The Cold War and Political Philosophy

A few years ago, for a class, I read Michael Burleigh’s Earthly Powers (2005), which is a history of the conflict between and commingling of religion and politics in 19th century Europe. The fundamental argument of the book is that 20th century totalitarianisms are really ‘secular religions,’ or ‘political religions,’ or simply fundamentalisms. Whatever one’s terminological preference, the argument is that revolutionary politics of the left and right—1793, 1917, but also 1933—must be understood in terms also used for religious fundamentalism. Burleigh’s book is a popularizing history, and I don’t judge it harshly. Still, I found and continue to find this interpretive framework rather shallow. Burleigh invokes in his introduction a number of the early interpreters of the totalitarianisms of the 1930s—many with direct experience of these forms of politics. The most philosophical among the writers he cites is Eric Voegelin. Recently, hoping to break a sort of intellectual circle I’d fallen into expressing certain things in my dissertation writing, I read Voegelin’s short essay Science, Politics & Gnosticism (1959, 1968). I have just finished an earlier, slightly longer essay, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (1952).

I read the second text because I found the first one enormously frustrating. In Science, Politics & Gnosticism, Voegelin spends a great deal of time castigating various thinkers, but most especially Marx, for conducting an enormous, elaborate, “intellectual swindle.” Marx’s whole body of work, Voegelin, argues (or perhaps simply asserts) is one long denial of reality. Many of Voegelin’s specific analyses are elegant, and great erudition is evident in places. Yet at no point in this text is it explained how Voegelin himself has such clear access to truth that he can say with confidence, outside of dubious textual evidence that Marx isn’t interested in ‘reality,’ that Marx is entirely wrong? The whole text is negative—an attack on gnosticism.

The New Science of Politics (and we should certainly note the definitive article) is not nearly so negative. Indeed, I wish I had started there. Voegelin’s argument is much more subtle and thought-out than it would seem to be, based on the anti-Marx screeds of the later text. Essentially, Voegelin believes that science and truth originate in personal, individual, experience. He is, we might say, a methodological individualist—although I get the sense that he would reject these terms. History cannot be the bearer of truth in a Hegelian or Comtean sense because it is outside of experience. On the other hand, crucially, individual experience is certainly in history, and has a history. This is important because while it is typically gnostic to build one’s politics upon a philosophy of history (the Christian apocalypse, the Communist paradise, the advent of the Superman), all political philosophy implies a vision of history. The relevant truth of personal experience here is the experience of transcendence. Certain historical events—most importantly Greek philosophy and Christian theology—opened the soul to transcendence. Another way of saying this is that until Greek philosophy, truth and the socio-political structure and tradition were inextricable. Philosophy ‘arrived’ after the real unity of the Athenian polis was broken because with the dissolution of the social structure, it seemed necessary to find a new source of truth. Philosophy, then, and especially political philosophy, is a truth that stands in opposition to the established order of society. Of course, Greek philosophy was relatively limited in its psychic impact. Christianity, on the other hand, eventually penetrated quite deeply into the population of the areas under its political control. This penetration is, for Voegelin, the transition from antiquity to the middle ages. It is also, crucially, the rise of a new kind of truth. Experience becomes more complex because the dimension of the transcendent has been opened. Voegelin is willing to say that this constitutes a kind of individuality that had not, previously, existed. This new form of experience brings with it new sorts of problems. In particular gnosticism, which he understands as a psychological response to the uncertainty generated by the opening to the transcendent. Gnosticism in the Middle Ages took the form of Christian chiliasm, arrived at something like a high point with the total dominance of vulgar positivism around 1900, and exists in the middle 20th century as, on the one hand, liberal progressivism, and on the other, Communism.

I do not expect to be durably interested in Voegelin. However, I think it would be interesting to approach his work as I understand it by trying to specify and contextualize three of his basic concepts: experience, the individual, and truth. Obviously, these three concepts are closely related. We can even express their relation in a restrictive sentence: truth is established only in individual experience. I would suggest, in an offhand way, that Foucault’s perspective on the generation of subjects and truths would be useful. Martin Jay’s Songs of Experience would, I think, be at least the beginning of a useful contextualization of Voegelin in terms of 20th century European ideas of truth. Similarly, Jerrold Seigel’s Idea of the Self might do the same for Voegelin’s fairly aggressive individualism. There is, I know, a certain amount of historiography on interwar writing on gnosticism. It would also be interesting to know more about Voegelin compared to Leo Strauss—for instance, to put Strauss’ book on natural right next to The New Science of Politics. If Strauss provides a contextually similar comparison, it seems to me that the most interesting recent comparison might be with Jacques Rancière’s work on politics as the partition of visibility. The New Science is, at least nominally, about the idea of political representation. Certainly, Rancière’s distinctions between the archi, meta, and para-political could all interfere in interesting ways with Voegelin’s analysis of pre- and post-philosophical political thought.

For the moment, I will file Voegelin away with my notes on him as a figure with whom I disagree deeply, but who does manage to have a perspective much at odds with my usual way of thinking. This is no doubt because I am myself totally compromised by gnosticism.

Borkenau and hypocritical nihilists

“The definition of a myth is that its believers do not regard it as a myth, but as supernatural reality. There is no valid truth, these Neo-Conservatives might say, not at any rate any truth for which it would be worth while to lay down one’s life and sacrifice other lives. But without such truths life, individual and social, is bound to disintegrate. So let’s act the other way round. Let’s start being ruthless and prejudiced to excess. The faith which used to inspire ruthless[ness] and prejudice will then be given unto us.” (429)

This is Franz Borkenau, writing in 1942. The “Neo-Conservatives” he’s talking about are those “pace-makers” of Fascism, among them: Georges Sorel, Vilfredo Pareto, and Oswald Spengler. Borkenau was associated with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, though not really a ‘member’ of the group (at least according to Martin Jay in Dialectical Imagination). He was Viennese, but fled to London relatively early in the 1930s. He is most famously an anti-communist, and author of The Spanish Cockpit about the civil war. In 1942, then, he’s in London writing about the fascists, for Cyril Connolly’s Horizon. (Incidentally, wikipedia’s list of quotes for this English man of letters includes, "We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy."—which I think is, in a less world-historical tone, what Borkenau says makes a fascist. See also, for instance, Max Weber’s citation in one or the other of the vocation lectures, of Nietzsche’s last man, who has become...simply happy).

What I find remarkable is the durable utility of this definition of political evil as the unhappy conscience. There is not, I think, much deep thinking going on in Borkenau’s short essay, but it’s worth paying attention to such attempts at a ‘transcendental’ definition of fascism, which I would compare to, for instance, Badiou’s definition of a Thermidorian in Metapolitics. In more historical terms, Borkenau’s essay (which I saw cited in Shlomo Sand’s Sorel book), is an example of the fascism-is-modernity line of thought that Horkheimer and Adorno worked as well:

“Fascism started with the shame-faced whisper that, after all, all ideals are dead and that, in order to keep human affairs going, an artificial stimulus of ruthlessness must be infused into them, by however insincere means. It ends with the assertion that the complete meaningless [sic] of life is the basis of sound philosophy.” (431)

That is, it is a result of the dissolution of ideals in the face of atheistic rationalism/materialism that took place all through the 19^th century. The subsequent search for new ideals is hopeless from the beginning.

“The absence of values able to prompt determined action is not limited to Fascist circles. The war has fortunately brought out the fact that, in some countries, negative values at least exist in sufficient strength, that people are still ready to die to ward off certain extreme evils. But the feeling of pointlessness of positive effort has not yet gone. I believe that it is deeply ingrained. It is the root-fact of Fascism. No easy solution, no facile watchword, will undo it. It is not only the root-fact of Fascism, it is also the root-problem of mankind at the present moment.

Yet one thing seems certain enough. In the context of the Fascist philosophy of meaninglessness even those elements of Fascism which otherwise would have meaning can only be incidents in a sanguinary tragi-comedy of self-destruction. There may be something to be learnt from our enemies. But our enemies cannot learn in. Only anti-Fascists can bring out the positive elements of our age.” (431)

Now, again, I’m pushing the parallels here, and distorting ideas on both ends, but this seems to me a clever sort of ‘hope through pure resistance to hopelessness’ argument of the sort that is not uncommon today. All inside the problematic of anti-foundationalism. No doubt there are real reasons for the accusations on the part of certain conservative cultural critics—and even from the political fringes: I have a soft spot for Lyndon LaRouche’s propaganda, if no other aspect of his organization—that various forms of radical critique tend toward the fascist. I wonder what the relationship is between this level of critique and the ‘Heidegger was a Nazi (and so was Derrida)’ type of anti-postmodernism?

Borkenau, at any rate, is an interesting fellow, a fine spokesperson for the cold-war totalitarianism school, and one I’d like to keep track of.