The Tragedy of European Civilization

Towards an Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century

Harry Redner

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351295703
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia del XX secolo

The tragedy of European civilization is a protracted historical event spanning the twentieth century and in many ways is ongoing. During this time some of the greatest modern thinkers were active, producing works that both reflected what was happening in history and contributed towards shaping it. This work is a critique of their ideas. Harry Redner establishes where and how they went wrong, in some cases with apocalyptic consequences for Europe and the world.

The great intellectuals of the age, at once philosophers, sociologists, political theorists, historians and much else besides, include Marx, Weber, Freud, Elias, Spengler, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Arendt, Nietzsche, and Foucault. All of them had a historical impact, even if only in molding academic disciplines and shaping of public opinion, as was the case with the philosophers Wittgenstein and Arendt.

This book explores the close links between anti-Semitism and cultural pessimism and the relation between psychology and sociology. Other themes range from the history and theory of the state, to the misconception of language and power. Suitable for students of sociology, philosophy, political theory, history, and cultural studies, this brilliant exploration of our civilization and its tragedies will also be of interest to intellectual general readers.

Part I

Masters of Social Science

Introduction to Part I

The tragedy of European civilization does not begin with the successful 1789 revolution, as reactionaries believe, but with the failed 1848 revolution. Hopes for liberal democratic regimes throughout Europe were dashed, and instead as a direct consequence of the failure there emerged two new militaristic states, Germany and, to a lesser extent, Italy. As well as that setback, authoritarian regimes were consolidated in Russia and Austria, and France embarked on a renewed imperial quest. Thus the stage was set for nationalist self-assertion, irredentist claims, colonial imperialism, and all the other misadventures that led directly to the First World War and indirectly to the Russian Revolution. Had the 1848 revolution succeeded, Europe would have had a very different future.

The unification of Germany might have proceeded on a democratic rather than a military basis, and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would have played a significant role. They would have founded a social democratic workers’ party many decades before it was actually established. The idea of a proletarian revolution might have lapsed half a century earlier than it did under the Revisionists. Marx did allow that revolution was not necessary in democratic America, where the workers’ demands could be achieved by peaceful means. Under such circumstances, the whole cast of the socialist movement in Europe would have been quite different. Even in Russia there might not have arisen a Bolshevik party dedicated to revolution. But, of course, none of this happened.

Instead, the conclusion that Marx drew from the failure of 1848 in his work The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte was that a proletarian revolution was inevitable since that was the only way that socialism could be established in the face of all the hostile forces in Europe. For him the June Days workers’ uprising in Paris was the augury of a future proletarian revolution that would eventually triumph throughout Europe. He became committed to revolution and took great pride in the Paris Commune of 1871 even though that was led by his anarchist enemies. He encouraged the revolutionary insurrectionists in Russia, but, of course, he did not live to see the outcome of their endeavors. What he might have made of Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks is impossible to say, but he would most probably have sided with the orthodox Marxists like Georgi Plekhanov against them.

Out of Marx’s own personal disappointment at the outcome of 1848 came his most brilliant literary tour de force, the book he wrote to get even with his enemies, above all with the detested Louis Bonaparte, the new president of France about to declare himself emperor. In it he presents politics as theater and history as drama. As in a play, the 1848 revolution in France unfolds in a number of acts following an unwritten script without an author. It models itself on earlier revolutions, re-enacting familiar scenes from the past. In particular it seeks to repeat the great revolution of 1789, but only succeeds in parodying it. Nevertheless, it has laid the groundwork for a revolution of the future, a socialist revolution, that would inevitably be successful. Thus Marx succeeds in conjuring up the romance of revolution, which would play such an extremely influential role from then on right down to our time when echoes of it can still be heard, though usually in the halls of academe.

The romance of revolution came into its own after the Russian Revolution at the end of the First World War. The authoritarian monarchies of the Romanovs, the Hohenzollerns, the Hapsburgs, and even the Ottomans in Constantinople collapsed and left open the opportunity for widespread insurrections and communist revolutions. These soon proceeded to take place all over Europe. World revolution seemed at hand.

The prospects for revolution seemed particularly good in Germany. And, in fact, Communist attempts at seizing power occurred first in Munich and then twice in Berlin, in 1919 when Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered, and again in 1923 when ordered by the Comintern for its own misjudged ends. None of them succeeded. They were easily crushed by the police and army commanded by the moderate socialist government under the presidency of Friedrich Ebert. From then on the socialists and the communists became deadly enemies. The socialists were soon to be called social fascists and regarded with greater hostility by the communists than the real fascists under Adolf Hitler. The Communist Party theoreticians, who had undoubtedly read their Eighteen Brumaire, saw Hitler as a latter-day Louis Bonaparte, a mere political adventurer, a “king of rags and patches,” as Marx had styled him. They even entertained the thought that by allowing him to come to power they were paving the way for their own later communist revolution. As Max Weber might have told them, they were digging their own graves.

Weber in his speech “Politics as Vocation,” delivered early in 1919 at the time of the revolutionary government of workers’ and soldiers’ soviets in Munich, which he called “a bloody carnival,” argued that every Left action brings its inevitable Right reaction. And so, indeed, it happened. First Hitler staged an attempted coup in Munich, which was put down, but then under Paul von Hindenburg the conservative nationalistic parties came to power and Germany drifted inexorably to the right, eventually to fall into the hands of the Nazis. While he was still alive, Weber worked assiduously to promote liberal democratic government in Germany and had some influence on the constitution of the Weimar Republic, ensuring presidential rule through direct election. It was a supreme irony of history—one that Weber would have appreciated but regretted—that this was precisely the means by which Hitler came to power, as I previously mentioned. Some of his friends have argued that had Weber been alive this would not have happened, but that is an unwarranted hypothetical rewriting of history.

Weber’s two speeches “Science as Vocation” and “Politics as Vocation” stand as an epitome of his whole sociological work, for in them he drew from the insights he had gained from his multifarious theoretical pursuits. The corpus of his works contains studies of economy, politics, law, religion, philosophy, aesthetics, ethics, and much else besides. He was the most comprehensive social thinker ever, perhaps the very last of the great European minds. It is a tragedy of the intellectual history of Europe of deepest consequence that his work was more or less lost in Germany so soon after his death and not recovered until very much later. As late as 1964, when the first major international conference on his work was held in Germany, the organizers had to call on foreigners, Talcott Parsons, Raymond Aron, and Herbert Marcuse, to present the keynote addresses, for nobody in Germany was fit to do so.

Weber is the equal of Marx as a master of social theory. For political reasons the two have been opposed to each other, as when Weber was derisively referred to on the left as “the bourgeois Marx.” But such crass comparisons are now well and truly past and passé. Now we are more inclined to consider what they had in common and how their work converged on certain central issues in history and society. One of these is the relation between revolution and the state. Each of them has grasped that successful revolutionary attempts to bring down the state only succeed in building it up again much bigger, stronger, and more domineering than before. Thus the French Revolution brought down the absolutist monarchy only to give rise to the Napoleonic state of bureaucratic administration. An analogous thing happened after the 1848 revolution under Louis Bonaparte. Marx believed that a future socialist revolution, though initially necessitating a dictatorship of the proletariat, would eventually lead to the withering away of the state. Weber strongly disagreed, for he saw socialism and the expropriation of the means of production as simply the further expansion of the state power. He was amply vindicated by the Russian Revolution and the totalitarian state that the Bolsheviks erected in place of Czarist autocracy.

In political matters Weber is far more realistic than Marx, who was misled by the romance of revolution and by the prophetic role he had assumed in relation to it. Weber, who had no such illusions, is more responsible in his judgments, though he, too, like most others, slipped up and allowed his patriotic ardor to overwhelm him at the start of the war. He followed an ethic of responsibility, whereas Marx was more apt to subscribe to an ethic of absolute ends. This is a distinction that Weber outlines in “Politics as a Vocation” that goes to the very heart of the relationship between politics and ethics. It enables Weber to avoid both the Machiavellianism of the amoral pursuit of power as an end in itself and the Kantianism of the categorical imperative according to which the ends can never justify the means. In politics evil means must sometimes be used for good ends, provided one is morally strong enough to take responsibility and answer for the consequences.

For Weber, personal responsibility was always uppermost in any course of action. Hence the ethical dimension could never be avoided or elided. But ethics cannot be prescribed by any higher authority or derived by reason from scientific truths or from any natural law. Ethics is based on fundamental values, which, ultimately, issue from basic life choices or commitments, which are inherent in cultures and civilizations and are not just a matter of individual preferences. Such fundamental values are often in contradiction to and conflict with one another. Weber conveyed this metaphorically as a struggle of gods and demons, as in ancient polytheism. Such a struggle can have a tragic outcome that might implicate not just individuals but whole societies and even civilizations. Hence tragedy can never be eliminated from human affairs. It is, therefore, inherent in history. The tragedy of European civilization is but an instance on the highest level and greatest import of this ineradicable aspect of human life.

Sigmund Freud, too, placed great importance on the ethical dimension of life. Like Marx, he was a moralist intent on relieving the sufferings of humanity, but by therapeutic rather than political means. He devised what he called “the talking cure,” by means of which as he put it, crippling neuroses could be transformed into ordinary unhappiness. He believed this to be a matter of science, but Weber and many other methodologists since have had their doubts about that. But whether or not psychoanalysis is a science, the further question remains whether it has any application beyond the individual to the social realm. In other words, is it a social science?

Freud obviously believed that it was and that it also could be applied to society, for on that assumption he wrote a number of social and historical studies. According to his disciple and biographer, Ernest Jones, two considerations drove him in that direction:

I would correlate the remarkable and unexpected change in the mode of Freud’s working with two considerations. [Firstly], he felt he had contributed all in his power to strictly scientific knowledge, and after completing that mighty task … was at last free, and need no longer restrain the flight of his personal thoughts. Then, secondly, he had come closer than ever to the dread phenomenon of death. There was the massacre of the terrible war in which he had feared, and even expected, his dearly loved sons to be killed and been doubtful if he himself would survive its privations.¹

Freud adverts to the first of these considerations, and more or less admits that these works are not “strictly scientific” in a letter to Lou Salome that he wrote on completion of Civilization and its Discontents:

I have written the last sentence which … finishes the work. It deals with civilization, consciousness of guilt, happiness and similar lofty matters, and it strikes me, without doubt rightly so, as very superfluous, in contradistinction to earlier works, in which there was always a creative impulse. But what should I do? I can’t spend the whole day in smoking and playing cards.²

Even allowing for the mock modesty, it is clear that Freud did not treat his social works with the same seriousness as those he considered his scientific works.

However, the second consideration that Jones gave for Freud’s turning in the social science direction was much graver and weightier. The ghastly war, the defeat of Austro-Hungary, the dismemberment of the empire, the social disruption of revolution, the social disintegration of class conflict and the demagogues stirring up the crowds—all this was extremely troubling and uncomfortable for the conservative in Freud. Immediately after the cessation of hostilities he wrote Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego. The first deals directly with the death and carnage precipitated by the war, which seemed to overwhelm all the restraints of civilization. As is well known, he availed himself, without proper acknowledgment, of Wilhelm Stekel’s idea of Thanatos, a term Freud himself never employed.³ According to this, there is an inherent death instinct for destruction and self-destruction in all human beings. This is a very dubious idea since rejected by nearly all leading psychologists, even such as are otherwise most favorably disposed to Freud. Only Elias Cannetti in his Crowds and Power has maintained a version of it.⁴ Basically, the idea involves confusion between the lack of any inherent inhibition among humans to killing their own kind, especially strangers, and the active impulsion or drive to kill others to obtain satisfaction, for which there is no evidence except among sadists and psychopaths.

The other dubious scientific premise that makes Freud’s social scientific theories flawed is that, in common with Carl Jung, he was a Lamarckian who believed that archaic psychic events could be passed on down the generations and be inherited as unconscious patterns by individuals very many generations later. This led him to develop his extremely implausible hypothesis of the primal horde and the murder of the original father as an explanation for law and culture in human societies. He did not resile from this view in his later writings, and it makes many of their basic assumptions dubious.

Norbert Elias was a far more scientifically responsible and rational sociologist, even though in other respects he takes off from Freud. He sought for a synthesis of Freud together with Marx and Weber in order to develop a general theory of civilization. In the period of the 1930s when he wrote, this was an ambition also shared by others in Frankfurt, where he worked, above all by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno of the so-called Frankfurt school. Their endeavor resulted in the renowned Dialectics of Enlightenment, written during the war when they were in exile in Los Angeles. What they produced was very different from what Elias had set down some years earlier also in exile in London. The main difference was that they were less sociologists than philosophers with a strong Hegelian bent toward dialecti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Part I: Masters of Social Science
• Part II: Untergangsters of History and Philosophy
• Part III: Critics of Culture, Society, and Science
• Epilogue
• Index