Week 10 Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle, who often serves as a survey course’s bridge between the romantic and Victorian periods, is a difficult writer, but his insights into literature, history, and politics make his eccentric books worth considerable patience. His style is designed to forge a relationship with an increasing, and increasingly skeptical, post-romantic-era public that is not easily satisfied by time-tested formulations about anything. But Carlyle himself was a complex man who wouldn’t fit comfortably in any era—for one thing, he was raised as a strict Calvinist and kept something of the Old Testament prophet about him even after rejecting the metaphysical tenets of this austere faith. Moreover, born in the same year as John Keats, he was by nature a moody and “romantic” individual, which means that he found it necessary in arriving at his mature prose style and authorial stance to work through his own “storm and stress” tendencies before he could find out what lay on the far side of them. It seems he had to pass through Byron to arrive at the calm classicist humanism of his hero Goethe. (But Goethe, author of The Sorrows of Young Werther, had to do something like that, too.) His German Idealist Professor Teufelsdröckh is not Carlyle, of course, but at the same time, Sartor Resartus is part of Carlyle’s 1830’s project of working out a new and viable way to set himself forth as a writer and social critic. Carlyle is characteristically, if explosively, “Victorian” in his admission that art must reestablish its value anew in modern society—and, most particularly, that it cannot do so by reverting to a programmatically “romantic” set of claims about art and social cohesion. In sum, Carlyle faces a task not unlike that of the Anglo-American modernists who will write nearly a century after his time: how to take past ideas (literary forms, social philosophies, political ideals, etc.) and “make them new” to suit the present time.

In Sartor Resartus, that is what Carlyle, in creating his fictional Professor Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, is doing with regard to the “romantic” tradition to which Carlyle himself has strong intellectual and emotional ties. He cannot (and probably would not want to) play the romantic philosopher in his own person. “Dr. T” is Carlyle’s eccentric spokesman for the Idealism of the Continent and, to some extent, for the recent and increasingly defunct British Romantic movement. As you can see from reading Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Wordsworth and his contemporaries as well as the second or Satanic generation of Byron, Shelley, and Keats, had already come to be regarded as a “school.” And to belong to a school, of course, is to become subject to the inevitable sway of fashion and changed circumstances. Carlyle’s ironic but nonetheless respectful presentation of Dr. Teufelsdröckh’s romantic notions about self and society, then, amount to the author’s way of keeping the best in that tradition open for English consideration while admitting that he, as a modern writer, cannot return to the good old days of the nineteenth century’s first few decades.

What does Carlyle think is worth preserving about the romantic tradition of thought? Well, he is not a precise philosopher like Kant or Hegel; I think it will do here to say that he finds a couple of things worth maintaining: first, the sense that what binds people together is not so much intellect as passion. But perhaps even more important to Carlyle is that romanticism, in its way religion-like, asserts the primacy of spirit over materiality and brute fact. I don’t suppose Carlyle ever truly reconciled the Weimar or “Goethean” humanist promoter of self-cultivation in himself with what has sometimes been called the “prophet of self-annihilation” and, later in life, the “worshiper of force.” But perhaps that is asking too much of him—he is most consistent in fighting by any and all means the advent of a fully materialist, and materialistic, culture in the British Isles. And Carlyle’s “romanticism,’ as he makes Teufelsdröckh illustrate dramatically in Sartor Resartus, was a necessary phase through which he had to pass if he was ever to establish an authentic new voice for his contemporaries. Romantic poses and premises were an essential part of his makeup as a writer and as a social critic.

With the phrase “social critic,” we move on to Carlyle’s mature social philosophy and stance as an historian as they appear in the 1843 text Past and Present. Writing during the Hungry 40’s, when economic instability and discontent were a powerful and threatening combination in Britain, Carlyle decries the alienation capitalism has created amongst workers and employers and, in fact, everyone in Great Britain. In an analysis of labor relations that Marx and Engels would later praise, Carlyle argues that while labor should knit humans together into a social whole, work in industrial Britain is wage-slavery, and the ideology that supports it has the people “enchanted” by its abstract and mechanical conception of human nature and society. The factory hands perform their daily labor for the capitalist, but at day’s end, they have little to show for it in either pecuniary or spiritual terms. The products of the worker’s labor (called “commodities”) enrich the capitalist at the expense of any fair distribution of what has been produced.

This state of affairs, says Carlyle, is even worse than the situation in Europe during medieval times. Back then, at least, the relationship between peasant farmers, their landowning Lords, and the Church, however oppressive and hierarchy-bound, was at least an authentic relationship. That accounts for Carlyle’s praise of feudal society—notice his references to Gurth the Swineherd and his master Cedric the Saxon (characters from Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe), who is himself an underling to the Norman Conquerors. Feudal labor relations, the idea goes, provided both lord and serf with a reciprocal sense of duty toward one another and with some sense of belonging to a stable world order. But in nineteenth-century Britain, no such responsible relationship between the classes prevails, and nothing makes a dent in the Iron Law of the Marketplace. Everywhere, Carlyle explains, one hears only the sentence, “impossible” in answer to the cries of impoverished workers, the unemployed, and those people’s dependents. The false god of riches Mammon, aided by idle aristocrats (“Game-Preserving Dukes”), greedy factory owners, machine-like workers with their demands for the cash that enslaves them, and political economy’s cant about “free trade” and “laissez-faire,” stops cold every attempt to end Britain’s chaos.

In our chapters, “Democracy” and “Captains of Industry,” Carlyle tries to redefine what is meant by key concepts such as “freedom” and “aristocracy,” in effect recycling them so that they will turn into solutions and not perpetuate the agony of the masses as well as the rule of the ne’er-do-wells. I call Carlyle a recycler of outworn concepts and systems because it seems that his advice isn’t to do away with the flawed, yet dynamic, capitalist order and return to an earlier time. His agrarian “feudalism” is an ideal construction, not something he sets forth as a viable way of life for the present. Rather, Carlyle wants to retain the basic form of capitalist production and even to hold on to the hierarchical relationship between the working and capital-owning classes. If all goes according to plan, there will be no need for another French Revolution—the big industrialists, properly spiritualized by the remnants of Carlyle’s Calvinist belief in the saving power of order, work, and duty, will become “Captains of Industry” and take control of a threatening situation. They will become the new Norman Lords. What the workers need, thinks Carlyle, is not the vulgar, anarchic democracy for which they presently clamor; it is work under the supervision of the newly responsible employer-class. Freshly recycled and spiritualized capitalists will take on the duties of a true aristocracy. Like the original conquerors who came over with William of Normandy in 1066, they will set to work with the materials at hand and build a stable order. They will organize (not reject) production and distribution in the machine age for the benefit of workers and themselves. In sum, they will lead Britain as no other class presently in it can, and thereby provide an answer to the ‘sphinx riddle” of just relations between human beings. That is Carlyle’s answer to what we generally call the Condition of England Question.

Finally, it might be argued with justice (and was so argued by Marx and Engels) that this solution requires the great capitalists to do something that isn’t in their interest: why should they do anything but what fills their coffers with more capital to invest? In sum, it might be said that what Carlyle advocates goes against the operation of a market economy, wherein employers takes on workers for as little as they can pay them, and gets them to do as much “surplus labor” as possible to generate capital. The system itself is the most powerful disincentive to change—it benefits those who are already poised to benefit. What Carlyle is arguing against is, quite simply, the brutal fact that a “system” (economic, social, micro or macro) can function robustly for a long time even though the mass of people who make it work don’t benefit from its continuance. And there is nothing within the system itself that tells they winners they should care about this ugly fact—the will towards a moral “fix” has to come from beyond the system, at least initially. Capitalism isn’t so much immoral as purely economic and amoral. It is entirely capable of solving the ancient problem of production, but when you assail it for not solving the equally ancient problem of distribution, it has nothing to say—that is no concern, properly speaking, of the economic system. Those who have money (congealed, abstract labor power, to borrow from Marx’s terminology) can buy all the things they want; those who have no money can starve unless someone (for religious or other extraneous moral reasons) decides to help them. That is what we call “private charity.” So long as capital keeps getting generated and commodities keep getting themselves produced and sold, the economy rolls along cheerfully—it doesn’t matter much whether one person buys 100 shirts or 100 people buy one shirt; in theory and to some extent in practice, the profits will be there for the taking. Those who are excluded from the magic circle of production, buying, and selling simply don’t count. But of course Carlyle understands that people usually do what is in their own selfish interests—especially when their utilitarian/market “philosophy” proclaims that they ought to do just that very thing. So how do you suppose he would respond to all this criticism of his suggestions? Do you find him anticipating such criticism in the chapters we have read from Past and Present?

Sartor Resartus Margin-Notes

1076. Regarding the portrait of Wordsworth, that poet’s glory or light faded into the light of common day; Carlyle writes that Wordsworth’s death was felt as the extinction of a public light. But this failure highlights Carlyle’s own problem – how to build and maintain his authority as a sage. How can he reintroduce spirit into the Victorian age? One might say that Wordsworth and Coleridge did not succeed permanently in their quest to do so for their own age. Or at least that what worked for them will no longer work today.

1078. “Have we not seen him disappointed…?” Such references point to the storm and stress movement in German literature, and in particular to Goethe’s book the sorrows of young Werther.immediately below, the author refers to Teufelsdröckh’s loss of faith, and then Deism comes in for criticism.

1079. “Foolish Word-monger….” Materialism and logic churn out false belief and offer false happiness. Carlyle and Teufelsdröckh oppose Jeremy Bentham’s radical utilitarian movement. Towards the bottom of the page, the narrator says that even doubt leads to God.

1080. “His heaven-written Law still stood legible and sacred there.” Quack muttering from a quack prophet – this will be a consistent theme. “Our Works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments.” Know what you can work at, says Teufelsdröckh. Work is of course a key concept in Continental philosophy, especially in Hegel and Marx. Perhaps Carlyle would agree with Oscar Wilde at least in saying that only shallow people know themselves, although Oscar Wilde would never posit work as the answer to this problem. “A feeble unit in the middle of the threatening Infinitude, I seemed to have nothing given me but eyes, whereby to discern my own wretchedness.” Teufelsdröckh is spinning his wheels on speculation not directed towards any object. He is an alienated intellectual. The steam engine universe threatens to run him down.

1081. “To me the Universe was all void of Life… it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.” This is a key passage. Materialism and logic lead to atheism, and Teufelsdröckh wrestles with spirituality and the meaning of spiritual language. He dramatizes the problem of materialism for us, providing distance from the raw emotion of his encounter with it somewhat as Wordsworth distances us from raw emotion by means of metrical verse. As for Carlyle’s style generally, he puts us in absurd situations, confronting us with the ugliness and cynicism wrought by unbelief and by the need to survive and render intelligible new environments.

1082. On this page, Teufelsdröckh is said to confront freedom and the casting out of Byron-Devils. Notice the mockery of Parliament as well. “Despicable biped! What is the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee?” Where does defiance come from? Teufelsdröckh asserts free will to defy death; he takes up a stance against death. “The Everlasting No… pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my Being….” At this point, Teufelsdröckh confronts the threat of unintelligibility and the possibility that he has no true source. He will arrive at his spiritual rebirth by casting out “legion,” to do which requires experience, the great spiritual doctor. And this is where we come to the center of indifference. “For the fire-baptized soul, long so scathed and thunder-riven, here feels its own Freedom….” The doctor needs an object, he needs direction. He must cast away his romantic vagueness and stop reveling in his own isolation and alienation. He must work through, in both senses, this romantic defiance of his. Carlyle acknowledges the need to adopt a romantic pose to go beyond romanticism. The impulse must be redirected. His spiritual labor’s object is the casting out of Byronic devils. They must be made to depart into everlasting fire, as the gospel would say. His feeling of freedom is what he calls a Baphometic fire-baptism. Romanticism will be construed as a movement and a moment in a much larger historical and philosophical context. But at this point standing puzzled between us and Teufelsdröckh and his romantics is the editor, who is just trying to make sense of it all.

1083. So Teufelsdröckh will seek experience – he will go to see the visible products of the past. But already the reader is being led to the necessary Mystery that will make life supportable. At the bottom of the page, Teufelsdröckh questions government and laws. But his point here is allied to the doctrine of natural supernaturalism – even such mundane things as governmental practice and legal codification have their source in mystery. The goal is to recover a sense of the eternal in the temporal and ephemeral, to spiritualize ordinary things.

1084. “Books. In which third truly, the last invented, lies a worth far surpassing that of the two others.” Books last and can continue to generate values. They offer us organic ties to the past. They are things woven, and retain the power to produce new thoughts, new suits of idea-clothes. Refer to John Milton’s claim that “a book is a living thing.” Then Teufelsdröckh moves on to discuss the significance of the battlefield, war.

1085. War, “from the very carcass of the Killer, [can] bring Life for the Living!” Teufelsdröckh offers a meditation on war and on the folly of passions about it. This page shows the influence of Hamlet’s ideas about the same subject. “Thus can the Professor, at least in lucid intervals, look away from his own sorrows….” At least he can look beyond himself now, can turn his gaze outward.

1086. “All kindreds of peoples and nations dashed together….” Teufelsdröckh wanders through the landscape, and recovers a sense of mystery in historical process by meditating on the revolution. He moves on to discuss the significance of history’s great men, Napoleon in particular. This page also shows the author coming to terms with the great upheaval stylistically.

1087. “Of Napoleon himself….” Napoleon is here described as an enthusiast of the very sort he criticizes Teufelsdröckh for being. Next the professor is off to the North Cape where he confronts a Russian smuggler. This passage is important for its style – Carlyle combines the sublime and the ridiculous in his representation of the northern landscape. It is a romantic symbol for regression into self-consciousness, with the ice reflecting itself to itself. But Teufelsdröckh is not allowed to remain in this place for long. The Russian smuggler brings him back to earth again, and in doing so he typifies Carlyle’s method.

1088. “How prospered the inner man of Teufelsdröckh under so much outward shifting?” It is time to cast out legion, or the Satanic school of romanticism. This will bring the professor to the Center of Indifference. He muses much like Hamlet about humanity’s pretensions.

1089. “[W]hat is this paltry little Dog-cage of an Earth….? The professor is still isolated and apathetic; he has merely passed through his objects of exploration. It is time to apply himself directly to an object – labor is central to Carlyle as it was to Hegel and will later be to Marx. We produce ourselves and find freedom and meaning in work.

“Temptations in the Wilderness!” And “Our Life is compassed round with Necessity; yet is the meaning of Life no other than Freedom, than Voluntary Force….” These pages prepare the way to the everlasting yea with preliminary definitions and injunctions. Here the injunction is to work in well doing. Once asserted, free will must turn itself towards work. For Carlyle, that seems to be what replaces God. But the basic point is one made by moral conservatives in many ages. Here is what Pope John Paul II said in 1979--”Nowadays it is sometimes held, though wrongly, that freedom is an end in itself, that each human being is free when he makes use of freedom as he wishes, and that this must be our aim in the lives of individuals and societies,” he wrote in 1979. “In reality, freedom is a great gift only when we know how to use it consciously for everything that is our true good.”

1090. “So that, for Teufelsdröckh also, there has been a ‘glorious revolution’.” In the middle of the page, the narrator or editor breaks in to end the professor’s over-reaching. Self-annihilation is announced as the first necessary accomplishment. The professor has now achieved it.

1091. The editor says that in Teufelsdröckh, “there is always the strangest Dualism….” That is a good description of Carlyle’s prose style. First the professor responds to nature, and then to his fellow human beings. “Nature! -- or what is Nature? Ha! Why do I not name thee God? Art not thou for ‘Living Garment of God’?” Here the editor describes Teufelsdröckh applying the metaphor of clothing to nature. And then comes an important moment: “The Universe is not dead and demoniacal….” This universe is Teufelsdröckh’s source and connection to others. Everyone is a wanderer like him, so he serves as a model.

1092. “Man’s Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his Greatness....” Carlyle uses the example of the common shoe black to illustrate the problem of desire: and the problem is that desire is infinite; it is based upon perpetual lack. I like the sentence “Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: it is even as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves.”

1093. “The Fraction of Life can be increased in value not so much by increasing your Numerator as by lessening your Denominator.” If you set the denominator to zero, anything will yield infinity. On the same page, the doctor says “Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe.” Do away with excess, and devote yourself to balance and calm. The key to life is not the pursuit of happiness -- renunciation is the key. Carlyle dismisses the utilitarian happiness principle. Carlyle insists that there is something “godlike” in humanity -- it is not something that the pursuit of happiness will bring out. The everlasting yea is “Love not Pleasure; love God.” The point is to walk and work in this kind of love.

1094. What does Dr. Teufelsdröckh need to do? The answer lies in his own statement, “Wilt thou help us to embody the divine Spirit of that Religion in a new Mythus, in a new vehicle and vesture, that our Souls, otherwise too like perishing, may live?” This will be his task as a philosopher and writer. The metaphor of clothing appears in this formulation – words spin new systems of thought and institutions.

1095. “America is here or nowhere.” The ideal resides within yourself. The doctor must produce a world from his own inner chaos. Carlyle reshapes the romantic conception of self so that the point is not infinite removal into isolated, alienated self-consciousness but instead to realize one’s divinity through work of whatever kind. Spirit must inform, give shape to, what the doctor calls the “condition” (by which he means material matter and circumstance). “Been no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even Worldkin. Produce! Produce!” Extra: Carlyle is trying to align or balance the self-cultivating humanist side of himself with the one that is always thundering about the need for work. Carlyle’s gospel of work sounds like promotion of self-annihilation, but a lot of Sartor Resartus is about how his eccentric German Professor develops spiritually and intellectually. He comes to realize that “America is here or nowhere,” meaning that the Ideal (freedom, self-perfection, progress) is inside our own spirit, and we first need to understand that before we can actualize the ideal. (Romantic premise: spirit must move through matter to realize itself fully; and as Hegel would say, you only realize your individuality fully in the context of society--you can’t do it “all by yourself.”) The Everlasting Yea is to love God rather than pleasure: first put an end to stormy posing (like Byron’s Manfred on the Jungfrau mountaintop, above everything and everyone else, sublimely alone, alienated, dissatisfied), realize that your ideal or “America” is right at home, and then direct your actions to the world so you can actualize your ideal, make it real. So the task is to get priorities straight and plan to make life worth something. Carlyle is a Scottish man of letters making his way into the world of English literature and hoping to make a living. He has to work, too--only as a writer. But write what? And what good will it do? What’s the point of foisting a strange autobiography/biography like Sartor Resartus on thousands of English “blockheads”? This page is capped by a call to order and production-- work.

1096. Natural supernaturalism is Carlyle’s version of transcendental philosophy. I remember Henry David Thoreau’s sentence, “Time is but the stream I go fishing in.” time and space clothe the absolutes towards which the Professor has been striving. But now “the interior celestial Holy of Holies lies disclosed.” What is a miracle? That is the question the Professor must answer.

1097. The Professor quotes David Hume on miracles – they are “a violation of the laws of nature.” Well then, asks the Professor, “What are the Laws of Nature?” As for science, he has this to say: “These scientific individuals have been nowhere but where we also are; have seen some hand-breadths deeper than we see into the Deep that is infinite, without bottom as without shore.” Carlyle does not dismiss science, but puts it in its place surrounded by the framework of natural supernaturalism.

1098. “To the Minnow every cranny and pebble, and quality and accident, of its little native Creek may have become familiar: but does the Minnow understand the Ocean Tides and periodic Currents, the Tradewinds, and Monsoons …? Such a minnow is Man….” We are encompassed by something greater than ourselves, and our creek is earth and our own customs that limit our vision. The Professor says that custom tricks us, “persuading us that the Miraculous, by simple repetition, ceases to be Miraculous. True, it is by this means we live; for man must work as well as wonder….” This thought is similar to ones you can find in romantic treatises – custom is the film of familiarity, etc. Carlyle accuses philosophy – or at least utilitarian philosophy – of lowering itself to the level of vulgar materiality and of carrying blind habit even into the sphere of philosophy. The aim of philosophy is, as Walter Pater will later write, “to startle and quicken” our sensibilities and perceptions (1643). It should denaturalize our perceptions and make us perceive the world as a continual miracle. Philosophy should oppose whatever we have rendered natural and ceased to perceive accurately. In this way, I would add, philosophy allies itself with the concept of artifice, not nature. At least strategically, Carlyle as a Victorian sage accepts the division between life and art and philosophy. Philosophy should provide us with a radically altered vision that will allow us to return to life without being crushed by it and turned into machines. This thought is similar to the way Immanuel Kant and his followers resist allowing us to become enslaved to the concept of nature. For Carlyle, perspective, attitude, stance are central – he aligns his prose with strong acts of will.

1099. Language is like space and time in its ability to serve as a garment covering the celestial dimension. Space and time, Kant’s categories, are ultimately illusions. Memory and hope answer that the past is not annihilated and the future not a wisp of air. Memory and hope are mystic faculties connecting us to the past and stretching us towards the future. They weave continuity and meaning. Carlyle sets up these faculties as means of opposing the appearances time, space, and even language. To achieve the goal of belonging, we must accept the task of building connections to what we posit as transcendent. Carlyle resembles Nietzsche at least in his determination not to be overwhelmed by even the most destructive kinds of knowledge – but of course their way of maintaining perspective differs radically.

1100. The Professor insists that “only the Time-shadows have perished, or are perishable; that the real Being of whatever was, and whatever is, and whatever will be, is even now and forever… believe it thou must; understand it thou canst not.” This is an important passage for understanding Carlyle’s strategy – he simply asserts that there is a fundamental truth, that there is a spiritual or metaphysical dimension. He asserts the power of mystery as necessary for human life, and makes the assertion in biblical cadence. He reiterates that properly understood, even the ordinary is miraculous: “the true inexplicable God-revealing Miracle lies in this, that I can stretch forth my hand at all; that I have free Force to clutch aught therewith….” So even voluntary movement is a miracle.

1101. Christ goes in many directions for Victorian authors -- here he is like Orpheus working wonders, and Carlyle asserts the power of human will and labor over nature. Oscar Wilde says that Christ is the most perfect individual. Art is individualism, and individualism is “a disturbing and disintegrating force.” In the middle of the page, Teufelsdröckh says that “Nature, which is the Time- vesture of God, and reveals Him to the wise, hides Him from the foolish.” This is another passage in which reorienting perspective is central. Properly understood, we are spirits, Geist. “Are we not Spirits, that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance, and that fade away again into air and Invisibility?” This passage is self-consciously romantic: seeing the eternal in and through the temporal, realizing the intensity of the moment and the immensity of “here.” Yet, Carlyle also captures the wistfulness of our feelings about such mysteries.

1102. Again Carlyle makes Teufelsdröckh assert that we are ghosts, spirits. The body is the clothing of the soul. At the end of this selection, comment on Carlyle as a Victorian sage. How do his assertions differ from earlier, romantic assertions? They have been unwoven and remade in a very open manner. Carlyle lets the audience in on how the transcendental sausage is made. That emphasis on the process of manufacturing transcendental ideals suits the journalistic nature of the times. Moreover, Carlyle rejects excessive emphasis on self and imagination. His path as an individual is self-annihilation, and work is the collective social solution to England’s problems. The world is already miraculous -- the first priority is to realize that fact.

Past and Present

1111. In the selection from the chapter Democracy, Carlyle opposes the doctrine of laissez-faire. He says that the times are unprecedented, “that in no time, since the beginnings of Society, was the lot of those same dumb millions of toilers so entirely unbearable as it is even in the days now passing over us.” The Phalaris Bull anecdote is a metaphor of enchantment, externalizing the injustice of the times and reifying it into solid Law. But this kind of thing is bad if done unconsciously.

1112. The Irish widow who dies of typhoid fever shows that we are all linked together, all potential hosts for disease. This is a grotesque way of making a point that people will not accept in the ordinary way. The page offers grotesque contrasts between the savage and the civil, especially with the mention of Black Dahomey. Carlyle prefers feudal relationships over contemporary ones: Gurth the Swineherd “is not what I call an exemplar of human felicity....” Nonetheless, this bondsman’s master at least acknowledged a reciprocal human tie, and the relationship cannot be reduced to the cash nexus. What is libertine? “The true liberty of a man, you would say, consisted in his finding out, or being forced to find out, the right path....” True liberty, therefore, it is the compulsion to work at what you do best. If you don’t like Carlyle, you might say this passage compares uncomfortably with George Orwell’s 1984 -- slavery is freedom.

1113. Who are the genuine aristocrats? Carlyle speaks for the wage-slaves: “if thou art in very deed my Wiser, may a beneficent instinct lead and impel thee to ‘conquer’ me, to command me!” Carlyle aims to preserve the principle of aristocracy rather than the specific class that now claims English titles; he asserts that there is an unconscious link in people’s minds to divine justice. “A conscious abhorrence and intolerance of Folly...dwells deep in some men....”

1114. William of Normandy contains both fire and light, but mostly light; “the essential element of him... is not scorching fire, but shining illuminative light.” Carlyle calls for a radical recycling of the aristocratic principle. His task is to perceive and make known the need and means for bringing order from chaos, productivity from idleness and anarchy. Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand cannot do the kind of work William the Conqueror could. As for revolutions, “Nature’s poor world will very soon rush down again to Baseness...” Revolutions are a sign of progress, but only an initial stage on the way to finding our true superiors.

1115. Finding those true superiors “is a work for centuries; to be taught us by tribulations, confusions, insurrections, obstructions....” In the section titled Captains of Industry, Carlyle addresses the significance of government: “Government, as the most conspicuous object in Society, is called upon to give signal of what shall be done; and, in many ways, to preside over further, and command the doing of it. But the Government cannot do, by all its signaling and commanding, what the Society is radically indisposed to do. In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom....” So the government gives signs and commands, but it is ultimately the symbol of the people. It is not the primary agent. Carlyle interprets raw capitalism as chaos, and says that “To be a noble Master, among noble Workers, will again be the first ambition with some few....”

1116. On this page, Carlyle addresses the ancient problem of distribution. Capitalism solves the problem of production, but not just distribution. There can be a noble industrialism and “Government by the Wisest.” These are the captains of industry who will fight chaos and necessity, making progress possible. The task of Carlyle’s prose is to align us with divine forces such as Justice. He means to spiritualize the debased, ordinary concept of work and return it to a place of honor. I would say that in this he looks back to German idealists such as Hegel and forwards to Marx. The Captains of Industry are as yet the unconscious masters, and the aim is to make them believe in themselves and to make us believe in them and align our wills with theirs. Carlyle attacks capitalist accumulation by comparing thoughtless capitalists to pirates and Choctaw Indians. Capitalists clothe their lust for money in ideological garments, but it is nothing more than aggression masked by false value systems. Carlyle makes a contrast between the real and the apparent, and he wants to reconstruct audibly (in part visibly, to but primarily Carlyle builds a sense of voice) the reality to which his readers must adhere in future.

1118. This final page ends on a note of energy and vitalism. “It is to you I call; for ye are not dead, ye are already half-alive: there is in you a sleepless dauntless energy, the prime-matter of all nobleness in man.” Carlyle has been trying all along to show how order can be brought from apparent chaos -- chaos is in the last instance intolerable, and he trusts that there is order underlying it, if only we could perceive it. The call to order involves an assertion of neo-feudalism. Carlyle’s wild and apocalyptic language is designed to allow us to encompass chaos, to surround it with a principle of divine order and tame it thereby. The very wildness of his prose seems meant to show that he is not afraid of anarchy -- “be not afraid,” as the Gospels say. Reducing social chaos to order, and re-spiritualizing the productive process will solve the problem of distribution -- an ancient dream come true.

Week 10 John Stuart Mill

On Liberty Notes in the Margins (Norton Anthology 7th. edition, Volume 2B, Victorian)

Introduction. John Stuart Mill asks the fundamental questions of social and political science:

1) what is human nature? (Organic)
2) how can we best educate and develop it? (Freedom and variety of situations)
3) what is the ideal society? (One that embraces development and liberty)
4) who can lead us towards it? (Eminent thinkers)

Mill proposes a model of development, so he must specify the agent that will change things as they now stand. What forces are repressing liberty and impeding progress today?

1146. Mill quotes Wilhelm von Humboldt on human nature: “the end of man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal or immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole....” This is a reformulation or modification of Greek and Renaissance ideals about self-development. It is not a formulation that the utilitarian Mr. Gradgrind would understand. Mill continues that, “Nobody denies that people should be so taught and trained in youth, as to know and benefit by the ascertained results of human experience. But it is the privilege and proper condition of a human being, arrived at the maturity of his faculties, to use and interpret experience in his own way.” Mill of course favors education, but insists upon specificity with regard to the goal towards which the educator should strive. Ultimately, he wants balance in all things, and education is a central way to achieve that.

1147. Mill seems to agree with John Milton that “reason is but choosing.” He says, “The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom makes no choice.” Custom is the enemy of genuine individualism. Again, “He who lets the world... choose his plan of life for him has no need of any other faculty than the apelike one of imitation.” To what extent, we might ask, would Mill countenance the consumer imitation model of bourgeois liberalism? It seems clear that he challenges this model, whereby we link our sense of self to material objects, and mistake the accumulation of owned objects for true progress.

Mill insists that “Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.” As he said just above, a perfect society built by automatons would not be a good thing. Humanity is constituted by potential that requires experience to realize and actualize itself. This basic romantic principle cuts against liberal economics, and certainly opposes the atomistic and mechanical conception of human nature we find in Jeremy Bentham.

1148. As for our emotional side, Mill writes as follows: “Yet desires and impulses are as much a part of a perfect human being, as beliefs and restraints: and strong impulses are only perilous when not properly balanced... It is not because men’s desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak.” Mill demands the same freedom and exercise for impulses and desires that William Blake does. He is all in favor of “energy,” but with the addition of a need for balance. Mill defines the word character as belonging to a “person whose desires and impulses are his own.” He refers -- probably consciously -- to Thomas Carlyle’s phrase “steam engine universe.” Then he goes on to criticize Carlyle rather directly if politely: “In some early states of society, these forces might be, and were, too much ahead of the power which society then possessed of disciplining and controlling them. There has been a time when the element of spontaneity and individuality was in excess... To overcome this difficulty, law and discipline... asserted a power over the whole man... But society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences.” Therefore, Carlyle’s feudalism is anachronistic and cannot supply the needed pattern for contemporary life -- it proposes to deal with inauthenticity by imposing an anachronism on everyone.

1149. “In our times, from the highest class of society down to the lowest, everyone lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship. Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves, the individual or the family do not ask themselves -- what do I prefer?... They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? What is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? Or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of the station and circumstances superior to mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary, in preference to what suits their own inclination. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary.” Middle-class conformity is the enemy -- the same bourgeoisie against which Carlyle takes aim. But the idea is that this middle-class has come by a much more tear radical and effective means of control -- not violent repression but rather the persistent and forced internalization of socially acceptable thoughts, until it is no longer necessary to think at all. I am reminded of Marcus Aurelius’ comment in his meditations that it is necessary not even to think what would offend others in our inmost thoughts. So much for romantic interiority. Mill continues with his critique of Carlyle, saying that such conformism is only acceptable on the “Calvinistic theory.” In that theology, “the one great offense of man is self-will.” So Calvin stands in for Carlyle here -- Mill’s criticism is largely against Carlyle’s social vision in Past and Present. Further notes -- Friedrich Nietzsche shows much contempt and yet a certain admiration for this trickery whereby the human animal is branded into making promises and keeping them, and of perceiving things the same way everyone else does. It might also be worth mentioning Michel Foucault’s idea that it is not so much repression that makes societies go as production and enumeration or definition, with subsequent control and shape in a non-humanistic way.

1150. Mill says that “‘Pagan self-assertion’ is one of the elements of human worth, as well as ‘Christian self-denial.’ There is a Greek ideal of self-development.” This kind of statement seems to flow from Mill’s understanding of Goethe -- a modern version of classical humanism. Pericles is the ideal -- full development of all the person’s faculties, all human potential. Mill says that “In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is therefore capable of being more valuable to others.” His social theory argues that richer “units” will lead to a richer mass of people. This brand of individualism takes account of larger social needs, so Mill is not a collectivist like Carlyle.

“To be held to rigid rules of justice for the sake of others develops the feelings and capacities which have the good of others for their object. But to be restrained in things not affecting their good, by their mere displeasure, develops nothing valuable, except such force of character as may unfold itself in resisting the restraint.” Mill opposes the excess of restraint for social conformity, though he recognizes that such restraint is a powerful force to be reckoned with. The need to resist against unnecessary constraints, Mill would agree with Sigmund Freud, accounts for a lot of misdirected individual and social energy. He promotes self-development, culture -- but thanks to the economic and social context in which he sets forth his theory, it will be taken as one idea among others in the marketplace of ideas. That is a very difficult problem to resolve.

1151. Custom versus genius: custom turns us into machines. “Persons of genius…are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.” Genius is something that Mill insists upon “emphatically”; it requires freedom and variety as its atmosphere. This is hardly an argument invoking “mass culture” as Walter Benjamin would, and it differentiates him markedly from Carlyle, who shows little interest in it—his heroic ideal isn’t about genius but about the worship of force and personal charisma or energy. Mill is more genuinely indebted to the romantic authors he has been reading. Well, fashion is one major challenge to this organic model of genius and development. Fashion links individual expression to an ever-recylable system of objects—generating a sense of self that stems from endless repetition and consumption. We identify with an image of ourselves, and take all necessary (economic) steps to conform to that image, but the image keeps giving way to another one. This model of the self mechanizes and harnesses the old romantic “problem of desire,” stripping it of its link to organic theory, to three-dimensional humanistic conceptions of human nature. Mill is concerned about the broad social forces bearing down upon us all—public opinion is like fashion, only in ideas. There is much inventiveness in fashion, inventiveness in “retailoring” what is out to make it in again. Carlyle responds against flunkeyist “fashionism” on its own terms, and thinks that his Clothes Philosophy provides a “recycling” alternative to flunkeyism, but how accurate is that faith?

1154. “The spirit of improvement is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people; and the spirit of liberty, in so far as it resists such attempts, may ally itself locally and temporarily with the opponents of improvement…The progressive principle, however, in either shape…is antagonistic to the sway of Custom…” Mill doesn’t see liberty and improvement as necessarily opposed. The enlightened person should always be aiming to improve. The important thing is to oppose complacency. In his book, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy, C.B. MacPherson points out that there is nothing inherently developmental about bourgeois liberal democracy. The accumulation of objects is not development, and so liberal democracy all too easily betrays its foundations in Whig gentility, whereby society is something like a gentlemen’s agreement to let progress take its slow course towards the spiritual and intellectual betterment of all. Materialist capitalism annuls this kind of “slow time” in favor of perpetual immediacy. Mill’s borrowings from the romantics may commit him to the infinite deferral of improvement, and to a tacit cultural elitism. I should end by mentioning once more the system of self-object identification inherent in fashion-based consumer culture, and suggest that perhaps we need not stress Mill’s kind of “genius” and “character” (admirable though they are) so much as insist that we must think our own thoughts even as we are subjected to others’. This is something like Greek strength as a model of resistance and progress, and I would have to admit that it largely cedes the possibility of rapid and massive changes in the social order. But that seems unlikely anytime soon. My point is that rejection of consumer culture may not be very convincing or effective. Probably the best you can do is inflection with a balanced self as the goal. Mill sees democracy as work, not as a perfect system.

Autobiography

1166. “From the winter of 1821, when I first read Bentham, and especially from the commencement of the Westminster Review, I had what might truly be called an object in life; to be a reformer of the world. My conception of my own happiness was entirely identified with this object.” In the beginning, Mill pursued a vague, general object -- reform, the happiness of others. I like the following passage: “Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And of course the answer is no. The negation here is similar to the effect of Carlyle’s steam-engine universe rolling over a person’s inner being. Mill says that he had nothing left to live for when he heard this “Everlasting No,” and he must have felt that he had lived as an automaton. His foundation for personal happiness was only an abstraction, what Francis Bacon would call a philosophical cobweb. It was a utopian vision based on a mechanical view of human nature.

1167. “My course of study had led me to believe that all mental and moral feelings and qualities, whether of a good or of a bad kind, were the results of association; that we love one thing, and hate another... through the clinging of pleasurable or painful ideas to those things, from the effect of education or of experience.” James Mill had taught his son that the goal of education was “to form the strongest possible associations of the salutary class; associations of pleasure with all things beneficial to the great whole, and of pain with all things hurtful to it.” James Mill followed a scientific model of the individual, and utilitarian education presupposes that character develops along the lines of mechanical association. If you identify your personal happiness with the general good, the idea goes, so long as you are working towards the general good you will be happy. But this is no better than middle-class conformity. It is not the way lasting human connections are made; it requires a shallow, flattened notion of human happiness and individuality.

1168. “Analytic habits may thus even strengthen the associations between causes and effects, means and ends, but tend altogether to weaken those which are, to speak familiarly, a mere matter of feeling.” It was not so much what Mill read but how he was taught to read it. The word analysis can mean “freeing up” the object of study, but that is not usually how we understand the term. The ordinary understanding is closer to the one Wordsworth condemns -- “We murder to dissect.” Bring up the famous definition of a horse in Charles Dickens’s novel Hard Times: “graminiverous quadruped.” The young John Stuart Mill seems to have been a victim of “dissociation of sensibility.” Helping other people is not a bad object, but you must first determine the grounds of human connection -- they are organic, not mechanical. You cannot superimpose upon the passions a scientific utopian scheme.

1169. “I was reading, accidentally, Marmontel’s Memoires, and came to the passage which relates his father’s death, the distressed position of the family, and the sudden inspiration by which he, then a mere boy, felt and made them feel that he would be everything to them....” Spontaneous emotion proves to be the key to his recovery. Mill describes a Wordsworthian moment in the form of an accidental encounter with a literary text, an autobiographical text written by Marmontel. This accidental encounter escapes Bentham’s and James Mill’s scheme concerning the formation of salutary associations. So the example is a rebuke of straightforward Benthamite utilitarianism-- the young Marmontel made a key emotional bond with others, forgetting himself for the moment. What we find described is not a mechanical “I ought” but a genuine outpouring of sympathy. Mill says that after reading this passage, he never again reached the depths of depression he formerly experienced.

1170. “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation exhaust themselves on that; and if otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will inhale happiness with the air you breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it...” happiness is still the goal here, but it is not to be directly pursued. The point is to stop analyzing happiness and start working on something you find meaningful for its own sake. It is best not to think of everything you say and do in light of ultimate purposes or end-states of consciousness. Mill has learned to ask Walter Pater’s question -- “what is this activity or thing or person to me?” It is not good enough to pursue some abstract notion of the general good and to claim that you are achieving an equally abstract kind of happiness by doing so; the activity must be meaningful to you personally prior to the attachment of any such abstract notion. Mill has not rejected the idea that happiness flows from activity, but it makes all the difference in the world whether that activity is do-gooding or intrinsically and intimately valuable to the person pursuing it. For example, if I have an inclination to tinker with computers, building them from scratch and solving whatever problems come up as I do so, I may by such means become happy, at least for a while. The same goes for things like reading a Jane Austen novel -- you don’t sit down to read thinking, “my goal in reading this book is to be happy.” If you did, you would become morbidly prone to checking your emotional state every other sentence to register your level of happiness or unhappiness. This kind of obsession resembles both heavy Puritan examination of the state of one’s soul and the associational theory of happiness promoted by Mill’s father and his tutor Jeremy Bentham. It is best to allow your consciousness to be directed towards an object other than your own interior states.

This is profoundly good advice, but if we want to criticize it, we might say that it is an evasion of romantic troubles concerning the problem of desire. It is this problem that caused Carlyle to reject happiness altogether in favor of self-annihilation leading to meaningfulness, awe, and collective belonging. Don’t we invariably reflect back upon our states of consciousness, whether we mean to or not? And if we cannot avoid doing so, the kind of happiness Mill describes will not satisfy us for long -- human beings even get tired of being happy after a while.

In any case, on the same page Mill emphasizes the need for balancing the sway of our faculties -- feelings and intellection are both important: “I had now learnt by experience that the passive susceptibilities needed to be cultivated as well as the active capacities... The maintenance of a due balance among the faculties now seemed to me of primary importance.” A many-sided personality needs many-sided experiences to develop and be free. Feeling is not mechanical, not associational. The self is not an isolated atom but rather an organic construct. Happiness comes from pursuing intrinsically meaningful activities and from allowing “passive susceptibilities” to operate freely. By this term, I believe Mill means self-culture, the patient development of our individual potential until we achieve a balanced, harmonious self.

1171. Mill reiterates the point he made earlier about basic utilitarianism’s unbalanced, mechanical view of human nature -- simply rendering people “free and in a state of physical comfort” and removing all hardships from life really would not make a community happy. Then he goes on to discuss Wordsworth’s significance for him: “This state of my thoughts and feelings made the fact of my reading Wordsworth for the first time (in the autumn of 1828), an important event in my life.”

1172. “What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought colored by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connection with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind.” Wordsworth teaches John Stuart Mill the true sources of happiness, and shows him the value of contemplation, of “wise passiveness” as a corrective for the analytic habit, which in modern times has reached the level of an obsession.

My Lecture Notes--Long, But Perhaps Useful

Mill is criticizing some of the flaws in utilitarianism to save that philosophy from itself. Utilitarianism is the corollary of C19 market economics, so that’s the first thing to discuss. We know the basics: the philosophers of capitalism, going back to Adam Smith and beyond, say something like the following: Rather than try to centralize a nation’s economy, the rulers should allow ordinary people to exercise their own initiative in producing, selling, and buying the material things that improve their standard of living. The less interference there is—consonant with preventing monopoly—the faster the people’s standard of living will improve. Supply and demand regulate the social order—people will buy what they want, and there will be someone to sell it to them at the right price, thanks to competition.

Let’s give the theory its due. In Smith’s formulation, capitalism is an Enlightenment-based, optimistic way of viewing human affairs: the market will harness otherwise selfish desires for gain and pleasure, and, as by an Invisible Hand, arrange human affairs in the best and fairest possible way. You don’t need the King to do it for you—your own desires and choices will bring order from chaos. Maybe we can’t change our nature and become angels, but that need not keep us from producing and consuming our way to a free and equitable society. And we will have done it by our own efforts, not like immature dependents on the will of some god or monarch. Kant said that Enlightenment consisted in humanity’s growing up and taking responsibility for its affairs; that’s what Smith wants us to do.

In addition to helping us achieve the age-old dream of “the good life” in material terms, capitalism is admirable in creating a space where all the ancient prejudices no longer tyrannize over us, or cause us to tyrannize over others. Consider how apt a given society is to mistreat the few or the disadvantaged, to discriminate against people because they don’t look like the majority, behave like the majority in certain matters, share the same religion or even quite the same strand of a religion, and so forth. Capitalism doesn’t care about anything like that—if you walk into a big department store, the merchant only wants to serve you, deliver a product, and get some of your green money in return. It doesn’t matter what color you are, whether you’re straight or gay, whether you’re a Christian, Jew, Moslem, Hindu, or Buddhist. Everybody’s money looks and talks the same. At least in theory, a capitalist system should be absolutely amoral. (That is, so long as fanatics and ignoramuses don’t import their extra-system values into the market and use the market to enforce those values, as in “we don’t serve ‘coloreds’ in this here diner.” Inherited wealth is another possible problem—it promotes something like the principle of aristocracy by birth.) Money flattens out a lot other “values” to a single quantitative standard—it liberates us from belief systems long used to treat others unjustly and strip them of their freedom. In this way, capitalism is as dynamic and revolutionary in the moral sphere as it is in the material realm of production.

Utilitarianism, which Ruskin despises and Carlyle disdainfully calls “Benthamee Radicalism,” is the corollary of market economics. Utilitarianism agrees with Adam Smith’s capitalists that individual choice-making and pursuit of happiness leads to social harmony, which Benthamees call “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” It’s a philosophy for a society of individuals who produce and consume commodities for one another, gaining their happiness in large part through the satisfaction of desires for comfort, sensory stimulation, and so forth.

Further, in its promotion of self-gratification, utilitarian philosophy further legitimizes capitalism’s deep indebtedness to the realm of desire as the source of social order and progress. Why? Well, we can probably agree with Carlyle that even the humblest nobody—the shoeblack, for instance—in the social order just keeps on conceiving one desire after another right up to his dying breath. The brilliant thing about market economics is that it generates not only objects to satisfy basic desires, it generates or “manufactures” new desires at a really stunning pace. We in our so-called post-industrial, service-based, new-age, information-superhighway (use your own phrase) society and economy know this even better than Marx. It’s evident in the realm of fashion, which recycles old desires in new and exciting packages, or even comes up with altogether new desires, which we either indulge as “wants” knowingly, or mistake for absolute needs. Capitalism thrives upon turning what we want into what we need, or think we need. The whole system is based upon desire for gratification of one sort or another—if we all became ascetics and decided to avoid everything not directly related to our survival and lcd comfort, capitalism would collapse instantly. People made fun of Bush 41 as “King George” when he said people should fix the recession by “just buying something,” but in a sense his majesty had it about right. “O reason not the need!” as another famous king said….Or if you don’t like 41 or King Lear, how about Oscar Wilde? “It’s only the superficial things in life that matter—man’s deeper nature is soon found out.” In this view, life is all about how many ever-so-slightly different shades of peach lipstick you currently own, how many unnecessary creature comforts, what the tail fins on your car look like, what color your hair is this week, and so forth.

No wonder we worship Hollywood actors and sports stars. And no wonder sex (that multifarious set of practices that we decadent westerners especially engage in mostly for fun) is the vehicle that drives advertising—it’s only slightly glib to say that advertisers sell sex even more than they sell particular products. Convince someone that he or she will “get more” by using a certain toothpaste or buying a certain car or cell phone, and profits flow.

Well, Utilitarianism is the philosophical handmaid of capitalism’s egalitarianism and choice-maximizing. People make fun of Bentham for being a one-dimensional man and for saying that “pushpin is as good as poetry.” But that’s his genius: he refuses to go beyond mechanistic formulae and paeans to quantitative pleasure because he’s convinced that it’s none of his business what you’re up to so long as you don’t harm anyone else. Pleasure is pleasure. Some people like opera; others like world wrestling federation matches. Some like both. So what? Who is to judge “quality” here, without either an elite few tyrannizing over the majority of lowbrow pleasure-seekers, or the lowbrows tyrannizing over the high-cultures? The best society, for the utilitarian, can be arrived at by the operation of the market: lots of happy people possessing and doing things that make them as happy as possible, and not trying to prevent others from achieving the same goals.

As for politics, capitalism and democracy are said to go well together: the “rational consumer” model of subjectivity, with its utilitarian imperative of pleasure, posits exactly the kind of bourgeois, self-interested individual who demands the democratic right to have a say in the way the country is governed. A society based upon the production and consumption of gratifying objects requires maximum freedom to make choices about which objects gratify one. Coercion is, simply put, bad for business! Also, markets need the kind of “stable dynamism” that comes with long faith in the democratic process: you can’t fulfill your needs consistently under a Stalin or Hitler, even if they provide “order” of a static sort. Authoritarians tend to deemphasize the pursuit of pleasure and push the idea instead that we must work like slaves towards some allegedly higher goal, generally an abstraction like “the people’s good,” which sometimes, though not always, translates into a vile particular like “the ruler’s bank account.” (Generally, authoritarians preach self-annihilation, or rather they channel the individual’s unconscious and “libidinal” desires to belong to something larger than themselves—the Reich, Pol Pot’s agrarian utopia, whatever.)

Briefly, Marx’s critique of all this optimism about the market is as follows:

The human relation to commodities is “fetishism”—we produce material objects and invest the objects themselves with value, eliding the fact that human labor makes them valuable. When you make a fetish or totem object, you worship it and let it determine what you do and think because it somehow contains the power of dead ancestors, etc. So the commodity becomes the determining power in human life, and humanity is reduced to a bunch of little cogs in the great machine that produces commodities. The capitalist sees humanity in abstract and mechanical terms—we are merely production-units, and the things produced come “alive.” In this way, any pleasure we get from objects is purely incidental: the system exists to perpetuate and augment itself; it really doesn’t serve humanity’s needs in any but the most superficial way.

Marx’s view follows Hegel: we produce our humanity and our world through the labor we perform. As Carlyle and Ruskin would say, work is what binds us together into a community, and what gives us our sense of dignity as human beings. But under capitalism, work is not even something we want to do—the circulation of commodities is all that matters, and ordinary people remain profoundly alienated from the labor they perform and from the results of it. It is meaningless or worse, and keeps them from becoming fully human. Further, the system by no means creates equality: those who own the means of production have all the capital, and they hire the workers’ labor on very unfair terms, paying them about as much as it takes just to stay alive and bury their troubles in drunkenness. Indeed, the vision of utopia is cruel in that the ordinary man and woman see the great wealth they’ve helped to produce all around them, but they can’t share in the benefits. The coal miner heats the rich man’s home, but shivers in his own hovel when the winter comes. Immoral! Unfair! Class inequity in its most unsustainable and vicious form. And capitalist “free-market” ideology sanctions it all with pious hypocrisy, declaring that the losers deserve exactly what they’re getting, while the self-righteous winners enjoy the fruits of others’ labor.

Well, Mill offers his own criticism of Utilitarianism—he focuses on what he perceives as the inadequacy of the assumptions made by Bentham and his father James Mill concerning human nature. He demonstrates the effects of his semi-mechanical, if benignly administered, education. The result is a nervous breakdown and deep reexamination of the basis of human happiness. Happiness is still the aim of life, but the issue of quality now becomes vital. And along with it, of course, comes the whole issue of who gets to decide on quality. Who will tell us when we’re attaining the right kind of happiness by the right means? Evidently Bentham and James Mill were not setting forth a tenable path for their protégé. But Mill doesn’t have easy answers about how progress is to be made—certainly, as he points out in On Liberty, we don’t want the vulgar middle class to become absolute in their opinions, as they’re threatening to do. Neither do we want political authoritarianism. The best Mill can offer is the notion that “those who stand on the higher eminences of thought” might prove to be the agents of improvement and change. This is still a deep problem for us today—to what extent are we right to be dissatisfied with our culture and expressions of unenlightened political will? Who decides value? Is there any authority principle higher than “the people and their desires and tastes”? Does a society need to have a sense of direction, or is that actually a mistaken demand? But doesn’t a society tend to ratify its majoritarian values as the only possible ones, and insist that its directionality flows from such values? So then we would need critics to break up what Mill calls “the hostile and dreaded censorship” imposed by the middle-class bourgeois majority. He’s responding to the fact that just as monopoly is a dangerous tendency in capitalist economics, so is cultural monopoly a threat when one group begins to dominate the production and consumption of culture.