Consciousness and Society

H. Stuart Hughes, Stanley Hoffman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351526500
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Hughes' ideas, and the way they are expressed in Consciousness and Society, have become paradigms of twentieth-century scholarship. In dealing with the changing social thought after 1890 in Europe, Hughes covers a wide array of thinkers and issues in a scholarly, yet graceful manner. His is a study of the "cluster of genius" of Europe at that time: Croce, Durkheim, Freud, Weber, and Nietzsche, as well as other great European minds. The book explores questions that are still relevant in today's society: Is the separation of facts and values tenable, or even desirable? Can rationality accommodate the ideas of a Bergson or a Freud? Is there, or should there be, a relationship between science and religion? And does history have any ultimate meaning for later generations?

Chapter
I
Some Preliminary Observations

THE PRESENT study is an essay in intellectual history. But to declare that one is writing intellectual history is really to say nothing until one has defined the term. History of this sort obviously deals with the thoughts and emotions of men—with reasoned argument and with passionate outburst alike. The whole range of human expression—as revealed in writing, speech, practice, and tradition—falls within its orbit. Indeed every declaration of mankind more explicit than a bestial cry may in some sense be considered the subject matter of intellectual history.

It might well be argued that this subject matter is not the deepest stuff of history. Below it (to use the workable but deceptively concrete metaphor of the "high" and "low" when dealing with the human psyche) lies the realm of unorganized sentiments and routine economic processes. Marx called this realm the "substratum." For Marx the important thing to know about it was the character of the regime of production that inexorably conditioned human life: for the great social thinkers of the next generation the crucial concern was the irrational, virtually unchanging nature of human sentiments—what Freud usually referred to as "drives" and what Pareto rather awkwardly termed "residues." However radically these thinkers differed from Marx, they at least agreed with him that what was "deepest" in human conduct for the most part fell into a pattern of mere repetition.

Or, to put the matter in moral terms, they agreed that the basic characteristic of human experience was the limited nature of its freedom. Men were masters of their fate, they argued, only for limited periods and in strictly limited segments of their activity. The eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century image of man as a self-consciously rational being freely selecting among properly weighed alternatives they dismissed as an antiquated illusion.

Some such conviction of the inevitable limitations on human freedom—whether by physical circumstance or through emotional conditioning-—has become the unstated major premise of contemporary social science. Sociologists and anthropologists, economists and psychologists are at one in confining within narrow limits the realm of conscious choice. And historians—who are customarily more squeamish about these matters—have been profoundly shaken by a line of argument that seemed to cut their very subject matter out from under them. This subject matter had always been res gestæ— the deeds of men. What was there to write of if these deeds were to be dismissed as simply the product of material and psychological conditioning? Were historians reduced to the necessity of becoming no more and no less than social scientists?

The dilemma is at least as old as the 1860's and will appear again in this study when we come to treat of the late nineteenth-century vogue of positivism. But the current strength and self-confidence of social science in the United States has presented it in a particularly acute form. Today an American historian may well suffer from an uneasy conscience when he chooses to write of the "higher" things—of ethical aspiration and the freely speculating mind.

Viewed from a slightly different angle, however, this state of affairs looks a good deal less unpromising. Historians have always written of the "higher" things—but without exactly knowing why. They have felt temperamentally drawn to the realms of the great deed and the lofty thought. And this bent has not been seriously altered by their new awareness of social science. However much historians may have learned from Marx and Freud to consider the more conscious aspects of human experience mere "rationalizations," or from Pareto to call them "derivations," they have stubbornly continued to write about them. An obscure sense of the fitness of things has kept them to the familiar definition of their calling.

A moment's reflection will suggest that the current insistence on the "basic" in human conduct, far from robbing the historian of his traditional function, has for the first time given him an adequate explanation of why he felt drawn toward a certain type of subject matter. This subject matter, we now realize, cannot possibly be the merely repetitive. For the essence of history is change—and change must be at least partially the result of conscious mental activity. Somewhere at some time someone must have decided to do something. "Vast impersonal forces" are simply abstractions—the sum of an infinite number of small but strictly personal decisions. In a statistical sense, the outcome of a large number of choices may be predictable, but in a metaphysical and ethical sense most of us are convinced that each individual choice is free. Our vocabulary and categories of thought imply this conviction.¹ Hence Croce was right—although not quite in the way he imagined— when he insisted that history was necessarily the "story of freedom."

The repetitive, the irrational, the quasi-instinctual may be the substratum of history—but it cannot be the subject matter of history itself. This can only be what is capable of coherent explanation in logically delimited time sequences. And in such an explanation deed and thought are inextricably entangled. Intellectual history means a way of treating this common material from the standpoint of the thought rather than of the deed.

The subject matter of intellectual history, then, is "rationalizations" of various levels of complexity. As such, it offers the trickiest sort of material with which historians are called on to deal. The pitfalls it presents are so numerous and so appalling as to prompt one to a veritable despair of reaching any adequate understanding or arriving at a comprehensible form of presentation.

Here, even more than elsewhere in historical scholarship, the student finds himself overwhelmed by the heterogeneity of his data. His materials are only in slight part measurable, nor, except to a very limited extent, are they comparable among each other. They are of all types and of all levels of intellectual sophistication: they extend all the way from the shoddiest journalism to the most abstruse scientific and philosophical investigations. Under these circumstances, the first and major temptation to be avoided is the urge to be encyclopedic. The perhaps laudable desire of the historian to "cover" his material adequately—to write some sort of "definitive" study—when applied to the field of ideas reveals itself as a dangerous illusion.

Whatever the situation may be in other branches of historical study, in intellectual history a work that purports to be definitive is an obvious absurdity: an encyclopedic investigation of the development of ideas—even in a limited area—would be an impossible assignment. A book of this sort would be obliged to shuttle constantly back and forth among incompatible levels of interpretation. Its author could not possibly have an expert knowledge of all the fields with which he was dealing: even the best-endowed historian possesses a satisfactory understanding of only a small number of subjects besides his own. The result of such an effort could scarcely fail to be unevenness and lack of focus—superficiality alternating with an overtechnical presentation of material. For the commonest error of the intellectual historian is to write about things that he does not really understand—things that he has not "internalized" and thought through again for himself. Yet without such a process, the historian can write no more than what Croce would call "chronicle"—material simply delimited, described, or catalogued—not true history as its best practitioners have always understood the term.

It is my hope that the present study avoids this first major pitfall. It is written in the conviction that only through rigorous selectivity and a sharp definition of the central problems to be investigated can the writing of intellectual history achieve artistic and logical integration.

A second set of dangers clusters around the question of the rationality of history. On the one hand there is the familiar temptation to see a clear design, to impose one's own neat pattern on the recalcitrant data. Of this danger most historians are well aware—perhaps even over-aware. They are so afraid of doing violence to the integrity of their materials that they shun any systematic presentation. Hence the invertebrate character of so much that passes for intellectual history. Yet surely to escape one trap does not mean that one must run blindly into another. An awareness of the fallacy of descrying an immanent reason in history does not imply that one must succumb to the converse fallacy of declaring its essential irrationality. If history obviously has no agreed-on rational pattern, the opposite is not necessarily true: even if one despairs of finding any manifest logic in history, one need not throw up one's hands and lament that all is chaos.

In any ultimate terms, the problem is insoluble. But on the pragmatic level, it can be solved rather easily. Whatever may be the nature of history "as it actually happened," statements about history can only be logical—otherwise they would be incomprehensible. Whatever may be the ultimate "reality" (and I defy anyone to tell me), one can communicate one's findings about history only in rational terms, i.e., in terms that are coherent and reproducible, although not necessarily rigorous. Again, to make rational statements implies setting up some sort of structure or laying out some design. Even if this be advanced as only the most tentative sort of hypothesis, it is still a coherent product of the human brain: it did not emerge by some spontaneous process of generation from the womb of history itself. The present study, then, rests on the assumption that in order to say something worthwhile about the history of ideas one must not be afraid to advance hypotheses and to proceed in a logically ordered fashion: I shall not shy away from doing what the social scientists would call "structuring" my material.

Finally, there is the old but still relevant matter of the "spirit of the times." Most of us think that such a spirit exists. Few go along with Goethe's skeptical characterization of the Geist der Zeiten as the historians' "own spirit in which the times are reflected."² But who is bold enough to say exactly what this spirit is? Who is confident that he knows how to locate it or to define it? The paradoxical truth is that the discovery of the spirit of the times is at once a technical near-impossibility and the intellectual historian's highest achievement.

By its very delimitation in time and subject matter, the present study implies the existence of some such spirit. The effort will be to locate—at least among a selected number of thinkers-—the common attitudes that together constitute the emerging critical consciousness of the early twentieth century.

And so we come to the delimitation of the study itself. First, I should like to state what sort of intellectual history I am writing; second, I want to explain why I selected a certain place, a certain time, certain ideas, and certain people for treatment; finally, I should like to say a few words about the form of the book and the personal viewpoints I have brought to it.

As customarily written, intellectual history deals with either a "higher" or a "lower" level of thought. The first refers to intellectually clear and significant statements— the second to popular effusions in the nature of slogans. The second is characteristically supposed to represent what has "seeped down" from the first level after a generation or two of "cultural lag": in this new setting ideas nearly invariably figure in vulgarized or distorted form. The present study falls in the "higher" category. A few further distinctions will suggest why this is the case.

In casting my mind over the literature of intellectual history, I have been struck by the fact that there seem to be three manageable ways in which this sort of study can be approached. (I am not considering works that treat the history of a particular aesthetic field or learned discipline—art, literature, philosophy, economics, and the like-—since these address themselves to a rather different set of problems and do not pose the central question of an integrating "spirit of the times.") The first is to deal with popular ideas and practices—with the whole vast realm of folklore and community sentiments. Historians interested in this sort of material proceed in much the same fashion in which anthropologists approach the study of ''primitive" culture. Hence the efforts of such historians have quite properly been labeled "retrospective cultural anthropology." Second, there is the kind of history that Croce called ethico-political—the study of the activities and aspirations of ruling minorities and of the rival minorities striving to supplant them.³ Finally there is the history of the enunciation and development of the ideas that eventually will inspire such governing elites. Proceeding on the assumption that only a small number of individuals are actually responsible for the establishment and maintenance of civilized values, history of this last type tries to determine the fund of ideas available at any particular time to men who have received a superior general education. Sometimes it is concerned with ideas that have already won acceptance—but in this case it shades off into the first category I have suggested. More commonly it deals with ideas that have still to win their way.

By now it is probably apparent that my own study falls into the final category. This, I am convinced, is the via regia of intellectual history. Not that the other types are not worth writing—far from it. But more closely examined they turn out to be something that is not quite the history of ideas. This consideration brings us back to the distinction between the "higher" and the "lower" levels. On the level of popular acceptance, ideas can scarcely be handled in intrinsic terms: they are not sufficiently explicit for that. Efforts on the part of historians to deal with them have all too frequently degenerated into a mechanical and boring catalogue of curious notions. Where they have been successfully (that is, meaningfully) handled, they have been integrated in a general structure of explanation covering all the interlocking practices of a given society. In short, they have become a constituent part of general social history. Perhaps that is what I really meant when I referred earlier to "retrospective cultural anthropology." This and conceptualized—not merely descriptive—social history amount very nearly to the same thing. Hence the first type of intellectual history that I identified may not have been intellectual history at all. As the only practicable way of writing the history of ideas on the "lower" level, it may simply be one possible approach to the historical study of society—an enormously important pursuit but not the one that concerns us at present.

The same may be said with slight modifications about the "ethico-political" type of intellectual history. It is not entirely clear whether this sort of study is on the "higher" or on the "lower" level. Certainly the notions entertained by the members of governing minorities frequently differ only slightly if at all from the beliefs and practices of their countrymen in less exalted stations. At other times the governing elite—or at least certain influential members of it—may be far "in advance" of the ideas of the majority. In any case, except in periods of unusual ideological integration, the stock of convictions held by individuals within the ruling minority varies markedly from one person to another. It is extremely difficult to assess with any accuracy what the dominant ideas at any given time actually are. The most reliable indicator is not what people say but what they do—and thus we are led directly back to the history of action rather than of thought.

This is an initial reason for doubting whether ethicopolitical history is exactly what we are after—its tendency to revert to the historian's traditional concentration on political activity. Furthermore, even where it has tried to remain on the level of ideas (in the sense of ethical aspirations), it has succeeded in doing so only at the price of a radical simplification. One or two "great" ideas have necessarily been singled out as organizing concepts. And these leading ideas more often than not on closer inspection have proved to be the historian's own. Croce himself, the godfather of ethicopolitical history, was, as we shall subsequently observe, by no means exempt from the charge of reading his own ideas back into the past.

We are left with the third type of intellectual history—the study of major ideas in their pristine form on the higher levels. I shall say something shortly about what kinds of ideas I think deserve this sort of treatment; for obviously only a small portion even of the more influential ones can be dealt with in a study of this length—if again we are to avoid the danger of cataloguing. Meantime a final word on the character of the present volume. In brief, it is an attempt to fill a recognized gap: it is an effort to respond to what one recent writer on intellectu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1. Some Preliminary Observations
• 2. The Decade of the 1890's: The Revolt against Positivism
• 3. The Critique of Marxism
• 4. The Recovery of the Unconscious
• 5. Georges Sorel's Search for Reality
• 6. Neo-Idealism in History
• 7. The Heirs of Machiavelli: Pareto, Mosca, Michels
• 8. Max Weber and the Transcending of Positivism and Idealism
• 9. The European Imagination and the First World War
• 10. The Decade of the 1920's: The Intellectuals at the Point of Cleavage
• BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
• INDEX