Legitimacy and revolution in a society of masses : Max Weber, Antonio Gramsci, and the fin-de-siècle debate on social order

248 Pages·2013·2.18 MB·English

by  Giglioli

LEGITIMACY
and
REVOLUTION
in a
Society of Masses
LEGITIMACY
and
REVOLUTION
in a
Society of Masses
Max Weber, Antonio Gramsci, and
the Fin-de-Siècle Debate on Social Order
M.F.N. GIGLIOLI
Transaction Publishers
New Brunswick (U.S.A.), and London (U.K.)
Copyright © 2013 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey.
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Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials.
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2012030969
ISBN: 978-1-4128-5162-6
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Giglioli, Matteo Fabio Nels, 1976—
Legitimacy and revolution in a society of masses : Max Weber, Antonio
Gramsci, and the fin-de-siecle debate on social order / M.F.N. Giglioli.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4128-5162-6
1. Legitimacy of government--Europe. 2. Proletariat. 3. Weber, Max, 1864-
1920. 4. Gramsci, Antonio, 1891-1937. I. Title.
JC497.G54 2013
320.1--dc23
2012030969
Contents
1Introduction
2Legitimacy and Decadence. Antidemocratic Social Thought in France
3Legitimacy and Reason of State. Vilfredo Pareto
4Legitimacy and Modernity. Georges Sorel
5Legitimacy and the Philosophy of History. Antonio Labriola
6Legitimacy, Charisma, and Disenchantment. Max Weber
7Legitimacy, Alienation, and Totality. Antonio Gramsci
8Conclusions
Bibliography
Name Index
Subject Index
1
Introduction
The set of questions surrounding the concept of legitimacy, the peculiar
centripetal dynamics that keep a polity together, or, by disappearing, shatter it to
pieces, is possibly the most important with which a study of politics may
concern itself. As Isaiah Berlin quite correctly remarks, the fundamental
question in politics is why a man should obey another,1 since force alone cannot
guarantee universal compliance with rules, but everyone stands to gain from
regulated social cooperation. The reason legitimacy is understood to be a central
problem in political thought is precisely the perceived indispensability of
motivations in favor of obedience, because the willingness to obey authority
logically puzzles us at the level of individual rationality, even as we perceive its
necessity for the smooth functioning of social interaction as a whole.
Interest in issues with a recognizable bearing on legitimacy has been recurrent
in the history of Western political thought. Indeed, beginning at least with La
Boétie, the question of the grounding of political authority can be seen as the
dominant preoccupation of what we have come to think of as the classical
tradition of political theorizing, from Grotius to Hobbes, from Locke to
Montesquieu, from Rousseau to Kant. Proponents and opponents alike
understood nineteenth-century liberalism to issue directly from this tradition and
to offer a systematic and comprehensive answer to the question of political
legitimacy. However, beginning with the last decades of the nineteenth century,
increasing challenges to the liberal image of legitimate order emerged and new
formulations were sought for the concept. One of the chief outcomes of the
process was the contemporary theorization of legitimacy within the social
sciences, which has decisively shed the link between the normative and
descriptive (or the motivational and the behavioral) aspects of legitimacy. Such a
transformation, I claim, was the consequence of the historical encounter with the
new society of masses.
The present work is an attempt to contribute to the intellectual history of the
concept of legitimacy during this crucial phase. It takes the form of an
investigation into reflection on the concept in Continental Europe during the half
century or so following the Paris Commune. In those years, I claim, three major
European countries—France, Germany, and Italy—underwent momentous
changes in social and political conditions that on the one hand ushered in a new,
modern world, recognizably similar to our own, and on the other brought the
legitimacy issue into dramatic, real-world focus.
The period preceding the First World War was a phase of crisis in the political
structures of European States. Issues related to legitimacy became salient in the
interests of many leading political thinkers of the age. The fin-de-siècle crisis is
admittedly not the only historical instance of an intellectual debate centering
around a vast social upheaval, but it possesses characteristics, both material and
spiritual, that make it especially valuable as a case study for those who seek
insights on the role of legitimacy in the modern world. Let us explore each in
turn.
In terms of socioeconomic developments, the end of the nineteenth century
saw the consolidation and spreading to the whole European continent of the vast
shift in productive processes springing from the Industrial Revolution. The
changes in the balance between city and countryside and the rapid development
of communications and transportation ushered in a completely novel society,
characterized by its mass dimensions, on an altogether different scale of
magnitude from the past. At the same time, these years saw the apogee of the
modern Nation-State form. The rapidly expanding public bureaucracy undertook
the regulation of ever-wider spheres of social interaction as it attempted to carry
through the first systematic nation-building projects. If the civilization of
machines was attaining unparalleled heights of wealth and material comfort,
proving the extent to which social collaboration could multiply individual
endeavor, the State was demonstrating similar advances in physical power,
internationally as well as domestically. Both industrialism and government
bureaucracies, however, required for their functioning an ever-increasing amount
of discipline from the individuals subject to their control. The society of masses
was a physically and psychologically invasive order.
The political crisis of the fin de siècle proceeded precisely from the search for
the means to justify such an invasive but unprecedentedly successful order.
The central decades of the nineteenth century, the heyday of Victorianism,
had witnessed the triumph of such a rational, immanent justification of authority
in the form of classical liberalism. Therefore, in terms of the history of political
thought, the fin-de-siècle crisis can be interpreted as the reaction to the end (or
the eclipse) of the hegemony of liberal theory and practice. From the perspective
of the ruling classes, the crisis was experienced as an untethering of rational
political discourse from collective action. The metaphor of the social contract,
with its double implication of free choice of obedience and rational obedience to
one’s own choice, no longer seemed relevant to modern conditions; the
calculating reasonableness of the utilitarian individual appeared as the product of
a more and more farfetched moral anthropology. Indeed, for the period before
World War I—and with a century’s hindsight—we can speak of a historical
hiatus of the microeconomic reference in the interpretation of politics.
What was to be done with those who rejected what were understood as the
rational forms and modes of politics and government? The age of progress had
also been obliged to face such dilemmas, as the encounters with Luddism and
the colonial Other amply attest. Nevertheless, the fin de siècle signals a
qualitative shift in this confrontation that becomes systematic inasmuch as the
disciplinary requirements of mass society do not allow resistance to modernity to
be safely marginalized, either politically or intellectually.2 As a result, a very
idiosyncratic shift takes place in the intellectual conceptualization of politics.
Throughout the history of Western thought irrational behavior was considered an
empirical fact, to be deplored or stigmatized, but signifying in itself nothing
more than the unavoidable imperfection of the material world, unworthy of
further interest as such. In the period we are concerned with, on the contrary, the
actual collective behavior of the newly politically relevant masses is taken to be
a meaningful and valuable object of analysis in its own right. The sources of
collective beliefs are investigated without explicit reference to the normative
standards they are to be measured against. It is the methodological revolution
that stands at the origin of modern social science.
Yet, normative questions or, rather, policy issues dependent on the normative
attitudes and preferences of the masses, were of the utmost importance to the
political environment in which fin-de-siècle thinkers operated. For those who,
broadly speaking, supported the status quo, the problem of concrete collective
behavior was largely conflated with the attitude toward Reason of State. This
was the traditional ancien régime techne3 of rule, realist in its assumptions and
flexible enough to conceive of strictly nonrational popular enthusiasms and
expectations. The problem became the regime of publicity to be afforded to
these techniques or, in other words, the self-reflexive effects of this type of
knowledge on the body politic in a mass constitutional system.
For the intellectuals in the revolutionary camp, the empirical puzzle of mass
behavior in the fin de siècle was different; it involved a widening gap between
socioeconomic conditions and political action. While socialist movements