11. Alienation, unity, and the dialectic

11.1 Origins of the dialectic: creatology

11.2 Hegel and the man-God

11.3 Hegel and politics

11.4 Hegel and the Romantic Age

11.5 Marx and Left revolutionary Hegelianism

11.6 Marx as Utopian

11.7 Notes

11.1 Origins of the dialectic: creatology

‘Alienation’, to Marx, bears no relation to the fashionable prattle of late twentieth century Marxoid intellectuals. It did not mean a psychological feeling, of anxiety or estrangement, which could somehow be blamed on capitalism, or on cultural or sexual ‘repression’. Alienation, for Marx, was far more fundamental, more cosmic. It meant, at the very least, as we have seen, the institutions of money, specialization, and the division of labour.¹ The eradication of these evils was necessary to unite the collective organism or species man ‘to himself, to heal these splits within ‘himself and between man and ‘himself in the form of man-created nature. But the radical evil of alienation was yet far more cosmic than that. It was metaphysical, a deep part of the philosophy and the world-view that Marx picked up from Hegel, and which, through its allied ‘dialectic’, brought to Marx the outlines of the engine that would inevitably bring us communism as a law of history, with the ineluctability of a law of nature.

It all started with the third century philosopher Plotinus, a Platonist philosopher and his followers, and with a theological discipline seemingly remote from political and economic affairs: creatology, the 'science’ of the First Days. We have already seen, in fact, that another allied and almost equally remote branch of theology – eschatology, or the science of the Last Days – can have enormous political and economic consequences and ramifications.

The critical question of creatology is: why did God create the universe? The answer of orthodox Augustinian Christianity, and hence the answer of Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists alike, is that God, a perfect being, created the universe out of benevolence and love for His creatures. Period. And this seems to be the only politically safe answer as well. The answer given by heretics and mystics from early Christians on, however, is quite different: God created the universe not out of perfection and love, but out of felt need and imperfection. In short, God created the universe out of felt uneasiness, loneliness, or whatever. In the beginning, before the creation of the universe, God and man (the collective organic species, of course, not any particular individual), were united in one, so to speak, cosmic blob. How we can even speak of ‘unity’ between man and God before man was even created is a conundrum that will have to be cleared up by someone more schooled in the divine mysteries than the present author. At any rate, history then becomes a process, indeed a pre-ordained process, by which God develops His potential, and man the collective species develops its (or his?) potential. But even as this development takes place, and both God and man develop and render themselves more perfect in and through history, offsetting this ‘good’ development a terrible and tragic thing has also taken place: man has been separated, cut off, ‘alienated’ from God, as well as from other men, or from nature. Hence the pervasive concept of alienation. Alienation is cosmic, irremediable, and metaphysical, inherent in the very process of creation, or rather, irremediable until the great day inevitably arrives: when man and God, having both fully developed themselves, finish the process and history itself by re-merging, by uniting once again in the merger of these two great cosmic blobs into one.

Note, first, how this great historical process comes about. It is the inevitable, pre-ordained ‘dialectical’ process of history. There are, as usual, three stages. Stage one is the original phase: man and God are in happy and harmonious unity (a unity of pre-creation?) but things, particularly with the human race, are rather undeveloped. Then, the magic dialectic does its work, stage two occurs, and God creates man and the universe, both God and man developing their potentials, with history a record and a process of such development. But creation, as in most dialectics, proves to be a two-edged sword, for man suffers from his cosmic separation and alienation from God. For Plotinus, for example, the Good is unity, or The One, whereas Evil is identified as any sort of diversity or multiplicity. In mankind, evil stems from self-centredness of individual souls, ‘deserter[s] from the All’.

But then, finally, at long last, the development process will be completed, and stage two develops its own Aufhebung, its own ‘lifting up’, its own transcendence into its opposite or negation: the reunion of God and man into a glorious unity, an ‘ecstasy of union’, and end to alienation. In this stage three, the blobs are reunited on a far higher level than in stage one. History is over. And they shall all live(?) happily ever after.

But note the enormous difference between this dialectic of creatology and eschatology, and that of the orthodox Christian scenario. In the first place, the alienation, the tragedy of man in the dialectical saga from Plotinus to Hegel, is metaphysical, inescapable from the act of creation itself. Whereas the estrangement of man from God in the Judeo-Christian saga is not metaphysical but only moral. To orthodox Christians, creation was purely good, and not deeply tainted with evil; trouble came only with Adam's Fall, a moral failure not a metaphysical one.² Then, in the orthodox Christian view, through the Incarnation of Jesus, God provided a route by which this alienation could be eliminated, and the individual could achieve salvation. But note again: Christianity is a deeply individualistic creed, since each individual's salvation is what matters. Salvation or the lack of it will be attained by each individual, each individual's fate is the central concern, not the fate of the alleged collective blob or organism, man with a capital M. In the orthodox Christian schema, each individual goes to Heaven or Hell.

But in this allegedly optimistic mystical view (nowadays called ‘process theology’), the only salvation, the only happy ending is that of the collective organism, the species, with each individual member of that organism being brusquely annihilated along the way.

This dialectical theology, in particular its creatology, began in full flower with the Plotinus-influenced ninth century Christian mystic John Scotus Erigena (c. 815 – c. 877) an Irish-Scottish philosopher located in France, and continued through a heretical underground of Christian mystics, in particular such as the fourteenth century German, Meister Johannes Eckhart (71260 -71327). The pantheistic outlook of the mystics was similar to the call of the Buddhist-theosophist-socialist Mrs Annie Besant: as Chesterton perceptively and wittily noted, not to love our neighbour but to be our neighbour. Pantheist mystics call upon each individual to ‘unite’ with God, the One, by annihilating his individual, separated, and therefore alienated self. While the means of various mystics may differ from the Joachites, or the Brethren of the Free Spirit, whether through a process of history or through an inevitable Armageddon, the goal remains the same: obliteration of the individual through ‘reunion’ with God, the One, and the ending of cosmic ‘alienation’, at least on the level of each individual.

Particularly influential for G.W.F. Hegel and other thinkers in this tradition was the early seventeenth century German cobbler and mystic Jacob Boehme (1575–1624), who added to this heady pantheistic brew the alleged mechanism, the force that drives this dialectic through its inevitable course in history. How, Boehme asked, did the world of pre-creation transcend itself into creation? Before creation, he answered, there was a primal source, an eternal unity, an undifferentiated, indistinct, literal Nothing (Ungrund). (It was, by the way, typical of Hegel and his Idealist followers to think that they add grandeur and explanation to a lofty but unintelligible concept by capitalizing it.) Oddly enough, to Boehme, this No-thing possessed within itself an inner striving, a nisus, a drive for self-realization. It is this drive which creates a transcending and opposing force, the will, which creates the universe, transforming the Nothing into Something.

11.2 Hegel and the man-God

The key step in secularizing dialectic theology, and thus in paving the way for Marxism, was taken by the lion of German philosophy, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). Born in Stuttgart, Hegel studied theology at the University of Tubingen, and then taught theology and philosophy at the Universities of Jena and Heidelberg before becoming the leading philosopher at the new jewel in the Prussian academic crown, the University of Berlin. Coming to Berlin in 1817, Hegel remained there until his death, ending his days as rector of the university.

In the spirit of the Romantic movement in Germany, Hegel pursued the goal of unifying man and God by virtually identifying God as man, and thereby submerging the former into the latter. Goethe had recently popularized the Faust theme, centring on Faust's intense desire for divine, or absolute knowledge, as well as divine power. In orthodox Christianity, of course, the overweening pride of man in trying to achieve god-like knowledge and power is precisely the root cause of sin and man's Fall. But, on the contrary, Hegel, a most heretical Lutheran indeed, had the temerity to generalize the Faustian urge into a world-philosophy, and into an alleged insight into the inevitable workings of the historical process.

In Professor Tucker's words, Hegelianism was a ‘philosophic religion of self in the form of a theory of history. The religion is founded on an identification of the self with God’ ³ It should not be necessary to add at this point that ‘the self here is not the individual, but the collective organic species 'self. In a youthful essay on ‘The Positivity of the Christian Religion’, written at the age of 25, Hegel revealingly objects to Christianity for 'separating’ man and God except ‘in one isolated individual’ (Jesus), and placing God in another and higher world, to which man's activity could contribute nothing. Four years later, in 1799, Hegel resolved this problem by offering his own religion, in his ‘The Spirit of Christianity’. In contrast to orthodox Christianity, in which God became man in Jesus, for Hegel Jesus's achievement was, as a man, to become God! Tucker sums this up neatly. To Hegel, Jesus:

is not God become man, but man become God. This is the key idea on which the entire edifice of Hegelianism was to be constructed: there is no absolute difference between the human nature and the divine. They are not two separate things with an impassable gulf between them. The absolute self in man, the homo noumenon, is not mere godlike..., it is God. Consequently, in so far as man strives to become ‘like God’, he is simply striving to be his own real self. And in deifying himself, he is simply recognizing his own true nature.⁴

If man is really God, what then is history? Why does man, or rather, do men, change and develop? Because the man-God is not perfect, or at least he does not begin in a perfect state. Man-God begins his life in history totally unconscious of his divine status. History, then, for Hegel, is a process by which the man-God increases his knowledge, until he finally reaches the state of absolute knowledge, that is, the full knowledge and realization that he is God. In that case, man-God finally realizes his potential of an infinite being without bounds, possessed of absolute knowledge.

Why then did man-God, also termed by Hegel the ‘world-self (Weltgeisf) or ‘world-spirit’, create the universe? Not, as in the Christian account, from overflowing love and benevolence, but out of a felt need to become conscious of itself as a world-self. This process of growing consciousness is achieved through creative activity by which the world-self externalized itself. This externalization occurs first by creating nature or the original world, but second – and here of course is a significant addition to other theologies — there is a continuing self-externalization through human history. The most important is this second process, for by this means man, the collective organism, expands his building of civilization, his creative externalizing, and hence his increasing knowledge of his own divinity, and therefore of the world as his own self-actualization. This latter process: of knowing ever more fully that the world is really man's self, is the process which Hegel terms the gradual putting to an end of man's 'self-alienation’, which of course for him was also the alienation of man from God. To Hegel, in short, man perceives the world as hostile because it is not himself, because it is alien. All these conflicts are resolved when he realizes at long last that the world really is himself. This process of realization is Hegel's Aufhebung, by which the world becomes de-alienated and assimilated to man's self.

But why, one might ask, is Hegel's man so odd, so neurotic, that he regards every thing that is not himself as alien and hostile? The answer is crucial to the Hegelian mystique. It is because Hegel, or Hegel's man, cannot stand the idea of himself not being God, and therefore not being of infinite space and without limits. Seeing any other being, or any other object, exist, would mean that he himself is not infinite or divine. In short, Hegel's philosophy is severe and cosmic solipsistic megalomania on a grand and massive scale. Professor Tucker develops the case with characteristic acuity:

For Hegel alienation is finitude, and finitude in turn is bondage. The experience of self-estrangement in the presence of an apparent objective world is an experience of enslavement... Spirit [or the world-self], when confronted with an object or ‘other’, is ipso facto aware of itself as merely finite being, as embracing only so much and no more of reality, as extending only so far and no farther. The object is, therefore, a ‘limit’. (Grenze.) And a limit, since it contradicts spirit's notion of itself as absolute being, i.e., being-without-limit, is necessarily apprehended as a ‘barrier’ or ‘fetter’. (Schranke.) It is a barrier to spirit's awareness of itself as that which it conceives itself truly to be – the whole of reality. In its confrontation with an apparent object, spirit feels imprisoned in limitation. It experiences what Hegel calls the 'sorrow of finitude’.

The transcendence of the object through knowing is spirit's way of rebelling against finitude and making the break for freedom. In Hegel's quite unique conception of it, freedom means the consciousness of self as unbounded: it is the absence of a limiting object or non-self... This consciousness of ‘being alone with self... is precisely what Hegel means by the consciousness of freedom... Accordingly, the growth of spirit's self-knowledge in history is alternatively describable as a progress of the consciousness of freedom.⁵

11.3 Hegel and politics

Typically, determinist schema leave convenient implicit escape-hatches for their creators and advocates, who are somehow able to rise above the iron determinism that afflicts the rest of us. Hegel was no different, except that his escape-hatches were all too explicit. While God and the absolute refer to man as collective organism rather than to its puny and negligible individual members, every once in a while great individuals arise, ‘world-historical’ men, who are able to embody attributes of the absolute more than others, and act as significant agents in the next big historical Aufhebung – the next great thrust into the man-God or world-soul's advance in its 'self-knowledge’. Thus, during a time when most patriotic Prussians were reacting violently against Napoleon's imperial conquests, and mobilizing their forces against him, Hegel reacted very differently. Hegel wrote to a friend in ecstasy about having personally seen Napoleon riding down the city street: ‘The Emperor – this world-soul – riding on horseback through the city to the review of his troops – it is indeed a wonderful feeling to see such a man.’⁶

Hegel was enthusiastic about Napoleon because of his world-historical function of bringing the strong state to Germany and the rest of Europe. Just as Hegel's fundamental eschatology and dialectic prefigured Marxism, so did his more directly political philosophy of history. Thus, following the Romantic writer Friedrich Schiller, Hegel, in an essay in 1795, claimed that the equivalent of early or primitive communism was ancient Greece. Schiller and Hegel lauded Greece for the alleged homogeneity, unity and ‘harmony’ of its polis, which both authors gravely misconceived as being free of all division of labour. The consequent Aufhebung disrupted this wonderful unity and fragmented man, but – the good side of the new historical stage – it did lead to the growth of commerce, living standards, and individualism. For Hegel, moreover, the coming stage, heralded by Hegel's philosophy, would bring about a reintegration of man and the state.

Before 1796, Hegel, like many other young intellectuals throughout Europe, was enchanted by the French Revolution, individualism, radical democracy, liberty and the rights of man. Soon, however, again like many European intellectuals, Hegel, disillusioned in the French Revolution, turned toward reactionary state absolutism. In particular, Hegel was greatly influenced by the Scottish statist, Sir James Steuart, a Jacobite exile in Germany for a large part of his life, whose Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy (1767) had been greatly influenced by the ultra-statist German eighteenth century mercantilists, the cameralists. Hegel read the German translation of Steuart's Principles (which had been published from 1769–72), from 1797 to 1799, and took extensive notes. Hegel was influenced in particular by two aspects of Steuart's outlook. One held that history proceeded in stages, deterministically ‘evolving’ from one stage (nomadic, agricultural, exchange, etc.) to the next. The other influential theme was that massive state intervention and control were necessary to maintain an exchange economy.⁷ It comes as no surprise that Hegel's main disillusion in the French Revolution came from its individualism and lack of unity under the state. Again foreshadowing Marx, it became particularly important for man (the collective organism) to surmount unconscious blind fate, and ‘consciously’ to take control of ‘his’ fate via the state. And so Hegel was a great admirer not only of Napoleon the mighty world-conqueror, but also Napoleon the detailed regulator of the French economy.

Hegel made quite evident that what the new, developing strong state really needed was a comprehensive philosophy, contributed by a Great Philosopher to give its mighty rule coherence and legitimacy. Otherwise, as Professor Plant explains, 'such a state, devoid of philosophical comprehension, would appear as a merely arbitrary and oppressive imposition of the freedom of individuals to pursue their own interest’.

We need make only one guess as to what that philosophy, or who that Great Philosopher, was supposed to be. And then, armed with Hegelian philosophy and Hegel himself as its fountainhead and great leader, ‘this alien aspect of the progressive modern state would disappear and would be seen not as an imposition but a development of self-consciousness. By regulating and codifying many aspects of social practice, it gives to the modern world a rationality and a predictability which it would not otherwise possess...’.⁸

Armed with such a philosophy and with such a philosopher, the modern state would take its divinely appointed stand at the height of history and civilization, as God on earth. Thus: ‘The modern State, proving the reality of political community, when comprehended philosophically, could therefore be seen as the highest articulation of Spirit, or God in the contemporary world’. The state, then, is ‘a supreme manifestation of the activity of God in the world’, and, ‘the State stands above all; it is Spirit which knows itself as the universal essence and reality’; and, ‘The State is the reality of the kingdom of heaven’. And finally: ‘The State is God's Will.’⁹

Of the various forms of state, monarchy is best, since it permits ‘all’ subjects to be ‘free’ (in the Hegelian sense) by submerging their being into the divine substance, which is the authoritarian, monarchical state. The people are only ‘free’ when they are insignificant particles of this unitary divine substance. As Tucker writes, ‘Hegel's conception of freedom is totalitarian in a literal sense of the word. The world-self must experience itself as the totality of being, or in Hegel's own words must elevate itself to “a self-comprehending totality", in order to achieve the consciousness of freedom. Anything short of this spells alienation and the sorrow of finitude’.¹⁰

According to Hegel, the final development of the man-God, the final break-through into totality and infinity, was at hand. The most highly developed state in the history of the world was now in place – the existing Prussian monarchy under King Friedrich Wilhelm III.

It so happened that Hegel's apotheosis of the existing Prussian monarchy neatly coincided with the needs of that monarch. When King Friedrich Wilhelm III established the new University of Berlin in 1818 to assist in supporting, and propagandizing for, his absolute power, what better person for the chair of philosophy than Friedrich Hegel the divinizer of state power? The king and his absolutist party needed an official philosopher to defend the state from the hated revolutionary ideals of the French Revolution, and to justify his purge of the reformers and classical liberals who had helped him defeat Napoleon. As Karl Popper puts it:

Hegel was appointed to meet this demand, and he did so by reviving the ideas of the first great enemies of the open society [especially Heraclitus and Plato]... Hegel rediscovered the Platonic Ideas which lie behind the perennial revolt against freedom and reason. Hegelianism is the renaissance of tribalism... [Hegel] is the ‘missing link’, as it were, between Plato and the modern forms of totalitarianism. Most of the modern totalitarians,... know of their indebtedness to Hegel, and all of them have been brought up in the close atmosphere of Hegelianism. They have been taught to worship the state, history, and the nation.¹¹

On Hegel's worship of the state, Popper cites chilling and revealing passages:

The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth... We must therefore worship the State as the manifestation of the Divine on earth... The State is the march of God through the world... The State must be comprehended as an organism... To the complete State belongs, essentially, consciousness and thought. The State knows what it wills... The State... exists for its own sake... The State is the actually existing, realized moral life.¹²

All this rant is well characterized by Popper as ‘bombastic and hysterical Platonism’.

Much of this was inspired by Hegel's friends and immediate philosophical predecessors, men like the later Fichte, Schelling, Schlegel, Schiller, Herder and Schleiermacher. But it was Hegel's particular task to turn his murky doctrines to the job of weaving apologetics for the absolute power of the extant Prussian state. Thus Hegel's admiring disciple, F.J.C. Schwegler, revealed the following in his History of Philosophy:

The fullness of his [Hegel's] fame and activity, however, properly dates only from his call to Berlin in 1818. Here there rose up around him a numerous, widely extended, and... exceedingly active school; here too, he acquired, from his connections with the Prussian bureaucracy, political recognition of his system as the official philosophy; not always to the advantage of the inner freedom of his philosophy, or of its moral worth.¹³

With Prussia as the central focus, Hegelianism was able to sweep German philosophy during the nineteenth century, dominating in all but the Catholic areas of southern Germany and Austria. As Popper put it, ‘having thus become a tremendous success on the continent, Hegelianism could hardly fail to obtain support in Britain from those who [felt] that such a powerful movement must after all have something to offer...’ Indeed, the man who first introduced Hegel to English readers, Dr J. Hutchinson Stirling, admiringly remarked, the year after Prussia's lightning victory over Austria, ‘Is it not indeed to Hegel, and especially his philosophy of ethics and politics, that Prussia owes that mighty life and organization she is now rapidly developing?’¹⁴ Finally Hegel's contemporary and acquaintance, Arthur Schopenhauer, denounced the state-philosophy alliance that drove Hegelianism into becoming a powerful force in social thought:

Philosophy is misused, from the side of the state as a tool, from the other side as a means of gain... Who can really believe that truth also will thereby come to light, just as a byproduct?... Governments made of philosophy a means of serving their state interests, and scholars made of it a trade...(Italics Schopenhauer's)¹⁵

In addition to the political influence, Popper offers a complementary explanation for the otherwise puzzling widespread influence of G.W.F. Hegel: the attraction of philosophers to high-sounding jargon and gibberish almost for its own sake, followed by the gullibility of a credulous public. Thus Popper cites a statement by the English Hegelian Stirling: ‘The philosophy of Hegel, then, was... a scrutiny of thought so profound that it was for the most part unintelligible’. Profound for its very unintelligibility! Lack of clarity as virtue and proof of profundity! Popper adds:

philosophers have kept around themselves, even in our day, something of the atmosphere of the magician. Philosophy is considered a strange and abstruse kind of thing, dealing with those things with which religion deals, but not in a way which can be ‘revealed unto babes’ or to common people; it is considered to be too profound for that, and to be the religion and the theology of the intellectuals, of the learned and wise. Hegelianism fits these views admirably; it is exactly what this popular superstition supposes philosophy to be.¹⁶

11.4 Hegel and the Romantic Age

G.W.F. Hegel, unfortunately, was not a bizarre aberrant force in European thought. He was only one, if the most influential and the most convoluted and hypertrophic, of what must be considered the dominant paradigm of his age, the celebrated Age of Romanticism. In different variants and in different ways, the Romantic writers of the first half of the nineteenth century, especially in Germany and Great Britain, poets and novelists as well as philosophers, were dominated by a similar creatology and eschatology. It might be termed the ‘alienation and return’ or ‘reabsorption’ myth. God created the universe out of imperfection and felt need, thereby tragically cutting man, the organic species, off from his (its?) pre-creation unity with God. While this transcendence, this Aufhebung, of creation has permitted God and man, or God-man, to develop their (its?) faculties and to progress, tragic alienation will continue, until that day, inevitable and determined, in which God and man will be fused into one cosmic blob. Or, rather, being pantheists as was Hegel, until man discovers that he is man-God, and the alienation of man from man, man from nature, and man from God will be ended as all is fused into one big blob, the discovery of the reality of and therefore the merger into, cosmic Oneness. History, which has been predetermined towards this goal, will then come to an end. In the Romantic metaphor, man, the generic ‘organism’ of course, not the individual, will at last ‘return home’. History is therefore an ‘upward spiral’ towards Man's determined destination, a return home, but on a far higher level than the original unity, or home, with God in the pre-creation epoch.

The domination of the Romantic writers by this paradigm has been expounded brilliantly by the leading literary critic of Romanticism, M.H. Abrams, who points to this leading strain in English literature stretching from Wordsworth to D.H. Lawrence. Wordsworth, Abrams emphasizes, dedicated virtually his entire output to a ‘heroic’ or ‘high Romantic argument’, to an attempt to counter and transcend Milton's epochal poem of an orthodox Christian view of man and God. To counter Milton's Christian view of Heaven and Hell as alternatives for individual souls, and of Jesus's Second Advent as putting an end to history and returning man to paradise, Wordsworth, in his own ‘argument’, counterpoises his pantheist vision of the upward spiral of history into cosmic unification and man's consequent return home from alienation.¹⁷ The eventual eschaton, the Kingdom of God, is taken from its Christian placement in Heaven and brought down to earth, thereby as always when the eschaton is immanentized, creating spectacularly grave ideological social, and political problems. Or, to use a concept of Abrams, the Romantic vision constituted the secularization of theology.

Greek and Roman epics, Wordsworth asserted, sang of ‘arms and the man’, ‘hitherto the only Argument heroic deemed’. In contrast, at the beginning of his great Paradise Lost, Milton declares:

‘That to the height of this great Argument

I may assert Eternal Providence

And justify the ways of God to man’.

Wordsworth now proclaimed that his own Argument surpassing Milton's was instilled in him by God's ‘holy powers and faculties’, enabling him (presaging Marx's yearnings) to create his own world, even though he realized, in an unwonted flash of realism, that ‘some call'd it madness’. For there ‘passed within’ him ‘Genius, Power, Creation, and Divinity itself. Wordsworth concluded that ‘This is, in truth, heroic argument’, an ‘argument/Not less but more Heroic than the wrath/Of stern Achilles’. Other Englishmen steeped in the Wordsworthian paradigm were his worshipful follower Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and even Blake, who, however, tried to blend Christianity and pantheism.

All these writers had been steeped in Christian doctrine, from which they could spin off on their own heretical, pantheistic version of millennialism. Wordsworth himself had been trained to become an Anglican priest. Coleridge was a philosopher and a lay preacher, who had been on the edge of becoming a Unitarian minister, and was steeped in neoplatonism and the works of Jacob Boehme, Keats was an explicit disciple of the Wordsworthian programme, which he called a means toward secular salvation. And Shelley, though an explicit atheist, idolized the 'sacred’ Milton above all other poets, and was constantly steeped in study of the Bible.

It should also be noted that Wordsworth, like Hegel, was a youthful enthusiast for the French Revolution and its liberal ideals and later, disillusioned, turned to conservative statism and the pantheist version of inevitable redemption through history.

The German Romantics were even more immersed in religion and mysticism than were their English counterparts. Hegel, Friedrich von Schelling, Friedrich von Schiller, Friedrich Hölderlin, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, were all theology students, most of them with Hegel at the University of Tubingen. All of them tried explicitly to apply religious doctrine to their philosophy. Novalis was immersed in the Bible. Furthermore, Hegel devoted a great deal of favourable attention to Boehme in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, and Schelling called Boehme a ‘miraculous phenomenon in the history of mankind’.

Moreover, it was Friedrich Schiller, Hegel's mentor, who was influenced by the Scot Adam Ferguson to denounce specialization and the division of labour as alienating and fragmenting man, and it was Schiller who influenced Hegel in the 1790s by coining the explicit concept of Aufhebung and the dialectic.¹⁸

In England, several decades later, the tempestuous conservative statist writer Thomas Carlyle paid tribute to Friedrich Schiller by writing a biography of that Romantic writer in 1825. From then on, Carlyle's writings were permeated with the Hegelian vision. Unity is good, and diversity or separateness is evil and diseased. Science as well as individualism is division and dismemberment. Selfhood, Carlyle ranted, is alienation from nature, from others, and from oneself. But one day there will come the breakthrough, the spiritual rebirth, led by world-historical figures (‘great men’) by which man will return home to a friendly world by means of the utter cancellation, the ‘annihilation of self (Selbst-todtung).

Finally, in Past and Present (1843), Carlyle applied his profoundly anti-individualist (and, one might add, anti-human) vision to economic affairs. He denounced egoism, material greed and laissez-faire, which, by fostering the severance of men from each other, had led to a world ‘which has become a lifeless other, and in severance also from other human beings within a social order in which ‘cash payment is... the sole nexus of man with man”.’. In opposition to this metaphysically evil ‘cash nexus’ lay the familial relation with nature and fellow-men, the relation of ‘love’. The stage was set for Karl Marx.¹⁹

11.5 Marx and Left revolutionary Hegelianism

Hegel's death in 1831 inevitably ushered in a new and very different era in the history of Hegelianism. Hegel was supposed to bring about the end of history, but now Hegel was dead, and history continued to march on. So if Hegel himself was not the final culmination of history, then perhaps the Prussian state of Friedrich Wilhelm III was not the final stage of history either. But if it was not the final phase of history, then mightn't the dialectic of history be getting ready for yet another twist, another A ufhebungl

So reasoned groups of radical youth, who, during the last 1830s and 1840s in Germany and elsewhere, formed the movement of Young, or Left, Hegelians. Disillusioned in the Prussian state, the Young Hegelians proclaimed the inevitable coming apocalyptic revolution to destroy and transcend that state, a revolution that would really bring about the end of history in the form of national, or world, communism.

One of the first and most influential of the Left Hegelians was a Pole, Count August Cieszkowski (1814–94) who wrote in German and published in 1838 his Prolegomena to a Historiosophy. Cieszkowski brought to Hegelianism a new dialectic of history, a new variant of the three ages of man. The first age, the age of antiquity, was, for some reason, the age of emotion, the epoch of pure feeling, of no reflective thought, of elemental immediacy and unity with nature. The 'spirit’ was ‘in itself {an sich). The second age of mankind, the Christian era, stretching from the birth of Jesus to the death of the great Hegel, was the age of thought, of reflection, in which the 'spirit’ moved ‘toward itself, in the direction of abstraction and universality. But Christianity, the age of thought, was also an era of intolerable duality, of man separated from God, of spirit separated from matter, and thought from action. Finally, the third and culminating age, the coming age, heralded by Count Cieszkowski, was to be the age of action. In short, the third post-Hegelian age would be an age of practical action, in which the thought of both Christianity and of Hegel would be transcended and embodied into an act of will, a final revolution to overthrow and transcend existing institutions. For the term ‘practical action’, Cieszkowski borrowed the Greek word praxis to summarize the new age, a term that would soon come to acquire virtually talismanic influence in Marxism. This final age of action would bring about, at long last, a blessed unity of thought and action, theory and praxis, spirit and matter, God and earth, and total ‘freedom’. Along with Hegel and the mystics, Cieszkowski stressed that all past events, even those seemingly evil, were necessary to the ultimate and culminating salvation.

In a work published in French in Paris in 1844, Cieszkowski also heralded the new class destined to become the leaders of the revolutionary society: the intelligentsia, a word that had recently been coined by a German-educated Pole, B.F. Trentowski, who had published his work in Prussian-occupied Poznan.²⁰ Cieszkowski thus heralded and glorified a development that would at least be implicit in the Marxist movement (after all, the great Marxists, including Marx, Engels and Lenin, were all bourgeois intellectuals rather than children of the proletariat). If not in theory, this dominance of Marxist movements and governments by a ‘new class’ of intelligentsia has certainly been the history of Marxism in ‘praxis’. This dominance by a new class has been noted and attacked from the beginnings of Marxism unto the present day: notably by the anarcho-communist Bakunin, and by the Polish revolutionary Jan Waclaw Machajski (1866–1926), during and after the 1890s.²¹ It was also a similar insight into the German Social Democratic Party that prompted Robert Michels to abandon Marxism and develop his famous ‘iron law of oligarchy’ – that all organizations, whether private, governmental, or Marxist parties, will inevitably end up being dominated by a power elite.

Cieszkowski, however, was not destined to ride the wave of the future of revolutionary socialism. For he took the Christian messianic, rather than atheistic, path to the new society. In his massive unfinished work of 1848, Our Father (Ojcze nasz), Cieszkowski maintained that the new age of revolutionary communism would be a third age, an age of the Holy Spirit (shades of Joachism!), an era that would bring a Kingdom of God on earth ‘as it is in heaven’. Thus, the final Kingdom of God on earth would reintegrate all of ‘organic humanity’, and would erase all national identities, with the world governed by a Central Government of All Mankind, headed by a Universal Council of the People.

But at the time, the path of Christian messianism was not clearly destined to be a loser in the intra-socialist debate. Thus, Alexander Ivanovich Herzen (1812–70), a founder of the Russian revolutionary tradition, was entranced by Cieszkowski's brand of Left Hegelianism, writing that ‘the future society is to be the work not of the heart, but of the concrete. Hegel is the new Christ bringing the word of truth to men...’²² And soon, Bruno Bauer, friend and mentor of Karl Marx and the leader of the Doktorklub of Young Hegelians at the University of Berlin, hailed the new philosophy of action in late 1841 as ‘The Trumpet Call of the Last Judgment’.²³

But the winning strand in the European socialist movement, as we have indicated, was eventually to be Karl Marx's atheism. If Hegel had pantheized and elaborated the dialectic of Christian messianics, Marx now 'stood Hegel on his head’ by atheizing the dialectic, and resting it, not on mysticism or religion or 'spirit’ or the absolute idea or the world-mind, but on the supposedly solid and 'scientific’ foundation of philosophical materialism. Marx adopted his materialism from the Left Hegelian Ludwig Feuerbach, particularly his work on The Essence of Christianity (1843). In contrast to the Hegelian emphasis on 'spirit’, Marx would study the allegedly scientific laws of matter in some way operating through history. Marx, in short, took the dialectic and made it what we can call a ‘materialist dialectic of history’.

A lot of unnecessary pother has been made about terminology here. Many Marxist apologists have fiercely maintained that Marx himself never used the term ‘dialectical materialism’ – as if mere non-use of the terms lets Marx off the hook – and also that the concept only appeared in such later works of Engels as the Anti-Dühring. But the Anti-Dühring, published before Marx's death, was, like all other such writings of Engels, cleared with Marx first, and so we have to assume that Marx approved.²⁴

The fuss stems from the fact that the term ‘dialectical materialism’ was widely stressed by the Marxist-Leninist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, these days generally discredited. The concept was applied by Engels, who of the two founders was particularly interested in the natural sciences, to biology. Applied to biology, as Engels did in the Anti-Dühring, dialectical materialism has an unmistakably crazy air. In an ultra-Hegelian manner, logic and logical contradictions, or ‘negations’, are hopelessly confused with the processes of reality. Thus: butterflies ‘come into existence from the egg through negation [or transcendence] of the egg... they are negated again as they die’. And ‘the barley corn... is negated and is supplanted by the barley plant, the negation of the corn... The plant grows... is fructified and produces again barleycorns and as soon as these are ripe, the ear withers away, is negated. As a result of this negation of the negation we have gained the original barley corn... in a quantity ten, twenty, or thirty times larger’.²⁵

Furthermore, Marx himself, and not only Engels, was also very interested in Darwin and in biological science. Marx wrote to Engels that Darwin's work 'serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history’ and that ‘this is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view’.²⁶

By recasting the dialectic in materialist and atheist terms, however, Marx gave up the powerful motor of the dialectic as it operated throughout history: either Christian messianism or providence or the growing self-consciousness of the world spirit. How could Marx find a 'scientific’ materialist replacement, newly grounded in the ineluctable ‘laws of history’ that would explain the inevitability of the imminent apocalyptic transformation of the world into communism? It is one thing to base the prediction of a forthcoming Armageddon upon the Bible; it is quite another to deduce this event from allegedly scientific laws. Setting forth the specifics of this engine of history was to occupy Karl Marx for the rest of his life.

Although Marx found Feuerbach indispensable for adopting a thoroughgoing atheist and materialist positions, Marx soon found that Feuerbach had not gone nearly far enough. Even though Feuerbach was a philosophical communist, he basically believed that if man forswore religion, then his alienation from his self would be over. To Marx, religion was only one of the problems. The entire world of man (the Menschenwelt) was alienating, and had to be radically overthrown, root and branch. Only apocalyptic destruction of this world of man would permit true human nature to be realized. Only then would the existing ‘un-man’ (Unmensch) truly become man (Mensch). As Marx thundered in the fourth of his ‘theses on Feuerbach’, ‘one must proceed to destroy [the] ‘earthly family’ [as it is] ‘both in theory and in practice’.²⁷

In particular, declared Marx, true man, as Feuerbach had argued, is a ‘communal being’ {Gemeinwesen) or 'species being’ (Gattungswesen). Although the state as it exists must be negated or transcended, man's participation in the state operates as such a communal being. The main problem comes in the private sphere, the market, or ‘civil society’, in which un-man acts as an egoist, as a private person, treating others as means, and not collectively as masters of their fate. And in existing society, unfortunately, civil society is primary, while the state, or ‘political community’, is secondary. What must be done to realize the full nature of mankind is to transcend the state and civil society by politicizing all of life, by making all of man's actions collective. Then real individual man will become a true and full 'species being’.²⁸

But only a revolution, an orgy of destruction, can accomplish this task. And here, Marx harkened back to the call for total destruction that had animated his vision of the world in poems of his youth. Indeed, in a speech in London in 1856, Marx was to give graphic and loving expression to this goal of his ‘praxis’. He mentioned that in Germany in the Middle Ages there existed a secret tribunal called the Vehmgericht. He then explained: ‘If a red cross was seen marked on a house, people knew that its owner was doomed by the Vehm. All the houses of Europe are now marked with the mysterious red cross. History is the judge – its executioner the proletarian’.²⁹

Marx, in fact, was not satisfied with the philosophical communism to which he and Engels had separately been converted by the slightly older Left Hegelian Moses Hess (1812–75) in the early 1840s. To Hess's communism, Marx, by the end of 1843, added the crucial emphasis on the proletariat, not simply as an economic class, but as destined to become the ‘universal class’ when communism was achieved. As we have indicated above, Marx actually acquired his vision of the proletariat as the key to the communist revolution from the 1842 work of Lorenz von Stein, an enemy of socialism, who interpreted the socialist and communist movements as rationalizations of the class interests of the proletariat. Marx discovered in Stein's attack the 'scientific’ engine for the inevitable coming of the communist revolution. The proletariat, the most ‘alienated’ and allegedly ‘propertyless’ class, would be the key.

Marx had now worked out the outline of his secular messianic vision: a material dialectic of history, with the final apocalyptic revolution to be achieved by the proletariat. But how specifically was this to be accomplished? Vision was not enough. What scientific laws of history could bring about this cherished goal? Fortunately, Marx had a crucial ingredient for his attempted solution close at hand: in the Saint-Simonian concept of human history as driven by an inherent struggle among economic classes. The class struggle along with historical materialism was to be an essential ingredient for the Marxian material dialectic.

11.6 Marx as Utopian

Despite Marx's claim to be a 'scientific socialist’, scorning all other socialists whom he dismissed as moralistic and ‘Utopian’, it should be clear that Marx himself was even more in the messianic Utopian tradition than were the competing ‘Utopians’. For Marx not only sought a future society that would put an end to history: he claimed to have found the path towards that Utopia inevitably determined by the ‘laws of history’.

But a Utopian, and a fierce one, Marx certainly was. A hallmark of every Utopia is a militant desire to put an end to history, to freeze mankind in a static state, to put an end to diversity and man's free will, and to order everyone's life in accordance with the Utopian's totalitarian plan. Many early communists and socialists set forth their fixed Utopias in great and absurd detail, determining the size of everyone's living quarters, the food they would eat, etc. Marx was not silly enough to do that, but his entire system, as Thomas Molnar points out, is ‘the search of the Utopian mind for the definitive stabilization of mankind or, in gnostic terms, its reabsorption in the timeless’. For Marx, his quest for Utopia was, as we have seen, an explicit attack on God's creation and a ferocious desire to destroy it. The idea of crushing the many, the diverse facets of creation, and of returning to an allegedly lost unity with God began, as we have seen, with Plotinus. As Molnar sums up:

In this view, existence itself is a wound on nonbeing. Philosophers from Plotinus to Fichte and beyond have held that the reabsorption of the polichrome universe in the eternal One would be preferable to creation. Short of this solution, they propose to arrange a world in which change is brought under control so as to put an end to a disturbingly free will and to society's uncharted moves. They aspire to return from the linear Hebrew-Christian concept to the Greco-Hindu cycle – that is, to a changeless, timeless permanence.

The triumph of unity over diversity means that, for the Utopians, including Marx, ‘civil society, with its disturbing diversity, can be abolished’. Molnar then makes the interesting point that when Hayek and Popper rebut Marxism by demonstrating

that no mind – not even that of a Politburo equipped with supercomputers – can overview the changes of the marketplace and its myriad components of individuals and their interactions, they miss the mark. Marx agrees with them. But, he wants to abolish the marketplace and its economic as well as intellectual (‘legal, political, philosophical, religious, aesthetic’) components, so as to restore a simple world – a monochrome landscape. His economics is not economics but an instrument of total control.³⁰

All well and good, but, as the history of communist countries has shown, there are not many followers of Marx who are willing to settle for a world where no economic calculation is possible, and therefore where production collapses and universal starvation ensues.

Substituting in Marx for God's will or the Hegelian dialectic of the world-spirit or the absolute idea, is monist materialism, in its central assumption, as Molnar puts it, ‘that the universe consists of matter plus some sort of one-dimensional law immanent in matter’. In that case, ‘man himself is reduced to a complex but manipulable material aggregate, living in the company of other aggregates, and forming increasingly complex super aggregates called societies, political bodies, churches’. The alleged laws of history, then, are derived by scientific Marxists as supposedly evident and immanent within this matter itself.

The Marxian process towards Utopia, then, is man acquiring insights into his own true nature, and then rearranging the world to accord with that true nature. Engels, in fact, explicitly proclaimed the Hegelian concept of the man-God: ‘Hitherto the question has always stood: What is God? – and German [Hegelian] philosophy has resolved it as follows: God is man... Man must now arrange the world in a truly human way, according to the demands of his nature’.³¹

But this process is rife with self-contradictions; for example, and centrally, how can mere matter gain insights into his (its?) nature? As Molnar puts it: ‘for how can matter gather insights? And if it has insights, it is not entirely matter, but matter plus’.

In this allegedly inevitable process, of arriving at the proletarian communist Utopia after the proletarian class becomes conscious of its true nature, what is supposed to be Karl Marx's own role? In Hegelian theory, Hegel himself is the final and greatest world-historical figure, the man-God of man-Gods. Similarly, Marx in his view stands at a focal point of history as the man who brought to the world the crucial knowledge of man's true nature and of the laws of history, thereby serving as the ‘midwife’ of the process that would put an end to history. Thus Molnar:

Like other Utopian and gnostic writers, Marx is much less interested in the stages of history up to the present (the egotistic now of all Utopian writers) than in the final stages when the stuff of time becomes more concentrated, when the drama approaches its denouement. In fact, the Utopian writer conceives of history as a process leading to himself since he, the ultimate comprehensor, stands in the center of history. It is natural that things accelerate during his own lifetime and come to a watershed: he looms large between the Before and the After.³²

The achievement of the Marxist Utopia is, moreover, dependent upon leadership and rule by the Marxian cadre, the possessors of the special knowledge of the laws of history, who will proceed to transform mankind into the new socialist man by the use of force. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the existence of evil is accounted for by the free will of the individual. In monist, determinist systems, on the other hand, all history is supposed to be determined by fixed laws, and therefore evil can only be apparent, while really acting in a deeper sense as a servant of the higher good. All apparent evil must be truly good, and serve some sort of determined plan, whether it be the unfolding of the God-man or an atheistic version thereof. Coercing people by a cadre in order to create a new socialist man cannot be evil or unacceptable in a just society. On the contrary, it is the duty of the Marxist vanguard, they who are the servants of the next inevitable stage of history, to impose such a regime. This is a duty to history, that alleged entity to which the cadre are in service, and who (which?) is destined to judge the actions of the past, to judge them as moral or immoral, as either advancing the birth of the allegedly inevitable historical future, or of thwarting such birth. In short, history or the cadre has the privilege and duty of judging any person or movement as being either ‘progressive’ (i.e. advancing the determined march of history) or ‘reactionary’ (retarding that inevitable march).

11.7 Notes

1. On alienation in Marx as rooted in exchange and the division of labour, and not simply in the capitalist wage-relation, see Paul Craig Roberts, Alienation and the Soviet Economy (Alburquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1971); and Paul Craig Roberts and Matthew A. Stephenson, Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation, and Crisis (2nd ed., New York: Praeger, 1983).

2. In extreme variants, such as the gnostic heretics of the early Christian era, the creation of matter was itself pure evil, an act by the Devil, or Demiurge, with spirit remaining divine.

3. Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), p. 39.

4. Ibid., p. 41. These and other early essays by Hegel were first published as a collection of Early Theological Writings in 1907.

5. Ibid., pp. 53^.

6. Quoted in Raymond Plant, Hegel (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1973), p. 120.

7. Hegel was also influenced by Steuart's great rival, Adam Smith, but unfortunately in the wrong direction. From the Wealth of Nations Hegel concluded that the division of labour had brought man the misery of specialization, alienation, etc. More interestingly, from Smith's friend the Rev. Adam Ferguson's famous line on events that are ‘the product of human action but not of human design’, Hegel got the idea of each individual agent of the world-soul's pursuing the world-soul's purposes without conscious intent. This is Hegel's famous concept of the ‘cunning of reason’ at work through history.

Ferguson, in turn, arrived at his famous phrase, not by analysis of the free market, as Hayek implies, but from an attempt to show that the revolt in Scotland in 1745, which almost succeeded in bringing the dread Catholic Jacobites to power, was unconsciously pursuing God's benevolent purpose of shaking Scottish Presbyterians – assumed of course to be God's true Church – out of their religious apathy. In short, the Scottish Catholics, though consciously pursuing evil ends, were unwittingly carrying out God's designs. Out of apparent evil, good. Similarly, when Hegel later hailed Napoleon as the ‘world-historical’ man, he saw Napoleon as intending to pursue evil but unconsciously furthering God's benevolent design. See Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 40–44.

8. Plant, op. cit., note 6, p. 96.

9. See ibid., pp. 122, 123, 181.

10. Tucker, op. cit., note 3, pp. 54–5. E.F. Carritt points out that, for Hegel, ‘freedom’ is ‘desiring above all things to serve the success and glory of their State. In desiring this they are desiring that the will of God should be done...’. If an individual thinks he should do something which is not for the success and glory of the state, then, for Hegel, ‘he should be “forced to be free”. ‘How does a person know what action will redound to the glory of the state? To Hegel, the answer was easy. Whatever the state rulers demand, since ‘the very fact of their being rulers is the surest sign of God's will that they should be’. Impeccable logic, indeed! See E.F. Carritt, ‘Reply’ (1940), reprinted in W. Kaufmann, (ed.), Hegel's Political Philosophy (New York; Atherton Press, 1970), pp. 38–9.

11. Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies (5th ed., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), II, pp. 30–31.

12. Ibid., p. 31.

13. Ibid., p. 33.

14. In 1867. See ibid., p. 34.

15. Ibid., p. 33.

16. Ibid., pp. 27, 30. For an explanation of what Popper refers to as the 'scherzo-style’ of his chapter on Hegel, see ibid., pp. 393–5.

17. M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971). Milton's depiction of the Fall and the Second Advent is truly eloquent and stirring. On the loss of Eden: ‘Farewell happy Fields/Where Joy forever dwells...’. And on the Second Advent: ‘Time will run back and fetch the age of gold’, ‘And then at last our bliss/Full and perfect is,/But now begins...’

18. On the influence of Schiller's views of organicism and alienation on Hegel, Marx and later sociology, see Leon Bramson, The Political Context of Sociology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 30n.

19. See Abrams, op. cit., note 17, p. 311.

20. B.F. Trentowski, The Relationship of Philosophy to Cybernetics (Poznan, 1843), in which the author also coined the word ‘cybernetics’ for the new, emerging form of rational social technology which would transform mankind. See James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (New York: Basic Books, 1980), p. 231.

21. On Machajski, see Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 102–6. Machajski's preferred solution to the problem of domination by the intellectuals was scarcely convincing. Machajski called for a secret organization of revolutionary workers, The Workers' Conspiracy, presumably headed by himself, which would lead the proletarian revolution, and establish a ‘classless’ society shorn of the evil distinctions between mental and manual labour.

22. Billington, op. cit, note 20, p. 225.

23. It is to Bauer that the world owes the terms ‘critical’ and ‘criticism’, which Marxists have long employed as endlessly repeated slogans ever since; e.g., ‘Critique of Critical Theory’, ‘Critical Legal Studies’, etc.

24. According to Schumpeter, moreover, Marx was virtually a co-author of the Anti-DUhring. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper & Bros., 1942), p. 39n.

25. Engels, Anti-DUhring, cited in Ludwig von Mises, Theory and History (3rd ed., Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1985), p. 105. Also see the sardonic commentary on this passage by Alexander Gray, The Socialist Tradition (London: Longmans, Green, 1946), p. 300n. Gray also notes Marx's summary of the dialectic in the Poverty of Philosophy, which he comments is ‘not without entertainment value’: ‘The yes becomes no, the no becomes yes, the yes becomes at the same time yes and no, the no becomes at the same time no and yes, the contraries balance, neutralize, and paralyze each other’. (My own translation from Gray's French quote.)

26. Marx to Engels, 16 Jan. 1861 and 19 Dec. 1860. See Gary North, Marx's Religion of Revolution: Regeneration Through Chaos (2nd ed., Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), pp. 89n-90n.

27. Tucker, op. cit., note 3, p. 101.

28. Ibid., p. 105.

29. Ibid., p. 15.

30. Thomas Molnar, ‘Marxism and the Utopian Theme’, Marxist Perspectives (Winter 1978), pp. 153–4. The economist David McCord Wright, while not delving to the religious roots of the problem, stressed that one group in society, the statists, seek ‘the achievement of a fixed ideal static pattern of technical social organization. Once this ideal is reached, or closely approximated, it need only be repeated endlessly thereafter’. David McCord Wright, Democracy and Progress (New York: Macmillan, 1948), p. 21.

31. Molnar, op. cit., note 30, pp. 149, 150–51.

32. Ibid., pp. 151–2.