politics. His absorbing interest has been in Man Psychologic and he
has had little traffic with Man Economic or Man Political. But the
rise of Socialism in the United States and the Bull Moose Progressive
movement challenged his mind around 1912, and in _Aristocracy and
Justice_, the ninth volume of the _Shelburne Essays_, he answered, or
rather defied, the new tendencies. By his conclusions in this volume
on man as an economic and political animal, he probably incurred more
hostility than any of his other books has provoked. For _Aristocracy
and Justice_ came out in 1915, the very time that the social revolt
movement in the United States was fairly getting off the ground for
a dizzy if brief flight: the dominant concerns of the generation of
thinkers younger than More were precisely his subordinate concerns,
economics and politics. Naturally, the new generation dropped bombs on
_Aristocracy and Justice_, and with a ferocity partly accounted for by
More’s sharp tone in writing it. The result was that the strongest side
of More, his continuous reflection on Man Psychologic, was avoided or
made light of, and his weakest side, his thought about Man Economic and
Man Political, was bombarded to fragments.
To begin with, More made the mistake of not arguing out economic
questions on the basis of economics, but instead made a direct appeal
to intelligent members of the propertied class to stiffen their morale.
“I am not here concerned,” he declared, “with Utopian visions, nor,
as I have said, am I arguing with those who are honestly persuaded
that a socialistic régime is, in our day, or any day, economically
or psychologically feasible. My desire is rather to confirm in the
dictates of their own reason those who believe that the private
ownership of property, including its production and distribution, is,
with very limited reservation, essential to the material stability and
progress of society. We who have this conviction need very much today
to strengthen ourselves against the insidious charms of a misapplied
idealism; we need to remind ourselves that laws which would render
capital insecure and, by a heavy income tax or other discrimination
in favor of labor, would deprive property of its power of easy
self-perpetuation, though they speak loudly in the name of humanity,
will in the end be subversive of those conditions under which alone
any true value of human life can be realized.” Do you wonder at the
vehement accusations that More was simply rationalizing class prejudice?
We need one more statement to catch the drift of More’s views: it is
likewise an uncompromising one. “In simple truth, property may rightly
be called the cause of civilization, but, strictly speaking, it is only
the occasion of injustice: injustice is inherent in the imperfection
of man, and the development of the means of living merely brings into
greater prominence what is an unavoidable feature of existence, not for
man only but for the whole range of creation, in this puzzling world of
ours.”
What More did then was to commit himself in advance to capitalist
economics, a system which may most briefly be defined as production for
the sake of profits or in one word profiteering. Can it be denied that
the main motive on which it relies is the desire for gain? And this
motivation, as economists admit, introduces an ethical contradiction
into the practices of the State. Nevertheless, many people claim that
there is nothing wrong with the theory of capitalism, and towards the
ethical defect it introduces they adopt two views: one, that the defect
may be remedied by education, the other, that it is inherent in human
nature. More adopts the latter view.
Now if capitalism is supported by a perfect theory, then from the
standpoint of economics there is nothing more to say, no matter how
horribly the thing might work in practice. For economics as the science
of production abstracts from the human as much as possible and regards
our feelings as irrelevant. But _does_ capitalism operate on a sound
theory? This, in a thinker of Paul Elmer More’s eminence, is the first
question we should expect him to answer, the more so as it is often
charged that the theory of capitalism is only improvised. But as we
have seen, he does not. He proceeds almost at once to declare that
“the security of property is the first and all-essential duty of a
civilized community”; shortly afterwards he says, “To the civilized man
_the rights of property are more important than the right to life_.”[7]
These statements pass if capitalism is correct in theory. But, once
again, is it? In the briefest possible space, I shall give the
theoretical objections. It is well understood, of course, that by
capitalist economics there are said to be three factors of production,
Land, Capital and Labor. Land and Capital, however, have become
practically indistinguishable: they are alike tools of production. But
is Labor also a tool of production? It is, according to capitalist
economics; Land, Capital and Labor exhaust the tools of production, and
the user of them is the Capitalist, that is, the owner of the tools of
Land and Capital.
But this theory, as every one knows, has been long and brilliantly
criticized in the realm of pure thought, precisely the realm in
which More should have debated the moot point. For there is a moot
point: is Labor a factor of production? No, say the critics, Labor
is not congruous with the factors of Land and Capital. Labor is a
mere abstraction that hides Laborers. Laborers (i.e., Labor) are the
tool-users, the producers themselves, and at bottom economics reduces
not to three terms but to just two, Laborers and Tools or Workmen and
Stuff. Hence the new industrial synthesis, it is said, must substitute
the Laborer for the Capitalist, the real user of the real tools of
production for the mere owner of them. Therefore, when More speaks of
the rights of property, we need to concretize the word property: what
he speaks of is the rights of property- or tool-owners or capitalists,
and it is precisely those “rights” that now require defence in the
region of pure theory.
Proceed one step further, and we shall run up against More’s argument
for the rights of property-owners as the basis of civilization.
Economics, we must remember, is separated from its soul: what is
more, it legitimately cuts itself off. Where is its soul? “The soul
of economics,” writes A. R. Orage in _An Alphabet of Economics_, “is
politics, and it is to politics that economics delegates the control
of questions such as what shall be produced, by whom, and how the
results shall be distributed.... To satisfy all our needs and desires
without work is really the aim of economic man. It is his object, in
fact, to reverse the curse upon Adam.... Instead of requiring the
improvements in economics to be shared equitably, politics insists
upon dividing them inequitably, so that one small class is enabled
practically to lift from itself the curse of Adam (that is, it can live
without working), while the large class of laborers are permitted to
incur a double curse--they work, that is, without living. Economists
of the baser sort or who have no political sense pretend that this
distribution of the product is itself economic in that it enables the
few to secrete Capital (that is to save) and to foster arts and science
requiring a long, leisured, and assumed future. Better knowledge,
however, convinces us that it is not safe to depend upon a social
class for an economic function.” How the author of _Aristocracy and
Justice_ would answer this, I cannot conceive, for no inkling is given.
We have crossed from economics to politics, and in the latter one of
the greatest themes is justice. Naturally, More as a Platonist does not
minimize this theme. Justice “is the act of right distribution,” he
begins by way of definition, “the giving to each man his due.” This,
please note, is a capitalist-political definition, and we may place
beside it for comparison the well-known formula: from each according
to his _means_, to each according to his _needs_. Social justice,
More continues, “is such a distribution of power and privilege, and
of property as the symbol and instrument of these, as at once will
satisfy the distinctions of reason among the superior, and will not
outrage the feelings of the inferior.” But how, one may well ask, can
social justice ever be expected to take place when the principle of
distribution is the principle of--the pig trough? For economic power in
our society precedes and determines the distribution of commodities;
the man with the dollars feeds and sometimes gorges and the man
without dollars does not; and this does not satisfy the reason and it
does outrage the feelings. More himself says we must steel ourselves
to a certain extent when viewing this method of distribution. “The
first and hardest lesson for each right-minded man in these days is
to discipline the heart to accept with equanimity the fatal fact that
social justice must include a considerable amount of that disposition
of Nature in dealing with her own which we, judging by the standard of
the individual soul, are so ready to call injustice. The first step
towards the equipoise of a soul just within itself is to recognize the
necessity of a measure of injustice in the relation of man with man and
with the world.”
I postpone comment on that in order to complete in this place the
outline of More’s political thought. Guided by the reflections of
Edmund Burke, the key idea for him is the formation of “a natural
aristocracy without which there is no nation,” according to Burke. “The
cure of democracy,” says More, “is not _more_ democracy, but _better_
democracy.” And better democracy will come when we develop more men
who might fit into Burke’s celebrated portrait of the men of light and
leading: “Men who are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion
to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites;
in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity; in
proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above
their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed
to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the
flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power
upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is
within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal
constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free.
Their passions forge their fetters.”
This is assuredly a humanistic ideal of a natural aristocracy, but
under present economic-political conditions have we any chance of
reaching it? We may get the natural aristocrats, but will they be
anywhere near the centers of political power? When we get to the
bottom, we are all likely to accept the definition of the political
power of the individual as being his power of self-direction; but
obviously the individual’s power of self-direction presupposes the
power of keeping himself alive. That is, the condition of political
power is economic power. To continue: voting is a process whereby
individuals empower an executive. They increase their powers of
self-direction by concentrating them upon the executive who acts in
their behalf. But when the voters are of unequal economic power, their
votes are necessarily unequal. In fact, the votes of many of them, who
have no power of keeping themselves alive but are correctly termed
wage-slaves, have no meaning at all: they can guarantee nothing. The
executive therefore quite naturally listens only to those whose votes
do mean economic power, because these are the only votes coming from
individuals who have power of self-direction. It seems to me that this
consideration has a very corrosive effect on any dream of a natural
aristocracy arising in our plutocratic community.
Because the discussion of More’s economics and politics has been
rather compact up to this point, a restatement is offered. More, as
one of the leaders of the New Humanists, has not dealt with the purely
theoretical analyses of capitalism. I do not say he is unable to,
or unfamiliar with the arguments: the fact is that he has omitted a
theoretical justification. To those who believe that the critique of
capitalism has been a devastating one, this is an inexcusable omission.
Secondly, to many people, including a considerable number who are not
humanitarians, capitalism is an inhumane system. They would criticize
More’s sentiment of justice, which seems to me in this particular to
be weak, though it is possible he represses his feelings from dislike
of the humanitarian gushing on the topic of social justice. There is,
all the same, a love of all men which can, which must, in fact, enter
into our sentiment of justice to temper the rigor of it, and this love
of all men to which I refer has nothing of the humanitarian “universal
embrace” about it. Without love there is in truth no justice. But the
difference between humanistic love and humanitarian love I should
define as a difference in what in man is loved. Humanism, I quoted
Julien Benda as saying in an earlier chapter, holds in honor the
abstract quality of what is human, and this permits us to love _all_
men, for there is equality in the abstract. Joseph Proudhon (to whom
Benda objected) does, I think, express the humane sentiment of justice
perfectly without spilling over into humanitarian sentimentality. I
mean he singles out that in all men which is worthy of love and toward
which one is irresistibly drawn to be just if one loves it. “There is
a tendency in every man to develop and force the acceptance of that
which is essentially himself--which is, in fact, his own dignity. It
results from this that the essential in man being identical and one
for all humanity, each of us is aware of himself at the same time as
individual and as species; and that an insult is felt by a third party
and by the offender himself as well as by the injured person, that in
consequence the protest is common. This precisely is what is meant by
Justice.” It is evident that Proudhon has an idea of Justice, which is
crystal-clear and crystal-hard, and that he feels this idea intensely.
The presence of a burning emotion for the idea of Justice I cannot
detect in More as a social thinker: his idea seems a mental skeleton
wired and strung up by class feelings.
In the third place, I tried to point out that a Burkean aristocracy
will have a most difficult time coming into being in a democracy which
Georges Sorel defined as the paradise unscrupulous financiers dream
of. In short, present-day economics in its effect on politics is all
against it.
But if the system of production for profit is untenable intellectually
and is inhumane and therefore untenable emotionally, it may still be
the best that can be put in practice, granting that human nature is
radically imperfect. It may be good enough for man because man is
not good enough for a more perfect system. The one fatal objection
to certain revolutionary schemes in the end may be that they are too
perfect for man as he is, that they will not work in practice as they
work on paper, unless man himself is first transformed. More made that
objection, and it is possibly his soundest argument. But it will be
interesting now to speculate on the possibility that a radical program
of economic reform might conceivably fit in with the basic ideas and
sentiments of the New Humanists. The Soviet Union I shall leave pretty
much out of account, for there you have a _fact_ to study and make
up your mind about. And possibly that fact in its present degree of
unfoldment demands not so much an intellectual and moral decision
as suspended judgment from the individual American. Furthermore, I
agree with T. S. Eliot that Russian communism like Italian fascism
seems to have died as a political theory in becoming a political fact.
Our present purpose which is to determine how flexible the Humanist
attitude may be in economics and politics is better served by reference
to a single extraordinary revolutionary (our example will be Sorel)
than it would be by an attempt in too short a space to analyze a
complicated fact that contains so many peculiarly Russian ingredients
to be subtracted before it is really instructive to us.
* * * * *
Perhaps the most fascinating of all the theorists of the social
revolution (but who reads him in America?) is Georges Sorel
(1847-1922), whose _Reflections on Violence_ was translated into
English by T. E. Hulme. Karl Marx had plotted out the acts of the
Capitalist tragedy, but by planting the idea of a class struggle so
prominently into the minds of men, by making men more conscious of
the opposition of capitalist and proletarian, Marx also introduced
an unforeseen factor working not for class war but for social peace.
Clearly understanding by the aid of Marx that society was in a state
of internal war, the peacemakers arose in mass. There was a general
amelioration of working conditions, there were concessions from the
capitalists, there grew up a pronounced tendency to blur and soften the
issues, to make everything a parliamentarian question. Sorel determined
to combat this movement toward pacifying the proletariat, and the
means he chose to throw into relief again the essential struggle of
the classes was to concentrate on the depiction of the last act of a
tragedy that might conceivably play on for centuries. He concentrated
on the vision of the general strike, the vast social cataclysm that was
to overthrow the capitalist régime. By means of this vision he hoped
to counteract the parliamentarian socialists and the philanthropic
capitalists, and thus preserve the purity of the class struggle.
The results were curious. Mussolini has told of his youthful fervor for
Sorel’s doctrine, and Sorel wrote an apology for Bolshevism. The best
thinker that French syndicalism has had, Sorel was nevertheless saluted
with enthusiasm by Frenchmen of the extreme right: he was hailed by the
Action Française! Pierre Lasserre, the anti-Rousseauist, has written
a book about him, _Georges Sorel: Théoricien de l’Impérialisme_, and
many Marxists have been indignant because Sorel considered himself a
true follower of Marx. Evidently a paradoxical thinker. But he was
not. He was miscomprehended by many for the sole reason that he was a
revolutionary classicist, which is not a paradoxical combination.
What Sorel did was to separate the working class movement from the
democratic or liberal-romantic or humanitarian ideology with which it
is habitually associated. He demonstrated forcefully that there was
no inevitable connection between them. They were not Siamese twins,
not even twins, but strangers who by an accident of history had been
chained together for three score years. Sorel’s intellect filed through
the chains and showed that one could be revolutionary in economics and
classical in ethics--to the astonishment of everybody.
As he has had practically no vogue in American revolutionary circles,
it is excusable to say a few words about his personal development
before singling out some aspects of his classical ethics. Proudhon
had tried to combine the classical ideal with socialism, and Sorel
seems to have taken his first direction from Proudhon. Marx blinded
him with light for a time, but it was characteristic of Sorel that
he always recovered his sight and eventually saw things with his own
eyes. Nietzsche was another master whose teachings he divided into the
valuable ideas and the rubbish. Proudhon, Marx, Nietzsche--there were
lesser masters he carefully sifted: Bergson, Vico. He read widely,
profoundly. In his first book he maintained--a Nietzschean idea--that
Socrates represented the decadence of Athenian life, the charge being
that Socrates introduced expediency and calculation into ethics. He
wrote a study of Renan and a study entitled _Illusions du Progrès_
which the anti-revolutionary Maritain has commended for its thorough
destruction of the middle-class notion of progress. The Dreyfus case
completely disillusioned Sorel with democracy and he plunged into the
anti-patriotic extreme revolutionary movement on whose behalf he fought
Jaurès and the other parliamentarian socialists with all the withering
scorn of a bold thinker and a bold man.
I have said that he severed the ties between the revolutionary workers’
movement and the romantic-humanitarian ideology. He did this by
scathing criticism of the sham religiosity of the romantic movement,
by excoriating the doctrine of progress, by exposing the middle class
conception of science. The last is worth quoting for the benefit of the
numerous Baconians to be found in our own liberal and revolutionary
groups. “The history of scientific superstitions,” Sorel asserts,
“is of the deepest interest to philosophers who wish to understand
Socialism. During the nineteenth century there existed an incredible
scientific ingenuousness which was the direct outcome of the illusions
that had aroused so much excitement towards the end of the eighteenth
century. Because astronomers had managed to calculate the tables of the
moon, it was believed that the aim of all science was to forecast the
future with accuracy; because Le Verrier had been able to indicate the
probable position of the planet Neptune--which had never been seen,
and which accounted for the disturbances of observable planets--it was
believed that science could remedy the defects of society, and indicate
what measures should be taken to bring about the disappearance of
the unpleasant things in the world. It may be said that this was the
_middle-class conception of science_: it certainly corresponds very
closely to the mental attitude of those capitalists, who, ignorant
of the perfected appliances of their workshops, yet direct industry,
and always find ingenious inventors to get them out of difficulties.
For the middle-class science is a mill which produces solutions to
all the problems we are faced with: science is no longer considered
as a perfected means to knowledge, but only as a recipe for procuring
certain advantages.”
There is a great deal, too, in Sorel that might be advantageously
perused by our social reformers. For the benefit of humanitarians, I
shall transcribe Sorel’s deep objection to optimists in the ranks of
reform. “The optimist in politics is an inconstant and even dangerous
man, because he takes no account of the great difficulties presented
by his projects; these projects seem to him to possess a force of
their own, which tends to bring about their realization all the more
easily as they are, in his opinion, destined to produce the happiest
results. He frequently thinks that small reforms in the political
constitution, and, above all, in the personnel of government, will be
sufficient to direct social development in such a way as to mitigate
those evils of the contemporary world which seem so harsh to the
sensitive mind. As soon as his friends come into power, he declares
that it is necessary to let things alone for a little, not to hurry
too much, and to learn how to be content with whatever their own
benevolent intentions prompt them to do. It is not always self-interest
that suggests these expressions of satisfaction, as people have
often believed; self-interest is strongly aided by vanity and by the
illusions of philosophy. The optimist passes with remarkable facility
from revolutionary anger to the most ridiculous social pacificism.
“If he possesses an exalted temperament, and if unhappily he finds
himself armed with a great power, permitting him to realize the ideal
he has fashioned, the optimist may lead his country into the worst
disasters. He is not long in finding out that social transformations
are not brought about with the ease that he had counted on; he then
supposes that this is the fault of his contemporaries, instead of
explaining what actually happens by historical necessities; he is
tempted to get rid of people whose obstinacy seems to him to be so
dangerous to the happiness of all. During the Terror, the men who
spilt most blood were precisely those who had the greatest desire to
let their equals enjoy the golden age they had dreamt of, and who had
the most sympathy with human wretchedness: optimists, idealists, and
sensitive men, the greater desire they had for universal happiness the
more inexorable they showed themselves.”