Against The Masses : Varieties of Anti-Democratic Thought Since the French Revolution by Joseph V. Femia

Author:Joseph V. Femia [Femia, Joseph V.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politics
Publisher: http://inclibuql666c5c4.onion
Published: 2001-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4: The Jeopardy Thesis

THE Enlightenment faith in reason or in science to achieve progress survived its encounter with romanticism, albeit in modified form. What Franklin Baumer labels the ‘New Enlightenment’,[327] which reached full bloom in the middle part of the nineteenth century, included a variety of protagonists: the English utilitarians and radicals, the French positivists, the Young (or ‘left’) Hegelians of Germany, Marx’s scientific socialists. While these groups constituted no sort of family, they were united in their optimism about the future and in their desire to apotheosize ‘man’ and his exploits in history. Despite their differences, they were all engaged in a common struggle against the forces of reaction and obscurantism. But the New Enlightenment was, to repeat, no mere copy of the original. The French philosophes were deemed too metaphysical and too analytic. A certain amount of romantic historicism had rubbed off on most New Enlightenment intellectuals, as also did ‘the cultivation of the feelings’. What they had not absorbed from romanticism was its tragic sense of the world as a mysterious and refractory reality, impervious to our rational schemes. Like the most optimistic of the philosophes, they generally envisaged a world where democracy, liberty, efficient governance, cultural excellence, and economic prosperity all fit together in a happy state of mutual support. Proponents of the jeopardy thesis disparaged this enchanting vision. For them, democracy posed a threat to our most cherished values and basic human needs.

Jeopardy Thesis (1): Democracy vs. Culture

The term ‘culture’ has been used in two different senses. Anthropologists understand it as the way of life of a people, the conventional patterns of thought and behaviour, including values, beliefs, rules of conduct, political organization, economic activity, and the like. In this sense, ‘culture’ is a descriptive term, though Victorian anthropologists claimed that the world’s cultures could be arranged according to a single hierarchy, from the least cultured to the most, and that Western civilization stood at the higher end of the scale.

By the turn of the last century, however, anthropologists began to adopt a relativistic position which acknowledged that the evaluation of superior or inferior itself rested upon a cultural point of view.[328] ‘Culture’ has also been used in an explicitly normative sense, as something to be achieved by deliberate effort. Matthew Arnold famously described it as ‘the disinterested endeavour after man’s perfection’, or ‘as an inward condition of the mind and spirit’, not as ‘an outward set of circumstances’.[329] Culture, so construed, is a form of self-cultivation; it involves the refinement of one’s artistic sensibilities or personal manners, the enlargement of one’s learning and intellectual faculties, and the achievement of a kind of spiritual nobility. We thus have ‘the man of culture’.

Those who interpret culture in this way usually recognize a cultural separation between one level of society and another. A distinction is sometimes drawn between ‘high’ culture—the pursuits of the enlightened elite—and ‘low’ culture—the pursuits of the mediocre mass. But the term ‘culture’ may simply be reserved for the expressions of ‘high’ culture, so that you can speak of the less cultured or more cultured strata of society.

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