Goldstein in the AHR

Goldstein, Jan. "Toward an Empirical History of Moral Thinking: The Case of Racial Theory in Mid Nineteenth-Century France." AHR Feb 2015. 

How should historians approach moral evaluation of positions that operate in fields which we now broadly agree are morally reprehensible? Given that historians cannot avoid and ought not reduce their work to moral judgment on their subjects, what is the responsible approach? This is the broad guiding question that Jan Goldstein frames for herself in her address as president of the AHA. She proposes an “empirical history of moral thinking” and provides an example of this with a work-in-progress on mid-19^th century French race science. Here, she says, the broad and correct rejection of race science on the part of the contemporary historical community actually poses a methodological problem.  The essay and the material are quite wonderful. Apparently reactionaries have been bravely pointing to ‘science’ to justify racialized hierarchy and regretfully shrugging their shoulders since at least 1847. The paper starts with a debate at the ethnographic society of Paris in that year, then looks at the reaction to Gobineau’s book, especially from Tocqueville, and finally considers Renan. I look forward with great anticipation to the book. And yet. I’m not sure that I understand the methodological intervention that is supposed to be happening here.

Certainly the problem itself—as I understand it, of moral judgment in historiography—is interesting. And the alternatives of either condemning outright all who seemed to accept race-thinking or of pretending not to pass any judgment at all, are not satisfactory. But is this really the alternative with which we are faced? Do practicing historians actually require additional methodological equipment in order to make moral distinctions between racists (or people making moral decisions more generally)? I’m not so sure. Goldstein’s approach sounds vaguely Foucaultian: “I have tentatively concluded that the moral field in question was structured by at least four...considerations, which constituted lines of force within it.” Goldstein is distinguishing between a space of moral decision and an intellectual field. I’m not sure that there is such a distinction, methodologically speaking. The tools developed within sociology of knowledge and the history of science seem to me reasonable well suited here to a reconstruction of the discursive space or the problem situation, and therefore to allow for evaluation of the positions taken. How is what Goldstein is doing here different from other excellently practiced intellectual history?

The talk is elegantly constructed and rich. The four “lines of force” according to which she believes the moral field around race science at this time organized itself are as follows. First, the ethos of scientific objectivity. This, she says, is basically at this moment Comtean. Second, the question of responsibility--that is, is it legitimate, or morally acceptable or necessary, to reject a scientific finding because it would have negative political or social consequences? Third is the Cousinian distinction between spirit and matter. To take a philosophical or scientific position arguing on the basis of material—race—was to deny spirit, mind, and so was (to Cousinians) inherently immoral. Fourth was the widely held belief that, as it is written somewhere, all men are created equal. This comes both in Christian and Republican or Enlightenment flavors.

Goldstein takes us first into the 1847 debate at the Ethnographic society on “the distinctive characteristics of the white and black races and the conditions of association of these two races.” This was presided over by Gustav d’Eichthal, a Saint-Simonian, and featured Victor Schoelcher who would soon, after the revolution, successfully campaign for the abolition of slavery in the French colonies as well as Courtet de l’Isle, who Goldstein describes as a lapsed Saint-Simonian and a major source of inspiration for Gobineau. Among the many interesting things to come out of this debate is the basic assumption, voiced by d’Eichthal, that there is a fundamental incompatibility between a scientific approach to race and the assumption of inequality. In the wake of the ’48 revolution and a wide acceptance of abolition, ethnography comes to seem, Broca says, “not a science, but as a cross between politics, sociology, and philanthropy.” As a result, for Broca, Renan, and others, a strong effort will be made to maintain that the two can simply coexist.

Goldstein turns next to the reception of Gobineau’s work on the inequality of races. She is especially interested in Tocqueville’s response. Partly because he is so eloquent and otherwise influential, but also because he is one of relatively few people—although he does this mostly in private—to reject on moral grounds the whole project that Gobineau pursues because of its negative socio-political consequences. Others draw, although not very effectively, on the axiomatic equality of human beings. Then there is the more powerful argument from dualism. Perhaps my favorite quote in a text rich with wonderful ones: “All of philosophy resides in…its being distinct from phrenology.” Here, especially, it is clear—as Goldstein argues explicitly at the end of the paper—that the language of science has extraordinary moral power. Only drawing on a combination of other arguments is it possible to contest it. Goldstein thus has some sympathy for those who are not quite able to convince themselves that something accepted as science—race—however repugnant it might be, is really to be rejected on moral or practical grounds.

She turns, finally, to Renan. I won’t try to reconstruct her arguments in any detail, although I’m very pleased to see him taken so seriously. That she finds Renan “interminably equivocal” is not surprising, this was a common judgment at the time. But I am a little surprised if the real point of the argument—as seems to be the case—is to wonder whether one can be justified in finding Renan, at all, an attractive figure given how easily he was folded into the world of Edouard Drumont. Certainly understanding the structure and ordering of Renan’s writing on (what turned out to be) race is important. That he struggled with the consequences of his own positions is surely important. I am not sure that I’m convinced by the argument Goldstein seems to be making here about the power of Comtean science. Comtean positivism, she writes, was “all about” hierarchy. Yes. Is this really enough to explain the importance, for Renan, of maintaining the superiority of the Aryan over the Semitic language/race groupings? I don’t know.

Certainly it seems to me that the clear supplement for this sort of recovery of moral judgment is to understand where this field itself came from. How is it that not only science, but this particular kind of science, completely committed to hierarchy, came to possess such moral prestige? This is a contextual argument. We get some of this in discussions of Schoelcher and then Bonapart. But if, as seems to be the case, a great deal is going to be laid at Comte’s door, then some powerful explanation for his success has got to found.

I kept thinking, because it’s a good book, and because it’s also about the rise of racial thinking, about Tom Holt’s The Problem of Freedom. (Holt is another former president of the AHA). He is not so interested in recovering moral judgment. And he wrote specifically about the British context. I don’t know the scholarship well enough, but I wonder if anyone has evaluated how those arguments fit into a French context? Quite differently, of course, but the question of post-emancipation labor must surely have arisen? Or perhaps the French case can be a test of some kind for his arguments?

Failed Counterrevolutionaries?

Bonner, Robert E. “Proslavery Extremism Goes to War: The Counterrevolutionary Confederacy and Reactionary Militarism.” Modern Intellectual History, 6, 2 (2009), 261-285.

My copy of the August issue of MIH has finally arrived. I have never before been subscribed to a professional journal. Reading articles in bound form, and marking them up in this bound form is oddly exciting. No doubt it’ll soon wear off.

Bonner’s essay is an informative summary of the kinds of arguments being made by some very extreme pro-slavery publicists in the late 1850s, in the crucial winter of 1860, during, and finally after the war. I have virtually no historiographical context for this—although if I had pursued my old counter-revolutionary studies path I no doubt would. Bonner’s point seems none the less pretty clear. He wants to document the existence and nature of this particular militaristic, authoritarian and explicitly counterrevolutionary wing of Confederate thought. What is the point of all these descriptors? The point is that given the radicalizing power of the actual outbreak of hostilities, a hearing could be had for individuals who were not claiming a ‘purer’ American republic, but rather wanted to overturn the entire revolutionary project. Their theory of politics, in great conservative tradition, held that the state should be representative of society rather than an egalitarian or any other force for changing it. But these publicists (for obvious and bad reasons I don’t want to call them intellectuals) were not the mainstream. Indeed, for me the most interesting aspect of the material that Bonner presents is the way in which it highlights a difficulty fundamental to any attempt to bring race into politics. In the North American context, I think it is fair to say that race has been constructed as binary. In this way, a firm racial hierarchy can be established while none the less insisting on a kind of egalitarianism within ‘whiteness.’ There are obvious logic problems here. A more rigorous form of racism implies a biologically determined hierarchy articulated densely through society. This seems to me to be a fundamental tension in racist discourse, one that is liable to be found (perhaps it is, I don’t know) in all attempts to actualize racial hierarchy in the political realm. Indeed, I wonder if it might be argued that any hierarchical system not tending toward the destruction of all egalitarian impulses cannot properly be called racism. No egalitarianism at all, only the racially best in charge, articulated to the level of the individual. Given the way the 19th century was, this was obviously going to point toward militarism—in which, it should be pointed out, the same problematic of hierarchy and equality only repeats itself—and political authoritarianism. Bonner’s essay shows that indeed it did, and in the Confederacy was sharply at odds with what was otherwise a rights-based rhetoric. Bonner’s closing point, made for reasons of space rather obliquely, is that within the rich field of Confederate memory, most of these radical discourses have little place. What remains, though, as it were to haunt the memory of Confederate war dead, is a certain form of authoritarian militarism.

Crowd psychology

Gustave Le Bon’s Psychologie des foules [1895] ends grandly by responding to a self-posed question, “Si nous envisageons dans leurs grandes lignes la genèse de la grandeur et de la décadence des civilisations qui ont prédédé la nôtre, que voyons-nous?” In the beginning, Le Bon says, at the ‘zero degree’ of civilization, there is only a “pousière d’hommes” (123) These are the very definition of barbarians, because nothing links them together. Over time, however, things change:

“L’identité de milieux, la répétition des croisements, le nécessités d’une vie commune agissent lentement. L’agglomération d’unités dissemblables commence à se fusionner et à se former une race, c’est-à-dire un agrégat possédant des caractères et des sentiments communs, que l’hérédité fixera progressivement. La foule est devenue un peuple...” (124)

After long struggles, this people, this race, will escape from barbarity. They will have, along the way, acquired an ideal—“peu importe la nature de cet idéal,” could be Rome, Athens, or Allah, Le Bon says. The possession of (or by) an ideal is the condition of escaping from barbarism.

“Entraînée par son rêve, la race acquerra successivement tout ce qui donne l’éclat, la force, et la grandeur. Elle sera foule encore sans doute à certaines heures, mais derrière les caractères mobiles et changeants des foules, se trouvera ce substratum solide, l’âme de la race, qui limite étroitement les oscillations d’un peuple et règle le hasard” (124).

After a period of striving for the ideal, degeneration sets in. The civilization grows, and when it stops growing, it declines. “Cette heure inévitable est toujours marquée par l’affaiblissement de l’idéal qui soutenait l’âme de la race.” Individuals have, as the level of the civilization grew, themselves become more strongly individual, “l’egoïsme colectif de la race est remplacé par un développement excessif de l’égoisme individuel...” What had been a bloc, a unity, becomes again simply a collection of individuals, holding on and held briefly together by old institutions and rituals that no longer hold any meaning. At this late stage, “divisés par leurs intérêts et leurs aspirations, ne sachant plus se gouverner, les hommes demandent à être dirigés dans leurs moindres actes, et...l’Etat exerce son influence absorbante.” The civilization has snuffed out the flame of its own ideal, and by consequence, “la race finit par perdre aussi son âme” (125). The civilization dissolves again into the dust of individuals out of which it was first constituted.

Usually, I believe, when Le Bon is discussed, one begins at the other end of this short book. The crowd is fickle, it is non-rational; it requires a leader who knows how to use simple images and forceful repetition to manipulate it. As I read Psychologie des foules, however, what most struck me (aside from the relatively low level of self-consistency) was the use of the concept of ‘race,’ and the basically skeptical (even anti-intellectual) approach to historical knowledge. It therefore seems to me that it is best to begin with the ‘philosophy of history’ in which Le Bon roots his vision of the crowd.

Indeed, every instance of a crowd is like a miniature demonstration of this philosophy of history. A crowd is most characterized by its trait of laying bare, or bringing to the surface, the ‘racial soul’ of those making up the crowd. The crowd, therefore, is a demonstration of the principle of history writ small. This resort to a single, unifying principle is typical of ‘pre-scientific’ sociology. The whole point of Durkheim’s intervention, it seems to me, is that there are different levels of phenomena, which therefore require different kinds of explanations. Le Bon’s mode of essentially psychological sociology is a typical target of Durkheim’s critique.

Gabriel Tarde, the other major French sociologist of the period, stands similarly accused by Durkheim. Not having yet read Tarde’s strictly sociological work, I am not in a position to say more, but it does seem to me that a comparison of Le Bon’s little essay with Tarde’s Monadology is instructive. In that bizarre text, Tarde is performing the typically modern philosophical operation (at least it is typically modern according to the Foucault I have been reading) of deriving a unifying principle or underlying direction from the thought of his contemporaries. For Tarde, this is the return in modern physics and social thought of the monad. It seems to me better to read Le Bon’s nearly-incoherent Psychologie less as a handbook for crowd manipulation, less as a sociological treatise, and more as an involuntary speaking of its own context. The book is a bundled and forcefully phrased translation (to avoid the word: reflection) of Le Bon’s anxieties, intellectual frameworks, and essential problematics.

Hence the pseudo-materialist psychology. Hence the (very 19th century) ‘spiritual’ biological racism (which, it should be noted, rests firmly on Lamarkian, rather than Darwinian evolutionary theory). Le Bon needs, somehow, to reconcile the ideal and the material. So the ideal becomes a force within the material world, manifested through collectivities and their basic underlying behavior patterns. The tautology of this kind of racialism is, to me, fascinating. People form a race because they live together and have similar experiences over a period of time. Then they have durably similar opinions and tendencies because they belong to the same race. As always, the boundaries of races are unclear, it seems at times as if ‘French’ is a race, but Le Bon refers more often to the ‘Latin’ race (which, by the by, carries in its soul a tendency to solve social problems through centralized governmental control working on abstract principles). In a similarly circular fashion, crowds are both the principle agents of historical change, and the reason that it is essentially impossible to have accurate knowledge of historical events. I wonder if those who have written on Le Bon have called this a ‘Heisenbergian’ theory of history.

There are other fascinating things about this book, but they all have to do with its rootedness in context, rather than any kind of reasoning or critical distance that it might achieve from this context. The back of the PUF edition I read calls it a ‘classique.’ It seems to me the opposite of a classic. I cannot imagine reading it without thinking about the late 19th century, the anxieties about democracy, socialism, decadence, the obsessive re-reading of the ‘pathologies’ of the Revolution, the racialism, the incredibly impoverished historical vision. The tensions I find in the text are interesting because of this context. For instance, Le Bon wants to be a relativist. Everyone knows, and no one admits, he says, that Homer is boring (77). But he can’t imagine (although some of his contemporaries could) a relativistic psychology. He can’t imagine a world without ‘ideals.’ So he ends up with a very thin, almost nihilistic relativism. All of which puts him quite squarely in his time, striking a pose of scientific observation of the various ‘pathologies’ of his era, while in fact participating fully in them.


[added: I have just finished reading Susanna Barrows' excellent *Distorting Mirrors* (1981), which I knew was largely about Le Bon, but which I'd only ever flipped through before. Highly recommended.]

Renan on decline and reform

Renan, Ernest. La réforme intellectuelle et morale.


It is 1871, France has just lost a war and fallen into civil war and socialist revolution. Frenchmen cannot help but look at the surrounding ruins and wonder what brought them to this point, and what should be done next.

Renan thinks basically that materialism and democracy have brought France to its current state of crisis. The Capetian dynasty made France, preceded it, and France therefore in a sense committed suicide when it killed the king. Since the turmoil of the Revolution, France has sought to replace the king with one dynasty or another—first the Bonapartes, and then the renewed Bourbons. Although Renan remembers the July monarchy with fondness (that, not coincidentally, was the period of his own youth), it was also the scene of creeping materialism that manifested itself in the 1848 revolution and Republic. The folly of universal suffrage was made plain to the idealistic republicans, but not before France had chosen a new monarch, Louis-Napoleon. The Second Empire was a period in which France’s wealth grew vastly, and its moral and intellectual strength (virility) declined just as much. The decadence of this kind of life is not unpopular, and if the Emperor had avoided war, it could have lasted indefinitely.

Yet the era of nations is also that of struggle between nations. France, in its pride and virility, had defeated and humiliated Prussia at the beginning of the 19th century, and now Prussia has taken its revenge. Prussia’s defeat made it strong and disciplined. France, in its materialism, had grown weak. Hence the collapse of the government, of any force of order, hence, that is, the moral defeat following the military one.

The reforms that must be undertaken should be modeled roughly on those that Prussia undertook after its defeat. Most famous here are Renan’s views on the intellectual failure of France. He wants the French to bring back autonomous, competing universities (he’s not the only one), which, he says, were a French idea to begin with, and so would in no sense be copies of German models. More interesting to me is his swipe at representational government. Of course his preference is for a return to the monarchy, but he is willing to admit that once a people has enjoyed a right for a generation—even one such as universal suffrage, with very dubious benefits—that right cannot simply be taken away. Clearly, though, simple election of an assembly by universal suffrage would result in mediocre and worse than mediocre leadership. This kind of election means the advent of the politician, whose only skill is to be elected.

There must be, Renan says, a two-house system. Of course there must be an assembly that represents the population qua population—although even here he thinks that where single men get one vote, married men get two, and married men with children yet more, since Renan’s view is that women already have too much influence in politics as it is. There must also be a house that represents the ‘moral individuals’ that make up the state. This means something like the constituencies. The teachers will be represented as teachers, the bureaucrats as bureaucrats, and so on. Large cities, whose people are already represented, will themselves get representatives. This is, I must say, a remarkable vision of society reflected, or transmuted, into an assembly.

It is also radically at odds with the traditional view that the political culture of France is hopelessly caught in a Jacobin trap. Renan is a liberal. He refers to himself in this way, and has some liberal positions, such as the right to free speech (though not free assembly). But he is a liberal who has become obsessed with order. Democracy, he says, makes of the population a heap of sand—nothing can be built with that. I suppose the answer is that he is not a liberal Republican, but a liberal monarchist who probably prefers Guizot, and Guizot’s ‘moment,’ to any conceivable republican one. Order, for Renan, is built to an extent on the clear-eyed recognition of hierarchy.

Renan thinks in terms of millennia and the vast movement of races. He looks back to the 5th century Germanic invasions for parallels to the current situation, and is pleased to explain a great deal by national, racial, character. It would be interesting to investigate how deep Renan’s racial thinking in fact penetrates into his political thinking (such as it is). It is the right of strong nations to conquer weaker ones, and perhaps, he is willing to hazard, the Latin peoples have lost entirely what warrior spirit they absorbed from their contact with the naturally warrior-like Germanic peoples. After all, some races are suited to servitude (the Chinese are good with their hands and have no honor, which I suppose is meant to signify that they are good for industrial labor, and the Africans are strong and good-natured, and so well suited for agriculture). Perhaps the revenge of France will not be on the battlefield at all. Indeed, Renan works himself into such a frenzy of possibility that by the end of the essay, with the possibility of a global conflict between two models of nationhood (the German and the American) looming on the horizon, he suggests essentially that France will be remembered for its tact and politesse, as the salt of the earth, that which gives taste to an otherwise bland world…small consolation, it seems to me.

It would be easy to read this little essay as a sort of traumatic symptom. The trauma is plain enough, and the thing is full of what seem like contradictions. At one moment he is lamenting the lost possibility of a triumvirate of nations, France, England, and Germany, united to stave off the terrible threat of Russia—at the next moment he is asserting that the real enemy is the Germano-Slavic spirit. The preface suggests that the defeat of France and the victory of Prussia should be seen as the natural consequence of France’s previous victories. The first sentence of the essay itself says that one cannot find (admittedly, rigorous) cosmic justice in the wheel of historical fate. Later in the essay, though, he comes back to the theme again, dressed this time in pseudo-science: France defeated Prussia in 1807, and let the flame of Prussian pride, which comes back to France in 1870, perhaps to help France regenerate itself in the same way…

In the end, it seems to me that if Renan moved through a republican phase, and his scientism in 1848 is something like it, then after the war he returns to the political opinions that his masters held in his youth. We have a racialized version of the elitist liberalism of the July monarchy—making hecatombs of the benighted masses on the altar of reason. Equality is the greatest virtue, and finds its expression in science, but only the best have access to it. I read Renan because he was important, and because his French is beautiful. The sentences are so often quotable, worth writing down and memorizing for use at a dinner-party; which is, after all, both the fault and virtue of French culture, according to Renan. His writing has an ironic distance from itself, even his political attitudes are, as it were, always at a remove, always posed with an awareness of their contingency. Yet I find him distasteful. His honesty amounts to accepting the consequences of his own superiority, or his belief in it. No wonder he was disowned by later generations.