CLASSICAL SOCIAL THEORY:
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KENYON COLLEGE
TRELEAVEN HOUSE
FALL 2024
DESCRIPTION OF COURSE
This course examines the development of classical social theory in the 19th- and early 20th-century. In the first part, we will stress the philosophical
and intellectual foundations of classical theory in the works of Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant, and Hegel. We will examine how social theory integrated classical political science (law), modern philosophy, and historical political economy in the formation of a new discipline. Distinguishing itself from the other social
sciences of the time, classical sociology, for the most part, rejected the Enlightenment view of positivism and natural science as the foundation for social science as it
turned instead to German idealism, existentialism, and romanticism for guidance. It also rejected the Enlightenment view of liberal individualism and utilitarian economics,
and in the process united the ancient ideals of ethics, politics, and social justice (Aristotle) with the modern (neo-Kantian) concern for empirical and historical research.
The second part of the course will examine the classical analysis of the historical origins of Western society in the structures and culture of alienation (Marx),
rationalization (Weber), and anomie and division of labor (Durkheim). Of special interest will be the analysis of the early humanistic works of Marx, his ethical
and political writings and their relation to Greek philosophy, and his later critique of political economy; Weber's historical sociology, modern economic history, and his theories of Western religion and science and their relation to the development of capitalism; and, finally, the foundations of French Kantian social science in Durkheim's early works on suicide and law, and his later idealist sociology in his theory of primitive classifications, religion, and sociology of knowledge. At the methodological level, we will study the three different views of critical and ethical science in sociology: dialectical science and the method of immanent critique of Marx, interpretive science and the method of historical understanding and value relevance of Weber, and moral science and the method of functionalist and ethical analyses of Durkheim.
In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, classical sociology in Europe was an empirical and historical science that investigated the System, Structures, Functions, Culture, and Ideals of modern industrial society for the purpose of implementing the principles of ancient natural law. During this early period of development, sociology was viewed by Marx, Weber, and Durkheim as a practical or ethical science of social justice. Classical social theory rejected the Enlightenment view of realism and positivist science, materialism and market economics, and individualism and utilitarian morality -- that is, it rejected the Enlightenment view of rationality, science, economics, politics, and psychology. Instead, it returned to the classical world of ancient Greece (Griechensehnsucht) with its view of practical science, moral economy, political discourse, and social justice and to the modern Kantian view of human dignity, individual freedom, constructed objectivity, and interpretive science transformed by German idealism (Hegel and Schelling), existentialism (Schopenhauer and Nietzsche), and neo-Kantianism (Dilthey, Windelband, and Rickert). In this way early sociology was able to integrate social science, social critique, and social justice; it integrated philosophy, political economy, and history in a new theory of the structures, functions, culture, and development of modern industrial society.
In the nineteenth-century there was a renaissance of Greek philosophy in Germany, and Aristotle's Ethics, Politics, and Economics became so important to the key theorists of this period that they transformed his thought into their own -- they made Aristotle into a German intellectual. He became so embedded in the theoretical horizons and philosophical landscape of the German university that his name could now be legitimately spelled with an umlaut -- Aristötle. Into this world was born sociology as it became an ethical science blending together the classical horizons of the ethics/politics and practical reason of Aristötle with the epistemology and critique of pure reason of Kant. The end result was the creation of a new critical science that represented an imaginative synthesis of the Ancients and the Moderns -- Athens and Berlin. The sociology of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim may thus be expressed in the following form: Critical Science = Classical Greek Ethics + German Philosophy (Critique & Dialectic) + History + Political Economy.
REQUIRED READINGS (PROFESSOR'S EDITIONS)
J. Locke, Second Treatise of Government (The Library of Liberal Arts, 1960)
D. Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in The Empiricists (Dolphin Doubleday Books, 1961)
I. Kant, The Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals (The Library of Liberal Arts, 1949)
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (The Library of Liberal Arts, 1950)
K. Marx, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. by Lewis Feuer (Doubleday Anchor Books), 1959) and
Karl Marx Early Writings, trans. by T. B. Bottomore (McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1964)
M. Weber, Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. by Talcott Parsons (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958)
M. Weber, Religion of China trans. by Hans Gerth (The Free Press, 1968)
M. Weber, General Economic History, introduction by Ira Cohen (Transaction Books, 1981)
M. Weber, "On Objectivity in Social Science," in The Methodology of the Social Sciences (The Free Press, 1949)
R. Brubaker, The Limits of Rationality: An Essay on the Social
and Moral Thought of Max Weber (George Allen & Unwin, 1984)
E. Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans. by John Spaulding (The Free Press, 1966) and
The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. by Joseph Ward Swain (The Free Press, 1965)
RECOMMENDED READINGS
A. Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory
I. Zeitlin, Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory
G. E. McCarthy, Classical Horizons: The Origins of Sociology in Ancient Greece
COURSE REQUIREMENTS
There will be a mid-term and a final take-home examination. Questions will be given out about 2 weeks in advance. Class attendance is required, as is class participation. The goal of the course is to encourage students to become more involved in their own education and enlightenment. The final grade for the course will be the product of 1/3 mid-term, 1/3 final examination, and 1/3 class participation.
My office hours are Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 8:15 to 9:45 AM in Treleaven House, Room 202, 105 Brooklyn St. Appointments to see me at other times may be made during the day, or immediately before or after class. My email address is "McCarthy@Kenyon.edu."
PROFESSOR'S NOTES AND COURSE NARRATIVE OF THE MAJOR THEMES
(Page numbers refer to above mentioned editions in Required Readings)
WEEK LECTURE TOPICS
| 1. | Introduction | Overview of Required Readings and Direction of Course: The Classical and the Critical in Classical Social Theory |
| 2. | John Locke | The Second Treatise of Government, chapters 1-5, pp. 3-30 Early Liberalism and Conflict Between Natural Law and Natural Rights in the State of Nature Introductory Comments on the Fusion of Horizons and Dialogue of Traditions: It should be noted that at the beginning of this course on Classical Social Theory the readings may appear to be disjointed and initially unconnected. The actual relationships among the various authors will become much clearer by the second week on Marx. The key to unlocking the secrets of the classical social theorists is the recognition that they relied on various traditions and intellectual areas to articulate their ideas, including political theory (Locke), epistemology (Hume and Kant), and moral and ethical philosophy (Kant and Hegel). (1) Locke's theory of natural rights and natural law will be essential to the readings of the Paris Manuscripts and On the Jewish Question; (2) Hume's empiricism and skepticism will lead into Kant's transcendental epistemological and moral idealism and Marx's theory of critique and sociology of knowledge (base and superstructure); and (3) Kant's view of humanity in terms of rationality, dignity, autonomy, freedom, equality, and self-determination within a kingdom of ends becomes a central element in Marx's early theory of species-being and human emancipation. This fusion of traditions or horizons (Horizontverschmelzung) is characteristic of the German intellectual tradition in philosophy and sociology and is the foundational principle of this course on nineteenth-century social theory. Natural Rights, Possessive Individualism, and Property in the 'State of Nature': focus on Locke's theory of the state of nature, Natural Rights, personal liberty, private property, and possessive individualism (para. 4-6, 25-30, and 57); state of nature consists of Natural Law based on Old and New Testament Scripture, divine revelation, Christian traditions, and the rule of right or natural reason (laws of God and nature) and the natural rights to life, liberty, health, and property (material sustenance and common property for life, liberty, equality, perfect freedom, and human rights for all members of the community) (para. 6-7, 25, 34-35, 38-40, 57, 87, 136, and 190); common property (food, clothing, shelter, etc.) and private property (para. 25-29); natural rights are derived from the natural law created by God; labor theory of value and justification of private property (para. 27, 34, 39-40, and 43); and theory of the social contract: sovereignty, civil society, and government (para. 13-14, 85-90, 95-99, 123-131, and 138-142). Examine the connections between the judicious Richard Hooker, who revives Scholastic Thomism and the natural law tradition in England in the sixteenth century and Locke's political theory. Hooker is mentioned 16 times in the Second Treatise by Locke. Natural Law and the Ancients: ethical theory of Natural Law based on the principles of equality, mutual love and obligation, moral community, friendship and fellowship, human needs and dignity, duty and social responsibility, affection for others, social peace, natural justice, and charity (para. 5 and 15) and economic theory of natural law with its structural limitations of spoilage, labor, and sufficiency (para. 31, 32, 33, and 34); overcoming natural law and communal limits to natural rights, wealth accumulation, private property, and business capital (para. 46, 50, and 37); and defense of liberalism, money exchange and unlimited accumulation of property, market and commercial capitalism, wage labor, wealth, and class structure (para. 28, 36, 43-50, and 85-87). Natural Law and Natural Rights in the American Revolution: Historical footnote: The tension between the social values and moral community of Natural Law and the individualism and property rights of Natural Rights will be noted, especially as it plays out historically in the continuation of the natural law tradition in Baruch Spinoza, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel, and Karl Marx and the natural rights tradition among the physiocrats (Francois Quesnay, 1694�1774 and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, 1727�1781) and classical economists (Adam Smith, 1723-1790). This tension is also present in the foundational documents and debates of early American society with the split between the principles of moral self-determination, social and human rights, and universal moral laws of the Declaration of Independence among the eighteenth-century Dissenters like Richard Price, Joseph Priestly, John Wiles, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson and the values of private rights and the primacy of property in the United States Constitution among the Federalists like Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Adams. For more information on these issues, see Staughton Lynd, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism. Some have even argued that this tension between virtue and property already existed in Locke. In his theory of the state of nature in The Second Treatise of Government (1690), Locke emphasized rights and property, while in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) he emphasized the "pursuit of true and solid happiness" as the pursuit of moral and intellectual virtues. In the latter work, the pursuit of happiness is viewed as "the foundation of liberty" and the "perfection of intellectual nature." These differences reflect whether one reads Locke through the writings of Hobbes in the former case (Leo Strauss) or the writings of Aristotle in the latter case (Thomas Pangle, Harry Jaffa, and Michael Zuckert). Other scholars have argued instead that the concept of the "pursuit of happiness" did not come from Locke but rather came from George Mason (Virginia Declaration of Rights, 1776), Adam Ferguson (1767), Richard Cumberland (1727), Gottfried Leibniz (1693), or Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui (1763). The intellectual origins of the phrase remains an open question to this day. This split between Natural Law and Natural Rights, communalism and individualism, and democracy and capitalism is also articulated by Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed by Mayer, pp. 506-510 and vol. 1, chapt. 10 and vol. 2, chapter 20 (2 vols. 1835 and 1840) and Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart, pp. 28-44. Bellah writes: "that by releasing the untrammeled pursuit of wealth without regard to the demands of social justice, industrial capitalism was destroying the fabric of democratic society" (43). Nature and Natural Law: As the political world was shifting dramatically in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the revival of Aristotelian and Thomistic scholarship and late-scholasticism in England, Spain, and Italy (Hooker, Cardinal Bellarmine, and Francisco Suarez), the Aristotelian view of organic nature with its final causality and immanent teleology was being replaced by mathematics and scientific naturalism with its view of nature as dead, mechanical, and inert -- the world had no intrinsic meaning or ultimate goal. At the moment of Aristotelian rebirth in the areas of ethics, politics, and law throughout Europe, the physics and metaphysics of the ancients was being replaced by modern science. At the very moment that scholars were searching for ultimate purpose and moral order in nature for a justification of the newly evolving political constitutions and social contracts, all meaning was being removed from physical nature itself. Moral Economy or Market Economy?: The key questions remain: What becomes of liberalism -- its political ideals of rights, liberties, and property -- when natural rights and liberalism itself are no longer connected to God and natural law -- no longer tied to the ethical and economic restraints on capitalism? What is natural law; what is its purpose and role in Lockean political theory: Is it to restrain capitalism, justify and rationalize capitalism, or is its purpose to provide the very foundations of human life in the community? What happens to liberalism when it loses its ties to natural law, community, love, friendship, and common and household property? Does it survive; has it lost its ethical and theological foundations and justifications; has it lost its purpose in being? Has it become indifferent to ethics, inconsistent to logic, and destructive to politics? When its underlying ethical and political values are displaced by the market, is liberalism any longer a justifiable social system; is it reduced to a simple crass accumulation of wealth, power, property, and capital? Capital is a form of private property which produces profits, interest, and exploited labor acquired through banking, commerce, industry, and wage labor. How does one justify liberalism and capitalism given the inherent inconsistencies and incoherence of liberalism -- it needs natural law to justify itself but then rejects natural law in favor of a market economy without limits to capital accumulation and private property. Is liberalism consistent with Aristotelian ethics and politics, medieval Christianity, or modern Protestantism? Is liberalism consistent with any ethical system built upon natural law? Have class privileges replaced natural rights in the second state of nature and civil society (civil government or modern state)? Finally, what is the ultimate purpose and meaning of human life -- economic accumulation of property or building a moral economy and political community? Natural rights can only truly exist in a community based on the moral community, common property, limited personal or household property, and natural law. Rights to life, liberty, and security are real only when the material foundations of existence in the form of food, clothing, work, and health for all members of the community are satisfied by the ethical and economic conditions of natural law in the original state of nature. In the Second State of nature after the invention of money, banking, commerce, and wage labor (chrematistike), the natural law of ethics and economics (oikonomike) is gone and, ironically, so too are the natural rights themselves. Free and equal individuals of the Original State of Nature are now turned into wage laborers and "servants" of the master (para. 85), while the main purpose of civil society is the protection of private property and class power. Without natural law in the second state, there can be no natural rights; rights and law are logically bound together -- one cannot exist without the other. In the Second State of Nature, there is a loss of the natural rights to equality, freedom, liberty, and material sustenance and security, as well as a loss of natural law, the moral community, compassion, friendship, dignity, etc. The irony in Locke's thesis is that will the rise of banking, finance, commerce, and trade, there is a loss of liberalism of rights and an individualism of self in a world of competition, self-interest, market rationality, and exploitative labor and wage servantry. This is why the modern concepts of natural rights, individual freedom, and self-expression under capitalism are incoherent and contradictory. They simply make no sense, as Locke himself acknowledges, since they lead to a Hobbesian world of suspicion, conflict, class inequality, wage servitude, and worker exploitation. Natural Rights cannot exist in a market economy and capitalism. Inalienable rights require a moral economy to exist since the rights to life and liberty require the prior rights of material well-being and health -- prior and permanent access to food, clothing, shelter, health care, etc. Locke is generally hailed as the founder of democracy but, in fact, he is the founder of market or liberal democracy which exists without natural law or a moral economy. This form of democracy based on the majority rule, consent of the governed, separation of legislative and executive powers, and the right of revolution also presupposes a class system of wage labor, unlimited accumulation of wealth and private property, economic exploitation, political oppression, alienation, and debilitating loneliness and monadic isolation. These contradictions of liberalism are expressed clearly in Marx's distinction between political and human emancipation in On the Jewish Question of 1843 and his analysis of alienation in the Early Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts of 1844. (Examine in more detail.) The internal contradictions and tensions within liberalism between natural law and natural rights, communalism and individualism, common property and private property, moral economy and market economy, and the original state of nature (creative insights into the natural order and law: rationalism) and the second state of nature (reflections on the empirical reality of a self-interested, competitive, and Hobbesian market economy: empiricism) are presently playing out in American society in discussions and policy about class, inequality, health care, taxation, welfare, protection of the weakest members of society (children, elderly, sick and infirmed, and working poor), and the nature of democracy itself. We live in exciting times as the intellectual heritage of Locke's second state of nature -- Liberalism -- is seemingly running its course and running out of time. Is the American experiment coming to an end? Examine. Also with the negation of the original state of nature (Rationalism) -- Eternal Law, Natural Law, and the Community -- what role remains for religion in society in the future? Locke's work in The Second Treatise of Government is a perfect place to begin this course and analysis of Classical Social Theory because he frames his discussion of democracy, rights, freedom, etc. between the two forms of the state of nature -- socialism and communalism in the Original State of Nature (chapters 1-5) and capitalism and liberalism in the Second State of Nature and Civil Society (chapters 5-19). Summary of Beginnings: Dialectic of Contradictions and Inconsistencies: The first three weeks of classes in this course will detail the inner dynamic, tensions, and inconsistencies that were part of the development of the political theory, epistemology, and moral philosophy of Enlightenment rationality -- the conflicts between natural law and natural rights in Locke, between empiricism and constructivism in Hume, and between morality/individualism and ethics/communalism in Kant and Hegel. Classical Social Theory attempted to weave its way between Scylla and Charybdis to formulate a critical social theory and ethical political economy that was longing for the Ancients, grounded in the Moderns, and dreaming of future human possibilities. To accomplish these ideals, Marx developed a critical and dialectical science, Weber an historical and interpretive science, and Durkheim a neo-Kantian quantitative and constructivist science. These views of science were to be later retranslated by American sociologists into an empiricist and positivist view of science that misplaced the philosophical traditions (epistemology, methodology, and ethics) of the classical period. In turn, the connection of the Moderns to the Ancients was also severed. For a more developed analysis of Locke's Second Treatise of Government and the conflict between a moral economy and a market economy in the Original State of Nature and the Second State of Nature, see the summary of Locke in the introductory sociology course, Social Dreamers, Socy 102. Locke's Political Theory in the Seventeenth Century Frames Western Discourse into the Twenty-First Century: The dualism between conflicting political and economic values and institutions is a main characteristic of Locke's view of humanity and society. This dualism will provide the context for much of the debate about human nature and social ideals -- about the future of Western society between socialism and capitalism that was originally framed by Locke and his distinctions between the original state of nature and the second state of nature (social contract), moral economy and market or money economy, natural law and natural rights, common property and private property, communal freedom and possessive individualism, individual freedom and market free choice (consumption), community and individual, and communalism and capitalism. A serious argument can be made that Marx will combine Locke's Original State of Nature of Natural Law and Natural Rights with Aristotle's ethical and political views of Athenian democracy, the French Revolution, and the Paris Commune of 1871 to form his insights into democratic socialism. And the ideas and ideals of Locke's state of nature continue into the present as the question continues to be raised -- are the natural rights of humanity (liberalism) to life, liberty, material sustenance, and heath care grounded in medieval moral and theological principles and the natural law of Augustine, Aquinas, and Hooker (chapter 2) or are natural rights grounded in capitalism and a Hobbesian vision of a "war of all against all" (chapter 5) -- self-interest, market competition, and class inequality? Looking at Locke can take the reader to socialism and a moral economy or to capitalism and a market economy. Loc What tradition grounds human rights or what tradition should ground human rights? Locke took the path of capitalism as the foundation of human rights, whereas Marx took the path of democratic socialism. |
| 3. | David Hume | Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sections 1-5 and 12 Theory of Knowledge, Empiricism, and Radical Skepticism Epistemology From Empiricism to Skepticism: Structure and operations of the mind: Senses and impressions (Sect. 2), Reason, judgments and propositions (Sects. 3-4), and the Imagination, habit, and custom (Sects. 5-7); Hume's theory of perception (impressions), ideas, causality, objectivity (substance), and self (consciousness); investigation into the foundations of the Enlightenment, Science, and Objectivity; epistemology and empiricism, impressions, and perception (Sect. 2); critique of the logic and reasoning of rationalism and empiricism (Sect. 4); theory of perception and imagination (Sect. 5); and radical skepticism about the justifications and foundations of experience, nature, and science through reason and the senses: problematic existence of substances/objects/external world (sec. 12) and causality (Sects. 4-5). Neither senses nor reason can produce or justify objects; neither senses nor reason can produce objective reality or objective validity; and neither senses nor reason can produce or justify causality and science -- perception and science cannot be justified by either empiricism or rationalism. These are all products of the imagination. There is a skeptical disconnect between epistemology and science. Summary of the Essay on Human Understanding: Hume's central focus is on the Structure of the Mind (Section 1) and the Foundations of Knowledge and Science in experience and perception (Section 2), reason and the association and connection of ideas (Section 3), causality (Section 4) and substance and objectivity (Section 12). He begins is analysis with the Structure of the Mind in Experience, Reason, and Imagination -- Hume's THEORY OF PERCEPTION AND EXPERIENCE (impressions of objects and ideas of causality), REASON (association of ideas, time and space, causality, and science), and IMAGINATION (primary [figure, motion, solidity, etc.] and secondary qualities [touch, sight, smell, etc.], habit, and the creation of objectivity and causality). His goal is to outline the structures, contours, and limits of the mind in order to help define the various aspects of knowledge, experience, and science. Our goal in this course is to outline the contours of the mind in order to appreciate the limits of social theory in particular and social science in general. Summary of Hume's Theory of Knowledge: Hume's theory of Empiricism in Sects. 1-3 and his theory of Skepticism in Sects. 4, 5, and 12. In the first three sections Hume articulates and defends the foundations of empiricism and science in the Mind (sect. 1), Perception (sect. 2), and Reason (sect. 3); in the other three sections he skeptically undermines the foundations of the Enlightenment and science itself with an analysis of Causality (sect. 4), Skepticism (sect. 5), and Substance (sect. 12): Hume's Defense of Empiricism: Section 1: Structure and Operation of the Mind: Sensations, Understanding, and Imagination Section 2: Foundations of Experience in Perception: Origins and foundations of perception and ideas in sensations Section 3: Foundations of Reason and Ideas: Association of ideas: resemblance, contiguity, causality, cause and effect, and the principle of constant conjunction Hume's Critique of Empiricism: Section 4: Foundations of Science and Causality: Foundations of science in causality and its critique in empiricism and rationalism Section 5: Skepticism and the Crisis of the Enlightenment: Imagination, custom, and constructivism Section 12: Foundations of Science and Substance (Objectivity and Realism) and Epistemological Constructivism: no access to objective world because of the nature of representations and dilemma of double affection, cause and effects, and primary and secondary qualities. Perceptions are re-presentations of the world and causal relationships are the product of habit and custom. Neither Substance or Causality can be logically or empirically proven or justified. Perceptions are not mirrors of reality or objectivity, but instead are re-presentations of the world. Critique of substance and objectivity from the perspective of the senses (empiricism) and reason (rationalism). Sections 4 and 12 contain the critique of causality and substance (objects) at the epistemological foundation of modern science. The conclusion reached by Hume is that the objects and causality of science are a construct of the imagination and habit; they are a psychological predisposition of the human mind to see the world is this manner. Objective reality is created -- Representations: the sensations and images of perception provide us with representations only, not objects; Cause and Effect: cause and effect are imposed on reality but do not come to us through the senses; and Primary and Secondary Qualities: we perceive primary and secondary qualities of things but never the objects themself. Substance, Causality, and Imagination: Beginnings of the Crisis of Empiricism: This is Hume's critique of objectivity (substance and realism) and causality (science and predictive truth). The central importance of this analysis is the later development of Hume's ideas in the philosophy of Kant and Hegel -- Kant's theory of Consciousness, Perception, and Understanding of the physical and objective world and Hegel's theory of Society: (1) Self-Consciousness and the History of Cultural Traditions, (2) Reason and Morality, and (3) Spirit, Culture, Ethics, and Politics -- and its further development and expansion in later theories of sociology (sociology of knowledge, science, culture, political economy, and the social construction of reality). Imagination is replaced by social constructivism as the foundations of the Enlightenment begin to weaken. (Note: This issue will have enormous implications for the relationship among science, modern industrial society, and the crisis of the environment in the course Science and Society. Hume is providing the foundations for Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). Hume's essay can be further divided into two main philosophical parts: Sections 1-4 involve a defense of empiricism, realism, objectivism, and positivism and Sections 4, 5, and 12 offer an alternative epistemology in skepticism, a constitution theory of knowledge, and critique of positivism that anticipates some of Kant's later theory of knowledge, representations, and subjectivity. [Note: Beyond Kant, Hume's skepticism and theory of representations also provides the basis for Schopenhauer's existentialism and Nietzsche's nihilism.] Just as Locke drew upon two conflicting traditions of natural law and natural rights, Hume also drew upon two opposing traditions of empiricism and skepticism, realism and representations. Hume begins his examination of knowledge, perception, and the mind with his theory of impressions, reason, and cause and effect (1-4), his theory of imagination and habit (5), and his theory of substance, objectivity, representations, and causation (12) in order to develop his theory of science and skepticism -- his theory of Perception and Empiricism (1-4) and his theory of Imagination and Skepticism (4, 5, 7, and 12). Hume's critique of Empiricism and his theory of Perception and Skepticism are grounded in the following: (1) Theory of Representations: sensations, images, and perceptions are nothing but re-presentations to the human mind of the external objects, but not the objects themselves (2) Theory of Causality: the relationship between external objects and perceptions are based on the justification of causality which itself cannot be justified -- their is no logical connection between the objects of perception and perception itself and (3)Theory of Primary and Secondary Qualities: just as all secondary qualities and characteristics of objects (hard, soft, hot, cold, white, black, etc.) are secondary qualities produced by the mind, so too are the primary qualities of extension, shape, and solidity. Hume's skepticism about the mind reflecting objective, external reality is based on his theory of representations, causality, and primary/secondary qualities. (Note: his skepticism had almost been forgotten in Western philosophy that sought to defend empiricism and positivism. Hume's theory of skepticism, imagination, and constructivism was certainly important to Kant who was awaken from "dogmatic slumber" and later to Karl Popper's theory of critical rationalism.) Hume's conclusion is that science, objectivity, and representations are a product of the human imagination -- they are created constructions. There is no perception of objects (1), no perception of causes (4), and no perception of the idea of substance (5) -- perception constructs the primary and secondary qualities -- subjective qualities. Enlightenment science itself is built upon a foundation of epistemological inconsistencies and contradictions, and their suppression. Like Locke, Hume never develops the implications of his own ideas -- about the mental geography and construction of objective reality. There is no impression of objects (perception) or causality (science). This will be left to Kant and Hegel to develop. Hume's analysis of mental geography and his skepticism call into question the very foundations of science by questioning the fundamental principles of the Enlightenment: Realism, Causality, Objectivity, and Science -- the epistemology of both Empiricism and Rationalism (Locke and Descartes). And it will be upon this epistemological and methodological foundation of cognitive constructivism -- transcendental subjectivity and Objective/Absolute Spirit -- that Classical Social Theory will be built. Foundations of natural and social sciences do not lie in experience. What is experience; what is reason; and what is the mind? London bridges and Enlightenment science come crashing down. Why? Hume, Enlightenment, and Positivism: Hume has been referred to by some as "the real father of positivist philosophy" (Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, p. 18 and Kolakowski, The Alienation of Reason, p. 31) and main defender of Enlightenment epistemology with his defense of empiricism (knowledge based on perception and empirical facts), objectivism (existence of external and autonomous world of objects/substances), realism (copy theory of knowledge -- perception and mind reflect objective reality), and naturalism (defense of scientific method as only way to truth) in sections 1-4 of this book. Realism, objectivism, and naturalism will later become the methodological foundation of sociological positivism with its views of objectivity, ethical neutrality, cognitive distance, and separation of the subject and object, knower and known. Positivism develops out of the Enlightenment branches of Empiricism and Rationalism. Both schools of nomothetic thought are based on a copy theory of objective reality whether it is achieved through the impressions, sensations, and inductive reasoning or through ideas, reflection, mathematics, and deductive reasoning. Positivism assumes the use of the scientific method (naturalism) to obtain a mirror reflection (realism) of the true, external reality (objectivism) through perception (empiricism) and ideas (rationalism). [There are a number of other historical branches of positivism from the Enlightenment to the late nineteenth century in the fields of epistemology, philosophy, science, economics, and politics that include the works of Francis Bacon, Henri de Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer, and the later Logical Positivism of the Vienna Circle in the twentieth century in the writings of Ernst Mach, Rudolph Carnap, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.] Constructed Objectivity and the Imagination: On the other hand, Hume's skepticism in sections 4, 5, and 12 opens questions as to the epistemological and methodological foundations of science and by implication opens questions about the nature of classical sociology. What are the relationships among epistemology, methodology, and social theory -- metatheory and theory? Hume's theory of objectivity (existence of an external, autonomous world of objects and things) requires the action of the imagination -- the world we perceive, experience, and understand is a constructed universe: for Hume, it is constructed by the imagination; for Kant, it is constructed by the transcendental subjectivity; and, for Hegel, it is constructed by the evolution of self-consciousness and the historical and phenomenal Spirit in Aristotle and the Greek polis, Jesus and the Spirit of Christianity, the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, and Kant's moral philosophy (R. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel, (Oxford UP, 1983: Chapter 9, pp. 482-490). It is a short theoretical jump from this philosophical notion of constructed experience and thought to the idea that the world itself is a social construct. What are the implications of this idea? Note: it will be this theory of the imagination and skepticism which will help precipitate the rise of German Idealism and classical social theory. Empiricism, Skepticism, and the "Metaphysics of Science": Hume's skepticism is a prelude to Kant's critique of pure reason and epistemology of subjective constructivism. A major result of his epistemological skepticism is the rejection of the foundations and metaphysics of modern science: realism (copy theory of knowledge), naturalism (causality in science), and objectivism (substance of external world) -- none of which can be logically justified by reason or experience, but only through the workings of the imagination. The foundations of the Enlightenment and Western science rest on less than solid grounds. In the late 1950s, C. Wright Mills in his Sociological Imagination will rely on Hume to reject the normative assumptions of both the epistemology (theory of knowledge) and methodology (theory of science) of American social science. He concludes his analysis of "abstracted empiricism" by arguing that, because of the metaphysical and normative limits to the types of questions raised by sociologists, Methods define, delineate, and create the appropriate Objects of study, Logic of inquiry, and Theory of society (pp. 56-57). The empiricism of knowledge and science constitute the Methods of social research, while, in turn, Methods create Theory based on the immediacy of attitudes, opinions, beliefs, and behavior (psychologism) (pp. 61 and 68). Hume's skepticism is also a prelude to a sociology of knowledge and political ideology (distorted reason and consciousness). The world we see with our body and mind, perception and reason, is a world that society (Marx's political economy and Parsons's and Habermas's System and Lifeworld) constructs from its institutions, culture, and consciousness. American Social Science as Methodological Reductionism and Political Ideology: The Metaphysics of Liberalism A social question or particular sociological problem is raised, an appropriate method is chosen, and theory is systematically constructed. According to Mills, the discipline has become a thin measurement of the immediate appearances, public opinions, consciousness formation, and the status quo. Sociology has been weakened by its tradition of methodological reductionism to "the organic metaphysics of liberal practicality" -- it contains a "bias toward scattered studies, toward factual surveys, and the accompanying dogma of a pluralistic confusion of causes." Sociology produces results that are useful for producing piecemeal reforms and narrow technical and specialized knowledge for running bureaucracies (pp. 85-86). Because of the limited range of its theories of knowledge and science due to its underlying "metaphysics of science," sociology can no longer raise the important social questions that lie buried deep beneath the surface phenomena; the central questions are no longer methodologically legitimate; and, according to Mills, sociology has become a discipline of "functional rationality," "propaganda," "adjustment," "conformity," and "ideology" (pp. 68, 80, 90, and 92). The "metaphysics of science" thus has a broad meaning and refers not only to underlying normative assumptions of knowledge and science of the Enlightenment and the limits placed on the questions science can ask, but also refers to the technical, political, and ethical assumptions of science that generally go unexamined. Epistemology and sociology are curiously blended together here. Empiricism as the Alienation and Repression of Reason: The Turn to Classical Social Theory Using Critical, Archaeological Hermeneutics: The discipline of sociology in the twentieth century has lost the ability to raise critical and ethical questions about society itself, its deep structures and systematic functions, causal relationships, political economy, social pathologies, macro social history, cultural hermeneutics and critical interpretation of meaning, and depth-hermeneutics and psychoanalysis. Sociology has lost the very Methods and questions commonly raised within its own classical tradition. It has lost Theory itself which has now been reduced to a mere collection, categorization, systematization, coordination, and summary of empirical data; theory has also been replaced by simple reflection on the actual methods used in social research. In other instances, theory has been reduced to empirical and textual content-analysis -- the reading of a text without history, theoretical and philosophical context, or knowledge of the buried classical and ancient traditions which provide the written text with subtlety, meaning, and intellectual depth. To uncover these lost and hidden meanings and traditions would require an archaeological hermeneutics -- uncovering the historical, critical, and philosophical framework of the text itself buried beneath of collected debris of centuries of social and intellectual history. Thus the central focus of this course represents a Return and Remembrance of the past traditions: Is there a way out of this dilemma where Methods are studied along with their underlying Metaphysics in order that sociology is not reduced to a measurement of appearances and political ideology; what are the new Methods to be taught in American sociology; what then becomes of the relationship between Theory and Methods; and, finally, and perhaps most importantly of all, can Theory be revived in American sociology? Hume's Critical Empiricism and Skepticism Anticipates Kant: Epistemology from Empiricism to Critical Theory: Hume begins his essay with a vigorous attempt to articulate and defend empiricism that all knowledge must be based on factual evidence and that ideas reflect empirical reality. However, after careful consideration of the act of perception itself, he was forced to conclude that there is no empirical or rational justification for the existence of concrete objects, causality, or the self. In Chapter 12, Hume argues that through the senses we see, hear, feel, and smell the physical characteristics, empirical perceptions, particular qualities, accidents, and appearances of the phenomenal world, but we do not perceive the substance, objects themselves, universals, or matter that underlie the various perceptions. Through the senses in perception, we see the lines or accidents (///|\\\) of the object, but not the object (O) itself or any objective reality. Perception gives us access to the sensations, but not to the idea of the object within which the perceptions reside. There is no direct sensation or perception of the object itself (O). We have knowledge not of the object itself but only of the perception or impression of the object (The Empiricists, Dolphin Books, Doubleday, 1961: 419-420). Hume then asks: If there is no perception of an object, then from where does the idea of the object -- substance, matter, or thing -- come? For Hume, it comes from habit and psychological predisposition to see objects as the focus of impressions, whereas for Kant it comes from the synthetic unity of consciousness (Robert Paul Wolfe, "A Reconstruction of the Argument of the Synthetic Deduction," in Kant, ed. by R. P. Wolff, pp. 99-100). For Hume, the imagination constructs objective reality; for Kant it is the mind. With the development of sociology, the imagination and mind become culture, self-consciousness, and history (Hegel), political economy (Marx), society (Berger and Luckmann), and language (Whorf and Sapir).
O |
| 4. | Immanuel Kant | The Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals,
second section, pp. 24-62 Moral Philosophy and the Critique of Practical Reason Critique of Moral Reason: Kant's critique of moral empiricism and utilitarianism (pp. 26-27, 35, and 43-45), critique of moral rationalism (5 and 28), and the categorical imperative or moral duty (5-6 and 31-34). Human beings have an inner dignity and self-worth because they are rational creators of their own natural law and moral principles. Objective moral laws are the product of subjective (universal and necessary) practical reason and the categorical imperative. Forms and Principles of Practical Reason: The basis for all moral action lies in the following principles to which all moral action, duty, and imperatives must conform: (1) Universalism, universal law, and principle of non-contradiction (38-41); (2) Human Dignity and humanity as an end in itself (46-47); (3) Moral Sovereignty, self-legislation, and practical will as sovereign lawgiver (48-50); (4) Kingdom of Ends (50-53); and (5) Moral Autonomy and human dignity (54-58). Natural law becomes an expression of the critical reason of the a priori and universal categorical imperative and not that of God, Nature, the Church, or the State. Human beings are viewed as moral sovereigns, divine creators, and free beings in their actions and practical reason within a kingdom of ends. Distinguish between hypothetical imperative (particular, utility, and happiness) and categorical imperative (logic and reason). The principles that underlie Kant's theory of practical reason and the universal maxims of the categorical imperative are (1) self-love and self preservation (vs. suicide, 39-40), (2) promise and property (vs. lying and stealing, 39-40), (3) development of natural capacities (vs. utilitarianism and hedonism, 40), and (4) achieving the common good and general welfare (vs. private happiness and pleasure, 40-41). The examples of suicide, the lying borrower, development of natural capacities, and the achieving of the common good were the four examples Kant used to clarify the application of practical reason and his moral principles. However, Hegel later argued that these basic underlying and unarticulated moral principles that framed Kant's philosophy of practical reason and the categorical imperative of human life, property, natural capacities, and the common good were themselves never theoretically articulated or philosophically justified. Hegel also argued that Kant had transformed his moral philosophy from a critical idealism into a form of "moral empiricism." (Regarding Kant's moral empiricism, see G. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 90-91; W. H. Walsh, Hegelian Ethics, 22-23; C. Taylor, Hegel, 371-372; A. MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics, 197-198; and L. Dupre, The Philosophical Foundations of Marxism, 20-21.) From his analysis of universalism and non-contradiction to his analysis of the kingdom of ends, human autonomy, and human dignity, Kant never articulated or justified the basic moral principles that grounded his theory of moral reason. One could argue that the moral tradition that underlies and guides Kant's analysis is that of the defense of the rights to life, property, and contracts. This means that Kant is indebted to Locke's theory of natural rights and natural law for the foundations of his moral philosophy. Subjectivity Creates Objectivity: Moral Philosophy, Epistemology, and Social Theory: Individual freedom, sovereignty, self-realization, and self-legislation are founded on the basis of the fundamental truth of both philosophy and sociology: Subjectivity creates Objectivity. This is true in moral philosophy, epistemology, and social theory. For Kant, this means that practical reason creates the objective moral principles and laws that define and guide human action within a kingdom of ends; it also means that perception, experience, and science are the product of human constructs and the a priori categories of the intuition and the understanding (time, space, causality, and substance) of transcendental subjectivity. On the other hand, for Marx it means that humans materially create the institutions, structures, culture, and history of society through human praxis (work) within worker cooperatives and economic democracy. Hegel will broaden the appeal of Kantian morality and practical reason (German Idealism) to include social ethics, law, politics, and the phenomenological recreation of the history of Western self-consciousness and freedom. Hegel provides the bridge between Kantian idealism and Marxian historical materialism. ---- OR ---- Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, sections 14-38, pp. 42-69 Critical Idealism, Epistemology, and the Critique of Pure Reason Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Empiricism: Kant's rise from "dogmatic slumber" and his response to Hume's epistemological skepticism about the inability of reason to logically justify the perception, existence, and reality of objects, self, and causality (pp. xi-xiii and para. 8 and 27-30); interpretive epistemology of the understanding and critique of pure reason: theory of representations, empirical intuitions, phenomenal appearances, perceptions, and the synthetic understanding (para. 10-11, Remarks I and II, and para. 34); knowledge of the world and natural science: empirical judgments of perception and experience and a priori concepts of the understanding (para. 15-23 and 30-31); and theory of the mind, understanding, and transcendental subjectivity (para. 34 and 36-38). Perception, Experience, and Thought as Constructed Reality: Transcendental Subjectivity and Objectivity: the idea that Subjectivity (unity of consciousness) creates Objectivity (objects of perception and thought) undermines the epistemology of realism and objectivism found in Enlightenment empiricism and positivism; it is the foundation of Kant's theory of knowledge and his Copernican revolution. Kant's theories of subjectivity, constructed reality (objectivity), practical (moral) and pure reason (knowledge), representations and appearances, and his ideals of the moral dignity and sovereignty of individuals will find their way into the heart of classical social theory. Marx is the next social theorist to be discussed in class. For his critique of modern capitalism, he will borrow a number of ideas from Kant: From his moral philosophy he accepts Kant's notion of the moral imperative, human dignity, moral autonomy, self-determination, self-legislation, and the kingdom of ends; from Kant's epistemology, he stresses the idea that knowledge is a construct, a product of human creativity, and a reflection of the divine nature of humanity. Marx will simply place these ideas in a social and historical context aided by Hegel's critical theory and social philosophy. By integrating the various component elements of the structure of the human mind -- sensations, reason, and imagination -- into the synthetic unity of the transcendental subject, Kant was able to synthesize the traditions of empiricism and rationalism into German idealism, thereby creating the foundations for an entirely new and revolutionary theory of knowledge. Kant thought that he was providing Newtonian physics with firm philosophical foundations and justifications, but he, in effect, created a whole new way at looking at reason, knowledge, and the objective world that transformed the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. German Idealism and Alienation: From Kant and Hegel to Marx: Trace Marx's theory of alienation from Kant's Practical Reason (Moralitaet) and Hegel's Social Ethics (Sittlichkeit) to Marx's Estrangement and Externalization (Entfremdung and Ent�usserung). In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel outlines the loss of community, social ethics, and natural law (Aristotle and Rousseau) as he traces the development of modern individualism from utilitarianism and hedonism, romanticism and the law of the heart, and virtue in the bourgeois zoo to the appearance of practical reason in the Enlightenment (Kant) and absolute freedom of the individual in the French Revolution and the Terror (Robespierre). This cultural alienation of practical reason undermines the primacy of the ethical life of the community and prepares the way for Marx's critique of Kant and Hegel and his economic and aesthetic theory of alienation. Rejecting Positivism and Existentialism: Foundations of Classical Social Theory Away from Liberalism (Locke), Empiricism (Hume), and Subjective Idealism (Kant): The writings of Locke, Hume, and Kant, and many others, prepared the way for nineteenth-century social theory -- but in unusual and unexpected ways. Both Locke and Kant have been criticized for their moral empiricism: Locke received the brunt of this criticism because of the inner contradictions in his political theory between natural law and the community (communal love, compassion, needs, and friendship) and natural rights and radical individualism (life, liberty, and property). With his final dissolution of natural law restraints on natural rights in the state of nature, his theory evolved into a crude defense of liberalism, class, and the market economy (C. B. Macpherson). Kant in a quite different fashion but with similar results also created a divide between the individual and the community by developing a theory of morality (Moralitaet), rather than a social ethics (Sittlichkeit). Instead, he attempted to internalize the theory of natural rights into his apparent idealist theory of the pure logic of practical reason and the categorical imperative. However, he, too, fell victim to an uncritical acceptance of the values of liberalism in his critique of practical reason (G. F. Hegel, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor). According to Hegel, the history and phenomenology of Western thought from the ancient Greeks to the French Enlightenment of the eighteenth century culminated in the radical individualism of Kantian morality and the French Terror. Both Locke and Kant ended their political and moral theories by defending the unreflective values of natural rights and liberalism in a form of moral empiricism. In addition, as we have seen in the introductory course, Social Dreamers, Kant's subjective idealism and theory of representations unintentionally gave birth to the existentialism of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, that is, the belief that the history of Western civilization ending in Enlightenment rationality and science only confirmed the Nothingness and Nihilism of knowledge and the meaninglessness of human life in the "last man." And as we have seen, Hume's attempt to justify empiricism as the foundation of modern science with its foundation in the self, substance (objects of experience), and causality (science) ended in a frustrating epistemological skepticism. Modernity opened with the inner tensions and contradictions in political theory between natural law and natural rights, between communalism and individualism along with the tensions and contradictions within epistemology between empiricism and idealism. These contradictions framed the formation of classical theory. It was into this world that Marx, Weber, and Durkheim would enter with their rejection of empiricism and positivism (Locke and Hume) as the basis for the social sciences and their rejection of moral empiricism (Locke and Kant) as the basis for social theory. Other paths were taken that led beyond empiricism, positivism, and existentialism. Existentialism was the literary and philosophical response to the loss of power (alienation and dehumanization), loss of meaning (alienation, rationalization, and disenchantment), the loss of community as Sittlichkeit (possessive individualism and egoistic rights), and the loss of foundationalism (skepticism and idealism) in modern society. Thus, classical social theorists were influenced by the rise of Existentialism: Marx by the writings of Schiller, Schelling, and Feuerbach, Weber by Nietzsche, and Durkheim by Schopenhauer. To these paths we shall now turn. |
| 5. | Karl Marx | "Alienated Labor," "Private Property and Communism," and "Needs, Production, and Division of Labor" (The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844), in Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, trans. and ed. by T. B. Bottomore, pp. 120-134, pp. 152-167, and 168-188 Alienation, Praxis, Freedom, Moral Economy, and Species-Being Alienation and the Ancients: Integration of Athens, Jerusalem, and Berlin: Critical hermeneutics: In order to give life to these nineteenth-century texts, we must see them in the broader historical, philosophical, and intellectual contexts in which they developed. Thus we must critically read each work as a dialogue within and between traditions. Marx begins Paris Manuscripts with the fundamental categories of classical political economy -- wages, profits, rent, land, capital, property, competition and market, production and consumption, exchange value, and the division of labor -- the "system of money." His goal is to look deeper into the foundations of these categories of political economy in the structures of power and alienation. The forms of alienation include: alienation from the product of production through private property, class, and inequality (122-123), process of production through division of labor, specialization, and fragmentation of labor (124-125), self as species-being through the rise of possessive individualism, natural rights, and materialism (126), and community and others through self interest, market competition, and concentrated power (128); integration of the great traditions of German Literature of Goethe, Schiller, and Heine (aesthetic labor becomes art, play, beauty, and creativity), German Philosophy of Kant and Hegel (self-consciousness, reason, creativity, and freedom), British Classical Economics of Smith, Malthus, and Ricardo (liberalism, market, and capitalism), Ancient Hebrew Scriptures of Torah and the prophetic traditions (theory of needs, idolatry, and community), and Ancient Greek Philosophy of Aristotle. Because of alienation there is a corresponding loss of control over production, creativity, freedom and self-determination, and loss of community. Where Locke used Richard Hooker and Medieval Christianity to provide the ethical foundations of his defense of natural law, natural rights, and a moral economy, Marx turns to Aristotle and the Ancients to provide a secular natural law for his ethical defense of a moral economy and critique of a capitalist market economy. Alienation of Production and the Ideals of the Classical Traditions: Theory of alienation is an ethical critique of capitalism that examines the loss in modern society of Virtue as individual freedom, self-determination, and aesthetic creativity, Reason as self-consciousness, control, citizenship, and the critique of idolatry, and Democracy as moral economy, ethical community, and popular sovereignty. Alienation occurs at the practical level of creating history and social institutions and at the theoretical levels of creating universal ideas and natural law capable of criticizing capitalist society. Alienation of the species-being represents a form of social domination in which workers have no control over the state and direction of production and no concepts, ideas, and theories capable of critical reflection or calling the system into question, that is, no ethics and politics. With the development of science in the study of society, there are questions lost to the public -- history and structure of power relations in private property and production and the ethics and morality of modern society. Workers and reason are repressed. (1) Alienation from Product -- loss of control, power, equality, and decision making -- Locke, Aristotle, and Rousseau (2) Alienation from Process -- loss of meaning, aesthetic creativity, and artisanship -- Smith, Winckelmann, Schiller, and Heine (3) Alienation from Self -- loss of human needs and life activity, species-being, praxis, individuality, freedom, rationality, self-determination, and moral sovereignty -- Kant and Hegel (Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics) (4) Alienation from Others -- loss of community, Sittlichkeit, natural law, democracy, and ethical community -- Torah, Hebrew Prophets, Aristotle, Spinoza, Rousseau, and Hegel (Aristotle's Politics) (5) Alienation from Nature -- loss of the physical environment and agricultural ecology -- Epicurus, L. H. Morgan, J. von Liebig, C. Darwin, and P. Proudhon. Craft Production, Aesthetic Labor, and Economic Democracy: Return from Alienation and Dehumanization: To overcome alienation there must be the following: (1) Product: an end to private property and a class society by creating worker associations, worker ownership of production, and common property; (2) Process: an end to the abnormal and distorting division of labor by dismantling the structures of industrial production and a return to artisanship and craft production; (3) Individuality and Species Being: a new form of individuality based not on possessive individualism, private property, market rationality, or utilitarian principles of happiness and pleasure but on aesthetic labor, human dignity, creativity, self-determination, self-realization, and beauty; and (4) Other and Community: rejection of the market, international trade, and the nation state as the integrating forces within society and return to a strong sense of communal solidarity, common good, general welfare, and participatory democracy. J. S. Mill pushed for equality and political/economic democracy because of his underlying values of freedom, pluralism, and diversity of opinion, whereas Marx moved in a similar direction because of his views on individuality, self-realization, human needs, and freedom. According to Marx, alienation ultimately leads to estrangement, dehumanization, and the loss of happiness and virture (moral and intellectual virtue), the loss of community, friendship, and social justice, and the loss of a moral economy and political and economic democracy (workers' collectives and producer associations). Species Being as Universality: Knowledge, Society, and Ethical Ideals: Humans are species beings because they create the world according to Universality, that is, according to self-consciousness, reason, community, ethical universality, and science; humanity creates the community, self, and nature. He treats himself as a universal from the perspective of science, knowledge, and consciousness (theoretical reason) and from the perspective of history, culture, and self-consciousness (Hegel), morality and practical reason (Kant), and politics (Aristotle). The power of Marx's ideas come from his classical horizons and his ability to integrate the classical ancient and modern traditions into a comprehensive critique of modern capitalist society, market competition, and industrial production. Human beings are species or universal and free beings -- they are part of a comprehensive historical and social totality; their essence or form is expressed in and through the community of citizens and social relations of production; they create their own universal natural law and ethical values of equality, dignity, and freedom in thought and empirical reality; they express these values in the totality of social institutions -- culture, knowledge, economy, work, law, constitutions, rights, and politics; they create their own objective world of knowledge, truth, virtue, and ethics in the form of universal consciousness of the physical and social reality; they form the physical body or environment (nature), which is the inorganic nature of humanity ("plants, animals, minerals, air, light, etc."), into the conceptual, theoretical, and technological objects of human consciousness as natural science and art; and they measure society and human development by these very universal principles. The universality of humanity is expressed in its consciousness, perception, and understanding of nature, its technology and work as it produces the physical conditions of its existence in food, clothing, shelter, and its building of the community and a virtuous life of happiness in the form of ethics, political economy, and democracy. Universality is human praxis as self-determination and creativity -- we produce the objects we see, the thoughts we have, the food we eat, the institutions we live in, and the ideals we live by. Ethics, politics, nature, and science are products of the society we have constructed. This idea develops the ethics and epistemology of German Idealism into the social theory and political economy of historical materialism. Science itself does not reflect reality and nature, but only the reality and nature created by capitalism and liberalism. It is not the transcendental forms of intuition of time and space nor the categories of the understanding of substance and causality, but the material structures and alienated categories of the class system and political economy that construct our understanding of nature and society. Marx's work may, therefore, be viewed as an expression of the historical and social integration of the visions, hopes, and ideals of the Ancients and the Moderns into a comprehensive theory of Universality, that is, theory, praxis, and Social Justice: Phenomenology of Social Justice and the Ethical Spirit: (1) Ancient Hebrews: from the ancient Hebrews he borrows the ideals of equality, critique of idolatry, redemption, freeing the slaves, remission of loans and debts, and returning of family property in the Jubilee and Sabbath (2) Ancient Hellenes: from Aristotle and Rousseau he borrows the ideas of community and human needs (chreia -- human need for happiness, phronesis, political participation, and a democratic polity) (3) Early Christian Hellenists: from the New Testament and Luke's Acts he borrows the ideals of love, common property, primitive communism, and human needs (2: 43-47 and 4:32-35) and (4) German Romantic Poets and Existentialists: from the European Romantics, he stresses individual creativity, self-determination (5) German Idealists: from the German philosophers he emphasizes creativity, self-determination, human dignity, reason, and freedom. This reminds one of the saying from Athanasius of Alexandria (4th Century), "For the Son of God became man so that we might become God." For Marx, by regaining our self-determination, freedom, and human creativity in the workplace and democracy, we again can become divine. British Liberalism: from Locke's labor theory of value (Chapter 5) and the original state of nature as a moral and community-based economy grounded in natural law and natural rights that protect individual freedom, equality, and dignity. Classics in the Classical: Social Ethics in Jerusalem, Athens, and Berlin: the concept of alienation summarizes Marx's theory of the history of Western thought from Jerusalem (ethical community, compassion, and debt forgiveness and property redistribution during Sabbath and Jubilee), Athens (moral economy, equality, democracy, human need, and natural law), and Berlin (art and human creativity, moral sovereignty, individual freedom, and self-determination), These traditions along with his theories of human emancipation, economic and political rights, and critical science (structures, dialectic, and contradictions) comprise the heart of Marx's theory of social justice. The various elements of alienation include the following: (1) Alienation from the Product represents a critique of Liberalism (Locke) through of the tyranny of private property, possessive individualism and economic rights, and the class structure; (2) alienation from the Process represents a critique of Capitalism (Smith) through the organization of production, division of labor, and fragmented specialization; (3) alienation of workers from their individual selves as Species-Beings, human nature, and Natural Law through the loss of the possibilities of self-realization, self-determination, human need, freedom, creativity, and the political community (Aristotle, Kant, Schiller, and Hegel); and finally, (4) there is the alienation from the Other which includes the loss of community, common good, general welfare, and social democracy (Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza, and Rousseau). These forms of alienation estrange the individual from themselves, society, and the philosophical and intellectual traditions of natural law. What is distinctive about humans is that they create universally -- that is, they create the community, nature, ethics, politics, natural law, and reason. This is the true definition of human creativity and universality; universality lies not in the transcendental subject or individual consciousness, but rather in human, aesthetic labor as it creates its own social reality (Objective Spirit) through self-conscious reason, community, ethical ideals of species being, nature, art, and science. Similar to Kant and Hegel, humans, according to Marx, create the world based on the universal, that is, the universal ethical and material basis for social life in the Community, Nature, and the Self. Thus the universal nature of humanity lies in ETHICS, that is, it rests in creation of the community: in the epistemology and moral philosophy of the transcendental subject and kingdom of ends (Kant); development of reason and self-consciousness in history and society from the ancient Greeks to the French Revolution (Hegel); and in our relationship to nature, production and work, and human nature as species being. Humanity is the creator of our moral, ethical, political, and social reality based on the universal and ethical assumptions of dignity, beauty, and creativity. We become human through our own creations as we reject all forms of metaphysical and economic idolatry. Aristötle and Social Justice: the philosophy of Aristotle may be found throughout Marx's early and later writings. In the Paris Manuscripts look to his theory of needs (164-165), self-realization, community, praxis (127), and social justice and the ideal polity. Schiller influenced his idea that work was to be a form of creativity according to the laws of beauty (128). Finally, Marx sought the underlying cause of alienation not in private property, but in the structure of industrial production itself (131); discuss also Marx's critique of the French socialist and anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the relationship between alienation and the equality of incomes (132). Marx and Kant: Marx turns Kant's theory of moral autonomy, creativity, and sovereignty into a material and historical force in his theory of the self-determination and self-realization of species-being in beauty; Theory of Private Property and Communism: critique of crude communism, social envy, and economic leveling (universal prostitution, universal private property, and universal capitalism, 153-55); theory of historical materialism (156); human emancipation of the senses, reason, and nature (159-162); humanization of the sciences and technology (163-164); Aristotle's and Marx's theory of human need, wealthy individuals, and the beneficence and brotherhood of humankind (164-165, 176, and 185); alienation and barbarism of needs (168-188), and communism, humanism, and the dichotomies of life (155). According to Marx, work becomes practical in both the technical and moral (Kant's practical reason) meaning of the term; and when we create as a species being we create according to the laws of beauty and freedom, that is, it is only then that we are a universal, free being. Universal here has the connotation of creating nature and objects (Kant's transcendental subjectivity) and moral law (universalism of the categorical imperative). This creativity in work is the foundation of species life and human dignity. From an entirely different perspective, the essay Alienated Labor may be interpreted as Marx's desire to portray the French Revolution and its constitution with the economic "rights of man" to life, liberty, and property within an empirical and historical context. In this way, he would be able to undertake an immanent critique of Locke's theory of natural rights by revealing what the ideals of life, liberty, and property would actually be like in an alienated and dehumanized workplace. Industrial workers have no such rights in a capitalist society since (1) the ethical, economic, and natural law foundations of natural rights do not exist in capitalism nor (2) is the market and industrial economy capable of creating the social conditions for these rights. These are only class rights for the wealthy bourgeoisie citizens. In his early Paris Manuscripts (1844), Marx examines the ethical and logical contradictions within economics and human labor under capitalism, while in On the Jewish Question (1843), he examines the ethical and political contradictions within democracy and the French Constitutions of 1793 and 1795. |
| 6. | Karl Marx | On the Jewish Question, in Karl Marx Early Writings, trans. and ed. by T. B. Bottomore, pp. 3-31 Political Alienation of Natural Rights, Economic Rights of Man, and Liberal Democracy Religion and Natural Rights as Forms of Ideology and Idolatry: An Introduction to Natural and Human Rights, Political Emancipation and Human Emancipation: This essay is about the nature of freedom, equality, and natural rights in liberalism and capitalism, and the internal contradictions and conflicts within Western democractic society between political emancipation and human emancipation -- between the rights of man and the rights of the citizen. Liberalism, democracy, and constitutional freedoms are forms of religion and idolatry that conceal and repress from conscious reflection the underlying economic structure of capitalist inequality, power, and autocracy. Although liberalism contains ideas of political emancipation, freedom, equality, and natural rights, it also contains a defense of market freedoms, private property, class, and economic and political inequality. Political emancipation does not lead to true human emancipation or freedom and equality because they are founded upon contradictory principles and social institutions. Full emancipation must involve turning both politics and economics into democratic institutions. Under capitalism, this is impossible. Marx begins this essay on liberalism (economic and political rights) with an analysis of Bruno Bauer's work on the Jewish question and the relationship between political emancipation and the religious prejudice and privilege of the Christians and Jews. The question under consideration is whether Jews should be provided with the same civil and legal rights supposedly given to Christians. For Marx this is not the real issue: The question under consideration is not whether Jews should be given civil and legal rights, but are these rights themselves forms of alienation and dehumanization -- are they not distorted rights to private property and thus not representative of true human emancipation, equality, or freedom? This work is a direct critique of Locke's theory of natural rights, especially articulated in the second state of nature as destructive of the moral economy and species being. In modern society, the political state is now the new religion and idol that conceals the economy/civil society from critical reflection; the universalism of political rights of the state and common good (Rousseau) conceal the destructive economic and egoistic rights of the market (Locke). The rights to security, liberty, equality, and property are capitalist rights to isolation, egoism, class, and alienation; they do not lead to human rights or human emancipation. By seeing the issue of rights simply in terms of the acceptance or rejection of religion, Bauer has focused on the wrong form of religious experience in modern society; he has remained at the level of Christianity and Judaism when he should be dealing with the religion of the modern state and capitalism. Marx will argue that political emancipation of the modern state is ineffective, illusory, and ideological -- even though he recognizes it as an historical progression from medieval society -- because it is a false emancipation leaving intact in the capitalist economy all the values and institutions that undermine civil and political liberties -- natural rights of man, radical individualism, class power and inequality, and private property. What begins in Bauer as a question about the nature of natural rights and religion (Christian and Jewish privilege and prejudice) develops in Marx as a series of questions about the very nature of natural rights, the distinction between the bourgeois rights of man (rights of separation, isolation, egoistic individualism, the Hobbesian war of all against all, barbarism, and capitalism -- the rights of alienated man) and the rights of the citizen (rights to protect and ensure the community, common good, and democracy -- rights of human emancipation and natural law), and ends with a brief statement about the potential for human emancipation (political economy). The Rights of Man in civil society are the economic rights to life (security), liberty, and property, whereas the Rights of the Citizen are the political rights to freedom of thought, speech, and assembly. The two forms of rights are antithetical to each other for the political rights of the citizen to freedom of democratic assembly and participation are undermined by the egoism, isolation, property, and class privilege of the elites. Popular sovereignty and the common good (Rousseau and Spinoza) are incompatible with a polity based on class, inequality, poverty, and power (Hobbes and Locke in the Second State of Nature). Democracy and Capitalism are logically and historically contradictory social systems. In the same way, Locke's distinction between the Original and Second State of Nature was an unusually gifted presentation and anticipation of these very issues of which he was unaware of at the time. A society founded on natural law, moral community, general welfare, and common property cannot be sustained by the introduction of liberal individualism, a market economy, and private property. Locke was not in an historical and economic position to anticipate the full implications of his own theory and structural changes. But, later in time, Marx's critique of alienation and exploitation may be viewed as a fuller development of the implications hidden in Locke's own political and economic theory. Marx is aware from the beginning of this essay that the bourgeois rights provide the ideological justification for private property and a market economY which result in the worker's alienation from the product, process, species-being, and community. Personal liberties under these rights are severely limited and distorted by the advancement of private rights and property since they continue to separate the individual from the potentiality of the community and politics, and ultimately fail to realize the political potentiality of the human species. True democracy and the political rights of the citizen are incompatible with the economic rights of man and liberal democracy; in fact, the natural rights of man (Locke) dissolve political rights, species being, and true freedom. This conflict between the Rights of Man and the Rights of a Citizen reminds one of the distinctions in Locke between the Original State of Nature and the Second State of Nature and Civil Society. These differences are implicit in Locke's writings, but because of philosophical, historical, or social reasons he never explored the implications of a possible structure conflict between natural law, natural rights, and common property on one side of the state of nature and a market economy, class, and inequality on the other (para. 50). The contradiction that Marx examines in this early writing is between the state and civil society. The rights of the citizen are political rights and social ideals that frame political participation, the integrity of the community, and individual freedom and human dignity, whereas the rights of man are forms of ideological displacement and obfuscation that distort human interaction and moral solidarity. But the former political emancipation and rights protect, shield, and ideologically hide the underlying economic rights and industrial system from critical review. Political emancipation hides the economic oppression that must be changed by human emancipation and freeing the rights of the citizen from an oppressive economic system. "Political life declares itself to be only a means whose end is the life of civil society" (Karl Marx: Early Writings, trans. by Bottomore (McGraw Hill: 1964), p.27. Politics is a mere means and form of idolatry used to protect and conceal civil society and the rights of man; it is a form of religion because it is a metaphysical and political illusion that is worshiped as true, but is not real. Political emancipation is a fundamental contradiction since it does not represent a full emancipation from religion, as Bauer argued. Rather, it itself is a form of religious ideolatry designed to hide the underlying reality of the economic system and the rights of man to property, inequality, and class power -- politics becomes a form of religion by which a constitutional government and democracy hide the realities of alienation, class inequality, and capitalism. That is, they hide the contradictions between political emancipation and human emancipation, between the political rights of the citizen and the economic rights of man, and between politics and economics. Politics contains similar contradictions to its system as does economics. Like ideolatry it represents the worshop of political rights of freedom, speech, and assembly when, in fact, there are no such rights under capitalism. The reality of political emancipation is the commercial and industrial economy justified by the rights of man; the rights of the citizen only hide and obfuscate the true natural rights of the citizen. Political emancipation of both the natural rights of man and of the citizen does not change the structural and economic reality of an alien economy. Thus it is a revolution within the mind and not the body. And within political emancipation itself, one discovers the contradictions between the economic rights of man and the political rights of the citizen whose contradictions tear society apart and make true emancipation impossible. Politics hides Economics from critical reflection and human emancipation. Politics is unreal because the society is undemocratic and capitalistic in the deepest structures of the social relations of production. Real emancipation will only occur when the ideals of politics become the concrete foundation of human institutions and human emancipation (30-31). This essay is a remarkable analysis of this distinction between political and social Ideals and political and social Ideology. This is an early example of the cultural and political application of Marx's dialectical reasoning and structural contradictions between the state and economy, political emancipation and economic emancipation, and the rights of a citizen and the rights of man. The liberal documents of the French Revolution contain contradictory premises, ideas, and depictions of reality that lead to a liberal false consciousness, but, at the same time, offer the French citizenry the possibility of socialist dreams of real democracy in the future. In his later economic writings, Marx uses dialectical reasoning to reveal the underlying irrationality and immorality of the structures of political economy in capitalist production. Giving the Jews constitutional and economic rights in "Germany" only realizes their continued isolation and alienation. Economic rights, civil liberties, and the social system of Locke are all forms of distorted alienation and oppression that are hidden from reflective self-consciousness by the religious deceptions and false consciousness of the idolatrous figures of political rights and the various state ideals of freedom, equality, and justice. This arguments continues today in the United States -- democracy is the religion and ideology of America which hides the underlying structures of alienation and oppression within capitalism from critical view -- an example of the eclipse of reason. By juxtaposing the economic rights of man and the political rights of the citizen, he is summarizing the history of modern Western political theory and the dialectic between Locke's economic theory and Rousseau's political philosophy. Marx is continuing his critique of Bruno Bauer's argument of religious and political emancipation of the Jews; this changes nothing about their position in society or their level of alienation. Economic rights in On the Jewish Question have the same authority, force, and results as economic equality of wealth distribution and crude communism in the Paris Manuscripts. Religious emancipation (Bauer) and crude communism (Proudhon) change nothing about the oppression of the social relations of production in the economy or about the oppression of natural rights and civil liberties in the state. Political emancipation does not free the individual from alienation and civil society; political emancipation only rationalizes and solidifies the ideology of possessive individualism, loneliness, and individual separation. Social Method of Immanent Critique: Through immanent critique of Marx uses the potentials and ideals of political emancipation and the rights of the citizen to critically evaluate the weaknesses of natural rights in Locke's Second Treatise of Government in the seventeenth century and in the American and French Revolutions of the eighteenth century. In his essay "Alienated Labor," he also uses immanent critique to examine the contradictions between the ethical ideals of liberalism (equality, freedom, self-determination, self-realization, human dignity, individual autonomy and sovereignty) and the historical reality of the industrial and workplace alienation of the product, process, species being, others, and nature. In his later writings Marx will move away from immanent critique to a dialectical critique of the structural (logical and historical) contradictions within capitalism. It should be noted that Marx took a final course at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin in 1839 on the Old Testament prophet Isaiah from Bruno Bauer. The book of Isaiah stresses issues of social justice, the Covenant, and the Law of Moses found in Deuteronomy and Leviticus with a focus on the Sabbath and Jubilee, love and kindness, and the critique of idolatry, oppression of the poor, and unjust and exploitative economic practices. Political Emancipation, Jewish Civil Rights, and Marx's Theory of Human Rights (3-4): Marx begins by summarizing Bauer's argument but finally concludes that Bauer has remained in the abstract, speculative, and theological realm of religion and political philosophy. Bauer argued that political emancipation ultimately meant emancipation from the religion of Christianity and Judaism, that is, that the state was always viewed from the perspective of the Christian state and not the state as such. Marx now moves to a consideration, not of the Christian state, but to a consideration of the nature of the political state and its own theological dimensions. According to Bauer, Christianity hid the oppression of the Jews and the rejection of religion offered the solution to the problem; according to Marx, it is natural rights which hide the alienation and exploitation of workers who have no real political and social rights of freedom, equality, and citizenship. Toward this end, Marx turns to a consideration of the nature of emancipation and who receives emancipation by following the structural contradictions and alienation of the state: (1) relationship between political emancipation and human emancipation; (2) contradictions between politics and civil society, the citizen and bourgeois, and general interests and private interests; and (3) the connection between economic and political rights in the French Revolutionary Constitutions of 1793 and 1795 for a better understanding of the possibilities of human emancipation. Bauer always remains at the theological level because he does not see how the state distorts, conceals, and represses consideration of civil society, the market economy, industrial production, and private property -- all of which undermine political and human rights. From this perspective civil liberties and natural rights are mechanisms of repression and ideology that hide the true reality of civil society. The fundamental contradictions of capitalism remain hidden in Bauer's analysis. Since Hobbes and Locke in the seventeenth century all freedom, liberty, equality, and rights have focused on the state and economic rights, just as all divinity, moral sovereignty, and creativity have focused on God. By examining the revolutionary constitutions of France in the late eighteenth century, Marx attempts to broaden our understanding of rights to include liberal and economic rights (Locke) and political and social rights (Rousseau) that encompass the total social system of modern industrial society and reincorporate a secular natural law theory of social justice into his analysis. Marx's reservations about providing civil liberties and rights to Jews was not based on his beliefs about Judaism and the Jewish people, but about the limits of these very liberties and rights themselves. They are the rights to property and capital -- these are the rights that justify alienation of the product, process, self, and community. He wants to expand the horizons of the discussion about rights to include political and human rights that go beyond the rights of property, possessive individualism, and market liberties, that is, the rights to life, liberty, property, and security. This is a direct critique of liberalism and Locke's theory of natural rights in The Second Treatise of Government. The state and political theory represent a form of religion, mythological, and ideology that conceals the underlying power relationships in society -- that conceals the relationship between the celestial and the terrestial. This is why Marx turns to an analysis of the economic rights of man and natural rights of liberal democracy and the rights of the citizen and natural law of nascent communism in order to reveal that natural rights do not protect individual freedom, liberties, and sacred rights. Comparing the egoistic and liberal "rights of man" to the political and universal "rights of the citizen" is also a way to compare Locke's economic theory of natural rights and Rousseau's political theory of the common good and general will. Rights are used to obscure civil society and its oppressive economic foundations by appealing instead to natural law of citizenship or political rights and the public institutions of democracy and political emancipation. The notions of equality, freedom, and liberty do not penetrate into the economic sphere of property and production or the rights of man; their metaphysical and celestial residue shields the economic or property rights of civil society from critical review and acts more like a theological dogma than a true political right. That is, rights protect and shield private property, economic inequality, and class oppression from critical reflection and understanding. The state represses the recognition of the structures of power underlying civil society and the dehumanizing workplace through its worship of political idolatry. The theological "rights of the citizen" to free thoughts, speech, and action or public assembly conceal from critical reflection the actual historical reality of the "rights of man" to life, liberty, property, and security. The political rights to free expression and participation in the political process is another form of religion, according to Marx, because it hides and distorts the reality of the capitalist social system that lies behind it, but is hidden from critical reflection and recognition. Politics conceals the reality of capitalism and the alienation, degradation, and barbarism of the Hobbesian "war against all" in a market economy. The "rights of man" protect the latter by means of the "rights of the citizen." Public democracy protects civil society of private capitalism and ensures its continuation and ideological unrecognition. Because of this, political emancipation is simply another form of false consciousness and ideology. [Note the structure of the academy, its organization of disciplines, and its separation of economics, politics, history, and sociology to accomplish this very end.] Marx's real concern was not just eliminating Christianity and Judaism from the political realm but eliminating all forms of religious experience from society, including the rights of egoistic man and alienation. What begins as a critique of religion in politics ends as a critique of politics as religion. Marx is aware that there is a tendency to interpret and confuse the rights of egoistic man as the rights of the public citizen. That is, liberty, freedom, rights, and equality are sometimes viewed as the basis for political participation and citizenship when, in fact, they are only the disguised foundation for the rights to possessive individualism, property, and the disposition of property. Marx writes: "...political liberation reduces citizenship, the political community, to a mere means for preserving the so-called rights of man. This is a world of self-sufficient and myopic monads, isolated and alone, terrified and without meaning or purpose in life; this is a world of existential loneliness and despair, without dignity and ends, community and humanity. It is a world of fear and anxiety where individuals seeks security, freedom, and happiness through the ownership of others and material prosperity, and not through creative work or communal purpose. Marx sees a major contradiction and incoherence here between Aristotle and Locke, moral economy and market economy, community and individual, species being and possessive individualism, and true democracy of the citizen (natural law) and liberal or constitutional democracy of man (natural rights). Under liberalism and a constitutional democracy, natural rights are not natural, innate, or universal to all, but rather, they are particular, market-based, and civil/legal rights based on the ownership of property and the prestige of class power. Natural rights do not exist in a liberal democracy and a market economy because rights are ultimately maintained by the legal system and state and won by merit and business success. These forms of civil rights maintain the social relations of a capitalist and class society resulting in the alienation and exploitation of workers and the false consciousness and ideology of its members. True human rights of the citizen are based on collective ownership and democratic control over property and production. Only then in an economic democracy based on human emancipation of its citizens and the ethical principles of human dignity, creativity, beauty, and self-determination are rights natural and universal. The spirit and human needs can only flourish when the basic material needs are satisfied by the solidarity of the community. Marx reverses the priority established by Locke between natural law and natural rights in civil society. The priority now would be political and human emancipation toward a moral community that protected the rights of the citizen to enable human creativity, dignity, freedom, and self-determination of the species being of humanity in both politics and production. This represents Marx's major addition in the nineteenth century to Aristotle's theory of social justice -- that is, to Ethics and Politics Marx adds Production and Economic Democracy. Later in the 20th century, the dysfunctional and destructive relationship between liberal democracy and economic oppression and alienation -- distinction between human rights and liberal/economic rights becomes even more apparent when liberal democracy becomes a form of plebiscitary dictatorship (Herbert Marcuse, Negations, p. 209). Behind democracy is an oppressive class system that destroys the very principles and institutions of democracy itself. The latter's function in modern society is not to secure human rights and political participation for all, but to hide, distort, and ideologically repress any recognition of the barbaric and aggressive nature of this form of government and economy. Politics as Theology: State and Natural Rights as Forms of Alienation, False Consciousness, and Ideology: This early essay examines the nature of the political ideology and illusions of the modern state, the limits and contradictions of natural and human rights, and the distinctions between political and human emancipation. It begins with Bruno Bauer's famous essay on the Jewish question written as a response to the issues of Judaism and civil liberties: contradiction between religious prejudice and political emancipation and the renunciation of both Judaism and religion as the basis for citizenship -- creation of a secular state (5-6); Marx's critique of Bauer: examination of the nature of the modern state, civil liberties, political emancipation, and the relationship between religion and the state (7-9); theory of the modern State: political emancipation and political theology (10-12); limits of political emancipation: false consciousness of the relationship between economics and politics, idealism of the state, alienation of politics and universal interests, contradiction between the bourgeois and the citizen (Locke and Rousseau), terrestrial and the celestial, separation of the private person and the public person, and the displacement of the individual from the community (13-21); modern state is a form of theology or religious experience (ideological distortion) since God masks economic injustice, alienation, human suffering, and industrial exploitation by directing us to heaven, salvation, and the expectations of eternal happiness. In a similar fashion, the modern state hides the irrationality and immorality of the market economy with its political illusions of equality, freedom, justice, and political emancipation; with an emphasis on political rights of equality, citizenship, assembly, and civic participation, there is a tendency not to notice the economic rights of property, class, and inequality. By unquestioningly integrating rights, liberty, and property, the state also represses the Need for human emancipation, human creativity and artisanship, species-being and self-defining work, and a democratic community. In both cases, the nature of rights, politics, and the economy go unexamined. Although it was Bruno Bauer who initially raised the question of Jewish civil liberties and political rights in Germany, one could also read On the Jewish Question as a dialogue with Spinoza over the nature of Judaism, ethics, rights, and democracy; although the essay begins with the question of civil rights for members of the Jewish community in Germany, it quickly turns into a dialogue between Locke and Rousseau over the meaning of economic and political rights, that is, over the meaning of political and human emancipation. Political emancipation and granting Jews civil and political liberties represent the privatization of religion, property, and civil society. They do not disappear as oppressive forces in society; they are simply displaced from the public to the private sphere where they are less noticed. It does not change the alienation of the political. That would require the introduction of human emancipation, political rights and liberties -- the rights of the citizen -- and Natural Law. With political emancipation, politics remains a form of theology and religion because it conceals and represses the underlying structural reality of civil society. Equality, freedom, property, security, and liberty are metaphysical illusions because they hide within political emancipation the true reality, direction, and purpose of civil society. Just as Christianity was used to repress the Jews, the state is used to repress those without property and rights under the illusion of civil rights and political liberties. Bauer fails to consider these issues and ultimately remains a political theologian. Thus Marx sees that the contradictions between the state and civil society are manifestly reflected in the relationships and alienation between the "rights of man" (natural rights of a market economy) and the "rights of the citizen" (political rights and natural law of politics) in the various French constitutions of 1791, 1793, and 1795. Compare these two types of economic and political rights to Locke's distinction in the original state of nature in chapter 2 between the natural rights of life, liberty, and property and the natural law of the commons, compassion, love, friendship, and justice. Politics and political rights in liberalism are forms of false consciousness and ideology because they hide from critical reflection the underlying structures of production, work, and economic rights. One result is an inability to see the internal and logical incoherence and contradictions of capitalism. This is similar to the incoherence and contradictions between the original/moral and second/market states of nature in Locke. On the other hand, these political rights of the French Constitution of 1793 and 1795 offer Marx a vision beyond liberalism to democratic socialism. The future ideals and institutions to some extent already exist in the present. Marx's theory of alienation represents a further critique of these economic rights and the effects of industrial production and work on human consciousness, freedom, species being, and human dignity. In both essays, he rejects the ideals of economic liberalism in natural rights and the French Constitution (politics) and in labor and the workplace (economics). The political rights of the French Constitution represent the ideology and false consciousness of capitalism which hide the destructive egoism and class nature of the economic rights; the political rights hide from critical review the deeper structures of alienation and class deformation of the workplace; finally, these same political rights in an ironic way also express the political hopes, values, and principles for human emancipation when the underlying economic system is replaced by a true democracy. Natural Rights and Natural Law in Locke and Marx: Contradictions between Capitalism and Democracy, Liberty and Freedom, and Economic and Political Rights: Rethinking relationship between Natural Rights and Natural Law: Political emancipation contains two contradictory set of political and ethical principles that historically and socially evolve into a defense of liberalism, on the one hand, and socialism on the other. These are the economic "rights of man" and the political "rights of the citizen". The former rights are forms of false consciousness as they defend the ideology and distortions of possessive individualism, crude materialism, private property, and oppressive class privilege, whereas the latter rights reflect the human need for true political freedom, public assembly, and free speech. These political rights will become the basis for later human emancipation and the fullest development of the rights of humanity's species being. The contradiction is manifested by the stark difference and ethical imperatives between the political "rights of the citizen" and species-being found in the French Constitution and Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1793 in Articles 1, 4-5, 7, 10-15, and 25 and the economic and egoistic "rights of man" in Articles 2, 3, 6, 8, 9, and 16 -- they reflect the profound contradictions between Natural Rights (state of nature and property rights -- John Locke) and Natural Law (political/human rights and emancipation, citizenship, political assembly and participation, and democracy -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau). Marx's rejection of the economic or property rights of egoism and civil society and the primacy of self-interest, economic power, and a market economy in political emancipation and the modern state (religiosity, false universality, and idealism of the state), and, finally, his analysis and critique of the natural rights (Article 2) to liberty (Article 6), property (Article 16), equality (Article 3 of the Constitution of 1795), security (Article 8), and the protection of liberty (Article 9) (pp. 22-26). Marx rejects the ideology of liberalism (individual freedom, political emancipation, and natural rights), implications of egoism and the economic "rights of man" for politics and a theory of rights, and the contradictory and antagonistic relationships in modern industrial society between politics and economics, human rights (natural law of the citizen) and natural rights (rights of the bourgeois in a civil society and market economy), and democracy and capitalism (26-30). The rights of man to liberty, property, equality, and security are, in reality, rights to egoism and self-interest, competition and greed, property and power, and consumerism and materialism -- that is, they are rights to isolation and loneliness, alienation and dehumanization, class and inequality, loss of compassion and community, and state intervention and oppression to protect class, capital, and property. Rights do not protect individual equality and freedom but create fear, isolation, and alienation. Rights are forms of religion, idolatry, and suppression of the broader ideals of the rights of the citizen who goals are to protect true political freedoms and rights of assembly, participation, and speech. -- the true human needs. Just as the traditions of natural rights and natural law are contradictory views of humanity, rights, and individual freedom, so, too, are capitalism and democracy contradictory principles and institutions. Democracy and political rights distort and hide from view the underlying class structure of the economy and resulting political reality of the powerful oligarchy. Just as economic and natural rights (liberty and property) and political and human rights (freedom and assembly) are contradictory rights, capitalism and democracy are contradictory social and political systems. Marx rejects the Jewish claims to natural rights because they contradict the real potentialities of humanity for building a society based on natural law, human needs, and social justice. To accept natural rights is to accept the whole social system of alienated labor, exploitation, and economic contradictions and crises upon which they are founded: Natural rights are grounded in a market economy and industrial capitalism. Marx recognizes the inconsistencies in liberalism between liberty and equality, bourgeois and citizen, and attempts to resolve the contradictions by combining freedom and social justice based on human need as part of a broader process of human emancipation. In fact, the greatest need of humans as species-beings is Social Justice defined as civil and legal justice, workplace justice, ecological justice, political justice, distributive justice, and economic justice. For the development of this view of social justice, Marx relies on the tradition of Natural Law from Aristotle, Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel to respond to the inadequacies of liberalism, possessive individualism, Natural Rights, and Locke. If one includes his later writings, Marx's theory of human emancipation encompasses a theory of the rights of the citizen ("On the Jewish Question"), economic rights to worker ownership and worker cooperatives ("Paris Commune"), social rights to education, welfare, insurance, etc. of the "Gotha Program," theory of needs and community ("brotherhood of man"). and the emancipation of nature, consciousness, and the senses ("Private Property and Communism"). The theory of human emancipation consists of a radicalization of human nature, virtue, participatory democracy, and Natural Law. By emphasizing the importance of Human Needs, Marx rejects the Natural Rights tradition of Locke and returns to the Natural Law tradition of Aristotle. Summary: Human Emancipation = Political Emancipation or the Great Divide of Western Liberalism (Rejection of Locke's economic and property "Rights of Man" and acceptance of Spinoza's and Rousseau's civil and legal "Rights of the Citizen") + Human Needs (Praxis, Creativity, Virtue, Compassion, Friendship, and Citizenship) + Economic Democracy (Worker Control, Decentralization, and Socialization of Production in the Paris Commune of 1871) + Social Justice (Civil/Legal, Workplace. Ecological, Political, Economic, and Distributive Justice). Marx views rights from two conflicting perspectives -- Ideology and Emancipation. The Rights of Man are the forms of ideology and false consciousness of capitalism and private property, while the Rights of the Citizen are the basic principles of human need, human emancipation, and democracy (secular Natural Law). The inner dualisms between the rights of man and the rights of the citizen, between Locke and Rousseau, between the economy and the state, between natural rights and natural law, and between the second market state of nature and the original communal state of nature represent the internal contradictions of natural rights theory and liberalism. Under these conditions, the state, instead of being an expression of species-being, human rights, and the political community, is an expression of profits, capital, and private property. Marx does not abandon human rights, but attempts to transcend these contradictions through human emancipation. (For more on this topic, see the discussion about the Paris Commune of 1871.) In summation, Marx writes "the political liberties ("rights of man") reduce citizenship, the political community, to a mere means for preserving these so-called rights of man" (On the Jewish Question, p.26). The federal constitution, laws, liberties, and rights of society are an extensive illusion and ideology -- religion --to maintain the domination of humanity by class property, market forces, and industrial production. Politics -- its idealism and theology -- becomes merely a means to protect the particular interests, structures, and materialism of civil society. Politics and law are not real and only hide the reality of capitalism -- its economic inequality, brutality, consumerism, alienation, exploitation, dehumanizing wage labor, and dispossession of the working class. The more focus on the former with its values of equality, freedom, rights, and justice, the less on the latter with its exploitation and distortion of human evolution in production and property. Thus, for Marx, politics and the law play the role formerly undertaken by religion and theology -- the displacement of social justice to the illusory and metaphysical realm. In the course of both "Alienated Labor" and "On the Jewish Question," Marx has rejected Locke's theory of natural and bourgeois rights of man and wage labor in the state of nature based on the principles of human dignity and moral autonomy in Kant (moral sovereignty and kingdom of ends) and human need and social justice in Aristotle (theory of democracy and the incompatibility of a market economy and chrematistics). Political rights and democracy require reciprocal and universal justice as their foundation. Marx's theory of Social Justice and human needs encompasses and integrates his ideas that focus on (1) the French Constitutions of the 1790s and the Rights of the Citizen; (2) the Gotha Program and the fair distribution of the means of consumption (social goods and services) and the means of production (worker cooperatives and ownership); (3) satisfaction of basic human needs (Aristotle's ethics and politics, Luke and New Testament Acts, and Rousseau's General Will); and (4) self-government, the brotherhood of humanity, and a government of the people by the people (Lincoln). Natural Law in Hegel: Marx's critique of the limits of natural rights and political emancipation represents an expansion and radicalization of Hegel's critique of the Enlightenment, liberalism, natural rights, political terror, and loss of the community and the common good in modern civil society in his works Early Theological Writings (1795-1799), Natural Law (1802), System of Ethical Life (1802-1803), German Constitution (1802), Jenaer Realphilosophie I (1803-1804) [ Jena Lectures on the First Philosophy of Spirit], and Realphilosophie II (1805-1806), Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Lectures on Natural Right and Political Science (1817-1818), Philosophy of Right (1821), and Lectures on the Philosophy of Objective Spirit: Part III of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1827-1830). Hegel's early writings focused on a return to the unity and harmony of ancient Greece in his Early Theological Writings with its emphasis on the community and social ethics (Sittlichkeit); his later writings attempted to integrate this Ancient ideal with the Modern view of the subjectivity of Natural Rights, individual liberty, and property. For his understanding of Natural Rights, Hegel turns to Kant and Rousseau as he rejects the materialism and empiricism of Hobbes and Locke in his essay Natural Law. In an early commentary on Kant's Metaphysic of Morals (1797), Hegel integrated Kant's theory of justice (part I) with his theory of virtue (part II) following in the footsteps of Aristotle who integrated ethics and politics. This synthesis developed because Hegel held that reason, moral autonomy, and freedom rested not in the abstract practical will and external categorical imperative of the particular individual but in the Spirit and Life of the community ("absolute ethical life"), that is, in the values, laws, and institutions of society. "Objective Spirit" is the term Hegel uses to refer to the re-incorporation of moral values and ideals back into the social, economic, and political institutions of modern society; modern Moralitaet is replaced by classical Sittlichkeit. According to Hegel, Natural Law no longer rested in the human nature, God, reason, human psychology in the state of nature, practical will and the categorical imperative, or free will deciding the General Will. Rather, Natural law, as the rational and moral principles underlying human action, values, and institutions (Geist), is an historical and social phenomenon. As he expresses this idea in his later writings, Reason and Natural Law express themselves in the Spirit of society -- in the historical development of the Absolute Spirit (art, religion, and philosophy) and the Objective Spirit (family, economy, and state). In the Phenomenology, self-consciousness evolves from the ancient Greeks to the modern French manifested and objectified in history, social institutions, and culture. In The Philosophy of Right, thought, religion, freedom, and morality are never actual or real until they have been externalized and made objective (existence) within concrete social forms; morality is not real until it becomes part of the constitution, laws, and the state -- the "rational social order." With Hegel, Natural Law has become a social theory. At this early stage, Hegel is clearly influenced by Rousseau's theory of the General Will and Montesquieu's "Spirit of the Laws." The Greek notion of the harmonious and integrated polis is the social ideal and driving force in these writings as there is no distance between the citizen and the individual. With the introduction of a market economy and fragmented society all this changes. Around the same time he was writing Natural Law, Hegel was also writing the System der Sittlichkeit which continued this discussion about the nature of morality in terms of the values and institutions of society -- the "moral life." Well into his later writings, Hegel attempts, like Locke, to balance and, ultimately, to reconcile Natural Law (Greeks) and Natural Rights (Liberalism), the abstract subjectivity of Kant with the public responsibility and political freedom of Rousseau, and the ideals of the Ancients with those of the Enlightenment: Locke attempts to integrate the two traditions for the purpose of ensuring and protecting individuals rights, liberties, and property within a market economy, while Hegel does so to protect both the ethical principles of the common good and general welfare of the community within the modern political life and the self-interest and natural rights of the liberal individual and the Enlightenment within capitalism. Just as Aristotle attempted to integrate ethics and politics in a democratic polity, Locke ethical principles and economic structures in the state of nature, and Hegel virtue and justice in social ethics, Marx created a practical science by pulling together human creativity and self-realization (social praxis) and a critique of political economy into a comprehensive theory of social justice. Expand these ideas about Natural Law in Spinoza and Rousseau. Mysticism, Political Alienation, and Human Emancipation: On the Jewish Question represents an analysis of political theory and alienation. It encompasses Marx's theory of the dual and contradictory roles of the modern state in capitalism: ideological mystification and political emancipation. Mysticism refers to the concealing of the economic and class foundation of modern industrial society by the state which undermines and negates the very possibilities of political rights and real freedom, while Emancipation refers to the emancipatory potential of the political "rights of the citizen" as opposed to the economic "rights of man." Natural Law in Marx: Integrating Ethics and Politics in Emancipation, Human Needs, and Economic Democracy: According to Marx, Locke, Kant, and Hegel did not succeed in integrating natural law and natural rights, politics and economics, and the rights of the citizen and the rights of man. He rejects their approaches in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843) and On the Jewish Question (1843). Marx will reject the Hobbesian and Lockean elements of the Natural Rights of civil society -- The Economic or Property Rights of Man of liberty, property, equality, and security, while accepting the Political or Human Rights of the Citizen of freedom of assembly, speech, thought, as well as civil rights and political liberties. Under capitalism, these political rights are reduced to mere means and ideologies meant to guarantee and hide from public view the economic rights of man, class, and property. These bourgeois rights of man are not true rights or needs because there is no guarantee or material means for their realization other than private or class property; they are rights only for those who already own property, and thus are not working-class rights or human rights. There is no common property or natural law for their protection as in Locke's original state of nature. Locke, Hegel, and Marx all battled with the conflicts and contradictions between Natural Law and Natural Rights, the Natural Rights of Hobbes/Locke and Rousseau/Kant, and the economic Rights of Man and the political Rights of the Citizen, respectively. But, like Hegel, Marx will move beyond the morality of Kant to a critical social theory and political economy. Natural Law is thus transformed in Marx into a theory of human nature as praxis, self-realization, and human creativity, the ideals of moral life in a democratic community; and a critique of chrematistics and the irrationalities of a market economy and industrial production. Natural Law as virtue and justice began with the "function of man" in a virtuous, public life (Aristotle), the creation of God (Aquinas and Hooker), and the nature of God, Reason, and Nature (Locke). With the aid of Hegel, Natural Law evolves from philosophy (function of man," virtue, and politics of Aristotle), religion (scholasticism of Aquinas), and political theory (natural rights theory of Hobbes and Locke) to social theory (political constitution of Hegel); with the help of Spinoza, Rousseau, and Feuerbach, Natural Law develops into the Concept and Idea of Democracy. This is why Marx's early writings in 1843 begin with a critique of Hegel's philosophy of law through an examination of the nature of democracy, the "rights of the citizen," and political and human emancipation (economic and social rights). Western thought has been organically reintegrated into a critical totality of human life. The dreams of Kant and Hegel -- human dignity, self-consciousness, and individual freedom -- are incorporated into worker cooperatives and the economic democracy of the Paris Commune. The ethical principles of Natural Law, which throughout the Middle Ages were grounded in the nature of God, Reason, and Nature are now grounded in the structures and institutions of the social system. God has been replaced by Democracy and Social Justice. That is, Marx's reappropriation of ancient Natural Law, along with his rejection of much of modern Natural Rights in On the Jewish Question has created a new model of social ethics (Sittlichkeit) by rewriting and reintegrating the ethics and politics, virtue and democracy of Aristotle with the nineteenth-century call for democracy. Overcoming political alienation is achieved through radical democracy, and Marx develops his early theory of democracy under the influence of the materialism and humanism of Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, especially Chapter 16 on democracy (1670), Tractatus Politicus (published posthumously in 1677), and The Ethics (1677), Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (1841), and Moses Hess, European Triarchy (1841). Marx starts in his work On the Jewish Question from the attempted synthesis of the Ancients and Moderns, Natural Law and Natural Rights, and the ethical community and the individual in Hegel's Natural Law theory with special emphasis on the latter's critique of Natural Rights and the replacement of the liberal, market rights of possessive individualism of Hobbes and Locke with the moral subjectivity and human dignity of Rousseau and Kant. Building upon these insights, Marx turns to the Natural Law of Hegel and Spinoza, the theory of democracy of Spinoza, Rousseau, Feuerbach, and Grote, and the theory of particular (economic) and universal (political) justice of Aristotle. Marx resolves the dilemma of these conflicting traditions by returning to Hegel's early writings and by giving the ancient Greek ideal a modern vision through the theory of democracy of Spinoza (1632-1677) and Rousseau (1712�1778). Once this is established, Marx has revived the Natural Law tradition of the Ancients, rejected the Natural Rights of liberalism, and framed the discussion within the modern institutions of social and economic democracy. The Analytic Marxists have mistaken the relationship between virtue and democracy, ethics and politics, morals and structures, and natural law and economics as an unbridgeable divide between the early and later writings of Marx -- the divide between philosophy and political economy. They did not recognize that Marx was unpacking and reconciling the Classical Natural Law tradition with modern industrial society. Griechensehnsucht: The Origins of Human Emancipation and Natural Law in Jerusalem, Athens, and Berlin: Marx's belief that the defense of the universality of celestial natural rights conceals economic power, class, inequality, and political alienation and represses the need for human emancipation, self-realization, and political and economic freedom (31). Richard Tawney in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism referred to Marx as "the last of the Schoolmen" -- the last of the Aristotelian natural law theorists. From his earliest writings, it is clear that Marx's soul was inspired by a longing for the Ancients which he found in the classical horizons and objective spirit of Jerusalem, Athens, and Berlin, that is, in the ethical and political ideals of Spinoza and Moses Hess, Aristotle and Epicurus, and Kant, Schiller, Hegel, and Feuerbach, respectively. This essay also shows how Marx can use a concept that has both ideological and repressive distortions (religiosity and idolatry) and emancipatory potential in the same idea. The notions of "natural rights" and "political emancipation" both contain these opposing principles: natural rights contain the contradictory rights of man and the rights of the citizen, while political emancipation leads to both bourgeois revolution of the French republic and socialist democracy of the Paris Commune. Locke ended the seventeenth century at first by incorporating natural rights into natural law, but finished his work on government by eliminating and dissolving natural law into natural rights; Marx took the opposite approach by redefining natural rights -- freedom, equality, and liberty -- in terms of the priorities of natural law, the common good, compassion, human dignity, and social justice. Summary: The species being realizes itself in its true life activity in the form of creativity, self-realization, freedom, and beauty of the craftsperson in the economy and the citizen in politics, in work and in democracy. Updated Historical Note on Civil and Legal Rights in the United States in the Summer of 2020: Minneapolis, Lafayette Square, and Black Lives Matter: Following closely Marx's response to Bruno Bauer and his analysis of the Jewish community in Prussia in the 1840s, a parallel historical and social development is occurring today (May and June 2020) in the United States. The same issues of nineteenth century Jewish Lives Matter apply today to the Black Lives Movement and the same questions may be asked about the nature of civil, legal, and political rights. Should American society extend these rights to all the racial and ethnic minorities in the country? Just as Marx turned down civil rights for the Jews, we should turn down civil rights for African-Americans and those behind the Black Lives Matter movement. Why? It was not because Marx was prejudiced, anti-Semitic, and did not believe Jews should be given civil rights, individual liberties, and personal freedom. Just the opposite was true. It was simply that the civil rights of liberalism are inadequate, prejudicial, and oppressive to both Jews and Christians. They are the limited rights of liberal repression. The racial minorities in America are asking for civil rights and equality before the law in the twenty-first century, just as the Jews were asking for the same rights in Germany in the mid-nineteenth century. In both cases, the initial question of civil or legal rights misses the mark, and Marx takes the whole essay to discuss the nature of civil or economic and political or human rights: To make Jews equal to Christians or Blacks equal to Whites will not bring about equality and freedom in an oppressive society because all groups are dominated and exploited. Civil Rights and Racial Justice are only part of a much broader issue of Social Justice. To concentrate only on the former is to miss the broader historical and social problem of racism in America. Racism is intimately connected to the alienation, exploitation, and oppression of a class society as a whole -- rule by the top one percent. Marx rejects the whole notion of civil and legal rights since it is connected to the political and economic oppression of the Jewish population under liberalism and capitalism. He rejects the limitations of natural rights based on a market economy, liberal individualism, consumerism, and economic class oppression and calls for political emancipation, universal rights, economic dignity, and self-determination as the basis for a broader and more comprehensive understanding of human rights. The law, police, courts and political system are all connected with the underlying values and structures of civil society and the total social system. Civil and property rights of liberalism and the natural rights tradition must be replaced by a turn to a secular and historical natural law as the basis for political and economic emancipation and social justice. What began as a protest against police violence and brutality and the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis has transformed in the past two weeks into a public protest and demand for human rights and social justice. Note: The problem with this movement -- Black Lives Matter -- is that at the moment American protesters, workers, intellectuals, professors, and the American liberal university do not have the theoretical and conceptual framework to overcome disenchantment and the eclipse of reason. They do not have the theoretical framework to move beyond this system or even take the first steps out of the present economic system. What is needed is a more comprehensive critical theory of social justice that can be applied to the real lives of those protesting on the streets of America. Improving the legal system only increases bigotry and exploitation in the long run by re-legitimating the liberalism and the social system. Moralizing and social protest must lead to concrete social, political, and economic transformations. Marx's On the Jewish Question only provides us with a beginning to this discussion. What is needed now is an expanded critique of domestic political economy and the American empire, and a more profound and comprehensive understanding of the ideals of political and economic democracy based on workers' control, economic and political equality, and a government "of the people, by the people" grounded in universal human rights. Also, issues of health care and the viral pandemic, psychology and mental health, education and the public maturation of citizens, income and wealth distribution, class and inequality, and the environment and ecological crisis must be considered part of this general theory of social justice. (For more on this issue, see McCarthy, Marx and Social Justice, chapters 3-7.) Summary and Conclusion: The Rights of the Citizen (political rights) provide the natural cover and ideology for the Natural Rights of Man (economic rights). Democracy provides the natural cover and ideology for Liberalism and Capitalism. Capitalism and Liberalism are incompatible with Democracy since their values and structures are inherently contradictory. Their goals and ideals run in the opposite direction. But Democracy hides the stark reality of alienation and exploitation of capitalist industry and social relations from human self-consciousness. Political Liberalism (On the Jewish Question/i>) with its distinctions between the economic rights of man and the political rights of the citizen contradicts and undermines its own ethical and political ideals, whereas at the same time, capitalism contradicts its own values, principles, premises, and potentialities in the distinction between individual creativity, dignity, and freedom in human labor and the social reality of class alienation, exploitation, and dehumanization of productive work (Early Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844). Marx does rely on the ethics and politics of classical humanism integrated into the dialectical and critical method of Socrates, Aristotle, and Hegel. |
| 7. | Karl Marx | "Theses on Feuerbach" and "Communist Manifesto" in
Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. by Lewis Feuer, pp. 243-245 and 1-41 Critical Epistemology, Methodology, and Historical Materialism Evolution of Theories of Consciousness: Critique of Empiricism and Materialism in Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Feuerbach: Summarize the evolution of the Enlightenment theory of consciousness and the constitution theory of objectivity (external world of things and substances) from Hume's theory of the mind, imagination, representations, and skepticism, Kant's transcendental subjectivity and perceptual and cognitive representations, and Hegel's historical consciousness and the Objective Spirit to Marx's theory of historical consciousness and materialism, base and superstructure, and political and cultural ideology (false consciousness). Marx outlines the beginnings of his critical epistemology and methodology in the Theses on Feuerbach, while in The Communist Manifesto he breaks with his earlier philosophical and sociological analysis of alienation and the organization of work to examine the deeper structures of political economy and power in modern industrial society. In the Theses on Feuerbach, Marx outlines his critique of both materialism (Feuerbach) and idealism (Kant and Hegel). The ultimate purpose of social theory is not to interpret the world, but to change it. During the classical period, besides Marx's theory of historical materialism, other approaches to historical consciousness and social structures will develop: Weber's theory of historical idealism, Durkheim's theory of collective representations, and Freud's theory of individual rationalization and unconscious repression. Historical Materialism and the Critique of Political Economy: In the latter work he evolves from an examination of the alienated creative potential of human labor or praxis to the logical and historical structural contradictions (Widersprüche) within the capitalist mode of production between the productive forces (science, technology, industry, machinery, and factories) and the social relations of production (organization, power, and class configuration of the workplace) -- the rationality of the productive capacity of capitalism to eliminate human misery and poverty and the class system which only perpetuates human suffering. But since the capitalist system rests on private property, class, and bourgeois power, the society created by this new socio-economic system is a barbarism of overproduction in an industrial surplus society. Marx also develops his theory of historical materialism whereby the institutional and cultural features of society (law, state, religion, family, art, music, etc.) are seen as framed, defined, and influenced by the underlying structures of capitalist production (24). However, it should also be recalled that in the Theses on Feuerbach, number III," Marx wrote that "the materialist doctrine that men are the products of circumstances and upbringing...forgets that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating" (1845). Even though the economic foundations of society frame and "determine" the superstructure and other social institutions, the creativity and imagination of humanity in their critical social theory and praxis can rise above their immediate historical conditions toward enlightenment, social change, and, ultimately, social justice. And this education and inspiration lies in the Classical Horizons of his imagination and social theory. Also examine his critique of bourgeois socialism (Proudhon) and utopian socialism (St. Simon, Fourier, and Owen). A universal increase in wages (Proudhon) and even "a fair distribution of the proceeds of labor" (Ferdinand Lassalle) would not change the underlying social form of production; it would only represent the universalization of capitalist social relations of production. Workers would become capitalists with a greater share in the profits but that would not change the power structure, alienation, or class system. Critique, Science, and Ethics: Foundations of Marx's Critical and Dialectical Science: Marx's dialectical and critical methods evolved over time to their fullest expression in the Grundrisse and Capital. Summary of the evolution of the Method of Critique as it integrates philosophy and sociology, ethics and science, justice and historical reality, and empirical phenomena and deep social structures. Over the course of his writings, his theory of immanent critique slowly developed and includes the following: (1) a phenomenology of the Western tradition from the ancients to the modern; (2) natural rights theory; (3) political economy and the structural contradictions, crises, and irrationalities of capitalism; (4) the future possibilities of grounding a society based on human freedom and human need; and (5) the development of social justice and democracy based on human emancipation, human rights, and human needs in the Paris Commune of 1871. Critique as Method: (1) The method of critique begins with the development of human consciousness in skepticism and representations in Hume, perception and the understanding in Kant, consciousness, reason, and self-consciousness in Hegel, and religion, politics (rights), and economy in Marx. Marx's approach evolves as a method that reveals the structural reality behind the empirical appearances and economic illusions created by humans. The appearances are reflected in alienated labor, natural rights, and economic production and prosperity. Beneath these appearances lie the structural reality of irrationality, immorality, and oppression. (2) The second element of Critique lies in the dialectic, structural contradictions, and immanent critique of modernity. This aspect of critique comes out of Hegel's Phenomenology and Logic. This approach also represents a rejection of later versions of Marxist dialectical materialism and scientific socialism which epistemologically and methodologically undermine his idea of the ethical critique of political economy. Marx enjoins the comparison of the concept of the species-being to alienation, the rights of the citizen (human emancipation) to the rights of man (political emancipation), industrial production to economic crises, breakdown, and barbarism, and the productive forces to the social relations of production. He sees that the contradictions between these ideals and forces produce a society that is unable to justify itself as rational or ethical. The very notion of Critique introduces the issues of the formation of Consciousness (sociology of knowledge) and the reality of Economic Structures as a way of getting access to the underlying incoherence and contradictions of the alienation and exploitation in modern industrial society. The forms of social and ethical Critique in Marx's writings include the following: Natural Law (I), Natural Rights (II), Deep Structures, Dialectic, and Economic Crisis Theory (III), Theory of Democracy (IV), and Consciousness and Sociology of Knowledge (V). There are thus three major forms of Critique -- (1) Substantive Critique of ethics and natural law in The Early Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts of 1844; (2) Immanent Critique of economic and political rights -- the rights of man and of the citizen -- in On the Jewish Question; (3) Dialectical Critique of the internal contradictions and history of the capitalist structures and industrial production in the Grundrisse and Capital; and Historical Critique or Historical Materialism revealing the historical and material connections between history and consciousness, institutions and cultural values and the relationship between ideology and capitalism. Forms of Critique and Science in Marx: Social Science as Critique involves questions of history, social ideals and secular natural law, potentiality, contradictions, immanent critique, and the integration of ethics and science. This dialectical and critical view of science represents a rejection of the subjectivistic, abstract, transcendent, and utopian moralism of the Left Hegelians (Max Stirner and Bruno Bauer) and French Socialists (Proudhon), the vulgar and sense-data empiricism of British political economy (Smith and Ricardo), the epistemology of British empiricism (Locke and Hume), and the narrow individualism and unrestrained lawlessness (lack of natural law) of liberalism (Hobbes and Locke). (For Marx's analysis of these schools of thought, see The Poverty of Philosophy, The Holy Family, and The German Ideology.) One tradition is stuck with the pure, transcendent ideal and the other the appearance of objective reality. (For more on these issues, see Patrick Murray, Marx's Theory of Scientific Knowledge, 1988.) Marx's view of science has moved beyond the abstract categories of the understanding (Kant), the rejection of empiricism (Hegel), and the historical evolution of reason and self-consciousness in the Spirit (Idealism of Hegel) to the study of empirical and historical reality but within the framework of the methods of social critique (historical materialism). Marx will focus on the internal, structural, and logical contradictions of capitalism expressed in its ideals of work (human creativity and self-determination), politics (political rights of the citizen), and the economy (theory of needs, structural integrity of the social system, and democracy), that is, its contradictions of social ethics, work, natural rights, and the logic of capital. Note: Max Weber will also develop a variety of different non-positivistic sociological methods, including an historical, hermeneutical, dialectical, and structural critique. Compare the various epistemologies and methodologies of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim to that offered in American sociology. The disappearance of European epistemology and methods and the rise of Anglo-American positivism marks the darkening shadows of the Enlightenment and decline in American sociology. This is the very thing Horkheimer feared in his work The Eclipse of Reason with the rise of empiricism, nominalism, and non-critical social theory. Horkheimer thought that this trend would only prepare the academic way for the rise of fascism in the United States since there would no longer be any critical theory and intellectual resistance. He saw at the end of WW II the relationship between the decline of truth and objective reason and the decline of ethics and democracy. "Dialectics" and "Critique" in Hegel and Marx as the Methodological Fusion of Aristotle and Kant: Limits of the Categories of Mind, Objective Spirit, and Political Economy: Marx's critical and dialectical method was creatively derived from the philosophical writings of Kant, Hegel, and Schelling. Hegel attempted to create in his Phenomenology of Spirit an historical reconstruction of the ethical and political phenomena of Western Reason (practical reason) and Spirit (social principles and institutions of ethics and politics) which were essential to the formation of the collective and historical consciousness of modern human beings. The "phenomenology of spirit" is the constructed, historical, and dialectical form and objective, moral experience and social consciousness of the phenomenal world of social ethics and politics. That is, Hegel retranslates and restructures Aristotle into the modern form of phenomenology, history, and dialectics. Hegel's phenomenology of spirit represents a dialectical and critical reconstruction of Aristotle's social ethics and politics (family, economy, and state). This represents the synthesis of Aristotle's ethics and politics, Kant's critique of pure reason in the modern consciousness of the natural and social worlds -- physical and social reality. an Hegel's distinctive dialectical and critical method. That is, the conceptual form that gives coherence and meaning to human experience and understanding lies in both our knowledge of objective reality and ethical/political reason from the ancients to the moderns. The Phenomenology of Spirit. is not completed by Hegel until the appearance of his later work Philosophy of Right. Marx, in his early writings, especially On the Jewish Question, constructed the dialectic as a form of historical and immanent critique of the categories that frame and structure our understanding of liberalism and natural rights; in his later writings, the method of critique turns into an analysis of the categories of the economic structures and institutions of capitalist production. As mentioned above, Marx sees a profound contradiction between the oppressive, narrow, and perverse economic rights of possessive individualism, materialism, and private property and the emancipatory ideals of the political rights of public assembly, political freedom, free speech, and democracy in the various eighteenth-century French Constitutions. Unfortunately for their times, the political ideals were not emancipatory, but acted as forms of ideology and false consciousness to hide the economic realities of alienation and exploitation in the workplace. In his later writings he sees the main contradictions as those between industrial production, economic expansion, the labor theory of value, and the creation of material wealth and the negative effects of class inequality, poverty, economic unemployment, constant crises, and eventual logical breakdown of the total social system. The purpose of dialectical reasoning is to reveal the inner logical and historical contradictions (Widersprüche) of natural rights and capitalist production in order to show the irrationality and immorality of a market economy and modern industrial society. The Dialectics and Critique also provide the foundations for Marx's theory of historical materialism. Borrowing from both Kant's critique of pure and practical reason and the limits of the categories of perception (forms of intuition of time and space), understanding (forms of substance and causality), science (laws of Newtonian physics), and morality (categorical imperative) and Hegel's critique (analysis and limits) of the historical phenomena and objective experience of the Spirit or the ethical and political categories and forms of collective or social consciousness, Marx applies this method to the analysis of the ideals and institutions of capitalism. Kant and Hegel examined the limits of the categories of consciousness and experience of nature and the Objective Spirit, mind and society. In fact, one could view Hegel as rewriting Aristotle's Ethics and Politics from within the history and social phenomena of the ancient philosophers and medieval Christians to modern Kantian morality and the Robespierrean violence of the French Revolution. Hegel examined the modern forms of Consciousness (experience) and Objective Spirit (Ethics and Politics) which represented an integration of the ancients and moderns -- Aristotle and Kant -- as he incorporated their ideas into a comprehensive history and phenomenology of spirit to produce a method based on the critique of reason, history, and society. Marx then used these integrated methods to undertake a new interpretation of modernity by showing how modern society itself -- its economic structures and ideology -- was internally and logically inconsistent and contradictory to its own publically stated principles and ideals of political economy and democracy and could not be defended ethically or rationally by these ideas. By applying this dialectical method, Marx has integrated the works of Aristotle, Hegel, and Kant into his Critique of Political Economy. He clearly was not applying a Comtean method of positivism and natural science to his study of the formation and development of industrial capitalism. This helps us to understand better some of the incorrect and inappropriate criticisms of Marx's critical and dialectical method in today's scholarly literature. Summary of Marx's Critical Methods of Historical Science: There is a wide variety of social research methods used by Marx in his early and later writings that include the following: Critique as Historical Materialism, Phenomenology of Historical Consciousness, Philosophical Anthropology, Dialectic and Contradictions of Ideas and Self-Consciousness, Contradictions of Capital, History of Capitalist Development, and Theory of Social Justice. (1) Historical Critique or Historical Materialism which examines the origins and nature of our political, economic, and cultural concepts, ideas, and theories (2) Phenomenology of Historical Consciousness or the history of the social forms of ideas, consciousness, and self-consciousness in Western thought that Marx uses as the foundation for his social analysis (3) Ethical Critique or Philosophical Anthropology is the underlying secular natural law and philosophy of humanity that he uses to criticize capitalism in his early philosophical essays by emphasizing human dignity, creativity, beauty, and self-determination (4) Dialectical Critique and Contradictions of Ideas and Structures, such as the contradictions between natural "rights of man" or the economic rights and the "rights of the citizen" or political rights. Human emancipation borrows from the emancipatory potential of these liberal rights as the foundation for his vision of socialist rights (5) Contradictions of Structures and Logic of Capital within industrial production and political economy that lead to the structural weakness and irrationality and the logical breakdown of capitalism in his later writings of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and Capital (6) History of Capitalism examines the historical development of capitalist production and its effects on the potential for human and environmental development (7) Ethics and Social Justice that follows closely the development of Aristotle's theory of ethics, political economy, and the Athenian democratic polity (8) Historical Hermeneutics and the critical interpretation of intellectual and philosophical traditions and texts (9) Immanent Critique of political and economic rights which reveal their underlying assumptions, values, institutions, and connections to capitalist production and exchange. I. Capitalism and Social Ethics: Natural Law, Philosophical Anthropology, and Substantive Ethical or Practical Critique: Ethical Contradictions between the ideal and real within a philosophy of species-being and self-defining humanity in the Paris Manuscripts. These contradictions manifest themselves between labor and work, alienation and praxis, empirical reality and social ideals, and property oppression and creativity/self-determination. These contradictions are essential to Marx since work is fundamentally an ethical and natural law concept (Hegel and Feuerbach); work expresses the essence and potentiality of humanity as creators (Kant) according to the laws of beauty (Schiller) and moral and political self-determining beings (Kant and Hegel). The basis for this critique arose out of Marx's borrowings from the history of Western intellectual thought, including German idealism (Kant and Hegel), Greek philosophy (Aristotelean ethics and politics), Hebrew thought of Genesis, Deuteronomy, and Leviticus, Romantic ideals of Winckelmann, Schiller, and German, British, and Irish Romantic poetry, and German Existentialism of Schiller, Schelling, and Feuerbach. It is at this point that Marx creates a secular natural law by informally recapitulating the history or phenomenology of the absolute (culture) and objective (family, economy, and state) Spirit from the ancients to the moderns in his writings. His early writings represent a Phenomenology of Ethics and Social Justice as he summarizes and incorporates the history of Western thought from the ancient Hebrews, Hellenes, Hellenists to the modern German poets and philosophers into a critical social theory of industrial society. This critical approach or phenomenology of politics represents the development within self-consciousness to articulate and make historically concrete its ideas (absolute spirit) and institutions (objective spirit) about freedom, rationality, and politics. Marx begins his essay on alienated labor by accepting the whole system of private property (land, capital, and labor) and competition and the market, their reality, laws, and institutions but moves below the surface phenomena and the categories of political economy to the deeper reality and structural foundations of alienation, exploitation, and commodity production. The ethical critique is also based on the Contradictions between the real and the ideal, the empirical/historical/structural and ethical/political ideals as they are expressed in the distinctions between work and labor, alienation and praxis, political emancipation and human emancipation, economic rights of the bourgeois man and political rights of the citizen, satisfaction of wants and needs, technical rationality of productive forces and the limits of the social relations of production, material production and class distribution in a post-scarcity society, etc. A society with these ethical and structural contradictions is immoral, illogical, and illegitimate. II. Political Contradictions Between "Rights of Man" and "Rights of the Citizen": Natural Rights Theory and Immanent Critique: Contradictions within political theory and the French Constitutions of 1793 and 1795 between state and civil society, political rights of free speech and assembly (Rousseau), and the economic rights of property and wealth (Locke), and human emancipation and political emancipation in On the Jewish Question. Marx moves beyond Locke's failure to integrate Natural Law and Natural Rights as he integrates the critical approaches of numbers I and II. Marx accomplishes this task because he rejects the theistic component of scholastic natural law while at the same time as he rejects the economic and market right to private property The non-theist and humanistic natural law of human labor, self-determination, and creativity according to the laws of beauty of the Paris Manuscripts of 1844 are expanded with the introduction of Natural and Human Rights to freedom, equality, citizenship, and political participation from On the Jewish Question. This form of critique represents the inner contradictions between the economic rights to property and the political rights to participation and assembly in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. III. Dialectical Critique, Historical Materialism, and Economic Crisis Theory: Economic Structures, History, and Logic: Overproduction, Stagnation, and Crises: Contradictions within the structures of political economy found in the Communist Manifesto and The German Ideology between the social relations of production and the productive forces, Enlightenment science, technology, and the industrial revolution and the class system, and unbounded human productivity and the limits of private property resulting in the limits and crises of capital accumulation, production, and consumption. In his middle-period writings of the Communist Manifesto and A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, the economic contradictions of production and class result in the overproduction of material goods and an imbalance between production and consumption, whereas in his later writings of the Grundrisse and Capital the economic crisis results in the overproduction of capital, misuse of natural resources, and high unemployment. Marx rejects the empiricism of crude materialism with its accumulation of empirical data, explanatory and causal relationships, and predictive laws. Instead, he creates the beginnings of historical materialism with his analysis of social consciousness, base and superstructures, economic and social structures, functions, history, contradictions between productive forces and the social relations of production, the logic of capital, and social justice. Throughout the course of Marx's writings, dialectical science captures the contradictions between the concept and history, logic and structure, and the ideal and the real. His early writings with their emphasis on the substantive contradictions between human essence and existence, species-being and alienated labor, intellectual/spiritual needs and material/physical wants, and human, natural law/rights of the citizen and bourgeois, natural rights/rights of man have been replaced in his later writings by the contradictions and immanent critique of the inner logic and irrational structures of production, and the unethical social system of capitalism -- the barbarism, economic crises, lost production, and abuse of humanity and its potentialities. The method of historical materialism of Marx, as opposed to Weber's theory of historical and cultural idealism, also emphasizes the relationship between consciousness ("mental production") and political economy, that is, the relationship between politics, law, morality, religion, and metaphysics (sociology of knowledge) and the structures of capital, class, and production. The underlying deep structure in Marx's early writings is informed by ethics, politics, and philosophical anthropology, i.e. natural law, whereas in the Communist Manifesto it is informed by the history and logic of capitalism. Evolution of Critique, Consciousness, and Historical Materialism from the Theory of the Subject: Critique refers to the metaphysics and a priori foundations of perception, experience, and knowledge in the following: 1. the imagination (empirical skepticism of Hume) 2. the transcendental subject (subjective idealism of Kant) 3. the Objective Spirit (objective idealism of Hegel) and 4. the foundations of human consciousness in history and political economy (historical materialism of Marx): see the "Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (141), German Ideology (14), and the Paris Manuscripts (156 and 159-160). For Marx, skepticism, idealism, and crude materialism (Feuerbach) are all forms of empiricism because they reflect the surface and superficial phenomenal world but not the deeper structures and functions of power, political economy, and social critique (hermeneutics and ethics). (See C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, pages 56, 66, and 68). IV. Democratic Ideals and Social Justice: Development of a critical theory of social justice in the Gotha Program and the Paris Commune founded upon an expanded theory of political and human emancipation, rights and liberties, political rights of the citizen, human needs, and participatory democracy in the political and economic realms. V. Critical Sociology of Knowledge: Historical Materialism and the Formation of Consciousness Examines the relationship between the economic base and the institutional/cultural superstructure of society. In order to understand the nature of the state, law, politics, religion, art, philosophy, science, and culture one must first appreciate the nature of the organization and alienation of production, class private property, and the distribution of social wealth in society. It is political economy which defines and delineates the context and boundaries within which social institutions and culture develop in modernity. These issues are found in The Communist Manifesto and the German Ideology. The notion of contradiction (Widersprüch) -- logical, structural, ethical and political -- is central to Marx's theory of science. As seen above, there are the contradictions between the economic and property rights of the bourgeois man (Articles 2, 3, 6, 8-9, and 16) and the political rights of the citizen for the common good and general welfare (Articles 1, 4-5, 7, 10-15, and 25) in the French Declaration of Rights (On the Jewish Question); contradictions between the empirical and historical reality and the ethical and political ideals of natural law and the state (Paris Manuscripts); and the economic and structural contradictions within the production process and capital (Critique of Political Economy, Grundrisse, and Capital). In the final analysis, capitalism is an irrational and illogical social system because it cannot realize the potentialities of the human species in creativity, dignity, self-determination, human needs, and freedom; it cannot create a polity based on human emancipation and the civil, political, and democratic rights of the citizen; it cannot produce a society that is efficient and productive and that doesn't always tend to inner contradictions, crises, and stagnation; and, finally, it cannot maintain a truly democratic and participatory system in which workers control their own lives, government, and workplaces, that is, in which workers cannot live a life of moral and intellectual virtue. Thus, within capitalism, there is always an unresolvable internal or structural contradiction between the rights of the citizen and the rights of man, species being and alienation labor, social existence and consciousness, base and superstructure, productive forces and social relations of production, overproduction of capital and underconsumption of social goods, human needs and human wants, democracy and capitalism, and the proletariat and bourgeoisie. This is the foundation of Marx's social theory as a social, ethical, and political critique of capitalism; this is the foundation of his theory of social justice -- theory and practice, Widerspruch und Widerstand. Also, Marx's critique of these internal economic, political, ethical, and structural contradictions are framed from within the social system itself. They are not imported or imposed from the outside, but develop from within the system. The social, ethical, and political ideals are those forms of false consciousness and ideology that attempt to hide economic alienation, class exploitation, and structural contradictions. Marx's turns the system's own forms of rationalization and distorted consciousness into the basis for his social and immanent critique. In his theory, the oppressive ideas of capitalism become emancipatory ideals of socialism. Finally, Social Critique and the Dialectic transcend the limits of liberalism and its theory of justice. With the dialectic and contradictions between the rights of man and the citizen, alienated labor and species being, productive forces and the social relations of production, consciousness and social existence, equal rights and distributive justice, equal exchange, contribution, & needs, the critical consciousness and ideas/ideals always reach beyond liberalism. Even the limited consciousness of liberalism with its ideals of freedom, rights, liberty, and equality transcends the historical moment with its ideals of citizenship, public participation, human rights, human emancipation, and democracy. Thus, the Analytical Marxists with their "Tucker-Wood Thesis" fail to realize the dialectical and transcending dimension of liberalism's economic and political thought that can reach beyond the present horizons to the future -- actuality contains its own potentiality. |
| 8. | Karl Marx | "Critique of the Gotha Program," (1875) and "Civil War in France: The Paris Commune" (1871), in
Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. by Lewis Feuer, pp. 112-132 and 349-391 Distributive Justice, Theory of Needs, and Economic Democracy Critique of the Gotha Program: This work continues the conversation between Natural Rights and Natural Law theory begun in On the Jewish Question, examines the categories of labor (112), wealth (113), nature (114), proceeds of labor (114), fairness (114), and society (115-116); connects political economy to a materialist reading of history (113); and develops a theory of social justice based on the evolution of human rights through capitalist rights, socialist rights, and communist rights (115-116). Marx's Theory of Human Rights and Fair and Just Distribution: (1) Capitalist Rights of Market Exchange: theory of equal rights or exchange rights in a capitalist economy based on the bourgeois ideals of equality, freedom, and market justice (2) Socialist Rights of Labor Contribution: rights in a transition economy based on socialist ideals of contribution and inequality of outcome (3) Communist Rights of Human Need: rights in a communist economy based on the principle of human need and fairness -- "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" -- taken from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Luke in the New Testament (118-119; "The Acts of the Apostles," 2:43 and 4:32-35); rejection of moralism and abstractionism as basis for social critique (119-120); social justice grounded in the structure of production and not in economic distribution (120); critique of vulgar socialism (120); and revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat (127). In Aristotle there is a Need for Creativity, Beauty, Virtue, Love, Democracy, Brotherhood of Man, and Justice (Paris Manuscripts, 125, 128, 160, 164, 164-165, 174 and 176) . In the end, according to Marx, social justice is the ultimate human need for it comprises both ethics and politics, virtue and democracy -- the need for basic physical necessities of human life or distributive justice, equal rights and human emancipation, economic and political democracy, and economic equality, freedom, creativity, and dignity. Human Need = Human Rights and Emancipation = Social Justice. Aristotle and Marx on Human Need: Closely following the Hellenic tradition of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Politics and early Hellenistic Christianity (Luke, Acts), but with the modern additions of praxis, aesthetic work, and human creativity from the German Idealism of Kant and Hegel and the German Romanticism of Schiller and Goethe, Marx's theory of human need can be clearly stated in the following Themes: NEED = Ethics, Politics, and Nature, Virtue, Democracy, and Stewardship, Human Rights and Citizenship, Species Being, Moral Economy, and Economic Democracy of the people, by the people in workers' associations. That is, NEED = Social and Ecological Justice. It can also be stated in the following Traditions: Ancient Hebrews and Prophets (Deuteronomy and Leviticus, Jubilee and Sabbat view of remission and redistribution), Hellenes (Aristotle), Hellenists (Luke, Acts), German Romanticism (Schiller and Goethe), and German Idealism (Kant and Hegel). Social Justice, then, is the institutionalization (political and economic democracy of workers' control and producer associations) of the good life and happiness (moral and intellectual virtue, natural law, human rights, and freedom and self-determination/self-realization). Critique of the Gotha Program: a happy and virtuous life (moral and intellectual virtues), the need for love (philia) within the family, friends, neighbors, and citizens, the need for democracy and political wisdom (phronesis), and the need for social justice (economic justice of distribution and reciprocity and the political justice of the democratic polity), while for Marx need refers to the need for self-determination and self-realization of the species-being in work (praxis), community, the political and economic democracy of producer cooperatives -- a "government of the people by the people" -- and social justice. Marx rejects the Lassallean socialist abstract theory of society, labor, distribution, and rights. In its place he calls for a more historical and structural analysis of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption based on his theory of historical materialism -- productive forces and social relations of production, base and superstructure. Beginning with the History, Structure, and Function of Production, Marx expands his theory of human emancipation, human rights, and human need from On the Jewish Question to the Paris Commune. His theory of Human Rights includes the following: (1) Political Rights of the Citizen to political assembly, free speech, participation, and freedom in the French Declaration of Rights (2) Economic Rights of the Workers to organize worker cooperatives, worker ownership of property and production, dissolution of classes, and human need in the Paris Commune (3) Social Rights of the Workers to education, insurance, social services, education, health care, and the building of the economic infrastructure and base (4) Distributive and Human Rights to common property, proceeds of labor, fair distribution, satisfaction of human needs, and social justice in the Gotha Program (p. 115). Marx's is very critical of the Gotha Program because of its abstract and ill-defined categories, such as common property, fair distribution, and equal rights. In place of common property, he develops his theory of economic, social, and labor costs; in place of fair distribution, he traces the development of distributive justice from fair and equal exchange in the market (liberalism) and contribution and merit (socialism) to human needs and fairness (communism); and, finally, he replaces equal rights with a more subtle and complex treatment of unequal rights. The critical method used in Critique of the Gotha Program parallels that of 1. Common property 2. Fair distribution 3. Proceeds of Labor 4. Equal rights based on fair distribution (115-116): a. fair exchange of labor for wages (liberalism) b. Contribution and effort in workplace (socialism, 118) c. Distribution based on human need (communism) 5. Distributive Justice (115-116): a. economic costs: replace the means of production b social costs and social rights: law, education, health care, and welfare costs d. labor costs: equal rights (114) These economic rights of fair distribution and human need found in the Gotha Program of 1875 and the Paris Commune of 1971 expand Marx's theory of economic rights from the Paris Manuscripts of 1844 and his rejection of the economic rights of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1793 and 1795 (life, liberty, property, equality, and security) in On the Jewish Question. In turn, the political rights of the French Declaration of political participation, assembly, and freedom of conscience, thought, and speech are made more concrete in the institutions of workers' democracy, producers' associations, and "the self-government of the people and by the people" (Lincoln) in the Paris Commune. Taken together they provide a more comprehensive overview of Marx's theory of human rights that integrate economic, political, and social rights of his early and later writings. The ethics and rights articulated in the Gotha Program have to be analytically sharpened and clarified so that social critique is not reduced to abstract moralizing and speculative ethics. The integration of ethics and politics, morality and social institutions found in Aristotle must take place in order to make the ideals of distributive justice and human rights concrete and relevant. The Gotha Program as an ethical and political doctrine is too vague, abstract, and moralizing. It needs theoretical and practical clarity -- analytic detail and practical application in the social world. Thus Marx develops the concepts of equal rights, fair distribution of common property and the proceeds of labor that lie at the heart of the Gotha Program and expands them into his theory of human rights and distributive and reciprocal justice by giving them grounding in the real world of liberalism (distribution based on a fair wage contract and fair exchange of labor and wages), socialism (distribution based on contribution and equality), and communism (fair distribution based on human needs and inequality). Question: Compare Marx's theory of human and political rights and distributive justice based on human needs to Locke's theory of natural rights and distributive justice based on common property, compassion, friendship, and human need in the original state of nature and his theory of civil rights based on meritocracy and accomplishments in a market economy in the second state of nature and civil society. Civil War in France and the Paris Commune of 1871: dismantle centralized government of standing army, police, government bureaucracy, clergy, and judiciary (363); separate church and state (355); allow foreigners to be elected to Commune, placed limits on salaries, eliminate State payments for religious purposes, exclude religion from education, confiscate Church property, reopen factories by workers, abolish night work for bakers and employment offices, close pawnshops, suppress standing army, uproot old class system, and create the concrete structures of democracy and the "self-government of the producers": universal suffrage, right of recall, rejection of careerism, limits to salary of elected officials, formation of worker cooperatives, and creation of decentralized, local democracies of urban and rural communes within a federal system integrating the nation (355-356, 360-361, 365-367, and 370); emancipate labor from wage slavery, dismantle class power and institutions, and end private property (369-370); ideals of the social republic exist within present society (370); and construct a moral economy based on human needs and human emancipation (119). The Paris Commune lasted 72 days from the end of March to the end of May 1871. Anarchism, Self-Government, and Communal Democracy in the "Seventy-Two Days of Spring": Commune represents a new form of political and economic democracy expressed as the "self-government of the producers" and as a "government of the people by the people": Marx, Rousseau, Jefferson, and Lincoln. Human emancipation is viewed as part of a larger tradition of political liberation from the tyranny of English imperial rule and the French monarchy, freedom from the bondage of racial-slavery in the American South, and social emancipation from the wage-slavery of modern capitalism in the English factory as it evolves in the writings of (1) John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1690) (2) Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (1776) (3) The French Revolution's Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which was originally drafted by the Marquis de Lafayette in consultation with Thomas Jefferson in 1789 (with contributions by Abbe Sieyes and the Comte de Mirabeau) and became the preamble and 17 articles to the French Constitutions of 1791, 1793, and 1795 (4) Bruno Bauer, The Jewish Question (1843) -- rejection of the rights of man, especially the rights to equality, liberty, property, and security. These rights are the rights of the egoistic man of civil society separated from the community and not the rights of species-being or the rights of the citizens -- Articles 2, 6, 5, 8, and 16 (5) Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (1863) (6) Ferdinand Lassalle, The Gotha Program (1875) -- worker associations, producer associations and workers control (7) Paris Commune (1871) on a social republic, "self-government of the producers," worker cooperatives, economic democracy, and anarchism (8) Critique of crude communism and Marx's theory of Needs and the brotherhood of humanity based on the traditions of Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, and On the Athenian Polity); Luke (New Testament); and Rousseau, (The Social Contract) By drawing on these documents, Marx is integrating the British, American, French, and German traditions of rights and freedom into a comprehensive theory of human rights and social justice. This is a clear example of a critical hermeneutics that integrates a conversation between a text and reader (Gadamer) within the general context and traditions within which the text appears. Reading Marx's critique of the Gotha Program and the evolution of his theory of distributive justice makes sense only within the history of the natural rights tradition from Locke, Jefferson, Lafayette, Lincoln, Lassalle, Proudhon, and the theory of needs tradition which includes Aristotle, Luke, and Rousseau. Compare Marx's ideal society of the Paris Commune to Aristotle's ideal polity in his Nicomachean Ethics and his Politics. Finally, discuss the exchange of letters between Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln in 1865. Listen to Lincoln's statement of 1858 in the Lincoln-Douglas debates: (Lincoln-Douglas Debates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFpmPNaMa_8 and https://americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechabelincolnillinois.html). Outline of the Evolution of Marx's Theory of Human Rights and Social Justice: Human emancipation, natural or property rights, and human rights as they develop over the course of his writings: (1) Emancipation from the alienated workplace, nature, senses, and consciousness in The Paris Manuscripts of 1844 (2) Natural Rights and Human Rights: rights of egoistic man (bourgeois or economic rights of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1793 and 1795: Rights 2, 3, 6, 8, and 16) and the human rights of the citizen of free speech, conscience, thought, assembly, and political participation (political rights of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1793 and 1795: Rights 1, 4, 5, 7, 10-15, and 25 from Locke, Rousseau, and the French Revolution) in On the Jewish Question (3) Ecological Justice and Human Emancipation of the senses in "Private Property and Communism" in the Paris Manuscripts (4) Economic Rights and Democracy: Economic democracy, self-government of the producers, worker cooperatives, worker ownership of property, dismantle old state, right of recall of government officials dissolution of class, distribution based on human need, and socialist democracy "of the people by the people" (Lincoln) in The Paris Commune (5) Distributive, Economic, and Social Rights: Equal rights and distributive justice: human need (Aristotle) and social rights including education and welfare state, insurance, building infrastructure and economic base, common property, proceeds of labor, fair distribution, and equal rights in The Critique of the Gotha Program. (On the issue of the primacy of labor over capital, see Abraham Lincoln, "First Annual Message" to the Senate and House of Representatives, December 3, 1861.) Social Justice as Human Emancipation, Human Rights, and Human Needs: Marx's theory of Human Rights and Human Emancipation rest on those writings which emphasize Rights, Needs, Structures, and Institutions: (1) Rights: theory of rights as it evolves from the works of J. Locke, T. Jefferson, Marquis de Lafayette, F. Lassalle, and A. Lincoln -- natural rights and natural law, pursuit of happiness, rights of man and rights of the citizen, distributive justice and crude communism, racial emancipation, and wage emancipation, and emancipation from slavery and alienated wage labor; (2) Need: theory of needs based on self-determination, creativity, and human dignity (Kant), species-being (Feuerbach), artisanship, art, and the law of beauty (Schiller and Winckelmann), the brotherhood of man (Aristotle), democracy (Aristotle and Grote), communal love and the common good (Aristotle and Rousseau), critical and dialectical self-consciousness (Schelling and Hegel), and a return to the ancients (Romantic poets); (3) Structures: deep structures of alienation, exploitation, class, private property, wage labor, factory work, economic contradictions and crises, and the inner logic of capital and production -- overproduction of capital and underconsumption of produced goods (Ricardo, Smith, and Malthus); (4) Institutions: the creation of economic and political democracy, worker associations, producer cooperatives, recall, universal male suffrage, and dismantling the bourgeois state. In the end, a creative and sovereign species-being acting according to the laws of beauty (Paris Manuscripts), freedom and human rights of the citizen (On the Jewish Question), human emancipation of nature and humanity (Critique of the Gotha Program), and political and economic democracy and social justice Paris Commune of 1871) are the fundamental Needs that guide human action. Following Aristotle, Needs may be broken down into Ethics and Politics, moral action and self-governing institutions: Real Human Needs are expressed in terms of Ethics -- virtue, character, and happiness or human creativity, self-determination, freedom, praxis, and justice in the workplace -- and Politics -- human emancipation, equal rights of the citizen, distributive justice, moral economy (Oikonomike) based on reciprocity, fairness, and grace in exchange, worker communes, producer cooperatives, and self-governing democracies of the people and by the people. Need, as the ultimate realization of species-being in political and economic democracy, is synonymous with Communal or Social Justice. Compare Locke's theory of natural rights and natural law to Marx's theory of citizenship rights (human emancipation) and natural law (species-being and needs). For more on Marx's theory of a moral economy and participatory democracy beyond the Paris Commune of 1871, see his Ethnological Notebooks (1880-1882) and especially his reading of Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society about the Iroquois Nations and the League of Peace. This includes an analysis of participatory democracy and primitive communism. Marx died before the completion of the book in 1883 and we are left only with his notebooks. However, Engels continued to examine the subject in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884). For more on the influence of the Iroquois Confederacy on European social and political thought, see Charles Mann, "The Founding Sachems," NY Times OP (July 4, 2005) and 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (Vintage: October 2006); Franklin Rosemont, "Marx and the Iroquois" (July 8, 2007); Terri Hansen, "How the Iroquois Great Law of Peace Shaped US Democracy" (December 17, 2018); Bruce Johansen, Forgotten Founders: How the American Indian Helped Shape Democracy (Beverly, MA: Harvard Common Press, November 1982); Kickingbird and Lynn Kickingbird, Indians and the United States Constitution: A Forgotten Legacy (Washington, DC: Institute for the Development of Indian Law, 1987); and Donald A. Grinde Jr. and Bruce E. Johansen, Exemplar of Liberty: Native America and the Evolution of Democracy (Native American Politics Series), no. 3, January 1991. With the emphasis on individual liberty and equality, democratic self-government, the consent of the governed, decentralized and limited government, local autonomy, individual responsibility, and rejection of slavery by the Iroquois Nation in their Great Law of Peace, they were influential on the framers of the US Constitution -- Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin -- as they were on Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Thomas Paine. Marx was able to integrate the democratic principles and ideals of both the French Constitution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1793 with the Iroquois Great Law of Peace (1451). SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND OBJECTIVE INSTITUTIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS, EMANCIPATION, AND SOCIAL JUSTICE (1) Return to Natural Law: Political Emancipation and the Rights of the Citizen (On the Jewish Question of 1843) (2) Emancipation of Human Needs from Alienation and Exploitation (wage labor and private property) (The Paris Manuscripts of 1844) (3) Freedom, Virtue, Beauty, Self-Determination, and Self-Realization (The Paris Manuscripts) (4) Brotherhood of Man (Kingdom of Ends) (The Paris Manuscripts) (5) Emancipation of Human Sensibilities, Needs, and Nature (7) Structures of Class Power, and the Critique of Chrematistics, Surplus Value, and the Barbarism of Economic Crises and Contradictions (Communist Manifesto) (8) Distributive Justice and Equal Rights (Critique of the Gotha Program) (9) Phenomenology of the Spirit of Rights: Emancipation from Political Domination (10) (American Revolutionary War), Racial Slavery (American Civil War), and Wage Slavery (Capitalism) (The Paris Commune of 1871) (11) Economic Democracy and Worker Cooperatives "of the people and for the people" (The Paris Commune of 1871) (12) Participatory Democracy and the Federation of the Iroquois Indian League of Peace in the Ethnological Notebooks. Race and Class Slavery: Lincoln Douglas Debates - Angry Town Halls of 1858 in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKfNMel5dug&feature=related See, John Nichols, "Reading Karl Marx with Abraham Lincoln," in the International Socialist Review in http://isreview.org/issue/79/reading-karl-marx-abraham-lincoln This essay also chapter in his book The S Word: A Short History of an American Tradition...Socialism (Verso: 2011). Robin Blackburn, "Introduction," in An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln, ed. by Robin Blackburn (London: Verso Books, 2011), pp. 1-100 and "Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln: A Curious Convergence," Historical Materialism, 19, 4 (2011), pp. 145-174; and Claude Fischer, "A. Lincoln, Socialist?" The Berkeley Blog, April 6, 2011 at http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2011/04/06/a-lincoln-socialist/ Summarize Marx's theory of Social Justice and Human Emancipation in his theory of civil and political rights (14, 20, and 23), human emancipation, emancipation of the senses and nature (119, 164, 159-160, 170, and 176), human needs and the brotherhood of man (159-160, 162, and 164-165, 170, and 176), distributive justice, equal rights, productive contribution, human needs, and economic democracy (114-116 and 118-120), and the structural changes of the Paris Commune of 1871, including worker cooperative, dismantling class system, economic democracy, political anarchism, separation of the Church and State, dismantling of centralized government (army, police, state bureaucracy, and clergy), and universal suffrage, direct elections, and electoral recall (367-374). The Tucker-Wood Thesis: Does Marx Have a Theory of Justice and Morals?: In the 1970s and 1980s in the United States, a group known as the Analytic Marxists (R. Tucker, A. Wood, A. Buchanan, R. W. Miller, A. Allen, S. Lukes, A. Collier, and T. Skillen) made arguments that Marx rejected a theory of justice as an important social category in his writings because: (1) he was an economic scientist (positivist) interested in developing the explanatory, deterministic, and predictive laws of capitalist development, crises, and breakdown; (2) he was critical of the natural rights tradition articulated in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1793); (3) he spurned abstract philosophical concepts such as "equal rights," "fair distribution," "common property," and "the proceeds of labor" as "ideological nonsense about rights and other trash so common among the democrats and French socialists" -- bourgeois (Proudhon) and utopian socialist (Owen and Fourier) theories of rights were forms of ideology and moralizing without the historical, empirical, and structural analysis of the inner dynamic and logic of capitalism; (4) the wage exchange in the labor market was an "exchange of equivalents" that did not represent an unfair or unjust purchase of labor by capital (wages = labor); and, finally, (5) they argued that Marx rejected all forms of ethical theory and moral criticisms against capitalism as "outdated verbal trivia," "obsolete verbal rubbish," false emotional consciousness, and ideological mystification. This theoretical position came to be known as the Tucker-Wood thesis. The reference to "obsolete verbal rubbish" and ideology is a critique of Locke's natural rights theory, French Revolution theory of the rights of man, and the French socialist theory of equal rights, fair and equal distribution, and distributive justice of La Salle. That is, it represents a critique of the false consciousness and theoretical trivia of British liberalism and French socialism because of their separation of ethics and political theory from the structures of political economy. (Aristotle's connection of Ethics and Politics, virtue and the institutions of political economy and democracy). It has been used by the Analytical Marxists to deny that Marx has a critical theory of social justice. A serious problem with this approach to Marx is the restrictive reduction by the Analytical Marxist of the concept of justice to modernity and liberalism, that is, to issues of Rights and Distribution -- to issues of market exchange and fair distribution (Kai Nielsen, in both "Marx on Justice," University of Toronto Law Journal, 38, 1988, pp. 28, 36, and 44 and in the "Introduction" to Marx and Morality, ed. by K. Nielsen and S. Patten, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplemental Vol. VII (Guelph, Ontario: 1981), pp.1-17, provides a alternative list of authors who rejected the Tucker-Wood thesis and who have argued that Marx did indeed have a theory of justice: I. Husami, G. Young, G. H. Cohen, and J. Elster; also see Norman Geras, "The Controversy About Marx and Justice," Philosophica, 33, 1984, n. 1, p. 48 who adds to the above list the following authors: R. Arneson, M. Green, C. C. Ryan, and H. Van der Linden. There are a number of non-analytic philosophers who have maintained that Marx did have a theory of justice, including A. MacIntyre, L. Dupre, S. Avineri, R. Bernstein, A. Leist, P. Kain, D. Kellner, and D. Cornell). Marx and Locke: Economic and Material Foundations of Rights, Freedom, and Justice: As we have discussed above in the analysis of Locke's original state of nature (chapt. 2), there can be no right to self-preservation and life and no right to liberty and freedom of action without the universal and material conditions of life in health and common property (natural law). Without the latter, rights are impossible and non-existent. Health and property are initially less rights than the universal conditions for rights to exist. With some major adjustments in the meaning of rights (human rights), freedom (human emancipation), and private and class property (common property or worker cooperatives), Marx radicalizes this insight and argues that true individuality (species-being) and freedom (human needs) require universal and socialized health and communal and democratic production. That is, Human Rights -- civil, legal, political, and social rights -- can only be built upon a social system based on economic equality, grace, reciprocity, needs, and democracy -- common property -- since it is only this type of system which can provide the material foundations for individual freedom, equality, and rights. The natural and economic rights of life and liberty without a moral economy (Aristotle), common property (Locke), or democratic socialism (Marx) only become egoistic, class, and property rights for the privileged few that threaten to overturn an egalitarian and democratic society. Ethics and Structure, Philosophy and Sociology: An Integrated Theory of Justice The Tucker-Wood view separates questions of distributive justice from issues of alienation, estrangement, exploitation, politics, and the loss of self and creativity. It represents a dehistoricized, decontextualized, and fragmented understanding of justice having more in common with John Rawls' theory of equal rights (equal liberties) and fair distribution (efficiency, abilities, talents, and fair opportunities) in the original position of the state of nature than that of Aristotle, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, or Marx. The analytic theory of justice separates political and juridical ideas from their philosophical traditions and intellectual horizons; removes the principles of justice from history, political economy, and democracy; abstracts moral philosophy from human self-development and the structures and logic (contradictions and crises) of capital; and isolates the Natural Rights from the Natural Law tradition. This limited view of justice emphasizes rights, liberty, market exchange, and distribution, whereas Marx, returning to Aristotle, includes issues of law, reason, virtue, nature, ideal constitution and polity, economic and political democracy, and the rejection of unnatural profits and property that undermine equality, freedom, and democracy. Stated succinctly, liberals define justice by means of rights and distribution within a system of private property and a market economy, while Marx defined justice in terms of virtue, happiness, human needs, the good life, and economic democracy. Having borrowed from Aristotle's ETHICS -- Human Nature, Virtue, Knowledge, Justice, and Friendship -- and his POLITICS -- Economics, Best and Ideal Constitutions, and Democratic Polity -- Marx developed a comprehensive critique of capitalism and a theory of Social Justice that went well beyond the prevailing views of liberalism. It is thus inadequate to judge his theory by those historically and theoretically limited standards. Marx integrated ethics and structures, ethics and politics, and philosophy and sociology. Moral philosophy requires an analysis of individual moral decisions and actions within a complex set of institutional arrangements that capture the social totality of the Lifeworld and System (Parsons and Habermas). This is the foundation of social ethics (Sittlichkeit) and Natural Law. Analytic moral philosophy fragments questions of justice into disciplinary spheres so that the real issues of the social totality of liberalism cannot be identified and articulated. Ethics, Structure and Critique are lost and repressed. Enlightenment and the Fragmentation of Moral Philosophy and Science: Morals Separated from State and Society: Both Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, pp. 52-62, 152-164, 172, 195, and 258-259 and A Short History of Ethics, pp. 199-214, and Agnes Heller, Beyond Justice, pp. 74-115 recognize that, with the birth of modern Enlightenment liberalism and individualism, moral philosophy and its questions of virtue, character, intelligence, and morality have been separated from traditional socio-political justice and its concerns for the nature of the law, friendship, political community, and moral economy; ethics has been separated from social and political theory; modern individualism from the virtuous good life; and, finally, moral philosophy from sociology and social justice (MacIntyre, p. 23). These forms of separation are expressions of the theoretical incoherence and prejudice of liberalism. (Note: science has also been separated from moral philosophy in its positivistic claims to realistic objectivity and neutrality.) Kant, too, had unintentionally expressed this underlying contradiction of modern moral philosophy in his separation of practical reason and justice (law). The objective spirit or substance of morality has been lost to practical reason and conscience. According to Heller, the tradition of Hegel and Marx sought to end this ethical dualism: "Modernity threw itself back into antiquity to keep the ethico-political concept of justice intact for and against modernity" (p. 92). Thus, Marx's theory of social justice must be examined within its historical and theoretical context and not be viewed through the prism of Enlightenment moral philosophy. Dialogue Between Sociology and Philosophy: Adjusting Kant's theory of perception and concepts to an understanding of social theory, it should be noted that issues of philosophy and social justice are empty and void without historical and empirical science to locate and frame them in social reality, whereas issues of sociology, as an empirical science, are disenchanted, meaningless, and irrelevant without philosophy and social justice to guide and inspire them. When there is no dialogue between philosophy and sociology, ethics and science, sociology becomes an empty and potentially dangerous expression of positivism (Horkheimer, Mills, and Bellah) and philosophy becomes a useless form of abstractionism and moralizing (Clodovis and Leonardo Boff). Under these conditions, it may well be said about contemporary academics in the iron cage: Sociologists without Herz or Heart (passion, practical reason, freedom, virtue, and morality -- Kant) and Philosophers without Geist or Spirit (community, social ethics, economy, polity, history, and social justice -- Hegel). It is this state, where science is without ethics and philosophy without political economy, that has fragmented the academy and repressed critical social theory and its ability to challenge and transform consciousness and society. This is the present state of American sociology where science has been reduced to positivism and naturalism and where the ideas of cultural science (Kulturwissenschaft), moral science (Geisteswissenschaft), historical science (Geschichtswissenschaft), interpretive science (Interpretationswissenschaft), dialectical science (Dialektische Wissenschaft), historical materialism (Historischer Materialismus), critical science (Kritische Wissenschaft), ethnographic science (Ethnographische Wissenschaft, phenomenology, hermeneutics, ethnography, and psychoanalysis (Psychoanalyse) have been lost. And with them there has been a decline in corresponding schools of thought in philosophy, including phenomenology, hermeneutics, pragmatism, symbolic interactionism, existentialism, critical theory, and neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian theories of knowledge, science, and law. They all represent different theories of knowledge and science, different epistemologies and methodologies, different research methods and techniques, different forms of inquiry into the nature of society, and, finally, different and exciting social theories. But in the present climate of positivism, physics, and neuroscience, they have been lost, repressed, and forgotten; they are no longer part of the program in most American sociology departments. In America, sociology is a dead or dying discipline. Marx's goal was to reintegrate and reinvigorate these disciplines, create a dialogue between traditions and fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung), and make science and historical materialism relevant to the self-determination and self-realization of species-being, human needs, and social justice. He attempted to construct a critical modern science based on the approach taken by Aristotle who, one could argue, divided science into two distinct areas: Ethics and Politics. The former refers to the moral values, virtue, happiness, character, and needs of the individual and the latter refers to the political, economic, and social institutions within which individuals realize their potential as ethical species-beings. Marx's Theory of Social Justice: Synthesis of Ethics and Political Economy, Athens and Berlin: But Marx was not a liberal and, therefore, developed an economic theory more comprehensively framed at the beginning and end of his career by a broader concern for the ethical principles and institutions of Social Justice in the State, Workplace, Nature, Economy, Consumption, and Production. That is, Marx's theory of Social Justice examines the central issues of Politics, Ethics, Political Economy, and Democracy, which are ultimately issues of the ethical principles and institutions of the political rights of the citizen and human emancipation; the virtuous life of natural law, human creativity, freedom, and self-realization in work; the emancipation of consciousness and nature; the ideal society of economic democracy and worker councils\cooperatives; reciprocal distribution, labor contribution, and human need; and the logical contradictions and structural crises of chrematistic capitalism. It represents a critique of the economic and egoistic rights of liberal freedoms and private property, the degradation and exploitation of human beings within the workplace, the domination and destruction of nature, the political elitism and plutocracy of liberalism, market distribution based on class and power, and the irrationality and immorality of capitalist production, distribution, exchange, and consumption. Marx integrates Ethics and Structure, Moral Values and Political Economy (Sittlichkeit) into his comprehensive theory of justice. His theory also represents a synthesis of the Ancients and the Moderns -- Aristotle, Hegel, and Ricardo. Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics and Politics developed a sophisticated theory of justice which included Particular or Economic Justice as Restitutive, Distributive, and Reciprocal Justice and Universal or Political Justice as the best constitutions of monarchy, aristocracy, and democratic polity and the ideal constitution as a democratic polity. Justice from this perspective is the institutional arrangement that encourages and nurtures happiness (eudaimonia) and the function or telos of humanity through the development of the character, soul, and life of moral (courage, moderation, goodness, honor, friendship, and justice) and intellectual and rational (episteme, phronesis, and techne) virtue. Justice is thus the development of a strong moral character oriented toward discursive rationality and practical wisdom through public discourse and deliberation within a democratic workplace and polity. When viewed within this tradition, we appreciate that Marx has an expanded theory of Social Justice and Critique that closely parallels the outline of Aristotle's Ethics and Politics and includes the following issues in his socialist theory of justice beyond liberalism, that is, justice beyond property rights and market distribution -- (1) law, political rights, and human emancipation, (2) virtue, freedom, self-determination, human needs, and praxis as human essence (3) moral ecology and the emancipation of nature, (4) economic democracy, (5) redistribution based on the socialist principles of contribution and needs, and (6) ethics and structures. Unlike the Analytic Marxists who limited justice to simply Rights and Distribution, Marx, following Aristotle, had a broader concept of justice which included issues of (1) Rights, (2) Ethics or virtue and character, (3) Nature, (4) Politics or democracy, (5) Distribution or consumption, and (6) Economics or critique of political economy. Justice, thus, represented the full development of human potentiality, reason, and creative work within an economic and political democracy. PART I: ETHICS, VIRTUE, AND NATURAL LAW (1) Civil and Legal Justice: Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Political Emancipation: in this first form of social justice the following themes will be examined: economy (ideology) and politics (ideal), religion and civil rights, state and civil society, and political alienation; politics as ideal, illusion, and ideology and the state, political ideals, and natural rights (juridical justice) as concealing class, power, property, and inequality of market economy and civil society; inconsistencies in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1793) between the economic and egoistic Rights of Man in civil society as liberty, security, and property and the political Rights of the Citizen in the state as political liberties, civil rights, community, democracy, political participation, discourse, and citizenship, individual freedom, and political rights as an expression of the true authentic human being as a species-being; and, finally, there is the goal that political emancipation will reflect a true social reality and not a political illusion and will lead to a more comprehensive and broader Human Emancipation in "Debates on Freedom of the Press (1842), Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law (1843), and On the Jewish Question (1843). According to Marx, Rights are more than a liberal defense of individual liberty and private property. They also include issues of the difference between ideology and ideals -- the ideals of political freedom and citizenship, human emancipation, democracy, and a return to Natural Law; (2) Workplace Justice: Ethics, Virtue, and Human Nature: ethical theory of human nature and goodness, critique of alienation and use of human life as a technical means; creating life through self-realization and communal self-determination in meaningful and fulfilling work and self-conscious activity (praxis); end of life as freedom and creativity according to the "laws of beauty" and practical (community) and theoretical (morals and ideals) universality, human essence and species life; private property and class system as distortions of human life, property and labor; and the relationship between humanism and naturalism in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844; (3) Ecological Justice: Emancipation of Nature and Consciousness in a Moral Economy: emancipation of physical, spiritual, and social needs, consciousness, perception, cognition, and nature within the beneficence and brotherhood of man and the need for freedom, self-realization, creativity in work, and community in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844; PART II: STRUCTURES OF POLITICS, ECONOMY, AND DEMOCRACY (4) Political Justice: Ethics, the Good Life, and Ideal Polity of Democratic Socialism: economic emancipation of labor, freedom from social and wage slavery, equality, workplace democracy, decentralized worker councils and cooperatives, collective ownership of property, economic self-government, universal suffrage and recall, expropriation of the expropriators, the dissolution of class inequality, private property, and centralized state power, and a phenomenology of the spirit of political liberalism found in the Paris Commune of 1871 in The Civil War in France; (5) Distributive Justice: Justice of Consumption, Economic Redistribution, and Reciprocity: clarification of the concepts of common property, proceeds of labor, fairness, equality, freedom, rights, and commodity equivalents, merit, contribution, and the satisfaction of human needs; and human emancipation and reciprocity through just distribution. Marx outlines the historical forms and evolution of distributive justice in The Critique of the Gotha Program with its reliance on equal distribution, private property, and the organization of production -- Rights, Property, and Production: (1) ideal capitalist justice is grounded in commodity production and the equality of wages and labor or crude communism within a system of private property and capitalist production (fair and equal wages); (2) the socialist principle, or the first phase of communist society, actualizes the capitalist ideal of equal rights and a fair distribution based on equal wages for equal labor (crude communism without private property). However this apparent equal right based on individual contribution, effort, intensity, and time (meritocracy within a capitalist production, alienation, and the specialization and division of labor) only leads to the right of inequality; and (3) the communist principle of just distribution based on human need without private property, capitalist production, and the alienated social relations of production. Rights justified by human need and the principles of social and human rights transcend the older ideals and ideology of bourgeois equality, fairness, and rights. Today the last two form the socialist principles of Distributive Justice -- Contribution and Need. Distributive Justice also includes issues of Distribution of Consumption, Needs, Historical Materialism, and the Labor Theory of Value, as well as (1) an analysis of market exchange between capital and labor based on the exchange of labor (use value) and labor power (exchange value) and (2) the socialist principles of distributive justice. Finally, examine Marx's critique of the utopian moralizing and ideology of the vulgar democrats and French Socialists J. J. Rousseau, P. Proudhon, and F. Lassalle. Finally, compare and discuss the differences between Locke's LIBERALISM -- theory of social justice, natural rights, and liberal democracy and Marx's SOCIALISM -- view of political and emancipatory rights, human needs, and democratic socialism. (6) Economic Justice: Justice of Production and Critique of Chrematistics and Political Economy: justice based on theory of exploitation, labor theory of value, surplus value and forced labor (profits and property), industrial expansion, and the economic structure in the Grundrisse (1857-58), A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), and Capital (1867, 1885, and 1894)): These works are central to Marx�s theory of social justice since they examine the structural limits, internal logic, contradictions, and irrationalities of capitalist social relations of production and critique of production process, capital accumulation, organic composition of capital, tendential fall in the rate of profit, and economic crises that undermine the possibility of a fair, rational economy and democratic polity. Social Justice here is related to issues of Critique, Dialectic, and Contradictions of Chrematistics or Political Economy, that is, to the unsustainability of an irrational and immoral social system. According to Aristotle, Chrematistike, as opposed to Oikonomike, is an unnatural form of wealth acquisition based on the market, profits, and property that ultimately distorts reason, virtue, and justice. A theory of Social Justice integrates Ethics and Structure. To understand the possibilities of democratic socialism, one must also appreciate the historical and structural realities of industrial capitalism and a market economy otherwise social critique turns into abstract moralism. These questions and their new methods are raised not to build a new positivist science of scientific materialism or to predict the breakdown of capitalist production, but, rather, to further justify and clarify his theory of natural law and social justice which is not just a philosophical theory of social ethics, but a socio-economic theory of political economy. Marx's theory of economics is actually a critique of chrematistics or unnatural wealth acquisition in a market economy. Thus his economic theory is part of a broader ethical critique of capitalism -- its institutional immorality, logical incoherence, and structural and historical contradictions (chrematistics). Justice and Critique: the critique of political economy which is an analysis of the History, Structure, Contradictions, and Crises of modern capitalism represents a continuation of Marx's original ethical theory of alienation and estrangement; alienated labor and economic contradictions and crises destroy the possibility of humanity's self-development and realization of social justice. Marx accomplishes his "critique of political economy" by completing the method of Kant's "critique" and Hegel's "phenomenology" as he integrates them with the ethics and politics of Aristotle. By being sensitive to the relationships between the Ancients and the Moderns, Aristotle and Marx, and Ethics and Science, we appreciate more fully the breadth of Marx's theory of social justice in its various forms of legal, ecological, political, and economic justice. It is not simply or even a theory of law, contracts, and obligations. Rather, Social Justice involves an examination of the Culture, Structures, Institutions, and History (System and Lifeworld) of liberalism and capitalism in order to judge if they further or inhibit human self-development and the good life -- that is, if they further or inhibit Virtue, Reason, and Democracy. Marx's theory of social justice consists of the integrated elements of the ethics and politics of Ancient Greece, British political economy, specific historical and institutional forms of the French Revolution and French socialism, and the formal epistemology and methodology (dialectics, contradictions, and critique) of German Idealism. Some contemporary authors reject Marx's ideas as being irrelevant to contemporary politics, economics, and the structural changes in society since the eighteenth century -- the rise of Keynesian economics, multinational corporations, the welfare state, neo-liberalism, neo-colonialism, atomic weapons, unionization, civil rights and political liberties, military-industrial complex, political gerrymandering and Super Pacs, population growth, sensitivity to the ecological crisis, etc. But a careful look at Marx's theory of civil/legal, political, workplace, distributive, ecological, and economic justice reflects the same general class and social differences examined by Marx in obviously different and more contemporary social forms. But the alienation, exploitation, dehumanization, political religion and idolatry, along with the historical, structural, logical, and ethical contradictions between the rights of man and the rights of the citizen, politics and economics, democracy and capitalism, economic expansion and environmental crisis, upper class and workers, and class differences in wealth, income, education, medical care, housing, etc. exist in more developed form. The social system is even more class divided and decadent now than before because of the extent of international exploitation and the political, economic, cultural, and ecological abuse of humanity and nature. INTEGRATING THE ANCIENTS AND THE MODERNS PART I: ETHICS, VIRTUE, AND NATURAL LAW (1) Civil and Legal Justice: natural rights, law, political emancipation, liberal freedom, citizenship, and democracy **** Rectificatory Justice, Ethics, and Politics: civil and legal justice in the Athenian polity and the distortions of virtue, reason, and democracy in a market economy (2) Workplace Justice: virtue, freedom, self-determination, species-being, praxis, and goodness **** Ethics, Virtue, and Practical Wisdom: moral and intellectual virtue, function of man, happiness, and reason (3) Ecological Justice: nature and humanity in a moral ecology and social praxis **** Physics and Metaphysics: nature as a living, organic whole with reciprocity to ethics and humanity, causality, and teleology PART II: POLITICS, ECONOMY, AND DEMOCRACY (4) Political Justice: popular sovereignty, self-determination, and self-government in democratic socialism of the Paris Commune of 1871 **** Political or Universal Justice and Democracy: democratic polity, citizenship, practical wisdom (phronesis), political deliberation (bouleusis), practical action (praxis), freedom, equality, popular sovereignty, and the best and ideal political constitutions (5) Distributive Justice: fair distribution, reciprocity, grace, and human needs **** Reciprocal or Particular Justice, Politics, and Oikonomike: distributive (dianemetikos) and reciprocal (antipeponthos) justice in a moral economy (6) Economic Justice: ethics and critique of political economy, chrematistics, economic crises, structural contradictions, and the history and logic of capital and surplus value production **** Chrematistike and Critique: rejection of competition, self-interest, class property, and inequality in a market economy that is destructive of democracy, virtue, and the function and telos of man. SCIENCE AND JUSTICE: DIFFERENT FORMS OF SCIENCE IN MARX: INTEGRATION OF ETHICS AND KNOWLEDGE, JUSTICE AND SCIENCE Throughout his early and later writings, Marx's theory of ethics and knowledge, justice and science parallel each other very closely. The various forms of civil, workplace, ecological, political, distributive, and economic justice reflect the ethical and political substance of the various forms of Critical Science: immanent, ethical, ecological, historical, phenomenological and hermeneutical, and dialectical science in Marx. That is Marx's theory of Social Justice parallels his theory of Critical Science: immanent critique of industrial alienation and "the economic rights of man," ethical critique of liberalism, historical materialism of natural science, ecological critique of industry and nature, and the dialectical or structural critique of capital. FORMS OF SOCIAL JUSTICE METHODS AND FORMS OF SOCIAL SCIENCE (1) Civil and Legal Justice -- Immanent Critique (natural economic rights to property vs. political rights to assembly, free speech, political participation, and assembly in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 1789 and the French Constitutions of 1793 and 1795 in On the Jewish Question) (2) Workplace Justice -- Anthropological and Substantive or Ethical Critique (species being and human creativity in the Paris Manuscripts) (3) Ecological Justice -- Historical Materialism, Sociology of Knowledge, and Ecological Crisis Theory (nature and metabolic crisis theory in the early and later writings) (4) Political Justice -- Historical Critique (Franco-Prussian War and Paris Commune of 1871) (5) Distributive Justice -- Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and Immanent Critique (history of Greek theory of needs, distribution, and particular and political justice compared to liberal and Lassallean views of labor, common property, equal rights, and fair distribution in the Critique of the Gotha Program) (6) Economic Justice -- Dialectical and Structural Critique (internal logical and structural contradictions of capitalism in the Grundrisse and Capital) (5) Ideals of Democracy -- Ethnographic Analysis and Social Critique (analysis of the Iroquois Confederacy of Nations, its participatory democracy in his Ethnological Notebooks, and the anthropology of Lewis Henry Morgan |
| 9. | Max Weber | The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Focus of class discussion will be on last two chapters: "The Religious Foundations of Worldly Asceticism" and "Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism" Protestant Reformation and neo-Calvinist Ethic and Theology Lutheranism in the Augsburg and Westminster Confessions: Luther on faith, labor, calling, and grace (79-92); Westminster Confession of 1647 (99-100) and Augsburg Confession 1530 (102). Neo-Calvinist Theology, Ethical Prophecy, and the Origins of the Spirit of Capitalism: double predestination, determinism, and the state of grace (99-100, 106, 110-114, 121, and 126); the transcendence, hiddenness, and unknowability of a neo-Platonic God (Deus absconditus), the total depravity and nothingness of man, and the existential and theological barrenness, sinfulness, and meaninglessness of the world -- expressions of Pauline indifference to the evil of the world (103-105); distrust of others, friends, and community (never know who is truly saved); professional calling or vocation (154, 156, and 160); religious rationalization and the critique of Catholic aesthetics, idolatry (157), and natural law (158 and 171); separation of grace and faith (111-112); separation of good works from salvation (115 and 117); inner isolation, unprecedented loneliness, and paralyzing terror (104-105 and 121); inner-worldly asceticism and neo-Platonic distrust of the body (117-121); glory of God and professional and ethical calling or vocation (108-109, 115, 161, and 171- 172); uniformity of life and the standardization of specialized labor and production (160-161, 166, and 169); condemnation of wealth (157); development of strong personality (119-120); religious rationalization, the critique of idolatry, and elimination of magic (105 and 117-119) and absolution (117); rejection of Catholicism, communalism, the mysticism of rituals and sacraments, Pelagian good works (104-106 and 117), and the politics of religion (105-106); inner-worldly asceticism and the spirit of capitalism (172); division of labor and calling (160-163 and 166); critique of utilitarianism, pleasure, and wealth (156-157 and 168-169); Robinson Crusoe and Pilgrim's Progress (107 and 176); asceticism, calling, methodical and uniform life, standardized production within capitalism, and business success and wealth as a sign of salvation or the commercialization of salvation (163, 169, 171, and 172), and theory of the iron cage of "specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart" (181). It should be noted that Calvin recognized the importance and centrality of hard work, perseverance, dilgence (more Luther), and a systematically organized life built around a profession and calling. However, it was the later neo-Calvinist Finally, business success and the accumulation of wealth and property were the objective and visible signs of salvation. The neo-Calvinist turned the notion of calling and perseverance into the spirit of capitalism and private property. These signs were not absolute guarantees of salvation only the possible salvation at the final judgement. The Protestant Reformation and neo-Calvinist movement created the intimate connection between Calvin and Hobbes -- the breakdown of natural law, social and ethical responsibility, and the community spirit followed by a radical individualism of predestination, Deus Absconditus, hard work, and the depravity and sinfulness of humanity as the foundation for capitalist self-interest, market competition, and possessive individualism. br> There were four other Augustinian elements to this Protestant ethic left unmentioned by Weber: (1) The business acumen and market success of individuals were only tests (2) within the solidarity of sin and (3) the mass of the damned; they were only hints or the appearances of salvation. (4) The final principle was that business failure and mechanical and mindless manual labor could also represent an inverse sign (neo-Calvinism) or ineffectual call (Puritan) of the chosen as an affliction. That is, the apparent failure or lack of success was only a inverse sign or apparent life failure whose purpose was to reaffirm the faith of the chosen one in the face of affliction, failure, and human suffering. The latter were not signs of damnation but tests of the individual's faith in God and faith in salvation in the face of apparent signs of damnation. The English Puritan preacher and writer, William Perkins, used the term "ineffectual call" for those (who were in fact not predestined for salvation) who might experience "a taste" of faith and grace, but not true "justifying" faith. Such men appeared justified in the eyes of men, but not the eyes of God. God sent trials and tribulations to test his Elect (who being human might continue to fall into sin and appear "lost", but are not). Reprobates may receive a false sense of Election. The question for New World Puritans was what should the "Saints" do" How should they live? So the "justified" work to prepare to receive faith and grace (what Lutherans would call the process of "sanctification" as opposed to "justification" which alone saves). Many Puritans moved from seeing this whole process within the realm of Predestination, to the realm of "covenant" to prescribe doing the things that would assist in preparation to receive faith and grace (although God alone would bestow these without regard to merit). (See an article by Stephanie Sleeper in Puritans and Puritanism in Europe and America, vol,1, pp. 436-437). Archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656), Archbishop of Armagh, Ireland (Church of Ireland/Protestant) wrote in his journal (which Puritans used as an important record of the moment of their "conversion experience") when he was a teenager that he knew he was damned, because for a whole year God had not severely tested him or visited afflictions upon him. In Ussher's view, God "tests" the Elect (predestined to be saved), as gold is "tested"/purified by fire, so the testing is a sign of God's Election of the Saints (the true members of the Church in this life). Augustine, Boethius, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin believed that the world was created by the infinite will and wisdom of God and was therefore predestined. This is the Christian doctrine of predestination. God knows the outcome of all ideas, decisions, events, etc., but they stopped at the idea that the world is "predetermined." God knows the future but doesn't ordain or predetermine it. This would metaphysically undermine the doctrines of free will, sin, and salvation. Although God knows everything, including the final results, humans are finite creatures and act according to the principles of free will and self-determination because they do not know the final outcome. They cannot know God's will or intentions and thus must act freely and self-consciously according to the accepted moral principles of the Church. Only later with the neo-Calvinist movement is the idea of free will dropped from their theological vocabulary as humans have no free will and everything is predetermined by God. This theological position leads to the individual terror and anxiety of each neo-Calvinist of not knowing if they are saved in a predetermined universe. One cannot change the course of God's will; one can only look for signs and hopes of salvation in the success within the business world and a personal vocation. It is this idea of pre-determinism that unites with systematic hard work and market success to produce the historical, religious, and social foundations of the spirit of capitalism out of the Protestant ethic. Church Doctrines of Predestination and Free Will vs. Predetermination and No Free Will: It should be noted that there was a fundamental difference between the doctrines of Predetermination and Predestination. The doctrine of predeterminism or God's fore-knowledge of individual activity and the act of predestination or God's actual influencing of human actions and destiny. God knew the future, but did not predetermine it. Faith was the central component of eternal salvation and that the world and human activity was predestined -- God had fore-knowledge of human activity, but did not determine it from the moment of creation; human action, sin, and, thus, salvation, were not predetermined, but the responsibility of each individual based on the ethical and theological principle of free will. This latter principle was rejected by Calvin. That is, God created the world (world as predestined), but did not predetermine human activity, sin, and salvation. This distinction between Predestination (human free will with God's fore-knowledge of the outcomes of human activity) and Predeterminism (no human free will since everything is already predetermined by God's will) was the basis for the theological doctrine of salvation and faith. In this way salvation remained within human activity and choice. This theological position of sin and punishment is able to balance God's creation of the world and at the same time retain belief in human free will, sin, punishment, and personal salvation. In the early 1990s the Catholic Church and the Lutheran Alliance of Churches met in Augsburg to agree based on the statements or writings of Paul and Augustine that faith was key to salvation, but not faith alone. Personal action and decision also played an important role in salvation. This presents an even more profound and perplexing metaphysical issue and problem within Christianity, that is not the object of discussion within this course, but which calls for a detailed and comprehensive analysis. What is relationship between faith and God's grace as a gift for salvation, on the one hand, and the personal works of compassion, love, and kindness on the other? What is the relationship between Christian metaphysics and salvation and the Mosaic Law and Prophetic Code, between the Church and ethics/politics, and between faith and social justice? All this produced a lonely and terrified individual without community, compassion, love, and natural law, without a compassionate and immanent God, without reason, meaning, and purpose in this world other than the glorification of a transcendent God, and without a deeper social ethic and political purpose -- the very requirements and ideals of commercial and industrial capitalism. And neither love, compassion, good works, or faith will alter the predestined fate of individuals -- nothing the mind or body can do will change the judgment of damnation and punishment. Trace the transformation of Calvinist theory from the 16th to the 17th century. (Note: Luther, a good Augustinian, believed in predestination of grace, salvation, and damnation, but left it to faith alone to define the human situation and control over human fears. The terror of the neo-Calvinists forced the Protestant doctrine to a more radical position.) It is just this type of radical individualism which prepares the way for Hobbes and Locke as the Spirit of capitalism. The Protestant Reformation held two apparent conflicting views of the economy -- on the one hand, it rejected materialism and utilitarianism and, on the other, it promoted self-interest, hard work, perseverance. the division of labor, increased production, success in a calling, and the accumulation of private property. Production, property, and prosperity without consumption and enjoyment was a potent combination in the early stages of capitalist development for commercial and industrial expansion (171-172). The industrial and market foundations for the future of capitalism rested in these values of the Protestant Ethic. Examine Weber's thesis about the relationship between religion and the rise of the spirit (consciousness) of capitalism and the relationship between idealism and materialism in his work. Summary of the Calvinist ethic from the Synod of Dort (1618-1619) -- TULIP: (T)otal Depravity of Man, (U)nconditional Election, (L)imited Atonement, (I)rresistible Grace, and (P)reservation of the Saints. According to Weber, the Protestant Reformation provided the cultural and psychological foundations for the origins of capitalism. However, a theme ironically implicit in Weber's own thesis is that the Protestant Reformation also provided for the cultural and moral undermining and unraveling of both the spirit of capitalism and Christianity itself. This is accomplished because the Protestant Reformation, as mentioned above, left the world with a transcendent and absconded God, distant from humanity and no longer immanent in the world. The world was left abandoned -- it became a meaningless and empty wasteland, lacking a sacred and moral purpose, a world of sin and corruption, a world left behind by its creator, that is, a world without virtue, meaning, or natural law. It is a world of asceticism and systematic work and control over one's physical body and nature; in it there are empty, lonely, and terrified individuals. Finally, it is a world without an ethical core where all values eventually become irrelevant and relative. The Protestant Reformation is the birthplace of both the spirit of capitalism and the spirit of moral nihilism; herein lies the birth of both capitalism and existentialism. (For more on this issue and the relationship between Protestantism, existentialism, and the Holocaust, see Richard Rubenstein, The Cunning of History, pp. 21 and 29-30, Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart, p. 6, and Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, pp. 17-31.) The Protestant Reformation enhanced the power of the Enlightenment, science, and rationalization resulting in further deteriorization of humanity toward the iron cage and the last man. According to these authors, the Protestant Reformation was instrumental in producing the spirit of individualism and capitalism, as well as the later spirit of positivism and science, the spirit of existentialism and rationalization, and the spirit of liberalism and Nazism (fascism). Finally, in his work Religion and the Rise of Capitalism Tawney writes that the Protestant Reformation was the cultural and spiritual reaction to the rise of capitalist institutions that preceded the sixteenth century. This is a materialist critique of Weber's idealism. Weber in his later economic writings appears to be moving in this materialist approach to history and society. For a more recent work on this topic with detailed historical and sociological analysis, see Benjamin Friedman, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (2021). Friedman argues, in opposition to Weber but within an idealist methodology, that capitalism was more influenced by later Protestant rejection of the doctrines of total depravity and double predestination and by its emphasis of free will, happiness, and economic progress. In the traditional interpretations of Marx his earliest writings were in philosophy and humanistic ethics, while his later writings emphasized economic theory, science, predictions, and positivism. Here is another gross misinterpretation of Marx since his later economic writings in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, the Grundrisse, and Capital further examines the alienation and exploitation of capitalism but also its internal and structural contradictions that made it an immoral and irrational political economy. Capitalism does not produce for the material well-being of its citizens, for the integrity of the moral community, for the institution of the rights of the citizen and democracy, or for the creativity and self-determination of its members as species being. Rather its productive forces -- science, technology, and industry -- produce to maintain class wealth and privilege, surplus value and profits, private property and power, and the continued maintenance of civil society and a market economy. As a result, it enormous productive capacity and industrial infrastructure is geared to maintain this unequal and exploitative economy that, because of its class structure and inequality, poverty wages, and workers inability to consume the material goods that are produced periodically goes into economic crises of overproduction, underconsumption, unemployment, production cutbacks and stoppage, and economic crises and breakdown. The economy is inherently, structurally, and logically unable to sustain itself as an exploitative and alienating class system. The rationality of the productive forces and mass production, which continuously grows and expands, is in constant conflict with the irrationality of the social relations of production and class structure of capitalism. Workers wage/slave labor is unable to sustain the enormous productivity of this economic system. This is not only an historical and structural crisis, but an unbridgeable logical crisis as well. Thus, both the early and later writings fit together in an integrated, comprehensive, and critical theory of social justice and the need to change society to permit its full rational potential to be realized. For Marx, this is the Paris Commune of 1871. |
| 10. | Max Weber | The Religion of China, chapters 5, 6, and 8, pp. 107-170 and 226-249 Confucianism, Patrimonialism, and the Ethical and Structural Inhibitions to Capitalism in China Rationalization, Rationalism, and Weber's Religious Typology: published in 1915 and 1920 this work examines the relationship between rationalization and rationalism, this-worldly ethic, other-worldly ethic (escape from world), asceticism (mastery of world), and mysticism (adjustment to world): this-worldly asceticism of Judaism and Protestantism, other-worldly asceticism of Catholicism, this-worldly mysticism of Confucianism and Greek religion and philosophy, and other-worldly mysticism of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism. Rationalization is discussed in this work as the institutional foundation of the ethics and moral values (rationalism) of Protestantism and Confucianism. The main characteristics of the Protestant rationalization of religion lie in the following: its rejection of magic and irrationality and its belief in the disenchantment and devaluation of the world, the transcendence and disappearance of God, the rejection of God's immanence in human history, the tension and depreciation of the world through ethical prophecy, and the rise of specialization (160), formal reason, science (125-127 and 151-152), law (118-119), and institutional bureaucracies. Confucian rationalism rejects Protestant rationalism with its understanding of virtue (228), ethics (235), materialism (242), self-control (244), irrationalism (240), education (246), and the gentile personality (247). Ethical and Metaphysical Foundations of Capitalism: (242-247): coherent religious rationalism, ethical values based on religious life (228 and 244), utilitarianism and materialism (242), hard work, frugality, success, self-interest, and ideal of wealth accumulation (237 and 245), economic rationalism (237), emphasis on supply and demand (247), education and training (246), meritocracy within bureaucracy, and tolerance (243). Missing Cultural and Religious Elements of Capitalism in Traditional Societies (China): good human nature (156), no transcendent God, no ethical salvation (228 and 234-235), distrust of vocation and specialization (126-127, 241, 246, and 248), no inner worldly asceticism (229-230, 238, and 247), no inner core or distinct personality (161, 232, 235-236, and 247), no ethical prophecy (228-229), no idea of sin (238 and 240), and no metaphysics (154): thus no tension between ethics and reality and thus no need to transform reality based on ethical and metaphysical principles of salvation, sin, and punishment, belief in cult of the dead, magic and mystery (240), virtue of grace, dignity, and gentleman (228, 244, and 248), self-perfection and salvation based on knowledge of classical literature (228), mysticism and adjustment to world (240 and 244), adjustment to local sibs and village communities (241), no formal rationality and education system (126-127 and 151-152), no rational money system (Bendix, Max Weber, 123 and 139), no rational legal system (148-149), no natural law or idea of individual rights and liberties (147), and no bookkeeping or accounting (242-243). Chinese businessmen had a similar ethic of utilitarianism, hard work, profit accumulation, self-interest, and business success as any Calvinist, but what they did not possess was the Protestant ethic and the rationalization of economic and social life, that is, the terror and inner loneliness, desperation, and isolation of the predestined Calvinist, the compulsive drive toward the systematic and methodical organization of one's economic and social life in formal specialization, rational calculation, technical knowledge and bureaucracy, and formal or natural science (early writings), and the history of the structural prerequisites of a capitalist economy in medieval religion, medieval city, modern state, industrial production (later writings). Missing Structural and Economic Elements of Capitalism in Traditional Societies (China): Mention that the first four chapters of The Religion of China outline the social institutions of China that structurally inhibit and undermine the growth of capitalism: (1) nature of cities in China (13); (2) monetary system, city, and guilds (3-32); (3) patrimonial and prebendal state (33-62); (4) limits to property and joint liability associations (68), and kinship organizations in rural society (63-83); and (5) self-government, law, limited economy, and welfare society in the Chinese village and sib (54-104). Also mention the economic and political structures of Ancient Chinese society: (1) village self-government (89), (2) temple court (92-93), (3) producer co-operatives (96-97), and (4) substantive law (102). Finally, stress the political and economic differences between European feudalism with medieval fiefdoms and the landed aristocracy and Chinese patrimonialism with its prebends, civil and military time limits of governmental positions, and classical educational system. Positive and Negative Structures for the Possibility of Capitalism in China: The positive elements in Chinese Culture and Structures for the development of capitalist values and institutions would include the following: materialism and utilitarianism (242), belief in wealth and success (245), education and training (246), economic rationalism (237), bureaucracy, ethical rationalism and virtue (244), cities and guilds, monetary and legal system, political stability and integration, internal commerce, calculating mentality, an emphasis on issues of supply and demand economics (247), and wealth as supreme good. On the other hand, the negative features of China which discourage the development of the spirit of capitalism included: (1) no inner or personality (235), (2) no theodicy, transcendent God (234-235 and 228), ethics, and no rights (232), no ethical prophecy (228-229); irrationality of magical beliefs (240), no asceticism or distrust of the body (229-230), virtue of grace, dignity, and gentility (228), no rational organized method of economic activity (242-243), no idea of calling or vocation (241), no proper technical, mathematical, or economic education (248 and 126-127), too much patrimonial bureaucracy and meddling in economy (137), limitations on property ownership, no bookkeeping and accounting that affected the organization of labor and production, and no need to expand personal businesses (242), no specialization (246), and no break with the sib, family, or village (237-238). |
| 11. | Max Weber | "'Objectivity' in Social Science and Social Policy," in
The Methodology of the Social Sciences, pp. 49-112 or the essay on 'Objectivity' on the Kenyon public drive, examine closely pages 26-57 'Objectivity' and Values in Weber's Interpretive Science and Wissenschaftslehre Kant and Weber: The Categories of the Understanding of Experience and History: Weber relies on Kant's theory of knowledge for his theory of science. The latter argued, as we have seen, that the mind (subjectivity) mediates, filters, and transforms the external world (objectivity) through the intervention of the a priori forms of intuition (time and space) and the a priori categories of the understanding (substance and causality) to form the objects of perception and experience. In this manner our sensations and knowledge of the world are formed through the a priori structuring of the transcendental consciousness. As a result we only know the phenomenal world of the appearances and not the external reality existing independently of the experiencing mind (thing-in-itself). There is no access to an objective reality or objective truth directly; sensations and knowledge are always filtered through subjectivity or consciousness. In a similar fashion, Weber argues that the significance of historical and social events are constructs of the categories of the understanding or the categories of our evaluative ideas and convictions -- value relevance, ideal types, and theory (76-77, 81-85, and 90-91). This represents a direct critique of empiricism and positivism. It should be noted that the fight over the nature of knowledge and science (metatheory) is, in reality, an indirect and displaced fight over the nature of society. This is why these issues of a theory of knowledge and philosophy of science are so important because they help delineate and define the legitimate range of questions and issues appropriate to the discipline and science of sociology. Outline the nature of science and objectivity in positivism (PERSONNNN) and compare to Weber's theory of knowledge and science in this essay, that is, compare Hume to Kant. Weber's point on value relevance is important here: No matter how sophisticated the scholar's methods are; no matter how much quantitative and qualitative empirical data are accumulated; no matter how much information is actually systematically organized and coherently processed; and no matter how much work is involved in the process, if the questions and concepts of the investigator (value relevance and theory) at the beginning of the study are limited in scope, range, and tradition, then the conclusions will be faulty and inadequate. And if the concepts and theory are limited in range, so too will be the actual methods applied. Weber's Wissenschaftslehre or Epistemology (Theory of Knowledge) and Methodology (Theory of Science): Empirical Science/Knowledge and Value Judgments: In this essay Weber articulates his theory of methods by distinguishing among social (A) science and knowledge (50-54), social critique and dialectics (54-59), and social policy and social problems (56-57, 59-63) on the one hand and (B) theory of interpretive science, value judgments, value freedom, and value relations on the other (68-82), and (C) his critique of positivism (72-73, 79-80, and 85-93). Value judgments are based ultimately on the "warring gods" or personal beliefs but can not be based on science itself. However, in an ironic methodological twist, science is grounded in these values. Critique evolves not out of value judgments but rather out of the examination of the contradictions, consequences, and effects of various actions and ideas, thereby disproving and de-legitimating certain forms of knowledge and activities. Discussion will focus on the relationship between Science and Ethics -- value judgments (Werturteilen and Wertungen), value relations (Wertbeziehungen), and value freedom (Wertfreiheit) in the Kulturwissenschaften. In this essay Weber will examine sociology or science in relation to culture and history, social problems, policy and action, ethics, and social critique and judgment. Concentrate on pages 50-53 and 72-94 for access to Weber's epistemology (theory of knowledge) and methodology (theory of science). Forms of Critique and Science in Weber: As with Marx, Weber employed a number of different methodological approaches to the scientific study of society, including the following: I. Historical Critique: The central focus of much of Weber's early and later writings was on the meaning and intentions of human action in history: Why did Western society become capitalistic? What were the underlying cultural causes of this transformation from medieval feudalism? His later writings began to emphasize less the cultural dimension and more the political economic structures of the transformation. Also to help explain the historical process of rationalization, Weber developed a theory of decadence and disenchantment (based on existentialism and the dialectical method) caused by the Enlightenment (positivism, materialism, and utilitarianism). The critique of rationalization and disenchantment was based on the use of the "dialectical method" since formal reason displaced and repressed substantive reason and the ability of humans to think, imagine, and create meaning in their lives. The claim of the Enlightenment to be the fullest development of human reason was a contradiction to the reality of the last man and iron cage. Weber's idea of the last man in an iron cage without substantive reason was derived from Nietzsche "Prologue" to Thus Spoke Zarathustra and from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and the loss of the spirit of Aristotle and the Athenian polity in Western consciousness with the rise of utilitarianism, hedonism, the French Revolution, French Terro, and Kantian moral philosophy; what remained were only scientific technicians and specialists. II. Hermeneutical Critique: The understanding and empathetic analysis (nacherleben) of cultural ideals and values to help define and judge the historical causes of intentions and actions (Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism). III. Phenomenological Critique: The emphasis here is on the cultural causes of human actions and the ideas and intentions in human consciousness. When examining the underlying causes for the development of Western capitalism Weber focused on the impact of the ethic and theology of Protestantism, especially Luther, Calvin, and the neo-Calvinists. To reinforce and validate his thesis about the impact of the Protestant Reformation on the evolution of capitalism, Weber undertakes a comparative analysis of the Middle East and China to determine why these societies never developed in similar directions. IV. Dialectical Critique: Refers to a "formal logical judgement" in examining the internal logic and consistency of cultural ideas and values and the historical impact they have on concrete situations. There will also be a judgment on the relationship between the ideas, logic, and intentions and the actual empirical impact and historical effects they have on individual and social actions ("Objectivity in Social Science," 54-55). The dialectic in Weber refers to the inconsistencies, consequences, and contradictions in social actions, culture, ideas, and institutions. According to Weber, science cannot dictate ultimate ends and values, but can show their influence and consequences on human actions and intentions. It cannot reveal the ought but can illuminate the possibilities and limits of intentions and actions. One example of this lies in his theory of rationalization: Weber compares the ideals of the Enlightenment with the actual evolution of the last man in the iron cage. Note: Marx used the dialectic to trace the contradictions within work, political theory, structure and mode of production, economy, and economic crises -- that is, to trace the contradictions between work and labor, political rights and economic rights, citizen and bourgeois, productive forces and social relations of production, base and superstructure, and the overproduction of material goods and capital. Weber in his essay on objectivity expressly stated that he used the dialectical method also. V. Neo-Kantian Structuralism: In his more materialist and later writings found in Economy and Society, Weber outlines the structural prerequisites in politics and economics of the development of capitalism in Western society. VI. Critique of Positivism: In his methodological essays, Weber relies on a Kantian epistemology to develop a constructivist theory of knowledge based on the ideas of evaluation, meaning, and significance of social actions. His key terms of adequate causality of actions, value relations, and value freedom. He is critical of positivism, explanatory science, naturalism, realism (empiricism and rationalism), and Marxian social theory. Weber's theory of objectivity, neutrality, and value freedom, understood in the broader context of his methodological writings, represents a critique of the hidden values and political assumptions of positivist science, as well as the loss of substantive reason. Neo-Kantian Epistemology (Theory of Knowledge): Weber refers to his view of science as Wirklichkeitswissenschaft or "an empirical science of concrete reality" consisting of the following elements: value relevance (Wertbeziehung), interpretive sociology of the understanding, and defense of historical and cultural science (72-79, 81, 83-84, and 92-94); infinite reality and idiographic and nomothetic objects and events (72-73); cultural significance to us (72, 76-77, and 82); understanding and explanation in science (41 and 77); causality (76 and 78); adequate causality (164-170) and objective possibility (80, 177-179); ideal types (90, 92-93, 98, 100-101, and 106); and critique of realism (92) and nomological laws (68, 72-75, 78-80, 85, 86-89, 103, and 106). Neo-Kantian objectivity and causality are quite different from nomological or natural science causality; the former includes discussion of issues of historical explanations, historical causality, the historical individual, empirical rules, adequate causality, objective possibility, and historical regularities (75-80), along with the use of ideal types (90-91). See also the section in Weber's essay "Critical Studies in the Logic of the Cultural Sciences (1906) on objective possibility (Eduard Meyer) and adequate causation (Johannes Kries and Gustav Radbruch) in historical explanation (164-188). Weber was a member of the German Historical School of Economics which rejected the deductive logic, static mathematical modelling, and universal laws of the Classical and Neo-Classical Schools of Economics. The Historical School emphasized the concrete, empirical historical aspects of economics, inductive reasoning, a holistic theory of the integration of society's individual social, political, economic, and cultural parts, and public policy and social reform. Neo-Kantian Methodology (Theory of Social Science): Synthesis of Relativism, Pessimism, and Existentialism: value freedom (Wertfreiheit), not as a reified objectivity, neutrality, and fact/value split, but rather, as "freedom from" the preachers (preachers of religion, metaphysics [being and reality] and idolatry), prophets (religious predictors of the future), and demagogues (authoritarian and oppressive political leaders who appeal to prejudicies and irrationality) who practice a metaphysics and religion of positivism (formal rationality, last man, iron cage, and disenchantment of objectivism, realism, scientism, nominalism, and utilitarian domination). Weber expands the sociological method with his outline of the historical method of objective possibility (Eduard Meyer's theory of history), adequate causality (theory of legal causality and preponderance of evidence from Kries and Radbruch), ideal types, fallacy and prejudice of naturalism and universal scientific laws, and legal hermeneutics (64-71, 79-91 and 95-112). The concepts of value relevance and value freedom Weber gets from Heinrich Rickert, the famous neo-Kantian theorist. Critique of idea that there is any residual positivism in Weber's interpretive and historical science in his later writings. Positivism is incapable of providing the epistemological or methodological foundation for historical and cultural science (Geschichts- and Kulturwissenschaft). Neo-Kantian Science or Positivistic Science: The Relationship between Value Relevance and Value Freedom: Some have argued that Weber begins with a neo-Kantian epistemology (value relevance), but ends with a positivist methodology (value freedom), thereby keeping the best of both worlds -- understanding and explanation, Kant and Hume, values and facts, and ethics and science. Although there is something tantalizing about this grand synthesis, it still represents a grand illusion. It remains illogical to arbitrarily combine two contradictory approaches to social science; the philosophical assumptions -- the metaphysics of methods -- underlying both views of science make their combination in Weber impossible. A scholar cannot have one criteria of truth, objectivity, science, and validity followed by its exact opposite. This is just another way of reading positivism back into the classical period. Also following his theory of knowledge in this essay, Weber is critical of both Marxist and neo-classical economics for their positivist method of prediction, causality, and explanatory universal laws. In his essay on objectivity in the social sciences, Weber is critical of both Marxism (7 and 103) and positivism (78-80) because of their adherence to the principles of PERRRSONNNN : Predictivism Empiricism (72-73 and 92-93) Rationalism (hypotheses, causality, deduction, and explanation, 45, 72-73, 76-80, and 89) Realism (92-93 and 107-110), reductionism (68, 72-73, and 80) Reductionism Scientism (universality of scientific method), objectivism (72 and 80-81) Naturalism (universality of the metaphysics of science: 72-75, 68, 78-83, 85-88, and 106-107) Neutralism (false objectivity and value freedom, 56, 76-77, and 148) Nominalism (value freedom: 52, 56, 76-77, 82, and 84) Nomothetic laws (72-73, 75-77, 79, and 85-93) Methodological Debates in Economics and Sociology in the 19th and 20 Centuries: Weber was a key player in the major methodological debates at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries: (1) the Methodenstreit (Methodological and Epistemological Debate) between members of the Austrian School of Economics led by Carl Menger and the German Historical School (Kathedersozialisten) led by Wilhelm Roscher, Karl Knies, Gustav von Schmoller, Karl Buecher, Adolph Wagner, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber; (2) the Werturteilsstreit (Value Judgment Debate) among members of the Verein fuer Socialpolitik which included Werner Sombart, Gustav Schmoller, and Weber; and (3) the Positivismusstreit, a third series of debates over the philosophy of the social sciences between the Southwest German (Baden) School of neo-Kantianism whose group included Wilhelm Windelband (Strassburg; distinction between idiographic and nomothetic sciences) and Heinrich Rickert (Strassburg, Freiburg, and Heidelberg) and scientific positivism which included Henri de Saint-Simon, Pierre-Simon Laplace, and Auguste Comte. A general summary of these three debates are outlined in various articles found in Wikipedia and Britannica Online. Neo-Kantianism in Contemporary German Social Theory: Epistemology and Methodology: The Southwest School of neo-Kantianism had been preceded by the "Back to Kant" movement of the 1860s led by Kuno Fischer's Kant's Life and the Foundations of his Doctrine (1860), Friedrich Lange's History of Materialism (1866), and Hans Vaihinger, founder of the journal Kant-Studien (1897) and his Commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1922). Neo-Kantianism, whether the Baden School of Windelband, Rickert, and Troeltsch, the Marburg School of Paul Natorp, Hermann Cohen, and Ernst Cassirer, or the Existential Kantianism of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, had a profound impact on the later development of both German critical philosophy and sociology, including: Classical Social Theory of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Sigmund Freud Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, Georg Simmel, and Alfred Schutz [see especially Simmel, Kant (1904), Kant and Goethe (1906), and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (1907)] Existentialism of Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger (student of Husserl and Rickert at Freiburg) Students of Heidegger at Marburg, including Karl Loewith, Hannah Arendt, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse at Freiburg, as well as, debate over Kant between Heidegger and Cassirer Christian Existentialism of Soren Kierkegaard, Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Karl Barth Neo-Marxism of Karl Korsch and Georg Lukacs Hermeneutics (Subjective Meaning) of Aristotle, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel, Weber, and Hans-Georg Gadamer Depth or Critical Hermeneutics (Objective or Structural Meaning) of Marx (structures, functions, and ideology of political economy), Freud (structures and functions of unconscious repression and psychoanalysis), Karl-Otto Apel, Alfred Lorenzer, Juergen Habermas, and Paul Ricoeur Critical Rationalism of Karl Popper and Hans Albert Critical Theory of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Habermas (Positivismusstreit with Critical Rationalism) Critique of Weber as Positivist and continuation of the Werturteilsstreit and the Positivismusstreit at the German Sociological Congress in Heidelberg (1964) by Horkheimer, Habermas, Marcuse, and Parsons and Weber's Method as Practical Science, see George McCarthy, Dreams in Exile, note 63, p. 345 and pp. 345-348; Classical Horizons, note 52, p. 180 and note 58, pp. 180-181; Marx and Social Justice, in Dreams in Exile, note 21, pp. 338-339; and Durkheim's Critique of Positivism and Theory of Representations, in Dreams in Exile, note 77, pp. 350-351 and pp. 350-356. French Postmodernism of Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyodard, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault (with ties to Nietzsche and Heidegger; see the books and articles by Richard Wolin on the relationship between Fascism, anti-Enlightenment, and Postmodernism, e.g. The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism). Some of these contemporary theorists will be the focus of study in the spring seminar, German Social Theory (Socy 461). With the prominence of positivism in American sociology, the methods within Classical Social Theory of neo-Hegelians like Marx and neo-Kantians like Weber and Durkheim are lost in translation and, thus, are not represented in methods courses in sociology. This leads to further divisions within the discipline between contemporary American and European sociology over the relationship between Theory and Methods resulting in the further degradation and disappearance of European thought in American academics. |
| 12. | Max Weber | "Science as a Vocation," in Readings in Introductory Sociology ed. by Dennis Wrong and Harry Gracey, pp. 187-192 and Rogers Brubaker, The Limits of Rationality, pp. 1-44 Rationalization of the Iron Cage and the Silence of Reason in the Last Man Rationalization, Disenchantment, and Bureaucratic Specialization (187): History of the evolution of Western science (Wissenschaft) from the substantive reason (Wertrationalitaet) of Greek philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, Renaissance art and experimentation of Leonardo da Vinci, early science of Galileo and Bacon, and the Reformation science and religion of Swammerdam to the formal rationality (Zweckrationalitaet) of the nineteenth-century Enlightenment of utilitarianism, liberalism, materialism, and scientific positivism (188-189); and theory of the iron cage and the last man of Nietzsche (189). This essay is an abbreviated rewrite of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit which culminates in the Enlightenment, the abstract moralism of Kant's practical reason and categorical imperative, and the French Revolution -- the Alienation of Culture, Spirit, and Reason. Weber's analysis of the history of Western science does not represent a movement toward self-consciousness and freedom but an intellectual movement representing the end of substantive reason in philosophy, politics, art, religion, and early science and the evolution of reason into a technical and instrumental rationality, materialism, utilitarianism, and positivism. Other terms that capture the essence of this argument are nominalism and anomie. Weber's term of disenchantment (Entzauberung) comes from the phrase, the "de-divinization of nature" (die entgoetterte Natur) by Friedrich Schiller in his poem "The Gods of Greece" ("Die Goetter Griechenlands") and from On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794), pp. 38 and 99, n.1. This concept is further expanded by Heinrich Heine, Walter Pater, Edmund Husserl, Georg Lukacs, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno. Rationalization and Disenchantment of Reason, Theory, and Methods: Prophets and Demagogues of Positivism and the Ideology of Science in the Classroom: Introduction to the values and Metaphysics of Positivism: scientific domination, naturalism, scientism, realism, and the prophetic preachings of the demagogue (190); and the warring gods of tradition and epistemological/moral relativism (191). Continuity within Weber's Wissenschaftslehre (theory of science) from his early to his later writings: from "'Objectivity' in Social Science" (1904) to "Science as a Vocation" (1919). The methodological principle of value freedom is a prohibition against preachers and demagogues in the classroom who espouse unconscious value systems and who use lectures for political and ethical moralizing; counterintuitively, it represents a critique of the metaphysics and ideology of positivism in the form of neo-Marxist and neo-classical economics with their hidden epistemological, methodological, and political agendas and biases. The modern prophets are the positivists who attempt to predict, control, and dominate the future through the building of causal explanations and natural laws. Immediately after Weber's analysis of infinite reality and constructed objectivity in "'Objectivity' in Social Science" (72), he undertakes a rejection of naturalism and positivism in his criticism of the science of causality, deduction, and explanatory laws; in his analysis of cultural and historical significance and the role of the understanding and value relevance in the social sciences (76), he criticizes the prejudice and dogma of the "naturalistic fallacy" and "naturalistic prejudice" of positivism (86-89); and in his essay "Science as a Vocation," his dismissal of preachers and prophets in the classroom (145-146) is located at the end of his analysis of the phenomenology and history of Western reason and the Metaphysics of the Enlightenment: Herrschaftswissen (knowledge of domination), formal and technical rationality (Zweckrationalitaet), meaningless science, repression of Substantive Reason (Wertrationalitaet), and the a priori assumptions of the Enlightenment theory of knowledge and positivism in terms of predictivism, empiricism, realism, scientism, objectivism, naturalism, neutralism, nominalism, and nomothetic laws (PERSONNNN). For Weber, positivism is the underlying theory of knowledge and methodology of both Marxist sociology and orthodox sociology -- science based on immediate facts and rejection of metaphysical or historical natural laws. Weber's critique of demagogues, preachers, and prophets focuses on the epistemology and methodology within Social or Cultural Sciences in his early essay "Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy" (1904) and on the underlying metaphysics of the Natural Sciences based on domination and control over nature in his "Science as a Vocation" (lecture at University of Munich 1918, published 1919) The former influences the types of methods and questions used in sociology and history (neo-Kantian hermeneutics and dialectical critique) and the latter results in the existential disenchantment of reason, the iron cage, and the last unreflective man; the former represents a critique of positivism, naturalism, predictivism, and causality, whereas the latter emphasizes a critique of nominalism, neutralism, and the ethical emptiness of the iron cage without spirit, heart, and substantive reason. This depletion of reason in the social and natural sciences results in the crisis of Western reason and the Enlightenment -- the loss of history, reason, and wisdom by the demagogues, prophets, and preachers of the illusions of positivism. In the natural sciences, the disenchantment of positivism leads to the loss of substantive reason and in the social sciences it leads to the loss of interpretive sociology in the form of hermeneutics (Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism), comparative historical analysis (Religion of China), and structural materialism (General Economic History). Finally, science is a vocation, that is, it is a value driven way of life that emphasizes a value orientation to the domination of nature. The use of positivism in the historical sciences imposes a foreign metaphysics and value system on the study of history and society -- domination, control, explanatory and analytical laws, functional mechanisms, objective causality, prediction, nominalism, etc., rather than issues of significance, meaning, cultural values, and historical structures. Both the natural sciences and the social sciences are phenomenal interpretations of the physical and social reality -- they are both social constructions of reality. Failure to see this results in the natural and social sciences becoming forms of political ideology. According to Weber, positivism is the product of the "rationalization" and "disenchantment" of formal reason in the social and natural sciences -- what has been referred to as "shadows of God" by Nietzsche, the "dialectic of enlightenment" by Horkheimer and Adorno, the "eclipse of reason" and the "liquidation" [extermination] of reason" by Horkheimer, and "the alienation of reason" by Kolakowski. Weber's theory of rationalization includes the bureaucratization of social institutions, the loss of objective reason, and the rationalization of method or positivism in "Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy." Method Constructs Objectivity and Social Reality and Defines, Frames, and Determines Social Theory: The Method of Disenchantment and Disappearance of Social Theory: With the rationalization of Method, critical social theory, history, and cultural science are lost along with the questions they raised. Theory is displaced and repressed by the disenchantment of reason and the loss of the critical traditions. Certain types of sociological questions, issues, and methods are no longer legitimate. With the Disenchantment of Reason (positivism) and Liberalism (utilitarianism) the very foundations of Critical Social Theory whether Marxian or Weberian are lost. Only questions and issues can be articulated and raised that are compatible with the methods applied in sociology. Thus the main issues of classical and contemporary European social theory fall outside the parameters established by the research designs and methods of American sociology which begin with an Issue, Literature Review (theory search), clearer articulation of Research Question, and then the application of the Scientific Method of Positive Science -- the falsifiable hypothetico-deductive method consisting of hypothesis construction, observation, and testing. This Method consists of the Issue, Hypothesis, Experimentation, Prediction, Causality, Observation, Validation or Falsification of Hypothesis, and Conclusion. After the initial search of the theoretical literature, the investigator this material to provide more precise and analytically clear the issues to be investigated. The literature and more precise articulation of the fundamental issues and questions are ultimately based on the particular method used by the investigator. The technical approach of positivism combines the broad Research Design with the quantitative Research Method in a comprehensive experiment based on empirical measurements and inductive observations of data collection, hypothesis construction informed by deductive logic, explanatory causal relationships, and empirical predictions resulting in explanatory universal laws of social behavior. Within this approach to science, theory plays the role of initial literature review at the beginning of the research inquiry, that is, as the history of ideas, summary of scientific conclusions, and the summary of the method applied. Theory as the conclusion and summary of the research, is, in reality, the product of the initial issues and methods used. A closer look at the Research Design of Positivism indicates that theory, as a broad comprehensive, historical, structural, and critical understanding of modernity, is not the focus of the present research. This is an outdate classical ideal. Rather, it is theory as the abstract and universal conclusions and summary of a specific methodology and method within Positivism. So, when theory helps define and articulate the initial research question, it is the Positivistic method that frames, defines, and determines the range of questions and issues to be discussed. From this perspective, the research program is already defined by a politics of disenchantment and rationalization -- it limits the articulation of possible research issues by its nominalism, scientism, and naturalism. Method informs Theory, just a Theory conforms to Method; Method transforms Theory, just as Theory is deformed. In this way, Method frames, defines, and determines the Issues, Hypothesis, and Conclusions since no issues can be raised or scientifically examine that do not fit into the pre-defined and pre-determined Method. Method defines the questions, categories, observation, conclusion, and theory. Following Nietzsche, this is what Max Scheler in his work Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge (1924 and 1926) called "the will to method" (133). The result is that theory becomes unnecessary and devolves into a subfield within the discipline. It is the method itself which designs and frames the questions and problems to be investigated, not the social theory. Critical ideas and traditions must be reducible to brief scientific hypotheses and causal explanations, quantitative analysis and statistical evidence, and empirical observation and collective validation. Theories developed by the classical and contemporary theorists in European which explore the deep structures of political economy and human consciousness, the internal contradictions and dialectic of ideas and institutions, the immanent critique of political ideology and false consciousness, the rationalization and eclipse of reason, the critical hermeneutics of the masters of suspicion (Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche), etc. cannot be raised within these scientific methods of the Anglo/American tradition. Here sociology is closely following in the footsteps of psychology and the other social sciences resulting in a crisis of the discipline and the academy, that is, resulting in a Disenchantment and Eclipse of Reason and its accompanying social problems (Weber, Marx, Freud, and Horkheimer). Scheler in Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge writes that "the positivism [of Comte and Spencer] is the ideology of recent Western industrialization" (80). Critical of both the Marxists and pragmatists who argued that human beings were "homo faber" or too makers who sought domination over nature, there were two other crucial forms of knowledge (Wissenformen) -- Bildungswissen or philosophical wisdom and virtue that give meaning to the world; it seeks knowledge of anthropology, metaphysics, being, reality, and essence. Erl�sungswissen is the second form of knowledge that seeks religious revelation and salvation. And Herrschaftswissen or positive science is the third form of knowledge. Scheler's theory of the three forms of knowledge integrates Greek philosophy, the Judeo-Christian religion, and Cartesian rationalism and mechanical science. Scheler also contends that the foundation of technical or formal knowledge does not reside in empirical facts or the transcendental subjectivity but in the very nature of modern industrial society: The economy and its quantification of money, merchandise, and exchange in the competitive market produces a similar structure in the collective and social consciousness that transforms classical and medieval physics and metaphysics into the quantification, formalization, and mechanization of modern industrial science itself (134). Freed from the other forms of knowledge -- ancient and medieval religion and metaphysics -- it became the independent basis for the modern domination of nature (Herrschaftswissen. And when arbitrarily and inappropriately applied to the study of society, it imposes a method of analysis that too is based on domination and control, not understanding and hermeneutics, comparative historical and structural analysis, immanent critique, ethical analysis, or the search for social justice. The will to method is a will to power over nature and society. For a more in-depth analysis of Naturalism, see Jonathon Moses and Torbjorn Knutsen, Ways of Knowing: Competing Methodologies in Social and Political Research, pp. 7-9, 15-16, and 48-51; Jeffrey Dixon, Royce Singleton, and Bruce Straits, The Process of Social Research, pp. 1-102 and 106-107. Note: In the Dixon et al. book the Qualitative Method has been reduced to a less intense but still quantitative variation of observation, surveys, field research, participatory observation, interviews, content analysis, and archival research (96-102, 256-292, and 296-332). Even the Norwegian work reduces Qualitative Methods to the hermeneutics of Dilthey and Gadamer, the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, and the history of science of Kuhn and Lakatos. The irony is that both approaches in these social research textbooks fail to consider the methods and methodologies of classical and contemporary social theory, especially Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, their philosophical traditions, and later followers in contemporary French and German Social Theory. Traditional research designs and methods exclude the heart of critical social theory resulting in further disenchantment and the eclipse of reason. In John Creswell's Research Design (pp. 94-96 and 108-109), theory is reduced to a literature review that aids in the articulation of the initial question and issue under investigation. The second use of theory occurs with the construction of a scientific hypothesis or proposition (p. 120) that investigates a particular set of constructs or patterns that detail the relationship among independent and dependent variables in a social setting and explain or predict certain phenomena or outcomes. The theoretical rationale or theoretical perspective is reduced to an explanation of how these variables are related to each other in a concrete pattern. Theory becomes the method, hypothesis construction, and universal explanation and prediction of the causal relationships between social phenomena (120). Thus theory is both the beginning and end of scientific research, that is, both the raising the initial scientific question, testing the question or hypothesis, and drawing the conclusion within the framework of positivism (125-126). In Creswell's analysis, theory is the whole process of question selection, hypothesis construction (explanation of observable variables, causality, and prediction), verification, and conclusion (126). The relationship between Theory and Methods here is also undertaken in Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba, eds., Designing Social Inquiry, pp. 19-23. Theory is indistinguishable from the Method and is thus the former is reducible to the latter since Method defines the observations, inferences, hypothesis, causality, testing, and falsification. "A social science theory is a reasoned and precise speculation about the answer to a research question" (19). The authors continue this line of thought with the idea that theories are the originators and products of causal hypotheses. This line of thought is taken up in another essay entitled "The Quest for Standards" by David Collier, Jason Seawright, and Gerardo Munck in the anthology Rethinking Social Inquiry, edited by Henry Brady and David Collier (pp. 36-46). Here theory is the translated as the actual method of hypothesis construction (p. 38). In the various method and research texts mentioned in this paragraph, theory has been described in a number of different ways -- theory as the literature review, or as the conclusion, or as the hypothesis construction, and as the whole research project from the initial question, observation, hypothesis, testing and prediction, and falsification to the final conclusion itself (p. 38). Pedagogy and Phenomenology: Objectivity in the Classroom and the Disenchantment of the Enlightenment: Weber's critical pedagogy and theory of classroom objectivity are connected to his phenomenology and history of substantive and formal reason culminating in the Enlightenment, Positivism, and Utilitarianism. The end result of this history of Western rationality is the repression and distortion of Substantive Reason (politics, art, physics and metaphysics, Renaissance art, early science, and religion), Ethics and Politics, and the creation of a culture of the "last man" without Spirit (Substantive Reason: Objective Spirit, community, and justice) and without Heart (Virtue: practical reason, self-determination, and morality) -- without Hegel, Aristotle, Rousseau, and Kant. The end of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904) is joined together with the end of "Science as a Vocation" (1919). Naturalism and positivism are rejected because they rob reason of self-reflection, dignity, and the search for an ethical and meaningful, good life. The Enlightenment produces its own opposite and results in the Alienation of Reason, which, in the end, undermines true 'objectivity' in the classroom. Enlightenment Science is antithetical to Reason and Objectivity since it is without Spirit ( Sittlichkeit) and Heart (Moralitaet). Disenchantment of Substantive Reason, Critical Science, and the Methods of History and Political Economy: The loss of substantive reason due to Rationalization and Disenchantment today would go beyond Weber's focus on the Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance forms of knowledge of philosophy, ethics, politics, art, and religion to include the loss of Substantive Reason, Methods, and Critical Science, including historical, human, interpretive, hermeneutical, cultural, and structuralist science (Weber), depth hermeneutics and discursive and dialogical reason (Freud), critical, immanent, dialectical, and ethical (social justice) science (Marx), and the neo-Kantian science of a sociology of knowledge and consciousness and the critical use of quantitative analysis in the loss of the collective consciousness (Durkheim).. All these different forms of science have been repressed and forgotten as legitimate methods in sociology due to the movement of the social sciences in general toward the naturalism and scientism of positivism. This represents the shadows and dark side of the Enlightenment, and it means that the American academy is becoming more and more silent in the face of serious social problems since it no longer has the language, concepts, and theories necessary to reveal and examine them in detail. Quantitative and qualitative methods, surveys, interviews, statistical calculations, and descriptive, correlational, causal-comparative, and experimental research, and the qualitative research using interviews, focus groups, ethnography, case studies, content analysis (recurring themes and patterns in documents, media, and speeches), questionnaires, participatory observation, grounded theory based on interviews and observation, phenomenology of lived experiences of individuals, etc. Content analysis and research summaries have replaced and repressed social theory to the point that the latter is unrecognizalbe with the loss of its "classical horizons." Without the historical and intellectual context, theory becomes impossible to read and understand. This represents the Twilight of Social Theory and the reduction of theory to observations and interviews, quantitative and mathematical analyses. Sociology has been displaced and disenchanted because it has lost its Herz und Geist in the iron cage when it lost its foundation in history, philosophy, and political economy, just as it has also lost the Horizontverschmelzung and Griechensehnsucht of Continental social theory. Having lost these traditions to positivist sociology, theory has disappeared as a relevant element in American sociology in a similar way that Freud has disappeared in American psychology and political economy in economics. Methods that do not reflect the narrow positivist epistemology and methodology of natural science are no longer considered scientific and are thus disenchanted and repressed. The irony of intellectual history is that these developments in American sociology best express the twilight of social theory and the key categories of the classical tradition since sociology itself is now the manifestation of disenchantment, alienation, and repression. Contradictions Between Value Relevance and Value Freedom: Some authors have noted an inconsistency, if not an outright contradiction in Weber's writings, between value relevance (Wertbeziehung) and value freedom or value neutrality (Wertfreiheit), or between Weber's neo-Kantian epistemology and his positivist methodology. According to them, there is a clear distinction between Understanding and Method. The scholar chooses a question on the basis of value preferences, but must maintain a neutral, objective, and unbiased approach in the actual empirical research of that question. This appears acceptable at the level of common sense but assumes an enormous burden at the level of metatheory and ultimately leads to an incoherence in Weber's Wissenschaftslehre. This is especially true when one considers that after each discussion of his neo-Kantian theory of knowledge and value relevance (72, 76, 82, and 84) mentioned above, he turns to a criticism of naturalism and positivism. Thus positivism cannot be the method of default and represents a misreading of Weber's critical method of research. Neo-Kantianism runs throughout both Weber's theory of knowledge and his theory of science. This is the main reason why value freedom must be translated not as "value neutrality," but as "freedom from values" of positivism, especially, objectivism, predictivism, and naturalism (52, 60, 72-73, 75, 78-79, 80, and 86-88) and realism (92), along with the critique of positivistic and explanatory laws and predictions of orthodox Marxism (68, 103, and 106). To his specifically methodological essays and their rejection of positivism, Weber's Science as a Vocation should also be mentioned as another critique of the formal rationality of positivism and the last man, that is, of the specialist without self-consciousness, freedom, or justice (Geist) and the pleasure-seeking utilitarian without passion, feeling, or morals (Herz). The modern technicians of bureaucracy are without a critical perspective based on the substantive reason of ethics and social justice. For many years the American sociological tradition had argued that Weber defended ethical neutrality, scientific objectivity, and methodological positivism, as it consistently failed to appreciate the irony that the "last man" was, in fact, a positivist who sought happiness and the technical knowledge of mastering life without meaning. Science is ultimately a vocation driven by the passions (Herz) and values/institutions [Geist -- Subjective (consciousness), Objective (institutions), and Absolute (cultural) Spirit] which construct the objects of scientific inquiry. Without values (Wertbeziehung) there are no objects; without values there is no science; and with "value freedom" and "neutrality" there is no science, but only the explanatory predictions of the last man enclosed in a cage of formal and utilitarian reason. Wertbeziehung (interests and theory) creates historical and social objectivity or representations. Existentialism, Relativity, and Objective Social Science: Question for discussion: Does the rejection of unconscious values refer only to value relevance and the questions asked within science that begin with personal prejudices, ethics, morals, politics, ideology, unarticulated assumptions of the sciences, etc. or are the sciences themselves -- Naturwissenschaften and Kulturwissenschaften -- forms of value relevance and thus open to criticism of "value freedom" and "freedom from values"? How radical and extensive is Weber's existential relativism -- his theory of the "warring gods" of the prophets (155)? Do values permeate both the form and substance of science? Are both epistemology and methodology themselves forms of value relevance? Is the neo-Kantian tradition of Windelband and Rickert that distinguishes between nomothetic and ideographic science and natural and cultural science itself a value relevant perspective? Weber almost views the sciences as ontologically distinct forms of knowledge of nature and history. He does not appear to be a relativist on this point. Access to culture and history, requires the use of a neo-Kantian methodology and a rejection of positivism. Objectivity is a construct and choice of human reason from the "infinite multiplicity of successively and coexistently emerging and disappearing events" ("'Objectivity' in Social Science," p. 72). Objectivity is created from an infinite reality by the specific value-relevant questions (theories) asked by the scholar. Finally, is there any objectivity in this approach to the social sciences? According to Weber, Objectivity rests not in the object, as in empiricism and rationalism, that is, objectivity does not rest in facts, causality, explanatory laws, or prediction, but rather lies in neo-Kantian fashion in subjectivity, i.e. consciousness itself. Neo-Kantian Objectivity: Objectivity as Coherence and Intersubjectivity: Objectivity lies in treating science as a subjective vocation based on hard work, dedication, virtue, integrity, self-clarification, duty, responsibility, etc. (152 and 155-156). It rests both in the consistency (54 and 96) comprehensiveness (72 and 80), and coherence of the investigative research and empirical scholarship, as well as in its intersubjective or communicative dimension as it does for Aristotle, Marx, J. S. Mill, and Habermas. According to Weber, social theories and empirical research are justified through academic democracy and public discourse -- public presentations, lectures, journals, traditional scholarship, congresses, etc. Objectivity lies not in the object itself (empiricism) or in the method applied (rationalism), but rather in the comprehensiveness and breadth of scholarship as a vocation (80), in the intellectual integrity of the scholar, and in the intersubjective, self-conscious knowledge articulated in the public spheres of the academy (Rickert). Although never developed, Weber was moving in the direction of a coherence and consensus theory of truth (subjectivity and intersubjectivity) while rejecting a correspondence theory of truth (positivist objectivity); consensus would occur within a comparative historical perspective of the economic development within Western Europe, India, Middle East, and China. Weber's theory of Objectivity represents a synthesis of Existentialism, Neo-Kantian epistemology, and an underdeveloped Theory of Consensus. In conclusion, his theories of Objectivity and Scientific Validity rest in Subjectivity (Consciousness), that is, Objectivity rests in the character of the scholarship, the vocation and dedication of the scholar, and the intersubjective validation of the research itself -- it lies in the principles of Coherence, Consistency, Comprehensiveness, Character (Private Vocation), and Consensus (Public Scientific Community). The Alienation of Reason: Rationalization, Positivism, and the Last Man: these are the characteristics of "the fate of our times" -- a meaningless universe with science as a form of technical reason whose ultimate goal is the domination of nature and man -- Herrschaftswissen (190). This concept was coined by Max Scheler in his essay "Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge" (1924) which was later expanded and incorporated into The Forms of Knowledge and Society (1926). Two page reading from the prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885) and the teachings of the �bermensch (striving and overcoming individual) and the last man without reason, justice, compassion, morality, or imagination. Weber views the last man as the "Specialist without Spirit" (technician and bureaucrat without Objective Spirit, substantive reason, or social justice) and "Sensualist without Heart" (utilitarian and neo-classical economist without compassion, mercy, or morality). After 10 years living in a mountain cave, Zarathustra, the prophet of ancient Iran, came down into a village marketplace and spoke to the assembled people about the "last man" who was without reason, creativity, or imagination. The last man represented the spirit of the modern age -- the utilitarian and bureaucrat who was no longer capable of imagining a "dancing star" ("Prologue" to Thus Spoke Zarathustra). Rationalization of Religion, Science, and Production: This internal (psychological) rationalization of the Protestant work ethic (Protestant Ethic, 105 and 115) and scientific rationalism is only furthered with the external (social) rationalization of capitalist social and economic institutions of the market, private property, free labor, and industrial production, that is, capital accounting, in General Economic History. In the ability to imagine a "dancing star" reside the possibilities of dreaming beyond the immediate facts of positivism in order to construct a broader historical and more imaginative social theory of modernity. Metaphysics of Science and the Rationalization of Reason: The historical process of rationalization is expressed in social institutions, culture, and reason. It permeates the modern economy, state, law, city, and religion, as well as science, epistemology, and method. Weber's analysis of the last man and the rationalization of science and the Enlightenment will be examined as a loss of substantive reason and intellectual reflection on the nature of "science" and "objectivity." Formal reason makes claims to universality (PERSONNNN) since predictive and explanatory laws, naturalism, and realism, rejection of natural law, along with the utilitarian search for "happiness" and "pleasure," are the ultimate arbiters of truth and knowledge. Science as a vocation of objective social ideals and moral principles (substantive reason) is lost. Weber's neo-Kantian method of value relevance (Wertbeziehung), value freedom (Wertfreiheit or freedom from values), and ideal types or utopian representations or cultural interpretations of the essential and finite characteristics of historical actions, institutions, and cultural events is an attempt to ground sociology in a new method of inquiry that is anti-positivistic ("the naturalistic fallacy"); it is an interpretive science of the essential elements of historical phenomena. Weber's critique of the rationalization of science is a critique of "specialists without spirit; sensualists without heart" in economics, history, and sociology. Existentialism within the Iron Cage represents a loss of Spirit and a loss of Heart or a loss of Method and Reason (interpretive and cultural science) and a loss of Ethics and Politics -- History of Western Reason and various forms of Science within Weber's Wissenschaftslehre: Geisteswissenschaften, Geschichtswissenschaften, Kulturwissenschaften, Interpretative Wissenschaften, Hermeneutik Wissenschaften, komparative Geschichtswissenschaften, and Geschichte Strukturwissenschaften des Kapitalismus. With the disenchantment of HEART in the form of ethics and values and the disenchantment of REASON, there is no longer an ability to seek truth, beauty, and justice. The iron cage is filled with bureaucrats and technicians without Spirit or substantive reason, community, institutions, or social justice in the form of the Absolute and Objective Spirit and utilitarians and economists without virtue, ethics, vocation, or moral autonomy and freedom. It represents a critique of the repressed values of positivism (metaphysics and mysticism of science) in the form of universal objectivity, scientific neutrality, and empirical realism. There is a need to recall E. A. Burtt and write a new text, entitled The Metaphysical Foundations of the Social Sciences. This critique of Scientists, Technicians, and Utilitarians as having lost Heart (morality, ethics, and freedom) and Spirit (Objective Spirit of self-consciousness within the community, collective values and institutions, politics, and social justice -- the ideal of the Objective Spirit is the Athenian polity whose inspiration and ideals die with modern individualism and its view of happiness, pleasure, and morality) represents Weber's critique of the loss of Substantive Reason in philosophy, art, politics, music, religion, and early science. Weber's brief summary of the history of Western thought and decline of substantive reason in "Science as a Vocation" is a form of a twentieth-century rewrite and summary of the Phenomenology of the Western Spirit. Hegel earlier in the Phenomenology of Spirit had also traced the loss of the good life, heart (virtue and morality) and spirit (community), rights, duties, and the state of the Athenian polity in Classical Greece (Aristotle) in the rise of utilitarianism and hedonism, French Revolution, Robespierrian Terror, and Kantian morality. Weber traces the loss of the Greek Spirit to the Enlightenment, utilitarianism, and the formal reason of specialists and technicians. See R. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel, pp. 212-213 and 480-490, and 522-579. In both cases history tends toward the iron cage of Formal Reason in Hegel and Weber. Hegel (Solomon, pp. 486-488), Marx, and Weber all criticized the Enlightenment, Liberalism, and Capitalism because of the loss of the Greek Spirit, community, and self-consciousness, but responded in radically different ways with Hegel's theory of the Objective Spirit and the State (Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of Right), Marx's theory of alienation and dehumanization within industrial production that destroys human creativity and self-determination (German Idealism) and democracy (Aristotle), and Weber's theory of Enlightenment rationalization and the disenchantment of substantive reason among the modern specialists and technicians without heart (virtue) or spirit (moral community). All three in one way or another rejected key aspects of Modernity, while being inspired by their vision of the ancient Greek world. The Disenchantment of Reason and Methods: Positivism is a highly value-ladened approach with many unarticulated assumptions and unconscious values about the nature of knowledge, method, and science that should be brought to light and critically examined. The idea of the Disenchantment of Reason is found in Weber's essay "Science as a Vocation" (1917) and the Disenchantment of Methods is found in his essay "Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy" (1904). In the former, Weber argues that with scientism (method of science as only legitimate form of knowledge) and naturalism (metaphysics of science and natural world of dead, meaningless, lifeless objects and things to be studied within framework of causality, prediction, and natural laws) -- science as the only true measure of objectivity and truth -- the history of Western thought from the ancient Greeks to the Protestant Reformation is just another form of magic, mystery, and illusion that disappears as relevant with the Enlightenment. This makes value judgements, ethics, morality, politics, art, etc. irrelevant in the pursuit of knowledge and truth resulting in the loss and disenchantment of reason. To re-enchant reason is to turn science into a vocation based on dignity and dedication. In the second essay, Weber undertakes to show how the various methods of German sociology -- cultural science, historical science, moral science, interpretive science, critical science, etc. -- do not conform to the method of the natural or positive sciences -- PERSONNN. The Politics of Disenchantment: The Re-enchantment and Vocation of Science and Methods: Connecting the thoughts of these two essays provides us with a new insight into his methodological intentions: Science is to become a vocation, a dedicated way of life and prescribed methodological behavior with concrete values that guide historical and interpretive investigations. That is, science is re-enchanted with values that do not disrupt the call for objectivity and freedom. These are the values (Wertbeziehung) that actually direct scientific research and inquiry by raising concrete questions, issues, and theories as opposed to the hidden epistemological, methodological, and metaphysical values of positivism which are assumed and articulated by the preachers, prophets, and demagogues -- prediction, empiricism, realism, scientism, objectivity, nominalism, naturalism, and nomological laws. |
| 13. | Max Weber | General Economic History, chapters 22-29, pp.275-351 (Recommended: The Religion of China, chapters 1-4, pp. 3-104) History and the Structural Origins of Capitalism in Medieval and Modern Political Economy From Marx's Historical Materialism to Weber's Cultural Idealism, Comparative Historical Analysis, and Structural Materialism: Weber begins his examination of general economic history and the structural and institutional foundations and preconditions of Western capitalism. He asks the questions about the nature of capitalism, as well as the structures and origins of capitalism. In the process he moves beyond his early cultural idealism and critical methods of interpretive (understanding, meaning and significance), hermeneutical (Protestant theology), historical (Protestant ethic), and dialectical (contradictions, consequences, and causes)) science, at the same time that he continues his early rejection of positivism, Weber begins to explore a new sociological method. Examine this new materialist method of his later writings in which he investigates the Historical, Structural, and Critical preconditions, foundations, and causes for the possibility of capitalism in the Medieval Church, Political Feudalism, and City Economy. (Note: Transcendental critique of sufficient reason in perception, understanding, and experience for Kant and historical critique of structural and historical preconditions of capitalism for Weber). (1) Distinctive Nature of Capitalism: he defines capitalism as rational accounting and economic rationalization by means of calculation, formal and technical reason, methodical organization, predictable routine, causality, maximal efficiency, and increased productivity (definition of capitalism, Weber, 275; compare to definition in the "Introduction" (1920) to The Protestant Ethic). Weber's theory of "rational capital accounting and bookkeeping" entails structural transformation of the medieval economy to begin the total rationalization of production, including the formation of private property, free markets, rational technology, formal law, and free labor. The three key elements into today's discussion include (1) the definition of capitalism as rational capital accounting and bookkeeping; (2) the rationalization of production and work in the factory; and (3) the structural and institutional history of the foundations of capitalism with special emphasis on medieval history, cities, commerce, military independence, law, and citizenship. (2) Rationalization of Production, Commerce, Property, and Political Economy: Weber then examines the Structural Preconditions -- the structures, organizations, and institutions of Production, Consumption, Market Exchange, and Distribution in the rationalization of the institutions of capital accounting, rational bookkeeping and profit accumulation through the restructuring of land, raw materials, labor, private property, urbanization, centralization of economic planning, factory system, banking, commerce, the state, formal rational law, restructuring of the social organization of production, division of labor and labor organization, etc. to the point where everything and everyone is calculable within a market economy. Every aspect of political economy and production is restructured for the purpose of efficiency, productivity, and profit accumulation. In the seventeenth century, the economic reality becomes transformed by mathematics, quantitative analysis, formal reason with its concentration on materialism, quantification, mechanism and machinery, causality and prediction, and the formal domination and technical control over ever aspect of the economy, including Production, Finance, Commerce, Exchange, and Property by means of rational calculation and quantification of all aspects of Production and Exchange. These are the structural pre-conditions for rational bookkeeping and accounting. The Rationalization of Capital provides the foundations for the Rationalization of the Science of Bookkeeping (and the Science of Nature). (Note that these are also the preconditions of natural science and positivism.) The structural pre-conditions for rational calculation and financial accounting lie in the Structures of Capital -- Rationalization of Production and Work -- and the necessary creation of (1) private property; (2) market freedom; (3) rational technology and factory (302-314); (4) calculable law (391); (5) free labor, markets, and urbanization (306); and factory production (302). In order to calculate, explain, predict, and mathematize the economic world, the structures of capital must first be organized to permit that conscious activity. (The same may be said of the rise of modern science at exactly the same time: In order to produce scientific inquiry, methods, and theories, nature must be mathematized, that is, it must be made into a predictable, calculable, mechanical machine. These are the "Shadows of the Enlightenment" -- the hidden dark side and shades of Enlightenment reason with their unconscious values and metaphysics. Weber is aware that the preconditions of the rise of modern science lie in the Rationalization of Production and Work -- Capitalism. However, he does not make the conscious connection to Marx and his method of historical materialism, but it is there nevertheless.) The rationalization of economics and nature must turn the world into a calculable machine for profits and exploitation. (3) From the Rationalization of Industry, Production, and Work to the Rationalization of Science and Technology: A Project Left Undone: Production, labor, and market costs, raw materials, infrastructure, transportation, wages, prices, sales, money, and profits must be quantifiable; accounting follows the logic of a machine in its causal relationships and predictions. See, Weber, General Economic History, pp. 275-285. This rationalization of production, commerce, finance, banking, exchange, and property is not only the structural preconditions for a capitalist economy, it is also the precondition for the rise of the Enlightenment reason and modern science and the domination of nature and humanity (Herrschaftswissen). Weber implies this in his earlier essay "Science as a Vocation" (1917) with his emphasis on disenchantment, formal reason in the iron cage, the technical utility of modern science, and the meaninglessness of science itself -- loss of substantive reason. However, in spite of the enormous historical evidence in his analysis he does not develop this argument of the Rationalization of Science, Technology, and Formal Reason further in his later writings; he does not seek to uncover the historical and causal links between capitalism and natural science. This would take the application of the method of historical materialism to see the relationship between capital accounting and rational bookkeeping and the rise of modern science. Capitalism is the pre-condition for Rational Bookkeeping and Accounting (Weber) and for Modern Science (Marx). Weber never finished the connection as he moved closer and closer in his later lectures and writings to historical materialism. This rationalization of capital accounting throughout the economy is the foundation of capitalism. However, Weber is also interested in examining the historical foundations of capitalism is the rise of the medieval city, medieval commerce and trade, citizenship and the modern state, etc. Thus his focus in General Economic History is on the mathematical, institutional, and historical rationalization of society: (1) Mathematical Rationalization of Capital as bookkeeping and accounting -- reduction of social and economic reality to a machine that can be calculated, examined, quantifited, and predicted using money as the medium of analysis (2) Institutional Rationalization or Preconditions for Rational Booking rest in private property, free market, science, technology, law, free labor, and commerce necessary to calculating rationalization (3) Historical Rationalization of Capitalism and Evolution of Institutions through the evolution of medieval society and the creation of the capitalist (4) Structural and Institutional Origins and Causes of Capitalism; analysis and summary of the structures of capitalism from the ultimate conditions of ancient cultures and religions, more remote causal factors in medieval society -- Church, feudal political order, and rise of medieval city (Weber, The City, 80-81) as a conjuratio or fraternal association with its commerce and trade (Weber, 318-319), political autonomy and citizenship (Westby, The Growth of Sociological Theory, 389), self-administration, and independent legal system and formal law (Westby, 391), and self-equipped army (Weber, 320-321; summary by Westby, 389) to the proximate causal factors in the sixteenth-century state (Collins, "Weber's Last Theory of Capitalism," 932), modern citizenship, and the rule of law (Westby, 391) and the modern economy with its formally free labor (Weber, 277 and 306), science and technology, market economy, individual freedom, private property (276 and 302), and factory system (302) -- and the Protestant Reformation with its asceticism, vocation, specialized labor, and rational economic ethic. Weber characterizes the distinctiveness of modern capitalism through the forms of capital accounting, formal bookkeeping, and financial accounting. This presupposes the rationalization of the full costs of production and consumption or the rationalization of the social totality necessary for the calculability, predictability, and efficiency of the economic system. This requires not only a new form of technical accounting of costs, labor, raw materials, prices, and profits, but a new form of formal and technical rationality along with new social institutions geared to the rationalization of society. This, in turn, required the rise of the early medieval city, medieval Christianity with its formal laws and bureaucracy, the nation state and universal legal system, protection of natural rights and private property, creation of free labor and a market economy, and the encouragement of the Enlightenment view of science and technology. This entails control over labor and nature (private property), regulation of economy (market and state), formal reason (science and technology), and the modern bureaucracy whose role is to rationalize and protect the liberal economy. Summary of Weber's Theory of the Rationalization of Science, Social Institutions, and Capital Accounting: Examine Brubaker's summary of Weber's theory of rationalization in terms of depersonalization, calculation, specialized knowledge, and the technical and rational control over all social institutions, especially religion, polity, economy, factory, labor, and science in the iron cage of modernity. The iron cage of the last man is formed from the inability to conceptualize and discuss ideas about substantive reason, hermeneutics or meaning in history in his early historical writings, structuralism or the institutional foundations of capitalism in his later historical writings, and dialectical or immanent critique in his essay on objectivity and naturalism. Examine the nature of Rationalization, along with the growing crisis of capitalism and existentialism in its various forms examined this semester: Religion and the transcendence of God (Deus absconditus) resulting in a correct, meaningless, violent, individualistic, and 'extremely inhumane' world of The Protestant Ethic, Positivism and Methodology in "Objectivity in Social Science," Science and Reason in the iron cage in "Science as a Vocation," Capitalism, Economy, and State as the structural preconditions of a free market, wage labor, and private property in General Economic History), and the summary of rationalization provided by Brubaker in The Limits of Rationality. All these works examine the nature of rationalization in the social sciences, natural sciences, and history/institutions of the rise of capitalism. Weber's "General Economic History" defines capitalism in terms of rationalization and the forms of systematic and methodical capital accounting and calculation: mathematics, quantification of experience, materialism, formal rationality, domination over nature and production, causality and prediction, and the loss of substantive reason as ethics and natural law. The historical forms of capital accounting take the following institutional forms: private property, market freedom, rational science and technology, calculable law, free labor, and the commercialization of economic life (276-277). Weber then continues to further his analysis with his discussion of the rationalization of finance and a regulated economy (279-285), the rise of the factory system and the rationalization of work (302-314), the rise of the modern city and citizenship (315-337), and the rational state and Roman, German, and Catholic law (338-351). From Epistemology and Metaphysics of Science to Social Theory and the Sociology of Knowledge: The fundamental and formal categories that describe Weber's theory of rationalization, disenchantment, and modern capitalism and also the same categories that describe Kant's transcendental categories of the understanding. Discuss this historical connection between the forms of abstraction of Political Economy and Epistemology. The formalism and abstractionism of intellectual Science is a reflection of the formalism and abstractionism of the commodity-exchange (theory of value, exchange-value, abstract labor, and surplus-value -- all these aspects separate from the material use-value of commodities) and the broader the structures of capitalism, just as it is "the social existence of humans which determines their consciousness" ("Preface" to Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.. This argument has been developed in more detail by Marx, Sohn-Rethel (Intellectual and Manual Labor, chapts. 5 and 6), and Marcuse (One-Dimensional Man, chapt. 6). The formal categories of the understanding and science are products of the abstraction from the actual and historical forms of capitalist production, exchange, and consumption. Sohn-Rethel stressed the importance of Marx's materialist theory and reality of exchange value abstraction and its effects on production and consumption as the true historical foundation of Kant's transcendental categories of the abstract mind. The manner in which we perceive, experience, and know the world is a product of the social system or it is the System which determines, defines, and conditions the Lifeworld. According to Sohn-Rethel, Kant's synthetic unity of apperception is based on the social synthesis and abstractionism of commodity exchange ("exchange abstraction"); he emphasizes the parallel forms of abstraction but does not show any direct causal relationship. The commodity exchange unites the production, market, and consumption into a coherent social system, and it is the abstraction of this system which produces a world of abstract unifying categories of time, space, substance, causality, etc. In chapter 20, he refers to natural science as "bourgeois science." Quite differently, Marcuse will stress the a priori political and technological imperatives of science, whereas Weber focused on the metaphysics (quantification and mathematization of formal reason and technical experience) of science compared to the values of rationalization and modern capitalism. Another twist in Weber's later theory of the foundations of capitalism is that he emphasizes the structural conditions for the possibility of capitalism, that is, (1) Outer Mechanism of the Economy: factory system, free labor, private property, and the market; (2) Inner Transformation: Puritanism; (3) Proximate Causal Factors: modern state; and (4) More Remote Causal Factors: Catholic Church and Puritanism, feudal political order, and modern city. Weber is tending in his later writings on the economy and society toward a structural and materialist theory of history and capitalism away from his early and more exclusive emphasis on idealism, consciousness, and religion. Methodology of Meaning, Structures, and History: Critical Hermeneutics, Political Economy, and Historical Sociology: Continued discussion about methodology in Max Weber's writings -- the relationship between a Sociology of Meaning and Understanding (verstehende Soziologie) in his writings on Puritanism and Confucianism and his later materialist writings on a Sociology of History and Structure (Erklärung) -- the structural origins of capitalism in the Introduction (1920) to the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The Religion of China (1915 and 1920), and General Economic History (1923). Examination of the relationship and compatibility between a neo-Kantian Sociology of MEANING and a Sociology of STRUCTURES. The early writings were expressions of neo_Kantian idealism (hermeneutics, history, and culture), whereas the later writings were grounded in neo-Kantian materialism (political economy, history, and structuralism). Finally, summarize the dilemmas in Weber's epistemology and methodology: epistemological split between value relevance and value freedom and methodological split between a sociology of meaning (understanding and culture) and a sociology of structures (historical causality and structural conditions of capitalism). Is there a fundamental divide in Weber between his early neo-Kantian epistemology and idealist methodology and a more materialist approach in his later writings? Are there different methods because he is asking different types of questions about the historical origins of society? Or is Weber simply moving in a direction back to the future, that is, back to the historical materialism of Karl Marx? Compare Marx's theory of dialectics and historical materialism to Weber's theory of interpretive science, cultural idealism, comparative historical analysis, and structural materialism. The Formation of Critical Science: Compare the Methods of the Lost Traditions of Marx and Weber: Summarize the neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian lines of thought in Marx and Weber. Briefly outline Marx's methods based on Critique, Dialectic, and Contradiction examined in the first half of this semester: (1) substantive and ethical critique of philosophical anthropology, species-being, natural law, and human needs in the Paris Manuscripts; in his critique of alienation and false needs, Marx uses a phenomenological method of the reconstruction of ancient and modern ethical traditions from the ancient Hebrews, Hellenes, and Hellenists to the Romanticism and Idealism of German poets and philosophers to locate and frame his own theory and telos of humanity; (2) the immanent critique or critical comparison of the values of equality, freedom, community, and justice to the reality of the structures and values of industrial capitalism in On the Jewish Questions -- economic rights are tied to capitalism, while the political rights of the citizen transcend capital and anticipate the individual freedom and rights of socialism -- the economic rights and freedoms of capitalism are logically incompatible and contradictory to the political rights and freedom of democracy; they also mirror the struggle in Locke between natural rights and natural law; (3) the structural and functional irrationalities and contradictions of capitalism in terms of the base and superstructure, productive forces and social relations of production, and material production and industrial prosperity alongside the class structure, inequality, poverty, and the barbarism of economic crises in the Communist Manifesto; and (4) contradictions of exchange value and use value, production for material well-being and capital (private property), and use value (needs) and surplus value (profits) leading to the "inevitable breakdown" of capitalism in Capital. Compare this application of Critique to the neo-Kantian methodology of Weber in terms of the different approaches regarding History and Meaning (Culture) and Structure and Political Economy, that is, in terms of his analysis of the meaning and values of religious consciousness in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and the second half of the Religion of China to his analysis of the foundations and prerequisite structures of capitalism in the "Introduction" to the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and General Economic History. Contrary to the intellectual tradition in the West, Marx and Weber had much in common: They both rejected empiricism and positivism; both used dialectical (logic, contradictions, and inconsistencies) and immanent (ideal compared to the real) critique; both were grounded in history, hermeneutics, and culture (ideology and rationalism); both examined the causes of modern industrial society, the conditions surrounding the origins of ideas and ideals, and the consequences for social institutions, individual actions, and public policy; both recognized the contradictions inherent in the social system between productive forces and social relations of production (Marx) or between substantive and formal reason (Weber); and both were critical of the alienation and rationalization of modern society. Their main differences resided in their understanding of the relationship between theory and practice on the one hand and theory and ethics on the other. Marx went beyond Weber by developing a social theory grounded in ethics, politics, and social justice. Weber could not expanded his understanding of value relevance to include a critical social theory; he could not see that the values implied in concept formation and empirical research were theoretical in nature and thus could be used as the basis for asubstantive or ethical social critique. According to the former, critique referred to the inconsistences, contradictions, and false consequences of actions and ideals, and not to the ethical critique of capitalism itself. For Weber, critique was internal to the structures, institutions, and actions of individuals, but could not be applied externally in the form of a social philosophy calling for radical social change. One can only wonder if American sociologists can recognize these theoretical and methodological approaches to sociology or if they simply reject them as being non-scientific (positivism and naturalism) and ideological. These, along with Durkheim, are truly the Lost Traditions. Classical Social Theorists rejected the underlying epistemological and methodological assumptions and framework of positivism -- naturalism and nominalism -- since these elements made it impossible for the theorists to use History and Critique as essential elements of critical social theory. Summary of the Critical Views of Science in Marx and Weber: Critique of Positivism and Naturalism Marx's Theory of Science as the various Forms of Critique or Critical, Structural, and Dialectical Science: Positivism as the Alienation of Consciousness and Reason Marx's developed a variety of methods and sciences to reflect his critique of political economy, including immanent critique, ethical critique, dialectical critique, historical critique, and political critique. All these different forms of science, empirical research, and social critique were part of his overall design of a comprehensive theory of social Justice based on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and The Politics. (1) Immanent Critique of Natural Rights and Political Alienation of the economic and political rights of the French Constitutions of 1793 and 1795 in On the Jewish Question. Marx measures the inconsistencies, incoherence, and contradictions of liberalism by comparing the rights of the bourgeois man and the rights of the citizen; the rights of capitalism and private property and the rights of freedom and democracy in the French Constitutions; the rights of egoism and self-interest and the rights of assembly and free speech. Class rights and human rights are historically and structurally inconsistent and reflect the fundamental problem of liberalism and capitalism. (2) immanent and Ethical Critique of Economic Alienation of production and the nature of work and creativity of the species being based upon a History and Phenomenology of Spirit and Social Justice in the form of the ancient Hebrews (Torah), ancient Hellenes (Epicurus and Aristotle), early Hellenists (Jesus, Matthew, and Luke), German Romantics (Goethe and Schiller), and German Idealists (Kant and Hegel) in the Paris Manuscripts. These traditions represent the highest ideals in Western society -- freedom, equality, moral community, human dignity, and self-determination which are the basis for his critique of capitalist alienation and exploitation. (3) Dialectical Critique of the internal and structural contradictions of Industrial political economy between the material productive forces and the social relations of production in the Communist Manifesto. They express the moral irrationality of an economic system that has the material foundation for the elimination of class, inequality, poverty, and human misery, as well as providing the material basis for democratic socialism. (4) Historical Critique and Political Analysis of the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 and the breakdown of the French Empire in his later writings provide an historical overview of the events leading to the formation of the Paris Commune. (5) Social and Political Ideals of Democracy that grew out of the institutional and social ideals of the Paris Commune of 1871 in the Civil War in France. The democratic ideals and social institutions of the Paris Commune offer the reader a limited view of the concrete horizons of Marx's theory of ethics and social justice. (6) Dialectical Critique found in Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Grundrisse , and Capital which examined the internal dynamics and structural weaknesses and contradictions of the capitalist economy resulting in economic crises, unemployment, tendential fall in the rate of profit, and declining profit maximization. According to Marx, the total economic system was irrational, repressive, and exploitative. (7) Ethnological Critique and Research on Imperial Colonialism and Participatory Democracy in Marx's later analysis of the anthropological method of ethnology in the writings of Lewis Henry Morgan as they aided the development of Marx understanding of participatory democracy in the Iroquois Nation. All seven approaches to his theory of critical, historical, and social science present the overarching framework for Marx's theory of social justice. Weber's theory of Social Science and Methods: Positivism as the Decadence and Disenchantment of Reason: Weber's various theories of science and methods come out of the neo-Kantian tradition of German Idealism with its emphasis on life, culture, significance, and evaluation: (1) Historical Science as he outlines the history of the Protestant Reformation with a distinct focus on neo-Calvinist ethic of predestination, determinism, terror, individualism, asceticism, vocation, and metaphysical comfort in The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism (Geschichtswissenschaft) (2) Hermeneutic and Interpretive Science by which Weber investigates the meaning and intentions behind the writings of the major authors of the Protestant Reformation in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Geisteswissenschaft, Interpretative Wissenschaft, and Kulturwissenschaft) (3) Comparative Historical Science in which Weber compares the social values, religions, utilitarian consciousness and social institutions of religion, law, prebend, state, and the village courts affecting the rise or inhibition of capitalism in Europe and China (Vergleichende Geschichtswissenschaft) (4) Epistemological and Methodological Analysis of the cultural and interpretive sciences that provide academics with the culture, values, ideals, intentions, and purposes of human action within society by means of a sociology of understanding, interpretation, significance, meaning, value relevance (Wertbeziehung, value freedom (Wertfreiheit, and cultural ideal types in his essay "Objectivity of the Social Sciences and Social Policy, 1904 (Kulturwissenschaften) (5) Dialectical Science by which the history of Western culture and the disenchantment of reason and methods reveals the internal logical contradictions and innate incoherence of Western reason (decadence and illusions), science (Herrschaftswissen), and sociology (positivism: naturalism, objectivism, and scientism) that lead to decadence and decay of Western culture and spirit (Dialektische Wissenschaft) (6) Comparative Historical and Structural Science that examines the necessary structural origins of Western capitalism in the medieval Catholic Church, feudalism, the political state (Staendestaat), and medieval city based on self-equiped military, trade, citizenship, and guilds; Puritanism; the rise of the bureaucratic state in the 16th century; and modern capitalism (private property, market freedom, rational technology, formally free labor, and the commercialization of economic life in the 18th and 19th century (Historische Strukturwissenschaften). Disenchantment and Repression of Classical Social Theory: The implications of these six different forms of science in the writings of both Marx and Weber provide a broader understanding and appreciation of the range of ideas, theories, and methods used in the classical tradition of German social theory. It also presents us with a stark reminder of the full and disturbing implications of Weber's theory of the disenchantment of reason, methods, and theories. The metaphysics of natural science -- scientism, naturalism, and objectivism -- is now being applied to American sociology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, following closely the patterns already in existence in psychology, economics, and political science. The main result is that there is a serious degradation and loss of European social and political theory. The questions, issues, and problems articulated in the methodologies of both Marx and Weber, listed above, are no longer applicable in the twenty-first century. Bluntly put, sociologist can no longer raise the questions and issues articulated by Marx and Weber, use their methods and theories, and undertake deep structural analyses and critiques of modern capitalism because their distinct methods grounded in neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian traditions are no longer understood to represent the true and universal scientific method. Thus their depth criticisms are no longer valid and legitimate forms of science and the questions they raised can no longer be legitimately articulated or remembered resulting in the Disenchantment, Alienation, and Repression of Social Reason. The implications of this occurence are very serious since sociologists no longer have the vocabulary and conceptual frameworks, theories, and ideas to recognize and fight fascism and protect and ensure democracy. The ideas of alienation, disenchantment, and derangement are no longer scientific or relevant. Finally, Marx's evolution of his different theories of critique, science, and methods corresponds closely to the evolution of his theory of social justice. That is, each new aspect of Marx's theory of social justice reflects his reading of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and The Politics: Forms of Social Justice and Forms of Scientific Methods: 1. Rectificatory Justice Immanent Critique of law and natural rights (civil and legal rights) 2. Ethics and Virtue Immanent Critique of Philosophical Anthropology and Phenomenology of Spirit (social ideals of human dignity and self-determination) 3. Environmental Justice Alienation of Nature (humanity and nature) 4. Particular Justice Aristotle, Economic exchange, and Oikonomike (human need and distributive and reciprocal justice) 5. Universal Justice Historical Science and the Paris Commune of 1871 (political theory and democracy) 6. Chrematistics Dialectical Science of the Contradictions of Capital (critique of political economy and wealth acquisition) |
| 14. | Emile Durkheim | Suicide, (chapter 5), pp. 241-258 and The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, pp. 13-33 and 169-182 (Recommended: The Rules of Sociological Method, pp. 1-13) |