So, today sucks, but I’m still gonna put out my review. Enjoy, as much as you can.
CONTENTS
Reviews
Wald, The New York Intellectuals
Bogosian, Operation Nemesis
de Maistre, St. Petersburg Nights
Lagniappe
Mithra Pic: Feline Consolation
REVIEWS
Alan Wald, “The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left From the 1930s to the 1980s” (1987) - Trots! People love ‘em, people hate ‘em. Me? I’ve known good and bad, the same with most kinds of people. I’d say I’ve known more good. They’re kind of like Quakers or anabaptists- irritating, sometimes, and they expect you to know and care about their arcana, but when the chips are down, in the worst spots, there they are, on the right side… usually.
Arguably, the place where Trotskyists (I’m told there’s some kind of distinction between “Trotskyist” and “Trotskyite” which marks the user as a Stalinist- I’m trying to use the nice one! Sorry if I fucked it up!) have, arguably, come closest to real power is America… but only ex-trots. Many ex-Trotskyists wound up as prominent public intellectuals with at least some political pull, figures like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, and many more big names, like Mary McCarthy and Saul Bellow, were in and around the general milieu of radical politics and modernist art in midcentury New York (do we count the thirties and forties as midcentury, or only sexy Mad Men times?). Then, they abandoned it. The radical politics, anyway, and sometimes modernism, or else they held on to a version of modernism that ossified over the decades into a new classicism. At least some of them became leading neoconservative writers during the era leading up to Reagan’s election to the presidency.
Something between the time, the place, and the people allowed this set to call themselves “the New York Intellectuals,” with the definite article, and get away with it. Maybe in part because this is America and no one really wants to call themselves “intellectuals”- and there was, from the beginning, some irony here. Communist organizing is always funny about the role of intellectuals, and the way the Trotskyist groups in New York in the thirties tended to recruit disproportionately from intellectual circles certainly led to some hand-wringing about working class bona fides (let’s just say this is a dynamic with which I have personal familiarity).
In a way, the process of becoming “The New York Intellectuals” allowed the worst impulses of a number of sides in the contretemps to confirm their pre-existing biases. Anti-intellectual communists could conclude that intellectuals will always betray them (never mind their whole tradition was started by a guy who never had a job that didn’t involve writing about ideas). The ex-trot intellectuals could conclude that all under the sun is irony and compromise and the “adult” thing to do is take what you can. American readers, such as they were — and there were more, and more serious, readers at the time in this country than at any other, before or since — could decide that this overdetermined shadow puppet show was just what intellectuals did and do and they could take it or, as the case would eventually be, leave it.
Well! Let’s see if we can put the horse back before the cart, here. Alan Wald is a historian and a Trotskyist organizer himself. He has delved deeply into the archive of the American left, in this and other books. As such, he has a “dog in the fight,” and emphasizes the milieu’s time on the left, roughly from the Depression until the end of WWII, more than he does its time in national prominence, roughly from the fifties to the eighties. He’s strongly critical of his subjects, though, being on the Trotskyist side of things himself, he sees their story as, at least partially, a story of lost opportunity. Trotskyism could have been a contender, Wald broadly implies, but between confused direction from the man himself in Mexico City, the endless fissiparousness of the movement and its infamous splits, and sheer historical bad luck, American Trotskyism never reached what Wald saw as its potential.
Most of the things that went wrong in the American Trotskyist movement had some unfortunate ironies attached, mostly concerning the role of intellectuals in revolutionary organizations and relations with their bete noir, the Stalinists in the CPUSA. Much like elsewhere, some of the best minds in America joined the Trotskyist bodies that arose in the thirties. And not just writers and academics clustered around the cafeterias at CCNY, either, but organizers too. Not for nothing did Trotskyists lead the legendary Teamster uprising in Minneapolis, and followers of sometimes-trot socialist pacifist A.J. Muste spearheaded the great Auto-Lite strike in Akron.
But Wald mostly focuses on, like the title says, New York intellectuals, and it does seem like a lot of the leaders of the fragmented Trotskyist scene did too. American Trotskyism means facing down the national guard in Minneapolis. It also means people like James Burnham, a transparently self-seeking wannabe intellectual big shot who was clearly attracted to Trotskyism in part because some interpretations of Trotsky (and Lenin before him) implied a strong powerful role in intellectuals such as himself in the revolution and the post-revolutionary dispensation. When Burnham realized — pretty late, for a supposedly smart guy — that the left wasn’t the way to power, he turned his coat, going well to the right of most of the neocons. More generously, a lot of American well-wishers to the Russian revolution, disgusted by the butchery and betrayals of Stalin, invested Trotsky and his fledgling movement with hopes they couldn’t possibly have fulfilled at the time. These disappointed hopes compounded the inevitable frustrations involved in any organizing. Out of the crooked timbers of humanity nothing straight can be made, as another overachieving European put it, and that frustrates people, especially pedants. See, I’m something of a pedant for failure and disorder- that’s how I manage.
They often hate each other, but Trotskyists and Maoists, in my experience, are alike in terms of their central method of managing disorder: the refinement and promulgation of doctrine, of “The Line.” They need to have answers to all questions. If they don’t, that would somehow mean that the transmission line of “scientific socialism” had been broken, or worse yet, lay with some rival faction. It has to go Marx-Lenin-Them, with these groups or else they’re not legitimate, somehow. And the line needs to cover every meaningful contingency. I get that this is an unhelpful mutation of an understandable impulse to develop explanatory mechanisms for the chaos of circumstance, to avoid the sort of unplanned (often degenerating into unprincipled) back-and-forth that characterizes so many other political actors. But I’ll admit, it was never my thing, and its excesses often make me queasy. “Bourgeois intellectualism” on my part, I guess, though that rather strikes me as the pot calling the kettle black.
Anyway- Leon Trotsky died at a deeply inconvenient time, that is, before he could issue some kind of directive to his followers that would allow them to take a “line” on the Second World War that made any goddamn sense at all. Instead, you got a pained hodge podge, where the Trotskyist sects all tried to make themselves seem more correct to the words of the prophet (uttered, it’s worth nothing, before Hitler started gobbling up Europe): that any future war would be a simple inter-imperialist squabble and that the role of the vanguard should be to sit it out and encourage both sides to lose. This was, after all, what the Bolsheviks called for in 1918, and it worked out for them (eventually).
Wald can admit that it was a “bad look” in wartime America for the Trotskyists to equivocate about who was the bad guy in the situation. He points, for good reason, to the sheer bald-faced opportunism of the Stalinists, who went from supporting the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to embracing the war effort, and even undermining allied union organizers and anti-racist efforts to do so. But Wald misses the fact that all that means is it should have been a layup for the Trotskyists- support the war and antifascism, support the Double V and union efforts, agitate for a just peace. But, at least in part because of the many Trotskyist factions competing with each other to seem most legitimate, none of them could convey any such simple message.
The failures of the Trotskyist groups during the war — along with the fact that the other, err, “socialist alternatives” at the time were equally unappealing — provided a lot of intellectuals a convenient exit strategy, but most of them were probably looking for the door well before then. There were, if you can believe it, even more reasons — more spaces on the little game board track, “move your piece X spaces away from radical organizing” — to quit socialist or communist movements then than there are today. The micro-physics of sectarianism in the thirties and forties was at least as vicious as the social media wars of today, as the careers of people like Max Shachtman (some of you may recognize that name from a throwaway line in “Inside Llewyn Davis”) attest to. Throughout the organizing space, the rocks of ego, stupidity, circumstance went smashing into each other erratically and made ejecta of many a potential movement leader. McCarthyism took hold, and like the situation with the war, the Trotskyists, while often seeing the stakes reasonably clearly, could not organize a coherent response, especially if it meant making common cause with the dreaded Stalinists.
What’s more, there was a lot more in the way of opportunity then than there is now. One thing the endless line-refining and inter-group squabbling in little magazines that characterized Trotskyism proved to be pretty good training for was the boom in public intellectual life that occurred in the US after WWII. There was a bigger market than ever before for intelligent, critical — but not too critical! — writing on politics and culture. Academia was also expanding, and the barriers keeping Jews out of the academy started coming down. One of the things that had impelled many young intellectuals in the thirties away from the CPUSA and towards Trotskyism was the Stalinist’s insistence on kitschy socialist realism and disgust for any kind of artistic experiment. Ironically, Trotsky himself, while much less of a cultural philistine than Stalin, wasn’t exactly the proponent of free experimentation in the arts that his American followers might have wished for, but he had bigger fish to fry by the time he was in exile.
The upshot is, a lot of major critics with an investment in modernism were at political loose ends after the end of the war, around the time when the American foreign policy establishment — themselves a richer, WASPier group of pedants and weirdos not totally dissimilar from the pedantic weirdos in the New York Intellectual scene — embraced modernism as a symbol of the freedom and progress to be had under American-style liberal democratic capitalism. It became a fat time for the people around magazines like Partisan Review, Commentary, and the universities.
I would have liked to have seen more of that story, how these people went from “State Department socialists” and “Cold War liberals” to out and out neoconservatives (or, in a few cases, got more radical again in the sixties). It’s been told elsewhere but I’d be interested in Wald’s take. It seems like it’s a story involving race and money, and neither of those seem to be the subjects Wald is most comfortable with, preferring his (generally quite sharp and compelling) close readings of texts and the sort of biographical interpellations of all sorts of Trotskyism-adjacent cultural figures that dot the text. I often struggle with tone in these reviews, and I probably don’t convey how rich this book is when trying to give my analysis. These people lived interesting lives, and if they failed — if they failed themselves, in many cases — at least they often did so in compelling ways. I’m curious to track down Wald’s work on the broader American literary left sometime soon. ****’
Eric Bogosian, “Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide” (2015) (read aloud by the author) - Some of you might know Eric Bogosian as an actor, a curly-haired, vaguely Elliot-Gould-like presence in such films as Uncut Gems and Under Siege 2, a spin on Law and Order, and at least one cinematic adaptation of his several renowned plays. I actually know a lady who was his personal assistant! She says he is great. In any event, he has also written this history book for a broad audience, and brings his storytelling instincts with him to make it a crisp read. He says he first thought of it as the potential basis for a screenplay, and once you know the story, you can see why.
The Armenian Genocide seemed likely to become -- is, in some places, like Turkey, where it is forbidden to be taught about in schools -- a footnote to the tragedy of the First World War. Those most directly responsible for the hundreds of thousands, upwards of 1.5 million, Armenian deaths, the leadership of the CUP ("Young Turks") and their flunkies, easily escaped war crime trials helmed by the British and their Turkish collaborators in the immediate aftermath of the war. Many of them looked set to return, to join their former underling Mustafa Kemal in rebuilding Turkish power in Anatolia and the broader Middle East. The larger powers of the world didn't care. The French and Italians soon lost their taste for their more ambitious meddlings in the Middle East; The British wanted their oil concessions, and would work with whoever they had to to get them; this also went more or less for the Americans, with more of the inconsistency (Wilson promising a League of Nations Mandate for Armenia, then Congress slapping him down) we're used to from American imperialism; Russia was devastated by the war and the Revolution and mostly wanted a quiet Armenian Soviet Republic. The Armenians were on their own.
But they were not without resources. As Bogosian reminds us in his crash course in Armenian history for his random anglophone readers, the Armenians are an old, old people. They've dealt with a lot of empires. They're a diasporic community- and a strong diaspora, like it or not, does seem to be the sine qua non of which genocides get to be turned into moral stories, and even avenged, and those that become statistics as far as most of the world are concerned. As any resident of East Watertown, like myself, can tell you, Armenians, wherever they go, enjoy quite lively community life- there's a half-dozen Armenian social clubs in my neighborhood, each seemingly attached to a different political faction with a long, hoary history, rivals to each other but they come out for their people when the chips are down. Some of Armenians, some of them diasporic, some of them who saw the slaughter that started in 1915, decided they would not let the world forget, nor the Young Turks get away with it.
Operation Nemesis was a plan put into place by the Dashnak, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, a socialist Armenian party that has gotten involved with all kinds of stuff all over the world in pursuit of their goal of a free, social democratic Armenia. Nemesis, named after the Greek goddess of righteous revenge, was the plan to track down the perpetrators of the Genocide and shoot them, one by one, wherever they were. More than avenging the Armenian people, it would also force the world to look what happened to them in the face. Bogosian tells us some of the planners -- passionate young Shahan Natalie (one rather thinks he came up with the name), old stalwart Armen Garo -- but his main focus is on young Soghomon Tehlirian. Tehlirian shot Talaat Pasha, arguably the single man most responsible for the genocide, one of a triumvirate of Pashas more or less running the Ottoman Empire during the war. He also surrendered to the Berlin police (this was 1921, near the beginnings of the Weimar Republic) and had his day in court.
Courtroom scenes are irresistible to certain kinds of writers, and Bogosian seems like one. He's right to put some focus on this one, as it's pretty fascinating. Soghomon Tehlirian came from a family that had suffered from previous Turkish persecution of the Armenians. After centuries of living under relatively stable, if not exactly liberated, existence under Ottoman suzerainty, the Armenians came to receive the lion's share of the violence of the Turkish elite trying to figure out how to hold on to its power as its antiquated system crumbled, under pressure from the rise of nationalism among its subject peoples and competition from growing European powers. There was already a revolutionary movement in Armenia, and many who looked to an Ottoman collapse to liberate their people- especially after the Young Turk movement, which came to power in Istanbul with the help of Armenian revolutionaries, turned violently on the Armenian community. So, Tehlirian joined a small unit of Armenians who volunteered to fight for Russia against the Ottoman Empire after World War One broke out. His family was killed while he was fighting mostly pointless engagements on the Caucasian frontier.
This isn't what Tehlirian told the German court. He told a story of surviving a massacre similar to the many, many which eyewitnesses recorded during the course of the genocide: Turkish gendarmes riding into town, killing some, forcing the others into the desert, and letting hunger and violence (sometimes official, sometimes from "paramilitaries," often random civilians or Kurdish tribesmen) pick off the rest. Except he wasn't there for any such massacres. He saw terrible things; he made himself a caretaker to dozens of children orphaned by the massacres and who were surviving on the edges of society. But he did not witness his family being beheaded. Plenty of families were beheaded- not the Tehlirians.
The Dashnak instructed Tehlirian to lie on the stand, and coached him carefully to do so. They had several reasons for this. One was protection: the Dashnak was an illegal militant organization, and if the world knew that they were hunting Turkish genocidaires, that would be a serious problem, for themselves and for the surviving Armenian population. Another was drama. They wanted the stories to get out. Nothing Tehlirian said on the stand was beyond what the Turks actually did, over and over. Another consideration was Tehlirian slipping the noose, but the Dashnak network proved pretty good at getting their people out, post-mission, without making them do a trial first. Tehlirian was also a brilliant witness. He could play a man driven to divine vengeance, not some thuggish assassination, because it was true. He was epileptic and ridden with nightmares about his murdered family. In part due to sympathy, in part because they wanted to sweep Germany's role in allowing their wartime allies to destroy the Armenian population under the rug, the German court acquitted Tehlirian of all charges. He died in Fresno in 1960, and you gotta figured that dude never had to pay for a drink in Fresno (good amount of Armenians there, I'm told) as long as he lived.
Bogosian tells the story well. Some of his History 101 instruction for the reader has some mix-ups. One weird one was when he insists that the pre-WWI Germans sought relations with the Ottoman Empire, and built the Berlin-Baghdad railroad, as a plan to seek "lebensraum," the agricultural "living space" Germany would eventually seek in Eastern Europe. I guess the idea was they were going to settle Anatolia? There's no evidence of that, and plenty of evidence that the Germans wanted to prop Turkey up as an ally because its collapse would benefit their biggest rivals, Russia and Britain. There's a few goofs like that in the book. Bogosian is a smart guy but not a historian.
Still and all, it's an amazing story, and he tells it well. Tehlirian may have been a somewhat nebbishy assassin. Some of those Dashnak guys were slick, though, and you can't help but enjoy their derring-do. One dude, Arshavir Shirakian, improvised an attack on a group of Turkish war criminals he ran across in Berlin, and then escaped the police cordon by chit-chatting with a family group that hadn't seen him just shoot a guy. The cops assumed he was a relative of this nice German family and let him right through. If the people of Armenia could be forgiven for thinking that the God they were among the first to embrace -- Armenians will tell you, they were the first officially Christian kingdom, way back in four-hundred-something -- abandoned them during the genocide. But some goddess of revenge dictated that the last of the three Pashas, who had the bright idea of joining the Bolsheviks, well beyond Dashnak's reach, and then double-crossing the Bolsheviks to start some Pan-Turkic rebellion, got got in the end by a Cheka officer of Armenian extraction.
Are we still allowed to thrill at that kind of thing? Well, I'm going to, anyway. I'm aware of the reasons why smart people, even people who aren't pacifists, don't, generally, allow murders, even the assassinations of unrepentant killers intent on killing again, to excite them... openly. I am aware of the arguments. I'm aware that Nemesis did not bring any Armenians back to life, did not bring Armenia's land back or create a stable, free Armenian state. I'm aware that revenge, generally, is unhelpful, especially between ethnic groups that are expected to live near each other, because it perpetuates a cycle of violence. I am aware that violence, even the killing of guilty enemies, is meant to do damage to the soul of the perpetrator. I am aware, lastly, that praising violence is generally the provenance of "the enemy," the reactionaries and the bullies, those practiced at and comfortable with violence, generally against those weaker than them. I'm aware that beyond that principle, cheering on violence is often seen as "cringe," the sort of thing cop groupies do, dividing good guys and bad guys and, surprise surprise! They are fans of the good.
Well... tough. Nemesis wasn't indiscriminate slaughter. The Armenian revolutionaries of all factions have made clear, over and over and over again, they want no generalized revenge against the Turkish people (they may not love them, but they don't want to slaughter them all). They wanted the people who specifically singled them out for the horrors of genocide. They worked at it, and they got it. In fact, probably the closest the Dashnak people came to a serious strategic miscalculation was the idea that genocidal madness was restricted to the leaders of the Turks. I'm not willing to say all Turks wanted to slaughter Armenians, and in fact one group of participants -- the Kurds -- have even apologized for their role in the genocide, through a range of Kurdish political organizations. But enough Turks did desire that violence, and a larger number were prepared to look the other way, that you could argue that the Pashas were just expressing their will... and still. They probably made the situation better by preventing the worst actors from returning to Anatolia, and there really was no creating a real Armenian nation at the time, anyway.
And while Bogosian does do some "oh, isn't violence terrible for the soul" stuff... well, most of the violence that was terrible for the soul of the Armenians, in his telling and in theirs, was the violence that was done to their people. Soghomon Tehlirian slept reasonably well after getting his man, it seems. If Shirakian was soul-sick about the multiple war criminals he gunned down, he didn't say so in his memoirs. The Dashnak people didn't crow about blood. They weren't sadists. They took a difficult and unpleasant job (though one with some emotional rewards) and did it. I don't think there's anything but sentimental mythology to tell us that such experiences, always and everywhere, hurt the mind or the soul worse than any other difficult, unpleasant task. Among other things, human psychology does not tend to be that straightforward.
And doesn't it damage the soul to allow world-historical criminals to go unpunished, to get back into power even? Some part of me thinks one of the things at the core of the madness the world is now seeing is how nobody, nobody, got punished for crimes that helped end the period of relative stability at the turn of the twenty-first century, the American invasions of the Middle East, the economic crash of 2008, etc. A few Icelandic scammers got thrown in Scandinavian summer camp prison and that was it. I can't prove it, but I do tend to think it makes people crazy, that kind of inconsistency, when millions suffer and die for nothing and the perpetrators get to enjoy their lives, even continue to hold power. I'm not saying revenge always "works" or is worthwhile. But neither does, or is, the sort of secularized version of Nietzsche's parody of Christianity that us lower-order types are expected to extend to our betters. The Armenian people refused this, resolved to set things right, and wrote another chapter in their long and honorable history in doing so. ****'
Joseph de Maistre, “St. Petersburg Nights: Or, Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence” (1821) (translated from the French by Richard Lebrun) - Insofar as Joseph de Maistre has a reputation in the anglophone world, it’s as the arch-orthodox monarchist conservative. No sentimentality, no Whig background like his British opposite number, Burke: this is the dude who wrote a rhapsody to the hangman as the basis of the social order. Isaiah Berlin wrote an essay about Maistre as forerunner of fascism (Maistre might be “fash” but not like that); Hari Kunzru had his altright TV writer villain insert Maistre speeches into the mouth of his renegade cop character. An air of limpid, cultured menace — think Hannibal Lecter — lingers around him.
Well, here’s a weird one- this supposed arch-orthodox, who was, by all accounts, a sincere and fervent Catholic, was also an “Illuminist” and a member of a Masonic lodge. This is an odd one. Catholic reactionaries aren’t supposed to like the Masons. In the anglophone Protestant countries, that’s mostly down to Masonic anti-Catholicism- I remember older Catholic relatives (not reactionaries) telling me if I had to join a fraternal order, it should be the Knights of Columbus, not the Masons. In continental Europe it’s a little more complicated. By and large, French reactionary culture has despised the Masons and the Enlightenment culture it was tied to. The Vichy regime had to be asked by the Nazis to round up French Jews, but they went after the Masons all on their own. At the same time, you do get groups like the P2 Masonic lodge, which assisted neofascist coup attempts in Italy, and Maistre’s lifelong involvement with Masonry and other mystical strains that weren’t exactly Catholic. Some of Maistre’s works made their way to the Vatican’s naughty list, even as Catholic presses translated and published his works.
“Soirees de Saint-Petersbourg” was, I’ve read, the work Maistre was most proud of, his last statement. Beyond that hangman spiel, which comes from one of the early dialogues in this book, most of his work that gets circulated in academic circles is his earlier, more directly political stuff, regardless of what the man himself thought. This is probably in part because the dialogues here are… odd. Take the subtitle. “The temporal government of providence” - maybe it’s just grammatically awkward, and means “the way divine providence governs the affairs of time,” but as read in English, makes it sound like a time-bound governance system for the divine. That doesn’t make a lot of sense- as far as I can tell, one of the basic elements of divinity is that it’s not time-bound, not in the way human life is, at least.
That’s just the subtitle. The dialogues themselves are a discussion between three dudes: a young, somewhat naive but polite “Chevalier,” a somewhat sententious but right-headed older “Count,” and “the Senator,” and when he starts talking, The_Wisdom_Dispenser has logged on. The Senator is Maistre, explaining how despite how it all looks, God has it all in hand. But not in some easy peasant way! It’s not all rainbows and meeting your pets in heaven. It’s closer to a state of divine justice, everything working out according to God’s plan, in much the same way as the existence of the hangman, however repellent — because repellent! — holds up the social order, so does suffering hold up the general temporal order. Maistre never quite gets at why this supposedly all-powerful, all-good God decided to make a universe with sentient beings destined to run afoul of his rules and suffer for it. Presumably, if the Chevalier bothered to ask that, rather than just tell Senator Maistre he’s a genius after every answer, Maistre would do a shell game involving causality or something. The usual mystic stuff.
The theology isn’t interesting, though it is weirdly off in places, for this supposed arch-Catholic, and most of the weirdness comes from Maistre’s insistence that, on earth, it actually does all make sense. That seems to be where his “illuminism” comes in, though I’ll admit, I’m a neophyte with this stuff. A lot of mystics – from Renaissance magicians to the Freemasons (back before they became a social club) to the Five Percenters – seem to understand the principle of “as above, so below” (never got why that was so compelling to people) implied that just as heaven is rightly ordered (again… why?), so too is Earth, if only we could see it. Oftentimes, they imply that happiness, peace, even superhuman power comes with somehow “grokking” this truth in its fullness. No waiting for divine redistribution of fates in the afterlife! It’s interesting, but also sad, mostly in the way it asks a sad question… which is more pathetic? Thinking that a divine figure will arrange things just so, make things somehow make sense, after you die, or thinking that you will, learn, magic your way to making this world make sense while still in it, the way God supposedly wants you (and really only you, and other people cool enough to do the thing) to do? I’ll punt to where I usually do: at least orthodox religion, with its series of IOUs payable on some judgment day, have substantial real estate portfolios on this earth, more than most of the heterodox can say.
What intrigued me most about the Nights wasn’t its strangeness, but its continuities with other thought. Here, I’m influenced by a book I read back in my comprehensive exams days, when I ambitiously looked into all kinds of stuff my professors didn’t recommend or even know about, because, I don’t know, I did. One was a book on de Maistre’s influence by one Carolina Armenteros. It was a strange, fascinating book, that insisted that far from being a lonely figure on his mountain of Catholic reactionary obscurantism, Maistre was actually profoundly influential on French social and historical thought throughout the nineteenth century. Moreover, his influence was less straightforwardly counter-enlightenment, in some easy “revolution and democracy equals bad, religion and monarchy equals good” kind of way, though he did believe those things. Rather, Maistre was important for his methodologies and research agendas, that generally complicated, and in some ways ran alongside, Enlightenment methodologies of social thought, rather than simply opposing them.
And in these dialogues, you can see it. Maistre despised most of the lumieres, the Rousseaus and Voltaires, but he did not altogether abandon their methods in favor because… what other options were there? He was too old and unadaptable for the Romantic route, like fellow French Catholic reactionary Chateaubriand would take (one of the reasons Berlin’s Maistre takes were so blazingly wrong- he places Maistre in his hall of fame of Romantic, anti-rational bad guys, and that dog won’t hunt). He wasn’t going to get over with his reactionary thought that way. He’s a little bit closer to Burke in this respect, in that he tries to lay down an alternative path to collecting, refining, and disseminating knowledge that will work for a literate public to whom you can’t simply wave a cross or a flag as an explanatory method. Burke is closer to romanticism, even populism, encouraging his epigones to try to track the capillary methods through which the “little platoons” create – maybe congeal is the right word, or generate, if we’re being more generous – the great organic tree of society.
But that’s not quite Maistre. In one sense of the word, Maistre was a rationalist: not in the degraded sense of “reasonable” (they’re not) but in terms of rationalist versus empiricist, working from first principles as opposed to from collecting observations. More than Voltaire or other salon Clever Dicks, Maistre hates Francis Bacon. But this isn’t for the usual “God is higher than Science” reasons we’re used to- it’s because Maistre believes he has a counter-science, a rationalist understanding of the universe superior to empiricism (not unlike Lyndon LaRouche, in this!). In his way, he was as devoted to the systematic exploration of the implications of his understanding as were any Enlightenment philosophes for theirs. This, presumably, is why the Soirees was his favorite work.
French historians and social scientists – Chateaubriand, Comte, Saint-Simon – did not reject Enlightenment empiricism as thoroughly as de Maistre did. It’s also possible to overstate de Maistre’s rejection of facts- he clearly was a great reader and collector of information, such as he had access to. What he had in common with later French historical social thought was a way of arranging his facts, using facticity strategically to counter other schema of thought, specifically, the Enlightenment thought of the revolutionary era, which threatened to become hegemonic in France, arguably in Europe. Later French social thinkers could, like de Maistre, take on board the trope of empirical facts pointing to a hidden hand, to forces that aligned human societies and history that can only be seen by a sort of negative inference, what the record shows is possible (and, more to the point, impossible). It’s not quite Hegel’s dialectic, or Smith’s invisible hand- it’s altogether woolier and, well, more esoteric than that- the idea that the scholar’s role is to uncover these esoteric forces (later given a boost by the ways in which stuff we can’t see, from germs to electromagnetic waves, really do affect our lives). They presume a hidden hand- maybe not Maistre’s divine providence, but something. Later social scientists could turn these intellectual practices towards goals that, had they been alive to see it, Maistre might disapprove and his lumiere enemies might like better, such as Comte’s rational society run by sociologist-priests. But they are still living in, attempting to explore and articulate, a world where knowledge makes itself known via the application of value-laden rationalistic schema giving order to the welter of fact. You can see how that might find itself even further down the road, with your Foucaults and LaTours, though I’d tend to think that would be more a legacy de Maistre left on French thought rather than direct influence.
Anyway! Who knows how much all of that really means. I do like spooky-ing up the French rationalist tradition. It’s no good taking people at their self-assessment without thorough examination, and the idea that the French really are more rational-as-in-reasonable than us Anglos never really washed. Rational as in schematic, sure… but their schemes might be weirder than all that. Among other things, rather disenchants our reactionary Lecter figure, too… That’s what allowed me to enjoy this as much as I did. Your mileage may vary. ****
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pic: Feline Consolation
She is good, even if the times are bad.