Romanticism and Counterculture

The Rise of an Alienated Intellectual Subculture

 

 

            We have seen that Burkean conservatism took the central elements of the worldview of the Roman Republic and of the Middle Ages and generalized them into a social philosophy.  Those elements were challenged on virtually all fronts by the Enlightenment, a vast change in outlook that championed rationalism, science, secularism, the rising commercial middle class, and republicanism.  Classical liberalism was one of the main products of the Enlightenment, although not everyone identified with the Enlightenment can be considered to have been a classical liberal.  In common with the broader phenomenon of the Enlightenment, classical liberalism challenged virtually all aspects of the medievalist regime -- kings, Church, mental orthodoxy in countless areas, social class structure, a statist control of the economy, and the like.

            The next major development to note is that within a short time after the beginning of the French Revolution there was, in turn, a massive revulsion, by the intellectuals[1] of Europe and America, against the Enlightenment.  This took the form of the Romantic movement, which began in the early 19th century.  Reinhold Aris' book on German thought from the beginning of the French Revolution to 1815 tells of the Romantics; he says that "all these thinkers were anti-bourgeois" and that they were deeply opposed to modern rationalism.  He says that "no one clung to the ancient order of society so uncompromisingly" as Justus Moser.  Despite the superlative applied to Moser, he says about Herder that "there is no other thinker of the period in whose works anti-rational tendencies found such strong expression...."  He traced Herder's rejection of the Enlightenment into the thinking of Fichte, Schelling, F. Schlegel and Hegel.  Aris tells of de Maistre, who "lost himself in mystical speculation," and of Novalis, "the most important thinker amongst the early Romantics," who was a "mystic impressionist."  Novalis joined many others in exalting the state.  Aris tells of "the distrust of capitalism which is one of the characteristics of Romantic thought."  Schleiermacher in turn deprecated the bourgeois "desire for personal happiness."

            A famous book on the subject is Julien Benda's The Betrayal of the Intellectuals, published in 1930, which discussed the intellectual temper of the 19th century.  Benda said that "this denunciation of liberalism, notably by the vast majority of contemporary men of letters, will be one of the things in this age most astonishing to History, especially on the part of the French."  [Notice his emphasis on the French.  Aris was writing about German thought.  We see from Benda that the same phenomenon was just as pronounced in France.]

            Friedrich Nietzsche denounced classical liberalism as mere "herd-animalization" and saw democracy as a "form of decline in organizing power."  He wrote of "the contemptible type of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats."  Nietzsche exalted the "will to power."  He was passionately aristocratic and affirmed "the order of castes, the order of rank."

            It was the German philosopher Hegel, however, towering over philosophy in the first part of the 19th century, who (especially as his thinking was applied by his followers after his death) most directly laid the foundation for the two main totalitarian systems of the 20th century -- National Socialism (Nazism) and Marxism.  He set forth a theory of how history moves through phases, a "dialectic," that sets off forces against each other and that would reach its final perfection in the Prussian Emperor. 

 

            Forerunners of 20th century totalitarianism.  After Hegel's death, his supporters broke into two camps.  The "right-wing Hegelians" spoke in terms of a dialectic of racial struggle; the "left-wing Hegelians" (of whom Feuerbach and Marx were the most prominent) spoke in terms of a dialectic of class struggle.  Romanticism and theories of racial struggle found expression in the German Volkish movement of the late 19th century, idealizing a mythic German past and detesting the rise of modern urban, industrial and commercial civilization.  Although many forces came together historically to cause eventually the rise of Nazism in Germany after World War I, the German Volkish movement must be counted as a major one.  To a very high degree, right-wing Hegelianism and the many other strands of totalitarian thought that were in existence were the product of intellectuals who were alienated against the Enlightenment, modernity, the bourgeoisie, and classical liberalism.

 

            The rise of the world Left.  The "alienated intellectual" had the power of the pen, but the number of intellectuals is always  numerically small.  Accordingly, the primary means of political and ideological struggle for the modern intelligentsia has been for its members to seek an alliance with any unassimilated or disaffected members of society, and this has been the defining hallmark worldwide of what is called "the Left."[2]  An alliance opens the way to effective power, bringing leadership, command, status and recognition.  An especially good discussion of this alliance, which has taken many forms over the past two centuries, appears in Eric Hoffer's The Ordeal of Change, where Hoffer says of the alienated intellectual that "his most potent alliance has been with the masses...The intellectual goes to the masses in search of weightiness and a role of leadership."  At the same time, Hoffer says, the intellectual "must feel that in satisfying these hungers he does not cater to a petty self." 

            The alliance has not always been strictly with the "proletariat" (the propertiless workers spoken of by Marx).  Every  disaffected or unassimilated group has, in turn over the past two centuries, been championed.  With this in mind, it is possible to understand Karl Marx as having been an intellectual who devoted his life to formulating calls to action and an ideology that directed its appeal to the proletariat.  He was not himself a member of the proletariat.  The various forms of socialist thought prior to the second half of the twentieth century tended to make its appeal primarily to the "workers" and to others in the lower economic strata.  Since World War II, the Left has more often sought out alliances with ethnic and racial groups to the extent that they are estranged from or have interests at odds with the mainstream society in the United States and Europe.  (Seeing this in the context of the history of these ideas, this marks a movement, in effect, from left-wing Hegelianism to right-wing Hegelianism; i.e., from theories of class struggle to theories of racial struggle.)

            The alliance of the "intelligentsia" with one or another group that was unassimilated or disaffected from the "bourgeois" mainstream has determined to a large extent the specific content of the various forms of socialist ideology.  Most of the concepts of modern socialist thought combine alienation with a justification for non-bourgeois values.  In addition, a central feature has been that the intelligentsia has sought to invoke the help either of a mass movement or of the state on behalf of the "weak" as against the successful bourgeoisie.  It has been in this context that government has been used in the 20th century as an instrument to overcome "exploitation" and otherwise to assist the weak.[3]

 

            The existence of a "counterculture."  Throughout history there have been subcultures of withdrawal.  As conditions worsened with the impending collapse of the Roman Empire, most ancient philosophies preached withdrawal as a way to escape.  The asceticism of the early Christians provides many examples.

            The stage was set for a similar pattern in the early 19th century when European and American thought moved sharply into a renunciation of modernity and of the existing culture.  Theodore Roszak's Where the Wasteland Ends (1972), a leading book of the New Left in the United States, is a literate explanation of the tie between the 19th century Romantic "revolt against Reason" and the counter-culture (in the United States and Europe, and indeed throughout much of the world) during the 1960s.

            One of the most important manifestations of counter-culture took the form of the Wandervogel (the youth movement that centered on hiking) in Germany between 1896 and 1919.  An extension of this was the Bund, which continued from 1919 until the movement was absorbed into the Hitler Youth in 1933.  Alienation from the middle class was the consistent thread.  Walter Laqueur says that "the Wandervogel chose the other form of protest against society -- romanticism.  Their return to nature was romantic, as were their attempts to get away from a materialistic civilization, their stress on the simple life, their rediscovery of old folk songs."  Anti-bourgeois and anti-classical liberal ideologies, and most especially the German Volkish spirit, ran through the movement.  After World War I, the Bund continued the youth movement, and featured a more militaristic orientation, with groups marching around with uniforms and flags.  The groups embraced a variety of totalitarian ideologies, ranging from intense German nationalist, to Sparticist (revolutionary Marxism) to Japanese samurai. 

            In the United States, some of the earliest manifestations of a counter-culture were the various "utopian communities" of the 19th century.  But the first large movement occurred in Greenwich Village in New York City prior to World War I.  Lewis Coser says there were "attempts to create countersymbols and a special and distinct culture of rebellion.  The Village provided a refuge from middle class philistinism and permitted the widest experimentation in dress, sexual mores, and life styles generally."  This continued during the 1920s.  H. M. Kallen said in 1923 that "its spirit is discontent; its cry: There is no good in the institutions of modern life."  The 1920s was the time of the "lost generation" and of the flight of intellectuals to Europe.

            This subculture of withdrawal and rebellion never fully went out of existence, and seems permanently to be present (such as it is in the 1990s).  Its most forceful resurgence, however, began with the Beatnik movement and then in 1956 with the birth of the New Left.  (Notice that 1956 predates the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War; the New Left gained mass support from people who opposed the war, but it is a mistake to see it as a product of the anti-war movement.) 

            Of the Beatniks, Jack Newfield told of "an underground subsociety that developed about 1953, was mythicized by the Beat novelists and poets, and quickly spawned colonies."  Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road, about a drifter, is called "the Bible of the Beat Generation."  One of the more famous works from within the movement was Allen Ginsberg's Howl, which Bruce Cook says was "written during a long weekend spent in his room under the influence of various drugs."  The movement was international in scope, and Cook says "there were Dutch Beats, Turkish Beats, French Beats, and German Beats" (though, short-sightedly in my opinion, he considered each of these disassociated from the others).

            As the counter-culture of the New Left came into being, the next few years saw a vast literature damning the main society.  This included such works as Theodore Roszak's The Making of the Counter-Culture and Where the Wasteland Ends; Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion; Charles Reich's The Greening of America; Norman Mailer's The White Negro; Abbie Hoffman's Revolution for the Hell of It; Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death and Love's Body; Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange; and Timothy Leary's High Priest and The Politics of Ecstasy.  The content ideologically was very similar to that of the earlier German Wandervogel.

            This counter-culture has affected American society in many ways (for example, note the language used in most movies today, as well as their content of alienation).  One such residual is what might be called "radical environmentalism," which continues the militancy of the early ecology movement as expressed in the Earth Day Handbook prepared for the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970.  This "left-wing," so to speak, of environmentalism picks up strongly from the Romantic movement's rejection of commerce, industry and modern organization, including "capitalism."

 

 

 

                                                            Bibliographical Notes

 

Much bibliographical comment has been given in the discussion above.  In addition to the books mentioned there, reference should be made to Howard Becker's German Youth: Bond or Free and Walter Laqueur's Young Germany for histories of the German youth movement from the beginning of the Wandervogel through its absorption into the Hitler Youth.  For an excellent history of the expression of the counter-culture in the art world, see Kenneth Coutts-Smith's Dada. 

 

A good inside view of the New Left can be obtained from Jerry Rubin's book Do It!

 

Early works that must be seen as seminal are Jean Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality, an early-18th century work that sees civilization in general as having strayed from humanity's purer origins; and Henry David Thoreau's Walden, in which time spent living in the woods provides a chance for reflection on the falsity of life among people.

 

For a recent expression of the point of view, see Robert Waller's The Bridges of Madison County.  (If it isn't apparent to you from your own reading as to how Bridges relates, read my article about it in Conservative Review.)