Chapter 12

The Modern West,

or the Triumph of

Bourgeois Nationalism

The march of God in the world,

that is what the state is.

G. W. F. Hegel

The state is the coldest of all cold

monsters. Coldly too, it lies; and

this lie creeps out of its mouth:

"I, the State, am the people."

Friedrich Nietzsche

As our discussion of the legitimization of power into authority evolved, we took care not to lose sight of two basic factors of the process; namely, that authority is created to cover the areas of overlapping, conflict, competition, combination and interaction of powers; and that its prerequisite is the consciousness of the powers involved. By keeping these factors in view and applying them to historical patterns of legitimization, we were finding crucial paradigms which will now enable us to emphasize further phenomena of the sociopolitical complex.

I. Fatalism and Concernment

We noticed that the English barons of the thirteenth century, the bourgeois of seventeenth century Britain or of nineteenth century Europe -- by becoming conscious of their power and demanding a share of the authority -- had one main concern. It was to question the famous proposition "render unto Ceasar the things which are Caesar's," by asking "why and how did things come to be Caesar's?" The question addresses both values and the role of the economy (i.e., who gets what, when, how and why); leading us to inquire whether and how authority affects the well-being and happiness of the different components of a political complex.

When the ruler claims to draw authority from divine providence and those who submit to his rule believe he does so, he can impose taxes and raise armies, and the ruled cannot -- or should not -- question his doings; for they are sanctioned by the supreme power of God which they accept and cannot control. Exceptions may arise where the divine providence is interpreted by another body than the ruler, such as the church, and that body checks and eventually opposes the ruler's authority. But still, there is little those subject to the secular and spiritual authorities of ruler and church can do -- or should do -- except calling on one to check the other, if it deems appropriate. Where the sovereign claims his authority directly as divine right, ruling by fiat, his absolutism becomes more flagrant. Obviously, those subject to such a ruler adopt a certain fatalism: some sense of inevitability and impotence regarding their own destinies. (While here we are basically discussing absolute monarchy, once the ruled in any polity, even a modern "democracy," feel helpless towards the authority of the ruling class, they become fatalistic about political power.) The sovereign ruler can decide what the ruled should do for him and what he will do for them. In such a setting the exercise of authority can border on naked power or at best take the form of a paternalistic and enlightened despotism, depending on how much the ruler(s) identify with the ruled.

History is full of instances when alien powers, seizing control of a territory and its population, exacted taxes and levied armies for their own aggrandizement, exploiting their subjects for their own ends, and remaining aloof from the social and economic affairs of the country as long as those affairs did not interfere with taxing and army-building, and their subjects remained submissive. Henry Sumner Maine called them "tax-taking empires,"[1] among which we can include certain episodes of Chinese and Indian kingdoms, the Persian empire, the early Norman rule in England, the Mongol rule from China to Russia, the Western colonial domination in Africa and Asia and, to some extent, the British rule in the American colonies before the revolution. Strictly speaking, these authority structures were not "of the people, by the people, and for the people." Whatever incidence they had on the social and economic life of their subjects was geared to the prosperity of the rulers and the metropolitan state. Where, as with the Normans in England, the rulers eventually came to identify with the conquered country, they became increasingly involved in its economic and social affairs, although their involvement was, in the context of this discussion, rather paternalistic.[2]

The alienation of the ruling class from the ruled may not necessarily be due to the alien origin of the rulers. The ruling class may emerge from within a society and at first closely identify with the ruled. However, by perpetuating their position while the society grows more heterogeneous, the rulers may begin to rule more for themselves and their own class than for "the people." The process broadly corresponds to the evolution of functional differentiations and affectional identifications discussed in Chapter Three. Some aristocratic rules follow this pattern. The German tribal electoral system of the times of Tacitus ended in absolute monarchies continuing into the nineteenth century.

By calling the authority pattern the ruling class, we should not fall under the illusion that class is usually monolithic, clear-cut and systematically identifiable. Rather, the authority pattern should beconceived in the context of the fermentations and dynamics of the socio-political flux. In that context different powers compete and compromise. Where they compromise, they implicitly or explicitly recognize certain activities as lying more within the domain of one and restrain themselves accordingly, as did (at times) the spiritual and temporal powers of church and state. Where they compete and conflict, they contest the exercise of certain activities by one or another power, as did (at other times) state and church in their spiritual and temporal claims. In their compromise and competition, while powers seek their own-welfare, they may eventually ignite consciousness of power potentials on the part of those over whom they exercise power, as was the case, for example, of the emergence of popular consciousness in Britain in the context of competition among the upper classes for control of Parliament.

In our examination of the evolution from consecration to constitutionalization we made some insinuations about the change in outlook towards the role and responsibilities of the authority in economic and social affairs: from what we qualified as fatalism, which is a more likely disposition in the consecration process, to what we may call concernment as we move to constitutionalization. "Concernment" connotes both involvement and concern on the part of both the authority and those who submit to it. It covers the responsibility of the government toward the people as well as the expectations of the people from the government which Bell has called "entitlement."[3]

As the legitimizing component of authority depended more and more on the interaction of powers within a complex, those powers, in their competition and compromise, demanded accountability and responsibility from the authority. This implied that the constituted authority would do certain things for those it governed and would be restrained in certain other domains. Those governed are, of course, those who, conscious of their power, participated in constitutionalization of the authority, and also those who were appealed to, flirted with or used as the powers involved competed and compromised--i.e, the mass of the population.

Once the principle of accountability and responsibility in government was established, the question of degrees arose. How much and to what sectors should the authority be accountable, and how much accountability could it demand of its subjects? To what extent was authority responsible for its subjects, and to what extent to its own interests? How closely related were the interests of ruler and subjects? And, indeed, what and how much should authority do or not do? These questions inspired and provided frameworks for modern political thoughts ranging from one extreme of anarchy to the other of totalitarianism, with various shades and combinations between.

II. Activism/Pacifism of Ruler and Ruled

Modern political thought developed, we must remember, not only as the direct result of the factors just emphasized, but in the context of the total environment of which the recently discussed factors were themselves manifestations. We should keep in mind, for example, the philosophical developments referred to in Chapter Seven, or the theories for explaining and organizing man in Chapter Nine. Following the thread of our inquiry, we may then say that in general, modern political philosophies on the nature and role of authority, in the light of economic developments, welfare, social justice and happiness, depended essentially on how different thinkers envisioned the nature of man. While consecration of authority was based on the nature of God, constitutionalization set up an authority whose nature and role was determined by the nature of those ("the people") who were its presumed legitimizers (its producers and consumers). Thus, the inquiry as to the nature of man by modern political thinkers reverts us to the human attributes covered in earlier chapters, notably, man's drives, inclinations and behavior in the context of social fermentations and dynamics.

Happiness and Freedom: Utilitarian, Liberal and Democratic

Concernment about political authority, as opposed to fatalism, implied the recognition of man's capacity to will and to reason, to be involved with government. It also suggested authority's concern about man's inclinations: Towards what and how were men inclined, and how was that--or should that be-reflected in their social interactions for the constitution of political authority? Erasmus, Comenius, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, to mention a few, had opened the way and given perspective to the study of man. There were different ways of looking at man; recall, for example, Helvetius' postulate that men were inclined to avoid pain and seek pleasure. Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) built his "principle of utility" on that postulate. Man's happiness, according to Bentham's utilitarianism, is commensurate with the degree pain can be avoided and pleasure achieved. "By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question."[4] By "every action whatsoever," Bentham adds, however, that he means "not only... every action of a private individual, but ...every measure of government," and continues further: "A measure of government ...may be said to be conformable to or dictated by the principle of utility, when the tendency which it has to augment the happiness of the community is greater than any it has to diminish it."[5] The political authority, using the principle of utility, should enact laws promoting the greatest happiness for the greatest number in the community. Of course, the political authority which engages in the arithmetic of felicity to produce this happiness should reflect the interests of "the people" and not be controlled by particular interests. Therefore, it should be a representative form of government wherein

the happiness of the individuals, of whom a community is composed, that is their pleasures and their security, is the end and the sole end which the legislator ought to have in view: the sole standard, in conformity to which each individual ought, as far as depends upon the legislator, to be 'made' to fashion his behavior.[6]

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) also recognized a representative form of government as most desirable for constitutionalizing political authority, but he did not consider it within the purview of political authority to take upon itself to measure and administer happiness for all. For Kant, the prerequisites for a civil state were freedom for every member of society as a human being; equality of each with all others as a subject; and independence of each member of a commonwealth as a citizen. Freedom implied the autonomy of an individual's will in pursuit of his happiness. In exercising that freedom in the social context, while no one should compel others to be happy according to his conception of their welfare, each in the exercise of his will should morally follow the categorical imperative, which implied that every individual should temper his will by reason so that social life might be possible.[7] Freedom would entail the right to act and its exercise would require the equality of the members of society as subjects before the law without regard to their possessions, whether material or mental superiority or hereditary prerogatives. Thus, the civil state would be "characterized by equality in the effects and counter-effects of freely willed actions which limit one another in accordance with the general law of freedom."[8]

While the members of society should have freedom of action under the law and be equal before the law, in order to participate in making the law they need to be independent (i.e., their own master), have some property (including any skill, trade, fine art or science) so that they serve no one but the commonwealth, and be free in their participation to formulate the general will.[9] Their legislation, in the light of the principle of freedom, should not prescribe ways to provide the members of society with happiness (which no one can prescribe for others) but to guarantee "every one his freedom within the law, so that each remains free to seek his happiness in whatever way he thinks best, so long as he does not violate the lawful freedom and rights of his fellow subjects at large."[10] These characteristics of a civil state could best be realized ultimately in "the only rightful constitution, that of a pure republic"--a representative system.[11]

However, in defining his "pure idea of the supreme head of state," Kant actually recognized three different forms of authority--the autocratic (rule by one person), aristocratic (rule of several persons of similar rank) or democratic (collective rule). Although Kant favored a representative republican form of government, he considered that, from the point of view of legitimacy, subjects owed obedience to the established legality of any of these forms. Envisaging the transition from one form to another (and ultimately to a representative republic) only through gradual reform, he absolutely prohibited violence for that purpose. For "all incitement of the subjects to violent expressions of discontent, all defiance which breaks out into rebellion, is the greatest and most punishable crime in a commonwealth, for it destroys its foundations."[12]

In Kant we find many factors which, in their complexities, combinations and contradictions, branch out in the nineteenth century to provide warp and woof for the diversified fabrics of modern political thought. For what was authority constituted? To provide general happiness, or to set up favorable conditions for the freedom of action of the members of society? If it were for happiness, Kant was right to question the postulate, for indeed one could ask: happiness according to whom? But the same question could be asked about freedom, which can be conceived differently by people with different interests. True, Kant conceived of freedom of action for all, but he made independence a condition for participating in the formulation of laws which defined freedom, and he qualified independence by (besides being adult and male) the possession of property, skill or trade, i.e., economic independence. In this he reflected the general pattern of bourgeois culture of the time. Only accountable and responsible people, in terms of economic independence, could create a responsible and accountable authority. It meant that the "propertied" could formulate the laws for the freedom of action of all, including the dispossessed. One consequence could be the perpetuation of the values (and interests) of the propertied bourgeoisie, especially where, as Kant advised, there should be no revolt against the established authority. Kant's theory held together as a whole under the assumption of the categorical imperative, that man be viewed as an end and not merely a means to be used by this or that will. Recently, Kantian concepts have inspired Rawls' theory of justice.[13]

The Kantian categorical imperative implied control of the will by reason on moral premises which, as noted in our discussion of norms in Chapter Six, was efficacious in a homogeneous social pattern. In the heterogeneous society, moral and ethical norms had to be supplemented by legal norms. In the exercise of their free will, men did not always act according to moral precepts for the common good. Injustices would be committed. Was that an adulteration of human nature, caused by social alienation, which could be remedied by a return to communal behavior? Or were injustices the realities of man's egoist nature, to be pragmatically recognized as the basic ingredients of social life, shaping and moving it along, and needing regulation by the political authority only in so far as the laws would create appropriate conditions for the free encounter and interaction of different egos in their search for "happiness"? We shall come to the former question of communal behavior later. As for the latter proposition, it brings us back to the fact that if legal norms were formulated by a political authority constituted by the propertied, then laws would be partial to the values and interests of the propertied. This political phenomenon emerged in our discussion of the historical evolution of legitimization. As our discussion evolved towards modern structures, the nature of the "propertied" shifted from predominantly aristocratic and clergy to bourgeois; and like earlier patterns the new propertied class, the bourgeoisie, wanted the political authority to make laws that provided freedom of action for the bourgeoisie but did not interfere with its sphere of power and control, i.e., free enterprise and industrial capitalism.

Earlier we mentioned the physiocrats and economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo who advocated the least intervention of political authority in economic affairs. The principle of laissez faire, laissez passer inspired liberal economies and political liberalism. The political authority reflecting the values of the capitalist bourgeoisie would concern itself with law and order at home, refrain from intervention in economic affairs, and maintain external security with a view to facilitating the expansion of the nation's free enterprise. That liberalism, however, was not altogether "democratic" because not all "the people," only the propertied adult males, could participate in the political process. In some instances, such as the Malthusian system, liberal economy would require the nonintervention of the political authority in the society's economic and social affairs to the detriment of large segments of the people, namely the dispossessed, who would be kept at the subsistence level and whose growth would be checked through famine-and disease. Pragmatically, this primitive liberalism recognized and accepted the realities of modern capitalist, competitive free enterprise. Its advocates advanced, along utilitarian lines, that in the long run, clashes and combinations of particular wills engaged in free enterprise for their well being, permitted each to actualize his economic potentials as best he could, and would produce the greatest possible happiness for the greatest possible number of people. This primitive liberalism was the basis of Spencer's social Darwinism, which inspired American political and economic practices. It did have a rationale of social justice: the survival of the fittest implied that each got what he deserved.[14]

We saw, however, that in the economic, political and social pulls and pushes, "the people" eventually became conscious of their power. By the turn of the nineteenth century, popular consciousness went along, both as cause and consequence, with the development of thoughts on democracy. In the context of liberal thoughts it evolved into democratic liberalism which, while upholding the principles of free enterprise largely free from governmental intervention, postulated that the choice of government should not be limited to the "propertied" but belonged to all adult citizens. (John Stuart Mill even included women.) The people could thus be represented in the legislative process, so that whether it was their happiness or freedom of action that the laws defined, they could help formulate them.

The question was whether the participation of "the people" in constituting a political authority dedicated to principles of liberal economy and not interfering with social and economic activities, was sufficient and efficient in reflecting the interests of the disadvantaged masses. The perennial question was whether providing the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people or, for that matter, the greatest amount of freedom of action for all through the principles of laissez faire, laissez passer, would not become lopsided. Even if free enterprise did produce a greater sum of happiness in the society (as compared to more controlled systems), would that sum of happiness not end up consisting of enormous and luxurious pleasures for a relatively few, leaving the masses in poverty? The alternative was that the greatest number be made relatively happy through a social policy for distributive justice. John Stuart Mill who, by modifying his earlier utilitarianism, had formulated the principles of democratic liberalism,[15] came to realize later that democracy in the sense of political representation alone was not enough; and he classified his school of thought "under the general designation of Socialists."[16]

The socialism Mill looked for was one he hoped would "unite the greatest individual liberty of action, with a common ownership in the raw material of the globe, and an equal participation of all in the benefits of combined labour."[17] He "saw clearly that to render any such social transformation either possible or desirable, an equivalent change of character must take place in the uncultivated herd who now compose the labouring masses and in the immense majority of their employers."[18] This change, he believed, could be achieved by education, habituation, and cultivation of the sentiments in a system of culture prolonged through successive generations. He therefore welcomed with interest "all socialistic experiments by select individuals (such as the Co-operative Societies)."[19] Mill juxtaposed this "socialism" with "that tyranny of society over the individual which most Socialistic systems are supposed to involve."[20]

Social Justice: Socialism and Anarchism, Utopian and Scientific

The socialistic systems to which Mill referred were mostly those advocated by the early nineteenth-century French socialist thinkers, notably the St. Simonian school which, Mill said, had opened his eyes to "the very limited and temporary value of the old political economy, which assumes private property and inheritance as indefeasible facts, and freedom of production and exchange as the dernier mot of social improvement."[21] Mill was influenced by the followers of Count Claude Henri de Saint Simon (1760-1825), whose ideas of social justice helped shape nineteenth century political thought. St. Simon emphasized the need for a union of society's moral, scientific and material dimensions. Christianity, cleansed of its perversions and restored to its original principle, namely, that men ought to regard each other as brothers, would guide intellectuals and industrialists -- who should hold the reins of political authority -- to improve the lot of the lower classes by providing work for all and seeing that all worked and were rewarded accordingly.[22]

St. Simon's thoughts were generally too broad and at times superficial to be practical. But his following left a great impact on modern political theories. In their brochure of October 1, 1830, responding to attacks in the French Chamber of Deputies accusing them of preaching community of goods and of women, St. Simonians declared that "they believe in the natural inequality of men"; therefore:

...they reject the system of community of property because it would be a manifest violation of the first of all the moral laws which they have received the mission to teach, and which requires that in the future each one should be ranked according to his capacity and be awarded according to his works.

But by virtue of this law, they call for the abolition of all privileges of birth, without exception, and consequently the destruction of inheritance, the greatest of these privileges, which today encompasses all the others, and whose effect is to leave to chance the distribution of social privileges among a small number of people who claim them, and to condemn the most numerous class to privation, to ignorance, to misery.

They demand that all the instruments of labor: land and capital, which at present constitute the scattered bases of private property, be exploited in common and hierarchically, in such a manner that each one's work corresponds to his capacity and his wealth to his labors.

They do not infringe on the constitution of property, except in so far as it provides the privilege of idleness for a few, permitting them to live off the work of others; and leaves to chance of birth the social ranking of individuals.[23]

They also recognized the equality of man and woman. Although St. Simonians were not very clear as to how public authority was to be organized, their ideas contained some of the germs of modern socialism.

There are, of course, many versions of socialism, depending on how each school of thought conceives of social justice and the role of the political authority in achieving it. But by and large socialism recognizes the existence of different individual potentials which should be encouraged to materialize in the social context--not solely for selfish interests whereby the individual could use his ability to exploit his fellow men, then perpetuate his advantages through heritage. Therefore, equal opportunity should be given to all, making men and women equal, and inheritance should be abolished or drastically limited. But the potentials of the individual should materialize because, in the spirit of social justice, "he who does not work, neither shall he eat," and each should contribute to the society according to his capacity and be rewarded according to his work. That implies the need to create appropriate jobs for all so that everyone's abilities can be fruitfully put to work, which in turn may call for social organization of work, production and distribution, i.e., public control and management of basic and major resources and means of production. Thus, to our question whether a popular representative government which did not interfere with free enterprise could secure social justice and the greatest happiness or freedom of action for the most people in general, the socialists' answer was negative. Two inverse questions, however, arise: does it have to be a popular representative government to initiate social distributive justice? and further, does it have to be the government at all? Could the government not be confined to "law and order," and social justice carried out by other segments of the society? In short, how closely are politics and economics related?

The public authority, of course, need not claim to be socialist to take socialist measures. When the nature of a given policy corresponds to socialist criteria of distributive justice it may be considered "socialistic," even if implemented by a government dedicated to a laissez faire, laissez passer economy and bourgeois principles. whose socialist action may be inspired by the ulterior motive of attenuating and neutralizing social discontent. An early example was Great Britain's Health and Morals of Apprentices Act of 1801 limiting the hiring age of pauper children to no less than nine and restricting their night work. Other instances included Bismarck's Sickness Insurance Law of 1883 in Germany, insuring the workers during illness, with expenses covered two-thirds by the employer and one-third by the worker, followed by the Accident Insurance Law of 1884 covering practically all wage earners at the expense of their employers, and the Old-Age and Invalidity Insurance Law of 1889 covered by employers, employees and the government. The governments which enacted these laws were far from being "socialist," and they were not "popular" representations either.

Looking back at our examples of early socialist ideas, we notice that both Mill (with his "socialist" tendencies) and the St. Simonians favored elitist arrangements rather than popular representative control. When Mill staunchly advocates proportional representation to secure the voice of the minority, he does so because "in no other way ...would Parliament be so certain of containing the very élite of the country."[24] He goes on to add:

The natural tendency of representative government, as of modern civilisation, is towards collective mediocrity: and this tendency is increased by all reductions and extensions of the franchise, their effort being to place the principal power in the hands of classes more and more below the highest level of instruction in the community. But though the superior intellects and characters will necessarily be outnumbered, it makes a great difference whether or not they are heard.[25]

Elsewhere Mill says:

Whenever it ceases to be true that mankind, as a rule, prefer themselves to others, and those nearest to them to those more remote, from that moment Communism is not only practicable, but the only defensible form of society; and will, when that time arrives, be assuredly carried into effect. For my own part, not believing in universal selfishness, I have no difficulty in admitting that Communism would even now be practicable among the élite of mankind, and may become so among the rest.[26]

In this, Mill is voicing the perennial concern of political thinkers from before Plato to after Lenin. As we noticed earlier, Lenin did realize that in a popular representative government the little man -- the worke -- could become more concerned about his own little kitty. So, in his practice of government, in order to promote socialism, he devised democratic centralism, i.e., a democracy wherein the elective process is controlled from top to bottom with, as Article 3 of the 1977 USSR Constitution affirms, "...binding nature of the decisions of higher bodies on lower." The Communist Party serves as the single leadership which shapes the government and public socialist policies. But are there not other possibilities? Are there not ways to initiate socialist programs in a society where the bourgeois philosophy of competitive free enterprise capitalism prevails? Let us look at some thoughts and attempts in this direction.

Some schools of thought, capitalizing -- selectively -- on man's positive attributes towards social justice, have conceived of initiating public action distinct from public political authority, believing that as their action reflects man's true inclinations toward social cooperation (temporarily adulterated by competition and private interests in the modern technological world), it will soon be embraced by the society at large and will modify the public political authority accordingly.

Robert Owen (1771-1858), the British philanthropist and self-made man, was one such socialist thinker. At the turn of the nineteenth century, as the young manager of the cotton mill in New Lanark, Scotland, applying his ideas of cooperative socialism, Owen transformed the inhumane and pathetic conditions prevailing in the mill and the town into a showcase of social justice visited by liberals and social reformers of the time. The filthy and vice-ridden New Lanark where five- to seven-year-old foundlings constituted over one-fourth of the labor force in the mill, working thirteen hours a day; where prostitution, drinking and thievery were rampant; and where the workers were enslaved by debt to the profiteering merchants, was turned in a few years of Owen's management into a peaceful community where child labor was replaced by free public schools, exploitive middlemen by cooperative stores, and law and order was maintained through communal participation. Owen, having gained international renown, began elaborating his social ideals for universal application. Influenced by his friend and associate Jeremy Bentham, he believed that happiness was the goal of society. If men actualized their wills to the detriment of their fellows, it was because their characters had been formed in the context of unfavorable social conditions and false beliefs. Otherwise, man's will was subordinate to his reason and could be properly developed through education and appropriate social organization of production and labor, increasing overall social wealth and securing perpetual employment of real utility to the nation. Owen's proposed solution for this end was the gradual transformation of society into cooperative communities, where in a combination of agriculture and industry small groups of up to two thousand would live and work together and share belongings. As the number of these communities increased they would join federations until they embraced the whole world, eventually making the present form of political authority obsolete.[27]

Owen's ideas were not well received in Great Britain, but in 1824 he arrived in the United States and invested his fortune to create a community according to his ideals at New Harmony, Indiana. It was a "society within a society" which, moved by Owenite enthusiasm, gathered some eight hundred people, among them some of the most distinguished minds and talents of the day. Members of the community received their necessities from the communal store; public education was free and children were clothed and boarded at community charge. Medicine was free and cultural life abundant.[28] Unfortunately, as Owen's son Robert Dale Owen noted, New Harmony was composed of "a heterogeneous collection of radicals, enthusiastic devotees to principle, honest latitudinarians and lazy theorists, with a sprinkling of unprincipled sharpers thrown in." Three years later, the Owenite utopia succombed under the pressure of social bourgeois realities.

Another attempt in the U. S. at creating a communal socialist society by public action distinct from the intervention of the constituted political authority was inspired by the ideas of the French thinker Charles Fourier (1772-1837). According to Fourier, man was by nature moved by a passional attraction which, if not adulterated by antisocial perversions, would bring men together in a communal spirit. To that end he conceived of a phalanx, a community of four hundred to two thousand people whose inhabitants would live in a large communal building. Groups would be organized for different tasks and individuals would be free to move from one group to another according to their inclinations. By appropriate education, conditioning and diversification of tasks, the members of the community would develop their passion for work and live in communal harmony. The community would no longer have conflicts and crimes nor waste its resources on soldiers, policemen and lawyers. As the system propagated itself in the world, political government would become redundant. The management of the affairs of the phalanx would devolve to an elective head called an unarch, and there would be a chief of world phalanxes called the omniarch. Fourier hoped some rich philanthropists would embrace his ideas and finance the initiation of his social projects, but it was not until after his death that his ideas began to be echoed in the United States.[29]

Albert Brisbane (1809-1890), after reading Fourier's Treatise on Domestic and Agricultural Association, had been so deeply impressed that in 1832 he had gone to Paris to study under Fourier's personal guidance. Later Brisbane organized Fourierist study groups in New York where he published his Social Destiny of Man (1840), developing and elaborating Fourier's system. Having succeeded in converting influential intellectuals such as Horace Greeley, editor of the New Yorker and later of the New York Tribune, Brisbane organized, inspired and initiated some 34 phalanxes involving some 8,000 people. The most famous was Brook Farm, for a time a cosmopolitan intellectual center. Unfortunately, like the Owenite venture, the Fourierist attempts at communal socialism were ephemeral, and in less than fifteen years one phalanx after another foundered.[30]

It is significant to note that in the first half of the nineteenth century actual experiments with communal socialism initiated outside the framework of political authority took place mostly in the United States. The total environment of the U. S. included the frontier spirit which still moved the country and kindled American adventurism. There was also the early American heritage of compacts, as well as the duality of federal and state governments making the pattern of political authority more fluid. These were the post-Jacksonian days of popular democracy; but also the days of economic crisis, overproduction on the one hand yet poverty and unemployment of the wage earners on the other. Further, those who initiated these experiments were, for the most part, influential intellectuals who could set themselves apart, carry their weight in the social context and "do their own thing." In these contexts, the valuational and economic crises were crucial. Commenting on these events, Sidney Lens notes:

Viewed in retrospect more than a century later, the utopian experiments of the 1840 's appear naive. But no drama can be understood outside its setting. This was a period of transition, from agrarian to an industrial society, in which all established values seemed to be falling apart. The concepts of brotherhood and community were being corrupted in unexpected ways. In this spiritual vacuum, what else was there to do but took for new forms of social organization?[31]

Europe had its attempts at communal socialism through public rather than political action at earlier times of valuational crises -- notably during the Reformation, when the Anabaptist movements, mostly in Germanic countries, established colonies with communal ownership of property and management of production. Some of these "societies within the society" such as the Hutterian colonies in the United States and Canada, still-survive.[32] As I have noted elsewhere, the survival of these communities may be attributed largely to their homogeneity of outlook, background and, above all, strong religious beliefs.[33]

Social class contours in nineteenth century Europe (as pointed out in Chapter Eight) were much sharper than in the U. S. And the political authority structures, as we have seen in our historical review, reflected those contours. There was little room for private socialist experiments, like those taking place in the United States, to change society. Political thinkers and activists in Europe had to concern themselves more directly with the topography of social classes and the role of the state in distributive justice.

Louis Blanc (1811-1882), the prominent French political figure, was among the political thinkers who believed that political authority should intervene to cure the social wrongs of competitive capitalism. To this end the state, by creating social workshops, should provide the workers the means of production and capital without interest. The management of the workshops, first appointed by the state, should later devolve to the workers. Louis Blanc believed that a system involving the workers in the management of production and elimination of capital interest would gradually eliminate private enterprise and cause a socialist state, "through a government friend of the people and issue of universal suffrage."[34] By his radical writings Blanc contributed to the ideas that ignited the French Revolution of 1848. Social, economic and political conditions were, of course, propitious for revolution: rampant corruption, a conservative and reactionary king and cabinet, accompanied by economic depression.

Louis Blanc led the radical wing of the republican government after the revolution and, engrossed by the armed control of Paris by the "proletariat," forced the conservatives and moderates in the government to accept work relief guarantees and establish national workshops. Those ideologically opposed to Louis Blanc accepted the program, however, as a means of neutralizing the radicals. The national workshops were but caricatures of Blanc's social workshops. After a few days of confusion in Paris caused by the inadequate organization of the national workshops, the minister of public works appointed Emile Thomas, who had obvious prejudice against the whole experiment, as director of the national workshops. As Thomas related later, the minister of public works, confided in him that "Mr. Louis Blanc preached the hate of the bosses to the workers; [and] that he stopped short of nothing but the replacement of all the entrepreneurs, businessmen and industrialists by the State..." The government let the experience be made "...because it would show to the workers themselves all the emptiness, and all the falseness of these inapplicable theories and make them realize the danger that it represents for them. Thus disillusioned in the future, their idolatry of Mr. Louis Blanc will crumble by itself."[35] Indeed, later events proved that the 1848 French Revolution was a consolidation of bourgeois capitalist values rather than a realization of radical socialism.

We have emphasized Blanc's political experience and the ill fate of his national workshops because it provides an appropriate point to turn to political thinkers who considered political authority--the state--not as a body which could be either bypassed or transformed by social action into an agent for social distributive justice, but as an obstacle and an aberration for such programs. This approach, too, had variations, depending on the conception of authority and human nature; but two broad characteristics of political authority could be discerned. One was the vision of political authority as distinct from the socio-economic current, superimposed upon it and exploiting it through taxation. The other was the recognition of political authority as the instrument by which the weightier part of the society, the ruling class, imposed its values and interests on the whole. While the two characteristics are interrelated, their distinction is important. With the first the political authority can be dissociated from the bourgeoisie, as did Proudhon, while with the second the bourgeoisie and the political authority are figured as concomitant, as Marx and Engels advised.

Developing on his concept of anarchy, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) wrote:

To be governed is to be, at each operation, at each transaction, at each movement, noted, registered, checked, tariffed, stamped, measured, assessed, rated, patented, licensed, authorized, commented on, admonished, prevented, reformed, redressed, corrected; it is, under the pretext of public utility and in the name of general interest, being enrolled, instituted, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, pressured, mystified, robbed, and then, at the slightest resistance, at the first word of complaint, redressed, fined, vilified, harrassed, persecuted, hustled, stunned, disarmed, garrotted, imprisoned, shot, raked, judged, condemned, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed, and to cap it all, played, fooled, outraged, dishonored.[36]

Proudhon was not a socialist. In many ways he was the idealist philosopher of the bourgeoisie. If in 1840 in his essay "What Is Property?" he had denounced property as theft, he was not referring to property earned by hard work, which represented labor value, but to exploitive property which returned not-worked-for income as interest, rent and profit. In that spirit he later acknowledged no more "the government of men by men, than the exploitation of men by men."[37]

Proudhon dedicated his General Idea of the Revolution to the bourgeoisie, which he praised for its past revolutionary spirit, but which he admonished and reprimanded for having lost its original virtues. These virtues were the positive aspects of the bourgeoisie, combining labor and matter into manufacturing, as did the medieval bourgeoisie before it was tantalized by capitalist easy windfalls of rent, interest and profit. Proudhon juxtaposed the bourgeoisie with the coercive political authority, against whose tyranny the bourgeoisie had many times arisen. He also placed the bourgeoisie in contradistinction to the unruly, reckless, disorganized and temperamental mob of the industrial era (notably the proletarian mob which controlled Paris during the 1848 revolution), whose labor force, freed from the negative exploitive aspects of capitalism, would correspond and combine with the virtuous bourgeoisie. Relying on man's ability to reason his will, Proudhon believed that it was possible to abolish the coercive institution of political authority and attain anarchism. He wrote:

Anarchism is, if I may say so, a form of government, where the constitution in which the public and private conscience is formed by the development of the science of law, is enough by itself to maintain order and the guarantee of all liberties, where, consequently, the principle of authority, the institution of police, means of prevention and repression, functionalism, taxes, etc., are reduced to their simplest expression; all the more reason, where the monarchical forms, high centralization, replaced by federative institutions and communal mores, disappear. When political life and domestic existence are identified; when by the solution of economic problems, social and individual interests are balanced and interdependent, it is obvious that all constraints having disappeared, we shall be in full liberty or anarchy. The social law is accomplished by itself, without surveillance, nor command, but by universal spontaneity.[38]

To attain gradually this goal of anarchy, Proudhon proposed a national bank of exchange which would freely put the workers' means of production at their disposal and issue them vouchers equal to the product of their labor, which they could then exchange for commodities. The bank would first be financed by taxation on property and progressive taxation of the salaries of government employees. As laborers would no longer need to pay for their means of production interest, rent and profit would eventually become obsolete, and government would be driven out of existence. Needless to say, Proudhon's plan had few followers. He was overconfident about the triumph of man's reason over his will. Proudhon's scheme, like those of Fourier, Owen and Blanc, depended on the proposition that once individuals, whether capitalist entrepreneurs or political powerholders, realized the wisdom of a plan which ultimately secured freedom and happiness for all, they would join it even though they would have to relinquish old privileges. Proudhon also overemphasized the "tax-taking" character of the political authority in opposition to the bourgeoisie, overshadowing the fact that the bourgeoisie had long ago become conscious of using the political authority structure to further its own interests. Later anarchists like Michael Alexandrovich Bakunin (1814-1876) and Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) recognized this fact, developed a "scientific" approach to anarchism and concluded that as the political authority upheld the capitalist bourgeoisie, that authority had to be eliminated, making the exploitive capitalist system crumble of itself without its political protector.[39]

To this later anarchist approach, as well as that of earlier socialists whom they classified as utopians, Marx and Engels opposed their scientific socialism. Bakunin's anarchism was not realistic, they maintained, because it held "that it is the state which has created capital, that the capitalist has his capital only by the grace of the state." Marx and Engels, on the contrary, said,

Do away with capital, the concentration of all means of production in the hands of the few, and the state will fall of itself. The difference is an essential one: Without a previous social revolution the abolition of the state is nonsense; the abolition of capital is precisely the social revolution and involves a change in the whole mode of production.[40]

As for the utopian socialists, their major shortcomings were, according to Marx and Engels, an inability to perceive clearly the emerging proletarian class struggle, reliance on their own absolute truths, reason and justice, dependence on the good will of the bourgeoisie and the upper classes to give up their privileges for social justice, and their failure to realize the nature of political authority--the state and its government--as an instrument of the ruling class.[41]

We covered some aspects of Marxist/Engelian communism in our discussion of ideology in Chapter Five. For our present discussion, let us briefly outline the scientific socialist (communist) approach to the role and nature of political authority by reviewing its answers to the few questions we posed earlier: Is there an alternative of public action to secure social justice without the intervention of political authority; when the government intervenes, does it necessarily promote social justice; and depending on the answers to these questions, who is to promote social justice? According to scientific socialism, as the political authority was the body in a bourgeois society used by the propertied and the capitalists to promote their own interests and privileges, public action to promote social justice was not likely to succeed because the political authority and the prevailing bourgeois values would hamper it. Reform will understandably be resisted by those whom the prevailing forms favor. Also, where the political authority intervened, it would ultimately have in view the interests of the bourgeoisie, i.e., the class from which it drew its authority. Consequently, those who could eventually further social justice were only those who would be its beneficiaries, the deprived masses of the proletariat. That could happen when industrial capitalism caused "unheard-of-development of productive forces, excess of supply over demand, over-production, glutting of markets, crisis every ten years, the vicious circle: excess here, of means of production and products--excess there, of laborers, without employment and without means of existence."[42] The class conflict thus becoming acute, proletarian class consciousness would be awakened and eventually result in the proletarian revolution.

The proletarian revolution was to bring the social, economic and political authority into the hands of the working class who would use it, through its dictatorship, to realize the classless society. The proletarian dictatorship would perforce be totalitarian, in that it should be all pervasive, not only economically, socially and politically, but also educationally and culturally (in short, ideologically) to undo bourgeois values and ideology and cause the political state to wither away. In its totalitarianism, it would embody the will and reason (the rationale) of the proletariat, with the ultimate goal of making that rationale the final and unique value of a monolithic communist ideology coinciding with the overall social organization. While Marx and Engels used this analysis to predict the coming proletarian revolution (which did not take place as they had foreseen), the importance of their analysis lies in its exposure of certain crucial characteristics of authority, namely, consciousness, dictatorship and totalitarianism.

Unlike their utopian predecessors, Marx and Engels revealed that for the power complexes within the social flux to participate effectively in controlling authority, they must first be conscious of power. This consciousness, as we have discussed, can involve the other ingredients of power inside or outside a given power complex. In other words, if one strain of the social flux became conscious of the power potentials of another, it may use them for its own ends, as the bourgeoisie did with the proletariat in the transitional period in Europe. It is also possible, and highly probable, that social strains relatively outside a potential power complex may catalyze that complex and render it conscious. Such would be the role of the intelligentsia in mobilizing proletarian consciousness in the Marxist-Leninist sense. The combination of the catalyst and the power potential will shape the emerging power complex, which in turn will contest, combine and compromise with other power complexes within its total environment. The communist movements in Russia, France, China and Cuba have each had a particular course and characteristics, with different doses of intelligentsia and popular class consciousness, and with different possibilities for carrying out its programs through revolution or reform. Indeed, in post-Stalin evolutions, many communist parties in Europe have dropped the concept of dictatorship of the proletariat and declared themselves constitutional players within bourgeois, free enterprise democracies. The change has been due not only to the negative impression left by the Stalinian cult of personality on the dictatorship of the proletariat, but also to the fact that European communist parties produced their own brand of theoreticians and did not want to be cowed into a proletarian revolution by the extreme radical intelligentsia, with whom they identified less than with the bourgeoisie.[43] Theirs will not be a dictatorship of the proletariat and the intelligentsia but of the technocrats and bureaucrats.

The general connotation of dictatorship is not, of course, the preserve of communism, confined to the eventuality of the proletarian revolution. It is in essence a basic characteristic of the power/authority pattern. Understandably, an authority pattern reflects the value system or the combination and compromise of value systems it upholds. In that sense, the laws and order (the norms) which authority imposes on the society dictate, so to speak, modes of behavior corresponding to those value systems. The more monolithic the value system which inspires an authority, the more obvious the "dictatorship" of that authority pattern. But even in the context of value system heterogeneity, depending on the degree of heterogeneity and the predominance of certain value systems, we can detect different degrees of "dictatorship." This explains, for example, why the U. S. imposes more limitations on "communist" inspired thoughts and activities than France, because the former identifies more closely with the laissez faire, laissez passer capitalist enterprise. It is this trait that John Stuart Mill feared as the tyranny of the majority.

Dictatorship remains coercive in so far as it imposes an order and mode of behavior without inculcating it in its subjects. To relieve itself of constant "dictation," the authority should eventually change the Weltansehauung of its subjects to the value system that inspires it. Marx and Engels advised total ideological conversion as the follow-up of the proletarian revolution and the goal of its dictatorship. This totalitarian approach, like the concept of dictatorship, is not peculiar to communist thought, but is a general feature of authority, with different degrees of application. Among the authority patterns which may least aspire to totalitarianism are some of the tax-taking empires. The schools of thought we have reviewed also show varying totalitarian implications where, in different schools, the individual's happiness and freedom of action are qualified by those of the community at large. Whether St. Simonians, Owenites or Fourierists, all have preconised the need for education, or rather reeducation, of the members of society to become unselfish and civil-minded, to control their wills by reason in the light of the teachings of each school, for the sake of ideal social organization.

Even laissez faire, laissez passer utilitarian liberalism, which advocates the least intervention of political authority, leaves room for totalitarian inclinations. When Bentham says that "each individual ought, as far as depends upon the legislator, to be 'made' to fashion his behavior," he is obviously talking about the action of the whole on the individual. And John Stuart Mill puts it more strongly by defining the

twofold division of the merit which any set of political institutions can possess. It consists partly of the degree in which they promote the general mental advancement of the community, including under that phrase advancement in intellect, in virtue, and in practical activity and efficiency; and partly of the degree of perfection with which they organise the moral, intellectual, and active worth already existing, so as to operate with the greatest effect on public affairs.[44]

Anarchism (in its ideological, not its popular connotation), advocates the nonexistence of authority altogether, envisioning a society where individuals, the ultimate power complexes, would reason their wills so that the overlapping areas of their powers (and interests) would be harmonious and they would not need external coercive authority. But at that extreme the whole should exert even greater totalitarian influence on individual behavior. Proudhon talks about "the constitution in which the public and private consciousness is formed by the development of the science of law." The science of law can be efficacious in harmonizing social relations only if every member of society understands it fully, and only when all private consciousness totally coincides with public consciousness. When we discussed the nature of authority we were careful to emphasize that by authority we meant understandings, laws, patterns of relationship and norms of conduct which regulated the interdependence, interpenetration and interaction of the power complexes in their areas of overlap. In other words, authority need not be an institution in the physical or even legal sense. Political and administrative bodies are only the more obvious aspects of authority, but moral and ethical norms can also constitute authority. Indeed, in the homogeneous communal pattern, as we pointed out, moral norms can suffice as efficacious authority. In advocating that pattern, anarchists and socialists, utopian and scientific, reflect the modern nostalgia for the communal paradise lost. They have hoped to replace political authority with a monolithic value system. But a monolithic value system is an authority pattern, and when efficacious it contains the whole of the community and imbues every member. It is a totality. It is totalitarian. A theocracy which, through their faith, regulates every aspect of life and inner thought of the members of society is totalitarian.

Statism

We must make a crucial distinction between two aspects of totalitarianism which have emerged, namely, control of the whole and control by the whole. The first is an all-pervasive political authority like the dictatorship of the proletariat; the second, a monolithic value system replacing political authority through moral and social pressure and conditioning. The former is used to achieve the latter, while the latter is achieved through communal integration. The narrower connotation of totalitarianism, as a term of political science, covers the totalitarian, all-pervasive authority as practiced by fascist or communist states. The integrational dimension of totalitarianism, however, is more potent because it serves as the valuational foundation on which a political authority justifies its totalitarianism and puts the whole above its parts. It is the basis on which totalitarian authorities have claimed the philosophies of Rousseau and Hegel. Indeed, Rousseau said,

the general will is always right and ever tends to the public advantage. But it does not follow that the deliberations of the people are always equally beyond question ....There is often considerable difference between the will of all and the general will. The latter is concerned only with the common interest, the former with interests that are partial, being itself but the sum of individual wills.[45]

Taken out of the context of Rousseau's philosophy, the affirmation of the general will can be used by a totalitarian state to disband dissenting groups and control the communications media.

The modern philosopher whose name is most associated with the idea of state is, of course, Hegel, whose philosophy stimulated many of the thinkers mentioned. His idealization of the state has been accorded great influence, at times rightly, at other times unjustly, in the realization of some of the totalitarian states of the twentieth century. In his dialectical analysis of becoming in man's realization of the ethical life, the Idea of Freedom and the attainment of objective self-consciousness, Hegel distinguishes three intertwined phases which culminate in the State:

1. The family, where through marriage the partners renounce their natural and individual personalities and "attain their substantive self-consciousness."[46] The family's personality is represented by its property and, more permanently, by its capital within the civil society and the state. Also, the manifestations of marriage as a union are the children, the embodiment of the parents' own substance. The family, through education and discipline, deters the children from "exercising a freedom still in the toils of nature" in order "to lift the universal [the state] into their consciousness and will." The children's education by the parents will equip them with the foundations of an ethical life and instill in them love, trust and obedience. But it will also raise the "children out of the instinctive, physical, level on which they are originally, to self-subsistence and freedom of personality and so to the level on which they have power to leave the natural unity of the family."[47] This will provide for the transition from the family into the civil society where the individual becomes conscious of his own particularity, "as a totality of wants and a mixture of caprice and physical necessity."

2. At the civil society stage of consciousness individuals in their capacity as burghers [bourgeois] act as private persons whose end is their own interest, and the universal [the state] acts as a means.[48] The civil society is both the battlefield of individual private interests and the social level of consciousness where men reciprocally relate to one another in their work and the satisfaction of their needs, and where "subjective self-seeking turns into a contribution to the satisfaction of the needs of everyone else."[49] This combination of self-interest and cooperation enhances the development of business and industry, as well as the expansion and diversification of production, in turn permitting the individual members of civil society to identify with certain sectors of economic and social activity which correspond to their particular skills and eventually join together into corporations. At the corporate stage, the individual gains a new level of consciousness because it is "recognized that he belongs to a whole which is itself an organ of the entire society, and that he is actively concerned in promoting the comparatively disinterested end of this whole."[50] While at the individual stage particular interests in civil society find the universal--the state-external to themselves, imposing its laws on them and regulating and mediating their mutual relations, at the corporate stage the corporation spirit is inwardly converted into state spirit, for it recognizes in the state the means of maintaining its ends.[51] Civil society thus passes over into the state, where it becomes intertwined with political officials and bureaucrats who already identify with the state. By this process the individual eventually becomes conscious of his integral being within the state.

3. The state should not be confused with civil society. If the specific end of state were laid down as

the security and protection of property and personal freedom, then the interest of the individuals as such becomes the ultimate end of their association, and it follows that membership of the state is something optional. But the state's relation to the individual is quite different from this. Since the state is [spirit]/mind objectified, it is only as one of its members that the individual himself has objectivity, genuine individuality, and an ethical life.[52]

The State in and by itself is the ethical whole, the actualization of freedom; and it is an absolute end of reason that freedom should be actual. The state is [spirit/mind] on earth and consciously realizing itself ....In considering freedom, the starting-point must be not individuality, the single self-consciousness, but only the essence of self-consciousness; for whether man knows it or not, this essence is externally realized as a self-subsistent power in which single individuals are only moments. The march of God in the world, that is what the state is. The basis of the state is the power of reason actualizing itself as will.[53]

Thus, in the constant process of becoming, the Idea of the State, all-encompassing and all-embodying, is the ultimate. It controls all and imbues all. It is total.

Hegel's philosophy, like others we have discussed, some of which he inspired, has a real and an ideal dimension, and takes one for the other. The family does "educate" the child but such education is not necessarily aimed at lifting the universal into the children's consciousness and will. Or, while the formation of corporations is a socio-economic reality, it is at least as apt to promote interest-group mentality as public-interest consciousness. As for the state, the particular interests which in civil society develop into corporations and find in the state the means of maintaining their particular ends, will more probably try to control the state rather than place themselves under its control.

* * *

While scrutiny of some nineteenth-century political thinkers has helped us appreciate the actual complexities of the age and the emergence of the bourgeoisie, we have noticed some difficulties in the realization of their ideals. As we have noted on several occasions, while ideas are induced by factors of the total environment, their ideals do not always correspond to actuality and their impact on the social flux is more or less latent. Remember, we said man's thoughts fly far and wide, where some dimensions can become overshadowed by others. Let us keep in mind the human realities we have tried to dissect throughout earlier chapters. To mention some: norms are devised by and for men; men submit not only to norms but can also be moved by anti-norms; value systems are prone to false-value deteriorations; the walls of conserver structures are in danger of adventurer erosion, while the bondless freedom of the adventurers is vulnerable to the security of conserver walls; within all this, ego makes sense in relation to alter who does not always do or let do as ego wants.

We do not mean to imply that political thinkers think in vain. Far from it. What they see and what they say make an imprint on society, and different thoughts in a heterogeneous context intermingle to emerge as particular phenomena in particular circumstances within the total environment. The ideas of St. Simonians inspired modern socialists and helped movements for the emancipation of women. Louis Blanc's ideas of guaranteed work developed into unemployment insurance and social security, and his idea of social workshops prefigured some of F. D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies. His ideas on self-management by workers are now largely implemented in Yugoslav factories. The ideas of Marx and Engels were, of course, instrumental in the emergence of the Soviet state in Russia, although it did not materialize according to their predictions nor follow their pattern. Today's multinational corporations, escaping political control, bear some resemblance to Proudhon's idea of autonomy from state impositions, while growing centralization of power in the machinery of the state in practically every country of the world is reminiscent of Hegelian thought. The apparent contradictions (between politically uncontrolled multinational corporations and growing state controls, for example) are due to the fact that the social flux follows no single prescribed blueprint, but its own fermentations and dynamics.

III. Towards a National Bourgeoisie

In the Western European model depicted earlier, bourgeois compromise with the traditional authority structures eventually produced the modern Western bourgeois culture, which not only diluted aristocratic and religious values but also absorbed much of radical and socialist ideologies. To a large extent, the mid-nineteenth century European revolutions served as catalysts for this process. The actual attempts by radical movements at social and political organization and control, such as the Paris Workshops of 1848 or the Commune of 1871, had shown that it was difficult to create any radical socialist or communist structures which did not reflect prevailing bourgeois political and economic realities.[54] Indeed, what they basically accomplished was to consolidate the national bases of the bourgeoisie. In Western political culture the process of production and distribution of wealth developed ideological conditions facilitating the conversion of the masses to bourgeois values. The Marxist social philosophy revealed the possible extreme developments of class differences and social injustices which could result from uncontrolled capitalist free enterprise. That philosophy awakened not only those who were to become victims of the system, but also those who would have been its temporary beneficiaries, only to be overthrown finally by the revolution of the proletariat, if Marx and Engels' predictions were to come true. Mill reveals the early concern and consciousness of the bourgeoisie:

I was not only as ardent as ever for democratic institutions, but earnestly hoped that Owenite, St. Simonian, and all other anti-property doctrines might spread widely among the poorer classes; not that I thought those doctrines true, or desired that they should be acted on, but in order that the higher classes might be made to see that they had more to fear from the poor when uneducated than when educated.[55]

A complex of social, economic and political factors was thus contributing to the compromise between capitalism and socialism. As the developments of the capitalist market economy soon revealed--whether at the stage of capitalism or imperialism--it simply was not the logic of a market economy nor the capitalist interest to keep the income of the great masses at the subsistence level; for while such a policy could produce cheap labor, it also robbed the capitalist of his market. Because the masses were the clients and consumers of capitalist production, the laborer's subsistence should include a margin of purchasing power to make the economy function: You cannot play poker with someone who has no money. As the economy developed and the technological means of production improved, the criteria for defining the subsistence level were modified to adjust the margin of the laborer's purchasing power to the new productive capacities of capitalist industry. While in the mid-nineteenth century most workers were limited to the slums and had no private transportation, in the third quarter of twentieth-century Europe and the United States a private home and a car or two (through loans and credit, bringing not only profit but also interest to the capitalists) became part of the purchasing power margin of the workers' subsistence level. These elevations and modifications of the subsistence level at the same time introduced the laborers to bourgeois values (property is prosperity, on credit or not), gradually converting the masses and widening the base of bourgeois culture.

We must note here that the continuation and overlapping of ritual and symbolic systems in areas of social evolution sometimes help the conversion of interests and values, making compromise possible. Thus, for example, while with the industrial revolution the bourgeoisie was rising, as long as aristocracy still managed to control, the newly prosperous bourgeoisie was mesmerized by the power and pride of aristocracy and was prepared to pay and behave so as to be bestowed with an aristocratic title. Similarly, the conversion of the proletariat to bourgeois values in the West succeeded to some extent because the proletarians, who under other circumstances might have been more adventurers and communal (having no property anyway), were conditioned to desire the bourgeois values of home, family and property.

At the same time, however, the working classes were becoming conscious of the exploitive character of the capitalist economy and the dangers of free enterprise which could, in the enthusiasm of profit-making, overproduce and then be forced to lay off, creating economic crises most detrimental to the masses at the subsistence level. The workers organized trade unions to secure guarantees against such hazards. The results were compromises and arrangements between labor and capital, mostly through the political structures, for social reforms covering such areas as unemployment insurance, health insurance, safety measures, working hours, working age limits and retirement.

These developments (the conversion of greater numbers of the working population to bourgeois values on one hand, and the capitalist concessions for social reform on the other) contributed to ever more overlapping interests of labor and capitalist powers, resulting in their contest--and cooperation--for organizing and legitimizing social and political authority. By the end of the nineteenth century, Engels was rescinding the earlier predictions he and Marx had made about the inevitability of a revolution. He wrote:

With this successful utilization of universal suffrage [by the German Socialist party between the 1860’s and 1890 's], an entirely new mode of proletarian struggle came into force, and this quickly developed further. It was found that the state institutions, in which the rule of the bourgeoisie is organized, offer still further opportunities for the working class to fight these very state institutions. They took part in elections to particular diets, to municipal councils and to industrial courts; they contested every post against the bourgeoisie in the occupation of which a sufficient part of the proletariat had its say. And so it happened that the bourgeoisie and the government came to be much more afraid of the legal than of the illegal action of the workers' party, of the results of elections than of those of rebellion.

For here, too, the conditions of the struggle had essentially changed. Rebellion in the old style, the street fight with barricades, which up to 1848 gave everywhere the final decision, was to a considerable extent obsolete.[56]

Nationalism

The new mode of proletarian struggle to which Engels referred, ballot-box competition with universal suffrage within the parliamentary form of government, implied the acceptance of the rules of the game--the electoral process --by the proletariat, and consequently the acceptance of the partners in the game--the bourgeois-capitalists and the authority structure that represented it--in which the proletariat was to have a share. How did this come about between classes with contradictory interests? The question seems to have been answered in the last few pages; it happened because the economic and social developments converted the working classes of Western Europe more and more to the bourgeois Weltanschauung. The question will become more pertinent, however, if we recall that the political entities which had come to be identified as sovereign states since the Reformation, and which eventually evolved through the struggle between the bourgeoisie and absolute monarchy into parliamentary governments which different social classes competed to control, were not themselves at first readily graspable concepts and entities with which all their inhabitants identified.

In medieval Europe, political realities for the mass of the people--the farmers, laborers and a great part of the bourgeoisie--consisted of the feudal entity (a manageable radius of identification for the common man) buttressed by the remote abstractions of temporal and spiritual authorities of the Holy Roman Empire represented, close at hand, by the prince and the church of the land (Landeskirche). When this structure broke down, practical political control moved from the close-knit feudal entity to the titulary king of the realm. At the same time the abstract premises of authority devolved from the remote, spiritual and temporal powers of the Holy Roman Empire to the sovereign king--as divine rights. Both the practical political control and the abstract premises of its legitimization thus converged onto the sovereign. The transfer did not take place smoothly and overnight. Some modern sovereign states such as Italy and Germany (the unification of the German confederation and Prussia under the German emperor) did not come into being until the nineteenth century. And those which did materialize earlier did not have their sovereignty recognized without contentions and challenges. The feudal aristocrats did not give up their rights voluntarily, nor did the Pope and the emperor. Some, however, such as England and France, started to form their political identities earlier than others--each under different circumstances, as we have seen.

The consolidation of sovereign states was, of course, concomitant with the consciousness of their ruling stratum as to the scope and nature of their realm. The king in the capital city and the growing bureaucracy that served him needed a clear vision of their population and territory and the contingent areas of their realm and those of other sovereigns--their frontiers both spatially and legally. Within the realm, however, segments of the population did not see the entity the king called his kingdom the same way he saw it. The traditional pattern of European culture was a mosaic of intermingling communities, each with its way of life, habits, dialects, symbols and traditions which, although surely distinct and becoming more so from one end of Europe to another, in many areas changed only gradually. Political frontiers of the emerging realms separating communities on the two sides did not always coincide with strict lines of cultural difference. The villagers, laborers and small merchants communicated and interacted across the borders in their common dialects with people of their own class and interests. Thus, despite the new political regroupings and divisions, a class and cultural identification cut across them. While the cultural identification was strong and was conditioned by religious differences in the aftermath of the Reformation, class identifications had untapped potentials.

There were then three patterns of interest to us. One was the communal identification of the population with a relatively short radius of strong affectional dimensions.[57] The second was class identification with potentials for a wider range, also involving an affectional dimension which could go beyond the frontiers of the sovereign states.[58] Finally, there were the sovereign states, imposing a more or less arbitrary (compared with the other two dimensions) line of separation -- a frontier -- across the map, and making the other two subject to fairly centralized political institutions. While the sovereigns who had carved themselves those political entities could see the purpose of the frontier line, could call the inhabitants "their people" (their nation) and the whole a state, their sovereign states as functional entities did not always carry the affectional and valuational dimensions needed to create a sense of oneness, involvement and identification among different people and classes.

The bourgeoisie and capitalist enterprise, as we saw earlier, thrived on these new larger entities and soon became conscious of the economic potentials of the sovereign states. The bourgeois attempts to share political authority were aimed at controlling these potentials. For the capitalist bourgeoisie, the political frontier of the state served as a frame within which the liberal economy operated and also as a base for broader free intercourse and exchange across frontiers. The political frontier became important for the bourgeois capitalist when, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, the overlapping of industrial and capitalist interests and competitions across the borders caused economic fluctuations and depressions, resulting in social and economic disasters within the country (the sovereign state). The political frontier could then protect (hence the economic term "protectionism") against the encroachments of economic competitors--that is, where the economy was not aggressive enough to bring the competition to the competitor's territory. The capitalist bourgeoisie would thus call on the government to build tariff walls to keep foreign trade from competing within the national frontiers and thus to safeguard the "national interests."

The economic factors which, both in their expansion and their depression, had developed "nationalistic" feelings among the ruling classes, the bourgeoisie and capitalist entrepreneurs, did not have altogether the same effects on the lower classes and the laborers who had not yet been assimilated and initiated into the national pattern. When the worker's social consciousness (as distinct from communal identification) could be aroused, he could still more or less identify with his class across the frontier. (That, of course, was not always the case, and the assumption that it was general led many radical internationalist movements to fail.) It was this characteristic that inspired the French National Convention of 1792, dominated by the radicals, to extend a helpful hand across the frontier to all who wanted to shake off the shackles of despotism. It was also to this class consciousness potential that Marx and Engels referred when they proclaimed in the Communist Manifesto that "the working men have no country. We cannot take away from them what they have not," concluding with the call, "Workingmen of the world, unite."

This broad class consciousness, however, as later events demonstrated, was not an affectional dimension corresponding to the functional realities of the lower-income working classes in the era of capitalist industrial development. When it came down to basic livelihood, the job-giver and the job-seeker were symbiotic--the reality of capitalist enterprise tied the worker and the capitalist together. There was a parallel symbiosis between the bourgeois capitalist and the ruling monarchy and bureaucracy which held the political structure together. Within these functional realities the affectional dimension of modern political cultures developed. This new affectional dimension was the nation.

The concept of nation was not new. It had roots in the traditional patterns. But-in that context it had strong affectional connotations and shrank into closely related groups with common ethnic, linguistic, racial and religious identities.[59] Otherwise "nation" was the appellation of vast spreads of people such as the Germans, French or Spanish, who did not, among themselves, feel a national political solidarity in the modern sense. Nationalism was the process by which the two dimensions came together, and a people's loose national identification was buttressed by close affectional feelings to develop a larger political entity: the nation-state

.

The functional grasp by the ruling class and the bourgeoisie of the new political structures was itself often concomitant with the development of affectional and valuational dimensions: For example, while the major incentive for the German Zollverein (customs union) between 1819 and 1844 was the bourgeois consideration of competitive commerce between the smaller German states, it was enhanced by nationalist sentiments which had been inspired by the French Revolution and awakened by the Napoleonic impositions.[60] These sentiments went beyond the functional and rational economic advantages of a customs union and were aroused by nonrational and affectional symbols and myths.

Let us not forget that this national consciousness was developing while the contest for control between the bourgeoisie and the more traditional ruling classes continued, thus giving a particular vitality to the process and sensitizing the larger masses. Parallel to that, while radical movements were being suppressed, whenever they surfaced, since their ideological messages were at times too abstract for the masses, they too, to some extent, used national unity as a slogan.[61] The complex of these factors, together with the industrial and technological developments and the growing impact of modern value-forming agencies of education, mass media and political parties, converged to make nation and nationalism the political myth of the modern age and the affectional dimension of sovereignty and statehood. And nationalism is indeed a myth.[62]

We call nationalism a myth because, first, it generally lacks the supernatural premises of a religious belief; and although at the origin its roots may be traced to the rationality of security and preservation, the more it becomes "nationalistic," the more it moves towards myth by the deformation of philosophic and historical facts (see Chapter Five). To be nationalistic is to interpret and understand the relationships between people and nations so as to favor one's own nation. Nationalism has at times--mostly modern times--been much more forceful than any belief or ideology. In the name of nationalism Christians have done most un-Christian deeds. And the Marxist and socialist ideologies could not prevent the workers from joining their national armies and fighting each other across the borders in World War I, partly because, as we said, they had played into nationalist hands. Jean Jaures, the French socialist leader, fell to the bullets of an assassin in 1914 as he returned to Paris from the conference on guerre à la guerre (war to war) where he preached international solidarity among the workers and encouraged general strikes to avert war among the nation-states. Years before he had said:

To break nations is to overturn sources of light ....It is to suppress centers of distinct and rapid action, leaving in their place the incoherent slowness of universal effort. Or rather, it is to suppress all liberty; because humanity, no longer in a position to condense its action within autonomous nations, will be asking for unity under a vast Asiatic despotism.[63]

Nationalism as an affectional dimension is grafted on the more primary values of patriotism with which it is easily confounded. Patriotism has a functional-affectional reality developing along the lines of belonging and identification--from pater to patria[64]: from father, family, home, clan, tribe and country to fatherland. This attachment to fatherland in its linear displacement is the transfer of loyalties from father to feudal prince and further to the sovereign. It is a relationship identifying the subject and the ruler tied together in an affectional bond supporting the functional purposes of preservation, security and survival. Historically, patriotism in the patriarchal and patrimonial sense could be illustrated by the feudal systems -- not only of Europe, but, if we use the term liberally, even those of the Bharata wars period of Aryan settlements in Northern India around the fourteenth century B.C., or the Chou period in China around the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. At that early stage, whatever the nonrational and affectional content of patriotism, its functional purpose was also apparent: the prince counted on his vassals for support in exchange for protection.

The patrimonial linkage faltered in Europe notably because in the process of expansions and retractions, gaining and losing territories, the rulers became more distant from their people, and came to identify with each other as a class different from their subjects, whom they used as means to play power politics. Consequently, the old down-to-earth patriotic belonging could no longer provide for a linear relationship between the ruler and the ruled regarding their common destiny. Their destinies did not always seem to coincide. Kings did not always behave like fathers to their people. The fiction of the vertical patriarchal line was no longer efficacious. Yet the state needed cohesion to permit the emerging bourgeoisie to flourish. Consequently, a horizontal pattern reflecting the bourgeois culture developed: that of community of origin--belonging to the same nation. Natus in Latin signifies birth, or arising--which in turn suggests belonging to the same race, language and culture--suggesting the uniqueness of a nation as distinct from others.[65] This implies the need to interpret historical and philosophic facts from a national perspective to enhance a nation's uniqueness. The more the process became ethnocentric, the more it contributed to national myth-building.

We discussed Fascism and National Socialism as acute cases of nationalism and national myth in Chapter Five. Many states which emerged after World War I promoted, in different degrees, nationalism and nationalistic myths for the cohesion of their countries. In each case the particular derivations from philosophy, faith, history, tradition or heroic epics were geared to national identity distinct from other nations. The Rumanians emphasize their Latin ancestry to distinguish themselves from their Irredentist neighbors whom, nevertheless, they wanted to incorporate into Greater Rumania.[66] The Poles easily proved their uniqueness as a nation with their own particular language, religion and culture between those of the Germans, the Swedes and the Russians, and their proud history which made them aspire to great power. Ataturk underlined the Turkish nature of his people to neutralize the Middle Eastern Arabic and Islamic cosmopolitanism and direct the country to Western modernism.[67] In Iran, the memory of the powerful Persian empire was revived and the Aryan origins of the people emphasized when Reza Shah encouraged the revival of the Zoroastrian traditions to curtail the Islamic grip which hampered his efforts for modernization.[68] In Hungary, nationalism was promoted not only for internal cohesion but for the revival of the glorious past, the revision of the treaty of Trianon and the return of St. Stephen's Carpathian realm.[69]

The Soviets also recognized the catalyzing potentials of nationalism. Especially during World War II when the chips were down, they filled their propaganda- mainly with "national" slogans to motivate the citizens in their struggle.[70] The need for nationalistic consciousness arose early in the life of the Soviet state when the free enterprise democracies, seeing the Soviet revolution as a threat, by overt invasion and covert actions and sympathies tried to crush that state.[71] If the Communist Manifesto exclaimed, "working men have no country," it also claimed that the proletariat should "constitute itself the nation," and that it was only when class antagonism within the nation vanished that hostility between nations would end.[72] In the meantime, the Soviets had to be nationally vigilant. The affirmation of Soviet nationalism over communal universalism came with Stalin's triumph over Trotsky and the latter's exile. Stalin led the party's policy toward his doctrine of "socialism in a single country," in contradistinction to Trotsky's international approach and the idea of "permanent revolution."[73] It was, of course, a question of policy orientation. The Soviet state, using ideology to consecrate its authority and emphasizing nationalism, notably by dramatizing Russian historical heroes and events, was also using the universalist tenets of communist ideology as a tool of its foreign policy by creating, through propaganda and collaboration with communist parties abroad, bases for sympathy, support and leverage in its international power politics.

Nationalism does not, of course, produce itself as a political formula simply by political action. The development of myth needs favorable conditions and deep-rooted traditional, folkloric and cultural patterns, cause and consequence of changing social, economic, philosophic or artistic developments. Consider music, for example. Wagner's music undeniably contributed to the national consciousness of the Germans; so did Borodin's for the Russians, Dvorak's for the Czechs and Sibelius' for the Finns.

While nationalism is a myth, it must be based on social and cultural realities to have a political effect. Somewhere at the popular base must be some common points of identification. The German people did have much in common; but nationalism ignited their consciousness of existing affectional potentials. The common characteristics of the German people were, of course, not eternal and absolute, but had developed under particular circumstances through the ages. Particular circumstances and common characteristics constitute the major components of the "formula" for nation-building, which, as a formula, may or may not work. In contemporary politics the question has been whether, for nation-building, a heavy emphasis on one of the major components, particular circumstances, cannot compensate for the other, common characteristics, where the latter are inadequate. If common interests do create common values (see Chapter Four) and modern value-forming agencies such as educational systems, mass media and political parties can indoctrinate and socialize (Chapter Seven), then probably nations can be built by making disparate people feel common interests in the context of a sovereign state, and by inculcating them with common values -- in other words, by creating favorable particular circumstances in the absence of common characteristics.

The proposition, however, as we have seen throughout, is not a simple matter of devising a mechanical system. For some time now, the twentieth-century "emerging nations" in the Third World have been growing conscious of their nationhood--or rather, their ruling classes are striving to develop such consciousness to replace the hitherto tribal, patriarchal and patrimonial loyalty patterns. The success of their efforts will depend on their particular characteristics, aptitudes and potentials for nation-building. The Arabs, the Kurds or the Croats may have particular "patriotic" feelings toward their own ethnic group rather than "nationalistic" feelings toward their respective national entities of Chad, Iraq or Yugoslavia. The bloody wars of Biafra and Bangladesh illustrate the problems faced by. new political entities made of disparate ethnic groups in their efforts to build nations in a hurry. As Rupert Emerson puts it, "An old recipe has it that, to make a rabbit pie, you must first catch a rabbit. By the same token, to engage in nation-building, you must first find the nation."[74] The point is, however, that in the modern world many newborn sovereign states have to bake a rabbit pie -- in a pressure cooker -- whether they have a rabbit or not.

The legacy of the colonial era and its aftermath of precipitated independence have imposed artificial frontiers sometimes dividing one tribal, ethnic or cultural area between different sovereign states, other times forcing different tribes, ethnic groups or cultures to cohabit. The situation may resemble that of the post-Reformation but only as a mirror image. In many ways it is the opposite of what happened in Western Europe. In Europe, as we saw, sovereignty as a legal concept was developed to justify the reality of states which were no longer effectively controlled by the emperor or the Pope and were already standing on their own in the sense that they could not be overrun and absorbed by other powers.[75] Many sovereign states were born in the twentieth century by the fiction, so to speak, of sovereignty and statehood. They were recognized because of a combination of the international ideological polarization of politico-military forces and its neutralizing consequences, the faltering military and political strength of the colonial and imperial powers, and a "nationalism" born from resentment of colonial rule. For awhile and to different degrees, the otherwise heterogeneous and often feuding ethnic groups within different colonial territories were united by anti-colonial sentiments, only to revert, in most cases, into feuding entities after their independence. Thus, the factors contributing to the birth of these sovereign states were, in many cases, negative. Of course, there were degrees and exceptions to this pattern. Where the bourgeoisie and intelligentsia had achieved some degree of national consciousness, the nation-state formula, emphasizing either socialist or free-enterprise economic patterns, did materialize. In some states such as Algeria, Tunisia or Vietnam nationalism created real consciousness of the concept of independence and a drive for sovereignty. As always, these facts should be considered in the context of the total environment, including the factors reviewed in our discussion of transitional cultures.

Sovereignty and statehood in their modern connotations developed in the context of Western culture. Not that the traditional societies of Asia, Africa and pre-Columbian America did not have political cultures, but as far as modern world order is concerned, the variations of Western political cultures are, broadly speaking, the accepted operative models. The United Nations, whose membership has become the endorsement of sovereignty and statehood for newly independent countries, is in spirit and structure a product of Western civilization.[76] The terms "nation," "sovereignty" and "state" in the Charter of the United Nations refer, by and large, to their development and understanding in the context of Western culture. They imply certain incongruities which the Western political cultures accommodated into their legal and political concepts, but which in the modern world context can create acute internal and external problems for the newly independent states.

At the internal level are, on the one hand, the principles of territorial integrity, political independence and exclusive domestic jurisdiction emanating from the concept of sovereignty and, on the other, the principle of self-determination of peoples, basically derived from the concept of nationhood. In the Western world, political cultures developed to render the fiction that the two concepts of sovereignty and nationality coincide and produce nation-states.[77] In the newly independent countries, however, there are often overt discrepancies between the two, causing internal frictions and conflicts because either the ruling bodies interpret the principle of exclusive domestic jurisdiction too broadly or the dissenting ethnic or other distinctive groups claim the right to self-determination too categorically. Again, the cases of Biafra and Bangladesh come to mind. But there are numerous other instances from Burma to Zaire.

The ruling bodies strive to create national consciousness and identity not only to dilute tribal and ethnic particularism within the country and maintain the political structure, but also to meet the challenge of external currents eroding that sovereignty. More specifically, these external currents are the two opposing international offspring of Western political cultures: ideological penetrations and multinational corporations. They remind us that non-Western efforts at nation-building are not taking place under the same global circumstances as did nationalism in Europe. In Europe, as we saw, nationalism was coincident with the growth of the bourgeoisie and the industrial revolution; and, as far as the world situation was concerned, it took place along with an aggressive European thrust to colonize. The newly independent and developing countries, by contrast, are trying to promote national consciousness to motivate the bourgeoisie and industrialize the country, while at the same time they are caught within the aggressive Western economic and political thrusts, which have evolved from the old, overtly nationalistic and imperialistic political, economic and military expansion into corporate and ideological universalism.

The two offspring of Western economic and political evolutions, the capitalist free enterprise democracies and the communist-inspired regimes, each in its own way, preach internationalism and resent militant nationalism which hampers their economic and ideological penetrations into each other's and other areas of the world.[78] Many newly independent countries view this new aspect of Western power as replacing the old, blatant political imperialism and endangering their sovereign integrity. They have tried to ward off this Western encroachment by awakening national consciousness. The task has not always been easy, requiring authoritarian attitudes and extensive indoctrination programs. Such measures are called for not only because economic underdevelopment does not always provide the combination of ruling stratum, bourgeoisie and lower class interaction which promoted nationalism in Western Europe during the nineteenth century, but also because the very presence of Western internationalism handicaps such an evolution. The overwhelming industrial and business potentials of the West attract the bourgeoisie of the developing economies beyond their national loyalties. A decade ago this hemorrhage was signaled out as "brain drain."[79] But more recently the trend is towards multinational corporations, basically controlled by Western capitalist nations and in control of supranational networks, absorbing more and more of the national economies and manpower of developing countries. Further, and partly as a reaction to the former trend, the lower classes and emerging working classes of the less developed countries are manipulated by a dissatisfied intelligentsia toward socialist and communist ideologies.

The coexistence of capitalist and communist patterns has, however, somewhat neutralized both. Together with other neutralizing factors at the international level, such as the nuclear stalemate between the big powers, this has permitted the ruling strata of the developing countries to exploit the fiction of sovereignty and carry out national policies limiting both capitalist and communist direct encroachments. Nevertheless, to develop their own economic, social and political structures along the path of the Western countries, they hardly escape the temptation to adopt national policies inspired by free enterprise or socialist and communist methods; thus they become sympathizers of and sometimes dependent on one or the other current.

Schematically speaking, nationalism as a political myth, influencing the authority structure within the states and their interaction with each other, should be complemented by the two broader international currents of multinational trade patterns and ideologies, with all the interests and class ramifications they imply. In the context of the total environment, these different dimensions combine and provide a variety of political cultures which, although categorizable according to certain criteria, are unique in the complexity of their total experience. Thus, for example, while both the United States and France presently maintain free-enterprise economies and parliamentary structures based on universal suffrage and competitive party systems, their political cultures differ. In the post-World War II period, the United States was more aggressive and liberal toward multinational corporations, but more defensive toward ideological penetrations. France, on the other hand, has been more cautious (to the extent that its partnership in the European Common Market permits) about the implantation of multinational corporations but more open to ideological penetrations. Each of these attitudes can be interpreted superficially as a reflection of self-confidence or vulnerability. They can, however, make sense only if analyzed and qualified in the context of the total environment and particular characteristics of each political culture, reflected in the evolution of their institutions.

Similarly, while developing economies and transitional cultures may share broad characteristics, they do present a variety of political patterns. For example, depending on the nature of their leadership and the extent (or lack) of a national base of support (and if it exists, whether it is controlled by any given social class), the ruling bodies of developing countries may either follow national policies more or less independent from contending international economic and ideological currents, or find it necessary to plug into those currents for their own livelihood. Here again it is difficult to draw clear lines. Together with the national bases of support and international affiliations, we should consider the intricate interplay of personalities, religious factors, military establishment, and other interests and interest groups.

All this leads to the relativity of political culture, implying, in the context of the total environment, that political culture may not be a simple and direct outgrowth of the broader cultural pattern within which it evolves, nor that it is always directly reflected in the political institutions operating within it. There is, of course, a process of adaptation among the three-total culture, political culture and political institutions--or rather, there should be if more or less harmonious political conditions are to prevail. But a society as a whole does not interact with its environment evenly, nor do its different dimensions and segments interact on equal terms among each other. For example, the newly independent countries were in most cases more directly exposed to western political culture as distinct from Western culture as a whole. This was reflected both in their pre-independence struggles and rhetoric for independence and in their post-independence social organization. Neither the pre-independence ideas of self-determination of the people, nor the post-independence Western style democratic institutions necessarily corresponded to their own cultural patterns. In most cases adjustments took place after independence, depending on the traditional, transitional or modern nature of the society. The conversion of most of African and Asian governments into authoritarian and military regimes, for example, is a case in point.

The discrepancy between the culture, the political culture and political institutions is in a way the crucial problem of politics. It is the difference between the popular understanding--or misunderstanding--of how a political complex works--or is supposed to work--and how it actually functions.

Figuratively, it is like the people in a democratic republic believing that grass-roots party caucuses put the representatives and finally the government in place, while in reality the process is manipulated by the party hacks or a plutocratic oligarchy. To complete the picture we may then convert the lags between culture, political culture and political institutions into the following: how the people believe their country is being run politically; whether they acquiesce; how the country is really being run; to what extent and how readily that reality eventually modifies and adjusts the people's understanding of the political process; and to what extent the people acquiesce to the political realities once aware of them. Variations in these paradigms relate to degrees of consciousness discussed earlier, which may cause different political cultures to evolve along the conformity/revolution or the consensus/ cleavage/dissent pattern developed in the last chapter. We thus return to the point of our departure at the beginning of this chapter.

We began by distinguishing between fatalism and concernment as attitudes towards political authority, both by those who exercise it and those who submit. Concernment in turn implied that to the extent the course of events is not left to fate, man and society rely on human will and reason for happiness and freedom of action. Happiness and freedom, it was observed, were relative terms. Man could strive for them individually or collectively. Depending on the alternatives, there could arise discrepancies between the share of happiness and freedom of different individuals, or distributive social justice could be provided, leveling off happiness, well-being and freedom, and insuring that each received his due--either according to his work or according to his needs. The first alternative inspired proponents of free enterprise liberal economy and capitalism; the second those of socialist and communist economies. Along with economic considerations, different approaches to the nature and role of the state developed, with the extremes of those who could envisage the eventual obsolescence and disappearance of political authority altogether when men became fully conscious of their social roles, and those who conceived of the state as the ideal embodiment of man's will and reason, the realization of his happiness and freedom.

Our review of the evolution of the modern Western world revealed, however, that in the actual dynamics and fermentations of its flux, the West begot what could best be defined as bourgeois nationalism. Our discussion in the last few pages seems to suggest current developments of Western bourgeois nationalism. In terms of its spread and influence into other cultures, while it has served as a model which other cultures have been forced to or have tried to adopt, its different and opposing variations have developed penetrating international currents of multinational corporate capitalism and communist ideology.

While we have considered these evolutions from economic, social and political points of view, we also have to keep in mind their enhancement by scientific and technological developments which may have far-reaching effects on bourgeois nationalist values. The growth of industrial productive capacity has both satisfied and increased material wants; social ambitions have been diversified and the pervasive advances of the mass media have rendered symbolic and valuational patterns more versatile in the inculcation of bourgeois and national values in the masses. But at the same time, science and technology, which both the free market economies and state capitalism have increasingly called to their services, are creating conditions and circumstances which may corrode bourgeois and nationalist values, without, as yet, providing clear alternatives. The masses are still brought up to "love" their country (whether under state capitalism or free enterprise), to create homes, bring up children, and inculcate them with ambitions and expectations of material gain and social advancement. But science and technology have produced means of transportation and communication which are creating new cosmopolitan upper classes ever more detached from exclusive national considerations.[80] The phenomenon is not altogether new. The aristocrats of the Austro-Hungarian empire spent their vacations on the Adriatic, the Russian aristocrats in France, Germany and Italy, and the American tycoons in England or the French Riviera. What is relatively new is the speed and ease of movement and communications in its combination with the development of multinational business. The new breed of multinational capitalist need not be constantly present at his "home" base, either physically or economically. He can place his factory where raw material is available or manpower is cheap, convert his cash into whatever currency is strongest, and choose legal residence where the income tax is lowest. At that level, not much "nationalism" is left. This new international capitalism can have repercussions on national political structures and policies, as did, for example, the attitude of some of the American oil companies during the Arab-Israeli war in 1973.

On the "home" front, scientific and technological breakthroughs like the pill are affecting such traditional bourgeois values as the status of women and the family. These factors should not necessarily suggest the downfall of the bourgeois value system as a whole, because bourgeois values are hard to replace. Bourgeoisie as a culture has had the singular versatility of turning what man for ages and in different cultures considered as vices and sins (but could not do away with because they were ingrained in him) into virtues. Greed and envy have turned into competitiveness; pride and anger into aggressiveness; lechery, gluttony and sloth, under different guises of the "good life," into consumption, and fame and fortune as signs of success. What we are witnessing in our time then is an evolution of bourgeois culture (not its demise) under the impact of the popularization of the products of modern science and technology. It is this evolution we should have in view as one of the major future currents of social fermentations and dynamics.

Our earlier discussion of man and his society led us into the all-encompassing total environment where culture emerged as man's general attribute, and within which our inquiry led us to political culture and its central theme, the legitimization of power into authority. Our analysis of how the nature of authority has evolved brought us to the national bourgeoisie as the prevailing value system of our times. As we are bringing the last touches to our canvas, we realize that in our journey we have found the socio-political complex more complex than only social and political. Its fabric is woven of human thread: man's values and symbols, his feelings, his thoughts, his stomach. Our canvas may have looked like abstract art at the outset, but it must make sense by now. Within it political institutions emerge as frames and structures. Their description will be of little use if, as we study them, we do not keep in mind the total environment, the culture and the political culture to which they are related. Presidency is a political institution, but it means little if not put in perspective. The presidency of the United States is not the same as that of France or Uganda. The presidency of Charles de Gaulle was not the same as that of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. Richard Nixon's concept of the presidency hardly resembled that of Thomas Jefferson, and the individual conceptions of presidency of the citizens of a country are not uniform either. Only by having an idea of the whole complex in which political institutions evolve can we make sense of them. By keeping that picture in mind we shall broadly outline the contours of political institutions in the remainder of this book.

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[1] Henry Summer Maine, Lectures on the Early History of Institutions (New York: Henry Holt, 1875), p. 384.

[2] For a discussion of some aspects of this topic in the Middle Ages see Rudolf Braun, "Taxation, Sociopolitical Structure, and State-Building: Great Britain and Brandenburg-Prussia," in Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 243-327.

[3] For a concise exposition of his idea see Daniel Bell, "The Revolution of Rising Entitlements," Fortune (April 1975).

[4] Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (London, 1789), Ch. 1.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., Ch. 3.

[7] Immanuel Kant, The Fundamentals of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Sec. 2; and his "On the Common Saying: 'This May be True in Theory, but it does not Apply in Practice"' (Theory and Practice, 1792), Sec. 2, in Kant's Political Writings (Cambridge: University Press, 1970), pp. 73-87.

[8] "Theory and Practice," p. 76.

[9] Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Part 2, Sec. 1.

[10] Kant, "Theory and Practice," p. 80.

[11] Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, Part 2, Sec. 1.

[12] Kant, "Theory and Practice," p. 81.

[13] See notably John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1971).

[14] For a discussion of Spencer's Theories from the point of view of social justice see David Miller, Social Justice (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), notably ch. 6.

[15] See notably his Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy (1844); and the first edition of his Principles of Political Economy (1848).

[16] John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (1873), ed. Harold J. Laski (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1924), pp. 195-196.

[17] Ibid., p. 196.

[18] Ibid., pp. 196-197.

[19] Ibid., p . 198 .

[20] Ibid., p. 196.

[21] Ibid . , p . 141.

[22] St. Simon formulated his ideas in a number of publications, notably his last work Nouveau Christianisme (New Christiantiy) published in 1825. See L'Oeuvre d'Henri de Saint Simon (Paris: Alcan, 1925).

[23] Louis Reyband, Etudes sur les Réformateurs Contemporains ou Socialistes Modernes (Paris: Guillaumin, 1840), pp. 89-90; trans. and summarized by Richard T. Ely, French and German Socialism in Modern Times (New York: Harper, 1883), pp. 70-71.

[24] John Stuart Mill, "Representative Government" (1861), in Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government (New York: Dutton, 1951), p. 356.

[25] Ibid., p. 357.

[26] Ibid., p. 280.

[27] See Owen's autobiography, Life of Robert Omen (1857).

[28] See George Browning Lockwood, The New Harmony Movement (New York: Appleton, 1905).

[29] Fourier's more important writings were Theory of the Four Movements and the General Destinies (1808), The New Industrial and Social World (1829), and Treatise on Domestic and Agricultural Association (1831).

[30] See notably Morris Hillquit, History of Socialism in the United States (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1910).

[31] Sidney Lens, Radicalism in America (New York: Crowell, 1969), p. 98.

[32] See notably Victor Peters, All Things Common: The Hutterian Way of Life (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota, 1965).

[33] A, Khoshkish, "Decision-Making Within a Communal Setting," International Review of Modern Sociology, 6:41-55 (Spring 1976).

[34] Louis Blanc, "Organisation du Travail," in J. A. R. Marriott, The French Revolution of 1848 in its Economic Aspects (Oxford: Clarendon, 1913), I, 270.

[35] E, Thomas, Ateliers Nationaux, p. 141-142.

[36] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Idée Générale de la Révolution au XIX Siècle (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1923), p. 344. For a slightly different translation see General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, as translated by John Beverly Robinson (London: Freedom Press, 1923), pp. 293-294.

[37] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Les Confessions d'un révolutionnaire, pour servir à l'histoire de la révolution de février (Paris: Marcel Riviere, 1929), p. 62.

[38] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Letter to X . . of August 20, 1864, in Correspondances de P. J. Proudhon (Paris: Lacrois, 1875), XIV, 32.

It is appropriate to note here that because the nonexistence of government is not likely to produce the ideal situation for the exercise of liberties and establishment of order and justice but rather cause disruption of social organization, anarchy has come to mean in popular language the collapse of governmental authority and disruption of security and social organization. This connotation has been further enhanced by the use of terrorism by anarchist militants to break governmental authority.

[39] See, for example, in G. P. Maximoff, ed., The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism (Glencoe, I11.: Free Press, 1953), p. 196; Errico Malatesta, Anarchy (London: Freedom Press, 1907); Peter Kropotkin, Modern Science and Anarchism (London: Freedom Press, 1912); and Miller, Social Justice, a discussion of Kropotkin's ideas of social justice.

[40] Engels' letter of Jan. 24, 1872, to Theodor Cuno in Karl Marx; and Friedrich Engels, Letters to Americans, 1848-1895 (New York:International Publishers, 1953).

[41] See notably Friedrich Engels, Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science (1878) and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880).

[42] Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, concluding summary.

[43] See Althusser, For Marx, pp. 236 ff; Carrillo, "Eurocomunismo" y Estado, Ch. 6; and Mark Porter, Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), Epilogue.

[44] Mill, "Representative Government," p. 262.

[45] Rousseau, The Social Contract, Bk. II, Sec. III.

[46] Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), p. 111.

[47] Ibid., pp. 117-118.

[48] Ibid., pp. 122-124.

[49] Ibid., p . 129 .

[50] Ibid., p. 153.

[51] Ibid., p. 189. The word "spirit" is the translation of the German "Geist," which in English can mean both "spirit" and "mind." We believe that "spirit," because of its transcendental connotations, better represents Hegel's use of "Geist." However, the mind behind the spirit should not be forgotten. Hegel's "spirit" has a rational dimension and does not cover ghosts.

[52] Ibid., p. 156.

[53] Ibid., p. 279.

[54] After the February, 1848, uprising in Paris, in the April elections for the National Assembly to draw up a new French constitution, the Left Wing, which under Louis Blanc advocated basic social and economic reforms, received less than a hundred seats, while the moderate Republicans received five hundred and the royalists of different tendencies about three hundred.

[55] Mill, Autobiography, p. 146.

[56] Friedrich Engel's 1895 introduction to Karl Marx's The Class Struggle in France, 2848-2850 (New York: International Publishers, 1935), pp. 21.

[57] Under the conditions of economic and social expansion, this could also imply regional and provincial identification on the basis of common geographical, ethnic, religious and cultural traits.

[58] This class identification, besides laborers and the bourgeoisie, included, of course, the aristocracy and ruling classes who often identified more with the sovereigns and ruling classes of other countries than with their own people.

[59] This is still prevalent and observable in some of the separatist movements in Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East and most of the developing areas, such as the Croate, Serb or Slavic nations in Yugoslavia or the Kurds in Iraq, Pashtun in Pakistan and many other cases of ethnic groups and minorities in Asia and Africa.

[60] In the aftermath of the French Revolution, Napoleon had imposed new and larger political structures under French hegemony on German principalities and kingdoms, such as the Confederation of the Rhine (1806) which, together with France's abuses of her power, helped make the German people conscious of their own nationhood.

[61] On the case of Germany, for example, see Hajo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany 1840-1945, New York, Knopf, 1969, p. 41.

[62] On nationalism see Carlton J. H. Hayes, Essays on Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1926); and his The Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism (New York: Smith, 1931); also his Nationalism: A Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1960); Rupert Emerson, From Empire to Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960); Edward H. Carr, Nationalism and After (London: Macmillan, 1945); and B. C. Shafer, Nationalism: Myth and Reality (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955).

[63] Jean Jaures, "Socialisme et Liberté," Revue de Paris, 6:504 (Dec. 1, 1898).

[64] Patēr in Greek and pater in Latin mean father. Patris in Greek means fatherland; patriarchy comes from the Greek meaning rule by the father as head of the familial community; and patrimony is the Latin equivalent for the passage of power and property through ancestry.

[65] See notably Carr, Nationalism and After, and Leonard W. Doob, Patriotism and Nationalism: Their Psychological Foundations (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1964).

[66] See notably Henry L. Roberts, Rumania: Political Problems of an Agrarian State (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1951).

[67] See notably Uriel Heyd, Foundations of Turkish Nationalism (London: Luzac-Harvill, 1950); and Ziya Gokalp Turkish Nationalism and Western Civilization trans. and ed. Niyazi Berkes (London: Allen and Unwin, 1959).

[68] See notably Richard W. Cottam, Nationalism in Iran (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1964).

[69] See notably C. A. Macartney, October Fifteenth: A History of Modern Hungary, 1929-2945 (Edinburgh: University Press, 1956-1957); also Thomas T. Hammond, "Nationalism and National Minorities in Eastern Europe," Journal of International Affairs, 20:9-31 (1966).

[70] See notably the quantitative analysis of the Soviet Communist party May Day slogans in Harold D. Lasswell et al., Language of Politics: Studies in Quantitative Semantics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968), pp. 243-244.

[71] Western hostilities toward the Soviet Union lasted until World War II and, we may add, thereafter. More specifically, however, we are referring here to the Allies' expeditions to fight in the Russian civil war (1918-1922) against the Bolsheviks.

[72] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, II, "Proletarians and Communists."

[73] See Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (New York: Doubleday, 1937); and his The Permanent Revolution (New York: Pioneer Press, 1931); also Arnold Toynbee, "Looking Back Fifty Years," in the Royal Institute of International Affairs' The Impact of Russian Revolution, 1917-7967 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967).

[74] Rupert Emerson, "Nation-Building in Africa," in Karl W. Deutsch and W. J. Folz eds., Nation Building (New York: Atherton, 1963), p. 95.

[75] If other powers could overrun them, they did so. Poland, for example, was partitioned between Austria, Prussia and Russia in the eighteenth century and totally disappeared as an independent state by 1815, not to re-emerge until after World War I.

[76] Without going far into the history of international organizations, we find the first direct antecedents of the U. N. in the Atlantic Charter of August, 1941, drawn up by Churchill and Roosevelt, to which the Declaration of the United Nations of January, 1942, subscribed. The Moscow Declaration of the Four Nations (U.S.S.R., United Kingdom, U.S.A. and China) referred to the 1942 agreement to propose "a general international organization based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states," which became the essential feature of the Dumbarton Oakes proposal of 1944. This proposal, supplemented by the Yalta agreement of 1945, drawn up by American, British and Russian heads of government and their experts, became the basis of the U. N. Charter. See notably Leland M. Goodrich and Edvard Hambro, Charter of the United Nations, Commentary and Documents, 3rd ed. (Boston: World Peace Foundation, 1969).

[77] However, there are still cases of demand for regional self-determination, such as those of Quebec in Canada, the Wallon and Flemish in Belgium or the Swiss Jura.

[78] See, for example, Harry Magdoff, "The Multinational Corporation and Development--A Contradiction?" in David E. Apter and Louis Wolf Goodman, The Multinational Corporation and Social Change (New York: Praeger, 1976).

[79] A. Khoshkish, "Intellectual Migration: A Sociological Approach to 'Brain Drain'," Journal of World History, 10:179-195 (1966).

[80] For a discussion of some aspects of the post-industrial culture see Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1977).