For our loyal friends, this is the beginning of Part Four of the Weber-buch and it draws on the intriguing similarities or cor-respondence between Constant's early theorisation of Liberalism and its evident assimilation in Weber's political sociology. Constant's important texts are available here:
http://www.panarchy.org/constant/liberte.1819.html
http://gallica.bnf.fr/?lang=EN
http://www.panarchy.org/constant/liberte.1819.html
http://gallica.bnf.fr/?lang=EN
One hundred years before Max Weber “crystallised” the
entire Romantic opposition to the
ravages of capitalist industry, of its “iron cage”, of its “soul-less bureaucratisation”
and “dis-enchanted” Rationalisierung
of all aspects of social life; one hundred years before Weber had finally isolated and identified the source of
this otherwise inexplicable socio-political and politico-economic development in the Vorbermerkungen as the “exact
calculation” enabled by the constitution of “rational organisation of free
labor under the regular [calculable] discipline of the [capitalist] factory”, Benjamin
Constant, one of the greatest exponents of the European Liberalism that emerged
triumphant out of the upheaval of the Age of Revolution, summarised what he
perceived to be the great transformation
of human society from Antiquity to Modernity as follows:
Cette différence en amène une
autre. La guerre est antérieure au commerce; car la guerre et le commerce ne
sont que deux moyens différents d'atteindre le même but, celui de posséder ce
que l'on désire. Le commerce n'est qu'un
hommage rendu à la force du possesseur par l'aspirant à la possession. C'est une tentative pour obtenir de gré à
gré ce qu'on n'espère plus conquérir par la violence. Un homme qui serait
toujours le plus fort n'aurait jamais l'idée du commerce. C'est l'expérience
qui, en lui prouvant que la guerre, c'est-a-dire, l'emploi de sa force contre
la force d'autrui, l'expose à diverses résistances et à divers échecs, le porte
à recourir au commerce, c'est-à-dire, à un moyen plus doux et plus sûr
d'engager l'intérêt d'un autre à consentir à ce qui convient à son intérêt. La guerre est l'impulsion, le commerce est
le calcul. Mais par la’ même il doit venir une époque où le commerce
remplace la guerre. Nous sommes arrivés a cette époque.
Utterly
evident is the Hobbesian derivation of
Constant’s hypothesis, which however he does not seem to appreciate in its explicit and dramatic implications. If,
indeed, “commerce has replaced war” as the ex-pression of human
individualist antagonism, of human conflict in the state of nature or of the
degeneration of civil society into civil war (remember von Klausewitz, “War is
the continuation of politics by other means”), Constant is unable to explain
how and why this switch, how and why
this quasi-religious conversion has
taken place historically and indeed how and why this “commerce” can take
place at all (!) beyond the mere statement that “le commerce n'est qu'un hommage rendu à la force du possesseur par
l'aspirant à la possession; c'est une tentative pour obtenir de gré à gré ce
qu'on n'espère plus conquérir par la violence”. Had Constant read Hobbes
more carefully, or had he lived long enough to read Nietzsche, he would have
realised that commerce can replace war as a manifestation of human conflict
whilst
still providing the basis of the social synthesis, only if commerce or exchange involve not the exchange of mere
“possessions”(however “gradual”) but rather that of dead labor (Constant’s “possessions”) with living labor – that is to say, only if this
“exchange” is categorically incommensurable in that it involves the reduction
of human living labor to mere dead objectified labor so that the former may be commanded politically by means of the latter! - And that such
“exchange” can take place if and only if living labor is “separated” from the
means of its reproduction and of production. It is only if living labor is
politically and violently reduced to dead objectified labor that its pro-duct
can be “calculated” or “measured” under “the regular discipline of the
factory”.
As we
explained in Part Two, contrary to Marx’s own account of this “reduction” (or
“fetishism” as he styles it), there is absolutely no way in which this can
occur by means of “market forces” or a “market mechanism” that operates automatically! There is no way
therefore, contrary to Marxian theory and orthodoxy, how a capitalist society
can function without the wilful and
conscious action of specific political institutions (whose operation and
function we will describe in this Part). Our task in this Part is not to
describe how capitalist society is
politically regulated but simply to show that it must be so regulated if it is to function at all!
Similarly Weber,
in reprising a century later “the brilliant Constant hypothesis” with its
functionalist and organicist ideal type
of “the ancient State”, as he himself acknowledges in ‘Objektivitat’, is entirely silent about the real historical and theoretical foundations of this exakte Kalkulation that he too places at
the centre of capitalist society and industry:
The
constructs of the natural law and the organic
theories of the state have
exactly the
same function and, to recall an ideal type in our sense,
so does
Benjamin Constant's theory of the
ancient state. It
serves as a harbor
until one
has learned to navigate safely in the vast sea of empirical
facts.
The coming of age of science in fact always implies the transcendence
of the
ideal-type, insofar as it was thought of as possessing
empirical
validity or as a class concept (Gattungsbegriff) . However,
it is still legitimate today to
use the brilliant Constant hypothesis to
demonstrate certain aspects and
historically unique features of ancient
political life, as long as one
carefully bears in mind its ideal-typical
character. (p.104, MoSS)
In effect, Weber adopts much more than what he, following
Simmel’s neo-Kantian theory of “social forms”, styles as merely Constant’s “ideal-type”
analysis of “ancient political life”: by exploiting the contrast that Constant so ably draws between the State in Antiquity
and “the modern State”, Weber effectively assimilates and elaborates the
Frenchman’s “brilliant hypothesis” to erect upon it his entire analysis of
capitalism and theory of society as well! – In doing so, Weber wholly eludes
and elides and even obfuscates Constant’s genial distinction between the importance
of “political freedom” (liberte’) for
the citizens of Antiquity and the functional retreat from this “public happiness” (jouissance publique) occasioned by the spread of “commerce and
circulation of property” under the novel capitalist regime, in favour of
“private happiness” (jouissance privee),
of the pursuit of private wealth and luxury. The reason for this apparent “omission” is that Weber’s
rigorous intellectual training, and in particular his thorough grounding in and
assimilation of the negatives Denken
of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, prevent
him from com-prehending the fundamental dif-ference (the different practical effect) between that “public happiness”, that political
“freedom” that had been so precious to the artificers of the American and
French Revolutions, and the mere “private happiness”, the petty and restricted
“liberties” – what Constant calls “garanties”
– to which the rise of the bourgeoisie and its “commerce”, or the rule of
capital, have dramatically reduced and
confined human political freedom.
Constant continues,
Il résulte de ce que je viens d'exposer, que nous ne pouvons plus jouir de la liberté des
anciens, qui se composait de la participation active et constante au
pouvoir collectif. Notre liberté à nous, doit se composer de la jouissance paisible de l'indépendance privée. La part que dans l'antiquité
chacun prenait à la souveraineté nationale n'était point, comme de nos jours,
une supposition abstraite. La volonté de chacun avait une influence réelle:
l'exercice de cette volonté était un plaisir vif et répété. En conséquence, les
anciens étaient disposés à faire beaucoup de sacrifices pour la conservation de
leurs droits politiques et de leur part dans l'administration de l'État. Chacun
sentant avec orgueil tout ce que valait son suffrage, trouvait dans cette
conscience de son importance personnelle, un ample dédommagement.
With Classics and Neoclassics, the sphere of “happiness”
or “utility” (for the Classics “labor” has utility because it “creates value”
positively, whereas for Neoclassics it “consumes” the world so that “utility”
or “value” consists in the “saving of
labor” instead, which therefore has “dis-utility”)
is always “private” because “labor” can be “divided” into “individual labors”
and can thereby be alienated in exchange
for dead objectified labor, so that the whole point of the “sociality” of social labor, its phylogenetic
interdependence, is lost. This is the root cause for the fact that
nous ne pouvons plus jouir de la liberté des anciens, qui se composait de la participation active
et constante au pouvoir collectif.
Under the rule of capital with its Trennung or enforced separation of living labor from means of
production, and its parcelisation of social
labor into “individual labors”, the
private sphere, civil society or the status
civilis, is what must be protected from
the State, which was constituted for
this purpose by political convention as
a way of preventing or escaping from the state of nature or status
naturae into civil society or the status
civilis and its concomitant scientific
hypothesis as the domain of necessity.
Already, therefore, the “everyday life” of “citizens” is subjected to the “sovereignty” of the constituted powers and cannot itself act as a constituent power. The original contractum
unionis, by virtue of the fact that it always understood the subjects of
this “union” to be individuals in
opposition to one another under the dire necessity (Hobbes) or the simple
“necessity” (negatives Denken) that leads to the alienation of individual
political “freedom” to a Sovereign who will “pre-vent civil war” and assure
“public safety”– by virtue of this fact, the con-vention of the contractum
unionis between “individuals” was bound to degenerate into a contractum subjectionis of these “individuals”
by the Sovereign or State. Put
differently, because in this status
civilis, in this “State”, the individuals composing civil society have necessarily alienated the “freedom” they enjoyed in the state of
nature, now this “freedom” is reduced to
and even confused with “liberty”, that
is to say, with the “protection” of their “possessions” and the preservation of
the salus publica (public safety).
This is the
essence of liberalism. And this is what Constant, and Weber who copies his
analytical blueprint, both fail to grasp. Constant mistakes for a “technical”
fact – the difficulty and complexity of “modern life” – what is indeed the
reality of the dis-enfranchisement of
the entire class of workers from ownership and decision-making in capitalist
society under the rule of the bourgeoisie.
Ce dédommagement n'existe plus aujourd'hui pour nous. Perdu dans la multitude, l'individu
n'aperçoit presque jamais l'influence qu'il exerce. Jamais sa volonté ne
s'empreint sur l'ensemble, rien ne constate à ses propres yeux sa coopération.
L'exercice des droits politiques ne nous offre donc plus qu'une partie des
jouissances que les anciens y trouvaient, et en même temps les progrès de la
civilisation, la tendance commerciale de l'époque, la communication des peuples
entre eux, ont multiplié et varié à l'infini les moyens de bonheur particulier.
Whether it be under Hobbes’s “Leviathan” or
State-machine, or else under Locke’s consensual “common-wealth”, what the State
protects are the “possessions” of “self-interested
individuals” – life, liberty and estate – to which they had either a “natural
right” (Locke) or a de facto claim
(Hobbes) already in the state of
nature but which were then under constant threat from mutual aggression. There
is no notion of “public happiness” in this political theory because “happiness”
or “utility” or “pleasure” is limited to the sphere of “individual
possessions”, which includes the power “to possess and alienate” human living
labor as if it were a mere “object”, as
if it were mere dead objectified
labor – in such a way that the “pro-ducer” (the worker) is homologated with and mistaken for the
object, the pro-duct of the work! Indeed,
the social, political and economic reality that underpins the concomitant
social theory of liberalism is that
this “private happiness” made up of the ownership of private property is
entirely dependent on the “separation” (Trennung)
of living labor from its means of production, its “parcelisation” from social
labor into “separate individual labors”, and its violent “exchange”and
therefore homogenisation with dead
labor (Constant’s “possessions”): this and this alone is the basis of the
capitalist social synthesis.
The problem arises, as Constant and Tocqueville perceive,
when this “protection” comes to permeate every aspect of the “private sphere”
through the process of what Constant calls “commerce” and Weber describes more
aptly as “socialisation”, that is, the development of social capital. Both
Constant and Weber, following the classic lines of liberalist doctrine, mistake
the effect for the cause: - they believe that the Parlamentarisierung is the “result” of a “natural progression” to
the Demokratisierung, dictated by “the system of needs and
wants”, by “the state of nature”, by the “freedom of the will” occasioning “the iron cage”, from the political model
of Antiquity to that of “modern capitalism”, rather than being the
“instrumental political expression” of capitalist relations of production.
Car, de ce
que la liberté moderne diffère de la liberté antique, il s'ensuit qu'elle est
aussi menacée d'un danger d'espèce différente.
Le danger de la liberté antique était qu'attentifs uniquement à s'assurer le partage du pouvoir social, les hommes ne fissent trop bon marché des droits et des jouissances individuelles.
Le danger de la liberté moderne, c'est qu'absorbés dans la jouissance de notre indépendance privée, et dans la poursuite de nos intérêts particuliers, nous ne renoncions trop facilement à notre droit de partage dans le pouvoir politique.
Le danger de la liberté antique était qu'attentifs uniquement à s'assurer le partage du pouvoir social, les hommes ne fissent trop bon marché des droits et des jouissances individuelles.
Le danger de la liberté moderne, c'est qu'absorbés dans la jouissance de notre indépendance privée, et dans la poursuite de nos intérêts particuliers, nous ne renoncions trop facilement à notre droit de partage dans le pouvoir politique.
Il s'ensuit que nous devons être bien plus attachés que
les anciens à notre indépendance individuelle; car les anciens, lorsqu'ils
sacrifiaient cette indépendance aux droits politiques, sacrifiaient moins pour
obtenir plus; tandis qu'en faisant le même sacrifice, nous donnerions plus pour
obtenir moins.
Le but des anciens était le partage du pouvoir social entre tous les citoyens d'une même patrie: c'était là ce qu'ils nommaient liberté. Le but des modernes est la sécurité dans les jouissances privées; et ils nomment liberté les garanties accordées par les institutions à ces jouissances….
Le but des anciens était le partage du pouvoir social entre tous les citoyens d'une même patrie: c'était là ce qu'ils nommaient liberté. Le but des modernes est la sécurité dans les jouissances privées; et ils nomment liberté les garanties accordées par les institutions à ces jouissances….
In the uni-versal
Eris of the newly-constituted liberal
bourgeois society, the overriding function of the State can be one and one only: the “security” of its component
“self-interested individuals” from the rapacity of one another that threatens
always to erupt into the “war of all against all”! The essential apory in Constant’s and Weber’s “formulation” of
this problem – of how “conflicting self-interests” in their “freedom” can ever
“converge” so as to found a “rationality”, whether economic or still less
“political”, or else of how these self-interests can “diverge” and still found a sphere of “necessity”
or “scarcity”! – is that this Schopenhauerian and Hobbesian “universal Eris”
cannot resolve these conundrums of political “freedom” and of economic
“necessity” except by sublating and reducing the former to the latter
(determinism) or by hypostatising the former by postulating its “autonomy”. By
contrast, Nietzsche understood all too well that Schopenhauer’s postulate of
this universal Eris (in Book IV of Die Welt) was “powerless” (ohnmachtig) to confront Hegel’s
problematic of the social synthesis -
of the actual existence of society, of human com-unitas, of co-operation and
even of inter esse! That is why he gave the problem of the Rationalisierung a “solution” that we
have explored in the Nietzschebuch.
And this “solution” involves the definition of “parliamentary democracy”, of
the Weberian reconciliation of
Demokratisierung with Parlamentarisierung, as an oxymoron, a contradictio in adjecto. So important,
so “apocalyptic”, so “fundamental”, is this Nietzschean pitiless critique of the Political in both its
Hegelian and Liberal forms, that Weber would surely have made it explicit in his work had he truly
understood it rather than simply “pass it by” (allusion to ‘On Passing-By’ in Zarathustra). Instead, Weber follows
faithfully the lead proffered by the “liberal” Constant:
Que le
pouvoir s'y résigne donc; il nous faut de la liberté, et nous l'aurons; mais
comme la liberté qu'il nous faut est différente de celle des anciens, il faut à
cette liberté une autre organisation que celle qui pourrait convenir a la
liberté antique; dans celle-ci, plus l'homme consacrait de temps et de force a
l'exercice de ses droits politiques, plus il se croyait libre; dans l'espèce de
liberté dont nous sommes susceptibles, plus l'exercice de nos droits politiques
nous laissera de temps pour nos intérêts privés, plus la liberté nous sera
précieuse.
De la
vient, Messieurs, la nécessité du système représentatif. Le système
représentatif n'est autre chose qu'une organisation à l'aide de laquelle une
nation se décharge sur quelques individus de ce qu'elle ne peut ou ne veut pas
faire elle-même. Les individus pauvres font eux-mêmes leurs affaires: les
hommes riches prennent des intendants. C'est l'histoire des nations anciennes
et des nations modernes. Le système représentatif est une procuration donnée à
un certain nombre d'hommes par la masse du peuple, qui veut que ses intérêts
soient défendus, et qui néanmoins n'a pas le temps de les défendre toujours
lui-même. Mais a moins d'être insensés, les hommes riches qui ont des
intendants examinent avec attention et sévérité si ces intendants font leur devoir,
s'ils ne sont ni négligents ni corruptibles, ni incapables; et pour juger de la
gestion de ces mandataires, les commettants qui ont de la prudence se mettent
bien au fait des affaires dont ils leur confient l'administration. De même, les
peuples qui, dans le but de jouir de la liberté qui leur convient, recourent au
système représentatif, doivent exercer une surveillance active et constante sur
leur représentants, et se réserver, à des époques qui ne soient pas séparées
par de trop longs intervalles, le droit de les écarter s'ils ont trompé leurs
voeux, et de révoquer les pouvoirs dont ils auraient abusé.
For both Constant and Weber, then, the “trans-formation”
of the experience of “freedom” from that of “active participation” in the
affairs of State in Antiquity to that of “passive protection” under the State, of bourgeois Sekuritat and salus publica in “modern capitalism”, is related functionally and organically to the progress and evolution of the “system of
needs and wants”, of the “iron cage of
modern industrial labor” (Weber). This helps explain why in Weber there is
concern for the State and parliamentary democracy only to the extent that they
are functional and organic to “the
rational organisation of free labor” and ultimately to “the iron cage”. Both
the ascetic ideal and the iron cage are “irrational”. Weber sees the “freedom”
of “labor” only as “autonomous market demand” and not in broader “political”
terms.
The question that Arendt poses by way of implicit
criticism of Weber (so does Marcuse in terms of “industrialisation” and
“science”, or Heidegger with his ‘Technik’, as “ideology”) is that “the iron
cage” is taken by him to be naturaliter
the entirety of the Political, as it was for Hobbes, in that “civil society”
now is identical with the State
because the entire “task”, legality and legitimacy, of the State is precisely
this “guarantee” (cf. Benjamin Constant, Reflexions
sur les Constitutions et les Guaranties) of the market mechanism as the ultima ratio, the necessitas(either “dire” or not, given that for Weber the will is
not identical with Hobbesian liberum
arbitrium and there ec-sists a “technical rationality”), the scientific
hypothesis of the equi-librium of
self-interests of atomised individuals whose only aim in social life, in exiting
the state of nature, is the pursuit of “private happiness” or “utility”. The
Political becomes absorbed into the Economic – except that the “freedom” of
labor involves the “specification” of its wants and needs not merely through
the market mechanism but also through “compromise” in Parliament of the
necessarily conflicting self-interests that are filtered by the market.
Indeed, as we pointed out above, Weber’s position
represents a regression with regard
to Constant’s still clear and sharp distinction between “freedom” and
“guarantees”, between active participation in politics and passive “enjoyment”
of constitutional “rights and liberties”. Both Constant and Weber maintain the metaphysical notion of “possession”, of
the “in-dividual’s” natural right to
the pro-duct of individual labors.
But whilst Constant still preserves
the validity of the Classical notion
of “freedom” which, to his mind, has been eclipsed by the complexity of the “socialisation” occasioned by “the system of
needs and wants”, for Weber, instead, this classical “freedom” or Freiheit never existed! It was never
“real”, but was only a “meta-physical”
delusion. What is real for Weber, what is physical
is the “greed-dom” of conflicting
individual self-interests that have finally found their most “rational”
expression as the end-result of the “ascetic Ideal”that has debouched into “the
iron cage of modern industrial labor”.
Arendt rebukes Weber (implicitly) for assuming that the
“frugality” of the Founding Fathers was exclusively “Puritanical” – when in
fact it could have been the “opposite” of retreat from the world, the opposite
of “renunciation”: the “frugality” and “industry” of the Puritans could have
been due to a greater concern for “public
happiness” and therefore “freedom” than for “private happiness” and therefore “luxury”.
However
that may be, of one thing at least we may be sure: the Declaration of
Independence, though it blurs the distinction between private and public
happiness, at least still intends us to hear the term 'pursuit of happiness' in
its twofold meaning: private welfare as well as the right to public happiness,
the pursuit of well-being as well as being a 'participator in public affairs'.
But the rapidity with which the second meaning was forgotten and the term used
and understood without its original qualifying adjective may well be the
standard by which to measure, in America no less than in France, the loss of
the original meaning and the oblivion of the spirit that had been manifest in
the Revolution…. Tocqueville again is quite right when he remarks that 'of all
ideas and sentiments which prepared the Revolution, the notion and the taste of
public liberty strictly speaking have been the first ones to disappear' .31
(p.132)
For abundance and endless consumption are the ideals of
the poor: they are the mirage in the desert of misery.In this sense, affluence and wretchedness are only two
sides of the same coin; the bonds of necessity need not be of iron, they can be
made of silk. Freedom and luxury have always been thought to be incompatible,
and the modern estimate that tends to blame the insistence of the Founding
Fathers on frugality and 'simplicity of manners' (Jefferson) upon a Puritan
contempt for the delights of the world much rather testifies to an inability to
understand freedom than to a freedom from prejudice. (H. Arendt, On Revolution,
ch.3, p.139)
What Arendt means here, if one subtracts the verbosity,
is that “the pursuit of luxury” or
Constant’s “private happiness”, may
tend to shrink the political or “public” space or universe of human beings so
as to render them a-political – with
the consequent neglect of the forms of political activity that “freedom”, and the “public happiness” it inspires, must stand for, in opposition to
“passive” liberties. To be “free” is
for Arendt, as it was for Constant, to
engage actively in the political life of one’s community. To be “at
liberty” to do something, instead, is to be the passive beneficiary of a right
or benefit “conceded” to oneself by the constituted
powers, by “the powers that be”. In this sense, one may say that “freedom” and
“the pursuit of luxury” – not
“luxury” itself! - may well be at odds, but not be necessarily “incompatible”!
That “freedom and poverty” may be incompatible is a problem or “social
question” that may be resolved simply by eliminating poverty through the
diffusion of the institutions of “freedom”. But if “freedom and luxury” also
are incompatible, then humanity has an even greater problem – and freedom has
found an insurmountable barrier!
This is Arendt’s reproach to Weber and indirectly also to
Marx in that she highlights the need to avoid the reduction of political freedom to the “technical” sphere of the
economy: it is most enlightening from a conceptual or analytical perspective,
and it is also quite appropriate in some respects. But she forgets, as Marx
would pointedly remind her, that her own high-brow, neo-Aristotelian conception
of “freedom” does not deal integrally (let alone fairly) with what is the most
important aspect of human existence under capitalism: - wage labor, which
neither Weber nor Arendt, and least of all Constant, ever distinguish from
human living labor. Arendt therefore re-presents the nostalgic apotheosis of
the dichotomy of bourgeois and citoyen that has been the bane of
Western political theory since Hobbes. She forgets that whilst the American
Founding Fathers may well have preferred the “public happiness” of active
participation in the political affairs of the newly-founded nation-state (the
famed spectemur agendo coveted by
John Adams), their ability to do so
depended exclusively or predominantly on that “luxury” that she says they
eschewed and self-righteously (hypocritically) denigrated!