That was quite an article written articulately and well referenced. Personally, I prefer the witticism and simple philosophy of America's greatest humorist, Mark Twain, who frequently spoke on the folly of mankind with comedic disdain:
“Man was made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.”
When their aim is to deconstruct "such institutions as the family, the school, the law and the nation state through which the inheritance of Western civilization has been passed down to us", then our aim as parents is to foster family, be responsible for our children's education (or deliberately involved), and teach a love of the inheritance of Western civilization.
James you guys are amazing so glad I found you on this journey, you should start a school, I learn so much from your articles, thank you for loving Canada
Elton, there is an ever-growing movement of parents stepping out of the system, homeschooling and forming co-ops. I have organized homeschool co-ops for well over ten years now, where students come together once a week for hands-on science class, classical vocabulary study, logic, and gym and the demand is rising. The homeschooling movement is so well-established by now that any parent who has had enough of the propaganda, indoctrination,and dumbing-down of curriculum can find local support group and join an alternative path of education.
I think that is a viable short term solution, but the ultimate goal should be to make school boards responsible to the parents who support public schools thru their taxes.
I agree with you - boards should be held responsible to the parents. At the same time, many families are choosing homeschooling as a viable long-term option because for them it offers a better academic/ worldview/lifestyle fit for the whole family.
My dear Mr M, I do sympathize with your skepticism, but I assure you that you could not find a more impeccably small c 'conservative' (you know, sustainable behavior to the sixth generation) than me.
My most referred-to historical character is not Karl Marx, but Martin Luther. whose objections to Papal Indulgences triggered The Reformation. What I end up doing is using a quasi-Marxian structuralist analysis of late capitalism to run the spirit of Luther's analysis of Indulgences, where it is not merely used, as it was in Father Martin's day', as an expedient to raise money to pay the debts of the Archbishop of Mainz and to build St Peter's Basilica, but as a cross platform system driver to profoundly alter and reconstruct social and existential (OK, 'spiritual' if you must) architecture on an indefinite basis.
My objections to Indulgence as a system driver are exactly the same as Father Martin's.
Thanks for a nice essay on the history of modern thought. I enjoyed the read, but as an old ex-Marxist I thought that not only was there too much weight being put on the authority and historical 'influentiality' of notable philosophers, but that their more totalitarian tendencies reached across all authoritarian collectivist traditions, including fascism; you know, "Ein volk! Ein Reich! Ein Fuhrer!"
When I speak of 'Marxism' here, I am thinking of the way Marx understood the means of production and the way it created wealth, institutions and social norms/practices to service and facilitate their operations, and shaped the way ideas and the architecture of discourse would be formed, constrained and potentially able to prosper within the intellectual and technological limits of the milieu made possible by its material circumstances.
With the arrival of early capitalism, the concentration of economic power in cities and the rise of absolute monarchies/urban oligarchies, secular philosophy got its chance to escape the clutches of priests and faith determined dogma, and take up where it had left off with the decline and collapse of the classical period.....under the patronage of the courts of great rulers. Political polemic was still monopolized by the religious exigencies of the Reformation and Counter Reformation.
But as we all know, capitalism doesn't stand still, as it increasingly colonized the status quo and demanded increasing adjustments to its increasingly powerful and persuasive requirements that applied constant pressure to events and the attitudes and emerging practices around them. By the middle of the eighteenth century this dynamic was becoming overwhelming for traditional institutions whose authority and clout was in decline, creating a whole new world of opportunity not just for practical men of science/technology and industry, but those who would speculate and conjecture on the possibilities in the entrepreneurial and increasingly secular world that was opening up in front of them.
In my view, there were three main options as the eighteenth century progressed, that were defined by industrial revolution that broke up traditional ways, means and beliefs, forced thinkers to rethink what presently existed and to then visualize new pathways that might address the challenges in front of them, in accordance not just with imagined worlds, but the opportunities that might possibly leverage them.
The first was the successful 'radical' populist/democratic rebellion of American colonist liberal experimenters that only decapitated an external kingship and aristocracy. The second was the Great British traditional/Liberal Compromise that started with the civil war and continued indefinitely by gradual increments, and third, was the absolutist totalitarian extremism of the French revolution that provided the templates for later fascism and communism.
And while these tendencies were separate events, they interacted with one another in ways that elaborated and explicated in all directions and interactions.
The narrative that I am spinning here tries to ground ideas in their milieu in a way that I do not think yours does. History does not proceed by its ideational debates/controversy so much as that the debates and the economic and social forces/circumstances surrounding their expression dance in a series of feedback loops, as they walk together in a series of adjustments that become historical events, particularly when contradictions reach a point of decisive seismic shift.
Blaming the wretched Rousseau for the subsequent troubles of the world seems a step too far.
And more, the emergence of the kind of bizarre tripe that is spewing out of our very damaged social and existential infrastructure has much more to do with the dynamics of Indulgence Capitalism than any previously extant ideological tradition. Its impending collapse and the rise of late modern fundamentalist religion, of which Woke faith-based extremism is just one sub-theme, is part of the roll out of new potential worlds that will replace the modern one, as we move into an increasingly unstable and uncertain intermediate transitional period.
It is just bound to be very turbulent and violent, in the same way and for the same reasons that the Reformation was, when the medieval world broke up in favor of the rise of the modern one.
"but as an old ex-Marxist..." LOL who exactly do you think you are fooling with that line? 0_0 "has much more to do with the dynamics of Indulgence Capitalism..." No - that shoe didn't just drop did it? Noo 0_0 Can't believe it...
Interesting but lamentably short shrift to the history of half the human race. "Although the women’s liberation movement might be pursued by employing liberal argumentation (men have been granted rights and so women should be granted rights as well), from the time that utopian socialist founding father Charles Fourier coined the term “feminist” and invented the ideology that goes along with it, women’s liberation has predominantly been argued according to the socialist mode." That leaves out a lot of liberal women’s rights advocates who decried women's legal status as lifelong children dependent on male whims, Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" in 1792 most notably.
It doesn't leave them out. It states simply that they argued predominantly according to the socialist mode. It is dealt with only briefly because this piece is not focused on feminism or women's rights.
Brigid: Let me correct this oversight by stating that Mary Wollstonecraft and her husband William Godwin were both thoroughly detestable intellects and vile people.
Yes, Wollstonecraft argued for women's rights applying at least a veneer of liberal philosophical argumentation which I agree with: I agree that since men have rights and access to public education, so should women.
Presumably, this was a convenient mode to make the argument in 1792 and Wollstonecraft may have thought that, given the recent success of the American revolution, liberal argumentation would stand the best chance of selling her bottom line. But no one should think for a second that Wollstonecraft or Godwin were principled liberal thinkers. Godwin was one of the most renowned (and reviled) radical thinkers of his time. He is the founder of modern philosophical anarchism, his philosophical anarchism helped inspire Owen (a founder of Utopian Socialism) and Marx and Engels cited him as having "contributed to a theory of exploitation."
When you know this much about Godwin, it is unsurprising to find that he once wrote that Western institutions are so corrupt "if their annihilation could be purchased by an instant sweeping of every human being off the face of the earth, the purchase would not be too dear."
(Dart 1999, 97).
Both Godwin and Wollstonecraft were life-long Rousseauan apologists and were sympathetic to the Jacobin cause (yes, to the most radical contingent of the French revolution which operated according to the anti-liberal Rousseauan program of attempting to absorb society into one collectivist hive mind and cutting the heads off any individuals who didn't comply), in fact, Godwin remained a British Jacobin even after the revolution. Wollstonecraft lived in France for a time and became friends will leading French revolutionaries. Before her "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" Wollstonecraft penned "A Vindication of the Rights of Men" in 1790 during the early stages of the French revolution - it was her retort to Edmund Burke who saw the revolution as dangerous the road to anarchy. Safe to say, Wollstonecraft's pamphlet didn't age well. According to the leftberlin.com, "Wollstonecraft was appalled by the extent of the bloodshed during the reign of Terror in the French Revolution. Nevertheless, she argued that perhaps it was necessary to rid society of all the evils of oppression."
Toward the end of his life, Godwin penned his personal memoires after the fashion of Rousseau's confessions (which inspired the genre of modern autobiography). *Hilariously* the conservative Anti-Jacobin Review at the time panned the book, noting "if it does not shew what it is wise to pursue, it manifests what it is wise to avoid." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoirs_of_the_Author_of_A_Vindication_of_the_Rights_of_Woman
Wollstonecraft, whose romantic letters are full of Rousseauan themes and imitations (see Dart 1999), opted to pursue an open marriage which unscrupulous commentators are want to call a "liberal" take on marriage. It isn't. It is the utopian whimsy of "free love" which proceeds from the anti-liberal analysis of Rousseau and is formalized in the approach to family advocated by the utopian socialists (the same thinkers who, correspondingly, formulate early feminism). Ultimately, "after William Godwin’s biography revealed that she had not been married when her first daughter was born, her social reputation was seriously tarnished, whilst her reputation as a Radical was increasingly a disadvantage, associated as she was with the Jacobin leadership of the French Revolution, the likes of Robespierre and Terror."
In summary, Wollstonecraft doesn't deserve to be counted as a liberal thinker - she may have borrowed some liberal argumentation seeing as she was writing two decades before the socialists developed their argumentation on women, but her alignment socially and philosophically was to the left of liberal revolution.
Dart, Gregory. 1999. Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mr. M: Thank you for an enlightening postscript and for noting that you believe women should have individual rights. Feminism means different things to different people. For many of us it's synonymous with women's rights to vote, own property, be educated and have bodily autonomy. I fear conflating it with socialism could provide cover for rolling back those hard fought rights and returning women to the servant class we still occupy in many parts of the world.
Brigid: Certainly. Well, in my opinion, the word "feminist" should be tossed in the trash, left to the scrapbin of history. Instead, those advocating for women's rights should call themselves women's rights advocates.
The term feminist, together with it's ideology i.e. that woman is oppressed by her marriage, not to mention by her family, that society is just a big patriarchy, is the concoction of the early utopian socialist thinkers, specifically, Charles Fourier (as was argued in the essay above).
It isn't that we, you and I, are presently conflating feminism with socialism. Feminism is socialism whenever it is faithful to its roots. It's that women's rights advocates have, since the time of Fourier (the early 1800s) deemed it desirable to conflate two distinct and diametrically opposed value systems for the purposes of furthering their causes. The conflation is not occurring in this discussion, it has reoccurred again and again in the culture war of the last 200 years.
A women's rights advocate should make their case in a principled and consistently liberal manner. A feminist argument pertaining to a women's right to property is either a dissimulation or a conflation because feminist ideation is socialist at its core and socialists do not believe in the right to private property for anyone.
There are some feminists who I respect more than others, the rational feminists and possibly the new "reactionary feminism" which I only know through Mary Harrington. A Reactionary is an opponent to the revolution, a person who is anti-radical. According to Harrington: "The only escape from a nightmare of atomization and war between the sexes is the recognition that we are embodied creatures, and that interdependence is not oppression but the very thing that makes us human."
Also, thank you for the Harrington link. Very interesting and compelling arguments. No term or idea is static and ideally we are always working towards more social harmony and happiness: "...re-evaluation of the feminist critique of “patriarchy.” Whereas radical feminists tend to see patriarchy as akin to a mass conspiracy to oppress women, I’ve come to see it as the aggregate result of historical human efforts to balance the conflicting interests of the two sexes. It has sometimes given rise to abuses and injustices, which are rightly condemned. But the solution is not to be found in some state of perfect symmetry between the sexes. For this cannot be had—the sexes are not interchangeable."
Mr. M: We have very different perceptions of the word feminism. I'm no feminist scholar, and I believe you about its coinage by Fourier and socialist origin, but I am a linguist and would argue that words come to be defined by their common usage. For me and many others, feminism connotes triumph over oppression. For my mother's generation it meant that she was the first woman in the entire history of her Irish Canadian family to go to college, over her father's objections. She was the first to have the option of leaving a husband who was drinking away all the family money, including her pay, and terrorizing the family every night. She couldn't buy a house in her own name as a woman in the early '70s, and needed her (beloved and supportive) brother to cosign. Her struggles had nothing to do with socialism and everything to do with self determination, liberty and very capitalist ambition. Whenever men have raised the subject of individual rights, from the Greeks to the Enlightenment, their sisters have clamored to be included, even when denied the ability to read and write or even leave the house. Feminism as a term may make some uncomfortable, but for many of us it represents a proud history of women’s struggle for dignity and equality.
This is a truly fine essay, with 2 small errors. 1. The word "devote", right at footnote 55, probably should be "devotee", as in " devotee of Saint Simon.", rather than "devote of Saint Simon".
2. The second arguable error is one of double or even triple ambiguity in the sentence which received footnote 19. That sentence is quote:
"Rousseau pre-empted later radical intellectuals from Marx, to Nietzsche, to the structuralists and postmodernists, in attacking the legitimacy of the professional historian and the very premise that written history could be anything but a collection of the historians’ own subjective biases."
It is true that "pre-empted" has the sense of being ahead of something else, as in Rousseau was ahead of all the other mentioned "radical intellectuals". But pre-empting also has the sense of "taking away" from the other party, as in "the president's speech pre-empted regular comedy programming."
I think that you actually mean that Rousseau "anticipated" or "predated" the other radicals in "attacking the legitimacy of the professional historian", given the Marxist thesis that "the winners always write history (in accordance with their own biases). "Predated", rather than "pre-empted", is the same thesis as you put forward at "3.1.3 Utopian Socialism and Rousseauan Education:", where you argue "Predating Marx and the Marxian variety of socialism by several decades ... (etc.)
And it is true that all these radicals, along with Rousseau "attack" the veracity of professional historians, but it is not true that they also "attack" the quote: "... (and) the very premise that written history could be anything but a collection of the historians’ own subjective biases.¹⁹" They all arguably agree with that "very premise" rather than "attacking" it. So in effect they all agree that the history of professional historians is nothing but a collection of the historians' subjective biases in support of the oppressor's biased view of history --- or something to that effect.
In sum, a little ambiguity in an otherwise fine essay.
I especially liked footnote 41, which reveals Rousseau and Hume to be a pair of the most odd "philosophical couples" possible, only sharing in hostility to Greek antiquity [especially Aristotle] and organized religion which is independent of the State (Rousseau) or supported by the State (Rousseau and Hume). Hume was so seriously skeptical that he bordered on "solipsism" [I can only be sure that I, alone, exist.]. His skepticism was only relieved by social interactions such as convivial dinners or billiards with his many friends.
However, Hume could never, ever, be absolutely certain that there really were such things as either "friends or enemies", given his skepticism. Rousseau, in sharp contrast, was so romantic, narcissistic and paranoid, that he was absolutely certain that everybody was his enemy and out to get him, especially the leaders of organized Catholicism in France --- and probably Protestant England too! Hence he eventually accused Hume of being "in" on a supposed "cabal" to get him!
That was quite an article written articulately and well referenced. Personally, I prefer the witticism and simple philosophy of America's greatest humorist, Mark Twain, who frequently spoke on the folly of mankind with comedic disdain:
“Man was made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.”
When their aim is to deconstruct "such institutions as the family, the school, the law and the nation state through which the inheritance of Western civilization has been passed down to us", then our aim as parents is to foster family, be responsible for our children's education (or deliberately involved), and teach a love of the inheritance of Western civilization.
You win top comment of the day!!
Absolutely that should be all parent groups motto Ruth
James you guys are amazing so glad I found you on this journey, you should start a school, I learn so much from your articles, thank you for loving Canada
Elton, there is an ever-growing movement of parents stepping out of the system, homeschooling and forming co-ops. I have organized homeschool co-ops for well over ten years now, where students come together once a week for hands-on science class, classical vocabulary study, logic, and gym and the demand is rising. The homeschooling movement is so well-established by now that any parent who has had enough of the propaganda, indoctrination,and dumbing-down of curriculum can find local support group and join an alternative path of education.
I think that is a viable short term solution, but the ultimate goal should be to make school boards responsible to the parents who support public schools thru their taxes.
"he who pays the piper gets to call the tune"
I agree with you - boards should be held responsible to the parents. At the same time, many families are choosing homeschooling as a viable long-term option because for them it offers a better academic/ worldview/lifestyle fit for the whole family.
My dear Mr M, I do sympathize with your skepticism, but I assure you that you could not find a more impeccably small c 'conservative' (you know, sustainable behavior to the sixth generation) than me.
My most referred-to historical character is not Karl Marx, but Martin Luther. whose objections to Papal Indulgences triggered The Reformation. What I end up doing is using a quasi-Marxian structuralist analysis of late capitalism to run the spirit of Luther's analysis of Indulgences, where it is not merely used, as it was in Father Martin's day', as an expedient to raise money to pay the debts of the Archbishop of Mainz and to build St Peter's Basilica, but as a cross platform system driver to profoundly alter and reconstruct social and existential (OK, 'spiritual' if you must) architecture on an indefinite basis.
My objections to Indulgence as a system driver are exactly the same as Father Martin's.
https://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/2205477-Luthers-Last-Laugh-Indulgermania
https://www.writing.com/main/books/item_id/2064958-The-Secular-Fundamentalist
Thanks for a nice essay on the history of modern thought. I enjoyed the read, but as an old ex-Marxist I thought that not only was there too much weight being put on the authority and historical 'influentiality' of notable philosophers, but that their more totalitarian tendencies reached across all authoritarian collectivist traditions, including fascism; you know, "Ein volk! Ein Reich! Ein Fuhrer!"
When I speak of 'Marxism' here, I am thinking of the way Marx understood the means of production and the way it created wealth, institutions and social norms/practices to service and facilitate their operations, and shaped the way ideas and the architecture of discourse would be formed, constrained and potentially able to prosper within the intellectual and technological limits of the milieu made possible by its material circumstances.
With the arrival of early capitalism, the concentration of economic power in cities and the rise of absolute monarchies/urban oligarchies, secular philosophy got its chance to escape the clutches of priests and faith determined dogma, and take up where it had left off with the decline and collapse of the classical period.....under the patronage of the courts of great rulers. Political polemic was still monopolized by the religious exigencies of the Reformation and Counter Reformation.
But as we all know, capitalism doesn't stand still, as it increasingly colonized the status quo and demanded increasing adjustments to its increasingly powerful and persuasive requirements that applied constant pressure to events and the attitudes and emerging practices around them. By the middle of the eighteenth century this dynamic was becoming overwhelming for traditional institutions whose authority and clout was in decline, creating a whole new world of opportunity not just for practical men of science/technology and industry, but those who would speculate and conjecture on the possibilities in the entrepreneurial and increasingly secular world that was opening up in front of them.
In my view, there were three main options as the eighteenth century progressed, that were defined by industrial revolution that broke up traditional ways, means and beliefs, forced thinkers to rethink what presently existed and to then visualize new pathways that might address the challenges in front of them, in accordance not just with imagined worlds, but the opportunities that might possibly leverage them.
The first was the successful 'radical' populist/democratic rebellion of American colonist liberal experimenters that only decapitated an external kingship and aristocracy. The second was the Great British traditional/Liberal Compromise that started with the civil war and continued indefinitely by gradual increments, and third, was the absolutist totalitarian extremism of the French revolution that provided the templates for later fascism and communism.
And while these tendencies were separate events, they interacted with one another in ways that elaborated and explicated in all directions and interactions.
The narrative that I am spinning here tries to ground ideas in their milieu in a way that I do not think yours does. History does not proceed by its ideational debates/controversy so much as that the debates and the economic and social forces/circumstances surrounding their expression dance in a series of feedback loops, as they walk together in a series of adjustments that become historical events, particularly when contradictions reach a point of decisive seismic shift.
Blaming the wretched Rousseau for the subsequent troubles of the world seems a step too far.
And more, the emergence of the kind of bizarre tripe that is spewing out of our very damaged social and existential infrastructure has much more to do with the dynamics of Indulgence Capitalism than any previously extant ideological tradition. Its impending collapse and the rise of late modern fundamentalist religion, of which Woke faith-based extremism is just one sub-theme, is part of the roll out of new potential worlds that will replace the modern one, as we move into an increasingly unstable and uncertain intermediate transitional period.
It is just bound to be very turbulent and violent, in the same way and for the same reasons that the Reformation was, when the medieval world broke up in favor of the rise of the modern one.
"but as an old ex-Marxist..." LOL who exactly do you think you are fooling with that line? 0_0 "has much more to do with the dynamics of Indulgence Capitalism..." No - that shoe didn't just drop did it? Noo 0_0 Can't believe it...
Interesting but lamentably short shrift to the history of half the human race. "Although the women’s liberation movement might be pursued by employing liberal argumentation (men have been granted rights and so women should be granted rights as well), from the time that utopian socialist founding father Charles Fourier coined the term “feminist” and invented the ideology that goes along with it, women’s liberation has predominantly been argued according to the socialist mode." That leaves out a lot of liberal women’s rights advocates who decried women's legal status as lifelong children dependent on male whims, Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" in 1792 most notably.
It doesn't leave them out. It states simply that they argued predominantly according to the socialist mode. It is dealt with only briefly because this piece is not focused on feminism or women's rights.
Brigid: Let me correct this oversight by stating that Mary Wollstonecraft and her husband William Godwin were both thoroughly detestable intellects and vile people.
Yes, Wollstonecraft argued for women's rights applying at least a veneer of liberal philosophical argumentation which I agree with: I agree that since men have rights and access to public education, so should women.
Presumably, this was a convenient mode to make the argument in 1792 and Wollstonecraft may have thought that, given the recent success of the American revolution, liberal argumentation would stand the best chance of selling her bottom line. But no one should think for a second that Wollstonecraft or Godwin were principled liberal thinkers. Godwin was one of the most renowned (and reviled) radical thinkers of his time. He is the founder of modern philosophical anarchism, his philosophical anarchism helped inspire Owen (a founder of Utopian Socialism) and Marx and Engels cited him as having "contributed to a theory of exploitation."
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/godwin/
When you know this much about Godwin, it is unsurprising to find that he once wrote that Western institutions are so corrupt "if their annihilation could be purchased by an instant sweeping of every human being off the face of the earth, the purchase would not be too dear."
(Dart 1999, 97).
Both Godwin and Wollstonecraft were life-long Rousseauan apologists and were sympathetic to the Jacobin cause (yes, to the most radical contingent of the French revolution which operated according to the anti-liberal Rousseauan program of attempting to absorb society into one collectivist hive mind and cutting the heads off any individuals who didn't comply), in fact, Godwin remained a British Jacobin even after the revolution. Wollstonecraft lived in France for a time and became friends will leading French revolutionaries. Before her "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" Wollstonecraft penned "A Vindication of the Rights of Men" in 1790 during the early stages of the French revolution - it was her retort to Edmund Burke who saw the revolution as dangerous the road to anarchy. Safe to say, Wollstonecraft's pamphlet didn't age well. According to the leftberlin.com, "Wollstonecraft was appalled by the extent of the bloodshed during the reign of Terror in the French Revolution. Nevertheless, she argued that perhaps it was necessary to rid society of all the evils of oppression."
https://www.theleftberlin.com/mary-wollstonecraft-a-fearless-radical-in-her-life-and-thought/
Toward the end of his life, Godwin penned his personal memoires after the fashion of Rousseau's confessions (which inspired the genre of modern autobiography). *Hilariously* the conservative Anti-Jacobin Review at the time panned the book, noting "if it does not shew what it is wise to pursue, it manifests what it is wise to avoid." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoirs_of_the_Author_of_A_Vindication_of_the_Rights_of_Woman
Wollstonecraft, whose romantic letters are full of Rousseauan themes and imitations (see Dart 1999), opted to pursue an open marriage which unscrupulous commentators are want to call a "liberal" take on marriage. It isn't. It is the utopian whimsy of "free love" which proceeds from the anti-liberal analysis of Rousseau and is formalized in the approach to family advocated by the utopian socialists (the same thinkers who, correspondingly, formulate early feminism). Ultimately, "after William Godwin’s biography revealed that she had not been married when her first daughter was born, her social reputation was seriously tarnished, whilst her reputation as a Radical was increasingly a disadvantage, associated as she was with the Jacobin leadership of the French Revolution, the likes of Robespierre and Terror."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoirs_of_the_Author_of_A_Vindication_of_the_Rights_of_Woman
In summary, Wollstonecraft doesn't deserve to be counted as a liberal thinker - she may have borrowed some liberal argumentation seeing as she was writing two decades before the socialists developed their argumentation on women, but her alignment socially and philosophically was to the left of liberal revolution.
Dart, Gregory. 1999. Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mr. M: Thank you for an enlightening postscript and for noting that you believe women should have individual rights. Feminism means different things to different people. For many of us it's synonymous with women's rights to vote, own property, be educated and have bodily autonomy. I fear conflating it with socialism could provide cover for rolling back those hard fought rights and returning women to the servant class we still occupy in many parts of the world.
Brigid: Certainly. Well, in my opinion, the word "feminist" should be tossed in the trash, left to the scrapbin of history. Instead, those advocating for women's rights should call themselves women's rights advocates.
The term feminist, together with it's ideology i.e. that woman is oppressed by her marriage, not to mention by her family, that society is just a big patriarchy, is the concoction of the early utopian socialist thinkers, specifically, Charles Fourier (as was argued in the essay above).
It isn't that we, you and I, are presently conflating feminism with socialism. Feminism is socialism whenever it is faithful to its roots. It's that women's rights advocates have, since the time of Fourier (the early 1800s) deemed it desirable to conflate two distinct and diametrically opposed value systems for the purposes of furthering their causes. The conflation is not occurring in this discussion, it has reoccurred again and again in the culture war of the last 200 years.
A women's rights advocate should make their case in a principled and consistently liberal manner. A feminist argument pertaining to a women's right to property is either a dissimulation or a conflation because feminist ideation is socialist at its core and socialists do not believe in the right to private property for anyone.
There are some feminists who I respect more than others, the rational feminists and possibly the new "reactionary feminism" which I only know through Mary Harrington. A Reactionary is an opponent to the revolution, a person who is anti-radical. According to Harrington: "The only escape from a nightmare of atomization and war between the sexes is the recognition that we are embodied creatures, and that interdependence is not oppression but the very thing that makes us human."
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/06/reactionary-feminism
Also, thank you for the Harrington link. Very interesting and compelling arguments. No term or idea is static and ideally we are always working towards more social harmony and happiness: "...re-evaluation of the feminist critique of “patriarchy.” Whereas radical feminists tend to see patriarchy as akin to a mass conspiracy to oppress women, I’ve come to see it as the aggregate result of historical human efforts to balance the conflicting interests of the two sexes. It has sometimes given rise to abuses and injustices, which are rightly condemned. But the solution is not to be found in some state of perfect symmetry between the sexes. For this cannot be had—the sexes are not interchangeable."
Mr. M: We have very different perceptions of the word feminism. I'm no feminist scholar, and I believe you about its coinage by Fourier and socialist origin, but I am a linguist and would argue that words come to be defined by their common usage. For me and many others, feminism connotes triumph over oppression. For my mother's generation it meant that she was the first woman in the entire history of her Irish Canadian family to go to college, over her father's objections. She was the first to have the option of leaving a husband who was drinking away all the family money, including her pay, and terrorizing the family every night. She couldn't buy a house in her own name as a woman in the early '70s, and needed her (beloved and supportive) brother to cosign. Her struggles had nothing to do with socialism and everything to do with self determination, liberty and very capitalist ambition. Whenever men have raised the subject of individual rights, from the Greeks to the Enlightenment, their sisters have clamored to be included, even when denied the ability to read and write or even leave the house. Feminism as a term may make some uncomfortable, but for many of us it represents a proud history of women’s struggle for dignity and equality.
This is a truly fine essay, with 2 small errors. 1. The word "devote", right at footnote 55, probably should be "devotee", as in " devotee of Saint Simon.", rather than "devote of Saint Simon".
2. The second arguable error is one of double or even triple ambiguity in the sentence which received footnote 19. That sentence is quote:
"Rousseau pre-empted later radical intellectuals from Marx, to Nietzsche, to the structuralists and postmodernists, in attacking the legitimacy of the professional historian and the very premise that written history could be anything but a collection of the historians’ own subjective biases."
It is true that "pre-empted" has the sense of being ahead of something else, as in Rousseau was ahead of all the other mentioned "radical intellectuals". But pre-empting also has the sense of "taking away" from the other party, as in "the president's speech pre-empted regular comedy programming."
I think that you actually mean that Rousseau "anticipated" or "predated" the other radicals in "attacking the legitimacy of the professional historian", given the Marxist thesis that "the winners always write history (in accordance with their own biases). "Predated", rather than "pre-empted", is the same thesis as you put forward at "3.1.3 Utopian Socialism and Rousseauan Education:", where you argue "Predating Marx and the Marxian variety of socialism by several decades ... (etc.)
And it is true that all these radicals, along with Rousseau "attack" the veracity of professional historians, but it is not true that they also "attack" the quote: "... (and) the very premise that written history could be anything but a collection of the historians’ own subjective biases.¹⁹" They all arguably agree with that "very premise" rather than "attacking" it. So in effect they all agree that the history of professional historians is nothing but a collection of the historians' subjective biases in support of the oppressor's biased view of history --- or something to that effect.
In sum, a little ambiguity in an otherwise fine essay.
I especially liked footnote 41, which reveals Rousseau and Hume to be a pair of the most odd "philosophical couples" possible, only sharing in hostility to Greek antiquity [especially Aristotle] and organized religion which is independent of the State (Rousseau) or supported by the State (Rousseau and Hume). Hume was so seriously skeptical that he bordered on "solipsism" [I can only be sure that I, alone, exist.]. His skepticism was only relieved by social interactions such as convivial dinners or billiards with his many friends.
However, Hume could never, ever, be absolutely certain that there really were such things as either "friends or enemies", given his skepticism. Rousseau, in sharp contrast, was so romantic, narcissistic and paranoid, that he was absolutely certain that everybody was his enemy and out to get him, especially the leaders of organized Catholicism in France --- and probably Protestant England too! Hence he eventually accused Hume of being "in" on a supposed "cabal" to get him!
Good stuff,
Kevin
Great article. I haven't read the entire thing yet but I will come back to it.
This article is somewhat similar. "Academia’s Infatuation with Marxist Ideologues"
https://unskool.substack.com/p/academias-infatuation-with-racist