{"id":2310,"date":"2016-01-07T00:00:42","date_gmt":"2016-01-07T05:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=2310"},"modified":"2021-11-18T13:57:10","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T18:57:10","slug":"back-to-herbert-spencer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=2310","title":{"rendered":"Back to Herbert Spencer"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"fuchschristian_marx_spencer_highgate\"<\/a>
Marx and Spencer’s facing graves (photograph by Christian Fuchs<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Chris Cutrone argues that the libertarian liberalism of the late 19th century still has relevance today<\/h2>\n

Originally published in <\/em>Weekly Worker<\/strong> 1088<\/a> (January 7, 2016). <\/em> [PDF]<\/a> Also published in <\/em>The Platypus Review<\/strong> #82<\/a> (December 2015 – January 2016). Re-published by <\/em>Bit\u00e1cora<\/a><\/strong> (Uruguay).<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Audio recording<\/strong><\/p>\nhttp:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/cutrone_backtoherbertspencer010716.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

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Herbert Spencer\u2019s grave faces Marx\u2019s at Highgate Cemetery in London. At his memorial, Spencer was honoured for his anti-imperialism by Indian national liberation advocate and anti-colonialist Shyamji Krishnavarma, who funded a [lectureship] at Oxford in Spencer\u2019s name.<\/p>\n

What would the 19th century liberal, utilitarian and social Darwinist, Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who was perhaps the most prominent, widely read and popular philosopher in the world during his lifetime – that is, in Marx\u2019s lifetime – have to say to Marxists or more generally to the left, when such liberalism earned not only Marx\u2019s own scorn but also Nietzsche\u2019s criticism? Nietzsche referred to Spencer and his broad appeal as the modern enigma of \u201cthe English psychologists.\u201d Nietzsche critiqued what he took to be Spencer\u2019s assumption of a historically linear-evolutionary development and improvement of human morality leading to a 19th century epitome; where Nietzsche found the successive \u201ctransvaluations of values\u201d through profound reversals of \u201cself-overcoming\u201d (On the genealogy of morals: a polemic<\/em>, 1887). Nietzsche regarded modern liberal morality not as a perfection but rather as a challenge and task to achieve an \u201cover-man,\u201d that, failing, threatened to result in a nihilistic dead-end of \u201cthe last man\u201d instead. Marx regarded Spencerian liberalism as an example of the decrepitude of bourgeois-revolutionary thought in decadence. Marx\u2019s son-in-law, the French socialist Paul Lafargue, wrote, just after Marx\u2019s death, against Spencer\u2019s \u201cbourgeois pessimism\u201d, to which he offered a Marxist optimism.1<\/sup> Such Marxism fulfilled Nietzsche\u2019s \u201cpessimism of the strong.\u201d By the late 19th century, Marxists could be confident about transcending bourgeois society. Not so today.<\/p>\n

Spencer\u2019s distinction of \u201cmilitant\u201d vs \u201cindustrial\u201d society (The principles of sociology <\/em>Vol 2, 1879-98) – that is to say, the distinction of traditional civilization<\/em> vs bourgeois society<\/em> – is still, unfortunately, quite pertinent today, and illuminates a key current blind-spot on the ostensible \u2018left\u2019, especially regarding the phenomenon of war. Spencer followed the earlier classical liberal Benjamin Constant\u2019s observation (\u2018The liberty of the ancients as compared with that of the moderns\u2019 1816) that moderns get through commerce what the ancients got through war; and that for moderns war is always regrettable and indeed largely unjustifiably criminal, whereas for ancients war was virtuous – among the very highest virtues. Do we moderns sacrifice ourselves for the preservation and glory of our specific \u201cculture,\u201d as \u201cmilitants\u201d do, or rather dedicate ourselves to social activity that facilitates universal freedom<\/em> – a value unknown to the ancients? Does the future belong to the constant warfare of particular cultural differences, or to human society? Marx thought the latter.<\/p>\n

The question is whether we think that we will fight<\/em> or, rather, exchange<\/em> and produce<\/em> our way to freedom. Is freedom to be achieved through \u201cmilitant\u201d or rather \u201cindustrial\u201d society? Marx assumed the latter.<\/p>\n

When we seek to extol our political leaders today, we do not depict them driving a tank but waking at 5 o\u2019clock and staying up past midnight to do society\u2019s business. We do not speak of their scars earned in combat but their grey hairs accumulated in office. Not enjoying the spoils of war on a dais but getting in their daily morning jog to remain fit for work. We judge them not as cunning warriors but as diligent workers – and responsible negotiators. In our society, it is not the matter of a battle to win but a job to do. Carl Schmitt thought that this has led to our dehumanization. But few would agree.<\/p>\n

What would have appeared commonplace to Spencer\u2019s contemporary critics, such as Nietzsche and Marx, must strike us today, rather, as profoundly insightful and indeed critical of our society. This is due to the historical regression of politics and society since Marx\u2019s time, and, moreover, to the liquidation of Marxism. What Marx would have regarded as fatally one-sided and undialectical in Spencer, would today seem adequate to the prevailing condition, in the absence of the Marxist-Hegelian dialectic. The Marxist critique of liberalism has been rendered moot, not in the sense of liberalism\u2019s actual social supersession but by historical regression. Society has fallen below the historical threshold of not only socialism but of classical liberalism – of bourgeois emancipation itself. Not only have we fallen below the criteria of Kant and Hegel that surpassed 18th century empiricism, we have fallen below its 19th century successor, positivism, as well. The question is the status today of liberalism as ideology<\/em>. It is utopian. As Adorno put it, it is both promise and sham.<\/p>\n

Militant and industrial tendencies confront each other today not as different societies, but as opposed aspects of the same society, however contradictorily and antagonistically, in capitalism. Similarly, the phases of \u201creligious,\u201d \u201cmetaphysical\u201d and \u201cpositive\u201d forms do not succeed one another sequentially in a linear development but rather interact in a dynamic of social history. What Spencer regarded as regressive \u201cmetaphysics\u201d remains valid in capitalism, as \u201cideology\u201d calling for dialectical critique. We cannot now claim to address problems in the clear air of enlightenment.<\/p>\n

If Adorno, for instance, critiqued sociological \u201cpositivism,\u201d this was not as a romantic anti-positivist such as Max Weber, but rather as a critique of positive sociology as ideology<\/em> in capitalism. For Adorno, positivism and Heideggerian ontology, as well as Weberian \u201ccultural sociology,\u201d opposed each other in an antinomy of capitalism that would be overcome not in one principle triumphing over another, but rather in the antinomy itself being succeeded dialectically in freedom. Weber denied freedom; whereas Spencer assumed it. Both avoided the specific problem of capitalism. To take a condition of unfreedom for freedom is the most salient phenomenon of ideology. This is what falsified positivism as liberal enlightenment, its false sense of freedom as already achieved that still actually tasked society. Freedom is not to be taken as an achieved state but a goal of struggle.<\/p>\n

An emancipated society would be \u201cpositivist\u201d – enlightened and liberal – in ways that under capitalism can only be ideologically false and misleading. Positivism should therefore be understood as a desirable goal beyond<\/em> rather than a possibility under<\/em> capitalism. The problem with Herbert Spencer is that he took capitalism – grasped partially and inadequately as bourgeois emancipation – to be a condition of freedom that would need yet to be really achieved. If \u201cmetaphysics,\u201d contra positivism, remains valid in capitalism, then this is as a condition to be overcome. Capitalist metaphysics is a real symptom of unfreedom. Positivism treats this as merely an issue of mistaken thinking, or to be worked out through \u201cscientific\u201d methodology, whereas it is actually a problem of society requiring political struggle. The antinomy of positivism vs metaphysics is not partisan but social<\/em>. As Adorno observed, the same individual could and would be scientifically positivist and philosophically ontological-existentialist.<\/p>\n

Spencer\u2019s opposition to \u201csocialism\u201d in the 19th century was in its undeniable retrograde illiberal aspect, what Marx called \u201creactionary socialism.\u201d But Marx offered a perspective on potentially transcending socialism\u2019s one-sidedness in capitalism. Spencer was entirely unaware of this Marxian dialectic. Marx agreed with Spencer on the conservative-reactionary and regressive character of socialism. Marx offered a dialectic of socialism and liberalism presented by their symptomatic and diagnostic antinomy in capitalism that pointed beyond itself. 18th century liberalism\u2019s insufficiency to the 19th century problem of capitalism necessitated socialist opposition; but liberalism still offered a critique of socialism that would need to be fulfilled to be transcended, and not dismissed let alone defeated as such.<\/p>\n

Only in overcoming capitalism through socialism could, as Marx put it, humanity face its condition \u201cwith sober senses.\u201d This side of emancipation from capital, humanity remains trapped in a \u201cphantasmagoria\u201d of bourgeois social relations become self-contradictory and self-destructive in capital. This phantasmagoria was both collective and individual – socialist and liberal – in character. Spencer naturalized this antinomy. His libertarian anti-statism and its broad, popular political appeal down through the 20th century was the necessary result of the continuation of capitalism and its discontents.<\/p>\n

Spencer regarded the problem as a historical holdover of traditional civilization to be left behind rather than as the new condition of bourgeois society in capitalist crisis that Marx recognised needed to be, but could not be, overcome in Spencer\u2019s liberal terms. Marx agreed with Spencer on the goal, but differed, crucially, over the nature of the obstacle and, hence, how to get there from here. Not only Spencer\u2019s later followers (more egregiously than Spencer himself), but Marx\u2019s own, have falsified this task. It has been neglected and abandoned. We cannot assume as Marx did that we are already past Spencer\u2019s classical liberalism, but are driven back to it, ineluctably, whether we realize it or not. Only by returning to the assumptions of classical liberalism can we understand Marx\u2019s critique of it. The glare of Marx\u2019s tomb at Highgate stares down upon a very determinate object. If one disappears, they both do. | \u00a7<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Note<\/h3>\n

1. www.marxists.org\/archive\/lafargue\/1884\/06\/herbert-spencer.htm<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marx and Spencer’s facing graves (photograph by Christian Fuchs) Chris Cutrone argues that the libertarian liberalism of the late 19th century still has relevance today Originally published in Weekly Worker 1088 (January 7, 2016). [PDF] Also published in The Platypus Review #82 (December 2015 – January 2016). Re-published by Bit\u00e1cora (Uruguay). Audio recording Herbert Spencer\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[39,18,32,16,23,21,6],"class_list":["post-2310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","tag-39","tag-adorno","tag-cpgb","tag-marxism","tag-neoliberalism","tag-postmodernism","tag-the-platypus-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2310"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3160,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2310\/revisions\/3160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}