Generalists with Chips on their Shoulders

Historical academics often bemoan the fact their discipline has been fragmented into narrower and narrower specialisms. It was partly in reaction to the cult of the monograph that I wrote my Bourgeois Liberty ... book.

What I hadn't realised was that that the displacement of the generalist had in the nineteenth-century given rise to such potent ideologies of frustration. Here's Kevin Passmore in his excellent Fascism: A Very Short Introduction:

[The late nineteenth-century] saw the emergence of modern disciplines in the universities: history, sociology, political science, physics, biology, literary criticism, and so on. The rise of professional, specialized research led to displacement of old-style scholars, sometimes amateurs, who claimed expertise in several fields. Lawyers and doctors, who had previously dominated university faculties, were especially likely to pretend to wide competence, and were attracted to ... racist, eugenicist, psychological, and historical ideas ...

These polymaths often resented their lack of recognition from specialist professional academics, and compensated by seeking political success. Some favoured the extreme left (the legally trained Lenin was a quintessential generalist); others the new right. [Maurice] Barrès gave the [French] republican establishment's refusal to honour a now forgotten race theorist as a reason for entering politics. It is no accident that doctors and lawyers were prominent in the far right. Their resentment of specialists was coupled with fear that professions were overcrowded with Jews and women, and with dislike of government plans to introduce ‘socialist’ health-care programmes. Doctors and lawyers espoused eugenicist theories, which they thought gave them the right to play god. Specialist academics were often just as influenced by pseudo-scientific knowledge and nationalism. In pre-war ultranationalist movements specialists sometimes held sway, but generalists with chips on their shoulders increasingly set the agenda. [p. 38].

If any reviews of my book complain that it attempts to be too far-ranging, I'll be careful not to take the criticism to heart!

The Twilight of Parliamentary Sovereignty?

From about 1870, there was a growing concern amongst liberals and socialists that developing international bond markets meant that executive states were being released from their dependence on representative parliamentary assemblies.

In the inter-war period, authoritarian regimes could use bilateral corporate arrangements with oligopolist capitalist enterprises to bypass taxation by express consent.

After World War Two, in the West, high wage economies combined with Pay-Roll or PAYE based fiscal systems tended to reinforce state reliance upon democratic parliamentarianism.

Globalisation and financialisation since the 1970s, arguably, has worked to once again shift state reliance from taxation of the democracy to bankrolling by the credit markets.

The European crisis is perhaps a worryingly profound stage in the development of this democratic deficit. Of course, whoever pays the piper calls the tune. Here's Gunnar Beck in today's Guardian on the European Stability Mechanism (ESM):

If implemented, the ESM will reverse the greatest 19th-century political achievement in Europe: the transfer of the power to determine taxation and expenditure from unaccountable monarchical governments to formally accountable parliaments. The eurocratic transformation will have taken place through systematic disregard by the EU institutions and its member states of practically all legal and constitutional safeguards put in place to prevent precisely the disaster that has befallen the eurozone now.

German Revolution, 1918

There's a new book out, All Power to the Councils! A Documentary History of the German revolution of 1918 - 1919, ed. and trans. by Gabriel Kuhn (PM Press: Oakland, 2012). It's too late for my book (which discusses the German revolution.

On 10 November 1918, a socialist government was formed in Germany. The same day, socialist leader Friedrich Ebert secretly agreed with Wilhelm Groener, Chief of Staff of the German armed forces, that the army would be used for internal policing duties, and that the workers’ councils would not be permitted to build up parallel governing structures.

A lot of the political tension that followed was due to debates about whether democratisation was compatible with leaving the traditional reactionary state personnel in place.

Here's the hard left, as recoded by Kuhn:

The government made a fatal mistake in leaving the old officers etc in place: "Had the government abolished the authority of army officers, had it removed the generals from their posts, then these men would not openly hatch counterrevolutionary plots today. ... the government has reinstated bureaucratic power and done everything to to protect the capitalists' safes by disarming the proletariat and arming the bourgeoisie. (107) [Liebknect, 'Confront the Counterrevolution!, 15 December 1918].

Violent counterrevolution was anticipated: "A war of starvation and - if need be - a German Vendée against the proletarian centres of government are being prepared." (95) [Karl Liebknecht, 'That Which Is', 21 November 1918]

The state apparatus had to be smashed and replaced: "... workers have to replace all the traditional organs of bourgeois class rule. Federal councils, parliaments, and municipal councils must give way to workers' and soldiers' councils. The workers have to occupy all posts, monitor all administrative activities, and adapt the needs of the state to their own class interests and to socialist demands." (101) [Rosa Luxemburg, 'What does the Spartacus League Want?', 14 December 1918].

This was the basis for the development of German communism.

Sex Tips from Mr Whippy

From the latest Literary Review, this made me smirk:

Correction

Literary Review regrets that Christopher Ross’s review of John Man’s Ninja: 1,000 Years of the Shadow Warriors (LR, August) contained false information about the author. It was incorrectly stated that Mr Man once drove a Mr Whippy ice-cream van and wrote a sex column for Time Out. This information was based on an interview on Macmillan’s website that was erroneously attributed to Mr Man and taken in good faith by the reviewer. Literary Review apologises to Mr Man.

Seeking Allies

I my book, I talk about socialists cooperating and clashing. I don't talk so much about socialists becoming liberal (or vice versa). Re-reading for the Nth time Robert Gildea's outstanding Barricades and Borders: Europe 1800-1914, I was reminded of the case of Peter Struve:

The manifesto of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour party (RSDLP), which was penned by ...  Peter Struve after the party was formed at Minsk in March 1898, noted that Russia had escaped the 'life-giving hurricane of the 1848 revolution' that had conferred freedom of speech, writing, organization and assembly on Europe. The Russian working class had to conquer these liberties as a pre-condition of the struggle 'for its final liberation, against private property, for socialism'.

The struggle for political democracy ushered in the possibility of collaborating with other classes in Russia. Unfortunately, Struve's manifesto asserted that 'the farther east one goes in Europe, the weaker, meaner and more cowardly in the political sense becomes the bourgeoisie, and the greater the cultural and political tasks which fall to the lot of the proletariat.' The historical task of the proletariat was not only to carry out the socialist revolution but also, before that, to push the fearful bourgeoisie towards undertaking its own, democratic revolution. Struve, who saw working-class agitation decline in Russia after 1900 and, as an accomplished economist, was impressed by Bernstein's views on the improving condition of the working class and the attenuation of class struggle, began to move closer to opposition groups in the zemstvos and their administrative organs. In 1901 he launched a paper called Liberation around which all supporters of a constituent assembly in Russia might gather.

Lenin was unimpressed, and condemned Struve for his dalliance with liberals.

While Mensheviks  and Bolsheviks had similar views of the approaching revolution - they expected it to be radically democratic, but not actually socialist - The Mensheviks looked to bourgeois allies, while the Bolsheviks preferred an alliance with the peasantry. As the Bolsheviks were to find (and as Trotsky had predicted), a party couldn't easily neuter bourgeois civil society with disintegrating capitalism itself. Lenin's objective of a kind of 'state capitalism' transitional to socialism proved to be a non-starter. Instead civil society dissolved in a the cauldron of a class-based civil war, and after a tenuous pivoting around a peasant economy, the command economy took over.

Whether a liberal-socialist alliance in 1917 was ever viable is another question. Probably not, I'd say.

British Liberty

It's notable that Edmund Burke never (I think) spoke of "liberty,". He always  always thought in the plural - "liberties."

It this an Anglo-Saxon thing? In his very fine volume, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), Michael Freeden writes:

 

to the extent that Marxist socialism traversed the Channel it was ... rapidly assimilated into local cultural preferences. It reflected the general appeal of liberty as a personal political value cutting across British ideological loyalties. In particular, British socialists were not prone to dwell on liberty as a macro-phenomenon relating to the emancipatory casting-off of class shackles, but tended to 'privatize' it by attaching it to individual benefits. (457)

Elsewhere, however, he writes of the continental "socialist conception of liberty in which liberty was associated not with human fulfilment but with a notion of individual action and choice facilitated by material means - a capitalist view transported into socialist organization." (475). The authors he quotes in support of this are Émile Vandervelde, Alexandre Millerand and Jean Jaurès. They were all more or less on the right of the movement, and perhaps influenced by the British model?

Searching the Book

I'm back again, and find that my book is now searchable on Amazon. This brings to mind: what odd words might one find there? Not too many, really. I can only think of 'Germani kaput!' and 'helluva'. That's if you don't think that terms like 'bourgeois liberty' and 'proletarian democracy' are not themselves odd and quaint. One might well think that, and so I've tried to justify myself in the preface, now readable.

If you think you might be in the acknowledgements, now's the time to find out. Apologies if I forgot you!