Crystallizing recent thinking on one of the most important themes in political science, the myths of the modern state, Hans Kohn here reports on four recent significant books: The Myth of the State, by Ernst Cassirer (New Haven, Yale, 1946); The Web of Government, by Robert M. MacIver (New York, Macmillan, 1947); Education in Fascist Italy, by L. Minio-Paluello (New York, Oxford, 1946); and Leviathan in Crisis, compiled and edited by Walter R. Browne (New York, Viking, 1946).
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The late Professor Cassirer in his last study, The Myth of the State, which he had almost completed before his death, describes as the most alarming feature in the development of modern political thought the appearance of a new force: mythical thought.
Professor Cassirer drew the inspiration of his life and his work from 18th century Enlightenment and Kant. In that century of emancipation, or as Kant called it, of maturity, the world was, to use Max Weber’s apt expression, entzaubert, “de-magicked,” subjected to the rule of reason. In our century of re-enchantment, of mass slogans and thought control, it is good to turn back to that time for guidance and inspiration. But it is his very 18th-century quality that limits Professor Cassirer’s understanding of the real power of myths in state and society. That power is much broader than he thought. Nor are all these myths as irrational or “primitive” as he presents them.
The main and shorter part of his book, “The Myth of the Twentieth Century,” accepts too readily Alfred Rosenberg’s rather bombastic claim of having defined the essence of the new century and of its dominating myths in his Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts. Professor Cassirer sees the father of the modern myth of the hero in Carlyle, and in Gobineau the father of the modern myth of race. His brilliant analysis does full justice to these thinkers, but his whole approach prevents him from understanding that there are myths in the 20th century, even rational myths, more powerful than those that dominated the confused thinking of the German magicians who came in the wake of Richard Wagner.
The Nazis, and Professor Cassirer, were wrong in regarding hero and race as the dominating myths of the 20th century. These myths are too crude for that. Even Italian Fascism itself did not know them. In so far as it was shaped by the cult of the hero, it was not Carlyle and Frederick the Great but the Renaissance image of man, the passionate clarity of a Castruccio Castracani rather than the high-sounding and nebulous morality of the North, that played the important role. The myth that influenced Mussolini was the social myth of the revolution as formulated under the combined influence of Marx and Bergson by Georges Sorel. This myth he fused with the entirely opposite neo-Hegelian cult of the state, the modern Leviathan.
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Professor Cassirer, although he has dealt with Rousseau in his other works, does not touch here on Rousseau’s part in the creation of the modern myth of the organic community.
What the citizen of Geneva did emotionally, Hegel did rationally. The historicism of Hegel, which claimed to find definite laws for history and thus to predict salvation and doom on a rational or scientific basis—thereby replacing prophetic religion—has influenced all those nationalist and class myths that have since become the dominant factors in political thought—especially, but not at all exclusively, in Central and Eastern Europe. For Hegel “the realization of self-conscious reason” finds its fulfillment in the collectivity, the nation or the state, and individuals “are conscious within themselves of being these individual independent beings through the fact that they surrender and sacrifice their particular individuality, and that this universal substance is their soul and essence.” But the “universal” was really only local: a group opposing other groups.
The individual lost his essence and became absorbed by the collectivity, and history became the struggle of collectivities, nations, or classes. Historical reality, the new rational myths proclaimed, follows its own inexorable law. At the same time, Hegel was deeply convinced, history was progress in the consciousness of freedom, a process in which even the negative and the evil were to bring about the ultimate good, the Utopian conclusion of history, the reign of freedom.
In this process, different collectivities at different stages assume positive and progressive roles and overcome opposition. In each stage there is but one collectivity—a nation or, according to Marx, a class—that is decisive carrier of the world spirit and agent of world salvation. For German nationalists, that carrier was Germany; for the Slavophiles, Russia; for the Marxists, it was the proletariat. Marx himself tended to combine, at least emotionally, both myths in his faith in the German proletariat; Stalinists today, at least emotionally, similarly emphasize the Russian proletariat.
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The principal myths Hegel bequeathed to the 19th century changed character with the changing intellectual climate of the times.
One myth consisted in the secularization of the theology of history, which Hegel himself stated in the conclusion of his Philosophy of History: “God rules the world. The content of his government, the execution of his plan, is world history.” In other passages “God” becomes the “Idea,” the “World Spirit”; what remains is a clearly determined process of history fully revealed to the mind of the philosopher, Hegel. Twenty years later, when the intellectual climate in Germany was expressed by David Friedrich Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach, Marx abandoned Hegel’s idealistic foundation of history for what he regarded as the deeper reality. Instead of finding the real in the ideal, he wished to find the ideal in the real. What remained unchanged, however, was the character of history as a clearly determined process that was fully revealed to the mind of the social scientist, Marx.
In the new age of “science,” history was determined by “natural laws which work with iron necessity towards inevitable results.” This faith in inevitability was shared by Marxists as well as by Spenglerians. For all their “realism” the Marxists thought in mythical forms and abstractions, but with a new dogmatism. Their fatalistic certitude, though claiming to be rational and scientific, became one of the dominant myths of the modern age, supported by the widespread myths of the power of science and the necessity of progress.
Hegel conceived of progress as perpetual movement and perpetual strife. Few myths, perhaps, have done as much harm as this one. While liberal thought held the state to be a mediator above nationality or race, class or caste, twenty years after Hegel the antagonism of nationalities or classes began to be regarded as so fundamental that history was interpreted as a perpetual struggle between them. The state became an instrument of nationality or class in this warfare. Though every state contains oppressive elements, these in no way make out its full or true essence. Yet Engels could declare in his introduction to the Civil War In France that “the state is nothing more than a machine for the oppression of one class by another.”
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It is a great merit of the book by Professor MacIver (The Web of Government) to bring the discussion of the problems of government down to the level of common sense and of reality. In the age of totalitarianism it is an easy temptation to overestimate Leviathan and the power of the human mind and will.
In his own quiet way, Professor MacIver destroys some of the most fashionable social myths. Frequently, trends in social life are represented as absolutes, as if they existed or were possible in perfect or ideal realization. This is the case today for such concepts as “free enterprise” and “collectivism,” planning and non-interference. In reality every existing system is a synthesis of these elements in varying degrees. The issue is how much of each system can be used and in what spirit; it is not economic ideals that are involved but degrees of individual liberty and authoritarian regulation.
Professor MacIver warns that government “is never wholly successful. It is never wise enough for its responsibilities. It is often presumptuous, and its crowning presumption is the claim of omni-competence, when it arrogates to itself the right to regulate all the concerns of men. It must realize that many methods of primary importance to human welfare are not directly amenable to its methods of control and should not be subjected to them.” The gravest peril arises when government usurps control over the myths of the community. Government should never be suffered to impose its controls on the cultural life of the community and it should not be entrusted with so exclusive a monopoly over the economic system that it could indirectly dominate the cultural life. .“For if the very livelihood of individuals and groups are at the disposition of government, then the values and ideologies of the government will inevitably become absolute and will inflexibly impose themselves upon the whole community, crushing its free spirit.”
The modern totalitarian disease lies primarily in disregard of individual rights and in aggressiveness, in the subordination of truth and law to fervent action and religious devotion.
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Of the three great totalitarian experiments in 20th-century Europe, the Italian one was the least successful. For this there were several reasons: the continuing influence of the monarchy and the Church, with their restraints upon totalitarianism, the lasting elements of Western humanism that have characterized the Roman legacy: even education in Fascist Italy, as Mr. Minio-Paluello’s book (Education in Fascist Italy) clearly shows, paid more attention to the training of the intellect than to the moral discipline of the will or to technical instruction. In 1925 the anti-Fascist intellectuals in Italy published under Croce’s leadership a manifesto in which they stated: “The intellectuals have as citizens the right of joining and faithfully serving a party, but as intellectuals their only duty is to bring all men of all parties to a higher spiritual level, so that all may fight the inevitable battles with ever more beneficial results. This is the real aim of their researches, mutual criticism, and artistic creations. When politics are contaminated with literature and scholarship with politics in order that violence, arrogance, and suppression of freedom may be patronized by those activities, it is not even possible to speak of a generous mistake. The Fascist intellectuals seem to assume that the Italians are experiencing a religious war waged in the name of a new gospel against an old superstition.” The old superstition was the middle-class liberalism of the 18th century, the new gospel, the myth of the magic power of revolution and of the historically predestined leadership of certain nations and classes on the road to mankind’s total salvation.
But even the relatively more successful forms of totalitarianism in Russia and Germany have in no way proven the weakness of the “old superstitions” or the strength of the “new gospel.” More and more we learn of the resistance inside Germany to the apparently monolithic state of Hitler, and the official purges and cultural excommunications in Russia show that even after thirty years of totalitarian education the “old superstitions” survive.
The title, Leviathan in Crisis, given to a compilation of articles and essays on the present-day state, is more appropriate than many believe: the leviathans of our age are not as strong by far as their loudly proclaimed myths would have us believe. In the few decades of their existence they have gone through more violent crises and more insidious inner conflicts and intrigues than free society had ever to suffer from. There is, even from the purely practical point of view, much to be said for the “old superstitions” of individual liberty, of tolerance, and of humility in the face of the nature of man and the nature of things.
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