An Introduction to Modern Social and Political Thought PDF
Preview An Introduction to Modern Social and Political Thought
AN INTRODUCTION TO MODERN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT AN INTRODUCTION TO MODERN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT ANDREW GAMBLE * © Andrew Gamble 1981 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1981 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire R021 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN 978-0-333-27029-5 ISBN 978-1-349-16615-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-16615-2 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Contents Preface VII 1 The world and the West 1 1 The meaning of the West and the Western tradition 1 2 The coming of world history 5 3 Western social and political thought 8 4 The Western ideology 12 5 Conclusion 16 2 The state and civil society 22 1 The idea of revolution 22 2 The bourgeois revolution 26 3 The Industrial Revolution 31 4 The origins of capitalism 34 5 The state of nature 41 6 Political economy 45 7 The idea of the state 47 8 Sovereignty 49 9 State and civil society 54 10 The new technology 57 11 The new cosmology 58 12 The new philosophy 60 13 Science and the intellectuals 63 3 Liberalism 66 1 The political revolutions 66 2 The constitutional state 75 3 The theory of popular sovereignty 87 4 The state as an ethical idea 94 5 Conclusion 98 4 Socialism 100 1 The unfinished revolution 100 2 The reaction to laissez-faire 104 3 Rationalism 106 4 Libertarianism 109 5 The origins of Marxism 110 6 The production of commodities 118 7 Accumulation 124 5 Politics and industrial society I: The national question 130 1 Introduction 130 2 Nationalism 132 3 The anti-Enlightenment 137 4 Gemeinschaft 146 6 Politics and industrial society II: The social question 151 A NATIONAL LIBERALISM 1 The rise of modern industry 151 2 Order and liberty 154 3 Democracy 160 4 Stratification and elites 168 B SOCIAL DEMOCRACY 5 The new liberals 173 6 Anomie 176 7 The anarchy and waste of capitalist production 178 8 Equality 181 7 Politics and industrial society III: The spectre of revolution 186 1 The Russian Revolution 186 2 Engels and the Second International 188 3 Leninism 197 4 Western Marxism 209 5 Conclusion 215 8 Conclusion 218 Guide to further reading 232 Biographies 238 Glossary 254 Index 262 Preface This book is intended as an introduction to Western social and political thought in the modem period, and particularly since the French Revolution. The material that could be included in such a sUIVey is vast, the need for selection great, and I am conscious that much that is important has had to be omitted, and that it has scarcely been possible to deal ade quately with the thinkers and the theories that appear in the text. The aim of the book is to encourage all who read it to read further, both the works of some of the writers discussed in these pages and the ever-multiplying literature about them. I have provided a short bibliography which I hope will be useful for this purpose. Biographical material has mostly been left out of the text and placed in a separate section at the end. I have also included a short glossary of some of the more important terms and concepts used in the book, not in an attempt to provide final definitions but for reference. I do not think it possible to stand outside the Western tradition and pronounce upon its character and its value from the standpoint of eternity. I have not tried to do so. I have tried to be objective and accurate in my exposition of differ ent theories, but the evaluation of them and the selection of what is important is naturally shaped by the overall approach I have adopted. I have enjoyed writing this book and hope it will be reward ing to read. Many people, teachers, colleagues, and students of mine have contributed to it, most of them unwittingly. I give thanks to them all, but especially to Chris and Tom and Corinna for not complaining too much or too loudly. 1 The world and the West 1 The meaning of the West and the Western tradition The terms West and Western carry many associations, histori cal, political, cultural, and geographical. They are often freely used as though they denoted particular entities, whose reality is undisputed. But only a little probing is necessary to dis cover what ambiguities and complexities lurk inside them. To name only the most obvious, the geographical boundaries of this 'West' are far from clear. Is it Europe that is intended? In which case should Russia and Poland be included? Or only Western Europe? Does Western Europe include Germany, and Spain, and Greece? And what of Europe overseas, the lands of predominantly European settlement, particularly the United States? To limit the term to Europe seems arbitrary when today the West also denotes a series of military and political alliances that stretch from North America through out Europe and the Middle East to] apan and Australia. Since the geographical definitions can be so confusing, cultural and ideological definitions are often preferred. Here the problem is deciding whether there exists a common 'Western' civilisation which can be distinguished from other civilisations, and whose characteristic features can be obser ved in many countries. The problem is complicated for us because we still live in the Western era, the period in which Western techniques, Western ideas and Western states have dominated the world as no other civilisation has ever done. This has encouraged many historians to construct a history of the West that sees a steady unfolding of Western civilisa tion over three thousand years from its dual origin in the Greek and Roman civilisations of classical times and in the 1 2 MODERN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT religions of the Jews Oudaism and Christianity). It is an extremely influential history and one that pervades most accounts of the tradition of Western social and political thought. One of its most common features is to divide Western history into three parts - Ancient, Medieval, and Modern. Ancient history is the classical era up to the fall of the (western) Roman Empire in the fifth century A.D. Medieval history is the period that embraces the 'Dark Ages' after the fall of Rome, when 'barbarians' overran and settled the former Roman colonies, as well as the history of the feudal states of Europe up to the end of the fifteenth century. Modern history covers the period that commences with the Renaissance and the Reformation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, then moves through the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century and the Enlighten ment of the eighteenth century, to culminate in the French Revolution of 1789 and the English Industrial Revolution which began in the 1780s. These major events prepare the ground for the 'European Century', 1815 to 1914, the century of liberty and progress, during which Western ideas, techniques, and political rule were spread around the world. In the twentieth century after two great wars caused a sharp decline in the status and power and relative wealth of Europe, the spirit of the West migrates, and the Western ideology and Western world interests discover a new cham pion in the United States of America, a nation built upon European migration, and the first 'new nation' of the modern world. The unique path of development taken by the West, which these histories celebrate, has long been a favourite object of enquiry for Western thinkers, and there has been no shortage of attempts to show that the technological and material superiority of Western states in modern times reflects the cultural and moral superiority of Western civilisation over all others. According to some of these epic accounts, Western civilisation is a unique historical organism which like the acorn has gradually unfolded all the potentialities contained within it from the beginning. As many critics have pointed out, however, such histories assume that the most lasting values and most important traditions of civilisation have a special and exclusive connection with Western Europe. They THE WORLD AND THE WEST 3 have to assert that the values and ideas of classical and Christian civilisations are preserved and enhanced in modem industrial civilisation, and indeed that they made this civilisa tion possible. Whilst the profound influence of classical and Christian culture on that of the modern West cannot be ignored, it is a highly misleading way of looking at the development of the West and at modern Western thought. It places greater emphasis on abstract ideas and values, the products of reflection and contemplation, than on the ideas and purposes which are embodied in social relationships, the practical ways in which human beings relate to one another and to their natural environment. Because intellectual history of the first type has been so dominant, far too much continuity has often been ascribed to Western history, so that the important gaps and breaks are not noticed, and it becomes impossible to conceive of the process of world development in terms which are not Western-centred. What also slips from view in these cultural histories is that the 'West' has no monopoly even of its own roots. Islam and Russia, both non-Western civilisations, drew heavily upon classical and Judaic tradi tions. A Western-centred view of world history too easily forgets that the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth cen tury, hailed so often as one of the most important events in the history of the world, only involved the loss of the western Empire, which included some of its most backward provinces. The Roman Empire lived on in the east with its capital at Byzantium (Istanbul) for another thousand years. The civilisation and the system of states that were esta blished in Western Europe in the early modern period (1500- 1800) were undoubtedly distinctive, but its superiority over all other civilisations was not clear cut. Again, it is easy to forget what a recent thing Western superiority is, and there fore to forget in what this superiority consists. In the early modern period when Europe was beginning to expand over seas and to colonise other parts of the world, European civilisation was in many respects inferior to other civilisations, and those civilisations that were protected by organised state power were able without difficulty to repel Western intruders. China and Japan, for example, expelled all foreigners at this time and closed their horders. Western expansion proceeded
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