[This is Chapter 3 from Murphey's book Socialist Thought.]
3
CONTINUITIES FROM MEDIEVAL VALUES
In Burkean Conservatism and Classical Liberalism I spoke of "the mos maiorum that existed (in the Roman Republic) during the Punic Wars and that almost all later Romans looked upon as ideal. This was a tightly knit society, organic, hierarchical, welded together by a powerful consensus. It was authoritarian and insulated . . . It had a landed, not a commercial, economic base; and its social and political structure was aristocratic."
Tracing the development of such values on through to the Middle Ages, I pointed out that "all of the outer forms of society changed greatly as the West entered the Middle Ages. The life was different; the religion, politics and institutions were different. But the underlying principles bore a striking resemblance to those of the mos maiorum . . . The Middle Ages adopted the element of social hierarchy. The feudal structure and aristocracy are among the first characteristics to come to our minds about it . . . In religion, the Roman Catholic Church towered over the Middle Ages. This was not identical to the old Roman ‘fear of the gods,’ but it was a similar sort of absorbing religious hegemony. The insularity of the Romans was replaced by the even greater mental authoritarianism of the Middle Ages . . . The economic foundation of the small family farm in republican Rome gave way to the landed economic base of the manorial system; and neither the Roman nor the medieval economies were more than slightly commercial. Both social systems were tradition-bound . . . Each impressed a strong control over human will and appetite. And each adopted in its own way the strong state. Neither valued 'individualism' for its own sake. The social systems were non-bourgeois, their thought anti-bourgeois. With some exceptions, these values dominated Western civilization for over two thousand years."1
As the centuries went on, however, there was an erosion and eventual shattering of these values and institutions. The landed economic base was slowly eroded by the rise of commercial towns and the development of trade routes. A rising bourgeoisie challenged the economic and political sway of the aristocracy. Western civilization became increasingly secular. Rationalism and empirical science got underway. The towering presence of the Catholic Church came to an end through the struggle with Protestantism and with the secular kings. The state was challenged in the name of the individual, with a wholly new perception arising that society exists primarily as a framework to serve the individual rather than vice versa. Religious toleration became an acknowledged necessity after centuries of bloodshed; and the church became separate from the state.
This is, of course, familiar history. We need to bring it to mind so that we can notice the extent to which socialist thought has continued certain themes from the Middle Ages. There is in several ways continuity from one to the other.
There have also been some very significant differences. Before I discuss the continuities, I shall want to review those differences:
Differences. Perhaps the major dissimilarity lies in socialism's having for the most part embraced an egalitarian vision, while the "conservative" values of the Romans and the Middle Ages were "hierarchical" -- i.e., class oriented. Eugene Kamenka has stated this in an oversimplified way when he has written that "the Promethean socialist vision of the noncommercial society is distinguished from the Romantic conservative vision by its rejection of hierarchy and by that alone."2 Marxism looks forward to the day when a "classless society" will replace the "class struggles" of all preceding historical periods. Even German National Socialist writing revealed an emphasis on equality, albeit an equality within a racial bond and within a system where a charismatic leader was to serve as the instrument of the society. The emphasis on equality exists in the theory even though actual practice may differ considerably, as is apparent in the Soviet Union when Solzhenitsyn refers to "the three hundred who considered themselves the artistic elite.”3 What may be more difficuit for us to understand these days is that the thinkers of the Middle Ages, and of, say, the Burkean conservative tradition that comes down to us even today, have been quite serious in their support of hierarchy. As Samuel Johnson expressed it, “subordination is conducive to the happiness of society.”4
The economic foundation of conservative values lay in a landed system. Socialism has often been anti-commercial in common with conservatism, but there is little indication of a desire to hark back to a basically agrarian economy. An implicit aspect of the anti-industrial, anti-technological thrust of the branch of socialist thought that stems from the Romantic movement must be to revert to an agricultural setting; but that hasn't been the main direction of modern thinking, even within socialist thought. Both Marx and the German Volkish thinkers talked in terms of abolishing the distinction between town and country and each had an animus against urban life. Yet, this seems only remotely connected with a landed economic system, even though such a system may be one of its implications.
The conservative vision was primarily religious. Socialist thought has been primarily secular, with even the socialist theologians often seeming to make their theology a mask for atheism.
A concomitant of this is that the attitudes toward rationalism and empiricism have been very much at odds. Medieval thought saw a threat in them; St. Augustine even saw a worldly preoccupation in them that was profoundly out of keeping with the other-worldly orientation to which he held. Again, it is true that some important strains of socialist thought have embraced anti-rationalist, anti-scientific and anti-technological worldviews, such as we saw during the New Left episode in the writing of Theodore Roszak. Such a thorough rejection of modernity is a marvelous vehicle for revolutionary alienation. But socialist thought on the whole has been closely intermeshed with modern intellectuality. This means that socialist intellectuals have been closely identified with the empirical science that has been so prominent a feature of the modern age.
The medieval consensus clung to tradition. Modern socialist thought, however, because it has been incessantly in opposition to the predominant culture, has found endless ways to stress the value of change.
Conservatism subsumed a belief in an underlying moral order. The Left, though, has used relativism, including a relativistic view of ethics, as a major tool in undermining the public's commitment to the so-called bourgeois ethical norms. This has placed it in opposition to codes of ethics. No doubt the Left has had a strong moral commitment, but this hasn't been toward things that people often have associated with "morality." It has fervently supported its perceived imperatives of "social justice" and social change. This is why socialist thought can at one and the same time be both morally relativist and imbued with high moral fervor.
The Middle Ages was hostile to open inquiry and the free expression of ideas. As a movement that has urged rapid social change, socialism has long found it expedient, in terms of its own interests, to support "civil liberties" -- the various freedoms that relate to politics and expression. Whether this represents a permanent devotion to those liberties is open to question, and of course, may vary with the cultural background of the particular socialist. There are many indicators, however, such as the intolerant philosophy of Herbert Marcuse and the actual practice within the Soviet Union, Communist China and Nazi Germany, that suggest that there is no necessary connection between socialism and civil liberties.
The conservative perception of "human nature" has, since Augustine, been pessimistic. Its literature refers to its "doctrine of human depravity." A powerful organic culture is needed to hold the dangers of human will and appetite in check. In socialist thought, though, the countless descendants of Rousseau, continuing into our own time, have held that there is an "original human nature" that is loving and brotherly and group-oriented, but that humanity has gotten away from because of the warpings of competitive society and social artificialities. This offers the foundation for a thorough rejection of "bourgeois values." At the same time, socialist intellectuals are alienated against the great run of existing mankind, and tend to view people as inert matter that desperately needs to be remolded. Marx brought these elements together when he looked ahead to a "classless society" based on the ultimate perfectibility of human beings (in terms of what he valued), while at the same time he considered people to be pawns in the great deterministic movements of the class struggle. Those of us who are not socialists and followers of Rousseau can see a very real inconsistency between this glowing optimism and this attribution of inertia, but most socialists do not.
Continuities. Despite the differences I have just discussed, and others that I am no doubt overlooking, there are several important continuities where ideas have flowed uninterruptedly from conservative philosophy into socialist thought. If we are to understand the historical relationships, we will need to be aware of this flow. Here are some of the continuities:
1. The nineteenth century British conservative Thomas Carlyle used his usual fiery eloquence to denounce commercial relationships as substituting a "cash-nexus" for genuine human contact. He insisted that “‘Laissez-faire,’ ‘Supply-and-demand,’ ‘Cash payment for the sole nexus,’ and so forth, were not, are not and will never be, a practicable Law of Union for a Society of Men." He argued that under a commercial system "man's duty to man reduces itself to handing him certain metal coins, or covenanted money-wages, and then shoving him out of doors." He said that it was necessary to "understand that money alone is not the representative either of man's success in the world, or of man's duties to man.”5
This denounces the "act of exchange" as a major form of human connection. It is directly at odds with the classical liberal perception of the act of exchange as a just and highly motivated relationship that can serve as the building block, repeatable billions of times, for a vast system of economic cooperation. The denunciation reflects Carlyle's bias in favor of a landed economic system and in opposition to commerce. It also reflects his sensitivity to the crassness of much bourgeois society as he saw it (we recall John Stuart Mill's complaint that the businessmen of nineteenth century England "think only of shop" to the exclusion of other values), and his principled objection to the version of classical liberal theory that has argued that there are no moral duties beyond contractual ones and that has not seen the necessity of an empathetic awareness of qualitative problems in human relationships. It does not seem that he was aware of a broader, more rounded expression of classical liberal theory (which was, after all, available in such works as Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments). Carlyle took classical liberal theory in its least defensible version and then destroyed it with his rhetoric.
Carlyle's words have often been echoed within socialist writing. As Robert Heilbroner describes the transition from feudalism to capitalism, for example, he speaks of the slow encroachment of commerce upon "the everyday round of feudal existence, each act of marketing binding men more fully into the cash nexus.”6 Eugene Kamenka explains the early Marx's theory of man's alienation "from his work, his products, and his fellow human beings" by saying that "money -- into which everything can be converted -- makes everything salable, and enables man to separate from himself not only his goods, the product of his work, but even from his work itself, which he can now sell to another." He quotes the young Marx as having written that "Money lowers all the gods of mankind and transforms them into a commodity. Money is the universal, self-constituting value of all things. It has therefore robbed the whole world, both the human world and nature, of its own peculiar value. Money is the essence of man's work and existence, alienated from man, and this alien essence dominates him and he prays to it.”7 This demonstrates the close connection between Marx's theory of alienation, which is a cornerstone of the point of view of the "humanistic Marxists" today, and Carlyle's sensibilities about the "cash nexus." We are not surprised, then, when Lichtheim, writing about Engels, who was of course intimately associated with Marx, tells us that "Engels put forward a socialist critique of British capitalism in essentially moralistic terms derived from Owen and from Carlyle, whose Past and Present Engels had liked, although he deplored Carlyle's Tory romanticism."8 Past and Present is, in fact, the book from which I have just quoted Carlyle.
2. In his book Ideas Have Consequences, the Burkean conservative Richard Weaver was distressed about the "decadence" that he perceived in Western civilization as far back as the fourteenth century. Because of its supposed effeteness and sentimentality, Nietzsche also considered the modern age decadent. And among socialists we find Pierre-Joseph Proudhon writing that "we are living in an age of decadence, in which civic courage has been annihilated, personal virtue cast aside, the race trodden down, all sentiments falsified and depraved."9
3. The alienation from commercial culture has led virtually all conservatives and many socialists to look back longingly to the past, both as a form of escape from the present and as recognition of a way of life that was more attuned to their values. Carlyle included a series of chapters in Past and Present that painted an idyllic picture of medieval life. On the continent the German Romantic movement saw the Middle Ages as a time of lost glory.
Among socialists, R. H. Tawney has looked back to the Middle Ages with admiration, even though he reserved some criticisms, in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. Ferdinand Lassalle argued that "we are in the habit of giving ourselves airs and of looking down on the Middle Ages as a time of darkness and barbarism. But in so doing we are frequently in the wrong."10 A rehabilitation of the Middle Ages has been desirable from the conservative and socialist points of view. This has contributed to the favorable reassessment of the Middle Ages that has occurred in modern scholarship. I discussed this development in Understanding the Modern Predicament.11
4. Ever since the ancient Greeks and Romans, conservative doctrine has seen the bourgeois tradesman as a vulgarian. In both ancient society and the Middle Ages the tradesman was an outsider. He was rarely part of the social and political life of the age. This long-term attitude is reflected in the twentieth century in Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt and George Bernard Shaw's Candida. The continuity of these perceptions was shown by the material I quoted in the preceding chapter on “The Alienation of the Intellectual.”
5. There has at the same time been a common opposition to classical liberal thought. The books by such conservatives as Russell Kirk, Eric Voegelin and Richard Weaver reveal a deep animus against the whole vision of an individualistic society. This will surprise some readers because these twentieth-century conservatives have been allied with classical liberalism against socialism; but the animus is there, just the same. The antagonism that conservatives of the nineteenth century felt toward capitalism easily fueled the flames of incipient socialist thought.
6. Continuity has tied together the economic thinking of the scholastics, the Mercantilists and the socialists. The British socialist R. H. Tawney referred favorably to this process when he observed that "the mercantilist thought of later centuries owed a considerable debt to scholastic discussions of money, prices and interest." Tawney saw the link as being primarily in the underlying premises rather than in technique. The basic assumptions of medieval writers "were two: that economic interests are subordinate to the real business of life, which is salvation, and that economic conduct is one aspect of personal conduct, upon which, as on other parts of it, the rules of morality are binding."12 These assumptions, which Tawney says underlay medieval thought, run through Tawney's own book The Acquisitive Society.
The chapter on "Medieval Economic Thought" in Lewis Haney's History of Economic Thought reveals several ideas that have fed in socialist thinking:
. "The idea of a natural community of property."
. "Teachings . . . concerning the dignity of labor."
. The theory of the "just price."
. The prohibition against usury, which for several centuries was defined to include any interest.
. "The minute regulation of trade and industry, largely through the agency of gilds (sic)."13
7. Adam Smith and David Ricardo were, as we all know, classical economists who supported capitalism. They expounded the Labor Theory of Value before the Austrian School developed the marginal utility theory of value, and also before the socialist thinkers Rodbertus and Marx made the Labor Theory of Value the cornerstone of their own thinking. Perhaps the major difference between Smith and Ricardo's use of the theory and Rodbertus and Marx's was that Smith and Ricardo did not use the theory as the springboard for a moral judgment that condemned all profit. They did not label it "surplus value" and think of profit as a form of theft. Such a moral judgment is central to Marxist theory as we find it in Capital. In our present context it is significant that the same judgment was part of medieval thinking. Tawney tells us that the medieval view was that it was all right for a merchant to make enough to pay him for his actual hours of work, but that any additional profit was illegitimate: "Gains in excess of a reasonable remuneration for the merchant's labor were, though not illegal, reprehensible." No wonder Tawney calls Marx the "last of the Schoolmen."
8. Land was the primary form of property during the Middle Ages. We should note that medieval thought considered all land "held in trust" rather than under the owner's discretionary control. This idea was later embraced by the conservative philosopher Coleridge and was endorsed by John Stuart Mill as part of his own eventual acceptance of socialist theory. In his essay On Bentham and Coleridge, Mill wrote that "perhaps . . . the greatest service which Coleridge has rendered to politics in his capacity of a Conservative philosopher, though its fruits are mostly yet to come, is in reviving the idea of a trust inherent in landed property . . . By the early institutions of Europe, property in land was a public function, created for certain public purposes, and held under condition of their fulfillment; and as such, we predict, under the modifications suited to modern society, it will again come to be considered.”14 Although Mill went on to say that this concept would help firm up the theoretical justification for private property itself, we can easily see how the idea lends itself to a socialist view of property.
9. In Chapter 20 I shall discuss the perceptions that socialist thinkers have had of "the work relation"; i.e., the situation of a worker who is employed by an enterprise in the marketplace. Needless to say, these perceptions have been highly critical. The desire on the part of socialist writers to denounce capitalism and to look forward expectantly to socialism has produced an ambivalence in the picture they have painted of the condition of workers in pre-capitalist, medieval society. They have (1) asserted that capitalism and the Industrial Revolution brought a disastrous fall in the condition of workers, which of course presupposes that they were better off earlier and which gives capitalism no credit for having improved their condition; but (2) they have at the same time expressed enough reservations about the condition of medieval workers to show that it is not literally a return to medieval conditions that they desire.
The first of these tendencies is evident in the statement by British socialist G. D. H. Cole that "The Industrial Revolution was the greatest act of dispossession in history . . . Before the Industrial Revolution, a man's work did ordinarily give him a certain sense of independence and did develop in him qualities of free-will and responsibility, whereas the factory system and the enclosed estates of the rich gave no such sense . . . .” From this and many similar passages in socialist literature, readers during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been told that capitalism had a terrible impact upon what had previously been a relatively decent existence.
There are many passages in socialist writing, however, that are candid about what conditions were really like during the Mliddle Ages. R. H. Tawney, for example, despite the favorable elements that he found in medieval thinking, was willing to say that the "golden age of peasant prosperity" was mainly a “romantic myth.” He said that exploitation was basic to feudal property; and he pointed to forced labor, demands upon the peasants at precisely the time when they needed to give attention to their own holdings, countless fees and taxes, and the partiality of the lord's system of justice.
Both tendencies appear in Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. On the one hand, Engels said that "before the introduction of machinery, the spinning and weaving of raw materials was carried on in the working-man's home. Wife and daughter spun the yarn that the father wove or that they sold, if he did not work it up himself. These weaver families lived in the country in the neighborhood of the towns, and could get on fairly well with their wages." His description of later conditions in the English factory towns was thus one of a great fall. But he nevertheless expressed just enough reservation about the preindustrial conditions to be left uncommitted to them. "They were comfortable in their silent vegetation . . . (C)osily romantic as it was, (it) was nevertheless not worthy of human beings."16
These divergent perceptions can fit consistently into a sincerely held view of history, since they are not mutually exclusive. But it is worth noting that each view is tactically useful to socialist thought's stance vis a vis capitalism. This suggests that the perceptions should be examined closely for the possible effects of bias. To my eye the socialist view of economic history is a blend that mixes partial truths with tactical expediency, so that the result is far from dependable. We will consider that more fully in Chapter 22 when we discuss the historiography apart from other concerns.
10. Marxism, in particular, has made "class struggle" a cornerstone of its analysis. Even if Marxism were not an influence, though, the fact that egalitarian socialism and welfare liberalism are founded on the alliance of the intellectual with the have-nots implies that they, too, include a component of class rivalry. Louis Hartz points to a significant area of continuity from medieval values when he says that "everywhere in Europe, in MacDonald's England hardly less than in Kautsky's Germany, socialism was inspired considerably by the class spirit that hung over not from capitalism but from the feudal system itself.”17
11. Another thread of continuity has been the one that has run from the aristocratic paternalism expressed in the concept of noblesse oblige to modern welfare ideology. It was the eighteenth century conservative Samuel Johnson, for example, who said that “an adequate provision for the poor is the test of every civilization.” Seymour Martin Lipset tells us that conservatism and social democracy have "often shared a belief in the welfare state." He points to the "collectivity assumptions inherent in the noblesse oblige concept of the role of the privileged classes and the state," and he says that socialism and the welfare state have had more in common between themselves than either of them has had with the atomistic doctrines of classical liberalism.18
12. This is not inconsistent with the fact that a continuing strain of elitism has run through both systems of thought. Aristocratic thought spoke openly of elitism as a virtue; modern socialist thought expresses it more covertly because it is an embarrassment to the ideology's democratic thrust, but this body of thought unavoidably harbors an elitist element because of the role played by the alienated intellectual as a central feature in its dynamic. We ought not to be surprised to see the outcroppings of elitism that appear in socialist writing, such as when Proudhon wrote that "the spiritual poverty of the Americans becomes evident in their morals. What, in fact, is American society? It is composed of commoners who have suddenly acquired wealth. Now fortune, far from civilizing men, most often brings out their vulgarity." An elitist distrust of average humanity is also apparent in his statement that "if heads of State slacken the reins for one instant, the peoples will surge forward . . . The only questions that need be asked is how the monster broke its chains . . . .”
My present concern is to show the continuities of attitude and perception. We will leave until Chapter 17 a more complete discussion of the elitist component of modern socialist thought.
13. Aristocratic thought and various branches of modern socialism share a yearning for "heroes" and a life of trial and strife which they contrast unfavorably with the settled placidity of bourgeois existence. (This underestimation of the heroic features of bourgeois life illustrates considerable insensitivity in such anti-bourgeois observers, but that is a subject we won't digress to discuss at this time.) Carlyle, a conservative, said of "hero-worship" that "verily it is the innermost fact of their existence, and determines all the rest." He argued that “man is created to fight; he is perhaps best of all definable as a born soldier; his life ‘a battle and a march,’ under the right General."
A similar yearning for the heroic appears in the various forms of totalitarian socialism as one of their major sources of appeal, although it isn't characteristic of pacifist or democratic welfarist points of view. We are familiar with such revolutionary heroes as Leon Trotsky, rushing from place to place across Russia in his train, and Che Guevara, killed while fighting in the jungles of Bolivia. They are similar to proletarian heroes who have been idolized in socialist literature. One example is the uncompromising, totally rational and always competent proletarian stalwart in Jack London's novel The Iron Heel. Such heroes have also played a role in Marxist-Leninist thought, as we see when Daniel Bell refers to "one of the great political myths of the century, the myth of the iron-willed Bolshevik. Selfless, devoted, resourceful, a man with a cause, he is the modern Hero."19
This elevation of the heroic was a point of emphasis within the German Volkish movement during the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. It was underscored by the National Socialists in Germany and the Fascists in Italy. Werner Sombart, writing during his Nazi phase, described a division within socialist thought on this point: "Trader and hero: they form the two great contrasts; they likewise form the two poles of all human orientation . . . The trader . . . enters upon life with the question: What can life give me? He wants to get for himself the greatest possible gain for the least possible achievement, he wishes to make life a gainful business; that means, he is poor. The hero meets life with the question: What can I give to life? He wishes to bestow, to lavish himself without return; that means, he is rich. The trader speaks only of 'rights'; the hero only of 'duties' which he owes. And even when he has fulfilled his duties, he always feels inclined to give more . . . And so we may conclude that there is also, depending upon the spirit which rules, an heroic and a trader socialism.”20 He says that this was Mussolini's view: "It was Mussolini who had this sentence stamped upon a coin: 'Meglio un giorno un leone che cento anni una pecora’ (Better a lion for a day than a sheep for a century)." Hitler voiced the same sentiment in Mein Kampf when he was distressed with having been born "in an age of shopkeepers" and cried out "Why couldn't I have been born a hundred years earlier? Say at the time of the Wars of Liberation when a man, even without a 'business,' was really worth something?"21
The continuity of this yearning from conservative to socialist thought is significant, but we also need to be aware of the "anti-hero" emphasis of much modern literature that emanates from the left. The "anti-hero" is to be understood in the context of the intellectuals' alliance with the have-nots and of the attack on bourgeois values. In any attempt by the intellectual to appeal to the have-not, it is not an extolling of achievement and of the extraordinary that is useful; it is empathy for weakness. Anti-heroic values also come in handy in the debunking of bourgeois moral values, especially those of hard work and responsibility. These two thrusts have been so characteristic of modern egalitarian socialist thought that we often lose sight of the fact that there is another kind of socialism, which stresses the heroic. Since socialist doctrines differ so widely on this point, it cannot be considered a defining characteristic of socialist thought.
14. Burkean conservatives have long condemned the "atomization" that has been typical of modern culture with its multiple centers of thought and activity, and with its broad base of individual self-direction. This is yet another theme that has continued into socialist thought. George Lichtheim has spoken of the "familiar habit of deploring the atomization" within modern life and has said that Marx shared this theme "with classicist admirers of antiquity and romantic adherents of medievalism alike." Louis Hartz sees the continuity when he writes of the "memory of the medieval corporate spirit" which socialist collectivism wants to re-establish.22
15. Medieval communal structures have in various ways served as examples for socialist thought. In their book The Soviet Dictatorship, Herbert McCloskey and John Turner tell about collective farming in Imperial Russia. They speak of the “mir, or commune, into which the majority of the peasants were organized." Although land was cultivated by each family, the mir handled the allocation and "periodically redistributed" the strips of land. "In the nineteenth century, many Russian intellectuals defended the mir as a type of peasant communism superior to any form of social organization developed in the West." These intellectuals considered the mir a possible basis for building a “communal society of the future.”23
In Britain, the Guild Socialists looked back to the medieval guild. Fried and Sanders tell us that such Guild Socialists as Samuel Hobson and G. D. H. Cole found a “model in the autonomous medieval guild.”24 I notice that in an anthology of anarchist writing an author named Senex says that "the focal point of Anarchism-Communism (is) the ex-territorial commune as the basic cell of a federated society." He refers to a book by Lewis Mumford and says that Mumford "dedicates a considerable portion of the book to the analysis of the general forms of the medieval commune, which to him, as to every libertarian thinker, represents the greatest approach to the natural function of a city .”25
16. There is even continuity with regard to certain statist abuses that have occurred in the Soviet Union. Vetterli and Fort point out that the secret police under the Tsars, the Oprichnina, were "efficient and ruthless.”26 This no doubt provided an example for the later Soviet secret police organizations. This can be overstated, however, since Solzhenitsyn makes it clear that the examples of despotism under the Tsars in the nineteenth century were insignificant compared to the abuses under the Soviet regime. "Seven attempts were made on the life of Alexander II himself," Solzhenitsyn writes. "What did he do about it? Ruin and banish half Petersburg, as happened after Kirov's murder? You know very well that such a thing could never enter his head. Did he apply the methods of prophylactic mass terror? . . . Execute thousands? They executed . . . five."
Vetterli and Fort point to a continuity between the "bureaucratization begun by Peter the Great" and the later bureaucracy under the Soviet regime. They also see a carry-over of the Russian tradition of messianic orthodoxy, since Marxism-Leninism makes its own claims to being the route to "truth and salvation."
17. Literature contains a number of references to a direct influence by an author of one of these philosophies upon an author of the other:
. I have quoted Lichtheim's passage that "Engels put forward a socialist critique of British capitalism in essentially moralistic terms derived from Owen and from Carlyle, whose Past and Present (1843) Engels had liked, although he deplored Carlyle's Tory romanticism."
. In Erich Fromm's anthology of "socialist humanist" essays, Nirmal Kumar Bose writes that “in 1904, Gandhi was deeply influenced by the thoughts of Ruskin.”27
. Adam Ulam discusses the British socialist Bernard Bosanquet and says that Bosanquet's idea of the General Will is "Rousseau tempered by Burke if not by Hegel, and is in general conservative.”28
. Michael Harrington mentions the relationship of German Junkers to anti-bourgeois ideologies of both the right and the left. He says that because the Junkers were "steeped in feudal tradition" and "contemptuous of the bourgeoisie" there was "a historic basis for urging the convergence of the German Right and Left, both of which were anti-bourgeois, against the liberals in the middle.”29
. Lichtheim says that the British socialist Morris "had come to socialism by way of Ruskin."
. The influence has sometimes run the other
direction, with members of the Left merging back into the Right. Lichtheim reports that various followers of
the French socialist Saint-Simon "turned Bonapartist" and
participated in Napoleon III's
regime. Lichtheim gives another
example, this time about England, when he refers to "former Chartists who
had been won over to Tory democracy (i.e., Disraelian conservatism) through
hatred of capitalism and liberalism . . . ." In Germany there was the example of Werner Sombart, whose long
academic career saw him move among the anti-bourgeois schools of thought. As we have seen, he went from the German
Historical School to Marxism to National Socialism.
NOTES
1. Dwight D. Murphey, Burkean Conservatism and Classical Liberalism
(Washington: University Press of America, 1982), pp. 41-42.
2. Article by Eugene Kamenka, "Marxian Humanism and the
Crisis in Socialist Ethics," Socialist Humanism, Erich Fromm, ed.
(Garden City: Anchor Books, 1966), p. 128.
3. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago Three (New York:
Perennial Library, 1978), pp. 479, 80.
4. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (New York: Modern Library, 1952), p. 113.
5. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1962), pp. 32, 65, 171, 119, 183.
6. Robert L. Heilbroner, The Limits of American Capitalism (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966), p. 113.
7. Kamenka, Socialist Humanism, pp. 120, 121.
8. George Lichtheim, A Short History of Socialism (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), pp. 93, 78, 184, 60, 162.
9. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Selected Writings (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1969), p. 125.
10. Ferdinand Lassalle, The German Classics, Vol. X (Albany, N.Y.: J. B. Lyon Company, 1914), pp. 439, 183.
11. Dwight D. Murphey, Understanding the Modern Predicament (Washington: University Press of America, 1982), pp. 87-91.
12. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Mentor Books, 1960), pp. 34, 38, 56.
13. Lewis H. Haney, History of Economic Thought, 4th ed. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1949), pp. 91-108.
14. John Stuart Mill, On Bentham and Coleridge (London: Headley Bros. Publishers, no year given), p. 74.
16. Frederick Engels, The Condition of Working-Class in England in 1844 (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1952), pp. 1, 3.
17. John H. M. Laslett and Seymour Martin Lipset, ed.s, Failure of a Dream? Essays in the History of American Socialism (Garden City: Anchor Press, 1974), p.401.
18. Laslett-Lipset, Failure, p. 585.
19. Laslett-Lipset, Failure, p. 103.
20. Werner Sombart, A New Social Philosophy (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), pp. 72, 73.
21. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (New York: Sentry Edition, 1943), p. 157.
22. Laslett-Lipset, Failure, p. 421.
23. Herbert McCloskey and John E. Turner, The Soviet Dictatorship (New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, Inc.), pp. 26-27.
24. Albert Fried and Ronald Sanders, Socialist Thought (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1964), p. 364.
25. Leonard I. Krimerman and Lewis Perry, Patterns of Anarchy (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1966), p. 347.
26. Richard Vetterli and William E. Fort, Jr., The Socialist Revolution (Los Angeles: Clute International Corporation, 1968), pp. 133, 134.
27. Article by Nirmal Kumar Bose, "Gandhi: Humanist and Socialist," Socialist Humanism, Erich Fromm, ed. (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1966), p. 100.
28. Adam B. Ulam, Philosophical Foundations of English Socialism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), pp. 52, 53.
29. Michael Harrington, Socialism (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1970), p. 66.