Joseph Schwartz's The Permanence of the Political

...Who among them would seriously disagree with his claim that "the true challenge for a just polity is to develop bonds of social solidarity which do not obliterate those very social differences that necessitate the construction of a limited but substantive common identity...

...Schwartz has no time for such "radical visions of postscarcity"' and of the final overcoming of the division of labor or for what he calls "a universal conception of human identity and a monistic conception of the good," by which he appears to mean the very possibility of non-coerced convergence toward a single, overall vision of the good life...

...This sits oddly with the author's promise of "recurrent historical and sociological references" and preference for "the political sociology of everyday life" and his complaint that "one of the greatest weaknesses of contemporary political theory" is "its radical separation of normative argument from concrete inquiry about the specific political and socioeconomic institutional practices that would instantiate such norms...

...These are, he claims, what Rousseau sought to eradicate, Hegel to regulate through bureaucratic management, the Marxist tradition to overcome through revolutionary transformation, and Arendt to bypass in her "'interest-less' politics of virtue...

...Forster introduces his Aspects of the Novel by proposing that "we are to visualize the English novelists...

...Schwartz suggests that such beliefs express a "radical impulse" shared by the thinkers he discusses, but there is much more to say about just how they worked their effects and what effects they had...

...He avoids some of their cruder interpretations (his Rousseau is much superior to Talmon's and his Hegel to Popper's...

...But the tide has turned...

...Is that "radical impulse" still alive and are these effects still to be feared...

...Indeed, Hegel, not usually thought of as a radical in Schwartz's sense, is there only because of his influence...

...And he argues that Arendt, unlike Marx and Lenin, worried about scientific management replacing politics, but in doing so drew an untenably sharp distinction between politics and economics and failed "to see that the ways we structure both production and social provision are inherently political issues," thus appearing to share 120 • DISSENT Books "Engels's (and later Lenin's) faith that in a society of abundance scientific expertise can solve all social problems...

...Another is that the principals' theories are considered primarily as contributions to the debates among professors that prevail in the penumbra...

...I, for one, eagerly await the author's answer...

...Indeed, for Rousseau, "it is precisely the absence of conflict in the sovereign assembly which manifests the existence of civic well-being and a healthy general will...

...For one thing, he has a refreshing way of asking: what actually goes on in the institutions they envisage...

...In what direction does a "truly liberal democratic socialism" point today...

...He also sees interesting connections between his central characters...

...as seated together in a room, a circular room . . . all writing their novels simultaneously...

...This applies no less to the contemporary political theorists with whom Schwartz takes issue in his polemical last chapter—communitarians, postmodernists, "post-Marxist or ex-socialist converts to 'discourse analysis,' " and adherents to the "politics of difference...

...He is also more cautious that they in imputing a dangerous historical influence to the ideas he criticizes, remarking that Talmon for one "ascribes to the political theorist an inordinate ability to affect the course of history...

...Schwartz locates himself in the outer circle, but he offers no more than a glimpse, in an all-too-brief concluding chapter, of its occupants' potential contribution to the world outside: namely to reconstruct "a radical democratic theory of politics in a feasible society more democratic and egalitarian than our own...

...He points to the weaknesses in the widespread conception of Rousseau as a proponent of direct democracy, observing that his assemblies are basically "ritual institutions that promote moral education and rejuvenation...

...The effects of this, both on true believers and on many others who acSPRING • 1997 • 121 cepted this commitment, are worth investigation...

...they seek a "renewed, majoritarian articulation of the social democratic tradition . . . accompanied by a universalist commitment to democratic equality...

...He shows how limited are the deliberations of Hegel's legislature, which is essentially "a transmission belt for information for the bureaucracy," arguing that Hegel "tried to transcend politics by curtailing the political influence of interests through the bureaucratic mediation of conflict by his universal class of civil servants...

...Popper and his fellow liberals were, I have suggested, writing against the tide...

...It is a vital project, with which Dissent readers will feel an immediate affinity...

...There is of course much force in this argument, as in its companion argument, also advanced here: that this shared longing for social unity and impulse to transcend politics has had historical consequences, in particular upon "twentieth-century radicalism's flirtation with, and often explicit defense of, antipluralist, authoritarian regimes...

...They do not engage in political debate and decision making...

...Likewise, Joseph Schwartz summons up theorists of what he calls the "radical" tradition: five principals—Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Lenin, and Arendt—surrounded by a penumbra of contemporary scribblers, all political theorists, all North American, and many engaged in the so-called "liberal-communitarian" debate...

...Beyond the penumbra is a select outer circle of contemporary political theorists who see what the world outside the circular room requires, openly embracing "social pluralism" and a relatively autonomous civil society but also liberalism's commitment to individual liberties and rights...

...I wish he had gone further into this intriguing question...

...Schwartz here focuses upon what he SPRING • 1997 .119 Books calls the "post-political visions" of those in the center, which, he claims, have unduly influenced those in the penumbra...

...Schwartz's project, he says, is to "liberalize" the radical tradition while affirming "the radical tradition's critique of the inequalities of power within the civil societies of liberal democracies...

...Like (virtually) all the contemporary thinkers scribbling within the circular room, they will take Schwartz's defense of the liberal antitotalitarian case for granted...

...Thus most of the Marx chapter concerns his views about morals, rights, and justice (about which he wrote almost nothing and always in passing) and Hegel is described as "the first great communitarian critic of liberal conceptions of morality...

...Nonetheless, Schwartz's perspective and preoccupations do generate some interesting and sometimes provocative insights concerning his chosen authors...

...They are said to strive to achieve "the political goals of the Enlightenment minus its metaphysical trimmings...

...And this takes us to the heart of his argument: that what he calls the classical radical tradition aimed to "transcend the preconditions of politics—the plurality of social groups, particular communal identities, and divergent social interests...

...That flirtation and defense used to be of central concern to writers such as Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin, Raymond Aron, Jacob Talmon and Leszek Kolakowski, who saw themselves as defending liberal fundamentals against the tide, hoping to save their readers and susceptible students from dangerous errors...

...He also rightly stresses the weakness of the case for seeing Marx as a committed postrevolutionary democrat and suggests that his equation of politics with class conflict and his assumption of homogeneous workingclass interests prepared the ground for Engels's and Lenin's even more technocratic, scientistic conceptions of postrevolutionary society...

...The worldwide collapse of communism, the sense of ecological crisis, the ever-increasing dilemmas of the welfare state, the increasing pressures of multicultural cohabitation, and much else have made the permanence of scarcity, conflicting interests, and divergent collective identities self-evident to all...

...122 • DISSENT...

...He is right to say that Hegel, unlike Marx, "perceived the importance of particular identities and communal projects within civil society to the social development of freedom" and that Marx's universal class, unlike Hegel's, "aimed to transcend politics by coming to power and abolishing the very particularity that, in his view, gives rise to politics in the first place...

...And he interprets Hannah Arendt as declaring "war on private and social interests," albeit in the name of politics, which, for her, is limited to "the grand politics of constitution making, war, the spontaneous creation of revolutionary councils, and collective disobedience to defend true constitutional principles"—the "high politics" of "glory and memorable speeches" about the final ends of the political community...

...For instance, I maintain that Marxism always manifested a congenital blindness toward moral questions concerning individual rights because of its core commitment to the idea that the world could be rid of the conditions that made them necessary...

...One is anachronism...

...The real challenge lies in pursuing the implications of his positive affirmation...

...Schwartz's "presentist" approach has its interpretive drawbacks...

...Thus Lev Kopelev, recalling his part in the liquidation of the kulaks, could write of how, although he was appalled by what he saw, his beliefs could tame his doubts...

...His purpose is to pinpoint a central flaw in the "overly canonical radical theoretical tradition" (he means, of course, the radical left), namely a hostility to "the very conditions that give rise to democratic politics—a plurality of social interests and diverse conceptions of the good life...

...Though he nowhere refers to them (except briefly to Talmon), readers familiar with their writings will recognize in Schwartz's book their various targets and some of their arguments...

...Thus Hegel's Polizei is said to prefigure "the role in advanced capitalist regimes of regulatory agencies and state macroeconomic and trade policy" and Marx is criticized for "never adequately confronting the implications of automation and cybernetics for the quality of work in an industrial or postindustrial society...