The Harry Lime Hypothesis

Midway through The Third Man, Holly Martins announces to a meeting of Vienna's literary scene that his next book will be a clean break with the trivialities that marked his previous works with a more serious story called, aptly enough, "The Third Man". The piece, some reviewers have noted, marks the central maturation in Holly Martins as he comes to understand the complexity of collective responsibility and the myth of the romantic hero. This is simple enough. More interesting, however, is the way in which Holly's interactions with Anna and Harry change over the course of the film especially near its conclusion. Anna asks Harry, for example, "What's your price this time?.... You must be proud to be a police informer." While her agenda obviously leads her to this statement as Harry's mistress, her point remains--all the characters in The Third Man are marionettes of larger forces at play, including the zeitgeist of the post-war era. This devaluation of the individual surfaces again at the end of the film's famous chase through Vienna's sewers, where a wounded and exhausted Harry Lime signals Holly to shoot him as though to give a proper ending to Harry's saga. Collectivized responsibility seems to mean collectivization in general--here, Harry Lime completes his role in the story in deference to some kind of collective will.

Anna comes out of this as the emblem of the drifting individual. The closing scene aptly captures this--she slowly approaches the stationary camera head on, growing from one of Harry Lime's dots to her full figure. Her attachment to Harry, borne out of her rescue from repatriation to the Russian sector, makes her the modern Antigone in the words of one critic and does perhaps redeem her. Her character's oblique reference to the Prague Coup of 1948, for example, allows us to sympathize with her plight. There is also something compelling in her indictment of Holly. His betrayal of his best friend is no small task, and it comes in the service of enforcers of justice who have lost much of their legitimacy. The black market is not some fringe phenomenon in Vienna after all, and those who attempt to control it fail to understand the desperation of the times. 

Like the other two films studied in my group, this adds the central dimension of tragedy to The Third Man. The tragedy itself becomes the lamentation of the film, not the compromises made by individual characters. If there is one glimmer of hope it comes, ironically, from Harry Lime himself. His suggestion from his famous cuckoo-clock speech, that good and evil can be magnified by each other, seems to ring true in the sentiments of Holly Martin's new book. Is evil necessary for their to be good, and can laying evil bare create virtue? Perhaps. But this old idea better fits Renaissance Florence than post-war Italy in film's perspective.

Cynicism and Hope in Post-War Film

I find it interesting that Alex and I have each noted that our films carry a deeply cynical and gritty tone toward the war while Justine's has a more hopeful view. This suggests with respect to Italy that the country escaped the crippling feelings of national guilt that other Axis powers had to confront in the wake of WWII. Italy never carried out anything like Hitler's Final Solution, so perhaps it escaped the moral condemnation and humiliation that Germany received and was thus able to recover psychologically more quickly. Das Boot, on the other hand, seems to cast the submarine crew as appendages of the German war machine and focuses on the ordeal they endured as pawns of the Third Reich. My film takes a cynical view not because of defeat, but because of the readily apparent hollowness of the Allied victory--WWII had not ended but seamlessly shifted east to the borders of the USSR. 

More on the Context of the Third Man

The writer of The Third Man's screenplay, Graham Greene, never intended the film to be a political piece. Greene was quoted as saying, "My only intention was to amuse.... I didn't want to provoke political sentiments." Reed's modifications to Greene's script transformed The Third Man into an intellectual work and expose its relationship to its historical context. The most significant change Reed made was to change film's tenor toward Holly Martins. Its unflattering view of the naïve, inexperienced, unworldly Martins contrasts its positive view of Calloway, the British MP attempting to police the wreckage of Vienna, and to a lesser extent Anna. It should be noted, however, that Anna herself is a participant in the same underground trade as all of our civilian protagonists--it is a fact of life that lends an overall palor to the film rather than a morally ambiguous realism. As the same essay quoted above argues (persuasively, in my opinion), the film's tone toward its American characters exemplifies Britain's frustration at the wartime cooperation and accommodation of the Soviet Union by the U.S.. However, the film retains some of Greene's imprints. Some commentators have characterized The Third Man as a lament of totalized war and its dehumanizing effects on all parties. Harry Lime, who interestingly is never given a nationality or any other real identity other than his criminal enterprise and connection to Martins, is this universal representative of what remains in the aftermath of the war. He is the prototypical anti-hero, a man Nietzscheof whom would be proud, with the force of his persona counterbalanced against the sadness of his situation. He is not the villain in this tale because we identify with his inner contradiction--he at once seems to transcend his surroundings with his aloof spirit and slick talk but is firmly a product of the toxic milieu in which he prowls. 

European vs. American narrative styles

In both its American and English versions, The Third Man opens with a voice-over. They are not identical, however. As compared here, the two monologues diverge in tone and purpose. The British version was voiced by the director, while the American used Holly Martins, the American author--an omniscient narrator vs. the protagonist. The unseen voice in the British version, as the same source notes, employs irony and understatement to set a dark and uncertain mood at the film's outset. For example, while speaking of the multi-national police force that controlled the city's center, it reads, "Good fellows on the whole, did their best you know." Compare this to the American version's "But they were good fellows on the whole and did their best." In the former, the ambiguity remains--it comes across as the narrator's opinion and not as fact. The American version firmly establishes them as the good guys in this story and removes any wiggle room.

These two styles come into conflict within The Third Man, but ultimately British sensibilities prevail. There is no clear resolution to Holly Martin's journey and the piece leaves the viewer with an abidingly cynical view toward the power politics and murky characters trying to sort themselves out in the shadows of "the old Vienna."

Real-Life Inspirations for The Third Man

The writer of The Third Man, Graham Greene, had a firm basis in espionage that the brought to bear in his piece. While the film is not explicitly a spy story, its portrait of the black market in Vienna gives it the same overall quality. The black market, like espionage, involves men in constantly perilous, extra-legal environments, dealing in goods and services beneath the table. Greene himself had worked as an intelligence officer for the British during World War II at the behest of his younger sister, an MI6 operative, and his elder brother had spied for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. Greene also employed contacts in the London Times and MI6 for background research on the occupation of Vienna and the criminal underworld it had spawned. Events in the film, like Harry Lime's penicillin racket, were not pulled out of a hat--they reflected the reality of an economy dominated by rationing and chronic shortages where criminals like Lime provided a useful and necessary public service.

The Social Context of Post-War Noir

Post-war cinema in Hollywood was by and large triumphalistic. Film noir, however, ran in largely the opposite direction. Instead of glorious optimism, noir expressed the ambient uneasiness and fear of the post-war environment where the menace of the Axis powers had been supplanted by Soviet Russia. Disillusionment emerged on domestic issues as well, such as in works like The Blue Dahlia (1946), which depicts the plight of a betrayed WWII veteran. As self-censorship began to move Hollywood away from social content in the early 1950s, film noir remained American cinema's lone contribution of social criticism to popular culture. The Stranger (1946), for example, the story of an American hunting down Nazi fugitives, was the first American film to depict footage of German concentration camps, according to this. Rather than the unbounded heroism and exaltation of the individual that came out of boilerplate westerns and feel-good films of the 1940s, noir presented a sinister, corrupt, and deterministic world where the protagonist is not the hero but the object of some larger, unseen design.

In terms of visual style, noir drew heavily upon the German expressionist style created by directors like Fritz Lang in the 1920s. The two genres shared a remarkable similarity in their content as expressionism emerged to communicate the despair and humilliating misery of post-war Germany.

Women up to French Revolution

Some key points:

Renaissance: humanism and education are for men only. Little attention given by Renaissance thinkers to women, and people like Albert (in On the Family) explicitly argue that women should be relegated to the domestic sphere exclusively. He writes, "I considered it safer to have her unable, and not merely unwilling, to harm me." whoa!

Reformation: The Reformation (perhaps as part of a larger "modern" sensibility) looks at men and women as sexual beings that must be controlled. Even though there is a "priesthood of all believers" and spiritual equity, there is no sexual equality. Men need women they can control to satisfy their sexual appetites so they don't promote sin and vice through prostitution and whatnot, and women need to be firmly subservient to their husbands for similar reasons. The family becomes an essential fixture of Reformation thought as such.

Also, convents are closed down (as church properties are seized) as "unnatural." A huge source of female independence is lost. Counter-Reformation emphasizes female saints as a counterpoint, such as St. Teresa (of the eponymous sculpture The Ecstasy of St. Teresa).

Women in high office: act like men. Elizabeth the Great becomes a near-androgynous being and isn't afraid to roll the proverbial hard six with the Spanish and Mary, Queen of Scots. Catherine the Great ruthlessly crushes Pugachev rebellion, acts decisively toward Poland. 

Style and The Cold War in "The Third Man"

One of the most distinctive aspects of The Third Man is its style. Its highly stylized cinematography took inspiration from the German Expressionists of the 1920s, using techniques such as the dramatic contrast expressed in the still above. Harry Lime's smirk stands alone among the gloomy ruins of Vienna, highlighting how he transcends the misery of his surroundings and, shall we say, his full embrace of his own "will to power." The camera finds itself listing to the side much of the time and the bizarre geometries of the city clash and slice across the light and shadow, creating a city one senses has truly "lost its marbles." 

The American visitor in the film, Holly Martins (played by Joseph Cotton), is a writer of romantic Western B-novels and a believer, as Roger Ebert puts it here, "in the simplified good and evil of his novels." He is a naïve fellow, totally at odds with the war-wizened denizens of the city he visits. Oddly, the film's production paralleled this divide. The American producer, David O. Selznick, most famous for romances like Gone with the Wind, wanted to film The Third Man in studio with a decidedly more upbeat tone than his British director, Carol Reed. Reed prevailed, shooting the film on location in the desolate, bombed out streets of Vienna. 

Sweden and the Welfare State

One of the trends over the course of European history has been the expansion of the notion of "rights." The liberal tradition first introduced the idea of civil rights, like property and liberty, through the work of people like John Locke. The notion of political rights followed--suffrage in particular in the 19th century. The 20th century marked the dawn of "social rights." Both the right and the left embrace this idea that society is obligated to provide certain "positive goods" to their citizens, whether they be the heroic glory of servitude in fascism or the cradle-to-grave care of the welfare state. 

This article outlines the problem with this trend. Ask yourself--are you entitled to a certain standard of living? And does the emphasis on the provision of "positive goods" by some to others diminish or increase the amount of "positive goods" in society? I think not. This trend marks the increasing "socialization" of Europe over the centuries, and with it, the decline of the self-initiating, responsible individual. Troubling.

One Take on the End of Communism

One of my favorite foreign films is Goodbye, Lenin!, the story of a son and daughter's attempts to protect their mother from realizing that Germany has been reunified. Their mother falls into a coma shortly before the fall of the Berlin wall and wakes from it afterwards, leading to an elaborate scheme. In this scene, however, their mother realizes something is amiss when she accidentally wanders out into the streets of the newly unified, capitalistic Germany. 

What I think the excerpt illustrates is how people under totalitarian societies internalize their own oppression. They come to expect so little of their government that they find themselves totally and completely disoriented by the glut of possibility represented by reunification here (or perhaps, the pink shag lampshade). The image of the statue of Lenin being carried away by the helicopter, moreover, hints to the romanticization of communism in the wake of its passing, as in the song we listened to in class. 

Europe's Future

Danielle, Leigh, and Mia have both been talking of late about European integration and the prospects for future conflict within the European conflict. Mia and Leigh take a fairly optimistic view that Europe is no longer susceptible to the tragedies of the first part of the 20th century, while Danielle seems more skeptical. I would agree with Mia and Leigh that Europe is too traumatized by that experience to let that happen again on its own soil. Europe is too interdependent and interconnected through the EU and the Euro Zone  for war to become a realistic option. What I find more probable is European animosity toward the "other." You see this in the flesh in the hostility Turkish guest workers experience in countries like Germany and even Switzerland. As the rise of India, China, and other centers of economic power causes Europe's dominance to wane on the international scene, perhaps the continent as a whole will become more aggressive to preserve what remains of its global sphere of influence.

I will make a leap here and speculate that in the next 50 years Europe will be profoundly "over the hump," mostly concerned with its own internal affairs as Asia dominates the international scene. America, though not quite the dinosaur Europe will be, will be in a similarly introverted position. The continent will be in no condition to fight wars.

Orson Welles: Playing Himself with a Passion

Orson Welles, the main antagonist in The Third Man, drew mainly upon his own personality when it came to his performances. The textbook example of this is the film Citizen Kane, where Welles' character, Charles Foster Kane, found inspiration in the actor's own megalomania and indefatigable self-importance. Similarly, in The Third Man, Welles' character shows an anti-social contempt for others in his single-minded pursuit of his own wants. The post-war environs of Vienna have become a breeding ground for seedy, slick-talking racketeers like Harry Lime (Welles), perhaps because the war sucked up all that was good and noble in that world.

Another interesting point about Welles was that his involvement in The Third Man was a function of his self-imposed exile from the United States lasting through the 1950s. Some speculate that this was to escape the rising anti-Communist tide that would bring about blacklisting and self-censorship for leftist artists in the States (Welles being among them). Given what we talked about in class regarding the exportation of American culture to the rest of Europe, it's interesting that in some ways Europe became a haven for more radical members of the American artistic and intellectual scene. This was not a first--the "Lost Generation" of American expats after WWI had set this precedent.

Nationalism, according to Geller

I have some issues with Geller's thesis on the relevance of nationalism in the industrial state. He alleges the following: group identities arise because individuals and collectives need to associate with the bureaucracies of an industrial state. If a group controls the bureaucracy, it gets favored status. If not, its identity forms around its isolation from the mainstream.

The problem with his point is that he fails to acknowledge other, countervailing tendencies on the issue of nationalism. Markets in particular tend to break down artificial barriers of discrimination. What Geller is referring to is not the capitalist state, but one that unites economic and political power in a single body (some, including Mussolini, called this fascism). The market and the bureaucracy, in the non-'fascist' state, are inversely proportional. So long as economic forces outpace political forces, nationalism shoud decline rather than grow. In other words, Geller is referring to a particular political situation that can increase nationalism--the fusion of economy and state into one Leviathan. As long as capitalism proliferates faster than bureaucracy, we should be able to avoid this situation.

An example of how markets are anti-discriminatory: let's say I'm a greedy capitalist pig. I want to pay a worker who's real wage value is $15 as little as possible. In this case, say the most I can get away with is $7. My competitor, however, also a greedy capitalist pig, realizes that I am underpaying my workers. They offer to pay my workers $7.01 or something like that. The logic of the capitalist will lead the nominal wages of the workers to steadily approach $15, their real worth.

"But wait, what if they're bigots?!?" All this model assumes is that not all employers discriminate homongenously. Varying levels of discrimination mean that the less bigoted are rewarded and the more bigoted are punished. It may take longer, but the same process will occur.

Closing the Revolving Door on Revolution

Cas posed the question of what differentiated Polish Solidarity from the events of 1968. I think there were several factors at play:

1. Religious support--the Catholic Church played a much larger role in supporting the Solidarity movement than in 1968. This tinted the events with a greater ideological importance and, therefore, greater gravity. 

2. Cause--the Solidarity movement drew off 'bread and butter' issues, as the video today outlined. They had become much more pronounced than even the woes of the Soviet Bloc in 1968, with shortages and revelations of corruption and mismanagement frustrating Poles. This was a much stronger motivation than the student-led protests by political/social radicals of '68.

3. Soviet Response--The Soviet Union wasn't as belligerent in responding to the Solidarity movement as in the case of '68. Perhaps this was because the Red Army was becoming bogged down in Afghanistan or the rise in tensions with the election of Reagan/Thatcher made such a move on Poland less appealing diplomatically.

High-Flying French Filosophy

I think my dear friends Danielle and JED are making some mistakes when it comes to characterizing existentialism. Existentialism does NOT say that stop at the observation that individuals are free to determine their own destiny--it says that people can't treat themselves as essential (i.e. possessing a defined, fixed character). The great conflict that Sarte begins with is the contradiction in the human mind between the fact that we undeniably have 'facticity,' or a material aspect to our lives/memories/past that shapes who we are, and our 'transcendence,' or ability to move beyond the materialistic qualities that shape us. As much as we can't be chained to our facticity, however, Sarte also says that we can't just ignore it. In Being and Nothingness, he uses the example of a gay man trying to come to terms with his homosexuality. He has two voices telling him different things--one a denier, and the other a capitulator to the title of 'homosexual.' Sarte rejects the denier because the gay man's homosexual actions exist in the real world--the way we talk about past actions implies that they have relevance and cannot simply be ignored.

The answer Sarte gives the gay man is to accept the contradiction--the absurdity--of being both a determinate and indeterminate being. While discomforting, I think he does offer us a way out. We have to act only for ourselves, not anything else, and then we'll truly be in line with our natural metaphysical condition.

Two problems with this:

1. I think people do actually have an essence. Evolutionary psychology, linguistics, and anthropology are steadily chipping away at the idea that people are 'blank slates' waiting to be filled with choices. Sarte obviously didn't have access to this info, though.

2. Sarte thinks existence simply 'is'--why does he use the verb 'to be' in a transitive sense when we're always thinking about the outside world (because we're unfortunately always defining ourselves in terms of objects, hence why we say 'to be something') but then treats 'to be' as intransitive when it comes to existence. Could existence be a property as well?

Preliminary Research on "The Third Man" (1949)

I am going to focus my first entry on our research project on probably the most famous scene in "The Third Man"--the famous "cuckoo clock scene." In it, Harry Lime (Orson Welles) and Holly Martin (Joseph Cotten) meet on a ferris wheel to discuss the arrest of Anna, Lime's actress girlfriend, as part of Lime's own criminal racket. There are a couple very cool things about this scene:

1. The music. Lime threatens to kill Martin because of the latter's knowledge of his illegal activity, yet a delightfully syncopated guitar tune opens and closes the scene as Martin waits for Lime at the entrance to the wheel. Quite ironic.

2. Throughout the scene, Lime complains of indigestion and laments that antacids are nowhere to be found in occupied Austria. Perhaps his own internal suffering?

3. Lime makes several overt connections between his thinking and that of the times. As their compartment approaches its zenith on the wheel, Lime comments that the people below them resemble 'dots,' and teasingly wonders if Martin could truly resist the offer of £20,000 for the life of one of them. States don't treat people as individuals, Lime submits, so why should I? This kind of callously utilitarian thinking echoes the brutality and ruthlessness of not only the defeated Axis, but perhaps also the victors as well (Lime is a Brit, for instance, and his language suggests this kind of thinking ought to be universalized. Moreover, he pulls back from pushing Martin out the door laughingly, in a reference to the discrepancy between the actions and rhetoric of the Allies).

4. Finally, Lime's famous line at the end of the scene suggests, perversely, that things won't be so bad--Italy under the Borgias produced Michelangelo, Rafael, and Leonardo, while Switzerland's 500+ years of peace and brotherly love produced cuckoo clocks. There's something very twisted about the detachment and coldness this view conveys.

Don't Hit the Big Red Button

Why didn't America and the Soviet Union destroy each other? In part, the answer may have simply been that the Cold War ended early enough. Having lots and lots of nukes sitting around means that probabilistically, there is a strong likelihood they will be used eventually. The other primary reason, however, is that ultimately conscience and self-preservation prevailed over ideology and fear. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example, Russia chose not to challenge the American naval blockade of Cuba to test their seriousness. The escalating spiral of pressure and counter-pressure eventually came to a halt when one party finally decided the stakes involved were two great. The two rival superpowers can be considered as the parties in the famous Prisoners' Dilemma, except in this case the cost of betrayal became persuasive enough for one of the parties to eventually cooperate with the other. 

Response to Justine

I disagree with Justine's assessment of Hitler's art in relation to his second career as Führer of the Third Reich. While she argues there is a substantial divide between his two occupations, there is in fact a remarkable continuity. Artistry in no way brings about a peaceful state of mind or being (hence the caricature of the tortured, anxious artist), and the claim that Hitler's watercolors and oil paintings could in no way presage his later brutality is false. 

What I think is most interesting about Hitler's art is how traditional it is. Expressionism and the avant-garde originated in Austria and Germany during the 1920s, and Hitler's work is a stark contrast to that of his contemporaries such as Kirchner, Munch, and Kandinsky. This kind of reverence for more traditional standards of beauty (as expressed in his landscapes, which follow an almost Romantic aesthetic), starkly opposes the bold innovations in composition, color, and perspective of his time. Hitler would later express his distaste for the avant-garde through his purging of "degenerate art" from the German cultural scene, as recounted in this article. Rather than contradict his later exploits, Hitler's art exposes his rejection of modernism's core value, the deconstruction of art to represent the tumult and uncertainty of the modern world, and in that sense underlines some of fascism's core tenets.

Stanley Milgram (Response to Mia)

We briefly touched on obedience in Wednesday's class while talking about the Nazi death camps. Mia's post here about the Milgram experiments makes the classic deduction from this test, which is namely that all human beings are sheep. Milgram claimed that his tests proved he could have recruited the SS in New Haven. However, I think there are several flaws with this test that should let us breathe a little easier about ourselves.

1. If you actually watch footage of the experiment (which was on Youtube but pulled because of copyright claims by Penn State), it becomes pretty obvious that it took some SUBSTANTIAL reassurance to keep those people going. There were 5 (not 4) responses, the last being the statement that the experiment would need to be discontinued if the teacher refused to continue. If we need that many layers to restrain us from not harming our fellow man, I find it reassuring. 

2. The researchers assured the experimental subjects that they would not harm the student (no "permanent tissue damage"). Why would a rational person doubt this? Especially given the fact that they are in a laboratory setting where it could be fairly assumed that the student's health and safety were not in jeopardy. Milgram does provide one anecdote of an electrical engineer who contradicts the supervisor because of his own knowledge of electricity's potential to harm, demonstrating the circumstances under which one could rationally object to the experiment. Absent that knowledge, however, it is perfectly rational for someone to continue.

3. Obedience is in many ways a healthy thing. If we were to constantly doubt everything we hear from people in positions of influence or power, our abilities of judgment would be severely hampered. So perhaps its healthy that we defer to the men from Yale University in the white lab coats. Society depends on hierarchies, and we shouldn't just chuck obedience out the window if we value order and stability. 

Chamberlain was a Fool

In Tuesday's class, we argued whether the Munich agreement was a rational foreign policy exercise by Great Britain and France. Some argued that it was, given that the West wanted a counterweight to Soviet Russia and that Hitler presented a rational argument for expanding Germany to include all persons of German descent. However, I think the evidence shows otherwise. Germany had already shown expansionary ambitions, such as the re-militarization of the Rhineland in 1936. On the specific issue of the Sudetenland, as indicated here, Hitler initially wanted to immediately occupy the region to throw off Czech defenses. This should have signaled alarm bells among the French and English. Finally, Hitler's annexation of the entirety of the Czech Republic in March of 1939 should have made the West realize the necessity of war. They instead waited nearly six months until Germany's invasion of Poland to make that declaration.

Debate Response

As a strong anti-statist, I obviously had a hard time arguing that fascism is 'a viable form of government that fulfills the needs of the governed' today. And while I ultimately think the anti-fascists did have a stronger case as Zak decided here, a couple points are worth noting.

1. Arguments for fascism seem absurd to our ears. Charlie and company repeatedly raised concerns over who would arbitrate a uniform moral standard under fascism, an objection a fascist would reject as based on the faulty assumption that a diversity of moral opinions is intrinsically valuable (thus Charlie would be begging the question since he seeks to prove that diversity is more valuable than uniformity). But it makes sense to us because we feel a deep skepticism toward the unlimited mandate given to the state if it is to create such a moral standard. Fascism's high estimation of order and security also strike us as sinister and insidious. All this shows the degree of desperation and hopelessness felt by citizens of Germany and Italy who supported fascist movements. 'Common sense' is completely irrelevant in uncommon times.

2. We really had no good response to Mia's (I think?) point that fascism is inherently militaristic, because it is. The logic of fascism works by creating enemies and framing everything in very bellicose, militant terms (the 'war' of production). This tends to lead to the real thing.

3. Cas mentioned in class that the wished we had discussed the economic advantages of fascism to a greater extent. I touched on that in my opening statement, arguing laissez-faire capitalism had atomized society and turned people into egotistic savages in constant competition with one another. Fascism, we tried to argue, would direct the energies of capitalism in a productive direction such as by ensuring full employment and the placing the private sector under the supervision of wise government. 

Your Soldiers Are Wack Yo

Nate's post responding to Sam here about the psychological effects of war on soldiers is, I think, right on the mark. Ever since the time of the Visigoths sacking Rome warriors have committed unspeakable atrocities against the enemy and civilians. Technology simply extended the ability of soldiers to inflict that kind of suffering. In addition, though, the doctrine of total war led to more unrestrained warfare. The countries in World War I largely fought away from cities, meaning that direct harm to civilians was minimal. The perceived destruction wrought by the war largely lay in its futility, senselessness, and enormous burden upon civilian populations.

While World War I may have been a more traumatic experience for soldiers, it did not represent a paradigm shift in how soldiers felt about war. The paradigm shift lay in the instruments they used to wage war, which yielded the unprecedented scale of the conflict.

A final point is that the worst atrocities committed during the war were not perpetrated by individual soldiers but by nation states. The Armenian genocide, for example. At the level of states, perhaps, the effects of nationalism and the horrific nature of the war might have been significant.

Comment to makaveli RE: Nitti vs. Cippico

"Also, Cippico seems to take pride in the fact that imports have increased so dramatically under Italian fascism. However, this has to do with the collapse of domestic industry rather than economic expansion. If Italian companies aren't producing the same goods and services they used to, they obviously must be imported from abroad if demand remains constant."

The Weimar Republic

The constitution of the Weimar Republic is one of the most stirring and beautiful political documents ever produced. Yet by 1933 it had been totally dismantled by the National Socialist Party and Germany had become a fascist state. There are a few basic reasons for this. The first was post-war political instability. Left and right-wing groups staged insurgencies and provincial rebellions that undermined the central government particularly because paramilitary groups like the freikorps acted as police instead of the German army. Germany's demilitarization due to the Versailles treaty left the Republic unable to maintain law and order creating a power vacuum.

The second was Germany's economic condition. The Republic was defaulting on payments of its reparations by 1923 and printing money 'like gangbusters' (in the words of Jim Haley) to cover its debts (as this video explains). Hyperinflation destroyed savings and the purchasing power of ordinary German citizens, leading to their impoverishment. The Great Depression only worsened matters, and the apparent impotence of the Weimar government (which slashed taxes and expenditures during the recession) destroyed the little credibility it had left.

A demoralized, distraught, and impoverished people could not be more open to something radically and tyrannically different.

Flabby Democracy

The question Cas posed to us at the end of class today, "How can democracy give way to fascism?", at first perplexes the liberal sensibilities of many on their first grappling with totalitarianism. I think this is because we are in a very, very different position than post-war Germany or Italy. Totalitarianism arises out of the destruction of a society's institutions and bonds that hold a country together--a situation of total and complete hopelessness. What separates it from other authoritarian movements is that it has no factional agenda, though it may use class or social issues to leverage support. In other words, its end is the pure expansion and enhancement of the state. It may begin as an ideological movement, but ideology becomes an artifice rather than the defining fact of the regime.

The easiest way a democracy can give way to authoritarianism is when trauma shatters the liberal sensibilities that would normally fight totalitarian impulses. Alternatively, if such liberal sensibilities have never existed in a society, democracy can quickly give way to authoritarian government (as this article on Venezuela demonstrates). World War I obliterated the social order of the Victorian age and left entire populations demoralized and atomized. This undifferentiated 'mass' left in the post-war period formed a perfect breeding ground for totalitarian movements. 

Revolutions Old and New

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Our fairly recent discussion of the Russian Revolution brings to mind a lot of aspects of the French Revolution. They bear many superficial similarities in the composition of the revolutionary bodies, the causes of discontent, and their immediate effects. 

Similarities:

1. Brought on by massive failures of existing political orders. The Romanovs had run Russia into the ground through World War I and the stagnant, static political order of the tsarist state. Similarly, France under Louis XVI had piled on huge debts and was unable to maintain the bloated bureaucracy and personal perks of the king. Famine was also a common factor in provoking the mass uprising. Both revolutions began through existing political means (in Russia, this occurred really in the 1905-6 revolution) but quickly exhausted them.

2. Both began as moderate alterations to the political order. In France, it was the establishment of a constitutional monarchy; in Russia, it was a liberal republic. However, radical elements quickly overtook both and plunged the country into chaos.

In France, the Thermidorian Reaction ultimately replaced the Terror because of popular resistance in conservative areas of France to Robspierre's radicalism. However, Russia succeeded through a more developed party apparatus that suppressed all dissent and enforced a uniform revolutionary ideology. The French Revolution, moreover, was not ideological in nature--there was no clearly defined vision for the future that emerged. This led to the tumult and chaos over the coming years as conservative directories, enlightened despots, constitutional monarchs, and emperors all had their turn ruling France.

Joseph Stalin's Tsarist Ambitions

The October Revolution of 1917 supposedly swept away the last vestiges of Tsarist Russia and left a clean slate on which the Bolsheviks could rebuild a new Russia in their image. However, Stalin effectively reversed that. His reign bore a striking likeness to his imperial predecessors both in tone and substance, such as his policies toward the peasantry. As our recent DBQ aptly noted, the 'rural question' was the defining issue in the 19th century for Russia. Stalin answered it once and for all by collectivizing ownership of land and effectively eliminating the peasantry as an independent social entity.

Moreover, Stalin's cultural presence in Soviet Russia resembled a tsarist one as well. He became the patriarch of the Russian people, much like the traditional view of the tsar, and invoked nationalist rhetoric that could easily have been lifted from one of Catherine the Great's speeches had she been a demagogue. Soviet Russia under Stalin also espoused conservative social mores in areas of family relations and social freedoms, such as by nearly outlawing abortion in 1936 and criminalizing homosexuality. For all its transformative power, modernism couldn't seem to change some basic aspects of Russia's political culture.

On Total War

Charlie's post here agrees with the notion that total war can be a positive force for a country. The principal reason he cites is that total war involves the entire population in the war effort and as such produces a more visceral connection to the war's effects among the people. This strikes me as a singularly circular argument if this connection is intended to prevent such wars from occurring in the first place.

The other problem with this argument is the conflation of a war's scale with its transparency. While wars have grown in scale over the course of history due to economic progress, population growth, and technological advancement, they have not become less opaque. The "fog of war" has always existed between the home front and the front line and has only been mitigated by advances in technology. We first saw the effects of communication advances on the "fog of war" in the Crimean war with the telegram, and they provoked considerable outcry despite the limited nature of the conflict.

In one respect, the scale of World War I hampered transparency. The national fervor wipped up by the conflict led to legislation like the American Sedition Act in 1918 that severely curtailed 'unpatriotic' speech or reporting on the war. There was also a clear divide in awareness between civilians and the military evidenced by post-war literature such as All Quiet on the Western Front and Mrs. Dalloway.

All of this refutes the supposed corollation between scale and awareness in war. Not only that, arguing for total war on the basis of its 'pedagogical' use strikes me as perverse, sickening, and disgusting. We shouldn't need bombed out cities and human carnage to proove to us that war is a terrible thing.

But at Least the Trains Ran on Time...

Jonathan's post arguing that fascism was not a true ideology until historians made it one is, in my view, very off base. For one, I think he underestimates the novelty of the fascist movement. Several aspects of fascism separate it from previous authoritarian systems, such as its fundamental connection to mass politics. Totalitarianism arose out of an atomized and terrified society where class and social distinctions had been wiped clean by the First World War. Fascism was not a class movement--it was factional, but it drew support from all corners of Italian society. A second differentiating factor was its new idea of relations between rulers and the ruled. Absolutism had to recognize the aristocracy as a lesser or greater partner in government. Liberal statists nominally presented themselves as popular servants and sought to reconcile competing social interests. Fascism, as its name implies, believed in the ultimate 'binding' of all members of society. The state and the people would be unified in the service of a common ideal--that of national greatness and the acquisition of power.

Mussolini called expansion and a larger sense of struggle 'an essential manifestation of vitality' by the State. The rhetoric of fascism was communal, emphasizing the greater unity of a people and the expression of this unity through the State. Contrary to what Jonathan asserts, fascism necessitated such an ideology before it could take hold in Italy else it could not have achieved the victory it did. Only once the regime had cemented its position could ideology be subverted to the greater telos of totalitarianism--the perpetuation of the regime for its own sake.

I'm Sorry Woodrow, You're an Imperialist Too

For me, the most salient aspect of the Fourteen Points isn't how idealistic, modern, or incomplete it is, it's how imperialistic they are. The First World War was not an ideological conflict; it was a political and territorial one. However, the post-war wrangling over Europe's future took a decidedly ideological tone due to the American agenda to stuff self-determination and liberal democracy down Europe's throat. He writes, "What we demand in this war, therefore, is nothing peculiar to ourselves. It is that the world be made fit and safe to live in.... safe for every peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its own life [and] determine its own institutions." This is really no different from the rhetoric of imperialist apologists for French expansion in Algeria. While we (this writer excluded) may be more sympathetic toward Wilson's goal, the essence of imperialism remains. In the Fourteen Points America shrugged off the last vestiges of isolationism and asserted itself as the global vanguard of liberal democracy. 

Also interesting to note is Wilson's complete ignorance of examples of colonialist/imperialist oppression outside Europe. His notion of self-determination is evidently selective.

The Long and Short of It--Racism?

David and Mia (fairly) recently mentioned the factor of racism in the European imperialist mindset. Race obviously provided a simple and conspicuous means to identify the rest of the world as 'other' and thereby facilitate the 'cognitive dissonance' (our favorite buzzword with imperialism) allowing liberalism for whites and subjugation for everyone else. 

I don't think imperialism hinges on race, however, in the way David and Mia seem to assert. My case in point is the Irish. For centuries, the Irish have been seen as the savage and inferior counterparts to the English despite their superficial (and genetic) similarities with the rest of Great Britain. Anti-Irish bigots had no trouble reducing this group to the level of apes and primitive peoples, as exemplified by the cartoon above. 

Even if the Congolese tribes and the Chinese had looked like Europeans, I'm confident some new means of differentiating Europe from the 'rest of the world' would have come about fairly quickly.

In Memory of Charlie Darwin

In 10th grade, we talked about the three great "Humiliations" of mankind: the Copernican revolution, which showed we are not at the center of the universe, evolution by natural selection, which showed we are not the crown of creation, and psychoanalysis, which showed we might not be in control of our own thoughts. We've discussed one already (Copernicus) in this course, and on Darwin's 200th birthday we're talking about the second. Darwin's hypothesis had a deeply disturbing impact on many people. It took mankind off its pedestal, it encroached on a religious explanation of the natural world, and it posed a further challenge to the Enlightenment social paradigm. As biology, it's irrefutable. However, it quickly became co-opted by racial apologists, nationalists, and members of the middle class as pseudo-scientific 'Social Darwinism'. What I think this shows most is simply that revolutions in our understanding of the world always precipitate a change in how society looks at itself, and the idea behind the scientific revolution can often become the idea behind a cultural revolution. 

Interestingly, 'Social Darwinism' wasn't in response to something new--it was taking a new idea and using it to deal with a pre-existing issue of growing inequality (another challenge to the Enlightenment paradigm).  So in this case, the process worked in reverse (even though Darwin's was in no way intended to defend imperialism or such thing). 

Rage against the Imperialist Machine?

There's been quite a bit of anger of late about the injustice of imperialism, such as Laura's and Leigh's posts. I by and large tend to agree with it, but it raises an interesting point. What would Europe and the West have been like without imperialism? Would the West still enjoy the standard of living and wealth it now has if not for imperialism? Would we even be in a position to complain about imperialism if it were not for imperialism? Scarcity means, unfortunately, that the world's resources aren't infinite. To some extent, one nation's loss comes at another's gain. So without imperialism, we might have a more equitable distribution of resources around the world, but that would mean decreased standards of living elsewhere.

I'm willing to accept this as a consequence of a non-aggressive, voluntary global village/community/[insert warm fuzzy platitude here]. But I think we should keep in mind that you can't have your cake and eat it too.

2/1-2/8 Summary

In class this week we focused on the causes and effects of imperialism. I really liked Danielle's comment regarding the Boer war in her post--namely, to what lengths were European powers willing to go in exercising their imperial policy? She asks the question "How can imperialism ever be successful if people will ALWAYS revolt?" I agree with her assessment that European powers needed a variety of power structures (like a nominally independent Congo Free State, one-sided trade agreements with China, and puppet rulers in India) to deal with their subjects without resorting to overt tyranny. However, in some cases this strategy failed egregiously, thereby highlighting the paradox of a liberal imperialism--Britain had to wage total war against the Boers with concentration camps, creating its own guerrilla forces, and a scorched-earth policy to suppress the rebellion. Military necessity forced the British to abandon 'civilized' practices of warfare, as encapsulated in the trial and scapegoating of 'Breaker' Morant. 

Why Can't We Be Friends? (da da daah da da...) [837ish-843ish]

The greatest downside of nationalism (for the nationalist at least) is that despite all your eloquence on unity and common purpose, your nation doesn't always get along too well. In fact, when coupled with profound economic upheaval, conflict often emerges. The first Industrial Revolution saw a revolution in the means of production that took some time to adjust to. Along with the political turmoil of the period, it provoked revolutions in 1830 and 1848. However, the second Industrial Revolution saw no such thing. I posit two principal causes:

1. The Second IR was not as 'revolutionary' as the first. As the textbook mentions, the Second IR was principally an "increas[e] in the scope and scale of industry", not a transformation of industry or the creation of industry. This made it less of a shock to people.

2. Rather than take up arms, reformers principally felt their calling lay in the political process. The development of states based around nations meant a greater connection between the state and its people (in part because of democratization, in part because the legitimacy of the state was now fundamentally in its people, not the royal line or aristocracy [Russia withstanding]). In places with developed political institutions, like Britain, violence was at a minimum, whereas in France events like the Paris Commune led to violent crackdowns. 

Change therefore came in the form of Socialist parties and workers movements that sought to work within the context of a 'bourgeois' government to improve the lot of the working class. Socialist thinkers like Eduard Bernstein moderated Marx's vision and used the vehicle of social institutions to achieve change rather than syndicalists and anarchists. A useful analogy, perhaps, is the AFL vs. the Knights of Labor from US history. 'Mass politics', as the textbook calls it, organized huge voting blocs within the political apparatus and were thus taken more seriously by the established states of the day.

Finally, this period of the "Gilded Age" is often cited by critics of capitalism for being an era of cartelization and monopolization. However, as the textbook correctly mentions, FREE TRADE proved to be one of the best deterrents to cartel behavior in countries like Britain (top right pp. pg. 829). FREE TRADE (i.e. foreign competition for the cartel, which makes it more difficult to sustain prices above the market rate) can defeat monopolies and cartels far better than regulation. 

pp. 793-806

The most pressing question to ask regarding this reading, I think, is how this new imperialism differed from other from previous European expansion in the 17th and 18th centuries. There are several principal areas of divergence.

1) Imperialism, unlike earlier colonialism, had to reconcile itself with Europe's nominal commitment to liberalism. It therefore had a much more developed cultural flavor, as exemplified by France. Liberal nationalism became the rhetorical signature of imperial apologists, such as Jules Ferry. Imperialism became France's route to re-establish its national pride and dignity after the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War. It also employed clearly developed ideas of racial and cultural superiority.

2) For similar reasons to 1), imperialism involved more subtle and varied means of control than past colonialism. In China, for example, European powers used trade treaties to cement and codify their commercial and cultural influence. After the Sepoy Rebellion in India, moreover, Britain rearranged its colonial government by removing whites from prominent public positions and establishing puppet governments.

Once again, both of these differences reduce to the different ideological contexts of the period. The transparency of foreign operations had increased exponentially over earlier colonization efforts, making it necessary for European powers to use less overt methods of control. Imperialism also required a more sophisticated defense to win over public approval and connect it to existing ideologies of nationalism and the like.

The Highest Stage of Capitalism?

Note: documents found at the Internet Modern History Sourcebook

Lenin and Hobson both argued imperialism was the natural (and, in Lenin's case, most extreme) manifestation of state-endorsed capitalism. Hobson, in Imperialism, endorses the view that imperialism exemplified the economic interest groups pressuring newly-unified states to expand their markets beyond Europe. Lenin followed Marx's analysis, contending that imperialism resulted from the general stagnation of capitalism as domestic industries coalesced into monopolies and profit margins began to decrease. To maintain profitability without increasing surplus value (the difference between a worker's wage and the value of his work), Marx argued capitalists would be forced to innovate or expand their markets. Thus, imperialism.

Others felt the process operated in reverse order. Joseph Schumpeter, in The Sociology of Imperialism, wrote that the imperialist spirit was a consequence of "The 'inner logic' of capitalism would have never evolved it. Its sources come from the policy of the princes and the customs of a pre-capitalism milieu... a martially-oriented class (i.e. the nobility) [that] maintained itself in the ruling position." The nationalist, statist desire for expansion and glory, in other words, created the opportunity for economic expansion.

Because the causes and effects of imperialism are so intermixed, determining them presents a 'chicken and the egg' problem. However, I am inclined to agree with Mr. Schumpeter. Imperialism was a state-sponsored enterprise, with the state acting in a power-maximizing fashion. Companies may have advocated and endorsed it, but it was fundamentally a political and cultural ideology.

767-781

Slavery and serfdom fell with the rise of nationalism because they were essentially aristocratic, feudal institutions. They couldn't match the potential of industrial labor and capitalism, and in both the United States and Russia they ended by state fiat. Reform voices, of course, came from the same vocal liberal bloc that opposed antiquated institutions like the Corn Laws. In keeping with the anti-liberal thinking of the time, however, these reforms were largely symbolic--in the U.S., for example, sharecropping replaced slave labor. However, the did signal the close of a previous era. Liberalism at the level of the state had become a negative rather than a positive force, an instrument for sweeping away old economic and social vestiges.

The advent of 'realpolitik' and the decline of romanticism also gave way to a new artistic and cultural sensibility of realism. Reporting on the Crimean War, for example, sought objectivity over style and flourish. As states became more calculating and centralized, perhaps, so did the populace create parallel institutions by which to monitor and scrutinize the state's activities. Realism, combined with a political agenda, was a far more pragmatic program than romanticism and sought to hit the target audience in the gut rather than the heart.

Clarification on Mazzini (Reply to Cas)

As I tried to articulate today, Mazzini is neither a top-down or a bottom-up nationalist. I define them respectively as the belief that the nation is created through a state-like entity and the belief that the nation is an 'emergent' being that arises spontaneously from the people themselves. These beliefs are means to the end, the end being a unified state governing a nation. Mazzini is not interested in means, however. "The Duties of Man" describes a vision wherein the nation exists as a beneficent force conscious of its place in the larger human family. It does not take a stance on whether a mass revolution will achieve this aim or a cadre of enlightened revolutionaries within the aristocracy or establishment. 

Mazzini argues that "the Divine design will infallibly be realized; natural divisions and the spontaneous, innate tendencies of the peoples will take the place of the arbitrary divisions, sanctioned by evil governments... The countries of the peoples, defined by the vote of free men, will arise upon the ruins of the countries of kinds and privileged castes, and between these countries harmony and fraternity will exist." The phrase "innate tendencies of the peoples" may signal a "bottom-up" mentality here. However, we can draw a useful analogy to Marx here. Both Mazzini and Marx argue that change will invariably happen. They do not say how. It is for that reason, for example, that Lenin could remain faithful to Marx in arguing that the proletarian revolution required a vanguard. Admittedly, it's less likely that members of the establishment would willingly give up their status in a top-down revolution following Mazzini's vision. However, my point is that Mazzini doesn't explicitly come down either way. 

Pigeonholing Mazzini as a raging populist is false, and it would be nice if we (i.e. Cas) could approach things with a little more subtlety. 

Summary Post 1/17-25

We've wrangled a bit over what nationalism means this week. I'm going to suggest, however, that we may have wrangled a little too much. Whether 'top-down' or 'bottom-up', nationalism is essentially a state-building process (the state being a compulsory territorial monopolist with ultimate decision-making power). Even cloaked in the façade of liberalism, nationalism wants to build up the instruments and reach of the state. As Robot Aliens (David) aptly noted, nationalism is about differentiating 'us' from 'them'--i.e., exclusion. This happens every day in the form of group identity. However, when it occurs coercively, it can be immensely destructive. I'm going to distinguish between a 'society' and a 'nation' here. A society is the collection of people usually governed as a nation. Societies do not need 'balances of power', states do. Societies do not engage in arms races, or seek territorial expansion, or steal from their citizens. States do.  

So in response to the apparent ambivalence about what kind of instrument nationalism is, it is clearly a statist one. We become confused because we see politics along a one-dimensional 'left right' axis while it is in reality a two-dimensional plane. Liberalism and conservatism both agree that a state is necessary, and as such can use nationalism to their advantage. Libertarianism and anarchism, on the other hand, cannot. 

Bismarck, OR: Reply to Charlie

Major Tom's original post here.

I disagree with Charlie's assessment of Bismarck's nationalism. While it's true that his popular rhetoric framed nationalism as a popular, emergent phenomenon, his actual conception of the nation-state was far more artificial. His ambition was clearly to increase not only his own standing, but also the institution of the Prussian state that he would bequeath to the future. Had Bismarck been a populist statist, he might not have exercised the remarkable restraint that he did. "Bismarck belongs in the company of one of the rare leaders of mighty states who chose to limit his ambitions" (Kagan, On the Origins of War  101). Perhaps because Bismarck saw himself as so personally connected to the state he led, even though still a "caretaker" figure, he considered the state's long term welfare in his actions. For example, playing the populace against the opposition in his wars with Denmark and Austria diminished the credibility of his opposition. Bismarck recognized that the state's long-term health required at its core, despite all other asymmetries, a basic concord between ruler and ruled. In addition, he resisted the impulse to punish France severely in the Franco-Prussian war. While it engendered lingering animosity among the French, Bismarck's territorial reach or indemnity could have been far greater. It was to his credit that he chose to restrain himself there.

However, it was ultimately Prussia's military culture and economic prowess that allowed for Bismarck's success. All of a leaders cunning and guile come to naught if not backed by a powerful military and economic machine. Prussia's military tradition within the junkers produced a professional and well-disciplined army more than a match for any other European power, giving Bismarck the muscle he needed to secure a unified German empire. 

pp. 754-762

One of Hegel's dialectics best explains the phenomenon of the nation-state in the second half of the 19th century. Napoelon III's reforms compromised the liberal desires of the middle class and (to a lesser extent) the working poor with the centralization conservatives desired. Essentially, a new status quo emerged whereby the 'thesis' of liberal, progressive revolution and the 'anti-thesis' of Restoration-era conservatism could coexist synthetically. Conservatism did not triumph outright through top-down nationalism (its survival required some concessions like legalizing trade unions and the like), but rather emerged a very different beast through the process of state-building. Gone was the nostalgic, Burkean attachment to royal houses and medieval traditions, replaced with the firm hand of the state as a newly created bulwark of the elite. 

The case of Italian unification is, for lack of a better term, a less revealing story. There are some interesting tidbits to be gleamed from the text, however. For one, Napoleon III's decision to withdraw from France's war with Austria-Hungary is striking for two reasons: first, he seemed unwilling to escalate the conflict for fear of its cost, and second, he feared the domestic consequences of the war. The former underpins the legacy of the Concert of Europe and the desire for international stability, while the latter emphasizes the compromise that lay beneath the new nation state (i.e. the emperor can't simply do as he pleases, for there are interest groups who check his power). No longer can a ruler claim that he is the state; rather, the state is now a discrete institution from the people it governs. The text quotes an anonymous Italian statesman observing, " 'We have made Italy; now we must make Italians.' " The division between the state and its people tellingly manifests the novelty of the nation-state as a political body. 

Is The Revolution Inevitable?

OR: Reply to Charlie

Marx would argue that liberal democracy is nothing but another opiate of the masses, not an actual tool for their own welfare. However, I agree with Charlie that this is a mistake, though for slightly different reasons. Marx's proletarian revolution has not occurred in the West because capitalism's image has remained good enough for people of all social classes to "buy into". Hence the farthest left the West has gone is only democratic socialism--working within a democratic market economy to promote an egalitarian social theory. Marx also underestimated the flexibility of democracy to incorporate populist movements that would promote the "general welfare", universal happiness, a pony for every poor child, etc. So rather than an explosive proletarian revolution, the state has instead slowly expanded to incorporate much of Marx's ambitions within the scheme of a democratic society. 

Another angle, perhaps, is the enduring legacy of the Enlightenment in Europe and America. Thomas mentioned this in his comment, and I agree. Because we're so Lockean and steeped in ideas of equal access to liberty and opportunity, American politics tends not to revolve around differences of economic class. On both sides of the Atlantic people on the whole put their lot in with the democratic process as the best way to resolve issues of "social justice". 

Not that this is a good thing. In fact, it makes it all the more insidious because socialism is no longer the monstrous, oppressive, and coercive beast that it is but merely a cog in the state's machinery. 

Reply to "The Mean Nurse Returns" (and comment)

Original post and comment here

I agree with Leigh's point that the basic idea of Romanticism was to shift the focus of art and thought toward the passionate, emotive side of individuals. However, I don't see it as an individualistic movement. The whole Romatic ideal of the "creative genius" only existed insofar as individuals tapped (sometimes in dramatic fashion) into a common reservoir of human emotion. Beethoven did not create something "new" through his Eroica Symphony, for example, but tapped into something that was already there. In fact, no one could really appreciate his work if there were not some commonality with his audience in it. Even though Romantics celebrated individual experience, they did not see it the individual as the end-all of human existence. 

This explains how pliable Romanticism became in the political sphere. Conservatives like Chateaubriand could emphasize the unity and solidarity that such experience brought to people. Liberals could portray the ideal of solidarity as the basis for a "non-repressive society" (to use Marcuse's term) where a free and tolerant social context allowed individuals to embrace their own romantic essence. Nationalism most clearly manifests this kind of romantic paradigm--defining a community in terms of its shared cultural values and qualities focuses on the basic, universal side of human nature, not the apogee of human nature that the Enlightenment revered. 

On page 730, however, the textbook asserts that it was Romaticism's individuality that associated it with nationalism. I beg to differ. Individuality divides the community as opposed to uniting it. If nations are unique entities, why are people within them not? This is an incoherent argument. Rather, Romanticism's interest in the "primitive" side of human nature could show how bonds of society brought people together into distinct cultures, forming the basis of nations. 

This brings me to Leigh and Nate's comments. Modernism and Romanticism have nothing to do with one another. Modernism is, as its name suggests, about "modern" things, sophisticated, pointy things with lots of sheet metal and minimalist design. It's about progress, building the new and sweeping away the cobwebbed vestiges of old outdated ideas like human emotion and irrationality. Compare a piece of art from the Bauhaus School to Delacroix. They have absolutely nothing in common. 

Modernism grows out of the same current Romanticism opposed, the application of the rational human mind to everything. Marx, Darwin, Bertrand Russell, even John Maynard Kenyes and the like are all trying to categorize and systematize and control the universe under their little analytical microscopes, whereas Romanticism just wants to run free in the woods. To conflate the two is a mistake. 

But that's just my opinion. 

Quibbles with Karl

Marx predicates his entire argument on the alienation of labor on an idea of exploitation. According to Marx, in other words, the capitalist must exploit the worker in order to accrue a profit. He uses the labor theory of value (i.e. the "just" price of something is directly proportionate to the amount of labor put into it) to justify this conclusion. If the marginal cost of a commodity, for example, is $100 per unit in Marx's scheme, the capitalist pays the worker only $90 per unit and pockets the extra $10. 

Marx is surely not arguing that the act of creation is a personally destructive process. Rather, he argues that labor is destructive to the worker when the value of his labor is worth more than the worker receives in return. Here's the rub though--the labor theory of value is false. Value is not absolute, it is subjective. There is no such thing as a "just price" for something. Rather, the price of a good is determined by its utility to the person buying it. To quote the Austrian economist Carl Menger (courtesy of Wikipedia):

Whether a diamond was found accidentally or was obtained from a diamond pit with the employment of a thousand days of labor is completely irrelevant for its value. In general, no one in practical life asks for the history of the origin of a good in estimating its value, but considers solely the services that the good will render him and which he would have to forgo if he did not have it at his command. (Principles of Economics).

Once we debunk his theory of value, Marx's entire exploitation scheme falls apart completely. Real wages and standards of living have risen, not fallen, over the last 150 years for the vast, vast majority of the worlds peoples, even during the Industrial Revolution that inspired Marx. His failure to grasp the subjectivity of value underscores his misunderstanding of capitalism.

Normative Name-Calling (Coffin 717-724, Proudhon, and other stuff)

The Early Romantic period is a textbook demonstration of Hegel's theory of history. The materialism/idealism debate aside, thanks to the French Revolution you have a new theory of social relations in liberalism countenanced by reactionary conservatism. However, material circumstances appeared to catalyze existing thought, not create it. The seeds of liberalism did not lie in factory conditions, they lay in Rousseau. Regardless, it leads to a basic reassessment of how society ought to be constructed. With regards to the Industrial Revolution, how do you distribute all this new wealth? If people can choose freely where they work and where they buy goods (economic freedom), does that imply a freedom to vote or self-governance (political freedom)? At this point, the synthesis is still elusive and won't emerge until long after the 1849-50 revolutions.

What feels most odd is the strange marriage of nationalism and liberalism. Nationalism is a highly illiberal idea--submerging the individual identity in the collective mass of a national identity. The only way to explain it is in terms of a common opposition to the illegitimate rule of monarchy and conservatism. This implies, though, that liberalism was not an atomistic, individualistic philosophy but again a new assertion of social relations--liberty can only be protected when each individuals has the power to protect their own liberty. The nation, a body of individuals, allows each to contribute to the political process, allegedly thereby securing liberty.