Mary P. Nichols: Thucydides and the Pursuit of Freedom. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015.

Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 53, Number 1, January/February 2016. Republished with permission.

 

Leo Strauss addressed his theme, “the city and man,” by considering a dialogue (Plato’s Republic), a treatise (Aristotle’s Politics), and a history (Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War). A student of Strauss and of his close collaborator, Joseph Cropsey, Mary P. Nichols has set her own publishing career on much the same arc. Having published illuminating studies on the Republic and the Politics, she has now turned her attention to Thucydides; as before, she has not merely followed Strauss but built on his work, raising a firm, civil voice of correction from time to time. Cheerful, lynx-eyed, and unruffled, she engages the range of recent Thucydides’ scholarship, always remaining very much her own woman.

Thucydides often gets pegged as the archetypal ‘foreign policy realist’—even a determinist. Nichols demurs: “In this book I explore”—that turns out to be one of her favorite words—”Thucydides’ commitment to the cause of freedom.” Athenians and Spartans both aim for freedom in the war, and although they sometimes “fall short of their claims to act freely and for the sake of freedom,” at other times they do not. What is more, “Thucydides is taking freedom as his cause.” His history, a “possession for all time,” as its author immodestly but accurately calls it, “speaks very much to our time, encouraging the defense of freedom while warning of the limits and dangers that arise in its defense.”

By “freedom” Thucydides means first of all political freedom in two, complementary dimensions: the city’s autonomy—literally, its ability to give laws to itself and not to acquiesce in another city’s imperial rule—and a regime within the city that enables citizens to participate in public life—as celebrated, famously, in Pericles’ funeral oration. This is real and not imagined freedom; Thucydides’ account of “speeches and deeds that do make a difference” in the course of events, “for better or for worse.” Grim Ananke or necessity may limit human speech and action, but it does not determine it.

Thucydides also points to another kind of freedom, what we call intellectual freedom—his own freedom as a historian. Although he adheres to facts rather than myths, binding himself to an austere recording of givens, of necessities, he also “calls attention to the fact that he himself is a writer of speeches.” He admits that he puts speeches into the mouths of the actors in his real-world drama; absent a record of his statesmen’s speeches, he has supplied them with speeches responsive to the circumstances in which they spoke. More, “it is Thucydides’ account, or logos, that examines the things said in light of the deeds. His freedom in writing his history lies not merely in his pursuit of the facts with a clear mind, but in his evaluation of them. Facts serve as a test of speech, but speech also interprets the facts, or speaks for them.” He is “a philosophic historian,” but because he limits his freedom by his overall adherence to facts he serves as “a better model” than the poet—and perhaps even the philosophic writer of dialogues and treatises?—who must not ascend too far into the realm of ideas.

Nichols organizes her book into five chapters, each centering on a statesman, beginning with Pericles, “the only one whom Thucydides allows to speak uncontested in Athens.” And rightly so: “Contrary to both the democratic and realist critics of Pericles, Thucydides presents Pericles as a model of statesmanship” who explains the Athenian regime and way of life in his funeral oration in terms of freedom, and the actions that are appropriate to freedom.” Pericles understands freedom as self-rule—”a potential, not a necessity, although it is necessary for full humanity,” that is to say the rule of the human soul by its distinctively human aspect, which is reason. The one man rules the many, the democratic regime of Athens, by speech not by force. Pericles rules Athenians by their consent.

Specifically, Pericles anticipates the Peloponnesians’ intention to cut Athens down to size, persuading his fellow citizens that ‘war is necessary to preserve [the Athenians’] freedom.” This is a moral not a physical necessity, inasmuch as Athenians could sacrifice their autonomy to the demands of Sparta and its allies. Like Thucydides himself, who argues for the “weakness” of “ancient times,” Pericles takes his moral bearings not from tradition, not from “filial piety,” and therefore not from the laws but from prudential reasoning itself and from the character of the Athenian regime, which is self-sufficient—capable, in Pericles celebrated phrase, of loving beauty with thrift and loving wisdom without softness. When the harshest necessity, the plague, hits Athens immediately after Pericles delivers his oration, neither he nor the Athenians blame the gods or turn to them. Nor do they surrender to the Peloponnesians. The plague does induce Pericles to admit that Athenian self-sufficiency can never be absolute. In facing the desperate, agonized, dying Athenians, “he presents himself to the Athenians as unaffected by adversity”; “in his bearing before the city, if not in fact, he does not succumb to the plague.”

Thus Pericles presents Athenians with “an image” of freedom—not the real thing as experienced during catastrophe but real in the sense of being a model, something to be lived up to. Moderating the hubris of the Athenians, their fear, and even their anger, “Pericles’ rule is… characterized by balance or measure, both in his policies and in the effect of his rhetoric on the people.” “With Pericles in charge Athens might have succeeded against Sparta.” Pericles’ best critics speak up here, saying that he expected too much of his successors, few of whom proved capable of such measure. Nichols agrees that “in demanding the beautiful, Pericles demands too much of his city—and also of himself.” But she adds that behind Pericles and his noble speech one must always remembers the presence of Thucydides, who “shows the human without undermining the beautiful.” “Pericles is therefore wrong when he says that he is inferior to no one in knowing what is required and interpreting it.” Thucydides is to Pericles what Plato is to Socrates. The image of Athens Thucydides presents “does not abstract this city from time and failure” in the way Pericles does:
“Like a true Athenian, as Pericles presents him, Thucydides does not have to hide. he does not have to hide his own weakness. Pericles conceals his. That is, in presenting an image of Athens, Thucydides demonstrates a freedom even greater than Pericles’, for he speaks without any pretense of self-sufficiency.”

Having shown the connection between measure or balance and freedom as Thucydides presents it, Nichols turns to the theme of “Athenian freedom in the balance”—an image that suggests both the scales of justice and a turn of fortune. To win the war, Athens needed allies, including its colonies. A polis on the island of Lesbos, Mytilene, located to the northeast of Athens near Asia Minor, sought to exploit the Peloponnesian threat (coming from the southwest of Athens) to win freedom from the Athenian empire. This leads to the first Athenian debate Thucydides presents, in which the general Cleon debates the mysterious Diodotus on whether to exterminate the Mytileneans. Absent the persuasive Pericles, Athenians must deliberate not over whether to consent to one speech but rather over which of two arguments seems better; this too is freedom—indeed the greater freedom of going from consenting to the one statesman of Chapter One to choosing between the arguments of the two statesmen of Chapter Two.

Cleon seeks to exploit democrats’ impatience with one another, their longing for reaching decisions, taking actions. He “denounces the endless speech and indecisiveness endemic to democratic government.” Diodotus “aims at moderating the passions of the Athenians in order to make space for thought and deliberation,” arguing that “the Athenians are responsible for their treatment of Mytilene.” Cleon uses speech to undermine “the legitimate role for speech in democratic government” like some of Socrates’ critics, he is a misologist. Although he “speaks frequently of enemies,” he “never uses the word ‘friend,'” perhaps because friends are usually on ‘speaking terms.’ Diotdotus’ name means “gift from the god”—a phrase Plato’s Socrates uses to describe himself. He overcomes Cleon’s misology by imitating Pericles—bringing his fellow citizens to reflect upon themselves, to know themselves as Athenians, that is, as self-ruling democrats. he brings them to reason by reasoning, by bringing out the self-contradiction of a speaker who speaks against speech. He then invites them to reason about their circumstance, to consider whether harsh dealings with Myutilene will really prove advantageous to Athens, which needs more allies not fewer. Justice—more specifically, equity—exhibited now may well redound to advantage in the defense of Athens and its regime in the future. In defense of Athenian freedom, “he implicitly warns Athens against its own erōs and hope, which can lead human beings to suppose they can do more than they can.” The equitable mind inclines toward pardon, which literally means “to know with,’ that is, to understand what the other did when he acted.”

By urging Athenians to think for a moment like Mytileneans, Diodotus would have them think of the rebels as human beings, to love wisdom in something like the sense of a Socratic ascent from the cave of one’s own polis, with its customs and passions. This is of course what Pericles had said what the Athenian regime does, what it is. “Justice must be understood in terms of what is good for the one who is just”; to be followed it must not be other-regarding, Putting it another way, the limits of this philosophic self-transcendence that simultaneously affirms the ‘self’ or character of the polis may be seen in the  fact that the Athenians do agree not to exterminate the Mytileneans, but do vote to enslave them.

And what of Diodotus himself? “As far as we know from the historical record, he exists only in speech—in Thucydides’ work—and not in fact.” Diodotus may be saying what Socrates would have said, had Socrates spoken on this occasion. And if “Diotdotus were invented by Thucydides,” he would not be a “gift from Zeus,” but “Thucydides’ gift to Athens”—the continuation of Periclean statesmanship. As Plato had Socrates present a city in speech, Thucydides has presented a statesman in speech.

Thucydides juxtaposes Athenian statesmanship, as it was and as it might have been, with the actions of the Spartans against Plataea. Unlike the Athenians, the Spartans don’t really deliberate at all, but only make a show of deliberating. Nichols devotes her third and central chapter to the Spartans and their principal general, Brasidas.

Not Brasidas but King Archidamus serves as the Spartan answer to Pericles with respect to speech, praising his countrymen for not having too much learning to “look down upon the laws” and for exhibiting such “severity” as to be “too moderate to disobey them.” As a consequence of this law-abiding severity, Spartans alone “do not become arrogant when successful.” For Sparta, freedom comes not from abstaining from war but from preparing for war and avoiding it until ready Archidamus seems “wary about risking Sparta’s freedom to pursue freedom for others.” But despite his caution (and perhaps because he is a Spartan, none too persuasive as a speaker?) the Spartans vote for war; there are limits event to Spartan self-limitation. The war-vote brings Brasidas forward.

Unquestionably the most able Spartan, Brasidas isn’t especially Spartan in spirit. Hew speaks as well as he fights. Nichols points out how ‘Diototean’ Brasidas is, gathering allies for Sparta by offering liberal terms to those cities who will join in the coalition against Athens. Although Brasidas “depicts a noble view of his city to the world,” he “never speaks before the Spartan people” and receives tepid support from them for his expeditions. Unlike Pericles, he is never quite at home in his native city. He died in battle at Amphipolis, a “one-man show” with “no home, not people”—except, in the end, Amphipolis, where the citizens consider him their savior in victories death.

As for Thucydides, Nichols remarks that his appreciation of Brasidas’ “daring and intelligence”—virtues “Pericles attributes to Athens”—demonstrates that such virtues are “not dependent on a specific regime”; they are human. But if man is a political animal, in addition to a daring and intelligent one, then such virtues are nonetheless dependent upon  the support of some polis, some regime. “While Brasidas does not need Sparta in order to act with daring and intelligence, he needs Sparta for his daring and intelligence to be truly good.” “In politics, no one can be a one-man show.” But the politics of the regime of his city aims at autonomy in the world while restricting citizen freedom at home. Its law-abiding severity almost literally alienates its best general. Thucydides’ appreciation of virtue, and of politics, when seen among Athenians or Spartans, gives added weight to his claim to have been “present on both sides” of the war, owing to the exile imposed upon him by the Athenians. His presence is both physical and intellectual.

The battle at Amphipolis results in a treaty followed not by lasting peace but a truce. The truce “bring[s] Alcibiades to the forefront of Thucydides’ history”—another man without a country, this time from Athens. He advances still another notion of freedom. He shares Chapter Four with decent, plodding, hapless Nicias, and their debate parallels the Cleon-Diodotus debate in the parallel second chapter.

Strauss argues that the Athenians met disaster in Sicily because they recalled the impious but able Alcibiades, leaving the apparently pious Nicias in charge; “not indeed the gods, but the human concern with the gods” caused the failure. Nichols maintains that Alcibiades is the real source of the problem. A man of vast, politically vague but self-centered ambition, Alcibiades regards the Athenian way of life as “motion for its own sake.” Unlike Pericles, Alcibiades does not consider peace the object of war; unlike Pericles (and his greatest student, Abraham Lincoln) he fails to see the sense in fighting only one war at a time. Without any publicly definable goal, political strategy loses its point; following Alcibiades in spirit even as they rightly distrust the man himself, the Athenians come to define “eternal law” as the enforcement of the will of the strong over the will of the weak. “Their appeal is less an acceptance of necessity”—as they claim in the famous debate on Melos—”than a pretext for their imitation of the gods.” “If realism teaches human limits in the pursuit of power, it is a teaching the Athenians at Melos reject.” The spirit of Alcibiades lures Athenians into a pseudo-realist power fantasy.

In his own way, Nicias is no better. “His ‘piety’ masks his caution. He does not manifest genuine piety, any more than the impious Alcibiades does. Genuine piety does not lie in ceding the human capacity to deliberate, judge, and act to divine forces, as Nicias does when he yields to the seers. Nor is it found in imitating the power of the gods to rule over the weak, as the Athenians imply at Melos, and Alcibiades manifests in his deeds. Rather, it consists in accepting the limits of the human in relation to the divine, limits in both knowledge and control, which by circumscribing action make it possible. Paradoxically, it is that great humanist Pericles who recognizes those limits and is able to act, as when, for example, he traces the plague to ‘daimonic things’ that are ‘beyond reason,’ while continuing to prosecute the war with Sparta, or when he cautions them that they must pay back whatever gold necessity requires than to take from Athena’s statue to continue the war.”

It seems likely that Mary Nichols is right about the gods. Alcibiades does indeed “act as if he were freer than he is”—acting as if he were the playwright in his own drama. And the Athenians imitate him, forgetting the prudence of Pericles and Diodotus. He is “the human face hidden behind the law of necessity to which [the Athenians] appeal” during the Melian debate. Neither he nor his country can rule themselves, any more. They both suppose that the conquest of Sicily is ‘about’ themselves, not Sicily. But the Sicilians will have something to say, and do, about that. Under the influence of Alcibiades, the Athenians have come to define beauty not as measure, as harmony, but s splendor, as magnificent excess.

Limitlessness in politics implies homelessness, a refusal not only of laws but of the limitations imposed by regimes—the theme of Nichols’s fifth chapter. Accused (falsely, Nichols suspects) of desecrating sacred sculptures, Alcibiades declines to return home to face the charges but offers his services to Sparta and eventually takes his one-man show to Persia—all the while hoping to angle back into Athens and take it over. In arguing for being allowed to return, he describes his love of Athens, which he defines not as a regime (as Pericles had done, and as Aristotle defines the polis as such) but as a locale. Alcibiades is not merely indifferent to regimes but “hostile to all regimes.” Because “regimes stand between the individual and his city, structuring their relationship and interaction,” Alcibiades rejects them in rejecting structure for the limitlessness of “pure possibility.” This is freedom reconceived democratically in the most radical sense: as doing what you want, regardless of reality. It is the joint at which democratic and tyrannical longings conjoin. “Against Alcibiades, and an Athens under his sway, Thucydides defends a political realism” to which ‘freedom is essential”—freedom as self-government, freedom as measure, freedom as the exe4rcise of reason, as action within the limits set by nature and by the gods.

Nichols’s interpretation enables her to explain the opening words of the History: “Thucydides, an Athenian….” Although an exile, Thucydides never imagines that freedom entails placelessness. The Athenian regime gave him the chance to inquire about Athens and not merely to obey it. “It is Athens that has the custom or law of funeral orations, which naturally lead the speaker to reflect about why its soldiers gave their lives for their city. Athenians stand out in Thucydides work for their self-reflection.” Self-reflection leads Thucydides to know that he doesn’t know, leads him to inquiry itself.  That inquiry results in his account of how Athenians came to forget self-reflection, to believe in accordance to their own desires without knowing, to think wishfully. In a sense, he needed to be exiled; he and his countrymen really were going in opposite directions. In sending Thucydides into exile, Athenians exiled themselves.

In her book on Aristotle, Nichols reported the fine discovery that Aristotle regarded a wife’s practical wisdom no less impressive than a husband’s. Here, too she plays the role of Mrs. Adams to her mentors, Strauss and Cropsey, adjuring them to remember the ladies. The ladies Nichols has in mind are Archedice—her name “sounds like ‘just rule'”—the daughter, sister, and wife of tyrants who ruled some eighty years before the Peloponnesian War, who herself “Possessed a moderation that the Athenians” who came later “would have done well to emulate”—and the unnamed wife of the Melossian king, Admetus, who intervenes on behalf of the exiled Themistocles, saving his life by teaching him how to speak to her husband. “Like Themistocles,” Thucydides, in recalling these incidents, shows that “he is able to learn from women”—those who prefer not to dare exceedingly, and whose connectedness to generation orients them toward “something more immediate and fundamental than the unwritten memory or fame Pericles promises those Athenians who give their lives for their city.” One could do worse than to learn from some women.

Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex. H. M. Parshley translation. New York: Bantam Books, 1964 [1949].

Sonia Kruks: Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Ambiguity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

 

Although it may seem so, The Second Sex was not all Simone de Beauvoir wrote. An experienced scholar who knows her business, Sonia Kruks invites readers to see Beauvoir’s political writings as a whole. She also wants to bring Beauvoir into contemporary debates on liberal rationalism and poststructuralism, showing that Beauvoir staked out a position critical of the former without succumbing to the arbitrary nominalism of the latter As an existentialist, Beauvoir held that political judgments involve the whole being of the individual who makes them—not only the pure mind of the rationalists but that stubborn fact, the body, with its instincts, vulnerabilities, and powers. Human beings find themselves situated not only in one mind and one body (one life) but also in concrete social milieus that tend to disclose and to foreclose moral and political choices, empower and weaken the scope for political action Beauvoir thus insisted upon the ambiguity of all political judgment and action, their complex incompleteness. Oddly, and unlike her contemporary Simone Weil, Beauvoir never seems seriously to have engaged the writings of philosophers much before Immanuel Kant—precisely those who turned to political philosophy in the first place. Aristotle makes a brief appearance in The Second Sex, but only to get slapped on the wrist for having failed to understand human embryology.

Writing in the tradition of Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger—all of whom rejected nature as a source of right and defined freedom as the absence of natural constraint—the existentialists called for “active engagement in the world.” Beauvoir distinguished herself from Jean-Paul Sartre, however, by thinking more carefully about the body, “at once the site of both freedom and constraint,” and by giving greater emphasis to social relations. These concerns caused her to emphasize the ambiguity of human life, its “irresolvable antinomies,” most especially the ways in which our embodied sociality opens us both to “reciprocity” and “violent harms.” She resists all Hegelian and Marxist attempts at some grand synthesis or ‘end of History’ which would resolve these antimonies. Most interestingly, and unknowingly, she came upon something very like the Platonic and Aristotelian distinction between theoretical and practical reasoning, now approached via the existentialist notion of liberty. There is an “ontological freedom [la liberté] and the practical, or effective freedom that is required in order to act in the world [la puissance],” the latter “requir[ing] the presence and support of others.” Ignoring classical political philosophy, she soon began “to incorporate a non-reductionist Marxism within her analysis.” I am reminded of Nietzsche’s remark on Ralph Waldo Emerson: With Emerson, we lost a philosopher.”

This moral and social thinker found herself confronted with politics by 1939. But, and again understandably in view of her intellectual formation, she described this experience in historicist terms: “History seized me and never let me go again.” Very much to her credit, she continued to resist the determinist side of historicism. After the war, which she spent in occupied Paris, the French Communist Party beckoned, especially since “there appeared to be no middle ground between unqualified support for the Soviet Union and a pro-American position, which aligned one with the exploitative forces of capitalist domination and imperialism” (as distinguished, of course, from the exploitative forces of communist domination and imperialism). To her credit, she could not quite bring herself to join the party, which “demanded an unquestioning discipline from its members which Beauvoir could not accept” (that ‘freedom’ issue, again), “espous[ing] the highly deterministic, orthodox version of Marxism (or, more precisely, Marxism-Leninism) that Stalin had formulated.” With Sartre, although never merely imitating him, she would develop an existentialist form of neo-Marxism, some of which entered the thought of the American New Left a generation later. Meanwhile, and in line with a French tradition dating back at least to Chateaubriand, she toured America in 1947. In her book, America Day by Day, she displays her by now well-honed capacity for the ambiguous and indeed ambivalent response: America was “the belly of the imperialist monster,” a land of “shrill anti-Communism” and “chauvinism,” itself conflicted with its “high-flown rhetoric of freedom” and its conditions of racism and poverty; “but she is also in love with the vibrancy of America, its sheer scale, its physical and social diversity, and its lack of stuffy European formality.”

Her most influential book, The Second Sex, elaborates on the question of the relation of freedom and the body. The argument is now familiar: “Women’s material dependence on men and their lack of control over their own fertility constitute fundamental elements of their oppression,” an oppression that Marxian economics alone cannot come close to relieving. Under current social conditions, a woman lives “continuously divided against herself”: both “an active subject,” a free person, and one “who is obliged to make herself both ‘object and prey'” in the mating game. Beyond the socioeconomic ‘class’ dialectics of Marx, she insists upon an underlying sexual dialectic centered on the body. Kruks doesn’t leave it there, however, showing how Beauvoir went on to criticize French imperialism in her 1954 novel The Mandarins, subsequently bringing sexual politics, imperialism, and her ‘existentialist’ preoccupation with the ultimate limit on freedom, death, all together in her substantial memoirs, weaving the personal with the political. “Simone de Beauvoir lived her philosophical orientation to the world.”

What blocked Beauvoir from having recourse to classical philosophy was her historicist rejection of the notion of human nature, and especially the idea that the distinctive human characteristic is the capacity to reason—which, however, she identifies with Kant’s “autonomous, rational will.” “Whatever there may be that is universal to human existence does not preexist particular lives and their specific projects and is brought into being only through them.” “Projects”: There is the modernist assumption that “freedom” consists of freedom from the physical; modern materialism puts this freedom in a precarious place, in a condition (as Beauvoir would say) of ambiguity and indeed of existential threat. She accordingly rejects contemporary ‘humanism,’ including the affirmation of ‘human rights,’ denying all remnants of human nature conceived as rational in the manner of Enlightenment thinkers and the historicists who followed. Beauvoir sees, however, that to throw the ‘human rights’ baby out with the ‘humanist’ bathwater can only lead to nominalism or even nihilism, as Hitler had so forcefully demonstrated. “A critical politics does still need to be anchored in some portrayal of what it is to be human.” (To put it in the language of a later notion of ‘deconstructionism,’ if we assert ‘the death of the subject’ how can the personal be the political?) Again, Beauvoir runs up against a problem well known to the classical philosophers she ignored, the distinction between ‘human being’ as an idea and ‘human being’ as a way of life. Unlike them, she assumes that rationality cannot be the source of freedom, as indeed it cannot if rationality’s most important discovery are ‘iron laws of history.’ She settles on understanding the human being as an “embodied subject”; “the lived body [is] ‘the radiation of subjectivity.” “No exterior reality determines our choices”—as in Hegel and Marx—”yet situations that we cannot but assume may so powerfully predispose us to act in particular ways that freedom may, in practice, be significantly curtailed.” Freedom comes not from the culmination of a rationally-determined historical dialectic but in strengthened social relations “chosen, built, and sustained in the here and now”—existentially, as it were.

Aristotle finds in the reciprocal rule of husband and wife in the household the nucleus of political rule in the polis. In her own way, so does Beauvoir: As subjects, the ‘otherness’ of others “is rapidly tempered by the reciprocal realization that each one of us is an object for the other, who is thus, like us, a subject.” Unlike Aristotle, she requires that such reciprocity meet the standard of egalitarianism; in this, she registers the democratic sociopolitical regime described by Tocqueville, although unlike Tocqueville she allows it to determine her moral and political doctrine. In this sense, she is no philosopher, having never ascended from the ‘cave’ of her time and place.

In considering oppression, Beauvoir doubts that Hegel’s ‘master’ in the ‘master-slave’ struggle for recognition truly esteems his masterly status because it exacts recognition from ‘his’ slave. Upon reflecting on Beauvoir’s work, Kruks identifies three kinds of oppression: asymmetrical recognition, indifference, and aversion. Dehumanization is the most extreme form of oppression. As seen in the Nazi extermination camps—where human beings “were just so much material to be processed efficiently”—to the old-age or (as they are called) retirement homes, where “the aged are frequently viewed as nothing more than pure objects,” dehumanization means treating the subject as object, as in Hegel. But of course there is a difference between dehumanization motivated by extreme aversion, as in the ‘camps,’ and the milder aversion seen in our attitudes toward the aged, as in the ‘homes.’ Sexual politics, in distinction to both of these, derives from asymmetrical recognition; it isn’t that men don’t recognize the subjectivity of women but rather that they subordinate it by the deployment of self-satisfying myths about ‘The Woman.’  In Beauvoir’s witty formulation, The Woman is “the mirror in which the male Narcissus contemplates himself,” or, as Kruks more prosaically puts it, “the object of male fantasies.” Such ‘objectifying asymmetrical nonrecognition also describes the ways in which Europeans (mis)understand Africans, Asians, even Americans. In America itself, dehumanization manifests itself most usually in an indifference fortified by complacency in contemplating the abstract principles of the Declaration of Independence and of constitutional law.

There is a difference between the dehumanization of the aged and the other kinds. The others are remediable. Although the attitudes toward the aged taken by their relatives and caretakers may be changed, aging itself cannot. Kruks remarks that, unlike The Second Sex, Beauvoir’s late book, The Coming of Age, does not conclude with a section on liberation. To borrow a Sartrian phrase, there is no exit in this life from the coming of age. “With the approach of old age one makes the startling discovery that one’s body, in its brute physical facticity, is itself ‘Other.'” Aging kills not only our bodies but our “projects,” our freedom, along with them. The old man does nothing: “He is defined by an exis, not a praxis.” She blames capitalism for this, inasmuch as “for many, a prior life of alienated labor also means that they have no existential resources to enjoy the enforced ‘leisure’ of retirement.” Old age “exposes the failure of our entire civilization,” Beauvoir writes, hyperbolically. She does not explain why socialism, as distinguished from, say, religious convictions, could help, and Kruks has nothing much to suggest, either.

Unlike many socialists from middle- or upper-class backgrounds, Beauvoir confronted her own privilege. Drawing upon Beauvoir’s thought but also supplementing it, Kruks insists on the limitations of “a politics of self-transformation” often seen among contemporary leftists, including feminists. She blames this on “a tacit neo-Kantianism” which centers on recognition of ‘the Other’ as “an autonomous rational will.” But as Beauvoir argues, and as Kruks agrees, rationalism, however well-intentioned, won’t bring us to a condition of fully egalitarian practice. “It may be preferable to acknowledge that one is privileged but then to act from one’s privileged location: to deploy one’s privilege as effectively as possible.” Beauvoir herself began to see her own privileged position as the Algerian war of independence from France intensified in the late 1950s. In the face of French brutality in Algeria, she could not deny that she was not French. But neither did she attempt to reject “her own privileged culture, or her privileges as an intellectual” within it. “Aware of her privileged status, she instead learned to deploy it as a basis for effective, public, political intervention.” Against French nationalism vis-à-vis the Algerians, she in turn deployed an appeal to patriotism, to France as the vindicator of The Rights of Man. “In actuality, Beauvoir supported a project of decolonization that did bring very significant changes in the world (not all of them perhaps for the best).” Indeed: As Kruks observes, the Third-World ‘liberation’ movements included the 1979 Iranian revolution, itself a denial of the rights of women Beauvoir had championed for so long; she broke with such French leftists as Michel Foucault, who foolishly and unjustly supported the mullahs when they “demanded that women wear the veil.” In her own way still a child of the Enlightenment, Beauvoir didn’t like veils on anything or anyone.

Such conflicts bring Kruks back to Beauvoir’s theme of the ambiguity of politics, and of human life generally. Beauvoir rejected reason as the standard of political judgment. As “acts of situated freedom,” political judgments are and should be made “with our entire being,” including our bodies, emotions, and “personal history.” Hence she treats political judgment most thoroughly in a novel, The Mandarins, not an essay. There, the main character arrives at the same political judgment Beauvoir espoused in the late Forties: alignment with a ‘third way’ democratic-socialist party in France but geopolitical support for the Soviet Union, which, “for all its deformations,” remains “the greatest force for progress and, as such, must be given support” against capitalist, imperialist America. Such judgments must always be open to revision, however, given exactly the self-knowledge they require, and also the limitations of our knowledge, both of our situation and our selves. “A political judgment is, even at its best, but an informed and reasonable guess, one made by a particular, ‘idiosyncratic’ self in a particular situation—and like all human action it is subject to failure.” (As indeed Beauvoir’s assessment of the Soviet Union so obviously was.)

“That these personal elements play a role does not mean, however, that reason is absent,” but rather that “political judgment must be understood as an existential choice.” Although Kruks doesn’t emphasize this point, she should, inasmuch as in the absence of reason, which is really nothing more than the principle of non-contradiction, judgments and choices would descend to incoherence or, when coherent, they would be so by chance, at random.

Prudential reasoning informs political life, but its end is justice, the topic of Kruks’s final chapter. Given Beauvoir’s socialism, one expects a discussion of distributive justice, but Kruks makes the more interesting choice, turning to the question of punitive justice. In her 1946 essay, “An Eye for an Eye,” Beauvoir considers the case of French Nazi collaborator Robert Brasillach, who had publicly identified Jews and Resistance members during the Occupation, effectively guaranteeing their “deportation, torture, or execution.” An opponent of capital punishment before the war, Beauvoir admitted that her heart wanted Brasillach dead. She distinguished punishment, defined as “the purely retaliatory treatment that revenge demands,” from sanctions, “those penalties that have intended purposes other than revenge,” such as deterrence or reform. “Revenge as a response to atrocity is almost always a failure on its own terms” because it cannot erase the effects of the crime. Nonetheless, true to her contention that judgment is not and should not be wholly rational, she finds hatred of “those who commit absolute evil” and “appropriate response”—a passion but not “a capricious passion.” This especially pertains to bystanders, those not directly injured by the wrongdoer; their response expresses “the inherent sociality of individuated existence,” the “intense personal bonds” we feel for those unjustly and cruelly injured and killed. Human sociality constitutes part of “who I am.” “For our world is suffused, our existence shaped, by our participation (often unchosen) in various anonymous social collectivities.” Although Kruks herself doesn’t approve of it, Beauvoir refused to sign a petition asking for clemency for Brasillach. Brasillach deserved to suffer the death penalty, in Beauvoir’s judgment, “as an expression of society’s extreme revulsion at [his] violation” of “the values that his crimes [had] violated.” Kruks prefers our contemporary ‘truth and reconciliation’ committees, whereby societies turn to a sort of therapeutic response to atrocity. She concedes that many members of those societies find reconciliation as unsatisfying as she (and to some degree Beauvoir) find punishment and sanction. As Beauvoir concluded at the end of her essay, “failure haunts all human action, love as much as vengeance.” The persistent ambiguity of human thought, sentiment, and action did not impede her “struggle for greater freedom in the world.”

Kruks’s helpful, comprehensive view of Beauvoir’s political thought shows a thinker who, beginning and remaining entirely within the horizon of ‘late-modern’ or post-Kantian political thought, with its valorization of freedom in opposition to ‘nature’ conceived as brute matter, nonetheless can be seen as struggling with the same considerations of prudence and of justice seen in Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero. Never having studied them carefully, she ties her own thought into unnecessary knots. Given the seminal character of her best-known book, The Second Sex, her argument there should be considered in light of the handicap imposed by her own intellectual formation.

As an advocate of freedom, Beauvoir begins with critiques of the three most prominent determinisms of the time: biology, Freudian psychology, and Marxism. “The fact is that the individual, though its genotypic sex is fixed at fertilization, can be profoundly affected by the environment in which it develops.” She concurs with Hegel’s judgment that biology enables men to act as ‘subjects,’ as individuals well adapted for activity, “while the female remains wrapped up in the species.” By this she means that after copulation the male mammal is free to leave whereas the female is stuck with pregnancy. Men create; they “strike out from temporal unity in general.” Women maintain; “in the female it is the continuity of life that seeks accomplishment” in her. “The individuality of the female is opposed by the interest of the species; it is as if she were possessed by foreign forces—alienated.” This begins well before pregnancy in menstruation and continues after it in nursing the child. The woman’s individuality remains “the prey of outside forces” until another ‘outside’ force, menopause, relieves her of these natural cycles; throughout her life, “there are many times when she is “not in command” of herself. “In comparison with her the male seems infinitely favored: his sexual life is not in opposition to his existence as a person, and biologically it runs an even course, without crises and generally without mishap.” Beauvoir resolutely overlooks the satisfaction that women take in their womanhood, and especially in child-rearing.

What she does insist upon is that although these “biological facts… are one of the keys to the understanding of woman,” they do not “establish for her a fixed an inevitable destiny” and remain “insufficient for setting up a hierarchy of the sexes.” “Woman is weaker than man” (not for her the absurd claim of some later feminists, that opening up sports for girls will result in women competing on an equal basis with men on the athletic field), but her weakness “is revealed as such only in the light of the ends man proposes, the instruments he has available, and the laws he establishes”—seen particularly in violent competition. “Thus we must view the facts in of biology in the light of an ontological, economic, social, and psychological context”; “the nature of woman has been affected throughout the course of history.”

Turning then to one of those elements, psychology, she observes that “all psychoanalysts systematically reject the idea of choice and the correlated concept of value, and therein lies the intrinsic weakness of the system.” (Decades later, feminists who argued in favor of the right to abortion ‘on demand’ framed the issue in exactly Beauvoir’s existentialist terms, as a matter of free choice.) Freud, for example, “endeavored to replace the idea of value with that of authority; but he admits in Moses and Monotheism that he has no way of accounting for this authority.” In contrast, “I shall place woman in a world of values and give her behavior a dimension of liberty,” with “the power to choose between the assertion of her transcendence [of biological and other determinisms] and her alienation as object.”

The same goes for historical materialism. Contra Marx, Beauvoir contends that the aforementioned “course of history” is not destiny. Although “the theory of historical materialism has brought to light some important truths”—notably, that “humanity is not an animal species” and “human society” arises against nature, “tak[ing] over the control of nature in its own behalf” by its “practical action.” But the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate also relieves woman’s estate, beginning to “annul the muscular inequality of man and woman.” It also liberates women from much household drudgery (without the need to enslave other human beings) and even liberates them from multiples pregnancies and from some of the burdens of child care. Marx and Engels misunderstood gestation and childbirth as ‘labor’ in the sense of artificial production; gestation and labor, and especially the sexual impulse that leads to them, register more than “productive force” in the manner of carpentry or welding. Woman “is for man a sexual partner, a reproducer, an erotic object—an Other through whom he seeks himself.” Even under the democratic socialism Beauvoir advocates, after the abolition of social classes, “sexual differentiation would keep all its importance” (emphasis added).  “Underlying all individual drama, as it underlies the economic history of mankind, there is an existentialist foundation that alone enables us to understand in its unity that particular form of being which we call human life.” For Beauvoir, for existentialism, the modern conquest of nature and the freedom it gives to the conquerors, relativizes all determinisms that modern scientists and philosophers have held up in its wake.

Indeed, history amounts to the story of this progressive conquest redounding to the favor of women. In the earliest societies nature bound women down with pregnancy and children; the true curse laid upon Eve was her exclusion from the “warlike forays” of men, “for it is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal,” thereby “transcending” mere life by inventing tools (including weapons) and generally “shaping the future.” If this sounds very much like Hegel, Beauvoir acknowledges that indeed it does: “Certain passages in the argument employed by Hegel in defining the relation of master to slave apply much better to the relation of man to woman.” “Doomed to immanence”—the opposite of manly transcendence—for centuries, women slowly began to benefit from the victory of “Spirit” over “Life,” of “technique over magic, and reason over superstition.” Because woman instantiates the larger immanence of nature itself (more tellingly, ‘nature herself’), “the devaluation of woman represents a necessary stage in the history of humanity.” But this is only a dialectical stage, not a permanent condition, and it too shall be transcended. There are even foreshadowings of future equality in some historical moments, such as ancient Egypt, where the goddesses lived on equal footing with the gods and “woman had the same rights as man, the same powers in court,” and the same property rights. Although Beauvoir doesn’t say so, this means that the exodus of Jews from Egypt was a dialectical reversal of that early, just social condition, for which humanity as a whole was not yet prepared; in fact she will go on to excoriate Judaism and Christianity for their masculinism.

“Christian ideology has contributed no little to the oppression of women,” subordinating them under its legal code and banning abortion as a result of “endowing the embryo with a soul”; abortion thus “became a crime against the fetus itself,” which it never had been under the preceding Roman law. In “demand[ing] a new status,” today’s women “wish that in themselves, as in humanity in general, transcendence may prevail over immanence.” She avers that “it is in Soviet Russia that the feminist movement has made the most sweeping advances,” citing as evidence the constitution of the Soviet Union—not necessarily the most reliable reflection of the realities of the Soviet way of life.

As in history, so also in myths, which persist into modern times. “The cult of the leader, whether he be Napoleon, Mussolini, or Hitler, excludes all other cults.” Bizarrely (given the status afforded to Lenin, Stalin, and soon to Mao Zedong), she claims that “socialist ideologies, which assert the equality of all human beings, refuse now and for the future to permit any human category to be object or idol: in the authentically democratic society proclaimed by Marx there is no place for the Other.”

Leaving aside her pro-Communist niaseries and looking at the core of her argument, one notices that Beauvoir has a problem to solve. The earliest religions, matriarchies, valorized Woman but also identified her with nature, with immanence. Ultimately, Man must rebel against her. “It was Christianity, paradoxically, that was to proclaim, on a certain plane, the equality of man and woman” in its renunciation and indeed hatred of ‘the flesh’ along with the world and the devil. Women are equally invited to renounce the flesh, which they (in Beauvoir’s terms) live in and through. “If she agrees to deny her animality, woman—from the very fact that she is the incarnation of sin—will be also the most radiant incarnation of the triumph of the elect who have conquered sin.” However, she can only do this by worshipping and serving Jesus as the Christ—a male god. “This is the supreme masculine victory.” It can only be overturned dialectically by valorizing eroticism as the new spirituality, by a sort of Hegelian synthesis of body and spirit, immanence and transcendence, all expressed in social egalitarianism. This is possible because human life itself consists not only of the bodily but of a tension between body and spirit, necessity and freedom. “The bond that in every individual connects the physiological life and the psychic life—or better the relation existing between the contingence of an individual and the free spirit that assumes it—is the deepest enigma implied in the condition of being human, and this enigma is presented in its most disturbing form in woman.” “What is she?” For her answer Beauvoir again calls upon Egypt: Woman is “a sphinx,” the riddle, “a fundamental ambiguity” who—and that—must be addressed.

In the second half of The Second Sex Beauvoir accordingly abandons consideration of history and mythology, turning to “woman’s life today.” The modern world is the world of human transcendence, of nature-conquest. To be sure, men have led the way so far, but their victories have readied the world for the ascent of woman, that is, for full human liberation. In terms of this non-deterministic version of historicism, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” a being produced by “civilization as a whole,” a civilization that aims at such liberation by the means of conquering nature. Even in the course of nature itself, the pre-pubescent girl is physically and mentally equal to her male cohort; such feelings of inequality she may entertain result from social indoctrination, especially from bans on risk-taking—climbing trees, fighting. But with puberty, nature imposes restrictions. The girl finds herself now “consumed in waiting, more or less disguised.” “She is awaiting Man,” daydreaming of “the liberator,” the “rich and powerful” Prince Charming. To attract him, she must cultivate “grace and charm,” appearing “weak, futile, docile.” Whereas “the young man’s journey into existence is made relatively easy by the fact that there is no contradiction between his vocation as human being and as male,” the young woman becomes “divided against herself,” “doomed to insincerity and all its subterfuges.” On the other hand, this conflict, this ambivalence, causes her inner life to “develop more deeply than that of her brothers”; barred from action, she must think. Her eroticism is, because it must be, much less unsubtle than the man’s. Also, despite her natural inclination to maintain rather than to create and transcend, the woman’s life cycle manifests itself in “crises—puberty, sexual initiation, the menopause—which are much more decisive than in the male.” Natural reality stares the woman in the face more intently. Oddly, Beauvoir additionally contends that these facts makes the woman less socially conformist than men; she could only be thinking of herself, and not the generality of women, who are surely no less conformist than men.

Already, in 1949, the conquest of women has transformed marriage into a contract between “two independent persons.” Marriage for the woman is “a more advantageous career than many others,” inasmuch as most jobs are still closed to her, but it is nonetheless a career choice, not a necessity. “Today the house has lost its patriarchal splendor,” having become merely “a place to live in,” no longer the locus of ancestor-worship, as it was in ‘the ancient city’ described by Fustel de Coulanges. Middle-class women who “lack outside interests” will busy themselves with make-work projects, “just to have something to do.” (Indeed, one of the ‘moms’ in my old neighborhood would clean the house every day, topping this off by a weakly waxing of the patio tiles, and then prohibit her husband and their three sons, as well as the rest of us, from entering her spic-and-span domain without removing their shoes.) And when she does find something to do outside the home, typically her activities amount to good-works civic associational activities, undertaken again for the sake of warding off boredom—Tocquevillian civil society gone pretentious and silly. (To some extent, Beauvoir needs to denigrate women’s ‘clubs,’ given her commitment to a statist socialism that would absorb such things into its all-encompassing egalitarian embrace.)

In her drive to liberate women from what has been considered necessity, Beauvoir does not hesitate to attack the continued valorization of motherhood. Returning to abortion, she claims that laws against abortion rest on “the old Catholic argument” that “the unborn child has a soul, which is denied access to paradise if its life is interrupted without baptism.” But, she objects, the Church does not oppose capital punishment or war; indeed the Holy Wars were launched against the unbaptized. In this she ignores the obvious point that murderers and marauding anti-Christian soldiers deliberately oppose Christian principles and practices, unlike unborn children. And of course by rejecting natural right she can simply avoid the question of a natural right to life. As for the mother who gives birth, she “is almost always a discontented woman” who attempts “to compensate for all [her] frustrations through her child,” spanking her child as a means of “taking her vengeance on a man, on the world, or on herself.” It is again difficult to resist the thought that Beauvoir takes a jaundiced view toward mothers and their supposed discontentedness. She also overlooks the maternal love of one’s own, which explains the ambitions mothers entertain for their children at least as well as displaced frustration. Admitting the strength of the love of one’s own would throw both her eroticism and her socialism into serious question.

Summarizing her analysis, Beauvoir writes that “Woman does not entertain the positive belief that the truth is something other than men claim; she recognizes, rather, that there is not any fixed truth,” a recognition based on the decided changes in her own body that occur at certain junctures in her lifetime. In denying the fluidity of truth, man is the one who is finally the greater hypocrite, “pompously thunder[ing] for his code of virtue and honor” while secretly inviting woman “to disobey it” and confidently expecting her to do so. “Man gladly accepts as his authority Hegel’s idea according to which the citizen acquires his ethical dignity in transcending himself toward the universal, but as a private individual he has a right to desire and pleasure,” marrying one woman and frolicking in a whorehouse with another, or others. Under these circumstances, woman consoles herself with religion, “the mirage of some form of transcendence.”

Beauvoir assures her readers that a forthrightly atheistic if not materialist democratic socialism will change all this. Equal work, equal pay, “erotic liberty,” consensual marriage which can be broken “at will,” free contraception and abortion, State-paid pregnancy leaves, State-sponsored child care (children will not “be taken away from their parents” but “would not be abandoned to them” by society): “Only in a socialist world” can these dreams be realized. The Hegelian dialectic will be consummated in mutual recognition of man and woman, but without any permanent ‘synthesis’ or ‘end of History,’ inasmuch as “sexuality will always be materialized [in] the tension, the anguish, the joy, the frustration, and the triumph of existence.” Nature, conquered, will also be redeemed as fully human, as Marx promises. By sexualizing Hegel and Marx, Beauvoir corrects them, relieving their theories of excesses of masculine ‘transcendence’ while making socialism more humanly satisfying, less Heaven-like.

Having remained entirely within the horizon of modern philosophy, Beauvoir underestimates nature both as a physical entity and as a source of right. (It almost goes without saying that she rejects God as the ultimate source of right.) Accordingly, she assumes that she can maximize freedom and equality at the same time, a circle not so easily squared if one respects the integrity of circles and the principle of non-contradiction. In presenting laws of change as an account of Being as a whole, Hegelian logic aims at overcoming that principle, of incorporating it into a larger movement. Beauvoir’s version of Hegelian and Marxian dialectic partakes of the dubiousness of its forebears, but it has succeeded in bringing modern feminism along with it.

 

 

Ross Abbinnett: Politics of Happiness: Connecting the Philosophical Ideas of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Derrida to the Political Ideas of Happiness. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.

 

Aristotle understands happiness as the exercise of the distinctively human virtues, not as a mood or a feeling. The small polis, where fellow-citizens knew one another, might be conducive to the cultivation of character. The large, modern state, with its impersonality and the mass-life that lends itself to fleeting satisfaction of their conjuring by entrepreneurs public and private, makes Abbinnett long for a less atomized, more “collective pursuit of the good life.” Yet how can such a collective pursuit succeed if conducted within the framework of the modern state? Abbinnett sensibly rejects the modern ideologies that promise happiness wrongly understood, but nonetheless stays entirely within the philosophic parameters set by those who substituted ‘History’ for natural right and the God of the Bible for its moral standard. He concludes by eschewing the grander promises of modern utopianism while remaining hopeful for some other, more modest socialist proposals.

He begins by objecting to defining happiness in exclusively individualist terms. “The experience of happiness… is essentially related to ideas of the good society and to the forms of individual life that are appropriate to it.” He defines such ideas not as discoveries about human nature—an idea he rejects—but as the products of historical formation; indeed, the ‘individual’ itself is such a product. Availing himself of the jargon of neo-Marxist thinker Theodor Adorno, he describes the modern individual “cut off from the satisfactions of God and ethical life, and subjected to a regime in which work and desire have been synthesized into modalities of the commodity form.” That is, the Enlightenment valorization of rationality, especially of instrumental rationality, has been combined by the modern regimes with a ‘work ethic’; this strategy alienates human beings from their own natural sense of happiness in order to “maximiz[e] the efficiency of production.” Under capitalism, “The original ethos of Enlightenment philosophy, which was the emancipation of humanity from its subjection to the gods and to nature, is transformed into a regime of control in which every aspect of human particularity is expressed as a quantum of productive potential.” Our ‘happiness’ now consists of effects “controlled by the standardized aesthetics of the culture industry”—Hollywood films, music, and so on.

Abbinnett, however, would ‘complexify’ Adorno’s analysis. The “politics of happiness” that has emerged under the thought-regime of Enlightenment and the political-economic regime of capitalism derives from “three different, opposed, but essentially related versions of what Enlightenment is, and what its moral, ethical, and political consequences have been.” These versions are stated by Hegel, with his ethics of ‘recognition’; Nietzsche, with his “critique of metaphysics”; and Derrida, “the relationship between the ‘self’ and ‘other’ that has arisen from Enlightenment ideals of transparency and calculability,” including the Hegelian Enlightenment.

The sensible side of Abbinnett’s project may be seen in his insistence that “political ideologies are attempts to realize impossible regimes of happiness” because there remains “an essential difference between practical and philosophic politics.” Such ideologies as utilitarian liberalism, Marxism, and fascism fail to see and accept this difference, which consists in the distinction between “a reflective consideration of the questions of freedom, solidarity, and well being posed by the contestation of ideologies”—that is, the contradictions among political opinions—and “the attempt to solicit the support of the masses through representational techniques”—rhetoric, broadly defined. Abbinnett’s own commitment to a form of ‘postmodernism’ in philosophy wedded to a form of socialism in practice may be seen in his preference for ideologies capable of opening themselves “to the experience of difference as a possible source of education or desire”; for example, he prefers ‘multiculturalism’ to more strictly defined understandings of what an ethically sound ethos is.

He begins with liberalism—not the natural-rights liberalism of Hobbes or Locke but the utilitarian liberalism of Bentham. Bentham grounds happiness in a human nature that does not itself have moral content, but simply must be accommodated because its core, pleasure and pain, is ineluctable. For Bentham, “any practical, theoretical, or moral principle that violates the capacity of human beings for the enjoyment of pleasure is, by definition, perverse and sophistic.” By his account, moral obligation arises not from duty but from a sentiment, sympathy—itself pleasurable. “The sheer immediacy of the physical sensation of pleasure… is the one true source of human happiness,” the “ultimate good for which all human beings exist.” Rejecting the moral claim of the ‘ancients,’ who integrated “enjoyment into the economy of sacrifice and deferral that is proper to the moral community of the Polis,” Bentham subordinates all political and social institutions to the pleasure of individuals. His successor, John Stuart Mill demurs to the extent that he insists that “not all pleasures are equal” (famously, in Mill’s words, “it is better to be a human being satisfied than a pig satisfied”); nonetheless, Mills also subordinates the modern state to the happiness of individuals, thus redefined and ranked. But this, Abbinnett argues (following Mill, as it happens) undermines the legitimacy of unbridled capitalism, leading at very least to welfare-state liberalism or to democratic socialism.

Hegel moves in for the kill, rejecting utilitarian individualism for the social-political concept of ‘recognition.’ For Abbinnett, the crux of Hegel’s refutation points to the inadequacy of any notion of happiness that refers only to the individual and its physical satisfaction; human satisfaction filters through our social relations, how we understand ourselves in large measure by our exposure to the opinions of others, very much including their opinions of ourselves. For his part, Nietzsche attacks even this wider conception of happiness or satisfaction, although he shares with Hegel a disdain for “the proliferation of desires that takes place through the modern market economy,” whose ‘consumerism’ collides with the inevitable fact of death. Famously, Nietzsche analyzes human life not in terms of the dialectics of recognition but in terms of the will to power, which Hegelian ‘recognition’ merely exemplifies. Hegel’s rational, administrative state is only another example of the modern state itself, that “cold monster,” as Nietzsche calls it.

To counter the modern dilemma, Nietzsche proposes self-overcoming, including the rejection of the terms of utilitarian pleasure seeking and of Hegelian (and Marxist) sociality. Overcoming physical appetites and aversions and also social ambitions and worries requires fearlessness, risk, living dangerously. Abbinnett contends that liberalism under Nietzsche’s influence becomes the ‘neoliberalism’ or libertarianism of Friedrich von Hayek (unjustly, he should rather have said Ayn Rand), with its esteem for entrepreneurial risk-taking and innovation, a “quasi-Nietzschean vitalism.” But this only returns us to capitalism’s “constant expansion of desire” in the individual, again subject to the ultimate limitation of death, and of the fear of death. Abbinnett implausibly attempts to tie this form of neoliberalism to Francis Fukuyama’s argument in The End of History, at the price of ignoring the Platonic dimension of Fukuyama’s argument, which grounds his thought in an understanding of human nature well beyond utilitarian pleasure and pain, and also beyond Nietzschean spiritedness, and not simply in ‘History.’ He goes on to charge Fukuyama with “conceal[ing] the modes of violence and subjection through which global-technological capitalism operates.” Abbinnett needs to do so because he rejects the idea of human nature as a ‘constant,’ whether so conceived as an existing ‘constant’ (as in natural-rights and also utilitarian thinkers) or as a future one (as in the Hegelian-Marxist ‘end of History’).

Abbinnett charges liberalism and its capitalism (or, as he might say, capitalism and its liberalism) with a self-contradictory “demand for the constant expansion of the market” “completely uncoupled from the moral economy of collective wellbeing,” and thus with “the ethical questions that are implicit in the concept of happiness.” Can ‘postmodernism’ help?

No, at least not in its aestheticist forms. There can be no escape from modernity into, for example, music, as Schopenhauer urges. Here Abbinnett has recourse to Marx, for whom “the ‘happiness’ produced by the ideals of heroism, romantic love, freedom, and redemption that have come to dominate the artistic imagination can be no more than an illusion imposed upon the experience of alienation,” an experience produced by capitalism. Once again, however, Abbinnett wants to complicate matters, regarding Marxian materialism insufficient and recalling the seriousness with which Hegel, Nietzsche, and Derrida treat “the aesthetic dimension of modernity.” Hegel recalls “the aesthetic unity of the Polis,” which Romanticism, for all its irrationalism, nonetheless sought to recover for the modern world. True, the “beautiful soul” of Romanticism can never suffice by itself, but it forms a necessary part of Hegel’s dialectical synthesis. The “crude utility” of bourgeois life seeks escape into “Romantic fantasies,” but both utility and aesthetic satisfaction may be found in the craft and trade guilds that give modern civil society—otherwise restless and atomistic under conditions of capitalism—the stability human beings would otherwise lack under those conditions. Abbinnett takes the point, while deploring the “conservatism” of such “corporate” structures.

Nietzsche is no ‘conservative.’ He takes Schopenhauer’s analysis of music and removes its merely contemplative component, contending that “the choral accompaniment to the [Greek tragic] drama provokes feelings of ecstatic unity with those tragic individuals who have tested the authority of the gods.” The “transformative power of the tragic arises from a feeling of sublime unity with the primordial force of creation.” Such force never rests. Therefore, “the truth cannot be presented in a form that is free from stylistic configuration,” from the current but not lasting state of reality or ‘Being.’ ‘Being’ “has no objective existence that can be expressed independently of the mythological powers of Dionysus and Apollo,” that is, of irrational energy and rational form, both in constant flux. Modern ‘culture’ fails to cultivate; “the means of cultural dissemination”—serving the ‘many,’ the ‘masses,’ the demos—has “all but stripped the aesthetic of its relationship to the tragedy of ethical life, and transformed it into the medium of homogenous desire,” of egalitarianism. Democracy, socialism make “the highest end of humanity” nothing better than “the alleviation of all contingency in the mode of production,” the “alleviation of suffering” which simultaneously would amount to “the end of the possibility of happiness.” Without tragedy, no possibility of joy can survive. Socialism is only another power-relation, deriving from and not really overcoming “bourgeois culture.” Against this, Abbinnett recurs to “the cautious precision of Adorno’s negative dialectics,” which “remains suspicious of such solicitations of individual will and creative conflict” as theoretical invitations to fascism in practice.

Derrida to the rescue. At least partially. Derrida questions the “Socratic hegemony,” by which he means “the claim that the fundamental concepts deployed by philosophy as such are unaffected by the languages in which they are expressed.” But according to him, language is both conventional and to some considerable degree untranslatable; he offers a new and more sophisticated form of classical conventionalism, itself a form of pre-Socratic philosophy. Even Heidegger’s attempt to recover pre-Socratic thought is “contaminated by the abstract categories through which it is presented”; it gives insufficient weight to the vagaries of language, of convention. The vast quantity of conventions, of ‘differences,’ results in “constant transformation,” whereby (for example) “fascism re-emerges as the good defender of the homeland against immigration” and “socialism becomes the reactionary voice of the white working class,” all attempts at “conjur[ing] an experience of unity from an illimitable play of difference.” It is enough to make Abbinnett turn to Marx, as he does in his central chapter.

As is well known, Marx came to reject Hegel’s Absolute Spirit in favor of dialectical materialism. “Bourgeois ideals” have no existence independence of their economic base, that is, the means of production. Marxism persists, Abbinnett maintains, because it offers a “critique of the economics of waste”; it promises “the overthrow of the bourgeois state”; it proposes a “theory of the immanent purpose of human history” in the classless or egalitarian society; it provides a “theory of radical democracy and distributive justice” based upon that egalitarianism; and it offers “a theory of human flourishing.” But Derrida observes that Marxism, too, remains vulnerable to a “plurality of contestations” or contradictory opinions “through which the fate of Marxism is constantly redetermined.” As technology redefines our social world it also redefines Marxist categories; for example, the bourgeois-proletarian relations Marx saw no longer exist, at least not in anything resembling the modern societies of the mid-nineteenth century. Accordingly, there is always, and must always be, a ‘New’ Left, absent the ever-receding ‘end of history.’ Marx’s central ‘moral’ doctrine, the “labor theory of value,” comes into question under the very socio-economic change that Marx himself considered the energy and stuff of ‘History.’ Abbinnett nonetheless concedes to Marx that “any neo-Hegelian politics of happiness must… begin with Marx’s characterization of the bourgeois epoch as ‘everlasting agitation'” or dialectic. But it must not end there, given the violence of Marxian practice, which is “bound up with a mythology of natural happiness” or “species-being” (emphasis added), despite Marx’s historicist ambitions. “The programmatic liquidation of classes deemed to be reactionary elements of the old order makes no sense unless it is understood as an attempt to purify society of everything that could be considered acquisitive, individualistic, or bourgeois”; under such an ethic, ‘freedom’ “becomes utterly idealized and utterly destructive.” Given this grim fact, is it “possible to be a happy socialist”? Evidently not, inasmuch as “there is a tension between the ultimate satisfaction of man’s species-being under the conditions of socialized production and the power of capital constantly to transform the intellect, sensibility, and desire of human beings.” Accordingly, Abbinnett rejects Marxian “historical teleology” altogether.

Nietzsche, then? Abbinnett rightly observes that Nietzsche would regard Marxism as a result of democracy or egalitarianism and of embourgeoisement, and assuredly not of their overcoming. To Nietzsche, Marxism would offer only another “unitary regime of calculative materialism.” Marxism offers “the constant vacillation of workers’ movements between the utopian promise of universal creativity and the Sisyphean labor of equalizing the of all in the means of subsistence.” This notwithstanding, Abbinnett tries to redeem socialism in Nietzschean terms—a characteristic move of the ‘postmodern’ Left. He attempts to reconcile socialism with Nietzsche’s will to power. This, he sees, would entail “a total transformation of what ‘socialism’ means.” This will require “the power of those who have disciplined the chaos of their own organic nature to impose order on the formlessness of ‘the herd,'” the actions of “those ‘free spirits’ who are capable of enacting their desires.” “Can this Nietzschean genealogy of socialism be mapped onto the ethical, political, and epistemic assemblage of Marxism?” Abbinnett bravely asks. Yes, he answers (against those of us who would say, ‘Not really’): Marxism offers “the possibility of a radical transvaluation of the social covenant that comes with each new generation”; Marxian Nietzscheism would jettison Marx’s teleological scientism, Marx’s proud claim to have formulated the first scientific socialism. “New categories are required to understand both the experiences of suffering and exploitation that arise from the global networks of capitalism, and the technological integration of mind, organism, body, and life into the expanded regime commodification” seen in those networks. Abbinnett makes lemonade of the bitter lemon of the pursuit of happiness: Socialism’s “pursuit of universal happiness can neither be realized nor, as an inherently ethical demand, given up.” But if so, why does this not simply reproduce the Platonic and Aristotelian insight that theory is not practice, albeit at the service of a dogmatic egalitarianism?

Abbinnett devotes his final two chapters to disposing of two rivals to this highly attenuated Marxism, a Marxism in which the ‘neo’ overbalances the Marxism. In the first, fascism, he finds its “appeal” in an “aesthetic solicitation of suprahuman powers which exceed the commonality of human suffering,” an amoral and “destructive” culture which, in its purest form, Nazism, broke with the Christian Church and the regime of monarchy by determining “to colonize the feelings of sacred devotion that were inspired by the church” in a form of “volkish militancy” expressed by “the mass aesthetics of broadcast technologies” deployed in the service of “a politically transformative power.” On Nazism or national socialism, Abbinnett suddenly becomes much more concrete and political in his analysis, much less ‘spiritual’/philosophic than he was on neo-Marxian socialism. He can then claim, with Adorno, that “Nazism is essentially a politics of scapegoating” (emphasis added—an attack on Jews and other ‘others’—even though in practice Marxism has been no less ‘essentially’ that, with the target being socio-economic classes instead of ‘races.’ Although fascism in its Nazi form obviously derives from modern ‘race science,’ he describes it as “an ideology that promises happiness through the complete rejection of modernity, and the return to an archaic community of ‘blood and soil.'” But the Nazi community of ‘blood and soil’ would have nothing archaic about it. Aryan blood will extend throughout the soil of the earth, availing itself of modern technology as its legitimate tool of ruling those ‘inferior’ races Nazis choose not to exterminate.

Abbinnett offers this critique of fascism because he needs to turn Nietzsche into an egalitarian channel, a move that can only be pushed behind a very heavy plow. Nietzsche, he remarks, anticipates fascism with his hierarchy of the strong over the weak and his ‘biologist’ materialism. His valorization of “overcoming” “inevitably and necessarily lends itself to the intensification of life through the spectacle of violence,” which it would indeed, if Nietzsche were the straightforward materialist Abbinnett takes him to be. But Nietzsche despises anti-Semitism, biological or other, and his materialism entails a far more refined life of the mind than anything offered by the crudities of Marxism, ‘neo’ or Karlite. This is not to endorse Nietzscheism; it is to defend it against the likes of Adorno, Derrida, and other apostles of an uncritical egalitarianism.

Fascist pseudo-religiosity puts Abbinnett in mind of the real thing, to which he devotes his final chapter. Except he doesn’t write about the real thing, focusing instead on religion as conceived by Hegel and Nietzsche. For Hegel, he rightly observes, “revealed religion should act as an allegorical expression of spirit”—that is, the Absolute Spirit—”within the relations of civil society.” The separateness of the Holy Spirit from all created things, including man, distinguishes the Holy Spirit from Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, but the Christian teaching that God took human form, along with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit upon conversion, brings Christianity closer to Hegel’s doctrine than any other major religion. Abbinnett’s “principal concern” here “is the return of religion to the increasingly abstract, disenchanted, and antagonistic relations of modernity” after Nietzsche’s radical challenge to Hegelian rationalism. If the Enlightenment project has failed, then why would religion not return, as registered in (for example) Gilles Kepel’s The Revenge of God? Indeed, “as the world becomes increasingly abstract and technocratic, so the yearning for the experience of the sacred grows stronger.” Heaven forfend, Abbinnett in effect exclaims. “We must ask if the happiness of humanity will always depend on the power of sacrificial violence” (including the Crucifixion) “and the hope of transcendental unity with the divine” (which isn’t exactly what Christians hope for, but Hegelianized ex-Christians do). Abbinnett wants the answer to be ‘No.’

“From the perspective of orthodox Christianity, Nietzschean materialism is nihilistic because pure will, freed from its responsibilities to a transcendent God, has no concrete relation either to other human beings or to its own essence as a created form. From a Nietzschean perspective, on the other hand, Christianity is nihilistic because of its denial of the creative forces that brought form and vitality to human civilization.” Abbinnett declines to adjudicate the matter, preferring to address the sociopolitical consequences of Nietzsche’s challenge to Christianity and to the Enlightenment. “First, we are forced to reckon with the necessary involvement of religion with the secular forces that have formed the regime of domination that is peculiar to each different culture.” Second, “the death of religion that Nietzsche envisages” will end in its resurrection, a “reversion to orthodoxy” “within the globalized relations of modernity.” Third, the return of religion presages a return to the religious wars the Enlightenment hoped to end. Abbinnett hopes to turn this return to a more narrowly moral path: a politics of compassion, of “alleviat[ing] the suffering of the Other.” The political ramification of this morality is, of course, socialism.

For this purpose, he again appeals to Derrida, who “argues that there are two sources of the word religion, both of which are irreducible, and each of which is contaminated by the other”: religiere, derived from legere or harvest, gathering; and religare, derived from ligare, meaning to tie or bind. The ‘binding’ element consists of “blind faith in the sacred”; the ‘harvest’ element consists of a “discursive community of the book” which discloses the sacred. Abbinnett knows that fascism’s symbol, the Roman fasces, denotes binding, and that Hitler’s Mein Kampf amounts to an attempted Bible-substitute. This enables him to assert that fascism and religion bear resemblance to one another, issuing in similar calls for confessional purity and “holy war.” He ignores that Marxism operates exactly the same way; the modern tyrannies of the Right and the Left gather men together in bonds requiring self-sacrifice in violent struggle. He prefers a kinder, gentler Marxism, but one might as well prefer a kinder, gentler ‘authoritarianism’ of the Right. In this he follows Derrida, who finds “the essence of all religious faith” in “the original promise of religiere,” that the faithful “should seek the truth of God in whatever, or whomever, confronts the sacred community.” This reinvents Enlightenment religious toleration (while avoiding Enlightenment rationalism) under the rubric of ‘diversity.’

Abbinnett concludes with an inconclusiveness that follows from his argument. While “each of us experiences our own particular moments of joy, love, and ecstasy,” “contingent and unsustainable,” a politics of happiness cannot exist because political life, for all its turbulence, requires some degree of stability and sustainability—as suggested by the quintessential political term, ‘regime.’ The radical historicism Abbinnett shares with Heidegger and Derrida prevents  him from endorsing any real political order. His socialism is exactly that: a course of social relations, fluid and ever-changing, resistant to structure and duration, a thing founded (if that is the word) on egalitarian “mutual recognition.” In this it resembles the commercial capitalism he deplores. Like it, it would require defenders in order to survive those who are not egalitarians, but that would spoil it. “We must recognize that happiness is a moral experience that can only be approached through the presence of others, both familiar and unfamiliar, to whom we must respond without the expectation of requital.” But what if those others requite us the wrong way? Christianity says, Turn the other cheek. But Christianity has God as the final requite. Abbinnett’s endless ‘History’ does not.