Intellectuals and Revolutions
Course Tutors: Dr. Richard Whatmore, School of English and American Studies, B
Professor Donald Winch, Humanities GRC, B
Dr. Brian Young, School of English and American Studies,
Course Aims: This course aims to introduce students to some important turning points in
European history during the last two centuries by considering the role played by intellectuals in
justifying or opposing revolutionary changes in society and forms of government.
Teaching Methods: 10 weekly classes will be held during the Autum Term, accompanied by a
weekly lecture. Attendance at classes and lectures is obligatory.
Assessment: course report at the end of term.
Reading: Students are required to do the weekly reading and give two presentations in the
course of the term. The questions appended to each of the topics given below provide a guide to
the issues on which presentations should be based.
Course Guide and Reading List
Lectures
Week 1:
Week 2:
Week 3:
Week 4:
Week 5:
Week 6:
Week 7:
Week 8:
Week 9:
Week 10:
Introductory Meeting
Introduction: Intellectuals and Revolutions (Professor Donald Winch)
The American Revolution (Professor Donald Winch)
The French Revolution (Dr. Richard Whatmore)
Proletarian Revolution (Dr. Richard Whatmore)
The 1848 Revolutions (Dr. Richard Whatmore)
Evolution and Revolution: Charles Darwin (Dr. Brian Young)
The Russian Revolution (Dr. Richard Whatmore)
The Fascist Revolution in Spain (Dr. Brian Young)
Totalitarianism in the Twentieth Century (Professor Donald Winch)
WEEK 2
Introduction: Intellectuals and Revolutions
The revolutionary episodes we shall be considering entailed substantial political and intellectual
upheaval preceded by violence. The successful revolutions created regimes that enjoyed varying
degrees of permanence, with the American revolution standing at one end of the spectrum and
the Russian revolution, since 1989, at the other. In the French case, while the effects have been
permanent, they were for a long period unstable and divisive. The fascist revolution in Spain
was both divisive and impermanent. In the case of the one scientific revolution we shall be
considering, that inaugurated in the biological sciences by Charles Darwin, one can say that it
still regulates inquiry into these sciences and had a major impact on social thought.
Revolutions, actual or projected, aim to overturn an existing order and to establish regimes
embodying favoured ideals in new socio-economic and political institutions. Since these ideals
and institutions, and the historical processes by which they are likely to be achieved, need to be
justified before and after the event, intellectuals of one kind or another have often taken a leading
part in articulating and disseminating ideas that would give revolutions legitimacy. Intellectuals
have also stood above or served on the other side of the barricades, providing analyses of why
revolutions fail and defences of the pre-revolutionary state of affairs.
Hence the linkage expressed in the course title, with its implied invitation to consider just what
we mean by intellectuals and the role played by their writings and other activities in patterns of
events that were always complex and contingent. No single unambiguous meaning can be
attached to the term. At different times and places the role has been occupied by a variety of
individuals and groups from differing social and political standpoints. Some intellectuals came
from the traditional educated classes (clerics, scholars, lawyers, doctors, teachers, academics,
journalists, ‘men of letters’, painters, composers, scientists and other ‘experts’). Others, like
Thomas Paine, were largely self-educated, anxious to address a wide audience beyond the
existing intellectual circles of his day. In all cases, however, there have been figures who have
attempted to provide the intellectual ammunition needed to initiate, sustain, or oppose a major
change of political direction.
The opening lecture will survey some of the above issues. You will find the reading given below
useful in clarifying them, either at the beginning of the course or at the end, when you have
covered specific episodes. The quotations are intended to provoke you to think of the various
ways in which intellectuals and those systems of ideas they have promulgated have figured in
revolutions.
Quotations
1.
‘The science of politics…like most other sciences, has received great improvement. The efficacy
of various principles is now well understood, which were either not known at all, or imperfectly
known to the ancients. The regular distribution of power into distinct departments; the
introduction of legislative balances and checks; the institution of courts composed of judges
holding their offices during good behavior; the representation of the people in the legislature by
deputies of their own election; these are wholly new discoveries, or have made their principal
progress towards perfection in modern times. They are means, and powerful means, by which the
excellences of republican government may be retained and its imperfections lessened or
avoided.’ Federalist Papers, No 9, 1787-8.
2.
‘Are those differences which have hitherto been seen in every civilized country in respect of the
enlightenment, the resources, and the wealth enjoyed by the different classes into which it is
divided, is that inequality between men which was aggravated or perhaps produced by the
earliest progress of society, are these part of civilization itself, or are they due to the present
imperfections of the social art? Will they necessarily decrease and ultimately make way for a
real equality, the final end of the social art, in which even the effects of the natural differences
between men will be mitigated and the only kind of inequality to persist will be that which is in
the interests of all and which favours the progress of civilisation, of education, and of industry,
without entailing either poverty, humiliation, or dependence? In other words, will men approach
a condition in which everyone will have the knowledge necessary to conduct himself in the
ordinary affairs of life, according to the light of his own reason, to preserve his mind free from
prejudice, to understand his rights and to exercise them in accordance with his conscience and
his creed?
Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human
Mind, 1797, 10th Stage.
3.
‘Along with the monied interest, a new description of men had grown up with whom that interest
soon formed a close and marked union – I mean the political men of letters. Men of letters, fond
of distinguishing themselves, are rarely averse to innovation….What they lost in the old court
potection, they endeavored to make up by joining in a sort of incorporation of their own; to
which the two academies of France and afterwards the vast undertaking of the Encyclopedia,
carried on by a society of these gentleman, did not a little contribute. The literary cabal had
some years ago formed something like a regular plan for the destruction of the Christian religion.
This object they pursued with a degree of zeal which hitherto had been discovered only in the
propagators of some system of piety. They were possessed with a spirit of proselytism in the
most fanatical degree; and from thence, by an easy progress, with the spirit of persecution
according to their means. What was not to be done towards their great end by any direct or
immediate act might be wrought by a longer process through the medium of opinion….The
resources of intrigue are called in to supply the defects of argument and wit. To this system of
literary monopoly was joined an unremitting industry to blacken and discredit in every way, and
by every means, all those who did not hold to their faction. To those who have observed the
spirit of their conduct it has long been clear that nothing was wanted but the power of carrying
the intolerance of the tongue and of the pen into a persecution which would strike at property,
liberty, and life. ..A spirit of cabal, intrigue, and proselytism pervaded all their thoughts, words,
and actions. And as controversial zeal soon turns its thoughts on force, they began to insinuate
themselves into a correspondence with foreign princes, in hopes through their authority, which at
first they flattered, they might bring about the changes they had in view. To them it was
indifferent whether these changes were to be accomplished by the thunderbolt of despotism or by
the earthquake of popular commotion.’
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790.
4.
‘When we closely study the French Revolution we find that it was conducted in precisely the
same spirit as that which gave rise to so many books expounding theories of government in the
abstract. Our revolutionaries had the same fondness for broad generalisations, cut-and-dried
legislative systems, and a pedantic symmetry; the same contempt for hard facts; the same taste
for reshaping institutions on novel, ingenious, original lines; the same desire to reconstruct the
entire constitution according to the rules of logic and a preconceived system instead of trying to
rectify its faulty parts. The result was nothing short of disastrous; for what is a merit in the writer
may well be a vice in the statesman and the very qualities which go to make great literature can
lead to catastrophic revolutions.’
Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution, 1856, Part III, Chapter 1.
5.
‘Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution
going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a
violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the
revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier
period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie
goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have
raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a
whole….The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and
resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward
all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the
advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general
results of the proletarian movement.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848.
6.
‘In France and in England [after 1830] the bourgeoisie had conquered political power.
Thenceforth, the class-struggle, practically as well as theoretically, took on more and more
outspoken and threatening forms. It sounded the knell of scientific bourgeois economy. It was
thenceforth no longer a question, whether this theorem or that was true, but whether it was useful
to capital or harmful, expedient or inexpedient, politically dangerous or not. In place of
disinterested inquirers, there were hired prize-fighters; in place of genuine scientific research, the
bad conscience and evil intent of apologetic.’
Karl Marx, Capital, afterword to 2nd German edition, 18.
Questions
1. Why did the Federalist Papers and Condorcet have such confidence in the contribution of the
‘science of politics’ and improvements in ‘social art’ to revolutionary success?
2. Does Paine or Condorcet merit the kinds of criticisms that Burke and Tocqueville make about
the role of philosophers and men of letters in bringing the French revolution into disrepute?
Would they have made similar criticisms of the American founding fathers, and if not, why not?
3. Why does Marx believe that class struggle has replaced the kind of equality that features in
Condorcet’s hopes for the future?
4. What is the difference between knowledge of the ‘line of march’ that communists bring to
bear on human affairs and that cultivated by the ‘hired prizefighters’ in the two Marx quotations?
5. What are the differences between the roles played in public life by intellectuals in France and
Britain?
6. When you have done the reading for each of the topics, which of the following most closely
approximates to your own view of the role of intellectuals?
They are ‘workers by brain’ in contrast with those who work by hand. They are ambitious
elitists and self-serving ideologues. They are alienated outsiders, opposed to social
conventions and prone to take extreme positions, left or right. They are opinion-formers
and educators, constitutional or legislative experts. They are ‘mere’ theorists, impractical
utopians. They comprise the ‘vanguard’ of changes that are immanent within society;
they act as midwives capable of easing the birth-pangs of a forthcoming social order.
They are independent, disinterested, and objective truth-tellers. They are brokers
between state and society. They are high priests, apparatchiks, technocrats, cultural
fashion-setters. They are experts in handling the general ideas that determine the nature
of the zeitgeist and the agenda for public debate.
Reading
E. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 1994.
V. Havel’s title essay in his The Power of the Powerless, 1985.
I. Berlin, Russian Thinkers, 1980.
S. Collini, ‘Intellectuals in Britain and France in the Twentieth Century’ in J. Jennings (ed),
Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century France, 1993.
T. W. Heyck, ‘Myths and Meanings of Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century British National
Identity’, Journal of British Studies, 37, 1988, 192-221.
J. Jennings and A. Kemp-Welch (eds), Intellectuals in Politics, 1997.
P. Anderson, ‘Components of the National Culture’, New Left Review, 50, 1968, 1-57.
For two attacks on intellectuals by anti-intellectual intellectuals that show how unloved the
intellectual can be in Britain see:
J. Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses, 1992.
P. Johnson, Intellectuals, 1988.
WEEK 3
The American Revolution
The revolution that created the United States of America began with the Declaration of
Independence, a document drafted by Thomas Jefferson, later to be the 3rd President. In itself,
the Declaration is a defensive, conservative, or preservative document, as much backward as
forward looking. It outlines the grievances of the colonies under British rule and proclaims their
intention to regain those ancient English liberties that had been undermined by the policies of
British governments since 1763. It contains some ‘radical’ features concerning the equality of
all men in the enjoyment of certain inalienable rights, but even these were based on arguments
articulated by Locke and other English opponents of monarchical power during the previous
century.
Of more truly revolutionary significance was the framing of the federal constitution of the United
States, and here The Federalist Papers, written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and
John Jay, are the source of major political and intellectual innovations. By accepting their
proposals for a federal constitution the Americans created a novel form of government: a modern
republic with representative institutions, containing elaborate checks and balances on the
exercise of power, and covering a territory far larger than any other republic known to history.
To accomplish this the founding fathers had to provide remedies for the defects thought to be
inherent in republican forms of government, notably proneness to factional conflict and
instability. The resulting written constitution survives to this day, with very little fundamental
amendment, as a perfect specimen of what enlightened eighteenth-century thinkers felt was
essential in any form of government that could be established from scratch. The success of the
Americans proved an inspiration to English and French supporters of revolution in France, where
the outcome was less propitious.
Quotations
1.
‘The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind. Many circumstances have,
and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all lovers of
mankind are affected, and in the event of which their affections are interested. The laying of a
country desolate with fire and sword, declaring war against the natural rights of all mankind, and
extirpating the defenders thereof from the face of the earth, is the concern of every man to whom
nature hath given the power of feeling..’
Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776
2.
‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by
their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit
of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their
just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes
destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new
Government, having its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as
to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.’
Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776.
3.
‘The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere
brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil
society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many
other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously
contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have
been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed
them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each
other than to cooperate for their common good….The regulation of these various and interfering
interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and
faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.’
Federalist Papers, Number 10, 1787-8.
Questions
1. What arguments does Paine employ to urge Americans to break the link with English
monarchy?
2. What natural or ‘unalienable’ rights do Paine and Jefferson believe to be universal? How are
such rights discovered and protected?
3. Why does Madison, in Federalist Papers, Number 10, believe that the formation of factions is
inevitable, dangerous, yet capable of solution?
4. Give reasons for the success of the American constitutional experiment when compared with
the failures of the French ones after 1789. Were they inevitable?
Reading
Primary Sources
The Declaration of Independence, 1776 and the Constitution of the United States, 1787
T. Paine, Common Sense
The Federalist Papers
Secondary Sources
J. P. Greene (ed), The Reinterpretation of the American Revolution, 1763-1789, Part IV; the
essays by Lovejoy and Adair in Part VI; and the essay by Morgan in Part VII.
Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, Chapers 12 and 15.
J. P. Greene and J.R. Pole (eds.), The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the American Revolution, 1991.
Gordon S. Wood, 'Democracy and the American Revolution' in John Dunn (ed.), Democracy:
The unfinished journey, 508 BC to AD 1993 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 91-105
Gordon Wood, 'Framing the Republic' in Bernard Bailyn, Robert Dallek, David Brion Davis,
David Herbert Donald, John L. Thomas, Gordon S. Wood, The Great Republic. A History of the
American People, third edition, volume 1 (Lexington, Mass., 1985), Part II, pp. 210-371.
M. Philp, Paine, Past Master, )
G. Claeys, Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought, 1989.
WEEK 4
The French Revolution
It is tempting to see the French Revolution as a replication of the North-American Revolution,
fifteen years on. Both culminated, after all, in the creation of republics in large states. The
French, however, believed that they were doing something new. From their perspective, North
America was fortunate in being a society abundant in land and relatively meagre in population.
It was easier to establish a popular government where the majority of the people had the
opportunity to purchase land: the most stable evidence of having a stake in the country.
Furthermore, excepting slaves and the indigenous native populations, North America was a
society less divided than France. Perhaps most distinctively of all, the United States lacked an
established church and enjoyed at this time a tolerance in matters religious which was the envy
of many European philosophes. It was a very different matter to establish popular government in
an ancient and absolute monarchy, ruling a society divided into legally distinct and potentially
antagonistic orders, with Catholicism the established state religion. The Catholic church was
also a dominant force in education, popular culture, and political communication. When these
differences are taken into consideration it becomes clear that the French Revolution was, at least
at the outset, more ambitious than the American Revolution. It entailed a social transformation
of society in addition to the creation of a new political order. The central events in these respects
were the transformation of the Estates General into a National Assembly founded on national
sovereignty in June 1789, the abolition of feudalism on the night of 4th August, the Declaration
of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which established civil and political liberties, and the Civil
Constitution of the Clergy, which demanded that clergymen sign an oath of allegiance to the new
state.
The Revolution began with a series of momentous outpourings of popular feeling, called
Journées by the revolutionaries, of which the most famous is the storming of the Bastille.
Although the Revolution appeared to enjoy the support of the entire nation, the flight of the
emigres began with the leading aristocrats of the court. Trickle became flood when the
revolutionaries in Paris alienated priests, feudal landowners, and exponents of alternate
conceptions of government. When Louis XVI refused to accept the loss of monarchical
sovereignty, attempting to flee France in 1791, the revolutionaries accepted that the logic of their
ideas was not to retain a mixed government but to establish an altogether new form of
government in Europe: a modern republic which was intended to be the most egalitarian,
commercial and popular state in history. Fear of opposition to absolute monarchy spreading to
other states in Europe, allied to concerns about the resurrection of French imperial ambition,
caused the Revolution to be opposed by neighbouring European states almost from the outset.
The result of such opposition was the beginning of civil war in France in 1790 and international
war in 1792. War became Terror in 1793, when members of the Jacobin Club, led by
Robespierre, defined ideas about citizenship so exclusively as to entail the imprisonment and
murder of their opponents.
Quotations
1.
‘The plan of this pamphlet is very simple. We have three questions to ask: 1st. What is the third
estate? Everything. 2nd. What has it been heretofore in the political order? Nothing. 3rd. What
does it demand? To become something. We shall see if these answers are correct. Then we shall
examine the measures that have been tried and those which must be taken in order that the third
estate may in fact become something. Thus we shall state: 4th. What the ministers have
attempted, and what the privileged classes themselves propose in its favour. 5th. What ought to
have been done. 6th. Finally, what remains to be done in order that the third estate may take its
rightful place.’
Emmanuel Sieyès, What is the Third Estate? (January, 1789).
2.
‘The representatives of the French people, organised in the National Assembly, considering that
ignorance, forgetfulness, or contempt of the rights of man are the sole causes of public
misfortunes and of the corruption of governments, have resolved to set forth in a solemn
declaration the natural, inalienable, and sacred rights of man, in order that such declaration,
continually before all members of the social body, may be a perpetual reminder of their rights
and duties; in order that the acts of the legislative power and those of the executive power may
constantly be compared with the aim of every political institution and may accordingly be more
respected; in order that the demands of the citizens, founded henceforth upon simple and
incontestable principles, may always be directed towards the maintenance of the Constitution
and the welfare of all.
Accordingly, the National Assembly recognises and proclaims, in the presence and under
the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following rights of man and citizen.’
Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, 27 August, 1789.
3.
‘What is called a republic is not any particular form of government. It is wholly characteristical
of the purport, matter or object for which government ought to be instituted, and on which it is to
be employed, res-publica, the public affairs, or the public good; or, literally translated, the public
thing. It is a word of good original, referring to what ought to be the character and business of
government; and in this sense it is naturally opposed to the word monarchy, which has a base
original signification. It means arbitrary power in an individual person; in the exercise of which,
himself, and not the res-publica, is the object.’
Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (Part Two), 1792.
4.
‘Nothing is more certain, than that our manners, our civilisation, and all the good things which
are connected with manners, and with civilisation, have, in this world of ours, depended for ages
upon two principles; and were indeed the result of both combined; I mean the spirit of a
gentleman, and the spirit of religion…But the age of chivalry is gone - That of sophisters,
œconomists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.
Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission,
that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude
itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom.’
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1791).
5.
‘We have seen men shut their eyes to the causes of the French Revolution, we have seen those
who tried to persuade themselves that any revolutions and conspiratorial sect before this
Revolution was but a chimera… We shall state that everything in the French Revolution,
including its most terrifying crimes, was foreseen, premeditated, planned, resolved. Everything
was the work of the most abominable villainy.’
Abbé Baruel, Memoirs which serve as a history of Jacobinism, 1798.
Questions
1. Was Paine right to argue that the French and American Revolutions were related phenomena?
2. How far did the French Revolution exemplify a ‘democratic’ revolution?
3. What, according to Sieyès, were the necessary principles of the French Revolution? How far
did the events of 1789-90 conform to these principles?
4. Was Paine’s republicanism compatible with monarchy?
5. Why did the French Revolution generate such intense ideological opposition?
6. What were the intellectual consequences of the French Revolution?
Reading
Primary sources
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, August 1789.
Decree on the Fundamental Principles of Government, October 1789.
The August 4th Decrees, 1789.
The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, 12 July, 1790.
Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man.
Emmanuel Sieyès, What is the Third Estate?
Secondary sources
K. M. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1990).
F. Furet, Revolutionary France (London, 1988).
F. Furet & M. Ozouf, A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (London, 1990), esp. entry
on Sieyès.
F. Venturi, The End of the Old Regime, 2 vols. (New Jersey, 1991), vol. 2.
J. Dunn, ed. Democracy: An Unfinished Journey, essays by Dunn and Fontana.
M. Forsyth, The Political Thought of the abbé Sieyes (Leicester, 1987).
WEEK 5
Proletarian Revolution
Having survived civil and international war for almost a decade, the French Revolution ended
with Napoleon Bonaparte’s prolonged coup d’état which began in November 1799 and
culminated in his being crowned Emperor by Pope Pius VII in December 1804. Although the
immediate result was France’s military supremacy, creating the first fears for a hundred years of
universal monarchy, the failed invasion of Russia in 1812 and the dogged opposition of the
British ultimately led to the defeat of Bonaparte in the ‘battle of the nations’ at Leipzig in
October 1813. The ‘Hundred Day’s’ was Bonaparte’s swan song, and Waterloo allowed the
Congress of Vienna to settle the map of Europe by invoking the principle of legitimacy, in the
hope of bringing peace after a quarter-century of war. A great deal of the language of Metternich
and Talleyrand at Vienna smacked of the Old Regime, but in practice 1815 was not a return to
the past. The ‘new wine in old bottles’ was liberal in the sense that all nations looked to Britain
as the model state to learn from and aspire to.
Admiration of the British took several forms, but it is notable that Britain’s combination
of civil liberty, mixed government, commercial society, and prominent aristocracy were the most
oft-cited explanations for her national supremacy. It might be thought that the birth of liberalism
as a political ideology at this time would have set the seal on the ideologies of revolutionary
France. The founders of liberalism, such as Benjamin Constant, made clear that in embracing
this creed they were turning against the republican ideas they had favoured in their youth.
French republicanism, however, rather than dying, found new life when it was turned to for
solutions to the problems of the age. Although it mutated, it retained its popularity as a source of
solutions to such evils as unemployment, social unrest, poverty and national egoism. The most
important ideological mutation was socialism, which developed in the 1820s and 1830s as a
critique of commercial and religious forms of life in modern Europe; it promised a new world of
peace, prosperity and social harmony.
There were many different types of socialism, from Robert Owen’s idea of small-state
utopias of labour, which William Cobbett famously derided as ‘parallelograms of paupers’, to
Saint-Simon’s ‘new Christianity’, but, in the ‘black decade’ of the 1840s, socialists began to pin
their hopes on a revolution in social relationships which would be led by one of the most
conspicuous members of modern society: the proletarian. Left Hegelians in Germany and
French radicals such as Louis Blanc and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, began to reinterpret modern
history by portraying commercial society as a war between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat
rather than being characterised by conflict between the people and the owners of land. Their
expectation, formulated by Marx in the early 1840s, was that socialist forms of production,
characterised by co-operation and communal labour, would replace the capitalist practices which
masked the exploitation, immiseration and alienation of the majority of the population. Indeed,
the revolution was perceived to be inevitable, guaranteed by the ‘iron laws’ of world historical
development. These laws, in Marx’s view, could be empirically validated by the new science of
historical materialism. The result, led by the most impoverished class of all, the proletariat,
would be a revolution in which ‘the expropriators will be expropriated’, creating a new world of
industriousness, equality, and fraternity.
Quotations
1.
‘The exercise of political rights offers us but a part of the pleasures that the ancients found in it,
while at the same time the progress of civilisation, the commercial tendency of the age, the
communication amongst peoples, have infinitely multiplied and varied the means of personal
happiness. It follows that we must be far more attached than the ancients to our individual
independence. For the ancients, when they sacrificed that independence to their political rights,
sacrificed less to obtain more; while in making the same sacrifice, we would give more to obtain
less. The aim of the ancients was the sharing of social power among the citizens of the same
fatherland: this is what they called liberty. The aim of the moderns is the enjoyment of security
in private pleasures; and they call liberty the guarantees accorded by institutions to these
pleasures.’
Constant, The liberty of the Ancients compared with that of the Moderns (1819).
2.
‘Reader, be reassured that I am not an agent of discord or an instigator of sedition. I anticipate
history by a few days; I reveal the truth which we try in vain to prohibit; I write the preamble of
our future constitution. This apparently blasphemous proposition - ‘Property is theft’ - would, if
our assumptions permitted us to understand it, be seen as a lightning rod against the coming
thunderbolt; but too many interests and prejudices stand in the way. Unfortunately, philosophers
will not change the course of events, and destiny will be fulfilled despite prophecy. In any case,
must not justice be done and our education completed?’
Proudhon, What is Property? (1840).
3.
‘True, it must be owned, we for the present, with our Mammon-Gospel, have come to strange
conclusions. We call it a Society; and go about professing openly the totalest separation,
isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named
‘fair competition’ and so forth, it is a mutual hostility. We have profoundly forgotten
everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings; we think, nothing
doubting, that it absolves and liquidates all engagements of man. ‘My starving workers?’
answers the rich Mill-owner: ‘Did not I hire them fairly in the market? Did I not pay them, to the
last sixpence, the sum covenanted for? What have I to do with them more?’ Verily Mammonworship is a melancholy creed, When Cain, for his own behoof, had killed Abel, and was
questioned. ‘Where is thy brother?’ he too made the answer, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ Did I
not pay my brother his wages, the thing he had merited from me?’
Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, 1843.
4.
‘Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political
advance of that class.…in the period of manufacture proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the
absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, corner-stone of the great
monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of modern industry
and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative state, exclusive
political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common
affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848.
5.
‘The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the
formation and augmentation of capital; the condition of capital is wage labour. Wage labour
rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose
involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to
competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of
modern industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie
produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its
own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.’
Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848.
Questions
1. What divided socialists and liberals in the early nineteenth century.
2. How far was socialism a development of ideas first canvassed in the French Revolution?
3. What was the role of the proletariat in Marx’s theory of revolution?
4. Explain why Marx’s analysis of history was the foundation of his political ideas.
5. Compare and contrast Marx’s socialism with that of Proudhon.
6. According to Marx, what would be the result of a proletarian revolution?
Reading
Primary sources
Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (any edition).
Karl Marx, The German Ideology (any edition).
Benjamin Constant, ‘The liberty of the ancients’ in Political Writings, ed. B. Fontana
(Cambridge, 1989).
P.-J. Proudhon, What is Property? (any edition).
Secondary sources
D. McLellan, Karl Marx. His Life and Thought (London, 1973).
S. Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge, 1968).
G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford, 1986), chs. 1-2.
G. A. Kelley, The Humane Comedy: Constant and French Liberalism (Cambridge, 1992).
T. Carver, ‘Communism for Critical Critics? The German Ideology and the Problem of
Technology’, History of Political Thought, 11, no. 1 (Spring, 1988), 129-36.
WEEK 6
The 1848 Revolutions
1848 was the year of revolutions. It began with a revolt in Palermo, Sicily, against the
corruption of the Bourbon king. Spreading to Naples, Ferdinand II proclaimed a new
constitution in February. Later in the same month, revolt in Paris ended Louis Philippe’s reign.
Although the king abdicated in favour of his grandson, a provisional republican government was
proclaimed under Alphonse de Lamartine. Before the end of February, the socialist Louis Blanc
had erected National Workshops to provide poor relief across Paris. In Vienna, March
demonstrations by university students led to the flight of the chief-minister Metternich and the
calling of an Estates General. Similar political upheavals followed in Hungary, Milan and
Berlin. In the latter Frederick William IV was forced to grant not only a new constitution but to
parade in its support in the streets of the city. Even the Vatican was not immune; Pope Pius IX
promulgated a constitution on 14 March. In Britain, where many foreign radicals expected the
greatest political change, because of the advanced state of commercialisation, a Chartist petition
to Parliament was presented in April.
In ideological terms the revolutions represented the first opportunity for open discussion,
in diets, assemblies and councils, between liberals, royalists, republicans, anarchists, socialists
and communists. Marx’s Communist Manifesto, which appeared in February, appeared the most
prescient of works in that its prediction of war between bourgeoisie and proletarians was
followed by communist insurrection in Paris. In the eyes all of the idéolgues of 1848, the
revolutions meant that history was catching up with social and intellectual developments. They
were certain that a new world was about to be created, transformed by the superior
enlightenment and rationality of the ideology they favoured. Perhaps this was the problem.
Political revolution commenced with feelings of supreme confidence, founded on the expectation
of the supreme victory of a particular ideology. Compromise was inconceivable.
Revolutionary euphoria was short lived. Revolt in Naples collapsed as early as May.
Austrian troops under Prince Windischgrätz suppressed rebels in Czechoslovakia in June while
in July General Joseph Radetzky drove Sardinian opponents from Milan and the rest of
Lombardy. In France, rather than a electing a president loyal to the republic, Louis Napoleon
entered office with a huge majority. Britain, far from seeing the most radical political
innovations, was the most stable of European states; the Chartist petitions proved farcical, and
the movement was dead by the end of the year. By 1850, revolt had been crushed in Germany
and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1851, by means of a coup d’état, Louis Napoleon
inaugurated the Second Empire. Revolutionaries were left facing an uncertain future, with the
Old Regime seemingly stronger than ever. This was the context in which Marx saw fit to rethink
and revise his ideas about the process of political revolution. It also saw renewed debate
between the opposing radical movements of 1848, all of whom had divergent interpretations of
their failure.
Quotations
1.
‘Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they
themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are
directly confronted. The tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds
of the living. And, just when they appear to be engaged in the revolutionary transformation of
themselves and their material surroundings, in the creation of something which does not yet
exist, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they timidly conjure up the spirits of the
past to help them; they borrow their names, slogans and costumes so as to stage the new worldhistorical scene in this venerable disguise and borrowed language. Luther put on the mask of the
apostle Paul; the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately as the Roman republic and
the Roman empire; and the revolution of 1848 knew no better than to parody at some points
1789 and at others the revolutionary traditions of 1793-5. In the same way, the beginner who has
learned a new language always retranslates it into his mother tongue: he can only be said to have
appropriated the spirit of the new language and to be able to express himself in it freely when he
can manipulate it without reference to the old, and when he forgets his original language while
using the new one.’
Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852.
2.
‘At that time Marx’s propaganda and his communist party organisation had almost no influence
over the urban proletariat of Germany, or at least the great majority of it. Marx’s organisation
had spread mainly to the industrial towns of the Prussian Rhineland, especially Cologne…There
is a great difference between an instinctive expression and a conscious, clearly defined demand
for a social revolution or social reforms. No such demand was made in Germany in 1848 or
1849, even though the famous manifesto of the German communists, composed by Marx and
Engels, had been published in March of 1848. It passed by the German people almost without
trace. In all the towns of Germany the revolutionary proletariat was directly subordinate to the
political radicals, or the party of extreme democracy, which gave the latter enormous strength.
But bourgeois democracy, itself confused by the bourgeois-patriotic program and by the
complete bankruptcy of its leaders, deceived the people.’
Michael Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, 18??.
3.
‘In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations of
production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production.
The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real
foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite
forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general
process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that
determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a
certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with
the existing relations of production or - this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms - with
the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of
development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of
social revolution. The changes in the economic in the economic foundation lead sooner or later
to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. In studying such transformations it
is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic
conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the
legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic - in short, ideological forms in which men
become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by
what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its
consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions
of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the
relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for
which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never
replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the
framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to
solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the
material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In
broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be
designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois
mode of production is the last antagonistic mode of the social progress of production antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from
the individuals; social conditions of existence - but the productive forces developing within
bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The
prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.’
Marx, Preface, A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, 1859.
4.
‘Will Socialism remain buried in the disdain with which the Socialists of 1848 are so justly
covered? I put the question without making any reply. I do not doubt that the laws concerning
the constitution of our modern society will in the long run undergo modification; they have
already done so in many of their principal parts. But will they ever be destroyed and replaced by
others? It seems to me to be impracticable. I say no more, because - the more I study the former
condition of the world and see the world of our own day in greater detail, the more I consider the
prodigious variety to be met with not only in laws, but in the principles of law, and the different
forms even now taken and retained, whatever one may say, by the rights of property on this earth
- the more I am tempted to believe that what we call necessary institutions are often no more than
institutions to which we have grown accustomed, and that in matters of social constitution the
field of possibilities is much more extensive than men living in their various societies are ready
to imagine.’
Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections.
Questions
1. How did Marx expect the revolutions of 1848 to proceed?
2. How did Marx explain the failure of his expectations concerning the revolutions of 1848?
3. How just was Bakunin’s criticism of Marx?
4. Explain Tocqueville’s perspective on the events of 1848.
5. Did Marx alter his view of bourgeois society after 1848?
Reading
Primary sources
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Surveys from Exile (Middlesex,
1992).
Tocqueville, The Recollections (London, 1947).
Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy (Cambridge, 1990).
Secondary sources
E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution
E. Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, 3 vols, vol. 1.
WEEK 7
Evolution and Revolution: Charles Darwin
Of all the many revolutions in intellectual life produced over the last century and a half,
Darwinism is arguably still the most far-reaching and pervasive. When considered alongside the
perceived decline of Marxism in the wake of the Revolutions of 1989, Darwinism has proved
more resilient. The media still enjoy running science versus religion debates in which Darwinian
biology is taken as the implicit opponent of religious sytems of belief, an antagonism which can
be dated back to the early 1860s when Darwin's attack on the biblically-sanctioned notion of a
unique point of creation in time achieved by a personal God was felt to be a potent threat by
churchmen and laity alike. Recent developments in genetics also appeal to the Darwinian
revolution, and Darwinism can thus be seen as central to many of the issues on the cusp of
morals, belief, and the nature of the future.
Darwin's thought has its own genealogy, and this has to be appreciated before his ideas and those
of his many popularisers can be properly considered. Charles Darwin (1809-92) led a largely
uneventful life, but his ideas were to prove as revolutionary as his predecessors in scientific
endeavour, men such as Copernicus and Newton, whose work fundamentally changed the way
people thought about not just the world, but the universe itself. The natural sciences of Darwin's
day were held by many to demonstrate the existence of a superintending creative entity who
could be readily identified with the Christian God. William Paley, an Anglican divine, produced
the definitive work in this field, Natural Theology: or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes
of the Deity (1802). It became a standard textbook in the Cambridge in which Darwin was
educated. Paley recommended that clergymen take up the study of biology and geology precisely
because they provided the evidence for the existence of a deity. It was thus from within a
Christian citadel that Darwin undertook an intellectual revolution which challenged the authority
of the Bible and its nineteenth-century defenders.
Unfortunately for Paley and his like, geology and biology would not long prove to be the
comforting source of Christian apologetics they had assumed them to be. Geology proved
particularly refractory: the evidence of geological layers pointed to a world much older than
computations based on the Bible could imagine; the presence of fossils and similar remains of
long-extinct species questioned the nature of the Creation account in Genesis, and they laid God
open to the charge of waste and imperfection: why create species that could not last? Why would
an all-wise Creator have to work his way through creation, making mistakes along the way?
These and allied questions were raised by geology, and a study of these matters by R.B.
Chambers, Vestiges of Creation, led to widescale unrest over the authority of the biblical
explanation of the world. It was the evidence of unthinkable aeons of time and of the extinction
of a myriad of long-unknown species that led to moments of deep despair in Tennyson's In
Memoriam, a poem which witnesses the difficult triumph of faith when confronted by an
apparently loveless universe. Tennyson's hugely popular poem typifies many of the anxieties
which confronted thoughtful people when contemplating the geological record.
It was after his journey on H.M.S. Beagle, during which he undertook detailed research in the
Galapogos Islands, that Darwin began to think through the ideas which led to his theory of
evolution. Notions of evolution were not new (his own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had
developed something very like a theory of evolution), but it was Darwin's formulation of the idea
of natural selection which proved revolutionary. His belief that species evolved amidst a general
struggle for existence, evolving characteristics necessary to survival in unpropitious and
challenging circumstances, was his major contribution, but it too had its source. Darwin derived
the idea of a struggle for subsistence from his reading of An Essay on the Principle of
Population, the celebrated but controversial work of a Christian divine, Robert Malthus.
Malthus too had faced Christian detractors, angry at his portrayal of a world which could not
supply the foodstuffs for an ever-expanding population. This too, they argued, challenged the
sovereignty and the purposes of a beneficent God. Darwin, then, absorbed both the troubling
lessons of geology and those of political economy: small wonder that many, but by no means all,
Christians were suspicious of both the man and his theory.
The public defence of Darwin, a timid and cautious man, was largely undertaken by T. H.
Huxley, popularly known as Darwin's Bulldog. An open agnostic, a term which he himself
coined, Huxley propounded Darwinian theory for the rest of his long life. There was, however,
one area in Darwinian speculation which Huxley denounced, and that was its application to a
theory of morals and society. Huxley was sharply critical of 'Social Darwinism', the doctrine
associated with Herbert Spencer and others which argued that society witnessed a continual
struggle for the survival of the fittest, and that a strong society would consequently be largely
constituted by the fittest, thereby challenging notions of charity which they saw as guaranteeing
the useless survival of weaker elements of humanity. Doctrines of eugenics, associated with
Francis Galton, became popular as a result, and they were advocated as enthusiastically by
Fabian Socialists, such as George Bernard Shaw and the Webbs, as they were by rugged liberal
individualists. In his Romanes Lecture of 1893, Huxley denounced this abuse of Darwin's
theories, arguing that a theory about biology was necessarily not applicable to morals, which he
saw as a very distinct category of human endeavour.
The Darwinian Revolution demonstrates several important features of intellectual revolutions. It
shows that ideas developed to demonstrate a particular belief system can be challenged from
within, and that scientific advance is dependent on a number of social and other factors, and not
on purely 'scientific' claims. Mid-Victorian Britain was a profoundly religious culture, but it was
also one still in a state of ferment after the Industrial Revolution, and its society and its economy
were subject to challenge and change as a result. Darwin's theory was introduced into a fractious
political culture, and there is evidence that Darwin kept back his theories from public exposure
precisely because he was afraid of the potentially revolutionary affects it could have had on
society. Not for nothing had Marx wanted to dedicate his major work to him, an honour which
Darwin politely rejected. It was, however, thinkers on the other side of the political spectrum
who saw in Darwinism a major element of a developing social theory, and this demonstrates the
permeability of revolutionary systems of thought. The science of society saw itself as an aspect
of natural science, and Darwinism was integral to much of the social and political thought of the
second half of the nineteenth century.
Quotations
1. 'The positive checks to population are extremely various, and include every cause, whether
arising from vice or misery, which in any degree contributes to shorten the natural duration of
human life. Under this head therefore may be enumerated, all unwholesome occupations, severe
labour and exposure to the seasons, extreme poverty, bad nursing of children, great towns,
excesses of all kinds, the whole train of common diseases and epidemics, wars, pestilence,
plague, and femine.
'On examining these obstacles to the increase of population which I have classed under the heads
of preventive and positive checks, it will appear that they are all resolvable into moral restraint,
vice, and misery.
'Of the preventive checks, the restraint from marriage which is not followed by irregular
gratifications may properly be termed moral resrtaint.'
Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1803.
2. 'The great author of nature, indeed, with that wisdom which is apparent in all his works, has
not left this conclusion to the cold and speculative consideration of general consequences. By
making the passion of self-love beyond comparison stronger than the passion of benevolence, he
has at once impelled us to that line of conduct which is essential to the preservation of the human
race.'
Malthus, Appendix (1806) to An Essay on the Principle of Population
3. 'In looking at Nature, it is most necessary to keep the foregoing considerations always in mind
- never to forget that every single organic being around us may be said to be striving to the
utmost to increase in numbers; that each lives by a struggle at some period of its life; that heavy
destruction inevitably falls either on the young or old, during each generation or at recurrent
intervals. Lighten any check, mitigate the destruction ever so little, and the number of species
will almost instantaneously increase to any amount.'
'Natural selection will modify the structure of the young in relation to the parent, and of the
parent in relation to the young. In social animals it will adapt the structure of each individual for
the benefit of the community; if each in consequence profits by the selected change.'
'Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are
capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is
grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been orginally breathed into a few
forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of
gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonerful have been,
and are being, evolved.'
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859.
4. 'Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating
the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combatting it.'
T. H. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, 1893.
Questions
1. Why were Darwin's ideas so shocking to his first readers?
2. Account for Darwin's preoccupation with the idea of struggle.
3. Why did Huxley so strongly oppose Social Darwinism?
4. How did a biological theory mutate into an ethical and social theory?
Primary Texts
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species ed. J.W. Burrow (1968)
T.H. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (1893; reprinted 1947).
Secondary Texts
J.W. Burrow, Evolution and Society (1966)
Peter Bowler, Darwin (1984)
Peter Gay, The Cultivation of Hatred (1995), esp. pp. 39-68.
Robert M. Young, 'Malthus and the Evolutionists: the common context of biological and social
theory', Past & Present, 43 (1969), 109-41.
R.J. Halliday, 'Social Darwinism: a definition', Victorian Studies, 14 (1970-1). 389-405.
Michael S. Helfand, 'T.H. Huxley's "Evolution and Ethics": the politics of evolution and the
evolution of politics', Victorian Studies, 20 (1977), 159-77
Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement (1988)
Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism (1997)
WEEK 8
The Russian Revolution
From a contemporary western-European perspective, the most significant events of 1917 were
probably the entry of the United States of America into the First World War, the ending of
stalemate on the Western Front, and the intensification of German submarine warfare. From the
perspective of the later twentieth century, events in Russia overshadow everything else. War
played a major role in causing the Bolshevik Revolution, as a combination of enormous military
losses and horrific conditions on the front line led to the mutiny of large numbers of sailors and
soldiers. As Tsarist rule collapsed, a Russian republic was proclaimed in September 1917 under
the social-democrat Alexander Kerensky. The Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, were better organised
than any other party, and by the end of October had vanquished Kerensky and proclaimed the
dictatorship of the proletariat and the rule of the soviets. An armistice was signed with the
Germans at Brest-Litovsk to end Russian involvement in the First World War, giving the
Bolsheviks an opportunity to create the first socialist society in a large state in history.
To combat counter-revolution, the Ural Regional Soviet ordered the execution of the exTsar Nicholas II and his family in July 1918, an act which contributed to the decision of the
western European powers to wage war on Bolshevism: the first intervention was that of a British
force, which landed at Vladivostok in early August. Civil and international war was to continue
until 1923 when, on the 1st of January, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was finally
established, including Russia, Ukraine, White Russia and Transcaucasia . By this time the Red
Army had become a source of fear to governments across Europe. Communism in general had
become a bug-bear for anti-communist politicians world wide, while large numbers of
intellectuals became fascinated by the first of many twentieth-century experiments in social
transformation.
Bolshevism raised numerous questions both for devotees and enemies of Marxist
socialism. Among the most prominent was whether the Soviet Union was to be a ‘normal’ state,
in the sense of having established national boundaries (socialism in one country), or whether
Marx’s view of the inevitability of world-wide revolution, and the withering away of all states,
was to be fostered by the new regime. In many respects, the origins of Soviet Russia and the
uncertain issue of its nature, can be traced to the fact that the leaders of the regime had two
‘bibles’: the works of Marx and the works of Lenin. The story of Lenin’s changing view of
Marxist revolution is important, beginning as it did with a theory of the necessity of a vanguard
of professional revolutionaries to foster democratic revolution (What is to be done?, 1902) and
developing into a justification of European socialist revolution in the midst of ‘the imperial stage
of capitalism’. On coming to power, the major question became the role of the party in social
and political life, and there is evidence that before his death in 1923 Lenin, with Trotsky, was
seeking to combat the swollen state and party apparatus. With Stalin’s ascent to autocratic
power, the wide range and ambivalent character of Lenin’s writings meant that they became used
as sources of justification for a very different conception of socialism.
Quotations
1.
‘In 1928, eleven years after the revolutionary happenings that lifted Kerensky so suddenly to the
crest and washed him as inevitably away, he assured us that Lenin and other Bolsheviks were
agents of the German government, were connected with the German general staff, were receiving
sums of money from it, and were carrying out its secret instruction with a view to bringing about
the defeat of the Russian army and the dismemberment of the Russian state. This is all told in
great detail in his amusing book, The Catastrophe. I had formed a pretty clear idea of
Kerensky’s intellectual and moral stature from the events of 1917, but I never would have
thought it possible that at this time, after all that has happened, he could have the audacity to
repeat the accusation.’
Leon Trotsky, ‘Concerning slanderers’, My Life.
2.
‘Lenin’s stand, before 4 April 1917, when he first appeared on the Petrograd stage, was his own
personal one, shared by no one else. Not one of those leaders of the party who were in Russia
had any intention of making the dictatorship of the proletariat - the social revolution - the
immediate object of his policy. A party conference which met on the eve of Lenin’s arrival
showed that none of them even imagined anything beyond democracy. No wonder the minutes
of that conference are still kept a secret! Stalin was in favour of supporting the Provisional
government of Guchkov and Miliukoff, and of merging the Bolsheviks with the
Mensheviks…Such are the present guards of Leninism…Let them name one of their number
who arrived independently at the position achieved identically by Lenin in Geneva and by me in
New York.’
Leon Trotsky, ‘Trotskyism in 1917’, My Life.
3.
‘The question of the state is now acquiring special importance in relation to both theory and
practical politics. The imperialist war has brought about an extraordinary acceleration and
intensification of the process of transformation of monopoly capitalism into state monopoly
capitalism. The monstrous oppression of the labouring masses by the state, which is fusing itself
more and more closely with the omnipotent associations of the capitalists, is becoming ever more
monstrous.…the revolution is now completing the first stage of its development; but this entire
revolution can only be understood as one of the links in the chain of socialist proletarian
revolutions being called forth by the imperialist war. Thus the question of the relation of the
proletarian socialist revolution to the state acquires not only a practical political importance but
also the importance of a most urgent current problem: how to explain to the masses what they
will have to do in the very near future to liberate themselves from the yoke of capitalism.’
Lenin, The State and Revolution, 1917.
4.
‘Leninism is Marxism of the era of imperialism and of the proletarian revolution. To be more
exact, Leninism is the theory and tactics of the proletarian revolution in general, the theory and
tactics of the dictatorship of the proletariat in particular. Marx and Engels pursued their
activities in the pre-revolutionary period when developed imperialism did not yet exist, in the
period of the proletarians’ preparation for revolution, in the period when the proletarian
revolution was not yet a direct practical inevitability. Lenin, however, the disciple of Marx and
Engels, pursued his activities in the period of developed imperialism, in the period of the
unfolding proletarian revolution, when the proletarian revolution had already triumphed in one
country, had smashed bourgeois democracy and had ushered in the era of proletarian democracy,
the era of the Soviets.’
Stalin, Foundations of Leninism, 1924.
5.
‘At this point we hear an interested reader asking ‘Will it spread?’ Will this new civilisation,
with its abandonment of the incentive of profit-making, its extinction of unemployment, its
planned production for community consumption, and the consequent liquidation of the landlord
and the capitalist, spread to other countries? Our own reply is: ‘Yes, it will’. But how, when,
where, with what modifications, and whether through violent revolution, or even by conscious
imitation, are questions we cannot answer.’
Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? (1935)
Questions
1. What, according to Lenin, ‘was to be done’?
2. What was Lenin’s attitude to democracy?
3. Explain Lenin’s view of imperialism?
4. How far were Lenin’s ideas derived from Marx?
5. Why did the Russian Revolution generate such intense ideological opposition?
6. What were the intellectual consequences of the Russian Revolution?
Reading
Primary sources
Lenin, What is to be done? any edition
Lenin, The State and Revolution, any edition
Trotsky, My Life, any edition
Stalin, Foundations of Leninism, any edition
Secondary sources
L. Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, 3 vols., vol. 3.
A. Solzenitzyn, Lenin in Zurich
E. Wilson, To the Finland Station
E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes.
WEEK 9
The Fascist Revolution in Spain
The rise of Fascism in the 1930s naturally witnessed a compensating growth in Marxist thinking,
and also in internationally-minded non-Marxist socialist and anarchist groupings. The signal for
a coming together of anti-Fascist interests was raised when the newly elected socialist (and
profoundly secular) government in Spain was challenged by the ultra-Catholic, fascistic forces
led by Franco and his allies. The cause of Spain became, from 1936 on, the cause of the Left
versus the Right, especially as Hitler was giving support to Franco. Indeed, one of the strongest
images of the Spanish Civil War depicted the aftermath of just such a German-supported air
attack: Picasso's Guernica, a painting which will be examined as one of the texts for this section
of the course.
Opposition to Franco's forces was not as uncontroversial as it might now seem. The British
government, led by Stanley Baldwin (who won an election under the slogan of 'Safety First'),
held to a policy of neutrality in regard to Spain's conflict. Many European political leaders and
opinion-makers thought it best to leave Spain to resolve its own tensions, though critics of that
approach suspected that this was tantamount to tacit support for Franco. It was in this
atmosphere that large numbers of volunteers from all over Europe came together in Spain,
ostensibly to support the socialist régime, but also, in many cases, to lay the grounds for Marxist
or anarchist victory. Whilst the writings of a large number of intellectuals have certainly helped
to shape perceptions of the Left's various campaigns in Spain, it is important to remember that
some 80% of the British volunteers could be described as having come from working-class
backgrounds. The significance of this involvement is integral to Ken Loach's recent, muchpraised film, Land and Freedom, which will also form part of the approach taken to this section
of the course.
The major primary text for this section of Intellectuals and Revolutions is George Orwell's
Homage to Catalonia, the work of an intellectual who became ever more critical of intellectuals
as a result of the divisions and internicene squabblings that he saw as compromising the Left's
supposed mission in Spain. The disillusioned nature of this text will be read alongside some of
the poetry of the Spanish Civil War, a mode of commemoration made popular by the recent
success of the testimonies of the Great War poets, such as Owen and Sassoon. The greatest
poem in English inspired by the Civil War is Spain, written by W.H. Auden, then a committed
Communist. Auden's poem spoke for a lot of volunteers in Spain, and other artists took up his
call: the composer Benjamin Britten wrote a ‘Ballad for Heroes’, which was dedicated to the
otherwise anonymous mass of the volunteer movement in Spain.
The Spanish Civil War thus witnessed a strong propaganda drive by Left-wing intellectuals,
artists, and poets eager to promote the anti-Fascist cause. Orwell always championed the antiFascist cause, but he grew suspicious of the rhetoric of internationalism and a United Front, and
this informs much of the writing in Homage to Catalonia. To others, Spain remained the ideal
moment in the liberating potential of international socialism - this is the spirit of Auden's Spain,
a poem in which the defeat of a just cause is still a far better moral and spiritual experience than
is the victory of reactionary forces.
This section of the course examines only a fraction of the rich literature produced during the
course of the Spainsh Civil War, and it also aims to introduce the pictorial element in intellectual
history through study of Picasso's Guernica and Loach's Land and Freedom. The popular writer
Lauire Lee also recorded his experiences of the Spanish Civil War, and it is vital to keep in mind
the close connections between the working classes and self-conscious intellectuals in the Spanish
Civil War. This was, after all, a largely socialist cause. Memories of the War are also important
in making sense of later events: the Fascist schoolteacher in Muriel Spark's seminal 1959 novel
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie inadvertently inspires a schoolgirl to go to her death in Spain,
and Anthony Blunt's interesting essay on Picasso's Guernica is the work of a man who was then
yet to be publicly exposed as a KGB agent, an active Communist in Cambridge in the 1930s.
Quotations
1. 'I had dropped, more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe
where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites.
Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of
working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory, it
was perfect equality, and even in practice it was far from it. There is a sense in which it would it
would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the
prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilised life
- snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc. - had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary
class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the moneytainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one
owned any one else as his master. Of course such a state of affars could not last.'
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 1938.
2. 'To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
To-day the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.
'To-day the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette,
The cards in the candlelit barn, and the scraping concert,
The masculine jokes; to-day the
Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.
'The stars are dead. The animals will not look.
We are left alone with our day, and the time is hort, and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.' W.H.. Auden, Spain
'Frozen in the fright of light chilled skull and spine
Drip bone-shriek-splinters sharper than the Bren:
Starve franco stroke and stave the hooves of bulls.
I am the arm thrust candle through the wall.
'Up cities crack firelaughter, the furious
Minutes and bark a ruin at a man in
His sealonliness; hair rearing finrays.
I am the spinning coil distilled eyes' iron.
'Neigh horse tear through steel teeth and a thicket
Of bricks! Beam an eyebomb, cellar and stride
Nerve, peeled pupil's enamel, rhomboid head!
I am the tiled blind hand plunged bulb in socket.
'Splint for the shriven shin, I foster mantrump out
Of festered history; sprout pointed fingers
Where an afterbirth is dung-and-rabble-teat.
I am the eyeball blown world! Axis of anger!
J.F. Hendry, Picasso: for Guernica
'One of Joyce Emily's boasts was that her brother at Oxford had gone to fight in the Spanish
Civil War. This dark, rather mad girl wanted to go too, and to wear a white blouse and black shirt
and march with a gun. Nobody had taken this seriously. The Spanish Civil War was going on
outside in the newspapers and only once a month in the school debating society. Everyone,
including Joyce Emily, was anti-Franco if they were anything at all.
'One day it was realised that Joyce Emily had not been at school for some days, and soon
someone else was occupying her desk. No one knew why she had left until, six weeks later, it
was reported that she had run away to Spain and had been killed in an accident when the train
she was travelling in had been attacked. The school held an abbreviated form of remembrance
service for her.'
Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 1961.
Questions
1. Why did Orwell lose faith in what was happening in Spain?
2. Was working-class solidarity a comforting middle-class myth?
3. Why did poetry flourish in the Spanish Civil War?
4. Why was Guernica so potent a symbol of the war?
Primary Texts
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
W.H. Auden, Spain
Valentine Cunningham ed., Spanish Civil War Verse (1980)
Benjamin Britten, Ballad for Heroes
Ken Loach, Land and Freedom
Secondary Texts
Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (3rd edn., 1977).
T. Buchanan, The Spanish Civil War and the British labour movement (1991)
C. Norris ed., Inside the Myth: Orwell (1984)
B. Crick, George Orwell: a life (1980)
D. Mitchell, Britten and Auden in the thirties (1982)
A. Blunt, Picasso's 'Guernica' (1969)
F.D. Russell, Picasso's 'Guernica' (1980)
WEEK 10
Intellectuals and Totalitarianism in the Twentieth Century
The interwar period in Europe was dominated by two different types of regime, the first having
resulted from the Russian revolution, the second from the accession to power of Mussolini in
Italy, Hitler in Germany, and Franco in Spain. Communism and fascism seemed to stand at
opposed ends of the political spectrum, but they both created regimes for which the word
‘totalitarian’ had to be invented. The First World War provided the backdrop against which the
Russian revolution occurred, and the post-war settlement was the setting against which Hitler
and Mussolini took power. The Second World War was partly the result of conflict between
communism and fascism, with the liberal democracies of Britain and America making common
cause with the Russians to defeat fascism.
Intellectuals were active in supporting or condemning totalitarian regimes. Outside Germany
and Italy, however, many intellectuals were engaged by left-wing causes. Hence the association
between intellectuals and the left during the interwar period, with communism and its fellowtravellers attempting to set the pace. Even those who were not members of the Communist Party
could be seduced by the Soviet experiment, as the quotation below from the work of Sidney and
Beatrice Webb illustrates.
Other intellectuals, such as George Orwell and John Maynard Keynes, warned against this
alliance between intellectuals and the far left; they were among the first to recognize the
totalitarian implications of communism in Russia and consequently anxious to mobilize opinion
around reforms that would remove the problems within liberal, and increasingly social,
democracies that had given rise to communism and fascism elsewhere. Orwell’s novels, 1984
and Animal Farm, together with Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, uncovered the assumptions
that lay behind totalitarian regimes and practices such as Stalin’s purges and show trials. They
mark the beginnings of the intellectual cold war and the slow process of disintegration of the
Soviet empire which culminated in 1989, leaving a legacy in Eastern Europe that is the object of
Vaclav Havel’s essay listed under the first topic in this course.
Quotations
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1. ‘But there is another and a non-materialist factor in Soviet Communism, setting it in
contrast with the civilisation of the Western world. It is based on an intellectual unity
throughout all its activities. It definitely rejects every remnant of the superstition and magic
which the most matter-of-fact twentieth-century man in the capitalist societies retains in his
conception of the universe and of man’s place in it. That is to say, Soviet Communism has a
new ideology as well as a new economics… It is working out the ethics of a new civilization
upon its own experience of social life.
Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Soviet Communism
2. ‘Shaw and Stalin are still satisfied with Marx’s picture of the capitalist world, which had
much verisimilitude in his day but is unrecognizable, with the rapid flux of the modern
world, three-quarters of a century later. They look backwards to what capitalism was, not
forward to what it is becoming. That is the fate of those who dogmatise in the social and
economic sphere where evolution is proceeding at a dizzy pace from one form of society to
another.’
J. M. Keynes on Stalin-Wells Talk
3. ‘To understand my state of mind…you will have to know that I believe myself to be
writing a book on economic theory, which will largely revolutionise…the way the world
thinks about economic problems. When my new theory has been duly assimilated and mixed
with politics and feelings and passions, I can’t preduct what the final upshot will be in its
effects on action and affairs. But there will be a great change, and, in particular, the Ricardian
foundations of Marxism will be knocked away.’
Keynes letter to Shaw, January 1, 1935
4. ‘…they had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs
roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after
confessing to shocking crimes. There was no thought of rebellion or disobedience in
[Clover’s] mind. She knew that even as things were they were far better off than they had
been in the days of Jones… But still, it was not for this that she and all the other animals had
hoped and toiled.’
Orwell, Animal Farm
5. ‘….acceptance of any political discipline seems to be incompatible with literary integrity.
…Group loyalties are necessary, and yet they are poisonous to literature, as long as literature
is the product of individuals. …Do we have to conclude that it is the duty of every writer to
“keep out of politics”? Certainly not!… I only suggest that we should draw up a sharper
distinction than we do at present between our political and our literary loyalties, and should
recognize that a willingness to do certain distasteful but necessary things does not carry with
it any obligation to swallow the beliefs that usually go with them. When a writer engages in
politics he should do so as a citizen, as a human being, but not as a writer.
Orwell, ‘Writers and Leviathan’
6. ‘The first thing you must realise is that power is collective. The individual only has power
in so far as he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan:”Freedom is Slavery.”.
Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom.
Orwell, 1984
Questions
1. What features of Soviet communism most impressed the Webbs? How did they deal with
criticisms of the one-party state and the show trials?
2. ‘The sin of nearly all left-wingers from 1933 onward is that they have wanted to be antiFascist without being anti-totalitarian.’ Was Orwell trying to put things right in Animal
Farm? Was his charge a fair one?
3. Is Animal Farm a lament for a revolution that went wrong or a denunciation of all
revolutions?
4. Why does Rubashov in Darkness at Noon confess to something he knows to be false?
Primary Texts
The Stalin-Wells Talk; Verbatim Record and Discussion by G. B. Shaw, H. G. Wells, and J. M.
Keynes, 1934, copy in Reserve collection.
S and B. Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization, 2nd edition, 1937, extracts in Reserve
collection.
A. Koestler, Darkness at Noon
G. Orwell, 1984 and Animal Farm
G. Orwell, essays on ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’, ‘Arthur Koestler’ and ‘Writers and Leviathan’
in The Penguin Essays of George Orwell.
Secondary Texts
E. J. Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes
G. Lichtheim, Europe in the Twentieth Century
B. Crick, George Orwell; A life
A. Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?