a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

For 18th and 19th century worldly philosophers whose analyses of capitalism Robert Heilbroner wrote about, the problem with capitalism was its inherent instability. The economic growth machine kept producing recessions, sometimes –by the end of the 19th century—accompanied by panics and bank-runs. Until very recently, proponents of capitalism, from Adam Smith forward, did not think that the instability problem could, ultimately, or definitively, be solved but they did think it could be controlled and ameliorated if the root cause of the instability could be identified. The machine will wear out, but meanwhile you can make the most of it. Marx, by contrast, because his chief concern was with the workers in capitalist enterprises, did not assume that the instability problem was soluble short-term. He assumed that it would induce the workers to protest how the system exploited them because they were not owners of the means of production in it or profit-sharers. Then capitalism would give way to socialism, which would not have this basic inequality built into it and aggravated by it, so a socialist economy would stablize itself, without political regulation. It is, of course, from Marx’s analysis of capitalism and his concern with its exploitativeness that the main anti-capitalist lines of analysis have descended.

So, in the briefest possible sketch, these are the terms of the pro and anti debate over capitalism’s mechanism and its future that we live with still. To my mind, those terms obscure the most fundamental problem of capitalism, which is that its expansionary dynamic, its unstable developmental course, is such that it can over-run the political domain and reduce political life to a feature of economic life. It can completely reverse the traditional relationship between economic life, which materially sustains people, supplying their basic needs, and political life, which is life (to define its freedom negatively) not dedicated to laboring to supply necessities and the materials for culture. To see this problem –the problem of the potentiality for the disappearance of politics in an advanced capitalist system—as fundamental, you have to do two things, I think: stop being trapped in the worldly philosophers’ machine metaphor, and, using a different metaphor, identify the elements of capitalism that can coalesce to eliminate political life.

Let me turn to the first requirement first. All the worldly philosophers, pro and anti capitalist, thought in the same metaphor: capitalism is like an intricate machine. A machine within the great lawful machine that is nature. The proponents of capitalism thought that if capitalism’s laws of motion and the interrelationships of its parts could be understood, by people thinking like physicists and engineers, it could be adjusted if it started malfunctioning—flooding or erupting. With experience, a manual for its operation could be developed so that adjustment would become a matter of experienced mechanics following the rules, no inductive judgment needed. Only the later 20th century free market theorists ever went so far as to dream that markets would adjust themselves—and this development in economics is extremely significant as an element of the novelty of capitalism in its old age. Robert Heilbroner recognized the remoteness of the free-market theorists from reality and described the novelty of their unworldly approach, but so did others. For example: Lester Thurow in Dangerous Currents: The State of Economics, which appeared in 1983.

During the 1980s, with Ronald Reagan’s presidency, free market ideas became the guiding economic ideas, and this brought the delusional quality of them to the fore. Reagan also gave them their most characteristic implementations: privatization of services once provided by governments, and tax cuts for the wealthiest capitalists, which were supposed to stimulate economic growth and fix or prevent recessions. These tax cuts were, of course, a way to make workers support the economy and support the government that supports the capitalists. They were a direct assault upon the majority of the people by a government that was supporting capitalism and capitalists –as became even more obvious when George Bush adopted the tactic. (I will come back later to the question of why this is not obvious to anyone who thinks about it for half a moment and why we are even having a debate in America now about renewing Bush’s attack on the well-being of the majority of the American people.)

The machine metaphor also supported –and still supports– the idea that all crises in the capitalist system were more or less alike, and lawful in themselves. Among mid- 20th century economists, the Great Depression dealt quite a blow to this expectation that the past contained learnable lessons, which was supposed to mean that no one would be condemned to repeat the past. But, despite the Great Depression’s shocking world-wide magnitude, which called forth a sub-division of economics called “macroeconomics,” the Depression, too, came to be seen as having a lesson to teach. Like the Holocaust. If only the lesson could be definitively learned! It has been unsettling to contemporary economists that so many controversies persist about why the Great Depression happened, and what mistakes in 1937 let it get a second punch, with effects that only the Second World War spike in demand “fixed.” But most economists of the chief WWII victor nations, America and its allies, nonetheless stayed confident. And slowly they were able to reach a working consensus –with some doubters, it should be said—that the Great Depression was never going to repeat because its lessons had been learned. The consensus economists realized that confidence in their “never again!” approach would disappear if the possibility were admitted that economies can have an unprecedented crisis or that “lessons from the past” might be indeterminate, useless or even blinding.

A second thought habit that the machine metaphor supported was the habit of considering the economy in isolation from the political realm, as well as in isolation from the natural world, the environment. Understanding ecosystems is not part of Economics. The relationship between politics and economics was only a matter of whether and to what extent political institutions should adjust economic institutions, whether and to what extent politicians should be like auto mechanics. Economists were not, by and large, accustomed to consider political events except episodically. They saw, for example, that in 1971 Richard Nixon had made a bold move by adopting an “open door” policy toward Communist China in the middle of his effort to keep trying to win the unwinnable war against Communist Vietnam. That this open door had opened the door for an effort Deng Xiaphong launched in 1978 to abandon Maoism and create in China a brand new kind of capitalism was hardly noticed until the 1990s. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was so tied to that superpower’s blind pursuit of an unwinnable war in Afghanistan, macroeconomists noticed that China had changed its production and banking systems and was exporting cheap goods at a fantastical rate. But to this day the kinds of capitalism that emerged in China and then in other newly exporting economies (Brazil, Russia, India, each quite different) of the post-Soviet era have not been analyzable in the familiar machine-metaphor terms.

Thinking in analogies to past events –raking the past for precedents– is almost compulsory in the current world. Or, to be more accurate, it is a compulsion that few are able to resist. And the more a person needs to imagine himself in control, the stronger the analogizing compulsion will be, and the more necessary the machine metaphors that support it will be. The driving force for this compulsion comes, I think, from a vague realization that sheer novelty, if it were possible, would mean unmasterable, uncontrollable chaos, and such chaos would signal catastrophe or death. If, on the other hand, “the economy” we are looking at is a mere variant on something we have seen before, been able to adjust, and survived, then survival is assured. All that is required is a steady hand on the tiller, a super smart twirling of the dials or defusing before the economy machine blows up or melts down or hits a wall or goes off a cliff (chose your image).

In these matters of how we think about the economy, the New York Times columnist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics Paul Krugman is among the most sophisticated. But his 1999 book on the topic, The Return of Depression Economics (subtitled “and the Crisis of 2008” for its latest paperback edition, updated through June 2009), tells in its title how accustomed Krugman himself is to analogical thinking. In the 1999 first edition, he deeply questioned the idea prevailing among economists then that the world economy was so well fixed after the Second World War –or by the Second World War—that it would go along with only “garden-variety recessions” and never again enter into a Great Depression or a Depression analogous to the Great one. He posed his questions as a student of the Asian crisis of the late 1990s. “Like the Depression, the crisis struck out of the clear blue sky, with most pundits predicting a continuing boom even as the slump gathered momentum; as in the 1930s, the conventional economic medicine proved ineffective, even counterproductive.”

Behind Krugman’s effort to show that we must realize that the Great Depression should be our standard for judgment now, there is, also, a new metaphor struggling to be born. He argues that the Depression was like a plague that broke out in a living thing. At the time of the Asian crisis, he says: “I thought of it this way: it was as if bacteria that used to cause deadly plagues, but had long been considered conquered by modern medicine, had reemerged in a form resistant to all the standard antibiotics.” To prevent another Black Death, we have to think like public health officers. We have now, fortunately, a vaccine, which has been theorized by John Maynard Keynes: if we stimulate an economy that looks like it is about to go the way of Japan in the 1990s, which is the latest equivalent of an economy on the edge of Depression, we can avoid “a lost decade,” a prolonged period of devastating stagnant demand, or even worse, a total world-wide economic collapse.

Krugman is certainly right in economic terms –and his new public health metaphor helps him be right, as does his clear understanding that the free market theorists are delusional. He is a voice of sanity against tax cuts for the rich, as he was in support of healthcare reform. But he, too, is trapped in a kind of thinking that falls way short of what is needed. And to say what this is, I think we need to look at Robert Heilbroner’s historical investigation more closely. As I suggested before, Heilbroner rejected the machine metaphor and all its analogizing, thinking instead of an economy as more like a person with a unique developmental history, or a group of persons with a group developmental history. All metaphors, of course, have limitations, but for the moment we can note that the advantages of this metaphor are chiefly two. It allowed Heilbroner to recognize that capitalism has changed from its childhood to its youth to its maturity to its old age. So, one should neither understand its current state (or states in different parts of the world) on analogy with its earlier ones nor assume that something in the early history could ever be simply and directly a cause of something in the present state or states. As developmental psychoanalysts know about real people, early experiences and psychic responses prefigure what is to come and are often repeated with variations in later phases, but they are not simply and directly causes of what develops. Krugman’s public health metaphor has the limitation of implying that a single economic bacteria can be found as the cause of Depression, and, if seen to be reappearing, addressed with a vaccine. But people in environments are more complicated, and groups of people even more complicated.

The second advantage of thinking developmentally about the economy is that the novel elements of capitalism’s old age appear more clearly –particularly the political elements, which Krugman does not consider. Looking through the lens of the developmental metaphor, I will write about these novel elements next time, coming to concentrate on how it happens that the national political leaders and the economic leaders in old age capitalism are the same people thinking –or not thinking–in the same way.

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While I was a graduate student in the late 1960s at the New School for Social Research in New York City, I knew I was in an outpost of Europe. But I really had no idea how different from the rest of American academia this outpost was. In my department there, Philosophy, the European émigré faculty completely ignored –some even distained– the prevailing American mode of doing philosophy, which was called “Anglo-American Analytic.” An idle pastime for Luftmenschen, irrelevant, that was the verdict. Over in the Economics Department, the range of theories taught was a bit Americanized, but the eminence gris was a German, Adolf Lowe, and one of his students, Robert Heilbroner, was the teacher that graduate students from all of the school’s five departments eagerly went to hear. Until Heilbroner’s American-born colleague and friend from Harvard, Paul Sweezy, editor of the Monthly Review, arrived to teach Marxian economics, Heilbroner’s book The World Philosophers plus Heilbroner’s own up-datings of it in his lectures was what Economics seemed to be. So the entire student body was either to the left or to the way far left –while the rest of academia was mostly studying statistics and marching rightward to the drumbeat from the Chicago School free-marketeers.

Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers was a phenomenon –and still is. He had published it in 1953 when he was a 34 year-old graduate student at the New School, studying with Lowe. Immediately, it became a best-seller. Among Economics books, only Paul Samuelson’s basic textbook has had a bigger readership. Right through its seventh edition, published in 1999 with a new post-face essay, The World Philosophers evolved with the times, but it remained the entrance-way into Economics for generation after generation of “general reader” Americans and for people world-wide reading it in dozens of languages. The popularity of the book is amazing, but even more amazing is the fact that its popularity began deep in the conservative McCarthyite 1950s and remained while Economics in America became decisively neo-conservative and the political elites became more and more hostile to Heilbroner’s social democratic vision. Even when he conceded “the triumph of capitalism” (the title of his famous 1989 New Yorker article), Heilbroner held –in his wry, urbane, witty way—to a “slightly idealized Sweden” of his imagination and a hope for “participatory economics.” With justification, considering his publishing experience and his continually huge readership, he assumed that the Economics thoughtful non-specialist Americans really wanted was not the one they had gotten.

There were, of course, reasons why the little Chicago-based tribe of free-market economists came to have such influence on big-time American capitalists, Wall Streeters, and political elites. And nobody was better positioned to understand those reasons than Heilbroner himself. In The Worldly Philosophers, he had described the emerging free market philosophy lucidly, noting its 18th century roots: the state should have as little control over capital markets as possible and those markets, left alone, would regulate themselves, making the capitalists wealthy and eventually making everyone else–the workers of all sorts– less miserable than they had been in the past. And he had pointed to the fallacy in this philosophy: in the history of capitalism, there are two recurrent, intractable problems. First, although the lot of the workers may slowly improve or improve for a brief time, a system that demands more and more capitalization will have to get it either from the state or from the workers, and either way –or a combination of both–will hurt the workers. And second, the money-hungry headlong growth system is inherently prone to periodic crises –recessions, depressions, and even a Great Depression— which hurt everyone, especially the workers hit with unemployment and tossed out of the system. The free marketeers had tremendous appeal because they, in effect, denied both problems. Heilbroner had a great appreciation for the allure in America of delusional optimism and of reality-denial. That is what all his work after The Worldly Philosophers studies –that allure.

Heibroner had set out to answer the question ‘what did the great economists of the 18th and 19th century think would become of capitalism?’ It was –as we say in psychoanalysis—a developmental question; and to take it up Heilbroner had to explore what each ‘worldly philosopher’ thought about the origins and infant development of capitalism and what each thought motivated people, generally, and inside a capitalist system. It was in their assessments of human motivation that he located the potentiality for delusion or reality-denial among economists.

The forbearers of the free-marketeers, particularly Adam Smith, had thought that capitalism was ultimately unsustainable because it was motivated by an acquisitive drive common to all humans. How could that lead to anything but an economic war of all against all? But in the meanwhile capitalism would be regulated by an “invisible hand” of rational calculative market decision-making on the part of capitalists, who would want it to keep laying its golden eggs as long as possible. The free-marketeers emphasized the near term prospect and ignored the prediction of ultimate unsustainability. They did not want to consider human acquisitiveness or ask what restraints on acquisition would be necessary for the long term. Instead, they lied to themselves and asserted that danger would come not from acquisitiveness but from a heavy hand of regimentation. The possibility that acquisitiveness is not innate, built into “human nature,” but a function of capitalism, an effect on human beings, could not be discussed. Acquisitiveness had to be normal, something we should admire.

After The Worldly Philosophers and through the 1970s, Heilbroner set forth his own ideas about how capitalism might develop –for example, in The Future as History (1959) and An Inquiry Into The Human Prospect (1974). Much more than any of the worldly philosophers, he tried to put the development of capitalism in a bigger context. Simplifying without ever being simplistic, he explored from many angles three huge trends that appeared in the 19th century and came to define the 20th century. The rise of capitalism was the first. The second was the incredible acceleration of scientific and technological development and innovation, which had such impact on the organizations of societies and on people’s social attitudes and traditional beliefs. And the third was the spread of revolutionary movements after the American and French Revolutions, which brought the working class –once serfs and slaves—into the political arena as citizens and eventually extended political participation to women as well. Taken together, these trends meant that the economic realm, once clearly distinct from the political realm, from which its commands had come, could no longer be kept separate or thought about as separate in the classical way –it was everywhere, and its laborers, the vast majority of the population, had at least the potentiality of coming out of obscurity and devaluation. The state control question needed to be asked on all three fronts –should states try to control or plan the economy? the knowledge production and innovation processes? and the ideal of political freedom, nationally and internationally?

One of the most illuminating features of Heilbroner’s exploration of this three-pronged key question was that he understood so clearly that America’s development on all three fronts had been fundamentally different than that of any other nation—and this fact has made us not “exceptional,” but naieve, ill-informed, unaware of the rest of the world. America’s development was different than that of the western European nation-states; certainly completely different than that of the states (chiefly, the Soviet Union and then China) which, by-passing capitalist development, had leapt into communism in the 20th century after prolonged feudal periods. And America’s experience was nothing like that of the underdeveloped colonial states of Asia, Africa, and South America that emerged out of the ruins of 19th European capitalist imperialisms —many of them as socialist states, creating democratic institutions for the first time, and many as home-grown dictatorships in which colonial elites took over from the retreating Europeans.

America had been uniquely endowed at its birth with huge open lands to expand into, plentiful natural resources of all sorts, geographical isolation from invaders, relative classlessness or lack of social and political inequality heritage, a well-made Constitution. The existence of slaves and indentured children and displaced native peoples being accepted as good for productivity and overlooked as a challenge to the nation’s founding political principles, all was well for capitalism to take root and flourish. Which it did, right through the Civil War and up to the recessions and banking crises of the late 19th century, when post-slavery capitalism became robber baronish and imperialistic in a quite European manner, white hot in speed of change, devouring of new overseas labor and immigrant labor groups, and quite beyond the reach of the invisible hand’s guidance. That is, American capitalism had a century to get established and become culturally and socially normal before it began to show signs of needing state regulation. Every American region had its capitalist winner ideal –plantation gentlemen turned textile kings, cowboys, old WASP and new pull-yourself-up-by-the bootstraps WASP industrialists; optimistic individualists one and all.

The western European capitalists never had such a period of full-throttle, individualistic freedom from involvement with their governments. Having no open land to expand into, they became overseas adventurers, but their imperialisms were state-sponsored and dependent on state projects like the building of the canals in the Suez and in Panama that opened the world’s oceans to traffic. Their restive workers were infused with revolutionary aspirations and then with the example of Russia. Then began the 20th century battering of European capitalism, first in WWI and then in WWII. After WWII, the western European states were forced to modify their war-ruptured capitalisms, introducing many elements of control and planning under social democratic leadership. They became –each one differently—socialist capitalisms or capitalist socialisms, with the main purposes of their modifications being, socialistically, to redistribute wealth sufficiently to keep inequality (and unemployment) from becoming extreme and to provide certain fundamental social services universally.

America had modified its capitalism somewhat, too, in response to the Depression, but the purpose served was different: it was to stimulate and hold the system together while it righted itself –which it did on a wave of economic activity in the defense and transportation industries during and after WWII. The war cured capitalism of its greatest crisis, the Great Depression. In the 1950s, when Heilbroner wrote The Worldly Philosophers, the economic and political elites assumed that this boom would go on and on, guided only by the invisible hand. As he pointed out, this was the decade in which reality-denying optimism got deeply entrenched.

I went back this week to read Heilbroner’s writings during the 1960s, up to the moment when I listened so intently to his lectures. His three-pronged analysis served him so well for seeing what a juncture point the 1960s were. He had warned in The Future as History that Americans really ought to rein in their general optimism, be more realistic about the pluralistic state of the world and the complex historical forces at work in it, and join with the aspirations of the populations struggling to pull themselves out of their colonial pasts instead of treating these people –particularly in South America—as populations to exploit for their resources and their labor. In 1960, he judged the globe to be divided into two worlds, which we now call the North and the South, and he saw the whole of the South going in the direction of one form or another of socialism (not in the direction of either Soviet or Chinese Communism). Similarly, he saw Europe continuing in the direction of democratic socialism, although he recognized that there were many factors drawing different European states away from their post-War commitments to wealth redistribution and social services. The best thing Americans could do for themselves and the world was to join this trend and do everything possible to help it remain allied with maximally free political institutions, to avoid the extremes of rigid socialist economic planning.

This, of course, is not at all what happened. America did move in the direction of a somewhat more social democratic domestic policy under John Kennedy’s and then Lyndon Johnson’s leaderships – accepting the premise that this direction demanded Civil Rights legislation that would finally end the discrimination that had kept African Americans politically marginalized and economically pushed toward the lowest rungs of the working class or into unemployment. But, at the same time, the country moved into overseas imperialist ventures –under the guise of stopping Communism’s advance—in South America and then in southeast Asia. The capitalist imperialist project destroyed the social democratic one.

In response to this tragic development, Robert Heilbroner decided to look again at his expectation for American capitalism’s trajectory, and to change his question. Thinking he might have missed something, he posed his new question sharply: what is capitalism?
The resulting book was The Nature and Logic of Capitalism (1985), which Heilbroner revisited after the collapse of the Soviet Union in a short book called Twenty-first Century Capitalism, his 1992 Massey Lectures here in Toronto. I’ll write about his answer in my next post, as it seems to me supremely relevant for the present moment, when capitalism, morphed again, has shown its dangers even more clearly.

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It has been my privilege to be the first biographer for two of the 20th century’s exemplary people, Hannah Arendt and Anna Freud. For a biographer, the significance of being the first is that no textual image or collection of images of the subject precedes the one you create. Your view is clear, no one before you has mapped the whole lifestory, from birth to death. Setting out relatively free of preconceptions, you find –with a certain ‘aha!’ wonder—that the lifestory has a theme. Or perhaps you find the theme just because the lifestory is becoming a story, and a story must organize or have an organizing principle, like any fabricated thing. Probably it is more accurate to say the story has many themes, but one comes to seem essential, the lead organizing principle, the masterplan. A similar surfacing of a theme happens when you are the first teller of your own story, when you are your one-and-only autobiographer, or when you create or co-create your story with your psychoanalyst. But you, then, would not be the one to judge the story or the theme exemplary; such a judgment comes from those who take the story as exemplary once it has been told.

Hannah Arendt was a person who could not think without examining the words and concepts in which she was thinking. She thought as though following a maxim: the unexamined thought is not worth thinking. A drive to understand and to contain in thought shaped her life –and I think it had since she was a child, trying to understand what happened to her father, who had tertiary syphilis and died insane, thought disordered. The important people in her life were thinkers, each with a particular and compelling depth and originality to his or her thought. As her biographer, I tried to tell her story as a story of her thinking finding its characteristic operation: delving into the origins of ideas and then tracking their histories as they became disordered and misused, indistinct or without necessary distinction-making. She offered cures for misconceived concepts; for example, for the concept “politics,” or “power,” which had become tangled up with “violence” (as discussed in my last post). ‘How shall we think about this?’ was her consistent discipline, and she conducted her life to sustain this constant inquiry. She was not an activist, but a supplier of clarity for activists, a compelling example of how clarifying stopping to think can be.

While I was reading Mohandas Gandhi’s autobiography this week, I found myself going into my biographer’s mode and commenting to myself constantly ‘What a different kind of a person is this than Hannah Arendt or Anna Freud!’ ‘How would I tell this story, after so many have told it for their purposes? What is its theme?’ Even though there are so many Gandhis already in the library, the theme question is not difficult, because Gandhi himself was unusually conscious of his own guiding theme, and he was unusually bold about announcing it. It is the title of his autobiography: my experiments with truth. He was his own activist, applying the results of his experiments directly and immediately to the political realm, and exemplary for his ceaseless effort and his truthfulness.

The nub of his book, it seems to me is Chapter VIII, on Brahmacharya. There Gandhi tells how, having been practicing self-control of his senses in thought, word, and deed in various ways since 1901, he reached his decision in 1906 to take the brahmacharya vow, refraining from any “carnal relation” with his wife. “I had not shared my thoughts with my wife until then, but only consulted her at the time of taking the vow. She had no objection. But I had great difficulty in making the final resolve. I had not the necessary strength. How was I to control my passions?” Controlling his passions became Gandhi’s life-project. And he was lucidly clear that self-transformation was his precondition for political action and for promoting the political transformation he envisioned. He described himself to himself as a person totally in service to India’s poor, and to be that person his passions had to be totally in his service. He set himself up as an example, but not of a finished experiment; rather, of a continual work in progress. So he did not say to his followers ‘do as I do’ –the formula of the perfectly self-righteous, moralistic authoritarian—but ‘do what you conclude you must try to do after we talk about why the brahmacharya vow was the only possible personally liberating vow for me.’

Practically, Gandhi’s answer to his question about how to control his passions was to starve them: “So overpowering are the senses that they can be kept under control only when they are completely hedged in on all sides, from above and from beneath. It is common knowledge that they are powerless without food…” So, in addition to further refining his diet of fruit and nuts only, which he had been keeping for six years, Gandhi began to fast periodically, to help himself “cultivate a distaste for the objects that are denied to the body.” Aversion for the objects of passions is necessary for one who would be a humble servant and who would realize Brahman, that is, be perfectly “open to the glories of God”(a state Gandhi did not claim to have achieved). He tried to banish temptation. (To me, this seems an impossible goal, because it entails the temptation to be perfectly untemptable and to set yourself up as exemplary –when the judgment ‘this person is exemplary’ must come from others, from the world.)

Fasting eventually became one of Gandhi’s most effective political actions. He discovered its efficacy when he became the advisor for a group of mill hands in Ahmedabad (Chapter XXII). The mill hands, unfairly treated by the mill owners, were considering a strike. Gandhi was their organizer, setting them a fourfold pledge: to non-violence; to not “molesting the blacklegs [scab labor]”; to not depending on alms but earning their bread by other means during the strike; and to not giving up on the strike. For the first two weeks, they marched daily with their ‘Ek Tek’ (‘keep the pledge’) banners, strong in their resolve. Then they began to waiver and became irascible with the blacklegs. That the mill hands might break the pledge they had made to him felt inconceivable, Gandhi confessed, wondering: “Was it pride or was it my love for the laborers and my passionate regard for truth that was at the back of this feeling? –Who can say?”

Gandhi did not know what to do, but suddenly a path opened before him: he found himself telling the assembled laborers that he would not take any food until they rededicated themselves to the strike and stayed with it to settlement. “The laborers were thunderstruck.” They wept, and wanted to fast themselves instead: “It would be monstrous if you were to fast,” they said to Gandhi, the beloved father of their action. While the strikers renewed their pledge, the mill owners, who were also “like family” to Gandhi, had their thunderstruck moment, too. Even though they had argued patronizingly that they were like parents to the mill-hand children and knew what was best for these poor, uneducated workers, the owners were moved by Gandhi’s fast: “The hearts of the mill-owners were touched, and they set about discovering some means for a settlement.”

Delighted as he was by the arbitration that followed, and the settlement, Gandhi was worried that his fast had a “grave defect.” Practitioners of non-violence, Satyagraphi, are not supposed to act against others, but only for their action’s goal. “With the mill-owners, I could only plead; to act against them would amount to coercion.” But, of course, the fast was an act against the mill-owners, and it did, of course, cause them “strain,” which “cut me, therefore, to the quick.”

Gandhi used his fasts like levers, prying people away from their fixed positions or away from their weaknesses. He was certainly correct that the fasts were not a form of persuasion; they were coercive; and they were not collective actions, not, in that sense, very political. “If you do not do this, I will die” they said. Although he was well aware of this “grave defect,” Gandhi went right ahead, on his own, not consulting or deliberating with others. You can see in the details of how he described what he was doing his awareness that he was, in effect, stirring up a family crisis, making all parties fearful that if they persisted in their benighted behavior, their lack of control over their passions, they would cause his death –the death of the leader they called Bapu (Papa). It is hardly a coincidence that Gandhi had admitted early in the autobiography –confessing a guilt that never ceased—his sense that he had caused his own father’s death by failing to keep the proper vigil at his deathbed. Instead he had been off having “carnal relation” with his wife. Everywhere in the autobiography the message is clear: if you do not control your passions every moment, Bapu will die –and you yourself will die unredeemed, unrealized. (For all its psychological subtlety, Gandhi’s autobiography nowhere entertains the possibility that commanding your self or your passions out of guilt is bound to lead you to commanding others as your atonement.)

Gandhi certainly proved with his life his point that no political actor is stronger than someone who is not held hostage by his investment in or his passions for objects and people in the world. Someone who has worked to have nothing to lose. Such a person has the possibility of being incorruptible; beyond bribes; beyond hypocrisy. Conversely, no political actor is more reprehensible than one who has taken an ascetic vow, or a vow of humble service and compassion, and then betrayed it. Gandhi understood this to be the story of all institutionalized religions, so thickly populated as they are with people who claim to follow the example of a humble ascetic –like Jesus, like Buddha, like Mohammed—and then do exactly as the ascetic did not do, arrogantly abusing other people or accumulating worldly goods for their own satisfaction. It is certainly one of the most depressing ironies of the contemporary world that so many people join religious institutions thinking that they will find there incorruptible people, moral leaders, when such are the least likely places for a truly moral leader to be found. Gandhi himself never had anything to do with institutionalized religion and his autobiography is full of lament that religious institutions offer their members such poor examples and such poor guidance.

Gandhi certainly did not share Hannah Arendt’s distinction –one of her many carefully drawn distinctions, clarifications—between the moral domain where the integrity of the self, “the standard of the self,” is crucial and the political domain, where concern for the world all share should be the paramount concern. This distinction would have made no sense to him. And that is, I think, because he was exceptional in his capacity to make every moment of self-concern a moment of concern for the world. But he was not exemplary for prioritizing concern for the world. But it seems to me that he nonetheless made his greatest contributions to the world when he was least concerned with the purity of his practice and most concerned with articulating principles he believed he shared with all –not just with fellow ascetics–who act in the world with worldly integrity. Such a principle was that non-violence can be stronger than violence when there is a widespread consciousness that violence is ultimately powerless, and ultimately self-defeating. That it always has been thus, and always will be.

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In November of 1998, the United Nations General Assembly made a remarkable declaration. The first decade of the new millennium, 2001-2010, the delegates said, would be an International Decade for the Promotion of a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the World. This followed upon a declaration made a year earlier that set the millennial year 2000 as the Year of the Culture of Peace. In the intervening year “non-violence” had entered the conceptualization, as the positive premise of “the culture of peace.”

That is, the UN delegates were not thinking of peace as simply a negative, the absence of war. “Non-violence” had come to signal something richly constructive: ecological non-violence. socio-political non-violence, and political non-violence—a broad, Gandhian program of recovering the natural world and natural ways of living. By 2005, half way through the decade, so many NGOs around the world had signed up to the UN’s intention, and were educating so many millions of people in techniques for establishing a culture of peace and non-violence in their families, communities and countries, that one NGO report referred to this world-wide university, collectively, as “the other superpower.” (You can read these fascinating reports at http://decade-culture-of-peace.org/2005report.html.)

Outside of Europe, “the other superpower” had been broadly united in its critique of America, the one of the two so-called superpowers that had been left standing at the end of the Cold War. For example, on January 31, 2003, Nelson Mandela called upon both Americans and people everywhere to organize demonstrations in protest of George Bush’s plan to invade and occupy Iraq. Speaking in Johannesburg, Mandela said that an American President “who has no foresight and cannot think properly” was going “to plunge the world into a holocaust.” He even went so far as to raise a topic that is almost never discussed in America –the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945: “if there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America.” America, he was saying, had no place to stand to accuse Iraq of preparing to use weapons of mass destruction when it had never owned up to its distinction as the one country that had ever used such weapons. According to BBC News, at least ten million people–probably many more– in sixty countries turned out for non-violent protests on February 15, 2003; the largest mass action in the history of the world.

Although so many outside of America and its allies among European leaders (not European citizens) consider America to be a key source of violence, the only organized political parties that work with versions of the full Gandhian eco-socio-politico vision are the Green Parties (which are active, of course, in America on a small scale, and in Canada and Europe on a much larger and more influential scale, with representation in the European Parliament). The beginning of the new millennium was also the moment when the Green Parties had reached the point in their evolution of some two decades when they stood ready to issue a Global Greens Charter. This document, ratified by national Green Party delegates from all over the world at a 2001 meeting in Australia, is in the same spirit as the UN effort to promote “a culture of peace and non-violence for the children of the world.”

I think that many people in America have no idea that the social democratic Green Parties are globally networked (with four federations of the national parties on four continents) or that their purpose is so embracing, not just environmentalist. Since the German Greens took the lead in the late 1970s in formulating party platforms and general statements, Greens have concerned themselves with “four pillars”: “Ökologisch”, “Sozial”, “Basisdemokratisch” and “Gewaltfrei” –ecological, social, basic democratic (referring to what in English is usually called participatory democracy), and non-violent. The Global Greens Charter elaborates the four pillars, and the parties themselves stay as close to participatory democracy in their own practices as possible.

We tend to think of 2001 only as the year of 9/11 and the launch of the “war on terror”; but it was also a year of great achievement in non-violent political life. The Cold War has been succeeded not by a “clash of civilizations” (as conservative theoreticians assert) but by a struggle between people all over the world, loosely organized, who want to live in a culture of peace and those who live by violence. That would be all the so-called civilizations made up of violent religious fundamentalists of all sorts and states that are militaristic and locked into arms races. It’s the Superpower –if we understand power as what arises when people act together as equals—vs. the Superviolences. (The distinction between power and violence implied in this description is one Gandhi and Arendt shared –and I will come back to it later.)

The actions of all the non-governmental people and organizations associated with the UNs’ Decade, with the anti-war protests of the 2000s, with the Green Party actions since the Greens Chartered themselves globally –these are all political actions, not moral statements. Satyagraha (non-violent resistance and non-cooperation) is a strategy for these people and organizations –and it runs across what they do as ecological activists, social justice activists, local and national and international organizers. But they do not think that they have to be Gandhian in their moral or spiritual lives to follow their vision. Their statements do not begin with self-rule or self-restriction; as individuals they do not usually ground themselves in ascetic practices or meticulously carried out vegetarianism. The Global Green Charter lucidly indicates that over-consumption is a problem of the first order –as does Tim Jackson’s Prosperity Without Growth, although without any political program—but the Charter does not teach that any person who wishes to act in the world to reduce earth-destroying and poverty-creating consumption must first conduct what Gandhi called “experiments with truth” to determine the best way to minimize his or her food intake.

For a thinker like Hannah Arendt, drawing a clear line between people’s moral lives and decisions and their political lives was of great importance –for the health and well-being of their political lives. This is how she summarized her distinction: “In the center of moral considerations of human conduct stands the self; in the center of political considerations stands the world.” Let me see if I can succinctly say what this aphorism means.

Basically, Hannah Arendt thought that in a world which has seen all moral standards collapse or reveal themselves to be only customs or mores of particular cultures, people have no doctrinal resort to help them resist either the temptation to bad deeds or to good deeds –often they cannot even judge what is bad and what good, and they do horrendous deeds in the name of some good. That is, the temptation to do good deeds can lead to inflicting perverse and violent ideas about what is good on other people. When moral standards have collapsed or been revealed as without either divine origin or natural law foundation, we ought to recognize, she felt, that morality is an individual matter of ”the standard of the self.” It is you saying to yourself “I will not do this deed because I could not live with myself if I did.” Not you saying “Thou shalt not kill.” This spontaneous internal conversation, not any commandment will guide your hand when you are confronted with a moral question or a moral dilemma; and you should remain humble in your conversation, not advertising it or commanding anyone else to follow you. Humility is the essential characteristic of the moral person. Morality that is prescribed or arrogantly dictated by commandments is always a step in the direction of authoritarianism –particularly in a time when all commandments have been infinitely corrupted as people have turned “Thou shalt kill” into “Thou shalt kill all your neighbors of this sort down to the very last child.”

Hannah Arendt was so averse to moralism in any form that she found companionship in her view with a fellow most people think of as the consummate immoralist among political thinkers: Machiavelli. He’s the one who supposedly recommended to princes that they learn to be bad. But this is not what Hannah Arendt read in The Prince. She saw a recommendation that princes learn not to be tempted by moralizing and do-gooding that is self-aggrandizing and prescriptive to others. Telling others what is good and good for them, will eventually be anti-republican, anti-political. Machiavelli’s famous aphorism “Better save your city than your soul” meant, she thought, that it is important above all to act in the political realm with regard for others, for equality, for solidarity in achieved agreements, the common world, and leave saving your soul to the privacy of your internal conversation, your conscience.

If the first decades of Hannah Arendt’s writing life were dedicated to the question “Was ist Politik?” and to giving the word “politics” the deep exploration it deserves, the last decade of her life was dedicated to the question “what is judgment?” And how does it operate in political action? What is its relation to conscience? She was writing on these questions for her last book, The Life of the Mind in the years I studied with her, and her reflections then seemed to me so right and so essential. She was all about how to be a political person and to exercise political judgment in particular political situations, without recourse to rules from inherited moral or religious traditions of any sort. But this week I found myself thinking her ideas through again, questioning. I’ve been wondering if it is possible –especially in our world–for people to be political in her sense without the example in their minds –the guidance in their minds—of a political actor who kept his standard of the self while being political, worldly.

This week I’ve been reading –for the first time—Mahatma Gandhi’s extraordinary autobiography. As well as a selection of biographies and books about the man by those who knew him, and several works by people now considering him and his life with their particular political situations in mind –like a manuscript by Ramin Jahanbegloo, an Iranian activist and supporter of the current Green Revolution in Iran, who teaches political theory here at the University of Toronto. Reading Gandhi and reading about him, I think I understand better than before why he was and has remained the exemplar of non-violent action and thinking. But also how he managed to be non-prescriptive, non-commanding, worldly person, just as averse to moralism and religious admonishing as Arendt was, although he was a spiritual adept, a religious man. I will write about this next post, from my state of astonishment before who he was.

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Since last weekend, the Toronto newspapers and radio talk shows have all been full of discussion of the G20 protests –the violent ones and the non-violent ones–and the police action against the protesters. Reading and listening, I found myself taking a tour in my mind of what I learned about citizen action from my teacher, Hannah Arendt. And what I have learned in the years since her death in 1975 from the citizen action tradition that became, I think, the most important one in the world after the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed, and apartheid ended in South Africa. That tradition, of course, came not from Europe or America –Arendt’s sources of inspiration—but from India.

Among my most treasured possessions is a two volume first edition of Peter Nettl’s 1966 biography Rosa Luxemburg. Hannah Arendt reviewed the biography for the New York Review of Books; then republished her review two years later in Men In Dark Times, a collection of biographical portraits. She made me a gift of the volumes in 1973, after we had had a conversation about what was valuable in the Marxist tradition, and what was just misconceived and dangerous—the topic of a series of lectures she had given in the 50s at Princeton. (The whole group of those lectures is only now on its way into the public domain thanks to an edition my friend Jerome Kohn is preparing.) “Rosa Luxemburg really could answer the question Was ist Politik? [What is politics?] You find the whole story in here,” Dr. Arendt said as she handed me the Nettl volumes.

The first lesson I –then 26 years old–got from reading through the 994 pages of Rosa Luxemburg was about how to read a book. There was not a page in the two volumes that was not covered with Dr. Arendt’s under-linings, little penciled marginal notes, and “yes!” and “no! with heavy exclamation points. The inside covers, front and back, were dense with topical words or phrases, page numbers, cross references—like a private index. Dr. Arendt did not, obviously, just read. She argued, she fought, she praised, she engaged Nettl and Rosa Luxemburg herself in a 994 page conversation. The action of the review was spontaneous, but based on deep, disciplined debate and deliberation.

But first to Rosa Luxemburg: she was a Pole, Jewish, respected but not very prominent in the German Social Democratic Party when Hannah Arendt’s parents joined the Party about the time of their daughter’s birth, 1906. Ten years later, toward the end of the First World War, however , “Red Rosa” had emerged as co-leader of the most radical left faction of the SPD called the Spartakus Bund. That is when Arendt’s future husband Heinrich Blucher, then a young working man, joined the Bund. Shortly afterwards, in 1918, Red Rosa was brutally murdered by right wing thugs –perhaps with the complicity of the former SPD colleagues who had renounced her and her ideas. Today, the spot where her tortured body was dumped in the Landswehr Canal is marked with a historical plaque: you can read it if you take a tour boat up the Canal, through the new post-Wall, post-1989 Berlin.

Red Rosa was considered a deviant thinker among the SPD Marxists for, basically, two of her ideas –the very two that Hannah Arendt thought were the most valuable legacy of Marxism. The first idea was that action is the crux of politics. Politics is people’s actions –the actions of people who consider themselves equals and who gain freedom together. This led Rosa to back all kinds of ways in which people act together –particularly mass striking and boycotting—and it led her to oppose all kinds of ways in which, even if for a supposedly good end, action is suppressed. No end is good that prevents people’s action. No political action is right that does not pave the way for more political action.

The second idea was that capitalism is not, as Marx himself thought, an economic system that is bound to collapse because its workers will rise up and destroy it when they grasp completely how it has exploited their labor and oppressed them. In that Marxian view, leaders and intellectuals must point out to the workers that capitalism’s crash time has come, and lo! the revolution will begin. Privatized property will be destroyed and workers will own the means of production, no longer being alienated from their labor.

Capitalism, the Marxist Rosa Luxemburg argued against this Marxist vision, is inherently expansionary, and it will grow indefinitely, grinding up workers and then going overseas to pull into its grasp every soul anywhere on the planet who can become a worker, a “wage slave.” All industrialists were imperialists, she insisted, who avoided the wrath of their workers at home by exploiting the overseas peoples their nation-states had already colonized. Nation-state imperialism and capitalist imperialism go hand in glove. Out-sourcing for cheaper labor and thus greater profit means that capitalism will not collapse until it has devoured all the planet’s resources and all the planet’s peoples. Red Rosa foresaw what we call globalization, and she even realized that globalization would require interlocking national banking systems. That is, industrial capitalism, producing and trading goods, would turn into finance capitalism, exchanging not just goods but printed money and money instruments.

The implication of this second idea was that the workers should act immediately to oppose the developing form of capitalism. They should, for example, refuse to participate in imperialistic wars . So, not as a pacifist, but as an anti-imperialist, Red Rosa urged workers against enlisting in First World War armies –capitalist armies. On this theory, we should all be anti-war, as by this time there is no such thing as a war between states or regions that is not capitalist imperialist.

Both of these ideas were central to Hannah Arendt’s thought from her youth; they lay behind her turn away from her first philosophy teacher, Martin Heidegger, whose notions about the people, the Volk, were fascistic, and toward her second philosophy teacher, Karl Jaspers, who became a hero of the German resistance to Hitler (a story I will write about later). When she wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Rosa Luxemburg’s understanding of imperialism suffused the long section called “Imperialism.” The foundation of Arendt’s cosmopolitan vision was laid out in that section, too. Only people concerned about the whole earth and all its peoples could conceivably act together against imperial capitalism, which, Arendt added, completely corrupts the overseas imperialists, who then go on to construct a “continental imperialism” in the countries of their near neighbors and a totalitarian regime in their whole Reich. A totalitarian regime is necessary to sustain overseas ventures and incorporate what being brutal masters over colonial slaves teaches about how to maximally control people and prevent them from acting. Rosa Luxemburg had suspected that racism would be the ideology of capitalist world conquest, and Arendt showed in enormous detail how that intuition also proved correct. Racism overseas melded into Aryanism at the Nazi homebase, Germany, and in their Reich.

That politics is action and that imperialist capitalism turning into totalitarianism is the complete antithesis of action, the destruction of politics, is Hannah Arendt’s thought in a nutshell. Politics-anti-politics; thesis-antithesis. And is there a synthesis to this dialectic, as the Marxists say? If a totalitarian regime collapses –because it has closed off its lifeblood, politics—something new may emerge. There may be a “new beginning” as Arendt said, but no dialectical “law of history” will bring it about. Only if the people have not lost all sense of what politics is will they be able to be political again. And both those who have been totalitarian and those who have fought totalitarians will have to recover, for even those who have fought a totalitarian regime assimilate to its anti-political methods. So Was ist politik? is really the key question in a world struggling to be post-totalitarian. The key question for the future. We are still in that world.

The main reason why Hannah Arendt’s thought is so difficult for most of her readers to grasp is that it really is as simple as I have just made it out to be. In the 1960s and 70s her simple idea made some readers angry enough at Hannah Arendt to want to denounce her and throw her in a canal. This was certainly so among the majority of American Jewish and Israeli readers of her Eichman in Jerusalem. There she showed how the Nazi totalitarians had systematically made their victims into people without politics–made the Jews and their leaders unable to act, to resist. Killed their action-sense before killing them. She was misunderstood to be saying that the Jews had “gone like sheep to the slaughter” or that they had co-operated in being killed.

She spoke an unfamiliar conceptual language, neither right nor left, so her meaning often could not be caught. For most people, politics is rulership, governance. For example, in his Prosperity Without Growth that I wrote about last week, Tim Jackson assumes that politics is government and hopes for the “good governance” that will instruct people how to do what is good for them – operating like a good prevention oriented public health system. He and most readers of The Oxford English Dictionary would be untroubled by the definition that you will find there: politics is ”the science and art of government.” This is the definition taken for granted in Departments of Politics or Government Departments in most universities, and in think-tanks of all persuasions, including Jackson’s.

For both Red Rosa and Hannah Arendt, by contrast, politics is people gathering to discuss and debate as equals and join each other as equals in acting. Politics presupposes a degree of freedom to discuss and act, and equality among those speaking and acting; the degree of freedom will grow in the acting. The constitutions and institutions such people make to keep alive their political process and to elect–one person, one vote—people to represent them when they cannot be there to speak and act directly, are their government. Laws are distillations of their accumulated wisdom about how to protect the political process and how to preserve the polity or organized society .

What Arendt did in the books that followed upon her great book The Origins of Totalitarianism, however, was to undertake something Red Rosa did not have the education or the political freedom for—or a long enough life. Arendt tracked back over the whole European tradition –starting with the Greeks–to figure out when and why people had started defining politics in a way that made the experiment in politics the Greeks began disappear from view. That is, defining it as rulership or government. She revisited the history of the American Revolution, too, asking how the Americans who cast off pre-industrial British imperialist rule rediscovered Was Politk ist –and the contemporary French revolutionaries did not.

In the other 20th century tradition where citizen action emerged as the essence of politics, the history summoned was different. And the self-taught scholar who summoned that different history was also the person who put its lessons into action in a political movement that accomplished something without precedent in the history of capitalist imperialism. Mahatma Gandhi inspired and led the Indian independence movement that brought a colonialized people to question British industrialism, cast off British rule, and establish an independent state. When he was murdered in 1948, at the age of 78, his unique voice was lost, but not his example or his vision, which I will write about next time and compare to the legacy of Red Rosa and her fine student, Hannah Arendt.

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