The Philosophy of Marx

The Philosophy of Marx
By  Étienne Balibar

This is quite a short book, mainly offering an overview of Marx’s philosophy, but with two appendices which are more focused and intensive. There are difficult sections, which is inevitable since the topic of the book is, after all, Marx and Marxism, but Balibar handles the difficult material very fluently so that I personally found it interesting and informative. [Anyone hoping for a handy summary of Marx's philosophy in this review will be disappointed!]

Like some other writers, Marx appeared to have announced his exit from philosophy in pursuit of something more useful. In the eleventh and last of the Theses on Feuerbach, we read: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’ Iris Murdoch made quite a career out of lampooning people thinking they could get away with such notions. In reality Marx did nothing of the kind, since without the tools of metaphysics he could not have begun to define and resolve the relevant issues. And indeed, Marx can be located very much within philosophical tradition; for example: "All these formulations, different in content or opposed in intent as they may be, share a common concern with the question of the relation between theory and practice, consciousness and life. This is true from Parmenides’s ‘Thinking and being are one’ to Wittgenstein’s ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’, via Spinoza (‘God is nature’), Kant (‘I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith’), and Hegel (‘The rational is real and the real is rational’). And here is Marx ensconced not just at the heart of philosophy, but at the heart of its most speculative turn, in which it strives to think its own limits, whether to abolish them or to establish itself on the basis of a recognition of those limits."[p45]

Having planted Marx squarely “at the heart of philosophy,” Balibar explains that Marx himself did not, in point of fact, leave behind a finished system of philosophy which we can refer to as “Marx’s Philosophy.”  "The fact is that, as I have sought to show in the wake of many others, Marxism and Marx’s Marxism... – from which, as is well known, he sought to extricate himself by quipping ‘all I know is that I am not a Marxist’ – never managed to find a language that articulated theory and practice,..."[p217]

Balibar himself argues that we must virtually excavate the philosophy of Marx from deep within the written words, and sometimes indeed from material he never intended to publish. "So we have the right then to interpret the implications of what Marx wrote. Not to consider the fragments of his discourse as cards to be infinitely reshuffled at will, but, nonetheless, to take a foothold in his ‘problematics’ and ‘axiomatics’ – in other words, in his ‘philosophies’ – and push these to their conclusions (to find the contradictions, limits and openings to which they lead)."

He emphasizes that Marx wrote fluently in a number of languages (German, French, English), well aware of the significant differences between languages in the meaning and connotations of key words, and aware of the philosophical connotations attached to them, their histories in the literature of philosophy. Hence, in his first appendix, he analyses the text in Marx’s 1845 Theses on Feuerbach in order to pin down just where Marx stood, paying special attention when Marx inserts a French word into a sentence written in German. [He learns a great deal from this text, writing  "Today, these Theses are regarded as one of the most iconic documents of Western philosophy[p169] which may be the case, but he seems to me overly grandiose when he compares it to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.]

Balibar explains that Marx developed his thinking over the course of a lifetime, that this was not a linear process and that there were some radical changes of direction. Major breaks occurred with the failure of the 1848 revolutions and then the Franco Prussian War and the Paris Commune of 1871. "I am tempted, rather, to believe that he never, in fact, had the time to construct a doctrine because the process of rectification went faster." [p162] "He was too much the theorist to ‘botch’ his conclusions, too much the revolutionary either to bow to reverses of fortune or to ignore catastrophes and carry on as though nothing had happened. And too much the scientist and the revolutionary to surrender to the hope for a messiah."[p162]

At his death, his work was still incomplete; Engels had to edit and complete some of it according to Engels’ own understanding and many other key works – not all intended for publication - did not even come into print before the 1930s. Consequently, Balibar makes clear that what we can refer to as Marxist philosophy often only exists in the work of later interpreters who started from different aspects of Marx’s thought, selected different elements and transformed them in very diverse philosophical directions.

Balibar is nevertheless cheerful about the implications of this. He believes that the development of Marxism between 1890 and 1990 was a failure and it is indeed jarring when an interesting analysis of the concept of the withering away of the state reaches its conclusion with Stalin executing the theorist. However, events have freed us from commitment to the past and we can tackle Marx in new ways. Here is how he expresses this suggestion:

"We do, nevertheless, have to recognize that Marxism is an improbable philosophy today. This has to do with the fact that Marx’s philosophy is engaged in the long and difficult process of separation from ‘historical Marxism’, a process in which the obstacles accumulated by a century of ideological utilization have to be surmounted. It cannot, however, be right for that philosophy to seek to return to its starting-point; it must, rather, learn from its own history and transform itself as it surmounts those obstacles. Those who wish today to philosophize in Marx not only come after him, but come after Marxism: they cannot be content merely to register the caesura Marx created, but must also think on the ambivalence of the effects that caesura produced – both in its proponents and its opponents"[p162]

Now to be honest I have no idea what Balibar is really saying there. If Marx himself considered that the failure of the 1848 revolutions invalidated what he had written in the Communist Manifesto of 1847, so that a radical change of direction was necessary, and he reacted similarly to the manifest deficiencies of the 1871 Paris Commune, it seems pretty hard to imagine that the same Marx – or any serious student of his work – would be unperturbed by any of the subsequent events between 1890 and 1990.

So why is Marxism an improbable philosophy today? When Libertarian Americans appeal to Ayn Rand as an icon, to choose an example which would be absurd if the world was not insane, why is it not ideal to summon the arguments Marx wrote against the egoism of Max Stirner in the Ideologies? Why is discussion of the ontological status of the individual in society less critical today than in 1845? I prefer to conclude with a more succinct remark by Balibar:  "Let us say that humanity cannot abandon a problem which it has not yet solved."

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The European Civil War 1914-1945

Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914-1945
By  Enzo Traverso


This was a very dense book at first, but in time the point became clear that each chapter is exploring its own theme in some depth, while accumulating the basis for an overall argument. It suggests that European history from 1914 to 1945 should be viewed as a single cycle of events and described altogether as a European civil war. These observations are not original and many sources are cited to support them. Certainly the book examines them in great detail, describing just how radically the core values of humanity collapsed for the duration, how Europe abandoned the idea of the state as a lawful framework for diverse people to live together, typically within an empire, replacing this with the image and by 1945 often with the reality of a nation state with a homogenous population, from which vast numbers of people were excluded and either obliged to transfer to their own national home or rendered stateless and hence also without rights.

However, the book's task is not descriptive but analytical. The writer is dissatisfied with the pronouncement that this period represented a collapse from civilisation into depravity; on the contrary, it represented the culmination of a process that was in hand since at least the Enlightenment. He dislikes the idea that we should remember only the victims of this disaster; we should not forget those who took part on either side of the civil war and what it is that they were responsible for doing. He is not willing to accept that all those who participated were wrong to do so, nor that the values which led them to fight should be abandoned; on the contrary, he argues that it was essential to be committed, the moral imperatives could not have been greater. We should honour those who defeated Nazism in Europe, remember what they fought against and be prepared to do the same again.

"The only memory of the age of fire and blood that was the first half of the twentieth century that it seems necessary today to preserve is the memory of the victims, innocent victims of an explosion of insensate violence. In the face of this memory, that of the combatants has lost any exemplary dimension, unless that of a negative model. Fascists and antifascists are rejected equally as representatives of a bygone age, when Europe had sunk into totalitarianism (whether Communist or Nazi). The only great cause that deserved commitment, so post-totalitarian wisdom suggests, was not political but humanitarian.” [p14]

One of the difficult themes in the book is its opposition to the widely argued assumption that communism and fascism were equivalent, by virtue of their totalitarian nature and the numbers of their casualties. Traverso does not understate Stalin's crimes nor Russia's participation in the immense forced population transfers as well as large scale murders which marked the age. At the same time he observes that the discussion of communism and the Cold War requires a global picture, while his work is concerned specifically with European history and the concept of a European civil war. The fact is that in the European context, communists displayed a fierce commitment to the struggle against Nazism which was never displayed by liberal democrats, let alone by the elites of the liberal democracies and the war in Europe was primarily fought out on its Eastern front, between Russia and Germany. Both German and allied casualties on the Western front were a mere fraction of those in the East. Once the Germans were halted and defeated at Stalingrad, the war was strategically lost.

Beyond this, I will concede that I am not clear if Traverso actually does reject the contention that communist totatilitarianism was equivalent to fascist totalitarianism. I suspect he has a more nuanced attitude, which could only be set out after introducing work such as Losardo's, who demonstrated the totalitarian elements in British and US practices, especially but not only during the two world wars, or the work of the Frankfurt School along similar lines. Two things are clear enough. One: He derides the notion that liberal democracy was going to defeat fascism, given its collapse across Europe in the face of fascism. Two: He also is sceptical of the way the anti-fascist alliance fell apart once the Germans were defeated, giving way to the new lines of the Cold War. He explains that the alliance was inevitably made up of very different forces, temporarily setting aside profound differences, and bound to go their separate ways in due course, but within that alliance the communists nevertheless played a vital role and generated the fierce commitment without which Nazism could never have been defeated.

Despite its density the book becomes more interesting and more challenging in proportion to the effort expended on reading it. I have already made an effort at a second reading. It is too early to say if I have understood it correctly - probably not, though writing about it has been a good start - but I have gained a lot from it already and I know I will return to it again.


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Seizing Freedom

Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All
By   David R. Roediger


The structure of this book is straightforward and it makes its arguments without excessively labouring the points. It opens by demonstrating that the emancipation of slaves in the American Civil War became an unavoidable war goal for the North primarily because of the actions of the slaves in liberating themselves. The many ways in which slaves were able and willing to revolt, despite appalling suffering and brutal punishments, is inspirational today and was seen that way at the time. So much so, in fact, that the Civil War opened a period of revolutionary possibilities in American politics and society.

The emancipation of slaves was such a seemingly impossible attainment that, once it became reality, other impossible goals also seemed attainable. Among these were the rights of women to vote in elections and the right of workers to an eight hour day. For a time, Black, female and worker rights were thought to be interlocked and capable of being pursued and attained together. The universal feeling was that freedom would not be given but might be taken through struggle and the self-liberating actions of the slaves were taken as the model to emulate against all odds. Sadly, divisions emerged which increasingly separated women, trade unions and freed slaves into competing and eventually hostile camps. These mutual tensions are described in painful detail and anticipated the contemporary discourse about ‘intersectionality’.

At the same time, Reconstruction itself fell into disrepute. The counter-revolution was partly explained by the failure of either main political party to take the side of liberty. The Republican Party was more comfortable protecting the rights of property and business, while the Democrats took the side of authoritarian politics, racism, segregation, patriarchy and the interests of employers. The counter-revolution in the Southern States especially was also a popular and violent movement among the defeated white population. It targeted not only Blacks but Republicans and progressive groups and was expressed in extreme violence, while the Southern States imposed fresh legislative restraints on Blacks known as the Black Code, which corresponded to the earlier Slave Code. As women, workers and Black activists were driven apart, their separate goals were lost to sight for many decades to come.

This tragedy was also a vital lesson. The book does not blame the progressive activists for their failure in the face of such powerful counter-revolutionary forces, but it does suggest for the future that each is more likely to attain its goals in coalition than in competition and hostility with each other. Phrased differently, authoritarian politics are consistently racist, patriarchal and economically oppressive, representing a common enemy. Even so, the barriers in the way of that coalition are formidable and possibly it may only be attainable and effective within the context of one of the major political parties.

Of all sections, the most directly topical at the time of writing – thinking of Trump’s effective support for the Nazi marchers of Charlottesville in Summer of 2017 – is the account of the reactionary terror in the Southern States as Reconstruction reached its premature and cynical conclusion and the doors closed on such a promising moment in American history. It offers the label “terrorism” to describe events then, and that fits events today just as effectively.

"  ... as much as the Republican Party would prove crucial to the disappearing of freedom dreams, the ability to combine terror and political acumen on the part of white supremacist Southerners also proved crucial in defeating meaningful emancipation. The odd syllables Ku Klux Klan, and the oddly titled Grand Cyclopses, Grand Wizards, and Grand Dragons providing leadership to that organization, capture the popular understanding of such terror. Picturesquely robed and hooded disguises completed a mystique that, as W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, gave “glamour” to terror." [p190]

"But the Klan itself was preceded by less coordinated attacks on freedpeople in the form of riots and night-riding, and it was succeeded by more of the same. The casualties came at the hands of the Klan, the Knights of the White Camellia, the Knights of the White Carnation, the White Leagues, the Red Shirts, the Knights of the Rising Sun, the Order of Pale Faces, the Knights of the Black Cross, the Southern Cross, the White Liners, and nameless mobs and individuals. From the New Orleans and Memphis Riots after the war to the Ellenton, South Carolina riots late in 1876, the violence proved varied and mobile, but unabated; 20,000 casualties is a conservative estimate.

In some locales, deaths arrived by the scores, as at Ellenton and at the Colfax Massacre in Louisiana in 1873, in which forty-eight died while in custody as prisoners. Humiliations also came, as freedpeople with the temerity to vote, claim land, organize as workers, drill as militia members, parade as veterans, quit jobs, or stand up as domestic servants to their employers had to be brought to heel, especially through whippings and sexual violence. In some counties, the Knights of the White Camellia practiced what the classic history of Reconstruction-era terror called “nonviolent terrorism”—patrolling at night as if slavery had not ended and writing threatening letters—though the prospect of violence was what gave such intimidation force. 

The extent and variety of terror ought not to tempt us to view the racial and class violence as desperate, formless, or aimless. Instead, it was consistently focused in its targets and its goals, seeking the restoration of Democratic Party rule, the suppression of civil liberties and labor rights, and the assertion of control over the bodies and voices of those who had just won freedom."[p191]

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Angela Y. Davis

If They Come in the Morning ... (Radical Thinkers) 
By  Angela Y. Davis


This collection of essays, letters, poems and notes from 1972 is a fascinating historical record from a period prior to the modern wave of mass incarceration in the USA. It is unavoidably dated in its style and many specifics have changed, but they have changed only for the worse and this writing has lost none of its topical relevance in the intervening 55 years.

The core theme is the corrupt use of the criminal justice system to incarcerate and control Black Americans. This is recognised as a flagrant updating of the system of chattel slavery whose abolition is still resented by White supremacists. Black Americans have always searched for ways to defend themselves and assert their human rights and the sources in this collection used the language of Marxism to interpret this as a revolutionary struggle rooted in class interests. In response, the US state and specifically J Edgar Hoover’s FBI employed its criminal justice system to target and silence political activists, in blatant contradiction of the constitution and the law. As a result, the country has had many thousands of political prisoners without properly acknowledging them.

Angela Davis points out that since the days of slavery and the Underground Road, resistance to Black oppression has been illegal by definition. She identifies in her first essay current categories of political prisoner that are hidden in plain view throughout the American justice system. They include Black political activists who have been criminalised or framed and Black prisoners who have learned to be politically aware and active within the prison system. More widely they include huge numbers of Black convicts who know very well they ought not to be in the prison system at all, not least because some 85% have been coerced or intimidated into pleading guilty without a trial or proper defence.

"Nat Turner [1831] and John Brown[1859] were political prisoners in their time. The acts for which they were charged and subsequently hanged, were the practical extensions of their profound commitment to the abolition of slavery." [p31] 

“The battle for the liquidation of slavery had no legitimate existence in the eyes of the government and therefore the special quality of deeds carried out in the interests of freedom was deliberately ignored. There were no political prisoners, there were only criminals; just as the movement out of which these deeds flowed was largely considered criminal.”[p32]

"A deep-seated ambivalence has always characterized the official response to the political prisoner. Charged and tried for a criminal act, his guilt is always political in nature. This ambivalence is perhaps best captured by Judge Webster Thayer’s comment upon sentencing Bartolo-meo Vanzetti to 15 years for an attempted payroll robbery: “This man, although he may not have actually committed the crime attributed to him, is nevertheless morally culpable, because he is the enemy of our existing institutions.” (The very same judge incidentally, sentenced Sacco and Vanzetti to death for a robbery and murder of which they were manifestly innocent.)"  [p30]

”In a revealing contradiction, the court resisted the description of the New York Panther 21 trial as ‘political,’ yet the prosecutor entered as evidence of criminal intent, literature which represented, so he purported, the political ideology of the Black Panther Party." [p33]

According to Louis S. Nelson, warden of San Quentin Prison, “… if the prisons of California become known as ‘schools for violent revolution,’ the Adult Authority would be remiss in their duty not to keep the inmates longer” (S.F. Chronicle, May 2, 1971)."[p40]

”The vicious circle linking poverty, police, courts and prison is an integral element of ghetto existence. Unlike the mass of whites, the path which leads to jails and prisons is deeply rooted in the imposed patterns of Black existence. For this very reason, an almost instinctive affinity binds the mass of Black people to the political prisoners.” [p42]

“The vast majority of Blacks harbour a deep hatred of the police and are not deluded by official proclamations of justice through the courts.” [p42]

The material in this book is sometimes aggressive and angry but often it is miserably sad. It bears witness to great suffering yet it includes uplifting tales of courage in adversity. The Marxist rhetoric can sound messianic and it seems that many activists truly hoped for revolutionary change but, with the benefit of hindsight, we already know that much of this energy was destined to run into the sand and that the prison situation in the USA was about to become much worse.

So what can we do? Maybe we can start by celebrating the courage and energy of the generation contributing to this important book. Then start to get angry. What else?

“The Black Liberation Movement is presently at a critical juncture. Fascist methods of repression threaten to physically decapitate and obliterate the movement. More subtle, yet not less dangerous ideological tendencies from within threaten to isolate the Black movement and diminish its revolutionary impact..."[p43]

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The Age of Atheists

The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God" 
By Peter Watson

This book explores suggestions for diverse ways to live in the absence of God. It is far better than my review and I recommend it. The book starts with Nietzsche's Death of God, and that identifies from the outset that the atheism of this book does have its origin in the rejection of a monotheistic faith. The book’s final conclusion, also, makes some pointed competitive remarks about the relative superiority of atheism to religion as a way of living. So we cannot get away from the principle that atheism is not simply a value system without God, but also one in which the rejection of God is a central value. I don’t know if this concept of atheism is only really applicable to those of us having the appropriate God shaped hole, or if a continuing rebellion against monotheism is in itself evidence that we have not yet broken free of its embrace. Those systems that function without reference to God may not fit the definition of atheism, they may even be accepted by religious people but they may exist in competition with or as a substitute for religion; an example is psychotherapy. For that reason, the book is able to take a pretty generous and sweeping view of its subject.

An important aspect of Watson’s account is to appreciate two things about atheism. One is its diversity – there are many atheisms. Another is the way it has evolved over time, with good reason to hope that the really terrible ideas are among those that have vanished into history.

A significant thread in the history is the realization of GK Chesterton’s prediction, that when people stop believing in God they do not believe in nothing, they believe in anything. From Spiritualism at the start of the 20th Century to New Age fringe beliefs at the end, with special attention to the huge role of the “counter culture” in and around the Sixties, this history incorporates a whole variety of “alternative” belief systems which had an impact in their day and left at least some traces.

In reality, direct opposition to God or to religion does not dominate this history and does not even play a starring role. It certainly does give proper weight to the evidence that atheists did indeed attack religion throughout the 20th Century, sometimes with extreme violence. The scientific atheism of Soviet Russia, and the Nazi project to contain and stifle Christianity as a platform opposed to Nazi ideology, both fairly described here, attained levels of stupidity that ensured they would not survive their temporary political functions. However, in each case the driving force was not atheism per se but the fear of religion as a potential platform for political opposition, something that did not seriously materialise. Out of its 26 chapters, in addition to a conclusion and an introduction, it seems to me that only one (Chapter 24) addresses the so called "New Atheism" and the currently still fashionable wars of science and religion, and this chapter does not make any contribution to the key arguments of the book’s conclusion. So very little of the book is particularly interested in attacking either God or religion. That is simply not the tone of the book.

The book does describe some major historical events that induced widespread dismay with traditional religion, in order to discuss the way people responded. The barbarity of the First World War shook the confidence of many in the concept of a just God; the outrageous abomination of the Holocaust was even more radically shocking; the prospect of nuclear war was again too stark for trite answers to suffice. Scientific developments also provoked discomfort, since the monotheistic religions make assertions about the material world that are incompatible with Science. For many thinkers, the search for a new value system was motivated by the need to properly engage with these problems, when traditional religion was simply no longer equal to the task.

In practice, the most satisfactory answers arrived at have not, in Watson’s opinion, taken the form of new, all embracing or unifying grand theories. Whether in Science, the arts or in philosophy, the trend has been towards more intimate and more fragmentary solutions. On the one hand, Watson does see Science offering a much more satisfactory way to comprehend our world than religion. On the other, he does not suggest that this results in a reduction of experience to a few deterministic laws – rather, it has enabled us to put names and reasons to a growing multiplicity of things which simply had no place in any religious account of “Creation.” In other words, we are able to see and to appreciate and wonder at more of our world in more complex ways than were ever possible in the past.

In a similar way, he credits artists, poets and also therapists with enabling to us give new names to our inner feelings and our subjective experiences, again not reducing our private nor our social lives to mechanistic formulae, but opening up an expanded field of possibilities both to appreciate and to accommodate. An example that struck me was Dr Benjamin Spock, whose 1946 book Baby and Childcare advocated treating children as basically good at heart, flatly contradicting the conventional Christian (Calvinist?) attitude that saw Children as intrinsically sinful and in need of correction. The point is that such transformations were not superficial but very profound, very tangible in their effects and often unquestionably desirable.

This history has space not only for cognitive models, but also for the non verbal procedures of dance, music and the visual arts. It also discusses the expanding awareness and acceptance of human desires, and the prospects of greater freedom for women, for homosexuals and for others, while noting areas of failure such as the continuing prevalence of genital mutilation.

It is rather futile, however, to try and convey the contents, the arguments or even the conclusions of this book to anyone who has not taken the time to explore its detail. The book is as much an experience as an argument. The accumulation of evidence and examples is its point. The book accumulates one example after another of proposals, observations and points of view to produce a convincing and detailed mosaic of the way ideas about life without God have evolved over the past 150 years.

It is not an encyclopaedia. It rarely gives enough information about any source to enable anyone unfamiliar with it to get by without Google, Wikipedia or something similar but frankly there is nothing difficult today in reading with a smart phone or tablet in hand. I made liberal use of those facilities in my reading, as well as adding a number of new titles to my wish list for future reading.

It is encyclopaedic. Much of the pleasure in the book is to spend time with the many illuminating and thought provoking voices within. Watson presents each source's point of view in its own terms, usually in a fair way, and only occasionally enters into a direct debate with the source by citing objections and criticisms. This cannot possibly mean he agrees with everyone mentioned - the sources do not agree with each other. Many of them self destruct anyway without Watson’s intervention. In some cases I certainly wanted to dispute Watson’s commentary, but that is part of the experience of active reading.

In short, the material in this history supports an optimistic, upbeat understanding of new possibilities opening up for human well being as a result of the Death of God. A question he attributes to the poet, Czeslaw Milosz, is one that I suspect fits with Watson’s own conclusions: ”Is the disappearance of religion in our lives any different from the disappearance of some of those other nineteenth-century myths, embodied in imperialism, racial superiority and colonialism? .. No one mourns their passing and no one foresees their return.” [p452] The point is excellent, though unfortunately I do not agree that any of those myths ever did disappear, which is a great pity.


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Spinoza

Within Reason: A Life of Spinoza" 
By  Margaret Gullan-Whur

Spinoza worked on his philosophy in the belief that, provided it was constructed on entirely rational lines, in accordance with the model set by Euclid’s geometry, then it would be accepted without doubt by educated readers and would be approved by the political leaders of his day. In practice, his work fell far short of that ideal and today we have Gödel to thank for showing its intrinsic impossibility. Euclid himself was toppled from his throne a century later. Indeed Spinoza’s own work admitted the possibility of reaching mutually conflicting views from the same starting point. In particular, it was apparent that people may on the one hand be motivated by Reason, so that error and dispute could be traced to mistakes in the reasoning process, but they could also be motivated by passion, with very different outcomes. The first shaped his Ethics, the second his Politics. If Spinoza’s philosophy had in fact attained logical perfection it would still have been rejected by his contemporaries. This became increasingly evident even to Spinoza himself. Knowing that, he deferred publication of his Ethics until after his death.

The author is not impressed by Spinoza’s claim to have relied strictly on Reason in his philosophy because it incorporates so much that is clearly no more than the reiteration of contemporary prejudices, of which she is most aggravated by his strident misogyny. I found her comment on this more than witty; arguments used to show that women are unfit to rule would make better sense if they were used to show that men are unfit to rule.

"Spinoza took care not to let his theory of mind be trapped in contemporary empirical theory... He was interested only in working from those laws of nature that could be taken as unarguably true – common notions governing all instances of a kind... According to Spinozistic principles then, any claim about the nature of women must be derived from an axiom or common notion and any claim made about women which could not be inferred from such a notion was suspect... Spinoza gives no demonstration of his view of women’s mentality in Ethics. He merely asserts that certain mental weaknesses are womanly... Yet in Ethics Part 3, and in later writings, the superstition and bias that strangled the rational faculties of women could also grip men in insane passion. ... Further, males are shown to be weakened by a humiliating affect traditionally associated with their gender. ‘Nor are they thought to be less mad who burn with Love, and dream, both day and night, only of a lover... Men generally judge [women’s] ability only by their beauty.’ Spinoza made men victims of female seduction. He claimed that women induced irrationality and distorted political decisions... Yet he used this male weakness as evidence for his view that women, not men, were unfit to rule.”

It is a delight to observe a woman skewering Spinoza’s misogyny using his own methods.

This book traces many examples where the content of Spinoza’s philosophy is attributable to and explained by contemporary events. Indeed, the book’s objective is really to identify these links. The associated account of Dutch history would be fascinating in its own right, were it not mercilessly selective. Instead, it is largely confusing, not least because detailed accounts of some events are set beside total silence on others. The upshot, nevertheless, is that his writings cannot be viewed as the dispassionate work of a timeless thinker. Happily, this does not have to be as big a problem as it might appear, because what can be rescued is not the content, the material that is so obviously of its own time and place, but the methodology and the attitude which are arguably of lasting value and absolutely relevant to our own time.

"...examination of Spinoza’s life and character serve to confirm that certain logical flaws are integral to his thinking and are therefore ineradicable. ... We may today get the most from Spinoza if we take the ... approach of appealing not to ‘the letter’ of his work, but to his general treatment of issues which concern us. Then, I believe, we find answers which spring from the mainstream of his philosophical thought – his metaphysical theory of the interrelatedness within nature of all natural phenomena, physical and mental – from which he believed deductions concerning particular cases should be made. Many such deductions are shockingly relevant to current affairs and contemporary personal situations... His requirement was that we reason out our predicament either by investigating its causes or by appealing to some common notion. While it would be satisfying to be able to intuit the truth of our situation, the bulk of Spinoza’s doctrine dictates that this option is not available to us. Instead, our decision making procedures must consider each experience of pain, loneliness, guilt, fear, obsession, appetite and financial or other anxiety as an event of kind so-and-so, taking into account our own internal drive. Moral dilemmas and practical choices are with equal profit examined against this grid. ... We should look at our ...predicaments not only in terms of what the harm or good in doing x must be when any human, considered independently of a specific historical or cultural domain, does x, but in terms of what is the harm or good for a person of our disposition. It must not be forgotten that Spinoza, stunningly, vests the ultimate obligation of any individual wholly in that individual, reasoning self.”

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Heretics

Heretics: The Creation of Christianity from the Gnostics to the Modern Church"  
by  Jonathan Wright

This is such a damned reasonable survey of heresy in the Christian religion, from ancient to modern times, that it would be impolite and perhaps self defeating to express irritation. It has an awful lot of ground to cover and, in closing, it addresses and acknowledges the extent of the material it has had to neglect, which is huge. At the close it has successfully name checked diverse major and lesser heresies and examined their impact on the unfolding history of Western Christianity, incorporating an interesting chapter on religious intolerance in the USA. It does so without anger or even much in the way of passion.

For the most part, the attitude taken is that heretics have played a constructive role, obliging religious leaders to define orthodoxy in the teeth of attack, and in at least a proportion of cases it is arguable that the choice might reasonably have gone either way, so long as a decision was taken. This quality of Christian thinking might invite more critical attention. The author himself notes how opponents of Christianity have, from the earliest times, seen its plasticity, its fecundity, its lack of clarity, as an obvious indicator that it is a human invention. It is worryingly easy to suggest alternative interpretations at too many points of its teachings, which is why Christians have invested so much in the construction and the violent defence of “orthodoxy.” The author notes this and dismisses it rather too lightly. He implies instead that this flexibility has enabled Christianity to remain relevant as circumstances changed – which is certainly the case but not a direct answer to the challenge. [Perhaps he is just too well aware of the catch all defence – that revelation unfolds over time, that the Christians have worked slowly and painfully towards understanding the truth. You can’t argue with that so why bother?]

He recognises that, after a period of being persecuted by state authorities (and the author agrees without exploring the topic that this has been greatly exaggerated), the alliance of Church and state (or altar and throne) placed the Church itself in the position of persecuting its rivals, a role adopted with enthusiasm. He notices (another aside) the thesis that persecution itself played a big part in the politics of Western Europe and he points out periods in which the active seeking out of heretics served a useful function in the way power was exercised. He finally explores the emergence of the concepts of tolerance (which is in itself provisional and retains the implication of a power relationship) and then religious freedom, primarily in the American context, though his suggestion that this was a miracle seems is, of course, just plain unsatisfactory.

All this is good and useful history, well worth reading, but I have the impression that it is a mill without sufficient grist, a blade without a sharp enough edge. To take a single example, I suggest that both the extreme barbarity of the Thirty Years War in Europe and the resolution in the Treaty of Westphalia, at its conclusion, to avoid any future wars of religion was a major landmark – not the overnight conversion of Europeans to religious toleration at all, but a major, tangible step in that direction which should be given due weight. In other words, the emergence of tolerance was not a miracle, but rather a product of history and available for study. The book mentions these things, but it deals with too many serious issues in the same way, by name checking it without paying due attention.

Part of the point of heresy is certainly that people died and were killed – typically in horrible ways - for their opinions. Part of the point about tolerance and freedom of worship, from which too many modern day extremists wish to distract us, is not merely that it is bad to kill people over opinions in a world without certainty, but that the attack on heresy very often served a disreputable part in the corrupt exercise of power. Heresy does have its own internal dynamics but it also serves a political role. When the attention of the crowd is [mis]directed towards heresy, there is something more material from which they are being distracted. After all, when we read ...

"Even without Christianity, people would have found things to fight about, and even without Christianity, the convenient (perhaps even necessary) concepts of heresy and orthodoxy would have carved out an existence."[p300]

.. then surely we are entitled to ask if heresy really ever was entirely a matter of Christian theology in the first place, rather than human politics. After all, the author does remind us several times that heresy only becomes a problem when someone decides to make it one. Other sources have mentioned that most Christians today continue to hold at least some and often many beliefs that have been ruled heretical in the past. So we need to give more time to examining its context and sometimes give more weight to that rather than the obscurity of the theological debate itself.

One conclusion the book does reach is worth preserving; there is always a place for strong opinions. Yet this author does not seem to suffer from strong opinions – he is fanatically moderate. It’s difficult to be offended by anything in particular [especially when it closes with a coy reference to a song “Bring in the Clowns” which my mother loved] but even he concedes that some people will decide to be offended anyway. I am an example. I am even irritated by the calm acceptance that there can be no “stable truth in a moral universe”. Some things are certainly wrong and burning heretics is high on that list.

"Heresy and orthodoxy ... are flawed concepts, because they orbit around the notion of stable truth in a moral universe that is often defined by flux. They are however also very useful ideas ... We might accept that most of our choices and assumptions are dictated by accidents of time and place, and we might feel a little hard done by because of all the determinism in our lives, but we still have to live them as if they were the best possible reflection of our chosen beliefs. That’s far less choice than we’d like ... but even if there’s a little intellectual dishonesty and sleight of hand involved, we have to be able to say “I’m right” and “you’re wrong”, even if neither of us is really sure. Else what’s the point?” [p301]

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The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels

Frock Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels 
by Tristram Hunt 

Marx and Engels are inextricable. Engels developed his own ideas independently but deferred to Marx as a far better communicator and theorist. After Marx died, Engels ensured that his works were completed, properly edited, published and promoted. It is fascinating and helpful to appreciate the separate contributions Engels did make without falling into the mistaken idea that he and Marx were in any important way divergent. They were rather each others’ best critics and stimulants. But it is also not correct to try and interpret Marxism without taking Engels into account.

Much of 20th century history can be traced to the impact and evolution of Marxism and of course reactions to Marxism. Obviously later “Marxists” wanted the credibility and status that goes with their association with Marx, cited Marx and Engels in support of their own proposals and actions, argued ad nauseam about who had the true inheritance, but that does not mean we have to accept their claims of authenticity. Why for example would we be required to believe the claims of a pathological liar and psychopath like Stalin? On reflection, how could that ever make sense? One answer is of course that it suits some sources to accept Stalin’s claims, for example, because that helps to discredit Marxism without proper scrutiny. It is worth discrediting Marxism because – and only because - it remains relevant to current circumstances.

Actually, many important works of Marx and Engels were not even available to read, let alone to influence anybody, until the third decade of the 20th Century, and so far as Marxism was influential this was largely through the medium of several short introductions written by Engels after Marx died. In a curious way, we are probably better placed today to appreciate what Marx and Engels really did say, and to evaluate their theories in a considered way in the light of evidence, than was possible throughout the last century.

To do this in a useful way, we need guides who are not overtly signed up to the Cold War camps of the past, either for or against. It is a task for a decent historian and on the whole Tristram Hunt has done a professional job of work here. He certainly points out some of the howling errors in Engels' writing, not least when Engels tries to fit Science and mathematics into his dialectical methodology, and he bewails the poisonous legacy – vicious as well as plain stupid - of this strand of thought in soviet science under Stalin. [I suppose it is best compared to the impact of creationism on attitudes to science in the modern USA]. He also describes with resigned distaste the enthusiasm with which Engels engaged in sectarian infighting among revolutionaries and their allies, and suggests that a major error of judgement in Engels' dealings with English socialists probably played a significant part in preventing Marxism from becoming established there [for better or worse is another debate, but I suspect this claim is excessive since Engels himself offered better explanations for the failure of British workers to sign up to the Marxist, revolutionary agenda].

He describes the extent to which Engels was a creature of his own times, but also the way Engels learned to challenge and radically transform some of the mistakes in his youthful thinking. A major example was in Engels' very racist references to supposedly inferior ethnic groups in his youth and his later appreciation and writing about the evils of racism and colonialism in capitalist values. A different example is the way Engels moved away from his early commitment to violent, revolutionary change, and increasingly advocated a gradualist, democratic process of social transformation, based on his long experience of witnessing failed and abortive revolutions around Europe and his realistic appreciation of the powerful resources available to the modern, reactionary state. In this and other examples, it becomes clear how important it is to place the writings of Marx and Engels in their historical context and to recognise the way their thinking changed over time, so that merely because there is a text to support one point of view, say to show their racism, this does not demonstrate that this was their final, considered judgement. [This is how ruffians can misuse scripture to perverse ends in every ideological system.]

Where Engels was right, though, his work is of lasting importance. He is appreciated by modern feminists, for example, because he analysed the position of women with reference to economic rather than biological determinism. He identified nationalism as a reactionary force that could totally undermine working class solidarity and he predicted that a major European war would destroy all prospects of socialist change for a generation. His prediction in the 1880s of what a modern war would look like turns out to be chillingly accurate and he developed a true horror for warfare, in contrast with his youthful practical engagement as well as theoretical fascination with it.

What emerges as the greatest strength in the work of Marx and Engels is not their prophecies nor their political machinations, but their thorough, systematic and evidence based critique of the way 19th Century Capitalism played out around them, and in their own time, with Engels of course offering a well informed, insider view as a practical industrialist, entrepreneur and financial speculator. It is even the one part of Marxism that really was successfully prophetic, as witnessed for example in the treatment of workers in the emerging capitalism of China and India and the impact of globalisation generally. It is because they were so perceptive in describing their own, contemporary environment – based on empirical evidence and observation, but also structured by an effective explanatory model - that their work has had such lasting value, and continues to be relevant today.

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