Privilege and Liberty and Other Essays in Political Philosophy by Kolnai Aurel Mahoney Daniel J

Author:Kolnai, Aurel,Mahoney, Daniel J.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780739159606
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2013-07-10T16:00:00+00:00

VIII. How the “Common Man” Differs from the “Plain Man”

The “common man” for whom the “century” and the kingdom of the earth are claimed is in many ways a different kettle of fish. To be sure, the debased machine-serving and machine-made middle-class or proletarian “plain man” of the industrial society marks an automatic transition towards him. But the authentic “common man,” far from being a simple product of the conditions of life under industrialism—in which case he would actually form the overwhelming majority of men—is above all a function and an implication of the subversive equalitarian ideology itself. As the “class-conscious” proletariat has been made rather than discovered by Marxism, so also the true “common man” is generated and trained rather than merely “championed” by his heralds and interpreters. He may be defined as a “plain man” gone mad, who, by exaggerating and puffing up his plainness, aspires to embody the fulness of human perfection and to achieve self-sufficiency in the sense not of renunciation but of all-round abundance. Unlike the “plain man” whose centre of gravity lies in his practical concerns but who is attached by firm, if somewhat elastic, ties to things “higher than himself,” the “common man” cares about nothing but his “welfare” in the strictest sense of the term and that of the universe in the most comprehensive. Indeed, for him the two coincide. He would “fight” for a raise of his salary or the acquisition of some more efficient gadget with the solemnity proper to the performance of a religious duty, but also capable of much enthusiasm, in the spirit of tua res agitur, about “better and cheaper” grammar schools in some antipodean country. He not only is but consciously and doctrinairely expects to be influenced, as a voter in the election of public officers, by the crudest ad hominem arguments and the basest “psychological” tricks. Yet at the same time he believes as a matter of course that he is better equipped than is “secret diplomacy” to decide about problems of foreign policy. He would subordinate his concrete “self,” with incomparably greater “generosity” than the “plain man” is likely to display, to any imperative of “progressive idealism.” He differs from the “plain man,” however, in that he is entirely unable to appreciate, or even realize the meaning of, any “ideal” point of view not assimilable to the categories of “his welfare.” Utterly irreverent towards anything that carries the pretension of being “above him,” he is boundlessly pliant to, and indeed craves to obey, any power that orders him about in his own name or in the name of any “progressive” purpose that reflects or flatters his aspiration to be everything. Averse to all constraint, tension and subordination, he is yet most willing to endure the heaviest chains that can plausibly be made to appear of his own making. Experiencing all transcendent authority as tyranny, he at the same time itches to be “determined,” and made to “will” the right thing, by what acts on behalf of “his needs.

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