertains to the temperament of the intellectual.  Jeffrey Hart says that in his academic experience he has noticed that many of the people who become faculty members in colleges or universities are people who in one way or another are saying an emphatic “no” to life outside the cloistered academic setting.   Introspective, critical, and sensitive, the intellectual is different from the man who plunges ahead.  His sensitivity and compunction almost unavoidably force him into the role of spectator and commentator.   The neurotic race run by a chronically immature humanity tends to disgust him, since he doesn't accept it at face value but instead pierces through to see its actual nature.

Even these three explanations don't tell the whole story, though. Another part of the answer is apparent when we see that we really don't have to explain why the alienation came into being in modern society. We only have to explain why it has continued. There has never been a time in Europe when the alienation did not exist. The defenders of the old feudal system were hostile toward bourgeois ascendancy from the beginning. Carlyle, Coleridge, Ruskin, Southey and Arnold -- all of them defended the ideal of the medieval world and laid down such a barrage of anti-bourgeois writing that it simply remained for the proponents of the rising socialist thought to continue their critique. This is a vital link between aristocratic and socialist thought.

It helps to think of the subsequent "reproduction" of the alienation as still a fourth cause.  Once in being, the alienation reproduces itself.  New generations of students and faculty become steeped in the already existing literary milieu -- in which the unquestioned fashion has been to disparage the middle class and its values.

[Note in 2003: I have added to my discussion of these causes in Chapter 11 of my book Understanding the Modern Predicament a note that points, also, to the very important role of eastern European, and especially of eastern European Jewish, immigrants to the United States after the mid-nineteenth century.  Much of the thinking and culture they imported into the United States was socialist, although of course there have been many individuals among those immigrants and their descendants who have not been.  This socialist thinking, which was alien to the United States, has played an immense role, including one relating to alienation, for more than a century.] 

These have all been important causes. In fact, I think that, taken together, they are most important. But in themselves they would hardly be fair. Another cause lies in the substantive complaints about the market economy and middle class lifestyle. If asked, the alienated intellectual will say that he is alienated because of the defects in bourgeois culture. Emerson, for example, tells of "abuses in which all connive." If he had been asked why he was alienated, he would have pointed to those abuses. We should take the defects seriously as contributing causes of the dissatisfaction. When we do so, we have to consider the merit of the many objections voiced by the intellectual.

My discussion of the substantive issues will have to be spread over most of my writing. Many of them will come up in my later book on the Left [see my Socialist Thought].  And both in this Introduction and in Understanding the Modern Predicament I have discussed the problem of values and lifestyle as that problem comes out of the cultural structuring that leads to the trivialization of life in our society. All of those discussions need to be understood as having a bearing on this final cause of the alienation.

I have said, though, that in my opinion the other explanations -- envy, displacement, temperament, etc. -- have actually been more important than any substantive cause. I reached this conclusion reluctantly over a period of time as I observed the intellectuals' response to their alienation. It would seem to me that if the intellectuals' main concern was with the mediocrity of the middle class, there was a simple solution available to them. In an age such as ours where enormous resources are made available to academia, the solution could have been for the intellectuals simply to flood the world with splendid work and then to enjoy it within the confines of their own circles.  In doing so, they could have assuaged their own frustrations while at the same time doing a great deal to elevate the standards of the rest of the community. But instead, the emphasis in modern art, music and literature has been on a trashy reiteration of the "poverty of the soul"' and the "sense of the awful."  This perpetual revolt is understandable if the main purpose is to attack existing culture. It serves the purpose of rivalry and attack quite well. But it is a poor way to overcome mediocrity.

I would now like to turn from a discussion of the causes of the alienation to a review of some of its consequences. These have been so far-reaching that virtually all of the peoples of the world have been profoundly affected.

Perhaps the initial consequence was that, with of course many exceptions, the intellectuals over the past century or more have formed a broad “subculture” of their own. There has been a wide diversity of viewpoints within the Left, but a large body of underlying concepts and values has been held in common by the overwhelming portion of modern intellectuals who have formed the Left. This helps explain the herd quality that is so often present and that would hardly occur if such a community of interest were not there.

A consequence that is directly related to this first one is that there has been a drain of intellectual resources away from classical liberalism.  This began in the middle of the nineteenth century in all of Western civilization, including the United States and Russia. The significance of this can be seen when we recall that up until that time classical liberalism had been in the forefront of the new age and of the attack on the old regime. Just as the new age unfolded, the intellectual ground was cut out from under the impetus toward a free society of individual liberty and limited government. The result has been that capitalism and the middle class have proceeded with a substantial lack of supporting theory and articulation. This is the real origin of the "silent majority."' The few intellectuals who "kept the faith" had a tendency to be driven into uncritical apologetics and dogmatism. This in turn narrowed the breadth and effectiveness of even such classical liberal appeal as remained. It is also worth mentioning that many of the specifics of capitalistic legal and institutional structure were left at a stage of only partial development. And this has given the critics of capitalism just that much more to point to when they have argued the insufficiency of capitalism.

Another result of equal or even greater importance was the rise of socialist and welfare-statist ideology. These began in Europe and America and then spread throughout the world because of the influence of Western ideas in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In the intellectuals' rivalry with the man of commerce, he has repeatedly sought an alliance with the have-nots. This coalition has been extremely effective in giving the intellectual the political strength he has needed if he were to succeed in the rivalry. Any ideology that expresses this alliance will have to serve the needs of both the intellectuals and the have-nots. Accordingly, it will be democratic and egalitarian and will involve an attack on all aspects of bourgeois values. Because it expresses a somewhat unnatural coalition, the resulting ideology has its own unique aspects. These set it off from straight socialist theory such as we saw among the ancient Greeks and will undoubtedly continue to see for ages to come. I think we can safely predict that in the long run the alliance will not hold together.  The intellectual is bound to have even less patience with the mediocrity of the have-nots than he has had with the lesser mediocrity of the bourgeoisie.  [Note in 2003:  The most recent alliance has been between the alienated intellectual subculture and the various ethnic minorities that the alienation can ally itself with.  Along the lines I am mentioning here, the intellectual should perhaps entertain some doubt about whether those ethnic groups will continue to welcome him as a leader and champion after they have come into ascendancy.]

This last point leads directly into another, which is that the intellectual has sought to use revolution and the state for what are essentially theocratic purposes. He makes them instruments of a "secular church." The intellectual most often aspires to change men, to intellectualize them.  "All life will be learning" isn't a surprising chapter-heading in one of New Left author Robert Theobald's books. When we recall that the really gripping religion in the modern age has been secular religion, the realization dawns on us that we haven't really accomplished a separation of church and state. The issue has just changed its form.

The magnitude of these consequences is tremendous. Countless millions have died in the gas chambers under National Socialism, in the Gulags of the Soviet Union and in China and Cambodia.  [Note in 2001: I referred to “gas chambers under National Socialism” in the published edition of this book, and am leaving the reference in so as to be faithful to the book as originally written; but I have since become aware of the scholarly literature, which I find quite solid, that questions or even denies that homicidal gas chambers ever existed and that the Hitler government ever had an intent to systematically kill the Jews.  This literature does not, of course, deny that a great many Jews were killed, along with large numbers of others.  No reader should judge that question without first reading that literature.]  For the victims, these consequences have been all-important. But even their personal suffering, however immense, isn't all there has been to it.  Many of the main historical contours of the twentieth century have come from the defense of the “free world" from expansionist totalitarian ideologies that have been driven by the fanaticism of alienated social religion. Hardly a facet of world history has gone untouched.

In Understanding the Modern Predicament, which I am summarizing briefly now, I traced these effects through several major historical events. This permitted me to tie together the effects of the alienation, the residual immaturity of mankind, the rise of the multitudes and the limitations of bourgeois life.

With regard to the French Revolution, we saw that there was a gaping void in the Old Regime, so that it couldn't continue to serve as a paradigm.  But we also saw that the elements of that void continued in new forms in the ensuing age. One of the great vices of the Old Regime, for example, was its statism. It is a vice that has continued as one of the leading vices of the modern period.

I devoted a chapter to the Russian nihilist.  We saw the alienation mirrored within him as it was passed eastward from Western intellectuality.  The nihilist was the student of Bakunin and Marx.  We see the continuing results of that transmission of ideas on the masthead of Pravda to this day.  [Note in 2001: Fortunately, the Pravda  of the Soviet Union is now a thing of the past.]

The causes of the First World War showed human immaturity operating through a mad jingo dance that continued over several decades at the same time that the nations involved were becoming so large and powerful that the explosion, when it came, was devastating. The size and muscle of modern European man had grown far beyond his spiritual and intellectual dimensions.

Next I took up the sources of National Socialism. It wasn't surprising to see how far back these sources went into the nineteenth century repudiation of the Enlightenment and of the bourgeoisie. This broader historical context made it possible to see how ludicrous it is to think of  Hitler as a product of madness; instead, we see that he held the mirror up to the qualities of twentieth century man and to the illiberal ideas that have been so ubiquitous.

In the final chapter I observed that the future of Asia, Africa and Latin America depends heavily upon the outcome of the intellectual division within Europe and America. The most important fact about Latin America, for example, has been its dependency upon European intellectuality for its ideas. This dependency makes it an heir to all the neuroses within that intellectuality.

THE IMPACT OF IDEAS

My purpose in summarizing the first book has been to lay a foundation for detailed study of the main social and political philosophies. These systems of interpretation have originated, at least in part, in the divisions within modern culture and in the immaturity. They are prominent consequences of those factors. They are also major causal agents. They provide the mental organization by which we interpret the reality around us.

The preoccupations of the practical man of affairs make him disregard all of this. He brushes off such things as abstract and irrelevant. He doesn't realize that systems of interpretation are like the water in which he, as a metaphorical fish, swims. They define and mold the existence he takes for granted.

The impact of ideas as causal agents is nowhere better illustrated than by the war in Vietnam.  The ideological divisions within the West gave rise to two diametrically opposed interpretations. One made the war seem totally unjustified on the part of the United States; the other made the war almost imperative. Given their ideological predispositions and tactical position, American.liberals saw the world as essentially the same as it was before 1914: a world of powerful nation-states, mutual distrust and a lack of.understanding.  American conservatives, including classical liberals, thought of the world as very different from the pre-1914 situation. They focused on the threat from the massive totalitarian social religions -- first National Socialism and then Communism.

To the liberal, accordingly, the war in Vietnam was a civil war. Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist leader. We had no business intervening -- or were even on the wrong side. This means that what we did in pursuit of the war was immoral. But to the conservative the war was a defense against continued Communist encroachment into the free world.  Vietnam was another battle in the continuing fight between a messianical totalitarian ideology and the rest of the world. Our loss in the war was a tragedy of untold proportions.

These differences had their origins in social philosophy. They greatly affected the conduct of the war. We pulled both ways. We fought the war, at great sacrifice; but we were paralyzed in will and were unable to state the purpose of the war on anti-Communist grounds. The American presidents were “caught in the middle." Despite their own liberal orientation, they saw the need to respond militarily. But they were sufficiently influenced by the liberal worldview that they were induced to fight the war in the most quizzical possible way. This paralysis of will produced a moral monstrosity: thousands of American men fighting and dying on the ground while the North Vietnamese were allowed sanctuaries nearby, and while bombing targets were tightly restricted in the north and we were unwilling to take the war offensively to the north. This paralysis combined with the impact of the anti-war movement, and with the unwillingness of the presidents to articulate the reason for the war, to sap the will of the American public. The result was a negotiated treaty of "peace” that left many thousands of Communist troops in the south. It was predictable that this would lead to the Communists' eventual victory.

But the consequences hardly stopped with the defeat. The division of the West in its interpretation of international reality, and the effect of this division on the will of Americans and hence of others to face that reality, were facts that remained important in the years following the Vietnam War. I rarely make historical predictions, since I am aware of the imponderables that arise out of an infinity of variables. It is enough to say that the world has been made more dangerous by the example of the collapse of Vietnam and of American will.  [Note in 2001: This was written before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the possibility of which was certainly one of the “imponderables” reflecting “an infinity of variables.”]

I haven't discussed the war for its own sake, but to illustrate the impact of the divisions within Western thought. It shows the practical significance of the "systems of interpretation."

THREE ADDITIONAL POINTS

Three points of somewhat less importance need to be discussed before I begin my review of the philosophies.

First, it is fashionable to say that we shouldn't use such "labels" as "conservative” or “liberal.”  This is, however, neither desirable nor practicable.  It is often used as a way of short-circuiting the terminology of someone who is discussing the philosophies, and I suspect that it has some origins in the attack on theory that has been a part of modern thought. Unless we join with such tendencies, we know that it is almost impossible to write or to think without generic categories. We have to use them to avoid the need to repeat with each use the entire body of ideas we have in mind.

Just the same, there are some obvious limits on the use of large categories. As we discuss the philosophies, we should remain aware that the variety of thought and of individual perspectives is much greater than even the most elaborate discussion of the thinkers within a school of thought could suggest.

Individual thinkers emphasize some parts of a philosophy and omit others altogether.  Each has a perspective that gives his views his own unique slant. And he will almost certainly think of nuances that will be left out of a general discussion. He also has an emotional relationship with his subject that may be obscured when his name is considered with other authors under a broad heading.  It is even possible that in life he would have despised those others. And yet he is put in with them.

Even more significantly, we will need to realize that there are gradations of views. A specific thinker will bring together a combination of elements that are not often found together. As such, they may not fit comfortably into what we describe as a general philosophy. The Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, for example, was an aristocrat, an existentialist, an historicist, and in some ways a classical liberal.  This combination made him nondescript. But that does not make his philosophy any less valuable.

We speak of certain ideas in Germany in the early nineteenth century as the "Romantic movement."  The names of Muller, Moser, Herder, de Maistre, Novalis and Schelling stand out. We think of them as having shared a common view. It isn't surprising, though, that a careful reading of each of them would turn up all sorts of differences that they themselves thought important. In applying the same label to all of them, we are simplifying for the sake of our own understanding.

Because I think it is necessary to generalize, I comment about it not to attack it, but to warn the reader about the extent of the judgment that is involved in what we are about to do. If his time allows, each reader will benefit by reading the authors directly. That will let him test my judgments and will make available to him their individual richness. He will see Macaulay and Carlyle, then, with all the adornments of their respective styles. If he can do this without losing the broad overview that is also necessary, he will be doubly rewarded.

Second, because history is the flow of human affairs, it consists of the interplay of billions of lives that have been lived over many billions of man-days and man-years. The reality of it is vast and complicated beyond any person's comprehension. In thinking about history we have to simplify by selectivity and to center on the main discernible forces. To do this evokes judgment, and the results may be controverted.

There is no clear line between the amount of simplification that is sound and the sort of simplification that is involved in the “one-shot" explanations of history. But despite the lack of definitive principle, we are justified in shying away from a bold single-cause explanation. I didn't join in the fashion a few years ago of revering Marshall McLuhan's one-pronged "the medium is the message" thesis. His position had the advantage of being dramatic. The very fact that he picked out a partial truth and embellished it with great emphasis gave it extra appeal. But the extremity of his emphasis, which supplanted so many other factors, made his position a half-truth at best. Unfortunately, many people are misled into either a total acceptance or a total rejection of such dramatically integrating vistas.

These thoughts apply above all to Marx. The conflict among social classes has occurred as far back as the ancient Greeks (and almost certainly well before that), so that his class theory carried with it at least a partial truth. But class conflict is only one of many aspects of life. Marx committed a catastrophic error when he submerged all these other aspects under the weight of his single class-theory emphasis. "There is move in heaven and earth, Horatio, than is dreamt of in your philosophy" is a good admonition to give any such sweeping dialectician.

We need to capture the main eddies of the multiplicity, not deny them or subordinate them to one striking factor. Even though we have to simplify and select, we maintain the chance for a truer view if we leave ourselves open to recognize the plurality of life.

Third, I agree with Richard Weaver that "ideas have consequences." If I didn't think they are critically important in human life, I wouldn't spend years writing this series of books with a detailed analysis of so many ideas.

The human milieu is a volitional milieu.  People live according to the ideas they hold. If savages think a cargo plane is a giant bird, they pray to the "God of the cargo plane." The role of ideas can hardly be overstated.

Just the same, there are directions in which I hold a much more delimited view of the role of ideas in human life. "Ideas" and "reason" may be extremely important in one situation and of only the narrowest significance in another.

If we consider the extent of the ability of men to use a philosophy to guide human development to a certain end, we are forced to conclude that such a thing is radically limited. The surgeons who in the 1960s pioneered in organ transplants were using the fine rationality of their profession.  And yet, how limited was their grasp of the consequences of their actions. They planned the transplants and through them a hoped-for lengthening of man's lifespan. But they couldn't and didn't plan the many effects of such a prolongation on every aspect of life. If their efforts could increase the ordinary lifespan to 100 or 125 or 200 years, they had no idea of the consequences that would reverberate in the human spirit, in learning, in the arts, in institutions, in family relations, in economics. These things are left to work themselves out as they arise. They will do so within a volitional milieu, but human reason hasn't looked ahead to plot them out.

Even comprehensive "socialist planning" scarcely does more. It has little control over the underlying ontological forces, the unseen spiritual and cultural and intellectual factors, which act even upon it and which it can’t foresee. Many authors have pointed to different underlying forces that they thought most important in molding human life: man's God-centered reality, by Richard Weaver; economic forces, by Marx; the impact of media, by McLuhan; invidious comparison, by Veblen; instinctual forces, by Ardrey; the struggle with scarcity, by Sumner; psychoanalytical factors, by Freud; the alternation of consensus and crisis, by Ortega; racial and geographic factors, by the German Volkish thinkers; and many others. If such matters as these impress themselves on human lives, then man's reason operates on a certain dimension that is only one of the many dimensions relevant to humanity.

This book and those that follow are about the major philosophies by which modern men have interpreted society. I mention the inherent limits of human reason so that it will not  seem that I place so much emphasis on ideas that the other potential factors are diminished. I do happen to believe that ideas are very important; but this is only in one immensely significant dimension.

NOTES

1.      Thomas Babington Macaulay, Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 47, 48, 69.

2.      George Steiner, Business and Society (New York: Random House, second ed., 1975), p. 364.

3.      John Stuart Mill, On Bentham and Coleridge (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1950), p. 39.

4.      R.J. White, ed., The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Lay Sermons (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 14-15. In the same regard, it is worth noticing that Jose Ortega y Gasset's philosophy of history saw the importance of cyclical alterations of comprehensive worldviews and crises of belief.

5.      Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann, trans. (New York, The Viking Press, 1968), pp. 610-611.

6.      Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson (New York: The Viking Press, 1946), pp. 70, 110, 111.