~ 8 Political Economy and Natural Law ~
Mill stated in praise of Smith’s work in general: “For practical purposes, Political Economy is inseparably intertwined with many other branches of Social Philosophy.” That of course entails the breaking away from narrow or abstract specialization or pretentiousness in economics into the sociological, historical, political, philosophical, psychological, psychiatric, artistic, and cultural milieu of the times, in spite of all its conflict and confusion today. Given that we interact with – and even view ourselves as – commodities sold at market value every day, we can also concede that political economy pervades all that we do. We have to admit that most joy and creation in our commodified world must be bought to be had. If “time is money” or else money is access, by virtue of having a lot of money and others not, money excludes many from joy and creation (from freedom), while money today is not necessarily accumulated through one’s own merit or hard work, but usually through the hard work of others. That is, through surplus value and many sources of passive or chimerical income. All are still miserable, though, in what Mill might term our economy’s “Stationary State”, not just for the laboring young who find less and less incentive to have children as their own labour is so undervalued, but even the super-rich as they feel threatened and obligated to perform for middle-class morality.
We might all be characters in Kafka’s The Trial but it might not be the case that we are each the protagonist but, rather, his obstacles. There is no guarantee, either, that the protagonist is a man. Tone-policing and gaslighting are resorted to by Beauvoir’s Serious Man who moralizes that the proved victims should stop being victims or the oppressed (as if their choice is always made by them). He even goes so far as to accuse female radicals who demonstrate against him of “that kind of female insanity” – of “bringing disgrace to [yourselves] as a gender” [1]. He even laments the rule that he cannot wield violence, or its threat, to silence them more than they are silenced already. It’s reminiscent of Burke himself dehumanizing women as “furies” during the October Days rather than addressing the systemic or economic injustices each particular individual actually faced[2].
In the mind of today’s reactionary psychologist – so antagonistic of government’s social control as an allegedly liberal individualist, social control alternatives are explored anyway. Gaslighting is the new means whereby mechanical subordination is the ideal end, not freedom. In 2017, Peterson and Camille Paglia had a recorded discussion called Modern Times, which is more of an echo chamber of ideology and snobbish self-aggrandizement than of civil or enlightening discourse. Resentfully, concerning the activist woman who have the organization and freedom to protest him or compare him to a Nazi, Peterson says: “most of the women I know who are sane are busy doing sane things…. They have their career, their family, they are quite occupied”. Consequently, it is his wish that these allegedly sane women ought to “go after their crazy harpy sisters!” “Enough pathology! Enough man-hating!” he demands, in a manner that actually justifies demonstrations against him. Nietzsche might be describing Peterson’s own inner workings here, which are so degraded by ascetic manic-depression and life-denial that they must be directed at others as resentment:
Much more often than such a hypnotic total dampening of sensibility, of susceptibility to pain, which presupposes unusual powers, above all courage, contempt of opinion, ‘intellectual stoicism’, another training is tried to combat the condition of depression, which at all events is easier: mechanical activity. It is beyond doubt that with this, an existence of suffering is alleviated to a not inconsiderable extent: today people call this fact, rather dishonestly, ‘the blessing of work’. The alleviation consists of completely diverting the interest of the sufferer from the pain, – so that constantly an action and yet another action enters consciousness and consequently little room is left for suffering: because this chamber of human consciousness is small! Mechanical activity and what goes with it – like absolute regularity, punctual, mindless obedience, one’s way of life fixed once and for all, time-filling, a certain encouragement, indeed discipline, to be ‘impersonal’, to forget oneself, to be in a state of [lack of concern for self]: how thoroughly, how accurately the ascetic priest has exploited these in the fight against pain!
– “Third essay: what do ascetic ideals mean?”, On The Genealogy Of Morality, 99-100.
So Peterson’s own mechanistic pretences, harkening to the very same asceticism that built modern prisons and asylums, lends credence to progressive patient activist groups in the 1970s US who argued, according to Harrington, that “psychiatry regularly labeled innocent people ‘crazy’ in order to deprive them of their liberties”[3]. So it could be with grifter psychologists and their “cured” adherents at a societal scale as mere priestly performance, not a concrete, positive movement.
To be fair to Peterson, Marxism (inverting Hegel’s idealism, his Philosophy Of History, into so-called Historical Materialism), does end up dogmatizing “history” and the “historical process” as “necessity” and, therefore, non-consciousness, i.e., anti-subjectivity and anti-freedom. Kierkegaard intuited that Hegel’s world-spirit or absolute freedom as freedom would disregard individual freedom. But just as Existential leftists, as in Beauvoir and Sartre, happened to also be fully aware of the false promise of the Hegelian system, they also knew of the Marxist false promise of working-class freedom harbouring unfreedom, as contradiction. How does Marx’s “class consciousness” end up arising from class historicism, i.e., class unconsciousness, as in the dependence on the forces of history, or else material conditions, rather than the free, active, and thinking wills of each individual? It cannot. So it actually goes with Lenin justifying “private capitalism” as well as “state capitalism” as necessary, following the historical process required of the Soviet Union, in Lenin’s The Tax In Kind. But that inverts our understanding of how the Russian Revolution played out, doesn’t it?
In order to appeal to the devotion of his troops, the chief or the authoritarian party will utilize a truth which is the opposite of the one which sanctions their brutal oppression: namely, that the value of the individual is asserted only in his surpassing. This is one of the aspects of the doctrine of Hegel which the dictatorial regimes readily make use of. And it is a point at which fascist ideology and Marxist ideology converge. A doctrine which aims at the liberation of man evidently can not rest on a contempt for the individual; but it can propose to him no other salvation than his subordination to the collectivity.
– Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics Of Ambiguity, 103.
Wright’s The Outsider has the same questioning of orthodox Marxism’s historical process. In it, Cross Damon criticizes these orthodox communists, especially the ascetic party man, Hilton, as hating “subjectivity”. But this is no different from Shapiro hating “subjective perception”, stoics hating judgemental or opinionated passion, or Hicks promoting individualism as a Randian “Objectivist”. Whether socialistic historicism/materialism or capitalistic objectivism/naturalism, actual individuality perishes in the seas of both. There is no deterministic force – or being on the “right side” – of history without idealistic choosing, learning, thinking, and acting on the part of one’s own mind as subjectivity.
The age of revolution is essentially passionate; therefore it is essentially revelation, revelation by a manifestation of energy that unquestionably is a definite something and does not deceptively change under the influence of conjectural criticism concerning what the age really wants.
– Søren Kierkegaard, Two Ages, 66.
One could credit Peterson for tapping into Jung’s collective unconscious of men – as something of a participation trophy in the world-historical process, but then one notices that his movement completely lacks meaning because it lacks a goal or a point. His Beyond Order is so carefully-worded, favours order so heavily, it is a completely lackluster appeal to creative and daring action: to collective consciousness, i.e., an active will or transcendence for each and all at a societal scale. Just as pointlessness constitutes Peterson’s following, so it is with the Canada-US trucker convoy and the US 2021 Capitol insurrection. Their movements are relevant to what Kierkegaard said of political movements in the present age:
In contrast to the age of revolution, which took action, the present age is an age of publicity, the age of miscellaneous announcements: nothing happens but still there is instant publicity. An insurrection in this day and age is utterly unimaginable; such a manifestation of power would seem ridiculous to the calculating sensibleness of the age. However, a political virtuoso might be able to perform an amazing tour de force of quite another kind. He would issue invitations to a general meeting for the purpose of deciding on a revolution, wording the invitation so cautiously that even the censor would have to let it pass. On the evening of the meeting, he would so skillfully create the illusion that they had made a revolution that everyone would go home quietly, having passed a very pleasant evening.
– Two Ages, 70.
Sol Cohen’s paper, The Mental Hygiene Movement, The Development of Personality and the School, finds its relevance in Peterson today, only in a negative sense as a reiteration of quasi-religious doctors peddling the deterministic stages of “personality” as pseudo-science (140-2). Protestant/ascetic work ethic, stoic discipline, families as “personality factories” producing well-adjusted children, and deterministic “personality” development (as the psychologist decides), all of these might constitute the mental hygiene movement of our time.
Where Peterson’s followers claim they were cured of depression and meaninglessness as a result of his sophistic rhetoric – his motivational clips, long-winded lectures, and debating tactics, this movement reveals itself to be far more like faking or malingering illness rather than actual illness, as Szasz explains of the use of psychotherapeutic rhetoric[4]. Peterson’s followers have never been ill, just as his resented antagonists, the academic or activist left and postmodern scholars, aren’t ill either. As will be explained in “10 The Objective Observer”, mental illness is metaphorical rather than actual. Peterson’s followers yearn, as most of us do, for passionate spirit, which might be needing to be part of something grand, featuring direction or transcendence. Yet transcendence doesn’t have to be religious let alone in clear, worldly reference to political antagonists as resentment.
Spiritual asceticism ought to be practiced in the monastery, or simply by individual inwardness. It is not to be moralized over others as material or systematized asceticism, as in George Gilder’s religiosity in Wealth and Poverty, a book Ronald Reagan promoted in person from the Oval Office. It turns out Gilder is the trifecta of material asceticism, naturalism, and sophistry, all in pursuit of un-Christian wealth gain. A key takeaway from his book apparently is that “in order to succeed, the poor need most of all the spur of their poverty”. Despite Gilder’s book citing and praising the classically liberal Wealth of Nations by Smith, Gilder ended up insisting that a “real job” is one that is neither guaranteed nor even optional, even in the free world. Gilder wanted to limit freedom and imprison working people, contra Smith himself. Smith argued that all contracts or obligations “forced from one by duress,…that is, by bringing one into a hardship or fear…, are void, being extorted by fear”. Nevertheless, Gilder justified the ongoing neoliberal assault on social welfare and governmental work in ignorance of Smith’s equity spending edicts in Wealth of Nations or Condorcet’s praise of US equality at the time of his French Revolution. Condorcet: “The spectacle of the equality which reigns in the United States, and which assures its peace and prosperity,” would be “useful to Europe”[5]. Condorcet also advocated welfare to the degree “of not being exposed to misery, to humiliation, to oppression”, which government owes to the people[6]. Complementary to that in the actual history of classical liberalism,
What improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.
– Adam Smith, The Wealth Of Nations, 115.
Dr. Peterson himself is on an anti-equality crusade today, vaguely arguing that “equity means ‘equality’ in some manner”[7]. But just as it was contradiction for casuist doctors to tell Christians they didn’t have to give alms to the poor (or they could kill in defense of man’s honor or property, according to Pascal’s Provincial Letters), so is it contradiction for Peterson to go on a fearmongering anti-equality campaign on the basis of 18th century classical liberal thought, as well as allegedly not being a right-winger. But you can count on Enlightenment liberals not being enlightened about themselves from the beginning. Reading 18th century writing is hard! Yet in Economic Sentiments, Rothschild explains that, “The imaginary world of the enlightenment is one in which no one is enormously rich, and no one is enormously poor (or poor enough to be bought)”, but that this same liberal economic utopia has a consistent pitfall, a contradiction: “The system of economic freedom is founded on the equality of all individuals, and it is at the same time subversive of equality. This is the endless circle in which individuals become rich, and use their money to buy power, to buy other individuals, and to influence the ways in which other individuals think” (251).
Whether rhetorically or concretely actualized, it still was liberal economics that wed the notion of liberty with equality in its very origins. And it did so in spite of right-wing nobility, which then appropriated and distorted liberal economics and rhetoric in the century following the French Revolution[8]. Further on, right-wing economics began coining thought-terminating cliches on liberal economic grounds, such as William F. Buckley repeating “freedom breeds inequality”[9], as though rampant inequality didn’t result in middle-class sentiments of unfreedom from the beginning. It’s absurd, then, to see a right-wing writer on the aptly termed “Barron’s” website now backpedalling on Smithian idolatry on account of the radical and equity ideals Smith obviously maintained[10]. The right-wing now contrives to demote Smith from “the father of modern economics” to “one of its esteemed uncles”! It’s apparent we need to start from the beginning to get a full sense of right-wing appropriations and distortions of liberal economics.
At the time of the French Revolution, “political economy” was overtly political and ideological. That changed, however, by striking the “political” from political economy (in rhetoric). Economics then repackaged itself as “an innocuous, unpolitical subject”[11] as Rothschild explains: the mere “scientific study” of populations rather than their naturalistic control and immiseration for productivity’s sake. The US economist and Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers proclaimed: “The laws of economics…are like the laws of engineering. There’s only one set of laws and they work everywhere.”[12] Indeed, economics has, following the Age of Enlightenment, maintained the pretence of being purely-scientific observation (that is, a natural science; abstract; absolute; objective) regarding its own shoddy human laws or its own partiality of this or that group over others[13].
Francis Hutcheson, the Scottish economist and an inspiration for Smith, was at least more overt regarding economic social control (as capitalism’s socialization, not individualization). Hutcheson wrote that “it is the one great design of civil laws to strengthen by political sanctions the several laws of nature.... The populace needs to be taught, and engaged by laws, into the best methods of managing their own affairs and exercising mechanic art”[14], so it is absurd to assume the free market’s “natural laws” are mutually exclusive to the state, or else to the socialization and regulation of the populace. Rather, the petty, middle-class capitalist praises our euphemistic “civil laws” while condemning unfavourable, or simply overt, applications of the same thing from the state.
In 1795, after his own incarceration and the Montagnard Terror’s end, Paine still ended up writing in Dissertation On First Principles Of Government that a civil government
has cognizance of every thing and of every man as a member of the national society, whether he has property or not; and therefore the principle requires that every man and every kind of right be represented, of which the right to acquire and to hold property is but one, and that not of the most essential kind. The protection of a man’s person is more sacred than the protection of property. (400)
We nevertheless ignored Kierkegaard in 1846 regarding systematizing classical liberals who themselves ignored or inverted Paine’s sentiment of valuing a man’s person higher than property. Kierkegaard: “Our objective and yet liberal age…is much too busy with the system and with forms to bother about human life”[15], which could also be saying the age is so rationalized and under “cognizance” in the system as to exclude choice – and may even be totalitarian in that regard. The abstract system of the free market, the “freedom of commerce”, at the expense of human life, could be a totalitarian favouring of its own, or what could be called market totalism.
One of the first implementations of Smith’s liberal ideals was actually through the ironically titled Eden Treaty – a free-trade agreement between England and France in 1786, just before the French Revolution. Monsieur Roland himself said “We have just concluded a commercial treaty with the English which may well enrich our great-grandchildren, but has deprived 500,000 workers of bread and ruined 10,000 commercial houses.” The system nevertheless treated this with sterile indifference, since Roland himself, just after becoming Minister Of The Interior, gave speculating and monopolizing bread merchants a mere slap of the wrist during food shortages in the midst of the revolution[16]. Contributing those individual lives to destruction, he thus contributed to its violent turn and his own downfall in favour of the system. Indeed, The Principles of Scientific Management by US industrialist Frederick Winslow Taylor openly declared, “In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first”[17], so we can declare the subjugation of the US individual to the system back in 1911 at least. Bitter irony and partial interest arises from Smith’s sentiment that “Great nations are never impoverished by private, though they sometimes are by public prodigality and misconduct”. Private interest can indeed amount to a great nation’s impoverishment and one is foolish to ignore it.
Contracts of usefulness ought to be what one chooses for oneself, free of coercion and in full subjectivity. Or else one is “not conscious” of the contract made, “and therefore cannot be bound by it”, as Smith himself said in his Lectures on Jurisprudence against contracts made in ignorance[18]. This could be Locke and Rousseau’s understanding of the social contract, which can be broken through rebellion and revolution at a wider scale. Smith, the classical liberal, may have meant contracts with government specifically, yet government isn’t the only entity governing our life or imposing contracts on us in ignorance. He also referred to growing up in your own country more generally.
how can you avoid staying in it? You were not consulted whether you should be born in it or not. And how can you get out of it? Most people know no other language nor country, are poor, and obliged to stay not far from the place where they were born to labour for a subsistance. They cannot therefore be said to give any consent to a contract, tho' they may have the strongest sense of obedience. To say that by staying in a country a man agrees to a contract of obedience to government, is just the same with carrying a man into a [ship] and after he is at a distance from land to tell him that by being in the ship he has contracted to obey the master.[19]
Similarly, one can be governed by ascetic work ethic, stifling family, religious, or traditional norms, and naturalist/objectivist prejudices built up over centuries to the detriment of actual freedom and life. This is why Scheler in “The Elevation Of The Value Of Utility Above The Value Of Life”, Ressentiment, attempts to make a hard distinction between “vital” values for life and community as opposed to the “useful” (that is, utility-oriented) values of commercial society and middle-class morality. He wrote that “it has become a rule of modern morality that useful work is better than the enjoyment of pleasure” but this is a specifically modern type of asceticism; “its mainspring is an essential component of the inner forces which led to the formation of modern capitalism” (124). As an endnote to this claim, Scheler wrote:
The specifically modern urge to work (the unbridled urge for acquisition, unlimited by need, is nothing but its consequence) is by no means due to a way of thinking and feeling which affirms life and the world, as it existed for example during the Italian Renaissance. It grew primarily on the soil of somber Calvinism, which is hostile to pleasure. Calvinism sets a transcendent and therefore unattainable goal for work ("workers in the honor of God"). At the same time, work here serves as a narcotic for the believers…. Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch have shown this very well in their studies on the Calvinist origin of modern capitalism. (164)
In trying to make someone else “useful” or merely instrumental through contracts under ignorance, e.g., through coerced and prolonged employment, the liberal west is illiberal because it values many individuals as “useless” in it if their work is unsatisfactory. Employers judge many employees under utility values until they are oriented differently: toward “usefulness”. In the history of class resentment, the middle-class judged the “idle” noble class above and today judges the “idle” working class below under this guise of utility values. Thus, all are psychologized as useful mechanisms or are discarded. “Useful” is subtly and often appealed to by the middle-class, as Franklin demonstrated earlier in “5 Classical Liberalism” regarding immigrating to and working in the US, as well as Bazarov the nihilist in “6 Nihilism and the Division of Labor” and Madame Roland’s sentiment in the play of making oneself useful to the French nation, in spite of life or vitality. Nietzsche might have been right to say in Beyond Good & Evil that “Slave morality is essentially a morality of utility” (156). Peterson recommends Nietzsche’s Beyond Good & Evil yet Peterson simultaneously lambasts leftists and radical feminists for not making themselves more economically “useful”, just as many of the blue-collar middle-class also lambast academics out of their “ivory towers” so they become more “useful” out in the mechanical trades or “real world”. Scheler notes, on the contrary, that utility values are resentment values. Peterson himself admits his utility values aren’t real values but reductive ones.
We assume that we see objects or things when we look at the world, but that’s not really how it is. Our evolved perceptual systems transform the interconnected, complex multi-level world that we inhabit not so much into things per se as into useful things (or their nemeses, things that get in the way). This is the necessary, practical reduction of the world. This is the transformation of the near-infinite complexity of things through the narrow specification of our purpose.
– Peterson, 12 Rules For Life.
He tries to elaborate away from this utility view in the same section, back to the “interconnected, complex multi-level world” view (it is reality, after all) but he lapses into moralizing “usefulness” later in Beyond Order, as in: “It is useful to take your place at the bottom of a hierarchy. It can aid in the development of gratitude and humility.” Hmm, no. Following Smith’s rejection of contracts made in ignorance in society, it is more important to become conscious of slipshod nonsense. So it is with capitalism as it insists, as Peterson does, on itself being “necessary” or else naturalistic, and the lower order being “useful” to the detriment of human life. The contrary could actually be true on all accounts. The Utilitarianism of capitalism was also opposed by Dostoevsky, as I’ve previously explained regarding the Underground Man in “4 Asceticism and Resentment” and Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, so there’s no helping Peterson’s inconsistency.
Yet the classical liberal Mill eventually re-assessed the self-interested utilitarianism as promoted by Bentham and so opposed by Dostoevsky. Jonathan Riley’s introduction to Mill’s Principles Of Political Economy With Chapters On Socialism states that Mill “wished to make clear that contemporary ideas and institutions of private property, and the highly inegalitarian distribution of wealth associated with them, were a matter of human choice and need not be accepted as ‘natural’.”[20]
Having now read a few political books by objectivists and naturalists of today (Hicks, Peterson, and Saad), my view is that Canadian academia is presently irresponsible for exporting an ahistorical, resentful naturalism through irresponsible men promoting false classical liberalism. An example of how ahistorical they are is obviously Hicks’ Explaining Postmodernism. In it, he is presumptive enough to assume the Girondin faction and the Montagnard faction can be neatly categorized as more Locke-inspired and more Rousseau-inspired respectively. He also contrives to frame the former as “reasonable” and the latter as oriented toward the Terror by “will” and “passion”, in accord with an Objectivist narrative, which possibly harbours Anglo-centric prejudice against continental thinkers. Locke=English; Rousseau=France; English=good; Terror=bad. Therefore, Rousseau=bad. Yet Ignatieff noted the case of the French Chevalier du Blin, former aide-de-camp of General Dumouriez, who had been arrested in 1807 by the British on accusations of being a spy. Left in solitary confinement, total solitude, for three whole months, he was driven mad. The French were just as keen as the British to be champions of reason as opposed to “the passions”, as we’ve already discussed of the Girondins (whom Pinel was most associated with and yet Pinel was appointed to his station by the Montagnards who happened to be “reason”-oriented as well). During their revolution, some of the French even formed a religious “Cult Of Reason”, and not just Robespierre’s “Cult Of The Supreme Being” as in the worship of Enlightenment Deism. As for du Blin, however, the British commission on the matter chose to interpret his madness as “proof of the susceptibility of the Gallic temperament to intemperate passions”[21]. Thus the irresponsibility and cruelty of their prison system could be ignored.
The contradicting phenomena also shows that Madame Roland, Siéyès, and Brissot (highly influential figures in the revolution, as one finds out) read both Locke and Rousseau, were presumptuously reasonable, and were radical and moderate in each of their particular situations. For Shapiro’s own part, he writes in completely ahistorical and reductivist ignorance that, “When Voltaire’s version of freedom was mixed with the passion of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), the result was the guillotine”. Yet one can more accurately note that Dr. Guillotine and the National Assembly’s middle-class and Enlightenment humanitarianism amounted to the guillotine, if one actually reads about the guillotine[22]. As for the objectivist Hicks’ insisting that “the Rousseauians wrested the Revolution away from the Lockean and turned it into the chaos of the Terror” and “it was Rousseau’s followers who prevailed in the French Revolution, especially in its destructive third phase”. Without citing anyone, this is a false dichotomy that’s supposed to buttress an anti-collectivist narrative. Hicks praises Locke’s Two Treatises and yet Locke plainly expands his individualism in it to encompass collectivistic interests. “Salus populi suprema lex is certainly so just and fundamental a rule, that he who sincerely follows it cannot dangerously err” wrote Locke[23]. The latin rule derived from the Roman philosopher Cicero being, “The welfare of the people is the supreme law”. If it is “the” supreme law, then where is the higher law for the egoic individual?
The impetus for liberation during the US Revolution was fairly Lockean, and yet the Tory Loyalists in the colonies, just as the right-wing conservatives or reactionaries in France, fired off in hyperbolic bad arguing against Lockean equality in their propaganda: “if the Whigs established their republic, they ‘will reduce all men into a state of nature,’ and perhaps the next step would be to cut off the legs of the tallest, that no man might look over the head of his neighbors.”[24] Such is the knee-jerk, catastrophizing nihilism or repudiating that you actually find in many conservative and reactionary arguments as they abuse free speech and neglect freedom of thought.
Locke nevertheless wrote that “It is not a change from the present state, which perhaps corruption or decay has introduced, that makes an inroad upon the government; but the tendency of it to injure or oppress the people, and to set up one part or party, with a distinction from, and an unequal subjection of the rest.”[25] Simply put, one part or party of society has distinction, oppression, and subjection over another as inequality. Their privileges justify, according to Locke himself, the breaking of the social contract, a change in the present state and government, i.e., the start of a revolution. That said, where Hicks lampoons Rousseau for pointing out that social conflicts and civilization “generated a few winners at the top of the social heap and many oppressed losers beneath them”, as Hicks paraphrases maliciously, then Hicks fails to follow Locke who, as we just read, condemns the oppression of the people in community. Indeed, the ideal that General Lafayette took from the US Revolution was this: 'May this Immense temple of freedom Ever Stand as a Lesson to oppressors, an Example to the oppressed”[26]. It could be immensely ignorant on Peterson’s part, then, to keep running on the belief, likely derived from Hicks’ book, that the chimerical Post-Modern Neo-Marxists orient all to only “oppressed vs. oppressor” distinctions, seeing as Lafayette praised the whole US project as the same. Where Hicks doesn’t accurately explain Lockeanism, he explains postmodernism even less.
Taken together, what Shapiro’s The Right Side Of History and Hicks’ Explaining Postmodernism amount to is a futile attempt by the right to frame the French Revolution’s failure and death toll as another failure of collectivist philosophy, since they believe Rousseau’s “General Will” amounts to that. And yet Jonathan Israel’s Revolutionary Ideas states,
Deriving from a complex interplay reaching back, underground, over many decades, volonté générale [general will], originally introduced by Diderot, had been vigorously adopted in his sense by d’Holbach, Helvétius, Condorcet, and Volney but adapted to mean something rather different by Rousseau. Intimately entwined with the greatest innovation in political thought of the eighteenth century—the doctrine that sovereignty lies in the people—the term is mostly used in early Revolution debates in its more general, non-Rousseauist sense. (23)
Contradicting Rousseau’s criticism of representative democracy in The Social Contract[27], the people’s sovereignty wasn’t actually enshrined through either of the enlightened revolutions of the US and France. Rather, it was mediated by a deep-seated mistrust of the people, leaning towards a ruling elite, a legislature. Ironically, the guillotine didn’t actually crawl out from a Rousseuist void either. According to Robert Opie’s book Guillotine, King Louis himself suggested the oblique angle of the blade (“The King examined the drawing carefully and when he came to the blade said: ‘The fault lies there, instead of being shaped as a crescent, the blade should be triangular in form and cut obliquely like a saw.’”).[28] The Guillotine was the product of France’s enlightened monarch and, more generally, of a legislature – a representative democracy, in the Lockean and early French revolution sense, not even in any Jacobin fanatic or collectivist proto-Stalinist sense. The same actually goes with the formation of the Committee Of Public Safety in a time of crisis as proposed by a Girondins liberal, Isnard[29], along with Danton, so not even Robespierrist “blood drinkers”.
The liberal Condorcet ratified the 1793 Girondins constitution with the following goal: “to combine the parts of this constitution, so that the necessity of obedience to the laws, the submission of individual wills to the general will, allow the subsistence in all their extent, of the sovereignty of the people, equality among citizens, and the exercise of natural liberty”. Furthermore, the Thermidorians rolled back the Terror in 1794, their Constitution of Year III was then ratified in 1795, and yet this constitution nevertheless stated rather innocuously that, “The law is the general will expressed by the majority of the citizens or their representatives”, so it wasn’t this “General Will” that led to the Terror but something else entirely. Presuming that some over-passioned Reign of Terror is limited only to Rousseauist influence – or to Jacobinism (that wasn’t Girondin Jacobinism), Hicks demonstrates the dishonest, lazy, easy-answer tendency of reactionaries towards radicals. Atrock bottom, this becomes a matter of the right-wing’s own flavor of historical revisionism, which is far more pernicious than today’s statue toppling. It absolves their own ironically radical/left-wing ideology, ie., capitalism-liberalism, of its actual, causal responsibility towards the opposing individuals they resent today.
Books, efforts, and professorship that actually explore the subject of the French Revolution contradict Hicks and Shapiro’s subjectively-intended anti-left resentment with obviously more in-depth material, as in Jeremy Popkin’s newly released book, A New World Begins. One of Burke’s own conservative concerns of the French Revolution in its early stage was, again, “the dust and powder of individuality”, which implicates capitalistic individualism or self-interest, not the “General Will”. He wrote, “To avoid therefore the evils of inconstancy and versatility, ten thousand times worse than those of obstinacy and the blindest prejudice, we have consecrated the state, that no man should approach to look into its defects or corruptions but with due caution.”[30] And even Louis-Marie de La Révellière-Lepaux, a Girondin returned from exile after the Terror, opined negatively during the Thermidorian Reaction that the National Convention had become a “mass without cohesion” – that “The Committee of Public Safety, the true heart of the State and the only pillar onto which to hold, which alone could rally everyone and move them to action, had itself fallen into complete dissolution”[31]. He said its members, “only concerned themselves with their own business, or with the business of their friends or supporters.” A concluding note here should be that the state isn’t the only means of collectivism or community organization. But in such a crisis as France’s economic circumstances – while fighting both internal and external wars, decisiveness had to come from somewhere other than the loosely-knit Girondins.
One can still say that everyone and their mothers read Rousseau, even outside France – and not only Wollstonecraft but also many US colonials, including James Otis, the pamphleteer who popularized the notion of “taxation without representation is tyranny!”. Yes, Bernard Bailyn explicitly says in The Ideological Origins Of The American Revolution that, “In his two most prominent pamphlets, James Otis cited as authorities, and quoted at length, Locke, Rousseau, Grotius, and Pufendorf, and denounced spokesmen, such as Filmer, for more traditional ideas of political authority” (27). Therefore, one can easily credit Rousseau a place in the ideology of US revolution. One of the best uses of “the celebrated Rousseau” by Otis is Rousseau writing: “The learned researches into the laws of nature and nations are often nothing more than the history of ancient abuses, so that it is a ridiculous infatuation to be too fond of studying them”[32]. Rightly-so, since Rousseau could have been referring to Grotius referring to the Aristotelian naturalism that “certain persons are by nature slaves”[33].
Before thought can really do its work, naturalism cements ideas about others too quickly; human freedom for men such as Hicks, Shapiro, or Peterson mummifies into human determinism (freedom’s contradiction) by their vague gestures towards so-called “human nature” or else the cold “facts”, which are usually defined by some expert other – abstracted from the whole affair, such as Burke from across the channel, but usually a self-styled and anonymous naturalist. At the start of the objective and bloody 20th century, Husserl’s “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” essay criticized spirited historicism on the one hand but also factful and psychologizing naturalism on the other. We ignored him too. Our distinctly human nature is the paradox of nature and spirit (facticity and freedom again) where neither are absolute. The Cartesian jury is still out on what is actually natural about humans, or what’s real in general, as soon as we have our own thoughts. That is, as soon as we have freedom, and we can agree that we – each of us – should. The existential qualifier against Epictetus, and against naturalism, is to negate the rule of making our will in “conformity with nature”. All might, instead, be within our power, including our own bodies and nature, as they might be within each of our wills.
[1] See YouTube’s “Jordan Peterson – Men Can’t Control Crazy Women”.
[2] Reflections On The Revolution In France, 60-1.
[3] Mind Fixers, 123.
[4] The Myth Of Psychotherapy.
[5] De l’influence de la révolution d’Amérique sur l’Europe, quoted in Economic Sentiments by Emma Rothschild, 169.
[6] Réflexions sur le commerce des blés, quoted in Economic Sentiments by Emma Rothschild, 77-8.
[7] https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/political-correctness/equity-when-the-left-goes-too-far/
[8] “Adam Smith and Conservative Economics”, Economic Sentiments. Also p. 249-50.
[9] Debate Five between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley during the US Republican Convention of 1968.
[10] Epstein, Gene. “The Trouble With Adam Smith”. https://www.barrons.com/articles/the-trouble-with-adam-smith-1471670360
[11] Economic Sentiments, 247.
[12] The Invisible Handcuffs Of Capitalism, 128.
[13] The Invisible Handcuffs Of Capitalism, 74-8.
[14] As quoted in Perelman’s The Invention Of Capitalism, 23.
[15] Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
[16] Kates, Gary. Cercle Sociale, 211.
[17] As quoted in Perelman’s The Invisible Handcuffs Of Capitalism, 93.
[18] Smith, Adam, “Report dated 1766”, Lectures on Jurisprudence, 403.
[19] Ibid, 403.
[20] “Introduction”, Principles Of Political Economy, With Chapter On Socialism, 16.
[21] A Just Measure Of Pain, 138-40.
[22] “Fouqiuer-Tinville; And The Tribunal”, Men And Women Of The French Revolution by J. Mills Whitham. Also, Guillotine: The Timbers Of Justice by, Robert Frederick Opie.
[23] Two Treatises, 158.
[24] Frazer, Gregg L., God Against The Revolution, 12.
[25] Ibid, 158.
[26] Paine, Thomas, Rights Of Man, 449.
[27] Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, “Chapter XIV deputies or representatives”, The Social Contract.
[28] Opie, Robert Frederick, Guillotine: The Timbers Of Justice.
[29] Belloc, Hilaire, Danton, a study, 210.
[30] Burke, Reflections on the Revolution In France, 82.
[31] “The Convention Is Weak,” LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY: EXPLORING THE FRENCH REVOUTION, accessed March 20, 2022, https://revolution.chnm.org/d/449.
[32] Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Collected Political Writings Of James Otis, 137.
[33] Miller, Jon, "Hugo Grotius", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/grotius/>.