Living collectively

Euston Station (London), 1837

Tony Judt is instructive of a certain class of intellectuals whom I call “Socialists Lite.” They are not so blind that they don't recognize that socialism, wherever it has formed the basis of public life, hasn't fulfilled its promises. He even recognizes the delusions of those who hold on to the faith. And, yet ...

A sign that a person is Socialist Lite can be seen in their use of the term “collective purpose” and their lament that such no longer seems to exist in public life. For Judt, our only shared social activity is consumerism, rather than the pursuit of “the common good.” The railways, beginning in the 19th century, exemplify for him “a collective project for individual benefit.” There is a great deal of nostalgia in his two essays on this subject -- “On the Glory of the Rails” and “Bring Back the Rails!” -- and one suspects, as with all of the leftist/liberal persuasion, that aesthetics plays a major role in their thinking.

After all, the train and the train station were the subject of some great art: the paintings of 19th-century French Impressionists, the artful, early 20th-century posters produced by the railway companies to entice people to travel, as well as some great public architecture. And on top of that the railways were also means of mass transit -- in contrast to earlier methods of locomotion -- probably also plays a role.

These two essays were among the last written by Judt. They were part of a book on “locomotion” on which he was working and did not live to finish. I wish he has been able to write this book, for the subject ties in with my interest in the subject of world literature, which, in turn, has to do with commerce and the spread of both material and cultural goods across borders.

Judt is such an artful writer that, on first reading, one might tend to agree with him. For instance, he begins the first essay with the statement that all knowledge was “enduringly local, whether cultural, social, or political” before the railway. But from my explorations on world literature, it is evident that knowledge traveled across borders and far afield, even if at 10 miles per hour at the most. It is true that many people never left the village in which they lived, even up until the late 19th century, but by the late Middle Ages there was increasing commerce among the various countries of Europe. After the discovery of the New World, knowledge increased exponentially. The railways did not arise ex initio.

Of course, as Judt points out, there were huge start-up and maintenance costs for early railways, and in the long run they have never been great money makers. Yet I don't think it is the case, as he suggests, that the railways and the railroad stations in particular were “harbingers and emblems of an age of public investment and civic pride.” The first European railways (except in Prussia), after all, were financed by private capital, probably by some form of stock company. It was only later in the century that governments got involved, for instance, in regulating fares, since trains were the major means of transport. (Now the government is stuck with them in most countries.) So, even those great railroad stations were monuments to a confident, perhaps even overweening, capitalist spirit, to the “great men” of the 19th century, e.g., Isambard Kingdom Brunel -- but not to “the public.” Thus, Judt is talking through his hat when he writes that “the railways were and remain the necessary and natural accompaniment to the emergence of civil society. They are a collective project for individual benefit.” He goes on to assert that the market cannot offer such a “practical benefit to individual and collectivity alike.” He even insists that the railways’ lack of profitability is a sign of their “social responsiveness!”

Judt is correct in pointing out the contribution of the railways to the Industrial Revolution and to the very layout of modern cities. But it wasn't the railways that inaugurated timetables and made us time-bound. The first Europe-wide postal system, put into effect by the Habsburg emperor Charles I in 1516, had timetables. Charles transformed a service meant to serve the imperial interests into one that benefited the public by contracting the Taxis family to run it and also to take letters for private clients. (See my post on this subject.)  The Taxis family had to invest in infrastructure: purpose-built postal stations, for instance, thereby relieving postal riders with the necessity of staying in inns. By the 1530s the Taxis had introduced “ordinary post”: fixed service, publicly advertised, leaving on a particular day of the week.

What distinguishes socialists from Socialists Lite is the respect that the latter have for memory and, indeed, for shared history. Socialists want to wipe the slate clean and start all over again, which is what the Soviets tried to do. What the Soviets were most successful at, indeed, was the destruction of civil society. You couldn't even trust your neighbors in the Soviet Union. So much for purposeful collectivity. For Socialists Lite, however, it always comes down to “the government," which is supposed to endow a country with “shared purpose.” Well, Hitler gave the Germans a shared purpose and look where it led them.

So, in the end, Judt's essays on the railways are a form of story-telling, an idealized portrait that is supposed to convince of the virtues of collective purpose.

"Downhill All the Way, 2"

Let me conclude the thoughts expressed in the previous posting. Judt writes that Hobsbawm, at the age of 94 (!), no longer had illusions about the Soviet Union, but that he remained reluctant to deny that it had no redeeming features. The reason: it stood "for a good cause, indeed the only worthwhile cause," which, for many in Hobsbawm's generation, mitigated its crimes. Judt introduces a footnote here, quoting the Polish writer Alexander Wat: "The loss of freedom, tyranny, abuse, hunger would all have been easier to bear if not for the compulsion to call them freedom, just, the good of the people."

I can't help thinking that the Soviets were aware of, indeed even took advantage of, the willingness of the Western intellectual class to believe that good could come out of the Soviet experiment. Successful tyrants play on people's gullibility, and Stalin was certainly a successful one. This gullibility stems from a belief that humanity can be corrected, that the world can be changed for the better, if the right conditions are met, if the right people are in charge. Even before the Soviets took over Russia, there was many a "planned economy" and "planned society" -- utopian communities -- yet not even the most benign stood the test of time.

Judt suggests that Hobsbawm was in the grip of what he calls a "secular faith" and, moreover, that he was not aware that he was. It is a striking fact that the professoriate is mostly liberal or left wing; I would not be surprised if most of them also considered themselves unbelievers or atheists. I can't think of a well-known conservative who is an in-your-face atheist. Which doesn't mean conservatives are necessarily believers. Being conservative, they are instead perhaps agnostic or uncommitted. But conservatives don't expect perfection on earth.

Picture credits: UK Media Watch; Quotehd

"Downhill All the Way"

The above is the title of an essay by Tony Judt, reviewing The Age of Extremes: A History of the World 1914-1991 by the Marxist historican Eric Hobsbawm. It appears in the posthumously published volume When the Facts Change: Essays 1995-2010. I picked up the volume at my local library, because it contains an essay that I had earlier come across in The New York Review of Books on the connection between modernity and the growth of railroads.

Ling Jian, Communist Sisters: Tears of Idealism

Even back in my undergraduate days, in the 1960s, Hobsbawm's writings figured on the edges of my consciousness, but, not being a history major, I never read him. Increasingly over the years I have become aware of his committed communism, and, as a committed conservative, this aspect of his writings made it unlikely that I would ever read him. The following, from the obituary in The Guardian on his death in 1912, speaks to my negative reaction:

"Hobsbawm was never to leave the Communist party and always thought of himself as part of an international communist movement. For many, this remained the insuperable obstacle to an embrace of his writing [!]. Yet he always remained very much a licensed free-thinker within the party's ranks. Over Hungary in 1956, an event which split the CP and drove many intellectuals out of the party, he was a voice of protest who nevertheless remained."

It can also be imagined that I would not have much sympathy for a scholar who wrote, in his 94th year, How to Change the World, what The Guardian called "a vigorous defence of Marx's continuing relevance in the aftermath of the banking collapse of 2008-2010." I have very little tolerance for people who believe they know how to change the world.

Okay. Not that I am unfamiliar with Marxist thought, and in fact it has been a great influence on my own ideas, especially the role that capitalism and the ensuing prosperity have played in creating Liberalism. (More to that topic at another time.) I learned a lot from Judt's essay, especially about left-wing intellectuals.

Judt begins by placing Hobsbawm as a scholar who had a great effect on a generation of historians from about 1959 to 1975, especially for his works on what might now be called social history, especially "a world of rural protest in Europe and overseas," as in his 1959 book Primitive Rebels. His writings unearthed an earlier tradition of British radical historiography and drew attention to labor and to workers and artisans. What Judt terms Hobsbawm's "most enduring imprint on our historical consciousness" are three volumes on the "long 19th century," beginning with The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 (1962), followed by The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 (1975) and The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (1987). Judt's essay, a review of the fourth volume in this series, made me think I should take a look at the second volume in particular.

Although Judt is an admirer of Hobsbawm for his erudition and breadth of "vision," what interests me about the review is his critique of Hobsbawm's shortcomings (which, although Judt doesn't say so, is really a critique of Marxist shortcomings). In a sense, Hobsbawm's allegiance to communism always remained that of the enthusiast for a vision that he embraced in his youth. Thus, the Spanish civil war, which united so many intellectuals in the anti-Fascist cause, remained for Hobsbawm "the only political cause which, even in retrospect, appears as pure and appealing as it did in 1936." The same can be said for many of my generation who came of age in 1968 and for whom the experience still represents something holy. This is a self-centered view of history and explains why so many of them, now receiving Social Security and benefiting from their IRAs, refuse to indict the anti-liberal attitudes of contemporary college students. In a similar way, Hobsbawm failed to indict Stalin's use of the Spanish conflict to "settle local and international scores under the guise of supporting an anti-Fascist war."

Beers sold in a Spanish supermarket

Judt also makes a fascinating observation, namely, that Hobsbawm, in this new book, fails to consider that Lenin's revolution was "above all the first and greatest of the 'third world' coups d'etat that he describes so well elsewhere, in which revolutionary modernizers capture the capital city and forcibly seize power in an archaic society." I guess that this explains why so many third world nations after World War II fit so easily in the Soviet camp. In a similar way, according to Judt, Hobsbawm misses the extent to which Hitler effected "a major European revolution," transforming Central and Eastern Europe in a way that prepared the way for the "Socialist" regimes of the postwar years, which built on what Hitler had brought about, "notably the destruction of the intelligentsia and urban middle class of the region, first through the murder of the Jews and then as a result of the postwar expulsion of Germans from the liberated Slav lands." Because Hobsbawm wishes to downplay any revolutionary tendencies in Fascism, he does not recognize the irony that Hitler paved the way for Stalin. This, to Judt, seems "a consequence of continuing to see the world the way it seemed at the time, when both ideologically and militarily Fascism and Communism were in total conflict, and Stalin represented the 'left wing' of the victorious forces of the Enlightenment."

I go on too long today, but I will have more to say on this subject, as it concerns my own interpretation of the current intellectual climate, a climate entrenched in the vision of Hobsbawm.

Picture credits: Christies; Affaritalini; Karen Salmonsohn