SUJETS DANGEREUX

Hannah Arendt. (1906-1975). Philosopher, self-described as a political theorist. Like Adorno, she was an original thinker. I have great respect for controversial original thinkers, kindred spirits. Although I do not concur with her thinking on totalitarianism, I admire her courage in using this rather unpopular (unless used as a blatantly thoughtless propaganda slogan) word, and in tackling this subject at all, in raising the issue of the banality of evil, in her explosive approach to the role of certain Jewish leaders in the Holocaust, and in other unconventional things, such as comparing Thomas Jefferson’s townships to the Russian Soviets. (Delightful!)

I am however staying away from the details. Here is another primarily informative entry ad maiorem reader edification. May the readers be encouraged to dig up these details on their own. In this sense, this entry is definitely worth posting, even though it is short on my original comment.

Despite her objections, she is often described as a political philosopher, but she always refused this label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with “man in the singular.” She described herself instead as a political theorist, because her work centers on the fact that “men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.” She was born in Linden, Germany, in 1906, the only child of secular Jews. During her childhood, she moved first to Königsberg, and later to Berlin. In 1923, she began her studies in classics and Christian theology at the University of Berlin, and in 1924 she entered the University of Marburg, where she studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger, with whom she started a long, stormy romantic relationship, which was criticized because of Heidegger’s membership in the Nazi party, her first, but by no means last controversy. In the wake of one of their breakups, Arendt moved to Heidelberg, where she wrote her dissertation on the concept of love in the thought of St. Augustine, under the supervision of Karl Jaspers, Heidegger’s friend. She remained close to Jaspers throughout her life, although the influence of Heidegger’s phenomenology was to prove of greater influence on her work.

In 1929, she met the young Jewish philosopher Günther Stern (Anders), with whom she was romantically involved, and later married. In the same year, her dissertation (Liebesbegriff bei Augustin) was published, but she was prevented from habilitating, because she was Jewish. She worked for a while researching anti-Semitism before being interrogated by the Gestapo, and then fled Germany for Paris. There she met her first husband’s cousin, the literary critic and Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin. While in France, she worked to support and aid Jewish refugees. In 1936 she met with Heinrich Blücher, a Marxist philosopher and poet, divorced Stern, and in 1940 married Blücher.

In 1941 she escaped the Nazis again, fleeing with her husband and mother to the United States. Living in New York, she served as research director of the Conference on Jewish Relations, executive director of the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc., wrote a column for the German-language Jewish newspaper Aufbau, and was editor of Schocken Books. She published What is Existenz-Philosophy in 1946, and worked, since 1944, on her first major political book The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951. In it, she related totalitarianism, wrongly, in my judgment, to 19^th century anti-Semitism and imperialism as an outcome of the disintegration of the traditional nation-state. Needless to say, my own analysis of totalitarianism, being the centerpiece of the Collective section, paints a very different picture, and my disagreement with her, on this subject, could not be greater. However, I applaud her for raising this issue in a serious and thoughtful manner, a far cry from the politicized and manipulative treatment of totalitarianism by the likes of certain American scholars, mentioned in my discussions of totalitarianism in the Collective section.

After World War II, she returned to Germany, and worked for Youth Aliyah. Later, she resumed relations with Heidegger, and pluckily testified on his behalf in a German denazification hearing. She developed a deep intellectual friendship with Jaspers and his wife, and began a correspondence with Mary McCarthy.

She became a US citizen in 1950, and started a sequence of visiting fellowships and professorial positions at American universities, serving as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, Princeton, Columbia, and Northwestern University. She also worked at the University of Chicago, at the New School in New York, as a fellow at Yale and Wesleyan University. In 1959 she became the first woman appointed to a full professorship at Princeton.

In 1958, came The Human Condition and Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess. In 1959, Reflections on Little Rock, her controversial reflection of the emergent Black civil rights movement was published. 1961 was the year of Between Past and Future, and her travel to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann for the New Yorker, which resulted in the publication in 1963 of her most controversial work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (see below). In that year she also published On Revolution. In 1968, came Men in Dark Times; in 1970, On Violence; in 1971, Thinking and Moral Considerations; and in 1972, Crises of the Republic. In 1970 she gave a seminar on Kant’s philosophy of judgment at the New School (published posthumously, as Reflections on Kant’s Political Philosophy). In the next few years she started her work on the projected three-volume work The Life of the Mind. She died before its completion, in 1975, at the age of 69.

Hannah Arendt is an admittedly challenging figure for anyone wishing to understand the body of her work in political philosophy. She never wrote anything that would represent a systematic political philosophy, a philosophy, in which a single central argument is expounded and expanded upon in a sequence of works. Rather, her writings cover many diverse topics, such as totalitarianism, revolution, nature of freedom, the faculties of thinking, willing and judging, the history of political thought, etc. A thinker of heterodox and complicated argumentation, she drew inspiration from Heidegger, Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Nietzsche, Jaspers, and others. The question, with which her thought engages, perhaps, above all others, is that of the nature of politics and political life, as distinct from other domains of human activity. Her work, if it can be said to do anything, can be said to undertake a phenomenological reconstruction of the nature of political existence, with all that this entails in way of thinking and acting.

Her work deals with the nature of power, and the subjects of politics, authority, and totalitarianism. Much of it focuses on affirming a concept of freedom synonymous with collective political action among equals. She theorizes freedom as public and associative, drawing on examples from the Greek “polis,” the American townships, the Paris Commune, and the civil rights movements of the 1960’s, to illustrate it. Another key concept is natality, the capacity to bring something new into the world such as creating a government that endures. Arguably, her most influential work, The Human Condition (1958) distinguishes between labor, work, and action, and explores the implications of these distinctions. Her theory of political action is most developed there. Her first major book, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), traced the roots of Stalinist Communism and Nazism in both anti-Semitism and imperialism. The book became controversial, because it suggested an essential identity between the two phenomena, which others have believed to be separate in both origins and nature.

In her report of the Eichmann trial, evolving into the book Eichmann in Jerusalem, she coined the phrase “the banality of evil,” to describe Eichmann. She raised the question of whether evil is radical, or simply a function of banality, the tendency of ordinary people to obey orders and conform to mass opinion, without critically thinking about the results of their actions or inactions. Arendt was extremely critical of the way that Israel conducted the trial. She was also critical of the way that many Jewish leaders acted during the Holocaust, which caused an enormous controversy and resulted in a great animosity directed at her within the Jewish circles. (The book was translated into Hebrew only recently, many decades after being written.) Nevertheless, she ended the book by endorsing the execution of Eichmann, writing: “Just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people, and the people of several other nations as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world, --- we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.”

Arendt published another book in the same year that was controversial in its own right: On Revolution, a study of the two most famous revolutions of the 18th century. Arendt went against the grain of traditional Marxist and leftist thought by contending that the American Revolution was a successful revolution, while the French Revolution was not. The argument echoed that of Edmund Burke, but she also argued that the revolutionary spirit had not been preserved in America, because the majority of people had no role to play in politics, other than voting. She admired Thomas Jefferson’s idea of dividing the counties into townships, similar to the soviets, which rose during the Russian Revolution. Her interest in council system, which she saw as the only alternative to the state, continued all her life.

Her posthumous book, The Life of the Mind, remained incomplete. In her study of thinking, she focuses on Socrates, and his concept of thinking as a solitary dialogue between me and myself. This appropriation of Socrates leads her to introduce novel concepts of conscience (giving no positive prescriptions, but warning what I cannot do, if I would remain friends with myself when I re-enter the two-in-one of thought, where I must render an account of my actions to myself) and morality (a totally negative enterprise concerned with non-participation in certain actions in order to remain friends with myself). Willing adopts St. Augustine’s notion of the will, talks of  the will as a totally free mental faculty that makes new beginnings possible. In her third volume, she was planning to engage the faculty of judgment by appropriating Kant’s Critique of Judgment, but did not live to write it. However, she left manuscripts (Thinking and Moral Considerations, Some Questions on Moral Philosophy), and lectures (On Kant’s Political Philosophy), revealing her basic thoughts on this mental faculty.

I will revisit Arendt’s controversial thinking in much greater depth and detail in the next stage of work on this project. It is, however, worth taking note of some of the most prominent other criticisms which have been leveled against Arendt’s work.

Primary among these is her reliance upon a rigid distinction between the private and public, the oikos and the polis, to delimit the specificity of the political realm. Feminists have complained that the confinement of the political to the realm outside the household has been part and parcel of the domination of politics by men and the corresponding exclusion of women’s subjection from legitimate politics. Marxists point to the consequence of confining matters of material distribution and economic management to the extra-political realm of the oikos, thereby keeping issues of material social justice, poverty and exploitation from political discussion and contestation. The shortcoming of this distinction in Arendt’s work is amply illustrated by a well-known and often-cited incident. While attending a conference in 1972, she was put under question by Albrecht Wellmer, Critical Theorist of the Frankfurt School, regarding her distinction of the political and the social, and its consequences. Arendt famously replied that housing and homelessness (which were the key themes of the conference) were not political issues at all, but that they were external to the political, as the sphere of the actualization of freedom; the political is about human self-disclosure in speech and deed, not about the distribution of goods, which belongs to the social realm as an extension of the oikos. It can be said that her attachment to a fundamental and originary understanding of political life precisely misses the fact that politics is inherently concerned with the contestation of what counts as legitimate public concerns with the practice of politics attempting to introduce new, heretofore non-political issues, into the realm of legitimate political concern.

Arendt has also come under criticism for her overly enthusiastic endorsement of the Athenian polis, as an exemplar of political freedom, to the detriment of modern political regimes and institutions. Likewise, the emphasis she places upon direct citizen deliberation as synonymous with the exercise of political freedom excludes representative models, and might be seen as unworkable in the context of modern mass societies, with delegation, specialization, expertise, and wide-ranging division of labor necessary, to deal with their complexities. Her elevation of politics to the apex of human good and goals has also been under criticism, demoting as it does all other modes of human action and self-realization to a subordinate status. There are also many criticisms leveled at her unorthodox readings of other thinkers and at her attempts to synthesize conflicting philosophical viewpoints in an effort to develop her own position (for example, her endeavor to mediate Aristotle’s account of practical judgment (phronesis) with Kant’s transcendental-formal model).

With regard to the greatest controversy over her banality of evil concept, she was legitimately and bravely willing to contest the prevalent depictions of the Nazi's inexplicable atrocities as having emanated from a malevolent will to do evil, a delight in murder. As far as she could discern, Eichmann came to his willing involvement with the program of genocide through a failure, or absence, of the faculties of sound thinking and judgment. Far from exhibiting a malevolent hatred of the Jews, which might have accounted for his participation in the Holocaust, Eichmann was an utterly innocuous individual, who operated unthinkingly, following orders, and carrying them out with no consideration of their effects upon those he targeted. This connection between the complicity with evil and failure of thinking and judgment inspired her last phase of work, seeking to explicate the nature of these faculties, and their role in our political and moral choices.

All these and other criticisms notwithstanding, Arendt remains one of the most original, challenging, and influential political thinkers of the twentieth century, and her work will continue to provide inspiration for the political philosophers of the twenty-first.

THE CULTURE INDUSTRY

Theodor W. Adorno has left an impressive legacy of written work in a broad range of subject matter, from musicology and literary criticism to philosophy, political science and sociology. All his works are original and interesting, but in this entry I have chosen his by far most important socio-political concept, that of The Culture Industry.

This entry utilizes certain excerpts from Adorno’s essays collected under the term he coined, together with Max Horkheimer, that of The Culture Industry. It is a representative sample of his interesting, even if fairly uncomplicated, discourse. As usual, quotes are in blue font. My comments here are in regular font.

My special biographical entry on Adorno (Adorno The Underrated) precedes this one immediately.

The sociological theory that the loss of the support of objectively established religion, the dissolution of the last remnants of pre-capitalism together with technological and social differentiation or specialization, have led to cultural chaos is disproved every day for culture now impresses the same stamp on everything. Films, radio, and the magazines make up a system that is uniform as a whole and in every part. Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are as one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system. The decorative industrial management buildings and exhibition centers in authoritarian countries are much the same as anywhere else; the huge gleaming towers, shooting up everywhere, are the outward signs of the ingenious planning of international concerns, toward which the unleashed entrepreneurial system (whose monuments are a mass of gloomy houses and business premises in grimy, spiritless cities) had already been hastening. Even now the older houses just outside the concrete city centers look much like slums, and the new bungalows on the outskirts are akin to the flimsy structures of world fairs, in their praise of technical progress and their built-in demand to be discarded after a short while, like empty food cans.

Adorno’s main thrust is understandable, and in his depiction of the culture industry as an element and the guiding force of mass culture, there is little for me to argue with. Even if the mass culture of architectural design and the urban and suburban planning has changed in appearance since his time, and the “gloomy houses and business centers in grimy spiritless cities” have given way to a more “cheerful” look, in most upscale neighborhoods, the slums all still look alike as slums, and the projects for the well-to-do have never lost their cookie-cutter touch, and are arguably (as argued by me) no less, and maybe even more, aesthetically challenged than the projects for the poor, and the ones described by him.

But his contention becomes far less persuasive when he claims the universality of all modern culture. I see an exception in Soviet Russia, where the celebrated Russian Intelligentsia never succumbed to the push of the culture industry, and where variety of design and its high aesthetic content had remained a priority, to offset the tedium of mass production.

Take Moscow subway, for instance. Built as a mass transit system, yet each station has been different from the others, all of them aesthetically splendid works of art. Even the notorious Stalin skyscrapers in Moscow have been unfairly criticized by those who may not even have seen them in real life, nor at close range. I’ve seen them all, and I’ve been inside all of them. Fairly small in number, they used to enliven the city skyline adding diversity to the cityscape. Having lived in New York, I never failed to admire the massive structures of Manhattan, beautiful in their own right, even if occasionally monotonous. Both Moscow and New York are cities of great spirit, and what is the best in them is totally unaffected by the blight of mass culture, as Adorno sees it.

But of course, Moscow was not to be spared the ugliness of its own boxes, crates, and food cans. Known as Khrushchoby, or Khrushchev’s slums, these despicable clones of each other, built in a hurry, to relieve the shortages of housing, these days they are mostly gone (having served without fail for half a century, that is, three times their expected “shelf life”), having been demolished with great difficulty, because of the sturdiness of their construction, to give way to the patently tasteless and even more despicable chic of the Yeltsin era (which fortunately began crumbling even before its builders could spend the money they received for it, due to poor engineering and outright thievery), as if to spite me with the reminder that the obnoxious mass culture, as described and denounced by Adorno, spreads like hellfire, when allowed, sparing not even the mightiest fortresses of aestheticism and good taste.

But the city housing projects, designed to perpetuate the individual as a supposedly independent unit in a small hygienic dwelling make him yet more submissive to his adversary, the absolute power of capitalism. Because the inhabitants, as producers, and as consumers, are drawn into the center in search of work and pleasure, all living units crystallize into well-organized complexes. The striking unity of microcosm and macrocosm presents men with a model of their culture: the false identity of the general and the particular.

In a sense, what Adorno is saying is that it is, perhaps, better for an individual to dwell in a communal flat, but with a spirit of its own than to become a homeowner dwelling in a single-family unit with no identity of its own whatsoever. Aesthetically and spiritually, I would agree with him, if he is willing to go that far, for, what is the value of privacy, which has no individuality?

Under monopoly, all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework will begin to show through. The people at the top are no longer so interested in concealing monopoly: as its violence becomes more open, so its power grows. Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce. They call themselves industries; and when their directors’ incomes are published, any doubt about the social utility of the finished products is removed.

From architecture and housing to all cultural forms which ‘no longer pretend to be art.’ However I disagree with Adorno here, because the real situation is much worse than he describes. The trash has never dropped its pretense to be art, but, on the contrary, it is passing itself as the art of the new era, to the dismissive and denigrating ridicule of the greatest treasures of human civilization.

Interested parties explain the culture industry in technological terms. It is alleged that just because millions participate in it, certain reproduction processes are necessary, which inevitably require identical needs in innumerable places to be satisfied with identical goods. The technical contrast between the few production centers and the large number of widely dispersed consumption points is said to demand organization and planning by the management. Furthermore, it is claimed that the standards were based, in the first place, on the consumers’ needs, and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance. The result is the circle of manipulation and retroactive need, in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger. No mention made of the fact that the basis, on which technology acquires power over society, is the power of those, whose economic hold over society is the greatest. A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself.

Consumerism is, indeed, a form of slavery, and not just the voluntary kind of enslavement, exhibited in all sorts of addictions and obsessions, but real slavery, based on sheer compulsion and oppression. Adorno is, therefore, right on, when he uses the word coercion in the last sentence above.

Automobiles, bombs, and movies keep the whole thing together, until their leveling element displays its strength in the very wrong, which it furthered. It has made the technology of the culture industry no more than the achievement of standardization and mass production, sacrificing whatever involved a distinction between the logic of the work and that of the social system.

Yet again, Adorno lashes at the loss of individuality as a result of the advancement of the culture industry. Those precious trophies of privacy and freedom, won by an advanced democratic society, are immediately forfeited through standardization and mass production, with the end result even worse than before social emancipation: at least then, people had the freedom of thought when they had no other; but having gained those missing ones and then having tied them all up in one large bundle, the loss has been astounding and total, to the dismay of those few of us who have been capable of realizing what exactly has been lost.

…From everything said above, it must be clear by now, why Adorno has become a special case for me, worthy of dedicating at least a couple of full-size entries to. I have a special weakness for all independent thinkers, interdisciplinary Renaissance men, and controversial figures, who engender controversy not like so many of these cheap shock jocks have learned to do it today, but solely by virtue of their independent-mindedness, so letting the chips fall where they may. As promised, my next person of note in this series is also an independent thinker and a figure of great controversy. Her name is Hannah Arendt.

ADORNO THE UNDERRATED

There is way too much information floating around these days, and most of it is trash. The unfortunate thing is that trash occupies the space in the reader’s attention which should otherwise belong to better pursuits. For this reason, I believe that it is a worthwhile cause, besides expressing my personal views on this or that subject, to draw my reader’s attention to this or that semi-forgotten, or totally forgotten, individual of note: Look, here’s such and such person deserving your attention. You may not agree with him or her, but at least do not ignore them on account of your ignorance of them.

It is only natural that most of the entries in my book are focused on my personal views of different things, but there are some whose primary purpose is to introduce the reader to some very estimable names, which, for some reason, have not become widely known, yet widely known they deserve to be. My desire to make the reader aware of their existence does not make such entries less personal than the other kind, of course, as the fact itself of my choosing to do so is not an objective quest to fill in some missing blanks, but a very subjective decision on my part.

The next couple of entries are therefore more generally informative than personally contemplative, which is indeed their proper function. The first covers the biography and the second, the major written work of one man very likely completely unknown to the reader, yet whose life and legacy are most certainly noteworthy in several respects. If these two entries succeed in eliciting in my reader an interest in this person, then their purpose has been achieved.

Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund, alias Theodor W. Adorno, was surely one of the more important, yet somehow almost deliberately underrated thinkers of the post-World War II era. Oddly enough, although not too surprisingly, he used to be better known in Russia (where I first became acquainted with his works) and across Continental Europe than in the English-speaking world, where, regrettably, no decent translations of his works were made in my time, and even with the appearance of better English translations quite recently, a stigma of inconsequentiality is still leaving its mark on his memory, as if the ignominy of his disregard in the past has been taken as an objective historical judgment of his legacy.

The reason why I find such disregard of him (particularly, in the United States) not surprising, is that, along with being a Marxist, albeit quite unconventional by, say, official Soviet standards, he was a relentless and uncompromising critic of contemporary Western society. (See my entry The Culture Industry, that follows, where Adorno’s views are treated in more detail.) It is always easy and the least instructive to criticize what one is expected to criticize: the outcasts and rejects, the proverbial bogeymen and other demons; but there is nothing more instructive and helpful to keep things in perspective than to criticize the  idol one has erected and worshiped religiously, to the detriment of religion proper.

Aside from being a prodigious philosopher across a broad spectrum of philosophical and social issues (his challenge to Karl Popper’s philosophy of science and to Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of existence, plus his highly original contribution to epistemology and ethics among other things, are exceptionally valuable), Adorno was also famous (at least in Russia and Germany, and in a few other places, if those first two have not been enough already) as an aestheticist and a remarkable music critic, not in that absurd caricature mold that I discussed in the earlier entry Skeptics and Critics, but in the very best sense of the word critic, which was also discussed there and can be further evidenced in his meta-musicological title: Philosophie der neuen Musik (1949).

In fact, all these very different intellectual pursuits of his, coupled with great thoroughness and depth of his scholarship, point to the closest approximation to our imaginary Renaissance Man, that we can find in the post-World War II world. The great scope and originality of his influence undoubtedly stem from the interdisciplinary character of his thinking; and the kind of erudite fastidiousness, with which he studied the nuances of post-Kantian Western philosophical traditions, is only possible when the scholar possesses a truly comprehensive grasp on his subject matter, thus adding a special intensity to his critique.

The following two biographical paragraphs are taken from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for my reader’s reference. There is no point for me to try to find an elegant way of retelling Adorno’s life story, so, let it be this way, since it is pretty obvious that without some minimal mentioning of his basic facts of life I just cannot do.

Born on September 11, 1903, as Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund, Adorno lived in his hometown Frankfurt-am-Main for the first three decades of his life (1903-1934), and the last two (1949-1969). He was the only son of a wealthy German wine merchant father of an assimilated Jewish background and an accomplished musician mother of Corsican Catholic descent. He studied philosophy with Hans Cornelius, a neo-Kantian philosopher, and music composition with Alban Berg. He wrote his Doctorate on Kierkegaard’s aesthetics in 1931, under the supervision of the Christian socialist Paul Tillich. After two years as a Privatdozent, he was expelled by the Nazis, and in the spring of 1934 he left Germany altogether. During the Hitler regime he resided in Oxford, New York City, and southern California. There he wrote several books, for which he later became famous, including Dialektik der Aufklärung (with Max Horkheimer), Philosophie der neuen Musik, The Authoritarian Personality (a collaborative project) and Minima Moralia. Also from these years come his devastating critiques of mass culture, and the culture industry. Returning to Frankfurt in 1949, to take a position in the philosophy department, Adorno established himself as a leading German intellectual and a key figure in the Institute of Social Research. Founded in 1923, as a center for Marxist scholarship, the Institute had been led by Max Horkheimer, since 1930. It provided the hub to what became known as the Frankfurt School. Adorno became the Institute’s director in 1958. From the 1950’s come In Search of Wagner; Prisms, a collection of social and cultural studies; Against Epistemology, an anti-foundationalist critique of Husserlian phenomenology, and the first volume of Notes to Literature, a collection of essays in literary criticism.

Conflict and consolidation mark the last decade of Adorno’s life. A key figure in the positivism dispute in German sociology, he was a key player in debates about restructuring German universities and a lightning rod for both student activists and their right-wing critics. These never-ending controversies did not prevent him though from publishing numerous books of music criticism, two more volumes of Notes to Literature, works on Hegel, and on existential philosophy, and collected essays in sociology, and aesthetics. Negative Dialectics, Adorno’s magnum opus on epistemology and metaphysics, appeared in 1966. Aesthetic Theory was the other magnum opus, on which he had worked throughout the 1960’s. It appeared posthumously in 1970. He died of a heart attack on August 6, 1969, one month shy of his sixty-sixth birthday.

My next entry will focus on Adorno’s greatest contribution to modern political thought: his concept of “The Culture Industry.”

NEO-MARXIAN IDEALISM OF HERBERT MARCUSE

Marcuse the Marxist was, of course, not an “idealist” in the traditional philosophical sense of the word, and neither was Marx. But the word “idealism” goes well together with Marxism, first, as an ironic combination of seemingly conflicting terms, and secondly, as a perfectly legitimate combination, considering another meaning of the word “idealism,” as a patently idealistic quest after the ideal, and, in this sense, both Marx and Marcuse were indeed idealists. (Also see my Marxian entries throughout this blog on the subject of Karl Marx’s peculiar brand of philosophical idealism which has received the rather ambiguous label of “dialectical materialism.”)

Herbert Marcuse was born in 1898 in Berlin and died in 1979 in West Germany. Having received a PhD in philosophy in 1922, from the University of Freiburg, he became a co-founder of the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung. Being Jewish, and astute enough, in 1933, just as Hitler was coming to power, he left Germany for Switzerland, but he did not stay there, moving to the United States in 1934, where he started teaching at Columbia University, and became an American citizen in 1940. During World War II, he worked as a U.S. Army intelligence analyst, returning to teaching in 1951 at Columbia, Harvard, Brandeis, and at UC San Diego, going back to Germany after his retirement in 1976.

Marcuse exhibits a lot in common with Adorno (see my next two entries), which connection I may further explore at some later date. He believed that Western society was unfree and repressive, that its technology was buying the complacency of the masses with material goods and kept them intellectually and spiritually captive. To be fair, he was not too kind to the Soviet Union either, as he was a sworn enemy of any kind of “frozen” establishment. He was not, however, an anarchist, which raises the legitimate question: who was he? Perhaps he was a better critic of the existing forms of establishment than a developer of a better alternative to them. “Es ist eine alte Geschichte, doch bleibt sie immer neu…”

A Closing Thought.

Regarding the “unfreedom” of Western society, I think that all critics of Western democracy have a legitimate  point, but are pushing it too far. According to Spinoza, and his philosophical authority is quite formidable, there is no such thing as freedom, and those who think they are free have no understanding of how unfree they are. Even our freedom of choice is not exactly free. In my practical definition, political freedom means letting a citizen be – as an independent thinker, perhaps, without encouragement of free thought, but at least without coercion to toe the line. In this respect, American society is free, to which I can testify from personal experience.

The downside of Western freedom is its insistence on a prefabricated list of multiple choices. You can be either this, or that, or even far-out that. But you can’t be politically incorrect, which means that you are not to stray away  from what is comme il faut in the range of acceptable diversity of opinions.

Still, I repeat, it is possible for an honest person to survive the onslaught of inconveniences involved in the pursuit of personal independence, provided we are bright enough not to expect any social benefits from it and do not mind being occasionally kicked below the belt.

THE EVOLUTION OF TOTALITARIANISM AS A TERM

Reducing and virtually equating the totalitarian principle to a number of regimes of the past, produces the wrong impression that it is an outdated phenomenon. Nothing is farther from the truth. Totalitarianism is a powerful nationalistic trend in all societies, and a very natural trend at that, and the failure to realize its importance, and to educate the public about its essence, is a great disservice to the public as well as to social scholarship as such.

The following supplementary summary is a reference item for those readers who are interested in the historical nuts and bolts of this subject. There is little value in arguing against or agreeing with the individual scholars mentioned in this entry, in the form of special line-by-line comments on my part, as my views on all these matters are already adequately expressed throughout this section. However, my closing comment at the end of this entry may be of interest to the students of totalitarianism, and I strongly advise my readers who may consider skipping the teal-fonted material not to miss it altogether.

“The term totalitarismo, employed in the writings of the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, was popularized by the Italian fascists under Mussolini. The original meaning of totalitarianism, as described in La dottrina del fascismo (1932), was a society, in which the ideology of the state had influence, if not power, over most of its citizens. Thanks to the modern technologies, like radio and the printing press, which the state could, and probably would use to spread its ideology, most modern nations would naturally become totalitarian in the above-stated sense.

“While originally referring to an “all-embracing, total state,” the label has been applied to a wide variety of regimes and orders of rule in a critical sense. Karl Popper in his Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), and in The Poverty of Historicism (1961), developed an influential critique of totalitarianism: He contrasted the ‘open society’ of liberal democracy with totalitarianism, and argued that the latter is grounded in the belief that history moves toward an immutable future, in accordance with knowable laws. During the Cold War, the term gained renewed currency, especially following the publication of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1957). She argued that Nazi and Stalinist regimes were totally new forms of government, not merely some updated versions of the old tyrannies. The source of the mass appeal (sic!!!) of totalitarian regimes, according to Arendt, was their ideology, providing a comforting, single answer to the mysteries of the past, present, and future. For Nazism, all history is the history of racial struggle, while for Marxism all history is history of class struggle. Once that premise was accepted by the public, all actions of the regime could be justified by an appeal to the Law of History or Nature.

“During the Cold War, the political scientists Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski were responsible for expanding the usage of the term in university social science and professional research, reformulating it as a paradigm for the Soviet Union under Stalin, as well as for the “fascist” regimes. In their view, the defining elements of totalitarianism included an elaborate guiding ideology; a single mass party, led by a dictator; a system of terror; a monopoly of the means of communication and physical force; and centralized direction and control of the economy through state planning. Such regimes had their initial origins in the chaos in the wake of the World War I, at which point the higher sophistication of modern weapons and communications enabled totalitarian movements to consolidate power in Italy, Germany, and Russia.

“Eric Hoffer in The True Believer argues that mass movements like Communism, Fascism, and Nazism had a common trait in picturing Western democracies and their values as decadent, with the people too soft, too pleasure-loving and too selfish to sacrifice for a higher cause, which, for them, implies an inner moral and biological decay. He claims that all these movements had offered the prospect of a glorious, yet imaginary, future to a frustrated people, letting them find a refuge from the lack of personal accomplishments in their individual existence. Individual is then assimilated into a compact collective body, and “fact-proof screens from reality” are established.

“In the social sciences, the approach of Friedrich and Brzezinski came under criticism from scholars who argued that the Soviet system, both as a political and a social entity, was in fact better understood in terms of interest groups, competing elites, or even in class terms (using the concept of nomenklatura as a vehicle for a new ruling class). These critics pointed to evidence of popular support for the regime and widespread dispersion of power, at least in the implementation of policy, among sectoral and regional authorities. For some followers of this pluralist approach, this was evidence of the ability of the regime to adapt to include new demands. However, the proponents of the totalitarian model claimed that the failure of the system to survive showed not only its inability to adapt, but the mere formality of supposed popular participation. Its proponents do not agree on when the Soviet Union ceased to be describable as totalitarian.

“The notion of post-totalitarianism was put forward by Juan Linz. (See my entry Post-Totalitarianism As A Fake Concept, posted on July 21^st, 2012.) For some commentators, such as Linz and Alfred Stepan, the USSR entered a new phase after the abandonment of mass terror, after Stalin’s death. Discussions of “post-totalitarianism” featured prominently in debates about the reformability and durability of the Soviet system in comparative politics.

“As the Soviet system disintegrated, opponents of the concept claimed that the transformation of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, and its subsequent sudden collapse, demonstrated that the totalitarian model had little explanatory value for researchers. Several decades earlier, in 1957, for example, Bertram Wolfe had claimed that the Soviet Union faced no challenge or change possible from the society at large. He called it a “solid and durable political system dominating a society that has been totally fragmented or atomized,” one which will remain “barring an explosion from within, or battering down from without.” Many of the classic theories of totalitarianism ruled out the possibility of such change, yet subsequent theorists acknowledged the possibility and in fact encouraged and welcomed it. Any suggestions of the indefinite stability of states labeled “totalitarian” among proponents of the term were largely discredited when the Soviet Union fell by the wayside.

“While totalitarianism as a political term fell into disuse during the 1970’s among many Soviet specialists, other commentators found the typology not only useful for the purposes of classification but for guiding the official policy. In her 1979 essay Dictatorships and Double Standards, Dr. Jeane Kirkpatrick argued that a number of important foreign policy implications could be drawn by distinguishing “totalitarian” regimes from autocracies in general. According to Kirkpatrick, typical autocracies are primarily interested in their own survival, and as such allow varying degrees of autonomy regarding elements of civil society, religious institutions, court, and the press. On the other hand, under totalitarianism, no individual or institution can be autonomous from the state’s all-encompassing ideology. Therefore US policy must distinguish between the two, and even grant temporary support to non-totalitarian autocratic governments, in order to combat totalitarian movements, and promote U.S. interests. Kirkpatrick’s influence, particularly, as foreign policy adviser and the United Nations ambassador, was essential to the formation of the Reagan administration’s foreign policy, and her ideas came to be known as the Kirkpatrick Doctrine.”

Summarizing all of the above, we can see yet again how a dubious application of the totalitarian principle is treated as a principle and then dismissed, on the grounds that it does not meet a fixed set of standards which in themselves have been based on a cluster of compounded fallacies and misperceptions.

As for the Kirkpatrick Doctrine, it reminds me of the current neoconservative idiocy just as ludicrous, if not quite as dangerous, as the new one. It seems like each time the academic standards hit a new low, there is a still deeper ditch to descend into. (See also the previous entry in this section [Iran, Iraq, And Jeane Kirkpatrick, posted on July 20, 2012 – sic!] and the “Kirkpatrick paragraph” in the entry which precedes it. [Totalitarianism In Western Tidbits – Part II, posted on July 19, 2012.])

In so far as the details of my criticism of these doctrines is concerned, they are being discussed in numerous previous entries, and elsewhere. But the theoretical bottom line is twofold: one cannot substitute the principle by an application, and one cannot, and must not, dismiss the soundness of a principle on the grounds of the unsoundness of an application or – even worse – of something which is mistaken for a representation of the real thing.