Socialism and Modern Thought by M. Kaufmann

Author:M. Kaufmann [Kaufmann, M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317285618
Google: 5HqPCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-02-12T02:52:32+00:00

CHAPTER VI.

SOCIALISM AND CULTURE.

“The change through which they passed was….. the rise of the race to a new phase of existence with an illimitable vista of progress, their minds were affected in all their faculties with a stimulus of which the outburst of the mediæval renaissance offers a suggestion but a faint one indeed; there ensued an era of mechanical invention, scientific discovery, art, music, and literary productiveness to which no previous age of the world offers anything comparable.”

“Looking Backward.”

“CULTURE and Socialism are transmuting everything,” wrote the late Mr. F. Adams in the Fortnightly Review of December 1893, i.e. next to the importance attached to the social problems of the day, comes culture in its claims on the modern man. In Socialism labour vents its grievances and gives expression to its hopes. Among the leisured classes culture, or the demand for a wider diffusion of the luxuries of the mind, takes the first place among the desiderata of the hour. The questions before us are these, How far do the two movements react on each other? Are they compatible?

“I write every line I write,” said Lassalle, the leader of German Social-Democracy, to his opponent, “armed with the whole culture of my century”. But this was not the intellectual condition of the great body of his followers. True, in the preamble of the Gotha programme, now superseded by that of Erfurt from which the phrase is omitted, we are told that “Labour is the source of all wealth and all culture”. But this only means that the “cultured few” are what they are through the unpaid and appropriated work of the untutored many; the means of culture are claimed as a right, they are not here considered as a possession.

On the other hand the professors of the religion of culture, such as David Strauss, the well-known exponent of the new faith as against the old, express their undisguised fear of the ultimate triumph of the ignorant multitude led by socialistic agitators. They speak of them as “the Huns and Vandals of our modern Culture, more dangerous than the former since they come not from a distance, but live in our midst”. In the same way the pessimist von Hartmann, pointing to the undoubted historical fact that culture has always been the possession of a minority, expects nothing but evil from the establishment of the social-democratic state and a corruption among its chief office holders which will open the door to an amount of coarseness, meanness, and immorality greater than that prevailing under the official corruption in Russia, Turkey or the United States taken together. Others, eminent in different departments of literature might be quoted, entertaining similar ideas as to the antagonism which it is asserted exists between socialism and culture, as, indeed, there are not wanting socialists who speak with as much contempt of culture as there are cultured persons without number who feel instinctively that the luxury of leisured learning is incompatible with socialistic principles.

It will be interesting, then, to

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