The cover of Sean Sayers's new study displays a black-and-white photograph of Karl

Marx, the bushy dark patch of his mouth in arresting contrast with the encircling white
halo of beard and hair. The book proposes an argument as bold, graphic and firmly
delineated as its cover, though with something of the same lack of tint and nuance.

For such a full-bloodedly Hegelian Marxist as Sean Sayers, the concept of human nature
poses something of a dilemma. On the one hand, his Hegelian humanism spurs him to
oppose those anti-humanist leftists who reject the idea of human nature completely; on
the other hand, his Hegelian historicism results in a notion of human nature so thoroughly
historicized that it is hard to know quite how it can be spoken of as a 'nature' at all. The
idea of a historical human nature has something of an oxymoronic ring to it. Sayers's
case, forcefully if unoriginally, is that human nature, for Marx, is no stable, universal
essence but a social, historical, developing process. At times, he describes human nature
simply as the totality of these historically evolving powers, needs and capacities. But this
is not quite what is usually meant by a nature. By 'nature', we mean those features of a
thing which arise from the kind of thing it is, the genre to which it belongs, not just from
the contingencies it undergoes. Sayers is rather keener on the social than the natural, but
he does not seem to see that 'nature' refers to the way that our fellow creatures bear in on
us at a level even deeper than sociality, in the very material constitution of our bodies. It
was this that the early Marx called 'species-being'. Laying eggs belongs to a hen's nature,
as tearing its feathers in a fight does not. Tearing its feathers involves its nature, since
feathers and perhaps some kinds of conflict are natural to a hen, but to claim that
anything a hen does is of its nature is to empty the term 'nature' of significance. It may
make sense to say that someone is cruel by nature, but it would be odd to say that
someone dropped a tea-spoon by nature, unless we meant that such carelessness was
typical of him. If one holds that an empirical description of how things contingently
evolve is all that we can stretch to, then one would be well-advised to drop the confusing
use of the word 'nature' altogether.

Historicism Against Romanticism

Culturalists and historicists may want to claim, improbably, that there are no such natural
features of humanity; or that there are but that they are scarcely significant; or that, while
somewhat significant, they do not define the peculiar nature of humanity; or that such
universal features always come fleshed out in social form. Sayers champions the latter
two cases, which few Marxists or non-Marxist humanists would doubt anyway; he also
accepts, some of the time at least, that there are permanent, trans-historical properties of
humanity. Thus, having at one point dismissed the 'romantic' attempt 'to circumscribe a
fixed sphere of "natural" or "true" needs', he later concedes precisely this, acknowledging
that 'there is a relatively unchanging core of purely biological needs'. Elsewhere, he seeks
to modify his case yet again by insisting that the distinction between 'true' and 'false'
needs is a historically relative affair, as though it were a historically relative judgment
that the need to drink is in general more important for human beings than the need to
drink while wearing a crimson-spotted tie. But his attempt to cling nominally to a notion
of human nature while effectively historicizing it away leads his study into a more
general kind of ambiguity, which, at times, veers close to simple confusion. Social
relations 'provide the necessary framework' within which alone human nature may
develop, which suggests a distinction between the two, but, at the same time, 'human
beings are social and historical beings through and through,' which might be taken to
imply that their 'nature' simply is a matter of social relations. If this is so, then there is a
logical problem in determining what is a matter of social relations. The empirical species
known as humanity, perhaps; but this is hardly a nature in any cogent sense of the term.

To describe human beings as social and historical through and through, however, may not
mean that they are nothing but their history. It may mean, more persuasively, that their
trans-historical or universal features are as socially instantiated as all their other features.
Sayers must presumably mean something like this, thus softening his otherwise rather
hard-nosed historicism, since he acknowledges that human beings are, among other
things, natural organisms equipped with certain relatively unchanging features. Indeed,
no one could reasonably doubt this; the quarrel over 'human nature' cannot be over
whether one accepts this fact or not, but over how strongly it should figure in a historical
account of the species. Human beings, Sayers uncontroversially observes, are not 'merely'
natural organisms but self-transforming historical creatures. This leads him to reject
Martha Nussbaum's self-consciously essentialist attempt to draw up a list of basic
universal human needs which could act as politically criterial: demands such as the
promotion of human autonomy, Sayers somewhat questionably claims, are too vague and
general to be of much use. On the other hand, with notable inconsistency, he
acknowledges that such minimal, universal demands as freedom from torture, starvation
and injury can, in themselves, provide the basis for a powerful critique of capitalism. It is
just that he does not consider that such demands exhaust the claims of Marxism.
Obviously not; but the point is not whether Marxism is reducible to such claims—who
ever thought it was?—but how much moral and political weight is to be ascribed to them.
And, here, Sayers's position is symptomatically unclear, torn as it is between a Hegelian-
historicist belittling of timeless natures and a proper political sensitivity to the
explosiveness in current global conditions of simply insisting that everyone gets enough
to eat.

The natural, then, is granted its place; but what Sayers bestows with the one hand he
customarily retracts with the other. This universal aspect of humanity 'must not be
regarded in isolation as a pure timeless essence, for human nature is also something
which has developed historically'. To claim that human nature has developed historically
may be to imply that there is an identifiable thing called human nature which has
undergone a history, a significantly different case from the book's efforts elsewhere to
identify these two notions. And to reject the idea of human nature as a timeless essence,
on the grounds that human nature is 'also' something which has developed historically, is
to re-instate the very duality which one is striving to overcome. Sayers is reluctant to
characterize what he recognizes to be the universal, relatively unalterable features of
humanity as a 'timeless essence', but it all depends on what you mean by timeless
essences. Death is not timeless in the sense that my death will occur at a certain time and
in a certain culturally specific mode, but it is indeed timeless in the sense that we do not
die simply because we belong to a specific historical period or set of social
circumstances. Death, and other such universal aspects of humanity, is not an essence in
the sense that it is the underlying source of all our historical fashioning, of which that
history is then a mere phenomenal expression, but it is surely an essence in the sense that
it is of the essence of the kind of entities we are, a constitutive, ineradicable dimension of
our natures.

The Social and the Biological

We are not, then, it turns out, simply social and historical beings, but 'natural-social
beings'. This, however, is hardly much of a concession. For, since these twin facets of us
completely interpenetrate, to the point where 'it is impossible to separate them out and
oppose them to each other', the social in effect confiscates the natural, which is proposed
only to be appropriated. It is true that Sayers views this symbiosis as a two-way traffic,
since our biology also goes all the way down. But all this seems to mean is that 'our
highest and most socially developed achievements are the activities of the biological
organism that we, as human beings, are', which really comes down to saying that all our
activities are our activities. It says nothing about how the biological bears concretely
upon the social. Most Marxists would agree that these two faces of humanity are
existentially one, in the sense that we never experience food just as food, or even hunger
just as hunger. But Sayers wants implausibly to claim that it is impossible to separate
them theoretically too, even though discussing the more permanent features of our
condition means that he has just done so. Norman Geras, who Sayers oddly includes in
the analytical Marxist camp, is accordingly taken to task for insisting in his Marx and
Human Nature that universal human needs can be, 'at least in theory', distinguished from
socially developed ones, a distinction without which Sayers's own attempt to demonstrate
their interpenetration would fall apart in his hands. There is, Sayers maintains, 'only one
thing: a socially modified need', which leaves unanswered the question of how we
specify which particular need is being socially modified, and how, without such
specification, we can identify the social modification in the first place. A few pages later,
this monism has snapped apart again into a dualism, this time in the shape of a dialectic:
there is 'a process of interaction between social activity and human nature'. History and
human nature are mutually determining products. But, since human nature and human
history are treated elsewhere in the book as virtual synonyms, it is hard to see how this
amounts to much more than a tautology.

The social and the biological may well come to us experientially all of one piece, but we
cannot deduce from this that their actual relationship is of a neatly symmetrical Hegelian
sort. One way in which the relationship is lopsided springs from the fact that what Marx
dubs our species-being—a notion scarcely present in this study—along with our natural
environment, sets drastic limits upon our historical self-fashioning. Sayers's
acknowledgement of this truth is rather cursory, as environmentalism receives a two-and-
a-half-page afterthought at the tail-end of the volume. Historicism, rather like the
postmodern culturalism Sayers dislikes, is in danger of overlooking the truth that much of
what is most interesting about human beings springs from the fact that they are 'cusped'
between nature and culture in a way which is both the source of their creativity and of
their potentially hubristic self-undoing, and which renders inadequate any description of
them pitched simply at either level. If Sayers, at least in one of his moods, recognizes this
in a somewhat perfunctory way, he is blinded by his historicism to some of its more
intriguing implications—implications to which, say, psychoanalysis has been rather more
alert.

The human body is indeed reconstituted from the ground up by its insertion into the
symbolic order of a specific historical culture; but this 'symbiosis' is a good deal more
painful, partial and traumatic than Sayers's conflict-free Hegelian synthesizing would
suggest, and never ceases to leave its minatory imprint upon our historical self-
transformations. There is that in the material body which resists this incorporation, just as
there is that in material nature which is blindly recalcitrant to our transformative projects.
It is not, as the historicists and postmodernists would have it, that the nature of humanity
is culture, but that culture or history are of our nature—that there is that in our material
nature which allows us to exceed and remake it, so that non-identity, for both good and
ill, is thus part of what we are. The fact that culture allows us to sit loose to the
constraints of our species-being is what opens up history in the first place, but is also the
felix culpa which plunges us into forms of crisis, tragedy and alienation mercifully closed
to the non-labouring, non-linguistic animals. However, this is not a way of speaking of
the human animal which historicists, even those who tip their hats to a universal human
nature, feel especially comfortable with, any more than their postmodern antagonists.

Transformative Energy

As a Marxist humanist, Sayers reads history as the ceaseless transformation wrought by a

being who is essentially active, changing and productive.1 Here, then, one might claim, is
at least one sort of timeless essence. There is one thing which never changes about
humanity and that is its productivity, the source and matrix of everything which springs
historically into being. Sayers, in short, has not so much refuted essentialism as displaced
it. If humans really are such social, dynamic, transformative animals, then this already
tells us a great deal about the kinds of abiding capacities they must possess. Any creature
which can continually create new needs for itself is unlikely, for example, to have the
kind of body which does not allow it to engage in intricate serniotic practices, deploy
tools in particular ways, enter into complex social relations with others of its kind, and
the like. We now have a whole set of procedures for distinguishing between such animals
and, say, slugs or squirrels, which is just what is traditionally meant by talk of 'nature'.
And since this transformative energy really is at the source of all historical phenomena,
then this is an essentialist doctrine with a vengeance. Essentialism, in my opinion, is not
necessarily a doctrine to be ashamed of; but it must be in Sayers's view, since he
1
Sayers does not really examine the notion of productivity in much detail. Marxism is familiarly charged
with too narrow a sense of production, but there are perhaps equal problems in broadening the concept, as
Marx himself arguably does, to encompass any form of human self-realization. In what sense the term
'production' still holds up when used of, say, savouring a peach or relishing the fragrance of a flower is a
question worth addressing. Sayers also seems to consider that the idea of production for production's sake
is an objectionably capitalist doctrine. He does not see that, in a transformed sense of the phrase, this
realization of productive capacities simply for their own sake and delight, rather than in the service of
utility, is exactly what Marx is advocating. It informs his distinction between use-value and exchange-
value. The book also largely passes over the charge that a productivist ethics fails to grasp the value of
being acted upon, of 'wise passiveness' and what Heidegger calls "Gelassenheit".
considers that his historicism is the enemy of essentialism, rather than seeing that it
implies it.

Marxism and Human Nature is as much about morality as it is about human nature. Here,
once again, the book needs to steer a precarious path between polar opposites—this time
between an ahistorical moral absolutism, and the brand of moral relativism into which
historicism is sometimes thought to slide. Sayers's exit-route from this dilemma is via the
well-traveled Hegelian-Marxist motorway of historical progress. On this theory, history
reveals an overall, if somewhat uneven, tendency for the productive forces to progress,
and, along with it, a wealth of human powers and capacities. What thus permits us to sit
in judgment on a particular phase of history is the further potential for development
which that situation bears within it as an immanent, contradictory force, but which it is
currently thwarting. It is thus that our ethico-political judgments can be freed from the
pretension of some God's-eye vantage-point without lapsing into the embarrassment of
historical relativism.

Despite a passing comment that 'Marxism need not involve a teleological account of
history,' Sayers is in fact a full-blooded teleologist. So was Marx, at least from time to
time; but there are indeed sufficient grounds in his and Engels's work on which to
construct a non-teleological theory of history as well. It is simply that Sayers himself,
with his reiterated belief that history constitutes an ordered, rational series of stages, each
of which slumbers immanent in the previous one, and which will necessarily culminate in
the historical 'destiny' of socialism, plumps for the less rather than the more defensible
version of Marx himself. S. H. Rigby's Marxism and History valuably distinguishes these
two competing texts within Marx's work, and amply demonstrated the untenability, both
theoretically and empirically, of the teleological model.

His historical determinism aside, however, Sayers's model of morality has much to
commend it. He recognizes that Marx is out to shift the whole register of morality from a
Kantian-deontological to a eudaimonic one, which turns not on abstract rights and duties
but on those forms of historical self-realization which make for happiness. He sees, in
short, that morality for Marxism is about abundance of life, not—or, at least, not in the
first place—rights, injunctions and prohibitions. Marxist ethics primarily are about how
to live well and enjoyably, not about what we must do, though it is probable that
establishing the conditions for the former entails something of the latter. And Sayers's
historicist suspicion of abstract ideas of justice overlooks the point that the concept of
justice is bound to be involved in the notion of eudaimonia as long as such well-being is
to be secured for everyone. Justice concerns the social distribution of well-being, and the
regulation of competing claims to it. But since what it is to live well in Marx's view is to
be able to realize one's powers, needs and capacities in as rich, untrammeled and all-
round a way as possible, there is a sense in which he has shifted the whole question of
morality from the 'superstructure' to the 'base'. For it is by the unleashing of actual
productive forces that these human powers and capacities are bred, and only by a
transformation of the social relations of production that the conditions in which they can
flourish all-round can be created.
The Limits of Romantic Libertarianism

Even so, Sayers's account skirts certain difficulties in this otherwise attractive ethic,
which is in fact romantic rather than Marxist in provenance. For Sayers, it is what makes
for potential historical progress within any particular historical régime which provides the
touchstone by which that order is to be judged. There is a fairly homogeneous set of
repressed productive powers struggling to get out from beneath any particular class
society, and what counts as morally good is to liberate this development in a process of
which socialism will be the culmination. But baulked human capacities are by no means
so homogeneous. Sayers must either assume that all such capacities are positive, or
provide some criteria by which the more positive are to be distinguished from the more
negative. And the problem for a historicist is that, if constant development is really all we
have, then history would seem to provide no stable basis for such criteria. Sayers
accordingly adopts the bold but implausible strategy of seeing any productive potential
which class society impedes as positive. The term 'productive', hovering as it does
between fact and value, is convenient for his argument here. There is a developing
process known as human nature, and to act morally is to allow it to evolve, confident in
the assumption that all of its evolutions will be enrichments. This is a naturalistic ethics
with a vengeance, for which whatever (potentially) is is right. What is wrong, in a
simplistic romantic-libertarian conception, is repression. And what is being held back
here by class society is a human nature which forms a single, non-contradictory, unified
narrative, and which, for all its dynamism, thus begins to look distinctly like the more
essentialist conceptions of humanity which Sayers is out to rebut. It is just that this, so to
speak, is an essence in motion.

But by what criteria do we determine which historical capacities are beneficent and
which not? Which of the potentials which capitalism is currently obstructing should be
fostered and which should not, bearing in mind that bourgeois legality currently restricts
such 'productive' human potentials as strangling one's guiltless neighbour with one's bare
hands? For, unless one smuggles positive value into the concept of production from the
outset, thus making the whole issue superlatively simple to resolve, strangling is certainly
the realization of a productive capacity. To reply that we should actualize only those
capacities which make for socialism is simply to beg the question, since, if socialism is
valuable because it is a positive form of self-realization, what is to count as such positive
self-realization still needs to be determined. As we have seen, one can seek to avoid the
problem of discriminating among capacities by espousing a naturalistic ethics, for which,
in effect, whatever is should be realized. This leaves open the question of whether, if it
also belongs to one's nature to create new needs and powers, these should also be realized
on naturalistic grounds—because the capacity to generate them is natural—or whether
they might be 'false' needs which can thus be backed by no such naturalistic guarantees.
A creature whose nature it is to create new needs might also be thought to create needs
which are false to that need-creating nature. Sayers believes that Marxism is just such an
ethical naturalism, refusing the distinction between fact and value; but he does not tell us
how we rule out realizing capacities like the power to rape and torture, even though
something like this has been among the darker implications of a certain romantic-
libertarian strain of ethical naturalism. D.H. Lawrence held that it was a crime to hold
himself above his basest desire, since it was, after all, part of him.

It is typical of such romantic libertarianism to hold that capacities become negative only
by virtue of being repressed, though, in this sense, Marx himself might well have been a
romantic libertarian, at least on occasions. For Nietzsche and Freud, by contrast, some
capacities become positive only by being repressed, or sublimated. A variant on this
romantic paradigm is what one might term moral aestheticism: what is bad, as with moral
naturalism, is not capacities themselves, but their imperfect realization; what is good, like
a fine poem or portrait, is a power faithfully, fully, robustly incarnated. Hegel's 'the actual
is the rational' is a distant relative of this case. Whatever the variants, however, 'the
development of powers, needs and capacities' is simply too broad a category to be
morally criterial. Yet where, for historicist thought, are the criteria for selecting amongst
such powers to spring from? Not, to be sure, from a morality transcendent of history, or
from a normative, non-naturalistically conceived human nature. For the latter move
would simply push the question of criteria back a stage: how do we decide which
particular capacities represent our nature at its truest and finest, and so can be set in
judgement over our actual historical behaviour?

Problems of Progress

Sayers is not oblivious to this problem, but neither does he satisfactorily resolve it. He
sees that to appeal to historical progress is inevitably to appeal to certain values—to a
certain conception of what counts as progress; but he sidesteps the question of the trans-
historical criteria which such an appeal seems to imply simply by asserting that the idea
of progress is for Marxism inseparably descriptive and normative. A Hegelian piety about
the unity of fact and value is thus made to do service for genuine argument. Progress, he
insists, is something 'higher', not just in the sense of 'later', but in the sense of 'more
developed' or 'more evolved'. But this merely begs the question of what kind of
evolutions are to count as positive. Cruise missiles are more evolved than paper darts, but
they are hardly to be greeted with more acclaim. It is no knockdown case against an
ahistorical morality to emphasize, as Sayers rightly does, that a critique of the actual must
somehow be immanent within it. For there are many critical, contradictory potentials
latent within any historical situation, and it is not unreasonable—though it may be
erroneous—to assume that, since history itself does not inform us which of its potentials
to realize, and since human capacities do not come with a 'good to use' label stamped
upon them, we might have to look elsewhere for guidance. The potentials may be
immanent in a specific situation, whereas the norms which identify them may not. If this
seems a curious idea, it is arguably no more curious than the historicist assumption that
what is positive is simply further productivity. The idea of immanent critique also usually
involves demonstrating how a particular social order is structurally incapable of living up
to its own morally admirable ideas, thus condemning it by its own self-proclaimed
standards in a way considerably more effective than upbraiding it from some standpoint
whose validity it might not even recognize. But by what criteria are the self-proclaimed
standards to be judged morally admirable? Because they are historically progressive? But
how do we judge that?
Sayers simplifies the problem somewhat by adopting an excessively stagist view of the
positive and negative aspects of capitalism. In the teeth of the fashionable anti-
modernisms of our time, he valuably recalls us to the emancipatory features of
capitalism, pointing out how alienation and the like has its progressive side. He also
seems to regard this case as rather more original than it is. But having insisted that
capitalism is in this sense inherently contradictory, he adopts the familiar Marxist schema
of distinguishing between its earlier, progressive unfolding and its later degeneration,
once capitalist social relations have become a brake on historical progress. This is true as
far as it goes; but, from a moral standpoint, it fails to grasp the problem of a system
which is progressive and oppressive simultaneously. When Marx speaks of all positive
things in capitalism being pregnant with their negative opposites, he is not thinking
sequentially, though he thinks sequentially about the system too. 'Development', in short,
is not a reliable enough moral criterion, since many of the objectionable aspects of
capitalism are as much a function of development as are the more enlightened ones. It is
not just a case of the system being good when it is still developing but bad when it is
stagnating. Not all 'dynamism'—that humanist buzzword—is to be celebrated. 'Good' for
Sayers basically means 'progressive', which, in turn, means that the present situation is an
improvement over some older one as judged by the standards of current human needs.
But it is perfectly possible to judge that capitalism is an improvement in some ways and a
deterioration in others. Fredric Jameson's remark that capitalism is both the best and the
worst thing that has ever happened to us is a rather lurid way of making the point.
Someone might see the system as positive in the sense of laying the ground for socialism,
while still not considering that this outweighed its actual depredations. And this means
that the positive and negative are so dialectically intertwined in the thrust of historical
development that any simple conception of development as positive is inevitably
undermined. Would socialism still be worthwhile if it took a nuclear war to bring it
about? If the world were to be plunged in a few decades' time into ecological disaster,
nuclear catastrophe and widespread genocide, would we still be able to say with Sayers
that 'the present form of civilization, even with all its discontents, is preferable to what
went before'? Is it necessarily nostalgic primitivism to ask whether the gains of modernity
unquestionably outweigh its losses?

In any case, Sayers's progressivist ethics are as untenably future-oriented as Benthamite

consequentialism. It seems a little abstract to argue that the mutilation of a child is wrong
because it contributes to stymieing productive capacities which could produce a more
humane political future. It might be rather less abstract to claim that the stymied future at
stake here is not history's but the child's. And what if killing a child somehow does play a
constructive role in the arrival of an improved society? Would realizing this capacity then
count as progressive? There are certainly cases of necessary evil; but we call them evil
because we consider them to be wrong despite the fact that they may be unavoidable
elements of a desirable outcome; and this suggests that there are moral criteria at play
here other than simple progressivist ones. Sayers maintains that we always criticize an act
as inhuman or degrading by our current, historically relative standards, which, in one
sense, is undeniable: by what other standards could we judge? Even absolute standards
are absolute for some historical judge. And to adopt the standards of another time or
place is still for us to adopt them. But it does not follow that we necessarily accept some
other set of historical standards to be valid too. It belongs to our historically relative
standards to hold that, if some other historically relative standards do consider rape to be
permissible, then they are wrong. Historicism and universalism are not in this sense
inevitable antagonists.

The Axis of Reciprocity

Objections such as these do not necessarily undermine an ethics based upon self-
realization, as long as the notion is stripped of the teleological determinism with which
this book couples it. But the phrase 'self-realization' is an ambiguous one, suggesting as it
does either a given self which is then realized, or a self which exists only in the process
of being realized. It thus corresponds to the ambiguity implicit in the idea of a historical
human nature, which can mean either a nature which is nothing but its history, or a nature
to which it pertains to historically actualize itself. When Sayers asks himself why it is that
self-development is valued, he replies, along with J.S. Mill, in somewhat lame, utilitarian
fashion that people do actually desire it. There are also a lot of people who actually do
desire amassing as much power and material wealth as possible. In fact, not everyone
values self-development—there are whole creeds which prize asceticism or self-sacrifice
above it, for example—just as not everyone, pace Marx, holds that the symmetrical, all-
round development of the individual is necessarily preferable to achieving excellence in a
single field. What Sayers might have claimed is that we value self-development because
such activity is constitutive of our nature or species-being, and that 'species-being', rather
like the terms 'nature' and 'culture', thus provides a pivot between fact and value. But this,
for Sayers, would no doubt steer rather too close to an essentialist rather than historicist
idea of human nature.

There is, in fact, a way in which a political ethics centered upon self-realization can avoid
the pitfalls of progressivism without abjectly surrendering to some Platonic paradigm.
Liberal morality holds that what allows us to discriminate between those capacities we
should actualize and those we should not is whether my exercise of such self-realization
will limit or damage yours. Socialist thought accepts this doctrine as far as it goes, but
presses it further by introducing a notion overlooked by this book, that of reciprocity. We
may realize those historically bred powers and capacities which do not obstruct the self-
realization of others, but also, and above all, those capacities which provide the very
ground and possibility of others' self-realization, in a common reciprocal enhancement. It
is this, surely, which the Communist Manifesto has in mind when it speaks of the free
development of each becoming the condition of the free development of all. And this
imperative is neither, in the manner of historicism, spontaneously announced to us by our
historical powers themselves, nor, in the fashion of absolutism, quite independent of
historical development. Indeed, in one sense, this value judgment follows from the fact
that social beings like humans are indeed bound up materially with one another, and, if
each is to achieve self-realization in non-atomistic conditions, such reciprocity is perhaps
the only way in which this is finally possible. Given that individual self-realization is a
good, which requires more arguing than the naturalistically minded Sayers is prepared to
countenance, there may be a sense in which, under certain historical conditions, socialism
is its logical outcome.
This is by no means a political ethics without its problems; but it fares better than a
progressivist teleology which can only ever refer terms like 'good' and 'bad' to a putative
future. On the contrary, it can show us something of what is wrong with rape, torture,
murder and exploitation right now, as well as serving the more useful functions of a
progressivist teleology by identifying those forces in the present which can be seen as
prefiguring a more desirable future. It is not, as in Sayers's rather simplistic
expression/repression model, that the human potential held back by the present will burst
dynamically through to form a future—a kind of forces-and-relations-of-production
paradigm at the level of ethics—but that the future is immanent in the present in the
shape of those forces which could, given certain wholly contingent political
developments, lay down the material conditions in which a greater reciprocity of human
powers might flourish. The model also promises in its own way to resolve the conflict
between universalism and historicism by furnishing us with the criteria by which to judge
certain historical phenomena as unjust or exploitative, while allowing us at the same time
to recognize how the material conditions for a mutually enhancing reciprocity of powers
were not then available. It is not a matter of idealistically asserting that human beings
may be just in any circumstances, nor a question of relativistically claiming that injustice
is not injustice at all when it could hardly have been materially otherwise, but of
recognizing that injustice and exploitation are bound to pertain to certain historical
conditions. If this repetitive, stylefessly written study fails to examine such possibilities,
it nevertheless offers a provocative, bravely unfashionable case.