On dialectics

1. What follows is a summary of Kolakowski’s historical outline of the philosophical and theological development of dialectical modes of thinking (“The Origins of Dialectic” in Main Currents of Marxism).

2. I’ve always been at my happiest in libraries, and I first read this in the John Ryland’s Library in Manchester 25 years ago. It seemed to me inconceivably strange and esoteric. But it stayed with me, niggling at the back of my brain on and off ever since. So I’ve always wanted to pin down: What is dialectics? How did it help to inform Marx’s social scientific approach? Is there anything to it, anything useful about it other than that? Or is it just an interesting way of thinking, a kind of literary presentation with no particular appeal or power from the point of view of generating practical, political knowledge and advice?

3. The dialectical outlook before Marx finds its roots in the romantic reaction against the Enlightenment; the Enlightenment its origins in the reaction against Christianity, by which it is nevertheless defined; and Christian theology through its absorption of elements of ancient Greek thought.

4. A focus and stimulus of Greek philosophy was contemplation of the human condition: in particular, that we are subject to time and decay, to non-existence before we were born and to death at some point afterwards. For Aristotle, it is a quintessential feature of humans that it is possible for them not to exist (in contrast, the Divine can neither come into existence nor exit from it). For Plato, the most tell-tale marker of human life is the gap between our knowledge from experience that our lives are subject to short time spans and the innate knowledge that we come from and belong to the eternal, which is built into the soul: we experience this gap as a nagging sense of incompleteness, unease, of alienation, angst, ennui. 

But if god is complete and self-sufficient, never changes and is outside the vicissitudes of time, for what reason does he create human beings, who are subject to both?

These views of the human-divine relation and this last question strongly influenced Christian theology (medieval and then north European Protestant mysticism). However, before that, we must first look at how the relationship between mankind and the eternal was handled by Plotinus, one of Plato’s followers.

5. For those plagued by a sense of incompleteness and separation from the eternal, Plotinus has an explanation of how this came about and advice on how to address or solve it.

Humans are partial creatures, and only get a glimpse of the possibility of their wholeness by remembering their past and anticipating their future, even though they only actually exist in the moment; whereas the One is all of a piece, undifferentiated, homogenous, outside time.

Nonetheless, Plotinus reasons, to get from the complete, timeless unity of the One to the flawed reality of human society and life, there must have been a process of degradation, first from unity to division (this is the development of intellect, of the self recognising the self, so that it becomes both the perceiving mind and the thing perceived, the subject and the object, divided, split); then from eternity to time (this is the same as the contamination of the soul by contact with physical reality, with the consequent possibility of evil, ie of death); finally, from stasis to movement with our entanglement and domination by matter (from the immobile self-sufficiency of the One to dependency, lack of self-determination).

For Plotinus, souls have created time by deigning to concern themselves with sensuous objects. Therefore, he recommends withdrawal from the physical world and the world of ideas as a way of reducing distraction from contemplation of the authentic within us that contains the knowledge that could lead back to the path of reunification with the One, a return home.

From the point of view of the influence on (early?) Marx, the important bit is the movement through degradation and fragmentation, followed by a return to completeness and authenticity.

Classy

Marxist philosophy and social analysis are inseparable. For instance, at an abstract level, individuals experience the subjectivity of others, their personality and will, as an external force, as objective. But from the perspective of Marx's materialism, an individual’s subjectivity is conditioned by their (objective) position within a (constantly developing) social structure. Individuals in the social group bring different aspects of the group experience to its collective subjectivity, in this way enriching it, concretising it, producing diversity within unity. At the same time, the group’s sense of itself, borne of objective socio-economic conditions, is reinforced, as if from the outside, by active social, economic and political differences with the groups whose position in the socio-economic structure, whose economic and political interests, whose class subjectivity put them in opposition to the first. This isn’t just the picture at the macro level, but also within classes—explaining, for example, the unity and divergence of the interests of industrial and financial capital, depending on the circumstances.

But Marxist philosophy isn’t everyone’s cup of tea—not least because its origins in a peculiar type of north European mysticism must render it pretty difficult to grasp without specialist training. Marx’s main, strictly philosophical innovation was probably his fusion of Hegelian dialectics with the mechanical materialism of the Enlightenment, via Feuerbach. From the 1850s his main innovation in social science was probably an adaptation of this to some of the most useful methods and approaches of positivism, while at the same time keeping a strong critical distance to it. But after about 1845, his thought, although evolving, bore the stamp of "materialist dialectics" right up until the end. This approach allows Marx to be both a propagandist for the working class and to try to take a scientific (that is, systematic) approach. An attempt at “objective study” does not rule out consideration of objective and subjective social factors in looking at the outcome of an historical or political process, which is the basic method of any historical materialist analysis. By "objective study", in this context, KM probably means “disinterested, unemotional, detached, unsentimental”. How else could the cause of the working class, which for him was the same as the cause of human liberation, hope to progress otherwise?

One reason that socialists have tended to be keen on philosophy is in order to help to avoid muddle-headed, misfiring arguments. Another reason is that we are interested on the search for the truth about the nature of human life. One aspects of historical materialism, which has built into it an understanding of the social and material limitations and potential of group political action–seeing their inter-relation as a process that takes place at multiple levels of social reality, from the macro down to the micro–is that both the limitations on social development and the potential for social development (and also so socialism) are constantly being reproduced, augmented and extended by capitalist economic processes. However, it never conceives  social progress as automatic, but always as an active political process by which the rising class prepares itself with the skills for future political rule. That is, it has clear objective and subjective aspects, which are relational categories, so that something that is a subjective factor in one context, seen from another perspective, in another relation,  is best understood as objective force or factor.

Practical philosophy

“The naively metaphysical standpoint of sound bourgeois common sense considers thought independent of being and defines truth as the correspondence of thought to an object that is external to it and ‘mirrored’ by it. It is only this outlook that can sustain the view that all forms of economic consciousness (the economic conceptions of a pre-scientific and unscientific consciousness, as well as scientific economics itself) have an objective meaning because they correspond to a reality (the material relations of production which they comprehend)”

Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy, 1923

I’m thinking of writing a textbook, perhaps called How to Learn Marx’s Theory and Apply it for Yourself to the Contemporary World. It would have to involve i) a short history of dialectics; ii) an outline of, perhaps, The Phenomenology of Spirit, The Philosophy of History and perhaps The Logic (if I could manage that); iii) a short history of political economy, focusing on labour theories of value; iv) an outline of Smith and Ricardo in respect to this question in particular v) Marx’s philosophy of the interaction of the subject and the object, as originally formulated in the Theses on Feuerbach vi) Marx’s philosophy in practice, as he applied to concrete analyses of historical and contemporary history and journalism; vii) Marx’s philosophy/ methodology in practice, as he applied it to economic analysis; viii) the relevance or otherwise of any of his tools to understanding the contemporary world, especially the specific nature of contemporary imperialism and the ongoing crisis of global capitalism; ix) Marx’s theory of colonialism and Marxist theories of imperialism; x) the theoretical and organisational degeneration of anti-imperialism and the Western left as a large-scale modern socio-historical phenomenon, that can only be explained by a careful and judicious application of Marx’s philosophical and social scientific method of the interaction of the subject, ala Karl Korsh in Marxism and Philosophy; and xi) ongoing problems with Marxist philosophy, social theory and economics, and possible answers to them.

Some quick points about Marx's philosophy and economics.

 1. Objectivity is distinguished by Marx in two ways i) material objectivity (eg use-values and wealth) and ii) social objectivity (in economics, exchange-values, or the quantities of abstract or homogenised labour). So both use values and exchange values are, in Marx’s theory, supposed to be objective, but in different ways. Many mix up the two, and, with regard to marginalism, mix up the perception of values of goods and services (a subjective, individual-psychological question) with use values, which can never be subjective.

2. The subject-object thing runs right through Marx from beginning to end, from the architecture of Capital—which begins with the general abstract conclusions on the nature of wealth in the capitalist mode of production and descends to the concrete evidence from which the general categories are derived—down to the detailed concrete passages detailing, say, the process of increasing subordination of the worker amid the process of development of manufacture. This is because Marx knows that all theory is inescapably subjective—but not only in the sense of being individually subjective,but also socially subjective, from a group point of view. However, he believes that the objective position of wage-labour in opposition to capital (again, the two form an inseparable mutually defining "unity") gives it a unique vantage point in the social structure. Hence the crucial distinction between a class in itself (an objective social-structural position in relation to property [land, labour and capital]) and a class for itself (a subjective awareness of position, interests and capabilities that informs social and political action). One reason why "subjective" in Marxism is not synonymous with "bias" in the everyday sense is that, once the accumulation of capital is seen to result from the labour process, as the product of dead labour, the subjective view from the objective position of the working class—that it is the class responsible for wealth creation—is seen to be objectively correct. That is, the subject and the object re-emerge as a unified whole, a unity. And in fact, the same thing is right there in the Theses on Feuerbach, as it is in The 18th Brumaire and the Civil War in France. Because one of the things that Marx is saying (or rather illustrating) in the quote from the Critique of the Gotha Programme is that wealth has a passive as well as an active side, a material as well as a social, an objective as well as a subjective. It is not possible to be a Marxist and not grasp that Marx's methodology—which conceives of reality as sensuous human activity, as political and social practice—is at base a conception of social change as the mutually determining relation subjective and objective factors at various levels. Because this is the very core of Marx's innovation, his specific philosophical advance over both mechanical pre-Marxist materialism (say, of Holbach or Feuerbach), which conceives of reality as an external object, and idealism, for which reality and contemplation are one and the same. That's more or less point one in Marxism, and if you haven't got that, nothing else is really available to you, and you are forced merely to decry it as "pseudo philosophical claptrap", in the manner typical of today's anti-intellectualism—essentially revelling in its own ignorance. "The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism—that of Feuerbach included—is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively".

3. Marxist objectivity, Marx's version of realist method—and so Rosdolsky's version of realist method—is always an everywhere understood as a mutually determining process between subjective and objective factors.

4. Without use value, there can be no exchange value, because any labour that goes into a product that no one wants is socially unnecessary. 

5. Another reason why abstracting from use values can't mean excluding them from the value equation, or separating them from exchange value, in Marx's system: because the use value of labour power treated as a commodity is the source of fresh value when it is turned into labour during production. Therefore, the lines of manufactured trousers hung up for sale in Marks and Sparks imply the class struggle!

6. It is some time since I studied the question, but some common objections to the LTV are as follows: i) scarcity is also a feature common to commodities that gives them value (Austrian School); ii) in an economy in which food or energy are commonly part of the production of commodities (whether as imputs for the worker or for production), then the same relation applies as it does for labour, and we have a food or energy theory of value (neo-Ricardians, the most important of whom is Sraffa); iii) even if there is then a food or energy theory of value, can we talk of exploitation of food or energy? Technically, yes; but morally, no. Marx aims for a dispassionate account of exploitation as a technical relation, but it has an irreducibly human-centred moral component: normative ethics vs scientific socialism. iv) Most of the classical economists, including Marx, assumed a falling rate of profit, but it is unclear whether there is strong empirical evidence for this on a worldwide scale over time. v) Marx's theory of the falling rate of profit is based on the idea that, because labour power is the sole source of fresh value, as the capitalist invests in new machinery (dead labour) to give them a competitive advantage, this may raise individual profits in the short run, but, as capitalists as a whole adopt the new technology, over the long run, the ratio of fresh value-creating labour (variable capital) to constant capital (machinery) falls, and with it surplus value (the relation between value and prices is that value is something like the long-term equilibrium price around which prices fluctuate because of variations in supply and demand), the source of profits. But what about new lines of industry, which are being developed all the time, will they not offset the overall declining tendency? But what if the productivity increase delivered by the new capital offsets the falling tendency? This development is not specified in detail, ie there is no integrated theory of it.

7. Only exchange vales can represent values, because they are the form that value takes in capitalist society and value is the content. In contrast, use values are the bearers of exchange value. Represent and bear do not mean the same thing.

8. A use value cannot be subjective. This is because it is the quality of the commodity that allows it to fulfil some socially mediated human need. It is the quality, the socially mediated human appeal, that allows it to enter exchange in the first place. Without it, no equivalence of, say 2 shirts for 1 exquisite tie, on the basis of their containing the same amount of abstract human labour, could take place.

9. The marginalists start with scarcity and find the explanation in variations in value in individual psychology, in individual tastes. For them the external world of material things and the subjective world of the mind (ie of individual tastes) are radically separate. For Marx, on the other hand, the two are inseparably part of the same whole, the same totality.

10. "It is in the various use values that value is expressed". No, value is expressed as exchange value. Use values are carriers of exchange value. These are two ideas that are fundamental to understanding the LVT, before you decide whether the the criticism of it are true or false.

11. The secret of Marx's analysis, as he used it, is that socially objective factors—such as exchange value—are themselves the outcome of previous clashes of subjective and objective factors. That's why the subject-object formulation holds. In practice, it is not a theoretical question, but a scholarly-practical question, the end result of scrupulous and detailed investigation at more and more concrete levels of social reality, at lower and lower levels of social reality, spiralling downwards to follow the inner relations (not causative relations!) of the mutually conditioning sides. Thus, even if the LTV aims at social scientific objectivity, it does not aim at class objectivity. On the contrary, it aims to punch a series of holes in classical political economy, in this way placing itself wholeheartedly in the service of achieving working class power.

12. On the Jewish Question.  Marx, in his argument with Bauer on the insufficiency of mere religious emancipation, adopts—mock-naively and for (heavy handed) satirical purposes—the characteristic denigrating epithets commonly heaped on Jews to suggest that they would be more appropriately heaped on the chief denigrators, the respectable bourgeoisie. Also, he's just emerging from pure Hegelianism (I think he's 25) so that the language makes it difficult for the casual reader to grasp what he's saying. He's saying social emancipation should be the revolutionary democratic goal.

13. The two basic point where today's "anti-imperialists" go wrong, is that, on some occasions, in relation to some kinds of regime, some forms of western Imperialism are relatively progressive; the partial advances in democratic and social control, though insufficient, are not illusory, but are real. This leads them into all kinds of reactionary contortions.

14. Marx never repudiates the idea that capitalism is progressive relative to some kinds of social formation. He certainly uses some of the (to us) loaded phrases of the day. He is also inevitably Eurocentric, despite his very serious attempts to get to grips with other cultures (on India, he probably read as much as was available in the day, even if this wasn't very much or very good). But "progressive" and "civilising" do not mean the same thing. The earlier passages on India merely note that, despite all the human horrors and destruction wreaked by colonial domination, at the same time the social basis of a stultifying social form, of "oriental despotism" is shattered. In a way, he is arguing against the romanticisation of social forms that severely check human development. The later passages on the Russian mir is not about changing his mind on the accidentally progressive aspect of colonialism (I don't think he had a fully-worked out view on what we would call imperialism, just hints here and there), but on there being the possibility of multiple trajectories towards social advance, rather than a single one suitable for all times and places.

15. The point about Marx's earlier quote about India and the one about the mir is his ability to see alternative potential futures immanent in existing social structures—notwithstanding that, based on the inadequate sources of the day, his picture of pre-colonial India has since been superseded. In contrast, the dogmatist sees only one possible path—whether that be inevitably positive or negative. But both are attempts at "a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical", but neither are really much to do with Marx's Marxism—ie, Marxism at its most powerful. That's why the "bleeding dry" of the later Marx fits perfectly well with, and is not cancelled out by, the earlier argument of progressive potential of destruction of repressive social and or state structures—whether we wish to apply it to historical societies or Saddam's Iraq—because in between the two are the actions of the main actors, the oppressor and the oppressed, which fulfil or nullify possibilities that were previously present. That's why Marx's views on the mir wasn't cancelled, in this sense, by the actual history of the development of capitalism in Russia.

16. Just as he saw the potential for the break up from the outside of social relations restrictive of human developments—but perhaps thought this potential closed off following the Indian mutiny—so he saw the potential for social progress on the basis of the Russian commune in a context of globalising capitalism. Ie neither of the potentialities he thought he saw materialised and, in fact, both have had to undergo full scale capitalisation or recapitalisation—in India's case, in part owing not just to transfers of technology and knowhow, but more importantly to the transformation in social relations, of the dominant property form, the precise trajectory of which owes in part to the imperial inheritance.

17. No expurgation of the possibility of Indian agency from the dynamic political picture:
"All the English bourgeoisie may be forced to do will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social condition of the mass of the people, depending not only on the development of the productive powers, but on their appropriation by the people. But what they will not fail to do is to lay down the material premises for both. Has the bourgeoisie ever done more? Has it ever effected a progress without dragging individuals and people through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation? The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the now ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindoos themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether. "
O yes, and tell us, clever clogs, by what processes do you propose might lead to the Indians being able to throw off the English yoke themselves?
"The political unity of India, more consolidated, and extending farther than it ever did under the Great Moguls, was the first condition of its regeneration. That unity, imposed by the British sword, will now be strengthened and perpetuated by the electric telegraph. The native army, organized and trained by the British drill-sergeant, was the sine qua non of Indian self-emancipation, and of India ceasing to be the prey of the first foreign intruder. The free press, introduced for the first time into Asiatic society, and managed principally by the common offspring of Hindoos and Europeans, is a new and powerful agent of reconstruction. The Zemindari and Ryotwar themselves, abominable as they are, involve two distinct forms of private property in land — the great desideratum of Asiatic society. From the Indian natives, reluctantly and sparingly educated at Calcutta, under English superintendence, a fresh class is springing up, endowed with the requirements for government and imbued with European science. Steam has brought India into regular and rapid communication with Europe, has connected its chief ports with those of the whole south-eastern ocean, and has revindicated it from the isolated position which was the prime law of its stagnation."

So: some historical errors on the nature of Indian property systems, owing to inadequate sources, but no “imperiocentric” siding with the English against the Indians, or denying that they would have to be the agents of the own political destiny if they were to enjoy the benefits of the destructive and self-serving interference of the imperialists.

The path of despair

Hegel argues somewhere that an awareness of the inadequacy of our conceptions is what propels us towards self-criticism, making intellectual progress—which, for him, is the same as progress per se—possible. He calls this "the path of despair". Amid the current fad for shallow self-help books and studies of the "economics of happiness", it might be worth remembering that happiness is not the main goal of progress, freedom is. From the vantage point of enhanced freedom, people might be in a better position to hammer out whatever happiness is for them.

After the Iraq war, it became clear to me that, whatever the mainstream of Western left is, I'm not really a part of it, either in terms of philosophical outlook or political inclination. However, I do still consider myself a Marxist of sorts—in the sense that most of my political "starting points" come out of that tradition—and I still think that progress should be possible in extending the areas of popular political an economic control. I think of this as "socialism", although I don't suppose it really matters what its called. Is there an economics possible that raises living standards for most people on the planet and gives them greater control over their own lives? This has been our Holy Grail for some time, of course, but is still probably the most important question facing the left in this generation. There can’t be any socialism unless we get a plausible answer on this. But it is a huge task. To get anywhere would require a large number of like-minded, flexible-thinking, knowledgeable and talented people working closely together over many years. After Iraq, however, and the apparent retreat of many into the safety of the broad political dogmas that existed beforehand—most obviously, an oddly reactionary brand of "anti-imperialism"—it doesn’t seem as though the conditions are in place for the "ruthless criticism of all that exists". This would be only the starting point for such a programme, which would also have to turn its sceptical gaze in multiple directions, towards itself as much as to the outside world. Perhaps one reasons that this doesn’t happen very readily is that, for many, the left is something like a family, and, at the social-psychological level, not many family members want to risk becoming an outcast by speaking out of turn.

Right at the beginning of The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel says this:“The more the ordinary mind takes the opposition between true and false to be fixed, the more is it accustomed to expect either agreement or contradiction with a given philosophical system, and only to see reason for the one or the other in any explanatory statement concerning such a system. It does not conceive the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive evolution of truth; rather, it sees only contradiction in that variety. The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant's existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. These stages are not merely differentiated; they supplant one another as being incompatible with one another. But the ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and this equal necessity of all moments constitutes alone and thereby the life of the whole. But contradiction as between philosophical systems is not wont to be conceived in this way; on the other hand, the mind perceiving the contradiction does not commonly know how to relieve it or keep it free from its one-sidedness, and to recognize in what seems conflicting and inherently antagonistic the presence of mutually necessary moments.”

And, if you can get past the fancy language and the romantic metaphor, I think it’s the same with, say, Hayek, or neo-liberalism, or whatever is the left's current demonic totem. We should be asking: What in these outlooks is useful? What can be usefully absorbed? What remains after an all-out criticism to be absorbed? That is, there has to be an appreciation and a firm grasp of Hayek and of neo-liberalism, of their strong points and achievements, as well as their weaknesses and faults, before they can be superseded. The same applies to all previous intellectual and practical efforts towards developing a socialist economics, including the holy-of-holies, Capital. From the point of view of empirical investigation, it means distinguishing capitalist propaganda from results. For example, where have their development efforts or their standard macroeconomic policies been successful, and why? And where have they been unsuccessful? Do they have any tools that we can reuse? Despite the colossal scale of the current financial-economic crisis, I personally haven’t yet seen anyone coming close to grasping the nettle. Certainly not the so-called "hard" left, whose ham-fisted/ hare-brained attempts to oppose the injustices of capitalism somehow always reek of injustice themselves, appear not to have picked up any tips from the disasters of the 20th century and, somehow, intimate the preparation of something worse than run-of-the-mill late liberal/social-democratic capitalism. (Sometimes—who could have conceived it?—even the imperialists appear to be more progressive.) But also, if a bit more depressingly, not even intelligent Marxists such as Robert Brenner (to judge by his organisation's website), who otherwise looks pretty much correct, so far as I can see, about the causes of the current crisis being found in the monetary response to the problem of long-term decline in profitability in the advanced capitalist states.

Illuminati

A couple of years ago, I read a two-volume work by Peter Gay on the Enlightenment, which is itself a model of undogmatic humanist scholarship and prose. But it got me thinking about a few other Big Topics that seem to be relevant to the political questions of the day, and since then I've been thinking of composing a series of What Is...? studies--such as What is the Enlightenment? What is fascism? What socialism? Capitalism? What is imperialism?

Well, given the scarcity of time, you've got to start somewhere. Therefore, as a kind of a memo to myself and a spur, I've typed up a page from my notes on the chapter on the Enlightenment, the period and the broad philosophical-social movement, in Norman's Davies's workmanlike Europe: A History.

Enlightenment and absolutism: 1650-1789

• The age of absolutism is characterised by a much wider variety of political systems than just absolutism.


• The colonies and colonialism form a backdrop to the period.


• The Enlightenment outlook is distinguished by its emphasis on rational thinking, and an appeal to evidence. It aims to be undogmatic and tolerant. “The light of reason” shines particularly strongly in the fields of science, epistemology and moral philosophy. Rules and patterns in the arts: classicism. The mania for encyclopedias. In religious thought, it is epitomised by deism. In economics, mercantilism and the physiocrats. In political theory, Locke and Montesquieu. The question of historiography: How should history be written? Key figures include Voltaire and the transitional figure of Rousseau.


• Reacting against Enlightenment rigidity and reductionism, Romanticism emphasises the spiritual, the supernatural, the spontaneous; imagination and emotion. Vico, Kant, Haman , Herder.


• This is the period of French supremacy, primarily under the reign of Louis XIV, the sun king (r 1643-1715) in the seventeenth century, whose religious policy turned against the Huguenots and the Jansenists, and who conducted four major wars (the war of devolution; the Franco-Dutch war; nine-years’ war; the war of Spanish succession). In the eighteenth century: stagnation and hunting under Louis the XV; Louis the XVI: before the deluge.


• In the British Isles, it is the time of the Restoration, the Glorious Revolution, the Act of Union with Scotland (1707)—the basis of modern British identity. The Glorious Revolution enshrines parliamentary sovereignty, as against monarchical or popular sovereignty. Charles II lives it up. James II is seen as too soft on the Catholics. William and Mary are invited in. The reign of the Hanoverians: George I, II, III, IV (1714-1830). The American Revolution (1776-83).


• In rest of western Europe in the eighteenth century: the Bourbon kings in Spain and the auto-de-fe; in Portugal, John the priest king and the Lisbon earthquake; in Italy, rivalry between the House of Savoy in Turin, the Habsburgs in Milan and the Duchy of Tuscany: enlightened despotism.


• In central and eastern Europe: the last surge of the Ottomans and the siege of Vienna, along with a revival of Hapsburg fortunes: Maria Theresa and Joseph II, the “crowned revolutionary”; “Josephism” and education of the state elite; the incorporation of Hungary (1687) and the Rakoczy rebellion (1704-11); the rise of Prussia under the Frederiks, especially Frederick the Great (r 1740-86), said to be—nor least by himself—one of the wonders of the age. The expansion and consolidation of Russia (eg down to the Black Sea), especially under Peter I (r 1682-1725), who killed his son and initiated thoroughgoing Westernisation, and Catherine II (1762-96), who was German and killed her husband; succession by palace revolution; the war with Sweden; the construction of St Petersburg; the subjugation of Ukraine and the Hetman State. The decline of Poland-Lithuania.


• The deleterious role of Orthodoxy in the Balkans, as conservative, anti-Western: “none of the great civilising movements that shook the Western world…could effectively penetrate…Political traditions owed little to rationalism, absolutism or constitutionalism; kinship politics dominated at all levels; nepotism lubricated by bribery was a way of life.”


• Mozart.

Inaugural post

Having of late undergone some disillusionment, I have decided to dust myself down, pick up my paddle and set off once again in my small bark, across treacherous waters, on a quest to seek out an answer the question: What is true?

This, I realise, may take some time.