Western philosophy
History of Western philosophy from its development among the ancient
Greeks to the present.
Modern philosophy
Modern philosophy » The 19th century » Positivism and social theory in
Comte, Mill, and Marx
The absolute idealists wrote as if the Renaissance methodologists of the
sciences had never existed. But if in Germany the empirical and
scientific tradition in philosophy lay dormant, in France and England in
the middle of the 19th century it was very much alive. In France,
Auguste Comte wrote his great philosophical history of science, Cours de
philosophie positive (1830–42; “Course of Positive Philosophy”; Eng.
trans. The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte), in six volumes.
Influenced by Bacon and the entire school of British empiricism, by the
doctrine of progress put forward by Turgot and the marquis de Condorcet
(1743–94) during the 18th century, and by the very original social
reformer Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), Comte called his philosophy
“positivism,” by which he meant a philosophy of science so narrow that
it denied any validity whatsoever to “knowledge” not derived through the
accepted methods of science. But the Cours de philosophie positive made
its point not by dialectic but by an appeal to the history of thought,
and here Comte presented his two basic ideas:
1. The notion that the sciences have emerged in strict order, beginning
with mathematics and astronomy, followed by physics, chemistry, and
biology, and culminating in the new science of sociology, to which Comte
was the first to ascribe the name.
2.
The so-called “law of the three stages,” which views thought in every
field as passing progressively from superstition to science by first
being religious, then abstract, or metaphysical, and finally positive,
or scientific.
Comte’s contribution was to initiate an antireligious and an
antimetaphysical bias in the philosophy of science that survived into
the 20th century.
In mid-19th-century England the chief representative of the empirical
tradition from Bacon to Hume was John Stuart Mill. Mill’s theory of
knowledge, best represented in his Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s
Philosophy (1865), was not particularly original but rather a judicious
combination of the doctrines of Berkeley and Hume; it symbolized his
mistrust of vague metaphysics, his denial of the a priori element in
knowledge, and his determined opposition to any form of intuitionism. It
is in his enormously influential A System of Logic (1843), however, that
Mill’s chief theoretical ideas are to be found.
This work—as part of its subtitle, the Principles of Evidence and the
Methods of Scientific Investigation, indicates—was concerned less with
formal logic than with scientific methodology. Mill made here the
fundamental distinction between deduction and induction, defined
induction as the process for discovering and proving general
propositions, and presented his “four methods of experimental inquiry”
as the heart of the inductive method. These methods were, in fact, only
an enlarged and refined version of Francis Bacon’s “tables of
discovery.” But the most significant section of A System of Logic was
its conclusion, Book VI, On the Logic of the Moral Sciences.
Mill took the experience of the uniformity of nature as the warrant
of induction. Here he reaffirmed the belief of Hume that it is possible
to apply the principle of causation and the methods of physical science
to moral and social phenomena. These may be so complex as to yield only
“conditional predictions,” but in this sense there are “social laws.”
Thus Comte and Mill agreed on the possibility of a genuine social
science.
Mill’s Logic was extremely influential, and it continued to be taught
at Oxford and Cambridge well into the 20th century, but in the end his
importance lay less in logic and epistemology than in ethics and
political philosophy. Mill was the great apostle of political liberalism
in the 19th century, a true follower of John Locke. And, just as Locke
and Rousseau had represented the liberal and the radical wings of social
theory in the early modern period, so Mill and Karl Marx represented the
liberal and radical approaches to social reform 100 years later.
Mill was raised by social reformers—his father, James Mill
(1773–1836), and Jeremy Bentham. His social theory was an attempt, by
gradual means arrived at democratically, to combat the evils of the
Industrial Revolution. His ethics, expressed in his Utilitarianism
(1861), followed the formulations of Bentham in finding the end of
society to consist in the production of the greatest quantity of
happiness for its members, but he gave to Bentham’s cruder (but more
consistent) doctrines a humanistic and individualistic slant. Thus, the
moral self-development of the individual becomes the ultimate value in
Mill’s ethics.
This trend was also expressed in his essays On Liberty (1859) and
Considerations on Representative Government (1861). In the former he
stated the case for the freedom of the individual against “the tyranny
of the majority,” presented strong arguments in favour of complete
freedom of thought and discussion, and argued that no state or society
has the right to prevent the free development of human individuality. In
the latter he provided a classic defense for the principle of
representative democracy, asked for the adequate representation of
minorities, urged renewed public participation in political action for
necessary social reforms, and pointed out the dangers of class-oriented,
or special-interest, legislation.
A radical counterbalance to Mill’s liberal ideas was provided by the
philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary Karl Marx. Prior to
1848, Marx used the Hegelian idea of estrangement (which Hegel
had used
in a metaphysical sense) to indicate the alienation of the worker from
the enjoyment of the products of his labour, the crass treatment of
human labour as a mere commodity and human beings as mere things, and
the general dehumanization of individuals in a selfish, profit-seeking
capitalist society.
In The Communist Manifesto (1848), which he wrote with his colleague
and friend Friedrich Engels (1820–95), Marx yielded to the revolutionary
temper of the times by calling for the violent overthrow of the existing
social order (as Rousseau had done before the French Revolution). All of
history, Marx said, is the struggle between an exploiting
minority and an exploited majority, most recently between the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat; and he advocated the formation of a
Communist Party to stimulate proletarian class consciousness and to
encourage the proletarian seizure of power and the institution of a just
and democratically managed socialist society.
Marx’s revolutionary fervour tended to harm his philosophical
reputation in the West, and his philosophical achievement remains a
matter of controversy. But certain of his ideas (some Hegelian in
inspiration, some original) have endured. Among these are:
1. That society is a moving balance (dialectic) of antithetical forces
that produce social change.
2.
That there is no conflict between a rigid economic determinism and a
program of revolutionary action.
3.
That ideas (including philosophical theories) are not purely rational
and thus cannot be independent of external circumstances but depend upon
the nature of the social order in which they arise.

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Auguste Comte
French philosopher
in full Isidore-auguste-marie-françois-xavier Comte
born January 19, 1798, Montpellier, France
died September 5, 1857, Paris
Main
French philosopher known as the founder of sociology and of
positivism. Comte gave the science of sociology its name and
established the new subject in a systematic fashion.
Life.
Comte’s father, Louis Comte, a tax official, and his mother,
Rosalie Boyer, were strongly royalist and deeply sincere
Roman Catholics. But their sympathies were at odds with the
republicanism and skepticism that swept through France in
the aftermath of the French Revolution. Comte resolved these
conflicts at an early age by rejecting Roman Catholicism and
royalism alike. He was intellectually precocious and in 1814
entered the École Polytechnique—a school in Paris that had
been founded in 1794 to train military engineers but was
soon transformed into a general school for advanced
sciences. The school was temporarily closed in 1816, but
Comte soon took up permanent residence in Paris, earning a
precarious living there by the occasional teaching of
mathematics and by journalism. He read widely in philosophy
and history and was especially interested in those thinkers
who were beginning to discern and trace some order in the
history of human society. The thoughts of several important
French political philosophers of the 18th century—such as
Montesquieu, the Marquis de Condorcet, A.-R.-J. Turgot, and
Joseph de Maistre—were critically worked into his own system
of thought.
Comte’s most important acquaintance in Paris was Henri de
Saint-Simon, a French social reformer and one of the
founders of socialism, who was the first to clearly see the
importance of economic organization in modern society.
Comte’s ideas were very similar to Saint-Simon’s, and some
of his earliest articles appeared in Saint-Simon’s
publications. There were distinct differences in the two
men’s viewpoints and scientific backgrounds, however, and
Comte eventually broke with Saint-Simon. In 1826 Comte began
a series of lectures on his “system of positive philosophy”
for a private audience, but he soon suffered a serious
nervous breakdown. He made an almost complete recovery from
his symptoms the following year, and in 1828/29 he again
took up his projected lecture series. This was so
successfully concluded that he redelivered it at the Royal
Athenaeum during 1829–30. The following 12 years were
devoted to his publication (in six volumes) of his
philosophy in a work entitled Cours de philosophie positive
(1830–42; “Course of Positive Philosophy”; Eng. trans. The
Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte).
From 1832 to 1842 Comte was a tutor and then an examiner
at the revived École Polytechnique. In the latter year he
quarreled with the directors of the school and lost his
post, along with much of his income. During the remainder of
his life he was supported in part by English admirers such
as John Stuart Mill and by French disciples, especially the
philologist and lexicographer Maximilien Littré. Comte
married Caroline Massin in 1825, but the marriage was
unhappy and they separated in 1842. In 1845 Comte had a
profound romantic and emotional experience with Clotilde de
Vaux, who died the following year of tuberculosis. Comte
idealized this sentimental episode, which exerted a
considerable influence on his later thought and writings,
particularly with regard to the role of women in the
positivist society he planned to establish.
Comte devoted the years after the death of Clotilde de
Vaux to composing his other major work, the Système de
politique positive, 4 vol. (1851–54; System of Positive
Polity), in which he completed his formulation of sociology.
The entire work emphasized morality and moral progress as
the central preoccupation of human knowledge and effort and
gave an account of the polity, or political organization,
that this required. Comte lived to see his writings widely
scrutinized throughout Europe. Many English intellectuals
were influenced by him, and they translated and promulgated
his work. His French devotees had also increased, and a
large correspondence developed with positivist societies
throughout the world. Comte died of cancer in 1857.
Comte was a rather sombre, ungrateful, self-centred, and
egocentric personality, but he compensated for this by his
zeal for the welfare of humanity, his intellectual
determination, and his strenuous application to his life’s
work. He devoted himself untiringly to the promotion and
systematization of his ideas and to their application in the
cause of the improvement of society.
His other writings include Catéchisme positiviste (1852;
The Catechism of Positive Religion) and Synthèse subjective
(1856; “Subjective Synthesis”). In general, his writing was
well organized, and its exposition proceeded in impressively
orderly fashion, but his style was heavy, laboured, and
rather monotonous. His chief works are notable mainly
because of the scope, magnitude, and importance of his
project and the conscientious persistence with which he
developed and expressed his ideas.
Thought.
Comte lived through the aftermath of the French
Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, at a time when a new,
stable social order—without despotism—was sought. Modern
science and technology and the Industrial Revolution had
begun transforming the societies of Europe in directions no
one yet understood. People experienced violent conflict but
were adrift in feeling, thought, and action; they lacked
confidence in established sentiments, beliefs, and
institutions but had nothing with which to replace them.
Comte thought that this condition was not only significant
for France and Europe but was one of the decisive junctures
of human history.
Comte’s particular ability was as a synthesizer of the
most diverse intellectual currents. He took his ideas mainly
from writers of the 18th and early 19th centuries. From
David Hume and Immanuel Kant he derived his conception of
positivism—i.e., the theory that theology and metaphysics
are earlier imperfect modes of knowledge and that positive
knowledge is based on natural phenomena and their properties
and relations as verified by the empirical sciences. From
various French clericalist thinkers Comte took the notion of
a hypothetical framework for social organization that would
imitate the hierarchy and discipline found in the Roman
Catholic church. From various Enlightenment philosophers he
adopted the notion of historical progress. Most importantly,
from Saint-Simon he came to appreciate the need for a basic
and unifying social science that would both explain existing
social organizations and guide social planning for a better
future. This new science he called “sociology” for the first
time.
Comte shared Saint-Simon’s appreciation of the growing
importance of modern science and the potential application
of scientific methods to the study and improvement of
society. Comte believed that social phenomena could be
reduced to laws in the same way that the revolutions of the
heavenly bodies had been made explicable by gravitational
theory. Furthermore, he believed that the purpose of the new
scientific analysis of society should be ameliorative and
that the ultimate outcome of all innovation and
systematization in the new science should be the guidance of
social planning. Comte also thought a new and secularized
spiritual order was needed to supplant what he viewed as the
outdated supernaturalism of Christian theology.
Comte’s main contribution to positivist philosophy falls
into five parts: his rigorous adoption of the scientific
method; his law of the three states or stages of
intellectual development; his classification of the
sciences; his conception of the incomplete philosophy of
each of these sciences anterior to sociology; and his
synthesis of a positivist social philosophy in a unified
form. He sought a system of philosophy that could form a
basis for political organization appropriate to modern
industrial society.
Comte’s “law of the three stages” maintained that human
intellectual development had moved historically from a
theological stage, in which the world and human destiny
within it were explained in terms of gods and spirits;
through a transitional metaphysical stage, in which
explanations were in terms of essences, final causes, and
other abstractions; and finally to the modern positive
stage. This last stage was distinguished by an awareness of
the limitations of human knowledge. Knowledge could only be
relative to man’s nature as a species and to his varying
social and historical situations. Absolute explanations were
therefore better abandoned for the more sensible discovery
of laws based on the observable relations between phenomena.
Comte’s classification of the sciences was based upon the
hypothesis that the sciences had developed from the
understanding of simple and abstract principles to the
understanding of complex and concrete phenomena. Hence, the
sciences developed as follows: from mathematics, astronomy,
physics, and chemistry to biology and finally to sociology.
According to Comte, this last discipline not only concluded
the series but would also reduce social facts to laws and
synthesize the whole of human knowledge, thus rendering the
discipline equipped to guide the reconstruction of society.
Though Comte did not originate the concept of sociology
or its area of study, he greatly extended and elaborated the
field and systematized its content. Comte divided sociology
into two main fields, or branches: social statics, or the
study of the forces that hold society together; and social
dynamics, or the study of the causes of social change. He
held that the underlying principles of society are
individual egoism, which is encouraged by the division of
labour, and the combination of efforts and the maintenance
of social cohesion by means of government and the state.
Comte revealed his conception of the ideal positivist
society in his System of Positive Polity. He believed that
the organization of the Roman Catholic church, divorced from
Christian theology, could provide a structural and symbolic
model for the new society, though Comte substituted a
“religion of humanity” for the worship of God. A spiritual
priesthood of secular sociologists would guide society and
control education and public morality. The actual
administration of the government and of the economy would be
in the hands of businessmen and bankers, while the
maintenance of private morality would be the province of
women as wives and mothers.
Though unquestionably a man of genius, Comte inspired
discipleship on the one hand and derision on the other. His
plans for a future society have been described as ludicrous,
and Comte was deeply reactionary in his rejection of
democracy, his emphasis on hierarchy and obedience, and his
opinion that the ideal government would be made up of an
intellectual elite. But his ideas influenced such notable
social scientists as Émile Durkheim of France and Herbert
Spencer and Sir Edward Burnett Tylor of Great Britain.
Comte’s belief in the importance of sociology as the
scientific study of human society remains an article of
faith among contemporary sociologists, and the work he
accomplished remains a remarkable synthesis and an important
system of thought.
Ronald Fletcher
Harry Elmer Barnes
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Henri de Saint-Simon
French social reformer
in full Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Comte (count) de
Saint-Simon
born Oct. 17, 1760, Paris, Fr.
died May 19, 1825, Paris
Main
French social theorist and one of the chief founders of
Christian socialism. In his major work, Nouveau
Christianisme (1825), he proclaimed a brotherhood of man
that must accompany the scientific organization of industry
and society.
Life.
Saint-Simon was born of an impoverished aristocratic family.
His grandfather’s cousin had been the Duke de Saint-Simon,
famous for his memoirs of the court of Louis XIV. Henri was
fond of claiming descent from Charlemagne. After an
irregular education by private tutors, he entered military
service at 17. He was in the regiments sent by France to aid
the American colonies in their war of independence against
England and served as a captain of artillery at Yorktown in
1781.
During the French Revolution he remained in France, where
he bought up newly nationalized land with funds advanced by
a friend. He was imprisoned in the Palais de Luxembourg
during the Reign of Terror and emerged to find himself
enormously rich because of the depreciation of the
Revolutionary currency. He proceeded to live a life of
splendour and license, entertaining prominent people from
all walks of life at his glittering salons. Within several
years he had brought himself close to bankruptcy. He turned
to the study of science, attending courses at the École
Polytechnique and entertaining distinguished scientists.
In his first published work, Lettres d’un habitant de
Genève à ses contemporains (1803; “Letters of an Inhabitant
of Geneva to His Contemporaries”), Saint-Simon proposed that
scientists take the place of priests in the social order. He
argued that the property owners who held political power
could hope to maintain themselves against the propertyless
only by subsidizing the advance of knowledge.
By 1808 Saint-Simon was impoverished, and the last 17
years of his life were lived mainly on the generosity of
friends. Among his many later publications were De la
réorganisation de la société européenne (1814; “On the
Reorganization of European Society”) and L’industrie
(1816–18, in collaboration with Auguste Comte; “Industry”).
In 1823, in a fit of despondency, Saint-Simon attempted to
kill himself with a pistol but succeeded only in putting out
one eye.
Throughout his life Saint-Simon devoted himself to a long
series of projects and publications through which he sought
to win support for his social ideas. As a thinker,
Saint-Simon was deficient in system, clearness, and
coherence, but his influence on modern thought, especially
in the social sciences, is undeniable. Apart from the
details of his socialist teachings, his main ideas are
simple and represented a reaction against the bloodletting
of the French Revolution and the militarism of Napoleon.
Saint-Simon correctly foresaw the industrialization of the
world, and he believed that science and technology would
solve most of humanity’s problems. Accordingly, in
opposition to feudalism and militarism, he advocated an
arrangement whereby businessmen and other industrial leaders
would control society. The spiritual direction of society
would be in the hands of scientists and engineers, who would
thus take the place occupied by the Roman Catholic church in
the European Middle Ages. What Saint-Simon desired, in other
words, was an industrialized state directed by modern
science, and one in which society would be organized for
productive labour by the most capable men. The aim of
society would be to produce things useful to life.
Saint-Simon also proposed that the states of Europe form an
association to suppress war. These ideas had a profound
influence on the philosopher Auguste Comte, who worked with
Saint-Simon until the two men quarreled.
Although the contrast between the labouring and the
propertied classes in society is not emphasized by
Saint-Simon, the cause of the poor is discussed, and in his
best-known work, Nouveau Christianisme (1825; “The New
Christianity”), it takes the form of a religion. It was this
development of Saint-Simon’s teaching that occasioned his
final rupture with Comte. Before the publication of Nouveau
Christianisme, Saint-Simon had not concerned himself with
theology, but in this work, beginning with a belief in God,
he tries to resolve Christianity into its essential
elements, and he finally propounds this precept: that
religion “should guide the community toward the great aim of
improving as quickly as possible the conditions of the
poorest class.” This became the watchword of the entire
school of Saint-Simon.
His movement and its influence.
Saint-Simon died in 1825, and, in the subsequent years, his
disciples carried his message to the world and made him
famous. By 1826 a movement supporting his ideas had begun to
grow, and by the end of 1828 the Saint-Simonians were
holding meetings in Paris and in many provincial towns. In
July 1830 revolution brought new opportunities to the Saint-Simonians
in France. They issued a proclamation demanding the
ownership of goods in common, the abolition of the right of
inheritance, and the enfranchisement of women. The sect
included some of the ablest and most promising young men of
France. In the following years, however, the leaders of the
movement quarreled among themselves, and as a result the
movement fragmented and broke up, its leaders turning to
practical affairs.
Despite this, the ideas of the Saint-Simonians had a
pervasive influence on the intellectual life of 19th-century
Europe. Thomas Carlyle in England was among those influenced
by the ideas of Saint-Simon or his followers. Friedrich
Engels found in Saint-Simon “the breadth of view of a
genius,” containing in embryo most of the ideas of the later
socialists. Saint-Simon’s proposals of social and economic
planning were indeed ahead of his time, and succeeding
Marxists, socialists, and capitalist reformers alike were
indebted to his ideas in one way or another. Felix Markham
has said that Saint-Simon’s ideas have a peculiar relevance
to the 20th century, when socialist ideologies took the
place of traditional religion in many countries.
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John Stuart Mill
British philosopher and economist
born May 20, 1806, London, Eng.
died May 8, 1873, Avignon, France
Main
English philosopher, economist, and exponent of
Utilitarianism. He was prominent as a publicist in the
reforming age of the 19th century, and remains of lasting
interest as a logician and an ethical theorist.
Early life and career
The eldest son of the British historian, economist, and
philosopher James Mill, he was born in his father’s house in
Pentonville, London. He was educated exclusively by his
father, who was a strict disciplinarian. By his eighth year
he had read in the original Greek Aesop’s Fables, Xenophon’s
Anabasis, and the whole of the historian Herodotus. He was
acquainted with the satirist Lucian, the historian of
philosophy Diogenes Laërtius, the Athenian writer and
educational theorist Isocrates, and six dialogues of Plato.
He had also read a great deal of history in English. At the
age of eight he started Latin, the geometry of Euclid, and
algebra and began to teach the younger children of the
family. His main reading was still history, but he went
through all the Latin and Greek authors commonly read in the
schools and universities and, by the age of 10 could read
Plato and the Athenian statesman Demosthenes with ease.
About the age of 12, he began a thorough study of Scholastic
logic, at the same time reading Aristotle’s logical
treatises in the original. In the following year he was
introduced to political economy and studied the work of the
Scottish political economist and philosopher Adam Smith and
that of the English economist David Ricardo.
While the training the younger Mill received has aroused
amazement and criticism, its most important aspect was the
close association it fostered with the strenuous character
and vigorous intellect of his father. From his earliest days
he spent much time in his father’s study and habitually
accompanied him on his walks. He thus inevitably acquired
many of his father’s speculative opinions and his father’s
way of defending them. But he did not receive the impress
passively and mechanically. The duty of collecting and
weighing evidence for himself was at every turn impressed
upon the boy. His childhood was not unhappy, but it was a
strain on his constitution and he suffered from the lack of
natural, unforced development.
From May 1820 until July 1821, Mill was in France with
the family of Sir Samuel Bentham, brother of Jeremy Bentham,
the English Utilitarian philosopher, economist, and
theoretical jurist. Copious extracts from a diary kept at
this time show how methodically he read and wrote, studied
chemistry and botany, tackled advanced mathematical
problems, and made notes on the scenery and the people and
customs of the country. He also gained a thorough
acquaintance with the French language. On his return in 1821
he added to his work the study of psychology and of Roman
law, which he read with John Austin, his father having half
decided on the bar as the best profession open to him. This
intention, however, was abandoned, and in 1823, when he had
just completed his 17th year, he entered the examiner’s
office of the India House. After a short probation he was
promoted in 1828 to assistant examiner. For 20 years, from
1836 (when his father died) to 1856, Mill had charge of the
British East India Company’s relations with the Indian
states, and in 1856 he became chief of the examiner’s
office.
In 1822 Mill had read P.-E.-L. Dumont’s exposition of
Bentham’s doctrines in the Traités de Législation, which
made a lasting impression upon him. The impression was
confirmed by the study of the English psychologists and also
of two 18th-century French philosophers—Étienne Bonnot de
Condillac, who was also a psychologist, and Claude-Adrien
Helvétius, who was noted for his emphasis on physical
sensations. Soon after, in 1822–23, Mill established among a
few friends the Utilitarian Society, taking the word, as he
tells us, from Annals of the Parish, a novel of Scottish
country life by John Galt.
Two newspapers welcomed his contributions—The Traveller,
edited by a friend of Bentham’s, and The Morning Chronicle,
edited by his father’s friend John Black. One of his first
efforts was a solid argument for freedom of discussion in a
series of letters to the Chronicle on the prosecution of
Richard Carlile, a 19th-century English radical and
freethinker. Mill seized every chance for exposing
departures from sound principle in Parliament and courts of
justice. Another outlet was opened up for him (April 1824)
with the founding of the Westminster Review, which was the
organ of the philosophical radicals. In 1825 he began work
on an edition of Bentham’s Rationale of Judicial Evidence (5
vol., 1827). He took part eagerly in discussions with the
many men of distinction who came to his father’s house and
engaged in set discussions at a reading society formed at
the home of English historian George Grote in 1825 and in
debates at the London Debating Society, formed in the same
year.
Public life and writing
The Autobiography tells how in 1826 Mill’s enthusiasm was
checked by a misgiving as to the value of the ends that he
had set before him. At the London Debating Society, where he
first measured his strength in public conflict, he found
himself looked upon with curiosity as a precocious
phenomenon, a “made man,” an intellectual machine set to
grind certain tunes. The elder Mill, like Plato, would have
put poets under ban as enemies of truth; he subordinated
private to public affections; and Landor’s maxims of “few
acquaintances, fewer friends, no familiarities” had his
cordial approval. The younger Mill now felt himself forced
to abandon these doctrines. Too much in awe of his father to
make him a confidant, he wrestled with his doubts in gloomy
solitude. He emerged from the struggle with a more catholic
view of human happiness, a delight in poetry for its own
sake, a more placable attitude in controversy, a hatred of
sectarianism, and an ambition no less noble and
disinterested but moderated to practical possibilities.
Gradually, the debates in the Debating Society attracted men
with whom contact was invigorating and inspiring. Mill
ceased to attend the society in 1829, but he carried away
from it the conviction that a true system of political
philosophy was
something much more complex and many-sided than he had
previously had any idea of, and that its office was to
supply, not a set of model institutions but principles from
which the institutions suitable to any given circumstances
might be deduced.
Mill’s letters in The Examiner in the autumn of 1830,
after a visit to Paris, where he made the acquaintance of
the younger liberals, may be taken as marking his return to
hopeful activity; and a series of articles on “The Spirit of
the Age” appeared in the same paper in 1831. During the
years 1832 and 1833 he contributed many essays to Tait’s
Magazine, The Jurist, and The Monthly Repository. In 1835
Sir William Molesworth founded The London Review, with Mill
as editor. It was amalgamated with The Westminster (as The
London and Westminster Review) in 1836, and Mill continued
as editor (latterly as proprietor, also) until 1840. In and
after 1840 he published several important articles in The
Edinburgh Review. Some of the essays written for these
journals were reprinted in the first two volumes (1859) of
Mill’s Dissertations and Discussions and give evidence of
the increasing width of his interests. Among the more
important are “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties” (1833),
“Writings of Alfred de Vigny” (1838), “Bentham” (1838),
“Coleridge” (1840), “M. De Tocqueville on Democracy in
America” (1840), “Michelet’s History of France” (1844), and
“Guizot’s Essays and Lectures on History” (1845). The twin
essays on Bentham and Coleridge show Mill’s powers at their
splendid best and indicate very clearly the new spirit that
he tried to breathe into English radicalism.
During these years Mill also wrote his great systematic
works on logic and on political economy. His reawakened
enthusiasm for humanity had taken shape as an aspiration to
supply an unimpeachable method of proof for conclusions in
moral and social science; the French positivist philosopher
Auguste Comte had some influence here, but the main
inspiration undoubtedly came from the English scientist and
mathematician Sir Isaac Newton, whose physics had already
been accepted as a model of scientific exposition by such
earlier British philosophers as John Locke, David Hume,
Jeremy Bentham, and James Mill. But he was determined that
the new logic should not simply oppose the old logic. In his
Westminster review (of 1828) of Richard Whately’s Elements
of Logic, he was already defending the syllogism against the
Scottish philosophers who had talked of superseding it by a
supposed system of inductive logic. He required his
inductive logic to “supplement and not supersede.” For
several years he searched in vain for the means of
concatenation. Finally, in 1837, on reading William
Whewell’s Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences and rereading
John F.W. Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on the Study of
Natural Philosophy, Mill at last saw his way clear both to
formulating the methods of scientific investigation and to
joining the new logic onto the old as a supplement. A System
of Logic, in two volumes, was published in 1843 (3rd–8th
editions, introducing many changes, 1851–72). Book VI is his
valiant attempt to formulate a logic of the human
sciences—including history, psychology, and sociology—based
on causal explanation conceived in Humean terms, a
formulation that has lately come in for radical criticism.
Mill distinguished three stages in his development as a
political economist. In 1844 he published the Essays on Some
Unsettled Questions of Political Economy, which he had
written several years earlier, and four out of five of these
essays are solutions of perplexing technical problems—the
distribution of the gains of international commerce, the
influence of consumption on production, the definition of
productive and unproductive labour, and the precise
relations between profits and wages. Here for the most part
Mill appears as the disciple of David Ricardo, striving
after more precise statements and reaching forward to
further consequences. In his second stage, originality and
independence become more conspicuous as he struggles toward
the standpoint from which he wrote his Principles of
Political Economy. This was published in 1848 (2 vol.; 2nd
and 3rd eds., with significant differences, 1849, 1852),
and, at about the same time, Mill was advocating the
creation of peasant proprietorships as a remedy for the
distresses and disorder in Ireland. Thereafter, he made a
more thorough study of Socialist writers. He was convinced
that the social question was as important as the political
question. He declined to accept property, devised originally
to secure peace in a primitive society, as necessarily
sacred in its existing developments in a quite different
stage of society. He separated questions of production and
distribution and could not rest satisfied with the
distribution that condemned the labouring classes to a
cramped and wretched existence, in many cases to starvation.
He did not come to a Socialist solution, but he had the
great merit of having considered afresh the foundations of
society. This he called his third stage as a political
economist, and he says that he was helped toward it by Mrs.
Taylor (Harriet Hardy), who became his wife in 1851.
It is generally supposed that Mill writes with a lover’s
extravagance about Harriet’s powers. He expressly says,
indeed, that he owed none of his technical doctrine to her,
that she influenced only his ideals of life for the
individual and for society, and that the only work directly
inspired by her is the essay on the “Enfranchisement of
Women” (Dissertations, vol. 2). Nevertheless, Mill’s
relations with her have always been something of a puzzle.
During the seven years of his marriage Mill became
increasingly absorbed in the work of the British East India
Company and in consequence published less than at any other
period of his life. In 1856 he became head of the examiner’s
office in the India House, and for two years, till the
dissolution of the company in 1858, his official work kept
him fully occupied. It fell to him as head of the office to
write the defense of the company’s government of India when
the transfer of its powers was proposed. Mill opposed the
transfer, and the documents in which he defended the
company’s administration are models of trenchant and
dignified pleading. On the dissolution of the company, Mill
was offered a seat in the new council but declined it and
retired with a pension of £1,500. His retirement from
official life was followed almost immediately by his wife’s
death at Avignon, France. He spent most of the rest of his
life at a villa at Saint-Véran, near Avignon, returning to
his house at Blackheath only for a short period in each
year.
The later years
Mill sought relief by publishing a series of books on ethics
and politics that he had meditated upon and partly written
in collaboration with his wife. The essay On Liberty
appeared in 1859 with a touching dedication to her and the
Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform in the same year. In his
Considerations on Representative Government (1861) he
systematized opinions already put forward in many casual
articles and essays. It has been remarked how Mill combined
enthusiasm for democratic government with pessimism as to
what democracy was likely to do; practically every
discussion in these books exemplifies this. His
Utilitarianism (in Fraser’s Magazine, 1861; separate
publication, 1863) was a closely reasoned attempt to answer
objections to his ethical theory and to remove
misconceptions about it. He was especially anxious to make
it clear that he included in “utility” the pleasures of the
imagination and the gratification of the higher emotions;
and to make a place in his system for settled rules of
conduct.
Mill also began to write again on the wider philosophical
questions that had occupied him in the Logic. In 1865 he
published both his Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s
Philosophy and his Auguste Comte and Positivism, but in both
writings his motives were largely political. It was because
he regarded the writings and sayings of Sir William Hamilton
as the great fortress of intuitional philosophy in Great
Britain that Mill undertook to counter his pretensions. In
dealing with Comte, Mill distinguished sharply between
Comte’s earlier philosophical doctrine of Positivism and his
later religion of humanity. The doctrine he commended (as he
had frequently done previously) because he regarded it as a
natural development of the outlook of George Berkeley and
Hume; the religion he attacked because he saw in it merely
another attempt to foist a priestly hierarchy upon suffering
humanity. It is noticeable that Mill’s language in these
books is much closer to the language of Bentham and James
Mill than it had been since his boyhood, and it was as an
act of piety that in 1869 he republished his father’s
Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind with additional
illustrations and explanatory notes.
While engaged in these years mainly with theoretical
studies, Mill did not remit his interest in current
politics. He supported the North in the U.S. Civil War,
using all his strength to explain that the real issue at
stake in the struggle was the abolition of slavery. In 1865
he stood as parliamentary candidate for Westminster, on
conditions strictly in accordance with his principles. He
would not canvass or pay agents to canvass for him, nor
would he engage to attend to the local business of the
constituency. He was with difficulty persuaded even to
address a meeting of the electors but was elected. He took
an active part in the debates preceding the passage of the
1867 Reform Bill, and helped to extort from the government
several useful modifications of the bill, for the prevention
of corrupt practices. The reform of land tenure in Ireland
(see his England and Ireland, 1868, and his Chapters and
Speeches on the Irish Land Question, 1870), the
representation of women (see below), the reduction of the
national debt, the reform of London government, and the
abrogation of the Declaration of Paris (1856)—concerning the
carriage of property at sea during the Crimean War—were
among the topics on which he spoke. He took occasion more
than once to enforce what he had often advocated, England’s
duty to intervene in foreign politics in support of freedom.
As a speaker Mill was somewhat hesitating, but he showed
great readiness in extemporaneous debate. Elected rector of
St. Andrews University, he published his “Inaugural Address”
in 1867.
Mill’s subscription to the election expenses of the
freethinker and radical politician Charles Bradlaugh and his
attack on the conduct of Gov. E.J. Eyre in Jamaica were
perhaps the main causes of his defeat in the general
parliamentary election of 1868. But his studied advocacy of
unfamiliar projects of reform had made him unpopular with
“moderate Liberals.” He retired with a sense of relief to
Avignon. His villa was filled with books and newspapers; the
country round it furnished him with a variety of walks; he
read, wrote, discussed, walked, botanized. He was extremely
fond of music and was himself a fair pianist. His
stepdaughter, Helen Taylor (died January 1907), was his
constant companion after his wife’s death. Mill was an
enthusiastic botanist all his life and a frequent
contributor of notes and short papers to the Phytologist.
During his last journey to Avignon he was looking forward to
seeing the spring flowers and completing a flora of the
locality.
Mill did not relax his laborious habits or his ardent
outlook on human affairs. The essays in the fourth volume of
his Dissertations (1875; vol. 3 had appeared in 1867)—on
endowments, on land, on labour, and on metaphysical and
psychological questions—were written for the Fortnightly
Review at intervals after his short parliamentary career. In
1867 he had been one of the founders, with Mrs. P.A. Taylor,
Emily Davies, and others, of the first women’s suffrage
society, which developed into the National Union of Women’s
Suffrage Societies, and in 1869 he published The Subjection
of Women (written 1861), the classical theoretical statement
of the case for woman suffrage. His last public activity was
concerned with the starting of the Land Tenure Reform
Association, for which he wrote in The Examiner and made a
public speech a few months before his death; the
interception by the state of the unearned increment on land
and the promotion of cooperative agriculture were the most
striking features in his program, which he regarded as a
timely compromise in view of the impending struggle between
capital and labour in Europe. He died in 1873, and his
Autobiography and Three Essays on Religion (1874) were
published posthumously.
A bronze statue of Mill stands on the Thames embankment
in London, and G.F. Watts’s copy of his original portrait of
Mill hangs in the National Gallery there.
Influence and significance
Mill was a man of extreme simplicity in his mode of life.
The influence that his works exercised upon contemporary
English thought can scarcely be overestimated, nor can there
be any doubt about the value of the liberal and inquiring
spirit with which he handled the great questions of his
time. Beyond that, however, there has been considerable
difference of opinion about the enduring merits of his
philosophy. At first sight he is the most lucid of
philosophers. Many people have spoken of the marvelous
intelligibility of his writing. Usually, however, it is not
long before doubts begin to creep in. Although the lucidity
remains, its span is seen to be somewhat limited, and one
sometimes has the uneasy feeling that he is being equally
lucid on both sides of a question.
Oddly enough, however, this judgment has not led to any
neglect of Mill. Little attention is now paid to Hamilton or
to Whewell, but Mill’s name continually crops up in
philosophical discussions. This is partly due to the fact
that Mill offers a body of doctrine and a set of technical
terms on many subjects (notably on induction) that have
proved extremely useful in the classroom. But a more
important reason is that he has come to be regarded as a
sort of personification of certain tendencies in philosophy
that it is regarded as continually necessary to expound or
expose because they make such a powerful appeal to serious
minds. Thus he is or says he is a Utilitarian; yet nothing,
it is pointed out, could tell more strongly against
Utilitarianism than certain passages in his writings. Then
again, he is said to be an Empiricist (although he says
himself that he is not), and his theories of the syllogism
and of mathematics are constantly used to demonstrate the
fatal consequences of this way of thinking.
It is misleading to speak without qualification of Mill’s
Utilitarianism. Nor is it sufficient to add that Mill
modified the Utilitarianism that he inherited from Bentham
and from his father in one way and another in order to meet
the criticisms that it encountered in Victorian times. He
does, it is true, sometimes give that impression (as in his
essay Utilitarianism); but elsewhere (as in his essay On
Liberty) he scarcely attempts to conceal the fact that his
premises are completely independent of Bentham’s. Thus,
contrary to the common belief, it appears to be very
hazardous to characterize offhand the precise position of
Mill on any major philosophical topic. He sometimes behaved
with a reckless disregard of consequences more suitable to a
Romantic than to a Utilitarian. He is thoroughly romantic,
again, and thoroughly representative of his age in the
eagerness with which he seeks out and endeavours to
assimilate every last exotic line of thought which shows any
signs of vitality. He himself claimed to be superior to most
of his contemporaries in “ability and willingness to learn
from everybody,” and indeed, for all his father’s careful
schooling, there was never anybody less buttoned up against
alien influences than Mill. In his writings there can be
discerned traces of every wind of doctrine of the early 19th
century.
Richard Paul Anschutz
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James Mill
Scottish philosopher, historian, and economist
born April 6, 1773, Northwater Bridge, Forfarshire, Scot.
died June 23, 1836, London, Eng.
Main
Scottish philosopher, historian, and economist. He was
prominent as a representative of philosophical radicalism, a
school of thought also known as Utilitarianism, which
emphasized the need for a scientific basis for philosophy as
well as a humanist approach to politics and economics. His
eldest son was the celebrated Utilitarian thinker John
Stuart Mill.
After distinguishing himself as a Greek scholar at the
University of Edinburgh, James Mill was licensed a
Presbyterian preacher in 1798. He soon turned to teaching,
however, and embarked on historical and philosophical
studies. In 1802 he went to London to devote himself to a
career in journalism. In 1804 he wrote a pamphlet on the
corn trade, arguing against a bounty on the exportation of
grain, and in 1806 he began his History of British India, 3
vol. (1817).
Mill became acquainted with Jeremy Bentham, who founded
Utilitarianism, in 1808. As Bentham’s chief companion and
ally for many years, he adopted Bentham’s principles in
their entirety and did more to propagate them and to oppose
the beginnings of Romanticism than anyone else. He was a
regular contributor (1806–18) to the Anti-Jacobin Review,
the British Review, the Eclectic Review, and the Edinburgh
Review (1808–13). In 1811 he helped edit the periodical
Philanthropist with the English writer William Allen,
contributing his opinions on education, freedom of the
press, and prison discipline. He also participated in the
discussions that led to the founding of London University in
1825. In 1814 Mill undertook to write various articles on
politics, law, and education for the six-volume Supplement
to the 4th, 5th, and 6th editions of the Encyclopædia
Britannica. As reprints they enjoyed a wide circulation in
his time. One of the articles, “government,” had
considerable influence on public opinion in the 1820s. (See
the Britannica Classic: government.) In it, Mill concluded
that a representative democracy based on wide suffrage is a
necessary element of good government. “Government,” which
was possibly the most succinct statement of the political
theory of the philosophical radicals, helped prepare the
ground for passage of the first Reform Bill by Parliament in
1832.
In 1819, two years after Mill’s History of British India
appeared, he was appointed an official in India House,
despite his drastic criticisms in the History of British
rule in India. He rose gradually through the ranks until he
was appointed head of the examiner’s office in 1830. The
History, his major literary achievement, was the first full
historical treatment of the British conquest of India. Mill
harshly criticized the British administration of India, and
during his 17 years with the India House he helped
completely reform the system of government in the colony.
However, the History’s severe Utilitarian analysis of Indian
civilization also popularized among European readers an
image of the subcontinent as perpetually backward and
undeveloped. Mill never actually visited India.
Mill was also influential in English politics. His
writings and his personal connections with radical
politicians helped determine the change of view from
theories of the rights of man and the absolute equality of
men, as promulgated by the French Revolution, to the
claiming of securities for good government through wide
extension of the franchise. His Elements of Political
Economy (1821), an especially precise and lucid work,
summarizes the views of the philosophical radicals, based
primarily on the work of the economist David Ricardo. In
this work Mill maintained: (1) that the chief problem of
political reformers is to limit the increase of population,
on the assumption that capital does not naturally increase
at the same rate as population; (2) that the value of a
thing depends entirely on the quantity of labour put into
it; and (3) that what is now known as the “unearned
increment” of land is a proper object for taxation. The
enunciation of the second of these propositions is important
in view of the use made of it by Karl Marx. Mill developed
Bentham’s doctrines by his explanation of the association of
ideas. This theory, presented in Mill’s Analysis of the
Phenomena of the Human Mind, 2 vol. (1829), centres on the
interrelatedness of mental concepts.
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Jeremy Bentham
British philosopher and economist
born Feb. 15, 1748, London
died June 6, 1832, London
Main
English philosopher, economist, and theoretical jurist, the
earliest and chief expounder of Utilitarianism.
Early life and works.
At the age of four, Bentham, the son of an attorney, is said
to have read eagerly and to have begun the study of Latin.
Much of his childhood was spent happily at his two
grandmothers’ country houses. At Westminster School he won a
reputation for Greek and Latin verse writing. In 1760 he
went to Queen’s College, Oxford, and took his degree in
1763. In November he entered Lincoln’s Inn to study law and
took his seat as a student in the King’s Bench division of
the High Court, where he listened with rapture to the
judgments of Chief Justice Lord Mansfield. In December 1763
he managed to hear Sir William Blackstone lecture at Oxford
but said that he immediately detected fallacies that
underlay the grandiloquent language of the future judge. He
spent his time performing chemical experiments and
speculating upon the more theoretical aspects of legal
abuses rather than in reading law books. On being called to
the bar, he “found a cause or two at nurse for him, which he
did his best to put to death,” to the bitter disappointment
of his father, who had confidently looked forward to seeing
him become lord chancellor.
Bentham’s first book, A Fragment on Government, appeared
in 1776. The subtitle, “being an examination of what is
delivered, on the subject of government in general, in the
introduction to Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries,”
indicates the nature of the work. Bentham found the “grand
and fundamental” fault of the Commentaries to be
Blackstone’s “antipathy to reform.” Bentham’s book, written
in a clear and concise style different from that of his
later works, may be said to mark the beginning of
philosophic radicalism. It is also a very good essay on
sovereignty. Lord Shelburne (afterward 1st Marquess of
Lansdowne), the statesman, read the book and called upon its
author in 1781. Bentham became a frequent guest at
Shelburne’s home. At this period Bentham’s mind was
much-occupied with writing the work that was later published
in French in 1811 by his admirer Étienne Dumont and entitled
Théorie des peines et des récompenses. This work eventually
appeared in English as The Rationale of Reward (1825) and
The Rationale of Punishment (1830). In 1785 Bentham started,
by way of Italy and Constantinople, on a visit to his
brother, Samuel Bentham, an engineer in the Russian armed
forces; and it was in Russia that he wrote his Defence of
Usury (published 1787). This, his first essay in economics,
presented in the form of a series of letters from Russia,
shows him as a disciple of the economist Adam Smith but one
who argued that Smith did not follow the logic of his own
principles. Bentham held that every man was the best judge
of his own advantage, that it was desirable from the public
point of view that he should seek it without hindrance, and
that there was no reason to limit the application of this
doctrine in the matter of lending money at interest. His
later works on political economy followed the laissez-faire
principle, though with modifications. In the “Manual of
Political Economy” he gives a list of what the state should
and should not do, the second list being much longer than
the first.
Mature works.
Disappointed, after his return to England in 1788, in the
hope of making a political career, he settled down to
discovering the principles of legislation. The great work on
which he had been engaged for many years, An Introduction to
the Principles of Morals and Legislation, was published in
1789. In this book he defined the principle of utility as
“that property in any object whereby it tends to produce
pleasure, good or happiness, or to prevent the happening of
mischief, pain, evil or unhappiness to the party whose
interest is considered.” Mankind, he said, was governed by
two sovereign motives, pain and pleasure; and the principle
of utility recognized this state of affairs. The object of
all legislation must be the “greatest happiness of the
greatest number.” He deduced from the principle of utility
that, since all punishment involves pain and is therefore
evil, it ought only to be used “so far as it promises to
exclude some greater evil.”
The fame of his writings spread widely and rapidly.
Bentham was made a French citizen in 1792, and in later life
his advice was respectfully received in several of the
states of Europe and America. With many of the leading men
of these countries Bentham maintained an active
correspondence. The codification of law was one of Bentham’s
chief preoccupations, and it was his ambition to be allowed
to prepare a code of laws for his own or some foreign
country. He was accused of having underestimated both the
intrinsic difficulties of the task and the need for
diversity of institutions adapted to the tradition and
civilization of different countries. Even so, Bentham must
be reckoned among the pioneers of prison reform. It is true
that the particular scheme that he worked out was bizarre
and spoiled by the elaborate detail that he loved. “Morals
reformed, health preserved, industry invigorated,
instruction diffused” and other similar desiderata would, he
thought, be the result if his scheme for a model prison, the
“Panopticon,” were to be adopted; and for many years he
tried to induce the government to adopt it. His endeavours,
however, came to nothing; and though he received £23,000 in
compensation in 1813, he lost all faith in the reforming
zeal of politicians and officials.
In 1823 he helped to found the Westminster Review to
spread the principles of philosophic radicalism. Bentham had
been brought up a Tory, but the influence of the political
theory of the Enlightenment served to make a democrat of
him. As far back as 1809 he had written a tract, A Catechism
of Parliamentary Reform, advocating annual elections, equal
electoral districts, a wide suffrage, and the secret ballot,
which was, however, not published until 1817. He drafted a
series of resolutions based on this tract that were
introduced in the House of Commons in 1818. A volume of his
Constitutional Code, which he did not live to complete, was
published in 1830.
After Bentham’s death, in accordance with his directions,
his body was dissected in the presence of his friends. The
skeleton was then reconstructed, supplied with a wax head to
replace the original (which had been mummified), dressed in
Bentham’s own clothes and set upright in a glass-fronted
case. Both this effigy and the head are preserved in
University College, London.
Bentham’s life was a happy one. He gathered around him a
group of congenial friends and pupils, such as the
philosopher James Mill, father of John Stuart Mill, with
whom he could discuss the problems upon which he was
engaged. His friends, too, practically rewrote several of
his books from the mass of rough though orderly memoranda
that Bentham himself prepared. Thus the Rationale of
Judicial Evidence, 5 vol. (1827), was put in its finished
state by J.S. Mill and the Book of Fallacies (1824) by
Peregrine Bingham. The services of Étienne Dumont in
recasting as well as translating the works of Bentham were
still more important.
Assessment.
Bentham was less a philosopher than a critic of law and of
judicial and political institutions. Unfortunately, he was
not aware of his limitations. He tried to define what he
thought were the basic concepts of ethics, but the majority
of his definitions are oversimple or ambiguous or both, and
his “felicific calculus,” a method for calculating amounts
of happiness, as even his warmest admirers have admitted,
cannot be used. As a moralist and psychologist, Bentham has
similarly appeared to be inadequate; his arguments, though
sometimes elaborate, rest too often on insufficient and
ambiguous premises. His analyses of the concepts that men
use to describe and explain human behaviour are too simple.
He seems to have believed both that man is completely
selfish and that everyone ought to promote the greatest
happiness, no matter whose. Not even the formula of which he
made so much, “the greatest happiness of the greatest
number,” possesses a definite meaning.
Given all this, it should be noted that the publication
since World War II of Bentham’s previously unknown
manuscripts has done much to enhance his reputation as a
philosopher of law. His Victorian editor, Sir John Bowring,
cut out from Bentham’s work much that was both original and
well-argued. The more up-to-date scholarship of such Bentham
specialists as Herbert L.A. Hart, J.H. Burns, Frederick
Rosen, and Lea Campos-Boralevi has revealed a more rigorous
and systematic thinker than the legendary muddled
Utilitarian that Bentham appeared to be to earlier
generations.
As a critic of institutions Bentham was admirable. In his
Rationale of Judicial Evidence he describes the methods that
a court should use to get at the truth as quickly as
possible; and in the Essay on Political Tactics he describes
what he considers the most effective forms of debate for a
legislative assembly—an account largely based on the
procedure of the House of Commons. In these works and in
others Bentham is concerned to discover what makes for
efficiency. Though he defines efficiency in terms of
happiness, his reader need not do so; or, if he does, he
need not think of happiness as Bentham did. Bentham’s
assumptions about what makes for happiness are often quite
ordinary and sensible; the reader can accept them and still
insist that happiness is not to be defined in terms of
pleasure and is not to be measured. Whatever is excellent,
ingenious, and original in Bentham—and there is a great deal
of it—need not depend on the “felicific calculus” and “the
greatest happiness of the greatest number.”
John P. Plamenatz
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Karl Marx
German philosopher
in full Karl Heinrich Marx
born May 5, 1818, Trier, Rhine province, Prussia
[Germany]
died March 14, 1883, London
Main
revolutionary, sociologist, historian, and economist. He
published (with Friedrich Engels) Manifest der
Kommunistischen Partei (1848), commonly known as The
Communist Manifesto, the most celebrated pamphlet in the
history of the socialist movement. He also was the author of
the movement’s most important book, Das Kapital. These
writings and others by Marx and Engels form the basis of the
body of thought and belief known as Marxism.
See the articles socialism and Communism for full
treatment of those ideologies.
Early years
Karl Heinrich Marx was the oldest surviving boy of nine
children. His father, Heinrich, a successful lawyer, was a
man of the Enlightenment, devoted to Kant and Voltaire, who
took part in agitations for a constitution in Prussia. His
mother, born Henrietta Pressburg, was from Holland. Both
parents were Jewish and were descended from a long line of
rabbis, but, a year or so before Karl was born, his
father—probably because his professional career required
it—was baptized in the Evangelical Established Church. Karl
was baptized when he was six years old. Although as a youth
Karl was influenced less by religion than by the critical,
sometimes radical social policies of the Enlightenment, his
Jewish background exposed him to prejudice and
discrimination that may have led him to question the role of
religion in society and contributed to his desire for social
change.
Marx was educated from 1830 to 1835 at the high school in
Trier. Suspected of harbouring liberal teachers and pupils,
the school was under police surveillance. Marx’s writings
during this period exhibited a spirit of Christian devotion
and a longing for self-sacrifice on behalf of humanity. In
October 1835 he matriculated at the University of Bonn. The
courses he attended were exclusively in the humanities, in
such subjects as Greek and Roman mythology and the history
of art. He participated in customary student activities,
fought a duel, and spent a day in jail for being drunk and
disorderly. He presided at the Tavern Club, which was at
odds with the more aristocratic student associations, and
joined a poets’ club that included some political activists.
A politically rebellious student culture was, indeed, part
of life at Bonn. Many students had been arrested; some were
still being expelled in Marx’s time, particularly as a
result of an effort by students to disrupt a session of the
Federal Diet at Frankfurt. Marx, however, left Bonn after a
year and in October 1836 enrolled at the University of
Berlin to study law and philosophy.
Marx’s crucial experience at Berlin was his introduction
to Hegel’s philosophy, regnant there, and his adherence to
the Young Hegelians. At first he felt a repugnance toward
Hegel’s doctrines; when Marx fell sick it was partially, as
he wrote his father, “from intense vexation at having to
make an idol of a view I detested.” The Hegelian pressure in
the revolutionary student culture was powerful, however, and
Marx joined a society called the Doctor Club, whose members
were intensely involved in the new literary and
philosophical movement. Their chief figure was Bruno Bauer,
a young lecturer in theology, who was developing the idea
that the Christian Gospels were a record not of history but
of human fantasies arising from emotional needs and that
Jesus had not been a historical person. Marx enrolled in a
course of lectures given by Bauer on the prophet Isaiah.
Bauer taught that a new social catastrophe “more tremendous”
than that of the advent of Christianity was in the making.
The Young Hegelians began moving rapidly toward atheism and
also talked vaguely of political action.
The Prussian government, fearful of the subversion latent
in the Young Hegelians, soon undertook to drive them from
the universities. Bauer was dismissed from his post in 1839.
Marx’s “most intimate friend” of this period, Adolph
Rutenberg, an older journalist who had served a prison
sentence for his political radicalism, pressed for a deeper
social involvement. By 1841 the Young Hegelians had become
left republicans. Marx’s studies, meanwhile, were lagging.
Urged by his friends, he submitted a doctoral dissertation
to the university at Jena, which was known to be lax in its
academic requirements, and received his degree in April
1841. His thesis analyzed in a Hegelian fashion the
difference between the natural philosophies of Democritus
and Epicurus. More distinctively, it sounded a note of
Promethean defiance:
Philosophy makes no secret of it. Prometheus’ admission:
“In sooth all gods I hate,” is its own admission, its own
motto against all gods, . . . Prometheus is the noblest
saint and martyr in the calendar of philosophy.
In 1841 Marx, together with other Young Hegelians, was
much influenced by the publication of Das Wesen des
Christentums (1841; The Essence of Christianity) by Ludwig
Feuerbach. Its author, to Marx’s mind, successfully
criticized Hegel, an idealist who believed that matter or
existence was inferior to and dependent upon mind or spirit,
from the opposite, or materialist, standpoint, showing how
the “Absolute Spirit” was a projection of “the real man
standing on the foundation of nature.” Henceforth Marx’s
philosophical efforts were toward a combination of Hegel’s
dialectic—the idea that all things are in a continual
process of change resulting from the conflicts between their
contradictory aspects—with Feuerbach’s materialism, which
placed material conditions above ideas.
In January 1842 Marx began contributing to a newspaper
newly founded in Cologne, the Rheinische Zeitung. It was the
liberal democratic organ of a group of young merchants,
bankers, and industrialists; Cologne was the centre of the
most industrially advanced section of Prussia. To this stage
of Marx’s life belongs an essay on the freedom of the press.
Since he then took for granted the existence of absolute
moral standards and universal principles of ethics, he
condemned censorship as a moral evil that entailed spying
into people’s minds and hearts and assigned to weak and
malevolent mortals powers that presupposed an omniscient
mind. He believed that censorship could have only evil
consequences.
On Oct. 15, 1842, Marx became editor of the Rheinische
Zeitung. As such, he was obliged to write editorials on a
variety of social and economic issues, ranging from the
housing of the Berlin poor and the theft by peasants of wood
from the forests to the new phenomenon of communism. He
found Hegelian idealism of little use in these matters. At
the same time he was becoming estranged from his Hegelian
friends for whom shocking the bourgeois was a sufficient
mode of social activity. Marx, friendly at this time to the
“liberal-minded practical men” who were “struggling
step-by-step for freedom within constitutional limits,”
succeeded in trebling his newspaper’s circulation and making
it a leading journal in Prussia. Nevertheless, Prussian
authorities suspended it for being too outspoken, and Marx
agreed to coedit with the liberal Hegelian Arnold Ruge a new
review, the Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher (“German-French
Yearbooks”), which was to be published in Paris.
First, however, in June 1843 Marx, after an engagement of
seven years, married Jenny von Westphalen. Jenny was an
attractive, intelligent, and much-admired woman, four years
older than Karl; she came of a family of military and
administrative distinction. Her half-brother later became a
highly reactionary Prussian minister of the interior. Her
father, a follower of the French socialist Saint-Simon, was
fond of Karl, though others in her family opposed the
marriage. Marx’s father also feared that Jenny was destined
to become a sacrifice to the demon that possessed his son.
Four months after their marriage, the young couple moved
to Paris, which was then the centre of socialist thought and
of the more extreme sects that went under the name of
communism. There, Marx first became a revolutionary and a
communist and began to associate with communist societies of
French and German workingmen. Their ideas were, in his view,
“utterly crude and unintelligent,” but their character moved
him: “The brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with them,
but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us
from their work-hardened bodies,” he wrote in his so-called
“Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844”
(written in 1844; Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of
1844 [1959]). (These manuscripts were not published for some
100 years, but they are influential because they show the
humanist background to Marx’s later historical and economic
theories.)
The “German-French Yearbooks” proved short-lived, but
through their publication Marx befriended Friedrich Engels,
a contributor who was to become his lifelong collaborator,
and in their pages appeared Marx’s article “Zur Kritik der
Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie” (“Toward the Critique of the
Hegelian Philosophy of Right”) with its oft-quoted assertion
that religion is the “opium of the people.” It was there,
too, that he first raised the call for an “uprising of the
proletariat” to realize the conceptions of philosophy. Once
more, however, the Prussian government intervened against
Marx. He was expelled from France and left for
Brussels—followed by Engels—in February 1845. That year in
Belgium he renounced his Prussian nationality.
Brussels period
The next two years in Brussels saw the deepening of Marx’s
collaboration with Engels. Engels had seen at firsthand in
Manchester, Eng., where a branch factory of his father’s
textile firm was located, all the depressing aspects of the
Industrial Revolution. He had also been a Young Hegelian and
had been converted to communism by Moses Hess, who was
called the “communist rabbi.” In England he associated with
the followers of Robert Owen. Now he and Marx, finding that
they shared the same views, combined their intellectual
resources and published Die heilige Familie (1845; The Holy
Family), a prolix criticism of the Hegelian idealism of the
theologian Bruno Bauer. Their next work, Die deutsche
Ideologie (written 1845–46, published 1932; The German
Ideology), contained the fullest exposition of their
important materialistic conception of history, which set out
to show how, historically, societies had been structured to
promote the interests of the economically dominant class.
But it found no publisher and remained unknown during its
authors’ lifetimes.
During his Brussels years, Marx developed his views and,
through confrontations with the chief leaders of the
working-class movement, established his intellectual
standing. In 1846 he publicly excoriated the German leader
Wilhelm Weitling for his moralistic appeals. Marx insisted
that the stage of bourgeois society could not be skipped
over; the proletariat could not just leap into communism;
the workers’ movement required a scientific basis, not
moralistic phrases. He also polemicized against the French
socialist thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in Misère de la
philosophie (1847; The Poverty of Philosophy), a mordant
attack on Proudhon’s book subtitled Philosophie de la misère
(1846; The Philosophy of Poverty). Proudhon wanted to unite
the best features of such contraries as competition and
monopoly; he hoped to save the good features in economic
institutions while eliminating the bad. Marx, however,
declared that no equilibrium was possible between the
antagonisms in any given economic system. Social structures
were transient historic forms determined by the productive
forces: “The handmill gives you society with the feudal
lord; the steammill, society with the industrial
capitalist.” Proudhon’s mode of reasoning, Marx wrote, was
typical of the petty bourgeois, who failed to see the
underlying laws of history.
An unusual sequence of events led Marx and Engels to
write their pamphlet The Communist Manifesto. In June 1847 a
secret society, the League of the Just, composed mainly of
emigrant German handicraftsmen, met in London and decided to
formulate a political program. They sent a representative to
Marx to ask him to join the league; Marx overcame his doubts
and, with Engels, joined the organization, which thereupon
changed its name to the Communist League and enacted a
democratic constitution. Entrusted with the task of
composing their program, Marx and Engels worked from the
middle of December 1847 to the end of January 1848. The
London Communists were already impatiently threatening Marx
with disciplinary action when he sent them the manuscript;
they promptly adopted it as their manifesto. It enunciated
the proposition that all history had hitherto been a history
of class struggles, summarized in pithy form the materialist
conception of history worked out in The German Ideology, and
asserted that the forthcoming victory of the proletariat
would put an end to class society forever. It mercilessly
criticized all forms of socialism founded on philosophical
“cobwebs” such as “alienation.” It rejected the avenue of
“social Utopias,” small experiments in community, as
deadening the class struggle and therefore as being
“reactionary sects.” It set forth 10 immediate measures as
first steps toward communism, ranging from a progressive
income tax and the abolition of inheritances to free
education for all children. It closed with the words, “The
proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They
have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!”
Revolution suddenly erupted in Europe in the first months
of 1848, in France, Italy, and Austria. Marx had been
invited to Paris by a member of the provisional government
just in time to avoid expulsion by the Belgian government.
As the revolution gained in Austria and Germany, Marx
returned to the Rhineland. In Cologne he advocated a policy
of coalition between the working class and the democratic
bourgeoisie, opposing for this reason the nomination of
independent workers’ candidates for the Frankfurt Assembly
and arguing strenuously against the program for proletarian
revolution advocated by the leaders of the Workers’ Union.
He concurred in Engels’ judgment that The Communist
Manifesto should be shelved and the Communist League
disbanded. Marx pressed his policy through the pages of the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung, newly founded in June 1849, urging
a constitutional democracy and war with Russia. When the
more revolutionary leader of the Workers’ Union, Andreas
Gottschalk, was arrested, Marx supplanted him and organized
the first Rhineland Democratic Congress in August 1848. When
the king of Prussia dissolved the Prussian Assembly in
Berlin, Marx called for arms and men to help the resistance.
Bourgeois liberals withdrew their support from Marx’s
newspaper, and he himself was indicted on several charges,
including advocacy of the nonpayment of taxes. In his trial
he defended himself with the argument that the crown was
engaged in making an unlawful counterrevolution. The jury
acquitted him unanimously and with thanks. Nevertheless, as
the last hopeless fighting flared in Dresden and Baden, Marx
was ordered banished as an alien on May 16, 1849. The final
issue of his newspaper, printed in red, caused a great
sensation.
Early years in London
Expelled once more from Paris, Marx went to London in August
1849. It was to be his home for the rest of his life.
Chagrined by the failure of his own tactics of collaboration
with the liberal bourgeoisie, he rejoined the Communist
League in London and for about a year advocated a bolder
revolutionary policy. An “Address of the Central Committee
to the Communist League,” written with Engels in March 1850,
urged that in future revolutionary situations they struggle
to make the revolution “permanent” by avoiding subservience
to the bourgeois party and by setting up “their own
revolutionary workers’ governments” alongside any new
bourgeois one. Marx hoped that the economic crisis would
shortly lead to a revival of the revolutionary movement;
when this hope faded, he came into conflict once more with
those whom he called “the alchemists of the revolution,”
such as August von Willich, a communist who proposed to
hasten the advent of revolution by undertaking direct
revolutionary ventures. Such persons, Marx wrote in
September 1850, substitute “idealism for materialism” and
regard
pure will as the motive power of revolution instead of
actual conditions. While we say to the workers: “You have
got to go through fifteen, twenty, fifty years of civil wars
and national wars not merely in order to change your
conditions but in order to change yourselves and become
qualified for political power,” you on the contrary tell
them, “We must achieve power immediately.”
The militant faction in turn ridiculed Marx for being a
revolutionary who limited his activity to lectures on
political economy to the Communist Workers’ Educational
Union. The upshot was that Marx gradually stopped attending
meetings of the London Communists. In 1852 he devoted
himself intensely to working for the defense of 11
communists arrested and tried in Cologne on charges of
revolutionary conspiracy and wrote a pamphlet on their
behalf. The same year he also published, in a
German-American periodical, his essay “Der Achtzehnte
Brumaire des Louis Napoleon” (The Eighteenth Brumaire of
Louis Bonaparte), with its acute analysis of the formation
of a bureaucratic absolutist state with the support of the
peasant class. In other respects the next 12 years were, in
Marx’s words, years of “isolation” both for him and for
Engels in his Manchester factory.
From 1850 to 1864 Marx lived in material misery and
spiritual pain. His funds were gone, and except on one
occasion he could not bring himself to seek paid employment.
In March 1850 he and his wife and four small children were
evicted and their belongings seized. Several of his children
died—including a son Guido, “a sacrifice to bourgeois
misery,” and a daughter Franziska, for whom his wife rushed
about frantically trying to borrow money for a coffin. For
six years the family lived in two small rooms in Soho, often
subsisting on bread and potatoes. The children learned to
lie to the creditors: “Mr. Marx ain’t upstairs.” Once he had
to escape them by fleeing to Manchester. His wife suffered
breakdowns.
During all these years Engels loyally contributed to
Marx’s financial support. The sums were not large at first,
for Engels was only a clerk in the firm of Ermen and Engels
at Manchester. Later, however, in 1864, when he became a
partner, his subventions were generous. Marx was proud of
Engels’ friendship and would tolerate no criticism of him.
Bequests from the relatives of Marx’s wife and from Marx’s
friend Wilhelm Wolff also helped to alleviate their economic
distress.
Marx had one relatively steady source of earned income in
the United States. On the invitation of Charles A. Dana,
managing editor of The New York Tribune, he became in 1851
its European correspondent. The newspaper, edited by Horace
Greeley, had sympathies for Fourierism, a Utopian socialist
system developed by the French theorist Charles Fourier.
From 1851 to 1862 Marx contributed close to 500 articles and
editorials (Engels providing about a fourth of them). He
ranged over the whole political universe, analyzing social
movements and agitations from India and China to Britain and
Spain.
In 1859 Marx published his first book on economic theory,
Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (A Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy). In its preface he again
summarized his materialistic conception of history, his
theory that the course of history is dependent on economic
developments. At this time, however, Marx regarded his
studies in economic and social history at the British Museum
as his main task. He was busy producing the drafts of his
magnum opus, which was to be published later as Das Kapital.
Some of these drafts, including the Outlines and the
Theories of Surplus Value, are important in their own right
and were published after Marx’s death.
Role in the First International
Marx’s political isolation ended in 1864 with the founding
of the International Working Men’s Association. Although he
was neither its founder nor its head, he soon became its
leading spirit. Its first public meeting, called by English
trade union leaders and French workers’ representatives,
took place at St. Martin’s Hall in London on Sept. 28, 1864.
Marx, who had been invited through a French intermediary to
attend as a representative of the German workers, sat
silently on the platform. A committee was set up to produce
a program and a constitution for the new organization. After
various drafts had been submitted that were felt to be
unsatisfactory, Marx, serving on a subcommittee, drew upon
his immense journalistic experience. His “Address and the
Provisional Rules of the International Working Men’s
Association,” unlike his other writings, stressed the
positive achievements of the cooperative movement and of
parliamentary legislation; the gradual conquest of political
power would enable the British proletariat to extend these
achievements on a national scale.
As a member of the organization’s General Council, and
corresponding secretary for Germany, Marx was henceforth
assiduous in attendance at its meetings, which were
sometimes held several times a week. For several years he
showed a rare diplomatic tact in composing differences among
various parties, factions, and tendencies. The International
grew in prestige and membership, its numbers reaching
perhaps 800,000 in 1869. It was successful in several
interventions on behalf of European trade unions engaged in
struggles with employers.
In 1870, however, Marx was still unknown as a European
political personality; it was the Paris Commune that made
him into an international figure, “the best calumniated and
most menaced man of London,” as he wrote. When the
Franco-German War broke out in 1870, Marx and Engels
disagreed with followers in Germany who refused to vote in
the Reichstag in favour of the war. The General Council
declared that “on the German side the war was a war of
defence.” After the defeat of the French armies, however,
they felt that the German terms amounted to aggrandizement
at the expense of the French people. When an insurrection
broke out in Paris and the Paris Commune was proclaimed,
Marx gave it his unswerving support. On May 30, 1871, after
the Commune had been crushed, he hailed it in a famous
address entitled Civil War in France:
History has no comparable example of such greatness. . .
. Its martyrs are enshrined forever in the great heart of
the working class.
In Engels’ judgment, the Paris Commune was history’s
first example of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Marx’s name, as the leader of The First International and
author of the notorious Civil War, became synonymous
throughout Europe with the revolutionary spirit symbolized
by the Paris Commune.
The advent of the Commune, however, exacerbated the
antagonisms within the International Working Men’s
Association and thus brought about its downfall. English
trade unionists such as George Odger, former president of
the General Council, opposed Marx’s support of the Paris
Commune. The Reform Bill of 1867, which had enfranchised the
British working class, had opened vast opportunities for
political action by the trade unions. English labour leaders
found they could make many practical advances by cooperating
with the Liberal Party and, regarding Marx’s rhetoric as an
encumbrance, resented his charge that they had “sold
themselves” to the Liberals.
A left opposition also developed under the leadership of
the famed Russian revolutionary Mikhail Alexandrovich
Bakunin. A veteran of tsarist prisons and Siberian exile,
Bakunin could move men by his oratory, which one listener
compared to “a raging storm with lightning, flashes and
thunderclaps, and a roaring as of lions.” Bakunin admired
Marx’s intellect but could hardly forget that Marx had
published a report in 1848 charging him with being a Russian
agent. He felt that Marx was a German authoritarian and an
arrogant Jew who wanted to transform the General Council
into a personal dictatorship over the workers. He strongly
opposed several of Marx’s theories, especially Marx’s
support of the centralized structure of the International,
Marx’s view that the proletariat class should act as a
political party against prevailing parties but within the
existing parliamentary system, and Marx’s belief that the
proletariat, after it had overthrown the bourgeois state,
should establish its own regime. To Bakunin, the mission of
the revolutionary was destruction; he looked to the Russian
peasantry, with its propensities for violence and its
uncurbed revolutionary instincts, rather than to the effete,
civilized workers of the industrial countries. The students,
he hoped, would be the officers of the revolution. He
acquired followers, mostly young men, in Italy, Switzerland,
and France, and he organized a secret society, the
International Alliance of Social Democracy, which in 1869
challenged the hegemony of the General Council at the
congress in Basel, Switz. Marx, however, had already
succeeded in preventing its admission as an organized body
into the International.
To the Bakuninists, the Paris Commune was a model of
revolutionary direct action and a refutation of what they
considered to be Marx’s “authoritarian communism.” Bakunin
began organizing sections of the International for an attack
on the alleged dictatorship of Marx and the General Council.
Marx in reply publicized Bakunin’s embroilment with an
unscrupulous Russian student leader, Sergey Gennadiyevich
Nechayev, who had practiced blackmail and murder.
Without a supporting right wing and with the anarchist
left against him, Marx feared losing control of the
International to Bakunin. He also wanted to return to his
studies and to finish Das Kapital. At the congress of the
International at The Hague in 1872, the only one he ever
attended, Marx managed to defeat the Bakuninists. Then, to
the consternation of the delegates, Engels moved that the
seat of the General Council be transferred from London to
New York City. The Bakuninists were expelled, but the
International languished and was finally disbanded in
Philadelphia in 1876.
Last years
During the next and last decade of his life, Marx’s creative
energies declined. He was beset by what he called “chronic
mental depression,” and his life turned inward toward his
family. He was unable to complete any substantial work,
though he still read widely and undertook to learn Russian.
He became crotchety in his political opinions. When his own
followers and those of the German revolutionary Ferdinand
Lassalle, a rival who believed that socialist goals should
be achieved through cooperation with the state, coalesced in
1875 to found the German Social Democratic Party, Marx wrote
a caustic criticism of their program (the so-called Gotha
Program), claiming that it made too many compromises with
the status quo. The German leaders put his objections aside
and tried to mollify him personally. Increasingly, he looked
to a European war for the overthrow of Russian tsarism, the
mainstay of reaction, hoping that this would revive the
political energies of the working classes. He was moved by
what he considered to be the selfless courage of the Russian
terrorists who assassinated the tsar, Alexander II, in 1881;
he felt this to be “a historically inevitable means of
action.”
Despite Marx’s withdrawal from active politics, he still
retained what Engels called his “peculiar influence” on the
leaders of working-class and socialist movements. In 1879,
when the French Socialist Workers’ Federation was founded,
its leader Jules Guesde went to London to consult with Marx,
who dictated the preamble of its program and shaped much of
its content. In 1881 Henry Mayers Hyndman in his England for
All drew heavily on his conversations with Marx but angered
him by being afraid to acknowledge him by name.
During his last years Marx spent much time at health
resorts and even traveled to Algiers. He was broken by the
death of his wife on Dec. 2, 1881, and of his eldest
daughter, Jenny Longuet, on Jan. 11, 1883. He died in
London, evidently of a lung abscess, in the following year.
Character and significance
At Marx’s funeral in Highgate Cemetery, Engels declared that
Marx had made two great discoveries, the law of development
of human history and the law of motion of bourgeois society.
But “Marx was before all else a revolutionist.” He was “the
best-hated and most-calumniated man of his time,” yet he
also died “beloved, revered and mourned by millions of
revolutionary fellow-workers.”
The contradictory emotions Marx engendered are reflected
in the sometimes conflicting aspects of his character. Marx
was a combination of the Promethean rebel and the rigorous
intellectual. He gave most persons an impression of
intellectual arrogance. A Russian writer, Pavel Annenkov,
who observed Marx in debate in 1846 recalled that “he spoke
only in the imperative, brooking no contradiction,” and
seemed to be “the personification of a democratic dictator
such as might appear before one in moments of fantasy.” But
Marx obviously felt uneasy before mass audiences and avoided
the atmosphere of factional controversies at congresses. He
went to no demonstrations, his wife remarked, and rarely
spoke at public meetings. He kept away from the congresses
of the International where the rival socialist groups
debated important resolutions. He was a “small groups” man,
most at home in the atmosphere of the General Council or on
the staff of a newspaper, where his character could impress
itself forcefully on a small body of coworkers. At the same
time he avoided meeting distinguished scholars with whom he
might have discussed questions of economics and sociology on
a footing of intellectual equality. Despite his broad
intellectual sweep, he was prey to obsessive ideas such as
that the British foreign minister, Lord Palmerston, was an
agent of the Russian government. He was determined not to
let bourgeois society make “a money-making machine” out of
him, yet he submitted to living on the largess of Engels and
the bequests of relatives. He remained the eternal student
in his personal habits and way of life, even to the point of
joining two friends in a students’ prank during which they
systematically broke four or five streetlamps in a London
street and then fled from the police. He was a great reader
of novels, especially those of Sir Walter Scott and Balzac;
and the family made a cult of Shakespeare. He was an
affectionate father, saying that he admired Jesus for his
love of children, but sacrificed the lives and health of his
own. Of his seven children, three daughters grew to
maturity. His favourite daughter, Eleanor, worried him with
her nervous, brooding, emotional character and her desire to
be an actress. Another shadow was cast on Marx’s domestic
life by the birth to their loyal servant, Helene Demuth, of
an illegitimate son, Frederick; Engels as he was dying
disclosed to Eleanor that Marx had been the father. Above
all, Marx was a fighter, willing to sacrifice anything in
the battle for his conception of a better society. He
regarded struggle as the law of life and existence.
The influence of Marx’s ideas has been enormous. Marx’s
masterpiece, Das Kapital, the “Bible of the working class,”
as it was officially described in a resolution of the
International Working Men’s Association, was published in
1867 in Berlin and received a second edition in 1873. Only
the first volume was completed and published in Marx’s
lifetime. The second and third volumes, unfinished by Marx,
were edited by Engels and published in 1885 and 1894. The
economic categories he employed were those of the classical
British economics of David Ricardo; but Marx used them in
accordance with his dialectical method to argue that
bourgeois society, like every social organism, must follow
its inevitable path of development. Through the working of
such immanent tendencies as the declining rate of profit,
capitalism would die and be replaced by another, higher,
society. The most memorable pages in Das Kapital are the
descriptive passages, culled from Parliamentary Blue Books,
on the misery of the English working class. Marx believed
that this misery would increase, while at the same time the
monopoly of capital would become a fetter upon production
until finally “the knell of capitalist private property
sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”
Marx never claimed to have discovered the existence of
classes and class struggles in modern society. “Bourgeois”
historians, he acknowledged, had described them long before
he had. He did claim, however, to have proved that each
phase in the development of production was associated with a
corresponding class structure and that the struggle of
classes led necessarily to the dictatorship of the
proletariat, ushering in the advent of a classless society.
Marx took up the very different versions of socialism
current in the early 19th century and welded them together
into a doctrine that continued to be the dominant version of
socialism for half a century after his death. His emphasis
on the influence of economic structure on historical
development has proved to be of lasting significance.
Although Marx stressed economic issues in his writings,
his major impact has been in the fields of sociology and
history. Marx’s most important contribution to sociological
theory was his general mode of analysis, the “dialectical”
model, which regards every social system as having within it
immanent forces that give rise to “contradictions”
(disequilibria) that can be resolved only by a new social
system. Neo-Marxists, who no longer accept the economic
reasoning in Das Kapital, are still guided by this model in
their approach to capitalist society. In this sense, Marx’s
mode of analysis, like those of Thomas Malthus, Herbert
Spencer, or Vilfredo Pareto, has become one of the
theoretical structures that are the heritage of the social
scientist.
Lewis S. Feuer
David T. McLellan
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Friedrich Engels
German philosopher
born November 28, 1820, Barmen, Rhine Province, Prussia
died August 5, 1895, London
Main
German Socialist philosopher, the closest collaborator of
Karl Marx in the foundation of modern Communism. They
co-authored the Communist Manifesto (1848), and Engels
edited the second and third volumes of Das Kapital after
Marx’s death.
Early life
Engels grew up in the environment of a family marked by
moderately liberal political views, a steadfast loyalty to
Prussia, and a pronounced Protestant faith. His father was
the owner of a textile factory in Barmen and also a partner
in the Ermen & Engels cotton plant in Manchester, Eng. Even
after Engels openly pursued the revolutionary goals that
threatened the traditional values of the family, he usually
could count on financial aid from home. The influence of his
mother, to whom he was devoted, may have been a factor in
preserving the tie between father and son.
Aside from such disciplinary actions as the father
considered necessary in rearing a gifted but somewhat
rebellious son, the only instance in which his father forced
his will on Engels was in deciding upon a career for him.
Engels did attend a Gymnasium (secondary school), but he
dropped out a year before graduation, probably because his
father felt that his plans for the future were too
undefined. Engels showed some skill in writing poetry, but
his father insisted that he go to work in the expanding
business. Engels, accordingly, spent the next three years
(1838–41) in Bremen acquiring practical business experience
in the offices of an export firm.
In Bremen, Engels began to show the capacity for living
the double life that characterized his middle years. During
regular hours, he operated effectively as a business
apprentice. An outgoing person, he joined a choral society,
frequented the famed Ratskeller, became an expert swimmer,
and practiced fencing and riding (he outrode most Englishmen
in the fox hunts). Engels also cultivated his capacity for
learning languages; he boasted to his sister that he knew
24. In private, however, he developed an interest in liberal
and revolutionary works, notably the banned writings of
“Young German” authors such as Ludwig Börne, Karl Gutzkow,
and Heinrich Heine. But he soon rejected them as
undisciplined and inconclusive in favour of the more
systematic and all embracing philosophy of Hegel as
expounded by the “Young Hegelians,” a group of leftist
intellectuals, including the theologian and historian Bruno
Bauer and the anarchist Max Stirner. They accepted the
Hegelian dialectic—basically that rational progress and
historical change result from the conflict of opposing
views, ending in a new synthesis. The Young Hegelians were
bent on accelerating the process by criticizing all that
they considered irrational, outmoded, and repressive. As
their first assault was directed against the foundations of
Christianity, they helped convert an agnostic Engels into a
militant atheist, a relatively easy task since by this time
Engels’ revolutionary convictions made him ready to strike
out in almost any direction.
In Bremen, Engels also demonstrated his talent for
journalism by publishing articles under the pseudonym of
Friedrich Oswald, perhaps to spare the feelings of his
family. He possessed pungent critical abilities and a clear
style, qualities that were utilized later by Marx in
articulating their revolutionary goals.
After returning to Barmen in 1841, the question of a
future career was shelved temporarily when Engels enlisted
as a one-year volunteer in an artillery regiment in Berlin.
No antimilitarist disposition prevented him from serving
commendably as a recruit; in fact, military matters later
became one of his specialties. In the future, friends would
often address him as “the general.” Military service allowed
Engels time for more compelling interests in Berlin. Though
he lacked the formal requirements, he attended lectures at
the university. His Friedrich Oswald articles gained him
entrée into the Young Hegelian circle of The Free, formerly
the Doctors Club frequented by Karl Marx. There he gained
recognition as a formidable protagonist in the philosophical
battles, mainly directed against religion.
Conversion to communism
After his discharge in 1842, Engels met Moses Hess, the man
who converted him to communism. Hess, the son of wealthy
Jewish parents and a promoter of radical causes and
publications, demonstrated to Engels that the logical
consequence of the Hegelian philosophy and dialectic was
communism. Hess also stressed the role that England, with
its advanced industry, burgeoning proletariat, and portents
of class conflict, was destined to play in future upheavals.
Engels eagerly seized the opportunity to go to England,
ostensibly to continue his business training in the family
firm in Manchester.
In England (1842–44), Engels again functioned
successfully in business. After hours, however, he pursued
his real interests: writing articles on communism for
continental and English journals, reading books and
parliamentary reports on economic and political conditions
in England, mingling with workers, meeting radical leaders,
and gathering materials for a projected history of England
that would stress the rise of industry and the wretched
position of the workers.
In Manchester, Engels established an enduring attachment
to Mary Burns, an uneducated Irish working girl, and, though
he rejected the institution of marriage, they lived together
as husband and wife. In fact, the one serious strain in the
Marx–Engels friendship occurred when Mary died in 1863 and
Engels thought that Marx responded a little too casually to
the news of her death. In the future, however, Marx made a
point of being more considerate, and, when Engels later
lived with Mary’s sister Lizzy, on similar terms, Marx
always carefully closed his letters with greetings to “Mrs.
Lizzy” or “Mrs. Burns.” Engels finally married Lizzy, but
only as a deathbed concession to her.
In 1844 Engels contributed two articles to the Deutsch-Französische
Jahrbücher (“German-French Yearbooks”), which were edited by
Marx in Paris. In them Engels put forth an early version of
the principles of scientific socialism. He revealed what he
regarded as the contradictions in liberal economic doctrine
and set out to prove that the existing system based on
private property was leading to a world made up of
“millionaires and paupers.” The revolution that would follow
would lead to the elimination of private property and to a
“reconciliation of humanity with nature and itself.”
Partnership with Marx
On his way to Barmen, Engels went to Paris for a 10-day
visit with Marx, whom he had earlier met in Cologne. This
visit resulted in a permanent partnership to promote the
socialist movement. Back in Barmen, Engels published Die
Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England (1845; The Condition
of the Working Class in England in 1844, 1887), a classic in
a field that later became Marx’s specialty. Their first
major joint work was Die deutsche Ideologie (1845; The
German Ideology), which, however, was not published until
more than 80 years later. It was a highly polemical critique
that denounced and ridiculed certain of their earlier Young
Hegelian associates and then proceeded to attack various
German socialists who rejected the need for revolution.
Marx’s and Engels’ own constructive ideas were inserted here
and there, always in a fragmentary manner and only as
corrective responses to the views they were condemning.
Upon rejoining Marx in Brussels in 1845, Engels endorsed
his newly formulated economic, or materialistic,
interpretation of history, which assumed an eventual
communist triumph. That summer he escorted Marx on a tour of
England. Thereafter he spent much time in Paris, where his
social engagements did not interfere significantly with his
major purpose, that of attempting to convert various émigré
German worker groups—among them a socialist secret society,
the League of the Just—as well as leading French socialists
to his and Marx’s views. When the league held its first
congress in London in June 1847, Engels helped bring about
its transformation into the Communist League.
Marx and he together persuaded a second Communist
Congress in London to adopt their views. The two men were
authorized to draft a statement of communist principles and
policies, which appeared in 1848 as the Manifest der
kommunistischen Partei (commonly called the Communist
Manifesto). It included much of the preliminary definition
of views prepared earlier by Engels in the Grundsätze des
Kommunismus (1847; Principles of Communism) but was
primarily the work of Marx.
The Revolution of 1848, which was precipitated by the
attempt of the German states to throw off an authoritarian,
almost feudal, political system and replace it with a
constitutional, representative form of government, was a
momentous event in the lives of Marx and Engels. It was
their only opportunity to participate directly in a
revolution and to demonstrate their flexibility as
revolutionary tacticians with the aim of turning the
revolution into a communist victory. Their major tool was
the newspaper Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which Marx edited in
Cologne with the able assistance of Engels. Such a party
organ, then appearing in a democratic guise, was of prime
importance for their purposes; with it they could furnish
daily guidelines and incitement in the face of shifting
events, together with a sustained criticism of governments,
parties, policies, and politicians.
After the failure of the revolution, Engels and Marx were
reunited in London, where they reorganized the Communist
League and drafted tactical directives for the communists in
the belief that another revolution would soon take place.
But how to replace his depleted income soon became Engels’
main problem. To support both himself and Marx, he accepted
a subordinate position in the offices of Ermen & Engels in
Manchester, eventually becoming a full-fledged partner in
the concern. He again functioned successfully as a
businessman, never allowing his communist principles and
criticism of capitalist ways to interfere with the
profitable operations of his firm. Hence he was able to send
money to Marx constantly, often in the form of £5 notes, but
later in far higher figures. When Engels sold his
partnership in the business in 1869, he received enough for
it to live comfortably until his death in 1895 and to
provide Marx with an annual grant of £350, with the promise
of more to cover all contingencies.
Engels, who was forced to live in Manchester,
corresponded constantly with Marx in London and frequently
wrote newspaper articles for him; he wrote the articles that
appeared in the New York Tribune (1851–52) under Marx’s name
and that were later published under Engels’ name as
Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany in 1848 (1896).
In the informal division of labour that the two protagonists
of communism had established, Engels was the specialist in
nationality questions, military matters, to some extent in
international affairs, and in the sciences. Marx also turned
to him repeatedly for clarification of economic questions,
notably for information on business practices and industrial
operations.
Marx’s Das Kapital (Capital), his most important work,
bears in part a made-in-Manchester stamp. Marx similarly
called on Engels’ writing facility to help “popularize”
their joint views. While Marx was the brilliant theoretician
of the pair, it was Engels, as the apt salesman of Marxism
directing attention to Das Kapital through his reviews of
the book, who implanted the thought that it was their
“bible.” Engels almost alone wrote Herrn Eugen Dührings
Umwälzung der Wissenschaft (1878; Herr Eugen Dühring’s
Revolution in Science [Anti-Dühring]), the book that
probably did most to promote Marxian thought. It destroyed
the influence of Karl Eugen Dühring, a Berlin professor who
threatened to supplant Marx’s position among German Social
Democrats.
Last years
After Marx’s death (1883), Engels served as the foremost
authority on Marx and Marxism. Aside from occasional
writings on a variety of subjects and introductions to new
editions of Marx’s works, Engels completed volumes 2 and 3
of Das Kapital (1885 and 1894) on the basis of Marx’s
uncompleted manuscripts and rough notes. Engels’ other two
late publications were the books Der Ursprung der Familie,
des Privateigenthums und des Staats (1884; The Origin of the
Family, Private Property and the State) and Ludwig Feuerbach
und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie (1888;
Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German
Philosophy). All the while he corresponded extensively with
German Social Democrats and followers everywhere, so as to
perpetuate the image of Marx and to foster some degree of
conformity among the “faithful.” His work was interrupted
when he was stricken with cancer; he died of the disease not
long after.
During his lifetime, Engels experienced, in a milder
form, the same attacks and veneration that fell upon Marx.
An urbane individual with the demeanour of an English
gentleman, Engels customarily was a gay and witty associate
with a great zest for living. He had a code of honour that
responded quickly to an insult, even to the point of
violence. As the hatchetman of the “partnership,” he could
be most offensive and ruthless, so much so that in 1848
various friends attempted unsuccessfully to persuade Marx to
disavow him.
Except for the communist countries, where Engels has
received due recognition, posterity has generally lumped him
together with Marx without adequately clarifying Engels’
significant role. The attention Engels does receive is
likely to be in the form of a close scrutiny of his works to
discover what differences existed between him and Marx. As a
result, some scholars have concluded that Engels’ writings
and influence are responsible for certain deviations from,
or distortions of, “true Marxism” as they see it. Yet
scholars in general acknowledge that Marx himself apparently
was unaware of any essential divergence of ideas and
opinions. The Marx-Engels correspondence, which reveals a
close cooperation in formulating Marxist policies, bears out
that view.
Oscar J. Hammen
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