Stephen Hicks discusses the Enlightenment vision of the eighteenth-century. This is from Part 14 of his Philosophy of Education course.
Clips 1-3:
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I’ve been browsing Anne Heller’s biography of Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand and the World She Made came out last year, and I am late to the discussion.
I was stuck by this line about the New York City that Rand lived in while she was writing Atlas Shrugged. Heller writes:
“New York was such a politically liberal city in the 1950s that Saul Bellow described it as an intellectual annex of Moscow” (245).
Moscow at the time was the capital of the Soviet Union, one of the most brutally totalitarian nations of all time. The communists killed 62,000,000 of their own people, many in forced labor camps, and made life miserable for tens of millions more across many decades. Like the national socialist regime in Germany and the international socialist experiments in China, Cambodia, and elsewhere, the Soviet Union is a disgusting stain upon human history.
But we call its apologists in the West liberals.
I am sure that historians a century from now will look back on our political language with puzzlement.
How is this for an oath of allegiance to one’s monarch?
“We, who are as good as you, swear to you, who are no better than us, to accept you as our king and sovereign lord, provided you observe all our liberties and laws — but if not, not.”
I’ve been reading Robert Hughes’s 2004 Barcelona: The Great Enchantress. Barcelona is the second largest city in Spain and the capital of the Catalan province, which has traditionally asserted a great deal of independence from the central authorities in Madrid.
The Catalans, as far back as the late medieval era, were among the first to re-establish democratic and republican political institutions. By the late 1200s, Barcelona was governed by a committee of seven individuals with varying powers along with a council of approximately one hundred citizens from all walks of life, as Hughes puts it, coopers, textile traders, “cobblers and bakers as well as bankers and the upper mercantile orders.”
Barcelona, with its excellent port and location on the Mediterranean, became a wealthy trading center and in keeping with its nascent democratic-republican polity developed a plucky spirit of independence. While it was not able to escape entirely the centralizing powers that aggrandized the authority of the monarch in Madrid, it was able to submit with some self-respecting grace, as the wonderful oath above indicates.
In keeping with that spirit of liberty, wealth, and self-assertiveness, Barcelona also developed an impressive arts and architecture culture, as the soaring Santa Maria del Mar cathedral, begun in the 1300s, indicates.
[This excerpt is from Chapter 4 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault]
Kant on collectivism and war
Of the major figures in German philosophy in the modern era, Kant is perhaps the one most influenced by Enlightenment social thought.
There is a clear intellectual connection between Rousseau and Kant. Biographers often repeat Heinrich Heine’s anecdote about how Kant always took his afternoon walk at a set time, a time so regular that neighbors could set their clocks by his appearance—except on one occasion he was late for his walk because he had been so caught up in reading Rousseau’s Emile that he lost track of time. 
Kant had been raised as a Pietist, a version of Lutheranism that emphasized simplicity and eschewed external decoration. Kant therefore had no pictures or paintings hanging anywhere on the walls of his house—with one exception: over his desk in his study hung a picture of Rousseau.[37] Wrote Kant, “I learned to honor mankind from reading Rousseau.”[38]
Neo-Enlightenment thinkers attack Kant for two things: his skeptical and subjectivist epistemology and his ethic of selfless duty. Kant’s account of reason divorces it from cognitive contact with reality, thus destroying knowledge; and his account of ethics divorces morality from happiness, thus destroying the purpose of life. As discussed in Chapter Two, Kant’s powerful arguments were a mighty blow to the Enlightenment.
Politically, however, Kant is sometimes considered to be a liberal, and in the context of eighteenth-century Prussia there is some truth to that. In the context of Enlightenment liberalism, however, Kant diverged from liberalism in two major respects: his collectivism and his advocacy of war as a means to collectivist ends.
In a 1784 essay, “Idea for a Universal History With Cosmopolitan Intent,” Kant asserted that there is a necessary destiny for the human species. Nature has a plan. It is, however, “a hidden plan of nature,”[39] and as such it is one that requires special discernment by philosophers. That destiny is the full development of all of man’s natural capacities, especially man’s reason.[40]
By “man” here, Kant did not mean the individual. Nature’s goal is a collectivist one: the development of the species. Man’s capacities, Kant explained, are “to be completely developed only in the species, not in the individual.”[41] The individual is merely fodder for nature’s goal, as Kant put it in his “Review of Herder”: “nature allows us to see nothing else than that it abandons individuals to complete destruction and only maintains the type.”[4] And again, in his 1786 “Speculative Beginning of Human History,” Kant argued that the “path that for the species leads to progress from the worse to the better does not do so for the individual.”[43] The development of the individual is in conflict with the development of the species, and only the development of the species counts.
But it is also not the case that the species’ development is about happiness or fulfillment. “Nature is utterly unconcerned that man live well.”[44] The individual and even all existing individuals collectively now living are merely a stage in a process, and their suffering is of no account in the light of nature’s ultimate end. In fact, Kant argued, man should suffer, and deservedly so. Man is a sinful creature, a creature that is inclined to follow its own desires and not the demands of duty. Echoing Rousseau, Kant blamed mankind for having chosen to use reason when our instincts could have served us perfectly well.[45] And now that reason has awakened it has combined with self-interest to pursue all sorts of unnecessary and depraved desires. Thus the source of our vaunted freedom, Kant wrote, is also our original sin: “the history of freedom begins with badness, for it is man’s work.”[46]
Accordingly, Kant admonished us, “we are a long way from being able to regard ourselves as moral.”[47] Man is a creature made of “warped wood.”[48] Powerful forces are therefore needed in order to attempt to straighten our warped natures.
One of those forces is morality, a morality of strict and uncompromising duty that opposes man’s animal inclinations. A moral life is one that no rational person would “wish that it should be longer than it actually is,”[49] but one has a duty to live and develop oneself[50] and thereby the species. Inculcating this morality in man is one of nature’s forces.
Another force to straighten the warped wood is political. Man is “an animal that, if he lives among other members of his species, has need of a master.” And that is because “his selfish animal propensities induce him to except himself from [moral rules] wherever he can.” Kant then introduced his version of Rousseau’s general will. Politically, man “thus requires a master who will break his self-will and force him to obey a universally valid will.”[51]
However, strict duty and political masters are not enough. Nature has devised an additional strategy for bringing the species man to higher development. That strategy is war. As Kant wrote in his “Idea for a Universal History”: “The means that nature uses to bring about the development of all of man’s capacities is the antagonism among them in society.”[52] Thus, conflict, antagonism, and war are good. They destroy many lives, but they are nature’s way of bringing forth the higher development of man’s capacities. “At the stage of culture at which the human race still stands,” Kant stated bluntly in “Speculative Beginning,” “war is an indispensable means for bringing it to a still higher stage.”[53] Peace would be a moral disaster, so we are duty-bound not to shrink from war.[54]
Out of this self-sacrifice of individuals and the war of nations, Kant hoped, the species would become fully developed, and an international and cosmopolitan federation of states would live peacefully and harmoniously, making possible within themselves the complete moral development of their members.[55] Then, as Kant concluded in a 1794 essay entitled “The End of All Things,” men would finally be in a position to prepare themselves for the day of “judgment of forgiveness or damnation by the judge of the world.”[56] This is the hidden plan of nature; it is destined to happen; so we know what we have to look forward to.
References
[37] Höffe 1994, 17.
[38] Quoted in Beiser 1992, 43.
[39] Kant 1784/1983, 27/36.
[40] Kant 1784/1983, 18/30 and 27/36.
[41] Kant 1784/1983, 18/30.
[42] Kant 1785/1963, 53/37.
[43] Kant 1786/1983, 115/53.
[44] Kant 1784/1983, 20/31.
[45] Kant 1786/1983, 111/50.
[46] Kant 1786/1983, 115/54.
[47] Kant 1784/1983, 26/36.
[48] Kant 1784/1983, 23/33.
[49] Kant 1786/1983, 122/58.
[50] Kant 1785/1964, 398/65.
[51] Kant 1784/1983, 23/33, italics in original.
[52] Kant 1784/1983, 20/31.
[53] Kant 1786/1983, 121/58; see also 1795/1983, 363/121.
[54] Kant notes a fundamental opposition between human desire and nature’s goals: “Man wills concord; but nature better knows what is good for the species: she wills discord” (1784/1983, 21/ 32).
[55] Kant 1784/1983, 28/38.
[56] Kant 1794/1983, 328/93.
[This is an excerpt from Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]
[This is Section 10 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]
10. Authoritarianism, not liberal democracy
So far we have three major themes in the Nazi Program: collectivism, socialism, and nationalism. The next question is: How do the Nazis believe this is to be achieved?
As early as 1920 the Nazis are clear that they are no friends of democracy, liberalism, or republicanism. They favor strong authoritarianism and centralized power.
Point 23 calls for censorship and government control of all newspapers.
Point 24 suggests limitations on religions that do not fit the Nazis’ goals.
Point 25 calls for centralization and unconditional power: “we demand the creation of a strong central power in Germany. A central political parliament should possess unconditional authority over the entire Reich, and its organization in general.”
These points in combination with the economically socialist points earlier are to give the government total control over all aspects of society.
Throughout the 1920s the Nazis are unapologetic about wanting to eliminate liberalism, democracy, and republicanism. Goebbels for example put it bluntly and publicly: “Never do the people rule themselves. This madness has been invented by liberalism. Behind its concept of the sovereignty of the people hide the most corrupt rogues, who do not want to be recognized.”[19]
In Mein Kampf, Hitler agreed entirely: “There must be no majority decisions.” Instead, “the decisions will be made by one man.”[20] So, Goebbels continued, “We shall create a power-group with which we can conquer this state. And then ruthlessly and brutally, using the State’s prerogatives, we shall enforce our will and our programme.” Again from Goebbels:
“History has seen repeatedly how a young, determined minority has overthrown the rule of a corrupt and rotten majority, and then used for a time the State and its means of power in order to bring about by dictatorship … and force the conditions necessary to complete the conquest and to impose new ideas.”[21]
The Nazis were very clear from the outset what they were in favor of, what they opposed, and how they planned to exercise power once they achieved it: socialism, nationalism, racial identity and purification—and a strong, centralized power to make it happen.
References
[19] Goebbels 1929, in Mosse ed., 1966, p. 105.
[20] Hitler 1925, p. 449.
[21] Goebbels 1927, quoted in Irving 1999, p. 117.
[Bibliography.]
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