Não é para fazer propaganda do ateísmo – até porque Freud, Darwin e Cristopher Hitchens já o fizeram com muito mais talento do que eu e a necessidade de acreditar em Deus persiste.
Mas é só para pensar: Jorge Guinle viu (nuas e ao vivo) Marilyn Monroe e Jayne Mansfield – entre milhares de outras de padrão semelhante. Salvo engano, teve um affair com a jovem Christiane Torloni – com quem esbarrei socialmente umas duas vezes e posso garantir a vocês que permanece uma das visões mais lindas e impressionantes que tive na vida (foi antes dela fazer uma cirurgia criminosa de redução dos seios – maldito Pitanguy).
Jorge Guinle era ateu – “A verdade está com os materialistas. Eu sou filosoficamente materialista” ele repetia sempre, adicionando a frase de Nietzsche – ”Deus é uma criação do homem”
Meus amigos: se um homem vê Marilyn Monroe nua e continua não acreditando em Deus, nós, meros mortais, expostos a muito menos evidências da perfeição do suposto trabalho do homem lá em cima, vamos acreditar como?
P.S. – Pouco antes de morrer, sabendo-se condenado, Jorginho disse que ia para o céu. Antes que alguém suspeitasse de uma conversão de última hora, pegou um taxi e foi para o Copacabana Palace tomar sorvete. Estilo até o fim.
P.S. 2 – Também cruzei socialmente com o Guinle duas vezes, uma delas em seu point mais frequente, o Copacabana Palace (vestindo uniforme de milionário em férias: um impecável paletó azul – brasão costurado no bolso superior direito – com calça bege e, claro, sem gravata – que é acessório de executivo ou empresário – coisas que ele orgulhava-se de não ser. “Nunca trabalhei um dia na minha vida” comemorava ele). Era baixinho, o que tentava disfarçar com salto reforçado. Para compensar a baixa estatura, olhos claros (azuis? Talvez – lembro com mais clareza da Torloni do que dele) que brilhavam com uma intensidade enorme, brilho próprio de quem já desnudou as mais belas mulheres da terra e sobreviveu para contar – e matar o resto de nós de inveja…
Por vergonha, perdi a chance de apertar a mão do grande homem, mas sorri para ele e ele sorriu de volta, com um pequeno inclinar da cabeça (possivelmente se perguntado de onde ele conhecia aquele gringo – de lugar nenhum, Jorge, e eu não sou gringo – nasci ruivo, mas na Mooca!!!)

Spencer, Herbert (1820–1903)

Herbert Spencer is chiefly remembered for his classical liberalism and his evolutionary theory. His fame was considerable during the mid- to late-nineteenth century, especially in the USA, which he visited in 1882 to be lionized by New York society as the prophetic philosopher of capitalism. In Britain, however, Spencer’s reputation suffered two fatal blows towards the end of his life. First, collectivist legislation was introduced to protect citizens from the ravages of the industrial revolution, and Spencer’s spirited defence of economic laissez-faire became discredited. Second, his evolutionary theory, which was based largely on the Lamarckian principle of the inheritance of organic modifications produced by use and disuse, was superseded by Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Nearly a century after his death, however, there is renewed interest in his ideas, partly because the world has become more sympathetic to market philosophies, and partly because the application of evolutionary principles to human society has become fashionable once more.

Spencer was born into a Nonconformist family in Derby, England, and never lost the individualistic temperament conferred by his upbringing. Trained as a civil engineer working for a railway company during the boom years of railway expansion, Spencer’s fertile mind soon spread to social and economic issues, and he joined the Economist as a sub-editor in 1848. In 1851 the publication of his first book, Social Statics, established his reputation as a thinker of extraordinary power and originality. In it he deduced the features of a civilized society from the central principle of justice – the law of equal freedom – that ‘every person has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man’ (1851: 103). This principle of equal freedom, which has been regarded ever since as the cornerstone of classical liberalism, led Spencer to insist on a very narrow role for the state (see Liberalism; State, the §§1–2). The state was at best a necessary evil to prevent one person from violating the rights of another – that is, to defend natural rights. Social Statics is the definitive text of the minimal or ‘nightwatchman’ theory of the state.

Spencer subsequently embarked upon an ambitious task of creating a wholly new understanding of philosophy, at the heart of which was the theory of evolution. In Social Statics an idea of the evolutionary progress of humanity had been implicitly assumed but not developed. Spencer explicitly applied evolutionary theory in his essay ‘The Development Hypothesis’ ([1890] 1852). He rejected the religious notion of ‘special creation’ – that each of the 10 million species had been individually created by God – arguing instead, like Lamarck, that new species emerged as a result of modifications in existing species, brought about by exposure to new conditions. Spencer elaborated this evolutionary theory in his essay ‘Progress: its Law and Cause’ ([1890] 1857) where he introduced the word ‘evolution’. Following Von Baer, Spencer claimed that progress was defined in terms of a change from the homogenous to the heterogeneous. His originality lay in the fact that he saw this ‘law’ at work across the whole range of natural and human phenomena. The ten volumes of Spencer’s magnum opus, the ‘Synthetic Philosophy’, traced the operation of evolutionary principles successively in psychology, metaphysics, biology, sociology and ethics.

In his Principles of Psychology (1855), Spencer put forward a Lamarckian explanation of mental development. For example, intelligence was a faculty developed as a result of cumulative modifications of the mind in successive generations of organisms responding to their environment. In First Principles (1862), he addressed the vexed question for his Victorian readership of the relation between science and religion. For Spencer, science entailed the deduction of general laws, such as the conservation of energy, which were not empirical generalizations, but necessary truths about empirical phenomena. But these truths could never be completely grasped. We could never know, for example, why energy was conserved. Such ultimate questions about the nature of reality formed what Spencer called ‘the Unknowable’. Religion yielded similarly unanswerable questions about fundamental issues – such as ‘does God exist, and if so, how did He come into existence?’ These issues were also part of the Unknowable; Spencer was an agnostic, not an atheist – he rejected anti-evolutionary religious doctrines, but God’s existence was not incompatible with his theory of evolution.

In his Principles of Biology (1864, 1867) Spencer acknowledged the centrality of Darwinian natural selection, but insisted that Lamarckian modifications played their part in the evolution of organisms from simple to complex structures. In Principles of Sociology (1876–96) he explained how, as humanity advanced, a process of differentiation of functions occurred, and society was gradually transformed from the ‘militant’ type, which was characterized by authoritarianism, uniformity and status, to the ‘industrial’ type, which was characterized by liberty, diversity and contract. He made use of the organic analogy (likening society to an organism) to sustain his laissez-faire theory, by interpreting organisms as made up of individualistic parts. Finally, in Principles of Ethics (1879–93) he gave the law of equal freedom an evolutionary dimension by linking it to the principle that each person ought to experience the full consequences of their actions, both good and bad – a principle which entailed that the fittest survived.

Spencer has left two enduring contributions to philosophy. The first is a highly cogent analysis of the philosophical foundations of classical liberalism. Social Statics is a masterpiece of argumentation, not far short of the stature of a Hobbesian or Lockeian text. The second is the evolutionary idea: it was Spencer, not Darwin, who was the founder of the philosophy later known as Social Darwinism, and who coined the term ‘the survival of the fittest’. Although Spencer failed to answer many questions raised by his theory of evolution, it cannot be denied that his evolutionary vision marks an important stage in our understanding of social development.

Marx, Karl (1818–83)

Karl Marx was the most important of all theorists of socialism. He was not a professional philosopher, although he completed a doctorate in philosophy. His life was devoted to radical political activity, journalism and theoretical studies in history and political economy.

Marx was drawn towards politics by Romantic literature, and his earliest writings embody a conception of reality as subject to turbulent change and of human beings as realizing themselves in the struggle for freedom. His identification with these elements in Hegel’s thought (and his contempt for what he regarded as Hegel’s apologetic attitude towards the Prussian state) brought Marx to associate himself with the Young Hegelians.

The Young Hegelians had come to believe that the implicit message of Hegel’s philosophy was a radical one: that Reason could and should exist within the world, in contrast to Hegel’s explicit claim that embodied Reason already did exist. Moreover, they also rejected Hegel’s idea that religion and philosophy go hand in hand: that religion represents the truths of philosophy in immediate form. On the contrary, the Young Hegelians saw the central task of philosophy as the critique of religion – the struggle (as Marx himself was to put it in his doctoral dissertation) ‘against the gods of heaven and of earth who do not recognize man’s self-consciousness as the highest divinity’.

Marx came to be dissatisfied with the assumption that the critique of religion alone would be sufficient to produce human emancipation. He worked out the consequences of this change of view in the years 1843 to 1845, the most intellectually fertile period of his entire career. Hegel’s philosophy, Marx now argued, embodied two main kinds of mistake. It incorporated, first, the illusion that reality as a whole is an expression of the Idea, the absolute rational order governing reality. Against this, Marx’s position (and on this point he still agreed with the Young Hegelians) was that it is Man, not the Idea, who is the true subject. Second, he charged, Hegel believed that the political state – the organs of law and government – had priority in determining the character of a society as a whole. In fact, according to Marx, this is the reverse of the truth: political life and the ideas associated with it are themselves determined by the character of economic life.

Marx claimed that the ‘species-being’ of Man consists in labour, and that Man is ‘alienated’ to the extent that labour is performed according to a division of labour that is dictated by the market. It is only when labour recovers its collective character that men will recognize themselves as what they are – the true creators of history. At this point, the need to represent the essence of human beings in terms of their relation to an alien being – be it the Christian God or Hegelian Geist – will no longer exist.

In the mature writings that followed his break with the Young Hegelians, Marx presented a would-be scientific theory of history as a progress through stages. At each stage, the form taken by a society is conditioned by the society’s attained level of productivity and the requirements for its increase. In pre-socialist societies this entails the division of society into antagonistic classes. Classes are differentiated by what makes them able (or unable) to appropriate for themselves the surplus produced by social labour. In general, to the extent that a class can appropriate surplus without paying for it, it is said to be an ‘exploiting’ class; conversely, a class that produces more than it receives is said to be ‘exploited’.

Although the exploiting classes have special access to the means of violence, exploitation is not generally a matter of the use of force. In capitalism, for example, exploitation flows from the way in which the means of production are owned privately and labour is bought and sold just like any other commodity. That such arrangements are accepted without the need for coercion reflects the fact that the ruling class exercises a special influence over ideas in society. It controls the ideology accepted by the members of society in general.

In Das Kapital (Capital) , the work to which he devoted the latter part of his life, Marx set out to identify the ‘laws of motion’ of capitalism. The capitalist system is presented there as a self-reproducing whole, governed by an underlying law, the ‘law of value’. But this law and its consequences are not only not immediately apparent to the agents who participate in capitalism, indeed they are actually concealed from them. Thus capitalism is a ‘deceptive object’, one in which there is a discrepancy between its ‘essence’ and its ‘appearance’.

In Marx’s view, it is inevitable that capitalism should give way to socialism. As capitalism develops, he believed, the increasingly ‘socialized’ character of the productive process will conflict more and more with the private ownership of the means of production. Thus the transition to collective ownership will be natural and inevitable. But Marx nowhere explained how this collective ownership and social control was to be exercised. Indeed, he had remarkably little to say about the nature of this society to the struggle to which he devoted his life.

The Critique of the Gotha Programme envisaged two phases of communist society. In the first, production will be carried out on a non-exploitative basis: all who contribute to production will receive back the value of what they have contributed. But this, Marx recognized, is a form of ‘equal right’ that leaves the natural inequalities of human beings unchecked. It is a transitional phase, although inevitable. Beyond it there lies a society in which individuals are no longer ‘slaves’ to the division of labour, one in which labour has become ‘not only a means of life but life’s prime want’. Only then, Marx thought, ‘can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!’ This is the final vision of communism.

1 Life and works

Marx was born on 5 May, 1818, in Trier, a small, originally Roman city on the river Moselle. Many of Marx’s ancestors were rabbis, but his father, Heinrich, a lawyer of liberal political views, converted from Judaism to Christianity and Marx was baptized with the rest of his family in 1824. At school, the young Marx excelled in literary subjects (a prescient schoolteacher comments, however, that his essays were ‘marred by an exaggerated striving after unusual, picturesque expression’). In 1835, he entered the University of Bonn to study law. At the end of 1836, he transferred to Berlin and became a member of the Young Hegelian Doktorklub, a bohemian group whose leading figure was the theologian, Bruno Bauer . The views of the Doktorklub became increasingly radical (to some extent, it would seem, under Marx’s influence) in the late 1830s.

Marx’s father died in 1838 and in the next year – perhaps not coincidentally – Marx abandoned the law in favour of a doctorate in philosophy. His thesis, Differenz der demokritischen und epikureischen Naturphilosophie (Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature) was accepted by the University of Jena in 1841. Marx had hoped to use it to gain an academic position, but, after Bruno Bauer’s suspension from his post at the University of Bonn, it became apparent that such hopes would have to be abandoned in the current political climate.

Marx turned instead to journalism, involving himself with the newly-founded Rheinische Zeitung and taking over the editorship in October 1842. However, the paper came increasingly into conflict with the Prussian government and was banned in March 1843. At this point, Marx decided to move abroad. In the summer he married Jenny von Westphalen (after an engagement of six years) and during a long honeymoon in Kreuznach worked on Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie (Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right) and the essay ‘Zur Judenfrage’ (‘On the Jewish Question’) in which he started to formulate his disagreements with his fellow Young Hegelians. He and Jenny moved to Paris in October of that year. It was in 1844 that Marx met up again with Friedrich Engels (whom he had known slightly in Berlin) and the alliance was formed that was to last for the rest of Marx’s life. Together Marx and Engels wrote Die Heilige Familie (The Holy Family) (1845a), a polemic against Bruno Bauer. More important, however, was the body of writing on economics and philosophy that Marx produced at this time, generally known as The Paris Manuscripts (1844).

Marx was expelled from France in 1845 and moved to Brussels. In the spring of 1845, he wrote for his own clarification a series of essays on Feuerbach. These ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ are one of the few mature statements we have of his views on questions of epistemology and ontology. In 1845–6 Marx and Engels wrote Die deutsche Ideologie (The German Ideology) which, although it too remained unpublished, contains an authoritative account of their theory of history and in particular of the place of ideas in society. Marx’s developing economic views were given expression in a polemic against Proudhon, La Misère de la Philosophie (The Poverty of Philosophy) , published in 1847.

Das Kommunistische Manifest (The Communist Manifesto) , written by Marx and Engels as the manifesto of the Communist League in early 1848, is the classic presentation of the revolutionary implications of Marx’s views on history, politics and economics. During the revolutionary upsurge of 1848 Marx returned to Germany, but with the defeat of the revolutionary movement he was forced to leave, first for Paris, and then, in August 1849, for London, where he would live in exile for the rest of his life.

The years of exile in Britain were difficult ones for Marx (and even more so for his loyal and devoted family). He was in constant financial difficulty and had to rely heavily on Engels and other friends and relations for support. His theoretical activities were chiefly directed to the study of political economy and the analysis of the capitalist system in particular. They culminated in the publication of the first volume of Das Kapital (Capital) in 1867. However, Das Kapital is the tip of a substantial iceberg of less important publications and unpublished writings. Among the former, the Preface to Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy) published in 1859, contains the classic statement of Marx’s materialist theory of history. The second and third volumes of Das Kapital, left unfinished at Marx’s death, were edited and published posthumously by Engels. In addition, three volumes of Theorien über den Mehrwert (Theories of Surplus-Value) , a series of critical discussions of other political economists, written in 1862–3, were published in the early twentieth century. An extensive and more or less complete work, the Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (known both in English and in German as the Grundrisse) was written in 1857–8 but only published in 1939. The Introduction to the Grundrisse is the mature Marx’s most extended discussion of the method of political economy. In addition, there exist numerous notebooks and preliminary drafts, many (if not, at the time of writing, all) of which have been published.

Political economy apart, Marx wrote three works on political events in France: Die Klassenkämpfe in Frankreich (Class Struggles in France) (1850), Das achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte) (1852) and The Civil War in France (1871). Among his many polemical writings, the Kritik des Gothaer Programms (Critique of the Gotha Programme) (1875) is particularly important for the light it throws on Marx’s conception of socialism and its relation to ideas of justice.

Marx was in very poor health for the last ten years of his life, which seems to have sapped his energies for large-scale theoretical work. However, his engagement with the practical details of revolutionary politics was unceasing. He died on 14 March 1883 and is buried in Highgate Cemetery, London.

2 Marx as a Young Hegelian

Marx is relevant to philosophy in three ways: (1) as a philosopher himself, (2) as a critic of philosophy, of its aspirations and self-understanding, and (3) by the philosophical implications of work that is, in Marx’s own understanding of it, not philosophical at all. Broadly speaking, these three aspects correspond to the stages of Marx’s own intellectual development. This and the following section are concerned with the first stage.

The Young Hegelians, with whom Marx was associated at the beginning of his career, did not set out to be critics of Hegel. That they rapidly became so has to do with the consequences they drew from certain tensions within Hegel’s thought. Hegel’s central claim is that both nature and society embody the rational order of Geist (Spirit). Nevertheless, the Young Hegelians believed, it did not follow that all societies express rationality to the fullest degree possible. This was the case in contemporary Germany. There was, in their view, a conflict between the essential rationality of Geist and the empirical institutions within which Geist had realized itself: Germany was ‘behind the times’ (see Hegel, G.W.F. §§5–8; Hegelianism §§2–3 ).

A second source of tension lay in Hegel’s attitude towards religion. Hegel had been prepared to concede a role to religion as the expression of the content of philosophy in immediate form. The Young Hegelians, however, argued that the relationship between the truths of philosophy and religious ‘representation’ was, in fact, antagonistic. In presenting reality not as the embodiment of reason but as the expression of the will of a personal god the Christian religion establishes a metaphysical dualism that is quite contrary to the secular ‘this-worldliness’ which (although Hegel himself might have been too cautious to spell it out fully) is the true significance of Hegel’s philosophy.

This was the position endorsed by Marx at the time of his doctoral dissertation on Epicurus and Democritus. Its subject was taken from a period of Greek thought that displayed parallels with the Germany of Marx’s own time. Just as the Young Hegelians faced the problem of how to continue philosophy after Hegel, so Epicurus wrote in the shadow of another great system, that of Aristotle. Epicurus is more successful than Democritus, Marx believes, in combining materialism with an account of human agency. Furthermore, Marx admires Epicurus for his explicit critique of religion, the chief task of philosophy, he asserts, in all ages.

In its destruction of the illusions of religion, the Young Hegelians believed that philosophy would provide both the necessary and the sufficient conditions for human emancipation and the achievement of a rational state. In the works that he wrote in Kreuznach in 1843 (the unpublished draft of the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and the essay ‘On the Jewish Question’) and shortly thereafter (the ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right : Introduction’) Marx called this position into question.

In the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right Marx makes two main criticisms of Hegel. The first is that Hegel’s real concern is to retrace in the political realm the outlines of his own metaphysics, rather than to develop an analysis of political institutions and structures in their own right. This gives his political philosophy an apologetic function, for it leads him to present the contradictions that he finds in reality as essentially reconciled in the supposedly higher unity of the ‘Idea’. But they are not, says Marx. On the contrary, they are ‘essential contradictions’.

Chief among such contradictions is that existing between the ‘system of particular interest’ (the family and civil society – that is, economic life) and the ‘system of general interest’, namely, the state. And this leads to Marx’s second criticism. Hegel, Marx alleges, assumes that the state, because it is ‘higher’ from the point of view of Hegelian logic, can effectively reconcile the contradictions of economic life. In fact, in Marx’s view, it is civil society that exists prior to the state. The state arises from the condition of civil society and is always subordinate to the form of the latter.

3 Philosophy and the critique of religion

Marx presents the implications of these criticisms for the critique of religion in the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right : ‘Introduction’. This short essay is a compressed masterpiece of vehement rhetoric, seething with antithesis and chiasmus. In Germany, Marx writes, ‘the critique of religion is essentially completed’. Thus the problem is how to go beyond it. Marx’s first step is to explain the significance of that critique, as he understands it.

The world of religion is a reflection of a particular form of society: ‘This state, this society, produce religion, which is an inverted world-consciousness, because they are an inverted world’. That is to say, only an inverted, secular world would produce religion as its offshoot. In religious belief, Man finds himself reflected in the ‘fantastic reality of heaven’, whilst he can find only ‘the semblance of himself, only a nonhuman being’ in this world. Religion thus provides a realm in which individuals can realize themselves, at least partially, given that full and adequate self-realization is not possible in the profane world. In this way, religion preserves the social order of which it is a by-product, both by deflecting attention from its defects and by providing a partial escape from it. In Marx’s famous words, ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people’.

Thus religion and the form of life associated with it are open to criticism at three points. (1) There is, first, the impoverished and distorted world of which religion is a by-product. (2) There is the way in which the image of reality produced by religion is falsely transfigured. (3) Finally, there is the failure by human beings to recognize the fact that religion has its origins in mundane reality.

It is this last element towards which the critique of religion is directed. Critique of religion connects religion back to its unacknowledged origins in social existence. Yet this is not enough. The critique of religion, inasmuch as it is a call to people to abandon their illusions, is also, according to Marx, ‘the call to abandon a condition that requires illusions’. By itself the critique of religion cannot remove the distortion and impoverishment of the world from which religion arises. This is of course Marx’s real project, for which the criticism of religion has merely prepared the ground.

Once the criticism of religion has done its work, philosophy must move on ‘to unmask human self-alienation in its secular forms’. The critique of religion ends, Marx says, ‘in the doctrine that man is the supreme being for man; thus it ends with the categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is a debased, enslaved, neglected, contemptible being’ (1843a: 251 ).

Much of this analysis represents common ground between Marx and his Young Hegelian former associates. Marx concedes that philosophy has both a critical role to play in exposing the illusions of religion and an affirmative one in establishing an ideal of human fulfilment. Nevertheless, Marx takes the Young Hegelians to task for thinking that philosophy alone provides a sufficient condition for human emancipation. Philosophy, he maintains, must move beyond itself: ‘criticism of the speculative philosophy of right does not remain within itself, but proceeds on to tasks for whose solution there is only one means – praxis’. For this, a material force – a ‘class with radical chains’ – is required, namely, the proletariat.

At this stage, then, Marx is critical not so much of the content of philosophy, but of what we might call the metaphilosophical belief associated with it: that it is possible (as he puts it in relation to the Young Hegelians) ‘to realize philosophy without transcending it’. A truly successful critique of religion would require the transformation of the social conditions within which religion is generated and sustained.

4 Alienated labour

In Paris, Marx threw himself into the study of political economy. His objective was to amplify his critique of Hegel and the Young Hegelians with a more far-reaching account of the nature of ‘civil society’. The Paris Manuscripts thus provide a unique link between Marx’s economic theory and his philosophical view of human nature. The concept which brings the two together is that of alienation (Entfremdung) (see Alienation §§3–5 ). Although Marx had made little use of this term in his earlier writings, the structure of the concept is clearly anticipated in his critique of religion. The fundamental idea is that an entity or agent gives rise to a product or expression that is distinct from but at the same time essential to itself. This secondary product comes to be cut off from its origin. In consequence, the agent suffers a loss of identity in some sense. Thus, for the agent to realize itself fully, it must remove the separation that has come between itself and its own product.

In the central discussion of the Paris Manuscripts , Marx sets out to apply the concept of alienation to the labour process. Alienation, Marx argues, is characteristic of a situation in which (1) labour is directed towards the production of commodities (that is, goods exchangeable in the market) and (2) labour itself is such a commodity. Marx divides the alienation involved in labour into three main forms.

(1) There is, first, the separation of the worker from the product of labour. It is in the nature of the labour process that it involves ‘appropriating’ the external world. But when labour is alienated, the sensible, external world becomes an object to which the worker is bound, something that is hostile to them, instead of being the means to their self-realization.

(2) At the same time, the labour process itself becomes alien to the worker. Because the imperatives according to which labour takes place come to the worker ‘from outside’ (that is, from the market, either directly or indirectly) labour is no longer an act of self-realization. It becomes, from the worker’s point of view, ‘an activity directed against himself, which is independent of him and does not belong to him’.

(3) Finally, Marx says, the consequence of these two forms of alienation is to alienate man from what he calls his ‘species-being’ (Gattungswesen). The latter concept (of which Marx made frequent use in 1843–4) is adapted from Ludwig Feuerbach. Man, says Marx, is a species-being ‘because he looks upon himself as the present, living species, because he looks upon himself as a universal and therefore free being’.

An analogy that may help to clarify this apparently circular definition can be made with the family. In a limited sense, people can be part of a family without consciously behaving accordingly (at the limit, we can think of members of a family who do not even know that they are related). But in order to be a family in a fuller sense, people must relate to one another as a family, and at least a part of this is that they should be aware that they are a family. So it is with human species-being. While the fundamental phenomenon on which the family is based is a biological relation, in human species-being it is labour. Thus, as labour is alienated in other respects, so people become alienated from their species-being. The consequence is the alienation of members of the species from one another.

Each of these three points is, one might think, somewhat questionable. Surely, in any situation in which individuals do not produce entirely for themselves, it will be inevitable that the products of labour are ‘separated’ from the original producer. Likewise, the labour process cannot be something that is freely chosen by individuals as long as they are objectively constrained by the nature of the material world and the resources available to them in finding efficient means to given ends. Finally, it is not at all clear what is involved in human beings ‘re-appropriating’ their ‘species-being’.

One way of making the concept of alienated labour more precise is to ask what it might be for labour to be non-alienated. Marx addresses the issue at the end of a discussion of James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy . ‘Let us suppose’, Marx begins, ‘that we had produced as human beings’. In that case, he claims, each of us would have ‘affirmed’ both ourselves and our fellows in the process of production. In the first place, I, the producer, would have affirmed myself in my production. At the same time, I would be gratifying a human need – that of my neighbour, for whom I am in this case producing. Thus, in meeting your need, I would have mediated between you and the species: ‘I would be acknowledged by you as the complement of your own being, as an essential part of yourself’. In this way, production and the meeting of needs involves a mutuality of self-realization and reciprocal recognition:

In the individual expression of my own life I would have brought about the expression of your life, and so in my individual activity I would have directly confirmed and realized my authentic nature, my human, communal nature.

(1844: 277–8)

These ideas help to explain Marx’s antagonism towards what he would call ‘bourgeois’ political theory. In so far as traditional political philosophy takes as its fundamental question how to reconcile competing interests, its starting point is, from Marx’s point of view, unacceptably individualistic. For what entitles us to assume that the interests of individuals are bound to be antagonistic? Rather than asking how to allocate rights and duties fairly when interests conflict, the task, Marx believes, is to move humanity towards a form of life in which conflicts of interest are no longer endemic.

5 The critique of philosophy

Although the Paris Manuscripts show Marx’s increasing engagement with political economy, they do not represent an abandonment of his concern with philosophy. The attitude that Marx takes towards philosophy, however, now becomes more critical than it had been in his earlier, Young Hegelian period. In part, this can be traced to Ludwig Feuerbach, whom Marx quotes approvingly at several points (see Feuerbach, L. §2 ). It was Feuerbach’s great achievement, Marx writes, ‘to have shown that philosophy is nothing more than religion brought into thought and developed in thought, and that it is equally to be condemned as another form and mode of existence of the alienation of human nature’. Thus Marx now regards philosophy as essentially continuous with religion, not a force directed against religion, as he had represented it at the time of his doctoral dissertation.

Marx makes a number of negative remarks regarding philosophy in general, but his more specific critical comments are directed towards Hegel. Like Feuerbach, he takes the view that Hegel has brought philosophy to a point of completion. The dynamic principle at the heart of Hegel’s philosophy, according to Marx, is that of ‘abstract mental labour’. Nevertheless, despite the genuinely critical elements contained within it, Hegel’s philosophy is vitiated by its idealist assumptions. In the end, for Hegel, alienation is merely a matter of the separation of the products of thought from thought itself, something to be overcome by a philosophical reorientation of consciousness. To go beyond Hegel, it would be necessary to make the concept of real, concrete labour fundamental. But this, Marx suggests, leads beyond philosophy itself.

Marx pursues these ideas in the ‘Theses on Feuerbach ’, written in the spring of 1845. Here he makes it explicit that his disagreement is not only with idealistic philosophies, such as Hegel’s, but also with would-be materialist ones, Feuerbach’s included. In incorporating within itself an idea of ‘activity’, idealism has important advantages over materialism. It is, Marx writes,

the chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism (that of Feuerbach included)…that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, praxis, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real sensuous activity as such.

(1845b: 421)

It should be noted that this passage is ambiguous. Is Marx envisaging a new kind of materialism (one that would not have the defects of ‘hitherto existing materialism’) or is it a call to leave philosophy – both materialism and idealism – behind altogether? Interpreters of Marx who take the former view have ascribed an implicit philosophical position to him (often called ‘dialectical materialism’). Nevertheless, the fact remains that Marx himself never developed such a position explicitly, and the conclusion of the ‘Theses on Feuerbach ’ appears to lead away from philosophy entirely: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’

The German Ideology , which Marx and Engels wrote from September 1845 to the summer of 1846, continues this line of argument. As in so many of Marx’s writings, the rhetorical trope from which the criticism starts is that of an inversion of an inversion. The Young Hegelians, Marx alleges, think of themselves as engaged in a struggle with the illusions that hold the Germans in their grip. But in fact they are in the grip of an illusion themselves: the illusion that ideas are an independent, determining force in political life. Feuerbach is not excepted from this criticism. Although he purports to demystify the realm of pure ideas, he still remains, according to Marx and Engels, ‘in the realm of theory’. Feuerbach, they claim, ‘never arrives at really existing, active men, but stops at the abstraction “man”’.

The alternative that Marx and Engels propose is, of course, also a theory, but it is a theory, they claim, of a quite different kind. ‘In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth’, their purpose is to present an account which will ‘ascend from earth to heaven’. Instead of translating general ideas back into equally general anthropological categories, the aim is to give a specific account of their historical origins. In so doing, it undermines the presuppositions on which the philosophical enterprise rests and philosophy, as an independent branch of knowledge, loses its medium of existence:

The philosophers would only have to dissolve their language into the ordinary language, from which it is abstracted, to recognize it as the distorted language of the actual world, and realize that neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only manifestations of actual life.

(1845–6: 118)

6 The theory of ideology: (1) The reflection model

The German Ideology is filled with polemical assertions of the priority of material life over the world of religion, thought and speculation. But it sets out to do more than sloganize. Its aim is to develop the framework for a scientific explanation of how the material life conditions and determines thought and culture. By the time The German Ideology came to be written, the term ‘ideology’ had established itself in German as referring to systems of ideas detached from and out of proportion to empirical reality (Heinrich Heine, with whom Marx was on intimate terms in Paris, used it in that sense). In The German Ideology this is certainly part of the meaning of the term. But the concept also has a wider explanatory function (see Ideology ).

Since the ancient world, political thinkers had been concerned with the role that ‘false’ or irrational forms of consciousness play in political life. To this extent, the Young Hegelian critique of religion represented the latest manifestation of a very long tradition. However, the originality of Marx’s concept of ideology lies in the way that it brings the idea of false consciousness together with a distinctively modern conception of society.

At the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, a conception of society came to the fore in Germany and France, according to which societies, like organisms, have the power of maintaining and reproducing themselves through time. Marx was very much taken with this view, which he endorsed in the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right . Chief among the conditions for a society to reproduce itself, according to Marx, are the ideas held by its members. Thus false consciousness, rather than being simply an accidental feature of human nature (albeit one with enormous political consequences) should be regarded as a phenomenon to be explained by the particular character of the society in which it is to be found.

If societies do not rest solely on coercion, then this is because those who are oppressed or exploited for some reason accept this. As Marx puts it bluntly: ‘the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas’. But how does this come about? What sort of connection holds between the economic structures of a society and the ideas of its members? The German Ideology contains two analogies that might serve as mechanisms for the explanation of the connection between material life and ideas. The first is embodied in the following famous passage:

If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process…. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life- process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises.

(1845–6: 47)

Let us call this the ‘reflection model’ of ideology. The idea is that ideology relates to material life as images do to reality in a camera obscura or on the retina of the human eye: items in reality are reproduced accurately, but in reverse.

Yet brief consideration of the analogy shows that, as it stands, it is completely inadequate. It is indeed true that the images on the human retina are ‘upside-down’. But does this mean that human beings do not perceive the world about them accurately? Of course not. The fact is that, as far as human perception is concerned, ‘upside-down’ is the right way up for images to be on our retinas. And this points the way towards the problem with Marx’s analogy. By describing all consciousness as reversed or inverted the contrast between ‘true’ and ‘false’ loses its sense.

A further objection arises later in the quoted passage in which Marx continues the reflection analogy when he speaks of the ideological ‘reflexes and echoes’ of real life- processes. Ideological ideas are, he goes on to say, ‘phantoms’ and ‘sublimates’. These metaphors carry with them an important implication: ideological thought is the effect of real processes, but it is itself insubstantial, without material reality or causal power. If this is Marx’s considered view, then it is clearly disastrous for the theory of ideology. For the point of the theory of ideology was to explain how it was that certain forms of thought served to sustain particular societies. Thus these forms of thought are, by assumption, not ineffective, but have very important causal effects: helping to maintain a particular social and economic order.

Finally, it is not obvious that ideology relates to material life as mind relates to matter. Is the implication that ideology is immaterial and material life non-intellectual? This plainly contradicts Marx’s basic position. Not only would it be odd for an avowed materialist to suggest that ideas are something basically insubstantial, but, even more importantly, it conflicts with the idea that economic life, so far from being unconscious or unreflective, is the central part of man’s cognitive engagement with external reality.

7 The theory of ideology: (2) The interests model

There is, however, another model at work in The German Ideology. While the reflection model draws on the parallel between the ideological process and a traditional, realist account of perception (the immaterial mind passively mirrors a mind-independent reality) what we may call the ‘interests model’ develops from a more instrumentalist approach to epistemology. That Marx was (at this time, at least) attracted to such views is apparent from the ‘Theses on Feuerbach ’. In the second thesis he writes, ‘The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.’ From this point of view, the most significant aspect of ideas is not their relationship to a mind-independent reality, but that they are the products of practical activity, and that this practical activity is itself guided by interests. The materialistic view of history that this leads to, Marx and Engels say: ‘does not explain practice from the Idea, but explains the formation of ideas from material practice’.

The problem with the interests model does not lie in the view that ideas are the product of interests itself, which is, of course, very plausible (although it is more difficult to determine just what proportion of our ideas are products of interests in this way – surely not all of them – and to explain just how it is that interests should assert themselves in the process by which ideas are formed). The problem is that ideological ideas are not simply ideas formed in the pursuit of interests. They are, in fact, supposed to be ideas that go against the interests of a large number of those who hold them (and in this way further the interests of others). How do ideas of this kind come to be accepted?

Marx and Engels’s answer starts from the following claim:

The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.

(1845–6: 64)

But this is not a satisfactory solution. Marx and Engels seem to view those who live under the domination of the ruling class as passive victims, taking their ideas like obedient chicks from those who control the ‘means of mental production’, with no critical reflection as to whether the ideas are either true or in their own rational interests. Yet why should one suppose that the ruling class is capable of promoting its interests effectively and forms its ideas in response to those interests, while the dominated classes simply accept whatever is served up to them?

Marx and Engels do, however, attempt to make their claim more plausible in their discussion of the nature of mental production. It is, they write, the most significant development in the division of labour that mental and manual labour become separated:

Division of labour only becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and manual labour appears…. From this moment onwards consciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really represents something without representing something real; from now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to proceed to the formation of ‘pure’ theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc.

(1845–6: 51–2)

The separation between mental and manual labour, Marx and Engels maintain, does not really lead to the formation of autonomous ideas; the ideologists who produce ideas are still part of the ruling class whose interests their ideas represent. Nevertheless, it offers an explanation as to why such ideas should be accepted by those, the dominated classes, whose interests they oppose: they are accepted because they are apparently disinterested. The ideologist, on this view, is like a bribed referee: able to influence the outcome of a game all the more effectively for the fact that he is falsely believed to be impartial.

Are ideologists, then, engaged in deception? Do they know the partiality of their ideas but present them none the less as if they were neutral and disinterested? On the contrary. According to Marx and Engels, ideologists are sincere – and, because they sincerely believe in the independence and objective validity of their own ideas, they are able to persuade others to accept them as such all the more effectively. Herein, however, lies the problem. How are we to suppose it to be true that the ideologists should both be constrained so that they produce ideas in the interests of the ruling class of which they are, appearances to the contrary, a part, and that they (and those who accept the ideas from them) remain sincerely unaware of the nature of this connection? Why do they think that they are independent when in fact they are not? And, if they are not independent, how do the class interests they share with the rest of the ruling class assert themselves?

In any case, it is clear why Marx should now become so hostile to philosophy: like any supposedly ‘pure’ theory, philosophy represents a deceptive abstraction from the particular circumstances and material interests that it serves. This move to detach ideas that are the products of material interests from the interests that they represent is epitomized, for Marx and Engels, in Kant (the ‘whitewashing spokesman’ of the German bourgeoisie, as they call him). Kant, they write:

made the materially motivated determinations of the will of the French bourgeois into pure self-determinations of ‘free will’, of the will in and for itself, of the human will, and so converted it into purely ideological determinations and moral postulates.

(1845–6: 99)

For Marx and Engels, at this stage at least, ‘moral postulates’ are, by their very nature, ideological.

8 Historical materialism

‘Where speculation ends – in real life – there real, positive science begins’, according to Marx and Engels in The German Ideology. The science to which they are referring is the materialist theory of history, whose classic statement is given in the Preface to Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy) (1859).

Taken most generally, the materialist theory of history asserts that the manner in which human beings produce the necessities of life determines the form of the societies in which they live. Every society other than the most primitive produces a ‘surplus’ beyond what it immediately consumes. The manner in which this surplus is ‘appropriated’ – taken from the direct producers and redistributed – determines the class structure of the society in question. If society is divided between direct producers and those who benefit from the former’s ‘unpaid surplus labour’ (something that is true of all societies where a surplus exists, prior to the advent of socialism) the relationship between classes is antagonistic.

At any stage, the size of the surplus is an expression of the level of development of the ‘productive forces’ – the resources, physical and intellectual, upon which material production draws. Every society contains both an economic ‘base’, composed of ‘relations of production’ (the relations producers have to the means of production and to one another) and a legal and political ‘superstructure’, corresponding to the base. The relations of production favour the development of the productive forces up to a point. Beyond this they become, Marx says, ‘fetters’ upon the forces of production, and a conflict arises which leads eventually to the replacement of the existing relations of production with new and superior ones.

Presented in these terms, it is clear that the materialist theory of history is intended as an exercise in social science rather than philosophy. Thus it may seem surprising that it should have attracted such enduring attention on the part of philosophers. However, scientific theories may be of concern to philosophers if their assumptions are novel, obscure or questionable, even if the intentions behind them are in no way philosophical (examples are Darwin, Freud and Newton). In the case of Marx’s theory of history, it is not just the meaning of and evidence for the particular claims to be found in the theory that have been controversial. The more general issues of the form of explanation that Marx employs and the kind of entities such an explanation presupposes have been continuing matters of dispute.

Interpreters of Marx divide broadly into three groups on these questions. In the first are those for whom Marx’s theory of history is intended to be scientific in the way that any other scientific theory is. With some qualifications, the majority of the earliest Marxists (for example, Engels himself, Kautsky and Plekhanov) fall into this group. On the other hand, those who believe that there is a contrast between Marx’s conception of science and the natural sciences may be divided into those who see Marx’s theory as a transformation of Hegel’s theory of history and those for whom it is fundamentally anti-Hegelian. The most influential presentation of the former interpretation is to be found in Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness (1921), while the latter is particularly associated with the French philosopher, Louis Althusser (see Althusser, L. §§2–3; Kautsky, K.; Lukács, G. §2; Plekhanov, G. §2 ).

In the late 1970s the first approach was revived in the English-speaking world by G.A. Cohen’s seminal Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (1978). According to Cohen, historical materialism can be presented in a way that contains nothing that should be unacceptable to anyone who accepts the legitimacy of Darwinian biology (see Darwin, C. ).

The two theories are, in Cohen’s view, importantly parallel to one another, for both employ ‘functional explanation’ (see Functional explanation ). When Marx says that the relations of production correspond to the forces of production, what he means, according to Cohen, is first that the relations are in some sense ‘good for’ the (development of the) forces and second that they obtain because they are good for the forces. (The same analysis, suitably adapted, applies to the correspondence between superstructure and base.) What is distinctive about Darwinian biology, however, is not just that it employs functional explanation, but that it provides a convincing account (what Cohen calls an ‘elaborating explanation’) of why its functional explanations are true: the process of natural selection. Does Marxism have an equivalent elaborating explanation?

All the indications are that it does not. In response to this, there have been two main lines of argument. One is that the theory should have (but lacks) such an explanation and that it is the task of a sympathetic reconstruction of Marx to provide one. On the other hand, it is also possible to argue that the search for what Jon Elster has called ‘micro-foundations’ is misguided (1985 ). Thus the functional explanations that Marx invokes in the theory of history rest on the fact that there really are collective agents (classes, for example). On this ‘collectivist’ reading it is sufficient simply to appreciate the nature of collective agency to see why collective agents should feature in functional explanations: they have the power to act purposively to bring about their ends. No reductive ‘elaborating explanation’ is necessary.

To take this view is to align oneself with the second and third groups of Marx’s interpreters and to affirm the fundamental gap between Marx’s theory of history and the explanations of the natural sciences (where functional explanations are not simply left unelaborated). If so, the Marxist theory of history cannot draw on the general prestige of science for its justification.

9 Political economy

In contrast to his relatively brief and schematic statements concerning general history, Marx wrote very extensively about the economic system under which he himself lived. Das Kapital, which presents Marx’s definitive analysis of capitalism, is a work of exceptional methodological complexity, as is already suggested by its sub- title, ‘Critique of Political Economy’. The phrase is ambiguous. Is Marx’s objective to criticize the bourgeois economy or bourgeois economics? In fact, Marx rejects this as a false antithesis: the subject matter of the book is both. Ten years before its publication, Marx described the work that was to become Das Kapital in a letter: ‘The…work in question is a critique of the economic categories, or, if you like, the system of bourgeois economy critically presented. It is a presentation [Darstellung] of the system and, simultaneously, a critique of it’.

The two aspects go together in Marx’s view because economic categories are not simply the means employed by an observer to classify some inert mass of data. They are themselves a part of social reality, ‘abstract forms’ of the social relations of production.

Bourgeois economists, Marx alleges, characteristically fail to recognize that their categories are specific to capitalism, and so they treat the capitalist mode of production as one ‘eternally fixed by nature for every state of society’, Marx alleges. A ‘critical presentation’ of economics must counteract the false eternalization of the economy that bourgeois economics carries within itself.

As it stands, this is a criticism of the limitations in the self-understanding of bourgeois economics rather than a challenge to its empirical content. Yet empirical explanation is a central part of Marx’s project. ‘It is’, he writes in the Preface to Das Kapital , ‘the ultimate aim of this work to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society.’ Has bourgeois economics failed to discover this law or has it simply not put its categories in historical context? At its strongest, Marx’s case is that both criticisms are true and that the former failing is a result of the latter. The ‘law of value’ that Marx claims to have discovered could not, he says, have been discovered by economic science ‘so long as it is stuck in its bourgeois skin’.

The connection that Marx sees between the categories of economic life and the categories of economic analysis is made more complicated by the structure that he ascribes to capitalism. Marx believes that an indispensable ingredient for understanding capitalism is the contrast between its ‘essence’ – its underlying determinants – and its ‘appearance’ – the way that it immediately strikes those who live in it. Corresponding to this distinction are two kinds of bourgeois economic thought: what Marx calls ‘classical economy’, on the one hand, and ‘vulgar economy’ on the other. Classical economy (the tradition whose greatest representatives were Ricardo and Adam Smith ) aims towards the essence of capitalism: it ‘nearly touches the true relation of things’, although it is not able to formulate that relation explicitly. According to Marx, it is the mark of the ‘vulgar economy’ of his own time, by contrast, that it ‘feels particularly at home in the alienated outward appearances of economic relations’. Yet this means that it is fundamentally unscientific, for ‘all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things coincided’. A truly scientific political economy must go beyond the immediately received categories of economic life. This is what Marx believes that he himself has achieved (and he considers himself for this reason to be the heir of the tradition of classical political economy).

In a letter to Engels, written at the time of the publication of the first volume of Das Kapital , Marx singles out what he calls the ‘twofold character of labour’ as the most important point in his book. Labour, Marx claims, is both the source of value and, at the same time, under capitalism, a commodity itself. Yet this commodity (labour- power, as Marx calls it) is a commodity of a special kind. Its value is not the same as the value of the commodities produced by the labour that is exercised on behalf of its purchaser, the capitalist. This discrepancy, in Marx’s view, explains the ‘origin’ of surplus-value – the fact that the capitalist appropriates the surplus-labour of the worker under the guise of a fair exchange. In discussing the manner in which, in capitalist society, labour is sold to capitalists as a commodity, in exchange for wages, Marx writes: ‘Hence we may understand the decisive importance of the transformation of the value and price of labour-power into the form of wages, or into the value and price of labour itself. This phenomenal form, which makes the actual relation invisible, and, indeed, shows the direct opposite of that relation, forms the basis of all the juridical notions of both labourer and capitalist, of all the mystifications of the capitalist mode of production, of all its illusions as to liberty, of all the apologetic shifts of the vulgar economists’.

Thus we see Marx making three claims: (1) that we should see reality as layered, having a surface appearance governed by an underlying structure; (2) that to make such a distinction is characteristic of the scientific approach to reality in general; and (3) that the phenomenal form conceals the real relations (it ‘makes the actual relation invisible and indeed shows the opposite of that relation’).

However, claims (1) and (2) do not entail (3). According to claims (1) and (2) (in themselves extremely plausible) the way that we see the world is not, immediately, adequate for us to explain the way that the world is. But that does not make our immediate perception of the world false. It simply lacks a theory. Yet Marx’s claim (3) is much stronger: reality presents itself in a way that deceives those who immediately perceive it. Marx’s own statements to the contrary, it seems that this third claim is best understood not as a general consequence of the nature of scientific understanding but as a specific feature of capitalism. Capitalism mystifies those who live under it, Marx believes, because it is a ‘deceptive object’. To penetrate its surface scientifically it is necessary to go beyond the limitations of bourgeois political economy.

10 The fetishism of commodities

The most detailed discussion that Marx provides of a case where the surface of capitalism presents itself as ‘false’ is to be found in ‘The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof’, in Das Kapital. This discussion is a recognizable reworking of the central themes to be found in the treatment of alienated labour in the Paris Manuscripts .

In the eighteenth-century sense of the term, fetishists were those non-European peoples whose religion involved the worship of inanimate objects. Fetishism is a fallacy attributing to objects in the world some quality (power and personality) that they, in fact, lack. Marx’s conception of commodity fetishism shares this structure, but differs in an important way. The fetishism of commodities is not a matter of subjective delusion or irrationality on the part of perceivers, but is somehow embedded in the reality that they face.

According to Marx, two separate facts or properties are distorted in the commodity- form. First, the ‘social character’ of human beings’ labour appears (falsely) as ‘objective characteristics of the products themselves’, and second (in consequence of the first fact, as Marx asserts) the producers’ own relationship to their ‘collective labour’ appears ‘as a social relationship between objects, existing externally to the producers’.

The first issue concerns what the ‘social character’ that is apparently a property of the products themselves amounts to. Is it the sheer fact that the commodity is a commodity? This suggestion must be rejected, for the belief that the product is a commodity is in no way a false or deceptive one. Likewise, it cannot be something concealed from the producers that commodities do as a matter of fact exchange for one another in certain proportions: it is hard to see how anyone could live their lives within a market society without having an adequate understanding of facts of this kind (enough, at least, to be able to buy something to eat). The best interpretation of Marx’s argument is that it is not such first-order facts about commodities but a second-order one that is the source of deception: it is not that commodities can be exchanged with one another in certain ratios but the reason why they exchange in the ratios that they do that is their hidden secret.

Marx’s account of the illusion regarding the social character of the products of labour is complemented by the account he gives of the second element in commodity fetishism. Because commodity production takes place as a process by which the producers’ activities are coordinated solely through the imperatives of a system of market exchanges, it follows, Marx says, that ‘the social relations between their private acts of labour manifest themselves as what they are – that is, not as the immediate social relationships of persons in their labour but as material relationships between persons and social relationships between things’.

Implicitly, the market commensurates the labour of each individual with the labour of every other producer – individual labour has its value in relation to the way in which others perform the same labour. The socially useful character of the labour of the individual producers thus appears to them, according to Marx, ‘only under those forms which are impressed upon that labour in everyday practice, in the exchange of products’.

Here again, Marx is indicating an illusion of the second rather than the first order. The individual producers are aware of the role of the market in determining the way in which they labour. In this they are quite correct. But they also believe (falsely) that it is the market that makes their labour useful (rather than recognizing it as a contingent fact about capitalist production that their socially useful labour takes on a market- determined form). Society generates such false beliefs spontaneously, Marx claims. The world of commodities ‘veils rather than reveals’, he says, the social character of private labour and of the relations between the individual producers.

That the true source of the value of commodities lies in the labour expended in their production is, Marx maintains, a matter of simple scientific truth. So, too, is the fact that the social character of private labour consists in the equalization of that labour under the auspices of the market. Nevertheless, fetishism is a matter of ‘objective illusion’ and knowledge of these truths does not dispel such false appearance. The discovery of the law of value ‘by no means dissipates the objective illusion through which the social character of labour appears to be an objective character of the products themselves’ any more than ‘the discovery by science of the component gases of air’ altered the atmosphere that people breathed.

The analogy that Marx chooses here is not a happy one. Admittedly, it is absurd to think that a scientist’s discovery about an object should change the object itself. But that is not the issue. It is not a question of whether the atmosphere itself changes after the discovery of its component gases, but whether the way in which we think about it changes. It is only if we suppose that capitalism, unlike the atmosphere, is an object of a particular kind – a deceptive object – that it is possible to claim that it will continue to encourage such false beliefs in the face of contrary knowledge.

But it is not just that the individuals who live in a society based on commodity production are deceived by it regarding the way that it works. The way that it works is itself criticized by Marx. Above all, the ‘social character of labour’ is made private in actuality. This is not a misperception or false belief, but a contradiction: a discrepancy between what Marx takes to be the intrinsic nature of social labour and the way that it is in fact organized. Capitalism is not just deceptive, but also defective.

11 Morality

The question whether Marx’s theory has a moral or ethical dimension is one of the most controversial of all issues surrounding the interpretation of his work, and the difficulty facing interpreters is easily seen. On the one hand, Marx has a number of uncompromisingly negative things to say about morality. Moreover, after 1845 at least, he affirms that his own theory is not a utopian or ethical one but ‘real, positive science’. Yet, on the other hand, much of the language that he uses to describe capitalism is plainly condemnatory (for instance, that it is antagonistic, oppressive and exploitative). Does this not represent an inconsistency on Marx’s part? Is he not moralizing and rejecting morality at the same time?

This section will present a line of interpretation according to which Marx is not inconsistent. The interpretation depends on a contrast between certain doctrines typical of moral philosophy (which, it will be argued, Marx rejects) and the rejection of ethical values as such (to which, it will be argued, he is not thereby committed). However, it should be noted that this interpretation is controversial and involves considerable reconstruction of the rather sparse evidence that we have of Marx’s views.

It is helpful to start, as Marx himself did, with Hegel’s critique of Kant. Both Marx and Hegel share the belief that morality, as embodied in Kant’s moral philosophy, is, as they put it, ‘abstract’ (see Hegel, G.W.F. §8 ). There appear to be three interconnected elements compressed into this criticism:

(1) First, morality is alleged to be abstract in the sense that it contains principles expressed in universal form (in Kant’s case, the ‘categorical imperative’ to ‘act only according to that maxim which you can, at the same time, will to be a universal law’ (see Kantian ethics )). While such principles may function as a test upon proposed actions, they do not, the argument goes, determine the content of the action to be performed. Thus, the claims of moral philosophy to the contrary, specific content is surreptitiously imported into ethics from the existing institutions or codes of behaviour of the society in question.

(2) Second, morality is abstract to the extent that it takes the form of a mere injunction: an imperative that is addressed to people’s ‘moral reason’, telling them to act in a certain way because that is ‘good in itself’. Moral action is detached thereby from other forms of human action and, as a result, moral theory has nothing to say about the conditions under which the forms of behaviour that it commends will be realized in practice.

(3) Finally, morality may be said to be abstract in that it contains an unhistorical understanding of its own status. It presents its principles as if they were the axioms of some timeless moral geometry. Yet, in fact, every system of morality is a way of seeing the world that arises in particular circumstances and responds to definite needs within those circumstances.

Although one or more of these features may be present in the forms of moral philosophy with which we are most familiar, it is not clear that they are a necessary feature of every view that one might call ‘moral’. Not all ethical positions have to express themselves as systems of universal principles that we are enjoined to follow because they are good for their own sake. Admittedly, many philosophers would argue that to combine the value commitments characteristic of morality with the meta- level doctrine that such values are, in the end, expressions of interest (Marx’s version of (3) above) inevitably undermines, as Nietzsche might have put it, the value of value itself. But it is at least arguable that the two standpoints are compatible. The path from sociological determinism to moral scepticism is not as steep, slippery and remorseless as it is sometimes claimed to be.

If this is conceded, we can draw a distinction between morality in two senses: morality as a quasi-Kantian system of principles (which Marx rejects) and morality as a set of values embodying a conception of what is good for human beings (which he can consistently accept). To present things in this way, however, may seem to give insufficient weight to the vehement hostility which Marx shows towards ideas of justice and rights, in particular. On the interpretation being proposed here, Marx’s animus is best understood as aimed at what he sees as the assumptions behind such values, rather than at the fact of their being values as such.

Roughly speaking, we may think of rights as things that permit individuals to act in certain ways, in given circumstances, should they wish to do so, and to be able to claim correlative duties on the part of others. A duty, correspondingly, would require individuals to act in some way, whether they wished to or not. Justice (if we do not think of it simply as a matter of rights and duties) would consist of principles on which benefits and burdens are distributed in cases where interests conflict.

What these values have in common is that they provide a framework which regulates and limits the self-seeking behaviour of individuals. They are values that assume a conflict between (to put it in Kantian terms) ‘duty’ and ‘inclination’. Just as Marx supposes that the categories of bourgeois economics eternalize the forms of bourgeois economic life, so, he believes, discussion of rights (which he denounces in the Critique of the Gotha Programme as ‘ideological nonsense’) eternalizes a situation in which the good of each individual is independent and so can only be advanced at the expense of others. Right, moreover, can only apply a fixed and equal standard to unequal individuals, ‘from outside’.

For the liberal, who is concerned to protect the individual’s powers of self-direction against the intrusions of others, the attraction of the idea of rights is that it presupposes nothing about individuals’ characters and personalities. For Marx, on the other hand, that is just its weakness: rights do nothing to transform human nature. Against this, it is clear that Marx, from the time of the Paris Manuscripts, sees social progress as characterized by a form of community in which (as he and Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto ) ‘the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’. Marx’s ethical ideal is one of solidarity in which all advance together.

Hence Marx’s reluctance to use the language of justice to condemn capitalism becomes more intelligible. It is not that Marx thinks that exploitation, expropriation, oppression, slavery and misery (a few of the terms he applies to the capitalist system) are just. But he is reluctant to use language that would suggest that these are forms of injustice for which ‘justice’ (in the sense of giving ‘each their due’) is the final and sufficient remedy.

12 Socialism

It may seem odd, given that Marx devoted his life to the achievement of a socialist society, how brief and unspecific his accounts of it are. One explanation that is often advanced for this apparent neglect is the following. Marx believed, it is said, that thought is limited to its own time. Thus it would have been improper for him, living under capitalism, to try to anticipate the nature of the society that would replace it and to write (as he puts it in the Preface to the Second Edition of Das Kapital ) ‘recipes for the cook-shops of the future’. While this may be part of the reason for Marx’s reticence, it cannot alone suffice. For, even if we grant that Marx believed that each stage of society sets a boundary which thought cannot cross (and it is by no means beyond question that he did hold this view in such a strong form) he is also committed to the view that socialism is anticipated within capitalism.

In the Preface to Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie Marx makes the general claim that new forms of society are always prefigured within the old ones that they replace. ‘Mankind’, he writes, ‘only sets itself 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’.

Marx describes the process by which capitalism prepares the ground for socialism at the end of the first volume of Das Kapital . As the productive forces developed by capitalism grow, he claims, so too does the ‘mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation’. A stage is reached, however, at which the monopoly of capital becomes a ‘fetter’ on production and ‘the centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist shell’. At this point, the shell ‘bursts asunder’, the ‘death knell’ sounds for capitalism and the ‘expropriators are themselves expropriated’.

The first and most obvious difference between capitalism and socialism is that common ownership leads to a quite different pattern of distribution of the products of labour. No longer will the capitalist, in virtue of his ownership of the means of production, be able to exploit the individual producer. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme Marx distinguishes two stages of post-capitalist society. In the first, the direct producer receives back from society (after deductions for shared costs and social expenditure) ‘what he has given to it as his individual quantum of labour’.

But this, Marx points out, is a principle of distribution that merely rectifies exploitation. It does not remedy the inequalities that arise from contingent differences in natural capacities between individual producers. Later, however, society will move beyond this, Marx claims, and ‘the narrow horizon of bourgeois right’ will be ‘crossed in its entirety’. At this point, the principle upon which society will operate will be: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!’ But socialism is distinguished by more than its principle of distribution. In particular, labour will be organized quite differently from the way that it is organized under capitalism.

One of Marx’s few reasonably extensive accounts of the nature of the socialist organization of production is to be found in the section on the fetishism of commodities in Das Kapital , as part of a comparison between capitalist and other forms of production. Marx starts with Robinson Crusoe, whose productive activity he describes as ‘simple and clear’. For Robinson, Marx says, the organization of production is a purely administrative operation: the end is known, as are the resources available and the techniques by which that end could be attained. Marx then moves from ‘Robinson’s island, bathed in light’, via feudal and patriarchal forms of production, before alighting on: ‘a community of free individuals, carrying on their labour with the means of production in common, in which the labour-power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labour-power of the community’.

Here, Marx says,

All the characteristics of Robinson’s labour are…repeated, but with this difference, that they are social, instead of individual…The social relations of the individual producers to their labour and to the products of their labour remain here transparently simple, in production as well as in distribution.

(1867–: 171–2)

The idea that labour could be ‘consciously applied’ in a complex modern society – resources and needs coordinated, efficient techniques adopted, innovation managed – with the same ‘transparent simplicity’ as an individual allocating his time to different tasks on a desert island is astonishingly implausible. And, even if it were not so, the question would still arise how that ‘common and rational plan’ (as Marx terms it elsewhere) would relate to the individuals whose task it was to carry it out. Would it not, from their point of view, be no less of an ‘external’ imperative to be followed than the dictates of the market that govern their labour under capitalism? Arguably, the idea that society under socialism would be spontaneously unified like one great, self-transparent super-individual represents an unacknowledged hangover in Marx’s mature thought from Hegel’s doctrine of Geist. However that may be, the presence of this doctrine goes a long way towards explaining why Marx had so little to say about the problems of socialist economic organization: he simply failed to see the difficulty. Few theoretical omissions, surely, have ever had more disastrous historical consequences.

La Mettrie, Julien Offroy de (1709–51)

La Mettrie is best known as the author of the eighteenth-century materialist manifesto, L’Homme machine (1747). His interest in philosophical issues grew out of his preoccupation with medicine, and he developed a tradition of medical materialism within the French Enlightenment. Born in St Malo, into the family of a prosperous textile merchant, La Mettrie pursued a medical career in Paris. He also studied for two years with the renowned Hermann Boerhaave in Leiden. After a brief period of medical practice, La Mettrie devoted his efforts to his translations and commentaries on Boerhaave’s medical works. He also began to publish the works that made him a pariah to both the Faculty of Medicine of Paris and to the orthodox – that is, his medical satires and his first work of materialist philosophy, L’Histoire naturelle de l’âme (1745). Because of the outrage provoked by these works, he was exiled to Holland in 1745. But L’Homme machine, the text in which he applied his materialism thoroughly and explicitly to human beings, was too radical even for the unusually tolerant Dutch, and La Mettrie was forced to seek asylum at the court of Frederick the Great where he later died. His willingness to publish ideas his contemporaries considered too dangerous led the philosophes to repudiate him.

1 Medical roots of materialism

La Mettrie’s best known work, L’Homme machine (1747), has sometimes been construed, largely because of its title, as a simple application to man of Descartes’ bête machine hypothesis (see Descartes, R. §12). But his materialism is richer, less mechanistic, and more embedded in the scientific and medical traditions of the eighteenth century than this narrow appreciation has suggested.

La Mettrie’s interest in philosophical issues grew out of his preoccupation with medicine. His medical works include translations and commentaries on Boerhaave’s principal works, five medical treatises on specific diseases and public health, and seven volumes of medical satires lampooning the ignorance and venality of the medical profession. His work manifests the hostility to metaphysics and commitment to an empiricism typical of many medical writers in the eighteenth century. His awareness of the divergent manifestations of disease in different individuals led him to emphasize the importance of the physiological constitution in his philosophical works. La Mettrie built upon Boerhaave’s tentative correlations between Lockean epistemology and the physiology of mental process to develop a materialist philosophy. That is to say, he not only adopted Lockean psychology as the best framework within which to discuss brain functions but also made the easy transition from Locke to materialism; in all of his philosophical writings, he emphasized the physiological evidence for taking this step.

2 Materialist philosophy

La Mettrie’s first philosophical work, L’Histoire naturelle de l’âme (1745), appears to be a conventional metaphysical treatise in style and vocabulary. But he deliberately subverted conventional philosophical arguments to argue for materialism, perhaps attempting to legitimate materialism by placing it within the established philosophical canon (see Materialism in the philosophy of mind). For example, he claimed that Aristotelian substantial forms – defined as the power of matter to acquire form, force, and the faculty of sensation – prefigured his materialism. He used the Aristotelian sensitive soul as a fruitful way to discuss mental processes and cited, as an epistemological rallying cry, the Aristotelian maxim, ‘nothing in the intellect which is not first in the senses’. He wielded his materialist reading of Locke as a weapon against seventeenth-century metaphysicians, especially Leibniz and Descartes, to argue that the soul could be completely identified with the physical functions of the body and that any claims about its existence or function must be substantiated through physiology. Without the impediment to research and understanding that the notion of the immortal soul posed, one could come to a more realistic assessment of human nature by studying all available scientific data. Writing as a physician committed to the practical application of empirical physiology to investigations of human nature and the soul, La Mettrie reappraised philosophical issues with the evidence and methods of medicine and physiology.

In L’Homme machine (1747), La Mettrie adopted a freer and more polemical style to canvass all the scientific issues of his day for empirical evidence for materialism. He provided lengthy and elaborate discussion of the physical basis of human behaviour in order to demonstrate that the effects of the body on the soul are so striking that one cannot reasonably assume that a soul controls the body; thus one must ultimately conclude that the soul, if the term has any meaning, must be considered part of the body. He used evidence drawn from anatomy, physiology, and psychology to assert the complete dependence of the soul on the body. Albrecht von Haller’s findings on muscular irritability were particularly attractive to La Mettrie as the most conclusive evidence against those who refused to admit that matter was capable of selfmovement, particularly the Cartesians. Making no qualitative distinction between conscious and voluntary and involuntary or instinctual, La Mettrie posited an active, organic, and selfmoving ‘man machine’. With his materialist theory of man substantiated by physiological experiments, La Mettrie thoroughly compared human beings to animals, despite the implicit disparagement of conventional notions of man’s place in the universe which those comparisons entailed. Furthermore, he suggested that atheism was the logical outcome of his notion of an active, selfcreating and sustaining nature.

La Mettrie’s other works on the philosophy of nature, L’Homme plante (1748) and Système d’Epicure (1750), further integrate human beings in nature by comparing them to lower creatures, like plants, and by placing them in the context of the unfolding of matter and motion in an evolutionary process.

In these works, La Mettrie empowered the physician, at the expense of the theologian and metaphysician, because he maintained that the physician’s physiological understanding of human beings was the most sound and most likely to yield productive results. The close connections he was able to draw between physical and mental processes demonstrated the utility of knowledge gleaned by his method, which was unsystematic, incautious and unconstrained by standards of orthodoxy, bound instead by stringent empirical standards – the method, he suggested, of the reform-minded, empiricist physician. La Mettrie then turned his attention to an area where the authority of the metaphysician or the theologian traditionally prevailed over that of the physician, ethics.

3 Moral philosophy

La Mettrie’s Discours sur le bonheur (1750) used his materialist notion of man and his place in nature to examine the implications of materialism for moral systems and for the individual in society. He raised the question of the effect society can have on the individual or the degree to which education can countervail physiological determinants.

He sought to determine whether our notions of virtue and vice correspond to human nature as revealed by physiology. The evidence of comparative anatomy led him to conclude that society was not only unnatural but also arbitrary, and that its notions of virtue and vice, while socially useful, were fundamentally at odds with nature and simply the result of socialization. Therefore, just as the physician must acknowledge the effects of the individual constitution on health and disease, La Mettrie insists, so too must the moral reformer recognize the limits that the individual constitution imposes on one’s ability to behave in the ways society has defined as virtuous. The brunt of La Mettrie’s moral argument is the hope that society, recognizing that its notions of virtue and vice are relative and designed merely to further its interests, will be persuaded to reward a greater range of human behaviour; thus, more individuals will be able to aspire to social virtues. In light of his understanding of human nature and morality, La Mettrie critically appraised other moral systems; he indicted Christianity and Stoicism, in particular, for their distorted views of human nature (see Virtues and vices).

4 Role in the Enlightenment

La Mettrie was more pessimistic than other philosophes about the possibility of social reform; for him, reform efforts were severely circumscribed by the sway that the physiological constitution exercises over the individual. His specific claim that virtue and vice are completely relative put him at odds with the aspirations of other Enlightenment moralists writing within the natural law tradition, and his hedonistic ethic put him beyond the pale as far as many of his contemporaries were concerned. But despite the fact that virtually all of the philosophes, even those like Diderot and d’Holbach who were indebted to him, found it dangerous to be associated with his radical materialism, La Mettrie himself was eager to proclaim his adherence to them. In his last philosophical work, the Discours préliminaire, written in 1751 just as the philosophic movement was beginning to coalesce around the Encyclopedia, La Mettrie claimed to speak for the philosophes. He explicitly identified his work in both medicine and philosophy with their concerns for reform. Where medicine offered hope for a more naturalistic understanding of human nature, the médecin-philosophe (a term he coined) might be able to reform social institutions in accord with that understanding. La Mettrie’s medical materialism is his distinctive contribution to the French Enlightenment and the history of philosophy.

Condorcet, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat de (1743–94)

The Marquis de Condorcet belongs to the second generation of eighteenth-century French philosophes. He was by training and inclination a mathematician, and his work marks a major stage in the development of what is known today as the social sciences. He was held in high regard by contemporaries for his contributions to probability theory, and he published a number of seminal treatises on the theory and application of probabilism. He is best known today for the Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (1795), his monumental, secularized historical analysis of the dynamics of man’s progress from the primitive state of nature to modernity.

Condorcet’s principal aim was to establish a science of man that would be as concise and certain in its methods and results as the natural and physical sciences. For Condorcet there could be no true basis to science without the model of mathematics, and there was no branch of human knowledge to which the mathematical approach was not relevant. He called the application of mathematics to human behaviour and organization ‘social arithmetic’.

The central epistemological assumption, upon which his philosophy was based, was that the truths of observation, whether in the context of the physical or the moral and social sciences, were nothing more than probabilities, but that their varying degrees of certainty could be measured by means of the calculus of probabilities. Condorcet was thus able, through mathematical logic, to counteract the negative implications of Pyrrhonic scepticism for the notions of truth and progress, the calculus providing not only the link between the different orders of knowledge but also the way out of the Pyrrhonic trap by demonstrating man’s capacity and freedom to understand and direct the march of progress in a rationally-ordered way.

In his Esquisse Condorcet set out to record not only the history of man’s progress through nine ‘epochs’, from the presocial state of nature to the societies of modern Europe, but in the tenth ‘epoch’ of this work he also held out the promise of continuing progress in the future. He saw the gradual emancipation of human society and the achievement of human happiness as the consequence of man having been endowed by nature with the capacity to learn from experience and of the cumulative, beneficial effects of the growth of knowledge and enlightenment. Condorcet’s Esquisse laid the basis for the positivism of the nineteenth century, and had a particularly significant impact on the work of Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte.

1 Life

Condorcet was one of the outstanding French mathematicians of his time. He was the only eighteenth-century French philosophe of stature to have participated in the Revolution and, as a legislator, to have had an impact on events after 1789. Born in Ribemont, his early education took place at Reims, and by 1758 he had entered the University of Paris where he studied ethics, metaphysics, logic and mathematics at the prestigious Collège de Navarre. There he was taught by the Abbé Nollet, a proponent of Newtonian physics, and he worked closely with Georges Girault de Kéroudon on philosophical matters and on the crucial problems of the integral calculus. In later years he also came under the influence of Euler, Fontaine, the Bernouillis and, above all, of the distinguished mathematician and academician, Jean Le Rond D’Alembert, who became his patron. He was elected Perpetual Secretary of the Academy of Sciences in 1773, and in 1782 became a member of the French Academy. An enthusiastic supporter and theorist of the Revolution, he played an important role in the drafting of the Déclaration des droits in 1789. Suspected later of being a Girondin, he was denounced, and died, possibly a suicide, in Bourg-la-Reine while awaiting the guillotine.

His first major work, Du calcul intégral, was published in 1765 as part of the Academy of Science’s proceedings, and was widely acclaimed. This was followed by a series of essays and mathematical papers, published between 1766 and 1769, including important work on the applications of the integral calculus to the still unresolved mathematical obscurities of Newton’s Principia. The extensions of the methodology of differential calculus, probability (the ‘mathematics of hope’) and their application to nonscientific areas, particularly the moral, political and social sciences, were to remain at the core of his thinking, especially during and after Turgot’s ministry (1774–6). His exploration of the potential of the calculus of probabilities was developed further in the Essai sur l’application de l’analyse à la probabilité des décisions rendues à la pluralité des voix in 1785. The Essai is complemented by the Eléments du calcul des probabilités et son application aux jeux de hasard, not published in its own right until 1805.

Condorcet was part of that new-wave reformist movement in late eighteenth-century France that included Turgot, the idéologues, and the physiocrats, all united in their understanding of how the world of ideas could and must interact with the world of political and social reality. Other major publications include the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assemblées provinciales (1788), Sur l’Instruction publique (1791–2), Réflexions sur la jurisprudence criminelle (1775), De l’Influence de la Révolution de l’Amérique sur l’Europe (1786), Quatres lettres d’un bourgeois de Newh(e)aven á un citoyen de Virginie (1788), Lettres sur le commerce des grains (1775), and the Réflexions sur l’esclavage des nègres (1781). In addition, he wrote innumerable pamphlets, drafts of bills and other legislative material for the National Convention. He was also interested in the development of a symbolic logic to give precise expression to intellectual operations and which would be appropriate to the formulation of a universal language of the sciences, although his treatise on this subject, the Essai d’une langue universelle, was to remain unfinished. In the non-mathematical area his greatest and most influential work is the Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain, published posthumously in 1795.

2 The science of the probable

Condorcet used mathematics as a model upon which to build a philosophy of social science, and to establish a methodology as applicable to the science of man as it was to the physical sciences. In Condorcet’s hands mathematics became an instrument of social and philosophical analysis and, following the lead given by D’Alembert, he set out to integrate the Newtonian view of a rationally determined order of nature into an analagous framework of moral, social and political order. He postulated the view that all human sciences were underpinned by positive fact in the same way as the physical sciences, and open to a rigorous system of analysis made meaningful through the use of a precise, well-determined ‘universal’ language, capable of unambiguous use across the whole spectrum of scientific enquiry.

Greatly influenced by Locke and Hume, as well as by the French sensationalist philosopher Condillac, Condorcet devoted much of his intellectual life to the development of a concept of ‘social arithmetic’ based on the calculus of probabilities. He saw probabilism as constituting the essential epistemological link between the social and the physcial sciences. By utilising the calculus of probabilities, the uncertainties and ambivalences inherent in previous attempts to study and evaluate man’s behaviour, which had resulted in the case of many philosophers in a profound scepticism, could be dissipated. He was convinced that this ‘true philosophy’ would provide the foundation for a systematic ‘science of man’. The clearest elaboration of this philosophy of probable belief and the methodological principles for its application are to be found in general, tentative outline in the notes to Condorcet’s reception speech to the French Academy in 1782, and in more sophisticated mathematical detail in the Mémoire sur le calcul des probabilités (1784), in the Essai sur l’application de l’analyse à la probabilité des décisions rendues à la pluralité des voix and in the Eléments du calcul des probabilités et son application aux jeux de hasard.

In the preliminary discourse to the Essai sur l’application de l’analyse, he postulated two key principles governing the processes of human reasoning: (1) that ‘nature follows invariable laws’ and (2) that these laws ‘are made known to us by observable phenomena’. What leads us to believe in the truth of such a postulation is our phenomenological experience of the facts and of the ways in which that experience accords with these two principles. A perfect and definitive calculation of the probability of their truth can never be fully realized, as it is impossible to take cognizance of the totality of the factors that shape our experience. Condorcet insisted, on the other hand, that such a calculation, were it possible, would indicate a very high degree of probability of the truth of these principles. In the light of this probable truth, Condorcet then added a third working proposition, namely that all human reasoning that informs judgment, decision making, choice and conduct is based ultimately on probability.

‘The truths proved by experience are simply probabilities.’ For Condorcet this insistence on uncertainty did not, however, lead to the impasse of Pyrrhonism. On the contrary, although all knowledge was founded only on probabilities, the value, or degree of probability could be determined with relative precision.

Condorcet fully accepted the Lockean view on epistemological modesty. Uncertainty characterized all human understanding (exception being made for the mathematical model itself), but for Condorcet, as for Locke, uncertainty was not an invincible, action-denying absolute. In the Essai sur l’application de l’analyse he sought to demonstrate, by means of the calculus of probabilities, how the defeatist scepticism of the past could be made to give way before the new positivism.

The calculus of probabilities was applicable in theory to all aspects of human life and behaviour, and in demonstrating the logical foundation for this principle Condorcet developed a view of rational belief that owed as much to Hume as to Locke. Belief in both the moral and physical sciences was in his system simply the representation of things as having to exist in a certain way, based on our experience that what has occurred will tend to recur within a frame of constant laws. Belief was not, however, the result of a raw process of reaction to sense impressions. Man obeys an automatic sentiment that leads him to belief, but in order to avoid

judgment and opinion degenerating into prejudice and irrationality, Condorcet took care to distinguish between the sentiment of belief and the actual grounds for belief. Reason and experience must play their part if man was to be rescued from the illusions of the senses and the fleeting impressions made upon the senses. To this end, he advanced the view that reason had found a powerful weapon in the form of the calculus of probabilities, which offered a dependable methodology for the estimation of the grounds for belief. The calculus would provide the necessary mechanism for the correction of any error arising from the passive, automatic and uncritical sentiment of belief, particularly important in the case of the moral and social sciences.

The principles of probabilistic philosophy enabled Condorcet to elaborate a model of calculation that permitted the objective evaluation of man in society, and with it he sought to transform the calculus of probabilities into a mathematically-based language of rational decision-making and action. The Essai sur l’application de l’analyse was an attempt to illuminate the ways in which the calculus could work in a practical context, in this case the constitutional process itself, so that the unpredictable and the contingent could be measured and minimized. This particular treatise represents Condorcet’s most detailed and sustained attempt to ‘discover the probability that assures the validity of a law passed by the smallest possible majority, such that one can believe that it is not unjust to subject others to this law and that it is useful for oneself to submit to it’. The mathematics that he then deployed exemplify the pioneering methodology that he would adopt in other contexts, such as crime, jurisprudence and taxation theory, to locate the human sciences within the realm of the probable, and to attempt to address the otherwise intractable problem of accounting for chance in human behaviour.

3 Progress and the science of man

Condorcet’s name has been associated most commonly with the ‘idea of progress’, and the work in which he developed this idea in depth is the Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain. Based on the empirical observation of data and the statistical analysis of that data, the Esquisse traces the trajectory of human achievement using a de-christianized chronology of historical periods or ‘epochs’. The tableau starts with primitive man in the state of presocial nature and culminates in the ninth ‘epoch’, covering the years from Descartes and the late seventeenth century to the birth of the first French republic. A tenth ‘epoch’ offers a vision of the postmillenium future and holds out the promise of unlimited human perfectibility. Condorcet paid particular attention to two factors in man’s advancement: (1) the growth of language as the principal vehicle of social progress and intellectual advancement, and (2) the development of technology and the physical sciences as instruments facilitating the progressive liberation of man from the darkness of past error and servitude.

Lockean sensationalist psychology deeply influenced Condorcet, particularly with regard to his doctrine of moral sentiment. At the start of the Esquisse primitive man emerges as the one creature with the faculty of receiving sensations, of reflecting upon them, of analysing them and recombining them. In Condorcet’s view, the pleasure-pain principle engendered in early man moral feelings, and eventually relationships, based on controlled self-interest. The sensations facilitated man’s difficult, but irreversible, climb out the of the darkness of primitive presocial life into the light of civilisation. Condorcet understood the implications for the moral sciences of Lockean reversion to the origins of knowledge in sense experience, together with its consequential destruction of the myth of innate ideas, and he saw Lockean sensationalism as an intellectual event whose importance was matched only by that of the Newtonian revolution in physics.

Condorcet wanted to show in the Esquisse that history was not the creation of random forces, with man cast in the role of passive spectator/victim. The gradual emancipation of man from the limitations imposed upon him by nature, and the consequential liberation of the individual, was itself a natural process, and the reflection of an order inherent in man’s condition that could be made intelligible. Man’s progress was enacted within the framework of an exclusively human condition, free from the intervention of transcendental forces. Progress was for Condorcet an entirely secular concept, the fruit of human dynamics interacting with the natural currents of history alone. Evil was not a consequence of man’s nature but of the absence of enlightenment, and would recede inevitably as knowledge in the moral sciences caught up with the advances being made in the physical sciences, and extended its beneficial effects.

In linking the pursuit of knowledge, and the inexorable logic of scientific advances, to the mission of progress, Condorcet had to demonstrate necessarily that there was a relationship between advances made in the physical and natural sciences and those made in the moral and social sciences, and that as man learned to order his natural environment by means of the physical sciences he would also learn to order his social environment through the advancement of the moral sciences and their political and sociological extensions. The historical portrait of man in the Esquisse is drawn with that demonstration in mind in the context of each successive ‘epoch’.

Progress for Condorcet was always a cumulative, collective phenomenon, dependent upon the free pursuit of knowledge and upon the rational application of that knowledge. His view of progress assumed that the laws of nature were constant, and that there was an analogous constancy at work in historical processes to which the calculus of probabilities in relation to the future was relevant. A scientific, mathematically-informed study of history would reveal constant principles, many of which would confirm the truth of human progress, as far as this truth could be defined in probabilistic terms.

The power of mathematics allowed man to rise above the facts of random phenomena and to take advantage of the ‘law of calculated observations’. This was the law that permitted a scientific understanding of causes, effects and relationships, that allowed for the determination of those recurring patterns of phenomena in human history that made a given truth probable, and that facilitated the measurement of degrees of certainty, and therefore control, in human affairs. It was the key that would open the way to a rationally-planned application of the ‘science of man’. The ‘science of man’, anchored firmly to what were essentially Baconian traditions of thought – observation, experiment, calculation – and Lockean–Humean epistemology, would establish the basis for a radical reordering of the processes of human understanding to create ‘a new understanding admitting only precise ideas, exact notions and truths whose degree of certainty or probability has been rigorously weighed’.

Condorcet argued throughout the Esquisse the case for the indefinite perfectibility of human society. His vision entailed the construction of a future in which man’s potential for social and political choice of action was theoretically infinite. Condorcet’s positivism was not facile, however, nor was his optimism Panglossian. The tenth ‘epoch’ of the Esquisse, in some ways naïvely utopian, is a projection of probabilities set out within a cautiously defined context of preconditions, reservations and contingencies. Condorcet never lost sight of the essential fragility of human civilization; progress remained dependent ultimately on the rational exercise of the human will alone, and without that vital driving-force progress would not take place.

Helvétius, Claude-Adrien (1715–71)

Helvétius was one of the most noteworthy and notorious figures of the French Enlightenment. In common with his fellow philosophes, he asserted that all philosophical discussions should be based on the empiricism of Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding (1689). But unlike Voltaire, d’Alembert, and the other members of ‘the party of humanity’, Helvétius took literally the notion that each person is a tabula rasa at birth – he boldly argued the case for unabashed environmental determinism. We are what our surroundings have made us, and nothing more.

Immediately after Helvétius published De l’Esprit in 1758, the Catholic authorities cited his book as definitive proof that the philosophes were out to destroy religion, throne, family, and all that is sacred. Only the struggle between court and parliament over control of censorship, along with his ties to Madame de Pompadour and the Duc de Choiseul, saved Helvétius. After suffering the indignity of three recantations, he decided upon posthumous publication of his second major work, De l’Homme (1773).

Not a single philosophe accepted Helvétius’ view that the mind is a completely passive recipient of data received through the senses; nor did any of his comrades second his constantly reiterated claim that all sensibility may be reduced to physical sensations. Some privately expressed their exasperation that Helvétius published so much that seemed to vindicate every charge the Church lodged against them: that they were materialists, advocates of free love, and champions of a scandalous hedonism. Nevertheless at least a few of the philosophes, after setting aside the philosophical suppositions of De l’Esprit, came to appreciate that the larger concern of Helvétius was with their own search for the social and political preconditions of an independent intelligentsia, the would-be agents of Enlightenment.

            1 Philosophy

An empiricist, a materialist, and a utilitarian, Helvétius was in every respect a son of the French Enlightenment, yet his fellow philosophes remained wary of his writings, which they regarded as a reductio ad absurdum of their own.

When Helvétius began his studies with the announcement that all the faculties of the human mind – memory, imagination, judgment, reason – can be reduced to sensation, he undoubtedly believed he was merely repeating what Condillac had set forth in his celebrated Treatise on Sensations (1754). Neither Condillac nor any of the philosophes had anything but praise for Locke’s attack on innate ideas (see Locke, J.). Where Locke went wrong, in Condillac’s estimation, was in his retention of the notion of innate mental faculties. Conducting one of the most memorable thought-experiments of the century, Condillac slowly brought a hypothetical statue-man to life, first by endowing it with one sense after another, then by showing how one sense comes to the aid of another, until a being emerges whose mind possesses all the higher mental faculties.

To the philosophes the Treatise on Sensations was a method of research; it provided the means to disprove all notions of innate ideas, especially as used by the Church to place its views beyond the reach of criticism. Alone among their numbers, and much to their dismay, Helvétius transformed Condillac’s method into a system of reductionist philosophy. No longer did the investigation end when painstaking analytical and genetic procedure slowly uncovered the hidden sensual roots of a given faculty of mind. Rather, the books of Helvétius begin with the dogmatic assertion that none of the faculties is anything more than the passive product of sense experience.

No support was forthcoming for the position staked out by Helvétius, not even – as the response of Diderot attests – from other materialists. Overwhelmingly in the eighteenth century, French materialists grounded their position in the newly emerging sciences of life. Sensitive matter, to Diderot, acts on its surroundings no less than the environment shapes matter. Where Helvétius denied the significance of organic constitution, Diderot believed that much of an individual’s character is given from the beginning, and will ultimately win out regardless of environmental circumstances. To Helvétius a new environment makes a new person; to Diderot criminals cannot be rehabilitated because it is impossible to override heredity and physical organization.

In ethics Helvétius was a hedonist and a utilitarian, so it is understandable that Bentham regarded De l’Esprit and De l’Homme as forerunners of his work, all the more so since on more than one occasion Helvétius uttered words virtually identical to Bentham’s formula of ‘the greatest good of the greatest number’. But had Bentham taken a closer look, he might well have rejected the notion that Helvétius was his predecessor; for hedonism as understood by Bentham had only the slightest connection with sexual liberation and was in every respect the opposite of a heroic ethic. How shocked, then, Bentham would have been to realize that the primary objective of Helvétius was to recreate the heroic values of antiquity in the modern world, a goal the Frenchman sought to pursue through the lure of sexual rewards.

Surprisingly, it was to ancient Sparta that Helvétius looked for a model of a sexually liberated social existence. Previously Sparta had been regarded as the home of a repressive civic virtue, a city whose citizens were forced to be free, forced to live in accordance with the dictates of their ‘higher selves’. Self-denial and self-overcoming, a constant and painful effort to put the public good above private interest – these themes, long associated with Sparta, were sometimes admired by the philosophes but always rejected, because the virtue of Spartans sounded too much like the monkish virtue they despised. Altogether different was the Sparta depicted by Helvétius. Drawing upon Plutarch’s life of Lycurgus, Helvétius conjured up a Sparta in which men eagerly engaged in noble deeds for their country because the greatest citizens were granted the sexual favours of the most beautiful women. ‘Lycurgus made love one of the principal springs of legislation’ (1758, II: 15); he understood that it is great passions that lead to great actions, and was wise enough to stir up grand emotions through the custom of having naked young women dance in front of youthful soldiers, praising the brave men and shaming the cowards.

All the philosophes agreed that the reverse side of denying original sin was an affirmation of the joys of sexuality. They also concurred that virtue and self-interest should not be set in opposition to one another; their shared view was that society should be so ordered that everyone has an interest in acting virtuously. However, it was one thing for Diderot to praise the free sexuality of Tahitians in an unpublished essay and quite another for Helvétius to publish and sign his name to an equally audacious proposal, and to imply, unlike Diderot, that his findings were directly applicable to the Europe of his day. The official Diderot, the public spokesman for the cause of enlightenment, was the author of The Natural Son (1757) and The Father of the Family (17??), two plays that endorsed conventional familial ideals in language that could not have been more exclamatory.

Diderot complained that Helvétius spent so much time attempting to prove that his kennelman, if placed in the proper environment, could have written De l’Esprit; he gasped in disbelief when he saw that Helvétius, in reducing everything to physical sensibility, was forever trying to explain the accomplishments of a genius in terms of copulation and defecation. Still, that did not prevent Diderot from placing De l’Esprit ‘among the great books of the century’.

What was it that Diderot and some of the other philosophes, for all their misgivings, admired in the writings of Helvétius? Above all, they gained a political education from his works; his conviction, that only through better legislation would humans ever have an interest in being virtuous, became theirs as well. ‘Morality is only a frivolous science unless blended with politics and legislation’, wrote Helvétius (1758, II: 15), ‘from which I conclude that, to be useful to the world, philosophers must consider objects from the viewpoint of the legislator’. Originally Diderot and many of the philosophes showed very little interest in forms of government; it was from Helvétius, a political thinker from the outset, that they learned how intimately their concerns about literature and the arts were tied to questions about politics.

2 Politics and the Arts

Both De l’Esprit and De l’Homme are primarily studies of the social situation of the gens de lettres, the intellectuals, under different political regimes. The maturity or childishness of the audience, its willingness or refusal to be instructed as well as entertained, the popularity of certain literary genres and the irrelevance of others, the inspiration or desperation of the writer – these matters and more hinge on the type of political regime that rules a country, argued Helvétius.

Helvétius adapted his study of the links between politics and the arts from Montesquieu. But before taking anything from the Spirit of the Laws (1748), Helvétius deleted Montesquieu’s chapters on climate. Why rule out in advance the possibility that the peoples of some parts of the world can ever hope to live under better conditions, inquired Helvétius, when political and social explanations suffice to account for their present predicament?

Although he rejected climate as a causal explanation, Helvétius kept intact the entirety of Montesquieu’s typology of political regimes, the division of governments into feudal monarchies, Oriental despotisms, and republics ancient and modern. Sparta, as we have seen, was the ancient republic most frequently cited by Helvétius; England, called by Montesquieu a ‘republic hiding under the form of a monarchy’, was the country Helvétius constantly alluded to when he wished to draw a contrast between the monarchy France was and the republic he desired it to be.

The constant complaint of Helvétius was that ‘our [French] mores and the form of our government do not permit us to deliver ourselves to strong passions’. Under monarchy, petty intrigue at court to enhance one’s reputation takes the place in politics that under a republic is filled by the ambition of citizens to win fame for doing great deeds for their country. Wherever monarchy is triumphant, there are subjects rather than citizens, and the socially best-placed of these subjects care only for their personal advantage and that of their family name. A good aristocratic father in France will use all his influence to secure a public office for his incompetent son. How different was the world of republican Rome wherein Brutus did not hesitate to sacrifice his sons for the sake of preserving the public good.

From top to bottom of the social scale Helvétius found nothing to admire and much to condemn in the France of his day. So downtrodden were the peasants, so dehumanized were they by the brutality of the nobles, that Helvétius deemed the life of savages preferable to that of the simple folk living in the French countryside. Nor, for that matter, was the existence of Parisians as admirable as foreign visitors were wont to believe. Beneath the glamour and brilliance of operas, dramas, and salons lay a disturbing human reality. To be successful in social life, Helvétius noted, a man must have a pliable character that assumes as many shapes as the number of mansions he visits. Perhaps it is no accident that it was shortly after the publication of De l’Esprit that Diderot penned a memorable depiction of a ‘man without character’, who had ‘no greater opposite than himself’, in Rameau’s Nephew (1762–74).

The novelty of Helvétius lies in his efforts to apply Montesquieu’s sociopolitical models to the study of literature and the arts. Each type of political regime, the despotic, the monarchical, and the republican, shapes culture in its own image, Helvétius believed. Montesquieu had hinted as much: he had gone so far as to suggest that satirical writings cutting the powerful down to size thrive in England because in that nation society no longer revolves around feudal privilege and legally sanctioned class hierarchy. It was left for Helvétius to convert Montesquieu’s passing suggestions into a systematic treatise on politics and the arts.

About Oriental despotism Helvétius had relatively little to say. He was willing, however, to risk a few statements on the subject of politics and the arts in the non-Western world. It was his contention that Oriental authors, if they ever told the truth, had to present their thoughts in coded form. ‘Under submission to arbitrary power,… it is certain that writers must insensibly contract the habit of thinking allegorically’ (1758, III: 29). Since the historians of despotic countries, unlike the poets, cannot hide behind a veil of allusions and symbols, their account of the past is inevitably a pack of tricks the living play on the dead.

For the most part Helvétius concentrates his energies on drawing a series of sharp contrasts between the vitality of the arts and letters in republican England and the waning of literary glory in monarchical France. Living in a nation that is not politically free, looking up to grands who are idle, spoiled, and vain, the French are ‘the most gallant, the most loveable, but the most frivolous people of Europe’ (1758, II: 20). Boileau, repeating Horace, had indicated that the calling of the writer is to instruct as well as to please; Helvétius, however, complained bitterly that the French, ‘by the form of our government, have less need of instruction than of amusement’ (1758, II: 20). Love affairs, flirtations, coquetry, changes of fashion in clothing, and other private matters, none capable of stirring great passions, are the concerns of monarchical subjects. One trivial preoccupation supplants another with remarkable rapidity in France because persons confined to the pettiness of private lives are readily bored. For years the explicit objective of the philosophes had been to mould the new phenomenon they referred to as ‘public opinion’; Helvétius’ response was to point out that a public exists only where there is a republic.

‘In London it is a merit to be instructed; in Paris it is ridiculous’ (1758, II: 20). Inevitably, then, the English writer is inspired, the French writer diminished, by the audience.

In a free state a man conceives the highest thoughts and can express them as vividly as they enter his mind. Such is not the case in monarchical states: in these countries the interest of certain corporations, that of various powerful individuals, and most of all a false and small politics, thwart the élans of genius.

(De l’Esprit, IV, ch. 4)

Helvétius was typically French in his belief that drama is the highest of the arts, and he was typical of his century in his conviction that the theatre of his day was inferior to that of the grand siècle. But he sounded a new note when he offered a political explanation of the decline of French drama. In republican England, he suggested, the grandeur of the tragic genre still holds sway; by contrast, in monarchical France the pettiness of comedy dominates the stage. Tragedies similar to those written by Corneille during a period of sedition and grand passions continue to be well received in England; but in France, beginning with Racine, the corrupted audience has become as indifferent to uplifting public themes as it is eager for love stories.

I say that in every country where the inhabitants have no part in the management of public affairs, where the words patrie and citoyen are rarely cited, one does not please the public except in representing on the stage passions agreeable to [private] individuals, such as those of love.

(De l’Esprit, II, ch. 19)

Romantic love makes us small; love of country enhances our stature, and there is no better way to promote great civic passion than through offering sexual rewards which satisfy the cravings of physical sensibility. Greek tragedies were as replete with civic lessons as they were devoid of the motif of romantic love. Modern playwrights may yet return to the model set by Sophocles, provided modern legislators precede them in copying the political strategies of Lycurgus. In the posthumous De l’Homme Helvétius proposed to convert France into a federation of thirty republics, each animated by civic passion.

3 Conclusion

One of the favourite topics of the philosophes was the question of how the intellectuals could become independent and influential voices for enlightenment in a social world based on privilege, wealth and patronage. It was Helvétius who convinced at least a few of the philosophes, especially those who remained outside the academies, that only a political solution would suffice. In a civic society writers will be inspired by an enlightened audience and rewarded for their creative efforts. Until the dawn of the new era, the best book will be the one that champions the republican cause.

Evidence of what some philosophes eventually borrowed from Helvétius, as well as what they chose to repudiate, may be found in the Système social of the Baron d’Holbach, published fifteen years after De l’Esprit and at virtually the same time as De l’Homme. Almost word for word Holbach repeated the arguments of Helvétius against dramas revolving around the theme of romantic love and in favour of tragedies modelled on those of ancient Greece. Again echoing Helvétius, Holbach complained that the French were a frivolous people, the women especially because they had been miseducated by erotic paintings and literature, in consequence of which the favourite pastime of the grands was adultery.

When it came to women Helvétius and Holbach could not have been more similar in their diagnosis, nor more different in their solutions. Holbach advocated that women withdraw from high society to the privacy of their families. Motherhood, fidelity, and a restoration of traditional familial virtues was his message. Only if women accept the sanctity of marriage will men recover from their socially induced corruption. Helvétius, in dramatic contrast, would abolish the remnants of feminine modesty so that ‘the favours of women, becoming more common, will appear less precious’ (1758, II: 20). Long ago Plato had made a similar suggestion, and Lycurgus – Helvétius believed – had transformed theory into practice.

Helvétius was not a great thinker, but he was surely one of the most daring writers of his age.