Will Morrisey Reviews

François René vicomte de Chateaubriand: Travels in America. Richard Switzer translation. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1969.

 

In July 1791, Chateaubriand left for the newly-founded United States on a fishing vessel chartered for seminarians from Saint-Sulpice heading for Baltimore. He aspired to find the nonexistent ‘passage’ through the American Northwest to “the Polar Sea.” (“In France there is courage; courage deserves success, but deserving it does not always ensure it,” he now admits.) Like most French explorers, “lone men abandoned to their own devices and their own genius,” unaided “by the government or private companies,” Chateaubriand had no companions after he set foot on the dock. 

The France he left still had a king; Chateaubriand had served in the Royal regiment for several months during the winter of 1790-91. But “the revolution was proceeding rapidly: the principles on which it was founded were mine”—mostly derived from Rousseau—but “I detested the violence which had already dishonored it”; in America he sought “an independence more in conformity with my tastes, more in sympathy with my character.” He knew that many refugees from the revolution had already fled to the “land of liberty,” Ohio; “nothing better proves the high value of generous institutions than this voluntary exile of the partisans of absolute power to a republican world.” And more: “This continent unknown to the rest of the world through all ancient times and through many centuries of modern times; the first savage destiny of this continent, and its second destiny since the arrival of Christopher Columbus; the domination of the European monarchies shattered in this New World; the old society ending up in the young America; a republic of a kind unknown then, announcing a change in the human mind and the political order; the part my homeland had in producing these events; these seas and these shores owing part of their independence to the French flag and French blood; a great man coming forth in the midst of discord and wilderness; Washington living in a flourishing city in the same place where a century earlier William Penn had bought a bit of land from some Indians; the United States sending back to France across the ocean the revolution and the liberty which France had supported with its arms; finally, my own plans, the discoveries that I wanted to attempt in these native solitudes, which extended their vast kingdom behind the narrow empire of a foreign civilization—those are the things which confusedly occupied my mind.”

The young man wisely brought with him a letter of introduction to George Washington from the Marquis de La Rouairie, whom the General had known as “Colonel Armand,” having fought alongside him during the American revolutionary war. He took a stagecoach to Philadelphia, the nation’s capital, “rolling along the highways of the New World, where I knew no one, where I was known to no one at all,” along a terrain disagreeably flat and featureless. Philadelphia, however, proved “a beautiful city with wide streets” along the Delaware River, which “would be an impressive river in Europe” but “not remarkable in America.” Still, even a fine American city lacked the distinction of its European counterparts. There were few monuments and no old ones. “Protestantism, which sacrifices nothing to imagination and which is itself new, has not raised those towers and domes which the ancient Catholic religion has crowned Europe. Almost nothing at Philadelphia, New York, Boston, rises above the mass of walls and roofs. The eye is saddened by this level appearance”—what his older brother’s yet unborn nephew, Alexis de Tocqueville, would consider one aspect of democracy in America. “The United States gives rather the idea of a colony than of a nation; there one finds customs, not mores. One has the feeling that the inhabitants do not have their roots in the ground. This society, so fine in the present, has no past; the cities are new, the tombs date from yesterday…. There is nothing old in America save the forests, children of the earth, and liberty, mother of all human society; that is, in itself, worth many a monument and ancestor.”

The experience of American liberty shocked the twenty-three-year-old aristocrat, who had taken his republicanism from reading “the ancients,” schooling himself on “the rigidity of the early Roman manners.” On the contrary, in Philadelphia he saw “the elegance of dress, the luxury of carriages, the frivolity of conversations, the disproportion of fortunes, the immorality of banks and gaming houses, the noise of dance-halls and theaters.” He might as well have been “in an English town,” under a monarchic regime. “I did not know that there was another liberty, daughter of the enlightenment of an old civilization, a liberty whose reality the representative republic has proved. It is no longer necessary to plow one’s little field, reject art and science, have ragged nails and a dirty beard, in order to be free.” American liberty began to liberate him from Rousseau. And indeed he would return to France in the summer of 1792 after reading of Louis XVI’s arrest, fighting with the Army of Princes against the too-Rousseauian Jacobins, who had revealed themselves as no friends of liberty, ancient or modern. 

President Washington—according “to my ideas at the time,” Cincinnatus—did not disappoint. In him “I found the simplicity of the old Roman,” unpretentious, with “an air that was calm and cold rather than noble.” Neither, however, did Washington overawe him; “I admire [greatness of soul] without being crushed by it” while greatness of fortune “inspires me more with pity than with respect.” At table, he “listened to me with a sort of astonishment” when Chateaubriand described his project. The well-bred young man saved the moment by exclaiming, “It is less difficult to discover the Northwest Passage than to create a people as you have done,” earning himself an invitation to dine again the next evening. This time, the conversation turned to the French Revolution, Washington showing his guests a key to the Bastille, sent him by Lafayette. “If Washington had seen the conquerors of the Bastille in the gutters of Paris as I did, he would have had less faith in his relic. The seriousness and the force of the revolution were not in those bloody orgies.” 

“Such was my meeting with this man who liberated a whole world. Washington descended into the tomb before a bit of fame could be attached to my name; I passed before him as the most unknown individual; he was in all his brilliance, and I in all my obscurity. My name did not perhaps remain a whole day in his memory. Yet how happy I am that his gaze fell upon me! I have felt warmed by it for the rest of my life: there is a power in the gaze of a great man.”

Chateaubriand brings out the character of that greatness by comparing Washington to the other great man he met—Buonaparte, as he calls him, refusing to write the imperial name, Napoleon, with which the parvenu grasped at legitimacy. The Vicomte’s return to France from England in 1802 came when the Emperor granted a general amnesty to the political exiles. A year later, when The Genius of Christianity appeared, Chateaubriand found himself in favor, as his book comported well with the ruler’s courtship of the Catholic Church. But the following year Napoleon arranged the execution of Louis XVI’s cousin, Louis-Antoine, the Duke of Enghien, on false charges of conspiracy to overthrow him. Chateaubriand broke with him and soon found himself relegated to internal exile, away from Paris. “If one compares Washington to Buonaparte, man to man, the genius of the first seems less soaring than that of the second.” Washington was no Alexander, no Caesar, no lion or eagle among men. “He defend[ed] himself with a handful of citizens on a land without memories and without fame, in the restricted circle of the domestic hearths”; “he does not place his foot on the necks of kings” after defeating the greatest generals of his time, “rush[ing] from Memphis to Venice and from Cadiz to Moscow” across Europe and beyond it. 

Washington “acts slowly: one could say that he feels he is the envoy of future liberty and that he is afraid to compromise it. It is not his own destiny this hero of another sort bears, it is that of his country; he does not allow himself to toy with what does not belong to him.” His battle trophy was the United States of America. “Buonaparte has no trait of this grave American,” wishing “only to create renown for himself” and “hold[ing] himself responsible only for his own fate” in a mission he knows “will be short.” In “crushing [the anarchy] of the Revolution “he stifles liberty and finally loses his own liberty on the last field of battle.” Prometheus-like, chained to the rock of Elba, “as long as he struggles against death,” Europe “does not dare to lay down its arms”; once he died, “what did the citizens have to mourn?” “Washington raises a nation to independence; a retired magistrate, he peacefully falls asleep beneath his paternal roof amidst the regrets of his compatriots and the veneration of all peoples.” 

As a result of their lives, “the republic of Washington still exists” in 1827, when Chateaubriand published his Travels. “The empire of Buonaparte is destroyed.” Whereas “the name of Washington will spread with liberty from age to age,” marking “the beginning of a new era of mankind,” “the name of Buonaparte will also be repeated by future generations, but it will be attached to no blessing and will often serve as authority for oppressors, great or small.” [1] “Buonaparte could also have enriched the public domain: he was acting on the most civilized, the most intelligent, the bravest, the most brilliant nation of the earth. What would be the rank he would occupy today in the universe if he had joined magnanimity to what he possessed of the heroic, if combining Washington and Buonaparte at the same time, he had named liberty the heir of his glory!” But “in his eyes men were but a means of power; no sympathy was established between their happiness and his.” As the pharaohs of Egypt “placed their funeral pyramids not in the midst of flourishing countrysides but in the sterile sands,” where they “rise like eternity in solitude,” so “Buonaparte built the monument of his fame in their image.” 

From Philadelphia Chateaubriand journeyed to New York, “a gay, populous, and commercial city,” then to Boston “to salute the first battlefield of American liberty.” Later, in Albany, who finally met a man who talked sense to him about his proposed adventure. “Mr. Swift made some very reasonable objections.” I needed companions and equipment, and “even if I were fortunate enough to cross so much wilderness without accident, I would arrive in frozen regions where I would perish from cold or hunger.” “He advised me to begin by acclimating myself, by making an excursion first into the interior of America, learning Sioux, Iroquois, and Eskimo, living some time among the Canadian scouts and the agents of the Hudson’s Bay Company.” Annoyed but sobered, Chateaubriand hired a guide and horses, heading first for Niagara Falls, then to Pittsburgh and Ohio—without abandoning his hopes for find the Northwest Passage, later on.

Among the Iroquois near Albany, he met M. Violet, a “dancing master among the savages,” who played a fiddle while the Indians “jumped like a band of demons,” men and women “daubed like sorcerers, their bodies half naked, their ears slit, ravens’ feathers on their heads and rings in their noses.” “It was a rather strange thing for a disciple of Rousseau to be introduced to primitive life with a ball given for Iroquois by a former kitchen boy of General Rochambeau.” More somberly, Chateaubriand conversed with the Sachem of the Onondaga tribe of the Iroquois nation, who “complained of the Americans, who would soon leave to the people whose ancestors had welcomed them, not even enough earth to cover their bones.” Later, Chateaubriand remarks that “the nations that peopled [Lake Erie’s] shores were exterminated by the Iroquois two centuries ago,” refusing to make his hosts into mere victims, recognizing that what was soon to be done to them, more or less peacefully, they had done to others, violently.

The Indians themselves already had “taken on something” of European manners, with horses and flocks, cabins “filled with furniture and utensils bought at Quebec, Montreal, Niagara, Detroit, or the cities of the United States.” “Hospitality is the last primitive virtue remaining to the Indian in the midst of the vices of European civilization”; “once received in a cabin, one became inviolable,” as “the hearth had the power of the altar,” “mak[ing] you sacred.” In those homes, the children were “never punished,” obeying grandparents and mothers but not fathers. The children nonetheless remain unspoiled. “If the savage child obeys no one, no one obeys him: there lies the whole secret of his joy and his reason,” since if they were to demand anything of their parents they would simply be ignored. They pay attention to their fathers not as patriarchs but as exemplars, each boy “studying the arts that he sees his father practicing.” “They are neither noisy, annoying, nor surly; they have in their appearance something serious like Happiness, something noble, like independence.” Were we Europeans to attempt to raise children this way, “we would have to start by relieving ourselves of our vices.”

It was on a river somewhere near Lake Superior, alone in nature and not with human beings ‘white’ or ‘red’ that Chateaubriand could at last, if briefly, fall into a Rousseauian reverie, as he recorded in his diary at the time. “The sky is pure over my head, the water limpid under my boat, which is flying before a light breeze…. Primitive liberty, I find you at last! I pass as that bird who flies before me, who travels haphazardly, who has only an embarrassment of riches among the shadows. Here I am as the Almighty created me, the sovereign of nature, born triumphantly by the waters, while the inhabitants of the rivers accompany my course…. Is it on the forehead of society or on mine that is engraved the immortal seal of our origin? Run and shut yourselves up in your cities; go and subject yourselves to your petty laws; earn your livelihood by the sweat of your brow, or devour the pauper’s bread; slaughter one another over a word, over a master; doubt the existence of God, or adore him in superstitious forms. I shall go wandering in my solitudes.” He had the wit and the realism to add, “Without the mosquitoes, this place would be very agreeable.”

Men fight over such natural beauty and fertility. In Kentucky, “for more than two centuries the nations allied with the Cherokees and those allied with the Iroquois nation fought each other over hunting rights there. No tribe dared settle on this battlefield.” But “will the European generations be more virtuous and freer on these shores than the American generations they have exterminated?” No: slaves will “till the soil under the whip of the master in this wilderness where man paraded his liberty,” with “the riches of the soil bring[ing] about new wars.” Still, there remains the wilderness itself, where “fireflies shone in the darkness and were eclipsed when they crossed a moonbeam.” “The traveler’s reverie is a sort of plenitude of the heart and emptiness of the mind which allows one to enjoy his existence in repose: it is by thought that we trouble the felicity which God gives us: the soul is peaceful; the mind is troubled.” The older Chateaubriand simply comments, “The 36 years that have passed since my trip have brought much enlightenment and changed many things in the Old and the New World; these years have necessarily modified the ideas and rectified the judgments of the writer.”

How so? Chateaubriand continued his researches in the intervening decades. More than half of his book consists of his discoveries in the books of others—his narrative of the North American voyage drifting off after his account of Kentucky, like the rivers there. He seems to have been determined more to preserve and publicize knowledge of the vanishing Indians than of the rising Americans, perhaps assuming that the Americans would take care of themselves. As an ardent reader, if no longer a disciple, of Rousseau, he finds the American Indians more interesting than the American Europeans or their African slaves. As a professional writer, he may also have an eye on the interests of his own readers. As of the 1820s, Chateaubriand could still write that his account of the Indians’ ways of life “shows America as it is today.” Only a few years later, Tocqueville would reverse his great kinsman’s emphasis, calling attention not to the Indians, whose aristocratic moeurs would die with them, nor even to the American Founders (although he took considerable care to describe their handiwork, the U.S. Constitution), but to the way of life of what he called the world’s “sample democracy,” in whose civil-social equality he saw the future of both republicanism and despotism in the modern world.

Regarding the “manners” of the Indians, Chateaubriand corrects Rousseau. “There are two equally faithful and unfaithful ways of painting the savages of North America.” You might “speak only of their laws and their manners, without entering into details of their bizarre customs and their habits which are often disgusting to civilized men.” If so, “all you will see will be Greeks and Romans, for the laws of the Indians are grave and their manners often charming.” Alternatively, you might reverse this approach, looking solely at the Indians’ customs and habits, ignoring their law and manners. “Then you will see only the smoky, filthy cabins to which retires a kind of monkey endowed with human speech.” But are you sure that your European ancestors were any better? A Roman writer “complained of being forced to listen to the language of the German and to frequent the Burgundian who rubbed his hair with butter” (not unlike the experience of cultivated persons in the America of the 1950s, forced to listen to barbaric slang and to frequent youths who dosed their hair with Vitalis). “Indeed, I do not know if the hut of old Cato in the land of the Sabines was much cleaner than that of an Iroquois. Sly Horace might leave us some doubts on that score.” To invoke our contemporary language, Chateaubriand is no ‘racist.’

He also recognizes ‘diversity’: “If one gives the same traits to all the savages of North America, the portrait will be unrealistic; the savages of Louisiana and Florida differed in many ways from the savages of Canada.” He will generalize without losing sight of particulars.

In considering any regime, one wants to know who rules. Generally speaking, “age is the source of authority” among the Indian nations and tribes. “The older a man is, the greater his influence”; the Great Spirit being eternal, He is the patriarch of patriarchs. The patriarchs perpetuate their rule initially by an engagement ritual, whereby the family of the young man proceeds from the elder’s cabin to the cabin of the girl’s mother. They consult her dreams. If favorable, the wedding will proceed; if unfavorable, the dreams may be “conjur[ed] away” by “hanging a red necklace on the neck of an idol of oak.” Chateaubriand adds, “Among civilized men too, hope has its red necklaces and idols.” After that, “a considerable wait ensues before the conclusion of the marriage,” as “the prime virtue of the savage is patience,” the virtue of hunters and warriors, who stalk their prey, and of gatherers and farmer, who wait upon the seasons. Closer to nature than the civilized man, the savage has no timepieces to rule him. “Whatever the young man’s passion, then, he is obliged to affect an air of indifference and to await the orders of the family,” occupying his time by building a new cabin. 

Peoples who live according to nature must view war differently than civilized peoples do. “In Europe they marry in order to escape the military laws; among the savages of North America no one could marry before having fought for the homeland. A man was not judged worthy of being a father until he had proved that he could defend his children.” This “manly custom” means that a man isn’t eligible for marriage unless he is a warrior and that “a warrior did not begin to enjoy public consideration until the day of his marriage,” until he shows readiness to procreate in peace, to perpetuate the nation in addition to defending it. Polygamy and even permission to “offer their wives and daughters to strangers” aim at strengthening families, not at weakening them, as such practices would do in Europe. “They think that they will make their family happier by changing the paternal blood”—a sort of controlled radicalization of the incest prohibition, the protection against inbreeding. To the Indians, such practices have a spiritual dimension, too, as they believe “it is the father who creates the child’s soul; the mother engenders only his body.” They choose the names of their children from the maternal line, intending the child to take “the place of the woman whose name he has received,” giving “life, so to speak, to the ancestors,” “communicat[ing] a kind of immortality to the ancestors, by supposing them present in the midst of their posterity” and “augment[ing] the attention the mother gives childhood by reminding her of the attention given hers,” with “filial tenderness redoubl[ing] maternal love.” 

The intention of linking those alive to those who are dead—of maintaining the bonds of families, of tribes, and of nations across generations—also accounts for the extraordinary “veneration for the dead” seen among the American Indians. “Lawful property is recognized only where the ancestors are buried,” which is why Indians show such revulsion against selling their lands. “Shall we say to our fathers: Arise, and follow us to a foreign land?” [2] Chateaubriand attributes this conviction to one of the differences between savage and civilized peoples. “Civilized peoples have monuments of letters and arts to preserve the memories of their homelands”—great cities, with their “palaces, towers, columns, obelisks,” expanses of cultivated fields, written chronicles. “The savages have nothing of all that.” Even their “traditional songs vanish with the last memory that retains them, with the last voice that repeats them. Therefore for the tribes of the New World there is only one monument: the tomb. Take away from the savages the bones of their fathers, and you take away from them their history, their law, and even their gods; in the eyes of posterity you strip these men of the proof of their existence as well as the proof of their nothingness.”

Indeed, “the true God makes Himself felt even in the false religions, and the man who prays is worthy of respect,” as the Indians show themselves worthy in their celebrations of marriage, funerals, and harvests. For the Indians as for “the ancient Greeks and most primitive peoples,” religious observance comes less in the form of words than of action, in dancing. “They dance to receive a guest, to smoke a peace pipe; they dance for the harvest; they dance for the birth of a child; they dance above all for the dead.” They dance for the hunt and the dance for a war, when the procession of warriors is followed by the march of “the medicine man, the prophet or augur interpreter” of dreams. Upon returning from a military expedition, “heads, hearts, mutilated members, and bleeding scalps are hung on pikes planted on the ground. They dance around these trophies, and the prisoners who are to be burned are present at the spectacle of these horrible pleasures.” In Shakespeare’s plays depicting then-recent English history, the heads of dead captains were exhibited on the heads of pikes.

It is almost needless for Chateaubriand to say that the Indians lack modern science. Looking at the night sky, they “scarcely know anything other than the north star,” which “serves as their guide at night.” They know their territorial surroundings intimately, however, and if they would “ban from the treatment of the ill the superstitious customs and the quackery of the priests, they would know all the essentials of the art of healing,” as their knowledge of herbal medicine “is almost as advanced among them as among the civilized peoples.” Chateaubriand has some (uncharacteristically Voltairean) fun describing the ministrations of the ‘medicine men.’ With respect to childbirth they take the opposite view of ‘the moderns’: Faced with a “difficult birth,” they “suffocate the mother, who, struggling against death, delivers her fruit by the effort of a last convulsion. They always inform the woman in labor before having recourse to this means; she never hesitates to sacrifice herself.” Indeed, when demanding respect for ‘indigenous cultures,’ egalitarians frequently overlook such customs, among which is the common feature of the four principal Indian languages, namely, the use of “two genders, the noble gender for the men, and the nonnoble gender for the women and male or female animals.” “In saying of a coward that he is a woman, the word woman is made masculine; in saying of a woman that she is a man, the word man is made feminine.”

The way of life common to all the Indian nations and tribes is warfare. “War is the great affair of the savages and the foundation of their politics; it has about it something more legitimate than war among civilized peoples because it is almost always declared for the very existence of the people who undertake it: it is a matter of preserving hunting lands or fields appropriate for farming. But by the very reason that the Indian applies himself to the art which causes death only in order to live there result from it implacable furies among the tribes: they are fighting over the family feuds. The hatreds become individual; as the armies are not large and each enemy knows the name and the face of his enemy, they also fight fiercely through antipathies of character and by individual resentments; these children of the same wilderness carry into their external quarrels something of the animosity of civil disputes.” Warriors compose one-fifth of the community, with fifteen being “the legal age of military service.”

The tribal council decides on war, although their resolution “binds no one” and “taking part is purely voluntary.” In preparing for that war, the military chief or sachem withdraws from the community for two days and the women are forbidden to approach the warriors, “although they may speak” to the sachem, “whom they visit in order to obtain from him a portion of the booty taken from the enemy, for the savages never doubt the success of their enterprises.” Only then do the warriors approach him, telling their plan of battle. As in so much else, the warriors sing, vaunting over the atrocities they intend to commit. (“I shall cut off the fingers of my enemies with my teeth; I shall burn their feet and then their legs.” Cole Porter would have no place.) The warrior’s song also extols “his own honor” and the honor of his family. His audience responds in kind: “Nothing is as noble, nothing is as handsome” as the warriors; “they have all the qualities and all the virtues.” Chateaubriand adds that “the Spartans had this custom too.” In keeping with this military ethos, in wartime “the natural indolence of the savages is suddenly replaced by an extraordinary activity; the gaiety and martial ardor of the young men communicate themselves to the nation. There are established kinds of workshops for the manufacture of sleds and canoes”—a rare instance of manufacturing industry in a martial civil society. The one check on a military expedition is religious. If the medicine man, or even one of the warriors, suffers from an unpropitious dream the action is called off. Thus “absolute liberty and unenlightened religion govern” hand-in-hand.

On the battlefield, the warriors taunt their rivals, calling each other “limping, cross-eyed, short; these words inflicted on the self-esteem augment their rage,” with “the frightful custom of scalping the enemy heighten[ing] the ferocity of the combat.” “This trophy is often taken with such skill that the brain is left uncovered without having been penetrated by the point of the instrument.” Honor, ferocity, battle-trophies and spoils: the thumotic character of the Indians’ regimes slights rational strategy, as “it is rare for the victors to pursue the vanquished”; they would rather “stay on the battlefield to strip the dead, to bind up the prisoners, to celebrate the triumph with songs and dances” and to “mourn the friends they have lost.” The corpses themselves are a valuable source of protein. As for the prisoners, the women “have a fine privilege” of saving them by “adopting them as brothers or husbands,” especially if the women “have lost brothers or husbands in the battle.” Once adopted, a defeated warrior never betrays his saviors, showing “no less ardor than his new compatriots in bearing arms against his former nation,” to the extent of killing his father or his son in the next battle. Unsaved prisoners are burned alive, as proposed in the battle hymns; alternatively, they might merely be enslaved. There are some variations among the nations when it comes to prisoners, however. “The Iroquois, renowned moreover for their cruelty towards prisoners of war, had a custom one would almost say was borrowed from the Romans, which bore evidence of the genius of a great people: they incorporated the conquered nation into their own nation without making them slaves; they did not even force then to adopt their laws; they only subjected them to their customs.” 

The work of Christian missionaries has softened some of these severities. “It was in the name of a God sacrificed by men that the missionaries obtained the abolition of human sacrifice. They planted the cross in place of the torture stake, and the blood of Jesus Christ redeemed the blood of the prisoner.” In reaction, “the Sachems, rigid partisans of the old customs, deplored that humaneness, a degeneration they said, of the old virtue.” O tempora, O mores. More generally, the influence of Christianity has “wiped out” the practice of worshipping the sun and its concomitant use of public sacrifices. Indians have retained their Manitous, typically a bird, fish, or other animal, although sometimes an inanimate object, chosen by each person and held as sacred to him. “The hunter is careful never to kill or wound the animal he has chosen for Manitou.” This is in keeping with the Indians’ animism, whereby not only men but animals are said to have souls animated by “divine intelligence.” Surrounded by nature, the Indians have no understanding of nature as philosophers understand it; they believe that natural objects can change their shapes, like Ovids who take their poetry as knowledge.

As indicated in the description of warfare, “dreams play a great role in the religion of the savage; their interpretation is a science, and their illusions are held for realities.” With a remaining trace of Rousseau, Chateaubriand comments, “Among civilized peoples, it is often the contrary: the realities are illusions.” “You can find in all that enough religion, falsehood, and poetry, to learn, to be led astray, and to be consoled.” 

With regard to politics, Chateaubriand corrects the mistaken claim that American Indians have no governments, their lives never having left the level of the family and its patriarch. In fact, “among the savages are to be found all the types of governments known to civilized peoples, from despotism to republic, passing through monarchy, limited or absolute, elective or hereditary.” They have also discovered federalism—necessary because the extent of their territories makes it impossible to govern far-flung tribes within a given nation from a central location, when it comes to routine matters. Human beings are indeed political animals, as “men need to protect themselves against the arbitrary before fixing relations with one another”; for this reason, “political laws are born spontaneously with man and are established without antecedents” and are “found among the most barbarous hordes.”

By contrast, civil laws such as laws governing private property and criminal law are formed not by necessity but by customs, and were initially enforced by families. “Vengeance was justice: natural law prosecuted among the uncivilized that which public law reaches among the civilized.”

All the North American Indian nations share some political characteristics. As mentioned, they are divided into tribes. Each tribe has a hereditary chief and a military chief, whose right to rule derives from election, “as among the old Germanic peoples.” Each tribe has its own name and emblems, the latter used as insignia in war and seals on treaties. As in ancient Greece and Rome, names of both tribes and individuals derive from some circumstance of their lives or some distinctive characteristic, e.g., Beaver Killer, Broken Leg, Beautiful Voice.

The national councils consist of tribal chiefs, military chiefs, matrons, orators, medicine men, although they “vary according to the makeup of the peoples. Although “nations so simple should have nothing to debate in politics,” council deliberations are often complex, covering treaties, embassies, alliances, elections, offers of mediation. “All these affairs are discussed with order; the reasons pro and con are clarified,” often with “a profoundness and judgment few statesmen in Europe would be capable of.” 

As to the several regimes seen among the Indian nations, Chateaubriand begins with despotism, “such as is found among most of the peoples of Asia and such as there existed in Peru and Mexico.” Wherever they are established, such regimes may feature “luxury and administration” but at the cost of civilizational stagnation, as the tyrant “always keeps the right of life and death over his subjects, and they are careful to close themselves up within a mediocrity which excites neither the cupidity nor the jealousy of power.” Without reward for industry, “the genius of man” never “arrive[s] at liberty through enlightenment.” In North America, the Natchez nation, originally from Mexico, exemplifies the despotic regime. Among the Natchez, the tyrant, likening himself to the sun, claimed ownership over the harvest, enabling him to control the distribution of wealth and to invent a “hierarchy of offices which involves a host of men in power through their complicity in oppression.” Each subject “saw himself obliged to bear to The Sun a part of his hunt or his catch,” to obey him without hesitation or compensation, and to submit to judgments by the Sun under laws the Sun ordained. His female counterpart, the Squaw Chief, took for herself “as many husbands and lovers as she wished”; “she then had the objects of her caprice strangled.” To keep the tribal chiefs satisfied with his rule, the Sun decreed “a general prostitution of the women, as it was practiced at certain Babylonian initiations.” Religious superstition was encouraged by priests intent on “fortify[ing] tyranny by the degradation of the people’s reason.” At the funerals of the chiefs more than 100 subjects were sacrificed in an act of mass suicide, their oppressors “abandon[ing] absolute power in life only to inherit the tyranny of death.” 

Summarizing the general characteristics of the Natchez regime, Chateaubriand observes: “On one side naked men, the liberty of nature; on the other, demands without equal, a despotism that goes beyond the most formidable examples among civilized peoples. The primitive innocence and virtue of the political state in its cradle, the corruption and crimes of a decrepit government: what a monstrous combination!” Without private property, for which “the savage nations” have “an invincible aversion,” and with the crops stored in granaries controlled by the chief, the Natchez suffered. Once the public granary was destroyed and the public field was divided into family plots, each worked and harvested but not owned by a family, the Natchez began to prosper. As for the Sun and the Squaw Chief, they “were only remembrances of the past, remembrances useful to the peoples, with whom it is never good to destroy the authority of the ancestors.” The Natchez “continued to maintain the perpetual fire in the temple; they did not even touch the ashes of the old chiefs placed in that edifice because it is a crime to violate the asylum of the dead, and, after all, the dust of tyrants presents lessons as great as that of other men.” 

The Muskogee nation (dominant partners with the Seminoles in the Creek confederation) has a limited monarchy. Their chief is called the Mico; he receives ambassadors and other foreigners and presides over the council, convoking to deliberate on questions of war and peace. Elected by the council of tribal elders and confirmed by the warriors, he “must have spilled blood in combat or have distinguished [him]self by force of reason, genius, or eloquence,” owing his power “only to his merit.” “In the council itself, where he receives so many honors, he has only his voice; all his influence is in his wisdom.” Mothers discipline their children by warning, “Be careful, the Mico sees you”—inculcating “the invisible despotism of virtue.” He wields the same “dangerous prerogative” as the Sun once held among the Natchez, control of the public granary; so far, he has not abused it. 

The Mico and the council of elders reverse the functions of officers in limited monarchies seen among “civilized peoples,” with the Mico making the laws and the council executing them. “These savages thought perhaps that there was less peril in vesting a council of elders with the executive power than in putting this power in the hands of a single man,” while “a single man of mature age and of a reflective mind better elaborates laws than a deliberative body.” This arrangement has worked well but the council suffers from what Chateaubriand judges to be “a capital vice,” having placed itself “under the immediate direction of the grand medicine man, who leads it through fear of enchantments and through the interpretations of dreams.” The Muskogee priesthood thus “threatens to capture various powers.”

The warriors serve under a completely independent war chief. Consonant with their military way of life, the Muskogees “seized Florida after having wiped out” or having enslaved “the Yamasees, its first inhabitants.” They forced the Seminoles into confederation with them. “Inclined to idleness and feasting,” renowned for their poetry and music, they have slaves to cultivate the land, although a married slave’s children “regain their natural right” of liberty “by birth.” “The misfortune of the parents is not passed on to their posterity; the Muskogees did not want servitude to be hereditary: a fine lesson that savages have given to civilized men!”—most noticeably the European Americans who live nearby. This notwithstanding, the Yamasee remain “timid, silent, patient, abject” even in freedom: “Such is slavery,” which, “whatever its mildness…degrades the virtues.” “This Yamasee, former master of the Floridas, is still of the Indian race; he fought like a hero to save his country from the invasion of the Muskogees, but fortune betrayed him. What made such a great difference between the Yamasee of old and the Yamasee of today? Two words: liberty and servitude.” Europeans, take note.

Far to the north, the Hurons and Iroquois live under aristocratic “republican” regimes. The Hurons supplement their tribal council with a hereditary chief, who rises to power through matrilineal succession. If war or disease extinguished a royal line, “the noblest matron of the tribe” chose the new chief; “the influence of women must have been considerable in a nation whose politics and whose nature gave them so many rights.” Whereas in Asia “the women are slaves and have no part in the government,” but are “spared in general from the harshest work of the fields,” and among nations of German origin “the women were free, but they remained strangers to the acts of politics,” among Amerindian tribes women “participated in the affairs of state but were employed at those painful tasks which have devolved upon man in civilized Europe.” “Slaves and beasts of burden in the field and on the hunts, they became free and queenlike in the family assemblies and in the nation’s councils,” in a manner reminiscent of the ancient Gauls.

The Iroquois originated in the Huron nation, leaving it to settle on the south bank of the Saint Lawrence River. Initially “a peaceful agricultural nation,” they developed warlike characteristics in their struggles with the Adirondacks (now called the Algonquians), “a warlike hunter people” who scorned “the emigrating Hurons.” “Resolv[ing] to perish to the last man or to be free,” the Iroquois discovered in themselves “a warrior genius, which they had not suspected,” defeating the Algonquins, who then allied themselves with the Hurons and the French. After the Dutch arrived at Manhattan, the Iroquois acquired firearms, “in a short time” becoming “more skillful in operating those arms than the whites themselves.” An “implacable” war began, lasting “more than three centuries,” at the end of which “the Algonquins were exterminated and the Hurons reduced to a tribe taking refuge under the cannon of Quebec,” settling along the shores of what’s now called Lake Huron.

The Iroquois republic has three councils: the council of participants, the council of elders, and the council of warriors—a version of what Aristotle calls a mixed regime. The council of participants, the “supreme council,” represents families; representatives are elected by the women, “who often choose a woman to represent them.” The male-dominated council of elders served as a body to which decisions of the council of participants could be appealed. Thus, while “the Iroquois had thought that they should not be deprived of the aid of a sex whose unbounded and ingenious mind is very resourceful and is capable of acting on the human heart,” they “had also thought that the decrees of a council of women could be impassioned.” The council of elders “tempered and so to speak cooled” their decrees, serving also as “the moderator between the council of participants and the council composed of the body of young warriors,” another group of persons inclined to be impassioned. 

Not every member of the councils enjoyed the right to speak in meetings. Instead, each tribe chose orators, individuals who had “made a particular study of politics and eloquence.” In Europe and (as Chateaubriand likely recalls) in France, giving such importance to designated rhetoricians “would be an obstacle to liberty.” Not so among the Iroquois, because the individual members of the councils never felt bound by the deliberation of the councils. Consent was based on deference to elders, not obedience to decrees. This way of life retained the spirit of liberty without undermining social and political order.

The Iroquois republic was federal as well as aristocratic. They divided their nation into five cantons, entitled to “make peace and war separately.” In case of disputes, neutral cantons offered “their good offices” to both sides. As a result of all these institutions, “the Iroquois were as famous for their politics as for their arms,” and this included foreign policy, where they deployed a balance-of-power strategy against the French and the English, although they usually favored the English, who counterbalanced the alliance of the Algonquins and the Hurons with the French. 

“Such was the Iroquois before the shadow and the destruction of European civilization were extended over him.” Generally, Chateaubriand estimates, there are now no more than 400,000 Amerindians in North America. They remain valiant warriors. Only a decade earlier, seeing an opportunity during the War of 1812, the Creeks fought hard against the Americans, at times practicing cannibalism. Although he doesn’t seem to know about the Washington Administration’s earlier policy of regime change, he sees its effects: “These savages had made notable progress in civilization”—indeed, the Americans had numbered them among the “Five Civilized Tribes” in the southeast since the Founding period. This progress was especially noticeable in “the art of war,” as they used artillery with great effect. Politically, they had instituted a rather rough form of impeachment, “judging and put[ting] to death one of their Micos…for having sold lands to the whites without the participation of the national council.” Now, in 1827, the state of Georgia claims that it bought the “rich territory” of the Muskogees and the Seminoles; although “the American Congress has placed an obstacle before this claim…sooner or later the Creeks, the Cherokees, and the Chickasaws, pressed in the midst of the white populations of Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia, will be obliged to undergo exile or extermination.” 

The future looks no better for the northern tribes and nations. Alcoholism, disease, and war, “which we have multiplied among the Indians, have precipitated the destruction of these peoples.” But these are not the sole reasons for Indian “depopulation.” “The Indian was not savage; the European civilization did not act on the pure state of nature; it acted on the rising American civilization; if it had found nothing, it would have created something; but it found manners and destroyed them because it was stronger and did not consider it should mix with these manners.” Catholicism, with its long experience in prudently melding Christianity with paganism, would have done better than Protestantism did in implementing such a strategy. “The Protestant governments of America occupied themselves little with the civilization of the savages; they thought only of trading with them. Now commerce, which increases civilization among peoples already civilized and among whom intelligence has prevailed over manners, produces only corruption among peoples whose manners are superior to their intelligence.” Having learned to barter with the Europeans for arms, alcohol, and trinkets, they declined. Dealings with these foreigners also deranged the Indians’ regimes, corrupting the delicately balanced councils when wars did not kill their leaders. By now, in the 1820s, most tribes “are simply led by a chief”; their councils are ineffectual. And with the establishment of American and English military outposts in tribal territories, Indians come to expect gifts and protection from these new ‘chiefs,” finally coming to “look upon [themselves] as a species inferior to the white.” “What need to govern oneself when one has only to obey?”

What if Europeans had never landed in the Americas? “Putting aside the great principles of Christianity, as well as the interests of Europe, a philosophical spirit could wish that the people of the New World had had the time to develop outside the circle of our institutions.” If so, “who knows whether we would not have seen one day land on our shores some American Columbus coming to discover the Old World?” Alternatively, “I wondered” if France had retained its colonies until the time the American English won their independence. “Would this emancipation have taken place? Would our presence on the American soil have hastened it or retarded it? Would New France itself have become free? Why not?” Chateaubriand thinks that France’s fortunes on continental Europe would have been better, with a place to send its excess population, a large market for its products, timber for its navy. Instead, “we are excluded from the new universe where mankind begins anew.” “France has disappeared from North America like those Indian tribes with which she has sympathized and of which I glimpsed a few remains.”

“If I were to see the United States again today, I would no longer recognize it: there where I left forests, I would find plowed fields; there where I cleared a trail for myself through the brush, I would travel on highways. The Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Ohio no longer flow in solitude; great three-masted vessels sail up them and more than 200 steamships animate their shores,” now dotted with cities. This new regime cannot but influence old Europe, whose scholars and writers initially “had not the least idea of the revolution which in the space of forty years took place in men’s minds.” But beyond the material riches of America, the “most precious” treasure has proved to be liberty; “each people is called upon to draw from this inexhaustible mine.” “The discovery of the representative republic in the United States is one of the greatest political events in the world. That event has proved…that there are two types of practical liberty. One belongs to the infancy of nations; it is the daughter of manners and virtue—it is that of the first Greeks, the first Romans, and that of the savages of America. The other is born out of the old age of nations; it is the daughter of enlightenment and reason—it is this liberty of the United States which replaces the liberty of the Indian.” Only a few years later, Tocqueville would describe this as the replacement of aristocratic liberty with democratic liberty.

Chateaubriand wonders if America can “preserve her second kind of liberty.” It may well divide. “Has not a representative of Virginia already defended the thesis of the old Greek and Roman liberty with the system of slavery, against a representative of Massachusetts who defended the cause of modern liberty without slaves, such as Christianity has made it?” And will the western states, far removed from the Atlantic states, “not want a separate government,” too? Will “foreign immigration” not “destroy the homogeneity” of the Americans? And “will not the mercantile spirit dominate” Americans, making “self-interest begin to be the dominant national faith,” again to the destruction of the nation by civil or international war? Chateaubriand expects international war to come not from Europe but from the new republics of Spanish America, where republicanism has taken a very different form, inflected as it has been by Spanish customs, ideas, principles, and prejudices, including a disinclination to educate the people. [3] “If the military spirit took hold of the United States, a great captain could arise,” and “liberty is not certain to preserve her patrimony under the guidance of victory,” any more than France had done, after the victories of Napoleon.

Even so, “liberty will never entirely disappear from America.” Ancient liberty, “daughter of manners,” proved more fragile than modern liberty, “daughter of Enlightenment.” Manners are readily corruptible by the advance of civilization itself, with its “brilliance and luxury.” Enlightenment still “shines after the ages of oppression and corruption,” fortifying itself with time; “thus it does not abandon the liberty it has produced,” being its “generative virtue.” Chateaubriand holds out this hope, perhaps, more for Europe, still afflicted with the political descendants of Bonaparte and the Jacobins, than for America, whose dangers lay ahead. 

Chateaubriand concludes with an account of the end of his trip. He returned to Europe in July 1792. “A simple argument between me and my conscience brought me back to the theater of the world.” He had left for the United States “full of illusions; France’s troubles were beginning at the same time as my life was beginning; nothing was finished in me or my country.” He never discovered the Northwest Passage and so “had not carried glory away from the midst of the forests where I had gone to seek it” but had rather “left it behind sitting on the ruins of Athens.” And so he ceased being a traveler in America and “returned to be a soldier in Europe.” This vocation of the sword failed him even as the vocation of the staff had done. There remained the vocation of the pen. His readers already knew that this was his true vocation, so he does not pause to say so.

 

Notes

1. See Montesquieu: “Dialogue between Sulla and Eucrates,” for the same observation regarding the legacy of tyrants who restore republicanism, or claim to restore, republicanism.
2. See Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges: The Ancient City, for the same observation.
3. Chateaubriand prefers not republicanism but “representative monarchy” as the regime appropriate for the much more heterogeneous populations of South America. “From the Negroes, Indians, and Europeans has come a mixed population, lethargic in that very gentle slavery which the Spanish manners establish wherever they reign.” Constitutional monarchy would serve such societies better, as that regime “destroys individual pretension to the executive power and unites order and liberty.” Unfortunately, already “talented people are rapidly disappearing” from the region. “A tiny Europe is being arranged patterned on mediocrity; to reach the new generations it will be necessary to traverse a desert.”

 

 

Albena Azmanova: Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Crisis or Utopia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020.

 

In both intelligence and experience, Albena Azmanova stands well above the common run of contemporary ‘Leftists’ (and ‘Rightists’). As a young Bulgarian dissident during the Cold War, she had occasion to see the difference regimes can make in the lives of those who live under them. Unlike many of her political friends from that place and time, she has remained steadfast in her commitment not only to democracy but also to the Marxism which animated the regime she opposed. Not really that Marxism, however: rather, the neo-Marxism seen in the writings of the Frankfurt School—Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, Jürgen Habermas (although, thankfully, she does not write with the latter’s turbid verbosity). [1] She wants a much more radically egalitarian form of society worldwide, as against both capitalism and liberal democracy, although in principle she refuses to elaborate on exactly what the regime replacing existing regimes would be. “The current possibility for an exit from capitalism does not demand a guiding theoretical elaboration of postcapitalism.” We’ll work that out when the time comes.

Capitalism today has produced an anxious, insecure world “facing the abyss as an accumulation of ecological, social, and economic problems have put it on edge, if not quite brought it to the edge of existence.” Indeed, throughout its history capitalism has “thriv[ed] through seemingly endless crises,” its death much predicted but never consummated. Azmanova would point her readers toward “easing our way out of capitalism without necessarily embracing socialism” and without “revolution,” by which she means violent regime change. She suggests that the West of the early 2020s may teeter in a way similar to the late-1980s communism she detested—that is, a condition ready for radical but peaceful transformation. Capitalist democracy may be subverted, against those on the ‘Right’ who would stabilize it, those on the radical ‘Left’ (and, one might add, the radical ‘Right’) who would overthrow it, and those on the ‘Center-Left’ who would reform it. To subvert capitalism in this way would be to “strike at the driving force of capitalism,” namely, “the competitive production of profit” which, she contends “is destroying human existence, communities, and our natural environment.” 

She calls this “malignant” contemporary capitalism “precarity capitalism,” characterized by “the universalization of insecurity, which is now afflicting the majority of the population, almost irrespective of employment type and income level.” True, “capitalism as an engine of prosperity is doing well.” But capitalism as a spoiler of our ways of life, cutting across the variety of political regimes, has generated “forms of suffering and injustice for which the old lexicon of progressive politics—which saw injustice mainly as a matter of inequalities and exclusion—has no available concepts” and can offer no realistic proposals for “radical transformation.” 

Capitalism intertwines with regimes—what Azmanova calls ‘democratic’ or, more precisely, republican political structures in the West, wherein citizens either ‘politicize’ or fail to politicize “society’s afflictions” by presenting or failing to present those afflictions “as issues demanding political attention and policy action.” “As per Marx’s original analysis,” she “views all forms of capitalism as intertwined dynamics of emancipation (that is, alleviation of oppression) and domination.” She intends “to detect progressive tendencies” within contemporary capitalism “while bringing to view the oppressive and exploitative processes at work.” She expects no genuine ‘existential’ crisis to topple capitalism; as seen in the aftermath of the 2008-09 recession and other apparent crises over the centuries, capitalism is a thing of formidable ‘staying power.’ Now as then, there is no “wide consensus among political and intellectual elites on the need to save society from the market,” nor is there any such consensus among non-elites. “There is a general tacit acceptance of the situation: we are taking pride in being resilient.” If anything, “over the past hundred years, the energies of protest have been gradually deflating from revolution to reform, resistance, and now resilience.” Frustrations remain, often powerfully so, but thus far “people have channeled their social frustration” either by hating “the super-rich” or by “xenophobia”—sometimes both. This isn’t a matter of what Marxists call ‘false consciousness’ so much as confusion caused by the recent substitution of one form of capitalism for another; neither elites nor ‘the people’ have caught up with the change.

Before describing that change, and offering her critique of democratic capitalism, Azmanova owes her readers an explanation of how she understands the “social theory” that frames her description and provides her criteria of judgment. With Marx, she rejects ‘idealism’—roughly defined attempting to set up an abstract standard of social justice by which one then evaluates existing conditions. Rejecting “utopian socialism,” she too offers “no detailed account of a post-capitalist society.” For Marx (taking his model from liberal theorists of capitalism, and particularly of markets), “communism is the realization of democracy as spontaneous self-organization of the people”; similarly, Habermas envisions “a public sphere and a lifeworld untainted by the instrumental logics of power and money,” with details to be worked out later. In Azmanova’s own words, “the proper purpose of critique, and of political action guided by it, is emancipation, not justice.” It should be remarked that Marx proposed an intermediate stage between capitalism and communism, namely, socialism, an economic and political condition that proved wide enough to drive ‘totalitarian’ or modern-tyrannical trucks through. Evidently, Azmanova expects “critique” to ward off that threat, partly because the persons offering the critique will have come out of the modern liberal democracies. She is silent on what would come out of, say, China, where ‘democracy’ has remained illiberalism and ‘capitalism’ has, too.

She summarizes “twelve tenets of critical social theory” as propounded by the Frankfurt School. The first is Marx’s: the point is not only to understand the world but to change it—in Marx’s circumstance, to end the “worker exploitation” seen in nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. Second is the practice of “immanent critique,” eschewing any “imaginary ‘independent’ point of reference from which standards of justice are supplied a priori” but instead taking the existing moral commitments of “modern liberal democracies”—generally, “individual autonomy and equality of citizenship within collective self-determination”—and proceeding from these regimes’ “self-understanding and assessment,” “notwithstanding conflicting interpretations of these ideas the inhabitants of these societies might have.” Thirdly, the analyst must be especially alert to those conditions within contemporary conditions that enable the formation of “a just social order” (defined in terms of the second tenet) and specify the processes for attaining it. This is the “deliberative” part of Habermas’s “deliberative democracy.” When examining those conditions themselves, the Frankfurt School emphasizes “the relational nature of [social] practice”; this includes its analysis of economics. Not only markets but all social relations “form a continuum of intersubjective practices invariably imbued with power and containing their own ever-shifting action orientations”—an “economy of practices” throughout society.

The fifth tenet of the Frankfurt School is to understand society as a system, by which Marx meant society not as a “composite of individuals,” as in original modern liberalism, nor as an undifferentiated collective or ‘mass’ but as “a structured form of social relations” wherein, and whereby, individuals follow their power-imbued practices according to pathways laid down in law and in custom. When those pathways cause suffering, Frankfurt Schoolers point to the sixth tenet of their analytical practice, that “we do not need to be certain of what is right to know that something is amiss”; circumventing ‘idealist’ or utopian standards, they offer “a negativistic formula of critique aimed at diminishing domination.” That is, the emphasis on critique seen in the Marxian Left avoids (some might say evades) the question of what justice is, preferring to go with what people within a given society feel to be unjust, what causes them to suffer, very often identifying domination as the cause of that suffering. This blends with the seventh tenet, that “the empirical reference point of critical theory is to be grasped not so much in terms of individual and prepolitical (psychological) experiences of suffering, but ones related to social subordination.” Eighth, “identifying the roots of injustice in terms of peculiarities of the social system paves the road to social transformation rather than simple political reform by erecting edifices against abuse (such as constitutional protections of basic rights), as liberal theory would prescribe.” This more ‘totalistic,’ not to say ‘totalitarian,’ understanding appeals “to fraternity, to fellow-feeling, to sympathetic concern—in a word, to a charitable attitude—and an appeal to make suffering impossible by altering the social conditions that engender that suffering in the first place.” The Frankfurt Schoolers thus share with much of the ‘Left’ a form of secularized Christianity, lending to their thought and practice a sort of atheist churchiness. 

The next two tenets emphasize the economistic dimension of Marxism. “Critical theory does not limit itself to addressing distinct grievances of suffering, but traces these to their root in the mechanisms underlying the distribution of social advantage and disadvantage,” finding that “root” in such economic relations as “the political economy of consumerism in the twentieth century.” This is what Marxists mean by “sociostructural sources” of human suffering. Capitalism is “a social formation typical of a society of commodity producers.” The first generation of Frankfurt Schoolers attempted to ‘complexify’ Marxism by conceiving of society as a system wherein not only economic relations but administrative, cultural, and legal systems and subsystems were understood to contribute “to social integration,” each in accordance “with its own rationalities committed to, efficiency according to its own purposes.” “While Marx perceives capitalism as a social system integrated through the overarching imperative of capital accumulation…Habermas reduces its dynamics to the function of the market as one subsystem alongside others.” Azmanova prefers Marxism to neo-Marxism on this point; while “abandoning the structure-superstructure dichotomy Marx employed to describe the relation of political rule to socioeconomic practice”—his claim that the latter determines the former, that capitalism causes political life to be what it is—she denies that the various forms of social relations operate in relatively autonomous spheres. Society is a “system of structured and institutionalized social relations, enacted through everyday practices.” That is, an “institutionalized social order” unifies a social system and a political system—in most Western countries, capitalism and republicanism. In much of this, Azmanova seems to be struggling to reinvent the classical notion of the politeia or regime, which does unite ruling offices, rulers, a way of life, and an overall purpose or set of intentions of a political community.

Finally, the Frankfurt School is historicist, but not in the Hegelian-Marxist sense of a rationally discernible teleological process. It emphasizes “historicity” more simply by insisting that “we must start where we happen to be historically and culturally.” Thus Marx’s iron laws of history, the foundation of his ‘scientific’ socialism, do not apply. But Marxist dialectic remains, with its interest in antinomies or contradictions that constitute “a given form of social relations.” “These antinomies are both sources of suffering and emancipatory openings toward attainable possibilities for a less unjust world.” 

Azmanova offers three “adjustments” or revisions of Marxist theory. She identifies three features which, taken together, characterize capitalism: the pursuit of profit through the production of commodities in competition with other economic actors. Of these, competition is “capitalism’s core systemic dynamic, its operative logic.” Competition, along with the initial act of appropriating goods, provides the energy; institutions (e.g. private property) enable the dynamic elements to operate more or less freely. Capitalism profoundly affects the lives of those engaged with it; “they become not only dependent on it but start to value it as the wellspring of their existence.” This dependence on and esteem for the capitalist way of life registers politically, as “the institutions of democratic representation and participation can be expected to give expression to this dependence, as much as they can be used to question and challenge it.” Competition pervades the political system as much as it pervades economic life. 

A novel feature of this definition of capitalism comes to light when Azmanova briefly turns to Communist China. She regards it as fundamentally capitalist, even when it had no private property and nothing resembling a free market; the state nonetheless “act[ed] as an entrepreneur in the global economy”; in China as well as in the frankly capitalist countries, “the competitive production of profit shapes perceptions of successful life and accomplished self.” Therefore, “even if we obtain a society in which the means of production and management are in public hands and all members are included and perfectly equal, this does not mean that the society would not be engaged in the competitive production of profit, with all the negative effect this has on human beings and their natural environment.” Having said that, she does not go on to explain how the Chinese way of life would produce a humane regime, were its ‘capitalism’ removed.

Azmanova’s second revision of Marxist theory concerns politics—specifically, “the dynamics of politicization.” By this she means the way in which citizens and governments interact to legitimize political ends and processes. Citizens expect their governments to do certain things, for example, “protect private property, defend territorial integrity, and safeguard order.” A government that fails to do what its citizens expect and demand loses its legitimacy. This also works in the other direction. By successfully enforcing its policies and laws a government reinforces its legitimacy. This “legitimacy deal” has “two characteristics: (1) it is not fixed—it varies according to context and evolves historically; and (2) its content depends on what are held to be both desirable and feasible services public authority is to render society.” And so, for example, if the Afghan government cannot provide certain services to Afghans, the Taliban may intervene, further delegitimizing the government while enhancing their own prestige. “Public authority’s functions are articulated within a symbolic fabric of perception within which they are socially constructed as being legitimate and legitimacy-conferring. The legitimacy deal evolves from within shared views about overarching core values.” Further, there is a “legitimation matrix” within which the legitimacy deal takes place; the matrix “grounds the legitimacy of the whole social order, as it defines the core norms that give it significance and signification,” “spell[ing] out shared life-chances (notions of a successful life and an accomplished self) and their fair distribution in society.” And so, in Afghanistan, the Taliban intend not merely to win favor in delivering goods Afghans want but to redefine what Afghans want. They aim at regime change.

The legitimation matrix extends well belong the mere delivery of physical goods. “Public authority’s functions are articulated within a symbolic fabric of perceptions within which they are socially constructed as being legitimate and legitimacy-conferring”; “the matrix is the mold within an entity originates, develops, and is contained.” The “legitimation matrix” differs from the “legitimacy deal”; the deal defines the relationship between public authority to society but the matrix “grounds the legitimacy of the whole social order, as it defines the core norms that give it significance and signification. In Aristotelian regime terms, the legitimacy deal has to do with rulers and ruling institutions, whereas the legitimation matrix is the telos of the regime. Under the regime of “democratic capitalism,” the matrix combines “two ground rules”: with respect to capitalism, it “stipulates that risks and opportunities be correlated,” that “taking risks should be rewarded with opportunities for improved life-chances”; in liberal democracy, it stipulates “that all members of society should have an equal say over the way in which life-chances are distributed” thanks to the “principle of equality of citizenship, enacted via the mechanisms of political representation and participation.” Capitalism has been transformed by capitalists when they have adjusted the legitimacy deal “in order to safeguard the legitimacy matrix,” which is more fundamental. 

Azmanova’s historical relativism, which cohabits uncomfortably with her moral principles, may be seen when she asserts that “the perceptions shaping the legitimation matrix and the legitimacy deal are akin to ideology”—or, to avoid that loaded term, “normative orientations”—understood as “representations specific to a given era.” She intends to distinguish these from the Marxist concept of “false consciousness” (which implies a scientific socialism she, along with other Frankfurt Schoolers, questions) and from the liberal economists’ concept of “rational interest.” Rather, normative orientation “connotes the cognitive and normative orientations regarding views about truth, appropriateness, and acceptability—a societal ‘common sense’ or rationality.” Any idea or proposal inconsistent with this historically-bounded common sense simply “would not even enter public debates,” as it would have no “rational justification” within the legitimation matrix of that time and place.

This notwithstanding, social circumstances in a given time and place provide openings for contestation, for “politicization.” This is especially true in liberal-democratic regimes, where “the channel between civil society and political society (i.e., parties and political institutions) is open.” The dissatisfaction citizens experience as concrete instances of injustice—perceived as unjust within the deal, the matrix, or both—can engage the minds of citizens in ideas and proposals that subvert that deal and/or that matrix. 

Azmanova’s third and final revision of Marxism concerns the “forms of domination and types of injustice” seen in capitalism. There are three such “trajectories of domination”: relational, systemic, and structural. Relational domination involves elevating “one group of actors” over “another by force of the unequal distribution of power in society,” whether that “power” is material (wealth) or ideational (knowledge, recognition). Abolishing or at least ameliorating relational domination entails “policies of wealth redistribution and political and cultural inclusion”—what one might describe as socialism plus a democratized form of Hegelianism (minus the rationalism). Systemic domination “subordinates all members of society”—not only ‘the many,’ whether a majority or a minority—to “the constitutive dynamic of the social system,” as citizens, “the winners and the losers” alike, “shape their lives according to” that dynamic “and internalize its operative logic in the form of understanding of social and personal achievement and self-worth.” Under capitalism, the rich, the middle classes, and the poor all act and think and feel in accordance with “the imperative of competitive production of profit,” defining social advantage and disadvantage in terms of the system. The spirit of competition also pervades the democratic political system, whereby “an overarching commitment to popular sovereignty” typically ‘privileges’ “the immediate interests of a particular national community over the interests of future generations, humanity as a whole, and the natural environment.” It might be added that such international competitiveness characterizes non-democratic political systems as well; in this sense, they too partake of the spirit of capitalism. Finally, structural domination “concerns the constraints on judgment and action imposed on actors by the main structures of the social system, the institutions through which the operative logic of the system is enacted.” In capitalism the main institutions are private property, management of the means of production, and the market. In democracy, electoral competition and the electoral franchise, “which together enact the systemic logic of the competitive pursuit of public office” are the main institutions. Structural injustice consists not of inequality and exclusion (“the ambit of relational domination”) but “of the actors’ incapacity to control the institutions through which the constitutive dynamic of the social system is enacted.” Regarding capitalism, this means “the commodification of labor and nature, i.e., treating human beings’ creative capacities as well as our natural environment as goods ‘produced’ exclusively for market exchange”; regarding democracy, this means “the ‘privatization’ of public life and the poor quality of public service,” by which Azmanova apparently means, for example, campaign contributions by private individuals and interest groups. 

Given the complexity of these forms of domination and injustice, confusion is easy. Marxism had depended upon simplifying social conflict, sharpening ‘class consciousness’ by exacerbating the divisions between workers and capitalists. Unfortunately for the Left, this rhetorically useful simplicity lends itself to blundering as political activists enmesh themselves in real-world complexities. Fighting against one form of injustice may obscure the others or even “enhance” them. And so, for example, “while feminists struggled against the oppressive structure of patriarchy and fought for equality with men in the labor market, women in fact increased the desirability and, ergo, the legitimacy of the competitive production of profit as a systemic dynamic of capitalism.” To meet this kind of difficulty, Azmanova proposes targeting systemic domination—the spirit and practice of competition for profit in the economic realm and for votes in the political realm. With regard to the moral problems of historical relativism noted earlier, Azmanova argues, somewhat circularly, that such an approach will help citizens discover this “common denominator behind the various, often conflicting grievances” and “to derive normatively generalizable notions of justice that can guide progressive politics as strategies of emancipation befitting the historical circumstances of our times.” ‘Progressivism’ is programmed into the enterprise from the beginning, so the ‘discovery’ of the principles of ‘justice’ is assured.

Accordingly, Azmanova dismisses European concerns with Muslim immigration as a form of xenophobia spurred by fears of cheap labor, “notwithstanding the ethnoreligious terms in which it is voiced.” “Threats of Islamization and terrorism” are merely “alleged,” not serious. The supposed proof of this is that the controversy over Muslims was predated by the controversy over cheap labor coming from the newly liberated Central and Eastern European countries added to the European Union after the dissolution of the Soviet empire. What is really at issue, she insists, is a new form of populism caused by “precarity”: “anxiety triggered by perceptions of physical insecurity, political disorder, cultural estrangement, and employment insecurity resulting from employment flexibilization, job outsourcing, or competition with immigrants for jobs.” That is, Azmanova takes the ‘pull’ of capitalism for cheaper labor from the Middle East and northern Africa as decisive, overlooking the ‘push’ from those suffering under despotic regimes in Muslim-majority countries. This inclination to center her attention almost exclusively on intra-Western economic and political conditions accounts for many of the weaknesses of her analysis generally; competition exists worldwide, not only in the form of economic ‘globalization’ (which she sees clearly enough) but in the form of geopolitics. There is little in the book to account for that. It is as if the Western liberal democracies could reform themselves in isolation from the rest of the world.

Azmanova usefully contrasts the “ideological landscape” of this century with that of the previous century. In the West, the twentieth-century Left stood for redistribution of wealth and political liberalism; the Right stood for the free market and traditionalism (although in the United States, the ‘tradition’ itself was broadly ‘liberal’). Both Left and Right often agreed on “constraining market forces,” although this was “stronger in Europe than in the United States,” as “European conservatism, in contrast to its American counterpart, has preserved the idea of the social vocation of central authority as part of its aristocratic heritage, while U.S. political conservatism, having its pedigree in Protestantism, has always shunned institutionalized authority.” The expansion of the middle class in the aftermath of the Second World War entailed forms of ownership newly available to the middle and working classes (especially investment in stocks via pension funds); simultaneously, there those decades saw the growth of “the management class,” described by James Burnham and others. As a result of these changes within capitalist societies themselves, the capital-labor dialectic of orthodox Marxism became “politically irrelevant.” With economic prosperity, a non-economic set of politically relevant priorities emerged—seen in the agenda of the New Left and neoliberalism, for example. At the same time, Azmanova rightly observes, the establishment of the postwar ‘welfare state’ throughout the West moderated these ideological conflicts by presenting itself as pragmatic and technocratic, an agent of competence replacing the old, much smaller, central governments staffed by political parties. 

All of this set up the ideological landscape of the twenty-first century. “The new economy of open borders and technological upheaval engendered both hazards and advantages, with new sets of “winners and losers.” Workers in manufacturing industries “feel threatened by the prospects of companies relocating production abroad or automating” whereas workers in the service industries feel less “exposed to globalization.” Thus, factory workers now vote ‘Right’ while service industry workers still vote ‘Left.’ Generally, those persons who see globalization as a disadvantage to themselves support economic protectionism and national sovereignty (including well-guarded borders against indiscriminate immigration) while those who see it as an advantage to themselves sit happily with foreign trade. “The liberal-versus-traditionalist cultural divide has been replaced by a cosmopolitanism-versus-nationalism dichotomy, fostered by contrasting judgments on the permeability of national borders in the context of globalization and the capacity of societies to cope with that change.” This cuts across divisions of capital and labor, Right and Left. Political parties have scrambled to adapt, with the Rightist parties somewhat quicker to make the needed adjustments. But have no fear: “Progressive forces might still find the language and the policies to give a valiant response to the anxious publics” of our time. “This book is an attempt to offer such an exit from the current impasse,” absent “a helpful crisis of capitalism” and “the crutches of inspiring utopia.”

Azmanova begins the second portion of her book with an account of the four “iterations” of capitalism. “Capitalism is always in flux,” although it remains steady in its “repertoire,” consisting of competitive pursuit of profit and the initial appropriation of goods (often explained by early modern theorists in terms of the ‘state of nature’). These core features of capitalism find institutional reinforcement in private property, management of the means of production, labor contracts, and “the market as a primary mechanism of economic government.” Finally, “the repertoire of capitalism also comprises an ethos: worldviews orienting behavior and giving it the meaning of rational enterprise under individual initiative.” Insofar as risks and opportunities roughly correlate for all those participating in the capitalist economy and “the material inequalities created in this process do not engender social privilege”—a new aristocracy in place of the old, feudal one—political democracy “can endorse the competitive production of profit” as unthreatening to such “institutional logistics of equal citizenship” as “equality before the law” and “universal electoral franchise.” 

Upon those foundations the four iterations of capitalism have arisen. The first, liberal or laissez-faire capitalism, was advanced by modern industrial technologies and the “liberal constitutional state,” which protected “autonomy for the individual” by abolishing guilds and the remaining feudal laws, replacing laws solemnizing landlord-peasant fealty with a contractualism that conduced to “labor commodification” insofar as workers now ‘sold’ their labor in exchange for agreed-upon wages and benefits, rather as a farmer sells his vegetables at market. From these arrangements sprung a mindset “valorizing and motivating rational enterprise under individual initiative”—not merely “a norm governing the realm of economic action” but a Zeitgeist, as Azmanova, following Hegel, calls it. Hence the capitalist (if not necessarily Protestant) ‘work ethic.’ 

The second iteration of capitalism was the aforementioned welfare state. “By the end of the nineteenth century, the free market had allocated considerably more risks to wage laborers and others who had little or no opportunity to make real gains in the economy, while putting them in inhumane, life-threatening conditions.” The “severe legitimacy crisis” caused by this “poverty and precarity” became “politically salient social phenomena,” resulting in the addition of “social rights” (in the U.S., the ‘Four Freedoms’ enunciated by President Franklin Roosevelt) being added to political and civil rights. “The political legitimacy of democratic capitalism after WWII came to rely on a notion of justice surpassing both that of political equality, which is fundamental to democracy, and that of individual entrepreneurship, which is fundamental to capitalism.” States now redistributed wealth in order to secure “the conditions for social justice,” with political parties “competing on a left-right axis of ideological orientation,” a framework that suggests difference primarily of degree, not of kind; in economic life, corporations dominated the landscape—capitalism’s equivalent of centralized authority. “Embedded within and therefore dependent on territorially bounded societies, corporation executives “had no choice but to be constrained by considerations of the public good,” once state regulation became common and the threat of ‘nationalization’ or ‘socialization’ of big firms seemed real. Depending on which way one looked at it, the second form of capitalism could be “celebrated as a triumph of democracy over capitalism” or “vilified as the triumph of corporate interests over society.” Either way, however, “consumerist hedonism” of one sort or another became the ruling ethos of Western liberal democracy.

The 1970s saw the “demise” of welfare capitalism. Government redistribution of wealth and overregulation “allegedly limited capitalism’s opportunities for profit-making and reduced the incentives for risk-taking” on which capitalism “purportedly thrives.” It is unclear whether Azmanova thinks ‘stagflation’ didn’t really happen or whether it was caused by some other other factors than those mentioned, but, at any rate, “democratic capitalism had to be reinvented yet again,” this time as “neoliberal capitalism” introduced by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and termed ‘Reaganomics’ in the United States. Center-left and center-right political parties again coalesced, again “under the guise of ‘meritocracy'” but now combined with “the newly redeemed ethos of individualism which credits achievement through personal merit and in conditions of fair competition.” The Rightist parties opposed the labor unions; the Leftist parties opposed “the oppressive bureaucratization of the economy and political life, “endors[ing] the New Left agenda of progressive politics centered on identity recognition.” Policies included privatization of publicly-controlled firms, deregulation of labor and produce markets, and free trade across national borders. Under neoliberalism, “notions of social justice have shifted from the original concerns with decent working conditions and standards of living secured through a solid and stable salary toward preoccupations with one’s employability and capacity to retain a job—a move from social ‘security’ to ‘resilience'” animated by the slogan, “Work smart, not hard.” The ‘rugged individualism’ and ‘work ethic’ of first-iteration capitalism morphed into a smooth individualism of personal self-fulfillment. Those still ready and willing to take risks, albeit very often with other people’s money, enjoy the “spectacular remuneration” earned on “the open, unruly seas of international finance which itself is celebrated as the wellspring of global capitalism.”

Neoliberal capitalism has produced more risk, less security, than many people prefer to endure. “The active offloading of social risk to society…has created a condition of generalized precarity,” which Azmanova considers the prime “social question of the twenty-first century.” Given “the liberalization of direct foreign investment” in local economies,” governments have rediscovered the importance of competition in a new (or in some ways old, pre-capitalist) form: “competitiveness of national markets.” This form has replaced both the domestic competitiveness valorized by neoliberalism and the striving for economic growth welfare capitalism chased. “The state began taking on the duty to aid specific economic actors,” offloading risks to “the weakest players,” those not so aided. Azmanova blames the rise of precarity capitalism on “the “extreme liberalization of the economy via privatization and deregulation” enacted by ‘globalizing’ neoliberal capitalists—no “allegedly” or “purportedly” about that. She cites the Clinton administration’s negotiations with China to get Qualcomm into the Chinese market as a typical example of choosing a winner and stiffing the losers, although President Clinton was neither the first nor the last to act that way, always under the rationale “that this is the only way to satisfy the imperative for remaining competitive in the global economy.” When the stock market crashed in 2008, governments reacted by judging certain financial corporations too big to be allowed to fail, lest one’s country lose ground in the world market. Since “the recapitalization of financial institutions with public money while the ownership of these institutions remained in private hands violated capitalism’s ground rule of correlating risks and opportunities,” the “legitimation matrix of capitalism was endangered again,” just as it had been by the Great Depression in the 1930s and stagflation in the 1970s.

This time, governments cut funds for what Azmanova regards as “essential social services,” primarily in health and education—funds unlikely to be restored, since the indebtedness incurred by government-controlled central banks will “restrain public spending for a long time, perpetuating austerity—and with that, precarity—as the new normal.” In effect, governments have redistributed public funds “from the weak to the strong,” causing more inequality and poverty. “Far from the expected retreat of the state under the forces of globalization (as per the neoliberal credo), we are facing the new phenomenon of governing bodies possessing increased power and capacity to inflict social harm and decreased responsibility for the social consequences of policy action.” States enjoy greater power regarding economic competitiveness, less power regarding social regulation. Capitalism survives nonetheless, because the “social safety net” is no longer regarded as a “political deliverable”; “economic reason substitutes for political reason” as “the economic logic of markets has penetrated our collective perceptions of fairness and personal visions of self-worth,” thereby “contaminat[ing] statehood, the system of education the courts, even the way we think about and value ourselves and our lives.” What kind of political democracy can there be, if “the demos disintegrates into bits of human capital” and takes this as the right way to live?

But there is unease among that demos. “Desperation is he raw material capitalism now feeds off,” and people dislike being desperate. Neither neoliberalism nor precarity capitalism has shut down democratizing political movements that resist self-commodification—movements for gender and racial parity, for example. “Politics is not dead,” although its scope has “shrunk.” Populisms Left and Right attempt to cut down on state rule, as the Right veers toward anarcho-capitalism and the Left toward “protection of cultural lifestyles within national borders.”. In Azmanova’s opinion, “appeals for ‘more democracy'” in these times “have become part of the problem even as they are presented as radical solutions.” Indeed, the whole panoply of “representative, participatory, or deliberative democracy,” along with the rival ideologies fueling “fragmented resistance, devolution, and poststructuralist ontologies of social empowerment,” must be challenged. “Liberal democracy might be as much part of the problem as it is part of the solution,” inasmuch as it now ‘politicizes’ the wrong issues—immigration and sexual liberation, not capitalist competition. Contra John Dewey, the remedy for the problems of democracy isn’t more democracy. “What we need is less capitalism,” especially since even working-class citizens now invest in stocks.” When “everyone’s (immediate) welfare becomes dependent on the good economic health of capitalism, even when it can no longer ensure improving living standards or fair distribution of life-chances and is rampantly destroying the environment,” the whole “socioeconomic system” must be “transcend[ed].” 

This can be done, she hopes, not by offering a vision of a future, just society—utopianism—or even by defining what justice is. Rather, socialists should “seek to identify those antinomies (internal contradictions) of contemporary capitalism that foster historically particular but structurally general experiences of injustice, and from which normatively generalizable notions of justice can be derived, then set political goals accordingly.” This “allows visions of social justice to emerge from the identification of a broad pattern of societal injustice—which she defines as “socially induced suffering”— surpassing “the grievances of particular groups while addressing all of them.” The “visions” will arise out of the real experience of misery—which, as a ‘Marxian,’ Azmanova inclines to locate in economic deprivation of one sort or another. This move enables her to ascribe any given misery to the capitalism as the broadest of the “broad patterns” she targets, and then to appeal not to economics but to social redesign as the way to remove it. So, for example, she reduces “xenophobia” to an economic cause: “loss of livelihood.” (It is noteworthy that her choice of the word “xenophobia” already biases the discussion against those who oppose the introduction of substantial numbers of immigrants into their political communities; the same may be said for almost any term with ‘phobia’ attached to it, consigning the aversion in question to the sphere of irrationality, neurosis, folly, cowardice.) 

Azmanova identifies two “structural contradictions” in contemporary precarity capitalism. First, today’s capitalism sees increased opportunities for “labor decommodification” alongside increased pressures for commodification. Labor decommodification occurs when a worker can “exit the labor market without damage to [his or her] well-being.” Such is today’s “portfolio person,” one “without permanent attachment to any particular occupation or organization, whose skills allow for self-reliance in finding paid employment on his or her own terms,” freed from “the bureaucratic constraints and power dynamics of a career path within an organization.” Unfortunately, technological advances have also “widened and increased and widened [the] scope” of commodification” by “turning knowledge and risk into new fictitious commodities,” thereby “increasing the time spent in paid employment.” Making money by tapping on a computer at home may or may not liberate you. Technology has empowered democratization of the means of production by enabling individuals to start their own businesses with minimal capital investment; technology has also increased competitive pressures (the driver of capitalism) among such firms by fostering globalization of markets. As a socialist, Azmanova would address this contradiction by retaining workers’ ability to exit the labor market voluntarily but also by having us understand employment as “a good to be distributed,” a social justice issue rather than an economic one.

The second contradiction consists of neoliberal cuts in social ‘safety nets’ combined with the lack of good jobs due to automation, global competition, and the practice of big corporations to locate their factories wherever in the world labor is cheapest. “Our livelihoods are increasingly reliant on gainful employment” because social welfare spending has decreased, “yet domestic economies are increasingly unable to provide” such employment. We have less free time and find ourselves pressured to use it “building skills for finding a job and remaining employed and employable.” 

These contradictions can produce a politically effective alliance against capitalism because they have a “common denominator”: “the acute, widespread sense of insecurity, of precariousness regarding one’s livelihood.” In terms of the “relational” forms of injustice, Azmanova points to increased inequality of wealth coupled with increased equality of social recognition, as seen in the civil rights movements in the United States and elsewhere. If social recognition of previously deprecated groups increases, that might be parleyed into demands for redressing the ‘wealth gap’—of mobilizing 99% of the population against the economic privileges of the super-wealthy 1%. In terms of systemic forms of injustice seen in the competitive pursuit of profit, the (as it were) mobilizable miseries result from capitalism itself, the competitive pursuit of profit, which results in employment precarity across class lines and in environmental degradation. As for structural forms of injustice, they exist in all social institutions “that underpin and enable competitive profit production,” whether the state-owned enterprises of China or the privately held corporations of the “capitalist democracies.” With such institutions, “the big winners are those who can exercise a rent type of control such as a natural monopoly and thus exempt themselves from the pressures of competition,” with money to spare to intervene in political governance, leaving the non-elites to fend for themselves, “exposed to the vagaries of intensified competition.” 

Obstacles to radical reform boil down to two. There is no coherent ideology to rally around because there is such a bewildering variety of conflicts in the contemporary world. In the economic sphere, alone, one sees rich versus poor, the global working class versus the national working classes, holders of secure jobs versus perpetual job seekers. Too, environmental issues have long been presented as ‘lifestyle choices,’ economic issues presented as ‘bread-and-butter’ issues; only in recent years has environmentalism been elevated to the level of survival, on a par with economics. 

Many socialists have attempted to overcome these difficulties by reformulating the socialist project as an effort to achieve radical democracy. For reasons already stated, Azmanova doubts that this will work, as “the mechanisms of democratic decision-making, even when well deployed, tend to naturally prioritize short-term exigencies of justice (inclusionary growth) rather than the intangible, for many, reality of environmental devastation.” But economic growth has been spurred by consumerism, which often mixes badly with environmental protection, and the fear generated by precarity has “foster[ed] a conservative-to-reactionary political expression (politicization) of grievances,” as seen America’s Trump phenomenon but also in many European countries, such as Le Pen in France, Orban in Hungary. 

It is enough to turn a socialist back to Father Marx. “In 1859, Marx remarked that ‘there must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery.’ A century and a half later, the spectacular increase in wealth is accompanied by a spectacular increase in forms of immiseration beyond economic impoverishment that are afflicting the multitude on both sides of the old class divide.” Economic impoverishment in the form of economic insecurity blocks the political efforts needed to achieve reform, “leaving neither space nor energy for engagement in larger battle about the kind of lives we want to live.” To see this can be to raise “not a cry for redistribution,” as in Marx, “but for regaining control,” a cry for “end[ing] a system that thrives on taking control away from ordinary people.” It isn’t a matter of “how life-chances are distributed, but whether what is being pursued as a life-chance is desirable or even acceptable”; “it is the very definition of a life-chance as the successful participation in the competitive production of profit that aggrieves the multitude,” suggesting “that the possibility for a radical, if not revolutionary, change is now more obtainable than ever.” In particular, “the young generation in Western liberal democracies demands a radical alternative” to “the existing system” and “our times are indeed ripe for it,” if neo-Marxists and their allies follow Gramsci’s formula of “passive revolution” rather than the futile course of violent revolution.

To counter the relational contradictions of precarity capitalism, tax the rich in order to end their advantage in political influence; continue the current practice of skill-building education and retraining. To counter the structural contradictions, enact legislation enabling worker and local community participation in corporate governance, thereby diluting private ownership of the means of production; reclaim public ownership of those monopolies needed for survival in the modern world, such as utilities; reform campaign finance. Such legislation will address the “systemic” contradictions of precarity capitalism by refuting the “constitutive logic of capitalism” itself, “the competitive production of profit.” The fear that precarity generates will wane, replaced by a “political economy of trust.” By eliminating competition, profit, and productivism, “the institutionalization of socially significant work as paid labor, deployed in a process of competitive production of profit,” socialists can redirect “economic action and scientific activity…toward the satisfaction of human needs,” away from the demands “create[d]” by capitalism, with its powerful advertising and overall ethos of acquisition as a means of attaining social prestige. Only “policies aiming to counter the competitive production of profit strike at the heart of capitalism, at its very operative logic.” 

One must ask, then, who defines “needs”? If it is the people at large, will demands not masquerade as needs? After all, ‘created’ needs are often responses to the findings of market research, i.e., desires. And if socialists take charge of defining needs, why should anyone trust them? Marx’s formula for justice, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” found cold comfort under the rule of the commissars. 

This is all the more so since Azmanova resolutely refuses to specify what socialism will look like. “We do not need to define the shape of a postcapitalist society in order to endorse the logic of overcoming capitalism a matter of the ‘politically hopeful’—of what makes sense in terms of tangible social dynamics and specific political demands.” A political economy of trust will take the general “form of a society that can satisfy human needs”—once again—without “devoting all of its energies to the process of needs satisfaction as capitalism does.” With markets and private property gone, “the task of allocating productive inputs and social surplus will pertain not to the market, but to public authority.” But if democratic institutions won’t do, who will wield that public authority other than ‘the few,’ the proud, the socialistic? Why should we trust the rulers of the political economy of trust, especially since democracy is held up as suspect?

More concretely, Azmanova believes that the worldwide political economy of trust can be achieved by recasting both global and domestic economies. International law must be rewritten to implement “high standards of employment and remuneration, consumer protection, and care for the environment.” She confidently asserts that “the rest of the world will have no choice but to follow” this model, if the Western countries adopt it under “strong political leadership,” and if the rest of the world “values access to the Euro-Atlantic economic space.” But, one must ask, what if China values the construction of a pan-Asian economic sphere more than access to American and European markets, simultaneously pushing into the Middle East, Africa, and South America in pursuit of raw materials? 

In the domestic economies, Azmanova advocates laws establishing secure sources of livelihood, “allowing everyone to profit from the increased decommodification capacity of advanced modernity” by means of “maximizing voluntary employment flexibility,” a policy of “universal minimum employment” undergirded by a “solid social safety net.” This will be achieved by opening national borders “to allow outsiders to get in” and by regulating the terms of non-standard employment. To accommodate immigrants, the social safety net should be based not on national citizenship but “denizenship, emulating the Scandinavian form of welfare provision.” Thus equality and freedom can finally “be reconciled as ‘real freedom to make choices'”—a “socially embedded autonomy that credits both productive activity and freedom from gainful employment as valuable sources of selfhood and tools of social integration,” “minimiz[ing] reliance on paid employment both for a person’s socialization and for the satisfaction of needs.” 

How to fund all this? Impose heavy taxes on, or transfer ownership from, private corporations that harvest profits gained from monopoly rent, such as too-big-to-fail banks. In Europe, these monies would go into a “European Sovereign Wealth Fund,” which would redistribute its revenues from each according to his abilities (e.g., a banker) to each according to his need (as defined by the managers of the fund). Azmanova assures us that the resulting political economy of trust “will increase the space for creativity by decreasing competition” while “enabl[ing] the satisfaction of human needs without inflating these needs,” “overcoming capitalism by subverting it from within” and replacing it “without a guiding utopia, without a revolution in the offing, and without a terminal crisis of capitalism.” One senses that she places most of her hopes on ‘critique,’ on the widespread dissatisfaction she sees in the West. Whereas Marx expected capitalism to fail by increasing the poverty of the workers, exacerbating the already “unfair distribution of wealth,” the new crisis of capitalism stems from its success, “its excellent economic performance, its intensity.” Exploitation no longer powers social injustice, as it did in Marx’s day; it is the core of capitalism itself, the unbearable stress of unrelenting competition and human commodification, that bears down on human beings everywhere. What the 99% of the human race now detest is “the very process through which wealth is generated and the impact this has on individuals, communities, and nature,” the “massive economic and social uncertainty” capitalism now generates. Politically, this means that banality is our friend. “Mobilized in a mundane and inglorious anticapitalist revolution”—Gramsci’s kind of revolution—these “forces can perform a social change yet more radical than any proletarian class struggle could ever achieve.” “A new multitude, more powerful in number and more bitter in its quiet discontent” than the New Leftists of the late 1960s, “is demanding a type of life that contemporary capitalism cannot deliver.”

Given this historicist argument, one can only reply that it remains to be seen whether such discontent will generate some new form of socialism or rather a fifth iteration of capitalism, not yet imagined. Up to now, capitalism has proven itself more resourceful than socialism.

But is historicism of any sort—Hegelian, racialist, Marxist, democratic-progressive, Nietzschean, Heideggerian, neo-Marxist—an adequate guide to human life? The first iteration of capitalism, along with the first iteration of modern republicanism, took its philosophic bearings from human nature and the laws of nature and of nature’s God which implant rights in each human being as such. Commercial republicanism thus held itself to a stable standard by which its achievements and its failures could be judged. Chattel slavery and wage-slavery alike eventually stood in the dock of the regimes so framed. Hegelian and Marxist historicism too had a stable standard, albeit a much more vague one: the ‘end of history,’ whether liberal or communitarian; so did racialist historicism, whereby evolution governed by the principle of the survival of the fittest would issue in the worldwide rule of a master race. All of these historicisms claimed scientific status, including the capacity to predict the future based upon experimentally confirmable laws of progress, leading to a knowable (if often somewhat vague) end, whether that were some form of egalitarian communitarianism or a worldwide reconstitution of feudalism ruled by a planetary aristocracy. In light of the catastrophic failure of so much of that stuff, the later postmodern historicisms have rejected these scientific pretensions along with the teleology that went with them. Hence the new political culture of ‘critique,’ which leaves the tasks of construction mostly undetermined. 

Finally, and on the level of practice, if regimes no longer feature competition in economics and in politics, what effectual check will remain on untrammeled power? Absent the institutions described by Adam Smith and James Madison, will the practice of “critique” really keep us free?

 

Note

1. For a review of George Friedman’s careful analysis of the Frankfurt School thinkers, see “Origins of the ‘New Left,” on this website under “Philosophers.”