8. Conrad's Praxeology

¹Willa Cather, “The Novel Démeublé,” in Stories, Poems, and Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 1992), p. 835.

²Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, 3rd ed., rev. (1966; rpt. Chicago: Contemporary Books, n.d.), p. 3.

³Willa Cather, “Escapism,” in Stories, Poems, and Other Writings, p. 971.

⁴Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, Bruce Harkness and S.W. Reid, eds. (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 40

⁵Ibid., p. 37.

⁶Ibid., p. 38.

⁷Ibid., p. 37.

⁸Ibid., p. 94.

⁹Ibid., p. 88.

¹⁰Ibid., p. 87.

¹¹Ibid., p. 37.

¹²Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, Anthony Bower, trans. (New York: Vintage, 1956), p. 240.

¹³“Five hundred pounds” in the money of Conrad's time (Secret Agent, p. 94).

¹⁴Secret Agent, p. 225.

¹⁵Ibid., p. 226.

¹⁶Terry Eagleton, Against the Grain: Essays 1975–1985 (London: New Left Books, 1986), especially pp. 24–25.

¹⁷Secret Agent, p. 66.

¹⁸Ibid., pp. 62, 66.

¹⁹Ibid., p. 66.

²⁰Ibid., p. 45.

²¹Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 202, 268, 271, 221.

²²Secret Agent, p. 66.

²³Ibid., p. 226.

²⁴Ibid., p. 88.

²⁵Eloise Knapp Hay, The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Study, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 247.

²⁶John Dewey, “Liberty and Social Control,” Social Frontier (November 1935): 41; cited in Friedrich Hayek's salient work, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944, 1976), p. 26, as exemplifying “[t]he characteristic confusion of freedom with power.”

²⁷Hayek dedicated The Road to Serfdom to “the socialists of all parties.”

²⁸Secret Agent, p. 67.

²⁹Ibid., p. 231.

³⁰Ibid., p. 67.

³¹Ibid., p. 226. Cf. the famous adage, “Exterminate all the brutes!,” penned by that other great proponent of progress, Mr. Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Like the Professor, Kurtz is a leftist reformer of an eccentric kind. As “a journalist” wistfully remarks to the narrator of Kurtz's story, his “proper sphere ought to have been politics ‘on the popular side’” (Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, rev. ed., Robert Kimbrough, ed. [New York: Norton, 1971], p. 74). This, like almost everything else that is said in Heart of Darkness, is true, in its way.

³²Secret Agent, p. 16.

³³Ibid., p. 33.

³⁴The significance of Greenwich as a symbol of space and time has been emphasized by Conrad critics ever since R.W. Stallman's essay, “Time and The Secret Agent,” in The Art of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Symposium, R.W. Stallman, ed. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1960), pp. 234–54. Stallman observed that Verloc's attack on time is an attack on “life itself” (p. 236). He was not concerned, however, with Conrad's hypotheses about how life manifests itself in processes of human action. Avrom Fleishman, Conrad's Politics: Community and Anarchy in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), p. 205, aptly says that “the effort to destroy time is symbolically an effort to end history—thereby theoretically achieving the revolutionary goal of a world beyond history and without time.”

³⁵Secret Agent, p. 118.

³⁶Ibid., pp. 14, 40.

³⁷Ibid., p. 50.

³⁸Ibid., p. 197.

³⁹Ibid., p. 216.

⁴⁰Ibid., p. 159.

⁴¹Fleishman, an intelligent, influential, and comparatively moderate interpreter of the novel's politics, says that when Conrad's anarchists talk about the cannibalism of modern society they are basically right (Conrad's Politics, p. 202). He discusses “the decay of the social order through the widespread ignorance, secrecy, and madness of its members” (p. 194) and associates this decay with (among other things) “private property” (pp. 198, 199). Eagleton (Against the Grain, passim) describes the novel as reenacting the dismal contradictions of capitalist society, while offering no “solution.” Apparently, Conrad is at fault for declining to announce a redemptive central plan.

⁴²Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness (London: Edward Arnold, 1979), p. 85, comes close to noticing this. But see note 57, below.

⁴³Secret Agent, p. 46.

⁴⁴Ibid., pp. 74–75.

⁴⁵Ibid., pp. 75–76.

⁴⁶Ibid., p. 16.

⁴⁷Ibid., p. 30.

⁴⁸Ibid., p. 102.

⁴⁹David Hackett Fischer, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 86.

⁵⁰On marginal utility, see section IV of my essay on Willa Cather, above.

⁵¹Secret Agent, p. 189.

⁵²Discussing the transition from pre-capitalist to capitalist economies, Ian Watt comments, “Our civilisation as a whole is based on individual contractual relationships, as opposed to the unwritten, traditional and collective relationships of previous societies” (The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957], p. 63). This is somewhat misleading. Capitalism does give ideological significance to contracts and multiplies occasions for them by multiplying economic relationships. Capitalist societies have been called “contract societies” because contracts are the legal stiffening of their spontaneous economic order. But contracts need not be written; most are not, even in the most advanced capitalist societies. Neither a capitalist nor a pre-capitalist society could last a moment without the operation of implicit contracts.

⁵³Secret Agent, p. 196.

⁵⁴John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, especially par. 119.

⁵⁵Secret Agent, p. 192.

⁵⁶Ibid., p. 130.

⁵⁷Hawthorn, one of the many critics of The Secret Agent who has been influenced by the Marxist ideology, sees even the behavior of Conrad's anarchists as “symptomatic” of capitalist society, although he can find little capitalist work, or work of any kind, going on: “Few people work in any real way in the novel” (Joseph Conrad, pp. 82, 85). He does not consider that the chief problem may not be the pursuit of private business but the pursuit of power. Indeed, he confuses the “privacy” of specifically capitalist pursuits with the “secrecy” of political manipulations (pp. 77–78). Both involve “mediated,” indirect, and unpredictable relationships, but it is not true, as Hawthorn suggests, that the system of market exchange is especially hostile to “public accountability and responsibility” (p. 79). Market exchange exists in every society, and the information that makes for public accountability is always more or less expensive. It tends to be cheaper in market-based than in power-based societies.

⁵⁸This pattern is also adduced by Stanton De Voren Hoffman, Comedy and Form in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad (The Hague: Mouton, 1969), p. 120, to somewhat different purpose; to Hoffman, it suggests “a kind of La Ronde of disorder.”

⁵⁹Secret Agent, p. 88.

⁶⁰Ibid., p. 173.

⁶¹Cather, The Song of the Lark (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), p. 571.

⁶²Zdzislaw Najder, Conrad in Perspective: Essays on Art and Fidelity (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 113.

⁶³Hawthorn believes that The Secret Agent requires an omniscient narrator to reveal the “total workings” of “social relations” in a capitalist society that lacks any “public determining centre of authority” (p. 78). But no society has an authority that could do that job.

⁶⁴F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

⁶⁵Secret Agent, pp. 40–41.

⁶⁶Ibid., p. 227.

⁶⁷Ibid., p. 41.

⁶⁸Ibid.

⁶⁹Ibid., p. 226.

⁷⁰Ibid., pp. 60–61.

⁷¹Ibid., pp. 27, 28, 25.

⁷²Ibid., pp. 28, 30, 26, 32.

⁷³Ibid., pp. 24–33.

⁷⁴Ibid., p. 20.

⁷⁵Ibid., pp. 37, 225.

⁷⁶Ibid., pp. 28, 25.

⁷⁷See, for example, the first four chapters of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom.

⁷⁸Secret Agent, p. 105.

⁷⁹Ibid., pp. 112–13.

⁸⁰Fleishman (Conrad's Politics, p. 213), who likes Sir Ethelred, observes that Sir William Harcourt, after whom he seems to be modeled, was an apostle of “quasi-socialism.”

⁸¹Secret Agent, p. 162. Paul Cantor (private communication) has observed that Sir Ethelred is the typical social planner, “trying to know something that can't be known.”

⁸²Ibid., p. 113.

⁸³Ibid., pp. 106–10.

⁸⁴Hay (The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad, pp. 243, 247) misses the web of associations and parallels that gives significance to both Sir Ethelred and the Lady Patroness. Hay believes that “[t]here is nothing in the least offensive” about either one of them: their political projects “come across in a spirit of pure fun”; their “political sentimentalities” are “harmless.” What, then, is Conrad's purpose for including them in this novel?

⁸⁵Secret Agent, p. 108.

⁸⁶Ibid., p. 106.

⁸⁷Ibid., pp. 106–07.

⁸⁸Ibid., p. 107.

⁸⁹Ibid., p. 111.

⁹⁰The locus classicus of American ideas on this subject is Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, which include “freedom from fear” and “freedom from want”—that is, freedom from risk and freedom from scarcity of needed material goods. An international application can be found in the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees, among some rights of clearer and sharper definition, an ensemble of rights that amounts to an insurance of success, including the right to “just and favourable remuneration,” to “social security,” and to “realization... of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for [a person's] dignity and the free development of his personality.” The idea that “machines,” “the machine,” or “technology” can easily create enough resources to fulfill such rights, and would certainly do so if the wastefulness of the market system were only curtailed, is common to all socialist and many liberal movements of the industrial age. It was confidently asserted by such philosophers of technocracy as Thorstein Veblen (in, e.g., The Engineers and the Price System [1921]). During the 1960s and 1970s, the idea of people's right and power to be free from scarcity was prominent all along the spectrum of left-liberal opinion. The title of Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Murray Bookchin's once-famous book, speaks for itself (Berkeley, Calif.: Ramparts Press, 1971). The distinguished historian William Appleman Williams thought that the United States had begun “to master the traditional economic scarcity” and should move on to conquer “the scarcity of humaneness in human relationships” (The Great Evasion [Chicago: Quadrangle, 1964], p. 53). John Kenneth Galbraith concluded his very influential book, The Affluent Society (1958), by saying that “we have solved” “the problem of producing goods” and must now “proceed... to the next task” (2nd ed. [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971], p. 317). The comparatively conservative Democratic Party platform of 1960, more mundane in its interests, insisted upon such alleged rights and powers as that of “every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living” (National Party Platforms, compiled by Donald Bruce Johnson [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978], vol. 2, p. 585). Slightly later, President Johnson developed plans for a quick and total elimination of “poverty” (definition uncertain), as a matter of right and duty.

⁹¹Secret Agent, p. 62.

⁹²Willa Cather, O Pioneers!, in Early Novels and Stories (New York: Library of America, 1987), pp. 170–72, 289.

⁹³Camus, The Rebel, pp. 24, 100.

⁹⁴Ibid., pp. 49, 223.

⁹⁵Secret Agent, p. 43.

⁹⁶Ibid., p. 33.

⁹⁷Ibid., pp. 72, 63.

⁹⁸Ibid., p. 212.

⁹⁹Ibid., p. 8. The Note was added in 1920.

¹⁰⁰Ibid., p. 124.

¹⁰¹Ibid., pp. 123, 131.

¹⁰²Ibid., p. 121.

¹⁰³Ibid., p. 11.

¹⁰⁴Ibid., p. 121.

¹⁰⁵Ibid., p. 122.

¹⁰⁶Ibid.

¹⁰⁷Ibid., pp. 129, 130.

¹⁰⁸Ibid., p. 129.

¹⁰⁹Ibid., p. 141. Fleishman (Conrad's Politics, p. 196) suggests that Stevie is the only character who allows himself to be aware of suffering. This is remarkably untrue. Stevie's revolt against suffering is exemplary, but virtually all the other characters revolt, too, and some of them ruthlessly. The anarchists revolt against the suffering of the working class, Sir Ethelred revolts against the suffering of unnationalized fishermen, Verloc revolts against the suffering occasioned by the necessity of work, Winnie revolts against Stevie's own suffering.

¹¹⁰Ibid., pp. 130, 132.

¹¹¹Ibid., pp. 132–33.

¹¹²Ibid.

¹¹³Ibid., p. 133.

¹¹⁴Ibid., pp. 133, 200.

¹¹⁵Ibid., p. 198.

¹¹⁶Mises, Human Action, p. 14.

¹¹⁷Eric Roll, A History of Economic Thought, 5th ed., rev. (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), p. 354.

¹¹⁸Secret Agent, pp. 198–99.

¹¹⁹Ibid., p. 200.

¹²⁰Ibid., pp. 203, 202.

¹²¹Ibid., p. 201.

¹²²So limited that one can understand the mainstream critical view, as expressed, for example, by Jan Verleun and Jetty de Vries (Conrad's The Secret Agent and the Critics: 1965–1980 [Groningen: Bouma's Boekhuis, 1984], p. 253), who say that the novel “almost completely denies” Winnie the “possibility of free choice,” that it pictures her as “predominantly a creature of milieu and circumstance.” But this kind of generalization breaks down when the specifics of Winnie's actions and decisions are observed.

¹²³Najder, Conrad in Perspective, pp. 150, 132.

¹²⁴Secret Agent, p. 228.

¹²⁵Ibid., p. 212.

¹²⁶Ibid., p. 231.

¹²⁷Ibid.

¹²⁸Ibid., p. 225.

¹²⁹Ibid., p. 56.

¹³⁰Ibid.

¹³¹Ibid., p. 63.

¹³²Ibid., p. 57.

¹³³Ibid., p. 61.

¹³⁴Ibid., p. 230.

¹³⁵Cather, My Ántonia, in Early Novels and Stories (New York: Library of America, 1987), p. 877.

¹³⁶Secret Agent, p. 228.

¹³⁷Ibid., p. 226.

¹³⁸Ibid., p. 227.

¹³⁹Ibid., pp. 226, 230.

¹⁴⁰Camus, The Rebel, p. 247.

¹⁴¹Secret Agent, p. 227.

¹⁴²Hay, The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad, p. 252.

¹⁴³Secret Agent, p. 228.

¹⁴⁴Ibid., p. 231.

¹⁴⁵Fleishman, in Conrad's Politics, agrees rather oddly with my assumption of a favorable ending of the novel—oddly because he regards the ending as a vision of “the value of human community” (p. 212), not the value of individual human action, and because he previously interpreted the Professor's vision of people swarming like industrious insects as Conrad's own vision of “whatever is inimical to genuine social life” (pp. 200–201).

¹⁴⁶Frank Norris, The Octopus: A Story of California (New York: Double-day, 1901), p. 651.

¹⁴⁷Ibid., p. 651. This is not the only place where Norris's people become insects; see also p. 180.