The Failure Of Serene Cosmopolitanism

The conscious aim of the 18th-century protagonists of Reason and Enlightenment was the reconciliation of all men in a luminous world swept clean of all the contradictions from which they suffered. Once the despots (kings) and knaves (priests) had been cleared away, all religion and all the ‘evil forces of superstition’ would melt like clouds; and when the peoples had been freed from superstition the relations between men would be regulated by Reason. But we find a very different world when we look from the conscious aims of the philosophes to the historical results of their philosophy (which was itself determined by factors of which they were quite unaware). As men of ideas, the philosophes misjudged the power of the idea; they failed to see that when an idea appears to become a real historical force it does so thanks to an energy received from below and not from above; this energy is not, or is not solely, derived from conscious good intentions but also from all the license and rationalization and indulgence that the intentions may cover.

All they knew of the idea was the idea itself; they knew nothing of what surrounded it. If the history of the 19th century is examined it will be seen that the sacred was not destroyed but displaced. The national myths and cults which make the 19th century the age of nationalities resemble the tribal myths and cults and also those myths and cults of the Polis which existed in the cities of the ancient world before it was unified by Rome and before the appearance of Christianity, the universal religion of the individual. This religion inherited the universality of the empire and transferred it, during the political schisms which followed the period of unification, from the temporal sphere to the spiritual. ‘Particularist’ psychological tendencies were obscured while the unification held, but they can be detected, even while semi-latent, in many a rebellion and religious heresy; and historians have had no difficulty in recognizing ‘national demands’ behind the heresies in the countries of the Byzantine Christian empire subdued by Islam. At the end of the middle ages particularist sentiments revived again in the newly flourishing cities, but were thwarted by the feudal system, with its uncertain territorial boundaries, and by the ecumenical claims of Catholicism.

The French Revolution, however, was thought to announce the approaching triumph of the human race; but what actually happened? What was the effect of the three-fold process of the de-Christianisation of the elites, or a part of them, by ‘philosophy’, the Napoleonic wars and the resistances they provoked in Europe, and finally the industrial revolution which de-Christianised the masses as the Aufklarung had de-Christianised the surface of society? What happened was that sacredness began to adhere to the immanent instead of the transcendent; it was projected upon man instead of God. The sacred was formed anew around what may be called two poles of association: myths of the Species and myths of the Nation.

With nationalism the ancient tribal and city myths and cults were revived and also surpassed. They were no longer the same myths and cults, but new ones attached to similar psychological constellations. And at the same time there was foreshadowed in the work of the early socialist thinkers a messianism of the human Species—whose virulence was neutralized at first in the 19th century by the admixture of political liberalism, then in its hey-day, but was to erupt in the 20th century as the communist ‘Islam’. The ‘philosophy’ of the 18th century did not lead to the realization or triumph of the benign and exalted conceptions which inspired it. On the contrary, its criticism seems to have prepared the way for myths of a very different kind. The whole tenor of 18th-century ‘philosophic’ thought was against the partitioning of humanity, whether horizontally into belligerent kingdoms or vertically into a hierarchy of orders which ‘reason’ could not justify. Superficially, it inclined towards a sort of serene cosmopolitanism, a dictatorship of the lucid and communicable which would banish everything tortuous or obscure. It was confident that intellectual clarity could overcome all opposition; and the biggest obstacle was the Church, which took some rude buffets from the French Revolution.

But it turned out that the following age, the 19th century, was a profoundly contradictory one. In the economic sphere it conformed to the 18th-century aspirations; by multiplying, extending, developing, and diversifying the processes of exchange it did in fact bring men closer together and disseminate clear and easily communicable ideas. But at the same time there was a reappearance of psychological constellations formerly associated with paganism and with the familial, tribal, and city gods, the objects of local cults of blood and soil. It seemed as though the past were not really past, as though the old cults were only repressed and not abolished, and could reappear in new disguises. Instead of being endowed with infinite potentialities, the historical psyche seemed to dispose of only a limited number of patterns.

When Christianity won the final round against the mystery religions in the Roman Empire, it saved the individual from dereliction; it attracted individuals because it was concerned with individual salvation. But in the 19th century the ‘group mysticisms’ (the mystique of the limited group and the mystique of the Species) returned to the offensive; and unlike the group mysticisms of the ancient world the modern ones are mystiques of immanence, and are therefore a crude and imperfect form of mysticism. Thus in our day both the Species and the collectivity are conceived in a much more rudimentary way than in the ancient mediterranean civilization.

The attraction exerted upon men by the group was all the more powerful in the 19th century because it was possible to form groups unrestricted by the social divisions of the old society, such as the orders and guilds which partially satisfied the group instinct, and uncontrolled by the individualist principle of religion (which, though still ecumenical, was no longer powerful). The characteristic 19th-century group is the nation. It was Christianity, with the Greek tradition interpreted through humanism, that bestowed upon the individual in the Western world the ability to value himself irrespective of group judgments, though these were still powerful and in fact the last word is always with them. And in the 19th century the group judgment vigorously reasserted itself. Even the most individualistic assertions of a Stirner or a Nietzsche rise from the depths of a sort of ocean of despair; and in the 20th century the domination of group judgments was even more forcibly and effectively imposed. As a general rule, even the ‘superior’ individual of our own day will judge himself by what one might call ‘group standards’. This is truer today than in the 19th century, and it was truer then than in the 16th.

In the 19th century there arose from the depths of society an egoism which was not directed towards the egothe individual came increasingly under the jurisdiction of group judgments, not merely in reference to other men but also in reference to himself. And with the technical progress in the methods for diffusing speech entire groups speaking the same language are beginning to hold the same beliefs, opinions, and prejudices. The individual is no longer shielded from this invasion by intermediate groups; and the ‘aristocrats’ who ignore the existence of any opinion outside their own aristocracy are now a negligible minority.

Group particularism was an early development and occupied an inferior position in the psyche; but in the 19th century it seems to have been freed from the influence of the antagonistic elements that kept it down. The individualistic universalism of Christianity lost influence, and this meant that the Hellenic element also was weakened—that same Hellenic element which, in the early centuries of Christianity, had raised a Jewish heresy to the level of the Universal. When the individual was chosen to be the vehicle of the universal, it was a triumph over every particularism.

Mankind was profoundly and universally stirred by the French Revolution and the break-up of the society of orders. In humanity’s stormy periods there are always currents which rise up from the depths of the past, and in the 20th century one of these millenary currents brought to the surface the ancient solar symbol of the swastika. Nineteenth-century particularism had been only national, but the 20th century went farther and invoked not merely the soil but blood as well. Particularisms of blood and soil poured over Europe like a tidal-wave from antiquity, and overflowed upon the rest of the world. Contact with Europe’s armed and (in the material sense of the word) civilizing invaders reawakened and stimulated the particularisms of the colonial countries. The Europeans taught the yellow and black intelligentsias not only their techniques, their science, and their history, but their nationalism as well; and this at a time when they were creating the very situations which, in the nature of things, bring nationalism to birth.

Simultaneously with the mystiques of the limited group there was a revival, from the middle of the 19th century, of a sort of mystique of the Species—a mystique of the entire human group, but considered as a species. And in this groping mysticism of the species the cosmopolitan hopes of the 18th century were combined with infinitely more profound and ancient impulses. These impulses, which may be thousands of years old, are a legacy from prehistoric times when man, the prey of other animal species and of the elements, may have felt an instinctive urge to come to the help of any creature of the same kind as himself.

-excerpted from “The Sociology of Communism” by Jules Monnerot (1949)