I agree that theory (and what passes for it) is really a rhetorical cudgel, a weapon in struggles for power. The most interesting part of this essay is the 2nd last paragraph that explains the particulars of the theory are irrelevant. What matters is skill in deploying it offensively and the ambition to do so.
But I don't think that 60s and 70s university culture _produced_ the robust system of control and protection of the status quo that we actually have, equivalent to the Party in George Orwell’s 1984. (I'm not sure if Aurelien was trying to argue it did.) Jeff Schmidt explains that production process very well in his frightening, hilarious and inspiring book Disciplined Minds. I recommend it to all https://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/
Schmidt's main point (as I understand it) is that power is given only to those who can be trusted to use it in the interest of the organizations to which they belong. Elaborate and rigorous systems of selection and training (that he details at length in the book) ensure that, for example, academic freedom (i.e. tenure) is never given to anyone who will use it or even need it. It is reserved for those who will be compliant. This works also in private enterprise, public institutions, NGOs, medicine, media etc. Those given power have no strong attachment to any ideology of their own, they adopt the ideology of the organization they are attached to as though it were their own and act accordingly.
This certainly reminded me of many of the wannabe revolutionaries I met in my college days (about a decade later), but in my generation there was a very large sprinkling of wannabe stockbrokers too. I'm not sure which ones were worse or less sincere. But it has been interesting over the decades watching the careers of the most prominent among them. The pompous right wingers I knew in college are still pompous right wingers, just now they are judges and accountants. The left wing radicals are.... well, many of them are in powerful positions, and almost all of them have sold out whatever integrity they had. But I'd certainly agree that there is something uniquely nihilistic about that particular generation - the sheer ease with which they slipped from anti-establishment radicalism to.... the establishment was a sight to see.
I look forward to your posts and am only disappointed that they end. Seriously.
This one struck home, not because I’m of that generation but because amongst the oldest children of it. The cultural, intellectual and ideological markers you describe are my indoctrination as it were. I may be a special case. I learned as an adult that a rather large family used me as a social experiment to solidify many of the ideals they held dear at the time. I’m hardly a young man anymore and have had to come to grips with what feels like moral, ethical and intellectual bankruptcy.
That same family is aghast that I would question authority or read deeply enough to draw my own conclusions about the world. How dare I think myself better informed than NPR broadcasts. Except there’s nothing else I can do. I was made this way by what you’re describing. I’m quite thankful for it in most every way, except for the psychological upheaval of recognizing that the people who made me this way didn’t really mean it.
Regarding the ever-morphing ideological landscape that somehow always favors the rich, the motto of the ruling class was best expressed by Tancredi in The Leopard: "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change" (Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga com'è, bisogna che tutto cambi).
I would also add that the modern condition, of which our rulers are the highest products, is one of manufactured barbarism, if you take Burckhardt's view that barbarism arises from history's absence. I work in an academic milieu and so interact with the highly educated and the aspiring highly educated on the regular. The former are overspecialized to the extent that they are ignorant of any area that falls outside their narrow interest, though the experience of lording over students has given them confidence in their own genius. Their ignorance is a sort of refined barbarism--I've encountered bonafide professors who did not know that the Soviet Union fought for the Allies during WWII and who bragged that reading books was a waste of time, for example.
While the professors at least have command of their speciality, the students are thoroughly barbarized. Their attention spans, conditioned by TikTok and Youtube, are so attenuated that they come across as semi-literate. They barely recognize events as recent as those of the last 20 years and going further back bewilders them. What historical knowledge they have is scrambled, facts like loose change in their heads--no coherence or meaning. They demonstrate very poor reading comprehension when assigned short (10-15 pages) argumentative essays.
Of course, I'm painting with a broad brush here. I've encountered many brilliant professors and students over my career, but they're the hopeful exception to the dismal rule. I will say this, however, about the students: once they learn to read and once they learn what's really out there in terms of human literature, they get excited. The barbarians are, in the end, dazzled by and assimilated into the civilizations they conquer.
One thing that I always find astonishing, among the modern "political actives" is the strange conviction they have that they not only know the big questions, but that their answer is right, i.e. there's a clear correspondence between the "answers" and their ideology.
So, to use the overused American examples, some people believe that the answer to everything is "deregulation and tax cuts;" others believe that "higher taxes and more regulation." This makes for neatly organizing who's on which side of American politics without making things too complicated. This has two consequences that get overlooked: first, what to do with the "questions" whose answers are neither, both, or some combination thereof, along with a lot of other details being straightened out? (i.e. every policy problem that demands an actual working solution) The answer is that those questions are thrown out as "wrong questions" irrelevant to politics because you can't neatly arrange the politics as contestation between two well-defined "sides."
And what about the people who are not "politically active," i.e. people who have to contend with real problems, i.e. those that demand "real" answers? They wind up being erroneously classified as "moderates" because they are neither of the clearly defined sides and ignored. But their problems don't go away and, beyond the fact that the solution is neither "cut taxes" or "more regulation," they don't know the answers--and for that matter, no one really does. So this creates a problem for the politicians: you can't tell them, as you can to the "politically active," the standard slogan "If elected, I'll cut taxes" and expect to win them over. In fact, I used to use this situation, when I was still in academic life, to illustrate this problem, which invariably got the students frustrated and they'd ask "What do these people want? What should I say I will do if elected to win their support?" The answer was that they want their problems acknowledged and addressed, but they themselves don't know what kind of policy would work for them best. It's the job of the politician to come up with an answer and sell them on the answer (or themselves).
The problem of "answers as slogans" is, first, that they are useless as actual "answers" to anything. They are simply heuristics indicating which side they are on, and second, that they actually get in the way of producing real "answers." No answer to an actual problem neatly fits the abstract theoretical answer taken from the sloganeering realm. You can deviate from them if you have enough public trust in you that they don't care if you deviate from the slogans...except hardly anyone invests enough in building up public trust in themselves to manage this. You have risen in politics because you can recite the profession of faith correctly for your side without an error every time you are required to, and if you can mobilize the "politically actives" through this, that's usually enough to win under normal conditions--as long as there aren't enough real problems bedeviling the rest of the public that they are looking for answers.
Once there's an agitated mass that are looking for answers (and know that the slogans are not answers), the sloganeers are invariably confused, like my former students. This is, potentially, where the "populist demagogues" can arise, but to link it to "anti-democratic" phenomena is misleading. The problem is that there are bunch of people--enough for someone to win elections based on their support--who are facing problems and want answers. You don't need to have answers, per se, but only to convince them that you are aware of the problems, will try sincerely to tackle the problems, and are competent enough that they could be trusted to do something and have a good chance of success. (Incidentally, these points are taken, with only minor modifications, from a famous book on successful Congressional candidates written in 1960s). Hardly a prescription for a demagogue: you get "real" demagogues only if the "democratic process" has failed to produce legitimate politicians who can pull this off and win confidence of the not-so-active share of the electorate, and the "demagogues," like the conventional politicians, rely on slogans, just that their "slogans" don't fit the existing ones.
I think this is a fundamental problem to any "democracy," and likely, any sort of established political process/institutions. Routines and inertia set in, especially since the masses won't care enough to be involved in politics unless they are facing serious problems, and these problems don't crop up constantly. You can get by among the usual suspects by pressing the "right buttons" whether they do anything or not because those who are not won't care enough. But once the not-so-usual suspects show up, they don't have the "right buttons" to be pushed. They want you to do something (that may involve going against the right buttons) and they don't really know what exactly they want you to do, beyond solving their problems.
"Good" kind of tribalism, expressing itself in a sense of genuine "citizenship" and "duty" can provide an answer to this problem, and indeed, in the old days of American politics, this was precisely how things got done. Members of Congress got there, by local standards, at least, by being able to demonstrate to their voters that they are members of their tribes (and American politics depended on not just exclusivist tribalism, but the idea that everyone belonged to diverse and overlapping network of multiple tribes that were mutually reinforcing.) who will faithfully carry out their duty to their people(s). But slogans came to displace tribes in the "modern" world, which were often becoming too difficult to maintain anyways. Hardly a "solution" in that there's no guarantee that this would always lead to real "solutions" (too many cooks and all that), but, at least, people did try to produce them, whereas, the best that politicians can do is to throw money at the problems and hope and pray that they'll go away by themselves.
The interesting thing that I'd like to draw attention to is that, even if it looks very different, this type of thinking is something that came to apotheosis in 1960s and 1970s, like the intellectual ideas you are describing, and underlay the foundation of "mass" politics in United States. The US politics equivalent of the "vanguards" started to become the thing in late 1970s and became the mainstay of politics by the beginning of 21st century--politics as contestation between slogans that ignored the masses and fancied themselves "leaders" who will lead the ignorant masses to deal with the "real problems" that they should be interested in. And these guys have won and are now in power, trying to dictate what the "real" problems are and declaring those who say otherwise "fascists." Interesting times.
FWIW, I began to leave my place in the PMC/ruling class in January 1971 just so I could be "prepared for the problems of the immediate future." It took about twenty years to get all the way out and re-founded on my own terms. I am content with how that played out. But boy, oh boy, did I take a beating from the ones I left behind -- a ruthless and merciless lot I learned, and jealous -- about a decade's worth before the beatings subsided and another decade before, gradually, they stopped, like a fan slowing down to a stop instead of stopping immediately.
Best definition of fascism I saw in the plethora of definitions attempted since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. Consistent with what I had gathered from a fantastic course on the intellectual roots of fascism in France during the first half of the 20th century. Essentially the antithesis of analytical efforts to formulate any and all other ideologies, was the angle of the course.
This fits perfectly with your 2 previous posts explaining the hollowing out of social values and principles, resulting in the emergence of the “rational” person in a purely transactional universe, untethered from duties, traditions and morals. This archetype is essentially the individual building block of a fascistic society. Also explains well why societies paying lip service to political myths, like “democracy” or “rule of law”, can veer towards fascism. Where the sovereign ultimately acts unconstrained without regards for substantive rules and principles, we end up with a state that corresponds closely to Carl Schmitt’s vision.
As I was reading the 7th paragraph (the one introducing Althusser) I thought to myself, "Heh -- sounds like orthodox economics." Sure enough, you came around to it in paragraph 13 ...
The phenomenon of variable ideologies that are preferred by our elites according to need reminds me very much of the American pragmatism of a John Dewey.
A great article, if a little long. The distinction you make between mentalities and ideologies is an important one,. Ideologies are subsets of mentalities. All human beings have mentalities; we all have ideologies of one kind or another..An ideology is a heuristic for conceptualizing power relationships in the hierarchical, larger communities that replaced the micro-societies of hunter gatherers in the Neolithic. Marxism is an explicit ideology. Liberal democracy is also an ideology, simply less explicit. IMO. Once again, excellent work. I always look forward to your articles.
I agree that theory (and what passes for it) is really a rhetorical cudgel, a weapon in struggles for power. The most interesting part of this essay is the 2nd last paragraph that explains the particulars of the theory are irrelevant. What matters is skill in deploying it offensively and the ambition to do so.
But I don't think that 60s and 70s university culture _produced_ the robust system of control and protection of the status quo that we actually have, equivalent to the Party in George Orwell’s 1984. (I'm not sure if Aurelien was trying to argue it did.) Jeff Schmidt explains that production process very well in his frightening, hilarious and inspiring book Disciplined Minds. I recommend it to all https://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/
Schmidt's main point (as I understand it) is that power is given only to those who can be trusted to use it in the interest of the organizations to which they belong. Elaborate and rigorous systems of selection and training (that he details at length in the book) ensure that, for example, academic freedom (i.e. tenure) is never given to anyone who will use it or even need it. It is reserved for those who will be compliant. This works also in private enterprise, public institutions, NGOs, medicine, media etc. Those given power have no strong attachment to any ideology of their own, they adopt the ideology of the organization they are attached to as though it were their own and act accordingly.
This certainly reminded me of many of the wannabe revolutionaries I met in my college days (about a decade later), but in my generation there was a very large sprinkling of wannabe stockbrokers too. I'm not sure which ones were worse or less sincere. But it has been interesting over the decades watching the careers of the most prominent among them. The pompous right wingers I knew in college are still pompous right wingers, just now they are judges and accountants. The left wing radicals are.... well, many of them are in powerful positions, and almost all of them have sold out whatever integrity they had. But I'd certainly agree that there is something uniquely nihilistic about that particular generation - the sheer ease with which they slipped from anti-establishment radicalism to.... the establishment was a sight to see.
"... a re-inversion of Hegel once more."
Um. Hegel was inverted and then re-inverted twice?
Brilliant stuff. thanks for it. It works in theory, who cares if it works in practice. Just look at the "Sanctions".
I look forward to your posts and am only disappointed that they end. Seriously.
This one struck home, not because I’m of that generation but because amongst the oldest children of it. The cultural, intellectual and ideological markers you describe are my indoctrination as it were. I may be a special case. I learned as an adult that a rather large family used me as a social experiment to solidify many of the ideals they held dear at the time. I’m hardly a young man anymore and have had to come to grips with what feels like moral, ethical and intellectual bankruptcy.
That same family is aghast that I would question authority or read deeply enough to draw my own conclusions about the world. How dare I think myself better informed than NPR broadcasts. Except there’s nothing else I can do. I was made this way by what you’re describing. I’m quite thankful for it in most every way, except for the psychological upheaval of recognizing that the people who made me this way didn’t really mean it.
Regarding the ever-morphing ideological landscape that somehow always favors the rich, the motto of the ruling class was best expressed by Tancredi in The Leopard: "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change" (Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga com'è, bisogna che tutto cambi).
I would also add that the modern condition, of which our rulers are the highest products, is one of manufactured barbarism, if you take Burckhardt's view that barbarism arises from history's absence. I work in an academic milieu and so interact with the highly educated and the aspiring highly educated on the regular. The former are overspecialized to the extent that they are ignorant of any area that falls outside their narrow interest, though the experience of lording over students has given them confidence in their own genius. Their ignorance is a sort of refined barbarism--I've encountered bonafide professors who did not know that the Soviet Union fought for the Allies during WWII and who bragged that reading books was a waste of time, for example.
While the professors at least have command of their speciality, the students are thoroughly barbarized. Their attention spans, conditioned by TikTok and Youtube, are so attenuated that they come across as semi-literate. They barely recognize events as recent as those of the last 20 years and going further back bewilders them. What historical knowledge they have is scrambled, facts like loose change in their heads--no coherence or meaning. They demonstrate very poor reading comprehension when assigned short (10-15 pages) argumentative essays.
Of course, I'm painting with a broad brush here. I've encountered many brilliant professors and students over my career, but they're the hopeful exception to the dismal rule. I will say this, however, about the students: once they learn to read and once they learn what's really out there in terms of human literature, they get excited. The barbarians are, in the end, dazzled by and assimilated into the civilizations they conquer.
One thing that I always find astonishing, among the modern "political actives" is the strange conviction they have that they not only know the big questions, but that their answer is right, i.e. there's a clear correspondence between the "answers" and their ideology.
So, to use the overused American examples, some people believe that the answer to everything is "deregulation and tax cuts;" others believe that "higher taxes and more regulation." This makes for neatly organizing who's on which side of American politics without making things too complicated. This has two consequences that get overlooked: first, what to do with the "questions" whose answers are neither, both, or some combination thereof, along with a lot of other details being straightened out? (i.e. every policy problem that demands an actual working solution) The answer is that those questions are thrown out as "wrong questions" irrelevant to politics because you can't neatly arrange the politics as contestation between two well-defined "sides."
And what about the people who are not "politically active," i.e. people who have to contend with real problems, i.e. those that demand "real" answers? They wind up being erroneously classified as "moderates" because they are neither of the clearly defined sides and ignored. But their problems don't go away and, beyond the fact that the solution is neither "cut taxes" or "more regulation," they don't know the answers--and for that matter, no one really does. So this creates a problem for the politicians: you can't tell them, as you can to the "politically active," the standard slogan "If elected, I'll cut taxes" and expect to win them over. In fact, I used to use this situation, when I was still in academic life, to illustrate this problem, which invariably got the students frustrated and they'd ask "What do these people want? What should I say I will do if elected to win their support?" The answer was that they want their problems acknowledged and addressed, but they themselves don't know what kind of policy would work for them best. It's the job of the politician to come up with an answer and sell them on the answer (or themselves).
The problem of "answers as slogans" is, first, that they are useless as actual "answers" to anything. They are simply heuristics indicating which side they are on, and second, that they actually get in the way of producing real "answers." No answer to an actual problem neatly fits the abstract theoretical answer taken from the sloganeering realm. You can deviate from them if you have enough public trust in you that they don't care if you deviate from the slogans...except hardly anyone invests enough in building up public trust in themselves to manage this. You have risen in politics because you can recite the profession of faith correctly for your side without an error every time you are required to, and if you can mobilize the "politically actives" through this, that's usually enough to win under normal conditions--as long as there aren't enough real problems bedeviling the rest of the public that they are looking for answers.
Once there's an agitated mass that are looking for answers (and know that the slogans are not answers), the sloganeers are invariably confused, like my former students. This is, potentially, where the "populist demagogues" can arise, but to link it to "anti-democratic" phenomena is misleading. The problem is that there are bunch of people--enough for someone to win elections based on their support--who are facing problems and want answers. You don't need to have answers, per se, but only to convince them that you are aware of the problems, will try sincerely to tackle the problems, and are competent enough that they could be trusted to do something and have a good chance of success. (Incidentally, these points are taken, with only minor modifications, from a famous book on successful Congressional candidates written in 1960s). Hardly a prescription for a demagogue: you get "real" demagogues only if the "democratic process" has failed to produce legitimate politicians who can pull this off and win confidence of the not-so-active share of the electorate, and the "demagogues," like the conventional politicians, rely on slogans, just that their "slogans" don't fit the existing ones.
I think this is a fundamental problem to any "democracy," and likely, any sort of established political process/institutions. Routines and inertia set in, especially since the masses won't care enough to be involved in politics unless they are facing serious problems, and these problems don't crop up constantly. You can get by among the usual suspects by pressing the "right buttons" whether they do anything or not because those who are not won't care enough. But once the not-so-usual suspects show up, they don't have the "right buttons" to be pushed. They want you to do something (that may involve going against the right buttons) and they don't really know what exactly they want you to do, beyond solving their problems.
"Good" kind of tribalism, expressing itself in a sense of genuine "citizenship" and "duty" can provide an answer to this problem, and indeed, in the old days of American politics, this was precisely how things got done. Members of Congress got there, by local standards, at least, by being able to demonstrate to their voters that they are members of their tribes (and American politics depended on not just exclusivist tribalism, but the idea that everyone belonged to diverse and overlapping network of multiple tribes that were mutually reinforcing.) who will faithfully carry out their duty to their people(s). But slogans came to displace tribes in the "modern" world, which were often becoming too difficult to maintain anyways. Hardly a "solution" in that there's no guarantee that this would always lead to real "solutions" (too many cooks and all that), but, at least, people did try to produce them, whereas, the best that politicians can do is to throw money at the problems and hope and pray that they'll go away by themselves.
The interesting thing that I'd like to draw attention to is that, even if it looks very different, this type of thinking is something that came to apotheosis in 1960s and 1970s, like the intellectual ideas you are describing, and underlay the foundation of "mass" politics in United States. The US politics equivalent of the "vanguards" started to become the thing in late 1970s and became the mainstay of politics by the beginning of 21st century--politics as contestation between slogans that ignored the masses and fancied themselves "leaders" who will lead the ignorant masses to deal with the "real problems" that they should be interested in. And these guys have won and are now in power, trying to dictate what the "real" problems are and declaring those who say otherwise "fascists." Interesting times.
FWIW, I began to leave my place in the PMC/ruling class in January 1971 just so I could be "prepared for the problems of the immediate future." It took about twenty years to get all the way out and re-founded on my own terms. I am content with how that played out. But boy, oh boy, did I take a beating from the ones I left behind -- a ruthless and merciless lot I learned, and jealous -- about a decade's worth before the beatings subsided and another decade before, gradually, they stopped, like a fan slowing down to a stop instead of stopping immediately.
Best definition of fascism I saw in the plethora of definitions attempted since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. Consistent with what I had gathered from a fantastic course on the intellectual roots of fascism in France during the first half of the 20th century. Essentially the antithesis of analytical efforts to formulate any and all other ideologies, was the angle of the course.
This fits perfectly with your 2 previous posts explaining the hollowing out of social values and principles, resulting in the emergence of the “rational” person in a purely transactional universe, untethered from duties, traditions and morals. This archetype is essentially the individual building block of a fascistic society. Also explains well why societies paying lip service to political myths, like “democracy” or “rule of law”, can veer towards fascism. Where the sovereign ultimately acts unconstrained without regards for substantive rules and principles, we end up with a state that corresponds closely to Carl Schmitt’s vision.
As I was reading the 7th paragraph (the one introducing Althusser) I thought to myself, "Heh -- sounds like orthodox economics." Sure enough, you came around to it in paragraph 13 ...
The phenomenon of variable ideologies that are preferred by our elites according to need reminds me very much of the American pragmatism of a John Dewey.
"True and right is what is good for me."
A great article, if a little long. The distinction you make between mentalities and ideologies is an important one,. Ideologies are subsets of mentalities. All human beings have mentalities; we all have ideologies of one kind or another..An ideology is a heuristic for conceptualizing power relationships in the hierarchical, larger communities that replaced the micro-societies of hunter gatherers in the Neolithic. Marxism is an explicit ideology. Liberal democracy is also an ideology, simply less explicit. IMO. Once again, excellent work. I always look forward to your articles.