week 5 - reading 2 (the liberal idea of civilization and its critics) Flashcards
C19
in contemporary IR often overlooked, ‘dropped out of view’ (Rosenberg)
omissions that are noteworthy:
- omission thinkers of intern. politics (incl. Nietzsche and John Stuart Mill, but also unknown (but famous then) Guizot and Kidd)
!some C19 thinkers more popular than others: Hegel and Marx most, Mill and other liberals least
C19 liber thinkers idea of ‘civilization’ = important impl. international order
the liberal idea of civilization
- Guizot
= vague term, hard to define
Guizot: politician/historian (liberal and conservatist)
- ‘history of civilization’ (lecture series)
Guizot: civilization = progress at societal and individual level
Guizot: not civilized =
- people whose outward circumstances are easy and agreeable, but whose moral/intellectual energies in a state of torpor
- basic material and moral needs satisfied, but certain portion of truth is doled out to each, no one is permitted to help himself
- high degree of individual liberty, but disorder and inequality,
- absolute liberty + considerable equality, but no general interest/public ideas/feeling, little society
Mill - civilization
- density and urbanization
- prosperity and technological advancement
- social coordination
- good government (to ensure peace/property/protection)
*highlights more the societal than Guizot does, but he also believed in the personal of Guizot
Guizot - modern (European) vs ancient civilization
-> triple application of ‘civilization’
ancient = unity of character (tend toward tyranny)
Europe = internal variety
- leads to general sense of liberty and tolerance within Europe
- was not always peaceful (constant war->liberty)
tripal application ‘civilization’
- mutual progress of social welfare and individual moral or intellectual dev.
- way in which different peoples have (sought to) achieve 1 (e.g. European civ., Egy. civ., Greek civ.)
- European civilization as the civilization of the world/humanity (is the best acc to Guizot)
popularity Guizot’s view of civilization with his contemporaries
- French historians had prominence within Europe -> Guizot’s history of civilization could be read by British liberals as an antidote to conservative conception of European public order dev. during/after French revo. (balance of power + territorial sovereignty as key principles)
- he highlighted that success European civilization was because of progress and liberty, not blindly doing the same as before
Guizot showed:
enlightement ideas + time-honoured values of European public law and political order were essentially the same thing
-> pursuit of civilization became fundamental goal of liberal international political thought (e.g. influenced idea of free trade for peace: commerce spread civilization)
movement from an individual to a mass society -Mill
= integral to civilization process
combination of individuals into larger masses necessary result of advance civilization (coordination is necessary to civilize)
Changed the way politics worked (Constant): less extensive participation and debate (individual smaller role)
- civilization multiplied the means of personal happiness, but also the means of destruction (greatest threat civilization is an uncivilized, warlike leader)
- need for representative government so that rulers would reflect character of society (civilized people need a civil leader, otherwise it is a universal threat)
- liberal worry: mass politics leads to worsening individual moral and intellect (esp. due to too much peace + happiness) -> need national institutions of education
!liberals didn’t believe civilization was automatic
national self-determination and the spread of civilization
Guizot: European civilization most distinctive feature was internal variety + that different elements tolerated each other
= often overlooked
liberal thinkers suggest a liberal template of society/gov. that appears against Guizot’s idea (where all principles of social organization are found existing together)
problem = how did liberals combine social/political homogeneity with what they believed was implied/required by civilization, the element of variety which they believed was it driving force?
- all liberal were committed to the principle of national self-determination (believed civilization could be universalized without challenging peculiarities of individual nations as they struggled to pursue their own path towards dev.
- all liberals accepted that different national characters existed
- liberals: free trade left political relationships between states unaltered (+ in some views didn’t even require gov. action)
- Cobden: desirable for liberals to assist movements of national liberation (eschew imperialism (Mill didn’t want to do this))
- once free, nations should be permitted to determine their future for themselves (Mill: only counts for ‘‘human beings in the maturity of their faculties’’)
- contrast ‘family of civilized nations’ and world of ‘backward’/’barbaric’ peoples (needed to be administered despotically though imperial mechanisms until they could stand for themselves) = most shared view 19th century
the social question, the state and the world-spirit
- liberal response
embrace the changes by channeling them through the concept off European civilization produced by French historians as Guizot
growth of commerce as benign + positively increasing the ‘means of personal happiness’ + prospects int. peace
saw it could be destablizing -> laissez-faire system: would voluntarily limit itself to not constrain/take benefits commerce (every individual right to pursue own personal happiness without interfering with others)
race, class, culture and power
before 19th century = little attention/role racism
- race itself not seen as source of difference, sometimes used as powerful indicator of difference
- reason: religious sentiments arguing everyone is human and divine
wasn’t until 1870 that ethnic categories became almost universal key for interpretation human history => centrality concept of race
racism before 19th century = enslavement Africans = supports lack of importance attached to race: when slavery became linked exclusively to one ethnic group it began to lose its general legitimacy (Snowden)
(Herodotus: 4 main axes identity of Greeks)
- blood (small role until 19th cent)
- language
- religion
- custom
race, Darwinism and geopolitics
- de Gobineau
- Darwin vs enlightenment idea
de Gobineau: inevitable degeneration/death of all civilization
- theory of race blood giving people racial characteristics (focus on female/learning or male/materialistic)
- national character was entirely given by racial characteristics
- critiqued Guizot’s ‘‘narrow’’ definition of civilization
- only people that were willing to mix races and thus spread civilization in neigboring lands could be civilized
enlightenment idea = human nature as uniform through time and space, composed of the ability to reason and pursuit passions
Darwin = stressed competition for the means of survival in a world of scarcity + importance of inhereted characteristics
social Darwinism
- Herbert’s survival of the fittest -> security of the state as existential problem
- use of racial categories to describe differences between European peoples -> society more competitive
- fight for white supremacy in existential struggle -> motivation for imperialist expansion
rise of ‘geopolitical’ thinking late C19
- closely linked to social darwinism (necessity of struggle for existence)
- apparent ‘closing in’ of the world: closure American frontier 1890 = perceived as threatening dev.: racist fear influx of new immigrants that would not be easily assimilated
- awareness that there were few options for imperial expansion left (after scramble for Africa)
World as a closed political system, no longer possible to redirect social tensions so that consequences were played out in the ‘barbaric’ spaces
+attention to need for power to protect what civilization people already had
critics of the liberal idea of civilization
- Freud: civilizing people requires repression, this can be positive, but unless civilization would be less repressive, it would lead to a build-up and explosion of psychological tensions (e.g. WW1)
- Weber: cultural science economic conduct rests on Protestant idea of work in a ‘calling’ that used to provide purpose, now ‘disenchanted modern world’ = meaningless toil and accumulation of wealth for its own sake
- Marx
- Nietzsche: ‘civilization’ of liberals not a form of higher culture, it is rooted in salve morality appropriate to the herd (weakening them spiritually)
*Nietzsche’s concept of nature = unequal and uneven, order of cases as supreme law of life, privilege of each is determined by their nature - Heinrich von Treitschke: highlighted human social and political association + necessary/natural particularism of humanity (-> idea of one universal civilized empire is odious) + inevitability of conflict between nations and states
Marx critique liberal idea civilization
- Marx: praised bourgeois achievements moving from Middle Ages + acknowledged that intensification of human ability led to inequality and instability + overproduction -> societies back into barbarism
- Marx: national divisions disappear with dev. of free trade and world market -> uniform character
(*Marx sought to accelerate this process) - liberal ‘fetishization’ of the commodity, capitalist tendency to be seen as self-evident necessity
'’production is a definite social relation beween me, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things’’
