Tag Archives: Friedrich Nietzsche

Russell on Marx as Excessively Practical Messiah and Schoolman

In his sometimes cranky, often witty, and always erudite History of Western Philosophy Bertrand Russell paints deflationary portraits of many members of the Western philosophical tradition.  (Russell is particularly witty when dealing with Kant and Nietzsche; those treatments will soon form the subject of posts here). He also shows a rare talent for the artful digression, which I want to illustrate by pointing to a couple of his asides on Marx.

In a  chapter titled St. Augustine’s Philosophy and Theology, Russell, immediately after informing us that the eschatology of The City of God is “Jewish in origin, and came into Christianity mainly through the Book of Revelation” and that Augustine’s primary talent lay in bringing together the “sacred and profane history” of the Old Testament and relating it to the history of his time in “such a way that the fall of the Western Empire, and the subsequent period of confusion, could be assimilated by Christians without any unduly severe trial of their faith,” goes on to say:

The Jewish pattern of history, past and future, is such as to make a powerful appeal to the oppressed and unfortunate at all times. St. Augustine adapted this pattern to Christianity, Marx to Socialism. To understand Marx psychologically, one should use the following dictionary:

Yahweh = Dialectial Materialism

The Messiah = Marx

The Elect = The Proletariat

The Church = The Communist Party

The Second Coming = The Revolution

Hell = Punishment of the Capitalists

The Millennium = The Communist Commonwealth

I do not know if the analogizing of Marxism to a religion or the description of Marx as Messiah began with Russell–it certainly didn’t end with him–but I doubt if anyone has quite so deftly moved from a discussion of medieval philosophers to doing so.

Later, in a chapter titled Locke’s Political Philosophy, Russell, after noting that labor theory of value is to be found in Locke, and may be traced back to Aquinas, quotes RH Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism:

The essence of the argument was that payment may properly be demanded by the craftsmen who make the goods, or by the merchants who transport them, for both labour in their vocation and serve the common need. The unpardonable sin is that of the middleman , who snatches private gain by the exploitation of public necessities. The true descendant of the doctrines of Aquinas is the labor theory of value. The last of the schoolmen was Karl Marx.

When Russell does get to discussing Marx directly, he is frank enough to admit that he finds Marx not philosophical enough:

Considered purely as a philosopher, Marx has grave shortcomings. He is too practical, too much wrapped up in the problems of his time. His purview is confined to this planet, and, within this planet, to man.

Marx might have resisted the description of himself as a Prophet, and perhaps even as merely having inherited the mantle of an older tradition of philosophizing, but I doubt whether he would have reckoned it a serious criticism of his thought that it was all too tightly bound to man, to this earthly domain of concern.

Starting to Understand the Reactionary Mind

My Brooklyn College colleague Corey Robin‘s new book, The Reactionary Mind, has, thanks to its provocative thesis (and its brilliant prose, a rare quality in an academic book), sparked a great deal of discussion in academic and non-academic circles alike. Given the relevance of the book to modern American political life, and its provision of an intellectual history of conservatism, the Wolfe Institute at Brooklyn College–where I serve as faculty associate–has decided to make the book the subject of this semester’s faculty study group. We will meet once a month to discuss the book’s arguments and analysis; I will lead the discussion. (The Wolfe Institute conducts such faculty study groups every semester; last semester I discussed Alexander Nehamas‘ Nietzsche: Life as Literature; Nietzsche, incidentally, is classified as a conservative by Robin.)

Unfortunately, this rather humdrum business of a bunch of academics getting together to read a book and discuss it, seems to have been rather bizarrely misunderstood–by some–as an ideological exercise of sorts. Professor Mitchell Langbert of the National Association of Scholars described, in a blog post, the study group’s planned activity as a “discussion…at taxpayer expense,” possibly an exercise in “taxpayer-funded ideology,” and wonders whether I will “permit disagreement” and whether “the democratic ideologies of Stalin and Mao will be used to illustrate Robin’s and Chopra’ commitment to freedom and democracy.” Professor Langbert also emailed Professor Robert Viscusi of the Wolfe Institute and myself (making sure to copy Brooklyn College administrators, though he got the email addresses wrong), and said, among other things:

I am offended at and concerned about the announcement that you released yesterday concerning a talk about conservatives at the Wolfe Institute. The talk is ideological, and your announcement is offensive to the few, suppressed Brooklyn College conservatives not already eliminated from their jobs via ideologically motivated personnel decisions. Calling American conservatism a reaction against democratic challenges and claiming that conservatives defend power and privilege against freedom movements are red herrings. The fishy scent is evident in your lumping together Ayn Rand, John C. Calhoun, and Edmund Burke. Have you sponsored speakers who can explain why doing so is ill informed?

Professors Chopra and Robin are entitled to their political views, but do you intend to offer balance? If the Wolfe Center sponsors ideological attacks on conservatism, do you also offer balance with a speaker or two who know something about conservatism?

I remain puzzled as to how a “faculty study group” could be confused with a “talk” and how the activities of a study group devoted to a discussion of a book’s arguments could be construed as the promulgation of an ideology. The invitation to the study group was sent to all Brooklyn College faculty members, presumably a diverse group that includes political orientations of all stripes. As Professor Robert Viscusi put it, “As many points of view will be represented as the participants choose to espouse.” My task is to lead the discussion, not to censor disagreement.

The problem might be, of course, that merely reading and discussing the book is offensive to some. To that sensibility I have nothing to say.

Update (February 10th): In my original post, I forgot to mention that Professor Langbert appeared to have copied Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, the CUNY Board of Trustees member who, last year, had played a significant role in the university’s disastrous decision to deny Tony Kushner a honorary degree. (The decision was subsequently reversed.) Mr. Wiesenfeld joined the fray by writing:

This is the curse of academia: no honest debate. Just shut your opponents down. Ahhh…but if political islamists come along, the liberalls[sic] cower. Nothing like implied or real threats of violence to take campus control. Checkpoints and BDS conferences anyone?

My reactions to this message are the same as above. I have added a link to “BDS conferences” so that readers can understand the reference.

Update (February 18th): Professor Langbert has responded to the post above in another blog post (at the National Association Scholars blog).

Nietzsche, Henry Moseley, and Conscript Armies

Years ago, as a schoolboy, I read Isaac Asimov on the evolution of the periodic table from Dmitri Mendeleev’s relative atomic mass version to Henry Moseley’s atomic number version. At the end of the essay, after describing Moseley’s contributions to devising the modern form of the periodic table of the elements, Asimov wistfully noted Moseley’s death in 1915 at Gallipoli (“”In view of what he [Moseley] might still have accomplished … his death might well have been the most costly single death of the War to mankind generally”). Moseley had enlisted (in the Royal Engineers and taken a sniper shot to the head; the Nobel Prize that might have been his in 1916 was never awarded. I was stunned by this coda to the seemingly straightforward story of scientific discovery that I had just been reading, and for years, was haunted by the thought of what the twenty-eight-year-old Moseley might have gone on to do.

It is said that Nietzsche has a line for everything. So, well, from Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human, Section 442, Chapter 8 (“A Glance at the State”):

Conscript army. The greatest disadvantage of the conscript army, now so widely acclaimed, consists in the squandering of men of the highest civilization; they exist at all only when every circumstance is favorable-how sparingly and anxiously one should deal with them, since it requires great periods of time to create the chance conditions for the production of such delicately organized brains!….and, in fact, it is the men of highest culture who are always sacrificed in the relatively greatest number, the men who guarantee an abundant and good posterity; for these men stand as commanders in the front lines of a battle, and moreover, because of their greater ambition, expose themselves most to dangers.

As always, standard caveats about Nietzsche apply.