Thermidorian Societies and Their Enemies: Books I-Iii

By Leslie Herzberger

The author was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1946. He served in the U.S. Army, then attended Columbia University School of International Affairs, and the Ph.D. Program in History at New York University. This book is part of the follow-up of the PH.D. Thesis Proposal that the author presented to New York University on December 24, 1980, and worked out as a private scholar the next 20 years. The work that went into the book spanned a period of around thirty years overall.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 25, 2007
• ISBN: 9781469100050

Leslie Herzberger

The author was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1946. He served in the U.S. Army, then attended Columbia University School of International Affairs, and the Ph.D. Program in History at New York University. This book is part of the follow-up of the PH.D. Thesis Proposal that the author presented to New York University on December 24, 1980, and worked out as a private scholar the next 20 years. The work that went into the book spanned a period of around thirty years overall.

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Copyright © 2007 by Leslie Herzberger.

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Contents

Introduction

I     

Part I

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Part II

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Part III

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

II     

Part I

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Part II

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

III     

Part I

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter II

Chapter III

Part II

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Afterword

Chapter I

Chapter II

Introduction

I

Social organisms are similar to individuals. They have to grow up. And to do that they have to go through stages. Freud investigated the stages of growth and maturity of the individual in his own way. So did Erik Erikson, a neo-Freudian who added some practical suggestions to Freud’s overall model. The model nevertheless remains: birth, infancy, childhood, adolescence, middle age, old age, death.

You might say that in this study we are focusing on the midlife crisis of youthful societies, that in their choice of a quick fix—a social revolutionary metamorphosis, as it was one that might have been forced upon them(!)—they might, nevertheless, never be able to successfully resolve that crisis. But they have to try; they have no choice! The consequences are often troubling and dangerous.

We are going to examine why this is so; and if this is so, how it comes about, how it develops, and what options are open in terms of solutions and resolutions—if any—as each of these modernizing societies one by one attempts to come to terms with their inalienable postrevolutionary heritage in the late modern world. From our vantage point, there are no resolutions inherent in the social revolutionary process. There are not even very good solutions available to it. It is an up-and-down process full of contradictions and paradoxes even though it is said to be used to eliminate just such contradictions and paradoxes from society.

The upside is that a society that is forced or that chooses the revolutionary option thereby gets a new lease on life. The downside is that the politics of social revolution is essentially the politics of closed societies! A social revolutionary society is a closed society; conversely, a closed society is essentially a revolutionary society.

We shall examine this essential relationship, its roots—intellectual, ideological, and structural, with reference to modern history—and its political-sociological context, including its overall meaning, its structure, and its process. Parallel with this line of analysis, we will counterpose the idealized construct of an open society—essentially the evolutionary societies of the West—which are much less idealized in their practice than in their theory, as a rule, in a comparative-type analysis. We will attempt to determine whether these two types of societies—the closed society and the open society, the revolutionary society and the evolutionary societies of the West—are more alike or more different from each other in the overall context of modern history, in full view of modernity. Are they more in tune with modernity, or are they more in conflict with the demands of modernity? Are they defying modernity, essentially committing hubris, subsequently visited by their own particular nemesis? If fascism is the nemesis of individualism carried to its pathological, paradoxical extreme, is a radicalized postrevolutionary state of things the nemesis of social revolution pushed to its pathological extreme, of unity turning in upon itself as it is mandated in spite of the demands of a more pluralistic and more random reality? Finally, if a radicalized state of things is essentially terroristic, what is the nature of its antithesis—of civilized man in society? This is the structural part of our analysis.

II

On another level, we will address process in this analysis. The social revolutionary process—dependent on a single morality, triumphant for all—should be considered as a thoroughly viable option for modernization in the twentieth century if a single morality alone, rooted in a single source of transcendental value, was an absolute perpetual value in itself at all times, everywhere! It is not and it cannot be!

Second, social revolution is thoroughly viable only if history—in whose name a progressive social revolution is justified in the modern world—is a singularly positive, one-dimensional, unilinear process, an autonomous process with predictable laws of movement of its own, independent totally of any irrationality, of any organizational degeneration and individual or group madness. This is not the case.

Third, social revolution is thoroughly viable if history, as a process of development of human societies from the more simple to the more complex, is identical with the idea of progress as something that leads the international community toward the good, the better, and the best in all areas of our lives. Only if progress, in the guise of increasing technical complexity and ever more complex organizational manifestation in evolutionary societies, leads to better and better situations for all in society can we then hope for similar unlinear progress (albeit in an exacerbated fashion) for revolutionary societies as well. History is a uniquely positive process only if the process of increasing complexity, increasing numbers, increasing organization, increasing sophistication in technique, increasing capacity for social control means a parallel process spelling an equal increase in the freedom, autonomy, security, and right to self-determination for the individual as a unique entity on his own, independent of the group and of history! It does not!

Fourth, if progress is not unilinear—meaning uniquely positive and constructive and benign—then by speeding up a normal evolutionary development to a matter of insignificance in terms of time, social revolution in the twentieth century is doomed to something less than a success, that is, if a preconceived idea of success is indeed their point of destination.

I     

The Political Anthropology Thermidorian Societies:

The Intellectual Roots of Demesure

Part I

Intellectual Roots of Demesure

Chapter I

The Premise

I

The problem of the social revolutionary process in the modern world is closely tied to the problem of the intellectual and his dilemma in post-Enlightenment society where he lives but does not feel he truly belongs.

The phenomenon of the intellectual is born of the ferment and Weltanschauung of the Enlightenment: the category of the intellectual per se is a function of middle-class democratic societies. It has crystallized to mean a private, disinterested, self-determining, independent scholar, an autonomous seeker after truth, responsible to no one except to the notion of truth, wherever he may find it, wherever it may lead him. Truth, in the lexicon of the intellectual, is never subversive to democratic societies. It is for man rather than over man; it exists in spite of man.

If the intellectual functions in middle-class society, as do fish in water, he was born in the womb of the aristocratic society that preceded it. The incipient intellectual was born into the violent aristocratic society—the late feudal society as it was in its stage of disintegration—as the clerque, the minor castle-urban figure, the bookish secular ascetic, literate and therefore functional for the lords of the manor and for the castle towns. He evolved as a phenomenon side by side with the gradual demise of the religious clerical ascetic, disappearing in utility alongside the declining utility of the feudal culture and the medieval Christian synthesis that was holding it together, validating it and rationalizing its existence on both the natural and on the supernatural level. Both the viability of that synthesis as an ongoing entity and the viability of the aristocratic feudal way of life were put to rest by the philosophic movement expressed by the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and by the accompanying Industrial Revolution that made the feudal aristocratic way of life impractical in any case.

The clerque, long in the shadows and held down by the notions of the aristocratic way of life, emerged full blown as the dilettante, as the bohemian, the pundit that questions all, knows all, reads all, but works not at honest labor; the intellectual shyster, in other words, the literate bum, the social fool of bourgeois society, a role accorded a different type in aristocratic society. From a feudal teller of tall tales, the magician with useful insight, we now have in the middle class the fool as the teller of true tales, of useful tales, of informed literate tales, sometimes unwelcome tales of truth and error, of major and minor significance, often a thorn in the side of middle-class society but still all the more a definite, direct function of it, born of it, living within it, and dying with it—their fates are intertwined. For instance, Rousseau, the self-made eighteenth-century man of the Enlightenment, was also Rousseau the Vicar of Savoy in France; who was also Rousseau the revolutionary intellectual, a man who believed that he had conquered himself by his own will and was now ready to show society how to conquer itself; the radical philosopher, the man of the next society—the new society—and the representative of the new man, of what man can be and, through his intellectual constructs, what society can be if he was allowed to guide them. The man had a foot in three different worlds: that of the elite, that of the democrat—the self-determining autonomous man—and that of the new man of the new society that would be rid and done with the old and start anew.

To be sure, this was the dilemma of all the intellectuals in outsized form. But the elements of tragedy are all there in major or minor form, including very much the self-destructive aspects of the intellectual who is living in a middle-class society but not of it, in perpetual search for a new society that will spell the end of this type; the autonomous society that he dreams of where all will be clerques, but one that, disingenuously, cannot tolerate antonymous clerques independent of society.

The clerque, totally subordinated in aristocratic feudal society, in turn necessarily saw as repressive, if not positively antagonistic to his own way of life, the aggrandized violence of the aristocrat, a violence that was the lord’s privilege and domain in any aristocratic society. The violence and conflict that he still saw in his inheriting middle-class society was viewed in the great intellectual literature of the nineteenth century as demeaning, intolerable for the masses, especially for the man of the intellect who knew better. For the left-wing intellectual gradually coming into his own, as was bourgeois society, this intolerance of aristocratic violence—which he saw as wasteful, archaic, and destructive, and which reminded him of the elitist (by then widely discredited) values of a repressive and violent aristocratic culture and society—seemed positively benign if not out-and-out altruistic and utterly mature. The intellectuals of the Far Right, on the other hand, saw middle-class violence and conflict as mere imitation and a pale mass copy of the great and good aristocratic violence in the mythical tribal and medieval robust past, an aristocratic past that was sold out. The bourgeoisie perverted such noble behavior into mere commercial self-gain for dirty money, for self-interest, while society goes down the tubes together with the great past culture, infected with money mentality. Both the Left and the Right despised the individualism of bourgeois society, including the liberalism and the democratic idea inherent in it, both in its nineteenth-century and twentieth-century manifestations. The Far Right despised the idea of democracy because it washed down the aristocratic idea, minimized it by allowing most to join in the struggle for rewards and for resources and for the honor that goes with earning it, rendering the idea of violence, power, and greatness irrelevant since, if all join in, these ideals would be diluted to the point where no one would be able to maximize them. No one will have great power any longer; no one will have great abilities to violate most or all others any longer. Therefore, no one will be great in terms of aristocratic perspective, thereby destroying the aristocratic ideal and, along with it, those who benefited from it—the men of supreme action, those who had very little thought or purposeful intellect. To save the feudal ideal and the people who were at home under it, those who were responsible for diluting and perverting the ideal of violence and action for action’s sake should be put in their place and the clock turned back in terms of cultural values to some mythic time far in the past.

On the Far Left, theoreticians depict bourgeois middle-class society as inherently violent, as abusing violence in their society by democratizing it and rendering it more widespread, more public, more accessible, more used, more pervasive, more sinister, and, therefore, more dangerous to society, to their society and also to other societies in their range and orbit. In this line of analysis, the notion of inherent violence renders middle-class society fundamentally contradictory and, therefore, destructive and self-destructive.

II

What the radical Right and the radical Left both have in common is the hatred of the bourgeois individualist who will not trade his individual autonomy for the proposed autonomy of a new society. Neither his ideology nor his structural position will predispose the commercial and professional bourgeois to trade his own autonomy for an ideal social autonomy, where that society’s general will will precede his own pluralistic popular will. It would be bad for business, but in theory, it would be good for society if he did trade it in. But then who is