“The Confusions of Pleasure- Commerce and Culture in Ming China” by Timothy Brook

Brook details the rise of commerce in China over the course of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). He shows how the increasing wealth of the merchant class disrupted previously established social hierarchies and norms. This wealth redistribution affected areas as diverse as rice production and subsistence farming, methods of communication, trade, and travel, textile manufacturing, and the enjoyment of the arts. In doing so, Brook develops an overall history of Ming China from the ground up- its rise and its eventual collapse.

Brook begins with the ideal model of how the first Ming emperor, Hongwu, envisioned Chinese society. “The emperor’s vision of an agrarian order was the Daoist model of a little elite of virtuous elders supervising self-sufficient villages and forwarding modest taxes to a minimalist state. Cultivators were tied to their villages, artisans bound to state service, merchants charged with moving only such necessities as were lacking, and soldiers posted to the frontier.” The Ming Code, the core laws of the dynasty, prohibited family lineages from switching occupations, just as it proscribed physical migration within the counties of China.

Ming China had a population of over 75 million subjects. It relied on a partially integrated system of courier, postal, and transport networks to move grain, officials, soldiers, and ambassadors across the realm by water and by road. The Grand Canal, which ended in Beijing, officially started south in Hangzhou, but a series of smaller canals made Ningbo its real southern terminus. 47,000 full-time workers were needed to maintain, dredge, and operate the canal. The journey from Hangzhou to Beijing took about forty days. This official waterway was also used by merchants, who tagged along on grain barges and other ships running imperial business. Private boats were also allowed to use the canal, as long as preference was given to vessels conducting state business.

In the early Ming, particularly, there was a great wealth disparity between China’s north and south. One Korean visitor sailing up the Grand Canal observed, “spacious tile-roofed houses south of the Yangzi, thatch-roofed hovels north; sedan chairs south, horses and donkeys north; gold and silver in the market south, copper cash north; diligence in farming, manufacturing, and commerce south, indolence north; pleasant dispositions south, quarrelsome tempers north; education south, illiteracy north.” Confucian philosophy tended to demean the merchant class. “To be a merchant was to be in the bottommost and least respected of the ancient “four categories of the people” (simin), which descended from gentry (shi) to peasant (nong) to artisan (gong) to merchant (shang).” However, as land became scarcer and droughts and floods perennially created bad harvests, enterprising people were forced off their lands to try to peddle goods and act as commercial middlemen. Farm land was consolidated and surplus crops were sold in urban  markets.

Over the years, this merchant class gradually grew in wealth, if not prestige, and social mechanisms sprung up to deal with this burgeoning trade. “While the government relied on registers to keep track of land ownership, the people kept their own records by writing contracts—as they had been doing for centuries—the size and location of the land under transaction, its price, and the conditions, consequences, and legal responsibilities attached to the sale.” While most contracts were written by scribes by hand, the use of contracts was also facilitated by printing. “Xylography (the technology of printing from wooden blocks) was developed well before the Ming. What the Ming period marks in the history of printing is a notable expansion in the volume and variety of texts…. Paper and ink were manufactured in greater volume, woodblock carvers more widely available and working at lower wages, new fonts designed to speed up the rate of carving, new ways of compacting knowledge onto pages devised, and wider distribution systems set up. The state did its part at the very start of the dynasty by canceling the tax on books in 1368.” Hongwu also prescribed certain books as mandatory reading. Ancient Confucian classics, modern law handbooks, moral primers, and, especially, his own Grand Pronouncements (Dagao) and his Proclamation to the People (Jiaomin bangwen) were published, distributed, and required to be read by all amongst the literate class.

Within China, local brokers acted to connect merchants transacting goods from region to region. They were the grease which allowed the machine of commerce to flow smoothly throughout the realm. Brokers drew up the contracts, acted as middlemen, and guaranteed against fraud.  Silver was the medium of exchange for major transactions, copper coins for smaller ones. “The wholesale trade even before the Ming thus involved three distinct parties: the merchant who owned the goods but did not personally ship them, the shipper who arranged for their transportation by hiring boats and engaging boatmen on the wholesaler’s behalf, and the broker who did neither but used his knowledge of local market conditions to arrange commercial agreements beneficial to both parties.”

Besides salt, tea, and alum the Ming state did not control any monopolies. It charged a 3.3 percent commercial tax on transactions, a “shop and stall” tax on retailers, and modest transit taxes for using state waterways and roads. In 1436, taxes were replaced from grain duties and corvee labor to simply being paid in silver. The 15th century scholar, Qiu Jun, comments on the relatively free markets at this time, “When the people operate their own markets, they can readily negotiate quality and price to determine whether or not to buy something. When officials operate markets for people, quality and prices are invariably fixed, yet self-interest and hidden dealings crop up all over the place. To operate [a state market] that produces profit and avoids corruption is difficult. The better course is for state administration not to get involved.”

The construction and upkeep of infrastructure, such as floating bridges and commercial roads, was organized by the local magistrate, but contributions came from “charitable commoners,” usually wealthy merchants and gentry. The central state played no role beyond major arteries like the Grand Canal and the highways needed to transport its soldiers. The Hongwu emperor did mandate the construction of one school per county, but again, the actual construction was handled at the local magistrate level, who sometimes also built a library with his own private collection. The gentry administrator, Zhang Tao, had a nuanced Confucian view of the rise of the merchant class. “Those who went out as merchants became numerous, and the ownership of land was no longer esteemed. As men matched wits using their assets, fortunes rose and fell unpredictably. The capable succeeded, the dull-witted were destroyed.”

Commerce in the Ming truly blossomed when the people moved from subsistence growing, beyond surplus growing, to commodity agriculture. “The growth of the cotton and silk trades induced Jiangnan people to plant cotton and tend mulberry trees on a scale beyond personal consumption. The northern Zhejiang silk market, for instance, was sufficiently developed that people could sell not only silk thread, which they produced by feeding silkworms on mulberry leaves they grew themselves, but the leaves as well. In Chongde county, for example, by the sixteenth century some peasants did not plant just a few mulberry trees in order to raise silkworms to “survive through lean harvests” but were growing fields of them so as to be able to sell the leaves commercially to mulberry leaf traders who in turn sold to other silk-producers. Merchants and producers both calculated to take advantage of fluctuations in the price of mulberry leaves as supply and demand shifted.”

Silk production was not the only area of specialization. A mid-Ming gazatteer mentions “Raozhou merchants, who distributed the porcelains produced in the kilns of Jungdezhen in Jiangxi. He mentions Huizhou merchants, who became the most prominent and prosperous commercial dealers in the dynasty…. He also mentions that Nanjing, Suzhou, and Linqing merchants dominated the silk trade, as also did Hangzhou merchants.” Brook continues, “Regions such as Jiangnan and the southeast coast produced the fabrics that “clothed the realm,” as the saying went, regions such as Shandong and Henan produced the raw materials for the weavers, while yet other regions such as Huguang and Guangxi grew the grain the weavers ate. An interregional—and maybe even a “national” economy—was emerging.”

Besides such essentials as horses, weapons, ironware, copper, and silk, Chinese merchants were also free to trade with foreign markets. “Zhangzhou’s port of Yuegang (Moon Harbor) was the center of the licensed (and unlicensed) maritime trade on the southern coast of Fujian.” Expat communities of Chinese traders established themselves throughout southeast Asia, while commercial trade with Japan, the Portugese in Macau, and the Spanish in the Philippines steadily grew. Chinese merchants mainly took back in silver with all of this outflow of goods. “Raw Chinese silk could be sold in Japan for about double its Chinese price; cotton thread and ceramics fetched between two and three times their price; high-quality silk fabrics sold for almost three times; licorice more than tripled its price…. [On the other hand,] silver traded at a much higher value in China than it did in either Europe or Japan.” Chinese merchants were also rising in prestige, as well as in wealth. “In 1504, Shanghai men regarded commercial travel as shameful; twenty years later, Shanghai merchants were traveling as far as Beijing, Shandong, and Huguang.”

With the merchant class’s rise came a dislodging of the stable social hierarchy. This change in status was most felt by the gentry class, who for centuries had been firmly planted at the top. “Being a sociocultural rather than economic category, gentry defies precise definition. At its core were those who held titles granted by the state principally through the examination system. But the status that degree-holders enjoyed extended to various educated relatives and to those whose cultural attainments and social networks gave them entree into the world of scholarship and connoisseurship that marked off the elite.” Being recognized as gentry also held prestige that could be passed down to one’s descendants. “The lineage—the collectivity of families acknowledging group cohesion through their male members—was the kinship unit above the family with which most people identified, and to which they became increasingly bound by ties of moral and financial obligation in the mid-Ming as the lineage acquired shared assets and a corporate identity.”

As the Ming dynasty progressed, wealth was replacing scholarship as the mark of status. Rich merchants took to wearing silk robes and concave hats, holding multi-course banquets, eating exotic fruits, planting rare trees in their homes, and collecting expensive porcelains and calligraphy. The luxury of reading also spread with the development of newspapers, books for amusement rather than moral education, and the private post to disseminate letters. Personal travel to see exotic sites and pilgrimages to monasteries became in vogue. Writing in the 1570’s, the scholar Chen Yao comments, “Now the young dandies in the villages say that even silk gauze isn’t good enough and lust for Suzhou embroideries, Song-style brocades, cloudlike gauzes, and camel serge…. It’s what they call fashion (shiyang), the look of the moment.”

Brook ends his book with the invasion of China by the Manchu in 1644 and the establishment of their own Qing dynasty. He questions whether moral decay and the breaking of social bonds, led by the rise of commercial culture, really did hasten the end of the Ming dynasty, as contemporary scholars were apt to complain. “The class system of overlordship and deference that held the Chinese world together at the beginning of the Ming was still there at the end. It had been much transformed by commerce, as merchants found their way into the elite and gentry turned to business to augment their income. But it had not dismantled it. For all the busy mobility that communication and commerce induced within Ming society, the structural distinction between those who ruled and those who were ruled was not weakened.”

“All For Nothing” by Walter Kempowski (translated by Anthea Bell).

Kempowski wrote this novel in 2006, but perhaps he had been thinking about its themes for much of his life. “We Germans are not children of melancholy.” Kempowski borrowed heavily from his own life. However, it is a fictional tale of how an East Prussian aristocratic family, the von Globigs, manage during the Russian invasion of January, 1945. “Mecklenburg, Prussia, Saxony: how pleasant it had been in the Germany of the past, and he spoke of when measurements were in ells, feet and miles, he spoke of post-coaches in which you travelled from country to country without needing a passport or a visa, he spoke of kreuzers, guilders and shillings…. But sad to say, the Prussians had eliminated that wonderful variety, insisting on unity, unity, unity!” In reality, Kempowski was fifteen at the time of the Russian assault. His father, a shipowner conscripted as a Wehrmacht officer, died in the last days of the war in a battle on Vistula Spit, one of two narrow strips of land over which all the Prussian refugees heading west had to flee. Over 300,000 Prussians would die attempting to escape the Russians.

Kempowski’s novel shows humanity in all its complexities. “There was something wrong with the gentry over the road. Putting out the swastika flag only when absolutely necessary, and then it was just a tiny little rag of a thing.” His story shows humans at their best and their worst. And often it was the very same people. “Wartime had made it possible to do many friends a good turn on the quiet.” The same man could be kind and gentle at one moment and callously conniving at the next. “If you were going to kill something you had to do it properly. From time to time Vladimir came along with the axe, picked up a chicken, and one blow was enough to kill it…. Some time or other every chicken’s turn came, and the axe went chop-chop.” No one in the novel is a caricature. Everyone is more complicated than they first seem. “Pastor Brahms was thought of as fractious, and a fractious person was somehow very German. ‘Here stand I, I can do no other…’ Sarkander had pointed out that Martin Luther had also been a fractious man.” The novel seeks to show how people react in a crisis. “Keep the teaspoons. They could be used like coins. ‘This is cash in hand!’ As a refugee, he said, if you want to cross a river you could simply offer the ferryman a teaspoon.” Pushed to the brink some men will lie, steal, cheat, and murder. “Onlookers shot the prisoners hostile glances. It’s the fault of people like that, they thought. They stirred everyone else up against us, they fanned the flames setting the world alight.” War is nothing but misery. “Had it all been for nothing? The columns of tanks, side by side and one after another, moving through the wheat fields of the east along a broad front, and the lieutenant himself standing in the turret of one of the tanks. Those had been the days!” And the brutality of war takes its toll on civilians just as much as on the soldiers. “And telling her to take down the picture of Hitler. What was the man thinking of? Didn’t you have to show something like that? If you didn’t defend first principles everything went down the drain. Wasn’t the Fuhrer their ultimate prop and stay?” In total war, no one in society is spared. “The teacher and his wife had believed that mankind was basically good and ‘nothing will happen to us’, but they had taken rat poison in the end. And now they were lying in their own vomit.”

The novel begins by sketching some interesting characters who wind up as refugees, wandering into the von Globigs’ landed estate, the Georgenhoff. “It was true that the centuries-old oaks of the Globig property warned the Schlageter Settlement, with its brand new birch trees, to stay where it was, calling halt to any further advance.” A political economist, a violinist, a painter, and a baron all spend time at the Globigs’ manor house. “Refugees: there were some dubious characters among them who might appropriate stuff that wasn’t theirs. Many of them never washed, or were always complaining. But there was also a fine old national tradition in those parts, people you could imagine in an engraving, upright and not to be intimidated. German blood that must be saved. The homeland spread its arms to take them in.” Already in the estate’s surroundings there were servants from the Ukraine, a Polish groundskeeper, French POWs, Hitler Youth, a Lutheran preacher, and Jewish slave labor. “Vladimir would have liked to tell people how the Russians had driven his comrades into a pit and shot them there, but he kept that to himself. He had once told the Czech in the Forest Lodge, and it had been a very bad idea. Since then he and the Czech had been at daggers drawn.” The plot drags on haphazardly, but then slowly takes up many subtle twists and turns as the intrigue and action builds. “On, go on was the watchword, reinforced by the rumor: ‘The Russians are coming.’” One theme that runs throughout the novel is the pressure war puts on a man’s morality. “Why did I have to go and marry a Jew? she had said, forgetting the good years, abusing him and complaining. She even talked about the Fuhrer.” Character is revealed through stress. “What a good thing there were people still trying to save what could yet be saved, at least in a small way…. These terrorist gangsters couldn’t tear the poetry in his head out of him.” The codes of civilized life and the bonds that hold society together can easily fracture under the threat of death and miserable deprivation.

“Edge of Irony” by Marjorie Perloff

This is a collection of biographical sketches on Austro-Hungarian subjects, who came of age near the end of the Habsburg Empire, the Dual Monarchy. Five of the six essays are about writers, while Perloff’s coda is on Ludwig von Wittgenstein, who wrote much about language games and the meaning of words. Perloff makes the case that these (largely Jewish) artists were a part of a distinct Austro-Modernist milieu, unique from their German Modernist contemporaries. 

The Habsburg Empire, at its peak, encompassed fifty million inhabitants of disparate ethnicities, covering over 240,000 square miles. By the end of the First World War, in 1918, the Republic of Austria was reduced to six million citizens, in a territory of only 32,000 square miles. Again, aside from Wittgenstein, the artists Perloff sketches all were born outside of modern day Austria, yet they all considered themselves loyal citizens of the Empire, to varying degrees. In 1918, another Austrian Jew, Sigmund Freud, would declare, “Austria-Hungary is no more. I do not want to live anywhere else. For me emigration is out of the question. I shall live on with the torso and imagine that it is the whole.” Eric Hobsbawm later commented on this inter-war period, “The decline and fall of the Emperor Franz Josef’s, being both long expected and observed by sophisticated minds, has left us by far the most powerful literary or narrative chronicle. Austrian minds had time to reflect on the death and disintegration of their empire…. Perhaps the perceived and accepted multi-linguality, multi-confessionality and multiculturality of the monarchy helped them to a more complex sense of historical perspective. Its subjects lived simultaneously in different social universes and different historical epochs.”

Perloff writes specifically about the Austro-Modernist style that “its absorption of other language registers into the authors’ native German, its troubling anti-Semitism [even among ethnic Jews], its conviction, most memorably expressed by Wittgenstein, that argumentation called not for linear discourse but a series of aphorisms, its transvaluation of normative values, its fondness for paradox and contradiction as modes of understanding, and especially the hard edge of its savage and grotesquely comic irony” are its lasting legacies. She continues, “Given the particular situation of the Habsburg Empire and its dissolution, given the eastern (and largely Jewish) origin of its writers, it developed in another direction [from its German contemporaries], its hallmark being a profound skepticism about the power of government—any government or, for that matter, economic system—to reform human life. In Austro-Modernist fiction and poetry, irony—an irony less linked to satire (which posits the possibility of reform) than to a sense of the absurd—is thus the dominant mode.”

Perloff’s first essay is on Karl Kraus’s sprawling play, “The Last Days of Mankind.” Every line in the play is a verbatim citation of primary sources that Kraus had stitched together- newspapers, speeches, letters, political meeting minutes, interviews, and manifestos. Kraus wrote in the play’s preface, “The most improbable deeds reported here actually took place…. The most implausible conversations in this play were spoken verbatim; the shrillest inventions are quotations.” The cumulative effect of this montage is an indictment of war (and its inherent cruelty) in general, of the First World War, in particular, and of all the men who instigated, participated in, and prolonged it. The play is a critique of the whole social fabric that allowed the viciousness of war to seep into all aspects of life and degraded and dehumanized not only the politicians and soldiers, but all of Habsburg society. War is cruel tragedy realized in blood. Kraus had particular disdain for the journalists who egged on the public, whipped up nationalistic fervor, and spouted the lies of the powerful- all in the name of social cohesion and patriotism. Language is a powerful tool. “Language, for Kraus, thus has a strong ethical component…. For him, words are still viewed as carriers of specific cultural/political import.” In another essay, Kraus wrote, “to confront the riddles of [language’s] rules, the scenes of its dangers, is a mania more admirable than the madness that thinks it can control language.” Kraus himself was a master of language. He famously quipped, “In Berlin, things are serious but not hopeless. In Vienna, they are hopeless but not serious.”

The book’s second essay is on Joseph Roth’s novel, “The Radetzky March.” The novel centers around the military tune, written in 1848 to celebrate Field Marshall Joseph Radetzky’s victory over the Italian armies at Piedmont, in what turned out to be the Empire’s last great military triumph. Joseph Roth would refer to the March as “the Marseillaise of reaction.” The novel follows three generations of the Trotta family in an arch of triumph and decline that mirrors the Empire at large. It sheds light on a world of prescribed status and class, which is disintegrating as the Empire tears itself apart from within. Perloff writes, “the novel tracks the dissolution of a particular complex of values—values in many ways absurd and regressive, but benign in comparison to the political climate of post-World War I Europe.” Roth, himself, would declare of his sympathies, “I’m a European, a man of the Mediterranean…. A Roman and a Catholic, a Humanist and a Renaissance man.” He was actually born a Jew in Galicia, modern day Ukraine. Looking back (and perhaps forward) in 1933, he wrote in a letter, “I have never overestimated the tragic destiny of the Jews, least of all now, when it is a tragedy to be a decent human being.” For Roth, decency went hand in hand with a kind of moral relativism, or, at least, skepticism. He was reluctant to generalize on truth, beauty, or goodness. “Explanation is the enemy.” In the novel, Roth puts these words into the mouth of a Polish Count, “Vienna already stinks of the sweat of the Democrats; I can’t stand being on the Ringstrasse anymore. The workers wave red flags and don’t care to work. The mayor of Vienna is a pious janitor. The padres are already going with the people; their sermons are in Czech…. This era wants to create independent nation-states! People no longer believe in God. The new religion is nationalism. Nations no longer go to church. They go to national associations. Monarchy, our monarchy, is founded on piety, on the faith that God chose the Hapsburgs to rule over so and so many Christian nations.”

Perloff’s third essay is on Robert Musil’s unfinished epic novel, “The Man without Qualities.” The novel was largely a meditative quasi-essay on possibility and contingency. Musil wrote, “Whoever has [a sense of possibility] does not say, for instance: Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this or that might, could, or ought to happen. If he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well, it could probably just as well be otherwise.” Musil’s novel is also about a world turned upside down by new technology and dissolving social norms. In the novel, Musil pontificates on the mind of his main character, Ulrich, “All moral events seemed to him to be the function of other events on which they depended…. There [is] only one question worth thinking about, the question of the right way to live.” For Musil, ethics and aesthetics were one. Life, art, knowledge, and science could all be combined. Jean-Pierre Cometti commented on Musil, “Unlike the philosopher, the essayist doesn’t demonstrate and lacks the ambition to do so, his ‘arguments’ are closer to intuitions and suppositions; they don’t have the systematicity that philosophical argumentation demands.” In the novel, Musil puts into the head of his quasi-heroine, “Every time Diotima had almost opted in favor of some idea, she could not help noticing that its opposite was equally great and equally worthy of realization…. Ideals have curious properties, and one of them is that they turn into their opposites when one tries to live up to them.” Musil goes on to describe the contradictions and absurdity of the Habsburg Empire, “Liberal in its constitution, it was administered clerically. The government was clerical, but everyday life was liberal. All citizens were equal before the law, but not everyone was a citizen. There was a Parliament, which asserted its freedom so forcefully that it was usually kept shut; there was also an Emergency Powers Act that enabled the government to get along without Parliament, but then, when everyone had happily settled for absolutism, the Crown decreed that it was time to go back to parliamentary rule.” Musil wrote in his diary of his own disposition, “As an individual I am a revolutionary. That cannot be otherwise for the creative individual always is. But in politics I am evolutionist.”

The book’s fourth essay is on Elias Canetti’s autobiography, “The Tongue Set Free.” He was born in Rustchuck, on the Bulgarian-Romanian border, to a Sephardic Jewish family, in a community which spoke the Spanish dialect, Ladino. His parents, who met in a theater troupe in Vienna, spoke German to each other, which the young Canetti struggled to understand. The family moved to England in his youth and so Canetti’s first language became English, even after his father had died and the family returned to various outposts within the Habsburg Empire. Perloff posits, “multilingualism complicates—and often undermines—identity.” Claudio Magris expands, “A plurality of heterogeneous components and irreconcilable contradictions…. Habsburg identity is paradigmatic of the lost or fractured identity of the modern individual.” Canetti, himself, mused, “how much of a forgotten language stays with us I have no way of knowing.” The clash of language in his head would make Canetti wary of all group identification, be it political, religious, or national. He was a European. He wrote, “When all pretexts crumbled, I was left with the excuse of expectation. I wanted people, including myself, to become better.”

Perloff’s fifth essay is on the poetry of Paul Celan. Although Celan eventually moved to Paris and conversed mainly in French, he wrote verse exclusively in German. He explained, “Only in one’s mother tongue can one express one’s own truth, in a foreign language the poet lies…. I do not believe there is such a thing as bilingual poetry…. Poetry is by necessity a unique instance of language. Hence never—forgive the truism, but poetry, like truth, goes all too often to the dogs—hence never what is double.” Celan’s parents were arrested, deported, and killed by the Nazis during the Second World War while he lucked out, having argued with them and slept at his girlfriend’s on that fateful night. He later wrote, “Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss…. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through and could resurface, ‘enriched’ by it all.”

Perloff’s final essay is on the philosophical and religious musings of Ludwig von Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein wrote, “Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different…. I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.” Wittgenstein believed that all growth was personal. One could not change society, but one could change himself. He had a secular determination to become a different man, a better man, “to turn into a different person.” He held “an intense desire to take something difficult upon himself and to do something other than purely intellectual work.” Perhaps, for him, intellectual accomplishments came all too easily. Wittgenstein told his Anglican friend, Maurice Drury, “If you and I are to live religious lives it must not just be that we talk a lot about religion, but that in some way our lives are different.” His family was ethnically Jewish, but had converted and he had been baptized a Catholic. “The true religion of the Wittgensteins, in any case, now became culture.” Politics and nationalism were coarse, demeaning, and beneath him. “Everything depended on individual integrity, on personal choice.” Wittgenstein wrestled with a Christian faith he could not quite believe in, even if he could embrace it. He wrote in his journal, “Christianity, I believe, says among other things that sound doctrines are all useless. You have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.) That all wisdom is cold: & that you can no more use it for setting your life to rights, than you can forge iron when it is cold. Faith is a passion.” Wittgenstein would state to Drury, “The symbolism of Christianity is wonderful beyond words, but when people try to make a philosophical system out of it I find it disgusting.” Closure of the mind was the enemy. The everyday present of actual lived life was the only thing worth examining. Language and experience placed strictures on all of us. Wittgenstein wrote, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

“Freedom and Its Betrayal” by Isaiah Berlin

This is a collection of six sketches of intellectuals Berlin contends were enemies of liberal thought. All these men lived in the late 18th to early 19th centuries and were all opposed to the expanding sphere of freedoms of mankind. The first portrayal is of Helvetius. Berlin suggests “his lifelong aim was the search for a single principle which was to define the basis of morality and really answer the questions about how society should be founded and how man should live and where he should go and what he should do, with the same degree of scientific authority that Newton displayed in the realm of physics.” Helvetius’ answer was utilitarianism, which he founded years before Bentham. Helvetius suggests, “over thee I set pleasure and pain; the one and the other will watch over thy thoughts and acts, excite thy aversions, friendships, tender sentiments, joys, set on fire thy desires, fears, hopes, reveal to thee truths, plunge thee in error.” The pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain are the base motives on which all men act. These ends are given. The business of the philosopher is to figure out a system by which means this can be achieved most efficiently. Helvetius does not believe in automatic progress. Government is needed to steer the ship towards the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Government is an art- the art of pursuing happiness. Rationalism, materialism, and science are the tools the wise will use to steer the herd of mankind towards greater happiness. History is useless. All interest is practical interest. “To have a right which nobody may impinge upon, to have a right which nobody may trample, to have a right to do or be or have this or that, whether anybody likes it or not, is an obstacle to the transformation of society in the direction of the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” Education and law can do anything. Man is infinitely malleable and flexible- a piece of clay that is to be moulded as the philosopher pleases. Value is objective and discoverable by observation and reason. In Helvetius’ system, all ultimate ends are compatible and will never clash. Individual choice for choice’s sake must be subsumed to the greater good for all.

Berlin’s next sketch is of Rousseau. Liberty, for him, is an absolute value. It is identical with what it means to be human itself. “If a man is not free, if a man is not responsible for what he does, if a man does not do what he does because he wants to do it, because this is his personal, human goal, because in this way he achieves something which he, and not somebody else, at this moment desires- if he does not do that, he is not a human being at all: for he has no accountability. The whole notion of moral responsibility, which for Rousseau is the essence of man almost more than his reason, depends upon the fact that a man can choose, choose between alternatives, choose between them freely, be uncoerced.” Like Kant, Rousseau views all men as ends in themselves, not means for other people’s purposes. Choosing the right path is not to follow some mechanical law. It is inherent in man. “The moral laws which man obeys are absolute, something from which man knows that he must not depart…. Laws are not conventions, are not utilitarian devices, but simply the drawing up in terms suitable to the particular time and place and people of regulations embodying sacred truths, sacred rules which are not man-made, but eternal, universal and absolute.” This is Rousseau’s conundrum. How can liberty and the law both be absolute? It is individual freedom versus society. Rousseau seeks “to find a form of association…. in which each, while uniting himself with all, yet may still obey only himself alone and remain as free as before.” He squares the paradox by saying that each man “in giving all, gives himself to nobody.” His premise, like most eighteenth century thinkers, is that nature is always in harmony. What one truly wants cannot be at odds with what another truly wants because the ultimate good must satisfy everyone’s rational demands. Thus his concept of the General Will. Rousseau states, “as long as several men in the assembly regard themselves as a single body they have a single will…. The constant willing of all the members of the State is the general will.” However, Rousseau was vehemently anti-cosmopolitan. He despised the arts and sciences, all refinement, the intellectual, the expert, and the specialist who put themselves over the heads of the masses. It was natural man who possessed instinctive wisdom. “The simple people of society possess a deeper sense of reality, a deeper virtue and a deeper understanding of moral values than professors in their universities, than the politicians of the cities, than other people who somehow become de-natureed, who have somehow cut themselves off from the inner stream which is at once the true life and the true morality and wisdom of men and societies.” He does make common cause with the outcasts, rebels, and artists who are unshackled from the chains of elite culture. Rousseau admits, “man is born free, and yet he is everywhere in chains.” He solves this puzzle by asking, “what if the chains are not imposed upon him? What if the chains are not something which he is bound as by some external force? What if the chains are something he chooses himself because such a choice is an expression of his nature, something he generates from within him as an inner ideal? If this is what he above all wants in the world, then the chains are no longer chains.” Control becomes ultimate freedom. “The State is you, and others like you, all seeking your common good.” The State gives man what he truly wants, even if he doesn’t know it and struggles violently against it.

Berlin next tackles Fichte. Berlin begins by discussing the British and French concept of negative liberty: non-interference in the affairs of others. He contrasts this with the German idea of freedom, which espoused “freedom from the iron necessities of the universe- not so much wicked or foolish persons, or social mismanagement, as from the rigorous laws of the external world.” Because of the backwards conditions of the German States at the time, citizens were deprived of many basics common in western Europe. The German masses reacted to this with a kind of Stoicism. “If I cannot get what I want, then perhaps by depriving myself of the want itself I shall make my life happier. Evidently I shall not be made happy by pining to get what powerful persons or adverse circumstances will not let me have. But perhaps by killing within myself the desire for these things I shall achieve that calm and that serenity which is as good a substitute for owning the things which I want.” The true Self cannot rely on external conditions. The true Self is only the inner Self. “The true ideal is to obey the laws of morality.” Again, it is the Kantian notion that all other humans are ends in themselves and not means in my life. Their ends are as sacred as my own. Morals are not things that can be discovered, or which are true or false, but are commands to be followed. “My duty can be only that which I can wholly control, not the achievement, but the attempt.” The most important things in the world are integrity and dedication. The ideal is what is worth fighting for. It is a Romantic notion. Man exists to serve fellow man. Fichte states, “man becomes man only among other men…. Man is destined to live in society; he must do so; he is not a complete human being, he contradicts his own nature, if he lives in isolation.” The nation is the organic whole. The greatest agent of this force is the divine leader or conqueror who molds the nation as the sculptor moulds clay. “Individual freedom, which in Kant has a sacred value, has for Fichte become a choice made by something superpersonal. It chooses me, I do not choose it, and acquiescence is a privilege, a duty, a self-lifting, a kind of self-transcendent rising to a higher level. Freedom, and morality generally, is self-submission to the superself- the dynamic cosmos.” Fichte’s freedom has become “the notion of freedom as the removal of obstacles to yourself.” It is a positive freedom, not a negative liberty.

Berlin next sketches a portrait of Hegel. For Hegel, “the universe was really the self-development of the world spirit. A world spirit is something like an individual spirit, except that it embraces and is identical with the whole universe. If you can imagine the universe as a kind of animate entity possessing a soul in roughly the same sense as, but no doubt grander than, that in which individuals possess souls, intentions, purposes, wills, then you can ask ‘Why do things happen as they do?’” And for Hegel, “history is solely an account of the experiences of human beings. Tables and chairs have no history because they have no experience. History is the story of human creation, human imagination, human wills and intentions, feelings, purposes, everything which human beings do and feel, rather than what is done to them. Human history is something we create by feeling, by thinking, by being active in some fashion, and therefore, by creating it, we are able to understand it, which is why the understanding of history is an ‘inside’ view, whereas our understanding of tables and chairs is an ‘outside’ view.” Furthermore, for Hegel, “the dialectic…. really makes sense only in terms of thought or artistic creation; and he applies it to the universe because he thinks that in the universe is a kind of act of thought, or a kind of act of self-creation; self-creation, for there exists nothing else.” Ideas are first created through thesis, then antithesis, in which conflicting ideas collide with the initial ones, and finally synthesis, in which all the ideas are fused, retaining elements of each. This clash of ideas is what generates progress. Furthermore, these ideas are not just in the brains of individuals, but are embedded in institutions such as religion, constitutions, and even migrations and revolutions. This process is not smooth, but moves in fits and starts. Conflict is necessary for growth. Without friction there is no progress. The process is inevitable. It cannot happen otherwise than as it does. Each step is a “rational successor” to the previous one. Every earlier stage “does not make sense” unless the later step is there to complete it. “But when you discover why everything is as it is- must be so- in the very act of understanding this you will lose the desire for it to be otherwise.” You become one with nature when you understand this ‘inside’ view, her purpose and her intentions. “Liberty is the recognition of necessity…. The world as whole is totally free, and we are free to the extent to which we identify ourselves with the rational principles of the world.” History is made by the few who are the highest rational creatures, but not necessarily by their own conscious desires. Hegel’s “world historical” is that which is objective, demonstratively rational, the powerful, the decisive, the concrete. “What seems abominable in one generation seems virtuous in the next.” Among all worldly patterns, the State is supreme. It is humanity at its most self-conscious and orderly. Whoever resists the State is bound to be destroyed. Hegel brought light to the fact that institutions matter more than persons, his invention of the history of thought was sublime, and his recognition of the dark forces and impersonal urges that move mankind was prescient. “The semi-conscious strivings of reason seeking to realise its being” were what created history, more than any individual king or soldier.

Berlin next tackles Saint-Simon. Saint-Simon is intriguing among these character studies because he is the only one, as far as I know, who actually thought he was the great new Messiah come to save the earth. His thoughts also predated much of Marxist theory. He was the father of the technological interpretation of history. He was the first to define class in its modern sense, as economic social entities. He was among the first historians to draw in economic factors in shaping history at all. He was among the first, and certainly the most well known, to come up with a planned society- “a kind of rational organization of industry and of commerce, in favour of applying science for the benefit of society.” He disdained democracy. He favored government by elites “who understand the technological needs and the technological possibilities of their time.” He also believed in a double morality- a kind of quasi-Straussian interpretation of a moral code. “What the enlightened elite must do is to practice one morality themselves and feed their flock of human subjects with another.” He was the first to see the need of a secular religion- that the masses would not be moved by reason alone and must be inspired by something higher, more noble and sublime. He saw clearly “the incompatibility between the view that wise men ought to direct society and the view that people ought to govern themselves.” Therefore, he disdained self-government. He was a materialist. For Saint-Simon, ideas were born of their time and all inventions from weapons, to mathematics, to poetry could only come as a response to the general conditions of their age. It is the milieu of the age, more than technological know-how, that creates. “Everything must be judged in its context.” Progress was not automatic, but was moved along by great men. “The progressive society is that which provides the maximum means of satisfying the greatest number of needs of the human beings who compose it.” Unlike the utilitarians, these needs need not be ultimate happiness. Civilization oscillated from “organic periods when humanity is unified, when it develops harmoniously, when the people who are in charge of it on the whole foster progress [and] critical periods when these arrangements are becoming obsolescent, when the institutions themselves become obstacles to progress, when human beings feel that what they want is different from that which they are getting, when there is a new spirit which is about to sunder the old bottles in which it is still imprisoned.” There are no absolute principles. Everything is unstable and evolving. The modern age must be dominated by scientists, industrialists, and bankers because these men can unite mankind. They have the knowledge and know the current needs of humanity. “The people cannot be expected to face the truth at once, but must be gradually educated.”

Berlin’s final biographical sketch is of Joseph de Maistre. He was a Savoyard aristocrat who was turned by the French Revolution from a mild reformer into a rabid reactionary. He despised Voltaire. Emile Faguet has characterized him as “a fierce absolutist, a furious theocrat, an intransigent legitimist, apostle of a monstrous trinity composed of Pope, King and Hangman, always and everywhere the champion of the hardest, narrowest, and most inflexible dogmatism, a dark figure out of the Middle Ages, part learned doctor, part inquisitor, part executioner…. His Christianity is terror, passive obedience, and the religion of the State.” Berlin agrees with that assessment and continues, “he preached the sacredness of the past, the virtue, and the necessity, indeed, of complete subjection, because of the incurably bad and corrupt nature of man. In place of science he preached the primacy of instinct, superstition, prejudice. In place of optimism, pessimism. In place of eternal harmony and eternal peace, the necessity- for him the divine necessity- of conflict, of suffering, of bloodshed, of war.” For Maistre, life itself is a battle. “Reason is simply a feeble faculty in men for the purpose, now and then, of fitting means to ends…. Nothing can stand perpetually but what something other than reason builds up, for what reason builds up, reason will pull down.” As for self-government, Maistre opines, “the principle of the sovereignty of the people is so dangerous that, even if it were true, it would be necessary to conceal it.” He felt that power lies in the ancient institutions organically formed, not intentionally designed. “The throne is more important than its occupant.” Absolutism is necessary precisely because it is so terrifying. “He fears and detests science, precisely because it pours too much light, and so dissolves the mystery, the darkness, which alone resists sceptical enquiry.” Reason and science provide men with false hopes. “At the end of positivist, optimistic periods of human construction, in which men rise up and say they are about to cure all the world’s ills by some economic or social solution, which then does not work, there is always a penchant for reaction on the part of ordinary people, satiated by so much false optimism, so much pragmatism, so much positive idealism, which become discredited by the sheer pricking of the bubble, by the fact that all the slogans turn out to be meaningless and weak when the wolf really comes to the door.”