Rousseau and Marx Can Be Seen as Critics of the Disenchantment - Essay Example

[Supervisor's Rousseau And Marx Can Be Seen As Critics Of The Disenchantment Of The World. How Would They Propose To Re-Enchant The World As Rousseau and Marx can be seen as critics of the disenchantment of the world so how would they propose to re-enchant the world. In order to study this concept one has to know that sociology is a modern discipline. It was called into being by the materialization of a new kind of social reality, heralded by the French Revolution and accompanied by the Industrial one, which both encouraged and made possible the reassessment of society as such. The new society replaced the long-established social order in Europe, the ancient regime, and, the conflict between ancients and moderns being a long tradition was called "modern." The nature of contemporary society and the conditions of shift to modernity have been at the core of concerns that preoccupied sociology since its earliest days. It was on this, finally, although possibly differently phrased, that the great proto-sociologists, Rousseau and Marx, as well as the founding fathers of the discipline, paid attention to. This revered tradition has been continued on this continent in the form of modernization theory and afterward, somewhat euphemistically, theory of development. The "disenchantment of the world" that modernity launches establishes the experience of hubris at the center of our condition--but without our having to foresee the once unavoidable punishment by the gods. The experience of disenchantment becomes critical for Marx when he is able to see within it the seeds of our capacity to experience a restraint that cannot be surmounted. For Marx, the insurmountable limit that we encounter in disenchantment is none other than our own mortality. It is the experience of a limit that is internal to the contemporary experience of unrestrained agency in which we feel ourselves incapable to remake the world in our own image. Marx's account of disenchantment, thus, does not involve degeneration into a re-enchanted universe but rather remains within the sphere of modernity. (Marx, pp 67-71) In the experience of disenchantment we are delivered into a universe that is approximate to the universe of the Greek tragedies, in which the heroic striving to surmount all mortal limits finds its collapse in the very unruly and fickle course that it sets in motion. Rousseau's and Marx's disenchantments, for example, regarding the relationship between the human and the natural not only of their disenchantment experiment itself, but also of his loss of faith in Rousseau's vision of nature and the possibilities of human accomplishment or fascination within it. Nevertheless, one could argue that it is not so much a matter of Kant having cast off Rousseau's visions as of his having come closer to some of the more worrying or vague aspects of that vision. (Watkins, p-15) Like Kant, Rousseau found the relationship between the natural and the human to be disenchantment, arguing that sublimation and repression, the price we must pay to enter human culture, take their toll in fire, war, and other manifestations of violence and aggression. In the ninth chapter of his On the Origin of Languages, for example, Rousseau contemplates the question of what could have driven human beings to exchange a life of nature for a life of language and culture: "the earth nourishes men," he writes, "but when their primary needs have dispersed them, other needs come to pass, and it is only then that they speak, and that they have any motivation to speak". But why, he asks, would they ever quit a life of nature, especially when the "life of language and culture" unavoidably leads to despair and crime: how could they "ever be enticed to give up their ancient liberty" and create a society that "leads to property, government, and laws, and steadily to the misery and crime that are indivisible from the knowledge of good and evil". Such a movement for Rousseau is inseparably associated with the prohibition of incest, the need to prevent, as Rousseau expresses it, a man and woman from becoming "husband and wife without ceasing to be brother and sister". (McFarland, pp 56-58) Only after the festival, Rousseau's reflection of human community and ritual, did incest become a transgress act. Before that time, Rousseau suggests, "instinct held the place of passion, habit held the place of preference" It has been widely recognized that it is not a relic of the past, bound to disappear with the advancement of the modern Order, as Marx has prophesied in the Communist Manifesto, and today it is usually included among the elements of modernity. The nature of this recent theorizing, however, is not new.( Marx, pp 45-46) Essentially, as in earlier sociological attempts to conceptualize nationalism within the framework of the modernization paradigm, nationalism is viewed as a cultural and psychological function of the process of modernization, a Super structural product of its basic "objective" structures. The emergence of' nationalism is seen as tightly connected to the modern phenomenon of state-formation and as related to the trend of the secularization of culture. But almost invariably the factor truly responsible for its rise is thought to be economic: in the final analysis nationalism is elaborated as a functional requirement or product of industrialization and capitalism. In this regard theories of modernity of the historical materialist origin on the whole proved very adjustable. Such political malleability may be attributed on the one hand to their general ambiguity, and, on the other, to the fact that they either included or could be interpreted easily as social critique. Although Marx misconstrued the nature of his difference form Hegel, he did not invent the fact of difference itself. The real difference between them does not lie in the fact that one was a critic of representation and the other was an apologist, for they were both critics, but rather in the specific character of their respective critiques. This difference emerges most sharply in how they handled the critique of representation, first articulated by Rousseau that has been coeval with the modern form of representation itself. Hegel combined his critique of representation with what we might call a critique of the critique of representation - and especially of the abstract ideal of 'true democracy' which Rousseau initiated and Marx later reconstructed. It was Hegel's critique of this 'abstract ideal' which Marx misread as conservative and doctrinal. In relation to the economic forms of the modern age, Marx contended that the simplest and most abstract element is the commodity and he analyzed its self-division into value and use value. The movement is from abstract right through contract and law to the state. For Marx and Rousseau, it is from value through exchange value and money to capital. Marx and Rousseau maintained that the classical political economy of Smith and Ricardo had made considerable advances in understanding the economic forms of the modern age - value, exchange value, price, money, capital, interest, rent, profit, etc. - but he argued that it naturalized 'labor' as the origin of value without questioning under what circumstances labor takes this form. He argued that in analytical terms political economy was strong: it perceived, for example, that the magnitude of value was determined by the average amount of labor time that goes into the production of a commodity. But dialectically political economy was weak: it treated commodity form as a natural fact of life rather than as the product of historically determinate relations. Marx and Rousseau saw himself as the first to comprehend adequately the historical specificity of the value form and release it from the naturalistic framework in which it had previously been imprisoned. Conclusion So it can be concluded Rousseau and Marx can be seen as critics of the disenchantment of the world. And Marx and Rousseau pushed the idea of 'the social' beyond anything conceived or conceivable within the natural law tradition to re-enchant the world. One weakness of Marx's approach of re-enchantment of the world, however, was that it could give the impression that the economic forms of capitalist social relations are their only forms, or at least that they are the essential forms of capitalist society, and that other non-economic forms - moral, legal, political, cultural, etc. - are in some sense epiphenomenal or inessential or even illusory. For the "disenchantment with culture," of which Trilling wrote, derives from the disenchantment of nature on which modern science and liberalism are built. These hypothesize a nature devoid of purpose, holding no support for man's conceits of nobility and excellence. In their search for a solution to the problem of political authority, Locke and other liberals still looked to nature. If nature failed to provide aspirations, it could provide a floor, and seemingly a sturdy one. Yet to later thinkers, this solution seemed rather half-baked. How could liberals derive the apparent "ought" of natural rights from the "is" of self-preservation How could a natural universe, determined by mechanical forces, account for freedom, and a presupposition of moral action How could a mind know nature, if it were merely a part of its mechanistic forces The re-enchantment--begun by Rousseau and Kant--was to posit new dimensions of reality untouched by nature. The result of this further rejection of nature, however, was to knock out the floor that early liberals had established. Re-enchantment became not what is given by nature, but what is chosen by man. (Watkins, pp 16-18) It is in this world of postmodernism that the artist assumes the special role that Trilling outlines for him in Beyond Culture. Works Cited Marx, Karl, "An Exchange of Letters," in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and society, ed. and trans. Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967), 210. Marx, Karl. 1978. The Marx-Engels Reader. (Editor), Robert C. Tucker. W. W. Norton & Company; 2nd edition (February). ISBN: 039309040X McFarland, Thomas, Romanticism and the Heritage of Rousseau; Clarendon Press, 1995, pp 56-64. Watkins Eric, Kant and the Sciences, Oxford University Press, New York, 2001, pp 13-23. Read More