Social Scientist

Concept of Man in Political Theory, Part Two Author(s): Sudipta Kaviraj Source: Social Scientist, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Nov., 1979), pp. 37-61 Published by: Social Scientist Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3520362 Accessed: 12/05/2009 02:01
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SUDIPTA KAVIRAJ

Concept Man in Political 7heory of

PART TWO

"NOW we can see we are at home," said Hegel about Descartes. "Like sailors who have long ranged the stormy seas,we can exclaim 'Land'!" With Hobbes, political theorists have the same feeling of coming home. This familiarity of concernment had already started with Machiavelli's theory. He talks of a psychology we understand: a man sooner forgets the death of his father than the loss of his patrimony-characteristic bourgeois sentiments, but expressed without the characteristic hypocrisy. Machiavelli's theory is really as a sign of, as a preparation for what was to come. significant He is a paradigmatic figure in a curious sense. So much is implicit in him; so little is elaborated. He simply noted down his conclusions about political activity in Italy. But it implied a whole set of

methodological and substantive postulates. Hobbes would render them explicit. Hobbes claimed that civil philosophy before him was "rather
a dream than a science". His theory is an inexhaustible reservoir of insights into the sociology of capitalism and partly its politics. Even his errors are instructive. Hobbes's Leviathan starts in a copybook fashion; methodologists would always be delighted with his He starts out scrupulous adherence to the logic of presentation. from some basic postulates in an ascending system of complexity

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and inclusiveness. At times he thought, somewhat on Plato's lines, of a symmetric system of isomorphic wholes. In fact, the notion of symmetry was so strong in him that he planned in a grand scale about three works on body celestial, body civil and body natural-in modern terms, natural universe, society and man. His universe was material. Anything that was not body was simply nothing. He made a small concession to the then current superstition in admitting that spirits existed, but added, not without a certain humour, that they too had body-a statement calculated to hurt the sentiments of the spirits more than a simple denial of their existence. Hobbes was a mechanist with exceptional imagination. In his system, man, society and nature formed a scheme of machines within machines. All those machines were however obligingly constructed on a single model-Hobbes's favourite machine, the watch".
He used the simile of the clock with rare effect, so successfully that

subsequently men tended to forget that it was a simile. The universe was a Cartesian cosmos in which the function of God was that of a great mathematician.3 All natural processes were exquisitely and perfectly controlled by natural laws. The mysteriousness of the medieval conception of nature was destroyed. From the earlier distinction between the known and the mysterious, philosophy now moved to the more confident distinction between the known and the not yet known. Appropriately, Leviathan opens with the famous mechanical allegory: Nature (the art whereby God has made and governs the world)
is by the art of man; as in many other things, so in this also

imitated, that it can make an artificial animal. For seeing life is but a motion of limbs. . . why may we not say that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an aritificial life? For what is the heart but a spring; and the nerves but so many strings; and the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body such as was intended by the artificer? Art does yet further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of nature, man. For by art is created the great Leviathan called a commonwealth or state. The whole is a composite of its parts. "The wealth and riches of all pariticular members are strength (of the state); salus populi its business;... equity and law are artificial reason and will; concord health; sedition sickness; and civil war death." One is sometimes not entirely sure if it is still a simile or a serious argument about the transitivity of characteristics from the units

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to the whole. If the second, then it marks the beginning of the celebrated liberal mythology of individualism. Hobbes had introduced a number of motifs into political theory which were to have significant, though unintended consequences. The relation between his theory and assumptions of liberalism is a continuing wonder. Because, interpreted in different ways, he can provide both the premises of liberalism, and its first critique. Like his contemporaries, Hobbes too regarded geometry as the perfect science.4 His ambition was to set up a similar, purely deductive structure on the basis of simple and self-evident postulates. Men, he thought, would have to accept his conclusions, since all one had to do to confirm them was to look inside himself. It may be said that this is somewhat different from a geometric proof. But he had a ready answer: That was all that was possible in social science "for this kind of doctrine admitted no other demonstration." Hobbes staked everything on his concept of man. Of course he took recourse to the current mythology of social contract. Though Hobbes describes his men in a state of nature, it is transparently a logical, not a historical condition.5 What he described was not what he believed man was at any point of real time, when there was still no state. Rather it depicted what men were "naturally", intrinsically, minus the coordinating mechanisms of state and society. So his formulations about the state of nature do not form statements like "this is what man was when the state,was not yet invented." It implied rather a different statement like "this is how men would have behaved, if we assume for the moment that there is no state". By this device Hobbes throws the "nature" of bourgeois man into a "pure" state. This man was somewhat less than attractive: competitive, grasping, unscrupulous, distinctly reminiscent of Machiavelli's prince, but made general. Features that were strictly reserved for the elite were now turned into attributes of all men. It seems curious why Hobbes depicted bourgeois men this way, though he did not disapprove of bourgeois society. Hobbes symbolized the bourgeois intellectualism of the rising period-abrasive, critical, materialist and believing in the rule of radical doubt. Hobbes mirrored all featurs of early combative rationalism. Probably because he did not think historically he rendered eternal the bourgeois characteristics he saw in men around him. The opening section of Leviathan is perhaps the most striking and most consistent exposition of a mechanical materialist view of man.6 Spencer was to try something similar later on, but

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with much less imagination and incomparably less success. Hobbes's psychology was a simple calculus of pleasure and pain to which all men are subject. "In the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual desire for power that ceaseth only in death."7 Power is defined in economic terms as present means to obtain some future good. Instrumental power, which is distinguished from natural, is defined further as one man's control over the natural power of other men. The value of a man is the price he gets on the market, or by the mechanisms of evaluation of the market-like society. This is supplemented by Hobbes's most interesting idea of happiness, the result no doubt of acute observation of social reality. This definition was prophetic. In time it would sink into the deepest layers of consciousness of bourgeois social behaviour. It would be part of a kind of social unconscious, forming a common element from the most private jealousies to the most sombrely formal legality-the lyrical equation of happiness with property. The makers of the American constitution were to use this legal lyricism with great effect. For Hobbes, "continually to be outgone is misery. Continually to outgo the next before is felicity. And to forsake the course is to die." This represents both the structure of objective social relations and also the structure of bourgeois values. Hobbes naturally concluded that a society composed of such friendly individuals must disintegrate out of sheer competition if not supervised by a deterrent powerful state. Thus the mythical state of nature where we find bourgeois men without a state is a society of war of all against all. Hobbes however was careful to remind his readers that "the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting; but the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is peace."9 Bourgeois society, on this showing, had rather poor chance of peace. Hobbes's concept generated two contradictory images of common man. Earlier Machiavelli had started the celebration of the individual. But he had eye for only one type of individual-lains. He sets up against the altruistic images of the middle ages, the model of a relentlessly acquisitive individual. However, the bourgeois characteristics are still quite abstract. Locke would develop the logical antitype of Machiavelli's statesman hero-the property owner, the hero of moneymaking. Despite differences, one can find some links between the medieval romantic hero and hero
the political hero. Hobbes has no heroes, or, for that matter, vil-

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of the renaissance political theory. With Locke's hero it would have none. This was risk-free financial heroism, unless of course the heroes succumbed to the uncertainties of speculation. Intellectually, Hobbes's man is a rationalist, a questioner, an unconditional critic. But even this rule of radical doubt, though originating in bourgeois rationalism, would eventually turn inconvenient for bourgeois society. Radical doubt, or what German idealists would call the principle of negativity, was a subversive principle. It would, in time, turn against capitalism itself. 10 Locke was to alter this. Despite its foresight, Hobbes's theory contained one critical error, though to call it an error is perhaps unfair. Hobbes never saw a functioning bolurgeois state. He certainly missed the existence of classes, and the effectiveness of ideology. Locke saw both. An actual capitalist society is much closer to Locke's model than to Hobbes's. Locke lacked Hobbes's imagination and logic. He worked out a more descriptive theory. Ironically he gained by lacking in imagination. He avoided logico-theoretical invention, describing both men and society as they were. But, since there was no neutral description, he provided an ideological description of society that was favourable to the new order. Political theory had quietly changed content. From an investigation of what the social structure was really like, it had shifted to a rather different exercise of how it could be presented to its maximum advantage. Locke's way of looking at capitalism fundamentally differed from Hobbes's on several points. Hobbes had no feudal illusions, and few bourgeois ones. Locke, by contrast, established the fundamental illusions of bourgeois society in the terrain of social theory. The foremost among them was the one that extreme individualism and social harmony were compatible objectives. C B Macpherson has shown how Locke started out from initial Christian assumptions, moved through a strictly temporary utopia of petty producers (so attractive to the lower and middle classes) only to end with a brilliant twist of the argument in favour of unrestricted accumulationl1. The single crucial factor that was absent from Hobbes's theory that appears with tremendous force in Locke is the registration of classes. Capitalism is now seen as a society of contending classes rather than of conflicting individuals. This is the small and enormous difference between the two visions of capitalism and the state. Like other rationalists, Locke too starts out from the general premise that all men have rationality. Along with his support for

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the 1688 revolutions, this instituted the myth that he was a supporter of democracy.12 This is a misunderstanding. Locke did not support modern democracy,only limited rights and constitutional government, making property the precondition for political rights. Besides, the fact that he believed that all men are rational does not make him in any sense an intellectual egalitarian. There is no explanation why, while saying all men are rational, he had to qualify it by adding "though not in an equal measure". If there can be differentials of rationality, there must be some criterion for judging them. For Locke, a scale of rationality lay readymade in the market,in differential success in commercial life. Economic or property differences were an indicator of rationality differentials in men. If a man is rational, he will, given equal opportunity (which is precisely what the market does), make good, which means, will make money. If he did not, it merely showed that he did not find his way about in a structure which called for a series of rational decisions; he lacked rationality. Locke finally succeeded in taming the concept of "being rational" in commercializing the critical idea of reason. Perhaps, this is somewhat unfair on Locke. He simply assumed what was a constant premise of social action in early capitalist society. In any case, the concpt of reason was transformed from an intellectual or moral to a firmly commerical concept. The double entry account book would henceforward be the infallible index of human reason. Locke established a second intellectual prejudice. Hobbes's basic premise had been that a structure of social relations built on
the laws of extreme individualism would never produce order, any

disciplinary counterforce to competition. Locke's state of nature. was an ideological answer to it.13 Self-interest cannot be the basic priciple of a working society, thought Hobbes. For, in getting things for himself no one would think of others, and have any scrubuilt-in ples about the means. Self-interest, Locke answered, had in dealing with others, a man mechanisms of equilibrium. For, would realize that others would do to him what he was going to do to others.Looking after one's own interest therefore included a certain consideration for similar self-interest in others. It took fairly serious economic crises to convince orthodox social theorists
that this was not true.

In Locke, we see the first-level culmination of the split in the human image that we first glimpsed in Machiavelli. Parallel to this split in the concept of man, the entire culture of political thethinker ory would also split apart after Locke. The next significant tradition. would be a somewhat confused rebel against Locke's

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He would evoke pathetically and sadly the old epic image of man. But this time it would appear with a difference. There is no conviction behind the epic image, only nostalgia. Locke had argued, in effect, that the use of political power was a serious matter. It could be trusted only with those who had proved their seriousness of mind beforehand by amassing property.14In historical terms, this was a bitter irony. For those who were denied entry to political power were precisely the men who had fought most courageously for the bourgeois revolutions-the extremist petty bourgeoisie. Rousseau was critical of this new alienation of political power under new subterfuges. Through his rejection of it, he started the romantic rebellion in social theory. Essentially, it was a rebellion against the implied elitism of the bourgeois rationalist culture. It was primarily a theory of negatives. In a reaction against rationalist glorification of artifacts and social contrivances, Rousseau glorified nature. His image of natural man was, like Hobbes's, merely a logical abstraction.15But he could not keep his ability as a novelist under control. His descriptions were sometimes so vivid that people concluded that it could not be just as dry a thing as a logical abstraction. Actually, it was simply nature in man.'6 Rousseau stressed the emotive, the affective, the spontaneous. He was also the common man, the bearer of common sense. Rousseau symbolized a rebellion against the confident elitist split in man's image. Social processes under capitalism were making it impossible to continue with the generic idea of man. In its place, you have two unlike species. In his romantic fashion Rousseau tried to revive the integral human concept.

and Property PoliticalAlienation

Above all, Rousseau developed the first, emotive critique of representative democracy, the ideal paradigm of bourgeois politics.17 He saw how, after the revolution, political power, an intense but shortlived democratization, was being cornered once more by a new elite. The new regime applied a new criterion for entry into political relevance-ownership of property. Rousseau therefore laid the blame on the door of the man who first invented property.18 Bourgeois society did not offer what it promised. Ideologically, man was born free; sociologically he was in chains everywhere. Rousseau's political model-rule by the general will-has been found fault with both in logical and practical terms. But its intention transformed its failure. Its aim was to end political alienation. Like all romantics, Rousseau's strength lay in his criticism,

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not in construction. General will was an utopian solution to a very real problem. He did not see the necessary difference between the early and stabilizing phases of the system and their very different ideological needs. Ruling in a stabilized bourgeois society could not be done by a continual revolution, by continual "storming of the Bastille." In showing the link between the regime of property and political alienation Rousseau partly anticipated Engels. Besides, he too saw the problem of what Marx called ideology. Representative democracy does not create a government by the people, only its illusion. "The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken. It is free only during the elections of Members of Parliament; as soon as Members are elected, the people is enslaved; it is nothing. In the brief moments of its freedom, the English people makes such a use of that freedom that it deserves to lose it."19 Capitalism seemed to him a monstrous anomaly, resting on "unsocial sociability". "Men are not naturally enemies It is conflict over things, not quarrel between men, which constitutes war, and the state of war cannot arise from mere personal relations, but only from property relations."20 He is indignant against a society in which "men are forced to caress and destroy each other at the same time, when they are born enemies by duty and knaves by interest."21 "Rousseau understood that there was something rotten in the world in which he lived, and impatient, indignant and outraged as he was he did not understand that the sanctuary of the decrepit civilisation had two doors. Afraid of being stifled there, he rushed to the entrance and found himself frantically battling against the stream of people entering. He did not realise that the reestablishment of primitive life was more artificial than the existing dotage of civilisation."22 Impact of Industrialization Between the time of Rousseau and the English utilitarians, Europe had gone through one of the deepest historical transformahad been completed. tions. The first wave of industrialization What were vague apprehensions in Rousseau's days had changed into reality. De Tocqueville, not a radical observer, said of Manchester in 1835: "From this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilise the world. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete works its development and its most brutish; here civilisation miracles and civilised man is turned almost into a savage."23 This worried other thinking men too. John Stuart Mill

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added to his Political Economy a new chapter in the 1848 editionon "the probable futurity of the labouring classes". "In the present stage of human progress, when ideas of equality are daily spreading more widely among poorer classes, and can no longer be checked by anything short of the entire suppression of printed discussion and even of freedom of speech, it is not to be expected that the division of the human race into two hereditary classes, employers and employed, can be permanently maintained.""4 At a time when capitalism had not yet attained state power, this subtle split had started showing only in the field of ideas. After industrialization, it appeared in a dramatically grotesque form. By denying, defiling humanity of the lower orders, capitalism brought back the philosophical problem of man with a sharpness and urgency it never had before. The capitalist society of early nineteenth century was differentfrom what it was a hundred years before. Meanwhile the American and the French revolutions had occurred in the sphere of politics; industrial revolution in the economy. No doubt, some features were common to the two stages. But the new milieu was forming new questions for social theory to solve. The split in the image of man was related to a growth of consciousness of classes. Abstract slogans of equality were showing strains in the face of everyday experience of inequality. Class war, again, was not Marx's invention. In 1831 a conservative Frenchman wrote: Every manufacturer lives in his factory like the colonial planters in the midst of their slaves-one against a hundred, and the subversion of Lyons is a sort of insurrection of San barbarians who menace society are neither in Domingo...The the Caucasus nor in the steppes Tartary; they are in the suburbs of our industrial cities...The middle class must clearly recognise the nature of the situation; it must know where it stands.25 STABLE CAPITALISM

The process of historical development of capitalism was with unevenness in its internal structure. And the complex, unevenness and the lack of synchronization were of great significance for understanding the growth of political theory. By the time the countries that had made classical revolutions of the first waysettled down to a comfortable capitalist England and France-had way of life, it was still an aspiration in Germany. The great contradiction in the nineteenth century social theory was, in part, a consequence of this unevenness. The differences between English

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utilitarianism and German idealism were determined by the state of capitalist growth, intellectual conjunctures inherent in a specific historic path.26 Differences between the two philosophies were not merely in their conclusions, but in the fundamental way of posing the questions. They did not use the same tools, concepts or methodological presuppositions. Even in cases where the two traditions worked with an identical concept-like rationality-the identical term concealed differences in conceptual meaning. After Kant,
this crystallized into a systematic opposition at all levels-of logic,

methodology, epistemology, and ontological premises. German idealism marked a turning point in the growth of political theory. Afterwards, European political theory would never go back to the homogeniety of a single tradition.

Debate Idealism-Empiricism
Formalized empiricism supplied the exact counterpoint to

the meanit. Idealism emphasized the principle of totality-that ing of an object is determined not by its intrinsic characertistics, but by the context of relations within which it is put. Empiricism
emphasized that the first precondition for solving a problem was to settle the question of its boundaries. Utilitarians were believers in methodological individualism.27 Dialecticians did not believe in the transitivity of characteristics from the parts to the whole. Between them, empiricism and idealism exhausted the alternatives within bourgeois thought in the nineteenth century. In reaction to the methodological flaws of empiricism, idealist dialectics emphasized the interconnected primacies of change, historicity of social facts, subjectivity, and the totality principle. Kantial idealism also offered a critique of enslavement of men by technological thinking and social controls. Man, for Kant, was always an end, never to be used as means. Idealist theory however developed strongly authoritarian tendencies contrasting sharply with liberalism. Personally, Kant could escape the tragic fate of fully articulated idealism because he was no political theorist. However, Hegelian idealism justified a state that had all the disadvantages of being bourgeois, without the extenuating features of liberalism. The nineteenth century brought bourgeois political theory to an interesting climax. Bourgeois theorization about the state had reached its peak period. In terms of quality, the fertility of its debates, its ability to pose fundamental questions, its methodological and logical refinements, it was never to be excelled. Paradoxically, in the midst of all this wealth, it was also in a crisis. Bourgeois political thinking had, over three centuries of continu-

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ous development, elaborated an internal system of response and correction. This mechanism worked wonderfully at first through relative and corrective overemphases. There were corrective oscillations between philosophical rationalism and empiricism. The growth of rationalist certainties brought on a romantic reaction. Within rationalist individualist theory too, Hobbes's extreme version of individualism was implicitly criticized in Locke's different handling of an individualistic theory. Each answer to an earlier position enriched the debate, for it ensured that the answer to this answer could not work on quite the same level. This led to greater searclh for internal logical coherence and conceptual innovation within the opposing structures of thought. Since Rousseau, however, it sh(wed new strains; it ceased to be a system of such picturesque oscillation, and showed the bitterness of a rupture. Two systems of social theory, both bourgeois, became so exclusive and self-enclosed that they even managed to make their terminologies Dialecticians were contemptuous of mutually incomprehensible. the "shallowness" of empiricist theories of knowledge. Empiricists replied by calling Hegel a fraud."8

UtilitarianLiberal Theory
German idealism rejected the assumption of methodological individualism. However it tended to justify authoritarian rule via a theory of the "real will". Utilitarian liberal theory had just the oppsoite conception about man's relation to society. Society was a mere collection; it could never have a life beyond that of its parts, which Bentham was never tired of repeating. This was a useful assertion in the fight against the tyranny of abstractions and a theory that could justify anti-democratic measures on behalf of such abstractions. At the same time it implied an additive idea of the totality, taking units at a flat rate, treating all units as of the same value.29 The idea of society on these lines assumed that the units were all uniform and equal, interchangeable in significancea proposition going better with the ideology of capitalism and less with its real structure. Idealists approached the equation from the side of the community, hypostatizing it. To them Robinson Crusoes were impossible, the life of individuals was predicated on the larger life of the community. As critical gestures against individualist fallacies these were of some value; but they contained the danger of the hypostatization of the state. Within the British theoretical tradition this was shown in Hobhouse's critique of Bosanquet.30 Interpreters of political theory working on purely technical-

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conceptual contrasts were so impressed by the polarities of these two paradigms that they often tended to overlook the subtle historical links between these two systems. This subtle similarity lay partly at least in the way the two systems formulated their questions. For both sides, the main question was the relation between individual man the two terminal units in the social process-the and the whole society. This feature is particularly remarkable among the utilitarians. For, unlike the German idealists, utilitarian social theorists had close intellectual and personal contacts with classical political economists.31 Ricardo formally belonged to Bentham's theoretical school. It would be incorrect to state that Bentham or the two Mills never registered the existence of classes.3' Surely they did. But the curious thing is how, when they came to the critical phases of their politicial arguments, they ignored the problem thrown up by a recognition of the existence of classes.

Algebra of Revolution
In most of German idealist social theory there is a sustained implied critique of methodological individualism. Organiwith this cist assumptions showed a fundamental dissatisfaction of the strucmode of thinking. But they did not try to break out ture of this problem. Organicism was, mainly, an inversion of the individualist approach. German idealists did not realize that "turning an error upside down" is not always getting rid of it. It may lead to just the opposite prejudice, the reverse error. Provoked by the overemphasis on the individual, and reduction of the totality into the simple sum of its parts, idealists answered with a reduction of the parts into an essentialist unity of the whole, apotheosizing the state. Political implications of this line of reasoning were very unpleasant.33 Men obviously could not live without society. From this it was argued, incorrectly, they could have no rights against society. Secondly, men were what they were partly, or even largely, because of the forming social pressures on their lives. From this, it was argued, again incorrectly, that the circle of this determinism could not be broken. People who were formed in a particular way by the social milieu, could not logically change the society, or even desire a change in its structure. Only when the individual's will coincided with the will of the government deputizing for the state, which in turn was deputizing for society, would it be called his real will. Idealism intelligently inverted the conceptual meanings of liberty and control. These terms simply exchanged their usual meaning. To act as one liked would not be freedom, but its negation. Idealism, in its extreme

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versions, would not be content with ordinary policing from the outside; it would set up policemen inside individuals, and soothingly call them their social conscience. Hegel's system had a fittingly dialectic destiny, but one that he would not have liked.34 Its conlusions were used to justify the stiff authoritarianism of Prussia, but its method was a "negative principle," a constant aid to radical thinking.35 Herzen called it the algebra of revolution. Individualist theory opposed to this excess of collective emphasis was an excess of individualism. It talked of man in the abstract, but all such abstractions were disguised generalizations of concrete social types. The features of this abstract individual made him look suspiciously like a shopkeeper. Benthamites even Locke in social narrow-mindedness. excelled It fixed man in the role of a congenital maximizer of narrowly defined utilities. Rationality was altered in its conceptual meaning. Here bourgeois theory made the critical and final transition from a concept of of the agent."36 "rationality of the system" to "rationality Rational action from now on would take the terms of the system as given. Under these circumstances, man was left with no other vocation except making profits. The principle that had generated the most abrasive critique of social evils in early capitalist development now formed the basis of legitimism. Society was "a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham," Marx remarked. "Freedom because both buyer and seller of a commodity, of labour power, are constrained only by their own free will . . . And Bentham because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation to each other is the selfishness, the gain, and the private interests of each. Each looks to himself only, and no one troubles about the rest, and just because they do so, do they all, in accordance with the pre-established harmony of things, or under the auspices of an all-shrewd providence, work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal and in the interest of all".37 Benthamism Bentham building on the liberal tradition from Locke's days, turned this simple superstition into the central philosophical fable of a whole tradition of political theory.38 This tradition was to become extremely critical of "metaphysical" beliefs.39 From Bentham downwards, all its major exponents poured scorn on the habit of not turning every answer into a question except for this one. Hobbes and Mandeville,40 were critical of this curious hypo-

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thesis. After Bentham, such doubts were silenced. It was a plausibility imparted to this idea by the apparent confirmation in social experience in a certain stage of growth of capitalism, the period of high productivity. Full development of utilitarian theory exemplified the Hegelian notion that all things, when fully grown, approach their negation. Pure utilitarianism was a logically sound system, provided one held to obviously absurd assumptions. Men were pleasure seeking animals. Hobbes too believed in this. But he left it there. Bentham would not be content with anything short of a complete calculus of "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" on each specific item of governmental policy.41 Calculations were possible only if one could postulate all pleasure as homogenous. Or, if one could think of a common scale effective for all men. If one allowed for different hierarchies for different men the calculus becomes more difficult. If one made the hopeful assumption that human beings could develop intellectually,and could therefore alter Or so their hierarchies over time, it was seriously jeopardized. Bentham thought. Besides, as critics were quick to point out, there were simple technical difficulties in calculating the composite pleasure of a human group. John Mill sought to rescue utilitarianism from this absurd psycholoy. His assumptions were considerably nearer social and psychological reality, but made less logical sense.42 Eventually, Mill presented for short periods nearly all intellectual trends in the then current cultural spectrum in Europe. A supporter of individualism in its most extreme form, he came to support a mild cooperative socialism towards the end.43 "I confess," he wrote in 1948, "I am not charmed by the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each others' heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind."44 Those Mill personified the who thought that way included Bentham. internal contradictions of utilitarian individualist political theory. But the fact that he was able to combine these apparently discordant trends, though at some cost to his logic, marked an affinity between these various theoretical systems: utilitarian rationalism and its romantic rejection; positivism and its mild, early socialist critiques. These were after all trends or articulations within the field of bourgeois social thinking, and did not go beyond the possibilities inherent in the given universe of discourse. Subsequently, "loses its way, moving either towards eclectic, bourgeois thought

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syncretistic compendia, such as e.g. the work of John St Mill, or into deeper elaboration of individual branches."45 Of later political economy Marx said what can be applied with greater justice to the literature on political theory: "It is altogether a literature of epigones; reproduction, greater elaboration of form, wider appropriation of material, exaggeration, popularisation, synopsis, elaboration of details, lack of decisive leaps in the phases of development, incorporation of the inventory on the one side, new growth on individual points on the other."46In post-Marx political theory, the existence of these individual points are also doubtful. In the 50 years after Mill there was a curious development in political theory-both preserving and subverting the theory of Mill's type. It continued Mill's themes and assumptions, but turned his substantive and open style of debate-one that he had taken from classical bourgeois theory-into wooden and closed form. Political questions were systematically converted into legal legal ones. This was no small change. For classical political theory represented an open universe of discourse. Legalism applied a form of closure on some of these options, and made only certain options respectable or acceptable. It subtly but effectively narrowed down the terms of the debate, the field of intellectual and theoretical options. Previously political theory placed the
question of linkage between economic and political power right at

the centre of its considerations. Also, it did not seek to pre-empt or disqualify in advance any answer. Whatever their position on the question, classical political theory of early capitalism debated the question of economic and politicalpower, and admitted them as serious answers, serious enough to be refuted. By the early decades of the twentieth century, however, this openness of classical debates was gone. Political enquiry was gradually forced into narrower terms-the first steps to the growth of a repressive consensus. Obviously, when political enquiry is equated with constitutionalist legalism, certain types of answers are ruled out. You cannot have Rousseau's position or Winstanley's, or Marx's and still work within the terms of constitutionalist political theory. Increasingly, under the disguise of legalism the answers were sought to be limited within the boundaries of bourgeois ideology. Solving the questions of inequality of property and power within constitutional terms meant that all radical solutions were outlawed. The conquest of political theory by constitutional law was symptomatic of the deep stability of capitalist prosperity in the nineteenth century western Europe and its resultant historical illusions. Little was left of old slogan of equality,47 except "equality before

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the law"-a particularly ironical concept in a society where by all accounts law had to be activated by money.48 It was, as Shaw observed, only a lyrical name for the real legal inequality that existed. Equality before law was largely an imaginary compensation for inequality in everything else. As to the concept of man, constitutionalism continued to narrow it down, impoverishing its old content. It distorted the image of man, and also of the student of politics. The political theorist was turned into an expert on law; men were reduced to the role of potential litigants.

LATE CAPITALISM
All previous revolutions in political theory had larger cultural or historical contexts. Usually, new theories came along with new social experiences and the intellectual need to work out new concepts to find men's way through them. Alternatively, as with romanticism, they formed part of a broader cultural movement. They were noticed not merely by experts, but also by common men. In fact, the "great" political theory of the classical bourgeois period carried on its theoretical conversation with ordinary people,49 and sought to convince them. But the recent revolution in political theory went entirely unnoticed except by specialist political scientists. It occurred in the fifties in the university departments in the United States of America. It was rather curiously called the behavioural revolution. It was bourgeois political theory's latest revolution and also the least significant. Surely late constitutionalism was amazing in its analytical and conceptual sterility. But as a part of a continuation of bourgeois ideology it did its work, spreading its fables of equilibrium and applying a closure to radical alternative solutions. Study of methodological real political life was sacrificed to that of simple juridical forms, which, according to the famous jibe, provided an infallible guide how not to run a country. Specialists now studied patterns of behaviour rather than formal structures. This was valuable to a limited extent. For it contained an unwitting admission on the part of apologetic theory that there were systemic differences between apparent and real It also led to a massive accumulation of facts on structures. life by empirical political scientists. But the major claim political of behaviourists was that they not only collected data on new fields but they did it in a new way, more scientifically. Now the empirical political scientist went boldly into the jungle of political life armed with questionnaires. Behaviourism certainly led to a in the jargon of political decisive revolution theory- the only

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THEORY

53

sphere in which its claims to revolution were justified. It turned old fashioned nouns into modish verbs. Whereas an old formalist would have talked unscientifically of outmoded things like legisand judiciary, a behoviourist would use latures, executives, inexorably scientific categories like rule-making, rule-enforcing and rule-adjudicating functions. It introduced so many secondary changes in the culture of political theory that people tended to forget the fact that the central social illusions were mostly left intact. In some cases, they were replaced by more aggressively conservative postulates. In the final analysis, it introduced a regime of more sophisticated and respectable positivism in political enquiry. Ideological orientations did not change, or when they did, they did for more intensified conservatism. New political science is no lesss solicitous about democracy or militant on behalf of freedom. It fought for the free world on all the world's battlefields-from municipal elections in obscure American cities to the paddy fields of Vietnam. In the fifties, William Kornhauser declared that ordinary men can have rational opinions only about things they know well, on the unexceptionable premise that rationality of a decision is a function of the information backing it. Therefore, if an Amerian citizen took a keen interest in the elections to his municipal government, he could arrive at rational decisions. It followed from this kind of argument that the more distant the issue, the less the chances of ordinary citizens taking rational decisions on them. An American citizen could, with effort, rationally behave in matters of American politics. But when it came to the justice of waging war in Vietnam, he could never have adequate information. American citizens getting excited about distant issues meant they were behaving emotionally and irrationally which could lead to totalitarian tendencies. All movements involving deep mass mobilization were potentially totalitarian-Gandhi's movement as much as Mao's.50 It is ironical how of originality. The central thrust of these arguments was basically

such theories came back in the fifties under the misleading claim

as old as Madison.

as Degradation Political Being

Meanwhile the image of man had done rather badly. Behaviourism continued with the old dichotomy: between man and society. Though it integrated some of Max Weber's and Durkheim's sociology, it deformed it adequately to suit its pur-

poses.51Political theorists still held on to their favourite abstractions. As one behaviourist engagingly put it, man was "clay" in

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the hands of the elite. In his glorious moments, he was a voter. His normal existence was as a pliant, manipulable, affluent nonentity. Intellectually he has fallen so low that theorists could tell him, with a serious face, that democracy was a government in which one of the major objectives was to keep the participation of citizens down to the required level.52 His political role blended beautifully with other ones. He formed the lonely crowd. In his office, he was Picasso's portrait of Mr Kahweiler, his existence half buried under files. Abroad, he was the salaried crusader for capitalist freedom. At home, he put his "soul on ice". Behaviourism completes the degradation of the political animal. He is no longer the political animal in Aristotle's sense. He is no seeker after "good life." He is not an active agent trying to shape the outlines of society he lived in. Politics is no longer the activity of trying to remould the collective life of men. His whole existence is programmed by others. And he is advised by experts to accept this, for those who programme his life know things better than he possibly can. He is no critic, and therefore no radical. Even those whom he calls "political scientists" do not claim to know what goes on inside government; they have given up by calling it a "black box".53 This abdication, however, is a sign of great scientific advance, and is expected to be fittingly celebrated. Man has above all become a non-critic. In fact, he seems to have a positive genius for not asking questions. When he does ask them, they are largely trivial. He is content to be a dot on the computer tape, an item in the catalogue. The ideal behaviourist's behaviour is to be content to be so. Only this is "participation". Anything more is incendiarism against political order.

Marx's Alternative
It must be seen that this kind of behaviourism has a certain twisted intellectual virtuosity. It is deeply suspicious of man's critical faculty of questioning, and tries to channel it into trivialism. But it obviously requires talent of a kind to ward off questions all the time; to see to it that when questions are raised, they are pretested to be insignificant. It understands and works the formula that the best censoring is done when you put the censors inside the man himself. It has been so successful that an average political scientist becomes ashamed to raise the classical questions about property and power. Marx had seen an alternative to this disgraceful end. A revolution in knowledge occurs only when the definition of the field itself is transformed. In modern political theory such trans-

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55

formations happened with Machiavelli and only twice-first Hobbes's rationalist revolution and second with Marx. Unfortunately, Marx's own work has been subjected too often to an empiricist reading. Interpreters sometimes tended to emphasize only the overt analysis in Marx's economic texts, to the exclusion of other related, implied emphases in his work. Alternatively, other interpreters ascribed to Marx an abstract humanism-an attempt at the creation of "a total human science."54 Marx's contribution to the implicit epistemological principles of political theory has not been carefully analysed.55 It is necessary to do this, because of Marx's surprising way of transforming categories and altering the structure of specific fields of knowledge. Marx did not simply offer new unorthodox conclusions about social processes under capitalism. He suggested new ways of asking questions. This is perhaps the secret of the long-range effectiveness of his corrections. Occasionally, even though his exact conclusions are considered problematic, his epistemic formulations continue to instruct. Marx altered the definition of political action, and the political possibilities in a situation. In the orthodox political theory of stable capitalism, earlier critical tendencies were replaced by a strong legitimist consensus. Politics was synonymous with keeping order. In more primitive forms, this meant simply policing the economy, ensuring that no one "rocked the boat" in high state of capitalism, preserving a considerably more sophisticated unfreedom.56 Politics had come to mean a type of conservative (or, at best, reformist) social engineering. For Marx, it meant just the opposite: the conscious process of changing the structure of social relations.

Dual Critique Social Relations of

On the concept of man, Marx brought in a change that was both interesting and paradoxical. His early writings make it obvious that Marx too had started with an anthropological problematic current in German social philosophy.57 And every radical position implies a certain militant humanism. Ultimately, however, among the nineteenth century radicals, Marx was perhaps the most consistent in demolishing bourgeois humanist abstractions about man. In his early manuscrpits, Marx too had talked of communism as a society in which there will be complete realization of man as man.58 Further, evolution of Marx's analysis of class hierarchy in capitalism made the continued use of philosophical anthropology impossible.59 Increasingly, Marx worked towards a dual critique of

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both the actual structures of capitalist social relations and its structure of perceptions and ideology centred on the self-loving individual atom. "Society," says Adam Smith, "is a trading society. Each of its members is a merchant".60 Certainly, one could argue that capitalism forces men to structure all relations into analogues of market relations. It was however a somewhat different proposition to impute a trader's consciousness to all. Marx had diagnosed the problem this way in one of his early works. In Capital too he continued with it: a situation in which "a sale and purchase of labour power goes on is the very Eden of Liberty, Equality, Property and Bentham", for reasons that we have seen. His abysmal contempt for Bentham was due to Bentham's unimaginative advocacy of the fable of social equilibrium. The critique in Capital is directed precisely at the fallacies of unrestricted individualism and theories of automated self-induced social harmony. Curiously, some of Marx's critical observations brought out the amazing prescience of Hobbes's theory. Hobbes had refused to share in the Locke-Bentham-Liberal mythology of the comof interests. There are such subtle and unexpected links position between Hobbes and Marx as theorists of capitalist society. This hypothesis that if one helps us on to the rather unconventional analyses the logical paths that are implicit in Hobbesian theory, one of them would tend in Marx's direction. Similarly, young Marx's critique often has a lingering aftertaste of Rousseau, specially in those passages in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts dealing with industrial civilization and deformation of personality.61 "Liberty as a right of man is not founded upon the relations of man and man, but rather upon the separation of man from man."i2 Capitalism reduces men to empty, formal individual entities making them "revolve for ever inside their own skins." Marx's early critique had a lot of these continuities with the previous anti-bourgeois critique that had grown since Rousseau.

Class Analysis
Marx was eventually to revolutionize the manner of criticizing bourgeois society, arriving at a redefinition of what was meant by a critique.63 This is'a measure of the difference between his early and mature texts. The central iproblem was not new. It had remained with Marx. But in the later texts he did not always allow the category of abstract man the status of an answer. Marx still regarded capitalism as a system that frustrated and deformed human personality. An element of his earlier theory of subjectivity into his under capitalism--his theory of alienation-continued

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OF MAN

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mature work. But this process of deformation was grasped and mirrored through different concepts. As early as 1843 Marx wrote: "Man is not an abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man, the state and society. The point is not only that man is linked with the world and society, but--and this is to he is also constituted and created by this go much further-that world."64 Marx may have been still under the influence of an anthropological problem borrowed from Feuerbach, as Althusser has pointed out. But he was already carrying it beyond those terms. And since concepts have an effecitivity that is related to their original field of discourse, the concept was already strained. His way of taking the Feuerbachian analysis beyond its original terms had brought him to a point where the unity of the original abstract category was already cracking up. The logic of the answer Marx suggested in 1844 already implied a reconstitution of the problem. "The alien being can only be man himself."65 If the product of labour does not belong to the worker it belongs to some other men. "If the worker's activity is a torment to him, to another it must be his delight and his life's joy. Not the gods, not nature, but only man himself can be this alien power over man."66 At this point, the content of the argument a negation contains of the style. Marx is still using the same terms "man" for workers and entrepreneurs. In his own reasoning old anthropological abstractions are shown to be meaningless. Here the abstract category of man conceals really two contrasting types of men, constituted by social relations. What stands out is not what is common between them, but what is not. He had arrived at "class." As a result of this, the concept of "man" took on quite a different kind of effectiveness. Revolution became "a search for man", for the alternate possibilities of arranging his life. It became a search for the time when classes would not exist, when there would be no other adjectives to men. Marx, in this sense, reactivated a concern for humanity that was suppressed by the triumphal liberal deformation of early individualism. This also implied for Marx an activist orientation to history. It is a search, and not a waiting. Man in this sense has not been realized in the historical process. That is why he must be realized. The Marxist theory of history and its central concern for revolution would then appear in a different light. It does not represent a bloodthirsty urge for destruction along with what was best in classical bourgeois political theory; it is a project for humanizing the world. The revolution simply wants to give men the world they deserve.67 Marx was primarily a theorist of capitalist society. Refe-

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rences to communism are brief and sketchy. For they come in not
as descriptions of a social order, but as quick counterpoints to capitalist social ordering. But the communist society, in Marx's

view, will create conditions in which "the free development of each contributes to the free development of all"6--the obverse of bourgeois ideals of individuality. In Marx's later works, the accent on the technological paradise where one could fish in the morning and write poetry in the afternoon declines. It is replaced by a somewhat different accent on the reordering of relations among men. Now it resides in a vision of a society in which distribution would be really equitable: "from each according to his ability, to each
according to his needs." The definition of humanization is altered -not just the freedom from degrading forms of labour, but a truly harmonious society. There is also a crucial emphasis that this humanization can come precisely from the class which is the most dehumanized. Marx's theory brought back some of the motifs of classical bourgeois revolutionary ideology, though had turned its back on them.69 He views man bourgeois theory once more as a radical, a critic, a revolutionary. Marx gave the concern for man a radical and revolutionary direction. It was "humanism" that did not pray and wait or reform, but sought out structures of inequality and attacked them, because they were a violation of human beings. He knew revolutions were not pleasant events, but they were necessary. Revolutions would not occur automatically, but a believer in the dialectic should "never say never." Like everything he took from earlier bourgeois theory, he entirely transformed what humanism meant. As a young man Marx had written: "To be a radical is to go to the root of the matter. For man however the root is man

himself."70And he kept his word. (Concluded)

2

Hegel, Lectureson the History of Philosphy, Part III. Hobbes, Leviathan, Introduction. This does not mean that Hobb's directly borrowed it from Descartes. These are ; mostly instances of parallel discoveries. Hobbhs, incidentlly, knew Descartes, and they had rather a slovenly quarrel about the authorship of a minor scientific discovery. 4 Voltaire, a hundred years later, still had the same perference. 5 C B Macpherson, Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Oxford University Press, 1962. 6 Leviathan, Book I, "Of Man". 7 Ibid, Part I, Chapter 2. 8 Hobbes quoted in Alasdair Macintyre, A Short History of Ethics, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1967, p 132. 9 Leviathan, Part I, Chapter 13.

CONCEPT OF MAN IN POLITICAL THEORY 10 11

12

59

14

15

16

17

Marx once mentioned as his favourite the Cartesian motto "doubt everything". Macpherson, op cit, Chapter 5, section 2 (i) No doubt there are genetic links between Locke and later liberal democrats, but he is, strictly speaking, a "precondition" rather than a constituent. Though formally Locke undertook to refute Filmer, a major and critical part of his theory was a careful answer to Hobbes. See Peter Laslett, Two Treatises on Government, Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 1960, Introduction. For detailed argument see Macpherson, op cit. In fact Rousseau was the only coatractualist to render this explicit. See his "Discourse on the O:igin of Inequality", GDH Cole (ed), Social Contract and the Discourses, London, Everyman, 1963, pp 155, 161 and 162. Ernst Cassirer, The Qltestionof Jean Jacques Roussea'i, Indiana University Press, 1967. A major Marxist re-reading of Rousseau has occurred in the last two decades, particularly through the work of Della Volpe and Colletti. Galvano Della Volpe, Rousseau and lIarx, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1978; Lucio Colletti, From Rousseauto Lenin, London, New Left Book, 1972. Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality. -cial Contract,Book III, Chapter 15. i, Book I, Chapter 4. etti, op cit, p 164. pn, SelectedPhilosophical Works, p 98. queville, quoted in Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, Ne\w York, Mentor 964, p 44. rt Mill, Principles of Political Economy, Book IV, Chapter 7. Girardin, quoted in Hobsbawm, op cit, p 234. Engels, GermanIdeology, Chapter 1. tement and critique of this concept, Steven Lukes, "Methodological Reconsidered", British Journal of Sociology, 1968. atators were particularly severe on Hegel. Anything that they could y translate into the common sense of their social science was evidently efore the most impressive literature on misunderstanding Hegel was the English language. Only L T Hobhouse attempted what was a rgh singularly harsh, critique of political idealism. Hobhouse, The Theory of the State, London, Allen and Unwin, 1969. 5est accounts of individualism in utilitarian theory comes from J S Mill,
kcellent popularizer of ideas. Utilitarianism, Chapter I.

82

93

34

35

a8

B7 38

Opcit. was part of Bentham's school. For a detailed account of the relations etween utilitarians and the political economnists, Elie Halevy, Growthof Philosphic Radicalism, London, Faber and Faber, 1972. C B Macpherson Life and Times of Liberal Denmoracy,Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1978, Chapter 2. Hobhouse, op cit. Ernst Cassirer, T77e Myth of the State, Yale University Press, 1969, section on Hegel. An influential reading of Hegel's philosophy on these negative-transcendent lines is Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1941. An extension of this critic to modern high capitalism can be found in his One Dimensional Man, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964. To me this appears to represent more a left-Hegelian than a regular Marxian critique. I have used the terms employed by Maurice Godelier, Rationality and Irrationality in Economics, London, NLB, 1972. Marx, Capital, Vol I, Moscow, p 172. Utilitarianism, though ineffective as a political doctrine soon after Bentham, retained its effectiveness as a sub-culture of social thought. Alvin Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of WesternSociology, London, Heinemann, 1971.

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SOCIAL SCIENTIST Bsntham carried out a double critique of the two previou3 traditions in political theory-Burkean conservatism and the theory of natural rights-on the ground that these were "metaphysical", that is, undemonstrable by logical reasoning. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (1714). For an exposition of his challenge to orthodoxies in social theory, see Joan Robinson, Economic Philosophy, London, Watts, 1962. On the numerous logical difficulties of this idea, Otto Neurath, "The Principle of the Pleasure Maximum", Empiricism and Sociology, Dordrecht, D Reidel, 1973. Mill's modifications were introduced in his essay Utilitarianism. Mill, Principles of Political Economy (1848). Ibid, Book IV, Chapter 7. Marx, Grundrisse,Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1973, p 883. Ibid. Tawney sought to revive it through a powerful polemic against the strong drift of mainstream academic opinion, R H Tawney, Equality, London, Allen and Unwin, 1931. I do not intend to underestimate the practical significance of the institutions o? rule of law. It must be kept in mind that a large part of the institutions of tlb Unimaginative use of th of law was won by an insurgent proletariat. "bourgeois democracy" may tend to hide this important historical and truth. Not the poor or the unprivileged but "ordinary" in the sense of being in; Williamn Kornhauser, The Politics of MAz/ S%ciety,London, Routledge Paul, 1960. Kornhauser obligingly provides summaries at the end o9 which, by condensing his argument, bring out the vulgarity of the tbl Often, Weber and Djrkheim are criticized, rather unjustly, not for said but for what their behavioural admirers make of them. Webei were serious critics of Marx and were surely two of the greatest mir social thinking. For an interesting redtfiaition of dmnocracy on these lines, Alr: The Civic Culture,Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1963 A phr ase symbolic of the general cognitive pessimism of this trc David Easton, since extensively used by political scientists obliviou This was particularly evident in the work of the Praxis school of example, in the work of Gajo Petrovic, Svetojar Stoyanovic, aN others. There have been only two serious attempts to do this: Nicos Poulana Power and Social Classes, London, NLB, 1973; and Ralph Miliband, Capitalist Sgciety, London, Weiden61fiS and Nicolson, 1969. Since thlen, Poulan has added State, 'Power, Socialism, London, NLB, 1978. Mviliband has followed up with a more general treatment, Marxism and Politics, Ocford, OUP, 1977. Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, Chapter 2. Althusser, For Marx, London, Allen Lane, 1939, "On the Young Marx". Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Moscow. Althusser, op cit. For an opposite reading, Adam Schaff, MJrxism and the Human Individual, New York, McGraw Hill, 1970. Earn3t Fisher, Marx in [Hi OwnIWords, Harm-ndsworth, Penguin, 1973, p 47. Marx, E-onomic anl Philos,phic Manuscripts, particulary the sections on "Estranged Labour" and "The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society". Marx, Capital, Vol I, Moscow, p 172. Alfred Schmidt, "Karl Mirx, 1818-1958, Bad Godesberg, Internationes, 1968, "On the Concept of Knowledge in the Criticism of Political Economy". Marx, Contributionto Critiqueof Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Introduction. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, pp 74-75.

40

41

42

43
44

4a 46
47

49

49

>o

'

32

3
1

66

67

68
59
6)

61
B6

63
64

66

CONCEPT OF MAN IN POLITICAL THEORY

66 67

61

Ibid.

68 69

70

This point is made in lyrical exposition by the Arnerican poet Walter Lowenfels, The Revolution is to be Human, New York, International Publishers, 1972. Critiqueof the GothaProgramme. In this sense Engels's claim that the proletariat were the inheritors of German classical philosophy can be generalized about the revolutionary heritage of bourgeois culture as a whole. Contributionto a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Introduction.