FREEDOM,

EQUALITY,
SOLIDARITY
An introduction to the history of ideologies.

Sami Zemni
2024

© Malak Mattar – Gaza 2024

DISCLAIMER
This syllabus is a translation and slightly revised version of the book “Vrijheid, Gelijkheid,
Solidariteit. Een overzicht van de belangrijkste sociale en politieke ideologieën” that I pubished
in September 2021 in Dutch with Owl Press-Borgerhoff & Lamberigts.

For citations please use: Zemni, Sami (2022). Freedom. Equality. Solidarity. An introduction
to the history of ideologies, unpublished manuscript. Translation of “Vrijheid, Gelijkheid,
Solidariteit. Een overzicht van de belangrijkste sociale en politieke ideologieën”, 2021, Gent:
Owl Press.

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Table of Contents

Foreword

Introduction 5
The outline of the book 7
Ideologies: back from never being gone? 15

Chapter 1: The unraveling of the medieval order (1450-1650) 17

1. Scientific progress and the gradual emancipation of politics 18
2. The end of Catholic hegemony: reformation and counterreformation 23
3. Colonial encounters: the dispute of Valladolid 27
4. The glorious revolution 30

Chapter 2: The European Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions (1650-1800) 35

1. The political origins of civil society 35
2. Enlightenment 38
3. Renewal in economic thinking. 43
4. The age of revolutions 45
4.1. The American Emancipation
4.2. The French Revolution: from radical experiment to imperial restoration
4.3. The Haitian Revolution

Chapter 3: The emergence of modern politics: industrial revolution and expansion of

capitalism (1800-1914) 53
1. The discovery of society and the emergence of modern ideologies 53
Conservatism 54
Economic and political liberalism 55
Early socialism 60
German idealism: Kant and Hegel 64
Liberalism and early imperialism 68
2. Bourgeois society 73
Marx and the birth of socialism 73
Anarchism 78
The first wave of feminism 82
The conservative offensive 84
The Catholic Church, renewed faith and Christian democracy 84
‘Science’, conservatism and racism 87
Positivism 88
Social Darwinism 89
Organic thinking: elite theories in search of harmony 90
Racial Theories 92
Discontent with democracy 93
From imperialism to colonialism 96
Latin American liberation
The Nahdha
The Meiji restoration in Japan
The Middle Kingdom: China
Social Democracy 106

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Chapter 4: From crisis to the world wars (1900-1945) 110
1. The Russian Revolution 111
2. The interwar period 120
The wilsonian moment: the awakening of the colonized world 120
Négritude 123
Mao and the Chinese Revolution 124
Liberal repositioning 126
A Diveded Left 128
The conservative revolution 132
3. Fascism and Nazism 135

Chapter 5: After World War II: reconstruction, despair, and revolutionary ideals 144
1. Liberal revitalization, human rights, and democratic revival 147
2. French radicalism: the chasers of meaning 149
3. The golden sixties: the new left, decolonization, and feminism 152
The New Left 152
The second wave of feminism and the civil rights movement 154
The decolonization 155
Development 157
Dialectics of colonialism 160
4. The liberation of the individual: the market and human rights 166

Chapter 6: The end of the Cold War and the ideological confusion 173
1. End of the Cold War 173
2. Multiculturalism 177
3. New feminism, post-feminism and postcolonial feminism 179
4. Apartheid and racial capitalism 184
5. Islam in revolt 186
Sunni Islamism
Iran and Ayatollah Khomeini
Jihadis
Salafism and jihadism
6. Populism, (new) authoritarianism and post-truth politics 194
7. Neoconservatism, the alt-right and the new extreme right 199
8. Progress optimism, realism, and global inequality 202
9. Ecology, climate and nature 207
10. Big data, Big Brother? 209

Conclusion: the first signs of the post-Western world 211

Bibliography 216

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Foreword
About twenty years ago, Ruddy Doom, my PhD research supervisor and mentor, asked if I
would teach his course Social and Political Ideologies. I accepted the challenge because I was
allowed to pilot the course for a small group of students. A few years later, I took over the
course entirely and today I stand before more then six hundred students annually at Ghent
University and about two hundred and fifty students at the Free University of Brussels.
I inherited not only the subject but also the course book. The book Freedom and Equality had
been published in 1986 and, for many years, offered students a solid introduction to the history
of emancipatory thought in Europe. Geopolitical changes that had a major impact on the place
and role of ideologies (e.g. the end of the Cold War) and the fact that the Department of Conflict
and Development Studies, formerly Third World Studies, insisted that social science students
also learn something about ideologies outside of Europe, led Ruddy to redesign the book. Parts
of the book disappeared and were replaced by Third World thinkers.
The book became a palimpsest, so to speak, after I took over from Ruddy. Year after year, I
rewrote pieces and added some thinkers while others were discarded. Every Friday morning, in
preparation for my afternoon class, I would read chapters from a variety of works by political
thinkers, take notes, and summarize. Someday, I thought, I would rewrite the work entirely. It
was the unexpected and unpredictable corona pandemic – which made my research fieldwork
in North Africa impossible – that led me to rethink and rewrite the palimpsest.

Several elements of Ruddy Doom’s approach are still recognizable in the manuscript. The
general view on the history of ideologies, the periodization, the attention to the interaction
between the various ideologies, their contradictions and the difference between thought and
reality, between political ideas and political practices, are still very much present in my book. I
substantiate the main choices I made myself further in the introduction but I remained true to
the idea that a history of ideologies should not be limited to a parade of highly intelligent
figures. The goal was to place the ideas and thinkers in their time and context, without
necessarily turning them into a work of history, and thus “to be able to assess the power and
also the limits of each individual contribution” (Doom, 1986:11).

I can only thank Ruddy Doom for trusting me with this course and teaching me so much over
so many years. Today, in our hurried academic world where everyone is running from meeting
over lecture to the next peer review publication, there is no more room for collective coffee
breaks where Ruddy combined analyses of ideologies with heroic stories from one of his many
travels through Asia or Africa. I can only look back at those days with nostalgia.

There are, of course, other people I must not forget here. Ester De Boek, and before that Maxine
Stevens and Isabelle Lanszweert, have always assisted me as student supervisors and tutors in
the organization of the classes, and over the years have given me many important insights into

5
the ways students interact with the course. I have tried to take into account their aspirations.
Over the years and during the many smaller and larger rewritins of the book, I received feedback
and input from many. I hope not to forget anyone. Thank you, Brecht De Smet, Sigrid
Vertommen and Koen Bogaert. I also want to thank the many colleagues who helped me to
correct the exams over the years. There are so many that I cannot name them all here. Thanks
to all of them! Also, of course, I want to thank my family who gave me the space to write this
book during corona lockdowns. Thank you Lise, Issa and Lilia.

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Introduction

Ideas are not dead thoughts, even when they are no longer contemporary; for they remain
steps in the evolution of contemporary ideas. We have wanted to present the ideas of each age
not as fossils but as evolving organisms, and not as butterflies in a box but as the vital
processes of the human mind. This is a history of the life of ideas: active, mobile, and
changing.
(Bronowski & Mazlish, 1960: xii)

Emancipatory politics inserts the thin end of the wedge of the future into the heart of the
present. They represent a bridge between past and future, a point where the two intersect.
And both present and future are fuelled by the resources of the past, in the sense of precious
political traditions which one must fight to keep alive.
(Eagleton, 2011: 69-70)

Political theory is ripe for decolonization: not only is it dominated by a canon of

overwhelmingly white thinkers, but many of those thinkers played significant roles in
legitimating and promoting the colonial project.
(Choat, 2018: 1)

If there ain't no justice, then there ain’t no peace

(Prince, Baltimore 2015)

“Every human society must justify its inequalities: unless reasons for them are found, the whole
political and social edifice stands in danger of collapse. Every epoch therefore develops a range
of contradictory discourses and ideologies for the purpose of legitimizing the inequality that
already exists or that people believe should exist. From these discourses emerge certain
economic, social, and political rules, which people then use to make sense of the ambient social
structure. Out of the clash of contradictory discourses —a clash that is at once economic,
social, and political—comes a dominant narrative or narratives, which bolster the existing
inequality regime”. (Piketty, 2020: 8) This quote by the the world-renowned economist Thomas
Piketty opens his book Capital and Ideology and leads directly to the topic of this book: the
history of political ideologies. Throughout history, societies have developed different
discourses that sought to legitimize the organization of political, social, economic and cultural
life. The answers that were given to the crucial questions of living together within society: Who
is slave (today we use enslaved, s.z.) and who is free? Who decides and who does not? How
should private property be organized?.... led both to discourses that defended the existing order,
in which there was always inequality, and to counter-discourses, discourses that undermined
the existing order in order to create a different social order. Out of this conflict, the clash of
different visions of reality and divergent opinions about the future, came the emancipation of
man.

7
Although everyone senses what emancipation means, the concept proves difficult to define.
Few would deny that emancipation has to do with the human endeavor to gain a full place in
society, but there is far less consensus on what exactly it entails. Does the pursuit of freedom,
of emancipation and equality end with equality before the law? Or, does emancipation mean
not only equality before the law but also equality in reality? And if so, how should it come
about? Emancipation implies that individuals and groups gain more and more control over their
own living conditions, which implies progress. It is undeniable that, despite the poverty and
inequality that still exist, humanity has made enormous progress over the last few hundred years
on an immaterial level (rights, freedoms...) and on a material level (technology, science,
medicine...). Although there may exist an “optimism gap” today (Bregman, 2013:13) – the idea
that everything is going well for ‘me’ but not for ‘us’, or the feeling of being optimistic for our
own lives but fearful for the future of humanity (climate change, the loss of nature, pandemics
...) – one cannot deny that life is better in 2021 than it was, say, two centuries ago. The Swedish
physician Hans Rosling explained this gap in his posthumously published Factfulness (2018)
because humans possess drama instincts (among others, the gap, fear, blame, or urgency
instincts) that give them an “overdramatic worldview”. Progress is simply undeniable.
However, that does not mean that progress is or was unambiguous, that it came about without
a struggle, that things will necessarily always be better, or that there exists a harmonious end
point after which history will cease to exist. Economists observe that since the years 1980-1990,
inequality has risen sharply throughout the world. Inequality in the industrialized and developed
world, after declining sharply in the post-World War II period, is rising again. At the same time,
the inequality between the developed North and the developing world – that had inequality
forced upon it by imperialism and colonialism for more than two centuries – was narrowing
from the 1990s onwards although the disparities remain large. Similarly, in terms of health and
life expectancy, we often see a decrease in inequality across countries but an increase within
countries, revealing very clear class inequalities (Therborn, 2021).

As people seek to remedy this inequality, or conversely, maintain it, we automatically enter the
realm of social struggle, or politics. Since the age of revolutions in the second half of the
eighteenth century, ideologies have shaped people’s aspirations. The struggle for emancipation,
both at the global and national levels, was and is a process full of tensions, conflicts and
contradictions between different groups (each with their specific interests), first and foremost
between social classes. Whenever groups mobilized for change, there were always other groups
who sought to preserve the social order instead. Therefore, the history of emancipation is
inextricably linked to power struggles. This is the terrain of ideological struggle.

There seems to be no term as difficult to define as ideology, even if it is a concept whose public
birth we can trace exactly. On April 21, 1796, French Count Louis Destutt de Tracy presented

8
his Idéologie to the Institut Nationale des Sciences et des Arts in Paris as a science of thought.
Destutt de Tracy’s ambition was to capture human action and thought in rational laws so that
the whole of society could be explained. This view is, of course, far removed from what is
understood by the term today. Andrew Heywood’s broad definition of an ideology as “a more
or less coherent set of ideas that provides the basis for organized political action, whether this
is intended to preserve, modify or overthrow the existing system of power” (Heywood, 2003:12),
is a good starting point.

A political ideology is a set of ideas and conceptions that seeks to shape social and political
relationships. A set of ideas means first of all that there are several ideas present. A single
proposition is not yet an ideology; there must be several that stand in a certain relation. This
connection can be logically consistent, it can also be functionally consistent and thus acquire
an inner logic that does not necessarily pass scientific scrutiny. Ideology is thus not a science,
although it may contain scientific elements, just as social science is not value-free (and thus
possesses ideological components).

Ideologies make a statement about boundaries and border (who belongs to a nation and who
does not, who has certain rights and who does not, who decides about something and who does
not...) and about property (what can one own, how much, how and to what extent can one
accumulate property...) and thereby reflect the choices made in a given society. The inequality
that is legitimized or denounced is not an inevitable consequence of the neutral or natural
workings of the economy but is thoroughly political. It is the political choices a society makes
that shape the forms of inequality. These choices are above all a reflection of a society’s
conceptions of social justice, what constitutes a just economy, and of the political-ideological
power relations between different groups and the discourse these groups use. We can add that
these debates and power relations take place not only within but also between countries and
continents (Piketty 2020: 12).

Thus, an ideology always includes positive and negative interpretations and opinions that are
both descriptive and normative. It forms a set of ideas that tries to get a grip on society as it is
(descriptive) and should be (normative). Ideologies are thus built around certain concepts whose
meaning may change over time. Since ideologies are related to each other – both in the form of
a conflictual relationship or within the boundaries of democratic rules – different ideologies
may use different central concepts (e.g. the use of the concept of class versus the concept of
elite) or use widely differing definitions of the same concept (freedom meant something
different to Marx than it did to Nietzsche or Gandhi). The success of an ideology is often related
to its ability to present its propositions, assumptions, and definitions as ‘right’ or ‘correct’,
indicating a competition or contest among ideologies. Thus, in the battle of ideas, each ideology
attempts to eliminate the contestation of its central concepts (Freeden, 2006:76-80) by

9
criticizing other, competing, ideas. However, this also happens within the major ideological
families. The definition of freedom for John Maynard Keynes, the liberal founder of the welfare
state, is very different from Von Hayek’s neoliberal definition of freedom!

Understanding this struggle is not an easy task. When we try to understand how an ideology
functioned in a particular historical context and how it related to other ideologies, our analyses
are often themselves influenced by ideologies or the context in which we are making the
analysis (Breiner, 2013). Writing the history of ideologies always entails a danger of
presentism, i.e. the anachronistic introduction of contemporary ideas and views into
interpretations of the past. Conversely, then, what is the relevance of ideologies when we
approach the past only with the ideas and perspectives that were valid at the time? Aren’t
Nietzsche, Marx, Spengler, Fanon or al-Afghani read and reread, interpreted and reinterpreted
because we think these works have something to say about our current society? Postcolonial
anthropologist David Scott’s concept of the problem space may offer a way out. Scott (2004)
sees a problem space as a historically constituted discursive space, a context of argumentation
within which a set of questions and answers is formulated and around which a horizon of
identifiable conceptual and ideological-political interests forms. Thus, we try to find out what
the questions were that the political thinkers wanted to answer; what their answers were and
ask ourselves, at the same time, whether the question is still relevant to ask today (Bardawil
2020).

Since ideologies are not only ideas but also seek to intervene in reality, ideologies focus to a
greater or lesser extent on social action. The reference group of an ideology may differ (classes
for Marx, elites for Pareto, übermenschen for Hitler or the umma for Ridha) but each ideology
seeks to mobilize a privileged group to defend their interests. In this interaction between ideas
and political engagement – whether based on party politics or on revolutionary action is not
important in itself – lays the dynamic of ideological change. If this dynamic is no longer present,
then an ideology degenerates into a doctrine, a codified set of views that seeks to shape socio-
political relations (or part of them) and is promulgated by an official body or institution (for
example, the Bush doctrine that proclaimed preventive war as a principle of U.S. foreign policy
or the doctrine of the infallibility of the pope promulgated by the Catholic Church).

This reflexive stance also makes clearer how science and ideology partially overlap but do not
fully coincide. Under the influence of the Cambridge school of political-philosophical thinkers
such as John Pocock, Quentin Skinner, or James Tully, the analysis of the history of political
thought shifted from the study of canonical texts supposedly asking eternal questions to an
examination of how societies developed changing ‘political languages’. In this way, the analysis
of political ideologies took the form of an analysis, explanation, and interpretation of historical
forms of political argumentation. Freeden thus sums up the modern view of ideology well.

10
Ideologies are “those systems of political thinking, loose or rigid, deliberate or unintended,
through which individuals and groups construct an understanding of the political world they,
or those who preoccupy their thoughts, inhabit, and then act on that understanding” (Freeden,
2006:3).

This analysis breaks with the classic Marxist view of ideology, a view that has not yet been
addressed. The purpose of science is to understand reality. That reality, according to Marx, is
not easily discovered or readily apparent. If things were exactly as they appear, there would be
no need for science because everything would be clear. Social science is therefore the search
for knowledge about the hidden true nature of society. The idea that society has an appearance
that does not correspond to its true nature is the starting point for the Marxist discussion of
ideology. For Marx, then, ideology was that which hides the contradictions of social reality
(Parekh, 2015). Social scientists, Marx argued, were responsible for further concealing reality
through the use of ‘faulty’ scientific assumptions. Only Marx’s socialism was true science
because it exposed the inherent contradictions of capitalist, bourgeois, society. Gramsci, the
Italian communist thinker of the interwar period, showed how ideology is used to legitimize the
capitalist order so that from this analysis we can also think about alternative ideological ideas.
The idea that socialism is a science that exposes the ideological manifestation and appearance
of society is largely untenable from a theoretical point of view but has been equally contradicted
by history itself.

This is not to say that there are no correct or scientifically based elements to be found in
socialism. Ideologies always postulate goals that explain, justify and orient people’s political
actions towards a particular goal, whether this leads to political actions that maintain a certain
social order (the liberal response to the challenge of terrorism), modify it (the far-right ‘dream’
of sending all ‘foreigners’ back to their country of origin) or seek to reinvent it in a revolutionary
way (the ideal of communist revolution). In this way, it makes perfect sense to treat socialism
as an ideology, just like the other ideologies (Eagleton, 2007).

Thus, science and ideology partly overlap but do not fully correspond. Ideologies and social
theories both start from specific assumptions, explain the social world, how and why it changes,
and provide a system of related concepts and ideas. But there are also crucial differences: social
theories are by definition conditional in the sense that science is always open to debate.
Arguments supported by facts can complement, nuance, endorse, or, conversely, criticize and
invalidate social theory. Social theory pursues objectivity (which remains an unattainable but
crucial goal), relies on reason, and is open to refutation. Although there is a great deal of
difference among ideologies and many changes have already occurred within ideologies, they
usually stick to the goal of providing certainty, clarity, and simplicity to the adherents of the

11
ideology. Nuance or doubt is not the best basis for inciting political action, which is why
ideologies describe themselves as closed, complete and finished (Neumann, 1997).

The outline of the book

This book aims to provide a critical introduction to the central ideas underpinning political
modernity: freedom, equality, solidarity and fraternity, and how they were conceived within
ideologies. In doing so, we follow the chronology of the evolutions of the various major
ideologies (liberalism, socialism, communism, conservatism...). This book is therefore not a
classical inventory of the ideas of important, mostly white and male, thinkers. Ideas of freedom,
equality and fraternity cannot be separated from the political, economic, cultural or religious
context in which they were formulated. Thus, the ideas of individuals or groups that are
described embody a particular way of thinking that is time-bound. These individuals or political
groups are therefore not seen as abstract heroes in the history of ideas, but rather as
embodiments of a particular time frame. Nor is the book organized on the basis of separate
chapters, each dealing with an ideology. Ultimately, I am less concerned with getting to the
heart of an ideology but rather with showing how within and between ideologies divergent,
contradictory, and constantly changing visions of freedom, equality, and solidarity have
occurred.
There remain, of course, some questions and practical issues that arise in writing such an
integrated history. First, there are limits to the number of details, to the number of facts that can
be included to contextualize certain ideas so that they remain clear to the reader. The focus on
liberty, equality and fraternity is a first criterion. Because of this, the reader will quickly
understand that many thinkers included in this book are only partially addressed. Kant, Hegel,
Gandhi, Abduh or Nietzsche have undoubtedly formulated important philosophical insights and
ideas, yet we only retain, in a synthetic way, their core ideas about freedom, equality and
fraternity. Although the evolution of science, medicine or technology has been indispensable in
human evolution, yet these milestones will only be mentioned here in passing. Just as the
influence of thinkers and intellectuals is sometimes overestimated, we must equally guard
against a technological determinism. Technology, science in general and medicine specifically,
and people together are the driving force of history; if only because ideas are often needed to
invent technologies.
A second problem is the choice of thinkers and political groups. In a history of emancipatory
thought, it seems impossible to ignore Hobbes, Marx, or Fanon, but how much importance
should be given to figures largely forgotten today, such as Holbach or Loyola? This is not only
a question of clarity, but also of our retrospective gaze which we use (un)willingly. The choice
of whether or not to include certain thinkers depends in part on the political debates in society
and the time in which we are writing. For example, starting in the 1960s, a conservative thinker
like Edmund Burke seemed like a relic of the distant past, good for academic debates but with
little social or political relevance. Today, the Burke Foundation is thriving as never before, and

12
several political parties, including the New Flemish Alliance (NVA), emphasize Burke’s
importance to their political programs. In my history, I have tried to choose mainly on the basis
of whether thinkers made statements about political conflicts and issues that illuminate the spirit
of a particular era. Nevertheless, it remains difficult to assess the relevance of particular thinkers
and their ideologies. There is not always a clear or direct connection between the writings of a
political thinker and their social success. No one would deny that Catholicism was the dominant
framework of thought in the Middle Ages in Europe and that this order was legitimized by the
Church in complex ways, but to what extent the ideas of Thomas Aquinas and his Summa
Theologica played a role in the daily life of the faithful serf or peasant is another matter. The
Church had other ways of establishing its power and control over the faithful. The same is true
of the labor movement. Marx may have been a symbol for all workers but few read Das Kapital.
In short, there is always a distance between a text and the way it impacts in reality. It is mainly
institutions and various forms of collective mobilization, from social movements over trade
unions to political parties, that make the ideology socially negotiable and thus more or less
successful.
Where do we begin our history, is a third question. Although modern political ideologies did
not emerge until the end of the eighteenth century, we turn back further in history to better
understand the slow and gradual emergence of political modernity. At the end of the fifteenth
century, the world changed dramatically. A series of expeditions from Spain and Portugal led
to the so-called “discovery” of the Americas (notwithstanding the fact that people had been
living there for centuries), new trade routes emerged, and people, goods, and ideas moved more
and faster than before. With this, a new economic system – capitalism – gradually emerged in
Britain. Over the centuries, that slowly made Europe the center of a global world system. It is
the beginning of five hundred years of a European, later Western, domination of the world that
is only today, with much conflict, being replaced by a post-Western world. The significance of
the rise of Europe is well summed up by the historian Frank Frankopan in a long quotation: “Its
rise, however, brought terrible suffering in newly discovered locations. There was a price for
the magnificent cathedrals, the glorious art and the rising standards of living that blossomed
from the sixteenth century onwards. It was paid by populations living across the oceans:
Europeans were able not only to explore the world but to dominate it. They did so thanks to the
relentless advances in military and naval technology that provided an unassailable advantage
over the populations they came into contact with. The age of empire and the rise of the west
were built on the capacity to inflict violence on a major scale. The Enlightenment and the Age
of Reason, the progression towards democracy, civil liberty and human rights, were not the
result of an unseen chain linking back to Athens in antiquity or a natural state of affairs in
Europe; they were the fruits of political, military and economic success in faraway continents.”
(Frankopan, 2017:197). In a story of human emancipation in which ideas about people and their
relationship to the state are central, the beginning of our history in the Renaissance seems
justified as long as we consider the global logic at work in the rise of capitalism. Capitalism

13
gradually replaced European feudalism, breaking the personal but highly unequal bond between
lord and serf and opening up the possibility of conceiving of human freedom and social
organization on a different basis. While the expansion of capitalism meant hardship and
exploitation for the masses in Europe and entailed a radical transformation of society as a whole,
capitalism meant even more hardship in the rest of the world in the form of slavery and
colonization (Yates, 2018). The break with the Middle Ages and its static order and vision of
man and society ushered in a time of emerging modern conceptions of human freedom and
equality.
A fourth, related issue relates to the predominantly Western, Eurocentric and patriarchal
character of classic histories of ideas and ideologies. For a long time, hardly any attention was
paid to female and non-Western thinkers or to thinkers who came from the working classes. As
a result, the biggest part of the world too often seems relegated to being a passive observer of
history with no input of its own, no ideas of equality or freedom, no active role in world affairs.
There is a growing body of research showing that racial and sexist prejudice has played an
important role in shaping some of the most important political ideas of political modernity.
Race and gender are not foreign concepts in political theory that need attention; rather, they are
constitutive components of modern political theory. As Choat (2020:8) rightly states,
“Modernity has been characterized by European colonial and imperialistic expansionism (...)
colonialism and its institutions have been justified and defended by many of the thinkers who
form the canon of modern political theory.” By focusing on the issue of emancipation and
political debates about equality, freedom, and fraternity or solidarity, this book aims to offer a
richer approach to the history of ideas. By describing important thinkers like Locke, Mill, or
De Tocqueville, all part of the “white” canon, on the issues of freedom, equality and fraternity,
I will be able to show both the richness of their thinking and their biases. This is about the
decolonization of the curriculum, about the recognition of the importance of colonialism in both
the creation of the ‘modern world’ and in the rise of the modern (social) sciences. This does not
at all mean that modern social theory should be rejected or that it has become irrelevant. By
taking into account the imperial and colonial context in which ideas about freedom and equality
were shaped, I aim to explain the limitations in thinking and thus create the possibility to
transcend them. This does not imply a relativistic position. Expanding what counts as
knowledge and increasing the supply of those who produce knowledge is a strong basis for
developing ‘better knowledge through dialogue and reconstruction (Bhambra & Holmwood
2021: 13). Criticism of the constitutive categories of modern ideologies but also social theory
leads to a reconstruction of these ideas based on the recognition of the importance of
colonialism and its intellectual legacies. The aim is to provide a more comprehensive account
of the rise of political and social modernity with the endpoint of creating knowledge that is
more effective in addressing contemporary debates and challenges. In doing so, I avoid what
Domenico Losurdo (2014) has called the “vulgar historicist” approach to the history of ideas,
which assumes that support for colonialism and slavery was so widespread or even universal

14
until the end of the 19th century that the racist ideas of Kant, Mill or De Tocqueville can simply
be dismissed as “part of an era”. The self-described narrative of modernity, and in it especially
of liberalism, is too idealistic. Liberalism sees itself as the product of the Enlightenment, the
dream of universal freedom that could come about through freedom itself. Liberalism seems to
be a framework devised by European and European-American white men who put a set of
universal principles into practice, realizing the modern capitalist state and bourgeois society
(Mann, 2012). Thus, we think of liberalism primarily as an ideology that stood up for political
rights and self-determination, but as Uday Mehta, among others, demonstrated, it equally served
to justify imperialism founded on political domination. Mehta (1999) argues that imperialism,
far from being at odds with basic liberal principles, in fact stemmed from liberal assumptions
about reason and historical progress. Faced with unfamiliar cultures, such as India, British
liberals could only consider them backward or infantile. Losurdo (2014) therefore argues that
this “paradox of liberalism” – simultaneaously demanding freedom in a European or American
context but justifying slavery, colonialism and imperialism abroad – only becomes
understandable if we do not see this as an accident de parcours, a derailing of reality that has
no relation to ideals. On the contrary, Losurdo argues, slavery is not something that persisted
despite the success of the three liberal revolutions (the Dutch, English and American). It
experienced its maximum development after that success and is inseparable from it. Let us
immediately add that this is the same problem for communism. If communism wants to reinvent
itself, as thinkers like Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek advocate, it will have to confront the
crimes of Stalinism, the historical example of a communism that existed for decades. Even in
the communist camp, it is not enough to place Stalin outside the ideals of communism and not
question the ideology itself.
However, this does not mean that when we demonstrate the shortcomings, biases, and
preconceived notions of those thinkers, that we should thereby cease to consider their ideas. It
is not so difficult to find the contradictions in the ideas of John Stuart Mills, which combined
criticizing slavery and advocating the emancipation of women, while at the same time harboring
racist ideas about non-European societies. Being aware of these limitations makes our view of
the past richer and with it the opportunities in the present to transcend those limitations. In this
way, we hope to contribute to a universalization of the ideals of the Enlightenment, a
universalization beyond the Eurocentric vision in which it was confined for too long.

Ideologies: back from never being gone?

In the early 1960s, the American sociologist Daniel Bell announced the end of ideologies. In
The End of Ideology: on the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, Bell (1960) attempted
to show that Marxism and socialism as well as classical liberalism had lost their appeal. The
sociologist was convinced that the call of the ‘inevitable collapse of capitalism’ or ‘the paradise
of an all-regulating market’ could no longer mobilize the masses. Bell felt that the people who
had lived through the Great Depression of the 1930s, people who had survived Stalinism,

15
Nazism, fascism, and World War II, were no longer willing to engage politically in ideas and
ideologies that seemed extreme. Instead, he claimed, they would opt for a pragmatic political
stance that was perfectly suited to the welfare state that took shape in the 1950s. Ideologies
would be replaced by a more instrumental reformism based on compromise, necessity, utility,
and scientific objectivity. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold War,
with the demise of the Soviet Union, Francis Fukuyama was quick to announce not only the
end of ideologies, but even the end of history. At the end of the twentieth century, ideological
conflicts seemed to be over for good. There seemed no alternative to the triumphant Western
liberal democracy consisting of free-market capitalism and parliamentary government. When
ideology and even history come to an end, politics disappears or turns into nothing more than
administration, governance or management. The mainly technical problems of the organization
and functioning of the state and the economy (the free market) then only need administrative
and technical solutions and not ideology. New forms of policy, or governance as it likes to be
called today, are introduced under the banner of technical efficiency and in the name of the
need for the ‘proper’ functioning of the market. We seem to have ended up in what the
Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek calls a ‘post-political situation,” a situation in which
oppositional ideologies embodied by different parties that competed for the voters’ favor within
democracy are replaced by a general consensus that capitalism and the free functioning of the
market are the basis of politics. By describing the economy as a neutral and natural domain,
politics is increasingly reduced to management in the name of efficiency, professionalism and
human resource management. Political events over the past decade contradicted these analyses.
The decade began with the self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor,
which set off a chain of uprisings throughout the Arab world. Other uprisings and mass
mobilizations around the world soon followed. From the Spanish Indignados, to the Greek
Syntagma uprising, to Occupy Wall Street; from mass mobilizations in Chile, China, Iran,
Sudan to climate strikes and more radical actions like those of Extinction Rebellion. While these
different forms of protest have emerged in very different historical, geopolitical and
geographical contexts, there has been a growing focus on what Revel and Negri (2011) have
called the common in revolt. These movements of pure refusal are not only reactions to the
consequences of the global economic crisis, but also reveal a “deep political malaise towards
democratic institutions” (Mouffe, 2013:109) or, as in the case of the revolts in the South, a
strong rejection of neoliberal authoritarianism. The 2010s have thus highlighted a global
renewed interest in the political. Discussions about climate change, about radicalization and
terrorism, about the global financial crisis of 2008, the Black Lives Matter movement or the
election of Trump, to say nothing about the corona pandemic, show that one can have fierce
debates not only about policymaking, elections or how power is exercised, about politics but
above all about the political, the whole of the structures which are induced by the relations of
authority and obedience and established with a view to a common end so that, at least, the group
does not break up… and this is precisely the terrain of ideological discussions.

16
Chapter 1: The unraveling of the medieval order (1450-1650)

History does not consist of isolated events, and it is not made by isolated people. The purpose
of historical study is to show the connections between events, and if (as in this book) the study
is presented in terms of people, the latter must illustrate the struggles and divisions of their
times. We are not presenting a portrait of heroes and villains, but an account of historical
changes in which sensitive and intelligent men have been involved, and through which they
have tried to find their way.
(Bronislaw & Mazlish, 1960:415)

Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion. The greatest of the revolutionary
upheavals that have shaped so much of the history of the past two centuries were episodes in
the history of faith - moments in the long dissolution of Christianity and the rise of modern
political religion.
(Gray 2007: 1)

Colonial knowledge both enabled conquest and was produced by it; in certain important
ways, knowledge was what colonialism was all about. Cultural forms in societies newly
classified as "traditional" were reconstructed and transformed by this knowledge, which
created new categories and oppositions between colonizers and colonized, European and
Asian, modern and traditional, West and East.
(Dirks 2001: 9).

The impact of the scientific revolution between 1500 and 1700 cannot be overstated. The
intellectual changes in thought that gradually took hold challenged the complex medieval order
and increasingly threatened the teachings of the Church. The European Renaissance refers to
various changes in politics, economics, the place of Christianity, and in thinking about man and
society that had a very slow but indelible impact on Western European societies, and from there,
soon on the rest of the world. Historians often characterized the Renaissance as a period in
which the arts and letters, based on a rediscovery of Antiquity, flourished. The Renaissance
began in Italy in the fourteenth century and spread throughout Europe over the next two
centuries. The term itself was first used by Italian humanists who used it to demonstrate that
after a long period of decline – the so-called Dark Ages – Europe was in a phase of rebirth.
However, the Renaissance was more than just a rediscovery of classical antiquity, it also refers
to the gradual demise of the feudal system and the emergence of new economic relations, to the
conquest of new lands and continents through the progression of seafaring, to the development
of new scientific insights (Copernicus...) and the introduction of knowledge from other
continents (compass, gunpowder...). This was the time in Europe when the old world order was
questioned. Not only did it appear that the earth was spherical and revolved around the sun,
human society and its organization were also questioned: the obviousness of the medieval order
was interrogated. With the Italian Renaissance, a new view on men, life and society gradually

17
emerged in which the individual would play an increasingly important role. However, the
innovative insights of the sciences did not lead to an immediate rejection of the theological
views of the Church. Unlike their successors, the fifteenth-century thinkers did not yet dare to
attack the omnipotence of the Church head-on, and they largely continued to legitimize their
ideas and views by appealing to the authority of either the thinkers of antiquity or the Church
(Russel, 1995 (1948):527). Thus, an initial period of the Renaissance centered on the
rediscovery of the classical works of antiquity, and in particular Platonic idealism. It therefore
did not immediately produce great philosophical achievements but it did lay the groundwork
for the later Enlightenment. The growing criticism of scholasticism led the “Renaissance to
make thinking again a worthwhile social adventure, rather than a monastic meditation aimed
at maintaining an already established orthodoxy” (Russel, 1995 (1948):531-532). The
Renaissance gradually became more empirical and future-oriented. Not the idealization of the
past but the belief in man’s future became central (Bronowski & Mazlisch, 1960). During the
Renaissance, a view of man gradually emerged that was no longer subordinate to the power of
the Church. Man, as a subject, became the central anchor of thought. The first scientific
discoveries (in which heliocentrism played a particularly important role) led to an enhanced
human self-awareness. The drive for knowledge, and the question of what knowledge was,
propelled human curiosity forward; humans wanted to understand and fathom the world but
also increasingly wanted to influence that same world and bend it to their will. Knowledge in
modern times broke with medieval knowing, with the hierarchical ordering of Christian
cosmology within which theology (as the highest form of knowledge) encompassed the truth
of all lower forms of knowing. These new ways of producing knowledge were developed by
the burgeoning sciences with their new mathematical and empirical methods of inquiry. No one
typified this gradual transition better than Leonardo Da Vinci.

1. Scientific progress and the gradual emancipation of politics

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519) was born near the town of Vinci (Tuscany) and grew up as an
adolescent within an artistic family in Florence. The Florence of the Medici-family remained
primarily a traditional city. With its beautiful libraries and solemn buildings, and with its
extolling of Greek and Roman works, the ideal image of Firenze’s leaders seemed to be mostly
situated in the past. Leonardo Da Vinci personified the gradual transition from this tradition-
oriented attitude to a more empirical one. The bigotry and idolization of the past gradually gave
way to a belief in the present and future of humanity.
This attitude was reflected in the rapid growth of the scientific method that Leonardo was
passionate about and with which he embarked on the study of nature. “He looked at her (nature,
sz) with two passions: a passion for the exact, which turned him to mathematics, and a passion
for the actual, which urged him to experiment. These two strands, the logical and the
experimental, have remained the two sinews of the scientific method ever since.” (Bronowski

18
& Mazlish, 1960: 11) His meticulous attention to detail in the study of nature was a sign of his
conviction that nature could be fathomed by study, by discovering the smallest structures that
made the larger whole clear. Humanists before Leonardo had already replaced the speculations
of the medieval scholastics with a return to the pagan authors of antiquity but Leonardo went
further in that he was interested not so much in the authority of these classical authors as in the
direct interpellation of nature. “When almost all thinking was still guided by universal and a
priori plans of nature, he made a single profound discovery. He discovered that nature speaks
to us in detail, and that only through the detail can we find her grand design. This is the
discovery at the base of modern science, all the way from atomic structures to genetics. '
(Bronowski & Mazlish, 1960: 18)

During the Renaissance, political power in a divided Italy lay with the city-states. The main
cities such as Milan, Venice, Rome, and Florence flourished from the fifteenth century onward
primarily through trade. The city-states were run by the aristocracies – not just the traditional
aristocracy by birth but also the highly successful bankers and merchants – but these
increasingly had to tolerate that a class of merchants was gaining power with its new economic
behaviors, habits, mores and values. The money earned through trade formed the core of the
power of the Italian cities and, very gradually, also changed the view on wealth and economic
activity supported by the Catholic Church. The classical vision of the Church prohibiting
interest (usury) gradually crumbled due to the need of merchants and traders to cover
themselves against the great risks still associated with sea trade with distant lands. To man and
send out merchant fleets required sums of money that a wealthy individual could not bear alone.
Borrowing money became a necessity, and so the profession of banker – long smeared – slowly
became respectable. Some of Italy’s greatest families, such as the Medici, began their rise to
power as bankers. Luxury and the ostentatious display of wealth was an expression of success
so the desire for even greater luxury was an important drive for the activities of the city-states.
However, this also meant that trade was unproductive for a long time. Little was yet created or
produced (with the exception of food). Trade primarily involved the exchange of certain goods
for a certain amount of money. Very few products were yet systematically produced to be sold.
The Renaissance did break with the Church’s narrow medieval view of wealth.

A new, more dynamic, view on economic activities developed. Mercantilism assumed that the
sovereign had the task of developing the nation’s income. By relying on the growing power of
merchants, who gained access to precious metals and other lucrative products (such as spices)
through gradual colonization, the king would increase the commercial development of the
nation and thus further build his own power as well. Foreign trade, or plunder of the wealth of
the countries and territories that were subjugated, led to the triumph of the absolute states of the
ancien régime from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

19
Not only in the economic sphere did a slow process of secularization begin. New ideas were
also developing in the politics of the city-states, heralding the beginning of political modernity.
The city-states were no longer led by tradition, Church or clergy, although these continued to
play an important role, but by men with vision and creativity. Politics thus no longer became
the management of an order willed by God but rather a work of art, carried by the art of
statesmanship. The first modern political treatise on the subject was written in the last years of
Leonardo’s life; Il Principe by Nicollo Machiavelli.

The humanist and Latinist Machiavelli (1469-1527) broke with the traditional mirrors for
princes that advised the ruler how to behave as a godly leader. Machiavelli was not so much
interested in describing moral or honorable behavior or how a society should be led but in the
factuality of how a society was concretely governed and how people behaved. In the Middle
Ages, a mirror for princes was a manual for future monarchs, a book that listed the ideals of
kingship so that the future monarch was presented with an idealized mirror on which to focus
his behavior. Writing mirrors was a way to influence power, to gain favor with kings and their
courts. The mirrors always encouraged virtue while power was always seen as a burden to be
borne, entrusted by God. Machiavelli’s “revolutionary new intervention was that in his
sovereign’s mirror he described the real and not the ideal face of the sovereign, so that the
mirror reflected something that the sovereign did not want to see under any circumstances.”
(Ehnmark, 1988:8-9) By rejecting morality as the basis of a reflection on politics, Machiavelli
introduced a more scientific view on human social behavior. To do so, Machiavelli relied on
empiricism which assumed that knowledge came from experience. Machiavelli formulated
some postulates about human behavior that reinforced his logical and rational pragmatism.

His main premise was that human nature was always and everywhere the same. Human nature
was simultaneously good and bad but for the purposes of politics one had to assume that man
was inherently bad. Crucial to Machiavelli’s approach was the scientific method which sought
to focus on the essence of politics and not its contextual manifestation. However, his universal
scientific ambition remained largely speculative. Machiavelli’s postulates did not so much arise
from the analysis of facts but, conversely, his facts ran from the postulates with which he started.
“His political philosophy is scientific and empirical, based on his own experiences in practice,
aimed at providing the means for the attainment of predetermined ends, regardless of whether
they are to be regarded as good or bad.” (Russel, 1995 (1948):536) Nevertheless, his
empiricism and rationalism proved to lay the groundwork for a later scientific approach to
politics. Moreover, the emancipation of politics from the religious heralded the gradual
secularization of life and thought. Machiavelli offered two criticisms of the Church: “She has
undermined religious belief by her bad conduct; furthermore, the secular power of the popes
and the politics to which this power leads prevent the unification of Italy.” (Russel, 1995
(1948):537-538) Machiavelli noted that “certainly, if the Christian religion had from the

20
beginning been maintained according to the principles of its founder, the Christian states and
republics would have been much more united and happy than what they are. Nor can there be
a greater proof of its decadence than to witness the fact that the nearer people are to the Church
of Rome, which is the head of our religion, the less religious are they. And whoever examines
the principles upon which that religion is founded, and sees how widely different from those
principles its present practice and application are, will judge that her ruin or chastisement is
near at hand. ' (Machiaveli, 1900:157) Although anticlerical, Machiavelli’s secularism by no
means implied an antireligious attitude. Machiavelli recognized the importance of religion as
social cement, as that which bounded people together. By approaching religion not as a spiritual
force but as a more objectified force, he made possible a secularized analysis of religion.

Il Principe is thus not a philosophical treatise but an analysis of politics as an art stripped of
morality and religion. Although the title of the work suggests that Machiavelli wrote the book
as advice for a ruler, he actually wrote more about the state. Machiavelli assumed, incorrectly
by the way, that the ruler coincided with the state. Machiavelli who lived in a divided Italy
explicitly wanted Italy to build a strong state that would have its place in the concert of nations,
a strong unitary state in which order and security were assured. This state was not to be
legitimized on the basis of religion, tradition or history but only on the basis of the results it
could present.

The raison d'état (state interest) became an end in itself and to strenghthen it, all means were
legitimate; persuasion, stratagems, deception could and should be employed if necessary.
Violence, or at least potential violence, was indispensable. A reliable army was therefore an
important prerequisite for anyone wishing to exercise and maintain power. Machiavelli
advocated the creation of a people’s army, an army that was willing to fight because it had
something to lose and not an army made up of mercenaries who fought only for their reward.
Laconically, Machiavelli noted that when people spoke of freedom, they actually meant
security. For Machiavelli, certainty meant first and foremost order but above all the inviolability
of private property. He was convinced that a population tolerated any regime, even a
dictatorship, as long as its private property (including women and children), was not touched.
It was therefore appropriate for the ruler to try to be loved by the people and to try to rule by
consensus. “But as it is difficult to couple love and fear together, it is safer, when one has to
miss one, to be feared than loved.” The reason for this is quite obvious: “Whether one will love
thee depends on men, whether one will fear thee depends on thee”. The fact that morality seems
to have been completely pushed aside in this regard led to the adage that the end justifies the
means; the basis of popular Machiavellianism. By separating politics from morality,
Machiavelli made possible a secularization of politics but at the same time drew attention to the
cynicism of political life. The sovereign’s responsibility to God was abolished or simply
neglected. The monarch is accountable only to himself and his subjects; with regard to God,

21
according to Machiavelli, he can keep up appearances, or not (Ehnmark, 1988:105). The
secularization of political theory undermined the religious legitimization of monarchy and made
it more difficult for the Church to legitimize its power.

Thomas More (1478-1535), like Machiavelli, was a statesman and writer who sought to
understand the political reality in which he lived and the social problems that he witnessed.
Thomas More was a deeply Christian man who was convinced that the state should actually be
there for its members and sympathized with the extreme poverty that afflicted a significant
portion of the British people. His most famous work Utopia describes the fictional travelogue
of the adventurer Raphael Hythlodaeus who visited the paradise island of Utopia on one of his
journeys.
In the first part of the work, More describes the social and economic devastation of the British
countryside in the sixteenth century. The development of the wool industry, and the financial
gain that came with it, led the Tudor family to set up large sheep farms. This first enclosure
movement (enclosure of land) changed traditional farming based on communal management of
land with open fields to a system of private land ownership or private ownership of farmland
separated by fences or hedges. This had dramatic consequences for most farmers who were
massively deprived of their livelihood. Together with the private ownership of land, and thus
the very gradual entry of capitalism, modern poverty emerged.
In the second part, More describes the ideal island, which reads like a positive mirror image of
the England of his day and age. The island is based on the common ownership of the means of
production and has no trade based on money. The islanders live without money and the
exchange of products is organized collectively. Thus, the private accumulation of wealth that
More saw in England as the cause of misery did not exist there. As a result, the Utopians lived
peacefully with each other. The Utopians recognized Christian doctrine and the public morality
of the island was based on the desire to live in harmony with nature and God’s will (indecency,
gambling, polygamy and adultery were forbidden).

The desire to create an ideal society in which money had no place seems to hide a desire for a
return to an ideal, Christian, medieval order. However, More was convinced that the medieval
order was crumbling and that a new economic order was emerging, an order he feared. As a
humanist, More was attentive to the unacceptable growing inequality that came along with the
emergence of the new, early capitalist, economic order. His views on money and prices were
still largely in line with the Church’s position. The doctrine of the right price held that the price
of a good was determined by the needs of both parties (buyer and seller) to maintain themselves
in their status. The idea of making the price dependent on supply and demand seemed repugnant
to More, since he realized that such pricing could be influenced by all sorts of illegal practices
to the advantage of the socially privileged. Utopia, however, remains a satire of the England of
his day. Outopos in Greek means ‘nowhere’, a ‘non-place’, and shows that More, who had the

22
best interests of the people at heart, could not or did not translate this into reforms or changes
in reality. “I wish it more than I hope for it”, he stated. More was no doubt driven by feelings
of justice. He saw the impoverishment of the population and understood that this dynamic was
not the result of mysterious forces or God’s will. He was well aware that poverty and inequality
went hand in hand with the advancing new socio-economic relationships. But because he could
not yet understand how these relationships were precisely shaped, that is, because he did not
yet understand the logic and laws of the market, he had no choice but to project his ideal into
another, imaginary, world.

2. The end of Catholic hegemony: reformation and counterreformation

Luther (1483-1546) was the son of an educated miner from Eisenach who sent him to the
University of Erfurt at the age of 17, hoping he would become a lawyer. At university, Luther
came into contact with the intellectual and theological conflict between scholastics and
humanists. Humanism saw the light of day during the Renaissance and culminated in the figures
of Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More. It had its origins in the renewed attention to classical
Greek and Roman works. More than a literary movement, humanism was an intellectual
movement that expressed a new self-awareness of the human spirit in which love of man and
nature stood central (Bronowski & Mazlish, 1960:61-63). Humanists opposed scholastic
dogmatic arguments and reasoning, but were not anti-religious. Like all reform movements, the
protets of the humanists was primarily directed at the abuses of the Church. Humanists
criticized the clergy, but not Christianity. On the contrary, most humanists thought they were
purging Christianity of the many errors the medieval Church had made in its faith.

While Luther was sympathetic to the humanists, he kept away from the dispute because he was
more interested in the search for God and the direct experience of piety, as opposed to the
philosophical thinking of the humanists or the dogmas of the scholastics. A trip to Rome in
1510 changed Luther’s life. Overwhelmed by religiosity and piety, he was shocked by the
decadent lifestyle of priests and bishops up to the pope. On All Saints Day, October 31, 1517,
Luther nailed 95 Theses of Indulgence to the gate of the church in Wittenberg, rebelling against
the decadence of the Church. Luther initially protested the far-reaching commercialization of
indulgences because they undermined, in his view, faith itself. Indulgences were the remission
by God of punishments for sins committed. After the believer confessed his sins, showed
repentance, and throug financial payment, the punishments could be remitted by the Church. In
practice, indulgences had become a trade in which the Church enriched itself. With his criticism
of indulgences, Luther undermined the theologic core of the Church. It was only a small step
from the idea that without repentance no remission of temporal punishment was possible, to the
idea that repentance alone, without the intervention of the Pope or the Church, was sufficient.
By emphasizing repentance and personal piety to achieve salvation of the soul, Luther wanted

23
to show that there was no need for sacraments and an administration to organize it, i.e., no need
for a Church.

Luther thus sought first and foremost the religious liberation of man, the creation of a direct
link between the individual and his God without the intervention of an ecclesiastical institution.
However, this religious radicalism was linked to a political conservatism and an economic
vision that remained by and large medieval in its outlook. Luther himself had no concrete state
system or organization in mind, but he emphasized that all believers should submit to a strong
authority. Luther enjoyed the support of both humanists and early German nationalists.
Humanists first supported Luther’s criticism of the excesses and sinfulness of the Church, but
when they realized that Luther was not trying to reform the Church from within but was
attacking the institution itself, most humanists turned their backs on him. German princes,
knights, merchants, and peasants supported Luther for political and economic reasons. For
decades the German princes denounced the greed of the ‘Italian’ popes and saw Luther as an
ideal ally. When Luther ordered the princes to expropriate the land and property of Catholic
clergy, it became clear that Luther’s universal message ended in the establishment of a German
Church and that what began as a religious reformation became entangled in political and
economic struggles and embedded in German social and national aspirations.

For Luther, it was clear that the religious liberation of man did not go hand in hand with equality
in this world: “An earthly kingdom cannot exist without inequality. Some must be free, others
must serve, some must be rulers and others must be subjects.” When, in 1525, peasants led by
the radical theologian and humanist Thomas Müntzer (who was inspired by Luther’s teachings)
revolted throughout Saxony against the greed of the nobles, Luther quickly turned against it.
The peasant revolt was led by the movement of Anabaptists who radicalized Luther’s teachings.
Based on the ideals of original Christianity, the peasants demanded a society in which work and
private property were common and in which there was overall equality. As a result, the
Anabaptists rejected the institution of the Church. They also thought they were in direct contact
with the Holy Spirit and therefore did not need the Bible for guidance. Luther, however, rejected
the idea of a social revolution and labeled the revolt a heresy. He advised the rulers to be tough
on the peasants, to eliminate them where necessary and not to shy away from the use of force.
All men may have been equal before God, but those who rebelled against worldly authority
were to be severely repressed, or as Luther put it in muscular Christian language, “Anyone who
can, must crush, strangle and kill them, secretly or openly, just like killing a mad dog.” The
princes destroyed the peasant revolt resulting in 100,000 deaths. Luther, of course, lost a lot of
support from peasants and townspeople, but with the nobility behind him he was able to spread
his teachings further. Luther was convinced that serfdom was necessary in an unequal society
and therefore demanded obedience. Neither oppression nor injustice was to be an excuse for
rebellion. Only spiritual demands were to be made by serfs. This powerful call for strong

24
authority came paradoxically from Luther’s conviction that Christianity had nothing to do with
politics. The inner freedom of faith could only be freely experienced if political power was
blindly obeyed, otherwise peace would give way to anarchy and conflicts that would make
spirituality impossible.

Luther thus became an exponent of the proto-nationalism of the German nobility. He extracted
the German states from the authority of Rome and can be considered a pioneer of greater
German unity. Luther also maintained the medieval suspicion of trade and finance. In his view,
economic utility was subordinate to moral rule, and usury was one of the worst sins. He saw
society as a distributional system, where everyone worked in his own place, where goods were
traded at a fair price, and where production for the sake of production and profit was prohibited.
Foreign trade and imports from distant countries should not be allowed. Luther also condemned
Copernicus, whom he described as a fool who wanted to turn astrology on its head. The same
Luther who condemned medieval superstition and the perfidious practices of the Roman Church
still lived in a world populated by dark forces and demons. The fact that he attacked the power
of the Church in no way meant that he had a high opinion of free inquiry or personal freedom.
Luther was a product of agrarian Germany and can hardly be seen as a mouthpiece for
mercantilist capitalists.

Calvin (1509-1564), rejected Catholic doctrine in 1533, fled France and settled in Basel,
Switzerland, where there was more religious tolerance. There the twenty-six-year-old began
what would later become, after many additions and modifications, his magnum opus The
Institutes of the Christian Religion. In contrast to Luther’s impassioned style, Calvin’s work
was an attempt to codify a rational and logically constructed morality, state order, and dogma.
Central to Calvin’s dogma was the assumption that man was a helpless creature in the face of
God’s omnipotence. Calvin radicalized Luther’s view by assuming that man’s fate was fixed
and he could do nothing about it because it was God’s will. In other words, man was predestined
for heaven or hell. In this predestination, man could only seek signs of God’s favor in this
worldly life.

In 1537 Calvin arrived in Geneva where he had been asked by a French evangelist to reform
the local church. Calvin, who by then was already considered a leader of the Protestant
Reformation, had great moral power over the inhabitants of the city. However, his harsh
teachings had also angered many citizens who eventually denied him access to the city for many
years. Calvin’s followers were able to convince him (and the citizens of Geneva) to return. He
only accepted on the condition that his Ordannances ecclésiastiques and Ordonnances sur le
régime du peuple would be accepted without any conditions. Those who rejected these
Ordonnances left the city, were imprisoned or executed. Calvin’s power was now not only
moral, but clearly also political.

25
Geneva was a trading city. For Calvin, profits made through trade could not be judged any
differently than other forms of income, after all, profits were the result of the diligence and hard
work of individuals. Self-realization and work ethic were important values for Calvin. How
then could the result of this labor, the wealth created, be objectionable? However, wealth was
not there to serve pomp and circumstance. Believers had to demonstrate an ascetic walk of life,
live in the fear of God, and banish pleasures. So money could only be spent usefully: as capital.
With this ethic, Calvin clearly embraced the newly emerging (early capitalist) economic order.
In other words, Calvin rejected the Catholic prohibition of interest, but regulated the use of
interest through strict ethical rules and christian moral values.

Calvin’s political principles, as practiced in Geneva, were the expression of a religious zeal. In
the Ordinances, Calvin explained how the theocracy of Geneva was to be organized. The
government consisted of a ministry and a consistory. The ministry comprised a disciplined
group of Protestant preachers who accepted and spread Calvin’s rigorous teachings. While the
ministry embraced religious doctrine, the consistory was responsible for practical morality in
the city. The consistory also acted as a kind of court where it investigated complaints about
morality and handed down (often very severe) punishments. Thus, questions of morality were
turned into legal questions subject to the power of the ruling government. Calvin’s church was
thus not only an institution that organized the worship of God, but also an institution that sought
to perfect humanity so that it could worship God. Calvin and his church enforced these precepts
with a heavy hand. Like Luther, Calvin rejected the new scientific insights that were slowly
spreading in Europe.

In Calvin’s view, there was no doubt that worldly authority was subject to the religious.
However, this theocracy broke with the traditional forms of religious order. Calvin’s dictatorial
theocratic regime (to use modern parlance), which tolerated no dissent or deviation, was
paradoxically also the breeding ground for a gradual development of individual freedom and
political individualism. The medieval hierarchical order gradually gave way to equal obligation
to the law. The worship of God and piety no longer depended on an individual’s social origin,
but on the extent to which he realized himself through labor. A person’s place in society was
no longer a consequence of descent.

Although the Reformation was initially a religious reform movement, it had secular
consequences that left an important mark on European history in the centuries that followed.
One of the important consequences of the Reformation was the strengthening of the territorial
state. Another consequence was the growth of a middle class throughout Europe and its role in
the emerging capitalist economic order. Luther and Calvin initially sought to purge the Church
of the ballast of traditions and superstition by returning to the so-called essence of the faith but,
unwittingly and unintentionally, they thereby foreshadowed modern times.

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3. Colonial encounters: the dispute of Valladolid

In 1550-1551, the king of Spain organized a dispute about whether Spanish war was permissible
on the American continent, about the spread of Catholicism, and about the religious and
intellectual capacities of the American indigenous peoples. It was thus the first moral debate in
European history about the treatment of indigenous populations, subjugated and conquered
peoples, at the time of Spanish colonization. It was a moral and theological debate, anchored in
the economic exploitation of the colonies. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1489-1573) defended the
view that the indigenous peoples should be forcibly converted, justifying war against them.
Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484-1566) rejected this evangelization by the sword and advocated
the ‘peaceful’ conversion of the indigenous peoples and fought for more humane treatment.

Sepúlveda, confessor of the emperor, philosopher, theologian, and humanist considered the use
of excessive force to break the opposition of the indigenous peoples to Catholicism permissible.
Sepúlveda considered them barbarians, as “monkeys” who were barely able to think for
themselves and therefore incapable of governing themselves. Therefore, it was justified to
subjugate these peoples even before they were converted. Sepúlveda cited four arguments: the
indigenous peoples were idolaters, they were “slaves” by nature, they practiced human
sacrifice, cannibalism and sodomy, and their subjugation would facilitate the work of the
missionaries. Wars had to be fought to eradicate their “crimes against nature”. Relying on the
Aristotelian doctrine of natural slavery – the idea that some people are inherently inferior and
therefore destined to be ruled by their ‘superior’ – Sepúlveda justified the Spanish policy of
conquest (Brunstetter & Zartner, 2011).

The Dominican friar de Las Casas, bishop of Chiapas, opposed the use of violence to bring the
indigenous peoples of the Americas to Christianity. Indigenous peoples were not barbarians at
all, he argued in a critique of Sepúlveda’s Aristotelian analysis. On the contrary, he claimed,
they were very talented and willing to accept the Christian religion. De Las Casas, however,
did not deny the existence of “natural slavery” but distinguished the indigenous peoples from
Aristotle’s barbarians. Therefore, the indigenous peoples were not to be forced to become
Christians through war, violence and oppression. The message of Christ was to be spread
peacefully and persuasively. War was only justified in specific circumstances, such as when,
after their Christianization, indigenous peoples would shed the Christian faith and thus become
heretics. War against heretics and unbelievers was justified but not against the indigenous
peoples because they were not heretics who needed to be punished.

The dispute, which was conducted mainly on theoretical grounds, was equally linked to the
economic interests of the colonial conquests in which the interpenetration between church and
state, between God and gold, between king and missionary was central. The Spanish missionary

27
in the sixteenth century was simultaneously a priest and an officer of the king. Evangelization
was closely linked to the accumulation of gold and was thus a political and economic enterprise.
Even when Christopher Columbus landed in the America, it was not clear whether the
indigenous peoples should be approached as humans or beasts. Some scholars affirmed that the
Native Americans were merely simple individuals with limited knowledge of their rights, while
others claimed that they were beasts or inferior beings in a human form. Nevertheless, the
colonizers had to provide legislation that organized the colonies politically and economically
(Parise, 2008). The Spanish conquerors, the conquistadores, were rewarded by the king with
the labor of the non-Christian subjugated peoples, the encomienda. Although slavery was
officially outlawed and the indigenous peoples were seen as “free vassals of the Crown,” the
encomienda system was one of forced labor, discipline, and control, a form of group slavery
subject to extreme punishment or death if the indigenous people resisted. Individuals within the
assigned encomienda organized for the colonizers the labor that had to be provided. In return,
the Spaniards had to ensure that the indigenous populations received the ‘gift’ of Catholicism
and the Spanish language and protect them from any attacks (which was ultimately to the
advantage of the Spaniards since otherwise they lost their free labor). Out of “gratitude for these
Spanish benefits” the indigenous peoples had to provide meat, metals, corn, wheat and other
agricultural products. For the indigenous peoples, Christianity and slavery went hand in hand.
For them there was no Christianity in freedom, and no freedom in Christianity.

The king, who wanted to keep the encomiendas under control, was open to the arguments of
the Las Casas, and even before the dispute of Valladolid the system was partially reformed. By
1537 the pope had declared the indigenous peoples to be rational, and in 1542 the New Laws
were introduced to even abolish the system. In some of the colonies this succeeded but it would
take until 1791 for the encomienda to disappear from the Spanish Empire. The dispute itself
ended with no clear winner, both camps claiming to have won.

The importance of the debate lies partly in its limits. De Las Casas may have had a lasting
influence on the better treatment of indigenous peoples, at least by the Church, but his ideas did
not have too great an impact. De Las Casas also realized, in a posthumously published work,
that his defense of Native Americans had likely fueled the transatlantic slave trade of Africans.
It was the Portuguese who had sent the first slave ships to Brazil in the first half of the sixteenth
century to sell the kidnapped Africans as cheap labor without any rights. De Las Casas stated
that he had mistakenly assumed that black Africans were “slaves” by nature. The humanity of
the Native Americans was thus partially acknowledged, by denying the humanity of the black
Africans. The limits of de Las Casas’ humanity thus became clear and also one of the main
points of discussion concerning human emancipation, namely the relationship between
ourselves and the Other, which in reality amounted to the relationship between an expanding
Europe and the territories that were being overrun and populations that were oppressed or

28
thrown into slavery. De Las Casas could only imagine equality in terms of similarities. The
indigenous populations “are by nature equal to Europeans, only in so far as they are potentially
European, or rather potentially Christian”. Bringing the Native Americans under the
‘charitable and benevolent religion’ was, for de Las Casas, the only path to human liberation.
The indigenous peoples “are undeveloped potential Europeans” and in this sense de Las Casas
is partial “to a discourse on the ameliorability of savages that extends well into the twentieth
century... He recognizes that humanity is one, but fails to see that humanity is at the same time
also composed of many” (Hardt & Negri, 2002:126).

The arguments that de Las Casas and Sepúlveda presented in the debate show that in the
encounter with the Other there is a gradual break with medieval political Augustinianism, the
subordination of politics to religion or theology (Fabre, 2006). The dispute was exceptional in
the sense that, for the first time, a country was accused of waging a non-just, non legitimate,
war. This was primarily a political problem for the king. His desire to limit the power of the
great encomiendas led him to temporarily halt the conquest. De Las Casas articulated the
interests of the royal family, Sepúlveda of the colonizers. Importantly, the entire dispute was
organized completely above the heads of those involved, the Native Americans. The debate was
a European self-dialogue, Spain thought to integrate a ‘new race’ into the European worldview
but forgot to hear the indigenous peoples themselves. The Medieval order gradually gave way
to the subordination of the religious to the political – the use of religious arguments to either
emphasize the humanity of the other, or coversely to support colonial policies – a debate that
would develop fully with the Enlightenment.

The Valladolid dispute also kicked off the simultaneous spread of capitalism, slavery, and
racism. Emphasizing the racial nature of capitalist expansion, which came into full swing in
North America beginning in 1619, offers us a contemporary perspective on the history of
progress, to look at it also from the standpoint of the oppressed (the Native Americans, Africans,
Asians, Jews, and later Muslims) and to note that for much of humanity, the encounter with
Western Europe was not initially a story of emancipation and progress, of enlightenment and
reasonableness, but a long story of suffering, violence, oppression, and humiliation (Virdee,
2014 and 2019). The emancipation of colonized peoples therefore became a continuous focus
in the human history of progress. Even after the wave of decolonization in the twentieth century,
debates about decolonization continue, from the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S. to
initiatives to decolonize universities.

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4. The glorious revolution
“Around the beginning of the seventeenth century, a new mentality began to emerge, determined
on the one hand by the successes in technology and mathematics, and on the other by factors
such as socio-economic changes, the discoveries of new continents, the effects of the
Reformation, and especially by the printing press.” (Vermeersch & Braeckman, 2019:114). The
rise of the bourgeois system of production for profit and private ownership, the transformation
of land into a tradable commodity, the change of agriculture as a system of production for local
consumption to a system of production for the market, the rising prices, and the growing
criticism toward the guilds (which were an obstacle to the free market) led to a conflict between
parliament and royalty in England that culminated in a civil war with religious overtones.

King Charles I based his personal rule on divine law. He adopted his father’s view that kings
were the “little gods on earth” and thus were above any possible power or law. Although British
tradition assumed that the king’s power was somewhat limited by natural law and common law,
in practice Charles I turned out to pursue a despotic policy that brought him into conflict with
Parliament on several occasions. In 1629 Charles I had dissolved parliament but was forced,
due to a shortage of funds to keep his armies going, to reconvene parliament. The new
parliament, the Long Parliament, was reluctant to meet the king’s demands for money and used
the king’s financial weakness to formulate its own grievances. In the Grand Remonstrance, the
parliament listed its objections to the monarch’s political, legal, religious, and financial policies.
Although the document expressed itself cautiously towards the person of the king himself, it
did target the Roman Catholic Church, and in doing so, parliament seemed to side with the
Puritans – English Protestants who wanted to purge the Church of any Roman Catholic
influence and who desired a further reform of the Anglican Church. The constitutional conflict
between king and parliament (over the limitation of the king’s power) thus also took on a quasi-
religious character. The king’s failure to respond to the Grand Remonstrance led parliament to
address the document not only to the king but also to make it public. In the end, the king replied,
reaffirming his belief in Protestantism but otherwise refusing to comply with just about every
demand of parliament. By making the conflict public, the conflict also acquired a social
character.

The Puritan revolt remained primarily a political and religious constitutional struggle because
in seventeenth-century England social groups defined themselves primarily as religious-
political communities rather than as socio-economic groups, which would not happen
consciously until much later. Although there was indeed a social aspect to the Puritan revolt, it
remained largely unconscious. Marxist historian Christopher Hill (1969) argues that the English
civil wars were a class struggle in which the despotism of Charles I was defended by the
reactionary forces of the established church and the conservative large landowners. Parliament
could defeat the king, Hill further argues, because it could call on the support of the urban and

30
rural mercantile and industrial classes, the progressive sections of the nobility, and, if necessary,
the wider population. This analysis must be qualified in the sense that the classes of which Hill
spoke did not always fulfill the role attributed to them by Hill: parliament was not always
progressive, part of the rural gentry sided with parliament while many citizens sided just with
the king.

The conflict between the king and parliament led to a first (1642-1646) and a second (1648-
1649) civil war in which Oliver Cromwell, the military leader of parliament, played a crucial
role. Cromwell, a man of nobility who grew up in a culture of Puritanism, supported the
rebellion against the king because he believed that if the monarch could freely levy taxes, it
made private property insecure for the citizens. He therefore felt that the king’s omnipotence
was unjust. An even more important motivation for supporting the rebellion was Cromwell’s
belief in freedom of belief, in other words in the freedom of the individual to practice his own
faith, insofar as it was a form of Protestantism and to the extent that the believer considered his
faith a private matter. Cromwell had called his troops the New Model Army because he
established them on a new principle in warfare, namely the conviction of the soldier for the
cause for which he fought, rather than using mercenaries. Cromwell could exhibit statesmanship
and diplomacy but, if necessary, he could equally act ruthlessly against enemies, which he
legitimized as being a cruel necessity. The New Model Army was an important innovation in
political history because for the first time civilians were conscripted as soldiers to fight for
ideological reasons and thus participate on the political scene. From this point of view, the New
Model Army was a distant forerunner of the democratic armies of the twentieth century.
More radical political discussions also took place within the New Model Army. The Levellers,
led by John Lilburne, Richard Overton and William Walwyn stood for a more democratic and
social message than Cromwell who expelled them from the New Model Army as early as 1648.
The Levellers opposed both royal and parliamentary rule and blamed Cromwell for replacing
the king’s tyranny with a new tyranny that was no better. Driven by a spiritual and religious
inspiration peculiar to Puritanism, they argued for more direct political input from the people.
The institutionalized church was dismissed as a bastion of hypocrisy and merchants blamed for
oppressing the poor with their monopolies. The political views of the Levellers were brought
together in the Agreement of the People. The Agreement put the principle of popular sovereignty
at its core but, for practical reasons, power should be delegated through elections. The Levellers
therefore argued for an extension of the right to vote and elected representatives would sit for
only two years. Executive power lay with the Council of State whose powers were spelled out
precisely. The Levellers tolerated religious differences and favored religious freedom. Courts
were to be reformed, judicial procedures simplified, and offered in a language that ordinary
citizens could understand.

31
For the Levellers, the greatest social fault line was the conflict between rich and poor. Yet we
must ask what they meant by this. Who was the people to whom the Levellers ascribed
sovereignty? The Levellers argued that the poor, artisans and peasants belonged to the people
but not the workers nor the unemployed. This was reflected in their views on voting rights. The
universal principle of generalized suffrage was in practice reserved for a select group of men
within society. In the patriarchal views of the Levellers, women (as well as children and
domestic servants) were subordinate to the breadwinner of the family, the man, and were
therefore denied the right to vote. Beggars and the unemployed were also not allowed to vote
because they would not have the appropriate work ethic (which so typified the Puritans), nor
were laborers, anyone who was paid a wage.

From their conviction, the Levellers also defended private property. Why should people work
if the results of that work were not untouchable? Or when it should be shared with others who
do not work? And why should men fight for their land if it is not to protect their property
(including wife and children)? With this position, the Levellers came into conflict with an even
more radical group, the Diggers. The Diggers advocated economic equality based on the
teachings of the apostles and actually sought to reform the existing social order. Their agrarian
lifestyle was based on creating small, egalitarian rural communities which they built on
communal lands and seemed to install a kind of primitive communism. Both the Levellers and
the Diggers were ultimately defeated; they were never more than peripheral groups in the course
of the English Revolutions. Nevertheless, they represented the more egalitarian and democratic
aspirations of the people, ideas that would inspire the later working class. Cromwell eventually
signed the death warrant of Charles I who was beheaded in 1649 and dissolved the Long
Parliament because it opposed his growing power and replaced it with the Rump Parliament.
Immediately, a third civil war (1649-1651) began between Charles II’s supporters and the
Parliament. In 1651, when the forces of Parliament finally prevailed, Cromwell became Lord
Protector (he refused the crown) of the English Republic. Cromwell died in 1658 allowing the
royalists to once again seize power. In 1660, the monarchy was reinstated. Charles II had
Cromwell’s corpse exhumed, hanged, and even beheaded.

The events in England did not have much impact on the situation of women. Most of the
churches, which still had a large influence, still saw women as inferior to men, and destined to
fulfill the role of wife or mother. Yet, for the first time, there were schisms within the Protestant
churches in which women -) who were considered equal to men before God by Quakers and
Anabaptists – came more to the fore. Women, incidentally, also took an active part in the
Levellers’ rebellion, although the Levellers did not claim the right to vote for them. In this
context, the work of Mary Astell (1666-1731) was groundbreaking. Astell, herself a devout
believer, criticized the Church’s view that women were subordinate to men. God had created
men and women both with intelligence and the ability to think. It was men, according to Astell,

32
who subjugated women, not God. By making women dependent and making it impossible for
them to think for themselves, men were actually insulting God’s will. For Astell, teaching
women was the way to greater equality. Long before feminism emerged as a concept, Astell
laid its foundations with her ideas.

With the return of the monarchy, one could conclude that the Puritan revolution failed
politically, but the Puritans were involved in the reformulation of ideas and ideals about
tolerance, a free church and a limited state (the limitation of the king’s omnipotence) that
reflected their belief in political, religious and economic individualism. In this sense, they
helped underpin the first modern ideas of citizenship, the restricted powers of a government or
a monarch that had lasting influence.

The scientific developments in Europe and the English Revolution were also accompanied by
changes in the worldview of various thinkers. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) emphasized that
through knowledge man was able to know and control nature. Man could, through observation
and experiment – the only source of truth: experience – fathom from the private and particular
the larger laws of nature. That knowledge is power was probably first formulated by Bacon,
and ushered in the advance of science. The speculative and theoretical nature of philosophy was
to be replaced by an experience-based method. Before man can put his experience at the service
of knowledge, however, he must first free himself from prejudices and erroneous views, the so-
called idols, that can impede his judgment.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was impressed by the new scientific insights of Galileo, which
broke with the static view of man and the world that had prevailed until then. He wanted to
explain all phenomena, including human behavior, on the basis of the movement, the dynamics,
of matter. As a defender of critical inquiry, Thomas Hobbes was at the same time an advocate
of blind acceptance of an authoritarian state authority. How did he come to this? Hobbes
witnessed the English Civil War, which traumatized him severely. Whenever he referred to it
in his work it was in terms of “the greatest calamities of mankind,” “the greatest evil on earth.”
All he saw in that turbulent period was anarchy and anomy. So he asked the question, “If one
man pretended that God commands one thing, and another man that he commands the opposite;
what equity is there in allowing the proposition of the one more than the other?”
In the state of nature – a metaphor for the most fundamental characteristics of man that were
independent of any specific society, culture, or administrative authority – Hobbes argued, man
gives in to his inherent impulses that propel him toward self-realization. This implied that he
strives for power in order to be able to concretize that self-realization, even against other people.
The result was a homo homini lupus society, a society in which each individual is both
combative and in the grip of the fear of the power of the other and of death. The ultimate result
of all that turmoil – because constant struggle is the logical consequence – is that more is lost

33
than gained. That is why Hobbes proposed that man give up his freedom. By doing so, man did
acquire security at the same time. Thus, humans had to unconditionally transfer sovereignty to
the unquestioned leader he called the Leviathan. This unconditional transfer of sovereignty to
the Leviathan, the mortal god, freed man from the possibility of self-realization and thus
struggle. The contractual transfer guaranteed stability and peace. The state, in return, assumed
responsibility for the commonwealth.

By the state Hobbes meant a body which, for the entire nation, constituted the only source of
law and legal certainty and which could also impose its authority through the monopoly of
legitimate force. Government was to be externalized in the civil service. That is, to consolidate
inequality and protect private property. It had, however, also to take care of the poor. Religious
or moral rules were pushed aside. Religion coincided with the state religion. Religion did not
justify the Leviathan; on the contrary, the existence of an absolute power was the reason for the
existence of the state religion. The end goal of the Leviathan, the avoidance of the anarchy that
inevitably resulted from man’s nature, was a necessary and sufficient reason for subjecting the
people to law and order.

In France, Réne Descartes (1595-1650) developed a different way of thinking. His famous
statement cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am) does not so much put the empiricists’ sensory
experience at the center, but rather reason, the mind that made knowledge possible. The search
for truth, for certainty, entailed doubting the knowledge of the past. Methodical doubt purged
the brain of its imperfections, allowing absolute certainty to emerge and thus true knowledge
to be achieved. Benedict (Baruch) De Spinoza (1632-1677) continued Descartes’ rationalizing
thinking. In his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, he took an innovative position on the Bible and
the knowledge it contained. In a break with medieval philosophy, Spinoza argued that the Bible
was not a scientific work, but rather a collection of historical narratives that urged man to live
a virtuous life. “With a boldness unbelievable for his time, Spinoza does not bend his reason to
the accepted view of God, but he bends the view of God to his reasonable understanding. God
remains for him the beginning, and the love of God the end; but his conception of God is
determined by reason and only by reason.” (Vermeersch & Braeckman, 2019:127) From there,
Spinoza developed an ethics, a theory of life, which centered on human egoism and his quest
for autonomy and power. Unlike Hobbes, Spinoza thought that this egoism could be perfected
through the love of God. According to Spinoza, against Hobbes, the state of nature cannot be
abolished by a social contract. Man remains selfish even after the social contract. Spinoza
concluded from this that it was better that power was therefore not in the hands of one person.
He thereby defended the idea that a democracy was the only form of state that could balance
the various opposing interests that existed within society.

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Chapter 2: The European Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions (1650-
1800)

Ignorance and misunderstanding of the historical context in which a philosopher worked is

liable to have the effect of limiting our imagination of what that philosopher could possibly be
saying to us, what ideas he or she could possibly be offering seriously. We risk becoming
insufficiently sensitive to the sometimes enormous gulf between our own and an earlier
philosopher's thinking and thus liable to serious errors of critical judgment. While some
questions about past philosophers are of merely historical interest, we should consider how
certain we can be in advance that we know which those questions are.
(Jennifer Welshman, 1995)

Markets, like merchants, are nothing new, but they are central to a capitalist society in a quite
new and more abstract way. This is because production and consumption are divorced -
people do not consume what they produce or produce what they consume - and are linked
only through the markets where goods and services are bought and sold. Instead of being a
place where you can buy some extra item that you do not produce yourself, markets become
the only means by which you can obtain anything
(Fulcher 2004: 16).

Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to
make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage
when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without
direction from another. Sapere aude! 'Have courage to use your own reason! ' - that is the
motto of enlightenment.
(Kant, 1784)

In politics all abstract terms conceal treachery.

(James, 1989:125)

1. The political origins of civil society

Although his work needs some nuancing, to this day John Locke (1632-1704) is often identified
as the founder of civil liberties with his publication of Two Treatises of Government. Locke’s
first treatise is a sarcastic refutation of the idea, then widespread, that the king was a direct
descendant of Adam. The starting point of the second treatise, as with Hobbes, was the natural
state of man. This natural state is not, as with Hobbes, hell. He succinctly described that state
as “All men are born free and equally alike.” This seems a promising starting point but we must
keep in mind that Locke was not referring to a specific historical period or an actually existing
condition, not even a desired outcome. What Locke was concerned with was sketching out
premises from which, through logical deduction, he could arrive at proposals for ordering life
in society.

35
Locke argued that everyone had a right to life and thus to the acquisition of food, clothing, and
shelter. All of these goods came about through a combination of nature and labor. Locke
assumed that man owned the labor of his body and the work of his hands which immediately
implied that the combination of one’s labor with nature (from which one may draw as long as
it is available to all) was his property. When money made its appearance, however, a new
situation arose. After all, when labor is the property of a person, he may dispose of it freely. So
he may also sell it, or another person may buy it. The buyer becomes the owner of labor, and
thus, once mixed with the factor of nature, also of its resultant: the products produced. What
Locke wanted to show is that a system of commodity production (nascent capitalism), and
consequently the social division between worker and entrepreneur, did not conflict with
“natural law”, but, on the contrary, was a logical consequence of it.

Locke realized that this led to differences in wealth. Inequality may have been a natural
consequence of social evolution, but it had to be resolved through politics. In other words, it
made the state necessary. For Locke, sovereignty lay with the people as an inalienable right but
legislative and executive power had to be transferred through a civil society to a political
authority. This contractual transfer of power, unlike Hobbes, remained conditional and limited.
The essence of man, according to Locke, lay in being industrious and rational but that did not
mean that everyone belonged to civil society. Locke did not mention women, and day laborers
and workers were so taken with the day-to-day struggle for existence that they could not rise to
rationality. The unemployed, vagrants, and beggars were completely out of the picture and had
to be forced into workhouses. It is clear that for Locke all these people were not full members
of the community. The transfer of authority, and whether or not that contract stood, rested solely
on the active consensus of the freemen. The rest of the population gave its tacit consent and was
therefore obliged to comply with the laws. Just as the French colonies later distinguished
between sujet (subject) and citoyen (citizen), the vast majority of the population was not a
citizen but merely a subject of the state and a passive element of the community.

State authority, which had the legitimate monopoly on the use of force, could punish those who
rose up against the established order, primarily the lower classes, but Locke realized that
constant struggle was far from ideal. Better for these subjects to tolerate the system through
passive consensus if not accept it. He saw a major role for religion in this, as he explained in
his Reasonableness of Christianity. Locke argued that religion should involve itself less with
complicated theological theories, but by means of a simple punishment and reward system
(heaven and hell) convince people to accept the existing order as such. Religion, therefore, not
only lost its right to be the touchstone for all behavior, but became a functional instrument in
the service of a political system.

36
Locke was a proponent of the separation of powers, but again some clarification is needed. The
judiciary was seen as being an adjunct to the legislature, which was in principle above the
executive. The monarch not only took care of the execution of the law, he also had the residual
power to take measures in all matters that were not dealt with by the legislature. Moreover, the
good monarch (Locke speaks of the godlike prince) could, relying on his prerogatives, act
against the law if this served the interests of the people. Locke was aware of the danger of this
proposition, since any tyrant could set himself up as a servant of the people. Who then and by
what criterion shall judge the conduct of the monarch? “The people shall be judges,” Locke
argued (admittedly only the freemen), and that by considering whether or not their interests
were served. Those interests were first and foremost the preservation and expansion of private
property. When the majority considered that the interests, and primarily those related to capital
accumulation and property, were seriously harmed by the monarch, this entailed the termination
of the contract. As a result, the king dethroned himself, becoming a rebel. Consequently, Locke
was not the advocate of individual freedoms in the face of the state, nor was he a champion of
constitutionalism. And his premise that everyone was born free and equal ultimately led him to
defend unequal rights and freedoms. At a time of rising capitalism, Locke favored a strong state
that protected private property. When we describe Locke in this way, we are doing so from the
standpoint of our zeitgeist. Viewed in his seventeenth-century context, he was indeed
groundbreaking with his view that it was justifiable to rebel against the sovereign when he
failed to fulfill his contractual obligations. Arguments based on God’s will or tradition were set
aside in favor of the autonomy of thinking men, even though ‘men’ were indeed the male elite
in practice. Nevertheless, Locke never accepted that this difference was natural or God’s will.
For him it was a consequence of the unequal opportunities individuals were given.

The impact and influence of Locke is hard to underestimate. His ideas were already an
inspiration for the French revolutionaries and especially the American independence fighters
and they still form the basis of many discussions about justice and rights. Both liberals like
Rawls or libertarian anarchists like Nozick refer to Locke. In recent decades, however, criticism
has been growing. Historical research and a broader (read postcolonial) view of Locke showed
that the man who started with “all men are equal” not only justified inequality within his own
society but was also involved in slavery. This cast a shadow not only on Locke’s work and
philosophy but equally on democracy and liberalism itself. Domenico Losurdo questions why
we should continue to revere John Locke with the title of “father of liberalism” since he was
involved in drafting the constitution of the state of Carolina that gave any “free man” absolute
power and authority over the enslaved (Losurdo, 2014:3). As Locke also held shares in a
company that traded enslaved people for a while which made him a lot of money, Uday Singh
Mehta (1999) described Locke’s attitude as hypocritical and saw his ideals about democracy
and rights as merely a cover for the oppression of non-Europeans. The slavery Locke protested
against was what he called the “political slavery” of absolute monarchy, but he had much less

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to say about the real slavery of Africans. Of course, it would be an exaggeration to think that
this means we should no longer take Locke’s thinking seriously but showing what the limits of
that liberalism were is important for a better understanding of history. The call for human rights
and inclusion that were undeniably present in liberalism, simultaneously led to new forms of
exclusion and oppression. In other words, it is not enough for philosophically or abstractly
laudable ideas to be expressed. They must also be enforced in reality.

2. Enlightenment
The limitations placed by the Scottish and English thinkers on man’s rational capacity were
absent from the thinking of the French philosophers. Destutt de Tracy described ideology as an
independent scientific discipline, which provided a theory and an explanation for the origin and
existence of ideas. The purpose of its investigation was to test the idea for its veracity through
the use of reason. Reason itself was considered to be untainted by emotions, interests, or
traditions. Armed with reason, the French Enlightenment addressed all prejudices, dogmas, and
false assumptions. Prudence and doubt were cast aside for unbridled optimism about the future
making just about every institution, from church over marriage to the state, the target of
criticism. Faced with malfunctioning institutions, philosophers constructed an abstract and
perfect counterworld. Freedom, the French Enlightenment philosophers argued, was precisely
definable and the same for everyone, all over the world. The universalism underlying this idea
led many a philosopher to “oblige people to be free”. In France, the philosophy of the
Enlightenment was transformed into a radical political ideology designed to liberate all
humanity.

Most philosophers found each other around the publication of the Encyclopédie of which
Diderot and d’Alembert were the driving forces. Encyclopedias were certainly not new, for
attempts to inventory knowledge had been made as early as Greek antiquity. Nor was the belief
that this science would also be an engine for social change new. However, the encyclopedists
in France did more than inventory knowledge. The many polemical articles and the attack on
many established beliefs also gave the work a political dimension that did not escape the rulers.
However, it would be wrong to believe that the encyclopedists were always on the same
wavelength. There were many divergent opinions and analyses on many important issues.

Enlightenment ideology was optimistic in nature and believed that the establishment of a
rational and therefore happy society would occur gradually. This focus on the future was best
expressed in Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain by Condorcet
(1743-1794): “Then there will come that moment when the sun will no longer illuminate on
earth but the freemen, recognizing no other master but their reason; where tyrants and slaves,

38
priests and their stupid or hypocritical instruments will exist only in history and in theaters....”
Man is not only rational, but also acts rationally, which necessarily leads to progress, ergo to
greater happiness. But who was the ‘man’ to whom the philosophers referred? For some, that
was simply the white man. The polygenetic current harbored the idea that there were different
types of people (races) that could be hierarchically ordered. Hume (1711-1776) had already
defended this thesis. “I am apt to suspect the negroes (sic) to be naturally inferior to the whites.
There scarcely ever was a civilized nation of that complexion, nor even any individual eminent
either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufacturers amongst them, no arts, no sciences.
On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the whites, (...) have still something eminent
about them, in their valour, form of government, or some other particular.” (Hume 1777)
Numerous encyclopedists shared Hume’s views. Voltaire, one of the so-called champions of
the Enlightenment, surpassed Hume’s racism. Voltaire hypothesized that black people were
perhaps a transitional race between man and ape. In any case, he thought that there were ‘several
races’ and, how could it be otherwise, the white race was at the top of the hierarchical pyramid.
Not only about Africans but also about Indians, Lapps, Gypsies and Jews (an odious nation and
enemy of humanity, he wrote) he had the most racist prejudices. One can find a reflection of
such prose in his Essai sur les Mœurs et l’esprit des Nations published in 1756. Voltaire, by the
way, was firmly convinced that black Africans were born with the idea of being enslaved.
Diderot and d’Alembert were hardly more flattering in their article in the Encyclopédie
(although they belonged to the monogenist movement). Encyclopedists were generally more
friendly to Asians, especially as the thesis that Europeans were of Asian origin took hold.
However, there were also philosophers who, when speaking of man, did indeed mean humanity
as a whole. Montesquieu, Helvetius, Condillac, Condorcet... were outspoken universalists.
Witness the introduction to Condorcets Epitre aux nègres (sic) esclaves: “Quoique je ne sois
pas de la même couleur que vous, je vous ai toujours regardés comme mes frères. La nature
vous a formés pour avoir le même esprit, la même raison, les mêmes vertus que les Blancs. Je
ne parle ici que de ceux d’Europe, car pour les Blancs des colonies, je ne vous fais pas l’injure
de les comparer à vous; je sais combien de fois votre fidélité, votre probité, votre courage ont
fait rougir vos maîtres. Si on allait chercher un homme dans les îles de l’Amérique, ce ne serait
point parmi les gens de chair blanche qu'on le trouverait.” (Condorcet 1781)

With respect to women, Enlightenment philosophers were often less prejudiced then their
predecessors. In general, they saw woman, like man, as a reasonable being. This was clearly a
step forward because throughout the Middle Ages and even into the Enlightenment period,
several writers had held the idea that women did not have immortal souls and were therefore
subordinate to men (De Beauvoir, 1956:129). The encyclopedists argued that it was the
upbringing and not the innate nature of women that was responsible for the relative absence of
female artists, scientists, etc. In their view, there was no natural inferiority that would place
women in social marginality, just as there was no reason why they could not participate in

39
political life. Of course, this did not mean that great philosophical thinkers of the Enlightenment
were always woman-friendly. Kant, for example, thought that his ethics applied to all
reasonable beings, only he did not count women among them. Nor did Kant have the most
edifying thoughts about race.

It was not only about race and women that prejudices were clearly found during the
Enlightenment. There was also a class bias to be found among many philosophers. Philosophers
soon realized that there was an intellectual gap between the literate elite and the masses.
Although in an abstract way they believed in the perfection through education of all, many
thinkers had a deep contempt for the common people. The people may have needed to be
liberated from ignorance but what if la populace also began to think for themselves? “The
people are like oxen, needing a whip, a yoke and hay,” and “We have never pretended to want
to enlighten shoemakers and servants, that is the work of apostles,” we can read in Voltaire’s
correspondences. What he meant by this was that a society based on social inequality would
inevitably be challenged if the masses revolted, and that was not the intention of the
philosophers. Diderot affirmed that “the people are too stupid, too wretched” to participate in
the Enlightenment. Thus, in the end, the abstract man (and the ideal of emancipation) is made
concrete in the figure of the white male scholar. This is a limitation that the philosophers
themselves realized was difficult to sustain on theoretical grounds, but whose practical
transcendence horrified them. Ultimately, the Enlightenment philosophers wanted to prove the
superiority of a modern capitalist, but highly stratified, unequal society over an ancien régime.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was an exception amidst the Enlightenment philosophers.

Rousseau did not reject reason but denied the idea that man was a purely rational being.
Emotions and passions were equally human and helped determine human actions, and so they
should be. Rousseau also rejected the necessary trinity of the Enlightenment: rationality,
progress and happiness. When asked by the Academy of Dijon, ‘Has the development of the
arts and sciences contributed to the purification of morality?’ Rousseau answered in the
negative. The rejection of progress and optimism caused many to distrust Rousseau.
Romanticism emerged in the midst of the Enlightenment.

Unlike Hobbes, Rousseau believed that man in the state of nature was good. Primitive man was
driven by an urge for self-preservation but also by compassion, empathy and love for one’s
neighbor. It was only through the development of civilization which Rousseau associated with
the development of agriculture, the division of labor, and especially the appearance of private
property that man was corrupted and therefore made unhappy. “The first man who, having
enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying ‘This is mine’ and found people simple enough to
believe him was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how much
misery and horror the human race would have been spared if someone had pulled up the stakes

40
and filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: ‘Beware of this imposter’: you are lost if
you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to everyone and that the earth itself belongs to no
one.” (Rousseau (19851754)) The accumulation of private property and the satisfaction of
individual interests did not serve the community, according to Rousseau. Through property,
people began to see themselves through the eyes of another. In order to build a sense of self,
the opinion of another became crucial. This, according to Rousseau, led to selfishness and the
dehumanization of human relationships because of the inequality that resulted from it. Equality
before the law could not remedy this because, as Rousseau wrote in Le Contrat Social (1762),
“In truth, laws are always useful to those with possessions and harmful to those who have
nothing.” Hobbes’ social contract, according to Rousseau, was misleading because it had come
about because the rich had managed to persuade the people to give up their freedom, making
inequality a fundamental feature of modern society.

Rousseau’s ideal society is one in which all people possessed something but no one possessed
too much; rural communities where free peasants had freed themselves from the yoke of
feudalism and in which they produced according to their needs and not for the sake of profit.
For Rousseau, a social contract is “a form of association which will defend and protect with the
whole of its joint strength, the person and property of each associate, and under which each of
them, uniting himself to all, will obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.” (Rousseau,
1994 (1762):54-55) The social contract is not one between people and ruler, between ruler and
ruled but an agreement between the people themselves, which means that sovereignty lies with
the collectivity as an inalienable right. Thus there can be no transfer of sovereignty to some
Leviathan or Godlike Prince. Nor can there be a representative democracy. Parliamentarianism
is a fiction, says Rousseau, while the English people think they are free, they are so only once
every few years, namely at the time of voting.

For Rousseau, egalitarianism, the drive for equality, meant that no citizen should be rich enough
to buy another citizen or so poor that he would sell himself. (Rousseau, 1994 (1762):54-55). If
this were so, then society was dominated by private conflicts of interest and only when these
interests disappeared could the volonté générale, the general will or the will of the community,
emerge. The volonté générale was more than the sum of all individual expressions of will (the
volonté de tous), it did not serve this or that group within the community, but only the interests
of the community as a whole. The volonté générale was thus the expression of the common
good that could only come about when there was equality. But who determined what this
volonté générale was? What if this volonté générale is not shared by everyone? Does the will
of the majority always coincide with the volonté générale? And what about a minority that does
not agree with the majority and does not follow the rules that follow from the volonté générale?
Rousseau answered laconically: “If it is expedient that he die, that he die.” This has become a
crucial idea in modern political thought. So, for Rousseau, there had to be an authority that

41
defined volonté générale, an authority that had to defend it and thus punish opponents.
Robespierre, who was indebted to Rousseau’s thinking, was confronted with this issue during
the French Revolution. Robespierre was not so much a bloodthirsty monster who sent many to
the guillotine but rather someone who rigidly adhered to his principles and saw himself as a
unique defender of volonté générale. Given the politically precarious situation, he found
himself compelled to take emergency measures. In short, it legitimized the use of violence
against people with dissenting (political) opinions, the life of the political opponent became an
obstacle that could be eliminated in the name of the ideal that was being pursued. The question
then is whether the uncompromising pursuit of virtue did not bring humanity as much
misfortune as accepting ‘impurity’?

By emphasizing equality as having its origin in the sphere of production rather than distribution,
one might consider Rousseau a precursor to socialism. However, caution is in order here. What
he had in mind was a community of peasants small enough for direct democracy to prevail.
Precisely because he stood up for the peasants (the people), and because he did not, or could
not, see how capitalism could be transcended, his romanticized vision of the free and equal
peasant community might as well become a traditionalist framework. Although he was
genuinely concerned with the fate of those peasants, he was at the same time afraid of what
might happen if the masses revolted. Rousseau was not a revolutionary, but a rebellious
romantic.

Rousseau deviated with his ideas from what the Enlightenment philosophers desired in the
political field. Enlightenment philosophers were opposed to absolutism based on divine will,
and to the monopoly of power of the upper classes (nobility and clergy). This did not mean that
they were therefore in favor of parliamentarism, especially if it were based on broad suffrage.
They wished power to belong to the new, emerging elites of which they considered themselves
the mouthpieces, in short, an enlightened despotism. Guided by reason, the monarch serves the
people in the sense of ‘tout pour le peuple, rien par le peuple.’

Montesquieu (1989-1755), although only indirectly connected with the actual Enlightenment
philosophers, had a great deal of influence on the emergence of modern politics through his
Esprit des lois (1748). However, Montesquieu wanted neither to serve the interests of the rising
bourgeoisie nor to establish a democratic regime through his principle of the separation of
powers. Montesquieu was a nobleman but realized that the power of the nobility was faltering.
He suspected that a time would come when the nobility would no longer have a privileged
position in society. His political analysis aimed to devise a modernized state in which the
nobility’s position, without privileges, would still be secure.
His starting assumption was that the various institutions, wherever they existed, did not come
about by chance but could be rationally explained because they fulfilled a social function.

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People have a natural desire to live together, and thus to interact in an ordered manner. No
social contract is needed to obtain an ordered society. For Montesquieu, the most natural order
could be found in a class society, crowned by a monarchy. Although Montesquieu was later
seen as one of the founders of liberal democracy, he himself preferred a monarchy because,
according to him, it guaranteed more freedom than a republic. In a monarchy, individuals are
allowed to do anything that is not formally prohibited by law, whereas in a republic, the morality
and devotion of the individuals restricted their freedom.

His idea of a separation of powers, the checks and balances, was intended to counter absolutism
on the one hand and, on the other, to inhibit popular participation. ‘Il faut que le pouvoir arrête
le pouvoir’ meant to him, in the first instance, that the nobility would once again assume its
intermediary function between the sovereign and the people. If despotism prevailed, the nation
was governed not by laws but by fear. If, on the other hand, the participation of the people was
too great, it would lead to anarchy. Thus, the mediating and moderating influence of the nobility
in coalition with the king that Montesquieu hoped for was actually a reformulation of the old
order. What was later seen as the foundation of a bourgeois state with a parliamentary regime
was in fact conceived as a built-in brake on the political emancipation of the rising classes.

3. Renewal in economic thinking.

Born in 1723 in Kirkcaldy, a small port town across the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh, Adam
Smith (1723-1790) was a follower of David Hume and his skepticism. Like many in his day,
destined to join the clergy after his studies, Adam Smith, under the influence of his teacher and
professor of moral philosophy in Glasgow, Francis Hutcheson, soon became disillusioned with
Protestant dogma. He refused to devote himself further to a religious life and opted instead for
philosophy.

In 1759, Smith gained fame with the publication of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a book in
which he laid the groundwork for his later masterpiece, The Wealth of Nations. In The Theory
of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith asks a seemingly simple question: How can a man, who is
primarily interested in himself, make moral judgments that also satisfy others? This question
flowed from Smith’s analysis of Hobbes’ work. If people were naturally selfish and had much
going for the pursuit of their own interests, how was it that the cities and towns of the country
resembled in nothing the evil state of nature Hobbes spoke of in his Leviathan? Smith sought
the answer in the way humans arrived at moral judgments. According to him, man did not make
judgments solely on the basis of self-interest but equally on the basis of compassion. Whenever
man had to make a judgment, an imaginary ‘neutral observer’ spoke to him and gave him
advice. Instead of relying purely on self-interest, man usually chose on the basis of the
observer’s advice.

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Some twenty years later, in 1776, Smith’s monumental work, The Wealth of Nations. An Inquiry
into the Nature and Vauses of the Wealth of Nations, was published. With the publication of
this book, modern economic thought was born. Smith’s goal was to discover the causal laws
that explained how wealth came about. To achieve this goal, Smith first of all wanted to
understand how people were, how they functioned. This approach, which would seem banal
today, was revolutionary in its day. Smith, like several predecessors such as Hobbes or
Machiavelli, wanted to describe how man was and not how he should be. Man became an object
of study, analyzable... in short understandable without a religious or moral bias.

Smith started from the assumption that man possessed certain tendencies, natural urges. Every
human being, Smith said, wanted to live better than he did now. This craving for improvement
was imparted to us from birth and ended only with death. A second ubiquitous and natural
tendency of man was his disposition to exchange, trade, or barter one thing for another. From
these assumptions, Smith developed his theory of how wealth was produced. In a nutshell, the
wealth of a nation was determined by two major factors: a pervasive division of labor and the
laissez-faire principle. The first factor stood for efficiency and increasing labor productivity,
the second for private capital accumulation as an engine for further development. Both factors
implied a social split between the owners of the means of production and those who only had
their labor power to sell. Domestically, the state had to follow a non-interventionist policy;
towards foreign countries, free trade was the rule. The Wealth of Nations therefore quickly
became the bible of the emerging capitalist bourgeoisie.

With Smith, the emphasis on economic production for production’s sake becomes immediately
apparent. Although the purpose of economic activity was to provide consumer goods that
satisfied needs, economic production of goods according to private expectations of profit was
seen as the best way to satisfy these needs. Although Smith’s analysis was about the wealth of
a nation, individual selfishness was assumed to accomplish this most optimally. Smith argued
that everyone was more concerned with what concerned him personally than with anything that
concerned others. But, he argued, “led by the invisible hand to promote an end which was no
part of his intentions, and which he would not have promoted so well if he had deliberately
aimed at the public good,” the goal, the wealth of the nation, was nevertheless achieved. The
invisible hand thus stood for a set of economic laws, over which man himself had no control,
which was not necessary, since they were automatically regulating. Smith’s position, however,
did not imply, in his view, that this selfishness could or should be unbridled. What he called
social sympathy, what we would describe today as empathy, namely putting oneself in the place
of the other, worked as a moderating brake on individual selfishness. None of this, of course,
prevented great inequality in society, which Smith also agreed with. As a classical liberal, Smith
was convinced that the future was going to look better and better. If the economy evolved

44
favorably, that is, could produce more and more through technological progress, this would also
lead to a greater demand for labor. Eventually, when everyone was employed, wages would
also rise, consumption would grow, and thus the economy would continue to grow. Smith thus
hoped that poverty would disappear and thus workers would also live a decent life. This could
only be achieved by leaving undisturbed the rhythm of the market economy, propelled by
individual selfishness. Any attempt by the government to act as a producer itself or to
redistribute wealth through state power, would disrupt this spontaneous evolution. Of course
poverty existed but just as you could not override gravity by law, neither could you escape,
Smith thought, the laws of supply and demand. “Smith, especially in relation to his French
colleagues, definitively secularized the belief in progress. Progress for him was no longer an
advance toward Utopia, toward paradise on earth, but simply a steady improvement in material
conditions in the here and now.” (Bregman, 2013:169-170) Inequality was no longer
substantiated by the Bible or commanded by nature; it was scientifically determinable and
justified.

4. The age of revolutions

Revolutions, historians argue, are moments of great social change in a short period of time and
represent a break with the past. The Glorious Revolution in England profoundly changed the
British monarchy and how politics was practiced. The American Revolution became the first
successful colonial revolt with the establishment of new political institutions, a republic and a
modern constitution, which undermined the political models of the ancien régime. The French
Revolution went one step further by focusing on human emancipation through political,
economic and cultural change. At the end of the eighteenth century, the Haitian Revolution
became the first successful revolt of enslaved people. These revolutionary episodes of political
change transformed the political culture of the moment. Through violence, rebellion but also
peaceful means, modern politics was born.

The American Emancipation

The American Revolutionary War, in which the American colonies fought for their
independence from Britain, began in April 1775 and lasted until September 1783. Britain had
defended the American colonies in the wars against the French and the Native Americans and
wanted the wealthy colonies to pay the substantial war debt. One of the new tax laws, the Stamp
Act of 1765, angered many colonists who thought the tax was unfair. They felt it was unfair that
Britain was taxing them when they had no or few representatives in the British Parliament. The
slogan no taxation without representation became a key political slogan of the American
Revolution. The belief that a government should not tax a population unless that population
was somehow represented in the government had already developed by the time of the English
Civil War. The idea that taxes without representation were a form of tyranny was a major

45
driving force of the revolutionaries. The British government, however, paid little heed to the
colonists’ claims and attempted to introduce various other tax laws that the colonists opposed.
This eventually led to a war for independence. Although the war continued until 1783, thirteen
colonies declared independence from the United States on July 4, 1776 with the Declaration of
Independence.

The American Revolution was underpinned by political ideas inspired by English political
thought, the European Enlightenment, and the specific American experience. The ideals of the
Revolution, such as the aversion to taxation, the importance of political representation, national
sovereignty, the fear of government (military) oppression, freedom of trade and the quasi-holy
nature of private property, natural rights (Locke), and a certain anti-Catholicism, quickly
became entrenched in American political culture. The founders of the United States were
strongly influenced by republicanism, by Locke, and by the optimism of the European
Enlightenment. George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson all agreed that laws,
not people, were the ultimate touchstone and that the government was accountable to the people
– the basis of the Constitution lay in popular sovereignty. George Washington believed that
personal freedoms, protected by a central government, were of paramount importance. The
purpose of government, he believed, was to act in the best interests of its citizens. To accomplish
this, Washington believed that government leaders should be elected by the people to ensure
that these government officials represented the interests of the people. Furthermore,
Washington, like the other Founding Fathers, believed that the government should be a secular
institution, separate from the church.

Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was a journalist and polemical writer who established some of the
basic ideas of the modern political order that later became central to liberal democratic culture.
In Common Sense, Paine opens his analysis with an opposition between society and
government: “Society is produced by our needs and government by our wickedness; the former
promotes our happiness in a positive sense by uniting our affections, the latter in a negative
sense by restraining our vices.” (Paine, 1969:28) Society, then, is a blessing, but government,
even in its best form, is only a necessary evil, in its worst form an intolerable evil. Paine thus
expressed a fundamental distrust of any form of government. Government, while necessary,
was primarily to ensure that all citizens could pursue and defend their own interests. Only in
this way could society be harmonious.
For Paine, therefore, the state order could only be a republic. The people should be in control
of the government through representatives they chose. He rejected a hereditary form of power,
such as a monarchy. Importantly, Paine came to the conclusion that equal rights also meant that
everyone should have an equal say in political representation. Paine was thus a proponent of
universal suffrage, which he defended against the caste-based electoral system in his Rights of
Man. Everyone over the age of 21 who paid taxes should have the right to vote. Later he would

46
defend that right to vote even more fundamentally. The right to vote was a primary right that
protected other rights and freedoms; taking away that right was nothing but a form of slavery
because without a political vote a citizen was subject to the will of another.

However, Paine also made a series of social welfare proposals that were less in keeping with
the American tradition. Although Paine believed in the benefits of international trade and
private property, he also feared a society in which the difference between rich and poor would
be too great. He therefore argued for poor care organized by the state and paid for by the public
treasury; for pensions for people of an advanced age; for government investment in the
education of the poor; for a maternity allowance paid to all women after the birth of a child; for
social housing for rural migrants until they had a job; for a progressive tax system... Paine thus
saw an extensive task for the state. Paine is therefore not entirely unjustly seen as a precursor
to the idea of the welfare state.

Three problems of independence found no immediate solution, namely the structure of the new
state, the place and role of women, and the differences in political-economic structure with an
industry-based order in the North and an agricultural economy built on slavery in the South.
Figures like Jefferson opted for a confederate state because, in their view, large states
necessarily tended toward despotism and war, and for fear that smaller states would not gain
influence within the union. The group around Hamilton and Adams favored a more centralized
state, especially for the purpose of economic development. Feminism also had a new lease on
life in independent America. Abigail Adams, the first wife of President John Adams, considered
access to education, property, and the right to vote essential to women’s equality. In letters to
her husband, Abigail Adams warned that women would revolt if the new constitution denied
women’s rights. At the end of the nineteenth century, the call for greater freedom for women
converged with the call for the end of slavery. Many women leaders of the abolitionist
movement found it contradictory to fight for the freedom and rights of African Americans when
they themselves could not fully enjoy them. It was not until the Civil War a century later (1861-
1865) that these tensions were partially overcome.

The French Revolution: from radical experiment to imperial restoration

The French Revolution – from the uprising of the aristocrats and the self-assertion of the
bourgeoisie to Napoleon’s dreams of empire – put into practice the many new political ideas of
the eighteenth century. Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, enlightened depotism, ... all came
into play in the different phases of the Revolution. On the eve of the Revolution, France was
still largely an agrarian country, a prosperous country but with a ruined government. The
government was unable to efficiently collect taxes and thus skim off some of the country’s
wealth. The French tax system was still largely based on the feudal structure and was thus not
adapted to the new economic reality and in which the nobility paid little or no taxes. In order to

47
obtain income anyway, the government contracted out the collection of taxes to private
individuals. Tax collectors accepted this job (people did not like paying taxes so there was often
resistance and violence against them) because they were allowed to make a profit. This
inefficient system meant that probably up to 60% of the taxes collected never reached the
government. It was this difficult financial situation that formed the backdrop to the French
Revolution. The nobility refused to acquiesce to the king’s will to collect new taxes (including
for the nobility). They convened the Estates General in 1789, for the first time since 1614. The
nobility thought it could control the Estates and wanted to increase its political power vis-à-vis
the king. Although the nobility still enjoyed its privileges, in reality the country was run by
government officials. This aristocratic revolution, i.e. the revolt of the nobility against the king,
however, came to a halt. The nobility thought that the new Estates General should meet on the
same basis as in 1614, with the three orders (nobility, clergy and the third estate) each having a
vote as one order. The nobility and clergy thus thought they would always have an advantage
over the Third Estate. However, the aristocratic revolution failed because many noblemen did
not realize that the Third Estate, or bourgeoisie, would not give in easily and wanted to
transform the Estates General into a National Constituent Assembly (Assemblée Nationale
Constituante). The king tried to prevent the ascendence of the Third Estate and called foreign
troops to reclaim his power. In this way, the king provoked the storming of the Bastille on July
14, 1789. The Third Estare, le tiers-états, during the ancien régime, referred to any person who
was not a member of the other two orders, the clergy and the nobility. This Third Estate was
both urban and rural, sometimes prosperous but often not, and represented the vast majority of
the population, which paid disproportionate taxes. In his pamphlet Qu’est-ce que le tiers-etats?
Sieyès indicated that the Estates General should choose on the basis of the true
representativeness of each order. “Nous avons trois questions à nous faire :1º Qu'est-ce que le
tiers-état? Tout. 2º Qu'a-t-il été jusqu'à présent dans l'ordre politique ? Rien. 3º Que demande-
t-il ? À être quelque chose.” (Sièyes, 1888:3)

At this stage of the Assembly (1789-1792), the moderate upper bourgeoisie, led by the
Girondins, initially tried to strike a balance between a constitutional monarchy and enlightened
despotism in which the king was supposed to be bound by a constitution and use his power of
veto in the interests of the people. Louis XVI, however, would not acquiesce in this compromise
and the aristocracy continued to conspire against the bourgeoisie. The French Revolution up to
that point had been primarily a social revolution of the bourgeoisie against the aristocratic
hierarchy but the king refused to play his part in it. Amid the growing chaos, the lower
bourgeoisie, the Jacobins, realized that there was only one possible way out: radicalization. The
military invasion of Austria and Prussia in 1792 sought to bolster the power of the French king,
leading to a revolutionary war by the government against foreign countries but also a situation
of civil war within the country itself. In the chaos of the moment Maximilien Robespierre seized
power and, basing himself on the political ideas of Rousseau, installed the Reign of Terror

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under the revolutionary government of the Comité de salut public. This phase of the Convention
(1792-1795) saw the abolition of the monarchy and the introduction of a whole series of new
laws and a constitution that definitively abolished the ancien régime. Rousseau’s political ideals
of a government of the people, of the general will, could only be brought into being, according
to Robespierre, by a revolutionary government that would not hesitate to use force if necessary.
This gave Rousseau’s ideals a more totalitarian reading: “It must be explained to all, so that at
least all good citizens may be rallied around the principles of the general will... The goal of a
constitutional government is the protection of the Republic; that of a revolutionary government
is the establishment of the Republic. The Revolution is the war waged by liberty against its foes
- but the Constitution is the regime of victorious and peaceful freedom. The Revolutionary
Government will need to put forth extraordinary activity, because it is at war. It- is subject to
no constant laws, since the circumstances under which it prevails are those of a storm, and
change with every moment. This government is obliged unceasingly to disclose new sources of
energy to oppose the rapidly changing face of danger. Under constitutional rule, it is sufficient
to protect individuals against the encroachments of the state power. Under a revolutionary
regime, the state power itself must protect itself against all that attack it. The revolutionary
government owes a national protection to good citizens; to its foes it owes only death.”
(Robespierre, 1927:62-63)

In theory, revolutionary rule was circumscribed by natural law. The basis of a civil society,
Robespierre argued, was morality or virtue, but in reality Robespierre increasingly curtailed
general freedoms because “enemies of the revolution” appeared everywhere. Virtue meant that
everyone worked for the common good but in periods of war, terror was a necessary evil
because without terror virtue was powerless and, conversely, without virtue terror was nothing
more than tyranny. The Jacobins abolished feudal rights outright, redistributed land for the
benefit of the small and impoverished peasants, and a new Declaration of the Rights (1793)
proclaimed that it was the government’s task to support needy citizens, introduced universal
suffrage for men, the right to education, democratized the army, and nationalized the Church’s
assets. This social revolution went further than the previous changes but stalled on the economic
front. The Jacobins may have been more radical than their predecessors, but ultimately they
were equally an exponent of the middle classes, of the bourgeoisie. Parts of the lower middle
classes, the sansculottes, demanded more far-reaching measures such as fixed prices for
necessary foodstuffs, a maximum limit on large fortunes, a redistribution of land so that no one
would have more than he could cultivate... The lower classes, such as the enrages, demanded
even more concessions given the chaos, war and poor harvests. The Jacobins would not and
could not give up private property. Criticism of Robespierre, who became increasingly
repressive in his policies and sent hundreds of people to the guillotine, grew: the urban poor did
not see their standard of living rise, the peasants thought agricultural prices were too low, the

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faithful despised the Jacobins’ ‘attack’ on the Church and on religion... Finally, Robespierre
was politically cornered and arrested. On July 28, 1794, he himself ended up on the guillotine.

Olympe de Gouges published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen
in 1791 in which she advocated equal rights for women. The Declaration was, of course, a
critical allusion to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen that had been
promulgated in 1789, which enumerated rights that applied only to men, while women had no
right to vote, to access public institutions, to professional freedom, or to property rights. Olympe
de Gouges defended the idea that women were born free and remained equal to men in rights.
In all her work, including her plays as a playwright, she articulated the values of the
Enlightenment and how they could bring change to women's lives.

Robespierre’s revolutionary government was replaced by a constitutional government, the

Directoire (1795-1799), which again focused on classical bourgeois themes. The reign of terror
was abolished and a new constitution was promulgated in which the more radical decisions of
the Jacobins were scaled back; equality before the law was what a citizen could expect, equality
in society was not the job of government! Universal suffrage was again abolished and a new
Declaration of the Rights of Men attached more importance to private property than to the duty
of government assistance. To solve financial problems, laws that set maximum prices for goods
were abandoned and economic freedom was restored. The Directoire struggled to hold its
ground in the face of political opposition from adepts of Robespierre, and radical ultra-
revolutionary movements such as Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals on the one hand, and
reactionaries and royalists who wanted the royal family back in power on the other. The
government increasingly relied on the military to deal with the political oppositions. When a
new political crisis erupted in 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte, who had already put down several
uprisings for the government, staged a successful coup.

Bonapartism combined revolutionary rhetoric with the doctrine of self-interest that culminated
in a masterful opportunistic political game: the bourgeoisie was presented with order and
stability in which it retained its economic wealth, the lower classes could dream of la grandeur
de la France, the slogan “liberté & égalite” satisfied the liberals, and although the Church
neither regained its position nor its possessions, Napoleon used religion to legitimize the
Bonapartist state. Although Napoleon’s battles ultimately failed to stabilize political life in
France he had a lasting impact on European politics. Napoleon introduced a new code of law,
the Code Napoleon or Code Civil, which formally established equality before the law and legal
certainty. The Code was actually a conservative interpretation of the achievements of the French
Revolution, but was undeniably a step forward compared to the ancien régime. By modernizing
the practices of the ancien régime according to the principles of the Enlightenment and the
aspirations of the Revolution, the Civil Code laid the foundation for modern law, both in France

50
and in many other countries conquered during the Napoleonic Wars. Although the Code
Napoleon established equality before the law, not everyone came out of it equally well.
Napoleon’s nationalistic megalomania and his militaristic mindset were reflected in the
legislation. The patriarchal family in which men took precedence over women and children was
enshrined in law. Although progress was made on inheritance law or the right to divorce,
women were assigned a passive role in society. And although slavery had been officially
abolished in 1794, that abolition was partially reversed in 1802.

It seems ironic that the French Revolution, which began with a revolt against nobility and
monarchy and an empire, ended in a constitutional monarchy under the Restoration. Yet this
Restoration is not a return to the past. The ancien régime with its class society and privileges
for the nobility had definitively disappeared. The bourgeoisie realized that the nation-state was
a means of pursuing its interests because the nation-state was increasingly the expression of
growing capitalism.

The Haitian Revolution

Shortly after Christopher Columbus landed on the island he named La Isla Española (later
Hispaniola) in 1492, the Spanish began to subjugate the indigenous populations. The Spanish
‘introduced’ Christianity, forced labor in the mines, murder, rape, bloodhounds, foreign
diseases, and artificial famine (by destroying crops to starve the insurgents). These and other
demands of ‘higher civilization’ reduced the native population from an estimated half million,
perhaps a million, to 60,000 in about fifteen years (C.L.R. James, 1989:4). The growth of
capitalism in parts of Western Europe and the very slow rise of modern and enlightened ideas
of freedom and equality (accelerated by the French Revolution) spread simultaneously with the
expansion of economic slavery, the systematic, sophisticated capitalist enslavement of non-
European peoples as labor in the colonies. In a paradoxical way, when slavery fueled both
quantitatively (number of slaves) and qualitatively (its complex organization) the growth of
capitalism (and the wealth of the West), Enlightenment ideals, fundamentally in contradiction
to slavery, spread to the colonies (Buck-Morss, 2000).

Saint-Domingue was the crown jewel of the French colonial assests and was one of the most
profitable colonies in the world. Cane sugar production was the main source of income, but
coffee, indigo and cotton were also in high demand in Europe. In the 1780s, 40% of the cane
sugar and 60% of the coffee consumed worldwide came from this “Pearl of the Antilles”. This
was only made possible by the massive importation of enslaved people. A large part of the
enslaved population in Saint-Domingue was of African descent. Most enslaved worked on the
land; others were domestic servants or worked in the sugar mills. The slave-regime was
particularly harsh, cruel, and brutal because the 30,000 or so white settlers feared the enslaved
majority (about half a million and also about 25,000 freed ‘mulattos’). Over time, thousands of

51
enslaved fled to the inhospitable mountainous interior of the island, where they became known
as Maroons. Under the command of charismatic leaders Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques
Dessalines, the enslaved freed themselves and rebelled against their masters in 1791. The
Haitian Revolution was thus the first and only successful revolt of enslaved people in modern
history. In 1804, after more than a decade of struggle, the richest colony in the western
hemisphere became the first black sovereign modern state, Haiti. Unlike the American and
French revolutions, the Haitian Revolution disappeared from most history books, however its
importance cannot be understated.

The Haitian Revolution, along with the American and French, changed the course of modern
history forever. European enlightenment thinkers, in their discourse, applauded the
emancipatory values of liberty, equality, and fraternity but that did not always mean that they
tried to make them a reality in practice. Although they often argued that (European) people
were metaphorically ‘enslaved’ by the dictatorial monarchies, they usually ignored the really
existing slavery in the colonies which they excused on cultural or racist grounds. The Haitian
Revolution was the most consequential of the three revolutions; the most radical expression of
the ‘right to have rights’. The former enslaved took the slogans of the French Revolution
literally; they believed in freedom, equality, and fraternity without the implicit or explicit limits
set by most Enlightenment thinkers (freedom only for the educated white man). The Haitian
revolutionaries embodied the ideals of freedom, equality, and fraternity in practice,
demonstrating the ambiguity and violence of these ideals. The revolutionaries in Haiti
radicalized revolutionary ideals by establishing their logic in reality as well. The constitution
of 1805 explicitly prohibited slavery, as well as discrimination based on skin color. The
constitution “broke with the then prevailing racist worldview and considered all Haitians,
regardless of skin color, to be black (...) These radical ideals of the Haitian Revolution
represented the pursuit of a new humanism in a post-racial world that lived on in the work of
later revolutionary thinkers such as Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon.” (Bogaert, 2020) Only in
Haiti was the proclamation of human freedom and equality total and universal and the ideal
defended at all costs even when it went against the economic logic of capitalism. Therefore, the
Haitian Revolution was also a threat to the dominant capitalist, bourgeois, order. Ultimately,
the Haitian Revolution failed, not because Haiti or its people were ‘backward’ as was
sometimes thought in Europe, but because over time the revolution renounced or forgot its
ideals as new hierarchies emerged in which a new black elite continued the process of economic
exploitation. The former enslaved people worked just as hard and were treated just as ruthlessly,
no longer as enslaved but as wage laborers who sold their labor. A debate began in Europe
about Haiti, slavery and the emancipation of non-Western peoples.

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Chapter 3: The emergence of modern politics: industrial revolution and expansion of
capitalism (1800-1914)

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave,
patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and
oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now
hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution
of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
(Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto)

Liberal theory has been constituted by its engagement in politics, and it is an important if
often overlooked historical fact that the creation and consolidation of empires was central to
that process.
(Pitts 2005: 4-5).

Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy
attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere
number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But
notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in
restraint and servitude.
(De Tocqueville 1848)

I think I have made it clear that I never intended to make enemies. But in an age when anti-
foreign sentiment was running high, it was unavoidable that in my position as an advocate of
open intercourse and free adoption of Western culture, I should make some adversaries.
(Fukuzawa 1897)

1. The discovery of society and the emergence of modern ideologies

The industrial revolution in England and the French, American and Haitian revolutions led to
various intellectual debates on the organization of the state, the design of its institutions, the art
of governing, rights, freedoms and duties of citizens and governments but also on how to
organize the economy. Central to this debate was the crucial issue of poverty and the poor. Until
the nineteenth century, there was no clear explanation of where poor people actually come from.
It was in the late eighteenth century that ‘society’ was conceived as existing in its own right
and not subject to the laws of the state but, conversely, subjecting the state to its laws (Polanyi,
2001:116-135). Both in the political-economic debates in Britain and in the discussions within
German idealism, the modern idea that there was such a thing as progress emerged. The
Enlightenment had grounded progress theoretically but the ‘discovery’ that the economic
organization of society conformed to specific laws and the ‘discovery’ that history was the story
of man and that the study of that history was necessary to understand man, formed the basis for
the concrete elaboration – through various political ideologies – of the idea of progress. The

53
idea that history would have a beginning and an end originated in the Middle Ages in the
philosophy of Augustine, who assumed that human progress (as a moral state and not
necessarily in material terms) would proceed according to a divine plan and end with the return
of the Messiah. The Christian idea that history was moving forward, finite, and irreversible was
a key idea for modern, secularized progress thinking that Rutger Bregman describes as “an
illegitimate child of Christianity.” (Bregman, 2013:144)

Conservatism
Edmund Burke developed his political ideas in relation to the great changes of the second half
of the eighteenth century. The impact of growing capitalism, the American Revolution (which
he had viewed positively), and the French Revolution (which Burke abhorred) gradually shaped
his thinking. Burke believed that poilitcs and policy should not be based on principles but on
common sense, because it could be assumed that the people were reasonable enough but would
not always understand higher principles.
Burke’s political ideas went sometimes against the prevailing views at the time. He opposed
the extreme exploitation of the Indians, for example, criticized British policy in the colonies,
and was instrumental in the trial of Warren Hastings, the first de facto Governor-General of the
Bengal between 1772 and 1785 who was on trial for extortion, corruption, exploitation, and
alleged extrajudicial killings. However, Burke was not opposed to the colonization of India as
such but felt that Indians, who could lean on a glorious history, should be given rights. In doing
so, he went against the general political opinion of the day, which sought the exclusive interest
of Britain based on her power, and the need to ‘civilize’ other peoples. Burke’s apparent respect
for Indian history and tradition did not mean that he treated all peoples of the world the same.
Although Burke became a proponent of the gradual abolition of slavery during his political
career, he legitimized that choice not on the basis of the rights of his black fellow man, nor his
history (as he did for the Indians) but on a carefully balanced interest between morality (and
thus the idea that the enslaved were people too) and economic interest to the mother country.

The French Revolution filled Burke with horror from the beginning. Reflections on the
Revolution in France, published in 1790, is an intellectual and political pamphlet that set itself
against the revolutionary events in France. The publication of the work also marked the
evolution of Burke’s thinking from a pragmatic slant to the political ideology of conservatism.
Burke emphasized that politics based on abstract concepts such as liberty or human rights could
easily be misused by those in power. He blamed the French revolutionaries for justifying
tyrannical measures in the name of liberté, égalité et fraternité. Burke thought the French
Revolution would end disastrously because the abstract foundations on which it was based
ignored the complexity of human nature and society. Burke opposed the idea of the French
Enlightenment philosophers that man would be a rationally acting being. He did not deny that
man could be rational but thought that he was determined primarily by his innate feelings and

54
attached to his prejudices, which he described as people’s attachment to values without
conscious rational justification. Burke “moved toward a romantic reverence for history as the
great healer-the goddess of change, but imperceptible change. He saw the past as a providential
source of good sense, and the constitution of England as its finest creation.” (Bronowski &
Mazlish 1975:429) Politically, this meant that Burke advocated gradual change. He realized
that eradicating any kind of change was impossible since “a state without the means of some
change is without the means of its conservation. Without such means it might even risk the loss
of that part of the constitution which it wished the most religiously to preserve.” (Burke, 1790)
Burke thus defended private property, tradition, and prejudice. The only measure was the
common sense, in that everything that existed owed its existence to its soundness. Social
equality, as sought in the French Revolution, was a delusion, otherwise it would have occurred
earlier in history. Nor did freedom mean the freedom to do or not to do what the individual
wanted but was rather a social freedom, namely that which the legislator foresaw as the possible
space of freedom for there could be no rights without duties.

“Though it is often claimed that the left stands for equality while the right stands for freedom,
this notion misstates the actual disagreement between right and left. Historically, the
conservative has favored liberty for the higher orders and constraint for the lower orders. What
the conservative sees and dislikes in equality, in other words, is not a threat to freedom but its
extension. For in that extension, he sees a loss of his own freedom. ' (Robin, 2011:8) It was
therefore not surprising that Burke automatically linked the issue of poverty to the issue of
security. The discussion of where poverty and the poor came from had become not a theoretical
discussion but a social problem. The first criticism of Burke’s reflections on the French
Revolution and his defense of constitutional monarchy, aristocracy, and the Church came from
Mary Wollstonecraft. She wrote A vindication of the Rights of Man in response to Burke,
arguing for republicanism and attacking the aristocracy. Wollstonecraft called the French
Revolution an extraordinary opportunity for greater virtue and happiness in this world. To
Burke, who described the women who surrounded Queen Marie Antoinette in her palace as
‘furies from hell,’ she replied, “Probably you mean women who gained a livelihood by selling
vegetables or fish, who never had any advantages of education.” (Wollstonecraft, 1790) She
further developed her first pamphlet in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which
she defended the idea that women were not inherently inferior to men, but due to the lack of
education. She was one of the forerunners of feminism by arguing that both men and women
were rational beings and that the social order should be based on reason.

Economic and political liberalism

In 1793 William Godwin, who married Wollstonecraft in 1797, wrote Political Justice. In it he
defended, against Burke, the idea that man was malleable and therefore amenable to constant
improvement. Because truth was supreme, man could transform himself into a being better

55
suited to live in happiness and harmony with his neighbor. In an echo of Rousseau’s romantic
vision, Godwin dreamed of the abolition of the state, of courts and parliaments but also of the
disappearance of crime and poverty because man would have achieved perfection. The most
successful response to Burke was Thomas Paines Rights of Man (1791).

Even more than the political discussions in response to the French Revolution, it was the
discussions about poverty, and by extension how the economy functioned (and should
function), that had a crucial impact on ideological evolution. Adam Smith, in his Wealth of
Nations, had defended the idea that economic abundance would trickle down from the top of
society to the rest of the population (the so-called trickle-down effect) because he thought it
impossible for a society to get progressively richer while its population got poorer. However,
the facts contradicted Smith and barely a decade after the publication of his masterpiece, a
major shift in thinking about poverty became noticeable. Joseph Townsend’s A Dissertation on
the Poor Laws, published in 1786, was a critique of support and assistance for the poor in
society – due to enclosures, more and more subsistence farmers were ending up in poverty –
because it would keep the weak alive and thus encourage population growth. With this
naturalistic argument, Townsend not only inspired the influential work of Malthus and later
Darwin’s theory of evolution, but also introduced the idea of “natural laws,” laws that were
largely independent of the existence of a government. Thomas Hobbes, a century before, had
argued for the despotic power of a Leviathan because people in a state of nature would behave
like animals, Townsend, however, thought that people were animals and that it was precisely
for this reason that minimal government was needed. “From this novel point of view, a free
society could be regarded as consisting of two races: property-owners and laborers. The
number of the latter was limited by the amount of food; as long as property was safe, hunger
would drive them to work. No magistrate was necessary, for hunger was a better disciplinarian
than the magistrate. ' (Polanyi, 2001:119-120)

Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) rejected Godwin’s optimism and his thesis that man was socially
malleable and thus amenable to continual improvement. In An Essay on the Principle of
Population, Malthus described how population grew at an explosive rate while food supplies
increased only sparsely. Malthus thought that population, if unchecked, grew every 25 years
according to a geometric ratio, while food supplies did so only according to an arithmetic ratio.
A geometric ratio or exponential rate meant that a number multiplied itself over and over again,
while an arithmetic ratio only increased by a constant number. Suppose the population today is
1 million, it would increase according to the ratio 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64... while food would
increase according to the ratio 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Taking into account that a person had access
to 1 unit of food in the first year, after 100 years 16 people would already have only 5 units of
food available (Buchholz 2007: 47-48). According to Malthus, population growth could only
be slowed by positive checks and by moral restraint. Positive checks were not optimistic

56
prospects for Malthus: war, disease, famine, infant mortality, and plagues could increase
mortality rates (and thus slow population growth). The birth rate could be lowered, though
Malthus was under no illusion, by moral restraint, whereby people would curb their sexual
passions, postpone marriage, and thus produce fewer children. This led Malthus to argue that
the betterment of fate, the social engineering of society, would run counter to human nature
itself. Therefore, he argued against any form of welfare for the poor (the poor laws). If wages
rose, workers would have more children, causing food shortages and lowering living standards.
Malthus was not a cold or heartless thinker who hated the poor. He was convinced that if the
positive checks (wars, famines, etc.) plagued the population, it would disproportionately affect
the poor in the first place. Thus, his position to abolish poor relief could be seen as a
humanitarian argument. Malthus’ arguments initially caused a stir, but it was not long before
they became commonplace in political debate as business leaders eagerly embraced the
argument to stave off any demands by workers for higher wages.

The search for ‘natural laws’ was continued by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) (although he
would eventually reject their existence) who argued that, just as the world was controlled by
gravity, humans were under the rulership of two masters, i.e. pain and pleasure (Buchholz 2007:
95). Because he assumed that all people preferred pleasure over pain, het thought that they
always made decisions that gave them more pleasure. Bentham argued that people should thus
consciously pursue happiness (happiness) by pursuing pleasure. Bentham put a limit to this
hedonism because, he argued, when a person was faced with a choice that could also
(negatively) affect the happiness of others, he had to choose the alternative that maximized
happiness for all. This search for “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” formed the
central idea of Bentham’s utilitarianism.

Utilitarianism, according to Bentham, was a new science because happiness was measurable
and quantifiable. According to his felicific calculus, the moral rightness (or wrongness) of an
act could be calculated by the amount of pleasure the act caused. The utility principle was
central to Bentham’s thinking, which was not so much a guide to human action as a new vision
of government, of the organization of a state and the political. A government, according to
Bentham, was to be judged only by its utility, by its achievements. Government had to seek the
greatest happiness for the people through the use of science. From a panopticon, a point from
which the whole world could be overlooked, science could chart society’s various parts and its
shortcomings. Through moral arithmetic and through reforms in law, government could seek
the greatest happiness and pursue relative social perfection. To do this, the government also had
to be coercive and controlling (threatening to punish) since the members of society had to
emulate the ‘scientific insights’ so that the happiness of all was increased. For Bentham,
government was a coercive institution. Therefore, government should pursue the interest of all
and not a particular class, neither the workers nor the capitalists. Bentham’s radical philosophy,

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however, was not always coherent. Bentham had ‘calculated’ that when someone accumulates
more and more particles of happiness, the last units that are added represent less happiness than
the first ones that were collected. Happiness, thus, was not evenly distributed and consisted of
different particles where the former gave more happiness than the latter. ‘Suppose,’ said
Bentham, ‘that you are very hungry, then a meal will give a lot of happiness, but once the
hunger is satisfied, then an additional meal will give little additional happiness.’ Based on this
moral arithmetic, one might assume that Bentham would argue for the redistribution of wealth
since the extra wealth that rich people accumulate would give little extra happiness. Bentham
rejected this idea because taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor, he thought, did
not serve the common good. He believed that redistribution would curtail the security of the
rich (security of being allowed to make a profit and become richer) and reduce the creativity
and inventiveness of the rich (to create wealth). On top of that, Bentham thought, the transfer
of money from ‘a few’ rich people to ‘many’ poor people would only make the rich poorer but
the poor not really much richer. Bentham was an advocate of free market principles because it
was useful, because it was part of the social mechanisms that made possible the the greatest
happiness for the greatest number. The great merit of Bentham was that he argued for the first
time that there was such a thing as a social optimum that could be achieved through scientific
planning. It was a daring idea to state that perfection is definable and could be realized. At the
same time, it was also possibly a nightmare that this perfection must be achieved and be
enforced by government.

David Ricardo (1772-1823) published On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation in
1807, a book that is one of the pillars of modern economic thought. According to Ricardo, a
nation’s income consisted of interests, profits, and wages, and in doing so, he tried to understand
the interaction between the large landowners, the entrepreneurs, and the workers, respectively.
The conflict between the large landowners and entrepreneurs, both capitalist but with divergent
interests, was the main political fault line of Ricardo’s time. Large landowners pressured the
government to close the borders to grain imports from abroad so that their own lands would
remain used and the price of grain (due to their quasi-monopoly) would remain artificially high.
The industrial bourgeoisie, on the other hand, who employed workers in their factories, wanted
to keep down the price of grain so that wages could be kept as low as possible and their profits
as high as possible (workers were not paid much more than what they needed, i.e. bread, to
survive). In doing so, Ricardo also laid the foundation of a labor theory of value that held that
the value of a good was proportional to how much labor was required to produce it, including
the labor required to produce the raw materials and machinery used in the process. Labor, in
other words, created the value. Marx would reinterpret this labor theory of value several decades
later as a crucial element of his analysis of capitalism.

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Ricardo predicted that Britain could either follow a closed, protectionist course that would
ultimately impoverish it or have an open economy based on free trade that would make her a
dynamic and wealthy nation. Since Ricardo believed that profits in industry depended on prices
in agriculture, he predicted that closing the borders to international trade would be disastrous.
Ricardo, who adopted in part the population laws of his friend Malthus, argued that as the
population increased, more mouths needed to be fed, more and more effort was required to keep
the lands productive. As a result, there was also a growing number of not very fertile soils being
cultivated (grain at a high price was assured by growing demand), which would increase the
costs of production. This would further increase the prices of grain and consequently the wages
of workers in the industry. This meant that industrialists would generate fewer profits and,
conversely, the large landowners would pocket more and more interest. In particular, the large
landowners who had the most fertile land (where costs were lower and production higher)
would make super profits. But this dynamic could not repeat itself indefinitely, according to
Ricardo, because land was finite. At some point, he thought, no additional land (at any cost)
will be able to be cultivated so general poverty in society would grow, capitalists and workers
would lose out, farmers would be able to sustain themselves but a small group of large
landowners would greatly enrich themselves. Ricardo theorized that grain prices could fall by
giving farmers lower wages but realized that this was practically unfeasible because agricultural
wages were barely above the subsistence level. The same was true of technological advances
that could increase production and reduce costs. In the short term, Ricardo did not think that
technological innovation could have a practical impact which left him with only one solution:
free trade! Ricardo substantiated his argument for free trade with his theory of comparative
advantages. Each country should specialize its production in the areas where it had a
comparative advantage, namely that which it produced best in the most inexpensive way. If all
countries did this and there was free trade between them, they could export their surpluses (and
import what they lacked) and both benefit. A free market without barriers benefited capitalism
but it also benefited consumers because they could buy goods at cheaper prices. This is why
Ricardo opposed the Corn Laws (which remained in place from 1815 to 1846 notwithstanding).
If the French produced cheaper grain than Britain, Ricardo suggested that French grain be
imported so that Britain could concentrate on other products. Ricardo realized that the free
market did not operate painlessly; some branches of agriculture or industry would have to
disappear irrevocably with all the social consequences that this would entail. Nevertheless, he
believed that in the long run the economic benefits outweighed the disadvantages. More so, in
the name of progress for all, he believed that protectionism (protecting one’s own markets)
would be too much to the disadvantage of less developed countries (Napoleoni 1975). Crucial
to this whole discussion is that along the way the idea had arisen that there was such a thing as
“the economy” or an economic society that was (in part) separate from the political state and,
more to the point, that “economic society was subject to laws which were not human laws”

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(Polanyi 2001:131) but was regulated by population laws (Malthus) and laws about the fertility
of the land (Ricardo).

Early socialism
After the conservative reaction to the Jacobin terror, the group around François Noël ‘Gracchus’
Babeuf – la Conjuration des Égaux (Conspiracy of Equals) – tried to revive the revolutionary
aspirations in 1796 by staging a coup with the aim of confiscating all wealth and introducing
general equality. Although the coup was not successful – Babeuf was arrested and his faction
disbanded – he can be regarded as one of the founders of socialist thought. Babeuf demanded
the complete abolition of private property and thus wanted to introduce economic equality, after
the Jacobins had established political equality in the constitution of 1793. Babeuf’s comrade
Sylvain Maréchal wrote in his Manifesto of Equals, “Equality was nothing more than a
beautiful and sterile fiction of the law. Today, when it is demanded with a louder voice, we are
told, “Shut your mouths, you wretches!” Actual equality is only a utopia; be satisfied with
conditional equality; you are all equal before the law.” Babeuf pursued de facto equality and
was convinced that it could not exist as long as private property existed for it could only produce
masters and slaves. The state had to be overthrown so that production and consumption could
be socialized, i.e. production would become common and redistribution would take place
according to the needs of the people. Here too, Sylvain Maréchal pointed the way: “We are
leaning towards something more sublime and more just, the common good or the community of
goods! No more individual land ownership, the land belongs to no one. We want, we demand,
the common enjoyment of the fruits of the earth: the fruits belong to everyone.” The agrarian
socialism that Babeuf and Maréchal advocated was embedded in the French revolutionary
context but had a great deal of influence in the first half of the nineteenth century. Major social
developments that were not yet fully understood, the expansion of capitalism, the critique of
religion and the institution of the Church, the struggle for survival of aristocrats and feudal
inequality... led to a multitude of ideas that sought to respond to social challenges. Paris became
a melting pot of radical, sometimes revolutionary and sometimes peculiar ideas, in which the
search for a radical redistribution of wealth and the quest for equality from a sense of justice
gave rise to diverse discussions about freedom and equality. In Britain, on the other hand, the
foundations of workers’ organizations outside a revolutionary framework were laid.

Robert Owen (1771-1858) was a self-educated businessman who at a young age became the
owner of the New Lanark Mills, a spinning mill employing some 500 workers. Owen, who
turned out to be a creative and efficient manager, was confronted in his factory and the village
around it with social conditions that he considered unworthy of human beings: child labor,
inhuman working hours and conditions, lack of hygiene, poverty but also ‘immorality’
(alcoholism, prostitution and promiscuity) and crime were commonplace. Owen felt that a
factory could not be run that way and developed the idea that social reform could go hand in

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hand with efficiency (productivity and profits) and progress. Owen organized education for the
children of Lanark, set up day care for children under five so that mothers could work in the
factory without worry, provided the workers with decent housing, better food and clothing. He
also provided psychological support for his workers in order to deal with their problems
(drunkenness, laziness, theft...). The result, a decade later, was that the New Lanark Mills
became the most profitable and productive spinning mill in the world. Owen published his
human philosophy in 1815 in A New View on Society. Owen’s central idea, building on
Enlightenment optimism and his own experience, was that human character, shaped entirely by
the environment (i.e., not by nature), was formed in early childhood. It followed, Owen argued,
that the whole approach to crime had to change. Antisocial behavior, primarily in children, was
not a result of deficient character but a result of emotional deprivation. As a result, it was
crucial, according to Owen, for society to assume its responsibility (in its own interest) to
provide children with a proper upbringing and education so that they would not end up in crime
in later life. Armed with these progressive ideas, Owen began a career as a social reformer. He
first advocated factory reform in the British Parliament but many negotiations and concessions
resulted in a watered-down proposal that Owen could not live with. Owen turned away from
politics and preferred practical socio-economic reforms. He proposed the creation of
cooperative villages, small communities (consisting of a 1,000 to 1,500 people) in which
everyone had about the same amount of land to engage in agriculture but there would also be
enough factories (with machinery) for industrial production and in which some activities such
as cooking and eating would be communal. Owens’ proposal, a kind of practical utopia, was
not new in itself but what was innovative was the idea that the community formed an economic
unit. While most utopias started from the question of how to function politically (how were
decisions made, by whom, who gets to vote, etc.), Owen was thinking mainly about how it was
best organized economically as an independent unit. Although Owen received high praise from
the bourgeoisie, his model of economic organization was not followed by other capitalists.
Owen then tried to raise money himself from philanthropists to realize his dream. In 1824, he
founded the New Harmony colony in Indiana, in the United States of America. His dream of an
ideal society with economic progress and a humane existence for all became a failure due to
the inexperience and opportunism of many colonists. Although Owen lost his fortune in the
experiment, he returned to England where he continued his struggle tirelessly, laid the
foundations of the workers’ organization in trade-unionism, and expanded his cooperative
movement. Although Owen did not yet fully understand the role of capital in the economy and
the laws of the self-regulating market, he concluded that the new economic system, capitalism,
had not freed man but had enslaved him. Owen therefore stressed the importance of the social,
that which bound people together, and the fact that a society could not be divided into separate
political and economic spheres (Polanyi,2001 : 176-178). Man, Owen believed, had to become
master of the machine in factories that were seen as ‘social structures,’ i.e. operated as a
community. Owen, like Saint-Simon, believed in industry as a beacon of progress. There was

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no need for revolution or violent upheaval. The spread of the ‘correct knowledge,’ which Owen
believed he had, would gradually eliminate ignorance and usher in a new era of equality and
truth. The “new man” would use his technological and industrial power to generate social
progress. Consequently, Marx and Engels later described Owen as an utopian socialist,
believing it a delusion that emancipation would come about solely through the power of
enlightened ideas. Ultimately, Owen advocated for the organization of society by experts,
technicians, and businessmen. Like Saint-Simon, Owen believed in science as a social
organizing principle that would make all conflicts disappear into a harmonious vision of the
future. But unlike Saint-Simon who called for a Renaissance of Christianity, Owen, was one of
the first open opponents of Christianity within the labor movement. Ultimately, the Owenist
movement failed because it was unable to respond to the diversity of opinion within a factory
or cooperative movement that ultimately generated political conflicts that Owen could not
answer.

Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), born into an impoverished noble family, pursued various
ideals throughout his life that were not always coherent, which is why his works inspired later
socialists, anarchists, romantics as well as managers and technocrats. Saint-Simon realized, like
Montesquieu, that the era of the ancien régime was unquestionably over and that the nobility
with its privileges would never return. For Saint-Simon, the strength of a state lay in industry –
by which he meant not only production in factories but any purposeful action – and in the
industrial class. That class consisted not only of the bourgeoisie but of everyone who engaged
in entrepeneurship and business. After first flirting with the principles of liberal capitalism,
Saint-Simon together with Auguste Comte laid the foundations of positivism (see below) and
developed an optimistic philosophy of progress in which industry was central. A society in
which industry, by definition cooperative and pacifist, would be central would make more
progress than a nation-state built on war and conquest. Saint-Simonism believed that scientific
and technological progress and innovation would emancipate humanity. In this, the government
had to play primarily a coordinating and technical role. The government should therefore not
interfere with political issues but pursue a technocratic policy based on ‘neutral’ economic
motives and scientific insights. Although Saint-Simon was not an advocate of an egalitarian
society, he did consider it the government’s task to reduce poverty. Saint-Simon thereby
emphasized the importance of a scientifically educated elite who should take the lead in social
change. The moral outrage against poverty (which was characteristic of Saint-Simon and his
later followers) led Saint-Simon to simultaneously advocate a moral and spiritual revival - le
nouveau christianisme - which, like Christianity during the Middle Ages, would be the moral
and intellectual compass of the social order. Some of his followers immersed themselves in this
spiritual quest, while others devoted themselves to major infrastructure works such as the
expansion of the French railroads or the digging of the Suez Canal. Ultimately, Saint-Simon’s
work was an attempt to channel the disappearance of the ancien régime after the tumultuous

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phase of the Revolution (which he saw as a destructive force, he survived the Terror in prison)
into more predictable directions. His search for a new “force” that could undergird the social
order led him to pursue both industrial development and spiritual resourcing: socialism,
technocracy, a renewed faith, or an idiosyncratic synthesis?

Industrialization widened the gap between women from the middle classes and working class
women. Although both were oppressed and often felt repressed, there was a growing difference
in their actions. Women from the better-off classes who were not allowed to work mainly
campaigned for more and better education for girls and voting rights for women, while working-
class women mainly emphasized improving their fate, i.e. wages and working conditions.
Women increasingly joined labor unions and some followed the social experiments of the
utopian reformers in the first half of the nineteenth century. The movements inspired by saint-
simonism met with the approval of many women as the movement recommended a lifestyle
free of the ‘tyranny of marriage,’ more compassionate and less male aggression. Suzanne
Voilquin (1801-1876/77) joined the saint-simonists with her husband in 1823. After her divorce
in 1832, she became the editor of the first feminist labor magazine, La Tribune de Femmes, in
which she championed women’s rights, education, and development for women but also
denounced the unfairness of French laws for women and workers and worked for economic
independence for women.

Proudhon (1809-1865) became an influential intellectual and a protagonist in debates about

economics, freedom, morality and politics through his work Qu’est-ce que la propriété,
published in 1840. To this question Proudhon replied, “It is theft!” This answer is less radical
than it seems in the sense that Proudhon was not against property but against private property,
which he defined as property that yielded an income without involving (productive) labor.
Proudhon thus opposed interests and rents, the kind of incomes that the ‘idle classes’ amassed
in an unproductive way. Proudhon gradually developed the idea that socio-economic
transformation would be carried by voluntary associations of workers through mutualism.
Mutualism would enable educational and economic cooperation among the workers, who
would own their means of production, thereby setting aside the ‘lazy’ owning classes (who
skimmed the profits). As workers would work for themselves, the economy would become
more productive and prices would reflect more fairly the value of a product. For Proudhon,
however, it was crucial that these mutuelles be built on voluntary self-organization, in other
words that there be no interference from a centralized government that would direct the
economy. The state, in Proudhon’s view, curtailed individual freedom by definition, whether it
pursued a social policy or not. As a result, Proudhon is considered one of the founders of modern
anarchism. Thus, the workers’ strategy was not to conquer state power, not through
parliamentary means and certainly not through the use of violence. Proudhon rejected the idea
of revolution or violent insurrection and was convinced that the state would disappear through

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the general spread of mutually beneficial workers’ organizations that would simply make the
state superfluous. This conviction on Proudhon’s part was an embodiement of a left-wing
moralism typical of the time that was based in part on a secularized version of Christianity.
Proudhon believed in a society regulated by a social morality in which people would recognize
the dignity of their fellow men and thereby exchange self-interest and pervasive individualism
for the common good.

A more radical form of resistance, inspired by Babeuf, lived on in the secret political societies
of Paris. Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881) was a revolutionary of the first hour, a radical journalist
of critical journals (which could never exist for long) and a gifted speaker and conspirator
involved in several coups and uprisings. Blanqui maintained that the revolution could only
translate the will of the people politically through violence. The people, even after the
revolution, remained subject to the old and new privileges that kept the bourgeoisie in power,
and this could only end in a frontal struggle. Blanqui thus rejected legal political action because
it would only strengthen the political right, even universal suffrage would not make a difference
since the ruling classes not only had an ideological hold on the people but also possessed
repressive devices that could intimidate the people. He therefore advocated for the creation of
small, politically conscious, armed groups that prepared in secret (as protection from the police)
for the ideal moment to seize power. This group was then to install a (transitional) regime that
would pursue policies in the interest of the popular masses who would thereby become
politically aware of their condition and carry the revolution with them. In other words, the
change was imposed from ‘above’; much more than through popular revolution, it was about a
coup d’état. In 1839, Blanqui and his supporters captured the town hall of Paris, from where
the revolution was proclaimed. The people of Paris, however, reacted only lukewarmly to the
news, and the forces of order therefore had no problem expelling the insurgents. Blanqui was
arrested, sentenced to death but later pardoned. Blanqui cannot easily be labeled a socialist; he
rejected the ideas of Proudhon and Marx. It is true, however, that the idea of the seizure of
power by a conscious small armed group finds some resonance in Lenin’s revolutionary
theories in the early twentieth century.

German idealism : Kant and Hegel

Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) examination of the limits of knowledge in Critique of Pure
Reason led to one of the most important and influential changes in Western philosophy. Kant
attempted to formulate answers to what for him were humanity’s three most fundamental
questions: What can I know? What must I do? and What may I hope for? Kant followed Hume’s
distrust that metaphysics could have a foundation. In his view, the history of philosophy was a
debate between empiricists and rationalists. Kant felt that empiricists were right to assume that
all knowledge about the world came from our experiences, but at the same time he felt that the
rationalists were right that thought had certain cognitive powers that were separate from

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empirical knowledge. Kant’s Copernican turn in the theory of knowledge amounted to saying
that the certainty of knowledge lay not in the world of experience, nor in its origin (the thing in
itself) but in the subject, in the thinking person. Our experience provided us with data for
knowledge, but it is the intellect that organized this data and formed it into knowledge. Because
we had no absolute certainty or statement whether they existed or not about the things in
themselves (God, I, soul...) – for we could not experience them directly – the thinking subject
had to assume that the cognitive forms of the intellect are certain, for they are the condition for
knowledge. Kant described his philosophy as transcendental idealism. The idea, Kant said, is
that which transcends man’s knowledge because it does not arise from observation or
experience, and is therefore perceived only as an appearance or illusion. It was based on a
“condition prior to the possibility of knowledge” and therefore “transcendental”. (Vermeersch
& Braeckman, 2019:153) This abstract theory of knowledge formed the basis for Kant’s later
work (such as the Critique of Practical Reason, Metaphysics of Morality, and a series of essays
on various political topics published between 1784 and his death in 1804) that took on a much
more distinctly political content, and thus also sometimes brought contradictions to his
thinking.

In Kants moral philosophy, man found freedom in the autonomous ability to promulgate the
moral law himself without depending on passions, inclinations, and interests, and to impose it
on himself through a consciousness of obligation. In his political writings, however, Kant
seemed to conceive of freedom more as the freedom to engage in self-determined ends. “Under
the demands of morality, political life itself would have to be organized around the idea of each
individual having basic rights to autonomy... Kant argued that everybody was endowed with a
certain dignity as an end in itself, and that all political life had to be organized around the idea
of implementing this possible kingdom of ends in themselves.”(Pinkard, 2019:23) Kant’s theory
of human dignity, however, was mostly limited to the white male segment of the population.
Equality for Kant meant primarily equality before the law, a formal recognition of a principled
equality that could admittedly coexist in reality with a great deal of actual inequality. Kant saw
in history a process of progress and concluded, as Terry Pinkard summarizes, “We are called
to establish a cosmopolitan world order of free republics so that humanity will finally achieve
its inherent goal, that of living in a world without war in which each individual is fully respected
and legally entitled to the rights belonging to a member of the ‘kingdom of ends.’”(Pinkard,
2019:26) The role of political institutions, according to Kant, was to regulate these different
goals (kingdom of ends), to reduce the tension that arose when they inevitably came into
conflict. Kant’s reflections on human rights, international peace, republicanism, the rule of law,
and cosmopolitanism had a lasting impact on Western political thought. Kant’s great influence
on the thinking of his time but also the increasing criticism on the Enlightenment in the
Romantic period caused a renewed focus on the human subject and interest in that which
produced man (i.e. culture), which was summarized as the Spirit (Geist). The urge to explain

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the progress of humanity through the place and role of Christianity was a final important
element in the development of German idealism. The idealists were thus unwilling to simply
acquiesce in Kant’s limits on knowing and posited that the idea constituted the absolute ground
of the unity of the world. Fichte found the Absolute in the idea of the I, Schelling in the idea of
Nature, and Hegel in that of Spirit.

Hegel (1770-1831) found Kant’s limits to knowing – the knowing that can know only its
appearance – an inadequate conclusion. For Hegel, thought was not to stop at the ultimate
questions; knowledge was to continue to pursue the Absolute. Hegel, influenced by the
Enlightenment and fascinated by the political upheaval of the French Revolution (both its
achievements and the Terror) and the subsequent rise to power of Napoleon, pursued a synthesis
of all these divergent and (sometimes) contradictory ideas. The Hegelian starting point was thus
absolute Idealism, the idea was not a creation of subjective thought but was reality, more so:
the only objective reality. The development of the idea into the universal all-encompassing Idea
– and therefore reality – was nothing but history. History was consequently an evolution from
the lower to the higher, it was at the same time the evolution towards freedom. For Hegel, the
confrontation between contradictory ideas constituted the dynamic of history as well as the
method of understanding it, namely the dialectical method.

The dialectical method assumes that everything that is, is a relation. Reason can only grasp
something when that something is seen in its context. It is through the making of connections,
and only through that, that the content of a thing is determined. Take an apple blossom as an
example. With my mind I can look at it as a cross-section of a process. With reason I see the
connection with its origin, the apple tree, and with what the blossom is not yet, an apple, the
difference with a cherry blossom and so on. In other words, by making those connections, and
only because of that, the content of a thing is determined. Within the becoming process, the
emphasis is on dialectical relationships, on the relationship between what is (the Thesis) and
what is not (the Antithesis). The tension between the two is ‘Aufgeheben’ (lifted up) in the
Synthesis. Aufheben, for Hegel, meant to ‘save’ as well as to ‘abolish’, so it is not the middle
way (the gray between white and black), but a union of the two moments (theses-antithesis) on
a higher level. For example, there was a strong commitment to worldly affairs among the
Greeks and Romans, but freedom was lacking (Thesis). With Christianity the principle of
freedom is introduced, but one turns away from worldly affairs to focus on the spiritual
(Antithesis). The Reformation forms the synthesis of this dialectic tension as the worldly
becomes secularized (through work ethics) and the spiritual is brought back to the world
(through individual responsibility), so that both freedom and the worldly are reconfirmed.
According to Hegel, this dialectical evolution proceeds in different ‘jumps’ or stages.
Everything includes both quality and quantity. Step-by-step, quantitative changes turn into a

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qualitative leap at a certain point in time. In this way one can lose one’s hair one by one
(quantity), until the last fatal hair falls and baldness occurs (quality).

Man’s thinking, according to Hegel, was a process that was in constant motion and went
through several stages. The mind ran first to consciousness and from there over self-
consciousness to reason and finally to absolute knowing. History was therefore a progressive
rational process. Just as the individual spirit made its way to the absolute, so too the spirit of
humanity, the world spirit, made its way through history to the Absolute, to freedom. “History
had a kind of necessary progression from the ancient position that only one person by nature
had the authority to rule over all others to the Greco-Roman-European idea that some (male
aristocrats) had that authority to rule over others, and finally to the modern period where the
guiding idea was that nobody had any natural authority to rule others and thus that ‘all are
free’.” (Pinkard, 2019:36-37) The ruse of reason consisted in the fact that freedom is realized
in the history of mankind, independently of the acting people. In other words, people are not
aware that history unfolds in a certain way.

Freedom was central to Hegel’s political views. He defined freedom as that which transcended
the merely individual. For Hegel, freedom was not so much the freedom of choice of an
individual or the possibility of self-realization but rather a realization of the individual’s
subjective sense of freedom in an objective form. In doing so, Hegel wanted the individual,
weak if left alone, to merge into a larger whole, a community. He saw this coming about in a
complex and layered realization of freedom in different stages and at different levels. At the
first, most basic level, freedom took the form of the family, the place where togetherness and
love were central, where children were born and grew up and the individual became aware of
his link to others. At the next level, the level of the civil community (civil society) – the area
where individual interests conflicted but could also work together as in economics – the
cohesiveness of the family was broken. The problem of this level was that freedom as a
community did not yet have a common consciousness. This was only possible, Hegel argued,
at the level of the state, the level where the common good took shape. Because the state enacted
laws, objective freedom was established, i.e., a freedom for the whole, a freedom that thus
differed from the subjective freedom of each individual. Freedom acquisition for the individual
consisted in knowing the contexts in which he lived, and obeying the laws. In this way, objective
and subjective freedom coincided, individual morality (Moralität) merged with social morality
(Sittlichkeit), and the individual engaged in evolution, in progress. Civil community
(Burgerliche Geselltschaft) and state were thus not synonyms. In society individual or group
interests dominated, for the state only the universal interest counted!

The state thus provided a synthesis between the principles that dominated the family and the
bourgeois community. The state Hegel was referring to, then, was certainly not the state from

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the ancien régime. If history was an evolution toward a perfect state order, as the embodiment
of Freedom made concrete, when did history stop? Was there then an end point (an ideal) and
who determined it? If the Prussian state order embodied concrete Freedom, as Hegel himself
argued, were social contradictions (the dynamics of dialectics) not frozen? Hegel argued that
the future remained open, but many interpreted his system as a finished whole, as the end of
history. Hegelianism therefore fell apart after Hegel’s death into an ‘orthodox school’ on the
one hand, the right-hegelians who were downright conservative, conservationist defenders of
church and state who often held important social and intellectual positions within society, and
a left-hegelian current, which included Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx, who used dialectics
as a critical method to devise a revolutionary new system of thinking.

Liberalism and early imperialism

The connection between liberalism, imperialism, and the growing importance of racism in
political ideologies is a crucial fact of nineteenth-century history. In the second half of the
eighteenth century, many influential intellectuals such as Smith, Bentham, or Diderot were still
critical of European-imperialist conquests (without therefore necessarily rejecting colonialism
de facto). Less than fifty years later, by 1830, little remained of this critical attitude. In France
and Britain, a liberal imperialism, supported by such diverse thinkers as de Tocqueville or J.S.
Mill, provided the arguments for subjugating non-European peoples and conquering their lands.
“This sea change in opinions on empire accompanied an increasingly exclusive conception
among European thinkers of national community and political capacity. The liberal turn to
empire in this period was also accompanied by the eclipse of nuanced and pluralist theories of
progress as they gave way to more contemptuous notions of "backwardness" and a cruder
dichotomy between barbarity and civilization.” (Pitts, 2005:2). Kant, Hegel, Voltaire, and even
Rousseau held decidedly racist views in which black people and indigenous peoples were
considered inferior, wild, and in need of Enlightenment, which could only come through
Europe. Even the myth of the noble savage which stated that the ‘wild people’, the explorers,
colonialists and first anthropologists encountered, were free from sin was a paternalistic and
condescending view of these people. These ‘savages’ lived in an intuitive and instinctive way
and were much happier than European people who had been corrupted by civilization and were,
it was assumed, not brutal but noble. Nevertheless, this more ‘benevolent’ analysis still
continued to see blacks and indigenous peoples as primitive, backward and in need of (Western)
civilization. Liberalism further stirred up racism in the nineteenth century. “For the intellectual
elites of Western Europe, the ongoing project of colonial conquest became a live data-set, a
human zoo from which they distilled their magical theories of scientific racism.” (Virdee,
2019:18) Whatever concrete ideological form these theories took, they all departed from the
idea that people could be divided into racial groups based on a number of physical
characteristics, that each ‘group’ was characterized by different cultural competencies from
which a racial classification could be drawn. At the top was always the “white race”, at the

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bottom, depending on the author’s pseudo-scientific assumptions, were the Australian
indigenous peoples or black Africans. The idea that some “races” were better suited than others
to development took several forms.

In a lecture that has become famous, De la liberté des Anciens comparée à celle des Modernes,
Benjamin Constant (1776-1830) contrasted the freedom of the ancients with that of the
moderns. According to Constant, the freedom of the ancients was based on a citizenship that
made little distinction between public and private life. Citizens participated actively in
collective power. The danger to this freedom of the ancients was that the state through its power
could oppress the individual and fetter his freedom. The freedom of the moderns, on the other
hand, was for Constant a freedom that protected personal privacy in a society in which each
person could do as he or she pleased. This freedom, he believed, was rooted in individualism
in which he also saw a danger. The danger to the freedom of the moderns was that the individual
would become too absorbed in the pursuit of his own, individual, interest without further
concern for the collective, societal, well-being and become less and less willing to pursue
collective goals (De Hert, Kinneging & Colette 2015). Constant, like De Tocqueville, saw in
the democratization of politics a danger to the freedom of the individual. The liberal Constant
was able to sympathize with the conservative attitude towards democracy due to the fear that
by demanding the right to vote, the masses would use state power for economic redistribution
(De Dijn 2020 :4).

The French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) realized that the French and American
revolutions were part of a wave of democratic revolutions that had not only done away with the
ancien régime but had also begun an irreversible process of increasing equality. For de
Tocqueville, democracy was more than just a political regime; it was the new form of the state
within which the idea of equality was increasingly taking shape. According to de Tocqueville,
the symbolic importance of the beheading of Louis XVI in 1793 could hardly be overstated.
During absolutism, the king was not only the bearer of (political) power but also the
representative of God on earth. He had, as it were, two bodies, a concrete, human, physical
body and a symbolic, eternal, body that connected the nation to God through the King. Hence,
the beheading of Louis XVI not only the execution of a physical person but also the elimination
of a political regime. “His execution was not simply the murder of a former ruler, but the final
break with a whole way of understanding power in society. Power no longer came to a single
individual who was given all kinds of theological attributes.” (Lievens 2010:36-37). De
Tocqueville, however, also feared this irreversible evolution. In the preface to his best-known
work De la démocratie en Amérique, he wrote: “Does one think that democracy, which
destroyed feudality and conquered kings, will give way to the bourgeois and the rich?” De
Tocqueville rejected despotism but equally feared democracy, the ‘tyranny of the majority,’ the

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possibility that within a democracy a majority (when it would have ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’ ideas)
could impose its will on the minority.

Alexis de Tocqueville, whose oeuvre gradually became synonymous with liberalism,

democracy, and individual rights, was simultaneously an apologist for colonialism and white
settlers in North Africa. De Tocqueville’s most famous work was ultimately based on the
glorification of democracy in a white settler society (settler colonialism) on the one hand, and
the legitimization of an all-out war against the North Africans to colonize their lands on the
other. De Tocqueville may have been against slavery, but he still advocated that France should
destroy anything in Algeria that resembled a civilization, city, or gathering of a population. His
Essay on Algeria (1841) is peppered with racist views on nomads, on the incivility of Africans,
on the duplicity of Arabs, the backwardness of Islam... There are “few religions so fatal to
man,” he believed, and considered Islam a step back from paganism. De Tocqueville was more
than likely not a “champion of democracy” but was working for a “white” Algeria that, just as
the white settlers in the U.S. had massacred the indigenous populations, had to enslave the
Arabs and Amazigh.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) had much influence with the publication of Principles of Political
Economy (1848) and On Liberty (1859) in which he outlined his views on state and society.
John Stuart Mill thus formulated the basic principles of classical liberalism in the economic and
political fields. Mill is still regarded today as one of the most influential thinkers, as the main
defender of the individual and individual liberties against the power of the state. Mill favored
the abolition of slavery but, as with many liberals in the nineteenth century, individual rights
appeared to apply only to “white people” (Mill did support women’s emancipation though). For
the “backward races” on the other hand, Mill seemed to assume that despotism was a legitimate
way of governing.

Mill was strongly influenced by utilitarianism but he gradually distanced himself from
Bentham’s teachings. According to Mill, the belief in the inevitability of progress – as
grounded in the Enlightenment ideals of rationality, progress and happiness – was too
optimistic. Progress was possible and necessary but it could only come about when there was
also freedom. Mill believed that progress could only occur in a society within which there was
a climate of freedom. Freedom thus became a condition for progress but this, according to Mill,
applied only to the “civilized” world. Between 1823 and 1853, Mill was an employee of the
British East India Company, a trading company that became a de facto powerful colonizer, and
did not believe that non-Western peoples should enjoy freedom. Mill thus rejected the
Benthamian idea that government could know people’s happiness. What was good or bad for
people, what brought them pleasure and happiness, could not be determined by government.
Government had to be there for the people, which meant that government could not impose

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happiness. The government was only allowed to create the conditions under which all citizens
could achieve maximum happiness. John Stuart Mill therefore also argued for expanded (but
therefore not single) voting rights, including for women. Mill, like de Tocqueville, feared the
power of the majority. What Mill called misrepresentation – the expression of mistaken short-
term thinking that characterized the majority of the population – led him to favor multiple
voting rights in which the quantity of the electorate was mitigated by the quality of the elites.
“Like Tocqueville, Mill was convinced that democracy could not do without an elite of cultural
and political professionals who could counterbalance the dangerous rule of sound popular
sentiment.” (Pels, 2011:98-99)

Mill had repeatedly argued that the moral worth of an individual was the criterion for holding
political office. Citizens who were “intellectually more valuable” than the majority of the
population should therefore have more political power. Mill thus based his argument for
unequal political power on the “unequal value of people as human beings” (Pitts, 2005:251).
Like de Tocqueville, Mill believed that civilization was threatened by the mediocrity and
conformity of the majority which would erode the spirit of freedom. Mill’s democratic and
inclusive premise was thus gradually redefined in more elitist terms whereby Mill, like de
Tocqueville in France, considered the working class inferior in the first instance and,
secondarily, the non-Western world. The freedom of the individual, in other words, had to be
protected against the power of the majority that could potentially threaten this freedom. The
dilemma Mill wrestled with, and which remains a political issue to this day, is how to protect
liberty from those who would seek to curtail it? In On Liberty, Mill attempted to resolve this
dilemma. Mill started from the assumption that freedom of speech was necessary for progress.
It made no sense to silence dissenting opinions and ideas because who could say with certainty
if there was no truth in them? So people were allowed to express bad, wrong, or false opinions
because this was productive for society. When people with “wrong” ideas expressed their
opinions, they could be contradicted and, possibly, convinced to abandon their wrong ideas.
But were there limits and where did they lie? Mills innovation lay in the fact that he did not
want to limit the expression of ideas. Like thought, its expression was not to be censored. The
limit was action or incitement to action, in other words when thought was used to bring about
a particular action. Not all actions were necessarily wrong or curtailable; the criterion was that
the action did not harm anyone else (harming oneself was another matter). As persuasive as this
modern political idea was (and is), in one area Mills’s analysis continued to cause tension,
namely over religious ideas and blasphemy. The difficulty of convincing people with deeply
held religious beliefs to tolerate criticism of their religious beliefs or insults to those beliefs is
still a debate. The classical liberal answer was (and is) to invoke a clear separation between
religious belief (which belongs to the private sphere that should remain free from government
intervention) and government (the public domain where democratic limits can be set). Even

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anno 2020, these convincing arguments do not always seem enough to balance freedom,
religion and tolerance.

The question remains, of course, whether imperialism was an inherent part of liberalism or an
accident de parcours, the individual denial of the ideals of liberalism by intellectuals in their
concrete political views. The endorsement of different political norms for different people that
was evident in imperialism needed legitimation and justification, and liberal thinkers provided
it. It is not enough to say that liberal political practice, under the pressure of the political
conjuncture, could not live up to its ideals and that the ideology as such remained
uncontaminated. Liberal theory was shaped by the political practice with which it was
intertwined and, as such, the establishment and consolidation of imperial empires was central
to this process. “The interconnections between liberal nation-building in nineteenth-century
France and Britain and the growth of their empires suggests that the process of democratization
in western Europe generated exclusions not only internal to those societies but also globally,
and that liberal thinkers of this period were deeply implicated in these exclusions.” (Pitts,
2005:254)

This was made clear once again by the discussions in the U.S. about slavery. After the American
Revolution, the agricultural economy in the southern states grew due to the further
entrenchment and expansion of slavery. As slavery became more important economically, so
did the idea of abolitionism, the drive to abolish slavery. Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)
became one of the first African American voices for the abolition of the institution after his
escape from slavery. A writer, preacher, social reformer, and politician, Douglass was living
proof to abolitionists that the arguments for slavery – that blacks lacked the intellectual capacity
to be free – were wrong. Douglass wrote several works about his experiences as an enslaved
person in which he also described his ambition to become a free man. Douglass believed in the
equality of all “people,” white, black, female or Chinese, and believed that equality through
dialogue across racial divides was possible and would promote coexistence under a constitution
that legally instituted equality. Douglass was one of the first to actively support the idea of
women’s votong right. At the first women’s conference organized by women in 1848, the
Declaration of Sentiments clearly states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men
and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable
rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these
rights governments are instituted, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed.
Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these rights, it is the right of those
who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new
government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form,
as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness.” Many in attendance
thought the right to vote went too far but Frederick Douglass argued that as a black man he

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could not accept the right to vote if women could not also claim that right. When the resolution
passed, it started the movement for women’s suffrage that dominated much of feminism for
decades. Women, white and black, were very active in the anti-slavery movement and played a
crucial role in the organization of the Underground Railroad, a clandestine network of secret
routes used to bring enslaved people from the southern U.S. to safer accommodations in the
northern part of the country. However, the gap between white and black in America and within
the women’s movement remained a thorny issue. As early as 1851, Sojourner Truth, an escaped
enslaved women, criticized the ‘white’ domination of the women’s movement in her speech
Ain't I a woman? Racism in the US did not disappear after the abolition of slavery by President
Abraham Lincoln in 1863 in the Emancipation Proclamation.

2. Bourgeois society
Marx and the birth of socialism
Although the story of communism starts with Karl Marx, the idea of communism is much older.
Marx did not invent the communist ideal out of thin air. He was inspired by three main
influences: the economic theories (cfr. Ricardo) that accompanied the Industrial Revolution,
early socialism that grew out of the frustrations of the unfulfilled ideals of the French
Revolution, and the philosophy of Hegel.

Early socialism was already striving for a more just society, where inequalities would disappear
and the lower strata of society would emancipate themselves. However, Marx felt that these
aspirations, which took a variety of forms, were still grounded in moral, religious or
humanitarian beliefs and therefore did not (yet) rise above the intuitively desirable. Marx
therefore labeled this kind of thinking as utopian socialism, ideas of imaginary future ideal
societies that were often unrealistic or naive. Marx labeled his own theory as scientific socialism
because the categories he used were grounded in the material context of actually existing
societies. Where utopian socialists sought to do away with capitalism because it went against
Christianity, against human nature, or against their sense of justice, Marx looked for the
sociological laws of motion within capitalism (the so-called inherent contradictions it evoked)
that would ultimately destroy it.

Marx was also heavily inspired by the economic insights of Locke and Ricardo and especially
the labor theory of value. Marx argued that the basis of value (the price), was labor. Ricardo
argued that the value of a good reflected the labor required to produce the good. Labor time
was the most important factor in determining the value of a good. Relying on Ricardo, Marx
nuanced: the value (price) of a commodity was the result of the socially necessary or average
labor time required to produce the good. In capitalism, however, more and more production
took place in large factories using machines and raw materials. These too, according to Marx,

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were goods in which labor time was reflected; machines had to be made by workers, raw
materials had ot be mined and transported by workers... But labor itself also became a good that
could be bought and sold. However, the wages that were paid were not so much a reflection of
labor time but rather the cost paid to keep the workers alive, the reproduction of labor power,
hence they were very low at the time of the industrial revolution. In the production process,
labor is combined with “fixed or stored human labor” (machines and raw materials) that
produces a particular good. Suppose the commodity is produced at a price of 5 euros and that
it is sold in the market at 7 euros. From where does that extra 2 euros come? It is what Marx
called surplus value, the value created by workers that is not part of the real cost of producing
the good because workers were not paid for part of their working time. Suppose a worker works
for 8 hours to produce a good that is sold in the market at 10 euros. The worker receives a wage
of 5 euros, while the entrepreneur pockets the remaining 5 euros. This surplus value, the profit
for the entrepreneur, is what Marx believes is at the heart of exploitation since the worker has
spent half of his time working not for himself but for the entrepreneur. The creation of this
surplus value is essential to capitalism. If the capitalist cannot create surplus value (because,
for example, he is obliged to pay out the full equivalent to the worker) then he actually stops
being a capitalist. Of course, quantitative changes can occur within capitalism. In the early
stages of capitalism, when surplus value was small and workers were unorganized, capitalists
could keep wages extremely low (at the level of subsistence). This phase of absolute
exploitation gradually changed with the enormous growth of the capitalist economy and the
demands of the workers which allowed higher wages to be paid. It entered an erea of relative
exploitation. Marx clearly indicated that capitalism had brought about incredible progress on a
human level. It had produced enormous wealth, skyrocketed the productivity of the economy,
and made masses of goods for consumption through a production process based on the
capitalist’s selfishness. Marx, as he himself emphasized, was not moved by a moralistic
aversion to the selfishness of the bourgeoisie. He did not want to improve or reform capitalism,
he wanted to expose the laws of motion of the capitalist system so that the proletariat would
understand how and to what extent they were being exploited (Napoleoni,1975 :99-110).

A third major influence was the monumental work of Hegel. Marx adopted Hegel’s dialectical
thinking but rejected the philosophical idealism that underpinned it. History was not a process
directed by the ‘Idea’ but developed dialectically through the forces of production and relations
of production. Hegel’s thinking was thus turned upside down or, as Engels, Marx’s supporter
said, “turned away from being upside down and placed on its feet”. Idealism was transformed
into historical materialism.
Marx’s historical materialism was a description of the past but also an analysis of the capitalist
mode of production and a prediction of a socialist and communist future. It was the history of
the evolution of how people made their world, the way people organized their world through
the use of raw materials, machines and tools in specific periods. Progress – the movement from

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one stage of production to the next – was the result of the dialectical tension between classes.
In other words, the class struggle became the engine of history. People were born in a specific
period and the set of relations of production, the mode of production, was determined by the
stage of development of the material productive forces of the time. These relations of
production formed the economic structure of society, the substructure. On this substructure
developed a superstructure of legal, political, and cultural institutions that reflected the
economic base (substructure). The cultural and intellectual consciousness of a stage (how
people thought about certain things) was determined by the dominant economic base of the
society. Hence Marx argued that it was not people’s consciousness that determined their social
existence but, conversely, their social existence determined their consciousness. Within a given
stage of development, production relations change through innovations, inventions, and
discoveries. A particular mode of production could not reproduce itself indefinitely. The
pressure of change on a mode of production would be cancelled out by class divisions through
a revolution that ushered in a new stage in history (Ozinga, 1987:12-18).

A revolution could not simply fall from the sky. It was possible only when a particular mode of
production was no longer able to assimilate change but had already produced new social classes
that were opposed to the ruling classes. After the revolution, a new dialectical cycle would
begin. For Marx, then, history was primarily a succession of economic stages. In the first stage,
the stage of primal communism, there were hunters and gatherers who lived primarily in a
communal system of tribes and clans. Although trade existed, production was primarily for use
rather than exchange. When agriculture was introduced, the notion of private property emerged
in the economic underpinnings. Individual ownership began to replace communal ownership
and this also led to the growing importance of inheritance making patriarchy the norm,
combined with monogamy. To further increase production in agriculture, slavery emerged
making trade more important and production to barter. The tensions within this system led to a
social revolution that led to a second stage, the stage of slave societies. At this stage, private
property became more important and production relationships were defined by those who
owned and those who did not (the slaves). Thus, the division of labor emerged (Ozinga,
1987:37-42). By associating labor with slavery, people alienated themselves from the
productive and creative essence of labor. With the expansion of slavery, trade grew, which also
created the class of traders and the use of money. In Ancient Greece, the economy grew,
propelled by slave-labor and military conquests. When in the Roman Empire no new rich
territories could be incorporated, the economic base (substructure) changed very gradually. The
many free people had a hard time surviving and were forced to resort again to subsistence
farming. The power of the old empires crumbled and led to a third stage in human development:
feudalism. In feudalism, the division of labor was between serfs and lords. In general, those
who worked (the serfs) owned the tools they used in their labor but they owed labor to the
landlord, paid (high) interest and could not move. Cities did not develop and remained largely

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rural. Production in cities was mainly manual labor that was strictly regulated by guilds that
made competition impossible. Trade remained mostly local for a long time, but inventions such
as the compass, which made distant travel possible, the Crusades, and the ‘discovery’ of gold
and silver increased production for exchange and trade rather than production for personal use.
The growing importance of traders meant that the power of the nobility began to decline and
the position of the serfs became less useful. Money played such a large role that the old feudal
relationships became a block and gradually disappeared. In the new stage, that of capitalism,
the division of labor was between the proletariat (those without the means of production) and
the bourgeoisie.

Marx saw capitalism as the last stage in humanity’s “prehistory” that would be overthrown by
a revolution of the proletariat. Capitalism was characterized by far-reaching human alienation
but also impressive technological progress. Such tension would lead to the end of capitalism
when the proletariat that had become an objective counter-power (a class an sich) but it would
now also have to become aware of its power and role in the progress of history so that it would
become a class für sich.
How the class consciousness of the proletariat would grow is a question that Marx and his many
followers thought through. It was clear to Marx that the proletariat would not suddenly acquire
revolutionary aspirations merely because of its position in the relations of production. It had
not escaped Marx’s notice that workers often wanted little more than a material improvement
in their standard of living and did not necessarily seek social upheaval. The question of
organization – through a party, a trade union or an International – therefore became an
important part of socialist thought. Marx saw in capitalism an inherent tendency toward self-
destabilization that regularly manifested itself in economic crises. A crisis is usually the result
of declining profits. Due to the economic competition to produce ever more cheaply, the
possibility of profit declines causing the economy to enter a downward spiral. This forces
capitalism to reorganize. Marx thought that this could not be done indefinitely, that too many
contradictions would arise making the situation untenable and eventually ending in a revolution
of the proletariat. The misery of the proletariat would grow (the middle classes would come
under pressure) and unemployment would increase to such an extent that at some point the
workers would realize that they constituted the majority of the population and were facing a
small group of rich people (Ozinga, 1987).

What should happen after the revolution? Marx distinguished two historical phases in the
struggle to create a society of associated producers. The first phase would be initiated by the
“revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat,” which represented workers’ democracy but still
carried the “defects” of capitalist class society. This initial phase would not only involve a break
with capitalist private property, but also a break with the capitalist state as the political chain of
command of capitalism. In this socialist phase, production and distribution would inevitably

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take the form of “each according to his or her labor” which would not yet completely eliminate
inequality. In the second phase, the phase of communism, the principle of society would shift
from “each according to his possibilities”, to “each according to his needs” and thus to the
abolition of the system of wage labor. In this phase, the state as a separate apparatus that stood
above and in an antagonistic relation to society would wither away and be replaced by a form
of political organization that Frederick Engels called “community,” the society of associated
producers. The abolition of capitalist class society and the creation of a society of associate
producers would lead to the end of class exploitation, along with the elimination of the divisions
between mental and manual labor and between the urban and the rural. The monogamous,
patriarchal, family based on the domestic subjugation of women would thus also be overcome.
Although Marx was aware of other, non-Western, economic stages, his historical materialism
remained primarily a description of European history.

Marx, as mentioned, also wanted to put his philosophy into practice and did not shy away from
political engagement. In 1864, Marx and Engels were among the founders of the International
Workingmen’s Association. The parties and movements that joined were by no means
ideologically united. Almost immediately the movement was traversed by two mutually
reinforcing fault lines. Internationalism attracted the workers’ movements to work together
while their national interests (and the own path they wanted to follow in it) further divided
them. Marx’s revolutionary ideas could be found in the programs of the labor movements and
the speeches of their leaders but concrete political action in the nation-states increasingly
diluted radical action and became increasingly reformist. These tensions were clearly
highlighted by the events in Paris in 1871, the Commune.

The Paris Commune was a 71-day uprising from March 18, 1871 to the Bloody Week of May
21-28, 1871, during which the revolt was put down. This revolt rejected the installation of the
government that had just been elected, and wanted direct democracy in its place. The Commune
and its violent suppression had a significant international impact, particularly within the labor
movement and the various emerging revolutionary movements. The Commune was a
democratic experiment in which citizens organized themselves to exercise power, in which
elections were organized in which women were allowed to participate, in which equal pay for
men and women was proclaimed, in which empty houses were given to the poor, in which the
use of justice became free, in which civil rights applied to all... In short, the Commune sought
to make a socially inspired order a reality. That is why the Commune was a lasting source of
inspiration for communists, who saw in it the harbinger of a proletarian revolution, for socialists
who saw in social welfare a policy of redistribution in favor of the poor, and even anarchists
who saw in the libertarian direct organization of the experiment an alternative to the state. The
Paris Commune is part of a “tradition of the oppressed” (Benjamin, 2016), one of the moments
in history when the lower classes succeeded, even if only for a moment, in breaking the chains

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of their oppression. The International met but was unable to adopt a common position. Vive la
Commune, wrote the Belgian socialist Van der Velde and Marx published The Civil War in
France in which he expressed his support for the Paris communards, but this symbolic support
came too late, the Commune had already been ruthlessly crushed. Within the International it
was difficult to be against the communards but the repression that followed in several European
countries caused despair. The anarchist movement led by Bakunin blamed Marx for the failure
of the Commune, while part of the English labor movement left the International. The question
of what was the best strategy for the labor movement proved to be a divisive one. Marx again
suggested the need for the proletariat to establish its own political party. Both the radical-
revolutionary tendency (the blanquists) and the followers of the anarchist current of the
proudonians stepped out of the International. Finally, in 1976, the International was dissolved.

Anarchism
In the second half of the nineteenth century, a split emerged within anarchism, between two
variants that were and still are difficult to reconcile. The first current, social anarchism, shared
the ideal of equality and a just society with socialism. Individual or individualist anarchism, in
which the individual became the measure of all things and criticized everything that curtailed
that freedom, had much more in common with libertarian thought. That both currents had an
anti-state attitude is not enough to make them into one clearly defined ideology.

Because of its emphasis on the individual, individualist anarchism was not a unified movement
either. Max Stirner (1806-1856), the most famous hyper-individualist anarchist, did not believe
in an objective social reality that existed independently of the individual. Abstractions such as
classes, the state or the masses, but equally religions and ideologies, were therefore not to be
taken seriously. Human action was driven by the Ego. His most famous work Der Einzige und
sein Eigenthum (The Ego and Its Own, 1844) was an indictment of the idea of the moral and
political superiority of contemporary civilization. Stirner made an attack on the modern world
that was increasingly dominated by ‘religious’ ways of thinking and oppressive social
institutions. It was an anti-authoritarian and individualistic critique. “There is nothing above
me,” he proclaimed, laying the foundation of a radical, self-centered development based on
individual autonomy. Stirner’s goal of self-liberation went against every form of dogmatic
thinking. He advocated an uprising carried out by people who rose above personal, social,
political and ideological limitations. Stirner’s most revolutionary idea, which inspired some of
anarchism, was the idea that private property was bad, that it was permissible to steal because
it was better that everyone have something than that there be a small group who have a lot and
many who have little. Stirner’s work had an impact on Marx’s thinking but was mostly picked
up in the second half of the nineteenth century by individualist anarchism. Thus, for these
individualist currents, the state was by definition a coercive state, a set of institutions that
illegally disrupted private arrangements between people and thus curtailed individual freedom.

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The fundamental belief in the absolute autonomy of the individual, self-sufficient and selfish,
meant that this movement did not formulate a critique around social inequality (Franks,
2013:458-459). It is in this that it fundamentally differs from social anarchism.

Social anarchism, according to Franks (2013), is defined by four main ideas. First is its anti-
statism, the rejection of state structures as oppressive and by which anarchism is clearly
distinguished from socialist or social democratic thought. Second, the rejection of capitalism as
a coercive and hierarchical set of norms and values that promotes inequality and injustice. A
definition of the “Self” and the individual embedded in concrete socio-historical contexts and
relationships with others, which distinguishes it from selfishness, is a third idea. Finally, there
is the recognition that the strategies used to achieve the ideal must precede or prefigure the
anarchist goals; that, in other words, the expected goals can and should already be implemented
in the here and now.

Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876), a Russian man born into nobility, led the anarchist resistance to
Marx within the International Workingmen’s Movement. For Bakunin, every institution (except
science) was oppressive and an attack on human freedom and its potential for self-development.
Ni Dieu, Ni Maître, the name Auguste Blanqui gave to his newspaper, accurately reflects
Bakunin’s ideal. The state was the greatest oppressor but other institutions were also rejected.
The organized churches and religion itself were seen as a form of coercion. “In history, the
name of God is the terrible club with which all divinely inspired men, the great ‘virtuous
geniuses’, have beaten down the liberty, dignity, reason and prosperity of man.” (Bakunin, s.d.
:53) More so: “The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the
most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind,
both in theory and practice.” (Bakunin, s.d. :25) Bakunin also saw the patriarchal family
structure as an oppressive system. Women remained slaves of their husbands, condemned to
humiliation and servitude. For Bakunin, there had to be equal rights for men and women,
women had to become economically independent, free to forge their own way of life. Freedom,
then, consisted in that man 'obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as such,
and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever,
divine or human, collective or individual. ' (Bakunin, s.d. :30)

The rejection of authority, of any institution outside or above man, was central to Bakunin’s
activism. The second point in the program of the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy
(an anarchist International) read: “The Alliance wants a political, economic and social equality
of the classes and individuals of both sexes, beginning with the abolition of inheritance law, so
that in the future the enjoyment will be equal to the production of each person, and so that, (...)
land, the instruments of labor, like all other forms of capital, will become the collective property
of the whole society and will be used only by the workers, that is, by the agricultural and

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individual associations.” (Bakunin, 1868) As with Marx, Bakunin’s strategy for achieving this
goal was revolution. However, Bakunin’s definition of revolution and the goal to be achieved
differed greatly from Marx’s, which ultimately led to the exclusion of anarchists from the
International. Bakunin advocated constant revolutionary action, daily radical change that would
break down oppressive institutions. Bakunin held to the idea of ‘creative destruction,’ the
breaking down of the existing oppressive order but only to make a new society possible. Radical
activism was therefore not only destructive but enabled the break with the status quo to build a
better world, the active destruction of the existing social and political order through human
action. Marx thought that the revolution would be carried by the proletariat, Bakunin, however,
thought that the most exploited workers, the unskilled workers and peasants who had been
largely pushed out of the capitalist system and whom Marx called the lumpenproletariat, would
carry out the revolution. On top of this, Bakunin’s goal was also not to take over the power of
the state but rather to break state power. For him, the future of humanity was not a dictatorship
of the proletariat or a socialist state but a system of free federations of small, egalitarian,
communities. Accordingly, the Anarchist International founded in 1872 stated that 'the
aspirations of the proletariat can have no other aim than the creation of an absolutely free
economic organisation and federation based upon work and equality and wholly independent
of any political government, and that such an organisation or federation can only come into
being through the spontaneous action of the proletariat itself, through its trade societies, and
through self-governing communes. ' (Stekloff,1928 ).

The defeat of the Commune in 1871 and Bakunin’s association with the Russian violent
revolutionary Sergei Nechayev (although the relationship between the two has never been clear)
presented anarchism with the question of political violence. The urge to want to break down
the existing order, the “propaganda of the deed” as Paul Brousse described it – violent and non-
violent actions intended to stir up the spirit of revolution among the people by showing that the
state was not untouchable – seduced many anarchists. Throughout Europe, anarchist activists
committed hundreds of attacks or robbed banks... in order to spread the spirit of revolution. In
the Catechism of the Revolutionary by Sergey Nechayev (1847-1882), it was stated that “the
revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no business affairs, no emotions,
no attachments, no property, and no name. Everything in him is wholly absorbed in the single
thought and the single passion for revolution.” Between the revolutionary, society, and the state
there is only a relentless and inexorable war on life and death. Nechayev continued: “He is not
a revolutionary if he has any sympathy for this world. He should not hesitate to destroy any
position, any place, or any man in this world. He must hate everyone and everything in it with
an equal hatred. All the worse for him if he has any relations with parents, friends, or lovers;
he is no longer a revolutionary if he is swayed by these relationships.” In reality, the many
anarchist acts of violence did not prompt the European masses to start the revolution. Gradually,
therefore, the purpose of these acts of violence became less clear. Anarchism threatened to

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degenerate into blind terrorist or nihilistic destructive violence. The hatred of the existing
unequal society that many felt; gradually turned against society as such. When the oppressed
did not want to be liberated (through the actions of the anarchist revolutionaries), the oppressed
gradually became part of the aversion that was held for the oppressor. (Doom, 1986:152)

Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) eventually offered a way out of this violent anarchism. Although
he rejected violence as a strategy, Kropotkin understood where that violence came from.
Kropotkin believed that those who used the weapon of ‘terror’ did so only because they were
responding to social inequality and poverty. He was convinced that should the immoral
authority of state, church, and ruling classes not exist, without the repression and control of
these institutions, people would turn to cooperative ways of producing and exchanging
(bartering) goods that would erode capitalism. Kropotkin’s most important contribution to
political theory is his critique of authority, especially of the state, and his radical idea of a future
stateless society where freedom and equality would reign in self-organized communes. In
Mutual Aid, Kropotkin laid the foundation of his theory by showing that competition and
competitiveness between people according to the social Darwinian principle of survival of the
fittest (see further), although it could occur under certain circumstances, was less important than
cooperation and mutual aid. History had made more progress thanks to the human tendency
toward cooperation. Kropotkin also rejected the more romantic ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
who saw cooperation as prompted by people’s love for each other. However, Kropotkin argued
that mutual aid had benefits for the survival of humanity (as well as the animal kingdom) and
their communities. Natural selection, according to Kropotkin, encouraged mutual aid.

After the revolution, Kropotkin argued, it was imperative that the state immediately disappear
and be replaced by self-governing communities or communes. To make the voluntary mutual
basis of these communes possible, two things had to be fulfilled immediately. First, social
equality had to be introduced, immediately and completely, and, second, wage labor had to be
abolished and replaced by a system of compensation based on the needs of the people. With
this vision, Kropotkin came close to Marxist thought with these ideas, which is why he called
himself a communist anarchist. The economic system he proposed was equally motivated by
cooperation and reciprocity, an economic system that would produce first and foremost what
people need. Kropotkin thought that a society developed enough to produce what was needed
would also have no problem giving each person what he or she needed. Kropotkin’s works
certainly had a great resonance throughout Europe but anarchism as an ideology remained a
political fringe phenomenon. An important exception to this was anarcho-syndicalism, which
was successful in some countries both in terms of its following and its impact on the class
struggle. Anarcho-syndicalism differed from other social anarchisms in its strategy to establish
an anarchist society. Anarcho-syndicalism saw the working class as the main agent for
achieving anarchist society by organizing them into revolutionary unions or syndicates. These

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unions would be both the instrument for the overthrow of capitalist society and the necessary
bureaucratic apparatus of the future society. Especially the French Confederation Generale du
Travail (CGT) and the Spanish Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) laid the foundation
of the principles of anarcho-syndicalism such as solidarity, direct action, and self-organization
of the workers which still gives anarcho-syndicalism a combative place in the emancipation of
the workers.

The first wave of feminism

It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that feminism, the belief in the political,
economic, and cultural equality of women, took on a positive content and embodied the struggle
to improve the status and position of women. This, of course, did not prevent women from
collectively standing up for equal rights in law, education, and politics in the decades before.
Nor did it mean that the most important political fault lines of the nineteenth century, this one
between labor and capital and thus also the issue of slavery, did not manifest themselves in the
movement. The women of the middle classes fought primarily for adjustments to the laws that
kept them in a subordinate and dependent position vis-à-vis men (in divorce, in charges of
adultery, in being allowed to own property...) and for equal access to higher education and to
paid work. Socialist thought also influenced the women’s movement worldwide. Clara Zetkin
and Alexandra Kollontai argued that oppression was primarily a class issue, for the family as
an economic unit fundamental to sustaining capitalism forced women into a subordinate
position that could only be changed by revolution. While the women of the well-to-do classes
protested against a life of imposed perpetual minority and idleness, the women of the working
class revolted against their precarious situation. As working women, their income from work
helped their families but unions, often men’s bastions, were not always positive about this
(women were seen as a threat to jobs for men).

Clara Zetkin (1857-1933) was one of the important German leaders of socialism and the
women’s movement. Zetkin approached gender inequality as a socio-economic fact. She
followed the analysis of Marx and Engels who argued that capitalism, by its striving to
accumulate wealth, presupposed the exploitation of women. Engels argued that the right to
inheritance, crucial to the reproduction of capital, was supported by a bourgeois morality, the
monogamous family and the separation of the private and public spheres, which then led to the
control of female sexuality. Therefore, the emancipation of women was an important part of
the class struggle. Zetkin’s analysis aligned with August Bebel’s influential work Die Frau und
der Sozialismus published in 1879. Bebel (1840-1913), one of the historical leaders of the SPD,
also argued in the book that the domination of women by men had its origins in history, not
biology. Women, Bebel argued, were doubly disadvantaged. They suffered both from the social
dependence of men but equally they suffered from the economic dependence in which women

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in general and proletarian women in particular found themselves along with proletarian men.
The pursuit of equal rights and equality before the law was not enough, according to Bebel, to
eliminate women’s oppression. The solution to full emancipation lay in solving the social
question, the elimination of the social and economic contradiction that could only take place
through socialism.
Zetkin founded a socialist women’s magazine, Die Gleichheit (The Equality), in which she gave
form to her emancipation theory, in addition to her political action. According to Zetkin, women
could only emancipate if they became economically independent like men by earning their own
income, through labor. Economic independence would also advance women socially and
politically. For Zetkin, then, the demand for economic equality and social emancipation was a
class struggle, a struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat, and only after a socialist
revolution could women become truly equal as women and as workers. Patriarchy and
capitalism were two parallel systems that maintained the oppression of women. Therefore, her
demand for equal wages between men and women was important. Wage inequality would lead
to a competition between men and women that would allow wages to get lower and lower,
leaving neither men nor women with a decent life. Zetkin also tried to implement these ideals
through political action and trade union mobilization. She not only laid the foundation of
socialist feminism, but also became one of the leading voices and leaders within the German
socialist movement. During World War I, Zetkin, along with Karl Liebknecht and Rosa
Luxemburg, belonged to the minor opposition in the SPD (see further). Because of her anti-war
views, Zetkin was arrested several times during the war. In January 1919 she became co-
founder of the Communist Party of Germany, sat in the Reichstag until 1933, only to flee the
country when Hitler came to power.

The struggle for women’s right to vote – the suffragettes’ movement – grew strongly at the end
of the nineteenth century and became a global movement in the twentieth. Movements around
the world, regardless of their different approaches, put pressure on their governments to obtain
the right to vote. Depending on the context, the debate around women’s suffrage often went
hand in hand with other social fault lines such as racial equality (slavery in the US). New
Zealand became the first country in the world to grant women, including Maori women, the
right to vote in 1893. But women’s emancipation had also become a theme elsewhere. Nana
Asma’u (1793-1864) was the daughter of the founder of the Sokoto Caliphate, Usman dan
Fodio, in present-day Nigeria. She became known for her wisdom and struggle for women. She
sought the institutionalization of education for girls and women and therefore trained a network
of women teachers who then traveled throughout the caliphate to teach women in their homes.
Nana Asma’u’s legacy lives on in Nigeria to this day, schools and movements are still named
after her. In Egypt, Huda Sha’arawi (1879-1947) became one of the best-known advocates for
women’s rights in the early twentieth century. After Egypt’s pseudo-independence in 1922, she
founded a women’s clinic and advocated with Islamic theologians and intellectuals the need for

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family law reform. She pushed for the abolition of polygamy and wanted women to have a
greater say in the marriage bond. Sharawi, who came from a wealthy family, did remain elitist
in her struggle in which she viewed wealthier women as the guides of lower-class women. After
her death, feminism in the Arab world developed in different directions. A secular women’s
movement, which drew inspiration from the theories, views and insights produced in the West
(e.g., Nawal al-Saadawi) and a more religiously inspired movement that seeks to find in the
resourcing of Islam, and especially in a non-patriarchal reading of the Qur’an, the elements of
women’s emancipation (e.g., Amina Wadud). In Japan in the early twentieth century, spurred
by a group of young writers, the Seitosha movement was founded. The autobiography of Raicho
Hiratsuka (1886-1971), In The Beginning Woman Was The Sun, described her struggle against
the social mores of her time in which the submissiveness of women stood central. The Seitosha
movement fought against the traditional, feudal attitudes that still prevailed in Japan and met
with much opposition. From the 1920s onward, the torch was taken over by other organizations
that, in order to undermine the patriarchal character of Japan, promoted the ideal of the ‘new
woman’.

Emma Goldman (1869-1940) argued that anarchism was an ideology that promised freedom
and equality to women, everything that women did not have. Goldman’s feminist anarchism
meant not only fighting the exploitative relationships between capitalists and workers but also
fighting the subjugation of women by patriarchy, which she saw as inherent in capitalism. Her
feminism was as committed as her political anarchism. In the Tragedy of ‘Women’s
Emancipation, she argued for complete equality between men and women, advocated
contraception to free women from the slavery of motherhood by deciding on their own
reproductive capacity. She denounced the patriarchal organization of society and opposed the
institution of marriage. She saw marriage as a continuation of the male tendency toward
domination, an institution that causes women to lose their name, privacy, self-determination,
and sense of self. Therefore, resistance to the traditional family structure and unequal relations
between men and women was necessary.

The conservative offensive

The Catholic Church, renewed faith and Christian democracy
Catholicism was a cultural system that gave meaning and order to the faithful through symbols,
rites and traditions. It constituted a moral compass in the here and now and a guide to salvation
in heaven in the afterlife. This culture was maintained by a Church, organized hierarchically,
with an institutional and political agenda that responded to the challenges the Church faced.
The French Revolution, and especially the phase of the Terror led by the Jacobins, had shaken
the cultural hegemony of the Church of Rome and put pressure on the alliance between altar
and throne. The development of science, the progress of rationalism, the growing state power
to organize provisions for its citizens, the spread of liberal and socialist ideas, and the rise of

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the working class all provided alternatives to the traditional religious, moral sense of purpose.
The goal of the Church in the nineteenth century, therefore, was to re-strengthen its bond with
the believer. The Church entered into agreements with various European governments in the
form of concordats, which regularized the relationship between the Church and the state.
Concordats clearly gave the political authorities the upper hand in the relationship with the
Church, but the popes believed that this was the best way to protect Church interests. On the
one hand, political authorities maintained ecclesiastical freedoms and recognized papal
supranational authority, but on the other hand, concordats also ensured the inhibition of any
possible independent direction of the believer.

The most significant change within the institution of the Catholic Church in the nineteenth
century was the centralization of an authoritarian authority in Rome in the hands of the pope.
This ultramontanism, of which Joseph-Marie de Maistre (1753-1821) and Louis-Gabriel de
Bonald (1754-1840) were the founders, saw in Roman authority the only alternative to the
disorder of the revolutionary ideas that were circulating. In his Du pape (1817), De Maistre
showed himself to be an advocate of absolute monarchy and the doctrine of divine right. He
rejected the idea that a constitution based on natural law could be formulated a priori, without
input from God. “All authority comes from God and reason, or that which is called philosophy,
(...) is a dissolving force.” (Von der Dunk, 1976:87) Yet even with De Maistre secularization is
already present in his thinking. Religion becomes an instrument in the service of a proper social
order, and not the other way around. After the revolutions and uprisings of 1848, the Church
became more militant. The uprisings and revolts had made it clear that the bourgeoisie, once in
power, ceased to be revolutionary. An agreement with a part of the bourgeoisie was found all
the easier because of the fears aroused by the rise of the working class and socialism. This did
not mean, however, that the Church was open to liberal ideas. Several papal encyclicals and
declarations condemned individual or social rights in all possible terms (the right to freedom of
faith, freedom of the press, separation of church and state...) and Pope Pius X’s proclamation
that the Catholic Church was irreconcilable with “modern civilization” showed that the Church
embodied above all a conservative and reactionary power. Even more than liberalism, socialism
was beleaguered. Socialism, which was based on a materialistic philosophy, was seen by the
Church as a great danger to man and society, since it was a direct attack on family, property
and religion. Ultramontane thought thus embraced papal authority and rejected modern political
ideologies as immoral and subversive. The Church’s attempt to recapture the soul of the
believer was accompanied by the redefinition of Church doctrine and the proclamation, in 1870,
of the pope’s infallibility (O'Malley 2018). The Church increasingly emphasized uniform
external behavior of the believer organized by a stricter definition of religious obligations and
prohibitions and supported by an increasing number of congregations; rather than inner
spirituality, in order to hold its own in the modern world. Outside of Europe, the missions
received the full support of the Church in order to foster a sense of religious renewal borne of

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conversions. The Catholic Church (aided in this by the Protestant churches as well) thus helped
shape the “civilizing mission” of the European colonial powers. This reformed and combative
Catholicism eventually led to tensions within several European countries.

In Germany, the growing tensions between the state – which wanted to weaken the bond
between the German Catholic Church and Rome to bring it under government control and allow
for a shared culture across the German denominational divide between Catholics and
Protestants – were described as a “struggle for civilization” or Kulturkampf (1871-1887).
German chancellor Otto Von Bismarck and his government believed that Catholics were more
loyal to the pope in Rome than to the German emperor. The optimism of liberal thought
throughout Europe, the belief in progress, and with it the growing criticism of the Church and
her teachings, led to tensions between Church and governments all over Europe. Thus
ultramontane thought increasingly clashed with nationalism. Especially in Germany and Italy,
which were not reunited until the second half of the nineteenth century, the Church and the
political authorities came to oppose each other. The Risorgimento, the gradual political
unification of Italy that began in 1820 with uprisings in Naples and Piedmont and ended in 1870
with the capture of Rome, marked the end of the Catholic Church’s dream of claiming
leadership of an Italian federation. The popes continued to oppose the new state and demanded
that the Ecclesiastical States be restored. Nationalism in general was often a challenge to the
Church. Relations between the national churches, the pope in Rome, and the national
governments within which liberals were increasingly empowered deteriorated. The German
Kulturkampf, as well as the various tensions and conflicts in other European countries, led the
Church at the end of the nineteenth century to change its policy by both recognizing the social
question and tolerating, at least in principle, the separation of Church and State.

In the encyclical Au milieu des sollicitudes, the pope instructed the Catholic faithful to accept
the institutions of the French Third Republic and henceforth to make a special effort to defend
Church interests within the institutions of the state. This meant that the Church did not accept
the government’s anticlerical legislation but tolerated it as a framework within which the
Church sought to emphasize its right to its own freedom. This so-called ralliement pacified
relations between atheists and believers in France, although the Dreyfus affair at the end of the
nineteenth century put renewed pressure on the fragile relationship. The fact was, however, that
the Church’s acceptance of the republic was a political one. The symbolic “toast of Algiers”,
on which the French Cardinal Lavigerie accepted the French political institution in the name of
the Pope, had nothing to do with innovative theological speculation; it was a purely political
decision, prompted by political considerations (Roy, 2007:17-18) In 1891, with the publication
of the encyclical Rerum Novarum, the Church also positioned itself on the social question.
Although socialism was again rejected because it went against the natural rights of humanity,
sought to destroy the family and faith, and that its proposed ‘solutions’ would produce only

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envy, chaos, and violence, the encyclical did recognize the existence of a working class and of
the larger social question. The encyclical also included a critique of unchecked capitalism that
had dire consequences for workers. The pope therefore called on the state to promote justice,
recognized the workers’ right to strike, and accepted the creation of Christian trade unions and
the introduction of collective bargaining between entrepreneurs and workers. Ultimately, the
Church remained an unconditional defender of the right of property and thus only accepted a
brake on free market mechanisms out of moral considerations: paternalistic assistance of
patrons and classic charity could be tolerated.

The ultimate goal of a harmonious society – with the family (the patriarchal family with the
father as breadwinner and the woman as mother and housekeeper united by the sacred bond of
marriage) and private property as its cornerstones – could best be achieved through corporatism.
When each part of society (agriculture, industry, science, the military...), just as each part of the
body, performed its function properly and thus served the common good, then society would
function harmoniously. The corporations, free consultative bodies between workers and
employers of one industry, could make agreements independent of the government that both
maintained respect for the labor contract and could improve the material living conditions of
the workers. The Church could still accept the existence of a Christian union but at the same
time made it clear that a Catholic party had to submit to the directives of the Church. For the
Church, there could not (yet) exist a Christian democracy outside the Church, as some believers
had hoped (e.g. Daens and the Daensists in Belgium). From the end of the nineteenth century
onward, therefore, an impressive network of Christian organizations developed that intervened
in the daily lives of believers. The renewed Christian culture was reflected in many European
countries in the establishment of Christian schools, Christian newspapers, workers’ and
women’s organizations, and leisure movements so that in some countries (such as Belgium and
the Netherlands) Catholicism became an all-encompassing framework that accompanied the
life of the believer from the cradle to the grave, the pillarisation began.

'Science', conservatism and racism

In the second half of the nineteenth century, conservatism underwent major changes. After 1848
and the rise of socialism, part of the liberal bourgeoisie became more conservative. The
fundamental inequality of man, a central idea of conservatism, underwent a change not only
within church doctrine but also within liberal thought. The bourgeoisie’s emancipatory
thinking, once it became the guiding force of the industrial revolution, partially gave way to a
new inequality doctrine. Alongside the classic conservative anti-rationalist thinking legitimized
by tradition and religion, a theory of inequality based on “science” also emerged in a positivist
and modernist form. Positivism, social Darwinism, and elite theories became secularized
versions of conservative thinking. The blending of these social theories with biology also gave
racism a significant boost. Biologically based racist theories; often based on the pseudoscience

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of phrenology; sought not only to substantiate inequality within societies but also to prove the
superiority of “the white race” over the rest of the world.

Positivism
August Comte (1798-1857), a student and later associate of Saint-Simon, set out to find a
scientific basis for the study of society. He was convinced that a positivist theory of society, la
philosophie positive, was necessary and possible, and thus a science of politics (Comte called
it sociology), to remedy the social chaos of the French Revolution. Positivism, according to
Comte, was a science-based social doctrine necessary for the new industrializing society. The
task of positivism was to develop a common moral code that would be based on scientific
findings and that would transcend utopian ideals of collective equality on the one hand and
atomic egoistic individualism on the other. In other words, Comte believed that the social
problems arising from industrial society could be solved by science as summarized in his well-
known motto Savoir pour prévoir, pour pourvoir (Mayer, 1961).
According to Comte, human thought proceeded in three stages, and every society went through
these stages. In the first, theological, stage, roughly the period up to the Enlightenment,
humanity sought explanations for its existence by believing in supernatural forces, the ‘will of
the gods,’ or the existence of one deity. In this period, therefore, tradition and blind obedience,
reproduced by hierarchical systems (such as parent-child relationships, religious institutions...),
prevailed. In the second, metaphysical, phase, humanity began to question the traditional order
with its emphasis on authority and faith. The “gods” were secularized as it were, and were
henceforth called democracy, natural law, human rights, sovereignty... Although man went on
to explore, this phase was not sufficient to provide solutions to social problems. It was only in
the third, scientific or positivist, phase that humans could solve societal issues. According to
Comte, positivism was not concerned with abstractions but with establishing facts and ordering
them in order to arrive at social laws. Therefore, according to Comte, sociology with its
positivist method would replace politics. Auguste Comte thus formulated one of the first social
evolutionist theories.
Although Comte was convinced that his sociology was averse to ideology and bias (which he
blamed on liberals and socialists) his teachings soon grew into conservative politics. Facts were
sometimes easy to establish but what consequences or decisions to draw from them were not
always clear. Suppose we establish that there is social inequality between men and women,
what lessons should we draw from that? Should we assume that this is a fact, and therefore a
normal thing and therefore defend the existing order? Or should we assume that this inequality
needs to be addressed and therefore change the existing order? The choice of one or the other
alternative is not dictated by the facts themselves but by our values and norms, by our moral
stance on gender inequality. Comte ultimately chose to preserve the status quo and argued for
a social order that appeared to be an updated version of the medieval order; a society where
everyone knew ‘their place’ and that was regulated by a faith. This faith was no longer the work

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of the Christian churches but a new “Religion of Mankind” or église positiviste, which
connected all of society in a harmonious and organic way, while the government supported
progress and maintained the existing order. Comte’s positivism ended in a conservative
worldview. Indeed, Comte was very hostile to liberalism, which he viewed as an ideology that
could only produce societies in chaos and confusion. Comte thought that through “science” –
which was not devoid of ideological bias – a harmonious society would become possible.
Comte, and other positivists, believed that “as human knowlegde advanced, human conflict
would wither away. Science would reveal the true ends of human action, and - though why this
was so was never explained - they would be found to be harmonious.” (Gray, 2007:59)

Social Darwinism
The declining role of faith in European and American societies in the second half of the
nineteenth century and the becoming more conservative of some of the liberal elite (often due
to the rise of socialism) stripped inequality theories of its older religious legitimacy. When
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation
of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was published in 1859, it was not only an incredible
challenge to the Church and its founding story of humanity – creationism; the belief that man,
life, nature, the earth, and the entire universe had come into being through a divine creation –
but was equally an opportunity to ground inequality in biological traits, to attribute human
differences to natural processes. Darwin had demonstrated the rules of the struggle for
existence; Spencer, who devised the concept of the survival of the fittest (which was later
adopted back by Darwin), wanted to show that inequality had a scientific basis, based in
biology, and thus prove that the free market was the most natural social arrangement. Where
Comte invoked science to formulate a critique of liberalism, Spencer used science to defend
liberalism. But, as the philosopher John Gray notes “in each case the science was bogus.”
(Gray, 2007:88) Using biology, Spencer constructed a narrative that turned the progress of the
human species into a pseudoscientific story of utilitarian happiness and small government.
Darwin had doubted that any moral or political consequences could be drawn from the
evolutionary theory of natural change. Darwin did not think that natural selection had a specific
direction or purpose. For Spencer, social evolution meant evolution toward the free market that
became the arbiter of social justice.
Spencer believed that government – which would ultimately disappear through industrialization
and urbanization – should not engage in economic regulation because it would affect the natural
intercourse between factually unequal people. If the government refrained from intervening in
the economic and social spheres, a “superior civilization” would gradually emerge through
natural selection. The principle of survival of the fittest would ensure that the weakest in society
were eliminated and make it a de facto synonym for survival of the fattest. The rich were “best
adapted” to survive in such a society. For Spencer, then, history is a process of purification, an

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evolution toward a superior civilization under the leadership of an elite. The government should
not take care of orphans and widows, nor should it invest in public services such as education
or support of the poor. Progress in social Darwinism became purely a matter of material
progress as the basis for human fulfillment; a pseudo-scientific narrative that not only
legitimized social inequality but also provided the enterprising bourgeoisie with a sense of
chosenness. Social Darwinism reinforced the belief of certain people (the top entrepreneurial
bourgeoisie), as well as certain races and civilizations, that they were better equipped to survive
than others. Also in the second half of the nineteenth century, liberalism seemed to have
perverse effects in supporting racist theories, as we will see further.

Although Spencer thought that peoples outside the West were not yet ready for democracy or
freedom, he was an opponent of imperialism. Many of his adepts and followers had fewer
problems with classifying groups of people into “races” and systematizing these differences
into rankings and classifications. The eighteenth-century distinction between civilized and
uncivilized peoples, and the at least theoretical possibility of being able to aspire to the standard
of “civilization,” gave way to a distinction between “superior” and “inferior” peoples, races,
and civilizations between which the evolutionary struggle for preservation was inevitable.

Organic thinking: elite theories in search of harmony

Notwithstanding the fact that the origins of the social sciences lie in the ideals of the
Enlightenment and that the first social scientists had rather a progressive and liberal worldview,
social scientists reinforced doubts about the rational progress of the world. The still young
discipline of sociology wanted to provide an answer to the social question and concretely erect
a dam against socialism and radical liberalism by providing the existing order with a scientific
justification. At the end of the nineteenth century, in the midst of the growing crisis of
liberalism, the Italian sociologist and professor of constitutional law, Gaetano Mosca (1858-
1941), stated, “In the world in which we live, socialism can only be thwarted if a political
science with a sense of reality succeeds in overthrowing the metaphysical and optimistic
methods that are in vogue in the social sciences today.” (Doom, 1986:165). Organic thinking –
which views society as a living organism like the human body within which all parts need
harmonious cooperation to keep the body healthy – recived a powerful boost at the end of the
nineteenth century from conservative elite theories. Mosca introduced an elitist theory of
politics that was an outright critique of democracy as an institution but also as an idea. In his
Elementi di Scienza Politica (published in 1896), Mosca argued that every society consisted of
two classes, one ruling and one dominated. It was the minority of the ruling class that was
important in politics and controlled social life (through parties, press...). This elitist theory could
still, from a logical point of view, be understood as a liberal critique of democratic reality, but
other social scientists such as Michels (who had previously been a socialist) and Pareto took it

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as a starting point to express a fierce criticism of both the ideal of progress of the bourgeoisie
and the socialist and/or social reformist idea of progress. The new generation of sociologists
distanced themselves from the rationalistic and optimistic philosophy of history of the previous
generation (such as Marx or Comte).

According to Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923), all societies consisted of only two interacting
groups: a powerless mass and the powerful elites where the elites were divided into ‘ruling’ and
‘non-ruling’ elites. Historically, elites were hereditary aristocracies but the democratization of
social life in the nineteenth century had changed the composition of elites; individuals and
groups from different classes were recruited although the privileged bourgeois descent was
most prominent. Unlike Marx, for Pareto the class position of the elites was less important than
the psychological profiles, the personality traits, of those who were part of the elites and thus
determined their domination in society. For Pareto, man was more than mere reason. Economic
interests and motives played an important role in the behavior of the elites but, in his view, it
was man’s non-rational impulses, passions, values and prejudices – what Pareto called the
résidus – that were more decisive. Society was constantly moving toward or away from balance
and harmony, a continuous clash between the non-logical inclinations (résidus) and economic
interests. This dynamic lay entirely with the elites. The masses, the passive non-elite, played no
role in it (except as foot soldiers in the plans of the elites). History for Pareto was thus not a
dialectical class struggle but rather an endless rise and fall of ruling elites; history was nothing
but the graveyard of aristocracies. Elites in Pareto’s circular theory of elites were determined
by the social type that prevailed: innovators and conservatives, or “foxes” and “lions.” “The
innovators are cunning, adroit, corrupt and employ all means to gain power. ‘Democracy’
makes it increasingly important to mobilize the masses. Those in power, who thus wish to
preserve relations, are often, for the sake of maintaining peace, prepared to make concessions:
they become soft and sentimental. Certain sections even defect to the innovators. When the
power of the ruling elite thus wanes, the relief is at hand: the foxes drive out the lions. Once it
has gained power itself, the new group is exposed to the penetration of a subsequent innovator,
which again weakens its position.” (Doom,1986 :165-166) Not only within societies was there
a constant struggle between the ruling and non-ruling elites but equally at the international level.
History was an uninterrupted struggle between nations and races, a permanent battle in which
the stronger subjugated the weaker. For Pareto, war was nothing more than the way in which
natural selection manifested itself and took place, and any humanitarian effort to avoid war was
detrimental to this natural evolution. “If European societies were to model themselves on the
ideal dear to the humanitarians, if they should go so far as to inhibit selection, to favor
systematically the weak, the vicious, the idle, the ill adapted - the ‘small and humble’ as they
are termed by our philanthropists - at the expense of the strong, the energetic who constitute
the elite, then a new conquest by new “barbarians” would by no means be impossible.” (Pareto
quoted in Buzaglo, 2018:105)

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Racial Theories
There was, as we have already seen, a connection between liberalism, underpinned by
pseudoscientific insights, and the classification of people into a hierarchy of “races” or
civilizations in which the “white race” was always at the top of human development. It was not
only biology (phrenology) that provided ammunition for racial theories. The Ethnological
Society of London, a discussion forum that helped establish anthropology as a scientific
discipline, attempted to “scientifically” prove the inferiority of Asians to Europeans in its 1866
session. Spencer’s social Darwinism already reflected the intertwining of liberalism and racial
thought – for example, Spencer advised the Japanese government not to allow mixed marriages
because, in his view, this would have ‘bad consequences’ from a biological point of view – but
in the second half of the nineteenth century, distinctly racist theories also developed. The
concept of race, which tried to give itself a scientific basis, was central to the confrontation
between the optimistic and pessimistic view of civilizations and their evolution (Bracher, 1984).
The Inequality of Races by Count Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau (1816-1882), published
in 1853, set the tone for a whole series of pseudoscientific works that ranked, analyzed, and
assigned people a place in human history based on external characteristics. For de Gobineau,
the course of history could be explained by race. He introduced the theory of the superior Aryan
race (with which he equally invented the Aryan race), a pure race of masters who had conquered
India but who, under the influence of Buddhism and mixed marriages with “inferior races,” lost
their status. The French aristocracy, de Gobineau thought, was a pure race because it had
avoided mixed marriages in its history and was thus superior to the rest of the French
population. Mixing what the Gobineau considered the three most important races (white, black,
and yellow) would lead to chaos and degradation. The Aryan race, the white race, was the most
intelligent race and the best able to create civilization. In 1899, Houston Stewart Chamberlain
(1855-1927) published The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century which described racism as
a comprehensive theory and ideology. Like de Gobineau, Chamberlain claimed that only
Aryans were capable of great things. But where de Gobineau saw the French aristocracy as the
new Aryans of the world, Chamberlain, who had become German, believed that only the
Germanic people were capable of developing a creative culture. The greatest danger to the
Aryans, therefore, was that “their race” would mix with “inferior races” which could only lead
to decay. To avert the danger, not only was a renewed self-confidence of the Aryan race needed
but also a scapegoat, an enemy who would become the embodiment of the danger. Building
further on the growing anti-Semitism in Germany, the Jews, through their supposedly
conspiratorial behavior, were the preeminent danger to the survival of the German race.
Biologically based racism and a renewed, virulent, anti-Semitism (which sprang from the
Christian religious anti-Jewish attitude but also transcended it) developed simultaneously in
Germany, France and Austria. A counter-reaction came in the form of Zionism. Theodore Herzl
(1860-1904) who was the father of modern political Zionism, founded the Zionist Organization

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in 1897 to promote Jewish immigration to Palestine and to establish a homeland for the Jewish
people.

In France, the Dreyfus affair put anti-Semitism at the center of political debate. In 1894, French
officer with Jewish background Afred Dreyfus was sentenced to life imprisonment for treason.
He was accused of passing secret documents to the Germans. Further investigation by family
members and some journalists showed that Dreyfus was innocent but the army refused to come
back on his sentence. It was not until 1898 that the true culprit, Esterhazy, was brought to
justice. He was acquitted, however, to the cheers of nationalists, conservatives and the first
fascist movement around Charles Maurras. When Emile Zola published his famous article
J’accuse, the Dreyfus affair became a national issue that dominated public opinion for years to
come but also led to anti-Semitic violence. For years the anti-Dreyfus camp continued to thrive
on a strong but narrow nationalism and an anti-capitalist anti-Semitism. When it became clear
that the documents accusing Dreyfus had been forged, the anti-Dreyfusards did not want to
believe it. More than that, they described it as a “patriotic forgery,” a justifiable forgery, as it
were, that underscored their primary racism and anti-Semitism (Paxton, 2004). The pro-Dreyfus
camp invoked universal human rights. Although Dreyfus was nevertheless acquitted in 1906,
the fault line between the two camps continued to smolder until World War II.

Discontent with democracy

The conservative intellectuals who shaped the cultural despair of the late nineteenth century
and early twentieth found their inspiration in the romantic cultural critique of Rousseau
(although they abhorred Rousseau’s democratic ideals), but especially in their distaste for the
ideals of the Enlightenment. Man, they argued in various ways, was not primarily rational but
volitional; “he is not by nature good nor capable of perfectibility; the politics of liberal
individualism rest on an illusion; evil exists and is an inherent aspect of human life; positivistic
science and rationalism are divorced from reality and at best only partly valid; the idea of
historical progress is false and blinds men to the approaching catastrophes.” (Stern, 1963:
xviii) Thus, these conservative thinkers saw man primarily as a willed and spiritual being in
need of a clearly defined faith and community. Therefore, these conservative thinkers used an
increasingly nationalistic or racist discourse in which a scapegoat or a culprit could be identified
for the moral decay of society. “Liberalism had grown strong by its idea of progress. Now the
belief in its inevitability and also on its sociological validity, had taken some painful knocks.
This applied not only to economic laisser-faire liberalism itself but also in the belief in the
political priority of liberty over equality, of the individual over the group. The pressing social
problem, the expansion of imperialism, and finally a nationalism that was leading to war were
all challenges to political ideas which far exceeded the basic individualist and rational axioms
of liberalism. ' (Bracher, 1984:62)

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Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) symbolized as no other the growing desperation of the
intellectual elite who saw in the rapid rise of capitalism and its all-important principle of
competition and profit and in massification – the increasing role of the popular masses in
politics, art and culture – the demise of culture. Democracy, and modernity as such, were
increasingly discredited from the end of the nineteenth century, regarded as a danger to culture.
This thinking gained great resonance after World War I, during the interwar period. Nietzsche
was an intellectual Einzelgänger, a cross-thinker who deliberately went against the prevailing
political, moral and ethical ideas of the time. Nietzsche rejected democracy and its
parliamentary system, equally disliked liberalism and socialism, but neither could he agree with
the more classical conservative currents. Nietzsche’s intellectual revolt was first and foremost
a revolt against the individual will and the coercive mediocrity and vulgarity that Nietzsche felt
were imposing themselves in the democratic tendencies, in the rise of women, in the socialists
who fought for the workers or mass education that was undermining the general level of
education. Nietzsche’s philosophy was motivated by ethical motives in which he emphasized
above all the impetuous creativity of an “aristocratic” minority. The majority, the ordinary
people whom he called tinkerers and bunglers, were negligible. “True virtue (...) is not for
everyone (...) It is neither useful nor wise; it isolates its possessor from other people; it is hostile
to order and harms the subordinates. It is necessary for the higher-ups to fight against the
masses.” (Russell, 1995:792) Nietzsche’s ethics, however, did not mean the arbitrariness of
fulfilling one’s own desire. Above all, he admired the heroic nature of the will. The new
morality divested itself of weakness and pity and embraced lordliness and lust. Against the herd
mentality of a God-inspired submissive morality, it was necessary to create a new morality, the
Herrenmoral. This morality could not be based on God because, Nietzsche argued, “God is
dead.” God was nothing but man’s projection outside himself and man realized this. For
Nietzsche, Christianity was the great culprit, the religion that denied and fettered the true nature
of man. Christianity denied feelings of superiority, revenge, wrath, adventure... and offered only
submission, a slave morality that tamed man and encouraged only cowardice, insignificance,
and usefulness. The new Herrenmoral was aggressive, combative, and unwilling to be limited
by anyone or anything else. It was an aristocratic morality; not everyone could achieve it. Only
the Übermenschen were destined to lead and rule and did not need to care about the majority.
“Everything that is good or bad in itself exists in a small minority of Übermenschen; what
happens to the rest is irrelevant.” (Russell, 1995:789) The Nietzschean will to power was thus
a powerful rejection of the rationalist ideals of the Enlightenment.

For Nietzsche, then, there was always an unbridgeable gap between an aristocratic elite and the
submissive masses, and this inequality was best maintained. Russel succinctly summarized
Nietzsche’s political theory: “The victors in a war, and their descendants, are as a rule
biologically superior to the vanquished; it is therefore desirable that they should hold all power
in their hands, and in their administration consider only their own interests.” (Russell,

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1995:799) In so doing, Nietzsche rejected both liberalism and socialism, more to the point:
these ideologies had to be opposed because they posed a danger to the Herrenmoral. Bravery,
creativity, resourcefulness and will to power may have been lacking in the mediocre
Üntermensch, but if they united they could still overcome the Übermenschen through the power
of numbers – slave morality was the morality of the great majority. “Therefore,” Nietzsche
argued, “we must oppose any unification of those who are weak as individuals, for fear that
their combined power will surpass that of the individually strong.” (Russell, 1995:800) With
his division of humanity into a minority that mattered and a majority that didn’t, Nietzsche
helped lay the groundwork for a political morality that was stripped of any kind of responsibility
or duty, more than it was a defense of self-interest. Nietzsche was trying to reconcile two kinds
of values; his fondness for power, war, aristocratic exaltation, violence, and cruelty (the
Dionysian in culture) with his fondness for philosophy, the arts, and especially music (the
reflective, apollonian in culture). This difficult balancing act caused Nietzsche to see politics
more as an art than a science. A ruler, a great statesman, became an artist by having a vision.
Limits, obstacles and boundaries to achieving that vision were allowed to be set aside and
violence was not to be shunned a priori. Clearly, this allowed Nietzsche to resonate with certain
socialist and anarchist circles, although unlike the political left, he condoned the exploitation
of the masses and their oppression. Nietzsche’s justification of the morality of the strongest, his
use of terms such as Übermensch, slave morality, and the will to power, of course, could not
but appeal to fascists and Nazis some decades later. Nietzsche, entirely consistent with his
ideals, was not interested in nationalism, nor was he a primary anti-Semite. It was mainly his
sister whose sympathy for Nazism caused Nietzsche’s texts to be distorted so that they were
more in line with Hitler’s ideals. “He who, however, sings a eulogy of the strongest, and the
warrior, glorifies war, applauds cruelty and power, even if much of it should be read in between
quotation marks, inevitably attracts the swine. Nietzsche would undoubtedly have scoffed at
Hitler (…) but a vulgarized Nietzschean ideology is an obvious source of inspiration for
Nazism.” (Doom, 1986:161)

The cultural pessimism that characterized a significant portion of the liberal and conservative
intelligentsia in Europe took on a violent edge in the work of French journalist George Sorel
(1847-1922). Sorel was a radical thinker who, disappointed in his Marxist commitment in his
younger years, combined revolutionary socialism with extreme nationalism. Alternating
romantic political ideals with progressive ones made him a challenge to both the political left
and right. Sorel rejected liberalism and rationalism, he renounced the liberal and social idea of
progress and replaced it with a belief in revolution in which violence stood central. The myth
of revolution, as Sorel reflected in his Réflexions sur la violence, replaced the idea of Marxism
as science. Sorel wanted to provide revolutionary syndicalism with an ideological foundation.
The true struggle for socialism, he said, took place in the sphere of production. It was the
workers themselves who had to and would improve their lot, independent of the tutelage of

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intellectuals and parties. Sorel departed from a moral standpoint, namely that the goal of
workers’ action was the good to be realized but this could only be done through struggle,
through belief in the myth of revolutionary violence. It was in struggle that man surpassed
himself and became heroic, it was struggle itself that gave form to morality. For Sorel, then,
socialism was an intuitive force, a myth, that could not be captured in scientific or rational
concepts. Sorel “remains a prototype and classical example of left-right radicalism with
totalitarian features. The real point was the ideological method of the myth of struggle and
violence, a myth which the great critics and subverters of liberal and rational social and
political thought were able to exploit. ' (Bracher, 1984:53-54)

From imperialism to colonialism

The enslavement and subjugation of Asia and Africa was a long and slow process that began
with the European drive for economic gain (the search for cheap raw materials, cheap labor and
markets), the spread of God’s word (the missionaries) and gradual military and political
domination and ended in colonization. In the Indies, it was the British East India Company that
established its first trading post as early as 1613, starting a slow but relentless “conquest by a
company” (Tharoor, 2017). As in China later, the conquest of India was primarily a capitalist
enterprise that took the form of plunder. The Indian civilization and the Mogul kingdom led by
Jehangir was one of the most important political, economic and cultural centers of the world in
the eighteenth century. India accounted for 27% of the world economy; by 1947, the year of its
independence, the British had so exploited the once powerful country that it produced barely
3% of the world economy. The indirect rule established by the East India Company was done
under the banner of free trade but in reality it was a smokescreen for a set of measures designed
to ensure that Indian resources would fall into the hands of the British. From unregulated
competition and excessive taxation over the wanton destruction of crops and industries to mafia
practices whereby local Indian rulers were required to pay large sums of money to the company
in exchange for so-called protection (which the company violated when it pleased and simply
occupied lands and kingdoms). As in China and Egypt, the nineteenth century for India was a
century of deliberate underdevelopment and industrial destruction. The British discourse that
the Crown would rule over India in the interests of the Indian people seemed to appeal to British
elites, including liberal thinkers, but in reality was a gross lie, a hypocrisy.

Napoleon’s expedition into Egypt (1798) was not too great a success militarily, but it did have
a great impact. Gradually the Arab, Indian and Chinese rulers and their societies realized that
the balance of power between Europe and the rest of the world was changing, that their own
social organization – which in the case of China or Islamic civilization were ancient universal
empires – was crumbling. The initial reaction to the arrival of the British or the French was one
of disapproval and dedain but also of wonder and sometimes admiration. Abd al-Rahman al-
Jabarti (1753-1825), Islamic scholar and historian, saw Napoleon’s invasion as a great calamity,

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a disaster, and as an overthrow of the natural order of things. Al-Jabarti denounced the French
custom of urinating in public, the custom of not burying the dead, the fact that women were not
modest, and that men and women had sexual intercourse with anyone and at will. He also
laughed at Napoleon’s attempt to set himself up as the protector of Islam and the his poor Arabic
language. At the same time, al-Jabarti looked up to French organization and discipline and to
its scientific achievements. The Bengali writer Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838-1894) wrote
that the world “had never seen such tyrannical and powerful people as the people who founded
the British Empire in India... The English who came to India in those days were afflicted with
a disease – stealing other people’s wealth. The word morality had disappeared from their
vocabulary. ' (Mishra, 2017:35) The need to reform its own political organization in order to
respond to the European hunger for raw materials, labor and profit (capital) became greater.
The tanzimat – the reorganization of the Ottoman Empire between 1839 and 1876 – was an
attempt to modernize the political and social foundations of the Empire, preserve the territorial
integrity of the Empire and its sovereignty, and counter both emerging nationalist tendencies
within the Empire as well as aggressive Western politics. In Tunisia, a constitution was
introduced as early as 1861 to provide the country with institutions that could implement the
necessary reforms in the face of French imperial appetite. The reformer Khayr al-Din al-Tunisi
(1820-1890), in his The Surest Path to Knowledge Concerning the Conditions of Countries of
1867, sought to unite the main parts of his intellectual legacy, namely his piety and faith in
Islam, the traditional statecraft he had received in his education, and the modern culture of the
West he studied. The pragmatist Khayr al-Din equated good governance with careful
management, and to this end he redefined the Islamic concept of maslaha to public or common
good. Justice, security, and prosperity for the people could be achieved through Islamic precepts
combined with the importation of Western technology. The ruling elites had the task of
implementing reforms for the good of the people. (Perkins, 2014) The Indian Moguls and the
Chinese Manchus also tried to maintain their empires. For a long time China tried to turn away
from what it saw as Western arrogance. For more than two thousand years the Chinese empire
had been a political unit, a multi-ethnic state based on Confucianism which was the universal
blueprint of man and society and was recorded in classical writings and works of poetry. China
prospered through the development of science and art and had a high-performing administrative
apparatus of officials. However, the ‘Heavenly Mandate’ – the political and religious doctrine
that justified the rule of the emperor depending on the rulers’ justice and ability – had gradually
led to an inward development, a disregard for everything that happened outside its own
civilization. In other words, the Chinese had not realized how quickly Europe was changing
and the impact it would have on the world. The Empire of the Middle was still convinced in the
nineteenth century that it was the center of the world. British policy toward China was ruthless.
The British used their Indian properties to grow opium and distribute it en masse in China,
addicting millions.

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The modernization of political and economic structures reflected the growing power of the
European powers but most leaders underestimated the European threat or overestimated their
own ability to prevent domination. By 1900, European powers controlled most of the world and
imposed their will on Asian, African, and Arab peoples. Supported by its military power, the
introduction of capitalism caused a great disruption of the societies that were still essentially
agricultural: millions of workers were forcibly employed on the other side of the world (e.g.
Chinese in Trinidad) on the orders of the British, raw materials were looted at insignificant
prices to supply their own economies, many rich and developed areas were “undeveloped”!
Colonization, whatever legal concrete form it took, was perceived as a great disaster, a
disruption of one’s own society, and questioned the foundations of one’s own society. The
cultural shock caused by colonization should not be underestimated. Centuries-old structures,
based on philosophical or religious beliefs, collapsed.

Islam, for example, was for centuries a universal frame of reference that shaped large and well
developed empires that spanned different political systems and economies. Throughout that
very diverse world (with different peoples, languages, cultures, and traditions), the idea of the
umma, the community of all believers, was a powerful identification that gave belonging and
fraternity to Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia, the belief that by sharing certain values and
norms they held a central place in world history. Colonization therefore marked the end of the
domination of Islam as a civilization, the introduction of modern legislation (from state law to
commercial law) marked the gradual end of the regulatory function of the shari’ah, Islamic
law. Given the loaded nature of the term, some clarification about shari’ah is necessary. The
term shari’ah – which in its Arabic origin refers to ‘way’ – is usually translated as Islamic law.
This is only partially correct because shari’ah refers not only to an “ancient law” but also to a
moral and ethical system. For Muslims, shari’ah primarily refers to a method of finding one’s
way to God, the way one travels to be a good person, ergo to be a good Muslim. As such, it is
often synonymous with a general sense of justice. There is no single, definitive exposition or
source of the shari’ah. To put it somewhat simply, there is no book you can pull out of the
library to know what the shari’ah says on this or that topic. The shari’ah relies heavily on
precedents, which is to say that it is case-based law rather than a “positive legal system” (the
body of laws, written and collected in law books, that apply in a particular society at a particular
time in its history). In the Sunni tradition, for example, there are four schools of law, each of
which takes a slightly different approach to the goals and methodology of jurisprudence. What
it means to apply or implement the shari’ah in practice depends greatly on the case at hand.
The shari’ah is not a comprehensive legal system, as it is limited to a few areas of law.
Moreover, within that limited field, there is room for very different interpretations. With respect
to certain issues (such as family law, marriage, divorce, adoption, inheritance...), the Qur’an is
very specific about how these matters should be regulated, and their codification into legal
statutes is relatively straightforward, although not always uncontroversial. For other issues not

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directly contained in the Qur’an, Islamic scholars have had to rely on the traditions of the
Prophet Muhammad when dealing with legal matters. Sometimes the Qur’an provides basic
principles – such as the importance of deciding matters based on consensus within the
community (ijma) – and it is left to legal scholars to determine how best to apply these precepts
to concrete situations and problems that arise (Mandaville, 2014:41). The shari’ah has also
been and is often the subject of political-religious debates in which opinions on the proper
interpretation often vary widely. These differences in opinions and interpretations occur not
only today from Antwerp across Cairo to Manila but have played a role throughout the history
of Islam (Berger, 2006).

The intellectual response of the colonized peoples was not long in coming. Long before the
struggle for independence became a reality, the peoples who had until then been considered
unfit to govern themselves were longing for freedom, equality and dignity. The intellectuals of
the colonized world reinterpreted their own religious and philosophical foundations of their past
but also eagerly read Western political thinkers. From Egypt to China to Japan, there were three
responses that recurred in one form or another in all reform and modernization thinking. Pankaj
Mishra sums up these reactions well: “the reactionary conviction that if Asian people were truly
faithful to their religious traditions, which were presumed to be superior to those of all other
civilizations, they would be strong again; the moderate notion that only a few Western
techniques were required by Asians whose traditions already provided a sound basis for culture
and society; and the vigorous determination, embraced by radical secularists like Mao and
Atatürk, that the entire old way of life had to be revolutionized in order to compete in the jungle-
like conditions of the modern world.”(Mishra, 2017:16)

Latin American liberation

The Enlightenment and modern political thought had a major impact on Latin America. Liberal
political ideas, especially from France, were the main inspiration for a decolonization
movement that began as early as the early nineteenth century. The collapse of the Portuguese
and Spanish empires had made South American countries independent but the challenge was to
provide the new nations with new political institutions and achieve social and economic
progress. Simon Bolivar (1783-1830), born in Caracas to an affluent family, was influenced by
the ideas of the Enlightenment but also of the American, French and later Haitian revolutions.
The liberal political ideas inspired him to rebel against the domination of the Spanish. Bolivar
viewed the idea of a republic with a separation of powers as an alternative to despotic rule, as
a form of emancipation from the absolutism of monarchies. The liberal consensus – republic,
popular sovereignty, natural rights – formed the basis of a series of wars between the Latin
American insurgents and the Spanish rulers. In the end, Bolivar liberated much of the continent,
earning him the nickname El Libertador.

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In the second half of the nineteenth century, positivism had a great resonance in Latin America
because the empiricism that underpinned it was seen as an ideal means of building the new
states. Positivism was widely accepted by a variety of intellectuals – the positivist creed “order
and progress” still adorns the Brazilian flag – who, depending on their source of inspiration,
drew diverse political lessons from it. Positivism in Latin America was a mixture of the thinking
of August Comte and of the social Darwinist Herbert Spencer and the German biologist Ernst
Haeckel. At the end of the nineteenth century, positivism was especially challenged by diverse
forms of liberation thinking, both in the countries that were independent but still marked by
major forms of inequality and in those that were still under foreign control.

José Martì (1853-1895) laid the groundwork for a radical anti-imperialism in Cuba that later
became an inspiration for Fidel Castro. Martì’s anti-imperialism advocated the emancipation of
Cuba. This could only become a reality if Cuba gained independence from Spain, thus
abolishing slavery but also ensuring that the U.S. would not control the island. Therefore, Martì
also advocated economic independence, which meant that Cuba would decide for itself what to
produce. In particular, agriculture, which consisted largely of the production of sugar for the
foreign market, was to be phased out. Cuban liberation was at the same time to entail a social
revolution, eliminating the gap between rich and poor. In his Montecristi Manifesto, written
with Màximo Gòmez, Martì called for unifying the country. The war was to be fought by both
the white and black inhabitants of the island. The Spaniards who resided there, and who did not
oppose the war, were to be spared. The revolution proclaimed equality for all, based on human
integrity and dignity. In Peru, José Carlos Mariàtegui (1894-1930) drew attention to the need
for emancipation of Latin America through a socialist revolution but one that would be based
on local specific conditions (the reality of extensive ethnic diversity), a critical appropriation of
European ideas. Although Mariátegui emphasized the economic aspects of Marxism, he
nevertheless did not reject the value of religion and myth in his treatment of the native
Americans.

The Nahdha
During the Nahdha, or revival, thinkers set out to find the reasons why the Arab-Muslim world
had fallen behind. The answers varied. Either one had to assume it was a result of the
"backwardness” of Islam or one had to assume it was a result of “no longer following true
Islam”. Indeed, according to the Islamic reformers, true Islam had been buried under a
centuries-old layer of dust of “wrong traditions”. Thus, the “restoration of the Golden Age” or
the early period of Islam could begin. It is also in this period that numerous traditions presented
as “authentic” were re-invented. An extremely important observation here is that Islam was not
usually seen as the main obstacle to emancipation or self-determination. On the contrary, Islam
very easily became a symbol of resistance against colonialism, a ‘national’ bonding agent to

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fight the colonial rulers. Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839-1897) was the most important pioneer
of Islamic reformism. Al-Afghani was a tireless political activist who traveled throughout the
Ottoman Empire and Iran seeking political support from political leaders against what he saw
as Islam’s two main enemies: European expansionism and internal decadence. Al-Afghani
criticized taqlid, the blind imitation of tradition, and revolutionized ijtihad, the rational
interpretation of Islam (Mandaville 2014). In his view, rationalism was the central element of
Islam, a rationalism that had been perverted by the ulama, the Islamic law scholars, for whom
he had no good word. The ulama had transformed Islam into a system of ignorance only to
serve their interests, and so Al-Afghani opted for a “purification” of Islam.

In 1883 Ernest Renan gave a lecture at the Sorbonne entitled Islam and Science that caused a
huge stir in Islamic intellectual circles and prompted the writing of a number of rebuttals,
including one by Afghani. Renan argued that Islam was a metaphorical “iron band” that
crowned the heads of Muslims and prevented rational and scientific thought, and therefore
explained the backwardness of Islamic societies compared to Europe. Renan’s argument was a
product of his two intellectual goals. First, he wanted to fit Islam into his larger narrative of
religious and civilizational differences to explain European superiority, and, second, Renan
wanted to show that religion, especially Catholicism, needed to be reconsidered in order to be
understood as the moral underpinning of a society that was consistent with God’s plan for the
evolutionary progress of humanity. In broad terms, Renan sought to reconcile religion and
science. In fact, Renan and Al-Afghani agreed on a great deal. Al-Afghani was attracted to
Renan’s attempt to reconcile religion and rationalism and to subject religious traditions to
critical examination. In his own works, Al-Afghani also denounced superstition, opposed
traditional interpretations of religion, and fought to disassociate faith from dogma and ritual
that he believed ran counter to rationalism, empiricism, and ultimately modern scientific and
intellectual progress. Al-Afghani challenged Renan regarding his treatment of Islam as a unique
faith, distinct from other world religions, that would never be able to embrace rationality. If it
were true that Islam was an obstacle to the development of the sciences, how could one know
that this obstacle would not one day disappear, he asked rhetorically. Why and how did Islam
differ from other religions? Al-Afghani was convinced that Islamic societies too will succeed
in breaking the bonds of tradition and finding the path of civilization and progress. If
Christianity, despite its strictness and intolerance throughout the centuries, was not an obstacle,
why should it be different for Islam? Al-Afghanis analysis still reverberates today. Even today
it is often wrongly assumed that Islam would not go hand in hand with rationality and
modernity. Little seems to have changed in over a century and a half (Moaddel & Talattof,
2002:23-28; Ringer, & Shissler, 2015). Al-Afghani, who formed his ideas through his political
activism and thus never developed a complete ideology, did remain consistent in his anti-
imperialism throughout his life, although it sometimes expressed itself in apparent paradoxes.
He was simultaneously a supporter of nationalism and pan-Islamism, he criticized the rigidity

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and intolerance of Islam but also wanted to re-energize it, he admired Western scientific and
technological progress and was convinced that rationality was peculiar to Islam. He applauded
Islamic identity and togetherness but supported cooperation with Christians, Jews and Hindus
(and did so himself during his lifetime). With Al-Afghani, for the first time, a layman stood up,
namely someone who had not received the traditional formation and training of an ‘alim
(Islamic scholar) in the religious sources, who dared to speak in the name of Islam, apart from
the traditional world of religious scholars, and called on Muslims to shed their subservience
and passivity toward the West and progress. As such, Al-Afghani laid the groundwork for an
intellectual and political evolution that had an indelible impact on the twentieth century.

One of Afghanis students, Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905), gave Al-Afghanis ideas a more
systematic treatment, forming the basis of Islamic reformism. Abduh, himself an ‘alim,
attempted to devise a program for the reform of Islam. He emphasized a religious unity within
Islam, rejected the traditional doctrinal disputes between the various schools of law, wished that
the Qur’an and the sunna be taken as the only sources of truth and that all the ballast of tradition
be jettisoned. Abduh also wanted to adapt the Arabic language so that everyone could study the
Qur’an. Abduh’s reforms centered on education. It was only through a new kind of education,
combining the best of both worlds, that Islam and the Arab-Islamic world would renew itself.
For Abduh, the Egyptian (as well as all other Muslims) had to be re-educated to become
politically and socially mature. Within that re-education, religion would play a central role. The
religion Abduh spoke of, as well as Al-Afghani, emphasized rationality above all. Renewed
self-knowledge, based on rationality, was for Abduh a sine qua non for making a renaissance
possible and for the Arabs to catch up with Europe without losing their identity or authenticity
in the process. Abduh thus had no problem accepting and adopting numerous ‘positive things’
(freedom, equality, social security, technology, science...) from the West. He even tried to show
that all these things were actually Islamic in origin but had been lost due to the decadence of
Islamic civilization. The Europeans had also forgotten this. Hence, after one of his travels in
Europe, Abduh stated, “In Europe I have seen Islam but no Muslims, in Egypt I see Muslims
but no Islam.”

Abd al-Rahman Al-Kawakibi (1855-1902), student of Abduh, also sought the reasons for the
decline of the Islamic umma within its own community. Al-Kawakibi assumed that the loss of
religious practices and beliefs were at the root of the decline but that it was not due to European
penetration alone but also to the despotism of the Ottoman sultans. The main reason for decline
was Turkish despotism that prevented a renewal of Islam. Despotism for Al-Kawakibi meant
the domination of blind obedience over rationality and science. As long as there was no
scientific progress, there could be no social progress and emancipation. Following his teacher
Abduh, Al-Kawakibi therefore stressed above all the reform of education and thought. For Al-
Kawakibi, the reform of Islam was a matter for the Arabs. He attributed to the Arabs numerous

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political, cultural, and moral qualities that made them the ideal group of reformers, in contrast
to the Ottoman Turks. Al-Kawakibi thus laid the groundwork for a racialized nationalism, a
pan-Arab Islamic identity. This identity he set primarily against “the Turk”, the internal other,
but Al-Kawakibi also used Europe, the West as the external other. He developed the concept of
“ Easterness” as the antithesis of “Western,” a notion he needed to apply the pan-Arab Islamic
identity to the Christian minorities of the Middle East as well. The Arab Christians were first
and foremost Arabs and thus likewise shared the positive attributes of being Arab. They were
Christians but culturally Oriental and thus quasi-Islamic.

The Meiji restoration in Japan

Developments in Japan had a major impact on political developments in Asia. From Istanbul
through Cairo and Tehran to Beijing, Japan was seen as an example to follow of successful
modernization in which it had still managed to retain its cultural integrity and autonomy.
Japan’s modernization, as in India or the Middle East, occurred under strong Western
imperialist pressure. The start of Japan’s rapid development came in 1853 after the American
commodore, Matthew Perry, “opened Japan to trade” by bombing Tokyo (then called Edo)
from his heavily armed ships. This led to the end of Japan’s self-imposed international isolation
and heralded the gradual end of the Tokugawa shogunate. During the subsequent Meiji
Restoration, which began in 1868, Japan industrialized rapidly by adopting Western ideas and
methods of production on a large scale. At the same time, equally major changes came to the
country’s political system and social structure.

Yoshida Shōin (1830-1859) was one of the first activists to oppose the shogunate and work for
the emperor and the restoration of his power. Shōin was convinced that only a strong emperor
could cope with foreign influence. His activism led him to also be one of Japan’s first
intellectual leaders. Shōin personified the will to simultaneously restore Japan’s power so that
it could stand up to the pressures of imperialism and the will that rapid spiritual revitalization
and industrial-scientific reform would lead Japan into modernity in its own way and pace. His
ideas were pragmatic to his political goals. He favored education for all (including peasants and
merchants), wanted Japan to adopt modern technology from the West, and wanted political
structures to be reformed. Shōin trained several youths who would later take on prominent roles
in Japan’s development. Shōin, enraged by the unfair terms imposed on Japan in a treaty with
the U.S. in 1858, became involved in a plot to assassinate a shohun. The plot failed, Shōin was
captured and eventually, at the age of 29, executed. Not only was Western technology
introduced but Western political ideas also seeped into Japan. Japan sent several missions to
Europe and the U.S., bringing several reformers into contact with liberal, social Darwinist and
later socialist ideas. The Meiji reformers realized that a xenophobic Japan that would isolate
itself from the rest of the world, which many Japanese still advocated, would not be able to
stand up to the imperialist appetites of the European powers and the US. The goal of the

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reformers was to make Japan strong enough as soon as possible so that it would be accepted
and recognized as the equal of the West. The question of how this was to be accomplished
received several answers.

Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835-1901) was influenced by liberalism but its goal of making the
Japanese state strong enough to compete with the West led him to nuance his liberal and
egalitarian principles. In principle Fukuzawa was in favor of education for all, seeing it as a
means of stopping Western control over Japan, but at the same time he feared that education
for women and peasants could lead to social unrest and thus weaken the state. In his most
famous work A Survey of Civilization (1875), Fukuzawa argued for civilization as a material
and spiritual well-being that would take man to a higher level through the quest for knowledge
and the pursuit of virtue. The West may not have been perfect but it was the most advanced
civilization and Japan needed to ask itself what it could learn from the West. Fukuzawa even
advocated that Japan “leaves Asia intellectually” and adopts only those ideas of the West that
strengthened and stabilized the Japanese state. Thus, Fukuzawa gradually became a more
conservative thinker where law and order became central to the interests of the state. Nakae
Chomin (1847-1901), who had studied in France, was strongly influenced by the egalitarianism
of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. For Chomin, it was clear that liberal values and democratic political
structures were Japan’s future. Japan therefore had to introduce the ideals of progress carefully
and sparingly so that the country would not be overwhelmed by the new ideas, causing the
process to end in nihilism or undermine Japan’s own values. On the other hand, there was
someone like Katō Hiroyuki (1836-1916) who was convinced that only an enlightened form of
despotism could bring about gradual changes in Japan and protect it from Western imperialism.
Hiroyuki articulated a growing tendency in Japan that democratic and republican forms of
political government were incapable of achieving Japan’s goals. When, in the early twentieth
century, Japan became a strong industrial nation but also a military power to be feared, social
Darwinist views, an offshoot of nineteenth-century liberalism, seemed to form the basis of a
Japanese imperialism, and potentially fascism, that will trample Asia underfoot.

The Middle Kingdom: China

The first reform impulses were prompted by the same question that animated the Nahdha: why
had Europe become so strong and China weak? The opium wars (1839-1842 and 1856-1860),
the military defeat against Japan, and the humiliating trade treaties had made it clear that China
could not stand up to imperialism. Rebellions regularly broke out and were ruthlessly crushed
by the imperial apparatus – the Taipei uprisings between 1850 and 1864 claimed twenty million
lives. The Qing dynasty, led by Empress Cixi, followed a conservative policy that coupled
military innovation and modernization of the military with an inflexible and conservationist
policy that further isolated China from world events. Kang Youwei (1858-1927) was the first
to call for a complete reform of the country’s economic structures and educational system. Kang

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advocated the preservation of imperial structures but believed in its reform that would enable
China to enter the modern world. Thus, Kang desired a controlled, top-down revolution. Kang,
like Al-Afghani with Islam, used a renewed reading of Confucianism – the most common
school he rejected as “false” – as the basis for a new nation. Political reform, intellectual
revitalization, scientific curiosity and the mobilization of the people became part of Confucian
doctrine in Kang’s thinking in order to reform China. In this way Confucianism gradually
became a “religion” in the image of Christianity or Islam, where until then it had been more
philosophy and ideology. Like European thinkers, Kang classified religions and civilizations.
However, he considered Confucianism superior to the monotheistic religions, which were
doomed to disappear in his ultimately utopian worldview that he described in his Book of Great
Unity. Technology, Kang thought, would lay the foundation of the progress needed for a
humane and equal society. This would consist, in the future, of administrative units governed
by direct democracy, based on a unified world government. In this way, a universal harmonious
community would emerge in which there would be no place for distinctions based on “race,”
ethnicity, language or religion. Kang’s ideal, however, was not free of racist thinking since he
advocated transforming “brown and black races” into a worldwide, homogeneous, “light
colored race” through a program of eugenics.
His disciple, Liang Qichao, gradually went a step further. Whereas at first Liang called for the
need for political reform, technological innovation, the abolition of the empire exam (on which
the administration had been built for centuries), and the establishment of a new national
education system to train “new citizens”; he gradually realized that the institutions of the empire
were not strong enough to make these necessary changes. Liang Qichao sought answers in both
the rich Chinese history and the Western political thinkers whose works were translated into
Chinese. Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism in particular had a significant influence on Liang
Qichao’s thinking: “All men in the world must struggle to survive. In the struggle for survival,
there are superior and inferior. If there are superior and inferior, then there must be success
and failure. He who, being inferior, fails, must see his rights and privileges completely absorbed
by the one who is superior and who triumphs. This, then, is the principle behind the extinction
of nations.” (Liang quoted in Mishra, 2012:151) However, Liangs thinking was also clearly
embedded in a political-economic analysis. Before Lenin, Liang realized that imperialism had
been the driving force of Western expansion and that this imperialism could not be limited to
the interests of an elite or the ambitions of a few states. It emerged, Liang argued, from the
populations themselves who co-signed the project of imperialism. In his Treatise on the New
People, Liang sought to combine what he saw as the best aspects of European thought with
Eastern traditions and insights. His belief that nationalism was a crucial source for China’s
resurgence led him to view freedom as something that was important only to the group and not
to the individual. Only through the submission of the individual to a group or nation could a
people avoid being enslaved by another people. The indignities that China had suffered in the
nineteenth century had to be avoided at all costs.

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Toward the end of the nineteenth century, two political-intellectual currents stood in opposition
to each other. On the one hand, there were the intellectual reformers (such as Liang) who tried
to conceive of a renewed China based on a new Chinese nationalism; on the other hand, there
were the anti-Manchu revolutionaries (such as Sun Yat Sen), those who viewed the imperial
dynasty as foreign invaders and who thus focused primarily on the question of state structures.
The major political changes of the early twentieth century required the ailing empire to invest
more in reform. After a hundred-day experiment of large-scale reforms (in which Kang and
Liang were involved) was reversed by the empress in 1898, the Boxer Rebellion, which broke
out in 1898, was the starting point of large-scale reforms that admittedly came largely too late
to save the empire. The Boxers – who got their name from their mastery of Chinese martial arts
– united with the imperial Chinese army in a revolt against the imperialist powers. The colonial
governments responded with a ruthless repression that inflicted many casualties on the
insurgents, had many Chinese officials executed, and looted the state assets by imposing high
reparations. The reforms introduced by the Empress afterwards, especially in education,
radicalized a generation of younger thinkers where the concepts of progress, technology,
emancipation, freedom and equality were on the rise. It is in this context and period that the
political consciousness of Mao Zedong (1893-1976) formed.

Social Democracy
As the political rights and economic situation of the workers improved – which was certainly
the case at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth – more and more
labor movements seemed inclined to want to adhere strictly to national legal frameworks. The
anti-socialist laws that existed in several European countries, the desire to preserve already
acquired advantages but also the growing competition with Catholic workers (who were
forbidden by the Church to join socialist parties and trade unions) caused the workers and their
leaders to integrate more and more into the existing political structures. The Second
International, founded in 1893, included all movements and organizations that endorsed the
class struggle and the socialization of the means of production, but it left strategy and tactics to
the national parties. This led to a growing nationalism within the labor movements that strained
international solidarity. Consequently, in World War I, workers faced each other like enemy
cannon meat in the trenches. The question of whether a socialist party had a revolutionary and
radical goal or should follow a more reformist course ran through all the European workers’
parties. What held the movements of the Second International together was a concern to
represent the interests of the workers, a loyalty to socialism and a belief in the necessary better
future. The issue that divided them the most was how to achieve this objective. The longer the
democratic tradition existed in a given country, the more reformist tendencies prevailed; the
less democratic the more revolutionary currents were successful.

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In France, Jules Guèsde (1845-1922) argued that power was in the hands of the bourgeoisie and
that the workers could only countervail this with their own counter-power. The workers’ party
was allowed to participate in the elections and take up parliamentary seats, but they did so as
an “enemy of the bourgeoisie”. Collaboration with the bourgeoisie was out of the question
because it would eventually lead to the weakening of the workers’ demands and would
constitute a betrayal of socialism. Jean Jaures (1859-1914), however, believed that between the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie, despite their objective contradictions, there were also points of
contact, in particular that they both belonged to the same nation, the same community, which
linked them. The state was not merely the instrument of the bourgeoisie’s power but rather
reflected the balance of power between the two. Socialism, Jaures thought, could give the full,
humanistic, meaning to nationalism, which was neither a surrender to the status quo and the
power of the bourgeoisie, nor did it seek to pursue an aggressive policy abroad. Jaures saw this
practical reformism not so much as an end in itself but rather as a tactic; the goal, however,
remained a society in which the means of production were in the hands of the community and
in which democracy permeated the social and economic spheres. Jaures thus did reject the idea
of a necessary violent revolution and even the bourgeois-driven general strike.

In Germany, within the SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands), the question about
the role of the party, and ultimately about the content of socialism, was even more clearly posed.
Karl Kautsky (1853-1938), editor of the SPD newspaper Neue Zeit until 1917, tried to strike a
balance between orthodox Marxist analysis and reformist tactics. Kautsky insisted in theory on
the necessity of revolution. The future would be socialist because a majority of people would
become socialists. Although Kautsky popularized the works of Marx, he was equally influenced
by Darwin’s theory of evolution. The socialist revolution would come by peaceful means, and
referred to the origins of socialism rather than how socialism should be achieved. Thus, a
revolution could only break out when all the necessary conditions had been met. Until that time,
the party had to build up, the proletariat had to unite further and exhibit strong discipline, and
the elected officials had to work for the proletariat. The party was not to engage in
“revolutionary gymnastic exercises” that would lead nowhere and possibly endanger the
workers’ movement because the party could not make the revolution itself. While in theory the
revolution might be preached, in practice it increasingly came to mean that this wait-and-see
attitude closely resembled a reformist practice in reality. It was in the last decade of the
nineteenth century that revisionism – a fundamental revision of Marx’s ideology – made its
appearance with the publication of Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der
Sozialdemokratie (translated as Evolutionary Socialism) by Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932).
Bernstein’s aim was not so much to subvert Marxism as to purge it of its erroneous elements,
the things about which Bernstein thought Marx was wrong. First, Bernstein criticized Marx’s
lack of clarity about the socialist future. The expected ‘leap to socialism’ seemed to him to be

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utopian and not scientifically based, as did Marx’s use of dialectics, which Bernstein thought
was merely speculative Hegelian philosophy. Second, he blamed Marx for the inaccuracy of
his predictions about the capitalist crisis. Bernstein rejected both the Verelendungstheorie in
which Marx predicted a general social pauperization in which the middle classes would
disappear (a portion would be able to save themselves and join the elite while the majority
would slip into the lower classes) and Marx’s Zusammenbruchstheorie (collapse theory), since
capitalism had survived every severe economic crisis and had not collapsed at all. More than
that, capitalism was still alive and well and had even improved the condition of many workers.
Third, Bernstein thought that workers would not be able, should a revolution succeed, to take
over and run industry. Nor did he believe in internationalism and thought that workers would
pursue their interests within the national context. It is clear that for Bernstein socialism had
nothing to do with revolution or complete social upheaval. Socialism for him was not the
antithesis of capitalism but was the democratized and social expression of it. Hence Bernstein
argued that the SPD, through its practical, reformist, practices, should openly admit as much
and reject the idea of revolution. Although Bernstein’s revisionism was a major challenge to
the classical views within the party, the reaction was not forthcoming from the party leadership.
Bernstein was not expelled from the party (as the more radical members wanted) which allowed
his ideas to gain a foothold. Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) was the mouthpiece of the more
radical wing within the party. She reproached Kautsky that if he rejected revisionism, he should
serve the revolution and renounce his “revolutionary attentiveness”. She then reproached
Bernstein opportunism that threatened the momentum of the labor movement. She saw
revisionism as a betrayal of the aspirations of the proletariat. For Luxemburg, the revolution
was not a putsch by a small group of people but the seizure of power by a conscious popular
mass. The consciousness and development of the proletariat developed through political
struggle and not by confining itself to syndical or parliamentary actions. A revolution was
therefore a long process with many different moments of struggle that could sometimes fail.
The totality of economic and political strikes and uprisings would eventually converge into a
revolutionary mass strike. The driving force of this revolutionary process was spontaneity, the
instinctive class character of the proletariat. The party or trade union was important in helping
to shape the revolution but could not be its leader, the party could not simply call off the
revolution at a specific time or moment.

Internal debates and tensions did not withstand the First World War. In the German parliament,
a large majority of SPD elected officials voted to participate in the war. Other European socialist
parties followed suit. International solidarity within the European labor movement became a
hollow concept. The chaos of World War I and the failure of the Second International gave
revolutionary socialism a new, albeit short-lived, impetus. In the chaos of the collapse of the
German Empire after the war, the SPD sought to establish itself as the ruling party of power.
The radical wing led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the Spartakusbund, wanted the

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revolution to continue not only in the political sphere but also in the socio-economic sphere. In
January 1919, the Spartakists called for a general strike to force the breakthrough. The workers,
yearning for peace after the misery of the trenches, barely followed the call. The army and
paramilitary militias were able to crush the uprising. This carried the revolutionary aspirations
of the SPD to their final grave.

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Chapter 4: From crisis to the world wars (1900-1945)

Modern monopolist capitalism on a world-wide scale - imperialist wars are absolutely

inevitable under such an economic system, as long as private property in the means of
production exists.
(Lenin, 1920)

In the long run the practice of solidarity proves much more advantageous to the species than
the development of individuals endowed with predatory inclinations.
(Kropotkin 1989:17-18)

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man’s greed.
(Ghandi)

Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and
accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State, which
stands for the conscience and the universal, will of man as a historic entity. It is opposed to
classical liberalism which arose as a reaction to absolutism and exhausted its historical
function when the State became the expression of the conscience and will of the people.
Liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts the rights of the
State as expressing the real essence of the individual.
(Mussolini, 1932)

Around the year 1900, political thinking in the core countries of the capitalist system was
crisscrossed by contradictory trends. The belief in progress, propelled by the colonial and
imperial adventures of the core European countries and underpinned by dubious science, lost
its momentum with the growing inequality that had exacerbated class divisions. The liberal
ideas of liberty and the ideal of the rule of law were political principles that were increasingly
becoming a reality in the most economically developed countries, but between countries strong
competition and rivalry remained the rule; war was never far away. Discomfort with modernity,
a sense of crisis, grew steadily throughout Europe. The central importance of the economy in
human life, the impact that labor had on both individual lives and society as a whole elicited a
variety of reactions. Socialists and communists denounced the exploitation of the system and
the alienation of man, while conservatives of various tendencies deplored the loss of humanity.
For some, the nation was the only salvation for the helpless individual, the framework within
which the excesses of capitalism could be contained; for others, the loss of traditional, religious
values and norms was the cause of a crisis of civilization. When war broke out within Europe
in 1914, it was clear that dreams of a socialist revolution seemed distant; workers of all nations
were not united but fought each other in the trenches for years and rallied behind the national
bourgeoisies; but the liberal belief that free trade between nations would lead to peace between
nations and democracy within nations also took a beating. The Russian Revolution of 1917 may

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have been unexpected but it was the starting point of a global political conflict between
capitalism and communism that dominated much of twentieth-century politics. In the interwar
period, the reaction to the revolution in Russia and the end of World War I led not only to an
authoritarian backlash but also to the emergence of the more radical new ideologies: fascism
and Nazism. The interwar period was also a moment when the emancipation of the colonized
peoples, strengthened by the promises of a new international order – the Wilsonian moment –
manifested itself more clearly.

1. The Russian Revolution

The Russian Revolution of October 1917 was the starting point of an ideological conflict that
dominated much of the international politics of the twentieth century and had a major impact
on the content and influence of modern political ideologies. Not only did socialist and social
democratic movements in Europe and the colonized world have to position themselves against
the Russian experiment, but liberalism, Christian democracy, and conservatism were also
challenged by the creation of the Soviet Union. The Russian Revolution redefined the
revolutionary ideals of Marxism in practice through the concrete construction of a specific state
order and, as such, it positioned itself; mainly through the ideas of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov,
better known as Lenin (1870-1924); against the reformist currents within socialism. In 1914,
both French and German socialists had approved the war budgets of their governments with
which social democracy preferred the national framework to international working-class
solidarity. The “proletarians of all countries” did not unite, as Marx had hoped, but fought each
other in the hopeless battles in the trenches. It had become clear that the policy of gradual
reforms of capitalism – the strategy of the Social Democrats – had become the dominant
tendency within European socialism. For Lenin, who had been a central figure in the Russian
revolutionary movement since the early twentieth century, this was nothing but high treason,
and those who adhered to reformism could no longer be described as Marxists in his view.
Lenin was first and foremost a revolutionary. His ideas developed during and through the
struggle for socialism and communism. His writings and ideas evolved according to the
concrete situation within which the revolution found itself. Leninism – a term coined by Stalin,
Lenin’s successor – had the function of canonizing Lenin’s ideas and consolidating the power
of the Communist Party, more than it constituted a complete ideology.

The Russian Revolution began in February 1917 through the spontaneous uprising of a large
part of the Russian population against the regime of tsar Nicholas II as a result of the extreme
hardships of World War I. The troops that were supposed to put down the revolt, led by the
workers of Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), defected to the insurgents, thus heralding the end of
three centuries of Romanov rule in Russia. The tsar stepped down and state power was taken
over by aristocratic and middle-class politicians who sat in the Duma, the Russian parliament.
The political question that arose for the revolutionaries during this turbulent period was whether

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there was any breeding ground for socialism in Russia. Or, in other words, could a socialist
revolution take place in a country that was still in the early stages of its capitalist development?
This question had already manifested itself at the beginning of the twentieth century and led to
the division of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1903 between Mensheviks (the
people of the minority) who favored the classical Marxist analysis that assumed that first
capitalism had to reach full development before proceeding to revolution and the Bolsheviks
(the people of the majority) who thought that Russia could proceed immediately to a socialist
revolution. Russia, in the early twentieth century, was still largely a feudal state with a small
capitalist economic sector and thus a small and weak bourgeoisie that could hardly make its
mark on politics. Russia remained a power in Europe due to the vastness of its territory and the
size of its army but was economically underdeveloped. The political system was a traditional
dictatorship in which the will of the tsar was law and was more akin to an ancien régime than a
bourgeois state. The land remained mostly rural, with village communities working the land,
and there was hardly agricultural capitalism either. Industrial development in urban centers was
dictated by state interests – with investments benefiting the military and bureaucratic apparatus
in particular – and made an independent capitalist class almost impossible. Any form of political
emancipation was blocked. Thus, despite the fact that Russia could not be seen as an ideal
candidate for a socialist revolution, revolutionary ideals lived in the country. A first
revolutionary impulse came from peasant-oriented radicals – the narodniki or populists – who,
because of their distaste for capitalism, were the first to advocate an immediate socialist
revolution. The narodniki were already calling for the overthrow of the tsar at the end of the
nineteenth century to help the impoverished and backward peasants and were striving for a rural
socialism based on the Russian village communities (mir), political village structures that the
tsar created to let the peasants make local decisions themselves but also to collect taxes. The
narodniki found inspiration in Marx’s writings who himself had proposed the possibility of
such socialism, probably prompted by his feeling at the end of his life that the great proletarian
revolution in the industrialized world would not materialize immediately. The adaptation of
more classical Marxist themes to the Russian context had been going on for some time.
However, most continued to follow the more classical schemes.

Georgi Plekhanov (1856-1918), who introduced Marxism to Russia, thought that capitalism
had made its appearance in Russia, that it would develop itself and that this evolution could not
be stopped. Thus he was convinced, in line with the orthodox view, that the objective conditions
for revolution could only be formed once Russia had passed through a capitalist phase.
Socialism was not possible without skipping the phase of capitalism. Plekhanov did think, based
on his historical materialist analysis of the Russian context, that this phase could be shortened.
Plekhanov agreed with the still feudal status of Russia and therefore the weakness of the
bourgeoisie to fulfill its historical role. The proletariat, he said, was already developed enough
to assist the bourgeoisie in its role and exhorted the workers to support a bourgeois revolution

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to accelerate the capitalist conditions of the later socialist revolution. Thus, he wanted the
workers to support a bourgeois revolution (the minimum program) as a necessary first step to
then take charge of the revolution and make possible the proletarian revolution (the maximum
program) (Ozinga, 1987:93). Plekhanov had a great influence on Lenin, who initially shared
Plekhanov’s analysis but gradually became convinced that the workers and peasants should
immediately take the lead of the revolution, that view would prevail among the Bolsheviks.
Lenin had no confidence in the bourgeoisie – the failed revolution of 1905 strengthened him in
this – but that did not mean that he considered the proletariat strong enough to proceed to
revolution. The proletariat, according to Lenin, could not independently develop a
revolutionary consciousness, only a consciousness that sought material improvement, union
demands such as higher wages, shorter working hours... what Lenin called economism.
Revolutionary intellectuals had to lead and guide the workers toward socialism. In this Lenin
differed greatly from Rosa Luxemburg, who believed in the spontaneity of workers’ actions
and who also argued for the necessity of democracy within the labor movement. Lenin argued
that too much democracy would turn the revolutionary movement into a reformist movement
and increasingly emphasized the necessity of building a strong and well-organized party. Only
a party of professional revolutionaries could act as the vanguard of the proletariat, and had to
introduce revolutionary class consciousness within the labor movement. This vanguard party
also had to unite the labor movement and ensure that the countless local mobilizations supported
the national political struggle in the struggle for more democracy (the minimum program) and
the struggle for the final goal, socialism (the maximum program).

In What to Do?, already published in 1902, Lenin proposed to organize the party on the
principle of democratic centralism. A top of the party controlled the organization through
channels of communication that ran vertically, namely always from the top to the base and
never horizontally (between two party cells). Discussion and internal dissension were possible,
but when a decision was made, absolute obedience was expected. Because of the authoritarian
context of the tsar’s repressive apparatus within which the party sought to organize, Lenin also
favored a small party – that is, not a mass party with a large number of members – that could
develop in semi-clandestinity. The ‘elite’ of the movement, the vanguard of the party
intellectuals, carried the class consciousness that the workers could not sustain themselves.
This, of course, was not without danger. “If the proletariat cannot formulate its objectives
independently, and the party has the monopoly of the correct approach to reality (because it
relies on scientific socialism); if decisions are more frequent and easier from the top down,
rather than the other way around; if democracy is seen as a derived value, subordinate to the
end goal – the revolution – and therefore also to the party; then the Leninist concept of
organization is inherently authoritarian. ' (Doom,1986 :193)

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The war years raised political questions with which Marxism struggled: how could capitalism
reproduce itself again and again, survive the various economic crises, and avoid the
revolutionary spiral predicted by Marx? Falling profit rates, as Bernstein had already shown,
had not made the middle class disappear, nor led to widespread poverty. In his Imperialism, the
Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), Lenin provided an answer. In his view, capitalism had
reached its highest stage, its final stage, through financial or monopoly capitalism. In order to
survive, capitalism was obliged to constantly look for new markets and places in which to
invest. Thus capitalism had gradually spread throughout the world and, by the beginning of the
twentieth century, spanned the entire globe. The world showed a division of labor between
nations, just as within nations there was a division of labor between classes. The industrialized
nations were international capitalists, while the underdeveloped and exploited nations formed
a new proletariat. Russia related to Britain, as it were, like the proletariat to the bourgeoisie.
Colonial and imperialist expansion, which had its heyday in the period between 1880 and 1920,
led to extreme forms of exploitation of the raw materials of the colonized world, and the
exploitation of its labor force. Imperialism did make it possible that within the core of capitalism
the bourgeoisie could make concessions to the working class, which Lenin saw as a form of
bribery and which forced the workers to betray their own interests. Workers in the rich parts of
capitalism could be paid higher wages because of the super profits made in the colonies. From
this, Lenin also concluded that there was great revolutionary potential among the exploited
peoples in the colonies or underdeveloped areas. Harding captures this analysis well: “The
epoch of global capitalism necessarily universalised the contradictions of capitalism and, in
the process, gave rise to a new phenomenon – that of exploiter nations. The argument, in brief,
was that the export of goods and capital to protected (non-competitive) markets, combined with
the ruthless extraction of surplus value from colonial workers unprotected by trade unions (or
moral scruples) produced super-profits: that is, profits greatly in excess of those on the home
markets. The monopoly capitalists were able to use these super-profits to arrest the general
tendency for the rate of profit to decline. They were also able to use part of this surplus to buy
off industrial militancy by developing a stratum of better-paid, more secure workers – a
workers’ aristocracy – whose interests became directly tied to imperialism..” (Harding,
2003:248) This analysis gave Lenin a materialistic explanation for the ‘betrayal’ of reformism
by the social democrats but also a renewed look at globalized capitalism and how revolution
against it could be shaped. Lenin wanted to show that even in those countries where there was
a small working class, in countries that were still largely non-capitalist, there was still a great
revolutionary potential. In doing so, he theoretically substantiated the possibility of a proletarian
revolution in Russia.

For Lenin, World War I was the outcome of the fierce competition and rivalry inherent in
capitalism, which was always looking for new territories to annex. This was a struggle between
countries that were increasingly orienting their economies toward military ends. On top of that,

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it had also become clear that the state in the core countries of capitalism had long since ceased
to be the liberal ideal of the minima state with limited intervention in the economic sphere but,
conversely, were increasingly authoritarian intervening imperialist states. The revolution in
Russia could have a huge impact on this order. The chain of imperialism would break first at
its weakest link, leading to a wave of revolutions worldwide. This idea parallelled the analysis
of another important socialist activist and leader, Lev Davidovich Bronstein (1879-1940), better
known as Trotsky, on permanent revolution. Trotsky likewise believed that a permanent
revolutionary spirit was needed to mobilize the proletariat in Russia to inspire global revolution.
An idea that later brought him into conflict with Stalin.

Lenin arrived in St. Petersburg in April 1917, after a period of exile when the revolutionary
upheaval was already in full swing. He was convinced that the proletarian revolution was
imminent, and worked against the interests of the temporary government. With the slogan All
power to the soviets (councils of workers already established in 1905 to coordinate the political
and economic strikes of workers against the tsarist regime) he sided with the insurgents.
Although the political situation destabilized and most political formations radicalized, the
Bolsheviks long remained a minority movement. The gradual assumption of leadership of the
soviets by Bolsheviks and Trotsky’s rapprochement with Lenin put Lenin’s movement in pole
position to take power. On November 7, 1917, the Bolsheviks deposed the provisional
government and took power. Lenin realized that the seizure of power did not yet mean the
triumph of socialism or communism. Although Russia had now established a bridgehead in the
worldwide socialist revolution, Lenin hoped that other European workers would also rise up.
Without outside help, Lenin thought, the revolution was doomed to fail. During this tumultuous
period, the distinction between socialism and communism also became increasingly clear. In
the nineteenth century, the two terms were often used as synonyms but upon Lenin’s return to
Russia, he changed the name from the Bolshevik Party to the Communist Party, very clearly
motivated by the desire to distinguish himself from the European socialist parties that were
increasingly following a reformist course. When the Comintern – the International of
communist movements – was founded in 1919, Lenin formulated twenty-one conditions for
membership. Only those movements that agreed to Lenin’s conditions were allowed to form
parties that used the term communism.

In 1916, in State and Revolution, Lenin had set out his ideas for what should happen after the
revolution. For Lenin, the bourgeois state was nothing but a powerful instrument of oppression.
As in his analysis of imperialism, he saw in the concrete states of the early twentieth century a
modern form of the Hobbesian Leviathan. “Far from assisting the development of productive
forces and the market, the state now served to develop the forces of destruction and had
embarked upon the most gigantic process of mutual annihilation in the history of humanity.
This was the necrosis of a civilisation, a mode of production and epoch of history. It had become

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a vast graveyard drenched in the mud and carnage of the world’s first total war conducted by
the world’s first total states. At this juncture in the history of mankind socialism was the only
alternative to barbarism. To escape war meant smashing capitalism and this entailed smashing
the state”. (Harding, 2003: 250)

Lenin saw in the soviets a reissue of the French commune, the basic organization of a
communist system in which the state disappeared for good. How long the transition phase was
to be remained unclear. Workers and peasants first had to secure their own interests against
class enemies. A strong workers’ state, a dictatorship of the proletariat, had to be established in
which the workers would oppress the other classes. As in any state, there would still be
oppression, at this stage on the way to socialism and communism, but this oppression was
already more democratic than in the bourgeois democracies since it would now be a majority
oppressing the minority. The new order of power did have to immediately dismantle the army
and replace it with popular militias, armed citizens who were not above the people but came
from their midst. The organization of labor councils made representative bodies such as
parliaments superfluous and all kinds of other controlling professions (politicians, judges,
police officers, bureaucrats...) would no longer have a reason to exist. The people themselves
would take over these functions and the few administrative tasks that remained would be
assigned to civil servants who represented the people. “The idea of the revolution had
concretised itself as anti-statism or, more properly, socialism – the empowerment of society. It
was a revolution against the nation-as-state: the dominant idea of politics since the French
Revolution.” (Harding, 2003:252)

Reality, however, turned out differently. Regardless of the Bolsheviks’ initial good intentions
and their withdrawal from the war – based on the Brest-Litovsk Peace that was detrimental to
Russia – the situation seemed hopeless. The socialist dream of greater production and of
abundance, collided with the reality of an economy in complete crisis. Industrial production
almost came to a halt and peasants increasingly refused to work their land for the market. In
addition, the opponents of the revolution organized themselves throughout the country. Former
officers of the tsar organized peasants and other malcontents into White Armies. These
sometimes received support from Europe, to rebel against the hastily established Red Army led
by Trotsky. This situation brought the revolution into a phase of war communism. The
Bolsheviks still assumed that legislation – change in the superstructure – was a crucial part of
the advent of socialism. Classes were abolished, privileges and distinctions were eliminated,
banking was centralized, central planning introduced, civil marriage replaced religious
marriage, divorce and abortion were made easier, the emancipation of women was supported...
(Ozinga, 1987:114-115). At the same time, the more authoritarian traits of the new regime
became apparent. Already at the end of 1917 the Cheka was established, the secret political
police, the iron hand of the regime that Lenin considered necessary to stop crime and corruption

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but equally political opposition. Any criticism of the policy was soon seen as a criticism of
socialism and thus a danger to the revolution. Political parties were banned one by one and even
the power of the soviets was curtailed in favor of the party leadership. The dictatorship of the
proletariat thus quickly became a dictatorship of the party. To survive, the Soviet regime
considered it necessary to exercise power in an arbitrary manner and to exercise total control
over society. Authoritarianism in the practical implementation of power increasingly
substituted itself for the humanistic ideals that were at the root of the revolution.
Authoritarianism, in other words, emerged from a revolutionary movement that saw itself as
the answer to arbitrary state power. The thousands of small decisions during the exercise of
power further eroded principles and good intentions. More democracy (if only within the party),
dialogue or tolerance for opposition were postponed to an indeterminate time in the future. It is
within this context that a veteran of the Bolsheviks, Stalin, patiently built his power.
With the end of the Civil War and wartime communism, several important political issues
resurfaced and the Communist Party faced several challenges. Sailors from the Kronstadt base
near St. Petersburg (who had already played an important role in the revolution against the tsar)
rebelled and demanded more democracy within the party, while within the party itself several
factions wanted more participation and involvement of trade unions and workers. The Tenth
Party Congress of 1921 made it clear that the party leadership would not tolerate any dissent.
However much the petitions and mobilizations emanated from convinced Bolsheviks, the party
leadership still preferred absolute loyalty to internal discussion. The dictatorship of the
proletariat was already a dictatorship of the party, and from 1921 even more a dictatorship of
the top of the party that consisted of four or five people. Thus, the Communist Party became a
bureaucratic machine that approved and loyally implemented the decisions of the party
leadership. Communism was what the party leadership claimed it was.

Once the party was in strong control, Lenin – increasingly weakened by ill health – tried to find
an answer to the poor economic situation. Since Lenin assumed that proletarian revolutions
would not be happening in Europe any time soon, there was no other option but to find the
necessary financial resources within the country to save the economy. In 1921, the party
launched the New Economic Policy (N.E.P.). The idea that the state should devise and direct
all economic plans was effectively scaled back. The state conceded to the reintroduction of a
limited degree of capitalism by withdrawing from small and medium-sized enterprises and once
again allowing peasants to cultivate their lands for sale on the market. Prices were left free,
foreign investment was encouraged, and wage labor was reintroduced. The state did remain at
the helm in the strategic industrial sectors of the economy, thereby maintaining control over the
largest factories. Within a few years it became clear that this approach was paying off. By 1926
the economy had returned to the level it was at just before the war. Lenin did not experience
this. Stricken with a series of strokes, he died in 1924. The power struggle for his succession
became a life and death struggle between the main party leaders. Although the power struggle

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was largely a matter of clashing egos, the struggle was equally embroiled with ideological
issues.

Lenin had admitted that the phase of the N.E.P. represented a step back from socialism but that
despite the limited free market under state control – what Lenin called state capitalism – the
Soviet regime remained a communist force. Indeed, it was the regime that decided to what
extent capitalist relations were permitted. The question of the nature of the Soviet state and
where to it should evolve was one of the political divisive issues of the 1920s. Especially
between Stalin, who held a great deal of power within the party since he had been promoted by
Lenin to secretary general in 1922, and Trotsky, Lenin’s favorite, a bitter struggle was taking
place. Two issues divided them. First, Trotsky held fast to his theory of permanent revolution
since the early twentieth century. Trotsky argued that the question of proletarian revolution
must necessarily be viewed from an international and internationalist standpoint. Trotsky was
convinced that the revolution had to be led by the proletariat and not by the bourgeoisie (which
was too weak) but also that the proletariat had to continue the struggle after taking power, make
it permanent, in order to achieve socialism. Trotsky did think that this workers’ state could not
survive in Russia unless other revolutions took place. In the 1920s, it was still clear to Trotsky
that the international isolation of the Soviet Union made the real expansion of communism
impossible. Therefore, the Soviet Union had to actively support all possible workers’
movements abroad. Trotsky probably overestimated the revolutionary potential of the workers
and underestimated the adaptability of capitalism but continued to faithfully defend his ideal of
socialist internationalism. Stalin responded with the theory of “socialism in one state,” which
he had the party approve in 1925. According to Stalin, the revolution could consolidate itself in
the Soviet Union if it succeeded in reaching a compromise with the West. This meant that,
unlike Trotsky, Stalin wanted to control and appease the Communist parties abroad through the
Comintern rather than to incite them to revolt. He realized, of course, that the West would never
leave the Soviet Union alone if it interfered in the domestic politics of those countries. A second
point of discussion was about the nature of the Soviet state. Referring to the French Revolution,
Trotsky thought that the revolution had reached its thermidor, the moment when it would
destroy or betray itself. The dictatorship of the proletariat had turned into a dictatorship of the
party, and the new economic policy had forced the creation of an impressive state apparatus –
economic organization was not left to the workers – in which a new bureaucracy held sway.
This new bureaucracy increasingly formed a new class with privileges that it based not on
private property but on the political control it exercised over the means of production. For
Trotsky, the Soviet Union was a deformed workers’ state, a bureaucratism, that could not
continue to exist (Fages, 1974:48). Either the bureaucracy would take definitive control of
power and develop into a new bourgeoisie, or the proletariat would proceed to a new revolution.
Stalin, echoing Lenin, reiterated that the Party was the only body that could represent the
proletariat. This Party, he said, was still by necessity authoritarian in order to cope with both

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internal and external threats, and therefore bureaucratic elements could survive within the Party,
but these would gradually disappear as the Communist goal approached. Stalin, since 1922, had
built the party to the point where it was more loyal to his person than to Lenin or the revolution.
The bureaucracy, which was increasingly drawing power to itself, owed its existence to Stalin,
who used the corporatized power of that bureaucracy to further consolidate his own power.
Stalin’s Machiavellian quest for total power led to the introduction of a culture of fear. Every
bureaucrat as an individual was a potential victim of Stalin’s plans but the bureaucracy as a
whole therefore formed a loyal army of obedient party members. In practice, this meant that
Stalin first liquidated the so-called left wing of the party around Trotsky. Trotsky was expelled
from the party in 1927 and a year later exiled, first in the Soviet Union but soon abroad which,
after a trip through Turkey, France and Norway, eventually brought him to Mexico. Even there,
Trotsky was not safe from Stalin’s violence. After several failed attacks, a fake journalist
managed to wound him in his villa with an ice axe. He died of his injuries a day later, not
without leaving behind an active and still influential Trotskyist movement. Stalin equally
tackled a so-called right wing of the party. On the question of how best to industrialize the
Soviet Union – there was no doubt about its necessity – Kamenev and Zinoviev, Stalin’s most
loyal allies until then, were won over to the analysis of Bukharin, one of the most respected
communist militants of the first hour. Bukharin argued that the spirit of the N.E.P. should
continue. By encouraging the peasants to enrich themselves, the necessary funds for gradual
industrialization would be found. The peasants had to be supported because any forced
industrialization would lead to opposition from the peasants. Stalin isolated this current within
the party and even though he was holding power firmly by the end of the 1920s, he had his
formers supporters executed in a series of Great Purges. Once the opposition was out of the
way, Stalin opted for central planning in which heavy industry was forcibly introduced and
agriculture was collectivized. As under tsarist rule, industrialization was partly financed by the
collectivization of agriculture. In order to gain indispensable control over the countryside, Stalin
introduced a system of kolkhozes, cooperatives of agricultural production, and sovkhozes, state-
run farms. What followed was probably one of the “the most savage and traumatic
transformation suffered by any modern society at the hands of its state.” (Harding 2003:262)
Everything that referred to the Russian past, the way of life, rural life with its traditional anchor
points, disappeared. “Villages were destroyed, forced labour camps established, crops burnt,
livestock slaughtered and the consequent famine killed millions. At unspeakable cost the regime
now secured the land under its control. It secured, too, a vast dispossessed workforce to build
the cities and industrial complexes, dig the canals and build the hydroelectric stations to fuel
the headlong drive for increased production.”(Harding 2003:262) The ruthless policy paid off
economically. The Soviet Union had managed to achieve massive industrial growth in a decade
or so, making it already the third largest economic power in the world on the eve of World War
II. The cost of this great leap in economic and social modernization was immeasurably high,
however. So great that Stalin soon became the example of “the” totalitarian leader. Stalin’s

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Soviet Union had become a violence-based political system. What remained was a personality
cult around the person of Stalin and a command culture where the Great Leader decided and
bureaucrats meekly executed. Any discussion, any form of creativity shriveled under the
climate of terror.

2. The interwar period

The end of World War I marked the demise of the European political order as it had emerged
from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The idea that the sovereignty of a nation-state was not
unlimited was reflected in the creation of international institutions and organizations, such as
the League of Nations. The enthusiasm for the Fourteen Points of U.S. President Woodrow
Wilson – a manifesto for a new world based on human rights, democracy, free trade, and the
right to self-determination – was quickly dissipated by the haughty and arrogant way in which
the European victorious powers controlled the postwar peace treaties, forced a resentment-
based peace in Europe (which would become the ideal breeding ground for World War II), and
prohibited any form of self-determination on the part of the peoples they colonized. The
unexpectedly rapid economic revival of Europe, in part a result of the tremendous growth of
the U.S. economy, quickly dissipated the pessimism of the war. The 1920s was a period of
economic prosperity and was accompanied by a cultural revival in several fields. From avant-
garde painting, to the Jazz Age, to the flowering of art deco; during the roaring twenties or les
années folles, the sky seemed the limit. Major changes had also been introduced in the political
arena. After years of struggle by the labor movement for universal suffrage, it was introduced
in most European countries after workers proved themselves as soldiers in the trenches, and
women’s suffrage was also introduced in several countries. Yet not everyone shared in this
optimism. In the colonies, the colonized peoples began to organize more and more, while in
Europe, and especially in Germany, a renewed conservatism emerged. It was in the young
Weimar democracy that the economy, hit by the heavy reparations imposed by the Treaty of
Versailles, that debt and inflation began to rise rapidly from 1923 onwards. It seemed to be the
harbinger of a global economic crisis, the worst in more than a century, that started with the
Wall Street stock market crash on October 24, 1929.

The wilsonian moment: the awakening of the colonized world

The enthusiasm surrounding U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points did not last
long. Wilson was not in a position to halt European dreams of a renewed push for colonialism,
nor to stop the hunger of Japanese colonialism. Not only were there no concessions in the
colonies that already existed, but with the demise of the Ottoman Empire, the French and British
had already decided during the war to divide the areas of the Middle East among themselves as
new mandate territories. The postwar phase felt like a betrayal to Asia and Africa. The many
Asian, Arab and African soldiers who had died in the trenches in Europe had brought nothing
to the countries of the South. The impact of the war and of the subsequent peace treaties did

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have a major impact on intellectual life in Asia and Africa. Until World War I, most intellectuals
from the South assumed that Europe was the beacon of civilization and progress. Fascination
with European science, which for most was the basis of Europe’s power, gave way to despair.
Modernization of one’s own society and political structures was still high on the agenda but
blind adherence to Western customs was questioned and one’s own traditions, religions,
civilizations and cultures were no longer necessarily dismissed as backward or obsolete. The
interwar period led to a gradual split between the older intellectual generation that increasingly
criticized social Darwinism and the materialistic basis of the modern West and spoke of the
importance of the spirituality of the East or the universality of Islam and a younger, more
radical, generation that spoke the language of nationalism or communism (or a idiosyncratic
mix of them). The intellectuals who proposed reforms of their political systems were overtaken
by the political enthusiasm of nationalist movements. The entry of the masses into politics laid
the groundwork for a wave of disenfranchisement and aspiration for independence that would
become inescapable some twenty years later, after World War II.

A renewed traditionalism also arose and came in various forms and capacities. The most
imaginative anti-modernism was penned by Gandhi (1869-1948) in his Hind Swaraj. For
Gandhi, the world war, colonialism, and the rise of totalitarianism were signs of the moral decay
of modernity. The modern world, he said, had become a world of cynicism where without a
moral compass, without spirituality, materialism, secularism and self-interest ruled. Western
modernity had certainly meant progress in terms of civil rights, the emancipation of women or
material betterment but without a broader aspiration of spirituality to achieve social harmony,
all this was insufficient. Human beings had become subordinate to the demands of the economy.
Since the industrial revolution, Western political thought, according to Gandhi, was therefore
aimed at legitimizing and intellectually substantiating the centrality of economic life. On top of
this, liberal political thinking was hypocritical, for what was true for the West was not allowed
for the colonized peoples. Gandhi therefore turned away from the Western way of thinking and
living by returning to traditional Indian virtues such as simplicity and spirituality. Gandhi was
thus anything but a revolutionary. Yet his tactics of nonviolence became a formidable weapon
for Indians, and, a few decades later, also for social movements resisting authoritarian leaders
in the Global South. “True civilization, he insisted, was about moral self-knowledge and
spiritual strength rather than bodily well-being, material comforts, or great art and
architecture. He upheld the self-sufficient rural community over the heavily armed and
centralized nation-state, cottage industries over big factories, and manual labor over
machines.” (Mishra, 2012:246) This vision of civilization led Gandhi to his nonviolent
resistance because the Western colonizer was also ultimately a victim of the evils of industrial
civilization. Gandhi therefore resisted the growing Hindu nationalism that was increasingly
dividing India and was partly inspired by the fascist movements in Europe. Gandhi believed

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that this kind of nationalism could never mean spiritual regeneration or social harmony but only
an change of power. Eventually Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist in 1948.

Mohammed Iqbal (1877-1938), poet, scholar, and politician, like many other Indian
intellectuals, was first impressed by the achievements of European civilization but gradually
became more and more disturbed by the nihilism of materialistic competitive culture and the
racist basis of colonialism. Through his studies that took him to England and Germany, Islam
took on increasing importance in his thinking. Iqbal was inspired by Nietzsche’s idea of the
Übermensch. In particular, Iqbal used the idea of self-fulfillment and self-development to argue
for a reform and reactivation of the Islamic community, the umma. Islamic identity was to be
strengthened by rediscovering Islam’s glorious past. Not the traditional forms of Islam with its
mystical forms of superstition that rejected the “Self” (the ego) but an assertive form of Islam
in which individualism would be the basis of humanity’s salvation. In The Reconstruction of
Religious Thoughts in Islam, a compilation of six lectures delivered by Iqbal throughout India
in the 1930s, Iqbal laid the groundwork for a renewed role for Islam as a religion as well as a
political philosophy and legal system in the modern world. Unlike Christianity, Islam,
according to Iqbal, had religious ideals that were inseparable from the social order. Islam
possessed legal concepts that could be the basis for social organization. Hence, Iqbal advocated
the unity of all Muslims. For Iqbal, solidarity among Muslims also meant a rejection of strict
nationalism – Islam could not be ‘trapped’ by national boundaries – but also the undesirability
for Muslims to reside as a minority in a nation. Iqbal thus laid the foundation of the two-nation
theory, the theory that held that Muslims and Hindus belonged to two different nations, each
with their own customs, religion, and traditions that allowed them to best thrive in separate
countries. With this idea, he shaped the idea of Pakistan, literally the Land of the Pure. On 1947
a partition divided the once powerful India into two separate countries. Iqbal is still remembered
as the spiritual father of Pakistan and poet of the East.

In Egypt, Rashid Ridha (1865-1935) followed Abduh’s analysis that the Islamic world had
fallen behind by abandoning the straight path of true Islam. Ridha breathed new life into Islam
by combining both the anti-imperialist ideals of al-Afghani and the modernization ideals of
Abduh. Ridha emphasized the more conservative aspects of Islam more than his predecessors
but, in the name of the public good; the Qur’anic principle of maslaha; dared to question the
limitations of traditional legal schools. For Ridha, thinking in the name of the common good
meant adapting the precepts of the Qur'an to the necessities of the moment. In this way, Ridha
wanted to develop a more rational form of Islamic thought. He encouraged both laymen and
Islamic scholars to interpret the primary sources of Islam themselves, independently of
centuries of jurisprudence. This led Ridha to defend sometimes very unorthodox ideas. For
example, Ridha accepted Darwin’s theory of evolution by arguing that the story of Adam and
Eve should be understood allegorically. Ridha denounced the tyranny of Muslim rulers

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throughout history but applauded the early days of Islam, the period when the umma was led
by the Prophet Muhammad and his four successors (the four righteous caliphs). This “golden
age” of Islam could only be experienced again if the ulama regained their integrity and restored
shari’ah, Islamic law. This idea was fundamental to the development of modern ideas on the
‘Islamic state’. Ridha long advocated the establishment of the caliphate as a symbol of Islamic
unity within which the governments of individual countries would organize public order on the
basis of democratic consultation. The abolition of the caliphate, and the founding of the modern
republic of Turkey, by Kemal Atatürk in 1924, led to passionate debates about political
institutions within Islam. Ridha continued to hope for a caliphate that should now be led by
Arabs, after the “Turkish betrayal”. Ali Abdel Raziq (1888-1966) studied economics and
political science at Oxford and classical Islamic theology at al-Azhar University in Cairo. In his
Islam and the Foundations of Governance, he defended the idea that Islam did not prescribe a
specific political structure and criticized both the intellectuals who used religious law as the
basis for defining political institutions as well as the Islamic leaders who in the past claimed
political legitimacy based on the idea of caliphate.

Négritude
Négritude was a critique, developed primarily by French-speaking intellectuals, writers and
politicians of the African diaspora during the 1930s, of (French) colonialism that sought to
honor and cultivate black consciousness. The concept of négritude was first used by the
Martinican writer and politician Aimé Césaire in the magazine l'Étudiant Noir. The movement
grew out of literary discussions between French-speaking black intellectuals in Paris, and their
colleagues in the United States during the years of the Harlem Rennaisance and the Haitian
Rennaissance (Gordon, 2015). Césaire defined négritude as the simple recognition of being
black, the acceptance of this fact, the acceptance of its history and culture. Césaire sided against
the idea of assimilation – the French colonial policy that wanted colonized peoples to gradually
adopt the culture and values of the colonizer to eventually become full citizens – and argued
for a renewed black consciousness. “If assimilation is not madness, then it is certainly folly, for
to want to assimilate is to forget that no one can change the fauna; it is to ignore the ‘otherness’
which is the law of nature.” (Césaire 1935) The négritude movement resisted the inherent
racism of the colonial system and sought to bring about cultural emancipation, achieve the
psychological redemption of colonized black peoples, valorize African cultural traditions, and
formulate a critique of colonialism in a quest for independence (Schwarz & Ray, 2008). Instead
of assimilation, it wanted a resurrection of the black peoples, not slavery or dependence but
emancipation. In this way, the négritude movement articulated a sharp indictment of the
European civilizing mission but also a systematic defense of non-European civilizations that,
in contrast to the imperialism and capitalism of Europe, would be built on commonality,
solidarity, and cooperation (Loomba, 2015). Many intellectuals of the pan-African movement
therefore worked for a re-valuation of individuality, a restoration of authentic identity that had

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been tarnished by colonialism, a liberation through the return to a shared and common history
before the arrival of the French (Loomba, 2015). However, it became clear that this attitude,
important for the formation of nationalist thought in Africa, could also be interpreted
conservatively as a return to a past that had never actually existed. A point that would be taken
up in the 1960s, by more radical thinkers such as Frantz Fanon. Césaire, who also became a
member of the Communist Party in the 1930s, was joined by, among others, Léopold Senghor,
the later president of independent Senegal, who was Christian and humanist and followed a
rather moderate political course and by Léon Damas, who was close to the socialists. In this
respect, the négritude movement was more a cultural project, an active humanism directed
against all forms of oppression, than a concrete political program.

Mao and the Chinese Revolution

In 1911, Mao participated in the uprising that ended the Chinese Empire. At that time he had
not yet come into contact with Marxist thought and leaned toward liberal ideals. After the
October Revolution and World War I, when he was working in the library of Beijing University,
Mao received his first lessons in Marxism. Less than two years later, in 1920, he was already
organizing and leading a communist group in Hunan and was instrumental in the founding of
the Chinese Communist Party in 1923. This decisiveness was characteristic of Mao’s political
practice but also of his political ideas. The interaction between political practice and theoretical
development with the aim of building an efficient revolutionary movement formed the basis of
Mao’s political thought (Nomura 1967). Mao developed his theoretical concepts based on his
political practice and reflected his own experience. Mao’s thinking was a complex combination
of Chinese and Marxist traditions. Mao subjected Confucianism, which for him was
synonymous with political and social conservatism, to criticism; while Stalinist Marxism with
which he had the most contact underwent a process of “sinification,” an adaptation to the
Chinese context.

After World War I, frustrations grew in an unstable China as the Western powers transferred
former German possessions to Japan. A wave of protests and uprisings erupted in 1919, giving
the nationalists renewed political momentum. After Sun Yat Sen was elected president, he and
his nationalist party, the Guomindang, sought to unify China politically and bring about an
economic revival by combining the traditional wisdom of Confucianism with the importation
of Western technology and know-how. Sun Yat Sen had an ambivalent attitude toward freedom
and equality. He thought that the necessary political unification of China could only come about
by opposing individual freedom. Individual freedom had to give way to a strong mass. This was
necessary, according to Sun Yat Sen, to obtain the freedom of the nation. He believed that a
talented elite should lead the country by working for the common good. The citizens would be
able to reap the benefits of these policies. After a period of state-led democracy in which
political unity had to be consolidated and the economy modernized, more freedom could be

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given to the citizens. Sun Yat Sen wanted to organize a mixed economy in which a robust state-
controlled sector was flanked by private capital, which was even allowed to come from abroad.
Sun realized, if he was to make his political ideals a reality, that he needed an army. He was
confronted with the fact that traditional army leaders often served only their own interests and
remained loyal only as long as their interests were not harmed. It is in this constellation of
power that the Chinese Communist Party, under the influence of the Russian advisors,
collaborated with the Guomindang. Sun allowed members of the CCP to join his party, hoping
on the one hand to break the power of the traditional landlords and, on the other hand, to gain
military support from the Soviet Union (Doom 1992). This marriage of convenience did not
last long. Sun Yat Sen died in 1925 and was succeeded by General Chiang Kai-shek who
distrusted the growing power of the communists. Chiang Kai-shek wanted to rebuild China
based on a renewed belief in Chinese traditions and rejected the use of Western ideologies such
as liberalism and communism. He aligned himself with the interests of the landlords and began
to purge the Guomindang of communist influences. In April 1927, he ordered the mass murder
of the communist allies. More than a million people were murdered. Mao had retreated to the
countryside after this massacre and together with the Red Army, he rebuilt a revolutionary base
in which he experimented with new forms of organization in which the peasants played a
prominent role. The Communist Party leadership did not believe in Mao’s rural-based
communism, nor did the Soviet advisers, who asked him to attack Changsa, the capital of Hunan
Province. Mao reluctantly carried out the decision. The attack ended in a humiliating defeat for
the Red Army, which was almost completely destroyed (Womack 2019).

Mao gradually went more his own way. He shaped his ideology through a belief in the powerful
organization of peasants under communist leadership. With the establishment of the Jiangxi
Soviet in 1931, Mao implemented land reforms to benefit the impoverished peasants, realized
social policies, introduced literacy programs, reformed marriage laws, and launched hygiene
campaigns. Mao’s Red Army managed to survive wave after wave of attacks by Chiang Kai-
shek. Mao’s tactic of “encircling cities by the countryside” and training the peasants in guerrilla
tactics seemed to be paying off. The basis of what later became Maoism took shape during this
phase of the struggle. However, the encirclement of the Jiangxi Soviet by Chiang Kai-shek’s
troops in 1933 seemed to be the final death blow to the Communist Party and the revolutionary
army. Nevertheless, the Communists managed to break the encirclement and embark on a
journey of thousands of kilometers, the Long March, to seek refuge in northern Shaanxi
Province. Tens of thousands of the approximately 130,000 soldiers, party members and
civilians who embarked on the journey did not survive. When the Communists arrived in
Shaanxi in 1935, Mao became the de facto leader of the Communist Party.

Mao’s ideas differed from Marxism-Leninism in two important ways. First was his view on the
role of the peasants. Although Mao emphasized, at least on paper, the importance of workers’

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leadership, in reality he shifted the focus of the communist movement to the peasants. For Mao,
the peasants were the bearers of the revolution and he emphasized their spontaneity, something
Lenin was loath to do. “We are here quite far from the conceptions of the cadre and vanguard
parties, but was there any other choice? Mao was very impressed with the peasant associations
that had taken the helm themselves to restructure economic, political and social relations from
the grassroots up.” (Doom 1992:311) In Moscow, the judgment was that this was a peasant
uprising, not a communist revolution. A second important difference from Marxism-Leninism
was Mao’s view of the People’s Liberation Army. The People’s Army was to behave like a
“fish in the water” which meant that the army would know its strengths and weaknesses (no
frontal attacks on strong opposition but use guerrilla tactics), serve the population and perform
civilian tasks (food distribution, education,...). The ultimate goal was to surround the cities from
the countryside. Mao continued the sinification of Marxism. He warned party members against
dogmatism and exhorted them to critically approach classical Marxism and to study China’s
past and present in order to give Marxism a national, Chinese, form (Starr 2015). For Mao, the
theories of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin were universally applicable but were not to be seen as
dogma but as a guide for political action. China thus had its own, specific, development, its
own national characteristics which meant that conventional Marxist concepts had to be adapted
to the Chinese context. “Reconfiguring Marxism in this way is vital for the efficacy and success
of practice. This Mao explains is a ‘concrete Marxism’ in opposition to an ‘abstract Marxism’
or a ‘foreign formalism’ as it is a ‘Marxism that has taken on a national form, that is, Marxism
applied to the concrete struggle in the concrete conditions prevailing in China’ ( Mao 2004,
539). This concrete Marxism in the Chinese context was referred to as Mao Zedong Thought”.
(Jain 2020: 203). In 1945 Mao and his People’s Liberation Army had driven the Japanese out
of China and in 1949 they had defeated Chiang Kai-shek and his Guomindang. The People’s
Republic of China had been born.

Liberal repositioning
The global economic recession led to unprecedented levels of unemployment and poverty and
posed a major challenge to liberal thought. Moreover, liberalism was not only challenged on its
economic merits but now had strong political-ideological opponents. Communism in the Soviet
Union, the conservative revival that put pressure on democracy throughout Europe, the rise of
fascism and Nazism, and the rise of military dictatorships in Europe (Spain, Bulgaria...) were a
test for liberalism. In other words, liberalism had to demonstrate that capitalism could still
create prosperity within a political order built on liberal ideals. Classical liberal thinkers viewed
an economic crisis as a disease created by the inefficient organization of the market. The crisis
of the 1930s, they thought, may have been worse than previous crises but the economy would
recover itself after a brief slump when the free market purged all inefficient practices. The
government’s main task, therefore, was to balance the budget and ensure that the national
currency would be strong. In practice, this meant cutting the budget and lowering wages. John

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Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) rejected this strategy since, according to him, it only made the
recession worse for the majority of citizens who would therefore turn their backs on politics.
Keynes believed that the crisis, the collapse of economic output and the rise in unemployment,
were the result of declining ‘demand’ or purchasing power. In his Tract on Monetary Reform
Keynes parried this waiting for things to get better attitude with “in the long run we are all
dead.” Keynes sought a way out of liberalism by abandoning the liberal dogma of non-
intervention and argued for the adjustment and regulation of the free market. While his
contemporary Friedrich Von Hayek, the founder of what would later become neoliberalism,
argued that labor should shoulder the burden of the crisis, Keynes, conversely, argued for
government intervention. Keynes published his ideas in 1936 in The General Theory of
Employment, Interest and Money, which after World War II would become one of the most
influential economic analyses in history. “Like Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Keynes’s
General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) was written to fight a tradition,
change mentalities, and chart a new course of policy. Like Smith, Keynes did not conceal the
moral and political dimensions of his economic thinking. These showed in a pair of ideas that
had preoccupied Keynes since the minislump of 1920–21. One was that unemployment was an
overriding moral harm, and that hard, immediate decisions were needed to avert its risks. (…)
A second preoccupation, expressed in the same book, was the sheer unhelpfulness of
conventional doctrine in guiding policy makers.” (Fawcett 2014:253)

Keynes advised governments to follow a counter-cyclical spending policy. Since full

employment was not possible, in times of economic crisis, governments should not save but,
on the contrary, should incur debts and invest them in the economy (by creating employment,
public works, etc.) so that purchasing power would recover. This policy of deficit spending,
spending in times of crisis, had to be alternated with paying off the debts when the economy
recovered. Keynes’ analysis was widely misunderstood by classical economists and liberal
politicians and his theory was seen as a restriction on the individual freedom of entrepreneurs
and an obstacle to the free development of entrepreneurship. To the accusation that he had
sympathies for Bolshevism, Keynes replied that he only wanted to save capitalism from
destruction. President Roosevelt’s New Deal in the U.S. – a series of economic programs, public
works, and financial reforms designed to accelerate the recovery of the economy and support
the unemployed and poor to avoid the crisis – showed affinity with Keynes’s ideas. However,
it was only after World War II that Keynesianism became a ubiquitous concept. Keynes’s ideas
laid the foundation for what would later become the welfare state.

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A divided Left
The Russian Revolution had a major impact on the course of the socialist movements which
became increasingly divided over ideological and strategic issues. Lenin had labeled the social
democratic course of socialist parties as treason and the Second International as counter-
revolutionary. In 1919 the Comintern, the Communist International, was founded. Under
Stalin’s leadership, Moscow sought to control the formation and political line of communist
parties throughout the world. Communist dissidents who rejected Moscow’s line or Trotskyists,
who had united in a Fourth International, could not stand up to the power of Stalin and his
ideology, which was officially named Marxism-Leninism in the 1930s. As a result, socialists
had to better define their own ideology and strategy, to sharpen their social democratic views –
the combination of democracy and emancipation. Although many socialists still described
themselves as revolutionary, legal and democratic politics was the only path to the “dictatorship
of the proletariat.” In reality, the socialist parties continued to evolve in the direction of the
reformist theses that Eduard Bernstein had outlined several decades earlier. These left-wing
divisions did not help the struggle against rising fascism and Nazism. Socialist parties in the
1920s estimated fascism as a classic reactionary and conservative response to German loss in
World War I. Communist parties followed a “class-against-class” political line dictated from
Moscow: fascists and social democrats were both branded enemies. This division had disastrous
consequences. Fascism and Nazism were able to come to power in Italy and Germany, and both
communist and socialist parties were banned. Faced with the failure of the “class-against-class”
policy, the Comintern decided in 1935 to establish a politics of popular fronts, an alliance of all
anti-fascist forces to build a dam against Nazism and Fascism. When the socialists accepted
this outstretched hand, the communist attacks on reformism stopped. Popular Front
governments came to power in France, Spain, and Chile.

The Frente Popular in Spain – a broad coalition of left-wing political parties, republicans and
Catalan nationalists – came to power after the 1936 elections. The program that the Frente
Popular wanted to implement was a bourgeois political program, one that the Spanish
bourgeoisie, due to its weak position, could not or would not claim for itself. However, this
moderate program already went too far for the Spanish reactionaries and conservatives. Led by
General Franco, who issued a pronunciamento from within the army leadership, the motley
coalition of malcontents sought to overthrow the republic. The republic, without weapons (most
of the Spanish army followed Franco’s dictatorial and proto-fascist line), tried to defend itself
by encouraging the citizens to defend the republic. It led to a three-year civil war. The fear of
an international armed conflict led to a policy of non-intervention by the Western European
democracies. As a result, the elected government in Madrid became isolated. Hitler and
Mussolini had no problem openly supporting Franco militarily, while the Soviet Union
provided some half-hearted support for the government. In 1939, the last republican resistance
broke. General Franco led the Spanish dictatorship until his death in 1975. Although Franco

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adopted some things from fascism (e.g., strong anti-communism...) there were also important
differences. Fascism, although counter-revolutionary in theory, did have the ambition to change
society. Franco was much more of a conservative who believed in the power of tradition. His
reign was mainly characterized by nationalism, Catholicism, anti-Freedom, and anti-
communism. Spain was not the only country in Europe where the military seized power.
Traditionally military and reactionary dictatorships such as Salazar’s Portugal, Horthy’s
Hungary, or General Metaxas’ Greece cannot be easily equated with fascism. These military
dictatorships showed similarities with fascism, including the hatred of political enemies such
as communism, socialism, democracy, and parliamentarism, as well as the ideological
inclination toward authoritarianism and nationalism. But it was not completely the same as
fascism. (Doom, 1986:217)

In France, the idea of a popular front government was legitimized by Léon Blum, leader of the
Socialist Party, by making a distinction between “l'exercice du pouvoir,” the exercise of power
within the existing political system, and “la conquête du pouvoir,” the conquest of power for
the transition to socialism. The exercise of power was a preventive and defensive policy against
the advance of the extreme right. With the slogan ‘For bread, peace and freedom,’ the Popular
Front won the 1936 elections. A coalition of leftist parties and anti-fascist movements led by
the socialist Blum, came to power in May. The government immediately introduced important
social reforms, social achievements that are still important to the political left such as paid
vacations, minimum wages, the reduction of working hours to 40 hours a week and the
introduction of collective bargaining agreements. Although the measures were successful with
the population, a section of businessmen and bankers sabotaged the policies, while far-right
political groups became increasingly vocal. The slanderous attacks of the far right, led by the
Action Française, weakened the Popular Front and sparked a new wave of anti-Semitism. The
intention was to discredit Léon Blum, who had a Jewish background, and to attack his
credibility. Thrown on the defensive, Léon Blum resigned in 1937 and one year later the
Popular Front ceased to exist. A new right-wing government greatly scaled back the People’s
Front’s social policies. The war was just around the corner.

In Belgium, which was also confronted with extreme right-wing parties such as Rex, Verdinaso
and the VNV, the idea of a popular front government only existed among the most left-wing
socialists and communists. As a party, the Belgian Workers Party (BWP) remained cautious
about the idea of a popular front, but after the strikes in the Borinage in 1932, which were
brutally suppressed, the leadership of the party realized that it was time to offer an alternative.
An appeal was made to Hendrik de Man to rethink the strategy of the labor party. In de Mans
view, Marxism was outdated. In his book Psychology of Socialism (1926) he developed the
theoretical foundations of his political ideas. De Man accused Marx of being a class reductionist
and determinist and instead proposed a vision based on voluntarism and ethics. De Man

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combined Marxism with new insights coming from psychology (Claeys-Van Haegendoren,
1972) For him, socialism, as an idea and as a practice, was timeless. He argued “that the
misguided practice of social democratic reformism was the result of an incorrect Marxist theory
of human nature and the nature of history. The lower classes did not display a revolutionary
consciousness, but rather a social inferiority complex and a vague sense of the need for
cooperation and social justice.” (De Smet, 2019) According to de Man, the worker was
alienated not so much because his wage was too low, but because he felt powerless and because
his work was not valued or appreciated. Higher wages would not change this feeling of
alienation, but would only push the worker into a bourgeois pattern of life. De Man believed
that if the working class was to emancipate itself, it had to have an ethical foundation, a value
system that would provide self-esteem and a place in society, not in the future, but now. De
Man rejected the class struggle as an outdated concept and wanted to make his ethically inspired
socialism attractive to the middle class as well. “Not the class struggle, but education to create
a new consciousness, a new ‘Man,’ would lead to socialism.” (De Smet 2019) The BWP, he
thought, should no longer be a workers’ party, but a people’s party, a party that would serve the
common good. De Man’s intention was to draw up a political program that could overcome the
crisis of capitalism and at the same time make a rapprochement with liberal parties in the fight
against fascism. His labors Plan, which became known as the Plan de Man, aimed to organize
strong state control of the economy to counter the power of the financial markets. The Plan was
more like a plea for a state monopoly over capitalism than for socialism. The Plan provided for
the creation of five commissariats (credit, industry, transport, foreign trade, and a general
commissariat) that were the instruments of structural economic reform. The major banks and
key industries would be nationalized, the central bank would support the government’s
economic policies, and the government would support and assist small businesses. In addition,
the Plan also provided for the implementation of a public works policy and measures to protect
purchasing power. This plan, which had to get Belgium out of the crisis, also had to put a stop
to fascism, which found fertile ground in the disastrous economic situation. But for the Man,
the state had to be protected from another danger: the paralyzing effect of political parties. He
believed in an authoritarian democracy. This meant, first of all, that he wanted to
deparliamentarize government. Governments should be full legislature governments, serving
their full terms without the possibility of being forced to resign by parliament. The government
should be appointed by the king, and once appointed it no longer had to answer to the parties
or to parliament. The only point of reference was the public interest, which could be
unambiguously established. The important posts of economic commissioner and National Bank
governors were held by technocrats, who were not under the control of parliament. Under the
slogans ‘Power to the Plan’ and ‘Nothing but the Plan, the whole Plan,’ the BWP was
effectively revitalized. The Plan mobilized new militants who saw it as their only hope of
getting out of the economic crisis. Yet in coalition governments before World War II, the BWP
implemented only a few parts of the Plan. De Man, who became increasingly authoritarian in

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his impatience to want to implement the Plan, was elected president of the party in 1939. His
policy of neutrality regarding the impending war quickly isolated him within the party. When
the Germans invaded Belgium, de Man dissolved the party and wrote a high-profile manifesto
calling on the population not to revolt against the Nazi occupation. Hendrik De Man chose to
collaborate.

Because Stalin had a firm grip on the Comintern, little ideological change could be expected
from the European Communist parties. The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci was an
exception. Gramsci’s premise was that it was impossible to replicate the Soviet revolution in
Italy. In tsarist Russia, he argued, civil society was underdeveloped because capitalism had not
yet been widely introduced there, the state was supreme, and authority was based on coercion.
Thus, the way to gain power in Russia was through a war of movements. A general revolt
against the structures of the state was enough to cause the tsarist system to collapse. In Western
Europe, where civil society was well-developed and thus strong, the situation was different
according to Gramsci. The state system resembled a fortified castle. It was impossible to destroy
it just like that. Capitalism was already deeply rooted in all levels of society. The ruling,
capitalist, classes and their ideology had acquired hegemony. This meant that the views of the
ruling classes had been passed on to the subordinate classes, who largely adopted these
hegemonic ideas as their own. Capitalism was thus largely accepted as normal. It presented
itself as a universal value, not only in the economic and political spheres, but also in that of
morality and culture (especially in education). That the capitalist state was based on hegemony
did not mean that it did not ultimately rely on violence to sustain itself. It did mean that the
existing order was taken for granted by an overwhelming majority, so power did not rest solely
on coercion. In such a system, the conquest of power by a workers’ party was more complex,
laborious, and time-consuming than in Russia: it was a war of positions.

According to Gramsci, the (Italian) proletariat could not win this war unless it made an alliance
with non-antagonistic classes, in this case the peasants. But Gramsci insisted that the factory
workers must take the lead. For Gramsci, this meant that the labor movement had to counter
the hegemony of capitalism by building a counter-hegemony. In this struggle, intellectuals
would play an important role. The function of traditional intellectuals as a group was to give
legitimacy to the ideology of the dominant class and to apply it in practice. The labor movement
had to form its own organic intellectuals to counter it. The organic intellectuals were no longer
armchair-scholars but committed intellectuals who participated in the struggle. They formed
the ideological cement between workers and peasants, allowing a new historical bloc to emerge.
In the long war of positions against the ruling ideology, socialist forces were able to conquer
large parts of society from the bourgeoisie because it weakened the consensus on which political
and economic power rested. As a result of this process, it was possible that the armed apparatus
of the state began to crumble. But in the end, violent confrontation with the state remained

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inevitable. The impact of Gramsci’s views was virtually nil in the 1930s. After all, he was
imprisoned by the fascists in 1926 and not released to die until 1937. The irony of all this was
that his imprisonment actually protected him from criticism from Moscow. It was only in the
1960s that his ideas were revived. Gramsci’s theories of hegemony and the role of ideology
were first picked up by postcolonial thinkers and leftist reformers in the 1960s. It is an irony of
history that, a few years later beginning in the 1970s, the ideas of a communist would be adopted
primarily by far-right thinkers, who used his insights to launch their attack on liberal
democracy.

The conservative revolution

One of the intellectual inspirations of fascism was the so-called “conservative revolution” in
1920s Germany and France, a literary-intellectual trend that, in contrast to the more classical
conservative responses of the nineteenth century, drew radical conclusions from the trauma of
World War I. The various voices of this conservative revolution in Germany all shared the idea
of the superiority of German nationalism and applauded the role this nationalism had to play in
countering the effects of pernicious liberalism and capitalism: the state- and nation-destroying
ideals of pluralism, tolerance, racial mixing, and bourgeois life. “The conservative
revolutionaries proclaimed the replacement of the ‘bourgeois’ age by a specifically German,
Prussian nationalist, truly conservative ‘socialism’, based on organic instead of numerical
thought, that is, on quality instead of quantity, on the people’s community instead of on class
and mass” (Bracher, 1984:118-119) Intellectuals such as Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Carl
Schmitt, Herman Rauschning, and Oswald Spengler belonged to this radically conservative
movement that had allied itself politically with the Nazis during the Weimar Republic. Being
part of the elite, these conservatives thought they could control the Nazis. Once Hitler came to
power, it became clear that the roles were reversed. In turn, the Nazis sought to control
conservative thinkers, since dissent was not allowed in Hitler’s dictatorship. Some conservative
thinkers fled the country and became critical of Nazism (Rauschning), some collaborated (like
Schmitt), others were killed, and still others like Spengler turned away from politics.

Spengler’s The Decline of the West reflected the pessimistic spirit of the times. Spengler wanted
to understand history by studying the rise and fall of cultures and civilizations. For Spengler,
civilization was merely the final, decadent, stage that cultures passed through. Cultures, which
he compared to living organisms, had a cycle of growth and decline just like the human body.
In the ascending phase, the culture is assertive, creative, and impetuous, while in the descending
phase only the vacuous civilization remains. History, then, knows no progress but an ever-
recurring cycle of growth and decline. Cultures rise and fall independently of each other
according to a life cycle of growth, flowering, decline and death. Spengler was of the opinion
that Europe, the Occident, had reached its final stage of decay and decadence unless she
completely reversed course. Spengler cultivated the will to power and thought that it was

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peculiar to European culture to control the world. The German race, in its resurrection, had to
lead the “white peoples” in the global racial struggle that had to stop the danger of the “rise of
the colored peoples”. Discipline and authoritarianism were needed to lead man to the glory of
the past. The dictators – Spengler himself speaks of the caesars – had to stop the supremacy of
money and democracy, and the individual had to merge into the ‘totality’ of the people and
race. Although Spengler used the concept of socialism (as did Hitler’s National Socialism after
him), this was no more than a right-wing, conservative use of the term that had very little to do
with socialist thought. In his view, it was about building a highly hierarchical, imperialist order
that united all classes under a strong and militaristic regime. Germany had to turn in on itself
and stop the pernicious influences from outside. The only victory was the victory of one’s own
race; mixing of cultures and cosmopolitanism only led to ruin. Although Spengler had
disagreements with the Nazis, it is not hard to see that Hitler was influenced by Spengler.

As moralists and as preservers of what they saw as tradition, conservative intellectuals attacked
modernity, the growing power of liberalism and secularism. They gave shape to a general
dissatisfaction associated with the social consequences of the industrial revolution and warned
of the loss in faith, unity, and values. They particularly denigrated liberalism, in which they saw
the cause of all evil. Liberalism, for them, was the general trend of modern society, and
everything they detested seemed to flow from it: bourgeois life, materialism, a political life
tinged with parliamentarism and parties that competed with each other, the lack of clear political
leadership... Stern describes this ideology as “the revival of a mythical Deutschtum and the
creation of political institutions that would embody and preserve this pecular character of the
Germans. All their works were suffused by this mixture of cultural despair and mystical
nationalism that was radically different from the untroubled nationalism of their
contemporaries.” (Stern, 1963: xiii) This attack on modernity and the complex ideas and
institutions that underpinned liberal, secular and industrial society was nothing less than a
conservative revolution. The conservative revolution embodied a paradox: “(I)ts followers
sought to destroy the despised present in order to recapture an idealized past in an imaginary
future. They were disinherited conservatives, who had nothing to preserve, because the spiritual
values of the past had largely been buried and the material remnants of conservative power did
not interest them. They sought a breakthrough to the past, and they longed for a new community
in which old ideas and institutions would once again command universal allegiance.” (Stern,
1963: xvi) These thinkers were primarily conservative out of nostalgia and revolutionary out of
their desperation (Stern, 1963:268). Conservative thinkers also rejected the growing belief in
and diffusion of the sciences. They feared the empirical and positivist slant of the (exact)
sciences in their institutionalization at the universities. The materialistic worldview of the
sciences clashed with their idealistic views. Despite their hostility to science, they were often
influenced by Darwinism, or more correctly, some social forms of it. “The idea of struggle for
survival was transposed by them to the international realm and turned into an exhortation to

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war, because war would select and ennoble the superior people. Actually social Darwinism
was a new and ‘scientific’ guise for their romantic sense of the nobility of struggle and self-
conquest.” (Stern, 1963:283) What thus became more evident in the interwar period was the
tension between the promise of emancipation through the liberation of the individual from
previous forms of dependence on the one hand, and the growing need for social harmony and
community on the other, a conflict between the ideal image of a rational individual and the
isolation of the individual in mass society (Bracher, 1984:48-49). The politicization of social
and cultural criticism and the ideologization of the social sciences (Mosca, Pareto...) also took
on a political organizational form in France, with the founding of the Action Française of the
monarchist Charles Maurras (1868-1952). The core idea of the movement was to protect order
from the destructive forces of modernization and the anarchist tendencies of democratizing the
masses. Action Française “meant the glorification of the national community and authoritarian
leaderhip by an intelligent and resolute minoroty whom the masses would follow. Amidst the
decay of society and the state the radical monarchist ‘Action’ was to enforce the new
authoritarian order by its combat units (Camelots du roi) through agitation and street fighting”
(Bracher, 1984:57) Maurras was an staunch opponent of parliamentarism and democracy,
renewing a tradition of thought that went back to de Maistre, Taine and Renan. This non-
hereditary form of state organization (as opposed to his preferred ideal of monarchy) led only
to a blunted struggle for the highest office and bidding for voter favor every few years, ending
in confusion and paralysis of politics. According to Maurras, the continuous change at the top
of politics led to a lack of continuity and therefore an undermining of the necessary leadership
that was to give France a renewed place in the world. Maurras’ integral nationalism was a
reaction against everything he saw as “anti-France” – the traitors to the French nation, the Jews,
the Protestants, the Freemasons, and the foreigners. The moral decay that he found indicative
in his France was a consequence of the republican idea of equality of every citizen. Since, for
Maurras, people were not equal by nature, the choice was clear: “Inequality or decadence,
inequality or anarchy, inequality or death, true freedom is only to be found in death, in short
democracy is evil, democracy is death.” (Weyemberg, 2001:46) Maurras by no means shied
away from concrete action. His ideology aimed to seize power. In 1936 Maurras published an
article in which he named 150 politicians who could be killed should war break out with Italy
(where Mussolini was in power) over Ethiopia. Socialist leader Léon Blum was attacked shortly
thereafter by royalists and followers of Maurras. Workers near the scene of the crime, were able
to come to Blum’s aid. Maurras defended himself by stating that he had not meant Blum’s
‘death,’ but only his ‘political death’ – a tactic the far right uses to this day. Maurras was
sentenced to nine months in prison for sedition and incitement to violence. According to
Maurras, the monarchy was to be hereditary, traditional (which did not mean social stagnation),
anti-parliamentary, and also decentralized (non-centralized political issues were to be decided
not by the monarch himself but by the citizens). In this monarchy, Catholicism played an
important structuring role. Maurras had a complex and ambiguous personal relationship with

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the faith, which he lost several times and regained at the end of his life. Maurras was therefore
more of a Catholic because he was an ardent supporter of the Catholic Church – an institution
of authority and order – rather then he was an advocate of a specific piety. In 1926, Action
Française was condemned by Pope Pius XI, forcing right-wing Catholics to choose camp.
Maurras followed his own path and although he was an extreme French nationalist and anti-
Semitic, in World War II he chose the camp of the collaborationist regime of Vichy led by
General Pétain. Maurras was undeniably a protagonist of the extreme right-wing ideology that
enjoyed success in France as in the rest of Europe, which paved the way for the fascist
movements in Italy and Germany. Maurras’ rejection of the French Revolution (the beginning
of decadence) and his radical conservative program was still looking for a restoration, the
restoration of the natural order of monarchy, a pre-revolutionary and pre-democratic order.
Fascism very clearly adopted elements of these conservative worldviews, but instead of striving
toward a lost past, fascism looked forward, toward a post-democratic order in which the people
recognize themselves in the leader who, once in power, suspends and abolishes democracy, in
the name of the people (Weyemberg, 2001). Maurras was sentenced to life in prison after the
war for collaboration.

3. Fascism and Nazism

Fascism can generally be seen as a reaction to the values of democratic humanism as they had
taken shape since the Enlightenment and the French, American and Haitian revolutions. The
global economic crisis of the 1930s, colonial domination and its backlash, the wounds of World
War I but above all the growing doubts of large parts of the population about liberal democracy
(individual freedoms, parliamentarism...) and the fear and loathing of communism seemed to
be an ideal breeding ground for the emergence of an ideology often associated with Evil itself.
As such, fascism has not been attributed profound political ideas but rather an aggressive and
violent manipulation of popular discontent and resentment. The American historian Robert
Paxton sees in fascism a political practice, a political behavior, more than a coherent ideology
like liberalism or communism. A behavior characterized by “obsessive preoccupation with
community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and
purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but
effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with
redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and
external expansion.” (Paxton, 2004:2018) However, fascism was, and is, both an ideology, a
movement and a regime; in other words, fascism can be described as a set of descriptive and
prescriptive ideas, as a political movement that has attempted to take power in various ways
and has actually come to power in some countries.

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In the interwar period, fascist movements were active all over Europe, from Scandinavia
(Nasjonal Samling in Norway) to Spain (the Falange), from Britain (British Union of Fascists)
to Eastern Europe (the Arrow Crossers in Hungary) and in Belgium (Verdinaso, Flemish
National Alliance and Rex); everywhere far-right movements were active and to some extent
successful. In Germany (the National Socialist Workers Party, NSDAP) and in Italy (the Partito
Nazionale Fascista, PNF), the fascists actually came to power. In the most general sense,
fascism can be described as an ideology that strives for the resurrection of an imaginary
community (usually the ‘nation’ or ‘civilization’) that must be purged of everything that fascism
regards as a possible obstacle to its own imaginary homogeneity (the ‘people’) through which
its imaginary essence (grandeur, heroism...) is deprived (the danger of communism, ‘the Jew’,
the ‘black’...) and its deep-seated identity is threatened (Palheta, 2021). This definition makes
it clear that fascism was by no means just a German or Italian phenomenon, but could occur
anywhere and at any time. The French historian Zeev Sternhell, for example, placed the
intellectual and ideological origins of fascism mainly in France, where between 1880 and the
interwar period the anti-democratic radicalism of a part of the extreme left (especially Sorel’s
revolutionary syndicalism) and the new nationalist, racist (de Gobineau) and anti-Semitic
(Maurras, Brasillach...) extreme right (Action Française) fused in a completely unique way.
Sternhell’s description of French fascism as an ideology underpinned by an exclusive
nationalism, an aggressive anti-Semitism, a clear racism, a preference for authoritarianism, and
an often violent opposition to political liberalism (and its democratic institutions) and socialism
led other scholars to discover similarities with other political systems or countries. Robert
Paxton described the American Ku Klux Klan (KKK) – a secret terrorist society based on the
idea of white supremacy, founded in 1866 – as the first openly fascist movement. Fascism’s
crucial link to racism was often minimized in 1930s Europe, even among leftist movements that
saw in fascism only a conservative reaction by part of the bourgeoisie. It was African militants
and intellectuals who first made the connection between the racist basis of colonialism and the
rise of European fascism. George Padmore (1903-1959), pan-African militant and intellectual
from Trinidad and Tobago, saw in the racism of settler colonialism the breeding ground for the
fascist mentality that took hold of Europe. When in 1935 the USSR sought a rapprochement
with Britain and France, who were described by the Soviet Union as “democratic-imperialist”
powers, and thus a less priority threat compared to the “fascist-imperialist” powers such as
Germany and Japan, Padmore left the communist international to continue supporting Africa’s
struggle for independence (albeit from a socialist frame of mind). Aimé Césaire, and later
Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, echoed Padmore’s analysis of colonial fascism by
speaking of the boomerang effect of European imperialist violence: the way colonial empires
used their colonies as social laboratories to test out methods of oppression, repression, and
control, after which these techniques could be brought back to the motherland and used against
the weak within their own societies. These insights also make clear that fascism cannot be
confined to a short period of European history but is an ideology that, despite its various

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manifestations, can be of all times and all places. The emergence of new far-right movements
in the 2000s, the election of Trump or Bolsanaro, or the Islamist regime of the Ayatollahs in
Iran, as we shall see further on, have breathed new life into this debate.

Before we further analyze the specific content of fascist ideology, especially Hitler’s Nazism
and Mussolini’s fascism, in their similarities and differences, we first consider the political
success of the ideology in Germany and Italy. Why did Hitler and Mussolini come to power? It
is clear that the global crisis after 1929 had a huge impact on political evolutions in Germany
and Italy, but of course this economic crisis was also present in other countries where the
fascists did not come to power. Nevertheless, Germany was hit harder by the heavy reparations
for World War I and the success of fascism can be seen in part as the political translation of the
economic recession. A first factor that may explain the success of fascism in Germany and Italy
is that despite industrial development, the two countries had not experienced a true bourgeois
revolution. The German Empire, which had not survived World War I, supported the interests
of German capital. In other words, the economic freedom of the bourgeoisie was not thwarted
but the bourgeoisie could not impose its political will. When the Weimar Republic was
established, the German bourgeoisie was too weak to deal with the crisis. Similarly, in Italy,
which was united only in the second half of the nineteenth century by the strength of the
Piedmont army, the alliance between the industrialists of the north of the country and the landed
gentry, large landowners, of the south was precarious. Both economically and politically-
ideologically, the bourgeois revolution in Italy remained half-hearted. Capitalism spread but
the landed gentry maintained the old social structures and relations for a long time, preventing
a complete breakthrough of bourgeois society. In other words, there was a “crisis of hegemony”
as Gramsci put it, a crisis in which the bourgeoisie appeared less and less able to impose its
political domination through consent without using more and more repression (Palheta, 2021).
When in both countries, after the end of World War I, a part of the population, especially the
workers, resorted to extra-parliamentary opposition (e.g., the Spartakus uprising or the
establishment of socialist councils in Germany, the occupation of factories, or the attack on
peasants in Italy...), order was restored not only by the forces of order but equally by irregular
forces and militias. The state seemed to have lost its legal monopoly on violence and the ruling
classes did not hesitate to use private militias to achieve their goals. Thus, even before the
fascists in Italy or the Nazis in Germany came to power, there was already a culture of violence
that affected the labor movement in particular. “Contrary to popular belief (in part of the Left),
fascism is not just a desperate response of the bourgeoisie to an imminent revolutionary threat,
but the expression of a crisis of the alternative to the existing order and a defeat of counter-
hegemonic forces. While it is true that fascists mobilise fear (real or simulated) of the Left and
of social movements, it is rather the inability of the exploited class (proletariat) and oppressed
groups to constitute themselves as revolutionary political subjects and engage in an experiment
of social transformation (however limited), that allows the far Right to appear as a political

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alternative and win the adhesion of very diverse social groups”. (Palheta, 2021) Thus, fascism
did not revolt against a working class in full development but rather against a “class whose
resilience was already broken, which was moreover internally divided. In short, a working class
that had already been forced onto the defensive.”(Doom,1986 :222)

A second factor in the rise of fascism and Nazism was the renewed nationalism in both
countries, which gained renewed momentum after World War I. The heavy reparations were
felt as a humiliation in Germany. The loss of territory, of the colonies, the dismantling of the
German army... created the myth that Germany had not lost the war at the front but had been
betrayed by the politicians. The stab-in-the-back myth – the myth that the politicians stabbed
the soldiers in the back – turned against the ‘guilty ones,’ the ‘Reds and Jews’. In Mein Kampf,
Hitler referred to the stab-in-the-back myth several times and used it as a breeding ground for
a new, aggressive, nationalism. Italy, which joined the war late, did not get the hoped-for
territorial expansion, and there too a sense of inferiority prevailed, fueling nationalism. Ruddy
Doom sums up the spirit of the times in Italy and Germany well: “A developed capitalism going
through an economic crisis; a working and entrepreneurial class just emerging from a bitter
struggle; a state that de jure invoked bourgeois principles, but a society that had hardly
internalized these principles; a parliamentary system that did not function flawlessly; a war
whose final outcome felt like a betrayal to those involved; a past full of frustrations and a
generalized sense of ‘no future.’ In such a context, a movement that promised to end socialism,
capitalism, bourgeois democracy and upheld a sense of self through nationalism, and most
importantly, a movement that felt like an alternative, became not only possible but successful.
The question then is, which layers of the population, were attracted to this ideology?” (Doom,
1986:224-225)

Fascism primarily attracted the petty bourgeoisie, the lower strata of the capitalist classes, the
middle classes, the small self-employed and the peasants. They were hit hard by the economic
crisis. But the white-collar workers and the liberal professions were also attracted to the fascist
ideology. All shared the fear that their social position was in danger, that their future was
blocked. These groups saw themselves as victims of big business, big companies, department
store chains, financiers and top bankers. At the same time, they also saw themselves threatened
by the labor movement, which was constantly expanding its ‘advantages’ to their detriment.
The petty bourgeoisie was the mainstay of order, morality, the family and, above all, money,
and therefore formed the backbone of fascism. However, the working class also did not remain
insensitive to the lure of fascism, not because it was in a position of strength, but just the
opposite, as we saw, because the labor movement had already been largely silenced. Where (as
in other European countries) the labor movement was still well organized, fascism had much
less of a foothold. Finally, there is the question of the extent to which big business supported
fascism. Fascism was not merely the expression of big business, even though both had some

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corresponding interests, they also continued to pursue their own goals. In Italy, the
Confindustria (the association of entrepreneurs) effectively subsidized the fascist party, but it
took a long time for German big industries to fully support the NSDAP. Ernest Mandel (1992)
summed this up well: “The majority of industrial and finance magnates were initially suspicious
of the all-or-nothing adventurer, the unscrupulous, nihilistic demagogue Adolf Hitler. Few,
including a few foreigners such as Henry Ford, helped him financially in the late 1920s. In
general, the bourgeoisie prefers a decaying democratic parliamentary regime, moving toward
a strong state, to the totalitarian rule of a fascist party that it can never fully control.” In other
words, big business supported fascism and Nazism not out of political blindness but because it
felt compelled to do so by the economic crisis and the erosion of liberal democracy. The danger
of outlining this “breeding ground” is that it suggests a logic of inevitability and gives the
impression, as it were, that fascism was the only possible outcome. It may explain why the
fascists gained a large following, but it does not explain why they were able to take power.
Hitler and Mussolini did not come to power like Franco or Salazar through a civil war or a coup,
nor did they use the military as a tool. The PNF and the NSDAP came to power through (broad)
electoral support. Why?

The top leadership of the political left completely misjudged the danger. The Communist Party
leadership initially saw fascism as nothing more than a variant of bourgeois conservative
democracy. On the eve of Mussolini’s appointment as prime minister, the Communist Party
circulated a communiqué about the “imminent change of cabinet.” The German party leadership
also underestimated the true nature of the NSDAP. For the Social Democrats, fascism was one
but certainly not the political problem, and the general view was that it would be easier to deal
with “petty-bourgeois radicalism” than with the Communists. Conservatives, on the other hand,
were obsessed with the specter of the left, which seemed to them far more threatening than
fascism. Of course, there was little sympathy for the political newcomers, but the expectation
that they would calm down and normalize by allowing them to participate in the system was
prevalent. The gradual erosion of democratic institutions led to a kind of surrender of power, a
retreat of the democratic elites who thereby gave the fascists and Nazis a free pass. The same
policy of tolerance and appeasement characterized the international scene. Initially, there was
great understanding and even sympathy for Mussolini. When his troops occupied Abyssinia
(Ethiopia) in 1935, the League of Nations remained silent. The rearmament of Germany led to
some disapproving remarks, but no more than that. Germany’s claims to Sudetenland, part of
the former Czechoslovakia, were accepted by France and Britain at the Munich conference in
1938. Europe, as well as the US, wanted to avoid war at all costs. The underlying idea of this
realpolitik was that concessions would eventually bring Hitler to his senses. Moscow had
recognized the danger of Nazism from 1934 onwards and attempts were made to isolate Nazi
Germany through a collective security agreement. When the rest of Europe failed to respond,
this resulted in the non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939. As

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pragmatic and cynical as Stalin was, he wanted at all costs to prevent the Soviets from
advancing alone against Berlin, although he overestimated Hitler’s willingness to abide by the
treaty. When Poland was invaded in September 1939, war with France and Britain also
officially broke out. In reality, it would be months before the first shot was fired. Only at that
point, when there was no longer a choice, was the “nature of the new regime” recognized.

The Doctrine of Fascism, written by Mussolini in collaboration with Giovanni Gentile,

describes fascism as “a spiritual one, arising from the general reaction of the century against
the materialistic positivism of the XIXth century. Anti-positivistic but positive; neither skeptical
nor agnostic; neither pessimistic nor supinely optimistic as are, generally speaking, the
doctrines (all negative) which place the center of life outside man; whereas, by the exercise of
his free will, man can and must create his own world.” (Mussolini, 1932) Fascism appeals more
to action than to reason. “I know very well that people can be won over by the spoken word
rather than by the written word, and that every great movement on earth owes its growth to its
great orators and not to its great writers,” Hitler said. Fascist ideology, therefore, must not be
examined for its inner coherence, nor for the correctness of its factual expositions. Fascist
ideology is not meant to be read, it must be heard and one must submit to it. Fascism lived not
on paper, but in the gigantic stadiums, during mass meetings and the endless flag parades, where
the rousing speeches were experienced almost as something physical. Aided by modern
technology and using mass psychology, the ideology was not so much conveyed to as rammed
into the masses. György Lukács called this “die Zerstörung der Vernunft” (the destruction of
reason), but apparently it was effective.

Fascism sought to present itself as a ‘third way’ between liberalism and socialism, hence it is
appropriate to contrast it with these two ideologies. Hitler, and by extension Nazism, was
opposed to capitalism as approached by classical liberalism. He criticized the ubiquity of the
capitalist economy, the dictate of the free market that had made money into a new God to which
everything was subjected. Not money but politics was to be in charge. Second, in the capitalist
liberal worldview, money was so central that there was no place left for man in his heroic form.
Third, Hitler thought that the international financial world economy, which he blamed for the
economic crisis, was controlled in a delusion by Marxists and Jews, the slain enemies. Initially,
both within the NSDAP and within the P.N.F., there was a so-called left wing, which became
impatient after the seizure of power because its demands were not met. As we have already
mentioned, some of the disaffected workers were attracted to fascism. Although the fascists in
Italy and the Nazis in Germany controlled the economy (as one might expect from a leftist
movement), this had nothing to do with socialism. National Socialism did not touch private
property at all, but it did put the economy at the service of an aggressive, expansionist and racist
policy, which included the conquest and violent subjugation of other peoples. It also did not

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take long for the so-called "left" wing within the NSDAP and the PNF to be literally liquidated.
In the Night of the Long Knives and in the subsequent Reichstag murders (June 30-July 2,
1934), the leadership of the Sturmabteilung (SA) – the ‘brown shirts’, armed militia of the
NSDAP led by Röhm – were murdered. Nazism and fascism developed a hatred of communism
and socialism, and although there was regular criticism of the free market, it was more likely to
come from the anti-Semitic playbook. The so-called “Jewish-international-capitalist
conspiracy” remained a recurring theme, directed against every possible opponent. Instead of
redistributing wealth, seeking to control the means of production, or abolishing private
property, the Nazis created a social and racial hierarchy in which solidarity was reserved only
for the members of one’s own popular community. “No individuals or groups (political parties,
cultural associations, economic unions, social classes) outside the State. Fascism is therefore
opposed to Socialism to which unity within the State (which amalgamates classes into a single
economic and ethical reality) is unknown, and which sees in history nothing but the class
struggle. Fascism is likewise opposed to trade unionism as a class weapon. But when brought
within the orbit of the State, Fascism recognizes the real needs which gave rise to socialism
and trade unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which
divergent interests are coordinated and harmonized in the unity of the State.” (Mussolini, 1932)
Neither Hitler nor Mussolini denied that the workers were right to strive to improve their lives,
but this could not be realized by socialism because this current manipulated the intentions of
the workers and was used for something quite different. Hitler remarked on this, “Marxist
doctrine is an individual mixture of human reasonableness and human absurdity; but the
combination is so arranged that only the absurd part of it can ever be put into practice, but
never the reasonable part of it. By categorically rejecting the personal value of the individual
and also of the nation and its racial component, this doctrine destroys the fundamental basis of
all civilization. This is the true essence of the Marxist worldview, insofar as the word worldview
can be applied at all to this phantom image spawned from a criminal brain.” (Hitler, 1939:265)

The elitism of fascism manifested itself in various ways but hyper-nationalism was its most
important expression. There was a clear and crucial difference between Italy and Germany.
Italy derived its supposed superiority from history, while Germany relied on racism. When
Italian fascism wanted to demonstrate its supremacy, it appealed to Ancient Rome, the
Renaissance, the builders of cathedrals, Machiavelli, Dante, Michelangelo... in short, the
glorious past that needed to be revived. In this sense, Italian fascism was closer to Romanticism
than to extreme nationalism. Nazism viewed Germans as a “Herrenvolk” on the basis of
biological superiority, which it believed could be ‘scientifically’ proven. Races, the Nazis
believed, could be distinguished from one another and placed in a hierarchical relationship. At
the top of the pyramid was the Aryan race; those with German blood. This German supremacy
was threatened first and foremost by racial mixing, which "poison Germany’s blood”.
Therefore, there was only one right that was inviolable, and this right was at the same time an

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all-holy duty, namely, “to protect the purity of the racial blood, so that the best types of men
can be preserved, and so that we may make possible a nobler development of mankind itself.”
(Hitler, 1939:332) This does not imply a defensive policy, however, for this blood was under
attack because it had a special appeal. “The black-haired Jewish youth lurks for hours, staring
satanically at the unsuspicious girl he wishes to seduce, spying and spying on her blood and
removing her from the bosom of her own people.” (Hitler, 1939:270) These “perverts” must be
stopped, and how can this be done more efficiently than by exterminating them? By this
reasoning, the executioner became the victim, and the victim the guilty party. The racial terror
of the Nazis was directed primarily against the Jewish people. In addition to the material
benefits that resulted from the confiscation of Jewish property, “the Jew” fulfilled the function
of scapegoat, on whom all misfortunes and mishaps could be passed on. The “final solution”,
the systematic, cold-blooded and ‘scientific’ extermination of the Jews, was the result of long-
term hate campaigns in which the Jews were not presented as a people but as ‘things’. For
Hitler, Jews permanently undermined the Aryan race, accusing them not only of promoting
capitalism and communism but also of spreading hereditary and sexually transmittable diseases.
Hitler may not have spoken of extermination until World War II but the dehumanization – he
spoke of Jews as parasites and leeches – clearly indicated his racist obsession. The Nazis first
wanted to cantonize Jews into ghettos. They hoped that life there would become so impossible
that the Jews would emigrate. However, most European countries did not want to receive
migrants and many Jews did not want to leave without their possessions and, for some, wealth,
which the Nazis preyed upon. The 1938 pogrom, Kristalnacht, led to the Nazis’ looting of
Jewish wealth. The dreaded SS was now given the lead in following up on the “Jewish issue”,
leading to the further radicalization of Nazi politics. Once war broke out in the East in 1939,
“the question was not if, but where, how and when Jews would be killed. In early 1941, it was
decided that Jews would either have to work themselves to death in camps or be killed
immediately.” (Passmore, 2014:116) In total, about six million people perished in the
concentration camps.

The idea of superiority logically led to expansionist desires. For Italy this meant the restoration
of the idea of the Roman Mare Nostrum, the imposition of the Pax Romana on the
Mediterranean. The attempts to subdue the Libyan resistance, the fighting in Albania and
Ethiopia ...all these battles were a clear indication that the so-called ‘invincible army’ was just
a megalomaniacal chimera of Mussolini. Once again, the Nazis justified their conquest drive
with racist arguments. Initially, they said that all Germans should be brought together into one
empire. This led to the anschluss of Austria, the annexation of Sudeten Germany, and claims to
the occupation of Danzig (Gdansk). Germany had set itself the task of allowing the German
race to develop to its full potential, but the necessary lebensraum (habitat) was lacking for this.
This habitat did exist in the East, which was populated with Üntermenschen. These areas had
to be Germanized. Himmler declared, “It is not our task to Germanize the East in the old sense,

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that is, to teach the people who live there the German language and German laws, but to ensure
that only people of genuine Germanic descent live in the East,” thus advocating the physical
liquidation of the Slavic population, a call for genocide.

Fascism, with its penchant for heroism and battlefields, was primarily a male affair. Hence a
form of secondary racism toward women. For the Führer, equal rights for women meant little
more than appreciation for what nature destined her to do. This meant, first, as a mother, and,
second, as the repos du guerrier. Both Hitler and Mussolini were obsessed with the danger that
the number of coffins would exceed the number of cradles, which was not entirely unfounded
in the war years. Both made pathetic appeals not to lose sight of procreation and reproduction,
to encourage mothers not to neglect “their mission”. On the political stage, however, there was
no place for them and even the working woman, especially in industry, was frowned upon. Of
course, any form of sexuality that deviated slightly from the heterosexual norm was also
abhorred. Therefore, homosexuals, like many other undesirables, were imprisoned or sent to
concentration camps and subjected to medical experiments to “reprogram” them.

Finally comes the adult male population. Of course party members could be ranked higher than
non-party members. And of course there was another elite within this elite (like the S.S. in
Germany). At the head of the hierarchical structure was the leader, il Duce in Italy and the
Führer in Germany. The leader was not the symbol of the people or of the state, he was the
people and the state. He was not the incarnation of authority, he was the authority. In this sense,
the freedom of everyone was a utopia, no matter how high a person had risen in the party
hierarchy. “Command is command” was the autonomy of the elect: blind obedience was
supreme freedom. Those who recognized this lie paid a heavy price for it. The rest had chosen
to acquiesce, out of conviction or out of fear, because they agreed or out of expediency, because
they were for the system or because it seemed the lesser evil, because they did not want to see
what it was or because they looked the other way.

Was Nazism possible without Hitler? Suppose he had been shot during the Munich putsch
attempt, or suppose he had not been rejected as an art school student. Would there have been
no world war or holocaust then? More generally, this is a discussion of structure and agency
within history. What role do historical figures play? Figures become historical only when they
succeed in gaining power; in other words, there must be a social breeding ground that makes
their success possible. The interplay of historical factors made Germany susceptible to
authoritarianism, and specific accelerators (including the economic crisis) reinforced that
tendency. All of this made Hitler possible, but not necessary or inlectable. Once the totalitarian
state was established, the leaders had the opportunity to pursue their personal agenda because
the opposing forces had been destroyed or paralyzed.

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Chapter 5: After World War II: reconstruction, despair, and revolutionary
ideals

Reason without imagination creates monsters. Imagination without reason creates useless
things.
(Bonefeld,2010 )

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for
everything he does.
(Sartre)

When the colonized hear a speech on Western culture they draw their machetes or at least
check to see they are close to hand. The supremacy of white values is stated with such
violence, the victorious confrontation of these values with the lifestyle and beliefs of the
colonized is so impregnated with aggressiveness, that as a counter measure the colonized
rightly make a mockery of them whenever they are mentioned.
(Fanon: 2002)

History suggests only that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom.
(Friedman 1962)

The end of World War II was accompanied by several geopolitical shifts at the global level as
well as major changes within the political and economic organization of states and nations. A
first point was the almost abrupt loss of power of Europe. The Western European powers, which
still prided themselves on their colonial possessions, saw their direct and indirect spheres of
influence shrink. The two new superpowers, the US and the USSR, dominated world politics
henceforth. The coalition between the partners of World War II almost immediately splintered,
as a Cold War made its appearance, putting pressure on all countries to convert to one camp.
For Western Europe, this meant taking shelter under the US umbrella. Now that both camps
had atomic weapons, a new concept made its appearance: mutually assured destruction, the
possibility that a third world war could destroy just about the entire planet. Alternating periods
of thaw and crisis eventually kept the first (US, Europe, Japan) and second (USSR and Eastern
Europe) worlds out of direct confrontation. However, a number of conflicts were fought in the
Third World, with Vietnam as the tragic low point. A second issue was the political and
economic parceling out of the world through the mass uprising of the colonized peoples. In less
than half a century, the colonial world was dismantled. After World War II, the fault line
between North and South became one of the main topics of international politics. Regarded by
some as a moral problem to be solved through paternalistic caritas, underdevelopment became
an international political problem in the context of the growing Cold War atmosphere. The two
great victors of the war each sought to expand their sphere of influence, and development played
an important role in this. Those who had hoped that this would lead in the short term to a steep
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rise in economic development, social progress and democratic achievements were disappointed.
The problems of what was described as “the third world” also determined the international
agenda.

The discovery of concentration camps and the horror of the Holocaust had a major impact on
political thought and how ideologies and human emancipation were viewed. The Dialectic of
Enlightenment by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer appeared after World War II and
became one of the most important works of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. Driven
by social justice, which brought them close to Marxism, the thinkers of the Frankfurter Schule
tried to understand how the Enlightenment could degenerate into its opposite, into the barbarism
of war and concentration camps. World War I was already proof to them that the individual did
not count, that the bourgeoisie was in ruins, and that capitalism had been discredited. After
1933, the rise of National Socialism led to a focus on the question of fascism, while Stalinist
crimes in the Soviet Union led to a generalized doubt about the orientation of civilization, the
march of progress. Marxist hopes for a transformation of society then seemed remote. After
World War II and the discovery of the horror of the concentration camps, Horkheimer and
Adorno shifted their attention from the proletariat to anti-Semitism and raised the question of
why, instead of engaging in progress, humanity lead to a new form of savagery. Adorno’s and
Horkheimer’s philosophy reconstructed the history of civilization and progress by paying
attention to the potentially destructive aspects of progress, the ways in which reason can destroy
itself and the masses can be convinced by depotism. The work reflected the post-World War II
pessimism about the possibility of human emancipation. Adorno and Horkheimer saw a danger
not only in the ideologies of fascism and Stalinism, but equally in the culture industry in which
they saw a new form of social control and enslavement. They found the failure of the
Enlightenment in the ubiquity of instrumental reason, reason that focuses primarily on the
useful and expedient, to controlling nature and the world around us. If this form of instrumental
reason prevailed, it led to a potentially dangerous conjunction with totalitarian forms of power.
Violence, they argued, was inherent in reason and in the Enlightenment.

This idea was also reflected in Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) who saw in the concentration camps
the appearance of absolute or radical evil; evil for the sake of evil itself. Genocide had become
a technical-bureaucratic issue. Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), had described
totalitarianism as a new form of government, a form of government that actually differed from
other forms of political oppression such as despotism, tyranny, and dictatorship. In
totalitarianism, to which Arendt included both Nazism and Fascism, terror was used to
subjugate and oppress entire populations rather than just political opponents. Radical evil – a
term Arendt borrowed from Kant – caused the victims of totalitarianism to become “superfluous
people”. She answered the question “Can someone do evil without being evil themselves?” in a
stirring book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Her analysis of the 1961

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trial of German war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem led her to speak of the banality of
evil. Eichmann was not a monster at all, it turned out, but rather an ordinary, rather gray,
bureaucrat. He was neither perverse nor sadistic but frighteningly normal. Thus, he acted
without any other motive than to pursue his career in the Nazi bureaucracy. Arendt’s banality
of evil thus refers to immoral acts that nevertheless seem acceptable to an individual because
he does not consciously think about them. “This refusal to think could possibly be the result of
an unpleasant experience of thinking, so that non-thinking evokes less fear than thinking, which
is avoided as much as possible, but also of having slowly become accustomed to it because
experience has taught you that it can have its advantages to direct your actions towards others,
advantages that you are reluctant to relinquish.” (Stagneth, 2017:89) Eric Voegelin, a German
political philosopher who fled Nazism in 1938, saw in the rise of totalitarian thinking (both
National Socialism but also Marxism-Leninism) the rise of political religions, pseudo-religious
ideologies, which simultaneously proclaimed scientific validity and religious absolutism,
ideologies that promised the follower (or believer) a new harmonious society in which politics
and human nature, culture and technology would converge into an ideal society. The only thing
in the way of these political religions were the enemies, those who did not want or deserve the
harmonious (future) society (Voegelin, 2000).

An important other critique of the claims made by ideologies, from a different angle, came from
the physicist and philosopher of science Karl Popper. Popper (1902-1994), who fled Austria in
1937, offered in his best-known work The Open Society and Its Enemies, published in 1945, a
lived and passionate analysis of what he called totalitarianism’s assault on civilization. In his
view, ‘evil’ came not from ‘outside’ one’s own society, but from reactionary forces that
undermined democracy from within. The roots of that ‘evil’ lay in the totalitarian tendencies
hidden in the thinking of Plato, Hegel and Marx. The greatest enemy of the open society, i.e., a
society in which people’s critical faculties are given free rein, lay in historicism: the idea that
by studying the past, certain laws could be discovered and that society could best be organized
on the basis of these supposed laws. Popper’s objections were therefore directed primarily
against all-encompassing ideologies that claimed to be based on science and found laws in
history, whether it was fascism or communism. He arrived at this argument through his
previously developed philosophy of science. Science, Popper argued, consisted in making
falsifiable statements. Anything that was empirically not falsifiable belonged to the realm of
metaphysics (which did not imply that it could not be useful). Just as astrology predicted
astronomy, or alchemy predicted chemistry, so Marxism or psychoanalysis were merely the
harbingers of science. Thus, there can be no question of scientific socialism. Popper therefore
concluded that the view that there are laws to be discovered in history was scientifically
untenable. Popper resolutely took an anti-historical position. Holism, the view that complex
structures could be understood in their totality on the basis of one basic principle, was to be
replaced by value-free partial research. Moreover, he considered this holism to be dangerous.

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Historian tendencies not only believe that they can ‘grasp’ the laws of history, they tend to think
that they have the task of adjusting reality. It is thus a source of authoritarian thinking, but also
of authoritarian action in that when rulers see for themselves a historically necessary task, those
opponents who stand in the way of the task’s perfection are treated as enemies. According to
Popper, utopias, reactionary and totalitarian systems of learning could only lead to closed
societies. Once the supposed ideal social order was achieved, all critical voices, dissenting
voices or other nonconforming opinions were silenced. Popper also pointed out a “paradox of
democracy.” In a democracy, the majority always seems to be right, but what if the majority
decides to curtail or even abolish democracy? Popper therefore argued that (individual) freedom
was not unlimited, that the will of the majority was not the essence of democracy, but rather the
maintenance of the institutions and regimes that sustained the open society. This idea would
decades later become the ideological basis of the liberal idea of an ‘armed democracy,’ a
democracy that “arms itself” against its challengers, whether migration, Islam, multiculturalism
or the rise of the extrame right and new fascist movements.

1. Liberal regeneration, human rights, and democratic revival

Although three-quarters of the world’s population was not represented, a Declaration of Human
Rights was adopted in 1948, anchoring internationally the basic ideas of liberalism. While the
first part of the declaration emphasized fundamental rights, the civil protection of each
individual and, above all, the curtailment of the power of government, the second part
emphasized the need for a liberal democracy with a social mission as the best guarantee of
respect for human rights. The declaration did not, as the French and American constitutions had
done before, refer to natural law or to any transcendent being to ground the authority of human
rights, nor did it explain how and why people were morally bound to these rights. The
declaration recognized rights as if they actually existed and bound us as humanity, whether or
not these laws were observed in practice. In other words, the declaration did not provide actual
protection – the UN did not and does not have the means to enforce these rights – but rather a
new aspiration of human achievement, a standard for all nations and peoples on earth. In this
way, liberal democracy as a political form was ascribed a global, universal, aspiration. There
were doubts about the usefulness and efficacy of human rights: was it not much more than a
discourse that governments used to fight each other? Couldnt rights be abused? What did these
rights mean if they were not respected? What did these rights mean to the colonized peoples?
Yet the importance of this declaration can hardly be underestimated. Within a few decades,
liberal democracy became the most successful form of political organization. Even before the
fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, democracy seemed the only game in town.
But an even more important development in the long run was global citizen activism that
mobilized human rights to protect individuals anywhere in the world from the abuse of power
by governments. British lawyer Peter Benenson launched a campaign – Amnesty – in 1961 to

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support political prisoners. His commitment was based on the moral force of human rights and
his conviction that imprisoning people because of their beliefs was reprehensible. As humane
and universal as this initial mobilization sounded, Benenson did not stand up for all political
prisoners. He did not think it worth defending political prisoners who themselves did not
recognize human rights enough, nor those who relied on the use of political violence. Amnesty
thus showed that law and human rights can be an important political weapon against the
sovereignty, omnipotence, and arbitrariness of states (as we shall see further in the American
civil rights movement) but that human rights and the endeavor to have them respected, averse
to any good intention, are also always embedded in complex political contexts that make a
neutral stance impossible (as we shall see further in the tension between politics and morality,
between politics and human rights that marked the French intellectual climate in the 1970s).

It was not only human rights that gave new impetus to liberal thinking. Liberals – both
intellectuals and politicians who invoked this tradition – wanted to draw lessons from the past,
from how the mishandling of the economic crisis of the 1930s had enabled Nazism and fascism.
Already in the 1930s it had become clear that the magnitude of the economic crisis challenged
some basic assumptions of liberal thought, namely that capitalism and the proper functioning
of the free market would automatically recover and that the free market and international free
trade would bring peace. During World War II, William Beveridge was tasked in Britain with
writing a report to devise a postwar social insurance system, administered by the state. The
Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services, in the spirit of Keynesianism, laid the
foundation for one of the most important postwar political institutions: the welfare state. “If
Keynesianism represented liberalism’s economic compromise with democracy, welfarism
represented a major step in liberalism’s social compromise.” (Fawcett, 2014:312) The idea of
providing all citizens with government-guaranteed material security through unemployment
benefits, pensions, family allowances, free health care, education grants, and other provisions;
was widely supported in a war-ravaged Britain and soon the rest of Western Europe. Beveridge
weighed two principles of liberal democracy: the state that preserved neutrality and ensured
equality before the law but also the state as provider of protection and organizer of solidarity.
He proposed that the active, working, population pay an insurance contribution in exchange for
access to benefits if there was a need for them due to illness, unemployment, or old age.
Beveridge believed that this would ensure a minimum standard of living for all citizens. To
keep the benefits system affordable, Beveridge realized that full employment was necessary (or
at least an unemployment rate that did not exceed 3%). He did not believe that free market
forces could achieve this goal and believed that the state, under democratic control, should take
steps to create full employment. Beveridge advocated a Keynesian economic approach with
state investment in public works and fiscal regulation. This thinking led to a postwar consensus
throughout Western Europe, a shared belief between left and right political parties, which

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supported the idea of a mixed economy (a regulated free market), Keynesian economic and
fiscal measures, and thus the expansion of the welfare state for all citizens.

2. French radicalism: the chasers of meaning

After World War II, French philosophers and intellectuals defined the international intellectual
climate until the 1980s. The ways in which these postwar thinkers viewed man, the world, and
thus politics, had a global impact. Notable among these was the enormous success of critical
theory. Critical theory not only reflects on what is (analysis and interpretation) but also asks the
question of what is desirable. As such, it necessarily contains a political dimension and rejects
the epistemological axiom of the value neutrality of the social sciences. In critical theory, the
descriptive and the normative, that is, the political, are inextricably linked (Keucheyan, 2013:2).

In republican France, it was not so much democracy that preoccupied the intellectuals but rather
the revolution and especially its radical phase, the phase led by the Jacobins. The French
Revolution had always been an important guideline of political thought. All leading French
politicians, whether on the left (Léon Blum) or on the right (de Tocqueville), had all interpreted
the Revolution to shape their own political project. After the Russian Revolution of 1917,
however, the revolution no longer became a fact of the past, but rather a project for the future.
The French Revolution became merely a stepping stone to the real revolution, the revolution
that would come about through a communist revolution. After 1945, then, the leading French
intellectuals were Marxists.

It was a native Russian philosopher, Alexandre Kojève (born Aleksandr Vladimirovitch

Koyevnikov 1902-1968), who trained and influenced generations of radical thinkers through
his lectures on Hegel in the 1930s. For Kojève, Hegel’s vision of history was the best answer
to the despair of the interwar period. Neo-Kantian philosophers assumed that moral values such
as justice and freedom were the same for all people, a universalism that would lead humanity
to realize these values through advances in science and technology. Kojève did not share this
apolitical and timeless optimism of progress. For Kojève, the engine of history was the Hegelian
master-servant dialectic. Man only became truly human by setting himself a goal and being
willing to sacrifice himself for it, putting his life on the line. For Kojève, human history was
the history of the life-and-death struggle between masters and servants, a struggle for prestige
and recognition. The masters, having already won a life-and-death-struggle, lived a life of
luxury, it was the servants who did all the work. The masters wanted to maintain this situation,
the servants wanted to change it. The servants were therefore the real engine of history.
However, the servants had developed all kinds of ideologies throughout history to accept their
own enslavement (abstract freedom, a transcendent god...). Only when they shed the fear of
their emancipation could they become truly free. It was only after the Enlightenment and then
the French Revolution, that servants could change the social order. Thanks to the French

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Revolution, a dialectical synthesis between master and servant could emerge, which for Kojève,
following Hegel, amounted to the end of history. Since history was nothing but the gradual
satisfaction of the mutual recognition of masters and servants, politics therefore ended through
and in the universal State. For Hegel that state seemed to be the Napoleonic Empire in 1806.
Kojève first thought that the ideal would be fulfilled by Stalin’s Soviet Union to later think,
partly disillusioned with the actual course of history, that the American way of life might be the
final goal. The state that Kojève referred to, in his view, united all of humanity (or at least that
part that was important to him) and was therefore universal, at the same time suppressing any
possible private differences such as nations or classes (Jameson 2014:396). If people were not
so delighted with the announced end point of history after all, then the tyrant just had to ‘lock
them up’ or ‘get rid of them’. Kojève’s ideal final state therefore looked less like a human
paradise than like a strictly controlled camp. “Anyone who starts by defining the human and
his/her needs (‘The human is nothing but a desire for recognition’) and then starts thinking
about politics, will quickly be inclined to see humans as things, their happiness as something
organizable, and their tyrant as an administrator. It should come as no surprise that it is
precisely the ‘defunct’ state that is the result of such thinking that emerges as the most
totalitarian of all. For there, in every sense of the word, ‘the government of men’ is the
administration of things.” (Van Middelaar, 2002:40)

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) started from a very different beginning point than his teacher
Kojève. His existentialism was an optimistic humanistic morality in which human freedom, and
its responsibility to make choices, stood central. For Sartre, man was not simply free, man was
condemned to be free. In l’Être en le néant, one of his most important philosophical works,
Sartre argued that man lived in a world without a foothold, a world without god or morality,
and therefore man was responsible for his own values. But this own morality was not a license
for extreme individualism. Sartre introduced, in addition to the free choice of the individual,
the universal standard of truth. Moral judgment, according to Sartre, was first defined by a truth-
judgment (Burnier, 1969:31-32). Man had to act as if the eyes of the whole world were upon
him. Therein lay human responsibility, a responsibility from which many – Sartre labeled them
as assholes and cowards – wished to evade. Sartre’s existentialism was thus a morality that
encouraged human beings to engage. Politically, after World War II, Sartre was attracted, like
most intellectuals of his time, to Marxism as an ideology and Stalinism as the concrete
embodiment of the human project of universal liberation. Sartre and his friend and colleague
Merleau-Ponty (with whom he later broke) were already aware of Stalin’s crimes in the late
1940s but nevertheless continued to believe that utopia – the hope for a better world in which
man would be truly free – was only possible through struggle. Violence was necessary to end
all violence, an idea that brought Sartre and Merleau-Ponty back to Kojève’s vision of history
as a continuous struggle.

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Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were the intellectual hubs of the journal Les Temps Modernes –
assisted by equally influential thinkers and a bevy of gifted writers such as Simone de Beauvoir,
Albert Camus, or Michel Leiris – which became a political instrument of existential politics
and shaped the political commitment of a generation of left-wing, radical and revolutionary
intellectuals. Merleau-Ponty wrote Humanisme et Terreur in 1947, a pamphlet that sought to
position the movement in the face of Stalinism, the French Communist Party, and in the face of
the question of violence; revolutionary and political terror. Merleau-Ponty argued that the
question of Stalinism could not be approached from a liberal perspective since liberalism by
definition rejected the hypothesis of revolution; a radical break with the past. Nor did it make
sense to ask whether Stalin respected the rules of liberalism, since it was abundantly clear that
he did not. The question, according to Merleau-Ponty, was whether the violence used by Stalin
was revolutionary, whether the violence was capable of creating truly human relations between
people, and, if so, whether the revolution could break with terror (Burnier, 1969). All politics
was immoral, Merleau-Ponty thought – even liberal humanism that preached nonviolence
thereby perpetuated the existing, unjust, order – so politics was always fighting ‘for’ something.
The dividing line between good and evil remained difficult to make in the concrete historical
struggle. He thought, despite growing evidence to the contrary, that Stalin’s structural violence
was a “childhood disease of a new history” and not an “episode of an unchanging history”
(Merleau-Ponty, 1969: 98). Therefore, it was the task of the intellectuals to expose the
hypocrisy of the Western democracies, to counter liberal propaganda and to support the
communist parties. Sartre, for his part, tried to reconcile his existentialism with Marxism in a
theoretical way. However, human freedom as the basis of existentialism was difficult to
reconcile with the teleological history view of Marxism. The French influential liberal thinker
Raymond Aron argued as early as the 1940s that the two schools of thought were irreconcilable.
Others, such as the writer Albert Camus, longtime friend of Sartre, simply rejected the
enterprise. In any case, Sartre had succeeded in rescuing Marx’s thinking from the ‘clutches of
mechanistic Stalinist doctrine’. Sartre concluded that man did need to be free “if he is to have
any chance of emancipating himself from his constraining socio-economic situation; however
socio-economically unfree the worker might be, he remains free to make choices such as
whether or not to revolt.” (Coombes, 2021: 255-56) Thus Sartre maintained the ideal of
revolution as the horizon of human liberation. In practice, this meant a constant commitment to
all sorts of political ‘good’ causes. Sartre was never able to devise a coherent political
philosophy but wrote countless political pamphlets, signed hundreds of petitions for which he
wanted to take responsibility. The need for commitment and engagement eventually became a
compulsion to bear witness again and again to the injustices that existed in the world. At the
same time, he also did not shy away from legitimizing the use of violence to achieve political
progress. When he broke with Stalinism in 1956, after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he
shifted his commitment to decolonization. Just as the proletarian revolution could not take place

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without violence, neither could decolonization without bloodshed. Sartre’s preface to Frantz
Fanon's Les damnés de la terre (1963) made this very clear.

3. The golden sixties: the new left, decolonization, and feminism

The New Left
The impasse of existentialism led to a resourcing, to yet another rereading of Marx, Nietzsche
and Freud, both in (political) philosophy and in the concrete political struggle. Foucault and
Deleuze represented a neo-Nietzschean movement of thought that, through structuralism,
steered the political debate in new directions. Foucault’s re-reading of Marx, Nietzsche and
Freud led him to see every speech and writing as an interpretation. The idea that there was a
right interpretation was abandoned for the idea of the dominant interpretation and thus of a
constant struggle for meaning – a war of interpretation; a verbal form of conflict and violence.
The idea that the structures within which man lived determined everything; structured reality
as it were, meant ultimately that man was nothing. Structuralism declared the end of the subject.
The metaphorical death of man, gave way to the power of language (Keucheyan, 2013:43-46).
The beginning of what would become a worldwide student revolt two years later, in May 1968,
was probably the publication of a pamphlet under the telling title “De la misère en milieu
étudiant: considérée sous ses aspects économique, politique, psychologique, sexuel et
notamment intellectuel et de quelques moyens pour y remédier”. Officially published by the
Strasbourg Students’ Association, but written by Mustapha Khayati, the pamphlet, printed with
university funds, caused a scandal. It articulated the ideals of a new leftist movement,
situationism. With their ideas rooted in Marxism but also in the artistic avant-garde of the
twentieth century, situationists advocated alternative forms of life, ways of living other than
those accepted by the capitalist order. In order to pursue people’s most basic desires and develop
better and truer passions, which had to be stripped of their spectacular and commercial value,
situationists worked to construct “situations” with favorable conditions for fulfilling these
desires. Situationists emphasized the need to create or seize situations that would lead to
rebellion; they advocated a politics of civil disobedience and cultural warfare led by artists and
activists organized in a loose international network (Gilman-Opalsky, 2012: 120).

Guy Debord, probably the most famous situationist, saw Western consumer society as a society
of the spectacle. In this society existed a new form of alienation that went deeper and further
than the commodity fetishism that Marx was talking about. The importance of ‘having,’ of
accumulating goods (property) was gradually replaced by an exaggerated concern for
‘appearance’ (image). For Debord, therefore, the conflict between the US and the USSR was
not a conflict between capitalism and socialism (or communism), but “an opposition between
free-market capitalism (in the US) and bureaucratic or state-controlled capitalism (in the
USSR)” (Gilman-Opalsky, 2012:111). Debord’s theory of spectacle began by arguing that

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everything we saw in the world was a reflection of triumphant ideologies, since the world was
the material realization of ideology. This was what made society a society of spectacle, i.e. the
idea that society “the embodiment of particular worldviews but is presented as a neutral natural
environment, as a terrain for (and not already an expression of) ideology. (…) while we may
be free to choose from a myriad of diverse options, all such free choice is constrained within a
general framework that limits our options only to ones that benefit (or at least do not contradict)
the existing society and its political-economic structure. Any choice beyond this framework
renders the chooser crazy or criminal” (Gilman-Opalsky, 2012:120).

Herbert Marcuse, basing himself on Freud’s psychoanalytic insights, argued that a great deal
of sublimation and repression was present in every society. In Eros and Civilization and The
One-Dimensional Man, he argued that contemporary man was only vaguely aware of societal
repression because his critical dimension was blunted, primarily because he lost himself in a
passive consumerism. Marcuse’s criticism was focused both on capitalism and on Soviet
communism. The increase in repression to keep people ‘in line,’ whether based on the illusory
freedom of capitalism or the bureaucratization of life in the Soviet Union, was accompanied by
the creation of false needs. These needs, produced and reproduced through the mass media,
education, morality and advertising, blunted the critical capacity of citizens. This created a one-
dimensional reality of conformism and passivity. As a result, a repressive tolerance prevailed;
although you were not interned for a dissenting opinion, you were tolerated or silenced.
However, if you attacked the core of the system, the repressive aspects of the status quo became
immediately apparent. The material benefits of society were so great that the criticism of the
classical oppositional forces was blunted. Hence the workers’ movement became civilized and
lost its revolutionary élan. Marcuse did still hope for the youth, and especially the student youth,
to take over the revolutionary flag.

What was seen as a hard-won victory by the previous generation; the welfare state; was taken
for granted by the younger generations. The higher standard of living was downplayed as a
consumer society, the rulers as a caste of regents, the contented citizens as “bastards”. May
1968 was also, and perhaps especially, a culture shock: a different kind of music and literature
(The Beatles & The Stones), a new dress and hairstyle, an almost obligatory struggle against
what was called ‘the norm’. It became a rule to go against the rule. Now that the Cold War had
subsided and given way to peaceful coexistence and detente, attention was diverted away from
the Soviet Union. The belief that there was a Russian hiding in every backyard disappeared and
the spotlight turned to the United States. Not only did U.S. behavior in Latin America turn out
to be less than pretty, but the impasse of the war in Vietnam began to loom more clearly. Anti-
imperialism was gaining strength. It was as if broad sections of the population in the West were
only now realizing that decolonization had not ended structural violence on a global scale. The
“tiersmondists,” or at least some, saw the opposition between developing and developed

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countries as the most important opposition of their time. The class divisions within the West
were no longer seen as antagonistic. Moreover, they were now discovering China and Cuba.
Mao’s red book and Che Guevara’s poster became almost indispensable attributes for students
who respected themselves. With some delay came the realization that the colonial period had
not been the most exalted episode presented to them and that the free and democratic West
distributed its benefits very selectively.

The second wave of feminism and the civil rights movement

The 1960s also saw the emergence of a second feminist wave. These feminists analyzed gender
inequality from every aspect of society, be it religion, politics, power, or sexuality. They
developed new theories and insights on how culture and society could be changed through
women’s emancipation. A central idea that underpinned this new momentum in feminism was
beautifully articulated by Simone de Beauvoir. In her book Le Deuxième Sèxe (The Second
Sex), de Beauvoir began with a simple question, “What is a woman?” Throughout history,
philosophers; mostly men; had often described woman as an imperfect being, from which de
Beauvoir concluded that woman was ‘the Other,’ that is, defined in relation to man. The woman
was what the man determined, she was defined in terms stipulated by the man. As a result, the
woman was only a ‘secondary’ being, in contrast to the man who represented the ‘essential’.
She therefore came to a radical conclusion: “on ne naît pas femme, on le deviant” (you are not
born a woman, you are made a woman). The in-depth exploration of women’s myths, social
pressures, and life experiences led de Beauvoir to assume that femininity was a social
construction spread over generations. In this construction, she argued, lay the causes of
women’s oppression. Being a woman was thus the product of social conditioning and of
education, and not of biology. Arguing that a woman’s biology should not determine her life,
stereotypes of the idealized image of women were described as a straitjacket imposed on them
by society through upbringing, education and psychology.

Second-wave feminism developed in the context of the civil rights movement in the US and the
protests against the Vietnam War. The women’s rights movement therefore saw the struggle
for women as a liberation struggle and not just a struggle for equal rights. Since biology was
not a basis for inequality, they also introduced the idea that inequality was rooted into the depths
of the private sphere, making the personal politics. The importance of de Beauvoir was that she
placed importance on the personal experience of women. This further stimulated women’s
consciousness. De Beauvoir believed that women needed to see themselves as a class within
society. Women needed to identify their shared experiences and oppression in order to liberate
themselves. Without using the concept of gender, de Beauvoir laid the groundwork for the idea
of a distinction between sex and gender, a theme that is still important in the feminist movement
today. Sexuality, reproductive rights, and the ability of women to control their own fertility
became important feminist issues. Second-wave feminists challenged the idea that women’s

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sexuality should be dictated by men. They argued that male dominance was the driving force
behind women’s lack of sexual pleasure. Sexuality, they stressed, was political.

The 1960s also marked a surge in the fight against racial segregation in the US. In 1964 there
was the historic march on Washington where Martin Luther King gave his I Have a Dream
speech, to enforce rights through nonviolent resistance. During this time Cassius Clay changed
his ‘slave name’ to Muhammad Ali and refused to go to fight in Vietnam: “no Vietnamese ever
called me nigger”. The black is beautiful and the afro-look had to make it clear that the WASP
(White Anglo-Saxon-Protestant) was no longer the mirror in which to measure self-respect.
Movements like the Black Panther Party, a kind of paramilitary organization, no longer avoided
direct confrontation. The emblematic figure Malcolm X, later Malik al-Shabaaz, rejected
Martin Luther King’s methods and advocated radical voluntary segregation (described as self-
help) of the black population of the US. Armed patrols shadowed law enforcement officers and
disrupted their efforts to racially control the “black colony.” Significantly, their projects of self-
development by decolonizing their own neighborhoods encompassed the full range of anti-
imperialist politics, from opposing slumlords to refusing to fight in the U.S. military (Dösemeci
& Thomson, 2018). Self-development and collective solidarity with one’s group based on a
strong consciousness were, for the enemies of the movement, evidence of “reverse racism”
(racism against whites). Malcolm X did not shy away from controversy and remained
ambiguous for a long time about what exactly he meant by “black supremacy”. Anyway, after
his conversion to Islam and a pilgrimage to Mecca, he officially and clearly distancedhismelf
from racism since Islam preaches racial equality. While these emancipation movements
demolished the more public forms of discrimination, the walls between white and black
certainly did not disappear.

The decolonization
After World War II, decolonization, the process of emancipation of colonies from the colonial
powers, reshaped world politics. In a relatively short period, between 1945 and 1970, most
African and Asian countries obtained their independence. Although this did not happen without
a struggle – nationalist movements in the South often fought years of wars – decolonization had
become inevitable. Europe’s loss of power and the rise of the two superpowers, the US and the
Soviet Union, during the Cold War set the international agenda. While the superpowers each
sought to expand their spheres of influence – the U.S. worked to contain the communist advance
by presenting itself as a model for the developed world while the Soviet Union presented itself
as an alternative – the two European colonial powers, France and Britain, responded differently
to these dynamics. Britain sought to guide and control aspirations for independence in the
territories it colonized while France thought it could return to the heyday of the colonial era.
When the celebrations for the liberation of Paris in May 1945 were not quite over, French
soldiers shot at a demonstration of Algerians in Sétif, many of whom fought in the French army

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against the Nazis and wanted to use the victory over the Nazis to gain more political control in
their own country. When the demonstration subsequently radicalized and caused European
casualties, the French forces of order, assisted by settlers, responded with ruthless repression.
Although it is unclear to this day how many victims there were – France holds the figure at
1,165 dead, Algeria speaks of 45,000 victims – it had become clear that France wanted to crush
the pursuit of independence. Because of this uncompromising policy, France fought hopeless
wars in both Algeria (1954-1962) and Vietnam (1945-1955) that not only took a heavy human
toll but also literally changed the French Republic. By yielding to the most pragmatic and
moderate nationalists, Britain, weakened by the military efforts of World War II, hoped not to
be dragged into protracted armed conflicts and to prevent the spread of communism. London’s
prudent policy was to transform her colonial empire into a commonwealth. The commonwealth
led and controlled by Britain, founded in 1931 but formalized in 1949, sought to be a assembly
of the former colonies, united by a shared English language and culture, with which Britain
sought to maintain economic and cultural ties and thus secure its interests. It was Sartre who
labeled this policy as neo-colonialism, a term that was adopted and theorized in the 1960s by
Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972), Pan-Africanist politician and president of Ghana, in his Neo-
Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism. According to Nkrumah, political independence
meant that classical colonialism had become a thing of the past but that a new phenomenon,
neo-colonialism, had replaced it. “The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is
subject to it, is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international
sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from
outside...” (Nkrumah, 1965) This influence and indirect domination could be embodied in
different ways. Troops of the former colonizer could be stationed in the former colony, but most
often neo-colonial control was carried out through economic or monetary means. The result
was “that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less
developed parts of the world. Investment under neo-colonialism increases rather than
decreases the gap between the rich and the poor countries of the world.” (Nkrumah, 1965) The
fight against colonialism, therefore, Nkrumah argued, had to be aimed at “preventing the
financial power of the developed countries being used in such a way as to impoverish the less
developed” (Nkrumah, 1965). Nkrumah’s analysis showed that political independence and the
issue of economic development could not be separated. It raised not only the question of how
best to achieve economic development, but equally how to make possible a true emancipation
and de-emancipation from the former colonizer.

In 1955, 26 African and Asian countries met in Bandung, Indonesia. Within the context of the
Cold War and development struggles in several countries, the participants represented about
two-thirds of the world’s population. It was the first world summit to bring together the
decolonizing world without interference from the West or any colonial power. Sukarno, the
then president of Indonesia, declamated “For years we, Asian and African peoples, have

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tolerated decisions made in our place by those countries that put their own interests above all
else. We lived in poverty and humiliation. But in recent years enormous changes have taken
place. Many peoples and countries have awakened from centuries of slumber. Silence has given
way to struggle and action. This irresistible force is flooding the two continents.” The
conference participants wanted to follow their own political path, away from the flaring conflict
between capitalism and communism. Despite the often great political, economic, and cultural
differences between the participating countries, the conference came up with a unified
statement of solidarity and hope for the South. The conference agreed that colonialism in all its
manifestations was an evil that must end quickly, condemning both Western imperialism and
Soviet control of satellite countries in Eastern Europe. The final declaration of the conference
also included plans for economic and cultural cooperation, support for human rights, and the
right of nations to self-determination. Bandung thus called for combating colonialism,
imperialism, and racism and demanded equal rights for all colonized peoples to make a more
just world possible. The main leaders of the newly independent countries such as Nehru (India),
Jinnah (Pakistan), Zhou-en-Lai (foreign minister of Mao, China), Kotalawela (Sri Lanka)... laid
the foundation for an alternative to communism and capitalism. However, it proved difficult to
permanently transcend all the differences between the countries, nor could the independent
countries completely escape the geopolitics of Cold War logic. Nevertheless, the spirit of
Bandung lives on. The solidarity among the former colonized countries is still reflected in a set
of principles. The hope for a better world where nations interact peacefully, the liberation of
the world from superpower hegemony and neo-colonialism, the equality of all nations and
populations, the solidarity with the poor, oppressed and exploited, and their right and need for
a dignified existence, still resonate in the South.

Development
Before the U.S. Congress in 1947, President Harry S. Truman had promised aid to all countries
that felt threatened by communism. Henceforth, he argued, there were two worlds: the free
world and the communist one. The message for the colonized world was clear: a camp had to
be chosen in the Cold War. To convince the newly independent states, Truman argued for the
first time for development aid: “We must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits
of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of
underdeveloped areas. The old imperialism - exploitation for foreign profit - has no place in
our plans. What we envisage is a program of development based on the concept of democratic
fair dealing.” Development aid thus emerged as a part of American anti-communist politics.
To help guide and devise this aid, large budgets were set aside in American universities for the
creation of area studies, an academic discipline to more effectively meet the challenge posed
by the Soviet Union at a time when African and Asian countries were decolonizing. It was no
surprise, then, that the form that development aid took reflected dominant Western visions of
poverty and economic development.

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The ambition was to modernize the developing world. The core assumption of modernization
theories was that economic development was necessary and that it was the engine of political
and social progress. Economic development through capitalism, it was thought, would
transform a society from a “traditional” structure (often associated with tribal organization) to
a more “modern” configuration. As society changed, social movements in the political sphere
would emerge and eventually unite in democracy. Thus, the West, through the American
superpower, pushed for the modernization of underdeveloped non-Western nations, and
development aid would play an important role in this effort (Johnson, 2010). Modernization
theorists gained great prestige within academia. Their theories seemed to provide a universal
framework for grasping both the past of the West and the future of the Third World in an
informed manner. Like their intellectual predecessors, these academics explained the economic
success of the West through the unique practices and values found in “modern” culture, which
automatically meant that the “traditional” world, clinging to “backward” ideas, had to accept
the West as the norm. Such an analysis also implied that the economic advantage of the West
was not due to natural resources, military conquests, colonialism, slavery, or other forms of
imperialism and exploitation. The Committee on Comparative Politics (CCP), led by Gabriel
Almond, dominated studies on the Third World and likewise benefited from connections with
security organizations (which sought advice), philanthropic foundations (which made generous
donations for research), and the government. Scientific and objective analysis, modernization
theorists reasoned, “would take social theory out of the realm of speculation. It would convince
a vulnerable, impressionable ‘developing world’ that liberal, capitalist democracy was the true
and only path to political freedom and a high standard of living. ' (Latham, 2000:50) Silently,
therefore, scientific production on the Third World became part of the extension of the
American mission to establish a policy in which the ideals of liberal, democratic capitalism
were to be spread throughout the world. In 1961, President Kennedy launched the Alliance for
Progress, a partnership between North and South America to support the economic and social
development of Latin America. Based on the modernization theories of the CCP, Kennedy
hoped to slow down the communist success in South America (e.g. the Cuban revolution) by
promoting democracy and free markets but also by developing military and police cooperation.
This was only the prelude to a policy in the region that served primarily U.S. interests.
Economic progress in the region, despite its efforts, was only moderate and the U.S.
increasingly supported military juntas and fettered the democratic aspirations of the Latin
American peoples. There was the support of the coup against President-elect Joao Goulart in
Brazil in 1964, or General Pinochet’s 1973 coup against President-elect Salvador Allende. It
was in Latin America, then, that a first important economic critique of modernization theory
was formulated.

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The Dependencia school, which devised the economic dependency theory, argued that poverty,
political instability, and underdevelopment in the South were the result of historical processes
initiated by the countries of the North that had led to the economic dependency of the countries
of the South. The central thesis of the dependency theory was that growth and development in
the rich North was dependent on exploitation and underdevelopment in the South. The theory
thus rejected the modernization idea that all societies could experience similar development if
they were based on the Western model. The South was not an underdeveloped version of the
West; its level of development was not simply comparable to the West’s level of development
in the past. The classical recipes of capitalist development (integration into the world market,
free market, privatization...) could not bring the South to economic prosperity because as
weaker economic partners they belonged to the periphery of the world economy. The
dependency theory thus removed the responsibility for the stagnant or weak development of the
South from the underdeveloped countries themselves and placed it on the highly developed,
industrialized countries of the first world (Stone, 2010:48). The periphery could not develop
because of the powerful center that controlled a world economy that placed its own interests at
the center.
Raul Prebisch (1901-1986), the founder of dependency theory, argued that colonialism and
international trade had not necessarily been helpful to the economic development of countries
in the South. On the contrary, by changing and aligning a country’s institutional, productive,
and socioeconomic structures with the developed world, colonialism had created a unique set
of structural problems in the countries of the South, namely unbalanced growth and an export-
oriented economy. Third World countries, he argued, were not so much “underdeveloped” as
“poorly” developed. Prebisch argued that international trade only reinforced this “poor
development”. With their weak national institutions and economic structures, Third World
countries were defenseless against the disruptive development that resulted from trade-induced
interaction with the heavily financed monopoly capitalism of the developed world. As a result,
Prebisch thought, Third World countries were dragged into a state of dependence on the First
World, becoming the producers of (cheap) raw materials for the development of First World
manufacturing, in short, a center-periphery relationship. Prebisch argued that trade
protectionism and import substitution strategies were acceptable and even necessary if the
countries of the South were to create self-sustaining development, which went squarely against
the capitalist script of development. The dependency school had great resonance in the
developing world. Eduardo Galeano (1940-2015) published Open Veins of Latin America: Five
Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent in 1971 in which he analyzed the consequences of the
economic exploitation and political domination of Europe and later the United States through
the lens of colonialism, imperialism, and unequal development. In Zimbabwe a year later,
Walter Rodney (1942-1980) published How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, in which he
explained in great detail how Africa was deliberately underdeveloped by European colonialism.
The French-Egyptian Marxist economist Samir Amin (1931-2018) elaborated on the idea of

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unequal development. Amin argued that there was a distinction between a center of the
capitalist system, within which the productive apparatus had developed greatly and the
proletariat could thus attain the status of a consuming middle class; and a periphery that served
mainly to provide raw materials as cheaply as possible and which were valorized in the
economy of the center, preventing the local proletariat from acquiring material autonomy. Thus,
underdeveloped countries could not be seen as independent entities but rather as parts or
building blocks of the capitalist world economy. In this world economy, peripheral economies
were forced into permanent structural reforms that ultimately benefited the enrichment of the
advanced capitalist industrial countries. Although Samir Amin adopted a Marxist frame of
mind, he was equally critical of Soviet Marxism and its model of third world aid. Amin did not
believe that the peripheral countries would be able to catch up economically in the context of a
capitalist world economy. He therefore advocated a policy of delinking. Countries of the South
would have to delink from the capitalist world economy by subordinating global relations to
their own independent domestic development priorities. The countries of the South would have
to formulate and develop their own development goals. Political sovereignty was therefore not
enough; there was also a need to work toward economic sovereignty based on autocentric
development. Delinking, for Amin, meant that countries would try to make the capitalist system
adapt to the needs of the South, and not make the South adapt to the needs of the center of the
world economy.

Dialectics of colonialism
Colonialism was not only a matter of political domination and economic exploitation but
equally a cultural logic that constantly produced otherness and drew boundaries of difference
between an ‘us’ and a ‘them’. The colonial world was a divided world where colonizer and
colonized were separated as much as possible: physically by regulating and controlling the
colonized’s access to certain parts of the city, legally by introducing unequal rights (mainly
duties for the colonized, privileges for the colonizers), but also in terms of thinking. The
colonizer largely ignored the existence of the colonized by grounding its own superiority in the
‘backwardness,’ ‘barbarism,’ or ‘violence’ of the colonized. The colonized was racialized into
a ‘dark Other’, obscure and mysterious at the same time. The colonial construction of identities
was ultimately always built on a racial logic, a logic in which the colonizer seeks to keep its
own identity ‘pure’ by disregarding the identity of the colonized, the colonized became the
negative antithesis of the colonizer’s positive attributes. But this logic of exclusion of the
colonized – in reality and in representations – was paradoxically also the basis of an
interconnectedness, a mutual (negative) dependence. “The negative construction of non-
European others is ultimately what founds and sustains European identity itself.” (Hardt &
Negri, 2002:133) From his own experience, the Jewish-Tunisian intellectual Albert Memmi
(1921-2020) wrote a psychosocial study of colonialism. In Le portrait du colonisé précédé d’un
portrait du colonisateur, Memmi sketched a portrait of the two protagonists of the colonial

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drama. For Memmi, the colonizer and colonized were two personality types locked in a logic
of mutual dependence. Colonizer and colonized are the two sides of the same colonial reality
in which each side can only define itself in relation to the other.

For Memmi, any colonizer, whether a large landowner, an administrator, or a laborer, could
only be a privileged one in comparison to the colonized. Colonialism was not only a matter of
exploitation but also of cultural and psychological destruction of the dignity of the colonized.
But the relationship between colonizer and colonized was not only an interpersonal relationship
but equally a class relationship. Memmi wrote of a “pyramid of petty tyrants” in which there
was a distinction between the French (and white) leaders of society, leftist colonizers who were
torn by their internal contradictions (they realized that colonialism was inherently problematic
and inhumane but could not or would not do anything about it and at the same time rejected the
nationalist aspirations of the colonized), those affected by colonization (Italians in Tunisia),
candidates for assimilation (the Jews, who were treated better by the French than the Tunisians
who were Muslims), and Tunisians who had been conscripted by the French to maintain their
authority. The economic and symbolic violence associated with this power structure, based on
racist stereotypes, maintained the system of privileges for whites and had devastating effects
on the colonized peoples. From this, Memmi concluded that it was impossible to resolve the
relationship between the colonized and the colonizer, specifying that colonization, like any
other form of domination, “carried an inherent contradiction which, sooner or later, would
cause it to die.” (Memmi, 2003:190). Claiming the right to existence of the colonized ruled out
any compromise with dominant forces and could only be achieved by unconditionally ending
the objective, material, relationship of domination and the privileges inherent in it. With this
conclusion, Memmi opened the debate on the role of violence in decolonization and
emancipation, a debate that Frantz Fanon fully engaged.

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was an extraordinary thinker who supported the decolonization
struggle after World War II, and remains one of the most widely read and influential voices to
this day. Born on the island of Martinique to a relatively well-to-do family, Fanon was a brilliant
student which took him to the University of Lyon where he studied psychology and medicine.
It was the migration to France that literally opened his eyes to the inherent contradiction of
colonialism that officially sought to bring ‘civilization’ to less developed peoples, while in
reality it violated the idea of civilization itself through the dehumanization of the colonized.
Fanon was shocked that in the land of the Enlightenment, simplistic anti-black racism was
widespread. In Peau noire, Masques Blancs (1952), Fanon laid the groundwork for his critique
of the French colonial policy of assimilation and of a new anti-racist humanism. In 1954, Fanon
left for Algeria where, as a psychiatrist, he had to cope with the psychological distress of French
soldiers and officers involved in torture and ill-treatment of Algerians. The Algerian struggle
for independence had erupted in 1954 with the uprising of the Front de Libération Nationale

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(FLN) and the French had unleashed a ruthless repression in response. The war would not end
until 1962 with the independence of Algeria, and with nearly half a million Algerian casualties.
Fanon quickly realized that he did not want to be part of a colonial and imperialist enterprise
that sought to crush a legitimate decolonization movement. He resigned and joined the cause
of the Algerians as a doctor. In Peau noire, Masques Blancs, Fanon explored the existential
challenges black people faced in a world dominated by white people. The book’s central
metaphor, that black people must wear “white masks” to get by in a white world, echoes the
insights of one of the founders of Africana philosophy (the work of philosophers of African
descent whose work deals with the subject matter of the African diaspora) of William Edward
Burghardt Du Bois - W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) who already pointed out that African-
Americans developed a double consciousness when they lived under a white power structure:
a consciousness that condoned the power structure and a consciousness that was experienced
when they were among other African-Americans. Fanon described the ways in which black
people responded to a social context that racialized them at the expense of a shared humanity
in the French Caribbean, in France, and in colonial conflicts in Africa such as Algeria. Central,
then, was the theme toward how the Self (of the black colonized) faced the trauma of being
categorized by others as inferior because of an imposed racial identity and how that Self can
recover a sense of identity and cultural kinship independent of the racist project of an imperialist
dominant culture. In all of his works, Fanon dissected the racist nature of the colonial project
of white European culture, that is, the hierarchical worldview that must portray black people as
“nègre” in order to have an ‘other’ against which European culture can be pitted in an
unconscious dialectical relationship. Fanon made a crucial distinction between noir (black) –
the consciousness of being black and what that process of consciousness meant to them – and
“nègre” – a dehumanized biological being with a black skin color.

While Peau Noire dealt with the psychological dimensions of the dehumanization of the
colonized and the possible resistance to it, he explored the political dimensions primarily in Les
Damnés de la Terre (1961). The difficulty in overcoming the sense of alienation that
dehumanization aims at (making the black a “nègre”) lies in learning to stop seeing oneself as
the dominant white culture sees and devalues the black but also, to not only negatively oppose
the white, to redefine oneself as independent of the racist project independent of ‘white’ values
and norms. Fanon placed his commitment in a clear ethical commitment to the dignity of all,
and the moral right to have his or her human dignity recognized by others. In Les Damnés de
la Terre, Fanon also addressed the necessary role that violence played in the struggle for
decolonization. True liberation was not possible without revolution, without a social upheaval
that would herald a complete break with colonialism. He did not believe that negotiations
between the colonizer and local, colonized, elites could lead to true independence and de-
colonization and therefore advocated the mobilization of the masses, the creation of a people’s
army, the need to define a national culture through revolutionary art and literature. Fanon

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argued that the colonized could not liberate themselves by embracing European culture, which
would only lead to rejection and ultimate self-hatred. Therefore, to achieve liberation, it was
justified to use violent means against the colonized. The point Fanon wanted to make was that
colonialism itself had introduced violence in all its forms to the colonies and the colonized had
the choice of either accepting this violence or throwing this violence back in the face, as it were,
of the colonizer who started the violence. Decolonization could only take place when the
colonized threw off the violence of the colonizer, thus without liberation struggles no universal
humanism.

The form this struggle was to take in concrete terms was not always easy to conceive. After the
victory of the Communist Party in 1949, China seemed to follow a rather pragmatic course.
Mao himself, although appointed chairman of the government and in 1954 president, played an
idiosyncratic role in political life during the first years. The government enacted laws designed
to break with the country’s past and allowed the national bourgeoisie to ‘fall in line,’ while Mao
chose to attack imperialism and the backward Guomindang nationalists. Land reforms were
introduced but there was still no collectivization nor redistribution of land. It was the successive
political and economic problems facing the country that radicalized Mao ideologically. At the
end of 1956, Mao launched the “let one hundred flowers bloom” campaign on his own initiative.
The intention was to encourage freedom of expression and allow a critique of the government
and the party. Since the party and administration had been well developed throughout the
country, Mao had not thought that the criticism would attack the revolutionary leadership head-
on. Not only was the authority of the party challenged but also that of the Great Helmsman
himself. This was followed by a violent repression against all forms of dissent. Less than two
years later, Mao proclaimed the Great Leap Forward, a social and economic campaign to
transform the country at an accelerated pace from an agrarian economy to a truly communist
society through the collectivization of agriculture and the creation of people’s communes.
China became one great experiment in which the entire population was engaged. Communism
would become a reality within a decade, oppositions between labor and capital, city and
countryside or intellectuals and workers would be eliminated. “A revolution by and for the
masses seemed to be taking shape and, judging by the official data, it also seemed to be an
economic success. This new development model was followed with interest by other Third
World countries and was enthusiastically received by progressives in Europe.” (Doom
1992:315-316) In reality, the Great Leap Forward was a failure. The creation of communes
had expected too much from the peasants who had to be responsible for both agricultural
production and the production of steel. Artisanally produced steel in rural areas was of poor
quality and useless, while crops were not harvested as attention was shifted from agricultural
production to industrial production. This led to an unprecedented rural famine in which several
million died (varying figures are given on the exact number of deaths, from 10 to 50 million)
(Jain 2020: 205). Criticism of the party and Mao grew again and pragmatic leaders within the

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party tried to roll back policies. For a long time Mao denied the problems of the Great Leap
Forward or accused domestic and foreign counterrevolutionary forces of subversive actions.
His position came under scrutiny and he was forced to take a step back. Beginning in 1961, the
policy was reversed and piloted in more pragmatic directions. By the mid-1960s, Mao had
become increasingly dissatisfied with government policies and doubted that it could bring
China to communism He thought that the policies pursued in the aftermath of the Great Leap
were encouraging the development of a new bourgeoisie. Thereupon, Mao decided to appeal
directly to the revolutionary voluntarism of Chinese youth, outside the power structures of the
Party. In May 1966, the first pamphlets and wall newspapers appeared at Beijing University
criticizing the government and the Party. To purge the country of ‘revisionist’ elements, Mao
launched the Cultural Revolution in which the Red Guards – groups of young Chinese who
were inspired by Mao’s Red Book – controlled society to make sure everyone followed the
Maoist line. Moderate politicians such as Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping were
publicly attacked. Intellectuals and party cadres were publicly humiliated, mandarins and elites
were ridiculed. In the name of fighting against traditional values, against traditional Chinese
culture, China was brought to the brink of civil war. What began as a controlled criticism of the
political hierarchy soon ended in violence, massacres, the destruction of temples and other
historical buildings, and political chaos in which millions were killed (again, varying and
anomalous figures are given going from 1 to 20 million).

As the country destabilized, Mao, who had regained control of the party, tried to restore order.
The People’s Liberation Army, which still had considerable legitimacy and had remained
relatively outside the violence of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was sent into
schools and factories. This dismantled the spontaneous mobilizations of schoolchildren and
workers and the organized Red Guards. Hundreds of thousands were arrested in various purges
that lasted until the early 1970s. The Red Guards were sent to the countryside to instruct the
peasants in Mao’s teachings. Gradually, however, Mao became concerned about the military’s
growing role in politics. While he himself had first appointed his supporter Lin Biao,
commander of the army, as his successor, he began to criticize the army. Lin Biao died in a
dubious plane crash. Like ten years before, the excesses of Mao’s policies caused a shift of
power to more pragmatic leaders. It was mainly the group around Deng Xiao Peng that took the
reins. Mao’s death in 1976 and the subsequent arrest of his closest associates, the so-called
Gang of Four, officially ended the Cultural Revolution. ‘He did a lot of good, and sometimes
bad” was the party verdict, which made it clear that China wanted to close the Mao chapter
once and for all and embark on a new path. With Mao, China once again became a political
world power; with Deng Xiao Peng, it also became an economic world power. Mao’s political
thought was a constantly changing body of work that looked for ways to find solutions to the
challenges that a society in revolution was facing. Mao was acting in a society that had still

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remained largely rural. Regardless of his concrete political decisions, his ideas exerted some
appeal to various revolutionary movements throughout the world.

Neither Stalinist communism nor Maoism – which had a temporary following in the West as
an alternative to the Soviet Union – seemed to inspire the Third World much. The problem
facing revolutionary movements was the growing aversion to the use of violence. One
exception, however, was Che Guevara’s focism. In the classical version of Marxism-Leninism,
a party, possibly with an armed wing, had to be formed first. In any case, the party had to
command the gun. Guevara turned the matter around. Since the political terrain was occupied
by the bourgeoisie, left-wing participation in politics would lead to cooptation and
embourgeoisement. The foco, a small guerrilla core, was to be the seed of the party in the
making. The uncompromising situation in which the guerrillas found themselves made it
impossible to align their political line with integration into the political system. However, the
expected evolution from foco over people’s army to mass political movement did not occur.
The willingness of the rural population to rally behind the revolution was overestimated, the
resistance of the regimes underestimated. It would lead to a failed adventure in eastern Congo
and the death of Che in Bolivia.
There was another aspect to Guevara’s voluntarism that helped explain his and Cuba’s success
in the West during that period. The classical communist view held that the socialist man could
only be the result of a socialist environment, a society in which the productive forces were
developed and relations were socialist. Rather, Che’s ‘new man’ was the result of a moral
positioning: socialism was realized because it was built by socialists. The failure of the Soviet
Union, in his view, had begun with the NEP. By adopting the capitalist categories of value,
wage labor, and rising rates of production, they had eventually become bogged down in goulash
socialism. Of course, according to Guevara, production had to be increased, but in doing so,
conscience as a factor of production and free labor as a means of eliminating alienation had to
be central. In Europe, where people were just rediscovering the works of the ‘young Marx’ on
alienation, these ideas were enthusiastically received by the new left, making Cuba a kind of
socialist Utopia for them.

A decade later, these political analyses found a translation into the academic world thanks to
Edward Said’s magisterial Orientalism. Said’s evaluation and critique of Orientalism provided
the basis for a re-reading of history, and especially its scientific and literary production, from
the point of view of the Other, primarily the colonized peoples; leading to the research field of
postcolonial studies. Edward Said showed that the West’s discourse on the Orient did not
correspond to reality. The “real Orient” had been exchanged for a discursive imaginary Orient.
The West was and still is presented as “masculine, democratic, rational, moral, dynamic and
progressive,” while the East was and is “stupid, sensual, feminine, despotic, irrational and
backward.” Orientalism is thus much more than a scientific discipline. It is also a style of

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thought based on an ontological and epistemological distinction between ‘the Orient’ and (in
most of the cases) ‘the West,’ a distinction between East and West that ultimately amounts to a
Western mode of domination over the Orient (Said, 1995 (1978):1-3). The Orient thus
represents a set of representations, framed by political forces, that brought the Orient within
Western knowledge and consciousness. The Orient exists for the West, and is constructed by
and in relation to the West. It is a mirror image of how the West sees itself. An uninhibited view
becomes unconsciously impossible, because too many interests stand between the subject and
the analyst. More than that, to protect its own position, the Westerner constructs the “Orient”
until it fits into its own worldview. Eurocentrism cannot but bring about a one-sided view and
people from the region itself must decolonize the human sciences through their own input. The
prejudices and stereotypes that exist in the West about the Third World, and certainly the
Islamic world, are thus not simply the result of a “wrong image,” they are the result of a power
imbalance that makes it possible for the center of the world system to define the South.

4. The liberation of the individual: the market and human rights.

The 1970s were marked by a growing critique of the welfare state and the national and
international economic structures that underpinned it. After the new-left critique of the 1960s
had criticized the welfare state for its alienating effect, a growing number of (neo)liberal
thinkers criticized the welfare state for its interference in the workings of the free market. In
this critique they were joined, unexpectedly at first glance, by humanitarian thinkers and human
rights movements who became dismayed at the human rights abuses in the post-colonial world
and the poor economic progress of the newly independent states.

The early 1970s were marked by a new economic crisis. The Keynesian recipes for dealing with
the crisis – state regulation of market forces and the stimulation of the demand side through
public investment – no longer seemed to work. Keynesian thinking had been the subject of
criticism in certain academic circles for some time. Milton Friedman and his Chicago school
of economists were ardent opponents of Keynesian economic principles. According to these
economists, the government’s first priority was to ensure a sound monetary policy, i.e., control
the public debt, limit inflation, and thus strive for a balanced budget. Furthermore, the
government had to refrain from intervening in economic affairs in favor of the market, keep its
social functions to a minimum, and, more generally, reduce its bureaucratic apparatus to what
was strictly necessary. For Friedman, the goal of this program was the (re)installation of the
political freedom of the citizen. It was a fallacy, Friedman argued, to suppose that there could
be such a thing as individual freedom situated in the political sphere, while economic freedom
was constrained by state interference in civil society, the place where material prosperity was
made by economic acts. Friedman, and many other neoliberals, assumed and continue to assume
that the state, the domain of politics, was inherently conflictual and therefore led to

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interventions that curtailed freedom, whereas civil society was just the domain of free, mutually
beneficial relations between people (Whyte, 2018). According to Friedman, freedom and
prosperity could only be organized in a limited number of ways. Either the economic activities
of citizens would be organized on the basis of free cooperation, namely the free market; or by
coercion, by a planned economy. As long as the state intervened in the market, the state
restricted the freedom of citizens. In other words, there was no political freedom without
economic freedom; the two were inseparable. Since political power automatically led to
concentration of power in the hands of a few, and economic power by definition just exists
through a free, diffuse and competitive system (the market), it was necessary, according to
Friedman, for the state to minimize its tasks in the name of freedom. The state was no longer
allowed to interfere in economic life. It also followed for Friedman that capitalism was the only
possible and necessary basis for democracy. The choice, in his view, was freedom or socialism.

The basis of this neoliberal vision lies in the work of Friedrich (von) Hayek (1899-1992), who
was perhaps the most influential neoliberal thinker of the twentieth century, as he came to be
known as a staunch defender of the free market. Hayek, who grew up in the Habsburg Empire,
feared the destructive power of nationalism and advocated economic freedom. As early as the
1930s, he developed a powerful critique of the central planning of the state economy, in
response to Keynes’s thinking. Hayek’s argument was based on the idea that economic planners
could never have all the necessary knowledge to organize economic life in an efficient way. He
was therefore a fundamental opponent of any form of "taxes," any form of deliberate order that
had not grown spontaneously. He emphasized that as soon as politics began to interfere in
economic or social life, it inevitably led to declining efficiency and oppression. A welfare state
and its commandments and prohibitions therefore proved to be nothing more than a One-way
Road to Serfdom, as one of his publications was called. Indeed, the administration, or
bureaucracy, with its opaque decisions, especially with an ever-increasing number of rules and
regulations, was highly associated by the population with curtailment and arbitrariness. While
Hayek’s criticism of central planning may have revealed its shortcomings, Hayek remained
blind to the shortcomings and limitations of the free market. He believed that the free market
had arisen as a result of spontaneous and unintentional human activity. Based on a renewed and
secularized conservatism that can be traced back to the Scottish Enlightenment (cfr. Hume),
Hayek hypothesized that free markets, like other social institutions, arose not by human design
and rational planning nor choice, but as a result of unintentional human action, by chance. Once
created, free markets and thus the capitalist system, Hayek believed, could not help but thrive
and expand.

This neoliberal economic thinking corresponded well with the political analyses and morality
of Ayn Rand. The core of Rand’s philosophy was that unlimited self-interest was good while
altruism was destructive. Ayn Rand (born Alisa Zinovyena Rosenbaum, 1905-1982) became

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best known for publishing two novels, Atlas Shrugged (1957) and The Fountainhead (1943)
but also for non-fiction work such as Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Rand’s novels were a
eulogy to freedom, reason, creativity, entrepreneurship, capitalism, self-worth and pride and an
complaint of coercion, oppression, extortion – which she soon found in government action – as
well as altruism and other forms of collective engagement (Butler 2018: 9). Rand believed that
collectivism was peculiar to ‘savages’ who believed that the collective could dispose of the
lives and deaths of its members. She saw religious as well as political institutions, church and
state, as controlling agencies that prevented individualistic self-interest from flourishing. Her
philosophical system of thought, objectivism, “starts with the idea that there is a real world
outside us that would continue to exist even without us..” By thinking objectively, by using
reason, Rand assumed we can understand how this world works. “If we know how the world
works, thought Rand, we can work out how we should best behave to thrive in it. That gives us
a new way to determine what is morally right or wrong, and politically workable or
unworkable—not on the traditional basis of religion, emotion, or authority, but on the objective
basis of reason.” (Butler 2018: 12). She dismissed the fact that there is nevertheless increasing
evidence that humans tend to cooperate and not always pursue self-interest as ‘diseases’
imposed by society, lies that betray human biology.

Ayn Rand wanted to create a morality in which self-interest, based on rationalism, was the norm
and altruism was immoral. Man had to see himself as an end in itself which meant that man
must put his own life and happiness first and not submit to the interests of others. His life is
obviously his own responsibility, he must maintain it and improve it. Rand’s ethic of self-
interest tracked with the neoliberal economic analyses of Hayek and Friedman. Her view that
individuals should be free to pursue their own interests corresponded politically with the
demand for minimal governments that were primarily to protect the freedom of the individual.
This morality also legitimized the capitalist free market system as the only moral system. “The
only economic system that is compatible with complete freedom, says Rand, is laissez-faire
capitalism. And that depends on the existence of private property and a rule of law by which
people can trade confidently without being coerced. The role of the state is merely to keep
everyone to these rules and suppress violence; no other state activity can be justified..” (Butler
2018: 14). Ayn Rand may have espoused militant atheism, but she still had a great deal of
success in the US. Her books still sell a million copies annually. After her death, the US Library
of Congress rated Atlas Shrugged the most influential book after the Bible!

Despite the fact that state interventionism was denounced during a period of economic crisis
and even when (von) Hayek was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974 and Friedman
in 1976, neoliberal ideas did not penetrate policy circles until well into the 1980s. The
neoliberals had first tried to put their theories into practice in Chile in the early 1970s with the
coup against Salvador Allende and their alliance with General Pinochet. But it was not until

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Thatcher’s England and Reagan’s America that their ideas gradually became hegemonic. Prime
Minister Thatcher’s goal was to reform Britain’s post-World War II political-economic
arrangement, which was based on economic growth stimulated by the combination of deficit
spending and a loose monetary policy. To deal with rising unemployment, increasing inflation,
and recurring wage disputes (fueled by powerful unions), Thatcher implemented the free
market. She was convinced that the free market would revitalize the values of the middle class
and bourgeoisie (coupled with a typical conservative infatuation with Victorian values) and
lead to a minimal state. However, “as she thrust market forces into every corner of British life
with the aim of ‘rolling back the frontiers of the state’, the state grew ever stronger. (...) The
unavoidable result of attempting to reinvent the free market was a highly invasive state.” (Gray,
2007:76-77) The policies pursued undoubtedly led to growth in the Gross Domestic Product
(GDP), while significantly reducing inflation, but the consequences were felt at the lowest
levels of the social hierarchy, resulting in growing poverty. In the so-called reaganomics (a
euphemism for unbridled free market, deregulation and privatization), the accusation was that
government could no longer be a solution, but was part of the problem. The idea of big
government restricting citizens’ freedoms had always been part of American political culture,
but the culture of unbridled selfishness of the Wall Street fat cats gradually paved the way for
more radical forms of rejection of the state (such as, for example, the Tea Party that emerged
after the election of Barack Obama in response to his health care reform in the 2000s).

Neo-liberalism takes different forms but still has some common beliefs. “Neo-liberals believe
that the most important condition of individual liberty is the free market. The scope of
government must be strictly limited. Democracy may be desirable but it must be limited to
protect market freedoms. The free market is the most productive economic system and therefore
tends to be emulated throughout the world. Free markets are not only the most efficient way of
organizing the economy, but also the most peaceful. As they expand, the sources of human
conflict are reduced.” (Gray, 2007:85) However, it is also important to note that neoliberalism
was not only based on the argument of the efficiency of markets, but also made strong political
claims. It argued that the redistribution of wealth that did not come about automatically through
the market was dangerous. Hence neoliberalism’s resistance to the demand from the Global
South for a global distribution of wealth. Instead, neoliberalism legitimized austerity and shifted
the “responsibility for Third World poverty away from the legacy of colonialism and the neo-
colonial framework of the global economy and onto the leaders of individual Third World
states” (Whyte, 2018:26). Poverty in the Third World for neoliberals, in other words, was not
the result of colonialism or the neo-colonial economic order but of the bad policies of local
politicians. This meant that the New International Economic Order created by the UN General
Assembly in 1974 had little chance of success. The NIEO sought to create a new world
economic system based on “equity, sovereign equality, interdependence, common interest and
cooperation among all States, irrespective of their economic and social systems which shall

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correct inequalities and redress existing injustices, make it possible to eliminate the widening
gap between the developed and the developing countries and ensure steadily accelerating
economic and social development and peace and justice for present and future generations.”
In its place came the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which established
comprehensive free trade agreements. In addition, international organizations such as the World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) took decisive action: no redistribution on a
global scale but competitive free trade.

The neoliberal conceptions of freedom were also consistent with the renewed worldwide
attention to human rights. At the international level, the intellectuals who saw human rights as
the cornerstone of democratic politics seemed to be the (unconscious) pioneers of the success
of neoliberal thought. It was in France that the moralization of politics – through the
centralization of human rights – first took clear shape. The dissident voices from the Soviet
Union had a major impact on French political philosophy in the 1970s. The disconcerting
account of forty years of concentration camps in the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag
Archipelago (published in 1974), had given rise to the so-called nouvelle philosophie. The
central idea of the new philosophers was that any (political) project that seeks to radically
change society will automatically lead to totalitarianism, a system in which the state seeks to
subjugate the entire society and that this can only be achieved through mass murder
(Keucheyan, 2013:14-17). In other words, it was not Stalin who was responsible for the gulag,
but Marx himself. Evil was part of ideology itself, more so, of all ideologies. All ideologies
were inherently totalitarian and had to be eliminated. Therefore, the new philosophers, inspired
by Burke’s conservatism, believed that theories were inherently problematic, or as André
Glucksman summarized it “to theorize is to terrorize” (cited in Keucheyan, 2013: 15). The new
philosophers criticized the Western tradition of thought that sought to understand reality in its
totality, so that, echoing Popper’s ideas, they saw in any attempt to understand reality in its
totality a sign of wanting to suppress or control it, and this could only lead to the Gulag.
Bernard-Henri Lévy, known as BHL (read béhachel), by far the most influential of the new
philosophers (although he did not see himself as part of the movement), sought refuge in
morality. No longer trusting any political project (because it would lead to death and
destruction), the BCBG thinker (bon chic, bon genre - good style, good class) advocated a
search for a universal morality, which he believed could only be found in human rights. In short:
since any political project by definition leads to new concentration camps, only a militant
defense of human rights remained as a surrogate.

The ideas of the new philosophers cannot be seen simply as a French fad of hip-looking jet-set
intellectuals in the posh salons of Paris, but as a reflection of the general intellectual and cultural
atmosphere in France of the generation of thinkers who had lived through May 1968 and who
were either embittered, cynical, or disappointed in the effect of the ’68 revolt, or had definitively

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given up hope that revolution or radical change could be an end in itself. The work of the new
philosophers can be seen as a reckless and disjointed mix of theories and attitudes that blended
themes from May 68 with political ideas that had previously been part of the repertoire of the
conservative right. In the opening sentences of Barbarie à visage humain, Bernard-Henry Lévi
wrote, in an exaggerated self-dramatization: “I am the bastard child of a diabolical couple,
fascism and Stalinism.” This not only set the tone of the political direction the new philosophers
would take. The new intellectual became a highly mediatised, if not media-savvy, figure who
rebelled against the universality of abstract theory by proclaiming his own subjective position
in which truth became primarily a matter of spontaneity and authentic speech.

A completely different, typically American, liberal interpretation of rights can be found in the
monumental work A Theory of Justice by John Rawls (1921-2002). Rawls wanted to find an
answer to two crucial questions: “What can we say to the ‘losers’ of society?” and “How can
we live together in an orderly way despite our ethical differences?” He believed he could find
that answer in a well-organized and just society that excluded no one from its benefits and
accepted profound disagreements about just what constituted a worthwhile life in a context of
peace. Rawls offered a legitimization of liberal ideals that included both freedom and equality.
He asked himself how a stable democracy could be shaped, on what principles a just society
could be built so that its citizens accepted it. Rawls sought this in a limited morality, namely a
basis of fundamental values that we can all agree on, rather than starting with a complete
morality based on a fully developed vision of a meaningful and good life (like Christianity or
humanism). In a modern, liberal society, Rawls thought, people should be quite strict about
freedoms and justice while being tolerant of people’s ethical-political choices (whether
religious or not, cosmopolitan or nationalist, Muslim or Christian...). Thus, just principles are
more important than philosophical conceptions of the good life, the right is prior to the good.
Inspired by Rousseau’s contract thinking, Kantian ethics, and insights from the social sciences
(e.g., rational choice theory), Rawls examined what rules were necessary to achieve a just
order. For Rawls, justice was not so much the reflection of an equality in reality as a form of
equity borne by shared institutions. In other words, Rawls was looking for fair institutions that
would not, on the one hand, disadvantage or hinder the rich, and on the other hand, exclude the
weak and poor.

Rawls started from a thought experiment by arguing that thinking about a just social order was
actually best started from a so-called original position, from a point where we do not know
whether we are part of richer or poorer groups of the population, or whether we are young or
old. In other words, we have to think from behind a veil of ignorance as rational beings what is
the most desirable way to live together. Thinking about justice from this original position,
Rawls thought, would lead to the understanding that freedom and equality can coincide. Rawls
eventually formulated two principles of justice. The first principle states that every individual

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has an unbreakable claim to inviolable rights necessary to live a life of self-respect. The second
principle states that social and economic inequalities may exist only if they meet two conditions
– Rawls considered it impossible and undesirable for complete equality to be pursued – namely,
that these inequalities must be tied to social positions open to all (fair and equal opportunities
for all) and that they must benefit the least privileged members of society the most (the so-
called difference principle) (Fawcett, 2014:341). The first principle should be guaranteed by a
constitution, while the second principle should be pursued through economic institutions.
However, observing and respecting the first principle (the fundamental equal rights for all) takes
precedence over observing and implementing the second principle and, within this principle,
equitable equality takes precedence over the difference principle.

Robert Nozick (1938-2002) formulated a libertarian response to Rawls’ theory of justice in his
Anarchy, State and Utopia. Nozick presented his own theory of a justified minimal state as a
utopia in which people could freely choose the rules of the society in which they found
themselves. For Nozick, the fundamental question of political philosophy was a question that
preceded the question of how the state should be organized, namely, whether there should be a
state at all! (Nozick 1974: 4). He argued that a state is justified only if one can show that a state
would be superior to an ideal state of anarchy in nature, in which people generally comply with
moral constraints and generally act as they should. “If one can show that the state would be
superior even to this most favored situation of anarchy, the best that realistically can be hoped
for, or would be an improvement if it arose, this would provide a rationale for the state’s
existence; it would justify the state.” (Nozick 1974: 5) Nozick’s meticulous analysis of this
question leads him to conclude that only a very minimal libertarian state can be justified.
Anarcho-capitalism, in which there is no state and all socially necessary services are organized
by private initiative cannot exist for long because human beings will choose to cooperate with
other human beings for defense and justice, thus creating a “minimal state” (Nozick 1974:118).
According to Nozick, when a state takes on more responsibilities than this minimal task,
individual rights will be violated. Thus, in order to support the idea of the minimal state, Nozick
presents an argument that illustrates how the minimal state naturally derives from anarchy and
how any expansion of state power beyond this minimalist threshold is unjustified. This, of
course, involved a critique of Rawl’s theory. For Nozick, a government that taxed rich people
was a form of coercion that violated their freedom. A government, he argued, had no right to
infringe on the rights of individuals by taking away their money and giving it to others.
Redistribution of wealth was out of the question (Nozick 1974:153), for attempts to redistribute
wealth to reduce inequality were, according to Nozick, bound to infringe on personal rights.

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Chapter 6: The end of the Cold War and the ideological confusion

The central task of the ruling ideology in the present crisis is to impose a narrative which will
place the blame of the meltdown not on the global capitalist system as such, but on secondary
and contingent deviations.
(Zizek 2009: 19)

It is hard to see how the discarding of liberal values is going to lead to anything in the long
term other than increasing social conflict and ultimately a return to violence as a means of
resolving differences.
(Fukuyama 2020)

There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively
constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results.
(Butler 1999: 33)

We are in an emergency situation in the Anthropocene epoch in which the disruption of the
Earth system, particularly the climate, is threatening the planet as a place of human
habitation. However, our political-economic system, capitalism, is geared primarily to the
accumulation of capital, which prevents us from addressing this enormous challenge and
accelerates the destruction.
(Bellamy Foster 2017)

1. End of the Cold War

Despite the appearance of being a world power, the USSR had in fact been greatly weakened
by shaky economic development. Brezhnev’s de-stalinization policy had offered citizens
relative prosperity but the planned economy, from which the nomenklatura in particular was
mostly reaping the benefits, was a symbol of inefficiency and corruption. The military
expenditures that accompanied superpower status put severe pressure on the annual budget,
while the war in Afghanistan (1979-1989) showed that this army had become more of a paper
tiger than a fearsome enemy. The population, structurally depoliticized for years, craved above
all a higher standard of living, something the regime could not offer. There was hardly any faith
left in the communist project. To save the system, Michael Gorbachev, who came to power in
1985, introduced a series of economic reforms, perestroika, that gave more decision-making
freedom to the various ministries and allowed for some limited market-oriented reforms. The
goal was not to abolish the command economy but to make socialism more efficient by allowing
some liberal measures that would benefit the citizens. At the same time, Gorbachev wanted to
make some minimal concessions in the political sphere. He wanted greater openness and
transparency, glasnost, of the Soviet system by giving citizens a minimum of freedom of speech
(they were now allowed to criticize policies) and by reducing state control of the mass media.
However, it seemed difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile aspects of capitalism with the

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socialist system. What China did manage – an economic boom without letting go of
authoritarian control over political life – did not succeed in the USSR. The entire Soviet system
collapsed like a house of cards. Ideology hardly played a role. There were no texts to inspire
the masses. The Eastern European communist regimes collapsed like a game of dominos. Even
the Cuban thorn in America’s side could not dampen joy and optimism. The consequences were
felt worldwide. The Soviet Union imploded, and the Asian republics, in a kind of decolonization
wave, quickly gained independence. Centuries of Russian domination and decades of Soviet
domination did not prevent nationalism from flourishing in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan,
Tajikistan.... Eastern Europe turned to the West, the EU and capitalism without a fight. What
remained was capitalism. For the first time in history, there was now only a single economic
system that was globally integrated: globalized capitalism.

Attempts to understand the new world in the making came from very different angles. For
Francis Fukuyama (b. 1952), the collapse of the communist bloc was the ultimate proof of the
triumph of liberal Western democracy. The superiority of liberal democracy (free market and
parliamentarianism) lay in the fact that it was based on the values of freedom and equality. Of
course, Fukuyama admitted that there were still flaws in liberal democracy, but these flaws
were the result of the imperfect functioning of liberal democracies in practice, and were never
the result of inherent flaws in the ideal of this form of government itself. Moreover,
authoritarian regimes were disappearing all over the world and there seemed to be a global
consensus for liberal economic free-market policies. Drawing inspiration from Kojève and
Hegel, Fukuyama saw history as an evolutionary process toward an ideal form of society. The
victory of liberal democracy as a form of government was nothing less than “the end of human
ideological evolution” and “the last form of human governance.” By the end of the twentieth
century, the ideological conflicts seemed to be over for good. According to Fukuyama, the
triumph of Western liberal democracy heralded nothing less than “the end of history.”

Samuel Huntington (1927-2008) departed from a completely different paradigm, but indirectly
seems to have much in common with Fukuyama. The division of the world into three blocks:
the “free”, the communist and the third world, lost all meaning after the end of the Cold War.
The era of political-ideological conflicts that characterized the entire twentieth century was
over. In the new global constellation, it was the individual civilizations that were the most
important entities. Huntington defined a civilization as the broadest cultural entity with which
the individual could identify, as a group of nations that had a common past, a common culture,
sometimes a common language, and almost always a common religion. And it was precisely
around these elements of civilization, according to Huntington, that the main motives for
conflict and cooperation in the world would be concentrated in the future. The civil war in ex-
Yugoslavia in the early 1990s clearly demonstrated this, according to Huntington. But
Huntington did not limit himself to analysis. The West was in a superior position and needed

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to maintain that superiority by understanding that future conflicts would be of a cultural and/or
‘ethnic’ nature. According to Huntington, this meant that the West should not export its ideal
of democratic universalism and stop its military interventions. Huntington considered the belief
that democracy had to be exported everywhere in the world to be a false, immoral, and even
dangerous idea. The new, post-Cold War world would be one of a “clash of civilizations.” So
Huntington started from a totally different idea than Fukuyama, but at the end of his story he
nevertheless appears to draw parallel conclusions: the end of the Cold War led to hegemony of
Western civilization.

The advance of neoliberalism, already implemented in the US and Britain in the 1980s, had a
further spread in the post-Cold War period. International financial institutions and large states
(the US) and supranational organizations (the EU) implemented economic reforms
(privatizations, financial deregulation, downsizing the state apparatus...) that eroded the
postwar welfare state. The Global South were imposed the same measures by the global
capitalist system. However, the practical results were not as the theoretical models had
predicted. The inequality between the rich and poor countries of this world grew more sharply
from the 1980s onwards than before. The tensions this created within these countries led to
several waves of uprisings and revolutions in the 2000s, from Tunis to Baghdad, from Sao
Paolo to Ankara, from Athens to La Paz. In Europe and especially in those countries where the
welfare state had been strong, criticism of neoliberalism remained. Yet, across all party lines,
there was talk of ‘deregulation and privatization’. The liberal parties were surfing on the success
of the globalization narrative and the victory over communism, while most social democratic
parties seemed to accept free market forces, subject to some control mechanisms. The Third
Way, in the 1990s, sought to give shape to this consensus and also to underpin it politically and
ideologically. With the Third Way, Anthony Giddens (b. 1938) wanted to devise a politics
‘beyond left and right.’ Although the subtitle of his work was The Renewal of Social
Democracy, the ideas developed in the book inspired several political families. One of the
reasons for its success was that Giddens, as a bridge builder, had no clear ideological positions.
Different political figures such as Blair, Clinton, Schröder or Verhofstadt all agreed (in part)
with Giddens’ theses. Conversely, opponents criticized the vagueness of the project, the
magazine The Economist disdainfully remarked “the big idea is that there is no big idea.” This
reflected well the spirit of the times.

Giddens’ premise was that globalization was irreversible and that it was characterized not only
by economic interdependence (and the optimistic idea that the market could give rise to an
economy without scarcity) but also by a process of detraditionalization (individualization) and
the growth of a risk consciousness (risks associated with technological innovations, impact on
nature...). These processes undermined the power of the nation-state, the family or religion, all
institutions that used to give citizens a sense of safety and security. This situation had far-

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reaching consequences for the way in which citizens constructed their identities, and Giddens
therefore believed that it was possible that the politics of self-actualization (the politics of one’s
own identity and self-fulfillment) could become more important than a politics of emancipation
(the politics of inequality). The times were characterized, on the one hand, by identity-politics
supported by new social movements that wanted to tackle global problems by changing
mentalities and behaviors (e.g. countering climate change by not eating meat anymore...), or on
the other hand, by a political apathy, a growing disinterest in politics and a glorification of
hedonistic consumerism. In the absence of an alternative to capitalism and the concomitant loss
of the possibility of a social class-based politics of emancipation in favor of a lifestyle-based
politics, Giddens argued for the restoration of trust and mutual relations of dependence between
citizens and between citizens and the government.

A renewed social democracy had to reshape social cohesion. The neoliberal desire that the free
market would solve all the needs of man and life in society had commercialized man in all his
relations. Such individualism could only lead to selfishness. The solution, according to Giddens,
lay in the formulation of a new politics of the radical center, between or beyond the left and the
right. There was, according to Giddens, no longer a central subject of emancipation (like the
proletariat before Marx) but there were plenty of political goals that gave reason for optimism.
Democracy had to reinvent itself, had to democratize itself, as it were, to usher in the era of
what Habermas called dialogic democracy. In a dialogic democracy, disagreements and
political conflicts are settled as rationally as possible through dialogue and consultation between
citizens, civil society organizations and governments. By definition, this dialogue rejects any
form of violence, coercion or command. Citizens are not only given more say but must have
more say. Dialogic democracy must be based on the autonomy principle, the idea that citizens
can think for themselves about social problems and help solve them, and on the solidarity
principle, the idea that the guiding principle of social action is the interest of the community
and not just the individual. Or as Giddens sums it up, “No rights without responsibilities, no
authority without democracy.”

As long as the international community was trapped in the straitjacket of the Cold War, ‘Islamic
fundamentalism’ remained of secondary importance. The whole world had watched with
amazement the course of the Iranian revolution in 1979, was startled by the bloody attacks in
Paris in 1986, and wondered where movements such as Hamas and Hezbollah had suddenly
come from, but above all drew its attention to developments in the Soviet Union. When the
Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 and on September 11, 2001 when five hijacked airplanes
carried out attacks in New York and Washington, this situation changed. Since 9/11, much has
been written about the War on Terror, about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, about al-Qaeda
and its cronies, about the radicalization of young people in Europe, but especially about Islam.

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Islam has become the subject of debates at the highest political levels to the most heated
discussions in the smallest cafes in Flanders.

2. Multiculturalism
Long before the term multiculturalism became part of our political and social jargon; and
therefore cause of sometimes fierce antagonistic debates; Western European societies had in
fact been multicultural for a long time. The migration flows of the 1960s – triggered by strong
economic growth and by a domestic population increasingly unwilling to do the dirty work
(mines...) – and the subsequent family reunions had made it clear that the guest workers were
no longer guests but were here to stay. Globalization and the migratory flows of recent decades
have made Flanders, Belgium and the rest of Europe more ethnically, culturally and religiously
diverse than ever before. This new society that is very different from the one in the 1960s poses
specific challenges. The national welfare states that were built after the war were largely built
on the idea of a clearly defined territory where the state organized solidarity (social security,
pensions, health care...) for a more or less homogeneous population. A common national
identity (however problematic it was in some countries) was emphasized to forge the necessary
forms of trust between citizens. That trust formed the basis of a citizenship in which rights and
duties were flanked by universalist principles of solidarity. The gradual erosion of the cultural
basis on which solidarity was built as a result of a very strong individualism (people are less
and less inclined to want something collectively), a decreased importance of borders and
nationality in a growing united Europe, but also the presence of migrant communities, put
pressure on the classical principles of the welfare state. In the context of the post-9/11
geopolitical shifts, the new social challenges and problems gave rise to a whole series of
questions to which we are far from having all the answers: Who is a citizen and who is not?
Who gets to vote and who doesn’t, why? Is multiculturalism a licence for all forms of diversity
or are there limits? Can diversity be visible in terms of language? Or in terms of dress? And in
terms of religious symbols? Does multiculturalism mean giving rights to groups and not
individuals? Is Islam even compatible with multiculturalism? And with democracy?...

The concept of multiculturalism ‘arrived’ in Europe after earlier political-philosophical debates

in the Anglo-Saxon world, particularly in the U.S. and Canada. During the 1980s, a fierce
debate had raged in the US between liberals and so-called communitarians. The former
assumed that human emancipation was only possible through an independent, autonomous, and
free individual whose behavior could no longer be prescribed by a straitjacket of religious
and/or cultural values. The latter believed that the individual was always part of a group
(however defined), or a community, and thus always belonged to a particular moral group. The
communitarists, according to one of their spokespersons, Amitai Etzioni, emphasized the
important role of the community in social and political institutions and believed in a shared

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definition of what is good, which was based on a balance between individual rights and social
responsibilities. Therefore, communitarians advocated a policy of recognition that protected
and supported groups and communities.

Charles Taylor (b. 1931), a key player in the multiculturalism debate, had been advocating a
policy of recognition since the mid-1980s. Taylor saw the human need for recognition as a
constant throughout history. Recognition was necessary because it helped build identity.
Therefore, he assumed that it was not so much specific (minority) rights for which (minority)
groups mobilized, but recognition and respect. Classical liberalism could not offer that because
it was only partially neutral. Taylor argued that political theorists, from John Locke and Thomas
Hobbes to John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, had paid too little attention to how the individual
was connected to the whole. The lack of attention to religious, cultural, and ethnic groups and
their desire for recognition obscured the social background against which life choices gained
importance and meaning. Taylor’s critique referred to a tension between two schools of thought
that had often been opposed philosophically but also politically until now. Modern liberalism,
which was reformulated in the 1970s especially by Rawls and Dworkin, was a search for the
balance between individual freedom on the one hand and a form of socio-economic equality on
the other. The government was not allowed to interfere with the autonomy of the individual and
thus was not allowed to interfere with individual preferences and ambitions. Citizens were
themselves responsible for their choices, as well as for the positive and negative consequences
of those choices. However, the state was expected to act as a provider of care. The state had to
take care of things in which people had no choice (terminal illnesses, disability...).
Multiculturalism blamed this thinking for an insensitivity to cultural aspects. Multiculturalists
assumed that people would be able to lead autonomous lives through their full membership in
a culture or community. Not only for minority groups, but also for the majority, culture and
cultural symbols could be important anchor points for life (identity, language,...). The fact that
a minority was in a weaker position meant that it had to be protected; not in order to gain unfair
advantages over the majority (as is often claimed by critics of multiculturalism), but in order to
correct disadvantages. The concern of multiculturalists then was to promote social justice and
not to undermine it. That multiculturalism was successful in the American, Canadian and
British context had to do with the growing realization that not only policies to eliminate
socioeconomic inequality (a policy of redistribution) were needed, but also policies that spoke
of dignity and respect (a policy of recognition) so that discrimination and racism could be
combated.

Will Kymlicka’s (b. 1962) idea of a multicultural citizenship represents one of the most
elaborate and developed arguments for multiculturalism. He does not legitimize the
introduction of collective rights for minority groups as an attack on the liberal rationale of the
importance of the individual but argues, just the opposite, that the granting of group rights just

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deepens and broadens fundamental liberal values. Kymlicka makes a distinction between
national minorities and immigrant groups. National minorities are groups that formed a
functioning community before being incorporated into a larger state (e.g., the Scots in Britain
or Inuit in Canada) while immigrant groups are minority groups that formed after a more or less
recent migration movement. Based on liberal principles, Kymlicka believes that a multicultural
policy should be implemented that provides both types of groups with minority rights.
According to Kymlicka, allowing these minority rights does not mean that these rights are
granted to protect the group itself but just the opposite, because it benefits the individual who
is part of that group. In this way, the individual would have easier access to sound conceptions
of “the good life.”

The key question (and fear among opponents of multiculturalism), of course, is how the group
rights granted relate to individual rights; how, in other words, group dynamics stand in relation
to individual freedoms. Kymlicka argues that minority groups can make two types of demands,
a right to internal restriction and a right to external protection. Minorities may demand the right
to settle internal disagreements without the intervention of the majority group. This often
involves the application of specific (usually religious) rules and/or laws to ensure that collective
customs, traditions and habits can be preserved. Since every society or culture always imposes
some form of restriction on its members (having to pay taxes, traffic rules, speed limits,
courtesy...), problems only arise when the proposed internal restrictions serve to impose things
that go against basic liberal principles – or rather principles of the majority – such as those of
gender equality or those of individual freedom of choice (e.g. forced marriages, performing
cliterodectomies,…). Kymlicka argues that there can be no place for such restrictions. However,
minorities may also request external protections that are intended to protect them as a group
from the impact of the decisions of the rest of society or from the economic and political
pressures of a larger group (e.g., language laws protecting French in Montreal or Flemish in
Brussels). These measures, according to Kymlicka, generate justice precisely by reducing the
vulnerability of minorities to the broader society.

3. New feminism, post-feminism and postcolonial feminism

In the 1980s and 1990s, feminists resisted the shift to the right in politics. They mobilized not
only for women’s rights but also protested against the neoliberalism of Reagan and Thatcher,
against nuclear weapons and for peace. Renewal in feminist thought came primarily in the areas
of sexuality, race and gender (queer theory). Joan Scott points out a crucial paradox in the
women’s rights movement. Women fighting for their rights in liberal democracies maintain that
differences between men and women are irrelevant and certainly should not be a basis for
legitimizing inequality. At the same time, however, by mobilizing and organizing as women,
women introduced the idea of difference into the political struggle, a difference they were just
trying to eliminate. This paradox – the need to both accept and reject sexual difference in

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politics – became one of the constitutive conditions of women’s long struggle for equal rights.
It also proved to be a basis for theoretical innovation (Scott, 1997).

For many women of color, the subject of race and the issue of racism was an important part of
their feminist struggle. In Women, Race & Class, which became a major turning point in the
feminist movement, Angela Davis (b. 1944) described the history of the women’s liberation
movement in the US from the days of slavery. In it, she showed how racism and class
discrimination (discrimination based on social class, policies, and practices that benefit the
upper class at the expense of the lower class) were a part of nineteenth and twentieth century
feminism, making it primarily reflect the interests of white middle class women and thus
sometimes (unconsciously) reinforcing prejudices in their own struggle for equality. Davis saw
slavery as a major cause for the persistence of prejudice in modern society. To cover up the
reality of slavery with its physical as well as sexual exploitation and violence, the prejudice of
the “licentious black woman” was created. While white women were seen as weak and therefore
destined for domestic work, black women were expected to work in the fields like the men, so
they were seen as “unfeminine.” At the same time, women’s domestic work was undervalued
which anchored a strict gender role pattern – white men working outside the house, white
women in the house.

Angela Davis also drew attention to the double standard, or hypocrisy, that had been prevalent
in part of the women’s movement. Early feminist advocates of family planning and reproductive
rights often worked to keep women of color from reproducing while white women were just
encouraged to do so. Eugenics – a set of ideas and practices that sought to improve the genetic
quality of a population by excluding people who were seen as inferior from reproduction or
encouraging those who were seen as superior to reproduce – was ingrained in part of the
women’s movement. Davis believed that these policies made many feminists of color
suspicious of white-dominated feminist activism on reproduction. Because of this past, black
feminists do not always see the issue of reproductive rights as a liberating ideal. Davis’s analysis
led to a renewed debate within feminism about which voices needed to be heard, which issues
were clearly feminist issues and which were not. Davis emphasized the need for diversity in
leadership and ideas within the women’s movement. It was time, Davis argued, to pay attention
to the needs and concerns of women of color, to their histories and how to inscribe them in the
struggle for emancipation. The answer was not always unequivocal.

In her book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), bell hooks (b. 1952), argued that
when feminists argue for equal rights with men that this is impossible because not all men are
equal to each other in a capitalist society. She used this idea as the basis of an inclusive feminist
theory. Starting from the concept of sisterhood, she believes that all women (and men)
regardless of their differences must unite to transcend the complex relationships between class,

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race, and gender. This way of thinking, intersectionality, was coined in the late 1980s by
African American feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw. Intersectionality became a lens through which
the intertwined relationships of race, class, and gender could be exposed. The three aspects of
reality interact to form multiple, distinct forms of oppression. The oppression of, for example,
African American women is different from the oppression of white women in the U.S. bell
hooks also called on men to get involved in the women’s movement and thus contribute to
changing power structures and mentalities. The feminist movement had to be a broad
movement, an inclusive one and not an exclusive or exclusionary ideology. Not only men, but
certainly socially marginalized women and women from minority groups had a role to play.
Feminism had to shake off the yoke of victimhood and transform it into a community of mutual
understanding, appreciation, and recognition so that it could follow its own path that could
undermine the patriarchal structures of capitalism.

Other feminists, in turn, argued for greater self-awareness within the movement, which would
lead to specific, distinct, forms of feminism. Black feminists such as Alice Walker and Maya
Angelou chose to speak of womanism as an alternative to feminism, which for them was
primarily a reflection of privileged white culture. Although there are different views of
womanism, a key idea was that both femininity and culture were equally important elements
that made up a woman’s Being. A person’s femininity, in other words, could not be separated
from the culture within which it arose. The difference with the intersectional view was that
womanism assumed that a woman’s culture was not one of the elements (alongside class and
race) of femininity but the lens through which the woman saw and defined herself. The black
skin color of an African American woman was not so much an element of her feminism as it
was the lens through which she understood her femininity.

Postcolonial feminism that developed in the wake of postcolonial thinking is a reaction to

feminism that is primarily concerned with the experiences of women in the West. Postcolonial
feminism therefore seeks to understand and undo the legacy of colonialism within feminist
activism. In other words, postcolonial feminism seeks to decolonize feminist activism.
Postcolonial feminism seeks to understand and interpret everyday experiences from a
postcolonial perspective, de-centering the white, Western, Eurocentric experience. By
analyzing how racism and colonialism have long-lasting political, economic, and cultural
effects on postcolonial women, postcolonial feminism seeks to demonstrate the difference
between what we are taught as universal (usually defined by the white world) and what are
differently lived experiences and realities. White feminism assumes that equality is a fixed and
clear fact that is the same all over the world. Postcolonial feminism reminds us that while
Western feminism advocates, for example, equal pay, that same concern may not apply to
women outside of Europe and America.

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Chandra Talpade Mohanty (°1955) argued that feminism in the Global South cannot be
introduced from the outside, it must come from within one’s own society, be shaped by one’s
own culture and ideology. In this way, Mohanty wanted to give a voice to the women of the
Global South who were too often not heard and called on the Western women’s movement to
recognize this diversity in their actions. While some feminists fear that such postcolonial calls
for authenticity beyond colonialism and imperialism may divide the women’s movement into
different tendencies, there are also many feminists who recognize the need for such an
approach. Failure to recognize the problem of difference reinforces structures of oppression
(Audre Lorde). White women who ignore their “privilege of whiteness” define “the woman”
only from their own experience and see the non-Western, non-white woman as an “Other” who
cannot be understood. Mohanty’s call to find in one’s own culture the basis of an authentic local
feminism was rejected by other postcolonial thinkers, such as Gayatri Spivak. Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak (b. 1942) believes it is futile to try to rediscover authentic indigenous
cultures under the impact of imperialism. Colonialism and imperialism were so profound that
local cultures have not remained intact. A nostalgia for a lost origin can be detrimental to a
critique of imperialism. To understand why she took this position, we must highlight her
seminal work. Spivak first became known through the publication of an article entitled Can the
Subaltern Speak? In it, she analyzed the failure of communication and lack of understanding
between Western and Eastern women. The oppression of women in the Third World was a triple
colonization, as these women were first colonized by colonial power, then by patriarchy, and
finally by Western feminism. The subalterns – the populations outside the patriarchal structures
of the colony and colonial power – could not speak for themselves because they were not heard
or understood. Spivak’s analyses, influenced by Derrida’s postmodern deconstructionist
approach, Gramscian concept of the subaltern, and Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, have
transformed Western philosophy while developing modes of thought committed to supporting
and inspiring transnational struggles for social justice. Spivak is thus an important thinker in
postcolonial theory, writing at the interface between Marxism, feminism, and postcolonial
studies and moving the theme of gender from the margins to the center of the postcolonial
tradition. Spivak used the postmodern method of deconstruction as a theoretical and political
way of thinking and applied it to a classic of English literature, Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane
Eyre. Spivak argued that the story has an imperialist framework that has gone unnoticed for
over 150 years. The heroine Jane is pitted against Edward Rochester’s first wife, Bertha Mason,
who is described as a creole, from Jamaica. Bertha becomes insane, is locked up by her husband,
and eventually dies in a fire (which allows Jane to marry Edward). Bertha is not just any ex-
wife, she is a woman of color, whom Brontë describes as if she were an animal, hovering
between animality and humanity. “Spivak concludes from this that the emergence of an
autonomous female subject in the nineteenth century, of which Jane Eyre is considered the
expression, has as a condition the denial of autonomy to women from the colonies, the reduction
of them to a pre-human state.” (Keucheyan, 2013:204) This also has the consequence that the

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history of women’s position in the West and the question of imperialism cannot be separated,
something that feminism has not done enough to date. On the contrary, by having imperialism
as a blind spot, feminism has in part reaffirmed the axioms of imperialism, valuing the
emergence of an empowered Western woman and her individuality without making it clear that
this was only made possible by imperialism. That Western feminism denies or minimizes the
impact of colonialism and imperialism is not only a theoretical issue but can equally be found
in the geopolitics of preventive wars or humanitarian interventions. The U.S. war in
Afghanistan in 2003 and the subsequent War on Terror, was often described as a struggle for
gender equality and against women’s oppression. Waging war to “liberate the Afghan woman”
appears to be human rights minded but is ultimately a war waged on the basis of a historical
pattern, reminiscent of the colonial era, in which all high morality came from the West as a
civilizing entity against lower forms of civilization in the rest of the world. Spivak earlier
succinctly summarized colonialism as “white men saving brown women from brown men.” Do
Muslim Women Need Saving? is Lila Abu-Lughod’s indictment of a mindset that has justified
forms of foreign interference, including military invasions, in the name of saving women from
Islam.

With her work Gender Trouble, Judith Butler (b. 1956) became one of the representatives of
queer theory. The subtitle of the work – Feminism and the Subversion of Identity – indicates
Butler’s greatest theoretical innovation. Queer theory gives positive content to the concept of
queer in order to subvert the stigma associated with it. As such, queer theory is not only a theory
but also a movement that seeks to denaturalize sexual identities. In Butler’s view, feminism has
effectively problematized traditional sexual identities by challenging the idea that patriarchy is
embedded in nature, but this problematization did not go far enough. Feminists must go a step
beyond denaturalizing identities and reject the very idea of identity. Butler thus undermined the
fundamental distinction on which feminism, particularly of the second wave, was built, namely
the distinction between gender and sex. While gender refers to women’s biological
characteristics and differences from men, gender refers to the cultural differences that separate
them. “This distinction is a variant of the more general opposition between nature or the innate
(sex) and culture or the acquired (gender), which is ubiquitous in modern intellectual history.”
(Keucheyan, 2013:197) Butler acknowledges that gender is indeed a cultural construct but adds
that so is sex! Butler ultimately rejects a difference between nature and culture; the categories
of ‘male’ and ‘female’ have no foundation. Thus, for Butler, there is no male or female identity,
just as there is no homosexual, bisexual, transgender or other identities. The idea that identity
is free and flexible and gender a construction, not an essence, is one of the foundations of queer
theory. Butler’s anti-essentialist project is one of radical critique of identities. Performativity
was the concept by which Butler explained this new vision of the relationship between gender
and sex. For Butler, a performative is a discursive practice that performs or produces what it
names. Put differently, it is the words we use to describe reality that bring this reality into being.

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Language is thus a form of social action and can have effects in reality (Terrel, 2020). Butler’s
analysis also had an impact on the social and political action of women.

The feminist movement, through its struggles, seeks to bring together the diversity and myriad
differences among women into a collective whole. A problem that comes with this is that of
representation. The feminist movement wants to represent all women, but this representation is
often problematic, puts a lot of power in the hands of a small group of women, and it tends to
homogenize the women represented. Butler therefore criticized gay and lesbian marriage, for
example. She was, of course, not against such a marriage on the basis of conservative morality
but because the desire to want to join the institution of marriage can strengthen that institution,
while marriage is just one of the pillars of patriarchy and the domination of men, not only
towards women but also homosexuals. In addition, this also means that the government, through
the legal framework of marriage, will regulate and define sexual behavior (which type of
relationship is legitimate and which is not...). “As such, gay and lesbian marriage risks
paradoxically consolidating a normative sexual-political regime inimical to sexual minorities.
Furthermore, in demanding the same rights as heterosexual couples, homosexual couples cut
themselves off from other categories of the population that are often even more oppressed than
they: single mothers and fathers, people who have multiple amorous relations, trans-genders,
intersexes and so forth.” (Keucheyan, 2013:199) Therefore, the only consistent solution, which
Butler prefers, is the abolition of state control over marriages, the removal of special civil or
financial rights granted through marriage.

4. Apartheid and racial capitalism

In South Africa, since the nineteenth century, a white minority politically, economically, and
culturally dominated a predominantly black population. This dominance was based on a strict
racial division between white and black. It was not until 1948 that the system of apartheid was
in place. Apartheid provided a legally institutionalized racial separation that existed until the
early 1990s. Apartheid was based on an authoritarian political culture in which white
supremacy, or baasskap in South African, controlled and dominated the country on a racial
basis. At the top of the ladder were the whites who enjoyed all civil rights, below them the
Asians and “coloreds” (people with a toned skin color, of mixed ancestry) followed by the black
Africans. In South Africa, socioeconomic inequality thus ran concurrently with ethnic and racial
divisions reflected in an urbanized industrial capitalism controlled by whites (including strict
rules for the employment of black Africans) and a rural non-capitalist economy dominated by
black residents. In this racially differentiated economy, white workers could claim individual
and social rights; in other words, they could be proletarianized. Even though they were
employed in industry, black workers could not assert the same rights and remained dependent

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on the non-capitalist economy for their livelihood. Apartheid was a political system designed
to maintain this segregated economy. The racial laws that were gradually introduced dealt with
all aspects of life, including banning marriages between white and non-white people or
reserving certain jobs only for whites. By law, everyone was required to be classified in one of
three categories: white, black (African), or colored (of mixed descent, primarily of Indian or
Asian origin). Classification into one of these categories was based on appearance, social
acceptance, and ancestry. For example, a person could not (regardless of skin color) be
considered white if one of his or her parents was non-white. This racial division was also
imposed geographically through a far-reaching system of systematic segregation. Black
persons, for example, were only allowed to enter “white areas” with special permission and
having the right papers. For whites, Africans (the black population), blacks (Africans and
coloureds and Asians) this led to divergent visions of the future.

Resistance to apartheid started early on with the establishment in 1912 of the South African
Native National Congress which was renamed the African National Congress in 1923. The
ANC and the other organizations that represented the interests of the black population
underwent major changes over the years both in terms of their basis, ideology and strategy.
Throughout the years, political ideas of emancipation were formulated, which were in line with
communist ideas, Christian ideals or Africanism, which wanted to fight against the feelings of
inferiority of the blacks and the glorification of the whites that rendered the Africans powerless.
Blacks had to start from their own history and culture, and above all realize that Africa is their
homeland. There was no need to strive for more participation within the system, but rather for
a black majority government. Beginning in 1968, Africanism received a new impetus from the
corner of the South African Student Organization (SASO). The movement, led by Steve Biko
(1946-1977), reflected the worldwide black consciousness movement. Biko advocated for the
emancipation of the black population without the assistance of whites. The title of a SASO
newsletter in 1970 “Black souls in white skin?”, a reference to Fanon, made it clear that liberal
white do-gooders were doing little more than confusing and distracting blacks from their
emancipation. How could they simultaneously criticize apartheid and still continue to reap the
benefits of the system, he wondered, just as Albert Memmi had done before. The blacks had to
do it alone. But then wasn’t this racism? “No,” said Biko, “after all, one doesn’t blame the
unions for not including patrons in their organization.”

The internationalization of the struggle against the apartheid regime also led to new insights on
the ideological level, in which the concept of racial capitalism became central. The term was
first used by South African economists and militants to show that capitalism, contrary to liberal
assumptions, did not weaken the racism of the South African regime but strengthened it and
was thus not the solution but the basis on which capitalism thrived. Cedric Robinson (1940-
2016) further developed the term in his Black Marxism in which he demonstrated that racism

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did not only occur in South Africa but that capitalism had been closely intertwined with racism
since its inception. Racial capitalism described the process of extracting economic value from
persons of a different color. Capitalism as an economic system, according to Robinson, was a
centuries-long story of continuous capital accumulation by producing and perpetuating
relationships of inequality among human groups. Therefore, since its inception, to survive,
capitalism had to make differences between people and exploit these differences to capitalize
on them. Capitalism gives economic expression to the racism inherent in European culture.
With this analysis, the implications for emancipation are clear. “Radical opposition to
capitalism is not generated only from within the dialectic of capital and waged labor but also
from the antagonism between capital and the various other categories of non-waged, coerced,
and surplus labor within racial capitalism – from the enslaved to the racialized
lumpenproletariat whom the Black Panther Party saw as the vanguard of the revolution in the
United States.” (Kundnani, 2020) Cedric Robinson thus wrote in the tradition of the black
radical tradition (De Bois, CLR James, Boggs...) and proved to be an inspiration for the renewed
attention in the United States regarding race through the Black Lives Matter movement.
Ultimately, apartheid did not survive the Cold War. Apartheid was dismantled in a series of
negotiations that culminated in a transition period that resulted in the 1994 general election, the
first in South Africa to be held with universal suffrage and from which a black majority took
power. It was not so much the more radical militants who took the lead. Nelson Mandela (1918-
2013), who spent 27 years locked up on Robben Island, militant of the first hour, became the
symbol of black liberation and first black president of the country between 1994 and 1999.

5. Islam in revolt
Islamism can be defined as a movement that advocates a reordering of governance and society
in accordance with the ideals of Islam, usually a shari’ah-based state (Mandaville, 2014).
Although its origins lie in 1930s Egypt, Islamism is a phenomenon that took shape mainly in
the second half of the twentieth century. There are two major currents within Islamism, one that
is pro-Western and thus supportive of Western interests in the Middle East region, and one that
is hostile to them. The base of the pro-Western current is the Saudi kingdom, the most
traditional and reactionary country in the region. The anti-Western camp has a Sunni and Shiite
form. Within Shiism, the Islamic Republic of Iran is the spearhead, while among Sunni
Islamism, first al-Qaeda and then Daesh (Islamic State - IS) are the ring leaders (Achcar, 2013).

Sunni Islamism
The works of the intellectual Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) played a crucial role in the development
of Islamism. The questions Qutb addressed in his works remained a central focus for all Islamist
movements. Qutb described the independent Arab state as being jahili. The word referred to
the jahiliyya. In the classical tradition of Islam, this was the “period of ignorance” that preceded

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the advent of Islam. Qutb thus transposed a concept of time (the time before Islam) to a
description of the state of things in his own time. He argued that any society that was not
regulated by God’s will and legislation, by the shari'ah, was wicked and false. That, in his view,
legitimized the struggle or jihad against the state. Those who found themselves in this general
analysis were part of the foundation of “revolutionary” Islamism; an Islamism that wanted to
seize power by force of arms and create a new man (the ‘good Muslim’). Those who did not
identify with Qutb’s combative rhetoric and wished to work within the framework of legality
gave birth to a non-violent Islamism, mainstream Islamism.

Central to this debate is the question of politics and religion and therefore the Islamic State.
Islamists have always assumed that the establishment of an Islamic state was the most important
condition for Islamizing society. Opinions differed as to how that state should be established or
how power should be conquered. Based on the answers, different forms, currents and tendencies
of Islamism emerged from the 1970s onwards. Sayyid Qutb’s works may have legitimized the
struggle, but ultimately his oeuvre was not a revolutionary manual. Several groups took a
chance, but none of them actually succeeded in destabilizing the states of the region for long
periods of time. The high point of revolutionary Islamism was the assassination of President
Sadat in 1981 which, at least in their theory, would lead to a mass popular uprising. Despite the
spectacular assassination, one thing had become clear: the Egyptian people did not follow and
the revolutionary plan failed. This essentially marked the beginning of the demise of
revolutionary ideals (Zemni, 2006).

With the Iranian Revolution (1979), the First (1980-1988) and the Second Gulf War (1991), the
geopolitical situation in the Middle East changed significantly. The US had lost its Iranian ally
overnight and the taking of Americans hostages in Teheran had a very traumatic impact on
American political life. To curb the influence of that “new enemy,” both the U.S. and much of
the European countries gambled on two horses at once: the secular but extremely authoritarian
regime of Saddam Hussein, as well as the reactionary and deeply religious Saudi Arabia.
Islamist movements underwent major changes during this period, due to the new geopolitical
world map but also to a process of self-questioning and criticism. After Sadat’s assassination,
it had become clear that the Egyptian people had not rebelled. Why was that? Had the plan been
poorly executed or was the plan itself built on false assumptions and presuppositions? Some of
the most radicalized youth immediately found their way to the new jihad par excellence: the
fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Hoping never to have to see them again,
these young people were supported and sometimes even sponsored by all kinds of Middle
Eastern states and the US. These states financed and organized the resistance against the Soviet
Union in close cooperation with, among others, Osama Bin Laden and the Pakistani secret
services. As long as they were fighting against Soviet troops, these fighters were called

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moujahidin, freedom fighters. It would only be a matter of years before they were called
“terrorists” (Zemni, 2006).

Iran and Ayatollah Khomeini

A militant Islam cannot be derived directly from Shiism. On the contrary, from the belief that
any government is imperfect, and in most cases can be considered corrupt until the return to
earth of the mahdi, one could easily infer a fatalistic attitude, one that advocates withdrawal
from the political arena. Paradoxically, it is precisely this potential fatalism and isolationism
that has pushed the Shiite clergy to the political forefront on several occasions, and especially
during the twentieth century. The Shah’s regime (1919-1981), which sought to usher Iran into
the twentieth century and the Western world with its “white revolution,” was completely
alienated from its people. Living conditions had not really improved. Compared to the luxuries
exhibited by the new rich, the majority lived in a pitiful condition. The culture of the common
people had been eroded and what had taken its place was not the best that modernity had to
offer. Political discontent was growing but found no legal outlet because the shah harshly
punished any form of opposition. Not surprisingly, Islam provided the spiritual and practical
framework for resistance. The mosque was the only public place that the army did not dare to
invade. When the shah was overthrown, it was natural that Islam would play a leading role in
the new regime. But it was not obvious that Khomeini would hold all the power, as different
ideologies and ideas circulated within Iran. Westerners usually see the Iranian Revolution as an
anti-modern and xenophobic movement that rejects all that is modern and non-Islamic, a view
reinforced by Iran’s current leaders. The Iranian Revolution, however, was not so much the
revival of an “essential” Islam that was independent of foreign influences. The contributions of
Ali Shariati, the main ideologue of the Iranian Revolution, demonstrate this. Shariati drew his
inspiration from both outside and inside Islam; from Western sociology, especially Marxist
sociology and the work of Frantz Fanon, as well as Muslim theology (especially Shiism). In
fact, Shariati devoted his life to synthesizing modern socialism with a renewed Shiism, and
adapting the revolutionary theories of Marx, Fanon and other non-Iranian thinkers to his
contemporary Iranian environment. The central theme of Shariati’s work was that Third World
countries such as Iran needed two interconnected and simultaneous revolutions: a national
revolution that would end all forms of imperial domination and revitalize the country’s culture,
heritage, and national identity; and a social revolution that would end all forms of exploitation,
eradicate poverty and capitalism, modernize the economy, and, most importantly, establish a
just, dynamic, and classless society (Abrahamian, 1982). Intellectuals would play an important
role in these two revolutions by being able to understand the internal contradictions of a society,
increase public awareness, and learn from the political experiments of Europe and Third World
countries. Shariati denounced imperialism and class inequality as the main enemies of society.
While he criticized what he called “vulgar Marxism,” especially the Stalinist variety, he also
criticized the conservatism of traditional Islamic scholars whom he accused of religiously

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underpinning the oppression and exploitation of the poor. According to Shariati, Shiism had to
reinscribe itself in its critical and revolutionary tendency, a tendency that was in line with both
nationalism and socialism. Shariati’s arguments were a clear threat to the power of the
traditional scholars because if revolutionary Islam, which sought equality and justice, was true
Islam, then the Islam of the theologians was false. If deeds to build a better society were more
important than personal faith (or blind imitation of traditional rules), then lay people, according
to Shariati, had a better understanding of Islam than the conservative scholars.

In the Iranian revolution of 1979, it was Rouhollah Moussavi Khomeini (1902-1989) who
prevailed politically. Khomeini succeeded in eliminating his early supporters, both Marxists,
socialists and communists but also more liberal-oriented movements. Khomeini’s victory is
perhaps best explained by the fact that his views resonated with popular resentments. Although
his philosophical training enabled him to engage in complex thinking, his message to the people
was extremely simple. For Khomeini, the cause of the people’s material and spiritual poverty
was simple: it was imperialism. For him, imperialism was not a complex historical
phenomenon; it was the work of Satan, who carried out his plan through the policies of the U.S.
and the Soviet Union. The struggle was thus not only against the Shah but possessed a global
dimension: the outcasts of yesterday became the new world liberators in whom the purity of the
believer was central. If the Iranian people are God’s instruments, they must be pure in heart.
There is no doubt that the majority of Iranians took offence at the manifestations of modern
culture, which was misunderstood and often unattainable and was forced upon them by the state
under the Shah. Like the causes, the solution to all the problems was simple to imagine:
installing an Islamic republic. Officially, the new republic became a system known as the
velayat-e faqih, the government of jurisprudence. This political system gave priority to spiritual
power over political power. The faqih or scholar of law is the supreme leader. This, according
to Khomeini, should be the most competent person to implement policies in accordance with
Shiite doctrine. This idea was not a return to the older forms of Islam as is sometimes suggested,
but rather an innovation of religious thought within Shiism. Traditionally, Shiite law scholars
remained submissive to the political rulers. In principle, the faqih was not elected, but acquired
his status through a spontaneous consensus of the faithful. In practical terms, however, this
meant two things: first, that all legislative, executive, and judicial power came into the hands
of the clergy, so that one can speak of a theocratic order. Second, what might be seen as an
expression of direct democracy (the faqih as an exponent of the popular will) in reality meant
the arbitrariness of power. Yet the idea of representation of the people (elections) was never
completely abolished. The Iranian parliament is elected and sets the beacons of policy. The
laws of the parliament are still tested afterwards against the Islamic Shiite standard by a Council
of Guardians, a college of clerics. But, despite all this, the parliament, or some parliamentarians,
remained a symbol of participation. Today, more than 40 years after the revolution, the
relationship between politics and religion, between a conservative bastion of power that wants

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to retain power and a younger population demanding change, continues to cause tension. There
was already an initial uprising in 2009, led by the Green Movement, and a broad civil society
revolt against the government's poor economic policies followed in 2019. For now, the regime
is not breaking, but for how long?

Jihadis
After the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, the armed groups turned against each
other, but also increasingly against the West. Not because of their strength but because of their
weakness, the armed groups – among whom al-Qaeda emerged in the mid-1990s – opted for a
new enemy. Pushed into a corner more and more by efficient state repression on the one hand
and the manipulation of an “Islamic enemy image” at international level on the other, they
resorted to blind violence. The shift in meaning of the Islamic concept of jahiliyya was central
to Qutb’s ideas. As a result, he was able to build a modern Islamic revolutionary ideology, the
cornerstone of which was the concept of jihad. Jihad became a revolutionary concept to change
the world in light of a bright future. As with communist and socialist revolutionary thinking, it
is not the revolution itself that is loved. What is important is what the revolution “asks” of the
men and women who engage in it. As the French writer Camus once said, ‘The revolution
consists in loving a man who does not yet exist.’ Communist, anarchist and today Islamist armed
groups all assume that only through sacrifice and death, can man and history be made. In a
revolution, it is not the act of killing that is worshipped, but rather the commitment and effort
required to become immortal through this act. Whereas communist and socialist armed groups
found proof of immortality in the ultimate and total liberation of man, religiously inspired
groups seek that proof in divine law. Regardless of the fact that eternity separates the two types
of violence, they also have important common ground. Whether the ultimate goal is the
liberation of man or the introduction of God’s law, both types of revolt are united in the
historicity of their killing, their will to dominate and their attempt to control social reality. These
‘revolutionaries’ killed God and even history and can only project a justification for their deeds
into a future ideal. In practice, this usually meant that reality had to be pushed or coerced into
the so-called ‘right path’ (Zemni, 2009). Jihad militants go thus back and forth between the
idolization of a past made into a fetish and the need to re-establish that fetishized past in the
(near) future. This is not only an efficient way to legitimize the acts of violence but also a way
to attribute guilt to the victims of violence. From Qutb to Bin Laden, the idea of ‘innocence’ of
people gradually disappeared as violence became more brutal and indiscriminate. This
radicalization corresponded to the shift from the Arab states as being the main enemy, to the
United States, Israel or ‘the West’. First, it legitimized violence against the government,
especially presidents, kings and ministers. By the late 1970s, there were already groups
convinced that civil servants could also be targeted. Due to the fact that they had a supposedly
free choice of whether or not to work for the government, they were described as potential
targets. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, this definition of potential targets expanded. For

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example, Bin Laden legitimized the attack on U.S. citizens by arguing that by paying their taxes
and casting their democratic votes, they bear responsibility for U.S. foreign policy.

Ayman al-Zawahiri (b. 1951), bin Laden’s right-hand man and al-Qaeda ideologue, has
continuously stressed the importance of jihad since the early 1990s. He assumes that the armed
struggle is the only possible solution to Islam’s problems and therefore never misses an
opportunity to accuse other Muslims, including Islamists, of treason. With al-Zawahiri,
ultimately everyone is ‘guilty’ if they do not belong to the group of the self-proclaimed chosen
ones. Al-Zawahiri wrote The Bitter Harvest in 1990, a pamphlet that takes stock of the politics
of the Muslim Brotherhood. He is convinced that by accepting the (democratic) political game,
the Brotherhood simultaneously legitimizes the Egyptian state and rejects the importance and
necessity of jihad. Therefore, the Muslim Brotherhood has quietly become part of the camp of
‘hypocrites,’ nominal Muslims who make alliances with the infidel authorities. A year later, al-
Zawahiri dared to go a step further. In his Council to the Umma, al-Zawahiri continues his
criticism of parliamentarianism but also attempts to undermine the position of Saudi Arabia’s
now-deceased chief scholar, Ousama Ben Baz. Al-Zawahiri, as leader of the Egyptian jihad
organization, continued to try for years to accelerate the revolution in Egypt. It was not until
1998 that, at the hands of Bin Laden, he quietly allowed the global struggle to take precedence
over the local. The distant enemy becomes more important than the nearby one, however much
he keeps repeating that the fight against the infidels must also be waged against the ‘hypocrites’
and ‘apostates’. In 2001, after the 9/11 attacks, al-Zawahiri published Horsemen under the
banner of the Prophet in which he denounced Bush’s “new crusade” against Islam as well as
the reformism and political entrism of the Muslim Brothers. This text reads like al-Zawahiri’s
political biography and testament. He goes over his militant career, takes note of the failures
and problems, legitimizes the attacks in the U.S. and tries to convince the masses to mobilize
against imperialism. A year later, The Allegiance and the Rupture was published. In contrast to
Horsemen, this work is a religious tract in which al-Zawahiri tries to set himself up as an
accomplished alim. The central idea in the work is that Muslims should support and help each
other at all times while completely cutting ties with the infidels. The allegiance towards other
Muslims, combined with a political and individual break with the infidels obviously aims to
polarize the world. This is almost literally the mirror image of Bush’s statement “you're either
with us or against us”. After al-Qaeda’s role was almost eliminated by the U.S. invasion of
Afghanistan, after 9/11, against the Taliban regime, the torch was taken over by Islamic State,
thanks to the U.S. war in Iraq in 2003.

Salafism and jihadism

To understand the scope of salafiyya we must take a detour through Islamic history. The word
itself refers to the salaf, the pious ancestors, and refers to the first and most faithful supporters
of the Prophet. The salafiyya has the ambition to return to the practices of these first generation

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Muslims. It does not want to live as in the seventh century, but wants to find in the behavior of
the Prophet and his followers the levers to understand the Qur’an today. The followers of the
salafiyya, the salafis, centralize the importance of the sunna of the prophet, the totality of words,
deeds and gestures of the prophet. The sunna is seen as the key to the interpretation of the
Qur’an. It is therefore immediately noticeable that human reason is rejected as a means of
interpretation. This discussion raged for quite some time in the ninth century and seems to be
playing a prominent role again today. In the first century after the emergence of Islam, fierce
theological debates raged that were linked from the start to political power struggles. The
starting point was the theological problem of whether or not the Qur’an was created and the
attributes of God as they appeared in the Qur’an. It had not escaped the notice of the early
thinkers of Islam that a serious theoretical question arose: how could one express the absolute
transcendence of God and at the same time insist on a divine text (the Qur’an) that seemed to
be embedded in social reality? On top of that, how could that be reconciled with the divine
attributes? Did God really sit on a throne? Did God have hands, arms...? The first school of
thought to formulate a clear answer to this, and which for a time was the official doctrine of the
Islamic empire under the Abbasids, was the Mu’tazila. This philosophical school came,
centuries before there was any European Enlightenment, to (for the time) bold conclusions.
God, they argued, could not possess specific attributes such as “power” or “knowledge”. For if
that were the case, then other things could come alongside God who would possess other
attributes, which would mean that God would no longer be one and unique. God can be
omnipotent or omniscient, but therefore must not possess power or knowledge. Since the divine
essence also belongs to the eternal, it cannot have its opposite. But the world of human beings
is not eternal and in that world anything can have its opposite. Specifically, this meant that the
Mutazilites assumed that the Qur’an was created by God with a clear destination: man on earth.
The consequence they drew from this was that the Qur’an did not belong to the divine essence
and therefore was made primarily for a well-defined time and a well-defined humanity. Since
everything changed, it was therefore necessary to approach the Qur’an with the autonomy of
the rational mind and adapt it to changing circumstances. In short, in order to defend the
absolute transcendence of God from a formal and logical standpoint, the mutazilites
desacralized the Qur’an. The first harsh reaction against that thinking came from a group of
people around the traditionalist Ahmad ibn Hanbal (died in 855), who was the founder of what
is today called the salafiyya. For ibn Hanbal, all such philosophical speculation was dangerous
to the faith itself and therefore questions such as “Does God have a throne? An arm?” were to
be left unanswered. The believer had to know and tell only that about God which was in the
Qur’an itself. For him, the Qur’an was indeed eternal and divine, and hence elevated above
human reason. Ibn Hanbal thus proclaimed that human reason could never fully fathom the
divine message, but that the best and most accurate way was to use the life of the Prophet and
his first followers (salaf) was a key towards understanding. Through the study of the sunna,
one could best preserve the divine message. The result, then, was the gradual rigidity of thought

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in what has come to be called the method of the hadith. The sunna is the totality of sayings,
deeds and gestures of the Prophet. But it is primarily what he said, the so-called hadith, that is
central. Without going into the very complex technical matter of the hadith here, we can say
that the study of those words has a great impact on contemporary Islam. It is in that way of
thinking, this method of approaching the divine message, that the specificity of the salafiyya
lies: the search for the way in which one can be a good Muslim goes along the analysis of what
the Prophet and his first followers did.

A second important source of contemporary salafiyya, in addition to its religious and legalistic
methodology, are the works on politics and social issues of two thinkers: Ibn Taymiyya (1263-
1328) and Muhammad Ben Abdelwahhab (1703-1791). Today, as we shall see further on, there
are different tendencies within the Salafiyya. While all tendencies share the method, they
sometimes differ greatly in their attitudes toward issues of power. Ibn Taymiyya lived in the
late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. He is a thinker who is frequently quoted and read
by many Islamists but also jihadists and Salafists. It was the rediscovery of Ibn Taymiyya’s
work, written at a time of crisis for the Muslim empire, that radically changed the content of
jihad. The importance of his work is that he sought to find a ground and a principle for the
construction of an Islamist identity outside the framework of a formal political institution such
as the caliphate (which disappeared with the invasion of the Moghuls). His main concern was
not the Islamic character of governance, but rather the defense of Islamic identity. The
consequence of this view of jihad was the gradual but steady emphasis on ritualistic purity that
served an inner movement toward purification. Ibn Taymiyya had taken different positions on
various themes throughout his career so that today everyone will find something to like in his
oeuvre. While Ibn Taymiyya called for opposing the Mongols who converted to Islam (because,
in his opinion, their conversion was superficial and hypocritical), other times he called for
remaining loyal to the rulers at all times. Most notably, Ibn Taymiyya emphasized the purity of
rules and practices so strongly that the ‘pure’ were rather quick to doubt the faith of those who
showed somewhat less ‘zeal’ or believed differently. Thus, Ibn Taymiyya did not usually call
for political action in times of deep crisis but stressed the importance of ritualistic homogeneity.
He was also one of the first to define Islam separately from an Islamic political government and
power. The result is obvious: the only true believers were those who adhered to the teachings
of Ibn Taymiyya, all the rest were heretics (Jews, Christians...) or perhaps no more than nominal
Muslims (Shiiites, Alevis...). This opened the way for enormous violence against all kinds of
Muslims with different views... something that is undeniably the case today as well.
Mohammed Ben Abdelwahhab stiffened and deepened this analysis further. Not only did he
accuse others of being bad Muslims, but his own Sunni brethren were also cast into the spell.
They were accused of straying from the straight path. Abdelwahhab, who thus laid the
foundation of the power of the clan of Saud, emphasized the uniqueness of God (tawhid). Since
God is unique, only He may be admired and worshipped. Whereupon Abdelwahhab began to

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attack all forms of popular belief (such as Sufism with its venerations of saints). This view is
also very much present in contemporary Salafi traditions.

An initial thrust of contemporary Salafiyya can be described as literalist-ritualist and wants the
believer to personally immerse himself in the religious texts and methods, and rejects any form
of political participation. Moreover, it tries to exhibit as little social participation as possible.
This is why this group, which is growing in terms of its following, has turned against the Muslim
Brotherhood. While the latter advocate dialogue and participation both in the Arab world and
in Europe, this salafiyya current primarily represents a quasi-sectarian withdrawal from society.
As such, this salafiyya is not so much concerned with politics and state affairs, but rather with
the individual practice of Muslims who live by a very strict and literal code. Everything in daily
life is reduced to the sacred sources. Unlike the Islamism of the Muslim Brothers, for example,
the Salafiyya rejects Western political concepts and is not concerned with social (social justice)
or economic issues. Its only goal is to live according to a self-proclaimed authentic Islamic way
of life. That way of life is possessed by the idea of sin (haram) and therefore rejects any form
of innovation (bid’a). This tendency refers to the current of people who are community
withdrawalists. The followers of this current (and not movement, because it is not formally
structured) increasingly detach themselves from the society, the state and the environment in
which they live. They then peacefully experience a very rigorous and dogmatic Islam that is
reduced to a code of conduct. This current is therefore only indirectly a political phenomenon.
The adherents of this current theoretically reject the nation-state in which they live, because
they consider it illegitimate or simply oppressive. By retreating into a very literal form of Islam,
they are actually saying ‘no’ to the state and public order, but at the same time they reject any
possibility of doing anything about it.

The second current is that of the reformers of the salafiyya. This current, too, uses the same
rigid methodology of ritual purity, and equally emphasizes the continuous struggle between
what is allowed and what is not (hallal and haram). The danger of committing a sin is their
greatest concern and fear. They differ from the first current in the fact that loyalty to the rulers
cannot be infinite. Criticism of political evolutions is sometimes necessary and, as with the
Muslim brothers (with whom they are otherwise at odds), criticism of Muslim leaders who
deviate from the straight path is seen as a duty. This current has been especially prevalent from
the Second Gulf War onward when a relentless criticism of U.S. policy but an even greater
criticism of its allies in the Middle East was developed, a criticism that particularly attacked the
Saudi royal family. We can consider this current reformist not because it somehow has anything
progressive to offer (quite the contrary!), but rather because it works to remove the Wahhabism
on which it relies from the power of the royal house. They want, as it were, the king to swear
allegiance to the religion, while today, conversely, the religion must bow to the interests of the
royal house.

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A third current, which we have already described to a considerable extent, is the salafiyya
jihadiyya, or the current that advocates jihad as the central aspect of the faith. Even though
there is a multitude of groups (each with their interests and goals), they all assume that anyone
can start a fight and make it a duty. The biggest fault line runs between the internationalists of
al-Qaeda, IS, and the like who fight anyone who opposes them, and the nationalists who see
the fight only as framed within and against a well-defined state (such as Hamas in Palestine and
Hezbollah in Lebanon). The paradox of the Salafiyya movements today is that they seemingly
harken back to an ossified and primarily ritualistic (as opposed to spiritual) Islam at the very
time when the world is characterized by globalization and thus greater interdependence. It
would be wrong to see the salafiyya as simply a reaction to globalization. Rather, it is a part of
it! Due to increased communication possibilities, and especially the not to be underestimated
role of the internet, the salafiyya is a particular way of believing (and sometimes of politics)
that only thrives within the framework of globalization. It is not a return to some older form of
Islam, but something new (even if it draws from Islamic tradition). The Salafiyya opposes
reason as a means of interpreting the Qur’an, but continually calls for personal interpretation
(ijtihad). The gates of ijtihad are wide open, they argue, because they have never been closed.
This highly individualistic approach is one of the success elements of this movement. All sorts
of traditions, legal schools or other religious authorities are done away with and in their place
comes a so-called personal choice. One is not a Muslim, but one becomes one by making the
effort oneself in thought and action. This way of thinking undermines all forms of vertical
power (of the state with respect to the believing citizen or of the imam with respect to the
follower) and is therefore an eminently transnational phenomenon that can thrive in Jakarta,
Antwerp as well as in Buenos Aires. It is also a kind of religion that gets rid of the cultural
embeddedness in which religious traditions usually thrive. Like the Protestant Pentecostal
movement (the fastest growing religion in the world), this kind of faith is especially concerned
with the idea of the danger of sin and the way it can be avoided in a quasi-instinctive way. In
the face of uncertainty and the many questions it poses to itself, this new believer chooses not
to reinterpret the Qur’an and the sunna but, conversely, to look for ways in which contemporary
challenges can be reconciled with divine precepts in order to distill new norms from them.
Instead of, for example, finding ways to deal with mixed bathing, or learning to live with forms
of promiscuity, the reverse is to strive not to participate in it, to oppose it, or to fight it.

6. Populism, (new) authoritarianism and post-truth politics

Populism can be seen as the “manifestation of a profound systemic crisis with a long antecedent,
which makes it necessary to reweigh and hold up to the light our liberal and democratic
principles” (Pels, 2011:20). Contemporary populism symbolizes a new breakthrough of the
political right and the extreme right, based on a renewed reading of liberal, conservative and
nationalist ideals. Populism redefines the national-democratic and the national-individualistic

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character of politics. Populists nationalize democracy by defining democracy as an achievement
of their own culture, as the historical result of a specifically European or Western (whether
defined as a Christian civilization or a secular tradition) evolution that other countries and
peoples cannot imitate. This leads to nativism that assumes that states can only be inhabited by
natives, since immigrants pose an essential threat to the homogeneous nation-state (whether
defined in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, culture or civilization). The new populism, while
emphasizing one’s own people and culture, is also national-individualist (Mudde, 2007; Pels,
2011). Citizens who assert their right to anything and everything (simply because they belong
to the ‘natives’) show little solidarity with others (certainly not with migrants, refugees... but
neither with the unemployed, ‘profiteers’,...). This individualism combines a populist ideal of
freedom, defined as belonging to one’s own identity group in opposition to other cultures and/or
religions (and in particular Islam and Muslims), with an economic populism or welfare
chauvinism whereby only ‘one’s own people’ are allowed to enjoy the benefits of the economy.
Right-wing populism is not necessarily against the free market, but wants to correct the market
based on nationalist criteria. (Pels, 2011:15-51). In the US, President Trump's slogan “Make
America Great Again” reflected this idea. Trump has pursued economic policies that have
clearly benefited the U.S. economy (against the interests of both China and the EU), but these
policies primarily benefited the wealthy Americans and not so much American workers. Several
far-right and conservative parties within the EU have also rediscovered the importance of
“national economies” and are strongly opposing what is seen as a neoliberal European Union.

The new authoritarianism that manifests itself worldwide from India (Modi) over Russia (Putin)
and from Turkey (Erdogan) to Brazil (Bolsanaro) and the US (Trump), opposes economic
globalization – or at least the way it has been organized so far – which they believe does not
benefit enough ‘their own group’. The authoritarian critique of globalization is not against
neoliberal global capitalism, but against the fact that it does not benefit the ‘own group’. Instead
of seeking to reorganize the world economy in a more equitable way, authoritarianism looks
only at the prosperity and well-being of its own group (whether that is the ‘whites’ in the US,
the ‘Muslims’ in Pakistan or the ‘Hindus’ in India). Thus, authoritarianism does not criticize
the capitalist world system as such, but is constantly on the lookout for any threat (real or
perceived) that can be blamed for the shortcomings of the free market. Since the leaders of this
new authoritarianism have no criticism of the neoliberal market itself, they constantly shift the
focus to the cultural sphere. Trump and his cabinet, composed largely of billionaires belonging
to the world economic elite, therefore devised policies that excluded groups that were perceived
as a threat to their power and interests (illegal immigrants, Muslims, African Americans, ethnic
and/or sexual minorities, antifa, BLM... ) combined with an exaggeration of specific threats
(terrorism) and a dismissal of some threats that are particularly real (climate change) but
trivialized. “Instead of taking a serious, consistent, coordinated, long-term approach to ending
emerging existential fears, governments around the world are seizing the opportunity to fill the

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vacuum of legitimacy left by the downsizing of social services and the winding down of postwar
efforts to create a ‘family of nations.’ They choose to make a powerful commitment to making
social problems and, consequently, thinking and acting in politics, a matter of security.”
(Bauman, 2017:38)

Nancy Fraser places the responsibility for the rise of the new authoritarianism on so-called
“progressive neoliberalism,” the combination of a belief in the global free market and an
(excessive?) attention to diversity, empowerment of women, or the fight against discrimination.
Fraser, of course, believes that these themes should be addressed but “by identifying progress
with meritocracy (if you just do your best, you’ll get there, s.z.) rather than equality, these terms
equated emancipation with the rise of talented women, minorities, and gays in the corporate
hierarchy who emphasize the winner mentality, rather than the abolition of that hierarchy.
These liberal-individualist conceptions of progress gradually replaced the more diffusion-
oriented, anti-hierarchical, egalitarian, class-conscious, and anti-capitalist visions of
emancipation that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s.” (Fraser, 2017:63) The consequence for
the political system is that the voter is left with only the choice between progressive
neoliberalism or the reactionary populism of a Trump, Erdogan, Putin, Wilders or Modi while
according to her, a leftist and thus emancipatory politics, should reject such choice. The
problem, for Fraser, is not so much that reactionary populism is or is not a new form of fascism
but that liberalism and fascism, however different, are intertwined throughout world capitalism.
As much as liberalism incorporates different values and norms than fascism, both are “a product
of unbridled capitalism, which destabilizes ways of life and environments everywhere and
brings both individual liberation and unprecedented suffering. Liberalism expresses the first,
liberating side of this process, while glossing over the anger and pain associated with the other.
When these sentiments fester in the absence of an alternative, they fuel every possible form of
autocracy, including those that truly deserve the name fascism and others that emphatically do
not.” (Fraser, 2017:69)

In post-truth politics, politicians appeal more to the emotions and feelings of the public than to
facts. Perhaps deception and lies have always been a part of politics, but what has changed
significantly is that it is not a matter of hiding certain truths from the public (political scandals),
but the deliberate use of lies, half-truths and deception to achieve certain political goals. The
origins of post-truth continue to be widely debated. Some situate the possibility of a post-truth
era in the introduction of postmodern theories into academia. In particular, the theory of
deconstruction – the idea that a text does not necessarily represent what the author intended,
but can be deconstructed to expose the political, cultural, social, and economic presuppositions
that underlie it – developed by philosopher Jacques Derrida and first applied in literary studies-
has been criticized by many. When this theory achieved academic success, it was adopted by
the rest of the humanities and social sciences, which applied the theory far beyond the literary

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criticism that Derrida envisioned. The idea that there was no such thing as an absolute or
objective truth and that there were therefore only different perspectives on reality was used not
only to ‘analyze’ society but also to criticize science itself. Social constructivism claimed that
reality, including science, was a social creation and thus undermined the scientific claim to
objective knowledge production. From the late 1980s through the 1990s, science wars raged in
academia. The Sokal Hoax in particular attracted a great deal of attention and resonated far
beyond the ivory towers of the university. Alan Sokal, a professor of mathematics, managed to
publish a nonsensical parody article in Social Text, a leading postmodern academic journal.
Sokal wanted to show that nonsense and sloppy thinking that denied objective realities was
taking over academia. “Much contemporary academic theorizing consists precisely of attempts
to blur these obvious truths - the utter absurdity of it all being concealed through obscure and
pretentious language. (...) Politically, I'm angered because most (though not all) of this silliness
is emanating from the self-proclaimed Left. ' (Sokal, 1996) Sokal’s article brought key
postmodern ideas to the attention of a much wider audience and, paradoxically, what was once
seen as the academic tool for (mainly American) liberal or ‘left’ thinkers was gradually adopted
by conservatives and right-wing ideologues. Organized in a wide range of think tanks
established during the 1970s, they spread doubt about the objectivity of science and used its
claim to truth to advance their own political and moral agendas.

An initial wave of attacks on science came in various forms of denial of science on a range of
topics from acid rain to the hole in the ozone layer and, especially politically salient in the U.S.,
the theory of evolution. Postmodernist ideas were welcomed by supporters of creationism, who
used them to turn their religion-based ideas about human evolution into intelligent design. The
success of intelligent design in the U.S. became an inspiration for climate change denial,
because it followed the same pattern of action and mobilization: “Attack the existing science,
identify and fund your own experts, push the idea that the issue is “controversial,” get your
own side out through the media and lobbying, and watch the public react. ' McIntyre adds:
“Right-wingers are using some of the arguments and techniques of postmodernism to attack the
truth of other scientific claims that clash with their conservative ideology.” (McIntyre,
2018:140-141) From there, with the fragmentation of popular news consumption, the rapid rise
of social media and new online publications that challenged traditional media, it was only a
matter of time before the advent of fake news that ushered in the era of post-truth. “In an
environment in which partisanship can be assumed, and it is often enough to “pick a team”
rather than look at the evidence, misinformation can be spread in the open and fact-checking
can be disparaged. The selective use of facts that prop up one’s position, and the complete
rejection of facts that do not, seems part and parcel of creating the new post-truth reality.”
(McIntyre, 2018:33-34) The work of Breitbart (and its creator Steve Bannon), Infowars and
many others, each with their army of trolls, have redefined political debates around the world.

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Post-truth is thus not so much about denying the existence of a truth, but rather about the idea
that feelings come before facts, and that facts are subordinate to one’s worldview or political
vision. “Thus post-truth amounts to a form of ideological supremacy, whereby its practitioners
are trying to compel someone into believing in something whether there is good evidence for it
or not. And this is a recipe for political domination.” (McIntyre, 2018:13)

7. Neoconservatism, the alt-right and the new extreme right

Neoconservatism emerged in the 1970s in the U.S. and represents a break with classical
conservatism. One of its founders, Leo Strauss (1899-1973), had a paradoxical influence on
American neoconservatism. Unlike the neocons, Strauss did not believe that liberalism was the
best political regime. Strauss developed his political views under the Weimar Republic, a time
of doubt and a regeneration of conservative thought. Influenced by the jurist Carl Schmitt, who
joined the Nazi party in 1933, and his ideas about the dichotomy between friend and enemy as
the basis of politics, Strauss believed that liberalism “meant the assertion of freedom over
virtue, a modern doctrine of natural right turns politics into a conflict of wills in which anything
is as good as anything else so long as someone wants it. The end result is nihilism, which
undermines liberalism itself.” (Gray, 2007:129) The idea that nihilism was at the heart of the
problem of political modernity reflected the German zeitgeist of the interwar period. American
neoconservative thinkers were sympathetic to the idea that liberalism needed a strong
metaphysical foundation, something they found in Christian (Protestant) values,
notwithstanding the fact that Strauss himself considered reason and revelation irreconcilable.
Neoconservatism has therefore developed in a way that departs abruptly from some of the
mainstays of classical conservatism. The founders of the movement in the U.S., such as Irving
Kristol, Daniel Bell, Patrick Moynihan or Nathan Glazer, did not draw inspiration from classical
conservative thinkers such as Edmund Burke or their contemporaries Russell Kirk or Michael
Oakeshott. Classical conservatism sees modern political ideology as it emerged in the wake of
the French Revolution as destructive in nature and sees it as the basis of violence and war.
Neoconservative thinkers, on the other hand, “believe that politics is a type of warfare in which
ideology is an essential weapon” (Gray, 2007:122). Of crucial importance, and what
nevertheless connects this new conservatism to classical conservatism, is the conservative idea
of the decisiveness of the lower classes. “It provides the most consistent and profound argument
as to why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, why they
should not be allowed to govern themselves or the polity. Submission is their first duty, agency,
the prerogative of the elite.” (Robin, 2011:7) Neoconservatism derives its coherence not so
much from a specific political doctrine, but rather from its conception of politics.

Depending on the context, neoconservatism may differ from neoliberalism, even though in
many cases they can go together. Neoconservative thinkers do not necessarily dream of a return
to minimal government because they recognize that not all social effects of free markets are

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good or necessarily positive for prosperity and they look to the state to mitigate the negative
effects of the free market. Government, according to neoconservative thinkers, should not
remain neutral but instead enforce ideas that promote the good life. Whether this is articulated
in a law-and-order discourse, a revived nationalist discourse focused on one’s own community,
or even religion as an essential foundation for social cohesion, neoconservatism can emerge on
either side of the political spectrum. Neoconservatism thus seems to recover the idea of the
social engineering of society, after all a classic idea of liberalism and socialism. Today’s
neoconservative movement (and particularly its American variant) assumes that the world can
(and must) be changed. It is mainly in the US and Britain that neoconservatism has had the
greatest international impact. Neoconservatism in the U.S. brings together a collection of views,
which obtains its coherence through the belief in the supremacy of the American way of life.
This means, first and foremost, that economic growth must not be compromised and that, in the
name of national security, the US has the right to defend its interests worldwide. An
international legal order that can interfere with this must give way to Washington’s unilateral
decisions if necessary. Toward the national sphere, this means a search for unity of thought and
action. Movements like the silent majority or the born-again Christians emerged as powerful
companions the route of the Republican party. Not only other religions were considered alien
to the U.S., but also homosexuality, pernicious music, the theory of evolution, abortion... The
British former Prime Minister Tony Blair and the former U.S. President G.W. Bush deviated
from the more realistic approach to international politics after the demise of the Soviet Union.
The belief that force (and thus violence and war) can lead to the victory of “the Good” (in its
eternal struggle against “Evil” i.e. Islamic terrorism, Iraq, Saddam Hussein...) and that good
intentions are most important for politics, served as legitimization for a number of wars that
were all justified as being humanitarian interventions. The war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq
in 2003 is a crucial example. Saddam Hussein was accused of supporting and collaborating
with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organization and building a nuclear military arsenal. Both
accusations were false and turned out to be willful lies. However, it would be too easy to dismiss
these lies as simple smokescreens for (mostly material) interests behind them (e.g., access to
oil, support for Israel...). Blair, like Bush, was convinced that war was in the service of human
progress and that establishing a new world order was morally the right thing to do. The war,
which caused many casualties and even crossed the boundaries of classical warfare (torture,
extra-legal renditions, the Abu Ghraib prison, or Guantanamo ‘affairs’) were seen as
unfortunate but necessary steps on the path of the greater good. Deception and lies, according
to Blair and Bush, were not really deception or lies because they served for what felt right. The
pseudo reality that Bush and Blair constructed – Iraq as an al-Qaeda stronghold that produced
nuclear weapons of mass destruction – resembled a postmodern game in which truth could be
established through power, coercion and war. The end result was the bitter irony of a war-
ravaged country that was indeed transformed into a training ground for radical and terrorist

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movements. In that respect, the rapid rise of the Islamic State in 2003-2004 was only the final
refutation of their worldview.

In continental Europe, neoconservatism was adopted by far-right, racist, parties that reoriented
themselves in a so-called post-racial society, as well as in numerous nationalist parties (from
the French FN to the Flemish NVA) and populist political formations (Wilders, Baudet, etc.).
“Though it is often claimed that the left stands for equality while the right stands for freedom,
this notion misstates the actual disagreement between right and left. Historically, the
conservative has favored liberty for the higher orders and constraint for the lower orders. What
the conservative sees and dislikes in equality, in other words, is not a threat to freedom but its
extension. For in that extension, he sees a loss of his own freedom. ' (Robin, 2011:8) Hence the
extreme right-wing formations turned en masse against Islam, Muslims, refugees and migrants.
The origins of this body of thought can be found in the work of various far-right thinkers who
reinterpreted the work of earlier radical thinkers such as Oswald Spengler, Ernst Junger or Carl
Schmitt. In Europe, Alain de Benoist (1943) in particular is sees as a precursor for what is called
la nouvelle droite or the new right. Already in the 1970s, De Benoist wanted to revalue the
European identity to get rid of what he called the predominance of Marxism (today reflected in
the debates about the so-called predominance of cultural Marxism) and the liberal crisis. He is
also seen as one of the inspirations of the European identity movement, although this movement
has differences with Benoist’s thinking (Sedgwick, 2019).

De Benoist calls himself conservative in the sense that he is for the preservation of traditional
values and adheres to a holistic vision of society. But, unlike French conservatives, he rejects
the free market economy, human rights but also the Christian heritage. De Benoist was one of
the right-wing thinkers who was influenced by Gramsci but thus transposed it from a left
emancipatory narrative to an extreme right-wing framework. De Benoist followed Gramsci in
his contention that a movement had to develop a metapolitics, an acting on ideological and
cultural issues, before proceeding to the effective taking of power. In other words, the minds
must mature before political deeds are undertaken. Political victories come after ideological
hegemony has been obtained. He therefore founded the Groupement de recherche et d'études
pour la civilisation européenne (GRECE), an intellectual think tank that since the 70’s was less
concerned with politics in the traditional sense of the word but mainly with influencing social
thought (Camus, 2019). The entry of all kinds of ideas of the group into mainstream society
first happened through the influence of journalists who picked up their ideas (such as Guillaume
Faye or Louis Pauwels at Le Figaro) and today is running at full speed through the mass use of
the new social media. The primacy of culture over politics in right-wing Gramscianism is
reinforced by digitalization. Ico Maly even speaks of a metapolitics 2.0, an algorithm-produced
cultural conquest of thought by the new right (Maly, 2018). It has since become clear that
Gramsci as a communist was indeed recuperated by the new right which increasingly resembles

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neo-fascism. Politicians like Baudet and Wilders in the Netherlands, De Winter, Van Grieken,
Van Rooy and Pohlmann in Flanders, Marionne Maréchal-Le Pen in France, but also a whole
range of intellectuals like Roger Scruton, Paul Cliteur or Sid Lukassen refer to Gramsci.

In Russia, meanwhile, from the same ideals, Alexander Dugin developed a neo-fascist ideology
he called the Fourth Political Theory. Dugin, who maintains contacts with Steve Bannon, de
Benoist and other right-wing European figures, proclaims the advent of a new, consistent,
fascism. Not the racist fascism of the Nazis that he sees as something specifically German but
a combination of genuine Russian conservatism coupled with a desire for real change away
from liberalism dictated by the U.S. Dugin is pushing for Eurasian cooperation separate from
the US, and bears similarities to Génération Identitaire in Europe. Génération Identitaire was
founded in France in 2003 as an identitarian movement centered on European civilization and
its many cultures – not the EU as a supranational institution. Syncretic in its ideological
reference – it combines nativism, Catholic social teaching, decentralization and direct
democracy – the group focuses primarily on what it sees as the two greatest imperialist threats
to Europe: the US and Islam. Closely linked to this movement are a host of European
organizations, such as Alternative für Deutschland, Pegida, Schild en Vriend,... all of which
share the same anti-Islam, anti-immigrant and often anti-Semitic agenda. Rob Riemen (2010)
sees all these movements as evidence of a perpetual return of fascism, others use the term
neofascism to clarify the innovations with respect to the fascism of the 1930s, and still others,
such as Enzo Traverso (2017) speak of postfascism. Be that as it may, all these movements
show unmistakable traits of what was once fascism, make allusions to neo-Nazi terminology
(the repopulation of Europe), and coquettishly flaunt the principle of the End Boss, the Führer
(Scheltiens & Verlaeckt, 2021).

8. Progress optimism, realism, and global inequality

Enlighntenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven
Pinker (b. 1954) aims to provide a framework for a new age of reason. Pinker argues that reason,
science, and humanism, the basic values of the Enlightenment, have brought progress to the
world and will continue to do so. For Pinker, progress is literally everywhere, in health,
prosperity, peace, and security, yet many people (and apparently especially “complaining
intellectuals who hate progress”) seem to be pessimistic today. Pinker wants to provide
arguments for being optimistic, to convince humanity that there is no reason for pessimism.
Pessimism is a betrayal of reason and common sense and can lead to making wrong political
choices. Pinker offers a sermon rather than an analysis, a story to convince people of their duty
to optimism. Figures can always be interpreted in different ways – there is a lot to be said about
Pinker’s poverty figures in particular – but the fact is that mankind has experienced tremendous
progress in recent centuries. But from where does this progress come?

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Pinker seems to simply assume that progress has come about simply because entire populations
have spontaneously become more tolerant, reasonable, and enlightened. Just as Adam Smith
needed an ‘invisible hand’ to explain the beneficial social effects of individual selfishness on
the free market, Pinker speaks of a “mysterious arc” that pushes reality toward greater justice.
In Pinker’s story there is no place for social movements, revolutions and uprisings, in short
there is no attention for the concrete struggle of so many people for those things that led to that
progress: the struggle against unequal rights, against slavery, for the minimum wage, against
racism, against Apartheid, for a clean ecology... Pinker’s history is one without heroes, without
a human subject. He praises the welfare state but describes the ideologies that underpinned it
as forms of pessimism, he applauds the emancipation of women and homosexuals but
denounces the so-called social justice warriors. Thus, the ideas of a few important
Enlightenment thinkers (Pinker has it especially for Montesquieu, Smith, Hume, Rousseau and
Condorcet) seem to be the only ‘heroes’. History according to Pinker is a history without
conflict and without struggle, ultimately even without people. Or rather, the many conflicts are
merely details in the ceaseless march toward progress.

Given Pinker’s own optimism, then, he cannot help but defend that which exists. Capitalism
and globalization have generally led to material improvement and should therefore be
embraced. Risks and potential dangers associated with them (populism, Putin, climate denial,
or the Islamic State) will disappear of their own accord; a bright future awaits us all. Pinker also
pays little attention to new risks, especially those related to climate, nature, and biodiversity.
Or risks that come from the fact that something is rational for an individual but perhaps
irrational for a society. Again, Pinker thinks that the genius of humanity will find a solution
(after all, we are always moving forward). And so he often seems to lean toward a simple
scientism – a rock-solid belief in (exact) science as the only objective means by which societies
can solve their problems and challenges. Therein lies another weakness of Pinker’s thinking.
Pinker seems to have rejected all forms of skepticism and critical analysis and to preach a belief
in progress... not recognizing that skepticism was precisely indicative of the Enlightenment.

The “disappearance” of the political in the narrative of progress is also found in humanitarian
thinking that has become ubiquitous in recent decades, in parallel with the advance of human
rights as a political discourse. When asked about the actual role of humanitarian work, Didier
Fassin, the former secretary of Doctors Without Borders replied as follows: “Until not so long
ago, in the 1960s, volunteers went abroad to fight for the freedom of oppressed peoples,
whereas today the humanitarian worker takes care of the victims of conflicts. Whereas
previously revolutionary language was used to defend oppressed peoples, today a
psychologizing vocabulary is used to make the world aware of their misfortune. Before,
imperialist domination was denounced; today we reveal its psychic traces. Not long ago we
glorified the resistance of a population; henceforth we examine the resilience and survival

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instincts of individuals. Of course, the traditional critique of oppression has not disappeared
but it is more than ever embedded in a human rights discourse. Geostrategic analyses have not
simply been replaced by a therapeutic approach...yet it is clear that a new political language,
laced with morality, is being employed to address certain good issues more efficiently.' (Fassin,
2012) While in the 1970s the criticism of underdevelopment and global inequality often had
political overtones (against Western imperialism), the Washington Consensus held out to the
world that free trade and free markets were the only possibility for global development.
Privatization and financial deregulation were imposed on countries of the Global South. This
ideological choice was dismissed as reason itself. It did not take long for this vision to meet
with criticism, not only in theory but also in practice, as many countries of the Global South
often became more unequal faster than before. Globalization had also literally globalized the
debate on development: it was no longer just the technocrats from the World Bank or the IMF
who had ideas on what development was and how to get there, but global civil society (including
voices from the Global South and celebrities) also joined the debate. The Nobel Laureate,
Joseph Stiglitz, accused the IMF of being one of those responsible for the underdevelopment
of the Third World. In his best-known work Globalization and its Discontents, he argued
against the analysis and practices of the IMF in particular, but also of the World Bank and the
World Trade Organization (WTO). He knew what he was talking about because from 1997 to
2000 he worked at the World Bank, where he used his position as vice president to raise
questions about the effectiveness of financial aid to developing countries. Another Nobel
Laureate in Economics, Amartya Sen, also emphasized the fallibility of free market theory.
Like Stiglitz, he did so not by placing that critique in an economic alternative but by criticizing
its inherent contradictions. In his book Freedom as Development, Sen argued that progress and
development were only possible through the elimination of unfreedom. Expanding freedom
should be the goal and the means of any development effort. Sen came to this conclusion
because he saw poverty not only as a matter of income but rather as a general lack of opportunity
for people to live the kind of life they would like to live themselves. The freedom that Sen
advocated, therefore, refers to both economic freedom and political freedom but equally to
social services (education, health care), guarantees of openness and social security. A more
radical critique of the policies of international financial organizations has come since the early
1990s from the heterogeneous movement of alterglobalism (sometimes called
altermondialism). Alterglobalism is a global movement for global justice. It is a highly
pluralistic, loosely organized movement that opposes the contemporary neoliberal way of
globalizing and works primarily for greater democratic oversight and control of free market
forces. In particular, the movement’s critique focuses on the global socioeconomic and political
inequality that globalization is said to cause or perpetuate. Important themes are debt
cancellation for developing countries, a resolute approach to ecological and social abuses, and
equitable rules for world trade and international financial transactions. The objective is
obviously to reduce the inequality between the rich North and the poor South and to achieve

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this on a sustainable basis with respect for the environment and climate. The movement consists
of a multitude of national organizations and networks without any centralized governance.
Consequently, there are often different visions (which can sometimes be contradictory) and
divergent tactics to achieve the goals. Some of the grassroots have revived concrete social
struggles into vigorous resistance. The social protest movements in Seattle (1999), Prague
(2000), Genoa (2001) or Gleneagles (2005) show that many at the grassroots see physical
resistance as legitimate and necessary.

These developments make it clear that progress, while undeniable, must be somewhat nuanced.
The French economist Piketty became a world star with the publication of Le capital au XXIe
siècle. In it, Piketty showed – based on an unprecedented amount of statistical material – that
since the 1990s inequality has been systematically growing worldwide. Contemporary
capitalism, which Piketty calls hypercapitalism, characterized by a huge concentration of
wealth in the hands of an ever-smaller group, is heading for an inequality similar to that at the
end of the nineteenth century. The Keynesian postwar period was an exception to a process of
concentration of capital that began in the eighteenth century. Inequality, Piketty argues, must
be reduced by a progressive tax on capital. It is in his Capitalism and Ideology that Piketty
further analyzes his initial findings. Piketty again notes that inequality is effectively globalized
but also that progress in the past has not been the result of the concentration of capital but rather
the pursuit of equality and especially access to education by the majorities in society. Since the
end of the Cold War, economic globalization, propelled by the growth and development of the
Internet, has ensured that the progress and egalitarian achievements of the past 40 years have
been undone. Keynesian redistribution was replaced by hyper-capitalist inequality. This leads
to more conflicts and more instability in our political systems, to major ideological shifts on the
political field.
One of the major achievements of the post-war period was the spectacular growth in the number
of educated people. As a result, the class structure of society (the struggle between rich and
poor) changed significantly. It has become a system of multiple elites in which the highly
educated, the intellectual and cultural elite (the gauche brahmane), appeal to a different
electorate than the wealthy, the business and financial elite (la droite marchande). The problem
is that both elites benefit from different aspects of globalization and the majority of the
population that does not belong to one of these elites feels abandoned.
Both the workers, the lower middle classes and a part of the small self-employed are
increasingly resisting hyper-capitalist globalization, are more and more open to nationalist
projects that go against the logic of the EU... It is in this electoral shift that Piketty places the
rise of populism, and especially social-nativism in which xenophobic nationalism and an
aggressive identity politics are mixed with a series of socio-economic redistributive program
points. This social-nativism is the new guise of the far right, combining a theory of property
(redistribution) with a theory of borders (‘our own people first). Piketty thinks this social-

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nativism is a dead end and argues for a participatory socialism of the 21st century in which a
new tax system must play a central role. A new politics of redistribution that must be organized
internationally must also address large fortunes and the movement of capital through
progressive taxation and return power to the people (not just the elites). Piketty’s success has
undeniably to do with the fact that many people, all over the world, are looking for alternatives
to the current unequal international order but also with the reasoned, scientific, nature of his
work. Admittedly, there is an important topic about which Piketty hardly says anything, nature
and climate!

Communism, too, is experiencing renewed vigor these days. For Zizek, the 2008 financial crisis
represents the second death of Fukuyama’s utopian prediction from the 1990s. After the
political dream of the liberal-democratic utopia was debunked on 9/11, the financial crisis was
“a sign of the end of the economic face of Fukuyama's dream...” (Zizek 2009: 5). The prevailing
capitalist ideology tries to blame the financial economic crisis not on global capitalism but on
secondary or contingent aspects of it such as the regulation of the market by the states, the
corrupt and unethical behavior of some businessmen, or, from the 2010s onwards
multiculturalism, migrants, refugees... Out of the crisis and the renormalization of capitalism
comes a renewed capitalism that places social responsibility and ecological awareness at the
center and seeks to provide technological solutions to global problems and challenges. This
anti-ideological position – a problem like climate change needs clear decisions and choices and
is therefore a political and not a technical issue – is false, according to Zizek. Capitalism
pretends to be a neutral social mechanism but is ultimately an ideological conception; there is
nothing natural about the spontaneous organization of the market. The political Left thus faces
the difficult task of demonstrating that there is nothing natural in the current crisis, that the
existing global economic system rests on a series of political decisions. According to Zizek,
these include the threat of ecological catastrophe; the inappropriateness of the concept of private
property in relation to “intellectual property” (the organization of the knowledge economy); the
social and ethical consequences of the new technological developments (biotechnology, digital
economy) and the growth of new forms of apartheid. While the first three challenges are
ultimately about the survival of humanity, the fourth challenge is primarily a matter of justice.
Neither liberal democracy nor socialism have answers to this. Zizek sees in socialism not so
much a ‘run-up’ to communism but rather a challenger to the only real alternative that remains...
communism. Socialism stands for an egalitarian collective while communism aims for an
organic community. Capitalism stands for private property, socialism for state property, but
communism just wants to overcome property in the “commons”; all the resources that people
as a group or community can use together (and thus decide for what and how these are used),
natural resources (such as common land) but also ecological resources (water, air,...) and
information resources (knowledge, texts, art,...). The new capitalism has become what
Boltanski and Chapiello call a cultural capitalism, a capitalism in which we consume not

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because it is useful, because it provides a status or identity (crf. Debord’s society of spectacle)
but because it gives us an experience that should make our lives pleasant and meaningful
(Starbucks does not sell coffee or Chai latté but a ‘coffee experience’ with ditto ethics),
consumption becomes part of the authentic experience of one’s own Self. Following, and in
response to Alain Badiou’s “communist hypothesis”, Zizek therefore argues for the ‘Idea of
communism’. The Idea (with capital letter, a clear reference to Plato) means a re-exploration of
the ideal of communism, the rediscovery of its essence that is not tainted by the flawed and
problematic experiences we have had with it. Badiou (2010) argues for a re-sourcing beyond
the Marxist theories of the 19thde century and the Leninist and Maoist interpretations. He
distinguishes three dimensions of egalitarian and emancipatory political projects: the
communist hypothesis as a general commitment to the principle of equality; the Idea of
communism as the different formulations of this principle in the limitation of the historical
context and the communist experiments as the political evolutions that put these different forms
of the communist idea to the test.

9. Ecology, climate and nature

From the pollution of the air and seas, to the destruction of the tropical rainforest, to the hole in
the ozone layer; from acid rain, to global warming; ecologists have been warning for an
environmental crisis since the 1970s. Ecology has always criticized some of the basic
assumptions of the main ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while attempting
to offer “a more positive and hopeful vision of human beings’ relationship with the natural
environment and with each other” (Ball & Dagger, 2004:233). Liberalism, socialism, and
conservatism all celebrated progressive human control of and the use of nature. Nature was
either something to be controlled or a resource that could be used for economic growth and
personal enrichment. This human-centered control of nature, according to scientists (first
proposed by Nobel Laureate in Chemistry Paul J. Crutzen and his collaborator, a marine
scientist, Eugene F. Stoermer in 2000) and ecologists, ushered in a new period in history: the
Anthropocene. The geological period between the Ice Age and today, the Holocene, has been
surpassed by an era in which man’s influence on nature is shaping not only life on the planet
but also the future of the planet itself. Climate change and even epidemics caused by viruses
and bacteria are all signs of the new era of the anthropocene.

Dipesh Chakrabarty was one of the first philosophers to consider the impact the anthropocene
might have on human civilization. The ideas of freedom, justice, and equality that have shaped
the history of modern ideologies are being challenged by the limits set by nature. Nature has a
history and is not the passive background against which the human species paints its picture of
progress and civilization. “Whatever our socioeconomic and technological choices, whatever
the rights we wish to celebrate as our freedom, we cannot afford to destabilize conditions (such

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as the temperature zone in which the planet exists) that work like boundary parameters of
human existence. These parameters are independent of capitalism or socialism. They have been
stable for much longer than the histories of these institutions and have allowed human beings
to become the dominant species on earth.” (Chakrabarty, 2009:218) The point is to redefine the
basic assumptions of modern civilization by recognizing that the anthropocene is the result of
the political and economic activities of the richest part of humanity, i.e. the logic of capitalist
accumulation. “While there is no denying that climate change has profoundly to do with the
history of capital, a critique that is only a critique of capital is not sufficient for addressing
questions relating to human history once the crisis of climate change has been acknowledged
and the Anthropocene has begun to loom on the horizon of our present. ' (Chakrabarty,
2009:212)

Ecologism goes against what both liberalism and socialism shared, namely a belief in endless
growth based on ever-increasing production. Ecologism emphasizes that unbridled growth at
some point has negative social consequences (less social welfare) and also damages the human
biotope, the planet. Regardless of some romantic and naive excesses, ecologism is not an anti-
modern or anti-technological ideology but one that warns – in a distant echo of Adorno and
Horkheimer’s dialectic of the Enlightenment – against a one-sided interpretation of human
emancipation. André Gorz (1923-2007), one of the founders of ecologism, emphasized that
ecologism is not just about protecting nature. In Ecologie et liberté, Gorz criticized the logic of
endless capitalist accumulation through the plundering of raw materials, labor and energy, the
impossibility of an eternal productivism (endless growth) and the consumerism associated with
it. Dirk Holemans summed up the framework of ecologism well: “Ecologism stands for the
preservation of the earth in order to build a human world out of it where each one can develop
autonomously through various paths of emancipation.” Holemans’ ecologism offers a new
image of man and society where the emphasis is on cooperation and togetherness – individual
autonomy in connectedness – which together lead to freedom and security. “What connects
them is the importance of relationships: freedom we only build together with and in relation to
other people, the same applies to the development of new forms of certainty.” (Holemans,
2016:134) For Holemans, ecologism is distinguished from liberalism and socialism by its
specific interpretation of autonomy which is neither an egoistic individualism nor collectivism.
It stands for “the joyful potential of shaping the world together. Realizing your autonomy means
emancipation and is diametrically opposed to a one-sided individualism: that joyful shaping
always happens in cooperation with each other, that is why we speak of autonomy in
connectedness, which also expresses the care dimension. ' (Holemans, 2014:141)

There are several ecological trends that Eric Corijn (2022: 148-151) summarizes well.
Ecorealists are prepared to take measures as long as no other, mainly economic, interests are
harmed. The living standards of ‘the hard-working people’ are invoked, but the underlying issue

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is the revenue model of the current economy. For example, various ecological challenges are
put on the agenda, but they are also repeatedly dismissed. Ecomodernists focus on a
rearrangement of the technological foundation of capitalist economy. They reduce the
ecological challenges primarily to climate change and then focus on the necessary reduction of
emissions. That is the basis for an energy policy based on nuclear energy and renewable energy.
For ecologists, the climate crisis and the ecosystem crisis are a consequence of the growth
economy itself, of consumerism, of an exhaustive use of nature. The Anthropocene must be
questioned, humans seem unable to cope with the inability of the natural system to recycle raw
materials and waste. Therefore, a new compromise with the ecosystem must be worked out.
That requires a paradigm shift. Instead of disconnecting humans from nature and seeing the
relationship between two separate systems through technology and work processes, humans
must reposition themselves as part of nature. Finally, ecosocialists argue that it is structurally
impossible to achieve the intended ecological goals within the contours of a capitalist economic
and political model. Without anti-capitalism, no realistic Green Deal.

10. Big data, Big Brother?

One major area of change that has affected our collective behavior and societal outlook is
undoubtedly the unlikely impact of the digital world, from the Internet through social media to
smart machine applications. For Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951), the digital revolution has not only
transformed our work lives, our leisure time, the way our homes are built and function, and the
way we communicate, but also ushered in a new phase in the development of capitalism and
with it a new modernity. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future
at the New Frontier of Power (2019), she describes how global technology companies like
Google, Facebook or Microsoft have claimed the human experience as a free resource (just as
the industrial revolution used nature as a free resource for economic growth), as a resource to
be translated into behavioral data. While citizens give up their privacy, personal information is
collected and used – through the use of complex mathematical algorithms – to predict our future
behavior (for the benefit of profit-making corporations) but also, and herein lies the danger, to
modify, control, monitor and manage our behavior. For Zuboff, the rise of surveillance
capitalism is a threat to democracy and freedoms. Surveillance capitalism is a parasitic
economic logic that is a threat to our human nature, just as industrial capitalism was a threat to
nature. It is the advent of a new modernity defined by instrumental power. Instrumental power
points to the transformation of the market into a project of total security. Surveillance capitalism
has annexed the human experience to market dynamics so that it is reborn as behavior, a new
fictional good (like Polanyi’s three fictional goods: land, labor, and money). Companies want
to extract as much information as possible from citizens to know how best to intervene in our
behavior: are we driving well? Can we pay our mortgage? Are we buying the right vegetables?
Do we carry viruses inside us?... Behavior modification through tuning, nudging, herding and

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conditioning thus shapes our behavior in ways that violate our freedom. “Surveillance
capitalism is best described as a coup from above, not an overthrow of the state but rather an
overthrow of the people's sovereignty and a prominent force in the perilous drift toward
democratic deconsolidation that now threatens Western liberal democracies.” (Zuboff,
2019:21)
One area where the introduction of technological devices and apps is finding very easy entry is
health. Just weeks after the spread of the Sars-Cov-2 virus in China, governments began
working with technology companies to collect data on people’s whereabouts (who did they
meet, when, where...) to predict the spread of the disease, inform policymakers and assist health
workers. But this data has also been and will continue to be used, of course, to monitor people’s
behavior, to monitor compliance with lockdown measures, and to intervene where deemed
necessary. The scope and variety of these new forms of surveillance have reached
unprecedented heights.

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Conclusion: the first signs of the post-Western world

The historian, and the historian of ideas par excellence, is well advised to look upon the
present as a part of history. In the present context this means that historians would be wrong
to expect their methodological notions to be final and valid for all times. The ‘understanding’
of past ideas can never be an abstract given, but a constantly, historically evolving process.
(Parekh & Berki, 1973:184)

We are living in a century of ideologies. Optimistic talk of an imminent 'end of the ideological
age' has proved a delusion of the fifties, as has the prediction of the decline of the
intelligentsia. Not an 'exhaustion' or an 'ageing' of political ideas in the period following the
Second World War, but a recharging of ideological energies and intellectual allurements
marks the age of the post-European modernization of the world.
(Bracher 1984: 2)

Without doubt there is in the West a belief that the type of secular and scientific methods
evolved since the Enlightenment have generated rational social and political models, which
make possible a better understanding and more efficient institutional organization of society
than existed before. It is this belief that is now challenged by the realization that there might
be other ways of conceptualising and doing things. And this realization has brought about a
loss of nerve. The West is beginning to lose the confidence (arrogance?) that the Western way
is better (the only?) way.
(Chabal 2012: 13-14).

On ne peut pas s'autoproclamer universel. Le problème c'est que ni l'Europe ni la France ne

sont le monde. Le problème c'est quand l'universalisme se fait ethnique. C'est quand l'identité
se conjugue avec le racisme et que la culture se présente sous les traits d'une essence
immuable.
(Mbembe, in Libération June 1, 2016)

Emancipation, the desire to free oneself from constraints and prejudices, from all forms of
undue domination, is an ancient human aspiration that has seen a steep development since the
Enlightenment and the Romantic critique of it. In many areas, human progress has been
impressive. Although we must question the overexploitation of our natural habitat or the
growing inequality in many countries, we are nevertheless much better off now than we were,
say, one or two centuries ago. For a long time, the time when first Europe and later the West
dominated the world, emancipation referred to the universalization of the modern, read
European, model of society based on social differentiation through division of labor
(capitalism), the breaking down of the old political order, the individual and his citizenship and
organic solidarity. Development and progress were elevated to the truth of humanity. In this,
ideologies played an important role. However we look at them, whatever evaluation we make
of them, liberalism and socialism (including revolutionary communism) were and are the two
great branches of the Enlightenment, the ideologies that each in its own way interpreted, shaped,

211
used and abused the slogan of the revolutions; liberty, equality and fraternity. The ‘liberation
of man’ did not always go over roses: exploitation, colonialism, slavery, oppression... were all
part of the crushing reality of modernity. Yet these ideological families had and have always
held a belief in the social engineering of society and man. The reaction came mainly from
conservatism which, despite its various forms and evolution, always looked rather backward.
The best possible of all worlds was always some golden age that lay in the past. Although
evolution could not be stopped, order and harmony always had to be recovered by a return to
the past. Although conservatism was often more of an attitude that sought to curb the crushing
force of modernity, such as during the interwar period or again today, it was a revolving
ideology expressed in crisis thinking (the ‘suicide’ or the ‘downfall’ of the West being a
recurring theme) that could only be defused by a renewal of the authenticity of identity whether
it went back to a Christian Europe, a Judeo-Christian civilization, or a humanist ideal.

The critique of the models of emancipation that developed after World War II came from a
variety of quarters. The discovery of concentration camps led to a critique of instrumental
reason, the shadow side of modernity. The ‘discovery’ of nature and especially the human
impact on nature led to the ecological critique. The ‘awakening’ of colonized peoples led to the
postcolonial critique. These three forms of critique question the alienating character of
modernity that was thought to be universal: alienation from nature, from which man closed
himself off by wanting to control it; alienation from the colonized who had to inscribe
themselves in a history in which they had hitherto been assigned only a passive secondary role;
and alienation from man who saw his authentic desires disappear in a reason reduced to utility
and efficiency.

These critiques should not be a rejection of the idea of universality. Humanity faces choices
that have never been more global. Whether it is about climate change, inequality or diversity,
we still need universal references, shared conceptions, that can provide a solution to these
issues. The critique of ideologies and their models of emancipation is not primarily to simply
reject them but to demonstrate their shortcomings. It is in the awareness of these shortcomings
that we can revive the message Enlightenment. The promise of the Enlightenment lies in the
connection between the universality of values and the plurality of cultures. This has nothing to
do with the simplistic dogmatism we often encounter today (our Western culture is the best and
must be adopted by all), nor with the nihilism of a pervasive relativism (all cultures and
especially all practices are equal). To reduce the ideals of the Enlightenment to something that
only we possess, and something that only seeks to denigrate the ‘Other’ in order to better
subjugate him, is an outright denial of the Enlightenment.

Chabal argues that, after decolonization, globalization caused the West to be confronted with
its own limits. According to Chabal, the way in which the West tries to find answers to new

212
challenges shows that the hundreds of years of domination and supremacy of the West and
especially Western thinking is coming to an end. In other words, Chabal assumes that Western
rationality (defined as the way Western societies explain and legitimize what it does nationally
and internationally, Chabal, 2012:3) proves incapable of providing solutions to contemporary
challenges due to a way of theoretical thinking that stands in the way of understanding. Chabal
defines the West not so much as a clearly defined geographical area but as those parts of the
world that experienced imperial expansion since the fifteenth century. Chabal mainly wants to
find out how populations of those countries imagined themselves and the world, how they tried
to control nature and how imperial and scientific achievements had an impact on their ways of
thinking. For a long time this did not pose many problems but today the West seems to be
experiencing an identity crisis that leads it to ask itself “who or what it is”. The various answers
given still remain largely negative answers, in other words, answers that mainly define what
the ‘non-West’ is or should be. The West defines itself by what it is not, the non-West, and that
refers not only to everything, roughly, outside Europe, North America, Australia and Japan but
increasingly, as reflected in the popular media, to that world that migrated to the West. Migrants
are pre-eminently a category of people who, merely by their presence in ‘the West’, make the
question of difference and the place that difference can/should make, clear. In other words,
migrants raise the question of the national identity of the country of residence. “Without doubt
there is in the West a belief that the type of secular and scientific methods evolved since the
Enlightenment have generated rational social and political models, which make possible a
better understanding and more efficient institutional organization of society than existed
before. It is this belief that is now challenged by the realization that there might be other ways
of conceptualising and doing things. And this realization has brought about a loss of nerve. The
West is beginning to lose the confidence (arrogance?) that the Western way is better (the only?)
way.”(Chabal, 2012:13-14)

What we are witnessing, and seem to have difficulty realizing, is the emergence of a post-
Western world. Not only are Europe and the United States being challenged politically,
militarily and economically by a whole host of new world powers (Russia, China, India,
Brazil...) but even more important is the cultural challenge. After 500 years of cultural
domination, the terms of the debate on development and emancipation are no longer dictated
by the West. Formerly colonized peoples want to move away from overly ethnocentric
conceptions of emancipation and hope that their own cultures and understandings can become
part of the overall debate. Thus, given the economic fragmentation of the world, the West can
no longer impose its thoughts on other peoples and cultures either. By definition, this leads to
a much more difficult debate in which the classical premises of our own principles are critically
questioned and put under pressure.

213
Whether it is about Black Pete (zwartepiet) or the Islamic headscarf, China’s geopolitical and
economic policies or the demands of indigenous peoples, the challenge lies primarily in
understanding where these views come from. Admittedly, we must not forget that these
demands for recognition are still raised within a world of inequality. The covid-19 pandemic
made it clear that although the coronavirus does not discriminate between people, there is still
an immense difference between the health systems of different countries and that within the
rich Western world a lockdown looks different for a family on the outskirts of a city with access
to all necessary resources, with enough space and a garden than for a family in a small apartment
in a big city center. On top of this, it has also been shown that despite all the knowledge, know-
how and facilities, the West had a hard time dealing with the virus and often fared worse than
Asian countries. The development of various vaccines against the virus highlighted the
geopolitical inequalities underlying this impressive international scientific achievement. The
US, the EU, Britain fought over the supply of vaccines with the companies, subsidized by public
money, pocketing further phenomenal profits by supplying to the highest bidder first.
Meanwhile, large parts of Africa and Latin America had to figure out for themselves whether
there was anything left for them. We heard little in Europe about the vaccines developed by
Russia, China or India.

These fragile times full of misunderstanding and doubt, often lead to highly emotional and
passionate debates. The passionate debate, Socrates already knew, may be able to arouse
passions, but it lacks the necessary humility and concern for pedagogy needed to steer it in the
right direction. It is the same Socrates who already warned against the passionate thinker who,
in search of an audience, plunges headlong into political criticism based on inner urges and
emotions. Usually such intellectuals devise their doomsday scenarios behind their desks and
view the world from their chairs through the small window through which light enters. Even
though their ideas on numerous matters often seem interesting and highly erudite, they rather
quickly forget that from that small window far from everything is visible. The ideal image of
the French engaged intellectual, as embodied by Jean-Paul Sartre, has long been discarded. The
intellectual today should be someone who critically seeks to understand the world. Today the
bling bling instant-thinkers who are more concerned with the media spin around their ideas than
with the development of a thoughtful body of work reign supreme. More than a new search for
new enemies as huntingtonian thinking seems to find in Islam, what we need today is a
humanistic critique that for the first time tries to live up to its promise of universalism. The core
of such a humanism is to recognize that history is a process of self-actualization and perfection
for all and not just the Western, white man. Humanism is therefore a process that is never
finished. It is an activity of humanity in search of universal ideas. Not a possession in the hands
of a few that must be transferred to the less fortunate peoples of this world. That is why self-
criticism is and remains so important. A true humanism does not limit itself to the chauvinistic
applause of our virtuous culture, our glorious past or our illustrious achievements. Therefore,

214
there is no real humanism when, in a quasi trivial and banal way, “our good Others” – those we
recognize and want to acknowledge – are selected in a completely arbitrary manner. In other
words, it is not enough to proclaim philosophers like Ibn Rochd (Averroës) or Ibn Sina
(Avicenna) as friends or predecessors of free thought, and to turn a blind eye to other thinkers
with different ideas. We can dissect, contradict and reject these ideas, but it is our duty to be
open to them. For it is in encountering the work of others – not the caricature to which most
mirror – that the real challenge lies. This work is therefore a plea against a universalism that
sees any kind of diversity as an aberration and shows a desire for unitary thinking and
homogenization.

215
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