Grundlegung

Some texts are impossible to approach without contamination. This is certainly the case with anything Kant has written. Indeed, I have read various pieces of Kant’s writing in the past (though not, I think this one). Probably I had to read “What is Enlightenment” three or four times. I remember reading “Religion within the limits of reason alone” in college. So now, the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals; I know almost nothing of what is said about this particular text, which I suppose is the most I can ask for. I’m reading the Gregor translation in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series. Haven’t looked at the introduction yet, and probably won’t. I also have one of those little yellow Reclam editions—but I’m only referring to it occasionally. I was sorely tempted to pause and write a bit after finishing only the preface, but I pushed on through the first part as well. Probably I should have written after the preface, and then again after the first chapter.

The first page of the preface to the Groundwork lays down, or acknowledges, various divisions within philosophy. Kant accepts the Greek division of physics, ethics, and logic. All rational cognition, he then says, may be either material—that is concerned with a particular object—or formal—that is concerned with the rules of thinking about objects in general. Now, a few pages later on, still in the preface, Kant distinguishes between Philosophie and Vernunfterkenntnis. The difference between them is that philosophy “sets forth in separate sciences what the latter comprehends only mixed together.” So we must take Kant here to be expressing a fundamental fact about the nature of reality—although the objects of rational cognition are always either material or formal, cognition becomes philosophy just when it is able to distinguish between them.

Philosophy of form is logic. Philosophy of material may treat either nature (in which case it is called physics) or freedom (in which case it is called ethics).

Logic can only be formal. It can have no material (or experiential) elements whatsoever. I notice here that Kant equates material with experience. Is it therefore impossible to have logical experiences? No doubt my experience of logic is simply not a part of the philosophy of logic.

Then, “natural as well as moral philosophy can each have its empirical part, since the former must determine laws of nature as an object of experience, the latter, laws of the human being’s will insofar as it is affected by nature – the first as laws in accordance with which everything happens, the second as laws in accordance with which everything ought to happen, while still taking into account the conditions under which it very often does not happen.” Next Kant says that philosophy itself can be either based on experience (empirical) or based on a priori principles (metaphysics). So, again, presumably the passage from rational cognition to philosophy is that from confused thinking about the form and content, together, to the clear demarcation between empirical and metaphysical parts of given ‘thoughts.’

Kant insists on this division. There is a paragraph on the philosophical division of labor, in which it is suggested that, just as in the various trades specialization is more efficient than dilettantism (not Kant’s words), so it must be in philosophy also. But although there may be such advantages, Kant ultimately ascribes to “the nature of science” the necessity “that the empirical part always be carefully separated from the rational part.”

I have tried to pay such careful attention to these various divisions and “cleansings” of empirical from metaphysical because it seems to me that Kant immediately—deliberately—confuses things substantially. Indeed, that the whole point of the pages I have so far read seem to me to be not so much about the careful distinction between rational and empirical, but rather about finding the precise point at which the two meet. I suppose that this point cannot be established without, first, or at the same time, a careful delineation of the separate realms.

Perhaps I am misreading (and over reading) rather radically, but Kant poses the question thus: “is it not thought to be of the utmost necessity to work out for once a pure moral philosophy, completely cleansed of everything that may be only empirical and that belongs to anthropology? For, that there must be such a philosophy is clear of itself from the common idea of duty, and of moral laws. Everyone must grant that a law, if it is to hold morally, that is, as a ground of an obligation, must carry with it absolute necessity...”

For proof of the existence if a moral philosophy completely pure of empirical elements, Kant turns to experience, to empirical fact. I suppose that proof of existence of metaphysics may be empirical without giving an empirical sheen to this metaphysics? I’m not sure that it can be.

Later in the same paragraph, Kant says, “the ground of obligation here must not be sought in the nature of the human being or in the circumstances of the world in which he is places, but a priori simply in the concepts of pure reason.” But this obligation has been attested precisely by experience, by the “common idea of duty.” Yet this is how we arrive at what is both a “clue and supreme norm” for our actions [“Leitfaden une oberste Norm”—is ‘clue’ really the best translation for Leitfaden? The phrase seems oddly unbalanced in English]. That is, of course, that our particular acts are to be undertaken not in view of any specific law or guideline, but rather, somehow, of law in the abstract. This will be formulated toward the end of part one as “I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law.”

I have skipped over almost the whole argument of the first chapter. Kant discusses the goodness of the good will, its relation to duty and law. The point here, as the chapter title suggests, is to move from practical morality to a philosophy of morals. Kant is obliged to destroy the idea that happiness is in any sense the goal of life. Happiness is reduced as a concept to something like survival, and the simple existence of reason is brought forward as sufficient evidence that God intended for us something other than brute existence. Ultimately, Kant is able to abstract the particular instances of law from the idea of law, and arrive at the moral principle of principle for its own sake. I found particularly interesting the following passage,

Nothing other than the representation of the law in itself, which can of course occur only in a rational being, insofar as it and not the hoped-for effect is the determining ground of the will, can constitute the preeminent good we call moral, which is already present in the person himself who acts in accordance with this representation and need not wait upon the effect of his action.

Then the long footnote on respect attached to this passage is amazing, from which, “Respect is properly the representation of a worth that infringes upon my self-love...The object of respect is therefore simply the law, and indeed the law that we impose upon ourselves and yet as necessary in itself...Any respect for a person is properly only respect for the law (of integrity and so forth) of which he gives us an example.” This seems to me exactly the sort of passage that one would want to read aggressively in a contemporary context. It is also just the sort of passage that makes me think maybe there is something ‘Kantian’ about Lacanian ethics, or that at any rate it would be more interesting to read Lacan’s ethical writings than Zizek had so far convinced me would be the case.

Finally, although of course I have been told about the Kantian categorical imperative in the past, I do not think that I had quite grasped (not that I have now) the significance of the universalism implicit in it. Universalism, or at least a will to universalism, is for Kant a necessary condition for morality as such. I think that in the past, in as much as I’d given it much thought, I had been caught up in what are basically utilitarian and ‘modernist’ objections. I was confounding good outcomes with morality, partly on the basis of a deep suspicion about the possibility of intention—a deep suspicion that the word doesn’t mean anything at all. Although I still have my uncertainties, it seems to me now that the whole discussion of the will is actually of secondary importance. The categorical imperative (at which we arrive through duty and law), functions primarily as a point of convergence, or interference, between the realm of pure moral philosophy and that of practical activity. In a way this is a banal conclusion to have arrived at: from the very beginning, the whole point was to provide a foundation for practical morals in the pure rationality. Yet it isn’t clear that such a foundation need necessarily take the shape of what is essentially a transgression of disciplinary boundaries.

the division of labor

I want to ask, at the end of De la division du travail social, how Durkheim can be so insightful and open minded about some things, and so committed to other obvious falsehoods? Durkheim asserts, for instance, that the individual is not the substratum of society, but is rather the result of the development of society. This is a rather radical thing to say, and I think especially so around 1890. Yet he also has a remarkably blinkered faith—without basis in evidence, as far as I can tell—that everyone has a ‘place’ in society, that it could be possible for each individual to be ‘fitted’ with a task that adequately fits their personal merits and abilities. Now, in fact, it is possible that he believes the second of these opinions is tenable exactly because of the first—that is, since society has such power in molding its organs (for this is what we individuals are), then of course we will all be shaped to fit our purpose, and ultimately no one will be out of place. I find this a little chilling--it makes me think of Ranciere's classifications of denials of the political from Dis-agreement. But first, what is Durkheim’s broad argument?

As groups of individual humans become larger (in his terms, grow in volume and density) the structure of these groups necessarily changes. At first, societies were segmented, built of a certain number of similar units (families, clans...). This kind of society is strongly conscious of itself and is held together by mechanical solidarity, or similitude (people are mostly the same). As societies grow, and become organized, the division of labor becomes increasingly necessary. The different parts of society become less and less like one another—their form is shaped by their function. A modern society is characterized by organic solidarity, which is solidarity born of mutual dependence. Society is less conscious of itself as such, and individuals, since they are more different from one another, are more conscious of themselves.

A great many consequences flow from this basic understanding of the nature of societies and their modernity. In particular, Durkheim has a clear vision for the primacy of the educational establishment and the government in shaping society. Some active directing agent, he believes, must make certain that the division of labor is not distorted in any serious way, and that each individual, newly opened up to the world, knows just enough about it (and not too much) to feel the dignity of their position as an organ—to feel that they are a part, and only a part, of a larger whole on which they depend, but which also depends on them. Indeed, this is the basis of the morality that Durkheim derives from the nature of society. He says,

La morale des sociétés organisées [as opposed to segmented societies] ...ne suspend pas notre activité à des fins qui ne nous touchent pas directement; elle ne fait pas de nous les serviteurs de puissances idéales et d’une tout autre nature que la nôtre, qui suivent leurs voies propres sans se préoccuper des intérêts des hommes. Elle nous demande seulement d’être tendres pour nos semblables et d’être justes, de bien remplir notre tâche, de travailler à ce que chacun soit appelé à fonction qu’il peut le mieux remplir, et reçoive le juste prix de ses efforts. Les règles qui la constituent n’nt pas une force contraignante qui étouffe le libre examen; mais parce qu’elles sont davantage faites pour nous et, dans un certain sens, par nous, nous sommes plus libres vis-à-vis d’elles. (404)

This is, I must admit, a clear articulation of another kind of liberalism. Not only does the individual ultimately depend on society, but the very idea of individual freedom is emergent from its structure. Yet this understanding of society, I think paradoxically because it is so indebted to ‘sociological relativism,’ is deeply committed to the idea, evoked here, of the ‘juste prix.’ I was surprised to see, near the end of this book, Durkheim cite Karl Marx on how the division of labor cuts down on time wasted in production and, as it were, tightens up the pores of the day (388). Without citing Marx, but I think clearly drawing on him, Durkheim also endorses a version of the labor theory of value—each thing has a value determined socially by the amount of useful labor contained within it. For Marx, this is the necessary starting point for the peculiar nature of labor-power as a commodity that is sold for its true value, and yet produces more value than went into it. For Durkheim, the same observation simply serves as a basis for asserting that since there is a correct price (however impossible to actually calculate), there are just contracts.

I have read that Durkheim and Bergson are in a sense the two master thinkers of this period. Certainly, I had the intense feeling reading De la division... that this was the beginning of a conversation I had heard before. For instance, Durkheim discusses law at length in the early parts of the book, as a way of grasping the structure of social consciousness. He argues, essentially, that certain forms of punishment have less to do with the crime and more to do with affirming the reality of the social bond. It is easy to see how one could begin there, and end with the idea—which I, perhaps incorrectly, associated with Bataille and others—that crime is in a sense necessary and constitutive of the psychic reality of society. Crime is produced by society in order that punishment of it may re-enforce collective consciousness.

Given, then, that Durkheim is foundational, I want very much to better understand the form of his relativism. This is his first book, does he retain the heavy, guiding, organic metaphor? I want to know more about his reading of Marx (it is somewhat remarkable that he mentions him at all, is it the German connection to people like Schmoller?)—how, specifically, does he react to the various increasingly assertive worker’s movements of the 1890s? There is something quite radical about attempting to treat the proletariat and ‘white collar’ workers as, essentially, the same, which is what he does. It also creates the potential for a radical under-evaluation of the claims of the industrial laboring population, and blindness to economic forces more generally.

Aron on Marx

On the theory that ideological purity is a sign of intellectual degeneration, I turned to Raymond Aron’s textbook (or something like it) Les étapes de la pensée sociologique for a treatment of Marx before looking at Althusser.

This particular text is interesting for several reasons. The book was published in 1967, which I think we can treat as the autumn of Marxism as a fad in French intellectual life. Aron is thus accustomed, at this point, to being set aside. This is perhaps the source of the clarity of his prose. I have for the moment only looked at the chapter on Marx (I think next will be Durkheim), so although I can’t say what the book as a whole attempts to do, I can say that for Marx, Aron attempts simply to say what points he thinks Marx plainly tried to make and to elaborate the sources of the ambiguity that typifies interpretations of this foundational thinker. I can also say that, as someone who has read a great deal about Marx, and has now read a few of the major texts, Aron seems enormously even-handed, though not without his faults.

Whence the ambiguities? First of all, because any philosophy that becomes ‘official,’ sanctioned by governments, and taught to hundreds of millions of people, can only be contested and confused. Apart from this there is the widely discussed philosophical/scientific division in Marx’s corpus. Aron presents this ‘Althusserian’ theory of Marx in contrast to the tripartite set of influences claimed by Marx for himself: English economics, German philosophy, French socialism (that is, sociology). Aron views skeptically the claim that we know, now, that the early philosophical manuscripts contain the secret of Marx’s work, even though Marx himself left them to rot. Many objections could be made (and no doubt have been made) to this somewhat ‘naïve’ approach. I think it is enormously valuable. Aron certainly does not hide the philosophical issues at play for Marx, nor does he attempt to paper over the (perhaps productive) leaps in Marx’s thinking. His naïve reading, then, is in fact an attempt at a less engaged (though no less ideological) appreciation of the author of Capital.

For Aron, Marx is first of all, above all, the author of Capital. Marx was and ‘wanted to be’ a scientific economist. Yet he was, plainly, at first and durably, a philosopher. His economics itself, Aron says, passes necessarily through sociology. So, in very compressed form, we can say that for Aron, the sources of Marx’s various ambiguities are to be found, first, in the confusions, slippages, or décalages between these three areas and, second, in the attempt to derive historical movement, then necessity, from the economic/sociological/philosophical conceptual toolkit he has constructed.

Aron seems to rely on Schumpeter for his criticism of Marx as an economist. For instance, in his discussion of the labor theory of value, after arguing that Marx adopts this theory as the only one that can account for the quantitative nature of the exchange of qualitatively different goods, Aron seems to endorse Schumpeter’s argument that since the value of labor itself is itself qualitatively determined, the whole thing is a word-game. Yet, if I understand correctly, it seems to me that this objection falls into the hole Aron describes between economy and sociology. The value of labor (that is, the cost of reproducing the worker physically, which includes his dependents) is determined socially. It is true that there is a physiological lower limit to the resources necessary for the reproduction of labor (or even for the act of labor), but Marx is quite clear that the cost of labor is determined, we might now say, culturally. This makes it no less real, but it does mean that the primary question is not biological, and perhaps therefore qualitative, but rather remains quantitative. Social norms declare that a certain set of material, of a given value, is necessary for the maintenance of the given worker. There is no bottom to the labor theory of value, and it seems to me that this means it does not run aground on physiology. This, however, is a quibble.

I won’t summarize Aron’s points about Marx more than I have already. But I do want to mention the final section of the chapter, in which Aron sets out the three great crises so far encountered by Marxism. The first, naturally, is the revisionist crisis between Kautsy and Bernstein. Then there is the crisis precipitated by the Bolshevik revolution. This time the antagonists are Kautsky and Lenin. The third crisis—and this struck me as odd—Aron says is contemporary (1967), and is between the Bolshevik and the Scandinavian models of socialism. The antagonism here is between, on the Bolshevik side, an economy planned entirely by a ‘total’ state, and on the ‘occidental’ side, an economy partially planned by a democratic state. Some Marxists, says Aron, are looking for a third way: a genuinely democratic state with a fully planned economy. If I, today, were asked to enumerate the crises of Marxism, I would quite naturally chose the first two in the same way as Aron has done. I might then say that Maoism, or tiers-mondisme was a third. I would want to think about whether the fall of the Soviet Union in fact constitutes a crisis in socialism, but it would be perverse to argue that it does not. I don’t think such an enumeration of crises would be controversial.

One might say that Aron didn’t have the perspective we have now. I think, however, that Aron wanted his crises to line up with the three poles of Marxian thought. The first, the revisionist crisis, is clearly economic. The second, the Russian Revolution, is sociological in that what is at issue, according to Aron, is the relation of state and class. Lenin claimed that the Bolsheviks, since they represented the proletariat, were, when in power, the dictatorship of the proletariat. Or, as many other Marxists thought, did the Bolsheviks really only represent a dictatorship over (‘sur,’ as opposed to ‘de’) the proletariat? Aron thinks that the dictatorship of the proletariat is a ‘myth,’ on obvious impossibility. How can the majority rule? The state itself, the actual human beings making decisions, will always be a minority.

This means that the last crisis, the one that Aron says is contemporary, is a philosophical crisis. It is philosophical in the sense that it represents an attempt to collapse the economic (a planned economy) and the political (democracy). Does Aron mean to suggest that this operation leaves us with the more general science of society, sociology? Writ large, it seems to me that Aron endorses Marx’s sociological categories, but does not draw the same conclusions from them, or find them in history in the same way, as did Marx. So perhaps the lesson is that Bourdieu will rise over the grave of Althusser? Aron, himself, defends the specificity, the irreducibility, of the political. Indeed, I could only smile, thinking about Badiou and Laclau talking about how Marxism tends to collapse the political into the economic—while Aron wrote, 30 years earlier, that one of Marx’s major problems was, “la réduction de la politique en tant que telle à l’économie...l’ordre de la politique est essentiellement irreductible à l’ordre de l’économie” (199). Perhaps it was a commonly made point? I don’t know.

I can’t finish without noting the odd presence, on tel gallimard’s cover for the book, of a detail from Volpedo’s The Fourth Estate, which is also the opening shot of 1900, and on the cover of Laclau’s On Populist Reason. Everyone wants to love that painting.

At any rate, I look forward to reading Aron on Durkheim. I expect he will need to be less careful, but I hope that won’t make him less lucid.

Flipping through the introduction to De la division du travail social, trying to get a sense of the text, I found a reference to an introductory course from 1888, in which Durkheim sets out the ambitions of his sociology. The course is republished in La science sociale et l’action, which I happen to have on my shelf. So, as my introduction to Durkheim, I read this introductory leçon. I’m glad I did.

Durkheim sets out to show what sociologie, or la science sociale, in fact is. He hopes to set down a series of inter-related questions that will constitute the specificity of this young science. The spirit will not be that of a professor simply explaining to his students a received truth, but rather of teaching mixed with research, where the students collaborate in a collective attempt to understand. The point here must be to contrast French with German universities. There are in fact many places in the text at which one can detect a certain national tension; to which we will return.

Most previous attempts to think scientifically about society have foundered at their very outset by assuming that society is a made thing. Durkheim says that Hobbes and Rousseau both, although the first makes it an individual and the second a collective enterprise, none the less see society as the conscious creation of man. I think one might perhaps argue with this characterization. I think the point here was really to attack a certain kind of utopianism that perhaps still hung, like a faintly bad smell, around French sociology. There is the broadly 19th century view of the Enlightenment (Rousseau) as an agent of Revolution, and Durkheim wants to distance himself from this. Then there are later socialists, like Fourier and Saint-Simon, with whom the science of society might be associated. Comte, after all, himself sprung from Saint-Simonianism.

Durkheim credits the economists with being the first to attempt to treat society scientifically: as a naturally occurring phenomenon that must, therefore, be subject to certain laws. This was a great step forward, but for the political economists, society is an abstraction that is not, itself, an object for scientific study. For economists, there are only individuals—and even then, these individuals, Durkheim says, are themselves in fact abstractions, without any concrete existence.

Durkheim makes his point through an analogy. In the past, ‘society’ was thought to be a machine, like a watch. The various parts and materials had been brought together specially for a purpose (for instance, to secure peace), and were not inherently related to one another except by dint of this bringing-together (the social contract). One might, Durkheim suggests, on the other hand, think of society as an organism. Just like any other naturally occurring phenomenon, then, society has its special laws. One might object that this contrasting analogy is highly politicized. Watches and machines obey natural laws just as much as dogs and other animals; it’s just that in Durkheim’s time no one could take apart a dog and make it again in a different way. The economists at least admit that society is not a made thing, but having taken the watch apart, they are not themselves able to arrive at the idea of society as an organism, having a reality greater than the sum of its parts.

Durkheim brushes aside, here, a perennial philosophical debate: is there such a thing as free-will? He allows that this is an interesting metaphysical question, but insists that it is only an interesting metaphysical question. He speaks of causality rather than determinism. That causality is a basic principle of the world is presented as the single best-established result of scientific investigation. It would perhaps be more honest to say that a firm belief in causality is not so much the result as the premise, and condition of possibility for modern science. Durkheim’s way of thinking about causality and the special laws of the organism remind me strongly of Claude Bernard. Bernard (or perhaps an intervening factor) might well be the source for Durkheim’s brushing-away of the free-will question—just as Bernard rejected the vitalist thesis that would have made it illegitimate to study living things, Durkheim rejects the idealist (spiritualist?) thesis that would say human free-will renders impossible the scientific study of society.

August Comte is the father of sociology. His great contribution was to make just the leap that the political economists failed to make. For him, sociology contained all the other positive sciences, because society itself contained these facts and was therefore more complex than any of them. But Comte, says Durkheim, was unable to distinguish between societies. For him, there was only l’Humanité, radically set apart from the natural world with an internal development all of its own, which, moreover, was always the same. There are three stages of civilization, and all societies go through them in the same way. Thus, in the end, Comte’s sociology reduces, for Durkheim, to a philosophy of history.

Herbert Spencer, who marked the next great step in sociological thinking, in the end succumbs to the same error. He admits that each society is its own individual organism, but then he applies a single rule of evolution to every single society he investigates. His empirical reach is impressive, but in the end he sees the same thing everywhere he looks. He, too, is really only applying a philosophy to society.

Durkheim then turns to something of a panoramic view of contemporary sociology. Alfred Espinas (who plays something of a role in Pierre Rosanvallon’s The demands of liberty) is credited with founding genuinely scientific sociology. That is, he is the first, in fact, to derive rules from empirical observation, rather than apply a philosophical system to selected data. Strong words. It’s good that Espinas gets this position, because without it, the French would look very thin on the sociological ground. Nearly all of the scholars Durkheim singles out in the following pages are German.

An interesting mise en abyme then occurs. Durkheim, discussing the various subdivisions of sociology, and the merit of division in general, says, “une science est, elle aussi, une sorte d’organisme” (101). That is, a science is like a society in that it develops both as a whole and in its constitutive parts by becoming more complex and subdivided.

Durkheim sets out the following non-exhaustive list of the broad fields of application that are, he says, already plainly to be found in sociology. First is social psychology, which on his telling is quite broad, including customs and traditions—we might today say culture. Second is sociology as a science of morals. This is recognized as related to the first, but its specificity is insisted upon. Third is law, which is itself in a sense only an ‘imperious’ application of collective moral sentiments. Lastly, there is economic science. Durkheim says that this is in a sense already close to genuine scientificity, but must first give up its supposed autonomy. I think the same point would be made by saying that Durkheim wants economics to give up its false naturalism and admit that economic behavior is embedded within a complex socio-cultural environment. Durkheim mentions two possible subfields, defined by subject, for sociology that aren’t yet even close to constituting themselves: the army, and diplomacy. I found this striking because the first seems to me a very natural subject for the kind of investigation of collectivity that Durkheim is proposing, while the second seems completely different. What did Durkheim mean by diplomacy?

Each of these subfields, Durkheim says, could be approached in two basic ways. He illustrates this by analogy to a basic division in medical science (also mentioned in Bernard): that of form and function, or morphology and physiology. Durkheim comes down solidly on the side of function. In the organism that is modern society, he says, the actual institutions are generally able to perform various functions, and the function performed by any given institution might change rapidly. It is therefore the functions, rather than the institutions which perform them, that are primary. I have always been made uneasy by what I have understood to be Durkheim’s functionalism, and here it is explained. I am still uneasy. It is possible to speak of the functions of an actual organism, because we are authorized to assume that, qua organism, it has a limited set of non-complex goals: eating, breathing, and so on—which we might themselves reduce, as Claude Bernard does, to sustaining the artificial milieu that the organism itself constitutes. It is to this end that we explain the regulation of various levels of chemicals, or of heat. Is it legitimate to make an analogy to society in this way? (ignoring, for the moment, the problem of delimiting each society, which I suppose needn’t be in principle different from the problem of delimiting different organisms). I do not think that we can, as Spencer does, assume that societies are organisms in the sense that they are born, grow, live, and die. Despite Marx’s attraction, as well, to the image of social metabolism, I do not think that we can say that societies eat and excrete. Perhaps Durkheim elsewhere explains himself differently, and more.

The remainder of the essay is taken up by an overview of the various sorts of students Durkheim feels would benefit from studying his sociology. In the first place, his wants to speak to students of philosophy. Philosophy as a discipline, he says, is already far on the way to dividing itself into two distinct disciplines: psychology and morals. Psychology is turning increasingly toward experimental science—it is Durkheim’s ambition that sociology should constitute a science of morals. A genuinely scientific study of morality is also, he says, the only way to overcome the oft-remarked upon dichotomy between science and morality. We might point out that, in the form of the free-will/determinism conceptual bind, Durkheim has already simply refused to discuss the relation of morals (presumably depended on some conception of human freedom) to science. I wonder if there isn’t a little slight of hand here. At any rate, this division of philosophy into psychology and morals is described as the division of labor in studying facts about individual consciousness and “la conscience de la société,” which is a naturally sociological object of study.

Durkheim next suggests that students of history would benefit greatly from the study of sociology. I think it is fair to say that the battle for disciplinary supremacy within the French academy between historians and sociologists begins here, later t be carried on between the various iterations of the Annales school and Durkheim’s inheritors.

With less imperialist intent, Durkheim also argues that law students should come out of their hermeneutic bubbles and allow sociology to speak to them of the function of law in society, and in particular of the nature of the various major juridical institutions (the family, the state).

Last but not least, sociology has a general pedagogical mission. Here is expressed in a bald form what I take to be Durkheim’s basic worldview and project. I quote at length:

Nous vivons dans un pays qui ne reconnaît d’autre maître que l’opinion. Pour que ce maître ne devienne pas un despote inintelligent, il est nécessaire de l’éclairer, et comment, sinon par la science? Sous l’influence de causes qu’il serait trop long d’analyser ici, l’esprit de collectivité s’est affaibli chez nous. Chacun de nous a de son moi un sentiment tellement exorbitant qu’il n’aperçoit plus les limites qui l’enserrent de toutes parts. Se faisant illusion sur sa propre puissance, il aspire à se suffire à soi-même. C’est pourquoi nous mettons tout notre mérite à nous distinguer le plus possible les uns des autres, et à suivre chacun notre mouvement propre. Il faut réagir et de toutes nos forces contre cette tendance dispersive. Il faut que notre société reprenne conscience de son unité organique; que l’individu sente cette masse sociale qui l’enveloppe et le pénètre, qu’il la sente toujours présente et agissante, et que ce sentiment règle toujours sa conduite; car ce n’est pas assez qu’il ne s’en inspire que de temps en temps dans des circonstances particulièrement critiques (109).

Or, much more succinctly, Durkheim wants to teach the over-inflated modern self that, “il n’est pas un empire au sein d’un autre empire, mais l’organe d’un organisme, et lui montrera tout ce qu’il y a de beau à s’acquitter consciencieusement de son rôle d’organe” (110).

As by temperament a liberal-reformist, I can only approve of Durkheim’s general project. Yet his language makes my collar feel a little tight. The ‘professor’ in Conrad’s Secret Agent would often feel, quite concretely, the massive weight of the people around him, their numbers and the power the numbers gave them over him. This isn’t so structured an appreciation of the social bond as Durkheim wants, but it seems, somehow, a more plausible response to modern society than actively appreciating and taking joy in one's role as a functioning organ within a larger social organism.

Tantae molis erat

Alfred North Whitehead famously characterized western philosophy as a series of footnotes to Plato (I paraphrase). I have the strong impression that a significant portion of contemporary historical work would fit comfortably into a few footnotes in the last 40-odd pages of Capital.

For instance, I recently read a short, popularizing essay by on globalization and politics by Kevin O’Rourke—I had already noticed his textbook, and thought idly about reading it. The article is interesting, and argues generally that geopolitical equilibrium has as much to do with patterns of global trade as to ‘technical’ capabilities. An important part of the article is an analysis of the uses to which certain European powers put their ‘comparative advantage in violence’—that is, they used this power-imbalance to seize or create monopolies where this was possible, to drive up prices, and pay for more violence. Marx, in chapter 31 (pg 917), describes these very same monopolies as moments of ‘primitive accumulation.’ Where O’Rourke suggests that we can ask whether or not the monopolies, given the costs of the military required to protect them, were really ‘worth it,’ Marx would say that they achieved their real purpose, which was capital accumulation rather than profit, per se.

More strikingly, in the final chapter on ‘The Modern Theory of Colonization,’ Marx describes in outline the very same economic process—the problem of creating in land-rich colonies a floating population of ‘free’ workers—that Thomas Holt puts at the center of his excellent The Problem of Freedom. Holt is certainly marxisant, if not explicitly Marxist; I’d check to see what he says specifically if I had his book here. In any case, I can now recognize that book as a sophisticated revision and expansion Marx’s basic framework in order to include and explain the trajectory of racism as a political force.

I also do not see, despite the prophecies at the end of chapter 32, how a historiography taking inspiration from Marx himself could be inflexible or deterministic. The very grammatical structure of Marx’s predictions set them apart from the rest of the text:

The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside and under it. The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. (pg 929)

Most of the sentences in Capital do not have this kind of lucidity (though I should really look at the German). Here, for instance, we are again in the philosophical realm: “this is the negation of the negation.” The historical narrative Marx has given us about the development of property relations in England (the so-called ‘classic’ case), in fact is contingent and flexible. It is eminently empirical, and although many people are starved to death, although this narrative does contain contradictions such as the presence of at once a great demand for labor and unemployment and starvation wages, this narrative is able to unfold across hundreds of pages without even a single ‘negation of the negation.’ Its logic is, rather, historical. The development of the English economy cannot be understood outside larger, essentially global series of events. This is not to say that god touched England, and the whole world moved in such a way as to produce capitalism at a given spot. Rather, as it happened, this particular geographical location witnessed the conjuncture (not, at least here, one of Marx’s words) of a set of circumstances that were propitious for the exploitation of the surplus-value of labor and the development of industrial machinery.

I would like to write some kind of summary, some sort of more comprehensive reaction, on finishing this book. I can’t. It’s too big, too rich with detail. I can only say that I understand how it became a classic (following, shall we say, Antoine Compagnon’s definition of the classic). The disjunction between the philosophical and the empirical, between the necessary unfolding of ideality and the contingent play of violence and power—such is the unevenness that makes a book a classic.

The Secret Agent

[I think I am obliged to say: spoilers]

The characterization, the plotting, and the prose in The Secret Agent are all slightly off—unbalanced.

There is a remarkable degree of depth in the interactions between different characters. The air fairly vibrates with code between any given characters. Even the (somewhat unbelievable) chance encounter between ‘the professor’ and Inspector Heat in a side-street is painted from, as it were, all sides. The long and excruciating scene toward the end of the novel between Verloc and Winnie, during which she is entirely quiet, is masterful (made, I think, for the stage). And yet the characters are not only more interesting interacting with one another than by themselves, they are only interesting when interacting. The criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso is mentioned by one of the characters, Ossian, at the beginning and the end of the book. The reference is more, I think, than local 1890s intellectual color. Ossian’s diagnosis of Stevie as a ‘perfect-type’ is cruel; his sudden realization that Winnie is very like her brother is, to say the least, self-serving. My knowledge of Lombroso’s work is second-hand, but it seems to me that Conrad has essentially drawn his characters from Lombroso’s types. I compare the novel with, say, Thèrese Raquin. Zola certainly made explicit use of anthropological types—but his characters are, I want to say, painted alone, while Conrad’s are always painted together.

It is hard to see by what principle, exactly, is the plot narrated. Suspense, but by no means in the usual way; the suspense is not about what will in fact happen, but about the revelation of what has happened. It is not that the whole plot is given at the beginning, but rather that we know long before we are told, that Verloc will set the bomb. We know, long before we are told, that Stevie will die—then we must wait, and wait, for this truth to come out, and its consequences to unfold. Conrad goes out of his way to telegraph the presence of the knife; but as we wait for Winnie to kill Verloc, we are really waiting for her character to reach the point at which this is possible, rather than for the deed itself. Similarly, we do not wait for Ossian to abandon Winnie, but to see what Winnie will do after. Yet I do not mean to say that the plot of the book is driven by changes in character, or that ‘plot-points’ are moments in the development of the characters.

The prose itself is playful and mocking. It is aware of the double role that each word and sentence has in moving forward the story, and also as a distinct object in a field of other objects. This, I think, is the source for the peculiar and oft-repeated double-use of words. As example drawn at random, of a whole paragraph:

“He had his own crusading instincts. This affair, which, in one way or another, disgusted Chief Inspector Heat, seemed to him a providentially given starting-point for a crusade. He had it much at heart to begin. He walked slowly home, meditating that enterprise on the way, and thinking over Mr Verloc’s psychology in a composite mood of repugnance and satisfaction. He walked all the way home. Finding the drawing-room dark, he went upstairs, and spent some time between the bed-room and the dressing-room, changing his clothes, going to and fro with the air of a thoughtful somnambulist. But he shook it off before going out again to join his wife at the house of the great lady patroness of Michaelis” (pg 176).

This paragraph is built like some kind of sonnet. Short sentence/long sentence, the two rhymed with ‘crusade.’ The punctuation of the emptied-‘it’ that he has at heard. Long sentence/short sentence, this time rhymed with ‘walked...home.’ Then three ‘room’s in a row for no reason at all but the sentiment of circulation and the sound. Then the last sentence provides movement and contains four different people.

In other places, Conrad plays with his level of discourse. This can mean veering rapidly from over-purple to colloquial. Or in a more Auerbachian sense, it can mean mixing up mode of address and content: ‘Moreover, he was dead.’
My feeling is that these discursive and narrative peculiarities of Conrad’s will begin to make sense as an ensemble if I am able to think out more clearly the historical meaning of the text. I know relatively little about Conrad’s body of work. The Secret Agent was written in 1906, and seems to be ‘set’ in the 1890s. It has the obvious themes of farcical revolutionaries and clumsily repressive states. Various approaches to life within modernity are showcased, from the police inspector to the Nietzschean bomb-maker. Empire is present with varying levels of intensity throughout the book. There is no doubt some kind of overt anglophilia at work as well, despite the general impression that London is a swamp where it is always night. These themes are all too much on the surface. Thematic analysis and formal analysis can be, I think in this case ought to be, filled out through historical contextualization.

Although I hesitate to use the word, Conrad is standing on the brink of modernism. He is obviously more nearly modern than Zola or other French ‘naturalists,’ from whom he is borrowing. All the pieces of the narrative, I want to say, are old, but he has woven these patterns in new thread. It would be easy to go through the text and point out parallels with various forms of modern art (as people have done, I think without interesting result, for Virginia Woolf and Proust). One of the things this means is formal experimentation and self-consciousness. Conrad is certainly doing these things. Hypothesis: the level of Conrad’s experimentation and self-consciousness is the naturalist generic convention.

dialectical reversal?

If, at present, variation of labor imposes itself after the manner of an overpowering natural law, and with the blindly destructive action of a natural law that meets with obstacles everywhere, large-scale industry through its very catastrophes, makes the recognition of variation of labor and hence of the fitness of the worker for the maximum number of different kinds of labor into a question of life and death. This possibility of varying labor must become a general law of social production, and the existing relations must be adapted to permit its realization in practice. That monstrosity, the disposable working population held in reserve, in misery, for the changing requirements of capitalist exploitation, must be replaced by the individual man who is absolutely available for the different kinds of labor required of him; the partially developed individual, who is merely the bearer of one specialized social function, must be replaced by the totally developed individual, for whom the different social functions are different modes of activity he takes up in turn. (Capital, pg. 618)

This is Marx’s humanism. Is it also the place at which some kind of Darwinian naturalism comes to bear a significant amount of weight in his philosophy of history?