Visionary or Man of Vision?
HOOK, SIDNEY
Visionary or Man of Vision? Moses Hess and the nature of 'true' and 'utopian' socialism By Sidney Hook "WHERE THERE is no vision, the people perish." There is a difference, however, between the...
...Current systematic denigration of Marx is the natural consequence of the vulgar identification of his thought with that of Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and even Mao Tse-tung...
...The visionary, on the other hand, is obsessed with a notion or fantasy that cannot even remotely relate itself to the present human condition and its viable alternatives...
...It is a useful and interesting little work as far as it goes, but it is a pity that Weiss did not write a full-scale biography of Moses Hess instead of giving us a fragmentary account of some of Hess' ideas...
...On the contrary: Henceforward it meant an understanding of the nature, the conditions, and the general aims arising there-from, of the struggle into which the proletariat had entered...
...In part it is a consequence of the history of the socialist movement which has borne such strange fruit...
...The term "true" is used because that is how Hess and his friends characterized themselves...
...In later life he became a lapsed Marxist and a follower of Ferdinand Lasalle and before he died he wrote a book, Rome and Jerusalem, which entitles him to be regarded as one of the founding fathers of Zionism—more in the spirit of Judah Magnus than of David Ben Gurion...
...Hess was known to his friends as "the Communist rabbi" although he was not a professing Jew...
...On the contrary, they paid them handsome tributes...
...Hess was a person of singular purity of character, a good man, whom one cannot help liking even when he writes nonsense...
...Marx was a utopian himself...
...For as most utopians do not know, there are no panaceas, no recipes or formulas, which will spare us the necessity of hard thinking and the risk of living in a dangerous world...
...More particularly, were the Utopian socialists men of vision or merely visionaries...
...They criticized the assumption that truth, reason and justice would conquer "by their own power" and their disregard of the historical conditions presupposed by a socialist society as well as the economic class conflicts and class interests which serve as the driving forces of political transformation...
...There are still some nuggets of insight that can be mined from the writings of the great utopian socialists but I doubt whether anything worthwhile can be found by digging in the slag heaps of "true" socialism...
...Socialists of his type virtually became extinct with the rise of Bolshevism...
...Marx was only a stripling of 24, but to Hess he was the personification of all wisdom...
...Try to imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel all rolled into one—not thrown helter-skelter into a heap, but truly united so as to make a unified whole—and you will get an idea of Marx's make-up...
...A picture of utopia should be part of every map of social life, not as a place to go but as a place by which we take our bearings on where we are going and on the alternatives open to us...
...They criticized the utopian socialists' over-elaboration of unnecessary details which ran out into pure fancy, their belief that socialism could be brought about by men of good will—scholars, bankers, engineers—and that small model experiments would persuade society to transform itself...
...What is more important, they never expressed disdain for the great utopian socialists—Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen...
...So far as I know neither Marx nor Engels ever specifically referred to Hess as a utopian socialist...
...There are even those who contend that the rule of reason must eventuate in a reign of terror, and who trace the genealogy of modern totalitarianism to the ideals of the Enlightenment itself...
...It is not absurd to pursue an unrealizable ideal if the fruits of our pursuit enrich our lives and strengthen us as we meet the challenge of new problems...
...Hess is more interesting as a personality than as a thinker...
...Whatever he believed was always off course...
...Since Marx and Engels allegedly scorned the utopian socialists, their writings are being seined for ideas that may have some topical significance...
...The same man may be both at different times or in different respects...
...He boxed all points of the philosophical compass from the airiest of idealisms to the crudest of materialisms...
...These they largely took over...
...Some writers assert that Marx himself may be regarded as a Utopian socialist whose notions of a classless society illustrate a fanaticism of general ideas which, when applied to the intractabilities The dictionary definition of a utopian is "one who believes in the perfectability of human society...
...Some who survived, blinded by Messianic zeal, joined the Bolsheviks and became first apologists of the GPU and sometimes members of its goon squads...
...One "true" socialist taxed Marx with "advising us [the German socialists] to avoid the inferno of the Middle Ages, by throwing ourselves into the purgatory of the decrepit rule of capital...
...It is not therefore a utopian fancy...
...The fanatic, the escapist, the perfectionist who is prepared to let his children starve because at the moment he can only get three-quarters of a loaf of bread—these are among the visionaries, the bad utopians...
...Today the term "utopian" has a more comprehensive meaning than in Marx's time...
...Competition between utopians of this stripe is almost sure to lead to adventurism and the posing of false alternatives...
...In his brief history of the Communist League, Engels sums up the difference in the following way: "Communism no longer signified the fantastical elaboration of a social ideal as nearly achieving perfection as possible...
...He was in turn converted to Marxism and then repudiated some of his own ideas...
...A genuine ideal cannot be realized...
...When he first met Marx he hailed him in a letter to a friend as "the greatest, I might even say, the only living philosopher...
...The subject possesses an intrinsic interest...
...There is a difference, however, between the man of vision and the visionary...
...a visionary...
...In the Communist Manifesto they are considered under the rubric of "reactionary socialism," not under "utopian socialism...
...The difference between the man of vision and the visionary is that the first strikes a light which opens up a fresh and fruitful perspective on a problem relevant to a present concern...
...Hess was a man of quick enthusiasms...
...Spinoza has always exercised a fascination on gentle and peace-loving reformers whose fuzzy mode of thought he would have found completely alien to his own idiom...
...What they objected to was not their vision, their ideals, their criticism of the bourgeois status quo...
...Is a Utopian a man of vision or a visionary...
...The possibility of developing an organized working-class movement to fight for socialist ideals depended upon those very freedoms which the "true" or "German" socialists were dismissing as not very different from the rights and privileges of serfdom...
...Or he may discover a new problem of great moment not seen by those immersed in the daily round...
...Everything Marx scorned or rejected is being reappraised for its possible value...
...And it may carry a moral for present-day thinking...
...ALTHOUGH there is some warrant for considering Hess a utopian socialist, unless his position is more carefully stated and differentiated from that of the great utopian socialists it may be misleading...
...A recent brochure—Moses Hess: Utopian Socialist by John Weiss (Wayne University, $1.95)—introduces American readers to one of the most appealing figures in the history of socialism...
...They are strongly—indeed, savagely and unfairly—attacked on two grounds: a minor one of philosophical obfuscation, and a major one of concentrating their fire against liberalism and the entire program of civil rights and representative government precisely at the time when the middle classes were concerned with opposing feudal aristocracy and absolute monarchy...
...They are not criticized on the same grounds as the great utopians nor even for needless absorption in the details of the socialist paradise...
...It suggests a whole family of meanings according to which, in some respects...
...and inertia of social institutions and habits, necessarily results in the dictatorship of an elite...
...Here Sidney Hook examines that view more closely, especially in reference to the utopian socialists of the 18th and 19th centuries and to one of the famous socialist thinkers, Moses Hess...
...He converted Engels to socialism and possibly Marx, too...
...Less perverse is the view that socialism took a wrong turn when it abandoned the high road of utopian thought for the so-called scientific approach of Marx...
...Before we encourage utopian thinking, we should make some necessary distinctions, between the men of vision and the visionaries, great reformers and absolutist millenarians...
...The visionary is lost in a dream which at best is a consolation for human helplessness but which more often is an attempted escape from the hard problems knocking at the door...
...There are signs of growing interest in Utopian thinking and especially in the thinking of the Utopian socialists...
...Marx and Engels called Hess and his friends not utopian socialists but German or "true" socialists...
...Hook, who is the Chairman of the Graduate Philosophy Department at New York University, is the author of several books on this and related subjects: Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx (1933), From Hegel to Marx (1936) and The Ambiguous Legacy: Marx and the Marxists (1955...
...Like those who today see little difference between the LI.S, and USSR and, disregarding the all important issues of freedom, talk glibly about them as being mirror images of one another, the "true" or "German" socialists saw little difference between feudal oppression and bourgeois oppression...
...in fact, they were among its first victims...
...He had a passionate admiration for Spinoza and fancied himself a Spinozist...
...Whatever the reasons for the revival of interest in utopian socialism we should welcome it...
...They thus served the [feudal] governments as a weapon for fighting the German bourgeoisie," somewhat in the same way as the Kremlin uses the neutralists against the West...
...In part this is due to the technological revolution of our time which has extended the frontiers of possibility, both of dread and of promise...
Vol. 43 • December 1960 • No. 48
