Marx and Bruke
Ives, C. P.
saying that sentiment for impeachment was waning and that additional funds were necessary to rejuvenate the impeachment drive. This ADA attitude plus the partisan political nature of the...
...none has created so vast an intellectual proletariat, with nothing but its technique to l o s e . . . " Nor is that all...
...Bevan has intimations from time to time of the empiric logic that gnaws at her thematic Marx as empiricist...
...In a surgical operation complete in a footnote, Oakeshott isolated the element in Marxian literature which may have--shall we say enticed?--Bevan into her--admittedly not unqualified--conclusion that Marx was no speculative Rationalist: "By casting his technique in the form of a view of the course of events (past, present, and future), and not of 'human nature,' Marx thought he had escaped from Rationalism...
...he had also said that the citizen of any European state was at home in any other, and so that the old Christian dom, though broken now into warring states and quarreling schisms, was still a cultural principality, sounding of the past out of which it had come...
...On the other hand most representatives feel that they could return to their districts before the election and portray a willingness to vote for impeachment if the evidence so indicates...
...honoris causa after the usual interval of four decades...
...There is, indeed, at times an almost blurring of the two terms evolution and revolution...
...Bevan makes all these points with clarity in behalf of her protagonists in her chapter '~Philosophical Foundations" and elsewhere...
...C.P...
...Bevan gives highly important testimony in distinguishing this Aristotelian empiricism from the ~valuefree" brand of the contemporary '~behavioralists...
...The result in political science, forming Burke and Marx alike, says Bevan, was an Aristotelian theorem of factual observation, straitly limited to people as they were and are, and then a generalization of such behavioral patterns as could be demonstrafed to survive variation in time, place, A Revisionist View by Ruth A. Bevan Open Court $7.95 and nurture in the promotion of community...
...Language, Burke had said, was the cement of society...
...Moreover, "nothing in this field can compare with the work of Marx and E n g e l s . . . They are the authors of the most stupendous of our political rationalisms--as well they might be, for it was composed for the instruction of a less politically educated class than any other that has ever come to have the illusion of exercising political power . . . No other technique has so imposed itself upon the world as if it were concrete knowledge...
...exis out, away from...
...Aristotle, a f a r all, was the author as well of the Ethics, just as laissezfaire Adam Smith wrote not just The Wealth of Nations, but (as Burke remembered), also The Theory of Moral Sentiments...
...re is back, hack to a former state or position---a mere return to the starting place, but worn, eroded by the friction of the turn-around--at best a squeaky wheel, at worst an ominously broken one...
...but since he had taken the precaution, of first turning the course of events into a doctrine, the escape was an illusion...
...Marx, abstracted into the dialectic from t h e reality of Bonapartism, put his shoulder to the revolutionary wheel which started at Kaiser and Czar and turned in friction and fury full circle to Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler...
...Let us count the ways in which the lady advances her theme...
...from Trinity College and his LL.D...
...The signs of Marx's deviation from Aristotle begin to show in Bevan's chapter on "Social Application," mount in '~l~ne Politics of Reality," and climax in Chapter Five, '~ne Politics of Change...
...is awarded for almost everything, Karl Marx was certified as a Doctor literally of Philosophy in the rigorous University of Jena...
...But all that she actually proves is that though her principals have indeed gone to school at the Lyceum, they agree on only one point--doubtless the most important--of The Philosopher's teaching: that anarchy is impossible since man is a social, hence, a political animal, not just _9 hypothesis but by direct observation of his behavior in half or more of the jurisdictions of Greek antiquity--Sicyon, Chalscis, Syracuse, Carthage, Lacedaemon, ~ontini, Sicily, Gela, Rhegium, to name those cited on a single page of the Politics...
...The generation of rationalist politics is by political inexperience out of political opportunity," says Michael Oakeshott, a modern Aristotelian, writing in the metaphor of the horse fancy, of which his knowledge is by no means abstract...
...Beth are, rather, Empiricists, Realists in the popular usage, though not quite Pragmatists in the cramped and vulgar meaning nowadays given that term in trendy political discourse...
...he can never get a square meal of experience...
...As do, of course, in fact, the behavioralists themselves: so that their valuefree findings are apt to be free only of the values of their adversaries and chock full of their own...
...Evolution is ex-volution, revolution re-volution...
...and that the origin of the change consists in those numbers 'of which 4 and 3, married with 5, furnish two h a r m o n i e s ' . . . . " Now that is really speculative rationalism...
...The older empiricists were all the way empirical, taking note of the primordial datum that the moderns affect to ignore--that men differ from stones and statistics in that they think, feel, and believe...
...Marx and Burke DR...
...BEVAN PROPOSES in this thoroughly researched and earnestly argued study that Burke and Marx are intellectual brothers not far under the skin--that both are Aristotelians, hence anti-Rationalists, counterIdealists',h-Raalists in the technical senses of the last two categories...
...Not even Aristotle...
...Ives The Alternative June-September 1974 23...
...The almost evenly divided public sentiment on impeachment concerns any congressman because of the uncertainty of response an opinion on impeachment would elicit from the electorate...
...But as suggested, she shows Burke to have embraced historical empiricism entire...
...Quaint as it seems in times when the Ph.D...
...Volution is from volvere, to roll...
...was part of the sound...
...Like Midas, the Rationalist is always in the unfortunate position of not being able to touch anything, without transforming it into an abstraction...
...This ADA attitude plus the partisan political nature of the House Judiciary impeachment inquiry has served to bring disenchanted Republicans back into the fold...
...There is also a strong sentiment in Congress that it would be politically wiser not to make an impeachment vote a campaign issue...
...So Burke warned against the revolution that returned France to an authority tighter than the Old Regime, after an erosion of consensus persisting to this day, and not only in France...
...Marx only as far as acknowledging that men by nature are not %ribeless, lawless, hearthless," much less atoms awash in nihilistic vacuum...
...Yet the distinction is elementary etymology, and surely etymological precision is urgent in the discussion, risky at best, which determines the state and fate of nations...
...And what Bevan fails to prove is that Marx, despite some renunciatory gestures, ever did shake wholly loose from speculative Rationalism---a claim, indeed, from which she herself begins to recede in the later pages of the book...
...Thus men were admonished on the whole to prefer growth to cataclysm, evolution to revolution, the middle of the path to the edge of the cliff...
...but it is the theme rather than the intimations which prevails in a nonetheless scholarly and instructive work...
...There was a century between Burke and Marx, but the pretechnical world of learning was one, just as the universal church was still at least pan-(Western) European, its language received as a matter of course by secular scholarship...
...Be it remembered that Aristotle himself was troubled by the ethereal quality of Plato's remarks on revolution...
...In the Republic," Aristotle says, "Socrates treats of revolutions, but not well . . . He only says that the cause is that nothing is abiding, but all things change in a certain cycle...
...Not even Burke could have put it better...
...And Aquinas had seen to it that Aristotle of the Peripatetics (the Walkie-Talkie School...
...Burke, she recalls, had his M.A...
Vol. 7 • June 1974 • No. 9
