Foucault (recall also here) famously denies that socialism has an art of government. And notably he does not seem inclined to supply one. That's notable, especially, because the 1979 lectures do supply several variants of a liberal art of government.
But that socialism lacks an art of government is by no means obvious. In chapter VIII, of T.L. Hobhouse's (1911) Liberalism, Hobhouse distinguishes between 'official' and 'mechanical' socialism. These are, to be sure, kinds of socialism Hobhouse rejects. (He is by no means a fierce critic of other kinds of socialism.) It turns out that mechanical socialism lacks an art of government (about which more below), but that 'official socialism' does have one:
Official Socialism is a creed of different brand. Beginning with a contempt for ideals of liberty based on a confusion between liberty and competition, it proceeds to a measure of contempt for average humanity in general. It conceives mankind as in the mass a helpless and feeble race, which it is its duty to treat kindly. True kindness, of course, must be combined with firmness, and the life of the average man must be organized for his own good. He need not know that he is being organized. The socialistic organization will work in the background, and there will be wheels within wheels, or rather wires pulling wires. Ostensibly there will be a class of the elect, an aristocracy of character and intellect which will fill the civil services and do the practical work of administration. Behind these will be committees of union and progress who will direct operations, and behind the committees again one or more master minds from whom will emanate the ideas that are to direct the world. The play of democratic government will go on for a time, but the idea of a common will that should actually undertake the organization of social life is held the most childish of illusions. The master minds can for the moment work more easily through democratic forms, because they are here, and to destroy them would cause an upheaval. But the essence of government lies in the method of capture. The ostensible leaders of democracy are ignorant creatures who can with a little management be set to walk in the way in which they should go, and whom the crowd will follow like sheep. The art of governing consists in making men do what you wish without knowing what they are doing, to lead them on without showing them whither until it is too late for them to retrace their steps. Socialism so conceived has in essentials nothing to do with democracy or with liberty. It is a scheme of the organization of life by the superior person, who will decide for each man how he should work, how he should live, and indeed, with the aid of the Eugenist, whether he should live at all or whether he has any business to be born. At any rate, if he ought not to have been born—if, that is, he comes of a stock whose qualities are not approved—the Samurai will take care that he does not perpetuate his race.
This account of official socialism, which at the time was not reality anywhere, anticipates key features of Burnham's experience based account of managerial socialism (and capitalism) in the (1941; recall) Managerial Revolution. We might also call it 'Leninist/managerial or ethnic biopolitics' (notice the role of eugenics). Presumably Hobhouse has not Lenin, but the Webbs (he mentions them in the next chapter) or George Bernard Shaw in mind. It's the kind of 'government house' socialism we find satirized, if it is that, later in Huxley's Brave New World. One can agree with Hobhouse that a 'noble lying' socialism in the services of an intellectual avant-garde in charge of planning and population control is not very attractive.
From the perspective of Foucault's treatment of socialism in 1979, I note three important features in Hobhouse's analysis. First, the bio-political element is clearly not limited to neoliberalism. Or to be precise, neoliberal biopolitics shares roots with the official socialist kind in English radicalism's response to Malthus and Darwin. Second, Hobhouse clearly does not think he needs to offer arguments against official socialism once he has unmasked it. In part, that's because he thinks his own brand of liberalism has moved beyond Manchester's focus on 'competition' and has a more solid conception of 'liberty' (based on ideas derived from J.S. Mill and T.H. Green.*) In part, because he seems to think once a program devoted to deception has been unmasked it becomes impotent (that strikes me as a mistake or naivete).
Third, Foucault's comment is offered in the context of the German SDP's (1959) commitment (at Bad Godesberg) not just to reformist Bernsteinism, but to the "economic-political consensus of German liberalism" as articulated in the Ordoliberal ideals of a social market economy. Either way, the art of government on offer from official socialism as presented by Hobhouse is indeed unattractive as an art of government for a mass party committed to democratic ideals, Enlightenment, and an ordered market economy.
As an aside, part of my interest in Hobhouse (1864 –1929) is, in fact, motivated by seeing his (left) Liberalism (about which some other time more) as a possible route toward Ordoliberalism. There are important differences between the ORDOs and Hobhouse's liberalism, but there also commonalities. To be sure, there is little interest in Hobhouse among the main first generation ORDOs. And I suspect that Hobhouse's absence in the neoliberal literature prevents Foucault from drawing on him.
But I learned from a forthcoming paper by Stefan Kolev and Ekkehard A. Köhler, "Transatlantic Roads to Mont Pèlerin: “Old Chicago” and Freiburg in a World of Disintegrating Orders," that the ORDOs themselves were shaped by the Berlin economist and sociologist, Heinrich Herkner (1863–1932). Herkner was one of the key left-Liberal thinkers of the Weimar age, and in the very work that inspired the ORDOs revisionism from classical liberalism, he was, in fact, also an ardent admirer of Hobhouse's Liberalism (see especially his Sozialpolitischer Liberalismus (1925), p. 39.).
Be that as it may, in the same chapter (in fact, in the previous paragraph) of Liberalism, Hobhouse also rejects another kind of socialism:
We can recognize in the contours of 'mechanical socialism' a Marxist edifice with its commitment to the labor theory of value, class warfare, and a materialist conception of history. What's notable is that unlike the 'official Socialism,' which he simply unmasked, Hobson feels the need to argue against the 'mechanical socialist.' This suggests to me that Hobhouse takes it as a more dangerous and more plausible alternative to his own views.
Regardless what one thinks of the merits of Hobhouse's criticism of 'mechanical socialism,' my present interest is in the following passage (which anticipates Foucault's observations on the absence of an art of government in socialism):
Of this all that need be said is that the construction of Utopias is not a sound method of social science; that this particular Utopia makes insufficient provision for liberty, movement, and growth; and that in order to bring his ideals into the region of practical discussion, what the Socialist needs is to formulate not a system to be substituted as a whole for our present arrangements but a principle to guide statesmanship in the practical work of reforming what is amiss and developing what is good in the actual fabric of industry. A principle so applied grows if it has seeds of good in it, and so in particular the collective control of industry will be extended in proportion as it is found in practice to yield good results. The fancied clearness of Utopian vision is illusory, because its objects are artificial ideas and not living facts. The "system" of the world of books must be reconstructed as a principle that can be applied to the railway, the mine, the workshop, and the office that we know, before it can even be sensibly discussed. The evolution of Socialism as a practical force in politics has, in point of fact, proceeded by such a reconstruction, and this change carries with it the end of the materialistic Utopia. [emphasis added]
Part of Hobhouse's polemical point is that for mechanical socialism to have an art of government requires it to forego Utopianism and become more like his own, piecemeal ameliorative (reformist) liberalism.+ And this means that in many ways it has to be an applied practice informed by concrete policy challenges emanating in particular sectors of the economy (and social life). I am going to leaving aside the well known dangers of reformism (for a revolutionary Marxism). What's notable about Hobhouse's position is that while it is compatible with a kind of technocratic pragmatism problem-solving specific sectorial problems, it also echoes the kind of view (recall) that Rosa Luxemburg (ca 1904) articulates, of a bottom up, local "often spontaneous class struggle seeking its way."
That is to say, while Foucault and Hobhouse both explicitly deny that socialism has an art of government that is compatible with democratic life (and Foucault insists that what passes for an art of government within Marxism is no better than a police state), Hobhouse de facto articulates a social-democratic art of government on behalf of a reformist socialism that is not far from his own social liberalism. I won't surprise you, I suspect, that Hobhouse's point is very much in the service for a political parliamentary alliance between liberalism and social democracy that he advocates.**
*"the teaching of Green and the enthusiasm of Toynbee were setting Liberalism free from the shackles of an individualist conception of liberty and paving the way for the legislation of our own time."
+From my vantage point this is very Smithian in character. And some other time, I hope to return to this.
**UPDATE: I thank Zoltán Gábor Szűcs for catching a number of errors in an earlier version of this post.
Comments