A Preface to Politics

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Your doctrine, in short, depends on your purpose: a theory by itself is
neither moral nor immoral, its value is conditioned by the purpose it
serves. In any accurate sense theory is to be judged only as an effective
or ineffective instrument of a desire: the discussion of doctrines is
technical and not moral. A theory has no intrinsic value: that is why the
devil can talk theology.

No creed possesses any final sanction. Human beings have desires that are
far more important than the tools and toys and churches they make to
satisfy them. It is more penetrating, in my opinion, to ask of a creed
whether it served than whether it was "true." Try to judge the great
beliefs that have swayed mankind by their inner logic or their empirical
solidity and you stand forever, a dull pedant, apart from the interests
of men. The Christian tradition did not survive because of Aquinas or
fall before the Higher Criticism, nor will it be revived because someone
proves the scientific plausibility of its doctrine. What we need to know
about the Christian epic is the effect it had on men--true or false, they
have believed in it for nineteen centuries. Where has it helped them,
where hindered? What needs did it answer? What energies did it transmute?
And what part of mankind did it neglect? Where did it begin to do
violence to human nature?

Political creeds must receive the same treatment. The doctrine of the
"social contract" formulated by Hobbes and made current by Rousseau can
no longer be accepted as a true account of the origin of society.
Jean-Jacques is in fact a supreme case--perhaps even a slight
caricature--of the way in which formal creeds bolster up passionate
wants. I quote from Prof. Walter's introduction in which he says that
"The Social Contract _showed to those who were eager to be convinced_
that no power was legitimate which was guilty of abuses. It is no wonder
that its author was buried in the Pantheon with pompous procession, that
the framers of the new Constitution, Thouret and Lieyes and La Fayette,
did not forget and dared not forget its doctrines, that it was the
text-book and the delight of Camille Desmoulins and Danton and St. Just,
that Robespierre read it through once every day." In the perspective of
history, no one feels that he has said the last word about a philosophy
like Rousseau's after demonstrating its "untruth." Good or bad, it has
meant too much for any such easy disposal. What shall we call an idea,
objectively untrue, but practically of the highest importance?

The thinker who has faced this difficulty most radically is Georges Sorel
in the "Reflexions sur la Violence." His doctrine of the "social myth"
has seemed to many commentators one of those silly paradoxes that only a
revolutionary syndicalist and Frenchman could have put forward. M. Sorel
is engaged in presenting the General Strike as the decisive battle of the
class struggle and the core of the socialist movement. Now whatever else
he may be, M. Sorel is not naive: the sharp criticism of other socialists
was something he could not peacefully ignore. They told him that the
General Strike was an idle dream, that it could never take place, that,
even if it could, the results would not be very significant. Sidney Webb,
in the customary Fabian fashion, had dismissed the General Strike as a
sign of socialist immaturity. There is no doubt that M. Sorel felt the
force of these attacks. But he was not ready to abandon his favorite idea
because it had been shown to be unreasonable and impossible. Just the
opposite effect showed itself and he seized the opportunity of turning an
intellectual defeat into a spiritual triumph. This performance must have
delighted him to the very bottom of his soul, for he has boasted that his
task in life is to aid in ruining "le prestige de la culture bourgeoise."

M. Sorel's defence of the General Strike is very startling. He admits
that it may never take place, that it is not a true picture of the goal
of the socialist movement. Without a blush he informs us that this
central gospel of the working class is simply a "myth." The admission
frightens M. Sorel not at all. "It doesn't matter much," he remarks,
"whether myths contain details actually destined to realization _in the
scheme_ of an historical future; they are not astrological almanacks; it
may even be that nothing of what they express will actually happen--as in
the case of that catastrophe which the early Christians expected. Are we
not accustomed in daily life to recognizing that the reality differs very
greatly from the ideas of it that we made before we acted? Yet that
doesn't hinder us from making resolutions.... Myths must be judged as
instruments for acting upon present conditions; all discussion about the
manner of applying them concretely to the course of history is senseless.
_The entire myth is what counts...._ There is no use then in reasoning
about details which might arise in the midst of the class struggle ...
even though the revolutionists should be deceiving themselves through and
through in making a fantastic picture of the general strike, this picture
would still have been a power of the highest order in preparing for
revolution, so long as it expressed completely all the aspirations of
socialism and bound together revolutionary ideas with a precision and
firmness that no other methods of thought could have given."

It may well be imagined that this highly sophisticated doctrine was
regarded as perverse. All the ordinary prejudices of thought are
irritated by a thinker who frankly advises masses of his fellow-men to
hold fast to a belief which by all the canons of common sense is nothing
but an illusion. M. Sorel must have felt the need of closer statement,
for in a letter to Daniel Halevy, published in the second edition, he
makes his position much clearer. "Revolutionary myths ..." we read,
"enable us to understand the activity, the feelings, and the ideas of a
populace preparing to enter into a decisive struggle; _they are not
descriptions of things, but expressions of will_." The italics are mine:
they set in relief the insight that makes M. Sorel so important to our
discussion. I do not know whether a quotation torn from its context can
possibly do justice to its author. I do know that for any real grasp of
this point it is necessary to read M. Sorel with great sympathy.

One must grant at least that he has made an accurate observation. The
history of the world is full of great myths which have had the most
concrete results. M. Sorel cites primitive Christianity, the Reformation,
the French Revolution and the Mazzini campaign. The men who took part in
those great social movements summed up their aspiration in pictures of
decisive battles resulting in the ultimate triumph of their cause. We in
America might add an example from our own political life. For it is
Theodore Roosevelt who is actually attempting to make himself and his
admirers the heroes of a new social myth. Did he not announce from the
platform at Chicago--"we stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord"?

Let no one dismiss M. Sorel then as an empty paradoxer. The myth is not
one of the outgrown crudities of our pagan ancestors. We, in the midst of
our science and our rationalism, are still making myths, and their force
is felt in the actual affairs of life. They convey an impulse, not a
program, nor a plan of reconstruction. Their practical value cannot be
ignored, for they embody the motor currents in social life.

Myths are to be judged, as M. Sorel says, by their ability to express
aspiration. They stand or fall by that. In such a test the Christian
myth, for example, would be valued for its power of incarnating human
desire. That it did not do so completely is the cause of its decline.
From Aucassin to Nietzsche men have resented it as a partial and stunting
dream. It had too little room for profane love, and only by turning the
Church of Christ into the Church Militant could the essential Christian
passivity obtain the assent of aggressive and masculine races. To-day
traditional Christianity has weakened in the face of man's interest in
the conquest of this world. The liberal and advanced churches recognize
this fact by exhibiting a great preoccupation with everyday affairs. Now
they may be doing important service--I have no wish to deny that--but
when the Christian Churches turn to civics, to reformism or socialism,
they are in fact announcing that the Christian dream is dead. They may
continue to practice some of its moral teachings and hold to some of its
creed, but the Christian impulse is for them no longer active. A new
dream, which they reverently call Christian, has sprung from their
desires.

During their life these social myths contain a nation's finest energy. It
is just because they are "not descriptions of things, but expressions of
will" that their influence is so great. Ignore what a man desires and you
ignore the very source of his power; run against the grain of a nation's
genius and see where you get with your laws. Robert Burns was right when
he preferred poetry to charters. The recognition of this truth by Sorel
is one of the most impressive events in the revolutionary movement.
Standing as a spokesman of an actual social revolt, he has not lost his
vision because he understands its function. If Machiavelli is a symbol of
the political theorist making reason an instrument of purpose, we may
take Sorel as a self-conscious representative of the impulses which
generate purpose.

It must not be supposed that respect for the myth is a discovery of
Sorel's. He is but one of a number of contemporary thinkers who have
reacted against a very stupid prejudice of nineteenth century science to
the effect that the mental habits of human beings were not "facts."
Unless ideas mirrored external nature they were regarded as beneath the
notice of the scientific mind. But in more recent years we have come to
realize that, in a world so full of ignorance and mistake, error itself
is worthy of study. Our untrue ideas are significant because they
influence our lives enormously. They are "facts" to be investigated. One
might point to the great illumination that has resulted from Freud's
analysis of the abracadabra of our dreams. No one can any longer dismiss
the fantasy because it is logically inconsistent, superficially absurd,
or objectively untrue. William James might also be cited for his defense
of those beliefs that are beyond the realm of proof. His essay, "The Will
to Believe," is a declaration of independence, which says in effect that
scientific demonstration is not the only test of ideas. He stated the
case for those beliefs which influence life so deeply, though they fail
to describe it. James himself was very disconcerting to many scientists
because he insisted on expressing his aspirations about the universe in
what his colleague Santayana calls a "romantic cosmology": "I am far from
wishing to suggest that such a view seems to me more probable than
conventional idealism or the Christian Orthodoxy. All three are in the
region of dramatic system-making and myth, to which probabilities are
irrelevant."

It is impossible to leave this point without quoting Nietzsche, who had
this insight and stated it most provocatively. In "Beyond Good and Evil"
Nietzsche says flatly that "the falseness of an opinion is not for us any
objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most
strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering,
life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing...." Then he
comments on the philosophers. "They all pose as though their real
opinions had been discovered and attained through the self-evolving of a
cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialectic...; whereas, in fact, a
prejudiced proposition, idea, or 'suggestion,' which is generally their
heart's desire abstracted and refined, is defended by them with arguments
sought out after the event. They are all advocates who do not wish to be
regarded as such, generally astute defenders, also, of their prejudices,
which they dub 'truths'--and _very_ far from having the conscience which
bravely admits this to itself; very far from having the good taste or the
courage which goes so far as to let this be understood, perhaps to warn
friend or foe, or in cheerful confidence and self-ridicule.... It has
gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has
consisted of--namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of
involuntary and unconscious autobiography, and, moreover, that the moral
(or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital
germ out of which the entire plant has always grown.... Whoever considers
the fundamental impulses of man with a view to determining how far they
may have acted as _inspiring_ genii (or as demons and cobolds) will find
that they have all practiced philosophy at one time or another, and that
each one of them would have been only too glad to look upon itself as the
ultimate end of existence and the legitimate _lord_ over all the other
impulses. For every impulse is imperious, and, as _such_, attempts to
philosophize."

What Nietzsche has done here is, in his swashbuckling fashion, to cut
under the abstract and final pretensions of creeds. Difficulties arise
when we try to apply this wisdom in the present. That dogmas _were_
instruments of human purposes is not so incredible; that they still _are_
instruments is not so clear to everyone; and that they will be, that they
should be--this seems a monstrous attack on the citadel of truth. It is
possible to believe that other men's theories were temporary and merely
useful; we like to believe that ours will have a greater authority.

It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet
that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do. Many of us
are ready to grant that in the past men's motives were deeper than their
intellects: we forgive them with a kind of self-righteousness which says
that they knew not what they did. But to follow the great tradition of
human wisdom deliberately, with our eyes open in the manner of Sorel,
that seems a crazy procedure. A notion of intellectual honor fights
against it: we think we must aim at final truth, and not allow
autobiography to creep into speculation.

Now the trouble with such an idol is that autobiography creeps in anyway.
The more we censor it, the more likely it is to appear disguised, to fool
us subtly and perhaps dangerously. The men like Nietzsche and James who
show the wilful origin of creeds are in reality the best watchers of the
citadel of truth. For there is nothing disastrous in the temporary nature
of our ideas. They are always that. But there may very easily be a train
of evil in the self-deception which regards them as final. I think God
will forgive us our skepticism sooner than our Inquisitions.

From the political point of view, another observation is necessary. The
creed of a Rousseau, for example, is active in politics, not for what it
says, but for what people think it says. I have urged that Marx found
scientific reasons for what he wanted to do. It is important to add that
the people who adopted his reasons for what they wanted to do were not
any too respectful of Marx's reasons. Thus the so-called materialistic
philosophy of Karl Marx is not by any means identical with the theories
one hears among Marxian socialists. There is a big distortion in the
transmitting of ideas. A common purpose, far more than common ideas,
binds Marx to his followers. And when a man comes to write about his
philosophy he is confronted with a choice: shall the creed described be
that of Marx or of the Marxians?

For the study of politics I should say unhesitatingly that it is more
important to know what socialist leaders, stump speakers, pamphleteers,
think Marx meant, than to know what he said. For then you are dealing
with living ideas: to search his text has its uses, but compared with the
actual tradition of Marx it is the work of pedantry. I say this here for
two reasons--because I hope to avoid the critical attack of the genuine
Marxian specialist, and because the observation is, I believe, relevant
to our subject.

Relevant it is in that it suggests the importance of style, of
propaganda, the popularization of ideas. The host of men who stand
between a great thinker and the average man are not automatic
transmitters. They work on the ideas; perhaps that is why a genius
usually hates his disciples. It is interesting to notice the explanation
given by Frau Foerster-Nietzsche for her brother's quarrel with Wagner.
She dates it from the time when Nietzsche, under the guise of Wagnerian
propaganda, began to expound himself. The critics and interpreters are
themselves creative. It is really unfair to speak of the Marxian
philosophy as a political force. It is juster to speak of the Marxian
tradition.

So when I write of Marx's influence I have in mind what men and women in
socialist meetings, in daily life here in America, hold as a faith and
attribute to Marx. There is no pretension whatever to any critical study
of "Das Kapital" itself. I am thinking rather of stuffy halls in which an
earnest voice is expounding "the evolution of capitalism," of little
groups, curious and bewildered, listening in the streets of New York to
the story of the battle between the "master class" and the "working
class," of little red pamphlets, of newspapers, and cartoons--awkward,
badly printed and not very genial, a great stream of spellbinding and
controversy through which the aspirations of millions are becoming
articulate:

The tradition is saying that "the system" and not the individual is at
fault. It describes that system as one in which a small class owns the
means of production and holds the rest of mankind in bondage. Arts,
religions, laws, as well as vice and crime and degradation, have their
source in this central economic condition. If you want to understand our
life you must see that it is determined by the massing of capital in the
hands of a few. All epochs are determined by economic arrangements. But a
system of property always contains within itself "the seeds of its own
destruction." Mechanical inventions suggest a change: a dispossessed
class compels it. So mankind has progressed through savagery, chattel
slavery, serfdom, to "wage slavery" or the capitalism of to-day. This age
is pregnant with the socialism of to-morrow.

So roughly the tradition is handed on. Two sets of idea seem to dominate
it: we are creatures of economic conditions; a war of classes is being
fought everywhere in which the proletariat will ultimately capture the
industrial machinery and produce a sound economic life as the basis of
peace and happiness for all. The emphasis on environment is insistent.
Facts are marshaled, the news of the day is interpreted to show that men
are determined by economic conditions. This fixation has brought down
upon the socialists a torrent of abuse in which "atheism" and
"materialism" are prevailing epithets. But the propaganda continues and
the philosophy spreads, penetrating reform groups, social workers,
historians, and sociologists.

It has served the socialist purpose well. To the workingmen it has
brought home the importance of capturing the control of industry.
Economic determinism has been an antidote to mere preaching of goodness,
to hero-worship and political quackery. Socialism to succeed had to
concentrate attention on the ownership of capital: whenever any other
interest like religion or patriotism threatened to diffuse that
attention, socialist leaders have always been ready to show that the
economic fact is more central. Dignity and prestige were supplied by
making economics the key of history; passion was chained by building
paradise upon it.

In all the political philosophies there is none so adapted to its end.
Every sanction that mankind respects has been grouped about this one
purpose--the control of capital. It is as if all history converged upon
the issue, and the workers in the cause feel that they carry within them
the destiny of the race. Start anywhere, with an orthodox socialist and
he will lead you to this supreme economic situation. Tyrannies and race
hatred, national rivalries, sex problems, the difficulties of artistic
endeavor, all failures, crimes, vices--there is not one which he will not
relate to private capitalism. Nor is there anything disingenuous about
this focusing of the attention: a real belief is there. Of course you
will find plenty of socialists who see other issues and who smile a bit
at the rigors of economic determinism. In these later days there is in
fact, a decided loosening in the creed. But it is fair to say that the
mass of socialists hold this philosophy with as much solemnity as a
reformer held his when he wrote to me that the cure for obscenity was the
taxation of land values and absolute free trade.

Singlemindedness has done good service. It has bound the world together
and has helped men to think socially. Turning their attention away from
the romanticism of history, the materialistic philosophy has helped them
to look at realities. It has engendered a fine concern about average
people, about the voiceless multitudes who have been left to pass
unnoticed. Not least among the blessings is a shattering of the
good-and-bad-man theory: the assassination of tyrants or the adoration of
saviors. A shallow and specious other-worldliness has been driven out: an
other-worldliness which is really nothing but laziness about this one.
And if from a speculative angle the Marxian tradition has shaded too
heavily the economic facts, it was at least a plausible and practical
exaggeration.

But the drawbacks are becoming more and more evident as socialism
approaches nearer to power and responsibility. The feeling that man is a
creature and not a creator is disastrous as a personal creed when you
come to act. If you insist upon being "determined by conditions" you do
hesitate about saying "I shall." You are likely to wait for something to
determine you. Personal initiative and individual genius are poorly
regarded: many socialists are suspicious of originality. This philosophy,
so useful in propaganda, is becoming a burden in action. That is another
way of saying that the instrument has turned into an idol.

For while it is illuminating to see how environment moulds men, it is
absolutely essential that men regard themselves as moulders of their
environment. A new philosophical basis is becoming increasingly necessary
to socialism--one that may not be "truer" than the old materialism but
that shall simply be more useful. Having learned for a long time what is
done to us, we are now faced with the task of doing. With this changed
purpose goes a change of instruments. All over the world socialists are
breaking away from the stultifying influence of the outworn determinism.
For the time is at hand when they must cease to look upon socialism as
inevitable in order to make it so.

Nor will the philosophy of class warfare serve this new need. That can be
effective only so long as the working-class is without sovereignty. But
no sooner has it achieved power than a new outlook is needed in order to
know what to do with it. The tactics of the battlefield are of no use
when the battle is won.

I picture this philosophy as one of deliberate choices. The underlying
tone of it is that society is made by man for man's uses, that reforms
are inventions to be applied when by experiment they show their
civilizing value. Emphasis is placed upon the devising, adapting,
constructing faculties. There is no reason to believe that this view is
any colder than that of the war of class against class. It will generate
no less energy. Men to-day can feel almost as much zest in the building
of the Panama Canal as they did in a military victory. Their domineering
impulses find satisfaction in conquering things, in subjecting brute
forces to human purposes. This sense of mastery in a winning battle
against the conditions of our life is, I believe, the social myth that
will inspire our reconstructions. We shall feel free to choose among
alternatives--to take this much of socialism, insert so much syndicalism,
leave standing what of capitalism seems worth conserving. We shall be
making our own house for our own needs, cities to suit ourselves, and we
shall believe ourselves capable of moving mountains, as engineers do,
when mountains stand in their way.

And history, science, philosophy will support our hopes. What will
fascinate us in the past will be the records of inventions, of great
choices, of those alternatives on which destiny seems to hang. The
splendid epochs will be interpreted as monuments of man's creation, not
of his propulsion. We shall be interested primarily in the way nations
established their civilization in spite of hostile conditions. Admiration
will go out to the men who did not submit, who bent things to human use.
We may see the entire tragedy of life in being driven.

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