On Liberal Revolution
On Liberal Revolution
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Overview
Gobetti was the first Italian scholar to identify “two Italys”: one enlightened and modern though small and weak, the other premodern, traditional, and dominant. A witness to the seizure of power by the Fascists, Gobetti became convinced that Italy’s hostility to liberalism could be overcome only with a cultural revolution. Endorsing a radical liberalism, he nevertheless believed that the Communists, led by Antonio Gramsci, could play a crucial role in democratizing Italy by helping to develop a secular culture. For a liberal state to subsist and grow, Gobetti argued, there must first be a transformation of both the economic structure and the legal and moral culture of the society.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300132960 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2008 |
| Series: | Italian Literature and Thought |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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ON LIBERAL REVOLUTION
By PIERO GOBETTI
Yale University Press
Copyright © 2000 Yale UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-300-08117-0
Chapter One
MEN, WOMEN, AND IDEASLEV TROTSKY
In the Rivista di Milano [Journal of Milan] for 20 February 1921, I showed that the Russian Revolution-by promoting the creation of an agrarian democracy, overthrowing autocracy and the mir [village commune], and creating a state in which the people believe because they feel they have made it themselves-is essentially, in its inner dialectic, an affirmation of liberalism. Further research on the intellectual crisis in Russia in the previous century and the study of a magisterial work by Lev Trotsky (Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Kautsky), which has not yet been translated into Italian and with which I am acquainted at first hand, have persuaded me to restate my thesis in philosophical terms.
Trotsky counters the abstractions of the Slavic intelligentsia, from Radishchev to Tolstoy, by proclaiming a liberal vision of history for the first time in Russia. He arrived at this conception of history as the result of free human activity by way of Marxist culture, which conceives the possibility of overcoming, in a fruitful manner, the abstract intellectualism that vitiates the stance of the Slavic thinkers as they vainly anguish over the artificial contrast between Slavophiles and westernizers. Slavophiles and westernizers share the same point of departure-the Hegelian outlook, but with Hegel given a mystical slant, something we have seen in Italy with the Hegelianism of Vera. Two different factors combined, each in its own way, to make these Russians lose touch with reality, ignore the conditions in which the people were living, and attribute a political function to an intellectual class that was impregnated with mystical values, bemused by the myth of pure rationality, and miserably incapable of action: one was the redemptive mission claimed for the Russian spirit from Khomiakov to Dostoevsky; the other was the importation into Slavic obscurantism (hailed as a revelation by Belinskii and Herzen) of the ideas of the European Enlightenment. The anarchic sentimentalism of the intelligentsia had not achieved a reflective consciousness, nor a complete individualism capable of reconciling itself with, and making use of, autonomous rationality. Whether these intellectuals were atheists or simply opponents of the institutionalized church, they did not succeed in formulating a critique of the old theocracy, and their religiosity did not lead to anything concrete but dissipated into messianic expectations of moral renewal. They did not understand morality as practical social action that counts for something socially to the extent that it is concrete and, to be frank, political; for them it remained a pure abstract form, an object of contemplation -a morality that finds redemption outside itself (for example, Tolstoy's Resurrection) and is thus false (inadequate and sterile) at its core.
A sound familiarity with economic ideas, however deterministically and materialistically they were understood at first, laid the initial basis for a denial of a theocracy that had developed in isolation from the real conditions of Russian life and had crystallized into a centralizing force with the power to crush all activity and to hold the citizens in a state of slavery. Trotsky's entire project as a thinker is to portray the religious problem as a purely political question, by which means he hopes to dissolve the mystical logic of churchly indifference and force it to yield a concrete self-justification; and that ought to be practically lethal to it. "Materialistic socialism," says Trotsky in a polemic against Masaryk, "is really for the workers the first stage of subjective life, of life lived for themselves." The criticism aimed at Russian theocracy by the intellectuals wandered off into a mystical vision that denied values, and reality. Russia is the birthplace of every sort of mysticism; there thought has to turn to abstraction, there idealistic values have to turn hazy and evanescent. Even Kant becomes a proponent of mysticism if he is transplanted into the Slavic environment (for example, Masaryk). Trotsky understands that to root out mysticism one has to destroy philosophy (pseudophilosophy) and affirm a materialistic conception of life.
History is made by individuals. So the individual must not become lost in a dream of fantastic transcendence or quietist contemplation; the task is to become aware of one's own responsibility.
"What does our Russian peasant suffer from? From the lack of individual consciousness, which is precisely what our populist reactionaries have celebrated, what Tolstoy glorified in the person of Plato Karataieff: the peasant who melts into his community, who obeys the soil. Socialism clearly will not be created out of Plato Karataieff, but out of workers who think, who are endowed with initiative and awareness of their own responsibilities. Whatever the cost, we have to nourish initiative in the workers. Individualism in the working class is not in contradiction with solidarity and fraternal collaboration" (Terrorism and Communism). Solid thinking like this, conscious of its own historical importance, is clearly a contradiction of Tolstoyan abstraction.
Trotsky's vision has taken a markedly voluntaristic turn, leaving behind the materialistic and fatalistic element that contaminates Marx's conception of history. Thus he puts the problem of the revolution in concrete terms, knowing that amid the empty anarchic hopes of Russian antitsarism the only possibility of introducing a principle of life and realization would be the creation of a class of leaders with a sense of the state, able to impose discipline and make this into a state of citizens. Against the reformism of Kerensky, who behaved in the Russian context as though he were an English democrat, Trotsky theorized the dictatorship of the proletariat, a government arising not out of the indistinct mass of the people but out of the portion of it that feels public responsibility; in this view factory councils became essential organs because they would be the road to political experience for workers and peasants, proportioned by degrees to their increasing maturity.
In countries like those of the Slavic world, where theocracy has existed side by side for centuries with a sentiment of purely anarchic libertarianism quite unable to harden into a solid awareness of individual values, Trotsky's whole critique of the natural-law metaphysics of the democrats is perfectly legitimate and profoundly liberal. To preach abstract philosophical equality is simply inane, given that in history equality has had real impact only as a political force in empirically determined and utterly transient circumstances. The democratic myth was a contingent offshoot of the French Revolution and a forceful weapon against feudalism, but it will hardly be able to create consensus in a people that is barely taking shape as such and still does not give universal credence to the value of the individual.
Trotsky longs for a state in which liberty is not proclaimed by law but is achieved by the citizens to the extent to which each is able to assume the responsibility. Over against abstract egalitarianism (which in Russia more properly deserves to be called by the frank term "reactionary") this is the potent inception of a liberalism that sees history as the living outcome-always unforeseeable and always outstripping the will of any individual-of what individuals themselves bring about, of what each is able to bring to the common task of humanity. And the de facto contribution of each cannot be weighted a priori, through a process of abstraction; it counts only pragmatically, in what is realized.
On these principles Trotsky defends his conception of liberalism, seeing a concrete example in the voluntary labor contributed by the workers on "communist Saturdays and Sundays." On these principles he affirms, with a resolve that leaves no room for doubt, that intellectuals have a function as the living force of civilization. And he proposes that industry be organized on the basis of a unified command, in opposition to the socialist system of collegial control and responsibility.
Only from tactical necessity and under the pressure of history in a country like Russia, the homeland of the mir, the country where every sort of community receives adoration, does this fertile movement for liberalism have to assume the name and sometimes the appearance of a movement for socialism. You cannot accomplish the education of an entire nation in the space of a few years: the masses will often reject the substance if doing so means that things retain familiar names. It falls to the historian to speak the truth, on a plane higher than political contingency.
LUIGI STURZO
The personality of Luigi Sturzo constitutes a challenge to both theorists and historians because within the man himself are contained all the insoluble difficulties and subtle equivocations that make it hard to grasp the praxis of the Popular Party -a party that, whatever its adversaries claim, is working out political positions and feelings that are quite impossible to mistake for old-style clericalism. For some years the Honorable Meda has found himself in a state of profound unease, and the great authority he enjoyed as quasi head of the government and unchallenged leader of the Catholics has suddenly plummeted. This is not just personal bad luck, nor does it signify the substitution of one figurehead for another. Rather, these developments signify the appearance of new ideals, a shift in concepts and methods. Today nobody views Meda as the leader of the Popular Party; he represents the old liberal reformist clericalism within the Popular Party, and since the latter encompasses the former, Meda is simply one element in the complex political game of Sturzo. Historically he figures as a precursor who hasn't yet understood, and therefore finds himself bewildered and at times bowled over by, a rationale antithetical to his own.
Within the government Meda is a man of ability, not an idea; Meda's experience will serve Sturzo as he constructs his own system of thought and pursues his own strategy. Meda reconciled Catholicism and liberalism without even seeing reconciliation as problematic. History, on the other hand, usually unfolds with a greater degree of thought and profundity: the experience of Murri could not be skipped over so easily. But the imperative of Murri, resolved in such a way as not to exclude Meda, indeed in such a way as to justify him, raised much more complex problems of culture and action: new elements forced their way into the hermetic circle of clerical uncertainty, which was still longing mystically for an idyll. Clericalism had amounted to nostalgic literature, and its importance to society was to supply a technique for diplomats: the Popular Party was supposed to become a force in the political contest.
To make Miglioli coexist with Crispolti, to receive the legacy of Murri and Pius X, to praise the pseudo-economic elucubrations of Toniolo and profit from the concreteness of Tangorra, to welcome even heresy with free and lofty superiority, to go so far as to exploit with regal sapience the elegant, combative dilettantism of Luigi Ambrosini (and compromise him instead of being compromised)-this is the majestic dialectic that the Popular Party has imposed on the disorganized life of the Italians, this is the truth behind its equivocation. Taken in isolation, it is easy to explain Speranzini and Anile, Gemelli and Crispolti, Miglioli and De Rossi. But when it comes to Sturzo, the problem is to resolve all these antitheses at once, to locate the unifying factor among all these individuals. We can follow the actions of the Popular Party; we can explain its nature and form without engaging in too many dialectical acrobatics. But the past and the future of his party are immanent in Sturzo himself, and we cannot understand his personality if we do not enter a realm of logic that lies above the empirical struggle. Thus he remains an enigma to the technicians of politics. To Giolitti he must have seemed a deus ex machina that suddenly materialized to cause a disturbance; philosophers themselves are disconcerted. In fact, Luigi Sturzo could be defined as the messianic figure of reformism, and even that definition, complex and ungraspable as it is, does not exhaust all aspects of the man.
If we are to discuss the thought of Luigi Sturzo, the concept of reformism requires a double clarification. Even in abstract terms it is impossible not to distinguish between reformism and reforms. Reform is part of the art of government. But in the concept of reformism we discern elements that lead us to judge it dismissively in the specific Italian situation of today.
Luigi Sturzo takes his place in the dialectic of Italian history by taking his place in the dialectic of reformism and creating a laic logic.
From 1848 to 1914, as we have argued elsewhere, the government of Italy was a form of state socialism. The Piedmontese Center-Left, the trasformismo of Depretis and Giolitti, the socialist monarchy, all reveal the separation between government and people and the tragic absence of a laic discipline and laic values in our national life. Government has to resort to illicit pressure, dealmaking, and corruption in order to find an equilibrium at which it can function without being toppled; reforms as correlatives of the art of government are not enough, because the unstable premise is constantly having to be re-created, and that task falls to reformism, which makes liberals, too, lose touch with their principles.
In the reformist illusion, the people submit to utilitarianism, and this condition distances them yet again from the unity that has already failed twice. What we have to deal with is a new, formal degeneration. What we have to do is halt the catastrophe of disintegration that the socialists neither see nor know how to avoid. In this light, Sturzo is the messianic figure of reformism, taking Cavour's prescription entirely at face value and striving to make the people believe in politics through a moral a priori. He thinks of democratic vitality, but he does not see, enclosed within the bounds of the problem he has to resolve, the relation between politics and the state. The popular movement is viewed by Sturzo in relation to the forces of regeneration in the future of all peoples, and in this way he resolves the two essential problems of the life of his party and of Italian life. He can make the effort to proselytize, at which the democrats failed, because he waves the banner of messianic reformism and uses the religious illusion to bring the masses to participate in laicization.
Continues...
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