People :
Author : Murray Bookchin
Text :
I have touched upon popular attempts to resist the immersion of society into “evil,” namely, the resistance of the Spanish Comuneros and the French sans culottes to the nation-state and, less directly, of craftsmen and independent farmers to capitalism.
But the drift of patricentric, urban, and economic institutions in an increasingly antihumanistic and anti-ecological direction was fought by people on a very sweeping scale and with more explosive ideas than I have indicated. Today, when we run the risk of losing all knowledge of history and, particularly, of the revolutionary tradition and utopian alternatives it offered, it is very important that we examine the libertarian movements that emerged at each of history’s turning points and the ideas of freedom they advanced. Here, we shall find a remarkable development of ideas that sought to countervail “civilization’s” immersion into evil. Indeed, we shall find progress in its truly authentic sense: a widening of social struggles to encompass more and more fundamental issues and a sophistication of the concept of freedom itself.
From the outset, let me draw a very important distinction: namely, between the ideals of freedom and the notions of justice. The two words have been used so interchangeably that they have almost become synonymous. Actually, justice differs profoundly from freedom, and it is important that we clearly disengage one from the other. Historically, they have given rise to very different kinds of struggles and they have voiced radically different demands from systems of authority to this very day. The distinction between mere reforms and fundamental changes in society rests, in great part, on demands for justice and demands for freedom, however much the two have been closely related to each other in highly fluid social situations.
Justice is the demand for equity, for “fair play,” and a share in the benefits of life that are commensurable with one’s contribution. In Thomas Jefferson’s words, it is “equal and exact...” based on a respect for the principle of equivalence. This fair, or equivalent, apportionment of treatment one receives — socially, juridically, and materially — in return for what one gives has traditionally been depicted by the balance or scale Justitia, the Roman goddess, holds in one hand, the sword she holds in the other, and the blindfold that covers her eyes. Taken together, the accouterments of Justitia testify to the quantification of an equity which can be parceled out and apportioned on both tables of the scale; the power of violence that stands behind her judgment in the form of her sword (under conditions of “civilization,” the sword was to become the equivalent of the State); the “objectivity” of her views as expressed by the blindfold.
Elaborate discussions of theories of justice, from Aristotle’s in the ancient world to those of John Rawls in the modern, need not be examined here. They involve explorations into natural law, contract, reciprocity, and egoism — issues that are not of immediate concern to our exploration. But the blindfold around Justitia’s eyes and the scale she holds in her hands are symbols of a highly problematic relationship that we cannot afford to ignore. In the presence of Justitia, all human beings are presumably “equal.” They stand “naked” before Justitia, to use a common word, bereft of social privilege, special rights, and status. The famous “cry for Justice!” has a long and complex pedigree. From the earliest days of systematic oppression and exploitation, people gave Justitia a voice — blindfold or not — and made her the spokesperson of the downtrodden against unfeeling inequity and violations of the principle of equivalence.
Initially, Justitia was pitted against the tribal canon of blood vengeance, of unreasoning retribution for the harm inflicted on one’s kin. The famous lex talionis — an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life — was applied exclusively for losses inflicted on one’s relatives, not to people in general. Rational as the demand for tribal equity may seem in its command for equivalence of treatment, this principle was parochial and restricted. No one stood up for the stranger who was abused or killed — apart from his or her kin in a distant territory. Punishment, in turn, was often very arbitrary. More than one life was commonly claimed for crimes that existed only in the eyes of the beholder, with the harsh result that blood feuds could go on for generations, claiming entire communities and people who were patently innocent of infractions that had long faded from the memory of the combatants.
The highly debated meaning of Aeskylos’s Orestaeia — a dramatic Greek trilogy in which tribal vengeance for the murder of a mother by her son in retribution for the death she inflicted on his father — has several different themes. Important among them was the higher sense of obligation a son (as well as a daughter) had to a mother under a system of so-called matriarchal law, in which women, rather than men, presumably formed the socially recognized knots of kinship and ancestry But no less important as a theme — and possible more so for classical Athenians, who prized this trilogy justice out of an archaic world of crude, unreasoning vengeance into a domain of rational and objective equity: to render justice “equal and exact.”
Which is not to say that justice had its origins in Greece. In the period following the transition from tribal societies to feudal aristocracies and absolute monarchies, the cry for justice — indeed, for written codes of law that clearly spelled out penalties for crimes — became a major demand of the oppressed. Equivalence in the form of justice “equal and exact” was slowly shorn of its class biases, be it in the Hebrew Deuteronomic Code or the reforms of Solon in Athens. Roman law, the basis for much of modern Western jurisprudence, sophisticated early popular gains enormously, acknowledging in the jus naturale and the jus gentium that men were really equal by nature, however much they were rendered unequal by society. Even chattel slavery was acknowledged as a “contract” of sorts in which a slave, whose life could have been claimed in warfare, was kept alive if he forfeited his body and labor to the victor.
What is problematic about justice “equal and exact,” however, is that all people are not equal naturally, despite the formal equality that is conferred upon them in a “just” society. Some individuals are born physically strong; others may be born weaker, by comparison. Still others differ markedly from each other by virtue of health, age, infirmities, talent, intelligence, and the material means of life at their disposal. These differences may be either trivial or highly important in terms of the demands that are imposed upon them in everyday life.
Ironically, then, the notion of equality can be used subtly for dealing with people on highly unequal terms: the same burdens are imposed on very disparate individuals who have very different abilities to deal with them. The rights they acquire, “equal and exact” as they may be, become meaningless for those who cannot exercise them because of physical or material liabilities. Justice thus becomes very unequal in substance precisely because it is established in mere form. An inequality of equals may emerge from a society that deals with everyone as juridically equal, that is, without regard for his or her physical and mental condition.
So-called egalitarian tribal societies actually recognized that such major inequalities did exist and tried to find compensatory mechanisms to establish substantive equality. The principle of the irreducible minimum, for example, created a bedrock basis for overcoming economic disparities that, in modern society, make many people who are formally equal highly unequal in substance. Everyone, irrespective of his or her status, capacities, or even willingness to contribute materially to the community, was entitled to the basic means of life. These means could not be denied to anyone who was a member of the community. Whenever possible, special treatment was given to the infirm, the elderly, and the weak to “equalize” their material position and to minimize their feelings of dependency. There is evidence that such care goes back to Neandethal communities some fifty thousand years ago. Skeletal remains have been found of a mature man who was seriously handicapped at birth and whose survival would not have been possible without the special attention he received from his community. Certainly on the level of economic life, the guiding maxim of justice — the inequality of equals — had not yet fully emerged. Preliterate peoples seem to have been guided by another maxim — the equality of unequals — a maxim that forms the foundations for the ideal of freedom.
The attempt to equalize unavoidable inequalities, to compensate at nearly every level of life for lacks produced by circumstances over which one has no control — be it a physical impairment of any kind or even a lack of rights because of shortcomings that may arise for a host of inescapable factors — forms the point of departure for a free society. I speak, here, not only of the obvious compensatory mechanisms that come into play when an individual is ill or impaired. I speak of attitudes as well; indeed, of an outlook that manifests itself in a sense of care, responsibility, and a decent concern for human and nonhuman beings whose suffering, plight, and difficulties can be lightened or removed by our intervention. The concept of the equality of unequals may rest on emotional determinants such as a sense of sympathy, community, and a tradition that evokes a sense of solidarity; indeed, even an esthetic sense that finds beauty in nature and freedom in wilderness. The basically libertarian notion that what often passes for justice “exact and equal” is inadequate — indeed, that it may doom countless people to underprivileged lives or worse, because of factors that can be remedied by rational means — is the cornerstone of freedom conceived as an ethics. To “freely” realize one’s potentialities and achieve fulfillment presupposes that these very potentialities are realizable because society lives by an ethic of the equality of unequals.
Let me stress the word “ethic,” here. Preliterate communities lived by the maxim of the equality of unequals as a matter of custom — as a dim form of inherited tradition. Owing to their parochialism, moreover, custom applied exclusively to members of the community, not to “outsiders.” Viewed against the broad landscape of early society, preliterate peoples were as vulnerable to onslaughts against their customs as they were to invasions by technically more sophisticated communities. It was not very difficult to shatter customs like the equality of unequals and to replace them with systems of privilege that lacked even the notion of justice. Once customary freedoms had been destroyed, the “cry for justice” came to the forefront — a poor but necessary substitute for the unbridled power of nobles and kings. Moral injunctions, later to be formulated into laws, began to confine their power. Biblical prophets, particularly the anarchic Amos, cast not only rhetorical thunderbolts against the privileged and the kings of Judah; they also extended the boundaries of unthinking custom, based on tradition, into the domain of morality.
No longer were the oppressed obliged to find the authority for the redress of injustice in the dim mists of tradition. They could establish moral codes, based on already existing systems of authority, to retain the limited rights they claimed. But no serious attempt was made to formulate these rights in rational terms, that is to say, to turn them into a coherent ethics that lent itself to reason and discourse.
For many centuries, then, justice remained a moral concern which took the form of quasi-religious, often outright supernatural, commandments rather than discursive judgments. “Equal and exact” meant precision, not a reasoned case for right and wrong. Indeed, right and wrong were said to be ordained from the heavens and treated more often as “virtue” and “sin” than as “just” and “unjust.” We must turn mainly to the Greeks and Romans — and as much to their philosophers as to their jurists — to find reasoned debates in the secular language of the real world around justice and, eventually, freedom.
It was among these thinkers that justice, conceived as a rational and secular affair, was to take the form of an ethical problem. People began to reason out the differences between just and unjust acts, not simply adopt them as moral injunctions by a deity or inherit them as a time-honored custom. Freedom, in turn, began to emerge not only as a wistful longing but as an ever-expansive body of ideas, sophisticated by critique and by thoughtful projects to remake society. A new realm of evolution was initiated which was not only natural and social but also ethical and emancipatory. Ideals of freedom began to become part of the evolution of the good society and, in our own time, of an ecological society.
I have drawn a fairly sharp distinction between custom, morality, and ethics because the ideals of freedom over the course of history were to take very different forms when they began to advance from a traditional to a prescriptive, and finally, to a rational outlook.
These distinctions are not merely matters of historical interest. Today, justice has become more entangled with freedom than at any time in the recent past, so that mere reforms are often unthinkingly confused with radical social change. Attempts to achieve a just society that involve little more than corrective alterations in a basically irrational society are becoming muddled with attempts to achieve a free society that involve fundamental social reconstruction. Present-day society, in effect, is not being remade; it is being modified by means of cosmetic alterations rather than basic changes. Reforms in the name of justice are being advanced, in effect, to manage a profound and growing crisis rather than eliminate it.
No less troubling is the fact that reason, with its demands for fundamental critique, analyzes, and intellectual coherence, is being subverted by “pop” moralizing, often of a blatantly religious character, while mystical mythmaking is invading even moral interpretations of freedom, evoking primitivistic and potentially reactionary images of liberation. These atavistic tendencies are usually personally oriented rather than socially oriented. Personal therapy is replacing politics under the egis of “self-liberation”; mythmaking is mingling with religion to produce luxuriant growth of mystical exotica. All taken together, are being thrown against rationality in the name of cosmic “Oneness” — a “night,” to use Hegel’s expression, “in which all cows are black.”
The regressive character of this development deserves careful scrutiny. Early ideas of freedom were confined to a mythopeic imagination. Their realization was doomed to failure largely because they lived in dreamlike fantasies of a return to a “golden age” that was beyond recovery, because of the extent to which even early humanity was separated from a presumed state of pristine animality. It was only in myths, such as Homer’s Island of the Lotus-eaters, that we fancifully imagined a condition where nature completely prevails and animality completely permeates the human community so that even memory is effaced. The placidity of the Lotus-eaters, who have no will and no sense of identity, divests them of any past or future in its timeless immediacy and seemingly “natural” eternality. Odysseus’s seamen, who are ordered to reconnoiter the island, are received “kindly” and served “the honeyed fruit of the lotus,” which deprives them “of any desire to return or send word” to their ship. Not only are they content to stay” and allow themselves to be sedated; they become “forgetful of home” and of themselves as individuated beings. Like modern-day offspring of the therapeutic and mystical age, they have no “self” to fulfill because they possess no “self” to be evoked.
This mythic fantasy of prehistory and of a lost harmony with nature that is more vegetative than even animalistic, is a libel on human beings as a whole — beings that possess intellect as well as physiological functions and a sense of the “ought-to-be” as well as the “is,” That mind and body have been wrongly thrown into sharp opposition to each other by religion as well as philosophy does not remove the fact that they are different from each other in very marked ways.
None of these remarks are meant to deny that humanity did live in harmony with nature in varying degrees in the past. But that harmony was never so static, so timeless, and so divested of development as it corresponds to the world of the Lotus-eaters in all its variations in different myths. Here, the utterly arbitrary character of myth, its lack of any critical correction by reason, delivers us to complete falsehoods. Viewed from a primitivistic viewpoint, “freedom” takes on the treacherous form of an absence of desire, activity, and will condition so purposeless that humanity ceases to be capable of reflecting upon itself rationally and thereby preventing emerging ruling elites from completely dominating it. In such a mythic — and mystified world, there would be no basis for being guarded against hierarchy or for resisting it.
Nor is nature, however pristine and “wild,” so fixed in time, so lacking in dynamism, and so eternal that it is little more than the scene one seems to behold from the picture-window of a middle class summer home. This basically suburban image of nature belies its fecundity, its wealth of change, and its richness of development Nature is turbulently active, even if the Lotus-eaters are not. We shall see, in fact, that ruling class ideology fosters such static and mindless visions of paradise all the more to render freedom remote and desire incompatible with its fulfillment. Indeed, the island of the Lotus-eaters is a regressive myth of a return to infancy and passivity, when the newly born merely responds to caresses, a full breast, and is lulled into a sedated receptivity by an ever-attentive mother. The fact that the earliest word for “freedom” is amargi, the Summerian expression for a “return to mother” is ambiguous. It may well be as regressive as it is suggestive of a belief that nature in the past was bountiful and freedom existed only in the cradle of matricentric society.
That there was a freedom to be won by activity, will, and consciousness after society had gone beyond mere custom and that hope was needed to achieve a new, rational, and ecological dispensation for humanity and nature had yet to be discovered. Indeed, once the ties between humanity and nature were severed, this became the harsh work of history. To retreat back into myth, today, is to lay the basis for a dangerous quietism that thrusts us beyond the threshold of history into the dim,often imagined, and largely atavistic world of prehistory. Such a retreat obliges us to forget history and the wealth of experience it has to offer. Personality dissolves into a vegetative state that antedates animal development and nature’s evolutionary thrust toward greater sensibility and subjectivity. Thus, even “first nature” is libeled, degraded, and denied its own rich dynamic in favor of a frozen and static image of the natural world where the richly colored evolution of life is painted in washed-out pastels, bereft of form, activity, and self-directiveness.
Such vegetative images of a “golden age” — and they are being revived today, by mystics in American, English, and central European ecology movements — did not simply spring from the oppressed in history. It is true that, as tribal life gave way to “civilization” in the Near East, Egypt, and Asia, a sense of loss and a wistful look backward to a forsaken garden of Eden permeated the utopian dreams of the underclasses, People spoke longingly of an age when the lion and the lamb lay side by side and nature provided a harmonized humanity with all the means of life. The human condition was conceived in terms of a golden era that was followed by a less paradisial silver one, finally descending into an iron age that ushered in conflict, injustice, and warfare — only to be repeated again into eternity like the seasons of the year. There was very little conception of history in a truly developmental sense — merely degeneration, recovery, and continual repetition.
Let there be no mistake, however, that this imagery was advanced only by the oppressed. The belief in a purely passive relationship with nature and nonhuman beings more easily served the interests of ruling elites in history than it did the ruled, however often it was evoked in the day dreams of oppressed peoples. In the first place, these images remained nothing more than day dreams — myths that functioned as safety valves, for the very real discontents of the dominated, and deflected active attempts to change the world into cathartic rituals and sedated longings. Hoarded up by priests and priestesses, they were served out as carefully choreographed dramas to the beat of drums and the noise of flutes, enacting in controlled rituals the anger that might have overflowed into action and basic social change. No society ever returned to its “golden” past; indeed, the imagery of an inevitable cycle, with its specious promise of an “eternal return,” reinforced the priestly manipulation of passive congregants.
Even more ironically, the image of a lost “golden age” was used to justify the tyranny of the “iron age.” Priest, priestess, and noble combined to explain the loss of a “golden age” as humanity’s penalty for a fall from grace. Be it an Eve who induced Adam to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge or a Pandora who opened the box that contained the ills that were to afflict humanity, paradise or the “golden age” was lost — so it was claimed — because humanity or its surrogates violated its covenant with supernatural power. Misery, in effect, had been brought upon humanity by its own failings, or by hubris—not by the emergence of hierarchy, property, the State, and ruling elites.
Indeed, rule it is various forms was needed to discipline an unruly humanity that lacked the sense of obedience needed to maintain an orderly world. Hence, we encounter a remarkable persistence of retrospective myths of a “golden age” not only in the myths of the oppressed but in the literature of their oppressors. That myth was cannily used to justify the domination of women in the Pandora story and the domination of men in the Odyssey (a truly aristocratic epic in which the next island Odysseus encounters after leaving the Lotus-eaters is the island of the harshly patriarchal Cyclopes), reveals that the drama is surprisingly gender-blind in its treatment of subjugation. Men are no less victims of the various demonic beings who rule the islands Odysseus encounters — each of which seems to be a mythic epoch — than are women.
The gropings of Greek rationalism toward a sense of history — of advances forward rather than returns backward — are far more radical than images based on false notions of a cyclic and basically static nature Thukidides’s history of the Greek people in the opening portions of The Peloponnesian War is impeccably secular and naturalistic. No myths burden this matter-of-fact account of the emergence of the polis and the settlement of the Greek homeland. Centuries later, Diodorus Siculus is distinctly realistic in his history of humanity’s evolution from prehistory into history, a drama of changes that break the bonds of myth, cycles, and parochialism. It is not even the Greeks alone who claim Diodorus’s attention, but “the race of all human beings and their history parts of the inhabited earth.”
Christianity, despite its ambivalences and its retreat from the secularism of the Greek chroniclers, brought a sense of hi story, futurity, and redemption to masses who were captive to cycles of eternal return. That Christian fathers like Augustine invoked the Fall from innocence in the Garden of Eden was only to be expected from a religion that plainly adapted itself to authority and the Roman State. But its own origins as a popular, even a rebellious Judaic movement, mired it in inconsistency that left it open to radical as well as conservative interpretations. The Jewish religion, for all its transcendental and dualistic visions of a creator god who is clearly separated from its creation, removed the deity from social life as well as nature. As H. and H.A. Frankfort have observed, social problems could now be fought out in a largely secular domain. No longer were they completely entangled with myth and divine claims to authority. In ancient empires, tyranny had been immersed in the authority of divinity and the claims of monarchs to divine sanction. Indeed, a “sacred cosmos” included a “sacred society,” so that social oppression acquired the mystical properties of nature — a line of thought as Janet Biehl has pointed out, that has been revived in present-day attempts to treat the natural world as “sacred” and restore Goddess worship to eminence in a nonsocial, myth-ridden form of “eco-feminism.”
The Church inherited this transcendental tradition, however much it tried to modify it. Ernst Bloch was to observe that: “...for the first time a political utopia appears in history [my emphasis]. In fact, it produces history; history comes to be as saving history in the direction of the kingdom, as a single unbroken process extending from Adam to Jesus on the basis of the Stoic unity of mankind and the Christian salvation it is destined for,” [12] Utopia, in effect, became an earthbound vision oriented toward the future rather than the past. Despite its religious trapping, salvation could be achieved on earth with the return of Jesus and the sorting out of the evil from the virtuous.
Indeed, the Hebrew scriptures are charged by an activism and a bias for the oppressed that was virtually unknown to other religions of the Near East. As the Frankforts point out, Egyptian texts which give an account of the social upheaval that followed the collapse of the Old Kingdom of pyramid builders “viewed the disturbance of the established order...with horror.” The power acquired by the oppressed is evidence “of lamentation and distress... I show thee how the undermost is turned to uppermost” bemoans the chronicler. “The poor man will acquire riches.” By contrast, the Hebrew scriptures deal with social revolt by the oppressed with exuliance. The birth of the prophet Samuel, for example, is celebrated with the words: “The bows of the mighty men are broken, and they that stumbled are girded with strength. They that were full have hired themselves out for bread; and they that were hungry ceased.” The poor are raised “out of the dust” and beggars are lifted “from the dunghill, to set them among princes, and to make them inherit the throne of glory...” [13]
Not only are the mentally numbing effects of myth shaken off, like the lethargic aftereffects of a powerful sedative; its fixity and conservatism are replaced by a sense of the dynamic and temporal that yields increasingly expansive ideals of freedom. The Joachimites, one of the most subversive tendencies in medieval Christianity, break away radically from the cloudy and calculated vagueness of official scriptural history, and provocatively divide it into distinct epochs of human liberation. Even more important than the great chiliastic popular movements, like half-crazed ascetics such as the Flaggelants and the Shepherds or Pastoreaux, who were to aimlessly attack the clergy and Jews in their wanderings, were monks like Joachim of Floris who were to lay the bases for more lasting libertarian tendencies. Writing in the twelfth century, Joachim, a Cistercian abbot of Corazzo, a Calabrian town in Italy, reworked the trinity, a largely mystical unity of the deity’s triune nature, into a radical chronology. The Old Testament was said to represent the era of the Father; the New, of the Son; and the Holy Ghost was a “Third Kingdom,” yet to come, a world without masters in which people would live in harmony, irrespective of their religious beliefs, and a bountiful nature would supply the means of life for all. From the fourteenth century in England to the sixteenth century in Germany — including the Hussite wars in Bohemia, which produced stormy communistic movements like the extreme Taborites—peasants and artisans fought valiantly in chronic insurrections to retain their communal, guild, and localist rights. Conservative as they seem in the light of “modernity,” with its harsh urban, technological, and individualistic values, this centuries-long tide of unremitting conflict gave to freedom a moral meaning that it has lost in our own era of “scientific socialism” and narrow economistic analyzes.
During the centuries that culminated in the Protestant Reformation, religion became increasingly earth-bound and less supernatural than it had been in the past, despite its abiding influence on peasant and artisan movements. By the time of the English Revolution of the 1640s, the democratic Levelers were largely secular in their outlook and derided Cromwell’s opportunistic pieties. It was not Christianity as much as it was a naturalistic pantheism (if a theism of any sort it could be called) that influenced the thinking of communistic revolutionaries like Gerrard Winstanlcy, who led the small Digger movement in the English civil wars of the 1650s.
Freedom, a relatively exotic word by comparison with the cry for justice, had acquired a distinctly realistic content. Men and women began to fight not only for freedom of religion but also for freedom from religion. They began to fight not only against specific forms of domination, but also against domination as such and for freedom to the means of life in a communitarian society. Activism began to replace the vegetative placidity of a wistful reverence of the past. Morality began to efface custom; naturalism began to edge out supematuralism; opposition to ecclesiastical hierarchy began to produce opposition to civil hierarchy. A refreshing sense of development began to replace the Fixity of mythopoesis, its repetitive rituals, and the atavistic grip of a dark superstitious past on the present and future.
If there is a single fact which marks the expansion of the ideals of freedom, it is the extent to which they were nourished by reason. Contrary to popular histories of philosophy, religion, and morality, rationalism had never been abandoned in the closing centuries of the ancient world and in the Middle Ages. Despite the infestation of the late Roman Empire by the Isis cult and ascetic religions from the East, the Hellenic effort to give a rational interpretation of the world was not only retained but it slowly became differentiated into new interpretations of what constituted reason.
Indeed, we today live in a paralyzing ignorance of the different kinds of logic and rationalism that thinkers developed well into our own time. The notion that there is only one kind of reason—a fairly static, formal, and basically syllogistic logic of the kind assembled by Aristotle in his Organum — is utterly false. Actually, Aristotle himself used a highly developmental and organic kind of reason in his other writings. Formal kinds of reason were modeled on mathematics, particularly geometry. Organic, or shall we say, dialectical reason, on the other hand, stressed growth rather than fixity; potentiality rather than an inferential succession of propositions; the fluid education of ever-differentiated phenomena from generalized, nascent, indeed seed-like, beginnings into richly developed wholes rather than the schematic deduction of fixed conclusions based on rigidly stated premises. In short, a richly speculative, organic dialectic co-existed with the formal, commonsensical logic we use for matter-of-fact problems in everyday life.
Theology was, if anything, an attempt to rationally understand the ways of the creator-deity in his interaction with his creation, particularly with humankind. In the “Age of Faith” or medieval world, both systems of thought were used to explicate a good deal more than faith to which, ironically, mysticism turned more readily, in its wistful longing for a long-gone innocence, than clerical scholasticism. Francis of Assisi felt deeply for the suffering of the poor and, more problematically, saw in-nonhuman life-forms a tribute primarily to the glory of a creator-god. But the Franciscan order was very easily co-opted by the Papacy and, in inquisitorial times, turned from persecuted into persecutor, including the persecution of its own Joachimite acolytes. Innocence, intuition, and atavistic longings — our modern mystics to the contrary — are not strong barriers to manipulation. It was often keen thinkers like Galileo who were silenced by house arrest and speculative rationalists like Bruno who were burned at the stake by the Inquisition rather than mystics like Francis or Meister Eckhart.
My point, however, is that reason is not cut from a single cloth. In its dialectical form, reason imparts a sense of history, development, and process to thinking, not ‘‘linear; I propositional, and syllogistic means and analyzes. Similarly, the early glimmerings of an organismic approach to the world, not a mechanistic one, also began to revive with explorations into biology as well as physics. Evolution was already in the air as early as the Fifteenth century, if we are to judge from Leonardo da Vinci’s writings on the marine fossils that were found in inland mountains, and his remarks that, in an ever-changing world, the Po river will eventually “lay dry land in the Adriatic in the same way it has already deposited a great part of Lombardy.” By the eighteenth century, evolution was an accepted fact among the French philosophes, thanks to the work of Maupertuis, Diderot, and Buffon.
The recovery of the body, the claims of the sensuous, the right to physical pleasure — not merely a restful happiness — began to raise a major challenge to ascetism, not simply of the kind advanced by official Christianity, but also by its radical spiritualists. The belief, so widely held by the poor, that the privileged should share with them in a presumably god-given fund of misery and self-denial, was steadily undermined by ordinary people themselves. The joys of the body and the full satisfaction of material needs were increasingly seen in Renaissance times as a heavenly dispensation. Lusty utopias like the land of Cockaygne, in which toil was unknown and roasted partridges dropped into one’s lap, began to abound among the masses, often in marked contrast to the monastic lifeways of denial preached by their mystical leaders.
Unlike radical millenarians, or even Joachimites, the masses did not place these utopias in some distant future or in the heavens above. They existed geographically in the West, off the known maps of the Renaissance; and they were worlds to be discovered by active exploration, not by the lazy play of one’s imagination. Indeed, it was not always the rationalistic Christian scholastics who posed the most serious obstacles to this naturalistic trend, but rather medieval mystics like Fra Savonarola, the monkish voice of the oppressed, who burned the artworks of Florence and preached a fiery gospel of self-denial.
By comparison with the rich differentiation of liberatory ideas and visions that appeared as the “Age of Reason” approached, the movements of the oppressed by the likes of Pastoreaux, Flaggelants, and even the Joachimites seem faltering and wayward. Unscrambling the more secular threads of Greek rationalism that had been entangled by Christian and Islamic theology, the Renaissance provided a voice for richly speculative and critical ideas.
What is important is that the best of these ideas, whether they are presented in systematic tracts, dialogues, or imaginary utopias, are amazingly all-sided. They are not only rational (even dialectically so) but sensuous; they advance a message of a new society in which everything human is basically good and should be afforded full expression.
From a social viewpoint, they are ecological in the sense that they are fully participatory: all aspects of experience play a complementary role in making a richly differentiated whole. The human body is given citizenship in these new eco-communities no less than the mind; the organic, no less than the inorganic; passion, no less than reason; nature, no less than society; women, no less than men. However time-bound they may sometimes seem from the perspective of our own ideas of modernity, no part of the human and natural landscape seems to escape critical investigation and efforts at reconstruction. They penetrate not only into social organization, culture, morality, technology, and political institutions, but into family relations, education, the status of women, and the most mundane features of everyday life. Like the Renaissance and the Enlightenment themselves, everything is brought up before the bar of reason and is rejected or justified in terms of its value to an emerging secularity and naturalism.
That thinkers can hardly hope to go much beyond their time should not surprise us. We need a true generosity of spirit to appreciate the expansiveness of their ideas — given the periods in which they lived. It is one of the great truths of dialectical wisdom that all great ideas, limited as they may seem to their own time and inadequate as they may appear in ours, lose their relativity when they are viewed as part of an ever-differentiating whole — just as a block of marble ceases to be a piece of mere mineral matter when it is sculpted into a magnificent structure. Seen within the larger whole of which it is a part, it can no longer be viewed as a mere mineral, anymore than the atoms that make up a living organism can be viewed as mere particles. With life emerges metabolism, a phenomenon that never existed on the inorganic level, and one that can never be imputed to an atom, much less to its electromagnetic properties.
So the thinkers of the liberatory, indeed revolutionary, tradition must be appreciated as much for what they add to our lime as they did to their own if the abiding character of their work is to be grasped.
Thus, we can distinguish several great tendencies in the expanding ideals of freedom: first, a commitment to the existing world, to secular reality, not to one that exists in the heavens or lies off the map of the known world. I am not saying, by this, that the radical theorists, utopists, and ideologists of the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and the early part of the last century conformed “realistically” to the world in which they lived. On the contrary, they tried in the best of cases to see far beyond it and they tried to rest their ideals on the best features of the times in which they lived.
Which brings us to the second tendency they expressed: the need for a carefully structured society that was free of the explosions produced by unruly nobles in England and on the European continent. The Renaissance, particularly the aristocracy of the age, had thrown society into a condition of chronic warfare. Amid the ruins left by the Wars of the Roses in England and the religious wars in central Europe, no humane society could be conceived of by radical social theorists and utopists other than one that was totally stable and almost machine-like in the cooperative symmetry of its operations. Long before Descartes had made mechanism into a philosophical world view, explosive social dislocations made it into a radical desideratum. That many utopists had taken the well-regulated monastery as their model is radical in itself; they could have easily opted for the centralized nation-states aborning in their midst, as was to happen in the nineteenth century within the socialist movement. If a “planned economy” was needed in their time, partly to countervail the chaotic behavior of the nobles, partly to control the depredations of an emerging commercial bourgeoisie on the peasantry and urban poor, the traditional and socially responsible rules adopted by the monastery for the conduct of everyday life seemed more ethical and humane than other alternatives. Only later, in the nineteenth century, and to some degree earlier, would an orderly society and a “planned economy” be identified with the centralized nation-state; this, ironically, in the name of a value-free notion of “scientific socialism” and attempts to achieve a “nationalized” economy.
A third tendency that contributed to the expanding ideals of freedom in the radical thought of the Renaissance and, again, in the Enlightenment, was the high esteem that was placed on work(. Not only did Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella, Valentin Andreae, and Francis Bacon, among others, impart an honored role to the artisan and food cultivator, but Denis Diderot brought their crafts and their contributions to society into the pages of the French Encyclopedia, where they are given almost unprecedented attention, and their skills are explored in breath-taking detail. Kropotkin cites a medieval ordinance which declares: “Everyone must be pleased with his work, and no one shall, while doing nothing, appropriate for himself what others have produced by application and work, because laws must be a shield for applications and work.” [14] This constellation of traditions and ideas has no precedent in antiquity and was to be honored in the breach during the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, deeply humane values permeated the mixed economy of peasants, artisans, freeholders, and proletarians in the centuries that immediately preceded the ascendancy of industrial capitalism in England. Even limits to toil were imposed in this dim, often little-understood era. As the late Marie-Louise Bemeri was to observe in her searching work, Journey Through Utopia:
The Utopian idea of a short working day which to us, accustomed to think of the past in terms of the nineteenth century, seems a very radical one, does not appear such an innovation, if it is compared with an ordinance of Ferdinand the First relative to the Imperial coal mines, which settled the miner’s day at eight hours. And according to Thorold Rogers, in fifteenth century England men worked forty-eight hours a week.[15]
Lastly, among the tendencies that surface in this mixed society, particularly during the Renaissance, is the high premium that is placed on community. This was an era that was directly faced with the disintegration of villages and towns by an ever-growing and atomizing market place. The unruly bourgeois-cum-burgher had to be controlled. He assailed not only the fragile bonds that held people together in a shared communal interest, but he also threatened its guilds, religious societies that cared for the poor and ill, its extended family ties, and its high values of human solidarity. To the extent that everything came up for grabs, from common land to kinship responsibilities, radical theorists and utopists tightened their muscles — and their vision — against the asocial behavior of the new bourgeois and the money oriented aristocrat.
We must not think too harshly, then, of Thomas More for trying to retain strong family ties in his Utopia and holding fast to Catholic orthodoxy in the face of a rambunctious monarch, Henry VIII, whose “reformation” replaced the hat of the bishop of Rome with the crown of an English king. More, like so many of his Renaissance contemporaries, leaned more toward a humanistic ecumene as expressed by the principle of the papacy than the nationalism as expressed by a parochial monarch. Indeed, More’s reservations about a monarchical dispensation for his ideal society are expressed through Hythloday, the narrator of Utopia who speaks for its author, in a very pointed comment; “...most princes apply themselves to affairs of war than to the useful arts of peace; and in these I neither have any knowledge, nor do I much desire it; they are generally set on acquiring new kingdoms, right or wrong, than on governing those they possess...”
Even more far-reaching than More’s ideal society is Valentin Andreae’s “Christianopolisa severely moral community that places stringent regulations on behavior, albeit with a deeply humane attitude toward human needs and suffering. “Christianopolis” is indeed a polis — a humanly scaled city with clearly defined walls, not a nation-state. But it is highly standardized in its dwellings and its almost mathematical division of functions, zones, and its balance between industry and agriculture. None of these utopias are based on private property — another monastic feature — and they distribute the means of life according to need. Whether they are described as islands as in the case of “Utopia” or communities as in the case of “Christianopolis,” they are really cities, and they have ascetic qualities, however well their populations live. These significantly prenational and precapitalistic traits must not be overlooked; the monastic ideal of service, work, sharing, and regimentation in the interests of a visible community good pervade the radical thinking of the day, particularly among the utopists. They appear in Tommaso Campanella’s “City of the Sun,” in which women enjoy an unusually high status, with its Platonistic eugenics and the emphasis that is given to the natural sciences. The orderly, work-oriented, and literate world they offer is a tight meld between medieval tradition and modern innovation. The social theorists and utopists of the Renaissance were fascinated by the possibilities for human improvement opened by science, as evident in Francis Bacon’s sketchy “New Atlantis” I which strongly emphasized the role of education in remaking society.
These themes — particularly, enlightenment through learning, the application of reason and order to human affairs, a keen fascination with science and a high regard for work — were to extend into the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. By now, the nation-state had clearly established itself and the city had ceased to be the basic unit for radical innovation. With Montesquieu, who sets the tone for the century, political institutions began to supplant property concerns, family relationships, and cultural issues. It is interesting to note that the communistic programs advanced by the Abbe Mably and Morelly are completely marginal to the work of the philosophes; indeed, to this day, we do not even know Morelly’s first name and his influence was very limited until we arrive at the closing years of the French Revolution, when apparently his Code of Nature was read by Gracchus Babeuf, the ill-fated leader of the “Conspiracy of Equals.”
The Enlightenment was more particularized than the Renaissance, when entire disciplines were created by single individuals with a flourish of a pen, and it was more oriented toward individual rights than the preservation of community. Its engagement with ecclesiastical ‘authority and a hierarchically structured body politic made the monastery an anachronism at best and anathema at worst. Indeed, more psychological than rationalistic. Enlightenment thinkers were often preoccupied with human nature, not only human reason. Both Diderot and Rousseau, perhaps the era’s most important figures, were men of “heart” as well as brilliant minds, and spontaneous passion played as much a role in their works as reason.
From beneath the surface interchange of radical ideas between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, several issues came into sharp confrontation with each other. Could material well-being for people in a time of profound economic distress be acquired only at the expense of the individual’s subordination to a well-ordered society, based on monastic discipline and, later, on state authority? Could equality in material things be purchased by surrendering freedom to compulsory economic plans? Did a full, sensuous, even playful, way of life endanger the need for all to work, a need that had nourished the ascetism that afflicts so many utopias and radical ideas about society? Was abundance for all possible in a time that had yet to prove it could meet the most elementary needs of life? And to what extent could men, not to mention women, create a lively, participatory political culture while working eight or even less hours at demanding tasks to satisfy their basic material needs? For all the moral admonitions that the ideals of that extraordinary time advance, most of the visions they embody are patently shaped by questions of this kind. It is simply impossible to understand their possibilities and limitations without taking these questions into account.
But amid the drift from city to nation, from monastery to state, from ethics to politics, from communal property to private property, and from an artisanal world to an industrial world, a fascinating combination of visions emerged that often contained the best — and the worst — of these sweeping social antinomies, I use the word “antinomies” advisedly rather than “changes” because I am speaking of seemingly contradictory co-existents, few of which fully supplanted the earlier ones in the minds of nineteenth century radical thinkers. Indeed, as we shall see, they have reemerged again, today, as highly modified demands in an entirely new synthesis of ideas under the rubric of social ecology. It is true that paired each against the other, certain radical theorists were to choose one over the other in many cases. Marxism, for example, distinctly chose the nation over the city and the State over the self-disciplined monastic commonwealth advanced particularly by Andreae, whose views often anticipate Robert Owen’s “industrial village.”
But other forms of radical thought were to emerge and develop a synthesis for their own time — one of rapid industrialization and urbanization — and give rise to a rich legacy of ideas that radicals can no longer ignore. And the time has come to examine that legacy, free from a biased sense of partizanship that stems more from petty factional hatreds than serious reflection.
I refer to the libertarian utopias and the expressly anarchist ideas that appeared in the nineteenth century: traditions that advanced ideals of freedom that were as rational as they were ethical and as self-reflective as they were passionate. One cannot simply ignore the compelling analyzes that were advanced by William Godwin’s Inquiry Concerning Social Justice, the corpus of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s writings, the incisive critiques of Michael Bakunin, the reconstructive work of Peter Kropotkin, particularly his far-reaching ecological insights, and the utopian visions of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier without forfeiting the rational and moral wealth of ideas that enter into their works from centuries of liberatory struggles and hopes.
Nor can they be dealt with as visionary “precursors” — or worse, ideological protagonists — of Karl Marx and “scientific socialism.” One might with equal arrogance dismiss the naturalism of Aristotle for the philosophical idealism of Hegel, or the historical work of Thukidides for that of Charles Beard. At most, all of these thinkers complement each other; at the very least, they illuminate important problems where they do conflict, each spawned by a different social condition in a drama of history that is still unfolding.
The course of human development has no more moved in clearly defined and necessarily “progressive” stages than has the history of human ideas. If we were to return to a more decentralized society, an Aristotle and a Thukidides would be more relevant to our concerns because of their stored wisdom of the Greek poleis is than a Hegel or Beard, who were concerned with nation-states. We have yet to fully assess the meaning of human history, the paths it should have followed, and the ideas that are most appropriate in the remaking of society based on reason and ecological principles.
The radical theorists and utopists following upon the French Revolution exhibited more expansive ideals of freedom than their predecessors in the Enlightenment — and they were to sum up a sweeping body of alternatives to the course followed by history; alternatives that were naively ignored by their socialist successors.
Both of these legacies are of immense importance for modern radicalism — the expansiveness of their ideals and the alternatives that confronted humanity. The anarchist thinkers and libertarian utopists were deeply sensitive to choices that could have been made in redirecting human society along rational and liberatory lines. They raised the far-reaching questions of whether community and individuality could be brought into harmony with each other; whether the nation was the necessary, indeed the ethical, successor to the community or commune; whether the State was the unavoidable successor to city and regional confederations; whether the communal use of resources had to be supplanted by private ownership; whether the artisanal production of goods and small, humanly scaled, agricultural operations were destined by “historical necessity” to be abandoned for giant assembly lines and mechanized systems of agribusiness. Finally, they raised the question of whether ethics had to give way to statecraft and what would be the destiny of politics if it tried to adapt itself to centralized states.
They saw no contradictions between material well being and a well-ordered society, between substantive equality and freedom, or between sensuousness, play, and work. They envisioned a society where abundance would be possible and a gender-blind political culture would emerge as the working week, superfluous production, and excessive consumption diminished. These questions, anticipated nearly two centuries ago and infused by the moral fervor of more than two thousand years of heretical movements like the Joachimites, have surfaced in the late twentieth century with a vengeance. Words like “precursors” have become simply meaningless from the standpoint of a crisis-ridden society like our own which must reevaluate the entire history of ideas and the alternatives opened by social history in the past. What is immediately striking about their work is their acute sense of the alternatives to the abuses of their day and to the abuses of our own.
We cannot ignore the differences that distinguish the anarchist theorists and the libertarian utopists of the last century from those of a more distant past Anarchic tendencies such as the primitive Christians, the radical Gnostics, the medieval Brotherhood of Free Spirit, the Joachimites, and the Anabaptists viewed freedom more as a result of a supernaturalistic visitation than as the product of human activity. This basically passive-receptive mentality, based on mystical underpinnings, is crucial. That certain premodern tendencies in the anarchic tradition did act to change the world does not alter the fact that even their very actions were seen as the expression of a theistic preordination, In their eyes, action stemmed from the transmutation of the deity’s will into human will. It was the product of a social alchemy that was possible because of a supernatural decision, not because of human autonomy. The “philosopher’s stone” of change in this early approach reposed in heaven, not on earth. Freedom had to “come,” as it were, from agents that were suprahuman, be they a “second coming” of Christ or the preachings of a new messiah. Generally, in accord with Gnostic thinking, there were always elites like “psychics” who were free of evil or leaders blessed with moral perfection. History, in effect, was as much of a clock as it was a Joachimite chronicle: it ticked away a form of metaphysical time until the sins of the world became so intolerable that they activated the deity, who no longer forswore his creation as well as the suffering of the poor, deprived, and oppressed.
The Renaissance, Enlightenment, and, above all, the nineteenth century, radically altered this naive social dispensation. The “Age of Revolutions,” if we are to properly characterize the period from the late 1770s to the mid-twentieth century, banished supernatural visitations and a passive-receptive stance by the oppressed from its historical agenda. The oppressed had to act if they wished to free themselves. They had to make their own history willfully, an incisive concept which Jean Jacques Rousseau, for all his failings, added to the history of radical ideas and for which he deserves immortality. The oppressed had to reason. There was no appeal to powers other than their own minds. The combination of reason and will, of thought and action, of reflection and intervention, changed the whole landscape of radicalism, divesting it of its mythic, mystical, religious, and intuitive qualities — which, regrettably, are beginning to return today in a disempowered and psychologically therapized world.
The radicalism of the “Age of Revolutions,” however, went further. The Joachimite treatment of history moves, not unlike the Marxist, to the drumbeat of an inexorable “final days,” an end, even a Hegelian absolute, where all that was had to be, in some sense, all that unfolded, followed the guidance of a “hidden hand,” be it of God, Spirit and the “cunning of reason” (to use Hegel’s language), or economic interest, however concealed that interest may have been from those who were influenced by it. There were no real alternatives to what was, is, or even would be — as absurd debates about the “inevitability of socialism” revealed a generation or two ago.
The emphasis of anarchist and libertarian utopists on choice in history was to create a radically new point of departure from the increasingly teleological visions of religious and later “scientific” socialisms. In great part, this emphasis explains the attention the nineteenth century anarchists and libertarian utopists were to place on individual autonomy, the individual’s capacity to make choices based on rational and ethical judgments. This view is markedly different from the liberal tradition with which anarchic views of individuality have been associated by their opponents, particularly by Marxists. Liberalism offered the individual a modicum of “freedom,” to be sure, but one that was constricted by the “invisible hand” of the competitive marketplace, not by the capacity of free individuals to act according to ethical considerations. The “free entrepreneur” on whom liberalism modeled its image of individual autonomy was, in fact, completely trapped in a market collectivity, however “emancipated” he seemed from the overtly medieval world commune of guilds and religious obligations. He was the plaything of a “higher law” of market interactions based on competing egos, each of whom canceled out his egoistic interests in the formation of a general social interest.
Anarchism and the libertarian utopists never cast the free individual in this light. The individual had to be free to function as an ethical being, according to anarchist theorists — not as a narrow egoist—in making rational, hopefully disinterested, choices between rational and irrational alternatives in history. The Marxist canard that anarchism is a product of liberal or bourgeois “individualism” has its roots in ideologies that are bourgeois to their very core, such as those based on myths of an “invisible hand” (liberalism), Spirit (Hegelianism), and economic determinism (Marxism). The anarchist and libertarian utopist emphasis on individual freedom meant the emancipation of history itself from an ahistorical preordination and stressed the importance of ethics in influencing choice. The individual is, indeed, truly free and attains true individuality when he or she is guided by a rational, humane, and high-minded notion of the social and communal good.
Finally, anarchist visions of a new world, particularly libertarian utopias, imply that society can always be remade. Indeed, utopia is, by definition, the world as it should be according to the canons of reason in contrast to the world as it is, according to the blind, unthinking interaction of uncomprehending forces. The nineteenth-century anarchist tradition, less graphic and pictorial than the utopists who painted a canvas of now and detailed images, reasoned out its theories in accordance with human history, not theological, mystical, or metaphysical history. The world had always made itself through the agency of real flcsh-and-blood human beings, facing real choices at turning points of history. And it could remake itself along proven alternative lines that confronted people in the past.
Indeed, much of the anarchist tradition is not a “primitivistic” yearning for the past, as Marxist historians like Hobsbawn would have us believe, but a recognition of past possibilities that remain unfulfilled, such as the far-rcaching importance of community, confederation, self-management of the economy, and a new balance between humanity and nature. Marx’s famous injunction that the dead should bury the dead is meaningless, however well-intended it may be, when the present tries to parody the past. Only the living can bury the dead and they can do so on ly i f they understand what is dead and what is still living; indeed, what is intensely vital in the body-strewn battlefields of history.
Herein lies the power of William Godwin’s concern for individual autonomy, for the ethical person whose mind is unfettered by the social burdens of suprahuman forces and all forms of domination, including deities as well as statesmen, the authority of custom as well as the authority of the State. Herein, too, lies the power of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s concern for municipalism and confederalism as principles of associations, indeed, as ways of life whose freedom is unfettered by the nation-state as well as the pernicious role of property. Herein lies Michael Bakunin’s hypostasization of popular spontaneity and the transformative role of the revolutionary act, of the deed as an expression of will that is unfettered by the constraints of compromise and parliamentary cretinism. Herein, finally, lies the power of Peter Kropotkin’s ecological visions, his practical concern with human scale, decentralization, and the harmonization of humanity with nature as distinguished from the explosive growth of urbanization and centralization.
I shall have the opportunity to examine and restate the ideas of these remarkable and little appreciated thinkers in the context of the problems we face today and the need for an ecological society. For the present, let me pause to examine the issue of emancipation of another kind — the emancipation of the body in the form of a new sensuousness and of the human spirit in the form of an ecological sensibility. These issues rarely figure in most discussions of social renovation, although they have a prominent place in utopian thinking.
A sense of sheer joie de viver, of joy of living, is closely wedded to the anarchic tradition, despite the arid patches of asceticism that surface in its midst. Emma Goldman’s admonition — “If I can’t dance in your revolution, I don’t want ill” — is typically anarchic in its disposition. A colorful tradition exists that goes back centuries in time to artisan and even certain peasant anarchists who demanded as much for the emancipation of the senses as they did for their communities. The Ophites in the backwash of antiquity reread the Biblical scriptures to make knowledge the key to salvation; the snake and Eve, the agents of freedom; the ecstatic release of the flesh, the medium for the full expression of soul. The Brethren of the Free Spirit, an abiding movement over many different names in medieval Europe, rejected the ecclesiastical reverence for self-denial and celebrated their version of Christianity as a message of sheer libertinism as well as social liberation. In Rabelais’s “Abbey of Thelcme” narrative, the maxim, “Do As Thou Wilt!” removed all restraint from the members of its playful order, who were free to rise, dine, love, and cultivate all the pleasures of the flesh and the mind as they chose.
The technical limits of past eras, the fact that pleasure could rarely be separated from parasitism in a demanding world of toil, made all of these movements and utopias elitist. What the Brethren of the Free Spirit stole from the rich, the rich, in turn, took from the poor. What the members of the Abbey of Theleme enjoyed as a matter of right was expropriated from the labor of builders, food cultivators, cooks, and the grooms who served them. Nature was not bountiful, it was assumed, except in a few usually favored areas of the world. Emancipation of the senses was often assumed by the poor and their revolutionary prophets to be a ruling class privilege, although it was more widespread in villages and towns than we have been led to believe. And even the oppressed had their dreams of utopistic pleasures, of visions where nature was indeed bountiful and rivers flowed with milk and honey. But always this marvelous dispensation was the product of a being other than themselves who bestowed the gift of plenty upon them in the form of a “promised land” — be it deities or irascible demons rather than technology and new, more equitable, arrangements of work and distribution.
The greatest Utopians of the nineteenth century represent a radical change in this traditional mix of outlooks and, in this respeetthey invite our attention. Robert Owen’s early “industrial villages,” which combined the most advanced technologies of the time with agriculture in humanly scaled communities were structured around the technological opportunities opened by the Industrial Revolution. Whether “first nature” is bountiful or not, it is dearly “second nature” or human society that is economically productive. Humanity makes its own social utopia rather than awaiting its messianic delivery from suprahuman beings.
And it does so through its own technical ingenuity, powers of cooperation, and social imagination. A technological utopianism was to develop a life of its own, to be sure, culminating in the present century with H.G. Wells’s technocratically administered world, and guided by Francis Bacon’s “New Atlantis” of centuries earlier, a sketchy scientistic utopia of the sixteenth century. William Morris’s utopia, on the other hand, was more artisanal and wistfully medieval, albeit libertarian to the core. His “News from Nowhere,” overthrows capitalism and recreates the commune of the Middle Ages with its pride in craftsmanship, its human scale, and its cooperative values. Industry, by and large, goes by the board, together with authority, and quality production compensates for any gains provided by the mass manufacture of shoddy goods.
Morris’s utopia, in this respect, is a romantic throwback to a world that was gone forever, but not one that was lacking in lessons for his time and ours. The quality of production and artistry of the artisan still haunts us as a standard of excellence and a means of conserving goods for generations in what is not a “throw-away” economy whose products are transient and insult every canon of good taste. Morris’s values were clearly ecological They advance a message of human scale, the integration of agriculture with crafts, the production of lasting, truly artistic works, and a nonhierarchical society.
The utopist who was to meld these seemingly opposing traditions — sensuousness with mind, the production of lasting goods with industry, the belief in a bountiful nature with human activity, play with work — was neither a socialist nor an idle visionary, namely, Charles Fourier, who turned (in his view) imagination into a science and Newtonian models of an orderly world into a cosmological fantasy. It is not important for the purposes of our discussion to explore Fourier’s sense of mission and the depth of his social principles. He was not only not a socialist; he was not an egalitarian. His works are riddled with contradictions, hefty prejudices, and are a totally failed endeavor to make his system of “passionate intercourse” into a mathematical system, and to enlist the support of the powerful and wealthy to establish his ideal phalansteries — enormous palaces that could house the minimum 1,620 people of suitable and complementary dispositions who would make for emotionally balanced communities. Needless to say, his phalanstery was to be as self-sufficient as possible with workshops, farming land surrounding it, residences, educational centers, and ballrooms, all linked by covered galleries to protect the inhabitants from inclement weather and give them easy access to each other.
What is significant about Fourier’s phalanstery is not its structural principles, but the principles that guided its way of life, many of which were formulated in opposition to the monotony of industrial work, the puritanical values of the time, the burden of poverty that was inflicted on the senses as well as the body. Accordingly, sexual freedom was to wash out traditional familial inhibitions and philistine conventions. God rules the universe by attraction and not by force. This was a novel viewpoint, indeed, a socially rebellious one. Rule consists of self-satisfaction not of obedience to authority. The answer to industrial discipline is the daily rotation of work interspersed by personal delights for body and mind, magnificent cuisine to satisfy the palate, a gallery of highly imaginative suggestions for easing life, and the all-important belief that irksome work could be turned into play by adding charm, festivities, and the company of complementary passionate natures in the form of coworkers. Fourier thereby tried to efface the demanding “realm of necessity” which held everyone in yoke to toil, and replace it with the artful “realm of freedom” which made even hard work a pleasurable desideratum.
The “Harmonian World” Fourier envisioned, based on attraction rather than coercion, became a social program — certainly for his acolytes who were to give it a distinctly anarchic character after his death. There was no contradiction in Fourier’s mind between human artifice and natural fecundity, any more than there was between body and mind, play and work, freedom and order, unity and diversity. As yet, these were rebellious intuitions that a naturalistic version of dialectic has to work out, Fourier’s writings converge in time, if not in place, with Robert Owen’s “industrial village” which realistically combined factories and workshops with farms in fully integrated communities, a vision that was to form the prototype for Kropotkin’s idea of a libertarian community.
Between the closing years of the French Revolution and the midnineteenth century, the ideals of freedom had acquired a solidly naturalistic, technologically viable, and solidly material base. Here, too, was a remarkable turning point in history when humanity, by whatever action, might well have swerved from a path of market-oriented and profit-oriented expansion to one of community-oriented and ecology-oriented harmony, a harmony between human and non-human that could have been projected by virtue of a new sensibility into a harmony between humanity and nature. More so than the latter half of the nineteenth century, when society became engulfed by a degree of industrial development that was totally remaking the natural world, if not turning it in time into a synthetic one, the first half of the century was filled with the promise of a new integration between society and nature and a cooperative commonwealth that would have satisfied the most generous impulses toward freedom. That this did not occur was due in no small measure to the extent to which the bourgeois spirit began to enfold the Euro-American mixed society of the past century — and, no less significantly, even the revolutionary project of remaking society that had found such rich expression in the Utopians, the visionary socialists, and the anarchists who followed in the wake of the French Revolution.
The revolutionary project had acquired a richly ethical heritage, a commitment to reconciling the dualities of mind, body, and society that pitted reason against sensuality, work against play, town against country, and humanity against nature, Utopian and anarchist thought at their best saw these contradictions clearly and tried to overcome them with an ideal of freedom based on complementarity, the irreducible minimum, and the equality of unequals. The contradictions were seen as evidence of a society mired in “evil,” indeed, as a “civilization,” to use Fourier’s word, that was turned against humanity and culture by the irrational directions it had followed up to the time. Reason, in its power to be employed speculatively beyond the existing state of affairs, was becoming a crude rationalism, which was based on the efficient exploitation of labor and natural resources. Science, in its searching probe of reality and its underlying order, was turning into a cult of scientism, which was little more than the instrumental engineering of control over people and nature. Technology, with its promise of ameliorating labor, was turning into a technocratic ensemble of means for exploiting the human and nonhuman world.
The anarchist theorists and the libertarian utopists, despite their understandable belief that reason, science, and technics could be creative forces for remaking society, voiced a collective protest against the reduction of these forces to purely instrumental ends. They were acutely aware, as we can now see retrospectively from the vantage point of our own historical malaise, of the rapid transitions through which the century was going. Their fiery demands for immediate change along liberatory lines was permeated by a sense of anxiety that society as a whole was faced with “embourgeoisment,” to use Bakunin’s word for the remarkably anticipatory fears and the fatalism that gripped him in the last years of his life.
Contrary to the philistine judgments of Gerald Brenan and Hobsbawn, the anarchist emphases on “propaganda of the deed” were not primitive acts of violence and mere catharsis in the face of public passivity to the horrors of industrial capitalism. They were, in great part, the product of a desperate insight into the fact that a historic moment in social development was being lost, one whose loss would produce immense obstacles in the future to the realization of the revolutionary project. Imbued with ethical and visionary concepts, they rightly saw their time as one that demanded immediate human emancipation, not as one “stage” among many in the long history of humanity’s evolution toward freedom with its endless “preconditions” and technological “substructures.”
What did anarchist theorists and libertarian utopists did not see is that ideals of freedom were themselves faced with “embourgeoisment.” No one, perhaps not even Marx himself who played so important a role in this infection, could have anticipated that the attempt to make the emancipatory project into a “science” under the rubric of “scientific socialism” would have made it even more of a “dismal science” than economics; indeed, that it would divest it of its ethical heart, its visionary spirit, and its ecological substance. What is no less compelling, is thatMarx’s “scientific socialism” was to develop in tandem with the bourgeoisie’s sinister undoing of the very objective as well as ideological premises of the revolutionary project by justifying the absorption of decentralized units into the centralized state, confederalist visions into chauvinistic nations, and humanly scaled technologies into all-devouring systems of mass production.
From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.
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