Revising Marx’s Narrative: Socialism Imposed Incrementally

According to Karl Marx, the inevitable rise of socialism and communism would happen automatically, in the wake of an equally inevitable and equally automatic collapse of the capitalist system. The workers would experience continually increasing poverty and suffering, while the capitalist system would break down economically.

After the failure of the old system, Marx’s new system would institute itself in human civilization.

Yet half a century after the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848, socialists and communists were still waiting. Capitalism wasn’t collapsing. In fact, it was getting stronger.

(While there is complicated discussion surrounding the many types of socialism and the many types of communism, for the present purposes, ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ may be regarded as almost synonymous. The word ‘capitalism’ here is shorthand for ‘free market’ capitalism or ‘laissez faire’ capitalism, which is significantly different from other types of capitalism.)

During the second half of the nineteenth century, working-class wages and standards of living improved steadily. Working conditions became more humane. In some cases, the rise of labor unions made the workers see themselves as parts of, instead of the enemies of, the capitalist system.

Disappointed socialists and communists began to rethink Marx’s doctrines. How would they impose their system on civilization, if the spontaneous collapse of the old system didn’t happen? One answer was the incremental establishment of statist redistribution schemes and the partial abolition of private property by introducing government ownership of certain industrial sectors.

If capitalism wasn’t going to cave in on itself suddenly, then perhaps it could be deliberately weakened so that it crumbled slowly. This tactic is sometimes called ‘Fabian’ socialism, named after the Fabian Society, a British political group.

The specific actions which would undermine civilization were systems of various redistribution programs and the nationalization of industries, as historian William Hagen writes:

In 1899, theoretician and journalist Eduard Bernstein challenged the capitalist breakdown theory. He argued that, despite Marx’s forecast, industrialization was neither eliminating the small-scale property-owning middle classes (“petty bourgeoisie”) nor, despite injustices and inequalities, “immiserating” the working class, whose real living standards, in the economically bustling pre-1914 decades, were actually rising as industrial society matured. Socialists should therefore abandon ideas of utopian collectivism beyond capitalism — that is, in a future socialism or communism — and ally with village farmers and small businessmen, and with the educated middle class, to seek realizable ends gradually by nonrevolutionary means. In Bernstein’s British-influenced view, socialism would amount in practice to a modern welfare state with nationalized big industry and finance, but preserving property rights in smaller enterprises and family farms.

The implementation of many small redistribution mechanisms would hide the fact that, taken together, their net impact would be quite large. Government ownership of various industries and financial institutions would be justified by various ad hoc explanations regarding safety or efficiency. Thus Fabian socialism is not only a gradualist, but also deceptive.

To make way for such programs, the socialists would need to eliminate the organic functions of society which naturally and historically had served the same purposes. Private-sector charities, foundations, community services, volunteerism, etc., would have to be dismantled so that government-operated social services were seen as the better, or only, option.

The notion that the government can, or should, take over functions previously and traditionally carried out by the private sector is and was like a virus, spreading and replicating itself, and destroying bit by bit charitable institutions which had so significantly helped people, and replacing those institutions with inefficient bureaucracies.

To trade the viral metaphor for a fungal one, the slow rot of incremental socialism might yet, in the dreams of the communists, bring about Marx’s enthusiastically anticipated destruction of society.

A Glimpse at a Historic University: Erfurt

The history of universities shaped in many ways the history of culture. The University of Bologna in Italy, which started around 1088 A.D., is commonly cited as the world’s first university. While this claim has been disputed, it generally stands. Within a century or two, universities sprang up around Europe.

The universities of Europe in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance years were structured differently than the universities of North America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

While the daily lives of students at the universities were more regimented than the universities of five to ten centuries later, the classes and professors were less coordinated. To obtain a degree, a student read whichever books, attended the number variety of classes and lectures, which he thought would best prepare him for examinations. There was no set number of semesters or courses needed to graduate.

When a student felt ready, he would request to be examined. He would then undergo days of detailed and intense testing, most of it spoken before a panel of professors, rather than written. When the examinations were over, the professors conferred among themselves, and decided whether or not the student had earned a diploma.

The students lived in buildings controlled by the university. The medievals had a balanced view of alcohol. While drunkenness was forbidden, and students would be punished for it, a glass of beer or wine was served with most meals.

Writing from a twenty-first century perspective, historian Eric Metaxas describes student life at Erfurt, one of Europe’s most significant universities:

By our own standards, life at the university was quite regimented, with students arising at 4:00 a.m. for devotions and going to bed at 8:00 p.m. All students lived in a residential college called a bursa, of which there were six in Erfurt. Students paid for room and board. Two meals per day were served, the first at 10:00 a.m., after four hours of exercises and lectures. After the first meal, there were more exercises and lectures until 5:00 p.m.

The exercises were, of course, mathematical and grammatical exercises, not physical ones. Regarding the bursa, Metaxas notes:

Bursa is the Latin word for sack or purse; this term is still with us in modern universities, where the treasurer or business officer is called the bursar.

Debate was a central activity at a medieval university. A student was given a viewpoint or hypothesis, prepared for several days, and then debated against another student. Often, the students were required to switch sides, and have the debate again a few days later. In this way, the students learned detailed evidence for both sides of the question.

Sometimes the debates were done in teams, with several students on each side.

Erfurt’s university excelled at debate, and its reputation for well-reasoned debates spread across Europe, as historian Lyndal Roper writes:

Founded in 1392, the university was the oldest German institution to have a charter, and in the early sixteenth century it boasted an outstanding collection of humanists, interested in the revival of ancient learning and in returning to the sources.

Particularly in the universities north of the Alps, linguistic skills were highly valued. Students already knew Latin when they arrived at the university. They expanded their Latin skills, learned Hebrew, and learned to distinguish between classical Greek and koine Greek.

The demands of precise scholarship caused professors and students to look at texts in their original languages. Aristotle and Plato were read in Greek, Cicero and Tacitus in Latin, and the Bible in Hebrew. To rely on a translation was to compromise one’s intellectual and rational standards.

Understanding Edmund Burke: The Difference Between Change and Reformation

The eighteenth century includes both the French Revolution and the American Revolution, and an axiomatic insight into those years is the failure of the French Revolution and the success of the American Revolution. Why, and how, did the one backfire, while other other one triumphed?

Part of the answer is to be found in the writings of Edmund Burke. He saw the clear difference between the two.

Both revolutions began with a quest for liberty - yet the American Revolution succeeded in increasing individual freedom, while the French Revolution ended with a harsh dictatorship’s limitations on personal liberty. Why the difference?

As constitutional scholar Mark Levin writes:

Natural law and the civil society or social order are not at odds with the individual’s liberty but in harmony with it - each requiring the other.

The difference was that the American Revolution sought to overthrow the government, and to change the political order, while the French Revolution sought to change society and destroy the culture.

The American Revolution worked to preserve a civil order which had a historical basis of liberty: the American Revolution did not attack, but rather appealed to, the Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights of 1689, both documents enshrining civil rights.

The French Revolution, on the other hand, misidentified the problem. Rather than attacking the absolutist monarchy, which had abused its power and limited freedom, the French Revolution attacked French society and culture. In so doing, it assaulted the very basis on which liberty might be based.

Mark Levin gives further insight into Edmund Burke’s views of the two revolutions:

The prominent British statesman and scholar Edmund Burke (1729 - 1797) emphasized another fundamental characteristic of the civil society - valuing human experience, tradition, and custom. Burke was outspoken in his sympathy for the American colonists and condemned the oppressions of the British monarchy that led to the American Revolution. However, he was also repulsed by the French Revolution. Burke saw the latter as a revolt led by elites and anarchists who had as their purpose not only redress against French rule but the utter destruction of French society, traditions, and customs.

Looking at Burke’s own words, he riffs on the words ‘change’ and ‘reform’ - as marking the distinction between the two revolutions. The word ‘reform’ refers to the act of directing, or redirecting, a system back to its original and foundational purposes and goals: so it was that the English system, based on the Magna Carta and the 1689 Bill of Rights, was oriented toward individual freedom and political liberty. The American Revolution was simply a redirecting of the system back toward those essential documents.

On the other hand, ‘change’ refers to the destruction of foundations. If the French Revolution wanted change, it wanted to destroy the civil and societal and cultural bases for freedom and liberty. If the French Revolution hoped to gain freedom and liberty via this route, it was sadly mistaken.

As Burke himself wrote:

There is a manifest, marked distinction, which ill men with ill designs, or weak men incapable of any design, will constantly be confounding, that is, a marked distinction between change and reformation. The former alters the substance of the objects themselves; and gets rid of all their essential good, as well as of all the accidental evil, annexed to them. Change is novelty; and whether it is to operate any one of the effects of reformation at all, or whether it may not contradict the very principle upon which reformation is desired, cannot be certainly known beforehand. Reform is, not a change in the substance, or in the primary modification, of the object, but, a direct application of a remedy to the grievance complained of. So far as that is removed, all is sure. It stops there; and, if it fails, the substance which underwent the operation, at the very worst, is but where it was.

With accuracy, Burke predicted the course and conclusion of the French Revolution; he died before it was over. He saw how it must go; the series of events could have only one conclusion.

The French Revolution, Burke foretold, having destroyed, or at least wounded, the social and cultural order, would proceed with a succession of random samplings, unable to establish its hoped-for new order. The French Revolution could not settle on a new pattern, and so implemented a sequence of new patterns, and kept each but for a short while.

Instead of instituting a new and better system, the French Revolution weakened the nation by confusing it with a series of experiments in government, as Burke writes:

By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways, as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.

The French Revolution failed for at least two reasons. One of them was that it hoped to fix a governmental and political wrong by changing, not the government and not the political system, but rather culture and society.

Political and governmental problems have political and governmental solutions. For this reason, the American Revolution, having identified such problems, did not undertake to change society and culture. Rather, it sought to change political and governmental structures.

The problems which led to the French Revolution did not have their roots in culture and society, yet the leaders of that revolution undertook to change both. They misidentified the source of the problems, and therefore prescribed the incorrect actions to repair those problems.

How the World is Structured: What is a Nation?

In the study of History, distinguish between ‘nations’ and ‘states’ — which is confusing, because in ordinary language, we use the words ‘nations’ and ‘countries’ interchangeably, and we use the word ‘states’ to refer to the fifty subdivisions within the United States.

But these words have a different meaning in historical scholarship.

A ‘state’ is a territory with its own government. As a territory, it can be identified on a map, and has distinct boundaries. It has one government for this territory. So what we call a ‘country’ in everyday language is a “state” — examples being Germany, France, Poland, Canada, etc.

A nation is a group of people with a shared sense of identity. The people of a nation have something in common: a language, a culture, a narrative history, a religion, art, music, clothing, etc.

Historians use the term ‘nation-state’ to identify a nation which has its own state. Japan is an example of a nation-state.

There are some states which are not ‘nation-states’ — these are states which include several different nations. Consider Russia: it includes not only ethnic Russians, but large numbers of people who live in regions thoroughly saturated in non-Russian languages and cultures. The area within Russia that is actually ‘Russian’ only part of the larger state.

Thus Russia would be classified as a state, but not a nation.

Conversely, there are nations which do not have states.

The Laplanders, or Lapps, are a nation with their own culture, language, etc., but do not have their own state. Rather, they live in parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia.

Historically, other nations without states would include Poland from 1795 to 1919. During those years, there was no country called Poland, but the Poles lived as residents in Russia, Austria, and Prussia. Likewise, some groups of Native Americans (‘Indians’) are classified as nations, but some of them do not have their own sovereign territory or state.

The ‘nation’ is an important factor in history, because it is more powerful in creating and maintaining identity than a state. The world is composed primarily of nation-states. The great movements of history are composed of nations, not nation-states.

The study of history serves people, according to Jill Lepore, when “it makes the case for the nation, and for the enduring importance of the United States and of American civic ideals, by arguing against” the malignant forms of nationalism.

By saying that thinking about history “makes the case for the nation,” Lepore is pointing to the concept of ‘nation’ in the abstract. She indicates that ‘nation’ is to be understood as a foundational concept: nations are the atoms which together form the world.

The modern world is a collection of nations. Has it always been this way? Are there alternative ways to structure the world? Are there better ways to structure the world?

Nations, unlike nation-states, have existed since the earliest known history. It is perhaps an innate feature of human beings to organize themselves as nations, and to their membership in a nation as one of their identities — but not their most important identity.

In terms of structuring the world, it is not necessary that the world be shaped by nation-states. Nations can, instead, be formed into the dominions of dynasties. This was often the case before the rise of nation-states. Individuals identified themselves as members of nations and as subjects of a dynasty, but not as citizens of a nation-state.

One can think of England, in which a soldier nine centuries ago perhaps thought of himself as fighting for “his majesty the king,” but not for “England.” — Likewise, an Austrian owed his allegiance to the Habsburg Dynasty, not to Austria. Thus a world organized by dynasties is an alternative to a world organized by nation-states. But in both of these scenarios, the nation remains.

Historically, then, we can see that there are at least two options for organizing the world: the nation-state or the dynasty. Are there other options? Could the world be structured around nations instead of nation-states?

If the world were organized around nations, instead of nation-states or dynasties, then it would essentially be a tribal world. This may have been the case in certain times and places, e.g., the non-Roman parts of Europe in the millennium or two prior to 800 A.D.

Thoughts about the nation-state, and alternatives to it, are relevant to concerns about nationalism. The word ‘nationalism’ is subject to various uses and misunderstandings. It is a problematic word, because it can refer either to a dangerous form, or to a peaceful form, of the nationalistic sentiment.

The dangerous form of nationalism is a value system which places the continued strength and growth of the nation-state above all else; in this sense of ‘nationalism,’ every other concern in life — e.g., family, friends, religious faith, duty, honor, art, science, music, literature, etc. — is subordinate to the nation-state. The savage implication is that any of those other things can also be sacrificed for the sake of the nation-state. This evil form of ‘nationalism’ can therefore lead to war and death.

The beneficial form of ‘nationalism’ is a healthy and balanced appreciation of one’s homeland, its achievements, and its contributions. This type of nationalism leads to better global relations between countries, because while it allows people to appreciate their own nation, it also urges them to appreciate other nations. Wholesome friendships between nations flourish when the individual nations have respect both for themselves and for other nations.

The peaceful form of nationalism is often simply called ‘patriotism,’ and patriotism is instrumental in forming productive and cordial relationships between nations. A nation filled with self-hatred will make a poor ally.

Interestingly, historian Jill Lepore speculates about whether “identity politics” could replace the nation-state as a primary organizational unit. Instead of loyalty to the nation, an individual could feel a primary loyalty to a demographic category like gender, race, etc.

Jill Lepore’s questions prompt musings: Could “identity politics” truly replace other forms of global organization? If it could, what would be the effects of this type of tribalism?

We can conclude that civilization seems to have made progress at times when the planet was organized primarily into dynasties, at times when it was organized primarily into nation-states, and at times when it was organized simply by nations as tribes. In all three situations, nations were an important identity, even when they weren’t the primary organizing principle.

We can also conclude that the distinction between peaceful beneficial nationalism and warlike malignant nationalism is significant, and that the former has edified civilization while the latter has turned civilization against itself.

The End of an Empire: Did Franz Abdicate to Spite Napoleon?

The Holy Roman Empire lasted over a thousand years. Had it been accurately named, historians would refer to it as a Central European Defensive Coalition, which is what it actually was. It was a loose confederation, so loose, in fact, that it’s not even clear when it began: historians point to various dates between 800 A.D. and 962 A.D. as the starting point for the empire.

Its ending point, however, is quite clear. The last emperor of the HRE, Franz II, dissolved the empire and abdicated in August 1806.

Franz II, however, had developed a backup plan. Two years earlier, in August 1804, he’d established Austria as its own empire, so that when he dissolved the HRE, the Austrian Empire remained as a self-sustaining unit. So the Holy Roman Emperor Franz II became the Austrian Emperor Franz I.

But why did he dissolve his own empire?

In 1806, Napoleon was in the midst of his reign over France, and in the midst of his imperial wars throughout Europe. The HRE had been weakened, and Napoleon was already in the process of subsuming it into an organization called the Confederation of the Rhein. Napoleon’s goal was to destroy the HRE, and thereby gain glory as the one who destroyed it.

Napoleon’s goal, according to historian Fabio Aromatici, was not only to eliminate the HRE, but also make its dynasty, the Habsburg family, irrelevant:

He wanted to narrow down the three hundred states part of the Empire to only one hundred and obviously reduce the influence of the Habsburg family.

Napoleon, in 1806, was on a rampage, his army occupying various territories in central Europe. He was on his way to Vienna, the capital of the HRE and seat of the Habsburgs.

He was about to enter Vienna and Emperor Francis knew he had to do something after almost four centuries of virtually unbroken Habsburg succession since Albert II in 1438. It was a matter of honor. After all, who wants to be remembered as the emperor who lost the empire, throne, and crown after a thousand years?

There is debate about what exactly Franz II was thinking, and responsible historians do not speculate about unverifiable matters. Motives, especially when not documented in writing, remain matters of conjecture.

Many researchers suggest, however, that Franz II, seeing that he could not defend or sustain the HRE, knew that he could at least deny Napoleon the joy of destroying it. By dissolving the empire, Franz II eliminated the object which Napoleon was pursuing. Napoleon couldn’t destroy an empire that didn’t exist.

The emperor had declared that the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved - unconquered - after a thousand years and that he was no longer to be considered Emperor Francis II but Emperor Francis I of Austria! The old empire was dead! Long live the new one! To be precise, nowadays there is still one princely member state of the Holy Roman Empire that has preserved its status as a monarchy until today: Liechtenstein. All the others are gone, part of history, bordering legend.
People clapped, cheered, cried, and wept, many cursed Napoleon.

Franz II made his stunning declarations from “the external balcony-altar of the Church of Am Hof.” This fascinating piece of Viennese architecture was the “stage for this historical announcement.”

The Kirche am Hof is one of many historic buildings in Vienna with its own architectural story and documented significance. The platform from which Franz II made his declarations is less of an altar, and resembles in some respects a balcony, except that it rests upon pillars or columns, and is essentially the roof of a sort of narthex or foyer or entryway into the church. It is surrounded on three sides by the external walls of the church, which rise significantly above it. On the fourth and front side, it is open, and overlooks the Platz, the large open area in front of the church. The space of the narthex beneath it is completely enclosed on all sides.

The Viennese call such a structure a Söller or Altan or Altane.

There are some historians, however, who see Franz’s abdication differently. They do not see it as a shrewd way to outwit Napoleon. They see it simply as the inevitable collapse of the HRE.

Even such historians, however, concede that Franz had deliberately undermined Napoleon’s Confederation of the Rhein, and had the foresight to provide himself with an alternative imperial title two years prior to the actual abdication.