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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
What is happening to the Left? It seems to be dying a slow death. While many commentators have predicted its demise, the Left has always defied these bleak prognoses and risen from the ashes in the most unexpected ways. Nevertheless, we are witnessing today a global decline in organized movements on the Left, and while social struggles continue to challenge dominant political regimes, these efforts do not translate into support for traditional left parties or into the creation of dynamic movements on the Left. Bestselling historian Shlomo Sand argues that the global decline of the Left is linked to the waning of the idea of equality that has united citizens in the past and inspired them to engage in collective action. Sand retraces the evolution of this idea in a wide-ranging account that includes the Diggers and Levellers of seventeenth-century England; the French Revolution; the birth of anarchism and Marxism; the decolonial, feminist, and civil rights revolts; and the left-wing populism of our time. In piecing together the thinkers and movements that built the Left over centuries, Sand illuminates the global and transnational dynamics which pushed them forward. He outlines how they shaped the notion of equality, while also analysing how they were confronted by its material reality, and the lessons that they did - or did not - draw from this. This concise and magisterial history of the Left will appeal to anyone interested in the idea of equality and the fate of one of the most important movements that has shaped the modern world.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction: Equality as the Great Modern Myth
The End of the Left?
The Emergence of Equality
1 From the Levellers to the Enigma of Rousseau
The Political Omens of Equality
Philosopher-Champions of Equality
2 The Revolution, the Terror, and the Conspiracy of Equals
Equality and the Jacobins
The Equals and the Class Struggle
3 Utopia as Refuge, from Politics to Chartism
The French ‘Utopians’
Owen and the Working Class
4 Springtime of the Peoples: Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century
1848: A Storm over Europe
The First Socialists in Power
5 Proudhon, Bakunin, and Anarchism as Freedom
The Consolidation of Anarchist Ideas
Anarchism on the Rise
The Advent of Revolutionary Syndicalism
6 Marx, Engels, and ‘Scientific’ Socialism
The Communist Manifesto
The Proletariat, Industrialization, and Science
7 The Fourth Estate, between Liberalism and Democracy
The Emergence of Workers’ Movements
The Labour Party and Socialist Reformism
8 Confronting Colonialism: The White Socialist’s Burden
How the Left Confronted Colonial Expansion
Reformism, Conquests, and Conflicts
Opposition to Colonialism
9 Nation and Internationalism: Dying for Your Country
The Socialists Enter Government
Class Consciousness and National Identity
Opposition to the War
The Decline of Patriotic Enthusiasm
10 Lenin and the State: Next to the Spinning Wheel and the Bronze Axe
The Bolsheviks and the Soviets
The Second Revolution
The Expansion of Communism
11 Blackshirts and Brownshirts: Right or Left?
Fascism and the Old Order
Nazism is not German Fascism
12 Mao and Chinese Communism: ‘A Hundred Flowers’?
From Sun Yat-sen to Mao Zedong
Communists in Power
An Eastern Capitalist Despotism?
13 The Socialist Imaginary in Post-colonial Countries
India and Pakistan
The Arab World
14 The Welfare State, a Working-Class Triumph?
The New Deal and the Beginnings of the Welfare State
A World of Class Compromise
15 Latin America and Opposition to the ‘Big Stick’
Cuba and the Guerrilla
Chile and Others
16 From the Civil Rights Movement to the May ’68 Uprising
The Struggle for Equality
Student Protest
Youths and Students in Europe
17 The Struggle for Gender Equality: The Feminine Mystique
Feminists of the Left
Early Feminist Theories
Late Feminism
18 The Rust-Belt Proletariat and the Return of Populism
The End of the Road for the Traditional Left?
Populism Right and Left
19 Consumption and Ecology: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
Does Work Really Make Us Free?
The Greens Are Coming!
A Melancholy Conclusion: Inequality and the Pandemic
Equality in a Globalized World
The Virus and Inequality
A Hollow Revolt
Groping in the Dark
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction: Equality as the Great Modern Myth
Begin Reading
A Melancholy Conclusion: Inequality and the Pandemic
End User License Agreement
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A Brief Global History of the Left
SHLOMO SAND
Translated by Robin Mackay
polity
Originally published in Hebrew by Resling Books. This translation is based on the French edition, published as Une brève histoire mondiale de la gauche, copyright © Éditions La Découverte, Paris, 2022
This English edition © Polity Press, 2024
Excerpt from Nous et les autres by Tzvetan Todorov © Éditions du Seuil, 1989, included by permission of the publisher. Excerpt from The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind by Simone Weil, 2001, used with permission of Routledge. Permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5826-1
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Dedicated to the memory of Tony Judt
Introduction:Equality as the Great Modern Myth
Equality is therefore at once the most natural thing, and the most chimerical.
Voltaire, ‘Equality’, Philosophical Dictionary (1764)1
I was born on the Left. My father was a lifelong communist, and hoped that I would follow in his footsteps. And so, very early on, he enrolled me in the Israeli Communist Youth movement. I grew up in the poverty-stricken Jaffa of the 1950s, a decade which saw the rise of anti-communism in Israel. Every year on 1 May, I marched dressed in a white shirt and red scarf. Out in the middle of the crowd, I would be worried sick about being spotted by other boys from my class, who I knew would then bully me at school. But then the fact that I was walking alongside other boys and girls – including one girl with whom I happened to be in love – would ease my fears somewhat, and I would feel quite the little hero.
The truth is that the boy I was in those distant days is still alive inside me. And yet, as early as 1968, the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact troops prompted me to break all ties with the communist movement. And, of course, the subsequent realization of the horrific legacy of the revolutions of the twentieth century did not exactly encourage me to return to it. And yet I continue to think as a man of the Left: some of the faults of my writing, and perhaps some of its qualities, can be attributed to that original political stance, which I am still not prepared to give up. Despite all of the disappointments occasioned by the deviations and failures of the social struggles of the twentieth century, a great gulf remains between the values that drive the Left in all its various forms and those that fuel right-wingers of all stripes.
I grew up in a family of modest means. My mother was a cleaning lady, my father a nightwatchman. When I was 16, I was obliged to abandon my studies to become a manual worker until my military service, and it was not until the age of 24 that I decided to take my school-leaving exam and enrol at university. Later, having obtained a doctorate, I found a position as a lecturer which allowed me to teach and do research. I like to think that the fact that I was in contact with members of the working class and was close to a number of movements on the organized Left prevented me from ever idealizing the topics of my research.
After many years teaching at Tel Aviv University, today, as Professor Emeritus, I enjoy the material benefits of the middle class. Unwilling to forget my past, however, I remain very conscious that most human beings find themselves in a far worse situation than myself, and struggle hard every day to improve their lives and those of their children. Even as I write these words, I have just read in the paper that half of the world’s population survives on less than 5 dollars a day. Most of us never meet these people – which is no coincidence.
Not far from where I live, there are folk whose basic civil, political, and social rights have been denied for fifty-four years. We hardly ever see these Palestinians, and when they do manage to find work in Israel, often as construction workers on meagre wages, they are usually transparent or invisible, perched on scaffolding high above us, and we hear about them only when they fall off and plummet down onto the sidewalk. This is one of the sources of my constant attention to social history and its political expressions – constant, and biased. As the British philosopher Bertrand Russell said, ‘a man without bias cannot write interesting history – if, indeed, such a man exists’. I fully share his view on this matter.
The End of the Left?
I am writing this text at a time when organized leftist movements around the world are in serious decline. Social movements still exist, and citizen rebellions continue to shake up many regimes, but this is not being translated into a gain in power on the part of traditional left-wing parties, or in the creation of dynamic left-wing movements.
Hegel told us that ‘the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk’, meaning that a historical process can only be understood in retrospect, at the moment when it is at an end. Does this principle apply to the worldwide Left today? I am not sure, and this book is a reflection of my uncertainty. Requiems for the Left have been pronounced dozens of times already, but, like a phoenix, it is repeatedly reborn from the ashes, in unexpected places and at unexpected moments. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, the Left seems increasingly old and tired: its ideological arms tremble and grope as it tries to grasp the future. But before deciding whether it’s time to bury it once and for all, it is important to take a brief look at the many faces the Left has worn and the metamorphoses it has undergone over the years.
At this point in the book, I am not going to put forward any unambiguous or over-restrictive definition of ‘the Left’ as a concept. Philosophers, historians, and political scientists have all tried to give such a definition, but they all tend to use the term in different ways. It has also taken on different meanings depending on the era and geographical context. In my opinion, the concept of ‘the Left’, like that of ‘Capital’, should be seen as denoting not a thing or an essence, but a relationship between things, a phenomenon whose meaning is always relative. Every left has a right, and likewise every right has its left wing. Moreover, this relational dynamic has altered significantly over the last two centuries.
We know that the appearance of the terms ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ was a quite contingent occurrence. When, on 28 August 1789, the newly formed National Constituent Assembly of France set out to deliberate on whether to maintain the king’s right of veto over the decisions of the nation’s elected representatives, opponents of the proposal gathered on the left side of the room, while supporters assembled on the right. But it would be several years before this left/right division became current in wider circles and took on its full meaning.
What were the initial criteria for this classification? What does the existence of the ‘Left’ on a global scale owe to this particular historical moment? Concepts usually take root when new representations emerge, but that does not mean that the birth of these concepts is perfectly consistent with the emergence of the phenomena themselves. In the case of ‘the Left’, the emergence of the concept must be viewed in parallel with that of ‘equality’, which at the time was taking hold in human consciousness. And the concept of equality always referred to ‘things’ different from one another, not to a ‘thing’ in itself.
During the French Revolution, ‘equality’ was one of the three great values brandished by the insurgents, along with ‘liberty’ and ‘fraternity’. In the revolutionary trinity, ‘liberty’ comes before ‘equality’ – probably because it is a far older concept. According to biblical myth, the Sons of Israel escaped from slavery to claim their liberty; and during the slave revolts in Rome, a resounding demand for liberty was often heard. In fact, within Mediterranean civilization, the notion had been a subject of debate since antiquity: Aristotle dealt with it in detail as early as the fifth century BCE (he also discussed equality, but only between free men). In the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes took up the subject, in the form of the question of the liberty of subjects to accept voluntarily the domination of the lord. Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the concept of liberty was increasingly defended by right-wing figures. For example, when Nazism was defeated, liberty was a central tenet of the political doctrines of both the Left and the Right in Europe. Indeed, the liberal Right has always accused the Left of posing a threat to civil and political liberties … and has not always been entirely wrong in doing so.
As for the all-important idea of fraternity, its origins lie principally in the Christian tradition; in other words, in the notions of love, pity, and charity towards the weak and the poor. Although the modern Left has adopted the notion in the form of ‘solidarity’, it cannot claim any monopoly on it. Nations have always been built on some sense of brotherhood between citizens. In all modern wars, for example, the brotherhood of combatants has been a cornerstone in the construction of national sentiment.
Equality among all humans, on the other hand, must be understood as a central notion when trying to decipher the historical appearance of the Left. In early agricultural societies, equality was not defined as a moral goal. No trace of it is to be found in the great hydraulic empires (from Mesopotamia to Imperial China), nor in the slave societies of the Mediterranean (Greece and Rome), nor in the feudal European countries (from England to Russia). Similarly – although many believers may not want to hear this – none of the monotheistic religions ever raised any objection in principle to slavery. The ‘former slaves of Egypt’ we read about in the Bible had themselves become legitimate slave owners in the Holy Land. Christians did not object to slavery either, and in their view the salvation of the soul always took precedence over that of the body. As for the Quran, although it recognizes the immortality of the slave’s soul, it still accepts the basic inequality between master and slave.
Just like polytheistic faiths (from ancient Athens to Hindu India), monotheisms tended to regard the ownership of certain human beings as a natural fact and a guiding principle of the cosmic order. In Europe, Christianity did not speak out against serfdom, and served as an ideological and legal anvil for the extremely rigid hierarchical edifice of feudalism. Despite the presence of a great many expressions of pity and criticisms of the cruelty of arbitrary power, equality between humans has never been an integral part of the dogma of the great religions. We might therefore say that Friedrich Nietzsche was quite wrong to attribute the invention of the idea of equality to Christianity.
On the threshold of the modern era, the demand for equality between humans was still in its infancy. Since equality did not exist in nature, the new moral standard had to rely heavily on models drawn from history. Nation-builders made reference to the distant past so as to demonstrate the long lineage of the modern peoples whose rebirth they hoped to bring about; at the same time, various left-wing circles also drew upon the past to confirm the correctness of their ideological enterprises and their optimistic predictions for the future.
For example, during the Civil War in seventeenth-century England, radicals imagined that, before the conquest of their country by William the Conqueror, the Anglo-Saxons were entirely equal and lived in the tranquillity of a pastoral society. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the first thinkers of the idea of democracy in the eighteenth century, portrayed man as a ‘noble savage’ in a state of nature, a creature imbued with the spirit of freedom and equality. According to Abbé Sieyès, author of What Is the Third Estate?, the Gallic tribes had lived without class distinction until the invasion of the Franks. The radical Jacobin François-Noël Babeuf was given the pseudonym ‘Gracchus’ in order to endow his actions with the aura of the ancient Roman republic’s plebeian tribune. In the nineteenth century, when the anthropologist Lewis Morgan published his research on community life and equality in ancient tribal societies, Marx and Engels were quick to echo his findings with great enthusiasm. According to them, what was the rule in primitive society would again be the rule in a future communist society, but with the additional benefits of the material abundance created by the machines of progress. Karl Kautsky, Marx and Engels’s official heir, also scoured the historical record, looking to utopias of the past for ideas that heralded socialism and communism. From Plato’s Republic, written in the fourth century BCE, through the Christian Gospels and the rules of the abbeys, to Thomas More’s Utopia, published at the beginning of the sixteenth century, he discovered an abundance of collectivist ideas and criticisms of private property – visions which, according to him, had up until then not been realizable because economic production was not sufficiently developed.
It should be pointed out that, although the many historical examples discovered by these scholars do indeed include criticisms of private property and social and economic injustice, calls for generosity towards the poor, and exalted proclamations in favour of liberty, the idea of universal equality is entirely absent in them. Noblemen knew nothing of equality: the ancient Anglo-Saxon and Gaelic tribes were governed by strict hierarchical rules; Plato’s Republic is an explicitly anti-egalitarian essay; neither Solon the Athenian nor Lycurgus the Spartan imagined what equality might be like; in most slave revolts, the insurgents’ aim was to turn the masters into their own servants; monasteries have always respected clerical hierarchy; and even in More’s Utopia, in which a sense of sharing predominates, slave ownership is still allowed, albeit subject to limits.
The Emergence of Equality
So what are the principal reasons for the gradual emergence of the myth of equality in the seventeenth century? Here I use the term ‘myth’ in the sense defined by Georges Sorel: not a misleading or illusory image of the past or present, but a set of representations that serves to unite people and encourage them to take collective action.
The first reason, in my opinion, is the waning of traditional agrarian structures across a large part of Western Europe, which first gave rise to an individual horizontal mobility of the individual. The expansion of agricultural production, following a significant improvement in practices linked to the introduction of new techniques, made possible a new division of labour which, in turn, led to unprecedented social mobility. These numerous changes in status and situation, although not always beneficial,2 altered mentalities in a way that had never been seen in other traditional agricultural societies.
It was not that revolutions caused the decline of the ancestral feudal order. Rather, it was the destabilization of the bonds of dependence and patronage that paved the way for a whole series of mass revolts and mutinies. The undermining of the feudal system of allegiance and vassalage, along with the decline of serfdom, together with the development of cities, the formation of capitalism, the growing emergence of a merchant class, and the constitution of new strata of rural and urban artisans, all profoundly altered the morphology of socio-economic power relations as well as modes of thought and the sensitivity of individuals towards the fellow human beings living and working around them.
Personal identities (always constituted in relation to the other) underwent decisive changes which fuelled and accelerated a growing malaise. Whereas the traditional social stratification of agrarian society had for centuries been regarded as ‘natural’, the new, more flexible configuration suddenly seemed less understandable and far less legitimate. The ensuing period of social instability – along with the first cracks in religious beliefs that had hitherto cemented a hierarchical order by naturalizing it – prompted individuals to compare themselves to one another (not necessarily out of jealousy or frustration), marking the beginning of a new dynamic of social relations characteristic of the modern era.
What significance should we attach to this still incipient ‘norm of equality’? In what sense did individuals feel or imagine that they ought to become the equals of other individuals? What was it about persistent inequality that at this point began to be seen as problematic, and in what sense was it felt that people should be equal, now or in the future?
The myth of equality has taken various forms, sometimes complementary, sometimes at odds with one another. At the very beginning of this profound cultural change, for example, we find the demand for equal civil rights under the law, followed by the demand for political equality in the form of the sovereignty of the people, but also, almost in parallel, the aspiration for greater equality in the socio-economic field and equal accession to independence and self-determination for all peoples.
Nowadays, demands for equality are expressed in the form of calls for equal opportunities in the education system, equality between peoples of different continents, equality between religions, cultures, genders, and sexes. All of this is increasingly understood and agreed upon. Over the course of contemporary history, then, the category of equality has been applied to multiple complex dimensions of life that are rather difficult to bring under a single conceptual umbrella. Today, are we witnessing a crisis of the various components of the myth of equality that would explain the disarray of leftist movements? I will try to answer this question in the conclusion of this book, if only partially. But before doing so, I want to sketch out an assessment, albeit inevitably brief and incomplete, of the successes and failures of the historical Left.
How dependent was the Left in each country upon the legacy of the long-term relations of forces that preceded its arrival? How has the Left continued to act within the framework of those forces, and to reproduce it? In what areas has the ethic of equality become hegemonic, to the point where its values have become entrenched almost everywhere in the world? And how and why has it repeatedly failed, provoking strong counterreactions? How did it come into conflict with political liberalism, colonialism, and nationalism? To what extent has the memory of the Gulag and authoritarian regimes that claimed to be communist paralysed the Left, considerably undermining hope and weakening the struggle for meaningful social progress? What positions has the Left taken up in relation to the idea of equality between similar humans, and equality between those who are unlike one another? Do most calls for equality generally envision relative rather than full equality? How has the idea of progress been integrated into the myth of equality, even as the deterioration of this idea, linked to the sentiment that we are living on a near-exhausted planet, is further weakening the Left today, making its work seem like a Sisyphean task?
Of course, in this short essay, I do not claim to offer a detailed history of all the currents of the Left worldwide: several shelves of volumes would not be enough for that! I will therefore confine myself to mentioning central nodes, movements that have had an influence upon the history of the Left, important figures, and, of course, significant events.
I will begin this short journey by trying to clarify exactly when the Left was born, and showing how it took its first baby steps. I have chosen two starting points: the Civil War in mid-seventeenth-century England, and the revolutionary philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which took shape in the subsequent century. This choice may seem rather arbitrary, as is necessarily the case with any historical choice, so I will try to give a brief justification of my choice in the first chapter.
1.
Voltaire,
A Pocket Philosophical Dictionary
, trans. John Fletcher (Oxford University Press, 2011), 124.
2.
In particular, the enclosure movement in England and Wales from the sixteenth century onwards corresponds to the first primitive accumulation of capital, which at the same time considerably impoverished a great many peasants.
1From the Levellers to the Enigma of Rousseau
The first source of evil is inequality. From inequality came wealth, for those words poor and rich are relative, and everywhere that men are equal, there are neither rich nor poor.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reply to the King of Poland (1751)1
As early as the sixteenth century, Europe saw major peasant revolts calling for the reduction of arbitrary taxes and the redistribution of land. Initially, this prolonged social unrest did not lead to a change of regime, but the brutal suppression of peasant uprisings left deep lingering frustrations. Traditional conflicts, and even outright battles between the nobility, the clergy, and royalty, did not result in any revolutionary change, except for a reinforcement of monarchical absolutism on the threshold of the modern era.
The great parliamentary uprising in the British Isles in the mid seventeenth century marked the beginning of a turning point in the history of sociopolitical conflict. Over a period of ten years, supporters of the king of England came into conflict with the supporters of Parliament, resulting in almost 100,000 deaths in a total population of about 5 million. The climax of this war saw not only the putting to death of the king – something which had happened in the past – but above all, for the first time in history, a public trial before his execution.
The beheading of Charles I also marked the beginning of a breakdown of the old order that had characterized all traditional societies around the world. It would herald the execution of other kings and emperors, from France’s Louis XVI to Russia’s Nicholas II – Puyi, the last emperor of China, was not executed but ‘re-educated’ to become a communist. However, the English MPs who tried the king and gave the world the principle of parliamentary sovereignty – nothing less than the inauguration of the politicization of the social classes – were not elected democratically, and could not claim to represent the totality of the kingdom’s subjects.
Membership of this political grouping did not require election; it was passed down from father to son and maintained through the payment of land tax. Parliament was mainly composed of representatives of the new middle nobility, large landowners, lawyers appointed by the king in the major cities, leaders of various sects of Puritans hostile to the official church, and so on. Essentially, these were political and religious elites who opposed the absolute power of the king, and who were supposed to represent society as a whole.
This English insurrection, although it made possible the emergence of new political and revolutionary actors, was therefore not a historical event for which political equality was a guiding principle.
The Political Omens of Equality
The anti-absolutist elites found themselves obliged reluctantly to mobilize the wider masses around them in order to take on the king’s army and bring about its defeat. It was at this point that what might be called a primitive left-wing movement appeared for the first time in history, in the form of the Levellers. They were not a political party with a platform or a set of policies, but their leaders wrote manifestos and petitions, held public debates, and even briefly, in 1649, published a pioneering newspaper, The Moderate.
They recruited mainly from among minor craftsmen – weavers, shoemakers, printers, glassblowers, etc. – as well as from among traders, professionals, and small and mediumsized farmers. Many of them enlisted in the New Model Army, commanded by Cromwell, and died in the fighting. Women also participated actively in the movement, writing their own petitions and organizing independent demonstrations.
The principal figure within the Levellers was John Lilburne. Born into a low noble family and apprenticed to a Puritan tailor, Lilburne soon became a radical activist and was repeatedly arrested. He became famous for refusing to take an oath in court. While incarcerated, he began to write short texts which he smuggled out of prison. His religious faith did not stop him from launching increasingly virulent attacks against the Church. He was also very vocal about the rights of the citizen and vigorously opposed the excesses of the legal system. In 1640, a petition to Parliament issued from his prison cell brought him to the attention of Cromwell, who, struck by its rhetorical quality, unhesitatingly took up Lilburne’s cause, eventually securing his release. Lilburne was made a captain in the new parliamentary army at the beginning of the insurrection, but would not sign its ‘Solemn League and Covenant’: he refused to swear allegiance to any commanding authority. Lilburne eventually resigned and decided to devote his entire life to political action under the name ‘Freeborn John’.
Lilburne’s campaign against the House of Lords landed him in prison, but this did not stop him from continuing to publish pamphlets in favour of equality before the law, and human rights. As his fame grew, so did the number of his supporters. In July 1646, he and other writers published A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens, which may be considered the first democratic programme set out by the Levellers. An Agreement of the People, a supplement to the basic principles, published sixteen months later, set out the ideological foundations for the first explicitly political movement in history.
The Agreement proclaims that all governing authority must be vested in the people. Only an assembly of representatives elected by all citizens may declare itself legitimate and legal, and therefore the monarchy must be abolished and replaced by a republican system based on the will of the people. The House of Lords may continue to exist, but only as an advisory body, not a legislative power. Parliament, elected by proportional representation once a year or every two years, should enjoy sole sovereignty. But these early democrats were also liberal pluralists on the political level. According to the Agreement, the newly elected Parliament was to end censorship of the written word, protect freedom of expression, and represent the full range of political and religious views in society.
Much of the discussion among the Levellers was based on theological arguments, although ultimately the ‘law of Nature’ guided them and supplied the framework for their conclusions. Most of them may have been Protestant and deeply religious, yet they advocated religious tolerance and freedom of conscience, and would later support the complete separation of church and state. They placed their trust in human reason and the possibility of translating it into political reality. But despite their in-principle commitment to political equality and their continuing demand for democratic elections open to all inhabitants of the kingdom, they excluded from the electorate not only servants and beggars but also women, even though, as mentioned above, women had actively participated in the uprisings. Moreover, like Cromwell’s supporters, they held private property to be sacred and vigorously rejected any challenge to it. It was this point that would lead to the emergence of the Diggers, in many ways the first instance of the ‘far Left’.
The Diggers, who considered themselves the true Levellers, had come to the conclusion that political equality could only be achieved with a concomitant development of social and economic equality. They adopted the name ‘Diggers’ because they had decided to devote themselves to agriculture, with the aim of creating a community of equals working public land. Their supporters, who were few in number, included agricultural workers and destitute artists, most prominent among them Gerrard Winstanley. The son of a cloth merchant, Winstanley had been an apprentice tailor and later became a Quaker. His formulation of justice was exemplary in its sobriety: ‘Work together, eat bread together, declare this all abroad.’
Although they gained support from the peasants who had fallen victim to the enclosures and been evicted from their land, the Diggers never succeeded in developing a more widespread movement. They remain historically significant, however, because they were among the very first to advocate the limitation or even abolition of private property in order to put an end to injustice, poverty, and what they themselves defined as ‘the exploitation of men by other men’. In short, they were the first historical advocates of socio-economic equality. Like the Levellers, the Diggers disappeared from the English political scene as quickly as they had appeared – but, although they seem to have been only a passing episode in the great insurrection against absolutism, the legacy of their demand for political, social, and economic equality would prove important in many ways. A century later, original thinkers would appear in France who placed egalitarian democracy and collective property at the heart of their thinking.
Philosopher-Champions of Equality
In certain respects the writings of Étienne-Gabriel Morelly and Gabriel Bonnot de Mably can be seen as a kind of theoretical continuation of the Diggers’ pioneering approach. It is not known whether there was any direct ‘influence’ of one upon the other, as there is no written evidence of any transmission of English avant-garde ideas to France, although there were lively exchanges between the two cultures. Nothing is known about Morelly’s life either; we know a little more about Mably, a Catholic scholar who hailed from the minor nobility and was the brother of the famous philosopher Condillac.
These two early ‘thinkers of the Left’ explicitly identified private property as the source of inequality among men. Morelly, the more radical of the two, openly called for the assets of the wealthy to be claimed as common property, after deduction of whatever was necessary for their personal needs. He also formally refused to accept any gain resulting from trade rather than production. Abbé Mably was more moderate in his search for remedies to the social distress and suffering that haunted his conscience: he criticized economic injustice, but was also apprehensive as to the correct measures to be adopted in order to achieve the desired equality.
The writings of Mably and Morelly remained confidential, on the fringes of the great intellectual flowering of the ‘Enlightenment’. Their style was rather clumsy and heavy-going, with neither an awareness of nor any attempt to understand the historical origin of the bold solutions they themselves proposed. In contrast, from their very first appearance, the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who may be defined as the first great thinker of equality, made great waves in the philosophical circles of the eighteenth century. At the same time that Morelly and Mably were working on their books, Rousseau published his first writings, characterized by a unique historical and anthropological approach. Given the meagre sources at his disposal, his ability to see through the internal contradictions of civilization to its fundamental formative elements occasioned great admiration among his peers.
Rousseau did not see himself as a French subject, but as a citizen of the free city of Geneva where he was born, raised, and educated. There is little doubt that his life as a migrant torn between two distinct political cultures – a small aristocratic republic and a vast absolutist monarchy – contributed directly to sharpening his original comparative outlook. His unstable existence – apprentice, educator, secretary to the wealthy bourgeoisie, musician with an uncertain income – helped forge his pioneering and very particular approach, which essentially stemmed from the sensitivities of a restless man in a precarious situation, with a talent for reading the social classes he had come into contact with and excelled at observing.
As early as 1751, in his famous letter to Stanislas, the former king of Poland, Rousseau wrote: ‘The first source of evil is inequality’; and when the Dijon Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters launched a public essay competition on the subject of the origins of inequality, Rousseau, already a prize-winner for an earlier essay, enthusiastically penned his entry. As he wrote later, in the Confessions: ‘since [the Academy] had shown sufficient courage to do it, I thought I might venture to treat it, and immediately undertook the discussion’.
Thus, the mid eighteenth century saw the idea of ‘inequality’ appear in France, tentatively, on the margins of thought; Rousseau was the pioneer, as he decided to devote the full power of his intellect to the question. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from Hobbes to Locke and from Montesquieu to Voltaire, philosophers had dealt with the questions of liberty, natural rights (without really touching upon equality), and the separation of powers, and had also strongly criticized the traditional ideology of the Church. Yet none of them had defended democracy, something which for the most part they tended to view with fear, as a kind of potential epidemic. From this point of view, Rousseau’s thought is exceptional within the panorama of the intellectual sensibilities of his era. In the Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality among Men, written in 1755, Rousseau for the first time sketched out a historical-anthropological account of the evolution of the division of labour in its initial phases, setting out from some brilliant intuitions to describe the emergence of inequality at the dawn of human civilization. His starting point is the rejection of the entire religious tradition, but also of the pessimistic philosophy of Hobbes and his heirs: there is no such thing as original sin, inequality is not the result of a divine will, and, above all, humans are not fundamentally evil. Indeed, according to Rousseau, the first humans cannot be defined according to any moral criterion; the categories of good and evil are inapplicable to them. And while they may have felt pity and identified with the suffering of others, only social humans have free will and are able to make choices that are not guided by their instincts. It is this freedom that determines the human capacity for perfection, which is responsible for the development of labour, the progress of the means of production, communication through language, and mutual dependence based upon common needs. And then comes the decisive moment:
The true founder of civil society was the first man who, having enclosing a piece of land, thought of saying, ‘This is mine’, and came across people simple enough to believe him. How many crimes, wars, murders and how much misery and horror the human race might have been spared if someone had pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch, and cried out to his fellows: ‘Beware of listening to this charlatan. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and that the earth itself belongs to no one!’2
Rousseau would never actually go beyond this position and call for the abolition of private property, although he admitted that democracy could only survive if social differences were not allowed to become too extreme. He constantly expressed his hatred for luxury, waste, and superfluous wealth. All he sought to do was to reveal the immanent relationship between the thirst for ownership and gain and social inequality. He lived in a pre-industrial era, but one in which capitalism had already taken hold, and where land had become a commodity and a major source of primitive capital accumulation. Yet the ‘Citizen of Geneva’ did not confine himself to a purely economic explanation; his greatness lay in bringing to light the psychological dimension of inequality, which played an important part in his bold theoretical account of its origins: ‘If this were the place to go into details, I could easily explain how inequality of influence and authority becomes inevitable among individuals as soon as, united in the same society, they are forced to compare themselves to one another and take account of the differences they find in their constant dealings with one another.’3
If we take Rousseau’s hypothesis on the birth of civilization and apply it to the changes that occurred in his own times – the mid eighteenth century – it becomes clear that French society would experience the revolutionary upheavals occasioned by the powerful ideological engine of the myth of equality just a few years later. And although Rousseau reluctantly dismisses the possibility of economic equality, he is certainly one of the spiritual fathers of political equality. The Social Contract, published in 1762, is undoubtedly a direct continuation of his earlier critique of inequality.
A society is not a family: it is based not on love but on agreement. So why are there masters and slaves? Was Aristotle right to say that some are born slaves while others are born to be masters? Are we to accept the religious dogma that the power to rule is God-given? Rousseau gives his ironic answers to all of these questions, defying both the ancient traditions of Greek philosophy and the dogmas of all religious belief systems: all illnesses have their origin in a superior force, but that is no reason not to call a doctor. In truth, men are born free and equal; it is power that subjugates them and it is fear that constrains and paralyses them, but, contrary to what most other philosophers have thought and written, force does not create a right to domination. An agreement in which one renounces liberty and submits to absolute domination is contrary to human nature, and cannot be called a true agreement. Genuine understanding between humans must be based on rational will and choice, which alone can endow political agreements with a normative status. How can humans in society, not in the state of nature, be free? In other words: how can they express their will? And, as an additional problem, how do we know what this will is? Is the general will the arithmetical sum of all individual wills? In an egalitarian and democratic body, there can be no contradiction between the interests of the sovereign and those of the citizen body, because they are one and the same. Thus, ‘the sovereign power need give no guarantee to its subjects, because it is impossible for the body to wish to hurt all its members’.
But what if a member of this body, a blinkered individual, were to express a particular will contrary to the collective interest? Rousseau’s startling answer is as follows: ‘If anyone refuses to obey the general will he will be compelled to do so by the whole body; which means nothing else than that he will be forced to be free.’4
Rousseau is not so naive as to imagine that all humans are sufficiently rational to always recognize their ‘true’ interests. Hence the egalitarian general will cannot be constituted of the sum, or even the majority, of individual wills: ‘One always desires one’s own good, but one does not always see what it is’, he states regretfully.5
The general will is thus equivalent to the idea of the ‘general good’; however, Rousseau remains unclear as to how this good is to be defined or accessed. He does not believe in systems of political representation, as delegates can never really represent other men. Nor does he advocate the existence of smaller groups (parties) that compete with one another to express the general will. Only small-scale societies, he suggests, are able to realize the general will in terms of equality, and only direct democracy can allow for full sovereignty and the expression of the general will. Rousseau’s imaginary ‘people’ thus takes the form of a small united community (a little imaginary Geneva?) in which the general good can be embodied.
