Philosophy and Political Theory

Two subjects everyone needs to study, and why they relate to each other

Given that I have this tendency to write whatever pops into my head, I don't necessarily write articles in an order than makes sense. So, now that I've joined Substack and I have yet to publish anything particularly intellectual on the platform, I figured that today, I would get back to basics and write an introductory (and hopefully simple) lesson on the subject of political theory, and how it flows from philosophy.

So, first of all, what is "political theory?" Well, for those of you reading this on my WordPress blog, you will be aware, if you select the category of posts that this article is listed under, that a political theory is a socio-economic system. What isn't mentioned there is that the field of political theory is the development of socio-economic systems. Obviously, this is quite different from political science, which flows from sociology, not from philosophy directly. Political theory is a relatively young field of study, and underwent most of its development during the 20th century. At the very beginning of the 20th century, there were only two competing theories, but by its end, there were four. 

The Four Political Theories throughout history

In order to understand how the four main political theories developed, it is necessary to understand the basics behind the philosophies that inspired them, and also their historical context. For millennia, there were multiple competing philosophies that came out of the Hellenic traditions that gave rise to the constant struggle between the republicans and the monarchists, and fascinating though the Greek and Roman philosophers may have been, it wasn't until the Enlightenment that things really got going. From the Socratic tradition came empiricism, a.k.a. scientific realism, which ultimately gave rise to liberalism, the first true political theory. What was called liberalism back then by the likes of John Locke is now called "classical liberalism" today, as you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who subscribes to the philosophy who isn't considered "conservative" or worse, "regressive." 

Classical liberalism was an ideal that a great deal of well-educated Englishmen subscribed to, and as the British government began infringing on more and more "English traditions" concerning natural rights, a group of these Englishmen decided in 1776 to break away from the corrupting influence of the British Crown. This eventually inspired the French to do the same. Setting aside the major differences between the American Revolution and the French Revolution, it is important to note that French liberalism, though inspired by English liberalism, has some important differences. The French tradition, which came from the mind of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, prioritises positive liberty over negative liberty, which is the opposite of the English tradition. Positive liberty is the the freedom to have or do something, whereas negative liberty is the freedom from having to do something. Another way to phrase it is that negative liberty guarantees the ability to act, whereas positive liberty guarantees the ability to receive. This difference will be important later.

Other than the "divine right of kings," there really was no philosophy propping up the existing European monarchies, which didn't exactly enjoy a monopoly on political power. Several European countries at that time were already republics, and even Britain had a republican government, despite have a hereditary head of state. With rapid scientific advancements challenging the authority of the church for over two centuries by that point, religiosity was in a state of decline, and therefore "because God says so" was no longer a sufficient justification to maintain the absolute power of the monarchy, especially after the French Revolution demonstrated just how powerless the monarchy truly was. Thus a reactionary philosophy arose in popularity among those who finally realised the revolutionary philosophy of liberalism was a serious threat to their power. This philosophy was more mystical, less scientific in nature and came from Heraclitus via Immanuel Kant, who believed that philosophy should serve primarily to deconstruct ideas rather than justify them. This was the origin of critical theory, which despite having a similar name to critical thinking, is actually the complete opposite. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel took this one step further in his 1817 book titled Encyclopaedia Logic, in which he revived the Platonic concept of dialectics. This opened a veritable Pandora's Box of utter madness.

Hegel, unlike his contemporary liberal philosophers, had no understanding of science, and thanks to that, he thought that the universe was nothing but a set of contradictions that God created to confound people. He seemed to believe that knowledge could be transferred only by divine revelation, not by scientific investigation. His was a rather strange brand of theology, and in his own day, most contemporary theologians and secular philosophers didn't really take him seriously for the simple reason that he was utterly incomprehensible. Hegel wasn't just a theologian, he was a mystic, and his particular interpretation of the dialectic sprang from the esoteric side of alchemy. Having dabbled in said esoteric side of alchemy myself, I recognised the connection instantly when it came to Hegel's synthesis of the two types of liberty. In a system that prioritises negative liberty, the onus is on the individual to provide for themselves, and makes no demand of society save not to coerce the individual. In a system that prioritises positive liberty, the onus is on society to allow the individual to act, and makes no demand on the individual. The two types of liberty are compatible, but one must take precedence of the other. A society that prioritises negative liberty over positive liberty will receive a high degree of both. A society that prioritises positive liberty over negative liberty will receive neither. If this sounds familiar, that's because there's a rather famous quote from Benjamin Franklin regarding liberty and security that essentially means the same thing. Rousseau, a contemporary of Franklin, did not agree, and Hegel, who came later, did not understand. Hegel's failure to understand persists to this day among his various successors.

Given Rousseau's prioritisation of positive liberty, French liberalism quickly became a dark mirror image of English liberalism, moving in the opposite direction and going even farther than the old monarchy ever did. If English liberalism was a move right, then French liberalism was a move left back to centre... and then even farther left. Following the Reign of Terror, the Napoleonic Wars, the temporary restoration of the monarchy and eventually the rise of the Second French Empire, the liberal experiment died in France after less than fifty years before a new political theory emerged. In 1840, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon wrote a book titled What is Property? in which he asserted "property is theft!" Call it "the 19th century version of clickbait," I certainly do. This book showcases the first known use of the phrase "scientific socialism," and is one of the first uses of the word "socialism" in general. Proudhon essentially invokes the labour theory of value (LTV) in order to make an economic argument, as opposed to a purely moral argument, against feudalism and chattel slavery, which several European countries still had, and in the Americas, the latter provided a supply of cheap cotton and other cash crops to Europe. The LTV has no single origin, though the first to truly codify it was Adam Smith in his treatise titled The Wealth of Nations, first published back in 1776 (coincidence?). While Proudhon may not have invented the term socialism, his book is, effectively, the first socialist economic treatise. However, it is important to note that Proudhon's definition of socialism did not become widely used outside of France until very recently, which is why Proudhon would, at least today, be more rightly called an anarcho-mutualist; he called himself an anarchist, after all.

Proudhon wasn't really a leftist; rather, he tried to synthesise the left and the right into a libertarian centrist position, what we would recognise as fourth positionism today, but which would have been third positionism at the time, because actual third positionism hadn't been proposed yet. Keep that thought in mind, because it's important, and I will come back to it later. Proudhon's synthesis never went anywhere, especially given all the attention that was on a far more infamous contemporary of his: Karl Marx.

Karl Marx was such a controversial writer in his own day that he was exiled from his native Prussia in 1845. Some point afterward, he met Proudhon in Paris, where the two were initially friendly before having a falling out (why am I not surprised?). Anyway, Marx had a very different idea of what property was from Proudhon, and delineated between personal property and private property for that very reason. In 1848, Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto, and clearly defines communism as "the abolition of private property." In other words, no person may own any capital, more commonly called "means of production," i.e. tool, building, or land that could be used for the acquisition of resources or generation of products. In the same book, Marx defined socialism not as "collective ownership," as Proudhon and the French syndicalists did, but as "state ownership" of the means of production. In other words, socialism is defined as state capitalism! However, government control over the means of production was not enough for communism to be achieved. Socialism could not give rise to communism unless the workers took control over the government, thus creating a workers' state. 1848 was known as "the year of revolutions" (coincidence?!), and saw the first attempt to unify all the German-speaking lands into a single nation. It failed, primarily due to the efforts of Austrian nationalists, but the stage was set for something far worse. 

Proudhon tried to synthesise the ideals of individual liberty with social liberty, in the hopes that it would provide economically for those who owned nothing. Marx flatly rejected the idea of individual liberty, and instead sought to eliminate all traces of individuality, such as the the nuclear family or as he called it, the "Judeo-bourgeois family", and become a "species-being," or human hive mind, which he thought was possible through social conditioning because he was a Lamarckist. Then again, one must consider the cultural backgrounds; Marx was German, and even uses the phrase "true German socialism" in The Communist Manifesto, and was an ideological successor to Hegel. Despite using dialectics himself, Proudhon wasn't a Hegelian in the formal sense. Many supposedly secular academics today say that Marx succeeded where the other Hegelians failed because he "demystified the dialectic," but there is no truth to this; Marxian dialectics are just as mystical as Paracelsian alchemy, and I ought to know, I've studied both. Anyway, the specific requirements of communism compared to other forms of socialism sets it apart and finally brings us to the second position, because according to Marx and his ideological successors (particularly Vladimir Lenin), socialism is a process, communism is the result. However, not all socialists want to bring about communism. Some socialists saw the failures of communism in the Soviet Union, and rather than simply dismiss it as "not real communism," they came up with something else, using the same Hegelian synthesis.

In 1920, several political theorists in the socialist tradition decided to explicitly reject communism as "fake socialism," because it created the same conditions as "liberal capitalism." These conditions were a parasitic ruling class that kept the workers enslaved in order to build the war machine to expand their empire. Therefore, these thinkers independently came up with a new position, a third position, in a bizarre case of convergent syncretism. In Italy, Giovanni Gentile (pronounced "dzhen-tii-ley") married syndicalism to nationalism in his book titled Fascism: Doctrine and Origins. He was effectively the mind behind a certain Italian socialist who decided to form his own party specifically to counter the Marxists: Benito Mussolini. Meanwhile in Germany, there were two movements to emerge, both of which were founded by former members of the communist Social Democratic Party (SPD). One of these was the National Bolshevik movement, founded by Ernst Neikisch, who hopped from party to party, including a brief stint back in the SPD. The other was the German Workers' Party (DAP), initially founded in 1919, but eventually hijacked, for lack of a better word, by one of its members, who renamed it the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) the very next year: Adolf Hitler. In Russia at this same time, Nikolai Ustryalov was quite frustrated with the Communist Party because of the anti-nationalist sentiment, and didn't embrace Bolshevism until he found a way to synthesise it with nationalism. He began calling himself a National Bolshevik in 1921 after discovering Neikisch's work, and for a while, was in good graces with Iosif Stalin, who was also a nationalist, and explicitly stated that he wanted "socialism in one country." It is for this reason that Stalinism, along with Fascism and National Socialism, is technically third positionist. Stalin himself wasn't an adherent of Leninism, he was a dialectic, developed his own ideas, which he laid out in his book titled On Dialectical and Historical Materialism, completed in 1935 and published in 1938, by which time Ustryalov had been executed on his orders.

I could go into the Marxist reactionaries, also called "revisionists," such as Leon Trotsky, Antonio Gramsci, and the founders of the Frankfurt School, but I see no need to here. That's a rabbit hole for some other day. What is important to note is that the supposed success of third positionism in central Europe had the intelligentsia of western nations, including Britain and the Americas, eventually copying them. Lord Oswald Mosley founded the ironically-named British Union of Fascists in 1932, the same year than Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president of the United States. Roosevelt was routinely criticised by American academics at the time for not being sufficiently heavy-handed in his executive role, and those same academics praised both Hitler and Stalin for the supposed success of their dictatorial rule. The progressive movement, at that time, had no idea what was actually going on in Germany and the Soviet Union, and after the Second World War came to an end, the progressive movement quietly swept their past praises of the European dictators under the proverbial rug. However, the people who actually had to endure the madness of these regimes never forgot, and luckily for us today, have laid bare the failures of Marxism and its inevitable transmogrification into third positionism in excruciating detail.

One ironically central figure in the movement towards de-centralisation is Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973). The work of the Mises Institute and its founder is largely based on the subjective theory of value (STV), first introduced in 1871 by another Austrian economist named Carl Menger. Today, the STV is far more widely accepted today among economists, even the Keynesian variety, than the LTV. It is a great irony that the pursuit of a scientific, rationally-ordered society throughout the 19th and 20th centuries involved so much pseudoscience, particularly the sacred belief in central planning. No central planner could ever possibly account for all contingencies within the system, and so whenever the central planner fails, he must either defer to the market or delegate to more central planners. The record of central planning is one of complete failure, and even in the rare instances where it succeeds, it is extremely inefficient. As I hope we have established by now, the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century were not founded on scientific realism, but on dialectical materialism, also called social constructionism. Their "science" is nothing more than a religion pretending to be scientific, it is mysticism disguised by secular and vaguely scientific-sounding verbiage. In the years since the founding of the United States, the dialectic has corrupted liberalism, and its marriage to Keynesian economics has given rise to neoliberalism, which, philosophically, is modern feudalism, in that it has no real philosophy behind it. That being said, the old monarchs were generally much more philosophically literate than modern neoliberal politicians, hence my alteration of the political compass.

The Four Political Theories today

In the modern day, classical liberals are still around, but typically call themselves "conservative" because they are trying to conserve liberalism as the political establishment increasingly embraces some variety of progressivism and/or authoritarianism. However, though it has its roots in scientific realism, classical liberalism is an incomplete philosophy, owing to the relative dearth of scientific knowledge when it was codified. Economics is a science, and classical liberalism is based on an outdated economic theory. Scientific realism itself is an incomplete philosophy, because science does not and cannot know everything. However, scientific realists are aware of this. Dialectics, on the other hand, do not accept this fact. All dialectical world views see themselves as complete theories, and thus concern themselves with the totality of the human experience, which is where the word "totalitarianism" actually comes from. Totalitarianism may be summed up by the phrase "everything is political," and I will conclude by explaining what that actually means.

The political is the concern of the state. Thus, the state's philosophy needn't be complete, as long as said philosophy has sufficient answers to political concerns. In contrast to a totalitarian state, in a conservative state, culture is political, but the economy is not; in a progressive state, the economy is political, but culture is not. In a properly free state, neither the economy nor culture is political. Thus, for a free society to function, private citizens need their own philosophy to make up for the gaps left by the guiding philosophy of the public (i.e. the founders of the state). In contrast, a personal philosophy is more trouble than it's worth to the citizens subjects of a totalitarian state, because it creates dissidents. Totalitarians and free thinkers cannot coexist, and everyone knows it, which is why the powers that be don't want us studying philosophy on our own... especially personal philosophy, such as stoicism. Study philosophy and complete yourself. Na shledanou.