Late Nineteenth Century Social Philosophy
The post-Revolutionary philosophers of the early Nineteenth Century were prescient in foreseeing the social problems of the Industrial Age. By mid-century, the philosophical emphasis had shifted from social reform to epistemological reform of philosophy itself, shifting philosophy away from idealism to materialism. New philosophers began to base their ideas upon empirical ideas and objective reasoning borrowed from science. Even Hegel, one of the last of the idealist philosophers, stated that, “Philosophy must assume a regular structure as teachable as geometry,” and he wanted philosophy to be based upon a “definite methodical procedure.”
Auguste Comte was a disciple of Saint-Simon who shifted from Utopian thinking about society to a scientific study of society. As the founder of “sociology,” Comte rationalized the study of human behavior by using scientific methodology. People and their actions could be examined, facts could be gathered, hypothesis could be formed, and theories could be put forward and tested. The goal was to study society as it was and not to imagine society, as it should be. The importance of the Positivism of Comte is that the philosopher stressed actual observation and careful study of society. In contrast to Comte’s more scientific approach, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was more political in his critique of society in his What is Property? (1840) and The Philosophy of Poverty (1846). Rather than putting forward utopian ideals, Proudhon anticipated Marx by examining society and expressing outrage (“Property is theft.”) at the growing class stratification, as the industrialist class enjoyed runaway wealth and the lower classes enjoyed endless repetitive labor. Like Saint-Simon, Proudhon imagined the disappearance of the state, but he wanted to substitute the authority of the state with the direct participation of the people who would decide their own affairs.
Although Proudhon sounded a bit less totalitarian than Hegel who believed that the nation and the state were one and the same and morally superseded the community, he, too, was an authoritarian. Women, he believed, should be submissive to men and take care of them, and while, serving men, women should also should have children and nurture them as well. He was typical of men of his age in his ideas about women and the use of authority. Proudhon, as a non-too-successful professional publisher and writer, also had strong opinions about accumulated wealth. He equated slavery with murder and property with robbery. As Proudhon stated in What is Property? “..property and robbery are synonymous terms; that every social advantage accorded or rather usurped in the name of superior talent or service, in inequality and extortion…”
Most socialists (and anarchists) defined socialism as direct government achieved through suffrage. Putting aside the fact that women and people of color could not vote, suffrage had its problems, because the mass of people were not well-educated or informed, they would not know how to vote for their own interests. Proudhon preferred to create a form of government that would create an equilibrium between freedom of the people and the role of the government. Arrested during the Revolution of 1848, sent into exile to Belgium during the Second Empire, Proudhon took the idea of equilibrium and applied it to war, advocating force to bring about equilibrium among nations, much to the dismay of his admirers. “Reforms always,” he stated, “Utopias never,” announcing pragmatism and positivism. A prolific letter writer and self-publisher of his many works, Proudhon was a native of Besançon, in Franche-Comté, the territory of Gustave Courbet. Sometimes writing as an art critic, Proudhon published his ideas about Courbet’s paintings of a region that was very familiar to him. Proudhon is perhaps better known for his association with Courbet than for his philosophical ideas today, because he was overshadowed by his one-time colleague, Karl Marx.
Karl Marx brushed Proudhon aside as a “bourgeois socialist” who would not advocate revolution. It is difficult today to ascertain Proudhon’s knowledge of German philosophy. Hegel had yet to be translated into French, however, Victor Cousin was teaching about Kant, for example, at the Sorbonne, and, from Proudhon’s own words, it would seem Cousin would have been his source of German thought. However, the main difference between Kant, Hegel and Marx and the socialists was that the Germans created structured models for their philosophical thought and the socialists were less systematic.
The social philosophers were futurist; they looked forward, envisioning a better life. They were less idealist than materialist in that they dealt with real social problems in a relatively practical fashion. Hegel and Marx, in contrast, were determinists. The future they posited was determined by the triadic forces of the dialectic. It was Marx, who dominates the discussion of social theory and philosophy today with his application of the Hegelian dialectic to economics, to the “secret engine” of culture. As Marx stated,
“…New relations in production, superior to the former ones, never come into being before their material reason for existence has developed in the womb of old society. Humanity puts to itself only the riddles that it can solve, for on looking closely at the matter, one will find that the riddle is put only when the material conditions of its solution already exists…”
Although Karl Marx 1818 – 1883) wrote often with Frederic Engels, (1820 –95) it is Marx who is the better-known philosopher. Together Marx and Engels wrote The German Ideology, 1846 and the Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1846. On his own, Marx wrote Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 1844, Wage-Labor and Capital, (usually referred to as Das Capital) 1849, The Eighteenth Brumarie of Louis Bonaparte, 1852, Grundrisse, 1857-88, Wages, Price and Profit, 1865, The Civil War in France, 1871, and Critique of the Gotha Program, 1875. Although Marx would live in bourgeois comfort in suburban London, his place of exile, and spent his days writing in seat G7 in the British Museum Library, he wrote movingly on the plight of the working classes during the Industrial Revolution. By the time Marx was forced out of his native Prussia for his revolutionary ideas, industry and capitalism had been the basis of modern society for over one hundred years and its consequences were plain to see.
Vast new wealth had been accumulated by the new commercial class, and an abyss of poverty subjugated the lower classes. Like many observers of his time, Marx foresaw a pending social and economic revolution—for human misery can be contained only so long. As a German national living in England, Marx would have witnessed the activities of Reformists, politicians and writers, such as Charles Dickens, and philosophers, such as Jeremy Bentham. The British thinkers repeatedly warned of the consequences of the environmental and social horrors that had descended upon the so-called “advanced” industrial nations.
Kant and Hegel are considered idealists, reaching towards some kind of absolute or universal. Marx, on the other hand, was a thoroughgoing materialist: for him, reality was grounded in existence, knowledge was the result of reality, and therefore the mind could never be independent of history. If the mind constructed reality, then the constructions must always be changing, along with history. If this was the case, then consciousness could never be absolute or universal and must be subjected to changing conditions. For Marx, these conditions were capitalism, the greatest social change since the breakdown of the Roman Empire into feudalism, and the middle class, the first new class since the beginning of human history. Capitalism had created a society based upon the abstraction of money, labor, goods, value, and, ultimately—human beings.
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