The relevance of Morris's utopia

This paper considers the reputation of William Morris's News From Nowhere and its evaluation as a utopia. It argues that there is a discrepancy between scholarly estimations of the book's importance and its treatment as a utopia relevant to socialism. Whilst scholars have for many years almost unanimously praised News From Nowhere as Morris's crowning achievement, most have also attempted to argue that Morris did not intend his work to be used as a serious model for socialism. After reviewing some of the secondary literature and distinguishing between a variety of different interpretations of Morris's work, I suggest that the relevance of News From Nowhere might be assessed by the standards which Morris applied to Thomas More's Utopia. Considering Morris's work in this framework of utopianism, I argue that the relevance of Morris's utopia lies in what Norman Geras has called its “maximum” vision.     

Marx's Utopian legacy

The terms "utopia" and "utopian" have long been used in predominantly dismissive ways. That this is the case is due partly to Karl Marx and his followers, who criticized socialist competitors as ineffectual dreamers. But while Marxism worked hard to present itself as realistic, serious and scientific, this essay argues that core elements of Marx's own project are utopian. Marx's utopianism lay in the aim of abolishing the distinction between state and civil society, and in the harmony he assumed would emerge as a result of that change. Consequently, the very concepts of "freedom" and "equality" would be transformed; the old debates about them would simply be redundant in communist society. This essay will explain why such objectives are utopian and even dangerous, and then evaluate the importance of and problems with this utopian legacy. In recovering Marx's utopianism we need not accept Marx's implication that utopianism itself has no real value for social and political change.     

Li Hanjun's views on socialism

This article examines Li Hanjun's views on socialism. Li Hanjun was one of the main founders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and expressed his vision and ideas of socialism during the 1920s. Like many other Communists in the early CCP, he was convinced that China should take a socialist road. Yet, in respect to how to realise socialism and what kind of socialist society should be built, Li held a view different from most of them. In his opinion, the governing institutions in a socialist society should be democratic and autonomous rather than centralist and bureaucratic; production and distribution should be administered and managed by an association of free and equal producers in the form of cooperatives instead of by the state and its officials. These views were quite distinct from the Soviet centralised state socialism and the dictatorship by a ruling elite. However, his ideas and designs of the economic and political institutions in socialist society were consonant with Marx on many points. Besides examining Li Hanjun's socialist views, this research also attempts to explore his philosophical inclinations and political orientation, in order to explain why he could conceive such special ideas of a socialist fabric.     

MISREPRESENTING MARX: A LESSON IN HISTORICAL METHOD

In this book Jonathan Sperber deploys his extensive knowledge of nineteenth‐century European social and political history, and his diligent research into sources that have become readily available only recently, to produce a substantial biography of Karl Marx. We find, however, that Sperber is mistaken in his treatment of Marx's ideas and of the intellectual contexts within which Marx worked. In fact, we suggest that he is systematically mistaken in this regard. We locate a root source of the error in his reductive approach to theoretical ideas. In section I we focus on the claim, taken for granted in the book, that Marx's ideas are instantiations of “materialism.” By detailed reference to the record of Marx's writings, we show that there is no justification for describing Marx as a “materialist” in the usually accepted senses of that term. In section II we review how Soviet and other interpreters of Marx, taking their lead from the later Engels, insisted that “materialism” was fundamental to Marxism. We suggest that Sperber's presentation of Marx's thinking as “materialist and atheist” aligns far better with such interpretations than it does with what Marx actually wrote. In sections III and IV we criticize Sperber's “contextualist” approach to dealing with ideas in history. His approach may seem reminiscent of Quentin Skinner’ s, but where Skinner deploys the discursive conventions prevailing in a past time to illuminate theoretical ideas, Sperber reduces theoretical ideas to context. We name Sperber's approach “theoretical nominalism,” a term that we use to denote the view that theoretical ideas are nothing but interventions into particular situations. We end by suggesting that greater attentiveness to philosophy and theory would have enriched Sperber's efforts in this book.     

TO THE PLANETARIUM—THERE IS STILL TIME!

This review essay examines James McFarland's Constellation: Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin in the Now‐Time of History, which stages a comparative reading of the two thinkers’ works and argues that they shared a resistance to the conventions of nineteenth‐century historicism as well as a desire to attend not to causation as a force in history but rather to the importance of each individual “present.” Benjamin's term “dialectics at a standstill” is a formulation only a reader of Nietzsche could have produced, as McFarland ably demonstrates. This review essay also delves into Benjamin's own use of the “constellation” motif, identifying complexities McFarland leaves out of his account. Influenced by Nietzsche's own uses of astronomical and astrological motifs, Benjamin employed the image of the constellation as a symbol not only for temporality (say, of the time it takes for starlight to reach our planet). He also used it to examine our transforming relationship with the cosmos and with nature most broadly, and, in the famous “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” he used it as a figure for the proper relationship historians should establish between their own period and the past; this is what yields an understanding of the present moment as the Jetztzeit, the “time of the now” enjoying its own dignity beyond any causal relationship with the future it may have. However, and as this review essay suggests, Benjamin's uses of the constellation image, and of images of stars, telescopes, and planetariums more generally, were highly ambivalent. They can serve as indices of his shifting views of modernity and of his desire that modern experience, seemingly condemned to alienation, might be redeemed.     

Work,Poverty and Modernity in Mayhew's London

Mayhew's understanding of work in London has not been considered a great success. His accounts of workers were sentimental and erratic and his ambivalence to political economy prevented him from fully understanding the relationship between work and poverty. As the century progressed, it was Marx and Booth who provided systematic and sustained studies of the labour question. However, as this article argues, the circulation of facts, moral judgements and guesswork that filled the pages of London Labour and the London Poor offers a fair representation of a metropolitan manufacturing economy that was characterized by uncertainty, speculation and shifting boundaries of capital and labour. In particular, Mayhew's demonization of small masters, the working poor who set up as independent producers and whom he blamed for over-competition, drew out a contradiction in contemporary understandings of capitalism: large-scale capital and well-organized labour were seen as progressive and modern but small businesses were flexible and adaptable and were for many the only hope of escaping poverty and breaking out of the ranks of labour. As such, it is Mayhew rather than Marx or Booth that best exposes the tensions between the aspirations of the working poor and the paradigms of social investigators that insisted on distinguishing capital from labour.     

Chinese Socialism as Vernacular Cosmopolitanism

This paper follows the life of an idea, a fundamental concept in modern Chinese intellectual life： socialism. It explores this idea as an alternative form of Chinese cosmopolitanism, drawing from Pheng Cheah＇s identification of two kinds of Chinese cosmopolitanism： mercantile and revolutionary. If part of what we mean by cosmopolitanism is the local use of an external, or international, or otherwise ＂independent＂ （relative to local power and practice） ideology or discourse to promote an agent＇s sense of social good at home and connection to the world, then the ways that socialist thought, ideology and praxis have been employed in China in the twentieth century constitute one such strain of cosmopolitanism. Shehuizhuyi （socialism） meant related but significantly different things to Chinese in the twentieth century. This essay argues that Chinese socialism can be viewed as a version of vernacular cosmopolitanism through two examples： Wang Shiwei in the 1940s and Deng Tuo in the 1960s, as well as the discourse of Pan-Asianism before and after the Mao era. Chinese socialism was as much a terrain of debate and contestation about what it means to be ＂Chinese and modern＂ as it was a shared vocabulary and set of aspirations. All along it has been able to play the role of cosmopolitan thought for some influential Chinese thinkers and doers--connecting China to the world in order to pursue universal values.     

The significance of maternalism in the evolution of fromm's social thought1

During his years as a member of the Frankfurt School, Erich Fromm developed a strong interest in the idea that there were distinctive male and female character orientations. Drawing on the positive evaluation of matriarchy made in the nineteenth century by the Swiss anthropologist J. J. Bachofen, Fromm argued that a “matricentric” psychic structure was more conducive to socialism than the patricentric structure which had predominated in capitalism. His interest in maternalism and his opposition to patriarchy played an important part in his rejection of Freud's theory of drives and in the development of a humanistic ethics in which love plays a central part. The idea of a gendered humanism is central to Fromm's social thought, although there is a danger that the over‐emphasis of sex‐based character differences unintentionally re‐opens the danger of the kind of sexual stereotyping which he resolutely opposed.     

Marx,Engels, and the Ethics of Violence in Revolt

Marx and Engels's thought—combined with the way in which it has been interpreted—has tended to militate against discussion of an ethics of violence in revolt. Along with Sorel and Fanon, their attitude towards violence is often seen simply as one where the ends justify the means and where violence in pursuit of a just society is necessarily defensible. However, we can (and should) look to certain sources within Marx and Engels for inspiration for an ethics of violence in revolt, which places emphasis on the humanizing aspects of their work, on the core ideas of freedom, moving beyond dehumanization and moving beyond violence. I argue that this approach suggests an abhorrence of any violence and can thus be combined with a pacifist-influenced approach to the ethics of violence in revolt. This is compatible with Ernst Bloch's interpretation of Marxism, which he describes as “concrete utopianism.” Classical Marxism can, then, offer fruitful pointers to an ethics of violence in political change, although Marx and Engels's texts must be used with considerable care and must be combined with the work of other thinkers, in particular those who display more explicit moral objection to violence of any kind.     

French antimilitarism before World War I: Gustave Hervé and L'Affiche Rouge of 1905

Gustave Hervé's political emergence occurred amidst the Dreyfus Affair. This accelerated his radicalisation. By 1901 he attained notoriety for an apparent image of the tricolour on a dungpile. Soon, his antimilitarist movement called Hervéism attempted to unite the revolutionary Left. After socialist unification, Hervé led the most extreme faction and created a weekly newspaper, La Guerre sociale. In 1905 he joined the Association Internationale Antimilitariste (AIA) which issued a poster based on his ideas. His experience with the AIA presaged several transformations on the French Left. Before 1914 Hervé was a strident voice within European socialism, advocating revolutionary means to prevent war. Years of incendiary campaigns failed to implement his ideas. Despite his dedication, the quixotic Hervé grew frustrated with leftist divisions. His disillusionment arose from a naive reading of an anachronistic revolutionary tradition. Hervé's sincere, yet romantic and eclectic, socialism exhibited atavistic features. Before the war Hervé rallied to ’la patrie en danger’; in 1919 he created a French national socialist party. Such shifts have been tied to Fascism. Though some recent scholars have stressed the dangers posed by antimilitarism, this article documents a more ambiguous picture of Hervé's experience with the AIA and his later antimilitarist activities.     

Ardent Service: Female Eroticism and New Life Ethics in Gertrude Dix's The Image Breakers (1900)

Gertrude Dix's socialist-feminist novel, The Image Breakers (1895) has perplexed twentieth-century critics by its brief, short-circuited representation of homoerotic affection between the two female protagonists. In answer, this essay roots the women's relationship in the wider social, historical context of New Life politics and ethics in the 1890s. Members of the Fellowship of the New Life heralded not merely a variety of alternative lifestyles including vegetarianism and co-education, but also extensive discussion about sexual mindfulness and generosity. The charismatic seer and inspiration for the FNL, James Hinton, preached that utopia could be achieved by practicing an erotically-charged altruism. If, as Sharon Marcus has claimed, such female mutual devotion was common and perceived as normative, it was particularly affirmed by ethical-socialist culture. In the novel, Leslie Ardent's loving service to Rosalind is fuelled by her political mission and desire for self-realization. Through this female intimacy, Dix evokes the initial phase of New Life socialism as Hinton and his followers had espoused it. By contrast, the women's heterosexual relationships are more troubling, as male comrades pressure them respectively into heterosexual marriage and free love. In order to discredit heterosexual free love, Dix paints its proponent as a disturbed anarchist, rather than admit that historically some in ethical-socialist circles had advocated polyamoury. Nor does she acknowledge the philosophical convergences between collective anarchism and ethical socialism at the fin de siècle, though she herself was engaged in radical communities. Through her indictment of free love, Dix punctures the utopian vision of a pure, selfless, erotic affection flowing between individuals; figuratively, the novel re-enacts the collapse of Hinton's own reputation from seer to seducer. Echoing scenarios by other female ethical-socialist writers, the early intimacy between Rosalind and Leslie then serves the function of nostalgia, symbolizing a now-lost stage of New Life optimism and association.     

Religion and communism: Feuerbach,Marx and Bloch

Whilst Marx made scattered positive remarks about the details of communist society, he also made important negative indications. Religion features in this negativity: his critique of religion is withering, there is no mention of religious life in communism, and he is emphatic that religion will play no role in such a society. For Marx, one of the tangible freedoms of communism was freedom from religion. The critique of religion is fundamentally inscribed in the very genesis of Marx's thought, and Feuerbach is crucial to understanding Marx's strictures on religion. Yet Feuerbach also figures in Ernst Bloch's very positive approach to religion, which argues that communism involves the freedom to be religious, in the sense of opening up oneself and society to the gold-bearing seams of the religious experience. This essay explores how such different conceptions of the relationship between religion and communism both draw sustenance from Feuerbach.     

SEAGULLS! ON MARTIN HÄGGLUND'S THIS LIFE: SECULAR FAITH AND SPIRITUAL FREEDOM

In this review essay, I examine Martin Hägglund's This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, a book that argues on behalf of democratic socialism on the basis of an atheistic confrontation with the fact of our mortality. Hägglund's book includes readings of Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Karl Marx, and Martin Luther King Jr. and is best assessed as a literary and philosophical, rather than historical, study of the relation between mortality and social action. Simply put, Hägglund believes that, from the standpoint of an atheistic confrontation with our mortality, our time itself should be our ultimate measure of value. He furthermore believes that democratic socialism is the political and economic form that most naturally follows from this, allowing us to honor, defend, and enhance one another's mortal time and freedom to make choices—and that, by comparison with atheism, religion offers only the false coin of otherworldly salvation. Although sympathizing with Hägglund's existential and political orientations, I criticize his account of religion, which I find to be historically weak. But I also criticize his approach to the problem of valuation, or the issue of how we make choices in relation to our limited time. Whereas Hägglund believes that mortal creatures like ourselves must make choices in a spirit of commitment—the “secular faith” of his subtitle—I observe that, despite our mortality, we humans make our choices in a variety of psychological states, and that asking us to occupy only one such state—one of zealous resolve—actually undermines our “spiritual freedom,” another one of Hägglund's key terms.     

Soviet elites and European integration: from Stalin to Gorbachev

This article argues that, like the liberalising “Great Reforms” of Russia in the mid-19th century, Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika of the late 20th century was propelled as much by reformist intellectuals' Europe-inspired visions of a more humane society as it was by military-economic crisis. Over the post-Stalin decades, a new policy-academic elite – economists, philosophers, scientists and writers – viewed in the apparent success of East European reforms a model of “socialism with a human face” for their country's eventual reintegration into a “common European home.” Yet their understanding of European integration was too superficial, and their appreciation of communist hard-liners' resistance too belated, to carry their reforms to successful completion. This article also holds that Russian reformers' naiveté was compounded by Western leaders' selfishness and short-sightedness. The latter clung to Cold War beliefs that the Soviet system could not produce a genuine reformist movement. When Gorbachev came to power, his perestroika was considered merely a “ruse,” its ideas of “new thinking” ridiculed, and ultimately only the “shock therapy” of Boris Yeltsin merited significant Western aid despite its broad incompetence and vast corruption. The combined Western-Russian failures in 1990s efforts toward rapid marketisation and integration proved even more damaging than those of the 1980s due to their broad discrediting of Western liberal democracy.     

SCHOPENHAUER'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Contained mostly within one brief chapter of his The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer's philosophy of history has long been considered either hostile or irrelevant to nineteenth‐century philosophy of history. This article argues that, on the contrary, Schopenhauer maintained what would become a widely accepted criticism of the methodological identity of historiography and the natural sciences. His criticism of Hegel's teleological historiography was more philosophically rigorous than is commonly acknowledged. And his proposal of a “genuine” historiography along the model of art became a major influence on the historiography of Burckhardt, Emerson, and Nietzsche. This article accordingly aims to restore Schopenhauer to the conversation of nineteenth‐century philosophy of history.     

Gramsci and the issue of religion: Catholic modernism and the Italian Partito Popolare

ABSTRACT

Gramsci's interest in Italian politics led him to tackle a key issue in the present-day discourse: the relationship between the Holy See and the national State. Additionally, he paid close attention to internal issues of Christianity, from its origins to his own times and – similar to many other socialist thinkers – he believed that there were several echoes between the early Christian experiences and contemporary socialism. From this arose his concern with the religious crisis of the early twentieth century – so-called ‘Modernism’ – as well as the story of the Partito Popolare (Popular Party, PPI), the organization founded by the priest Luigi Sturzo after the First World War, which was marked – especially amongst its left-wing components – by its anti-fascist positions.     

Flothilde's visions and Flodoard's histories: a tenth‐century mutation?

Although Flodoard of Reims is best known for his comprehensive historical writings, he also recorded separately the visions of a young girl named Flothilde. Re‐examining Flodoard's varied historical works in light of these visions reveals that he was unusually interested in visions generally, and particularly those of women. The question is why. In proposing answers, it will be suggested that both Flodoard's histories and Flothilde's visions represent a crucial moment in the transformation of ninth‐century Carolingian understandings of history, visions, and reform into the quite different patterns of the early eleventh century.     

Marx and Modernity: Rethinking Labour,Capital, and Capitalism

This article argues that China’s modern historical development and, more generally, modern global developments can be illuminated by a renewed encounter with Marx’s critical analysis of capitalism. This renewed encounter entails a fundamental critique of traditional Marxism’s understanding of capitalism and of socialism. It seeks to explain the historically dynamic character of capitalist society as a system of ongoing constraints. This central feature of the contemporary world cannot be grasped adequately by intellectual paradigms, such as theories of identity or of politics, which have been dominant in recent decades. The approach outlined here analyzes capitalist modernity as structured by a historically unique social function of labour, and is based on a fundamental reevaluation of the meaning of labour in Marx’s analysis as the object, rather than the standpoint of his critique. The focus on the historical specificity of Marx’s analytic categories also calls into question any conception of a transhistorically valid social science.     

KARL POLANYI AND THE REALITY OF SOCIETY

This essay reconsiders Karl Polanyi's famous thesis about the “embeddedness” of the economy through an examination of two recent books: For a New West, a collection of previously unavailable essays by Polanyi, and Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers's The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi's Critique. The guiding thread of this analysis is the claim that a constant in Polanyi's thought was his belief in what he called “the reality of society,” that is, that society exists as a social fact over and above the individuals that constitute it. The essay begins by tracing Polanyi's intellectual development, drawing primarily on the essays found in For a New West. Polanyi's quest to reconcile individual freedom with social solidarity led him first, in the years between the First and Second World Wars, to embrace liberal socialism, before his readings in anthropology persuaded him that traditional economies “embed” the economy in social relations and that the nineteenth‐century liberal project of a “disembedded” economy (through the so‐called free market) is a departure from this anthropological norm. The essay then examines and questions Block and Somers's claim that Polanyi maintained that the economy is always “already embedded,” arguing notably that Polanyi believed that the advent of market society entailed an economy that was actually disembedded from social relations, not merely one that was re‐embedded in an alternative set of institutions.     

Security in international society: A comment on Alex J. Bellamy and Matt McDonald

Although English School (ES) theorists have played a significant and explicit role in security studies, Bellamy and McDonald claim that this has not been the case. However, they fail to show how they have arrived at their conclusion. Moreover, Bellamy and McDonald conflate solidarism with cosmopolitanism, with the result that they wrongly claim that some theorists are ‘weak’ while others are ‘deep’ solidarists. In addition, their attempt to view human security as a reflection of solidarist trends in the ES is welcome, but their method risks undermining the ES. I propose that an ES perspective on security needs to incorporate elements from three streams of thought: pluralism, solidarism and cosmopolitanism. I contend that security ought to be viewed as people centred and that it should be embedded within international society's norms, rules and institutions.