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Civilization, Oikos, and Progress

Enlightenment versus Barbarism in History

Atle Hesmyr
Nisus Publications

Civilization, Oikos And Progress


Enlightenment versus Barbarism in History

Atle Hesmyr
Nisus Publications
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For my children, Tuva and Mikael

Copyright 2013 by Atle Hesmyr nisus2014@gmail.com

Cover photo by the author

Nisus Publications, 2014 ISBN 97882 91612 126

Contents:
Chapter I: Alluvial Soils and Civilizations in History, p.7. Chapter II: Turmoil in Medieval Europe, p. 23. Chapter III: The Legacy of the Enlightenment, p. 60. Chapter IV: European Civilization; From Faith in Progress to Germs of Dystopia, p. 83. Chapter V: Romanticism, Nationalism and Political Reaction, p. 111. Chapter VI: Imperialism versus Universalism; Use and Abuse of Science and Technology, 1870-1945, p. 135. Chapter VII: The Civilization That Could Have Been, p. 155. Chapter VIII: Modernity and Individualism, p. 181. Chapter IX: Ecology and Economics; The Urgent Need for a Reunion, p. 199. Chapter X: Civic Virtue versus Corporate Self-Interest; the Major Battle of the 21st Century, p. 222. Notes, p. 255.

Preface The essays in this book have been written during the previous 4-5 years but at the same time being the results of some 20 years of historical, anthropological and ecological studies and they have been fertilized by innumerable discussions with academics and nonacademics alike, and with revolutionary as well as non-revolutionary people. The author is indebted to the many authors referred to throughout the book, and to his many discussion partners throughout the years. Of course, none of them bear any responsibility for the views presented in the present texts. The responsibilities for our generation more precisely those of us who are supposed to have reached maturity and to be able to take on responsibility for the next one have been loaded upon us by the former, who obviously should have addressed the issues of a declining civilization and disintegrating eco-systems far more adequately than has been the case. The challenges which will confront us all in the years ahead are of an entirely novel character; no parallels may be found in history which will readily tell us how to go about them, ameliorate the toll which will be demanded by Gaia as a consequence of the perpetual overdraw in the Bio-bank by every single generation since the industrial take off in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. The only thing history may teach us is what we should not do, if we shall retain our hopes for restoring civilization and keeping this planet in its green mantle rather than declining into outright barbarism and rendering the face of the Earth as dead as the moon or Mars. Todays responsibilities are not qualitatively different from those which confronted the post-war generation as understood in the above mentioned manner however much they may have been magnified quantitatively, through accelerating soil erosion, climate

change, destruction of microbial, plant and animal diversity, and poisoned and disintegrated eco-systems in general, not to mention the immense threats to the sense of a common humanity resulting from a global economic system propelled by the urge after rapid monetary gains to the detriment of the billion or so people who are enduring an existence at starvation level on a daily basis. These challenges will obviously occupy generations ahead and the basic one will be one of keeping faith in the potential achievement of viable solutions after so many wrong turns at crucial turning points in History. Ulefoss, Telemark, Norway, Scandinavia February, 12th, 2013 Atle Hesmyr

Note: The paper version of this book will be published in 2014, during the 100th Anniversary of the war eruptions of WWI so fatal to European Civilization. It is the hope of the author that the present book contributes to throw some light upon the causes of the Civilization collapse in the early 20th century, as well as presenting some suggestions of repair to the damages done to societies around the world as well as to their natural environments; damages which we, unfortunately, bring with us in this century and the costs of which are of tremendous proportions.

Chapter I

Alluvial Soils and Civilizations in History

SINCE the first Agricultural revolution in Catal Hyk in the inner regions of modern day Turkey some 10000 years ago, farming and selective seed production have gone hand in hand with river systems including their annual flooding of the subsequent agricultural lands and the fertilizing sediments deposited by the respective rivers from the Yang Tse, Ganges and Indus in the East, to the Rhine, Seine and the Thames in the West. One may even want to include the Mississippi in such a schematic overview. Even in the early start for agricultural man about 8000 B.C. in the mountainous region of eastern Turkey, the city of Catal Hyk, which is now being excavated, the sites under exploration by archeologists which since James Melaarts publications in the 1950s and 1960s has been known to be the birthplace of agriculture as we know it are situated amidst a nexus of rivers running down from a mineral rich mountainous area. The same is obviously the case with the eastern rivers of Chinese and Indian civilizations, running down from the Himalayas, as well as the Mesopotamian and Egyptian, as well as the European rivers which originate in the Alps. All these river systems bring with them withered minerals, soil particles and fertilizing substances which then are deposited along the riverbanks and the deltas of these great rivers to be utilized for farming purposes and building of civilizations later on in history; the Indian, Mesopotamian and Egyptian being some 4-6000 years old, while the European are of a somewhat younger date, after the age of great migrations spread the techniques of farming from the Greco-Roman origins by the route of the Phoenicians and the Celts. Certainly, the Romans spread their own version of agriculture, but it was arguably not the wisest one especially not after they inherited the

Carthaginian soil mining commercialized farm techniques in the aftermath of the Punic wars in the 3rd century B.C. Historical Civilizations The knowledge accumulated through thousands of years of farming along the great rivers of the Far East and the Near East, including the practice of green manure consisting of annual and perennial legumes with their nitrogen fixating rhizobia nodules and other microbial symbiotic relationships with higher plants such as wheat and corn was thoroughly elaborated by Aristotles pupil, Theophrastus in the 3rd century B. C. By this time the ancient Greek civilization was overrun by the Macedonians, while the Romans were struggling with the Carthaginians over the control over the West Mediterranean sea. Theophrastus knowledge was then hidden from the Western hemisphere for more than a thousand years with the possible exception of the Celts and their continuing agricultural practices throughout the Roman period, exemplified through the Britannia Superior in present day Wales in the first centuries A. D. and all the way down throughout western France. The original practices of farming with legumes were developed among the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia (including the growing of Persian clover) and Egypt (utilizing the Alexandrine clover), both of them highly complex agricultural societies utilizing advanced seed selection and annual legumes such as the above mentioned ones as well as cereals, which could be stored for long periods of time to cope with droughts and similar natural inconveniencies. This long term planning, combined with the keeping of records and annals, constituted the universal basis of civilization as we know it throughout history. Even the Peruvian civilization of the Andes utilized these techniques of preserving their civilization, even to the extent of building highly complex irrigation systems in the mountain valleys on the South American continent.

The advantages of using legumes such as clover in agriculture are not limited to the nitrogen fixating effects of the rhizobium symbiosis. Among the other benefits are the capability of the clover roots to penetrate deep into the packed soil and mineral sediments deposited annually along the river basins; a capability which may not easily be replaced by human mechanical tools and machinery such as the plow or the harrow when it comes to loosening and aerating the soil for effective plant growth. These techniques are still among the most widely utilized ones within modern day organic agriculture or agri-ecology, in which they are utilized in a combination of green manure, soil aeration and forage harvesting. Employed in a proper manner they contribute to arresting the depletion of soil fertility and instead contribute to building up of soil reserves and making way for long term productivity on a high level, resulting in high quality food production preferably for local and regional markets. In addition to the usage of green manure crops there was, especially in France, a long standing practice of using horse manure for the improvement of heavy clay soils off the Atlantic coast. In addition to the direct soil improvement due to the effects of the organic abilities of the horse manure, with ample quantities of manure the effect was also attained that soil temperature was heightened with several degrees, allowing for early sprouting and so on.1 The use of clover as horse feed made this type of agriculture even more favorable as regards improvement of heavy clay soils, which are found in abundance along the Atlantic seaboard and which are not easily farmed in a sustainable manner with the use of heavy tractors and machinery because of the dangers of soil compaction and erosion (gullies and so on). However, the first great manifestations of advanced agriculture in Europe occurred in connection with the river systems bringing withered minerals down from the Alps on the European continent and from the Breacon Beacons on the British Isles, to be deposited along the river valleys and in the delta zones in exactly the same manner as occurred in the far East and in the Near East in ancient

times. In the Middle Ages this fundamental ecological and evolutionary fact contributed to the establishment and growth of cities like Paris and London which, with their favorable localization somewhat up the river currents of the Seine and the Thames, were well posited to trade off their agricultural and artisanal surpluses around the world within the reach of their increasingly efficient ships; and thus making headway for modern commerce. Even the Italian cities of Venize and Milan could draw upon the minerals deposited from the Alps in the lesser river systems running southeastwards from the Southern Alps region, and which contributed to the necessary agricultural surplus needed for maintaining civilization in this region to the extent of making the Italian renaissance a peak in European civilization during this otherwise dark period in European history.

Early Modern Democracies and the Enlightenment In the 17th century the growth of the Low Countries as the most progressive region in Europe when it comes to democratic ideals 2 and the development of Holland into the commercial leadership of Europe after the failed Spanish imperialism in the previous century, is another testimony of the importance of alluvial soil culture in Europe. The river Rhine and its delta system along the North Western seaboard of the Atlantic proved highly productive as far as agricultural production is concerned, and in combination with the principles of religious tolerance which proved highly favorable in this period of religious strife elsewhere on the continent (the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War), Holland was able to reach a prominent position economically as well as culturally during the 17th century after the defeat of the Spanish armada in 1588. A hundred years later the so-called Glorious Revolution brought about an understanding between the Dutch and the British, facilitating trade across the channel with agricultural produce (woolens and so on)

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with lime from the British channel regions for the increasingly acidified fields of the Low Countries after intensive farming during the previous centuries. This favorable development goes a long way to explain the practical bio-chemical aspects of the agricultural revolution, and along with the new insights into the biological aspects of agriculture developed during the Enlightenment era with Bayles Historical and Philosophical Dictionary, Lockes Thoughts on Education and Treatises on Government and not least Montesquieus Persian Letters and Spirit of the Laws as pioneering works to be elaborated on by de Monceau and Wallerius in the middle of the 18th century. After the War of Spanish Succession in 1709 the British and the French took over the lead in the quest for a prominent role within Western civilization a quest which was settled between the Seven Years War (1756-63) and the defeat of Napoleon in 1814; the unfortunate outcome of which made headway for nationalism and imperialism throughout the 19 th century and ending with the two world wars in the first half of the 20 th century. Thus, a long history is made short by showing that the once promising European civilization based on decentralized regions and an ecologically sound agriculture in the course of two centuries degenerated into an imperialist strife in which the focus on soil management lost its prominence in favor of militarism and aggressive trade practices including cannon boat diplomacy in the Far East and so on. The imperialist turn of ancient Roman and Chinese civilization, as well as the modern European ones from the Portuguese and Spanish in the 15th and 16th centuries to the British, German and American in the 19th and 20th centuries, are all testimonies to a kind of lazy economy based on looting rather than harvesting the abundance of nature in an ethically and ecologically sound manner. At bottom of this dismal turn of events lies contempt for the honest and hard laboring peasant and farmer, a malpractice which was eagerly warned against by the pioneer of modern economics,

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Francois Quesnay, in his mid-18th century writings for the French Encyclopdie. Quesnay and the physiocrats were perfectly right in stressing the agricultural basis of our civilization, while the school of Adam Smith warped the entire issue of economics with their stress on navigation and commerce as its basis. Obviously, navigation and commerce can only be secondary aspects of any kind of society civilization or not; this is elementary logic and the effort to deny it has led to enormous social and ecological dislocations in our own time, accumulated during the last 200 years or so. Whether western civilization will be able to redress this negative spiral, based on the most elementary logical fallacy, remains to be seen. As the situation stands today it seems more likely that the West will have to confront a massive collapse, while the East first and foremost represented by India and Russia will carry on civilization according to the time honored principles of the French physiocrats of the 18 th century, while China and Japan have been digging too deep into the Western misconceptions and lost their focus on the vital foundations of sustainable civilization in ecologically sound soil management.

Alluvial Bases of Historical Civilizations As regards the American civilization there is no wonder why the European colonists from the early 17 th century onwards concentrated their interests on the Atlantic seaboard and then moved into the Mississippi valley. The same soil formation processes and annual fertilization of the river valley soils which had produced civilizations elsewhere in earlier ages and other places, as listed above, also drew people and their farming aspirations into the Mississippi. However, with the influx of slaves into the colonies there developed a highly malevolent form of lazy economics in the American colonies, only to be redressed in the wake of the Civil War in 1861-65. Instead of holding on to the Puritan ideals of hard work and honest financial practices the mid-west degenerated into a chaotic and nihilistic

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community structure which could only be repaired through a massive civil strife. Basically, this kind of lazy economy was not principally different from the same kind of exploitation utilized by the British in the Far East and in the Mediterranean, that is, in connection with their Cannon Boat Diplomacy forcing the Chinese and Indians to hand off their surplus production against their own will, and even bombarding Alexandria in the early 1880s in an act more or less of pure envy of the great productivity of the Nile and its river valley agriculture which had produced their lasting civilization for thousands of years. With the explosive population growth on the British Isles and the European continent in general at least in the Western parts the need to obtain food and other basic materials from elsewhere in the world grew into unprecedented proportions; and regrettably the Western European countries continued with enforced industrialization instead of coming to their senses and acknowledge the fundamental physiocratic insights into sound economics. In the Ancient European civilizations of Greece and Rome the fact that the Mediterranean basin lacks great river systems apart from the Nile contributed largely to the depletion of their agricultural base throughout the centuries from the 9th to the 3rd B.C. Additionally, another problematic was the loose, sandy soils of the hillsides, lacking in clay to glue the soil to the mineral substrate and causing erosion to a massive extent when these hilly regions were farmed because of population increases and lack of productivity in the lower regions. The insights of Theophrastus (Aristotles pupil) in the 3rd century B.C. came too late to rescue the Greek civilization, while the Roman was embarking on the imperialist ventures including the Punic wars, during which she embarked on the same malevolent soil practices which to an increasing extent had bereft the former Phoenician colony of Carthage of the soil fertility which had laid the foundation for the establishment of a colony in this region in the first place. Again, it

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was the sandy soils which were the core of the problem, in distinction from the Atlantic soils which consist in ocean sediments from time immemorial.3 The ancient Greeks had become increasingly dependent on the rich soils of the Black Sea region for the import of grains to their growing populations, trading off their surplus of wine and olive oil against the grain and flour from this eastern region which, alas, was fertilized by the Danube river system as well as by the river systems of modern day Turkey, and hence drawing on the minerals transported down from the Alps and the mountainous area of inner Turkey respectively. All these facts testify to the vital importance of the rivers and alluvial soils when it comes to the development and maintenance of civilization, and hence to the long term planning perspectives needed for any society to remain at a civilized level instead of regressing into barbarism. The Romans regressed into barbarism when they embarked on imperialism instead of reforming their agricultural base, as did the European civilization when it tumbled into a Scramble for Africa and similar imperialist ventures before the outbreak of World War One. Another highly informative issue as regards the ecological and climatic implications of a soil destructive practice, such as occurred in the Mediterranean in the late Greek and early Roman civilization, is the fact that the loss of carbon from the soil, tied up by the microbiological production of the CO2 fixating glycol-protein, Glomalin, contributed to the rise in temperature throughout the Merovingian era and the early Middle Ages.4 This is still only a hypothesis, but it is largely probable when considering modern day science as far as soil carbon and the climate issue is concerned. There is every reason to worry about what will become of the modern climate crisis when considering the huge impacts of the Ancients soil malpractices on the climate of the above mentioned time periods. As compared to the thousands of years old civilization of the Mesopotamia, the Nile valley and the Indus valley, the modern

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European civilization has only lasted less than a thousand years if we are to reckon with the abruption which occurred with the downfall of the Roman civilization in the 5th century A.D. and the subsequent barbarian turn of events. The centuries from Charlemagne in the 8th century A.D. and until new developments in agriculture which occurred in the centuries toward a new urbanism was developed in the 12th and 13th centuries, may reasonably be termed dark as well as feudal. During this period very little was achieved in the direction of civilization on the European continent apart from pledging allegiance to the Christian faith, which need not consist in any civilization maintaining soil practices and resource management techniques whatsoever; this was amply testified during the last two or three centuries of the Roman empire after Constantin the Great introduced Christianity as the new state religion in Rome. What were then the soil management techniques which maintained civilization for so long a period of time in the ancient civilizations of India/Pakistan, Mesopotamia and Egypt? And why did they eventually collapse? Obviously, all of them developed irrigation techniques to manage the flooding river systems, directing the water from the massively flooding rivers, containing highly valuable nutrients and minerals, into dikes and then onto the fields as need may have been during their respective dry seasons. Additionally, they utilized legumes especially annual clover as a green manure crop and also as a kind of soil loosening technique, in which the roots penetrated the slightly packed soils after the flooding and the irrigation. The names Persian clover and Alexandrine clover, which still exist on the modern day seeds market to the benefit of organic farmers all around the world, testify to this important fact. On top of these obvious ecological foundations of their age old civilizations they developed law codes, such as Hammurabis from about 1700 B.C. which prescribed the way in which the land was to be worked, goods and crops distributed, the toil of labour conducted, and so on

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testifying to the fact that the Roman law codes were not the first ones to operate in history.

The Decline and Fall of Ancient Civilizations and the Prospects for the Modern Post-Industrial one As regards the causes of the downfall of these ancient civilizations, we know that the lumbering in the hillsides of Tibet and the Himalayas and in the Turkish mountains caused the irrigation systems in the Indus valley and along the Euphrates and the Tigris to be silted, so that the slaves could no longer cleanse them before the next flooding season. As far as Egypt is concerned lumbering in the mountains of the upper Nile region, the building of dams up along the Nile, in addition to the Roman exploitation of the agricultural surplus caused great disturbances in the Egyptian civilization disturbances from which she has not yet recovered. However, it is only the Mesopotamian civilization which is finally and irrevocably lost, while in the Indus valley and along the Nile there is still a working and highly advanced agricultural production going on, albeit not as harmonious and sustainable as in the heyday of these civilizations some 5000 years ago or more. As regards the present situation it is highly appropriate to consider the birth of Western Civilization along the river banks and the alluvial soils deposited here through ages of evolutionary time, which Leonardo da Vinci in fact indicated already in the 15 th century. This provides us with the highly necessary time perspective to elaborate on in our effort to maintain this civilization and what it takes to preserve an artificial soil comparable to the ones which have been lost through urbanization along the great river banks of the Europe from the Thames and the Seine to the Elbe and the Danube rivers. How will we proceed to retain and improve the soil fertility in the long run on lands that are bereft of the yearly deposition of

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mineral nutrients along the river valleys, especially now when the worlds known reserves of mineral phosphorus are depleted at the same time as the U.N. is warning about a serious food crisis throughout the rest of this century? Are the farmers of Europe to the extent that they have not been replaced by huge agribusiness companies scientifically fit to deal with the situation? And what about the departments of agriculture throughout Europe; will they acknowledge the need to accommodate to an evolutionary time perspective in the proceedings of agriculture, implying the necessary cooperation with microbiological flora and fauna which has been around on the Earths surface for about 500 million years, and without which we hardly stand a chance in this age of rapid climate change on a global scale? In India the authorities are simply feeling the necessity to overrun commonplace democratic rules in an effort to restore a minimum of ecological balance in the agricultural production of several regions, partly as a result of the fact that the numbers of suicides among her farmers are increasing because of failing genetically modified crops. As a response to this highly dismal tendency the Indian authorities have decided to retort to implementing organic agriculture as a way of securing the health and wellbeing of her farmers, and the necessary food production of high quality for the countrys inhabitants. This may seem like a transgression of basic democratic rights in the west. However, it is certainly a state of emergency, and as long as people have been misinformed by the press on these issues, there seems to be little other options left than to simply overrule the situation with the necessary means at hand. Compared to what may be feared of authoritarianism in the face of the immense challenges to civilization and humanity throughout the present century, the Indian approach seems to be of a mild and benevolent degree. Surely, a libertarian approach is for an anarchist always to be preferred. However, seen in the light of the present

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challenges, including the Climate and Food crises, with all it entails of the refugee issue and the lack of mental as well as economical means to cope with it on the massive scale which is foreseen by for instance the Union of Concerned Scientists, there has hardly been a narrower and more fragile basis on which a libertarian approach to the Malaise of Modernity (to use Charles Taylors expression) could be founded. According to Gaia scientist, James Lovelock, we are confronted with the planets vanishing face, and how we are supposed to go about such a tremendous challenge with a libertarian spirit intact when we (as a species) have not been able to go about it by now; alas, we are even still amidst a War of religion which we were supposed to have ended during the enlightenment era remains an utterly open question. Lovelock himself in fact envisages an age of war lords and brutish survival of the fittest kind of end game, while people are hoarding up canned food and familiarizing themselves with survivalist literature and seemingly useful tools in front of a forecasted crises situation even while holding on to their lives in the metropolitan areas instead of seeking out to the countryside to aid the farmers in their desperate struggle to keep up with the aggressive agribusiness corporations (Bayer, Monsanto, etc.) which enforces their G. M. crops and the adherent pesticides on an increasing amount of agricultural lands. It is exactly this kind of aggressive capitalist tendency which are tentatively halted and reversed by the Indian authorities these days, in a country which modern eco-agriculture originated some hundred years ago while the West was embarking on its massive industrialization of the primary production within Western civilization an industrialization which has proved fatal to the ecological systems and balances of the entire Globe. If one takes a look at old maps of Europe for instance from the late 17th century; that is from the early beginnings of the Enlightenment era a venture that any ecologically oriented person definitively should do one finds that in those days they were still in possession

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of a largely ecological outlook. One finds that river systems, lakes and fiords are almost painted like sacred vaults in the landscape, and one is able to understand the meaning of these ecological systems for the development of the entire European civilization which is now being threatened by the massive abuses of the landscapes and their natural resources. Alas, our modern day civilization, which to a large extent has been a barbarian aftermath since the two world wars in the previous century entailing a largely plundered planet, as Fairfield Osborn put it in his 1948 work of that title appears to be a highly primitive and brutalized one compared to the highly sensitive Enlightenment Era approach towards nature and towards civilization itself. When it is portrayed as primitive compared to our own age, it is largely on the basis of lesser consumption and a simpler technology. However, the technology was fairly advanced at that stage at least during the apex of the Enlightenment represented by the French encyclopdie and it was developing at a pace which everyone could apprehend and influence upon.5 Considering the fact that humanity will probably reach the 10 billion population mark in or around 2050 it should be fairly obvious to everyone that we need a new or rather renewed agricultural revolution in the decades ahead. The G.M. industry of corporate capitalism is already proving to be failing on a massive scale, while the rapidly growing microbiological investigations within the science of mycorrhizal crop production which takes place in various corners around the world albeit as yet, still too slowly, considering the huge challenges we are facing will have to redress a hundred years of failure within agribusiness. As an ecological horticulturalist the present author has done experimentation with mycorrhizal symbiosis in various gardens during the last twenty years or so, and I can testify to the immense productivity of this kind of agriculture even almost independently of the summer season weather, when this kind of horticultural practice is observed scrupulously. This essay does not allow for an extensive elaboration on the practices; however, let me

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just briefly state some basic principles: In early spring, gather some fine samples of nettles, including the roots, from some nearby location, and then put it in 200C for two weeks or so while turning the mass around once a day. During these two weeks in early May (or springtime), gather samples of soil microorganisms in the nearby ecological surroundings, from the root zones of fine green plant stands. Put the samples on a bottle, obviously with the soil in it, and break a few tiny holes in the locker to see that oxygen is let in. Then, when the nettles has dissolved into a fluid nitrogen substrate, pull the microbiological mycorrhiza spores into the substrate and keep on turning the fluid around once a day to keep it circulating and to let oxygen in. Then, when your potatoes or your vegetables and herbs in your garden or on your fields appear and seems strong enough, cover the crops with green manure (lawn cuttings, et cetera) and then pull a few deciliters of your nettle and microbiology fluid in a can, pull cold water (as cold as you can get it) on for a few seconds and then turn it up to approximately 20 degrees Celsius. With this mixture you can water your rows of potatoes and vegetables and herbs, and let Mother Nature do the gardening for you. All you need to do is to see to it that your soil is covered with green manure, that oxygen is still let into the soil, and that weeds are not taking over your garden. Then you may repeat the mulching method with the green manure for as many times as the microbiological organisms are able to break it down, and you may even want to use a hoe to work it into the top layer of your soil. When applying a new layer of mulching material, see to it that the procedure of applying the fluid from early spring, which you keep on turning once a day, is repeated. When your crops are big enough you may just let the garden grow freely, avoiding the weeding procedure, and you will most certainly harvest a very fine crop of high quality when the autumn arrives without having to do too much work on it (because Mother Nature does it for you) or without any application of chemical fertilizers or pesticides of any sort whatsoever. If it does not work, you can complain to me and we will certainly sort out what was not functioning properly. The

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practices of this mycorrhizal horticulture will be elaborated on in a forthcoming book on eco-gardening which I am planning, and which is based on twenty years of experience and the most updated scientific approach. In the meantime the interested reader could consult the work Mycorrhiza in Crop Production.6 Thus the kind of lazy economics which overtook the European civilization from the time of the Portuguese and Spanish conquests in the 15th and 16th century onwards, all the way into the collapse in 1914 and once again in the 1930s, may be reworked into an intelligent and ecological economics entailing the most advanced practices of urban agriculture and horticulture as well as sustainable eco-technologies and utilization of renewable energy resources such as sun and wind, tides and waves. Amidst the climate and food crises we are heading into, in the decades ahead these solutions seem to the present author to be the only way in which our precious civilization may be redeemed from another and definitive collapse, from whence other parts of the world will take on the leadership in this new and unparalleled era for humanity. Obviously, the potentialities for improvement in the direction of an authentic ecological civilization are of immense proportions and they will have to be realized if we shall be able to escape an altogether new and chilling barbarism making the former ones seem like lullabies in comparison. At the very least, the generations following after us deserve that we make a serious attempt at achieving these long standing goals, such as they historically was drawn up by great humanitarian thinkers like Peter A. Kropotkin in his Fields, Factories and Workshops and Ebenezer Howard in his Garden Cities of Tomorrow. While tomorrow may be a relative term indeed, there is not much time to think about it any longer and wise persons all around the world have long since started realizing this project. All that is lacking which still seems too far off, indeed is a mass movement which transcends the present day Occupy Movements and puts its hands in the soil, literally speaking, and dig its way into the future like the historical

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Diggers Movement did in the glorious days of the English revolution in the 1640s, when the future seemed within reach and the bright visions were not yet precluded by corporate capitalism and insidious nationalisms on a massive scale.

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Chapter II

Turmoil in Medieval Europe

AFTER the collapse of the hubris ridden Roman Empire in 476 AD the proceedings of which were drawn out for some three centuries after the fading away of the so-called Pax Romana with the death of Marcus Aurelius, scarcely ameliorated by Caracallas edict in 212 AD which belatedly offered Roman citizenship to all the subjects of the Empire Europe returned to digging sticks, bows and arrows until the renewed civilizatory project of the Renascence era (primarily in Italy and the Low Countries) and the concomitant economic take-off, including urban development, the founding of universities, establishment of granaries, new trading opening for cultural exchange over vast areas, to the extent of bringing the Legacy of Ancient Greece back to the European mainland from its exile in the Byzantine Empire. The pitiful Roman utilization of that legacy which involved a complete return to dust as regards the democratic tradition with the fall of the Republic in the wake of the three subsequent Punic Wars, and the assassination of the Gracchibrothers, Tiberius and Gaius, who made a heroic effort to save it by introducing economic reforms in favor of the hard working Roman yeomen (self-reliant farmers), based on the mind-blowing experiences of their father during his tenure in the Iberian Peninsula took more than a thousand years to repair. The tactics of war and conquest had proved a stunning failure in that region and nearly finished off the entire Roman adventure due to vehement opposition by the natives and the exhaustion of the Roman legions which consisted of those honest farmers who were supposed to equip themselves with armory for battle engagements, financed by the economic surplus they drew from their soils.

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The Decline and Fall of Roman Civilization and the New Growth in the High Middle Ages The barbarism which the Romans supposedly were fighting elsewhere had turned upon themselves with a vengeance including horrendous civil wars, gladiator uprisings, feeding of prisoners of war to the beasts, emperors fiddling while Rome was burning, to borrow an expression from H. H. Scullard 1 in short, cultural decadence en masse. According to Scullard, in his analysis of the accelerating downward spiral of Roman Civilization in the first century after the introduction of a new time perspective, on his visit to Greece in 66-67, an artist-emperor like Nero: summoned Corbulo [his own father-in-law] and the commanders of Upper and Lower Germany, Scribonius Rufus and Scribonius Proculus, to join him: on arrival they received his order to kill themselves, and obeyed In Rome Neros autocracy and megalomania increased. He identified himself with various gods (Hercules, Apollo or Helios) and coins depicted him wearing a radiate crown. The month of April was renamed Neroneus and Rome itself might even be called Neropolis.1 The more or less insane rulers who followed suit contributed their share to finishing off the Greco-Roman civilization reaching a climax with the infantile Co mmodus who didnt even know the ABC of civilized behavior, as he eagerly welcomed the death of his own father, Marcus Aurelius (one of the exceptions as regards wisdom and humility among the Roman emperors), in his own hunger for power and glory unable to utilize any of the wisdom embodied in the Roman literate tradition from Cicero onwards, including her hard working historians. The inevitable outcome of such uncivilized behavior par excellence including the worn out soils over wide tracts around the Mediterranean basin remains lasting testimony to

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the greed for which the Titans, according to Greek mythology, had been punished by the gods, and which the ancient Greeks themselves tried with all their might to make good handed down to us through the toil and integrity of Aristotles pupils in the Academy, notably Theophrastus contributions to the birth of scientific soil management.2 The loss of their wisdom proved a tremendous price to pay as Europe degenerated into feudal follies and extreme economic inefficiency, including the completely unnecessary and counterproductive fallow practice, causing a leeching of soil nutrients such as nitrogen by the lack of plant roots to absorb it through the rainy winter season in the humid climates in culturally central parts of Europe a problem for which the ancients long since had found the solution through nitrogen fixating legumes as cover crops, green manure and animal fodder. This crucial knowledge was not to be recovered until well into the Enlightenment era, through the discoveries made by Montesquieu and the Encyclopaedists in their studies of the agricultural basis of Persian and Egyptian societies, subsequently to be adapted by farmers all over North-Western Europe, and resulting in a vast expansion of economic productivity. According to Medieval historian, John H. Mundy: Along the English and continental coasts of the North Sea and the German reaches of the Baltic, tidal marshes were drained. By about 1300 cultivation in the delta of the Rhine, Mense and Scheldt rivers had advanced at the expense of the sea almost as far as it has today.3a This fact alone goes a long way to illustrate the problem inherent in modern history writing when it comes to portraying the essence of the 18th century agricultural revolution as some kind of primarily mechanical-industrial phenomenon. The three field system which already at an early stage in European modernity was elaborated into 4, 6 or even 8 fields under rotation in the more advanced agricultural regions of Europe; at least from the time of Jethro Tull onwards

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laid the foundations for higher productivity, more varied crops and dishes and a more lasting sustainability than had been the case with the ancient Greeks and Romans. The rediscovery of Aristotles, and especially his pupil, Theophrastus, work during the Italian Renaissance, made way for a sound theoretical approach towards this first agricultural revolution after the decline of the Roman empire. As noted by Mundy: The Milanese led in building dikes and clearing the central stretches of the Po Valley, a task accomplished by about 1300 [!] The deforestation of valleys and flood control not only increased the area under cultivation but also transformed shallow and swampy streams into navigable rivers.3b During the Italian Renaissance the Medieval humanist par excellence, Leonardo da Vinci, drew upon these chronicled developments in his pioneering notions of evolution in nature, paving the way for the proper time perspectives needed to transcend the religiously motivated creationism such as they were to be manifested in the Enlightenment tradition established by the French Encyclopaedists of the 18th century (Diderot, Buffon, and others), and culminating in Charles Darwins and Alfred Wallaces scientific theories on the origin and development of species by way of environmental adaption and survival of the fittest from the 1850s onwards. The way in which these evolutionary ideas and largely verified facts were to be abused in the name of imperialism and socalled social Darwinism during the dismal Scramble for Africa in the decades preceding World War One, belongs to the darkest moments within the failed Industrial Civilization which from its inception in the late 18th century to this very day has been taking a dramatic toll on the once rich biological diversity that formerly characterized Telus or Gaia. Although the European Middle Ages traditionally were labeled dark, there have been efforts to modify this picture. Certainly, one

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may find beacons of progress and humanism in that era; however, measured against the level humanity had reached at its best in the classical epoch, it all seems like some kind of silly joke when viewed in the light of what remains for us today to draw upon in our efforts to stake out a viable development for the future. The otherworldliness causing such a chilling indifference towards human suffering which erupted in Charlemagnes imperial slaughter of women and children at Verden in the 8th century the Holy Cross in his hands the burning of free thinking spirits all the way to the finishing off of the witch hunts in the late 17 th century, is simply of no avail to a species aspiring towards survival on a planet already on its way to another mass extinction this time caused by our own. No god whatsoever will give us the species back regardless how hard pious people may pray, and how many they eventually turn out to be, when the going gets tough. The secularization process which has given humanity the sciences, the literature indeed, literacy itself, which was so fatefully lacking among the Medieval poor (some 90 per cent of the population) has taken centuries of strife and dedication; the Protestant Reformation being a crucial part of it, and containing all the complexities one would expect from the socio-cultural heritage it grew out of. At one extreme one encounters peasant rebellions by infuriated poor people who lashed out against idlers of every sort clergy as well as nobles and on the other self-serving opportunists who were eager to make a name for themselves in the annals of history, to the extent of deceiving their supporters among the lower social strata. After the Investiture Controversy (1075-1122), which centered around the appointment of bishops throughout Europe and ended with the Concordat in Worms between the Pope and the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire (but which continued in full force in more remote parts of Europe, outside the control attainable by the clerical and secular rulers due to the limitations of infrastructure and communications at the time), the head of the Catholic Church, his

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court (the curia) and the clergy in general, expanded their power to an overwhelming extent largely due to the illiteracy of the toiling poor, who were easily manipulated by the ideological scare involved in such horror forebodings for every sinner such as the nightmares of the Purgatory, visions of eternal suffering in an ingeniously contrived Hell, and so on. To the detriment of any n otions of progress through those long centuries from the decline of GrecoRoman civilization, to its revival in the 18th century (overlooking the sporadic and hazardous attempts by single minded individuals during the Renaissance, and heretic movements among the poor throughout Europe) this power was not restricted to the spiritual domain, but engulfed the entire earthly affairs in day-to-day life, from regulations of how and when to work, for whom and what purposes, and by which means. The Papacy grabbed hold on monasteries, landed estates among the nobility, silver and gold, and paraded their ensuing status symbols to an extent which increasingly impoverished and enraged the secularly oriented population in general for whom economic productivity and thrift was a primary focus. Heavy taxation was strangling the economic basis of European communities, only to produce even more irrational escapades by the sacred elites who additionally expanded their non-deserved earnings through the practice of letters of indulgence, for sale to any soul who may have been inclined to cleanse his or her soul for real or imagined sins committed towards god and humans alike. The principle of absolution pertaining to the authoritarian and hierarchical Chain of Being warping completely Aristotles biologically motivated coining of the term became the exclusive privilege of redeeming human beings from sin and its consequences. The success of the Purgatory myth led naturally, in the actual socio-cultural context, to a veritable mass mania in the scramble for salvation from renewed trials after the earthly sufferings were endured.

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As regards the new prominence put on labor and the organization of work during the Middle Ages there occurred a momentous movement across the continent with respect to the new urbanism which developed largely in opposition to the feudal lord, the clergy, and emerging monarchical powers and to the monopolization of the economy which these classes had obtained for themselves since the fall of the Roman civilization in the 5 th century A.D. According to historian P. Boissonade:

In the twelfth century a wind of revolution blew upon almost all the towns of the west. In 1134 Poitiers, at that time an industrial and commercial town, tried to form an urban federation after the Italian model, in conjunction with the cities of Poitou. Cambrai in 1127, Compigne in 1128, Amiens in 1113 and 1177, Orleans and Mantes in 1137, Vzelay and Sens in 1146, Rheims in 1144, and in the north and east the Flemish and Rhenish towns Ghent, Tournai, Liege, Speier, Worms, Cologne, Mainz, Treier sought to safeguard their economic future by rising in resurrection against the arbitrary power of lord or monarch. London itself tried to proclaim a commune in 1141. The revolution sometimes assumed the implacable and tragic aspect of a class war.3c During the so-called High Middle Ages (of what kind of substances the ruling elites were high on remains a subject for investigation by the historians of medicine) the Papal Church deteriorated into a singularly exclusive institution; simultaneously, its international character conflicted with the emerging national movements within the diverse European regions, and the parallel development of their respective (more or less) absolutist state power apparatuses. However, even more important from a long term historical perspective, the main conflicts were fought out between peasant movements, urban confederacies and trading guilds which fought both of them tooth and nail. The revolutionary spirit of the

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era, and the extent to which it permeated all levels of society and involved the whole economic foundation of the germinating restoration of European Civilization after more than a Millennium of barbarism, is aptly depicted by the prominent historian of that epoch, Perez Zagorin, who in his Rebels and Rulers concluded that: it was obvious that if the subjects were divided from their rulers in so fundamental a matter as religion they might well be led into political opposition or revolt [ ] Neither danger nor censorship could prevent the circulation of forbidden writings by reformers in Catholic kingdoms. A regular underground trade in religious propaganda was carried on, fed by secret presses and transmission belts In the Netherlands and elsewhere, heretical publishers used forged and false imprints on their books to escape detection. [] The outbreaks, followed shortly by other revolutionary acts, provoked the terrible repression by the Spanish regime that ensued. The events as a whole were the expression of a simultaneous religious and political crisis that signaled the onset of the first wave of revolutions in the Netherlands.4

The Early Reformation Struggles The royal powers claiming mandate from god in their political escapades fuelled by the blood of honest and hard working peasants and artisans were for their part striving for control of religious life (as a dire ideological need on their behalf) and the local and regional clergy; hence, in this sense the Papacy constituted a threat towards their scheme for political centralization. Moreover, the secular nobility and the clergy the feudal two-headed monster par excellence were entangled in a demonic ballet which partied at the cost of the toiling majority which, needless to say, primarily consisted of farmers and serfs in that rural age. The celebrated dictum, City air makes people free, hardly did them any good, as

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they were literally walled out or enclosed in by the emerging cities and noble estates respectively. Only to the extent that the economic take-off, caused by simple rediscoveries of ancient soil management practices as well as the Black Death (1348-50) created the economic room to roam for these poor strata, were they relieved from a life in the most horrendous spiritual and material darkness. One of the main factors underpinning the popular attraction of heretical movements in Medieval Europe consisted in their possession of literacy, which enabled them rather to laugh than cry in their confrontations with the abusers of spirituality in the name of an omnipotent, ruthless and cruel god and his co -monsters. The immense differences with respect to conditions of living dividing the people into two nations, to borrow an express ion from a modern liberal, Disraeli, confronted by the class wars in the latter half of the 19th century proved to be a veritable social and economic furnace for centuries, involving everything from burnings of independently thinking individuals to the r eprisals by the victims sympathizers in the form of merciless and violent upsurges all over Europe; most famously represented by the English peasant revolt in 1381 and The German Peasants War in the 1520s, both of them induced by false promises made by the new bosses in the spiritual bazaar. John Ball and Wat Tylers well organized campaign on behalf of the impoverished English peasantry in the early Reformation era, was crushed by the coordinated and self-serving military efforts among the privileged elites; no better fared the infuriated German peasants in their disbelieving reaction against Martin Luthers betrayal in favor of the landed aristocracy. Already in the 13th century the Latin philosopher, Marsilius of Padua, advocated the necessity of clerical abstinence from earthly affairs focusing on the economic thrift of the Italian renaissance spirit and the consequent new social structures evolving in that region urging that the administration of society in general had to be left for secular deliberations among the driving economic strata.

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Thus, his recorded political thought entailed an elaboration of the Concord at Worms, and was subsequently included in the free thinking spirit among the Renaissance progressives in Italy, who populated the peninsula throughout the ensuing couple of centuries. According to historians of Medieval Europe, C. Warren Hollister and Judith M. Bennett: [] Marsilius of Padua and others began to define what constituted a political community and what claims it could make. Marsilius wrote that each political community had a ruling part that should wield free and full authority over all within that community, including clergy.5 In the 1320s William of Ockham, in the ordinary British polite and laconic, albeit occasionally too subservient intellectual manner echoed Marsilius demands, arguing that the Church and its clergy were obligated to abandon earthly power and riches, in order to concentrate themselves on prayer and contemplation. According to Norwegian historian, Johan Schreiner, writing in the post-war Enlightenment spirit of the 1950s: While Marsilius advocated ideas rooted in the Italian city republics, with their anti-clerical fighting spirit and civic realism, several scribes at the court of Louis belonged to the zealous camp among the Franciscans, the so-called spiritualists. In the front lines of this calling stood a university lecturer from Oxford, William of Ockham, who joined the Emperor in 1328. Previously, he had endured a three years stay in Avignon, where he was drawn to court to answer for his philosophical writings, and only by escape survived his familiarization with the Papal town. The experiences that he accumulated there became endless food for his mind, in the merciless narrations he delivered. Still, Ockham was a devoted adherent of the Papacy; however, a Papacy restricting itself to spiritual guidance and avoiding the dead end road of power politics and purely secular demands.6

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The same views were advocated by the Flemish, Geert Groote, in the 1350s. According to Hollister and Bennett, Groote: [] stressed again, within an orthodox framework that Christian fulfillment comes through inward piety, simplicity, religious reading, and contemplation. From his teachings grew the Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life, who, like the beguines before them, took no lifetime vows and lived in common, pooling their resources and houses. They were enormously influential in the Netherlands and other parts of northern Europe. 7 Previous to this era there had been a mushrooming of heretical movements throughout Europe, exemplified by the Waldensians and the Albigensians in Southern France. A fundamental element of their spiritual orientation was directed towards social and economic issues, and they were regarded as a massive threat towards the powers that be and their status quo. In the regular Carolingian spirit among subsequent absolutist French rulers all the way up to the sun King and the imbecile Louis of the Great Revolution the god given king headed the ruthless repression of these movements, and in companionship with the Papal stronghold at Avignon (13091377) the despotic monarch achieved nearly irresistible influence and control over the papal church and the clergy in general especially within the reach of their military power, but also ideologically among the illiterate masses throughout the entire cultural sphere encompassed by the Papacy itself. The Hundred Years War, raging between France and England between the years 1337 and 1453 hence, the initial stages of which co-occurred with the Avignon exile led to an early resistance against the Papacy itself on the British isles; not only by spiritual heretics and social radicals, but also by the Court and its representatives who, one may add, were polarized to a lesser degree as one of the long term effects of the Magna Carta drawn up in 1215, making headway for a more liberal orientation towards

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social and economic affairs than was the case on the suffocating feudal European continent. In the singularly dismal 1350s, when possibly one half of the population in some corners had been eradicated by the massive pestilence, the reactionary Papal hold on the social and economic structure proved utterly counterproductive for almost anyone among the survivors; hence; even the English parliament sought to restrict the Popes power of taxation and judicial veto. As land and its soils itself was the primary source of riches in the agrarian economy, the abandoned fields and buildings were of no avail without peasants working and tending them hence, the effort by the greedy idlers among the upper strata, with or without Bible in hand, to profit from the generally collapsing socioeconomic basis, was met by fierce opposition from honest and hard working people everywhere. Consequently, among the most influential figures in the attacks against the Papacy and its irrational and self-serving conduct, was an Englishman John Wyclif who in the 1370s was among the leaders of a movement for spiritual regeneration, accompanying the mundane struggles of the farming population, culminating in the revolts of 1381. Additionally, Wyclif influenced Jan Hus in Bohemia through the latters period of studying with the English professor at the University of Oxford. Wyclif himself, as well as the social movement he initiated in companionship with William Langland (whose literary expression, Piers Plowman, reached a wide readership and audience especially among the farmers), the Lollards, and Jan Hus and the Hussites (who developed into a radical social movement after the burning of their martyr), condemned the Pope and denied his religious authority. Before long, this antiauthoritarian stance encompassed the entire complex of social and economic issues. Moreover, in the farmers revolt of 1381 the salt of the Earth had had it with empty words from above. In the Bohemia of Hus his followers represented a tremendous challenge against the secular as well as religious power of the Holy Roman

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Emperor a challenge which was only exasperated after the execution of their scholarly educated inspirer in 1415. Hus, no less than Wyclif, stressed the study of the gospels as the road to salvation an agenda picked up on by Luther a century or so later obviously too late to serve the German peasants. The way in which the authoritarian ghost of this centuries long movement echoed Caracallas 212 Edict, through his theses on opposition in 1517, testifies the universal truth of revolutions being lived phenomena spontaneously erupting among people who have an undeniably justified cause rather than theoreticians venturing to map out the future. Regrettably, in the modern era the list of the latter variety has dwarfed the former to the extent of bereaving the very concept itself of any sense and meaning all the way into the corridors of academic historians.8

Opposition Against the Papacy On top of the culmination of the centuries long Reformation process which ended in a German tragedy among the honorable Thomas Mntzer and his companion rebels, only to lay down the foundations of a extraordinary dismal European deterioration into god given state centralization, highly repressive ideologies, and veritable man hunts targeting innocent people trying to orient themselves on the premises of Mother Nature even the institution of monastery was under fierce attacks. In the 15th century followers of the French philosopher, Reuchlin, published the so-called Satanic letters, ostensibly authored by a monk in a helpless and clumsy Latin vernacular the publication of which caused a cheering atmosphere among the poor at the cost of the very church institutions themselves. The humor of the episode belongs to the rare exceptions from the overall picture of the era as dark, and shows that irony and wit by far is a privilege invented and enjoyed by well paid TV entertainers, prime time, in a modern cultural context. Quite to the contrary,

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during the Middle Ages the usage of these linguistic techniques were effective expressions of a universal trait among our species enabling Reason itself to prevail over the brute force retorted to by our closest companions among the primates. The largely hidden and obscure history of humor remains to be written. As for the internal organization of the Papacys government and commanding structures, the rotten institution met with an immense challenge when pope Gregory XI in 1376 decided upon leaving Avignon in order to restore the seat of command in Rome a project totally unacceptable to the French monarch, who immediately called in a pope number two Clement VII who was supposed to be his primary ideological tool in France. According to authoritative historians, Bennett and Hollister, [] the Avignon popes were more noted for their bureaucratic skills than their sanctity, for they carried to its ultimate degree their predecessors enthusiasm for administrative and fiscal effieciency. 9 Obviously, this efficiency did not belong to the tradition of philanthropic benevolence on behalf of the toiling poor; for the French state apparatus the removal of this tool of repression and usurpation meant ruin if not compensated for in a similar efficient manner an efficiency, however, which proved to be the doom of the entire Papacy. It launched the age of the Great Schism involving endless strife among the clergy itself all around the Western hemisphere. The fact that everyone secular as well as clerical from then on had to deal with two commanders within the same hierarchical, dead end institution, undermined the very authority and credibility of the whole venture. To the Catholic church, which had enough trouble to deal with already in consideration of the prolific heretical movements using any means at hand in their efforts at achieving social and economical progress the development proved fateful, indeed.

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The Schism produced the so-called conciliatory movement among the clergy, which was intended to restore order in the spiritual chaos and secure the economic foundation of the idle classes in the revolutionary context of the era. Needless to say they achieved nothing but a heavier lash against their own arses as often results from this kind of trickery and manipulation. By the time this lofty venture appointed a single, new Pope at the Pisa counsel in 1409 getting rid of both of the two twin Popes Europe had already been inflamed by the English peasant revolt of 1381 and similar revolutionary action by the downtrodden. Furthermore, the two disposed ones (as one would have guessed) refused to leave their positions, resulting in a three headed figure hardly more fit to restore order than the previous vain attempts. Amidst the execution of Jan Hus for heresy in Bohemia in 1415, the counsel at Konstanz (1414-18) once more contrived to appoint a single godhead in Rome. The burning of Hus naturally infuriated whole populations over wide areas throughout the region and subsequently entered the revolutionary legacy of the protestant movement itself; he was elevated to the status of a martyr, thereby undermining the Catholic Churchs traditional and popular monopoly in this respect. Hence, this monopoly, which had enabled the clerical authorities to manipulate entire social strata among the toiling poor and secure their subservience to their feudal overlords, in the belief that the Saints were ready to welcome them in afterlifes paradise, was no longer at hand paving the way for directly secular social movements, including the so-called Millenarians who demanded the coming of a New Jerusalem right away and here on Earth. The limits of spiritual manipulation was within reach and the drawn out struggles between owners of other peoples souls and the disobedient ones continued right into the Thirty Years W ar (161848) on the European continent, while the English revolutionaries (including their written material produced by the sharp pens of John Lilburne and Gerrard Winstanley of the famous Levellers movement) paved the way for an entirely new direction in Europe

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a secularizing Enlightenment to the benefit of honestly laboring people.10 On the European continent a similar effort was postponed until 1789 only to be aborted by the consorted hypocrisy and power mongering among the monarchical ghosts from an era which should have ended long since, considering the 150 years of Enlightenment in between. During the time period allotted to the conciliatory movement among the Catholic adherents to human superstition, however, there had developed three different theories with respect to the means at hand regarding the ruling techniques for the Papacy. One focused on the feasibility of advisory suggestions to the Pope by the actual council members, albeit reserving the final authority to his person alone. Another was the so-called Episcopal one, according to which the outdated godhead was only one among equals and, consequently, subject to the majority decisions among the bishops spread all over Europe and, one may add, all the way across the oceans to the subsequently acquired imperial domains in the Americas and Asia. The third variety was the allegedly democratic one, involving germinating notions of parliamentarism which was far removed in time as well as content from the origins of the democratic idea and tradition in Ancient Greece contending that the church belonged to every religious acolyte, and that the councils were entitled to dispose of the Pope if so desired. The latter occurred at the counsel in Basel As for the Holy Roman Empire, where the refor mation was to achieve wide popular following only after the slaughter of the poor peasants in the 1520s launched by Luthers betrayal of their earnest hopes for social and economic progress already in vogue elsewhere, most notably in the Low Countries and subsequently across the channel11 the fragmentation process of the archaic Empire was ripening. Luthers betrayal may be understandable in the sense that his own life was at stake amidst the turmoil however, as one would have expected from a pious man expecting eternal

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bliss and salvation in the real afterlife, a higher moral standard would have been in due place on a par with the integrity shown by the likes of Wyclif and Hus, on whose sufferings he based his entire agenda. Luthers cowardice in the face of risking excommunication and further persecution enrolled him among the camps of regional princes and monarchs at the apex of social and economic power, resulting in a rebirth of religiously founded state ideologies involving alignment with the school of Kramer and Sprnger who, in their demonoligcal project from the 1480s onwards turned their anger and frustration against infidels of every variety from herb users to unfaithful women. The cruelty of this renewed claim at soul ownership was not ended until the philosophes of the Enlightenment had done their work throughout the 17 th and early 18th century finally paving way for Civilization once more in Europe, and involving scientific approaches to the vital arts of horticulture and agriculture as the economic foundation of cultural blossoming in every sense of the term, and picking up the threads dating back to Ctal Hyuk in the Turkish highlands some 10000 years ago, and the subsequent millennia long civilizations in the Indus Valley, the Mesopotamian valleys, the Nile valley as well as their accumulated experiences through thousands of years in the scientific approaches to these arts in ancient Greece and Rome. Once more in the human venture it was opened a path of reasoned approach to the natural environment surrounding every living being, rather than expecting the real life to start after our bodies are decomposed by microbial life forms and their allies in the ecological cycles making this planet a unique one as far as present documentation goes. Whether new soul owners will venture to claim a number two also in this sense of the irrationality agenda, remains an open question as always if one is supposed to judge from the news of a bigger Tellus 2.0 in outer space somewhere. In any case, this one was still unique and the chances that the tools of the irrationalists will be

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more efficient on the surface of the bigger one would score high points at the betting odds (or some other quiz entertainment) after the failures in proper approaches to life itself, as testified in the wide array of modern crises from novel human diseases to dead ocean basins and every possible manifestation of destruction in between summed up as the Environmental or ecological crisis by oriented individuals ever since the days of the Industrial Revolution and its abuse for false ends.12

The Revival of Aristotle versus the New Irrationalism When the invention of printing by movable types in the 1440s was deployed in a commercial sense, the mass publication of Malleus Malificarum and Luthers Cathecism enabled the efforts at indoctrinating whole populations with state propaganda bereaving this promising technological novelty of its progressive potential. However, there were certain signs of a more benign future development notably in the increased communications between wider regions throughout Europe as regards its intellectual heritage, including the rich Renaissance literature redeeming the classical Greco-Roman legacy from oblivion. After the return of Aristotle by way of Aquinas efforts to subdue him to the Christian orthodoxy in the 13th century after the exile of his and other surviving cultural material in the Byzantine Empire there was reopened new paths into basic human epistemology; despite the obfuscating implications of mixing the two utterly incongruent approaches to reality: the former by an immigrant biologist and socio -political observer and historian using his abilities to the best of his intention in favor of a largely secularized Greek population in the wake of tremendous blows against their cultural and social foundations, in the form of catastrophic warfare and its overall costs. The appropriator was, if possible, even further apart from the very incarnation of classical Greek culture, than one of the latters first appropriators the so-

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called Alexander the Great who did not get more out of Aristotles teachings and personal tutorship than to engross the mistakes which the former toiled most of his adult life to warn against the defocusing of the oikos (ecological and economical) basis of society. As noted by classical scholar, A. E. Taylor, in his introduction to Aristotles philosophy, [] even in Plutarchs Life of Alexander we meet already with the full-blown legend of the influence of Aristotles philosophical speculations on Alexander. It is, however, improbable that Aristotles influence counted for much in forming the character of Alexander. Aristotles dislike of monarchies and their accessories is written large on many a page of his Ethics and Politics; the small self-contained city-state with no political ambitions for which he reserves his admiration would have seemed a mere relic of antiquity to Philip and Alexander. [] For all that Aristotle tells us, Alexander might never have existed, and the small city-state might have been the last word of Hellenic political development. 13 Obviously, the ethically founded principle of the Golden Mean permeating all of Aristotles socio-political thought harmonizes to an infinitely small degree with the Great Alexanders claim of receiving advice from the Egyptian Oracle, only to tumble into the East and literally hit the wall in India in the form of doing battle with the regions elephants. An altogether sad but true story albeit not without humoristic undertones, the latter of which was utilized by ancient Greek philosopher Cynon in his plea to be absolved from any involvement in the imperialists eastern military escapades with the lessons drawn from the immensely costly and protracted Parthian Wars in fresh memory. The overwhelming usage of the spreading printing presses for utterly irrational purposes delayed the developments made during the Italian and Flemish Renaissance and their respective rich humanist traditions containing them in closed intellectual circles and only

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and always at the risk of their representatives lives and physical well being. The burning of the scientist Giordano Bruno, at an intolerably late stage (1600), is testimony enough to the singularly reactionary character of the Christianizing crusade hitting hard upon individuals in every corner of the Globe in the name of an omnipotent, but still good god punishing people for sins they ne ver even figured about committing or did not know the meaning of. Luckily, the increased communications forced its way to enlightenment and prosperity by way of cultural exchanges and trade within the secular domains of European civilization reaching into the rich archives and cultural legacies in corners far apart, thereby opening up the novel notions of a universal humanity and cutting across particularistic claims to cultural superiority and the kindred fatal misunderstandings. Needless to say, this exchange of basic cultural knowledge among people from various bioregions and continents was, by far, a novelty introduced during Europes Renaissance. Trading have taken place since man began to make tools even among our relatives in the other groups of primates, there can be found examples of distribution of surplus resources; after all, who would want to carry around more than the backbone can keep above the ground, when life consisted in constant migration, as it did before more or less permanent settlements were established? Surely, this is far beyond the point in this essay; however, it makes for a contextual apprehension of the very phenomenon of mutualism and interdependence, which would not be without avail to anyone interested in the subject. It was precisely the horrendous accumulation of landed property and corresponding military power ideologically justified by the holy churches which occasioned the very protests among the dispossessed during the Middle Ages. Without an understanding of this basic socioeconomical structure, the theological ballet would simply make no sense whatsoever except for theologians; a pseudo-science which is culturally exclusive per se, in contrast to the universalistically oriented sciences with their origins in the classical era. The inherent

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skepticism involved in scientific research itself starts out with the questions first, rather than the other way round a favorable approach to achieving knowledge about anything. Consequently, the Renaissance spirit and its, precisely, questioning attitude towards inherited dogmas reopened a path towards new modes of orientation across the rigid socio-economic limits of feudalism narrower than the gates of Eden and introduced new perspectives on the tools for conviviality (to borrow from a book title issued in the still optimistic and libertarian early 1970s, authored by Ivan Illich), so central for the well being of any thriving culture. Obviously, what appears to be convivial in one corner of the Globe, is useless in another like ice drilling equipment in the Sahara, or, say, war ships within a peaceful Iroquois confederacy in the interior of Northern America. However, the common denominators among the varieties of cultural traits developed by societies and the respective groupings of their members, are extensive the actual extent of which naturally depends on the single individuals occupation(s), needs and faculties. Indeed, without this overlapping very few significant historical developments would be explainable at all unless warfare is all that ever was in human history. As only the utterly corrupted person subscribes to such a misanthropic interpretation of the diverse ventures made during our tenure on this planet, we can conveniently skip that alternative to concentrate on the progressive side of historical logos unless one still may be prepared to contend that we are all living in a dream world an afterlife since there scarcely would have been any one left according to the warlords preferred worldview apart from themselves, who, needless to say, rather abstain from the fighting until all the cannon fodder is used up; and by then theyre so shaking scared that they hardly stand upright. The dream world of ancient battles is long g one furthermore, the ancients were indeed wise enough to regard war as an utterly counterproductive, albeit sometimes unavoidable phenomenon, often with catastrophic outcomes for their entire social and economic infrastructure, to the extent of extinguishing centuries

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of cultural development. The most striking examples is, obviously the Peloponnesian War, described in detail by one of the founders of historical research, Thucydides, who were the last to hail the events. The Roman losses during the three subsequent Punic Wars and the implicated economic repercussions as regards the foot soldiers energies which were supposed to encompass farming as well; the catastrophic defeat of the professionalized legions in the Teutoburgian Forest in the year 9 AD added salt to the open wounds. Taken together, these instances of armed conflict with people from whom they would have drawn more lasting and solid profits by way of trade, finished off the grandiose ancient Roman project. The confederal structures developed on the European continent during the Middle Ages, most notably by the Hanseatic League reaching from Novgorod in the East to Bergen and London in Western Europe largely determined the later developments as regards economic and cultural exchanges, including the ties across national frontiers which connected the recorded members of the Republic of Letters during the Enlightenment from Benjamin Franklin in the American colonies to agricultural scientist Komov in Russia, joined together by the singular efforts made by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond DAlembert in the heartland of Reason in the 18th century.14

Economic Take-Off and Social Progress As regards the Holy Roman Empire, in which the Protestant Reformation reached its fullest expressions and impacts only after the reformer Luther had announced his theses in 1517, and, moreover was smart enough not to put it in a more unveiled jargon cowardly enough to avoid confrontation with powerful regional princes who for their own self-serving purposes saw profits within reach by the utilization of his theological program,

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and additionally provided Luther himself with protection against the Papacy and its power apparatus, which immediately had excommunicated him from the ideologically intolerant and closed circles of the religious community, the overdue imperial structure was in bits and pieces. The regional princes were fighting the emperor as well as each other a socio-economic and military context which, minimally, facilitated opportunities for the deployment of innovating religious notions which could be utilized for the underpinning of the respective earthly powers of the princes albeit not in any leveling or conciliatory sense and their respective positioning towards the emperor. However, first and foremost the abuses of the socially progressive potentialities implied in the revolutionary struggles and their long heritage as described above against an insurgent peasantry becoming more and more infuriated over the conditions under which they had to their work within agriculture as well as within the crafts necessary for their day-to-day living in a medieval economic context, were tangled up with the various revolts of the Medieval era. With the invention of the printing presses from the 1440s onwards, through the introduction of Gutenbergs movable types, came primarily a mass distribution of bibles and occasional other religiously motivated literature at least in the domains which were the most isolated from the Renaissance atmosphere of humanism, scientific research, expansion of trade routes and the consequent civilizing cultural traits pointing the way towards the Enlightenment era in modern European history from the late 17 th century and throughout the 18th. In the harbor cities around the North Sea and into the Baltic Sea the development of the Hanseatic League paved the way for exchange of a vast array of cultural traits, as mentioned above, from highly different societies in the Middle Ages from Novgorod in the East (modern day Russia) to London in the West, and Bergen in the North

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and with its base in the Northern German cities of Lbeck and Rostock. The secular implications of this exchange of cultural contacts simply cut their way through the rigid and religiously founded dividing lines of the entire legacy of the Holy Roman Empire which had long since been disintegrating. Beyond the main area of the Hanseatic League with its confederal structures doing without any centralized authority whatsoever, implying political as well as the main economic issues confronting every social strata of the age there obviously was an expansion and further elaboration of the routes of communication and trade into the more peripheral parts of Europe and even into the strongholds of the feudal organization of socio-economic life, challenging the authority of the church, the clergy, the traditional aristocracies, and even the monarchies which had developed as an effort to solve the incessant strife between all sorts of war lords and other particularistic efforts to take the lead after the decline of the Carolingian empire and its successors in the tradition harking back towards the days of the ancient Roman Empire. The very element of literacy itself and its various fields of employment apart from the non-progressive one of spreading bibles and highly reactionary demonologic literature (including the Maleus Malificarum of the late 15th century), which aimed at singling out certain groups of people for the harshest kinds of repression most notably the witch-hunts which tended to defocus the obvious and elemental tasks of human beings in everyday life completely. The immensely disturbing obsession with the ways and going-about among heretic people and movements would most certainly have aborted the entire effort at reviving European Civilization in the modern era, if allowed to proceed as business as usual.15 When Martin Luther, joining the struggle within the protracted reformation campaigning from the days of Marselius, Wyclif and Hus, to stress the study of the Christian bible as the only way to faith and salvation, this was highly welcomed by urban as well as rural

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populations obviously because they were left in peace and allowed to proceed with their mundane doings without the risk of persecution because of belonging to the wrong ethnic group, practicing the wrong kind of sexuality, harvesting and utilizing the wrong herbs, or doing business with the wrong people, and so on. As the Catholic church and its representatives had a tendency to contempt productive labor notably among the lower social strata in order to reinforce their ideological hold on society in general the road to celebrating the protestant representatives entirely new approach was short among farmers, craftsmen and women, and traders alike, abstracting from the ideological differences between the various spokesmen of the new faith Lutherans as well as Calvinists. The obvious need to get rid of the highly unproductive approach to social and economic life in the wake of the blows and setbacks from the days of the Black Death onwards seemed fairly obvious to the vast majority of people in Europe and beyond. Obviously, the European mainland and the British Isles were from an evolutionary and eco-productive point of view immensely rich in fertile soils, with all that this means for the possibilities of achieving higher cultural forms whatsoever. The Romans had largely gone amok in their craving for the lands of the German tribes and the Celts in France and even headed for the Isles and tried to conquer them, before they found themselves in a two front war at the time of Emperor Hadrian. They were forced to withdraw from the present Scottish border area because of the huge tolls that their hubris ridden expansion involved. Without the immense productivity of the soils in these areas, there would have been very little reason for the Roman conquerors to venture such grandiose military campaigns, after they long since had found themselves in huge economic difficulties on the Italian peninsula and the nearest regions. These difficulties were exactly those which the Gracchis set out to solve with their reform efforts.

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The knowledge and wisdom achieved by the Greeks highly regrettable a bit too late exemplified in the works of Aristotle and Theophrastus regarding the scientific basis for a rational and sustainable agriculture, however, was certainly retained among people here and there in the centuries during the dark ages in the Medieval period. With the new creed exported from the largely devastated Middle East where scarcity produced ascetic ideals to the utmost absurdity, indeed, even to that claim that life here on Earth is only a preliminary step into the real one in Heaven or Hell the ruling powers of the dominating feudal regions in Europe until the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648, literally bathed in the blood of those who dared to reap the riches of Mother Nature, Gaea, according to the ancient Greeks. The persecutions of heretics throughout the centuries after the decline of the Vikings, Huns and the other invading nomadic or trading people in the Merovingian age that is, with the event of the Frankish monarchies in the 8 th century, and the reestablishment of the so-called Holy Roman Empire are so packed with atrocities that one would rather not look at them, even as a historian. However, one crucial event has to be mentioned; and the reasons are at least two: Firstly, the events and its implications point directly towards the French Enlightenment and the Great Revolution of 1789. Secondly, the utterly disproportionate interpretations of them among historians are testimony enough to the truth of Nietzsches preoccupation with the way in which we deal with historical phenomena. The need for feudal lords as well as the monarchies and their justifying clergy to impress the illusions of the ascetic ideal into the minds of the popular masses (peasants, artisans and traders alike), had already proven highly counterproductive for any notion of economic development through the entire European mainland until the so-called economic takeoff from the 11th century onwards. Without understanding the economic causes of the entire Reformation, and its multiple sociopolitical struggles and campaigns the entire transformation of Europe through these centuries becomes inapprehensible, if only

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from a commonsensical point of view. The literacy inherited from the Greco-Roman world was obviously not totally wiped out however much it was abused in favor of theological manipulation and quarreling. After the Black Death in 1349-50, the entire continent and beyond was in complete shackles leaving vast tracts of land simply unproductive because of the enormous loss of people (without which the soils were basically useless for the ruling elites within secular and clerical aristocracies alike) simply necessitated the need for reforming the economic structure. In the interiors of Eastern Europe, which were far less struck by the disease which killed up to of the population in the most densely populated and coastal areas the economic productivity was retained to a far more extensive degree than in the west. If only to retain its hegemony as a cultural sphere as distinguished from the civilization in the East and the invading nomadic people which recurrently flowed into central Europe from the vast areas in modern day Russia and Mongolia, the Western parts of Europe would simply have been conquered and, thus, ended up like the Roman Empire if the region had been unable to attain economic and social progress.

Etienne Marcel, the Jacquerie and the German Peasants War During the hard times in the most immediate years after the Black Death, the events in Paris during the so-called Jacquerie, and so on, massive farmers and artisans revolts against the ruling and privileged classes erupted spontaneously as a reaction against the effort to retain the ideals of asceticism amidst total havoc. The people who had survived the great plague obviously lost much of their faith in the religious creed in the wake of the disasters, and were in a kind of celebrating mood after the immediate sorrows and mourning were digested. In Paris, a tailor and trader in the farmers

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raw produce happened to find himself in short of his needed supplies from the peasants in the surroundings of the stronghold of the repressive monarch, Louis because they were simply hampered by the feudal lords in their efforts to keep up productivity and go on with business as usual; and even with the aim of achieving some progress on their own behalf. The early bourgeois Etienne Marcel who has been depicted as a dictator by historians loyal to the Christian faith was in fact mayor of the city and simply did his duty to assist the artisans and traders within the city in their day-today work, which implied seeing to it that they got the raw materials (linen and so on) from those struggling peasants in the rural surroundings. He became the leader of a revolution that failed or, rather, was simply crushed by the overwhelming military powers of his, his colleagues and the peasants opponents. As if these circumstances were not enough to enrage the toiling people, the elites in France and England had started a more than 100 years long battle among themselves the so-called 100 Years War which actually was drawn out until the middle of the subsequent century. The tolls taken by the knights war efforts (tax increases and so on) became unbearable for the salt of the Earth in this context and it would have been suicidal for them not to try to resist the usurpers and their religiously motivated strife. The universal and timeless logic in these developments have been repeated throughout history; revolution most often follows from excessive warfare at the cost of the toiling poor people. It was the case with the English revolution in the 17 th century after the endless strife with the Spanish imperialists (ending with the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, but only after draining the Isles of its resources); it happened again in France in 1789 in the wake of the so-called first world war the European Seven Years War (1756 63) and the subsequent War of American Independence, draining the treasury of the French monarchy of resources and incurring huge debts; and obviously it led to the revolutions occurring in connection

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with the most well known First World War (1914 -18). The lesson is ancient, and it is only by ignoring the long term perspective involved in these processes, as well as by the nationalist orientation, that the causes and effects are obfuscated. Such an obfuscation often theologically motivated, and simply impossible to attain without it became far more easy for example in England and the German states because of these areas isolation from the Renaissance spirit which had its bases in the Mediterranean region and in the Low Countries first in Italy and then spreading along the coast northwards up the Atlantic coast. The democratic efforts by Marcel and his heroic resisters to the utterly useless feudal economic system involving everything from incessant warfare to the cruelest torture of free thinking people as well as the early democracies in the Low Countries, is intimately connected with these developments. The immediate impact of the Reformation in the Lutheran domains evolved in the German states during the Peasants War of 1524 -25, when the new theses of Luther himself had caused the rural poor to avail themselves of this new opportunity to achieve economic progress and liberation. However, their efforts were highly unwelcome by the traditional aristocracies whether secular or clerical who simply wouldnt accept them, and in their reactionary response managed to enlist Luther himself on their side of the struggle. The tensions between these various social strata in the years between the announcement of Luthers theses in Wurtemberg in 1517, exploding in the violent clashes between them in the above mentioned revolutionary events, came to lay one of the foundations for an entire tradition of direct popular action against usurping (and often idle and useless) ruling strata within modern societies reaching climaxes such as the English Revolution in the 1640s, as well as the American and French Revolutions in the 18 th century and finally being completely messed up in the Russian Revolution of 1917, when a political party (the so-called Bolsheviks headed by the imported figure of V. I. Lenin) took over the entire venture

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launched by the Ukrainian farmers and the Makhnovich movement among the Russian mirs (rural villages).16 The German peasants had been encouraged by the new creed and tried to make use of it in their struggle against their overlords among the landowning aristocracy, who took most of their agricultural produce away from them leaving them to toil in vain and justified their conduct with laws and regulations derived from the totally non-productive Catholic faith. Following the example of the English peasants in 1381, they enjoyed singing the following line while toiling in the fields: When Adam dug and Eve span, who were then a gentleman? In this way they made their own interpretation and use of the holy script to make their stance clear; however, their conditions and point of view found no sympathy in Luther. Quite to the contrary; he authored his work: Against the murderous and robbing peasants, and encouraged the princes to strike the former down with a ruthless hand a gift from the reformator which they certainly made avail of, so that the protestant support for the poor peasants cause and an effort to relieve them from their sufferings had to be offered from other and lesser known intellectuals in this Medieval context, Thomas Mnzer and Friedrich Pfeiffer. As always, the support in favor of the downtrodden and largely unarmed among the population takes some courage and often involves high risks against the lives and wellbeing of the sympathizers and the fates of these heroic figures are testimonies to this general rule to an utmost degree. These two benefactors were far more closely linked to the Calvinist version of the Protestant Reformation, which included the secular elements of these revolutionary struggles to quite another extent than the Lutheran did, often implying direct confrontations with earthly authorities. As we have had time to recognize, Luther was incessantly stressing the obligation to remain obedient to the government whatever it may be or do. Obviously, such a position would eventually lead into the most cruel of all rulers if followed

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all the way, which it certainly did in the end with the Nazi government and its display of any kind of abuse and atrocity one could ever possibly dream of in the worst of nightmares, from experimentations with the health of political prisoners all the way to the regular slaughtering of the Jews in the Holocaust inferno. All of it justified in the name of their god and their view of religion. The Wars of Religion which raged in the Holy Roman Empire, and subsequently also in France, necessarily tended to exclude any opportunity for social and economic progress, until the first breakthrough was achieved with the peace of Augsburg in 1555. According to the contract achieved in this settlement of the counterproductive religious strife, the respective prince was entitled to determine the religious faith of his respective domain resulting in the large number of protestant states in the North and along the Baltic Sea and the entire Nordic region. In the South, Bavaria was declared Catholic and joined in an alliance with the emperor, who retained his catholic beliefs. Emperor Karl V abdicated a year after the conclusion of peace and spent the rest of his life in a monastery, and handed over the ruling seat to his son, Philip II, who came to head the counter-reformation from his base on the Iberian Peninsula; counter-revolutionary efforts which he came to proceed with in companionship with the former emperors brother, Ferdinand. In France there were devastating strife and endless bloodshed in the French Calvinists the Huguenots struggle to achieve the most basic social foundations for economic progress against the royal powers. Their cause was supported by wide segments of the rural as well as the urban populations, and there has been estimates that as many as 1/3 to of the French nobility were Huguenots hence, they obviously represented an immense threat against the monarchy, not least because of their demands for independence. The most fundamentalist among them even advocated the case for theocracy. As a religious grouping the Huguenots were collectively branded as

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heretics and brutally persecuted in the period 1560-90 a result of which was a mass emigration, most notably into regions belonging to the Netherlands where the religious climate was marked by a greater degree of tolerance. This influx of Protestants into the economically progressing North-Western European region implied a reinforcement of its defensive struggle against the repeated attacks from the Spanish rulers and their fleet in the imperialist efforts to subdue the Dutch provinces and force the entire population to accept the Catholic faith. Consequently, the Protestant Reformation and the succeeding Wars of Religion led to an irrevocable schism within the religious camps of Western Europe. The German states split into the two camps of Protestantism in the Lutheran vein and Catholicism, which were the only ones allowed. In the other European countries there were established national churches such as the Anglican in England, the Presbyterian in Scotland and the Catholic in France and Spain. In the Flemish region there was an effort to achieve as high degree as possible of religious tolerance, which contributed strongly to the development of Hollands strong economic position in the 17 th century, because of the simple fact that people could concentrate themselves freely on secular issues and productive labor rather than waste their energies on internal religious strife even to the extent of mutually destructive warfare.

Into the Modern Era As regards the very Christian faith and the institutional structure of the new protestant churches which came to be established, these developments were marked by the fact that the monasteries disappeared (or, rather, were overtaken by secular agents), and with this Europe was divested of the cult of the saints, the pilgrimages, the masses for the dead, and most importantly the letters of indulgence

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and which incidentally annulled the entire classical Greek way of dealing with politics and ethical consideration, and which Montesquieu toiled all his life in his efforts to find any new basis for in the early stages of the Enlightenment era; notably the very minimum essentials implied in any meaningful conception of democracy the motivation and will in the individual to follow a track in the direction of the classic ideals of civic virtue (with all that this necessarily entails when it comes to ethical consideration). The simple replacement of these letters which basically entitled anyone with the required amount of money/riches to act at his/her will without taking into account the consequences of their conduct with the protestant confession, certainly proved completely useless for the montesquieuan project as even the monetary license was abolished; form then on everyone (with or without economic means) were free from ethical consideration if they chose to. The age after virtue was heralded.17 The license among the clergy and aristocracy to ignore or even magnify the sufferings of their suppliers with the basic means of subsistence, is by itself a sufficient explanation of the outbursts among the third estate in France in 1789 and the years leading to the revolutionary turmoil when the reforming efforts in the economic sphere by men of Reason like Francois Quesnay and Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot were turned down by the very deniers of the principle of civic virtue the monarchists, the clergy and their secular profiteers among the aristocracy. To illustrate the socio-economic context prevailing in the decades leading up the Revolution, and the toil conducted by these men of Reason during the Enlightenment to address the dead end injustices permeating 18th century society on the European continent at large, a quote from Turgots Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Riches will suffice to explain the rage among the poor when their spokesmens efforts were turned down by the ancien rgime of Louis XVI and his allies at home and abroad:

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The Husbandman is the only person whose labour produces something over and above the wages of the labour. He is therefore the sole source of all wealth.[] The land pays him directly the price of his labour, independently of any other man or any agreement. Nature does not bargain with him to oblige him to content himself with what is absolutely necessary. What she grants is proportioned neither to his wants, nor to a contractual valuation of the price of his days of labour. It is the result of the fertility of the soil, and of the wisdom, far more than of the laboriousness, of the means which he has employed to render it fertile. As soon as the labour of the Husbandman produces more than his wants, he can, with this superfluity that nature accords him as a pure gift, over and above the wages of his toil, buy the labour of the other members of society. The latter, in selling to him, gain only their livelihood [italics added. A. H.] but the Husbandman gathers, beyond his subsistence, a wealth which is independent and disposable, which he has not bought and which he sells. He is, therefore, the sole source of the riches, which by their circulation, animate all the labours of the society; because he is the only one whose labour produces over and above the wages of the labour.18 This essential message of the so-called physiocrats, who were actually laying down the foundations of laissez faire as an economic principle to replace the rigid mercantilism and its reactionary upholders within courts and among lawmakers, was simply denied by the rulers and idle classes only to be abused by the imperialistically oriented appropriation of their ideas and labors through the penning and subsequent mass spreading of the famous Wealth of Nations, in which the former moral philosopher, Adam Smith, included the war profits drawn by the British in their military victory over the French in 1763 as a natural building block of political economy along with speculation and deceit. 19

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As regards the subsequent avail of the printing presses during the Protestant Reformation, the spread of bibles in the respective national languages and the demonologists willing and able support of the these ventures obviously didnt represent the kind of progress hoped for by the working poor in all corners of Europe, as the witch-hunts and persecution of single minded individuals literally made focus on basic economic and social issues impossible to an overwhelming extent. The enforcement of unfounded patriarchy into the very oikos sphere, depriving the already down-and-out women of their domain as prescribed by nature of the last vestiges of their social (and consequently, political, power) an inherent flaw in the religious scripts themselves simply made the subsequent enlightening efforts in the 18th century almost impossible from the outset.20 Among the ancient Greeks, in their founding of the very democratic tradition, this basic principle found expression in the largely self-evident mandates given from the oikos to the politikos sphere, and their efforts to reduce the labors implied in their politically coordinating efforts of the whole economic structure in the ecclesia (public assembly) attended by the male representatives of their poleis. The ancient Greek polis was not a state and neither simply a city, in our modern sense of the term; quite to the contrary, it consisted in the agora centre as well as the surrounding farm lands which were the home of the vast majority of their citizens. These facts alone go a long way to explain the utterly incongruent perceptions of the very concepts of politics and economy among the founders of our, largely spoilt, civilization and the war is profitable-thing, worshiped into absurdity by their abusers throughout the ages.21 Every lasting civilization in recorded history acknowledged the necessities of keeping the records, conserving the soils, and operating in the day-to-day workings in the economic sphere from long term time perspectives all of which are elements that have largely been abolished from our failed, industrial one.

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Among the Enlightenment philosophes the recovery of the universal truths was a main focus, from Montesquieus familiarizing with the legacies of ancient Asian civilizations, the physiocrats universalist economic principles and Chateubriands interest in the aborigines cultures on the Northern American continent an approach which permeated the entire venture of Diderot and DAlembert in their gathering and free distribution of the knowledge accumulated by humanity within the sciences, agriculture, crafts and industries by the second half of the 18th century in the great Lencyclopdie. As the note from the English translator of Quesnays kind and benevolent offer to people all around the globe, in the Tableu Economique illustrates: To the farmers of England, this translation, undertaken chiefly with a view of setting the superior use and advantages of agriculture to their country in a clear light, as the original was to prove the absolute necessity of it to France, is most respectfully dedicated by the translator.22 The thank you so much from the British imperialists was a World War dragging out for some seven years, and making headway for a steady destruction of an entire civilization and consequently, immense threats against the entire webs of life in the ecosystems making up the biosphere and its atmosphere evolved through millions and billions of years on this planet. As the scholar of the Medieval mindset(s), Frederick B. Artz, summed up with respect to the turmoil plaguing Europe, until the appearance of the Enlightenment, in his The Mind of the Middle Ages: The last Mediaeval century, the fifteenth, saw the end of the Hundred Years War, and strong monarchy limited in England but absolute in France becoming the pattern of the future. The papacy, having weathered the Babylonish Captivity and the Conciliar

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Movement, was back in Rome enjoying a sort of Indian summer before the storm of the Protestant Reformation. Everywhere the middle class was willing to defy church and state authorities and the nobility to extend its political and economic rights. 23 Thus, the foundation was laid for the modern era and its complex developments, political conflicts, intellectual ventures and general efforts to restore the basis of a civilization which had languished in barbarism for more than a millennium only interspersed by glimpses of light and hope here and there, soon to be quelled by the upholders of irrationality and injustice whether secular or clerical.

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Chapter III

Tolerance, Progress and the Legacy of the Enlightenment

LOOKING back on the overall long lines in European history one may often come to pose the question whether the developments occurred have involved real and substantial progress for humanity. High cultures like ancient Athens, with their direct and participatory democracy and exquisite civic virtue among their citizens, have been superseded by the brutal and restraining social structures and mentality of feudalism. Self-governed and egalitarian city confederacies have been replaced by centralized State-power and swollen, faceless bureaucracies. In todays situation, with tendencies such as a blossoming new religiosity, religious fundamentalism and intolerance, and global ecological systems completely out of order, it is becoming increasingly popular to question the very concept of progress itself. In the 18th century, on the contrary, when the foundation was laid down for modernity in western history, the importance of religious tolerance which substantially and logically limits religion to the strictly personal sphere and belief in progress ranked high on the agenda; a combined focus intimately interconnected and consciously fostered because of the energy released into economic activities and participation in secular public affairs by increasing numbers of people among the populations in the Western world (defined as the continents circumventing the North Atlantic) the cradle of modern conceptions of democracy.

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Religious Conflict and Debate After the Thirty Years War came to a conclusion with The Peace of Westphalia in 1648, religious issues ceased to be a source of conflict between European states. Ever since the Reformation, the conflict between the catholic orthodoxy and the new credo which resulted from Martin Luthers theses in the beginning of the 16 th century had made a strong mark on European countries, in feuds between them as well as within each respective country. Strong dissenter movements had been a rich source of social unrest and even revolution; more specifically in England in the 1640s, where the political end result was the establishment of republican rule under Oliver Cromwells leadership. Certainly, highly enl ightened and libertarian ideas were espoused during the English revolution in the 1640s, by the radical dissenters Gerrard Winstanley and John Lilburne, belonging to the so-called Levellers who aimed to do away with land accumulation and social injustices in general during this first of modern revolutions. Indeed, in the magnificently encouraging words of Winstanley himself: When a man hath meat, and drink, and clothes, he hath enough. And all shall cheerfully put to their hands to make these things that are needful, one helping another. There shall be none lords over others, but everyone shall be a lord of himself, subject to the law of righteousness, reason and equity, which shall dwell and rule in him, which is the Lord1a A generation later on England experienced yet another revolution the so-called Glorious Revolution in 1688, and the year after that, drew up their Toleration Act. The English authorities sought to put an end to the internal social conflicts spurred by diverging religious views by proclaiming religious tolerance. Philosophers like John Locke (1632-1704) in England and Voltaire (1694-1778) in France were strong and central voices on behalf of the new attitude towards religion and they addressed the authorities traditional desire and

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ability to enforce an unitary and conformist religious creed on every citizen, and argued for individual choice along rational and conscientious lines as far as religious faith was concerned. From such a stance, the road would prove short to a materialistic and largely atheistic outlook, as John Herman Randall has shown in his The Making of the Modern Mind. It has been contended from several sides, among them Johann Pezzl, that religious issues were a central theme in the Enlightenment era as well, equalling their position in the previous centuries. In view of this it follows that the problems relating to tolerance and its limits, as well as censorship, would also attract veritable attention. The growing materialism and to a large extent, atheism, expounded by philosophers like La Mettrie (1709-51) and DHolbach (1723-89) was largely posed against a religious stance, and it grew out of the preceding and parallel deistic movement, such as favoured by Newton (1642-1727) a few decades earlier. In her recent work, The Enlightenment, Dorinda Outram quoted historian Peter Grays view that the Enlightenment represents the growth of modern heathendom. During this era, though, the tendency was to relax focus on religious issues in favour of ever more rationalistic views, such as manifested in the French Encyclopdie, which was published in several volumes between 1751 and 1772. The issue of witchcraft, which had been a matter of great concern for high and low since the Reformation era, was desiccated in the early stages of the Enlightenment era, most notably by the Dutchman, Balthasar Bekker (1634-98), most notably in his work, The World Bewitched (1691). Bekker, though a pastor, was accused of atheism, but left in peace in the tolerant United Dutch Provinces, and his book was an important ignition of the critical Enlightenment spirit, along with the works of Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) in France and Lockes pupil, Lord Ashley Shaftesbury (1671-1713) in England

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all of whom contributed to paving the way for the principle of civic virtue in modern Europe. From the religious debates the issue of tolerance raised its head, and it was as argued by Outram originally a religious idea. The regimes actually in power throughout Europe in the seventeenth century, with their absolutist rule, had been ideologically founded on the idea that the regent was gods substitute on Earth, surrounded by the clergy and its religious orthodoxy. The dissenter movements which had haunted protestant as well as catholic countries for several centuries, had even threatened secular monarchical rule over the people. Hence the authorities had persecuted these movements with every means at their disposal. In time, though, it was generally understood that these internal religious and political conflicts proved counterproductive for the respective countrys economy. Holland was an obvious example: It was probably mainly because of this internal tranquillity between citizens of various religious beliefs that the Dutch economy prospered to the extent where it became the leading one in 17th century Europe. People of diverging religious views were united in their urge for prosperity and economic progress, which resulted in a tremendous economic growth and may well have been considered as an example to follow by England when the Toleration Act was declared in this country in 1689. John Lockes Essay on Toleration was written in defence of the Toleration Act, and was followed up by a corresponding work written by Voltaire in France, where the principle of tolerance faired worse in the hands of the authorities. This led Voltaire as well as Montesquieu (1689-1755) to embrace the English constitution as a kind of ideal to which other other countries aspire as far as government, tolerance and freedom of expression was concerned. Pierre Bayle, for his part, argued that there is no truth sure enough to validate persecution, and in his Philosophical Comments (1686) refused to bow to any other criteria of truth than reason. As early as

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the 1640s John Milton had argued vehemently for freedom of conscience and expression, and his writings came to prominence during the Enlightenment era.

Philosophes and Salons In France, Diderot (1713-84) the co-editor of the Encyclopdie, as well as Voltaire, were imprisoned several times in the infamous Bastille-tower, for their writings a fact that illustrated the far more barren soil in this country (compared to its neighbour across the channel) as far as freedom of expression was concerned. In Prussia, on the other hand, Frederick the Great introduced a high degree of religious tolerance, as contrasted to Maria Theresas Austrian/Hungarian empire. As noted by John Herman Randall the Enlightenment was ready to tolerate religious dissent, but not political, and to this day governments have drawn the line at this point. 1b Diderot, who in his Philosophical Thoughts written in the 1740s contended that scepticism was the first step towards truth, witnessed this book being burned by the authorities. In this work he also denies the revelations and the miracles of the church, although he retains his faith in Catholicism. It was only at a later stage that he moves towards deism and materialism, and thus regards his life as a wandering of a sceptic. 2 In the subsequent decades, Diderot argues in favour of so-called natural religion, and contends that all of the world religions are but results of this kind of religion. He even defends materialism and atheism, which as mentioned above caused his imprisonment in 1749. In commenting on his own persecution and the governments intolerance and censorship generally he uttered that happy is the age when the rulers of the world acknowledges that their security consists in governing enlightened people. Diderot

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attacked prejudices of every kind and regarded them as the cause of every war. For his early writings Voltaire was imprisoned for 11 months in the Bastille. Like Kant a few decades later on he was a spokesman for free thinking and admired England for her religious freedom, tolerance of a diversity of ideas, embrace of scientific research, relative freedom of the press and respect for literary men and women.3 Voltaire also admired Frederick the great who was his host during longer stays in Prussia, and who himself was a literary man and wanted to be reckoned among the philosophes for his support to art and science, his lacking servility towards religious dogmas, tolerance towards every kind of religious beliefs and so on. In Prussia under the regency of Frederick the great emphasis was placed upon the socially useful, that is to say a utilitarian approach to philosophy and science, in the vein that Jeremy Bentham (17481832) was to articulate later on. Meanwhile Roger Williams in England expressed the view that the state is a purely secular power and should have no judicial power over any religious faith or congregation. This view would become prevalent within the rationalistic clergy in the 18th century, with its focus on Christian morality as the most essential content of the biblical scripts, before this attitude again came under attack from new pietistic tendencies towards the end of the century. In several European countries throughout the 18 th century with England as an important exception a strict and complex censorship was upheld in regards to the written word, although the grip was loosened to a certain extent towards the end of the century. The French Encyclopdie, edited by dAlembert (1717-83) and Diderot, was also among the victims of this censorship in its earlier publication stages. The authorities held the opinion that the public should be protected against harmful ideas. After 1750 authors were to a lesser and lesser degree victims of the censorship, but this did

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not prevent Diderot and others from expressing their social, religious and political views in the form of the novel instead of explicit nonfictional pamphlets as is natural in the western world today. As for Diderot and his colleagues, it would seem appropriate to compare their situation with that of Russia in the 19th century, when prominent authors like Tolstoi and Turgenev, faced with the czarist censorship, found it necessary to camouflage their political and social views in novels. As an illustration of the lessening of the censorship in France towards the final decades of the 18th century, the French monarchy in 1787 issued decrees which allowed limited tolerance and somewhat better conditions for Protestants in that country. Rousseau (1712-78) was probably the most complex and contradictory among the Enlightenments philosophes. He remained faithful towards his religiosity and believed in a god of love and beauty, and in his very special way paved the way for tolerance even as he suffered condemnation in catholic France as well as in Geneva and thus came to find himself stuck between a rock and a hard place. The editors of the Encyclopdie cooperated closely on the publication of this work until 1759, when the whole work was examined by nine censors investigation. Following this process dAlembert chose to resign from the struggle for freedom of expression and handed this task over to Diderot. The Encyclopdie was thoroughly marked by a sceptical, rational and scientific outlook; in its protracted publishing process Diderot befriended Rousseau for a while, but the two philosophers were to later sharply disagree, as Rousseaus anti-civilization stance became more and more manifest. All of the aforementioned philosophers belonged to the cosmopolitan Republic of Letters, a kind of authors community across nationalities, even though Paris was their recognized centre. With his slogan Ecrasez linfame Voltaire came

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to defend the case against intolerance most vehemently and argued for the so-called natural religion and natural morality. His wor k under the same title also represented a critique of organized religion, and he contended that the religious aspects of life belonged to the private sphere. He was a strong supporter of the cause that aimed to separate church and state; hence his views are highly relevant today for the ongoing debate with respect to state churches as they exist to this very day, and which still infuriates so many humanists in various countries. The penetration of Enlightenment ideals, and visions for a universalistic development within European civilization, into the vast areas of Eastern Europe and Russia during the 18 th century, largely conducted by Denis Diderots familiarizing with the Russians and empress, Catherine the Great, made headway for huge potentialities in the direction of social and economic progress. However, the repressive tsarist regime turned out to warp the entire immense efforts made by the Encyclopaedie editor in his travels to Russia, by the empress Catherina herself in the regimes utterly cruel treatment of political opponents. The major event which caused this undermining of the universalizing promises was the so-called Pugachev Rebellion in the eastern regions of the vast empire. The peasant Pugachev simply claimed to be the emperor without any other objective than to raise hell among the oppressed and poor peasantry within the Russian empire, only to be quartered by the Russian authorities after the rebellion was crushed by way of treason from one of his allies. The events are portrayed in detail by the great Russian poet, historian and prominent liberal, Alexander Pushkin, in his History of the Pugachev Rebellion.4a One of the obvious preconditions for the debates between the Enlightenment philosophers, the clergy and the authorities in general could reach out and spur interest among the 18 th century public, was the great number of salons, or discussion forums, which was

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established throughout France and particularly in Paris. It was more often than not women who took the initiatives in establishing these forums in their own homes and in this way got involved in the public debates as well. The salons hosted many philosophes, that is to say, people who met any subject with a critical and investigative mind. Among these were in fact women themselves, such as Emilie du Chatelet, who translated the works of Newton and wrote her own scientific essays. These philosophes wrote generally for the public and were, apart for the better known philosophers, also represented by a large number of lesser known writers and journalists, who benefited from the fact that an ever increasing number of the French public had become literate citizens. From the outset the salons had been directed towards the nobility, but during the process the new middle classes including the artisans were welcomed in their discussions. Among the social classes, the peasantry was almost singularly absent from them and thus lagged behind in the general intellectual development and continued to cling to more archaic and conservative attitudes towards social and political issues, religion and morality. However, by and large the importance of the public sphere generated by the salons was a crucial element in regards to the spread of new ideas and insights which had originated with the philosophical orientation of the 18th century; they represented something quite innovative and modern in European society. 4b In the Renaissance, on the other hand, various social strata were largely isolated from acquiring an understanding of new scientific and philosophical ideas. Many of the 18th century salons even survived after the ill-fated French Revolution, and women like Sophie Condorcet the widow of the philosopher maintained her salon after her husbands death and strived to reach out to the public with the liberal and radical ideas inherited from a century of Enlightenment.

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Censorship versus Tolerance Regarding the authorities position in the various European countries, they disagreed overwhelmingly with respect to how far tolerance should be allowed and accordingly on the extent of censorship in the public sphere. As already mentioned, England was among the most liberal countries in these respects and allowed a high degree of freedom of expression, followed by Prussia under Frederick the great. France retained a middle position and tried to balance between the respect for the new ideas of its own famous thinkers on the one hand, and its basis in orthodox Catholicism on the other. The Austrian/Hungarian empire under Maria Theresa rejected the idea of religious tolerance altogether, with this stance only moderated when Joseph II ascended the throne, giving way to carefully administered principles of tolerance. As for Scandinavia, the case is illustrated by the fate of cabinet minister Struensee, who was sentenced to death primarily for two reasons. Apart from the fact that he had insulted the monarchy by becoming the queens lover after the King suffered from mental illness, in 1770-72 he also introduced progressive liberal reforms and abolished censorship reforms that affronted the ruling elites in the Danish kingdom. To what extent his execution was a result of insulting the King or due to these liberal reforms is an open question; nevertheless, it illustrates the heated debates that occurred all over Europe with respect to the Enlightenment philosophers struggle for freedom of speech and a liberal society. The ideas manifested in this struggle were to prove quite irresistible for governments throughout Europe in the long run, and they tried one after the other to incorporate the new ideas in their own state policies, especially in regards to the rationalization and efficiency of the state administrations and economic life. In this period in the latter half of the 18th century they abandoned the old mercantilist economics which had dominated the scene for a century or two, and moved in a liberalistic direction, following the ideas of the so-called physiocrats, Quesnay and Turgot, and finally the liberal

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economics of Adam Smith as expressed in his famous work, The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776 and representing the greatest cannibalism on the human spirit ever, destroying the very principle of laissez faire as developed by the French Enlightenment philosophes and economic reformers, Francois Quesnay and AnneRobert Jascques Turgot. The two camps within economic liberalism split during the European Seven Years War (1756 -63), and the subsequent claim of victory from the British Empire destroyed the promise of free trade and, to a large extent, subverted the Western adherence to Reason. The inclusion of warfare, secrecy and speculation included in Smiths version could not have been further from the minds of the two above mentioned Frenchmen. 4c

Towards the end of the 18th century women finally tended to become more visible in the public debates. In the early 1790s, Olympes de Gouges in France and Mary Wollstonecraft in England wrote their works on womens rights, with Wollstonecrafts A Vindication of the Rights of Women being the most well known in posterity. In this work Wollstonecraft criticizes the ill-founded exclusion of one half of humanity from political life, and contends convincingly that it is due to the uneven socialization processes of young men and women that the latter were excluded from participating as England lacked the great extent of the salons in France in the public sphere, which was a foundation of life as political beings. Wollstonecraft could point to the fact that women who had managed to break these barriers were not lagging behind men in any way with respect to their grasp of fundamental social, religious, scientific and political issues. She also undertook a journey to Scandinavia where she discovered a society where women had acquired a fairly advanc ed social position compared to many other European countries (including her home country). Mary Wollstonecraft lived in a reciprocally stimulating relationship with political philosopher,

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William Godwin, who produced such classical works in European radical thought as The Enquirer (on libertarian pedagogy) and Enquiry concerning Political Justice. The issue of womens role in society received on a par with the slavery issue wide attention during the Enlightenment debates, where, at times, philosophers such as Voltaire and Rousseau were at loggerheads. The latter represented a more traditional view of womens role; indeed, he expressed the view that womens place was in the family home as mothers, nurses and lovers and he strongly disliked their part in the lively discussions conducted in the salons. G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) considered the Enlightenment to be a continuation of the Reformation in the 16 th century, with their respective focuses on the critically minded individual as well as on social secularization processes. For Hegel and many others the issue at stake was how far tolerance was to be allowed: He expressed his worries that the spiritual aspects of human life would be lost in this process. However, though Hegel distanced himself from the sentimental nationalism of his romanticist contemporaries, he hardly escaped succumbing to the dismal consequences of the way in which the Napoleonic imperialist craze had ravaged Europe. By the time he produced his major works, the universalist Republic of Letters was long gone and the continent was moving rapidly in a direction as far as social and political organization is concerned which stands sharply at odds with the ideals of the Enlightenment more specifically a Europe consisting of a confederacy of autonomous albeit interdependent cultural regions. The dichotomies and ambiguities riddling European history and civilization throughout the 19th century necessarily left their mark even on the presumably universalist thought of G. W. F. Hegel, who for some reason or other found it necessary to hail the Prussian army as well as Napoleon Bonaparte as noble expressions of the Weltgeist, later to play into the subconscious of indoctrinated soldiers on both side of the border in catastrophic outcomes of crucial turning points in

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history such as the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871, following the Franco-Prussian war. The impotence among intellectuals whether German or French regarding the urgent need to take a resolute stance against the imperialist ambitions of Bismarck as well as Napoleon III, and to promote the case for reason and freedom fought bravely, though against all odds, by the Parisian communards, wreaked havoc on confederal and universalist ideals in Europe and left the continent sliding into World War I. Regarding the ambiguities of Hegels philosophy, Herbert Marcuses Reason & Revolution presents a highly readable analysis and elucidates the way in which the German philosophers theories subsequently were subscribed to by the politically far right as well as by the traditional Left most notably represented in Karl Marx and his inversed Hegelian dialectic; the so-called historical or dialectical materialism, with all its pre-determination rubbish.5 As regards the continuum between Hegels and Marxs panaceas for the perfect society; e.g. history as well as the future reduced to mathematical games, Sidney Hook presented an in-depth analysis in his 1950publication; From Hegel to Marx. As pointed out by Hook, for Marx all history is the progressive modification of human nature6 a contention which essentially represents a positivist stance and, hence, precludes direly needed efforts at critical evaluation of social, economic and political developments, as well as dooms human beings to repeat yesterdays mistakes however veiled and transformed due to the specific historical contexts and circumstances they may be. This stance of Hegel as well as Marx illustrates clearly the extent to which the Enlightenment orientation as represented at its best by the critical spirits of a Montesquieu, a Franklin and a Diderot had vanished by the early decades of the 19 th century. Thomas Paine (1737-1809) put it this way in the introduction to his work, The Age of Reason: Every man [has the right] to his opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion,

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because he precludes himself the right of changing it. 7 Quite contrary to the nationalist myopia and prejudices of Hegel and the Hegelians (including Marx, all his internationalist rhetoric aside), the singularly humanistic universalism of the Enlightenment era was represented by the artisan, inventor and revolutionary soldier and philosopher, Paine nationless, poor and destitute. From his experiences drawn in both the American and the French revolution as the Enlightenment reached its apex, he took an uncompromising stance against slavery and advocated social justice on the basis of an equitable distribution of the total produce within agrarian societies. The existential price he had to pay was a funeral attended by a handful of people and an aftermath as a dirty little atheist. These minute facts alone go a long way in illustrating the downward spiral embarked on at that time by the entire Western Civilization. In summary, there is every reason to contend that the issue of tolerance pervaded 18th century society at all levels, from the royalty to the artisans and peasantry and even the slaves at the bottom of the social hierarchy. The issue forced its way into the public debates as a result of the great scientific discoveries which had been made in the previous century, and the new ideas represented an irresistible wave for the search of knowledge and insight. They were to a certain extent more powerful than a massive and armed force of rebellious social elements, and in time constituted a decisive precondition for The French Revolution to occur in the way that it did, with its emphasis on written constitutions side by side with the more traditional and violent revolutionary ingredients. Frederick Copleston described the Enlightenments destructive criticism of religion, and to some extent of social and political affairs, for its negative side, while the positive aspect consisted in the attempt to understand the world and especially man himself in his psychological, moral and social life. 8

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The Idea of Progress The belief in progress was also clearly expressed among the philosophes of the Enlightenment, even to a certain extent by the most critical of civilization, Rousseau, in a certain way which will be commented on below. In general, the philosophers of the 18 th century strongly believed in progress, influenced as they were by Newton and Locke and the previous centurys scientific achievements. They wanted to expand humanitys insight from the natural sciences to men and womens social, political and moral life, focussing on the observation of data, actual social phenomena and developmental traits. For instance the co-editors of the Encyclopdie, dAlembert and Diderot, held that progress could pretty well be taken for granted, in the sense that intellectual enlightenment would bring with it social and moral progress. 9 As they appear in the Encyclopdie, the ideas of the Enlightenment are in several ways very complex and partly inconsistent. Anything else would have appeared strange when one takes into account the many diverse authors who contributed to its volumes over the years. What the majority among them held in common, however with an obvious exception in Rousseaus writings was a general belief in progress, reason, science and civilization. According to Randall, reason and science paved the way for a veritable millennium where Locke, Helvetius (1715-1771) and Bentham (1748-1832) prepared the ground for adherence to the idea of human perfectibility.10 It remained a strong belief that the whole of humanity would take part in the same progress. As indicated above, the general background for this strong belief in progress was the scientific and intellectual revolution which occurred in the 17th century, when Bacon, Descartes, Bayle, Spinoza, and above all Locke and Newton had paved the way for a new and modern insight into the physical laws of nature, humanitys ability to achieve knowledge of these, as well as social and moral issues. In time, one had come to the conclusion that the conditions of humanity

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did improve over time at least this was the opinion held among the so-called moderns in their dispute with their intellectual opponents, the ancients, who clung to the traditional view that the ideals of the Ancient world could never be surpassed. After 1700, the idea of progress becomes more and more explicit, and the monarchies of Europe are to various degrees compelled to incorporate this view in their respective hegemony, the result being the so-called enlightened absolutism. Until then, state power had to a large extent been founded on the conception of the monarch as a kind of substitute for god on Earth, and their orientation had been of a religious and retrospective character. During the 18 th century these governments were forced to acknowledge and make use of the new ideas which inundated Western society, and thinkers like Voltaire and Diderot became welcome guests at the various courts of Europe, more precisely in Prussia and Russia. It was the State that was considered as the main agent of progress, and a well ordered government was considered the best guarantee for social welfare. However, it was universalism not nationalism which dominated the public debates. The emphasis was put on the unity of humanity and toned down, or sought to explain away, differences between various peoples and nationalities, though in time France would prove to be the main centre of the Enlightenment. Many people around 1700 adhered to the moderns. At this stage, witchcraft faded away and everything supernatural was relegated to a diffuse role. People no longer feared either god or the devil. Rather, god became a kind of first cause of the universe, and this universe was then discovered by reason, through the empirical research conducted in natural science. Symptomatically, the watchmaker became a symbol of the deity. Ernst Cassirer has contended that, in this Age, knowledge of humanitys own activity, intellectual selfinvestigation and foresight represented the proper function and task of thought. In his classical work on the Enlightenment Cassirer

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contends further that maybe no other century was so thoroughly pervaded by the idea of intellectual progress as the century of the Enlightenment. 11 However, the elevation of Reason was confronted with ardent opponents during the 18th century. Edward Gibbons critical evaluation of Christianity in his The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, aroused strong reactions among the clergy as well as lay people. In time, counter-tendencies and movements like Methodism in England, Jansenism in the Latin countries, and pietism in Prussia and Scandinavia appeared on the social scene. Debates raged on gods place in the world, and many people adhered to the so-called deism, according to which the deity was understood as a kind of omnipotent intelligence, and the primary task of science was to reveal the laws of nature created by this watchmaker-kind-ofgod. The clerical reaction, however, was not strong enough to subdue the veritable flood of philosophical and scientific literature published during the 18th century. Many people eventually adhered to the view that religion was an identified enemy of progress. This faith in progress was a quite innovative tendency and differed diametrically from the traditional belief in a so-called lost, golden Age, as for instance the Renaissance had presented the Ancient world as an ideal which, in the best of cases, only could be copied. In the midst of this struggle for progress toiled the contributors to the French Encyclopdie and the very raison detre for its publication was exactly the notion of humanitys potential for making social, economical and cultural progress. One of its editors, Diderot, was a declared enemy of tradition, and his project included visiting the artisans workshops and acquired first -hand insight into their production techniques, which he then scrupulously presented in his articles. Thus, according to Edouard Herriots biography, Diderot in this way accumulated a profound understanding of the role of

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industrial technology in modern society and in a future society. 12 His co-editor followed suit to conclude that close to no-one knows the names of these benefactors of humanity (the inventors), while almost no-one is ignorant of its spoilers, i.e. the conquerors. Accordingly, the importance of the artisans labour i n contributing to the welfare of society, in general, was aggrandized to an unprecedented extent: They were honoured in a way that goes a long way to explain their prominent position in the French revolutionary events in the early 1790s, especially in Par is which had already for some time been a centre of progressive, enlightened ideas about political structure and economic productivity. Diderot drew substantial inspiration from Francis Bacons works in the late 16 th and early 17th century, and put forward a kind of premature Taylorism, i.e. division of labour and industrialism as means to make human production more rational and efficient albeit without the crippling alienation adhering to post-napoleonic economies, which generally proved to reintroduce slavery on a mass scale through wage labor and industrial specialization even to the extent of exploiting children as chimney sweepers and, thus, threatening the very notion of progress itself. According to Palmer, Colton and Kramers massive introduction to world history the Encyclopdie represented an important contribution to the notion of social progress, albeit with such diverse contributors as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, dAlembert, Buffon (1707-88), Turgot (1727-81) and Quesnay (1694-1774) taking the lead.13 Even many people belonging to the clergy and the nobility bought and read this comprehensive work, despite the authorities suppression in the early stages of its publication. In regards to the views concerning social life and its political institutions many philosophes elevated the English constitution as an example to be followed by other European states. Montesquieu, for example, envisaged that the French state may move forward in the

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direction staked out by the English, and in his major work (which, in his own words, nearly killed him), The Spirit of the Laws, he elaborated extensively on the preconditions for freedom under republican, monarchical and despotic rule respectively. His preferences tended towards the former. Voltaire, on the contrary, could hardly be termed a democrat as he was much more concerned with freedom of expression for people like himself than of political freedom for the public in general. Rousseau, who as a consequence of critique of civilization came to be fairly isolated in these disputes, may still be regarded as a kind of radical democrat as far as he envisaged a kind of progressive, direct democracy. In a passage in The Social Contract he argues that sovereignty cannot be represented as any way similar to processes that we encounter in modern conceptions of representative democracy and the election of professional politicians who are beyond recall and independent of bounded mandates from the electorate.14 More precisely in relation to the public, such ideas also came to the fore during certain phases of The Great French Revolution, more in which direct democratic assemblies were developed at the grassroots level of the Parisian sections in 1792. However, the majority among the philosophers of the Enlightenment were closest to Voltaires position, and were prepared to sacrifice political freedom in favour of intellectual freedom. The so-called Physiocrats, among them Quesnay and Turgot, eventually entered the political scene with their new economic theories and reform efforts. Turgot, who was also a positivist philosopher and contributor to the Encyclopdie, contented that humanity as distinguished from other animals has a capacity to achieve progress through its history, in the sense that one generations achievements is widened and deepened by the next one, and that this progress is going through three stages; the religious, the metaphysical and the scientific, with profound impacts on social and economical life. A decade or so before the Revolution Turgot was

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engaged at the Court with the primary task of sorting out the French states finances following the crisis which haunted the country in the wake of the immense war costs during the European Seven Years War of 1756-63 and the American War of Independence. His reforms, however, were far too drastic under Frances circumstances. The price on grains swelled dramatically as a result of the reforms impacts; moreover, he was up against the overwhelming majority among the aristocracy as well as the idlers of the crown and clergy. Consequently, he was dismissed from his post to concentrate only on his studies and writings. His successor during the initial stages of the Great French Revolution, Necker, fared no better at the hands of Louis XVIs despotic regime, and the hugely unpopular dismissal of these economic reformers goes a long way to explain the fury among the revolutionaries in the later stages of the revolution such as the infamous September massacres and the subsequent violent escalations. Thus, the promise of physiocracy as the Enlightened economy manifested through Quesnays in depth analyses from the early 1750s onwards (among which the most familiar one was published under the title Tableu Economique in 1758, amidst the war turbulence) was aborted. Condorcet (1743-94), who delivered the great testament of the Enlightenment, On the perfectibility of the Human Mind, took an active part in the Great Revolution and penned his high minded hopes amidst the revolutionary turmoil. According to John H. Randall he should properly be regarded as the very soul of the The French Revolution. 15 Under the culminating Terror he eventually took his own life to avoid the disgrace of an execution, and until the end he clung to the notion that humanity strives indefatigably towards the ideal despite his personal fate. Among the objections raised in our own days against the ideals of the Enlightenment, one may mention the modern misconception that human beings were largely reduced to some kind of machines, that

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spiritual and religious aspects of life were subdued, and that a new kind of repression allegedly was the end result of this process. As against this stereotypical caricature, one of the strongest voices in defence of the ideals of the Enlightenment and the related social struggles, Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) pointed to the immense social inequalities that riddled 18th century society, the recurrent famines that struck France in this Age, and the horrible conditions of the small farmers and the working classes caused by a stern material scarcity amidst voluptuous material indulgence among the upper classes. In this context he acclaimed the fact that the philosophers of the Enlightenment enthusiastically embraced scientific and technological progress with their potential for enhancing human freedom and personal dignity.16 Regarding the confusion with respect to the Enlightenment and the attitude of its intellectual avantgarde towards human nature, technology and the interrelationships between our own species and its ecological surroundings popularly designated as a prime cause of the present environmental malaise the aim of understanding and mastering natural forces to the benefit of a universal humanity cannot simply be reduced to the hubris ridden plundering and Promethean conquest adhering to industrial capitalism as it proceeded throughout the 19 th century and into our own era. Contrary to the Titans of ancient Greece, and their modern descendants from the Industrial Revolution onwards whose hubris is repeatedly punished by the gods for their greed as Dixon Wecter observed in his 1948-introduction to a publication of Benjamin Franklins writings; writings which in their entirety present timeless words of wisdom that one probably will search in vain for finding an equal: Doctor Franklin found electricity a curiosity and left it a science. Thorough, accurate, modest, diffident, cooperative, selfless, more eager to hear contrary evidence than confirmation of his theories as man and researcher Franklin had innate good manners.17

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In 2010, the UN reported that 1 billion people around the world are starving on a daily basis, and it would not seem far-fetched that the above mentioned defence of the ideals and achievements of the Enlightenment remain highly relevant for ethically oriented people around the world not only in the western world but also at a global level. Vast cultural areas in the East are still awaiting their own Enlightenment Era it is yet in its starting blocks in some places, and always confronted with harsh repression from the theocratic authorities in the respective countries. A socially emancipating process in these areas necessarily will have to be fought for and conducted by intellectuals as well as a broad populace inhabiting them. The project of forcing democracy upon these countries by the use of western armies seems to only slow down any democratizing process because the local and regional repressive powers strengthen their grip on the inhabitants as they are threatened by a common foreign enemy represented by the NATO forces. As regards the West (however narrow or broadly we define it), it is clear that we have a rich history and ideals to live up to. Those of the Ancient world belong to these, accompanied by the ideals of the Enlightenment. In face of the extraordinary challenges that will confront humanity in this century, we would have been completely lost if we fail to observe and continue the enlightening spirit of the 18th century. The tradition of understanding ecological phenomena dates back to this Age, and ecological issues were discussed in the Encyclopdie side by side with political, social and religious issues. Through the work of dHolbach, Wallerius and du Monceau, revolutionary insights into the productive bio-chemical processes in soil laid the scientific foundation for the agricultural revolution. As argued by Kant, among others, an enlightened public is the very precondition of an authentic democracy one of his luckier statements, as distinguished from his notions of warfare as an aesthetically appreciable phenomenon. A future ecological society is also depending on an enlightened public who ideally achieves

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institutionally rights to participate directly in political life through local public assemblies in possession of final decision making authority in co-operation with their confederated neighbours. In other words, a sovereignty which cannot be represented in any way but instead manifests its palpability through the confederal ties directly democratic local assemblies and their recallable and clearly mandated delegates in the assemblies at the confederal levels by integrating local communities and regions in ecologically balanced systems with a social and cultural life based on the ideals of mutual aid and complementary relationships, where power remains in the hands of the ordinary citizens as a whole. Such a development would obviously involve a considerable expansion of Enlightenment ideals which will only fit in well with the very spirit of the Enlightenment. As clearly revealed during the past decades, the dominating powers the oligarchic political assemblies and multinationals managing boards are all too strongly profiting by a continuation of the present anti-ecological way of development (making a mockery of the word), and their hegemony rests on the fact that most people do not know what is actually going on at the highest political levels and in the lobbying traffic intimately connected with it. This oligarchic system is inherently anti-ecological and repressive: Today, instead of ecologically and ethically oriented citizens in charge, big business and technocratic elites are ruling the social scene. So, even if it is not possible to detect a smooth and linear progress in the history of humanity, it would be completely foolish to ignore the immense potential encompassed in humanitys insight into the processes of nature and into our own social and psychological conditions which originated with the 18th century Enlightenment insights which have accumulated over long periods of time. It is hard to envisage that the tension between this potential on the one hand and the present realities tainted by anti-ecological and dehumanizing

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trends on the other can go on endlessly. For social ecologists the task is clear: To contribute to the materialization of this potential based on direct action at the local level, in combination with regional and global networks and co-ordinated political campaigns. The dismal alternative is that such a faith in the potentially substantive, democratic and ecological progress is quelled by the Realpolitik of the ruling elites, which will prove fatal to the possibilities for future generations to repair the social and ecological diseases that haunt humanity, and subvert their ability to create a libertarian and ecological i.e. rational society.

Chapter IV

European Civilization from Belief in Progress to Germs of Dystopia

BY the time when the Enlightenment Era of the 18 th Century ebbed with revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, followed by an Industrial Revolution at least as chaotic and incomprehensible as any political or social revolution, a new kind of scientists had entered the scene: The so-called political economists. While Europes intellectuals at large had the greatest difficulties of nourishing hopes of further progress when the ravages of the Napoleonic wars ended with the Congress of Vienna in 1815, there were segments in the upper social strata who had profited from all the war destructions and the human sufferings, and in that way claimed to have found the formula as to

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how the European Civilization were to be pushed forward. The hidden hand of the Market, carried on by heavy machinery and gunboat diplomacy, became the new Credo.

The Enlightenment and the Ancients The 18th Century The Enlightenment whose insights built on the scientific discoveries of the previous century, was strongly focused on drawing lessons from the ancient Greco-Roman civilization, including the overwhelming need to sort out the causes for the decline of this civilization and its replacement by barbarism and feudalism. Paying attention to these chilling facts, Montesquieu pointed to the fact that civic virtue disappeared from the Romans when property concentrations and accumulation of riches alienated the common soil cultivating citizen from the basic means of life. In that way he or she lost any kind of political influence; a deterioration that Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus did heroic attempts to reverse with their reform efforts towards year 100 B. C. From the time of ancient Greece there were Aristotles works to guide the common man as well as the scholars, and in this context one does well to mention his vehement encouragements in the opening stages of Politics, where he warns citizens of the Greek poleis against losing focus on the cultivation of the soil and conserving its fertility, in favor of trading businesses. Surely, there was not talk of an either/or for neither Aristotle nor the Gracchis, but they emphasized that the household oriented subsistence agriculture would have to embody the basis of cultural life and of the economy. The exaggerated focus on trade and colonization had repeatedly drawn Greeks as well as Romans into exhausting wars with Persians and Carthaginians respectively. Historically conscious philosophes noticed that neither Aristotles nor the Gracchis warnings were heeded, with fatal consequences for the two cultures and a dramatic deterioration of the once rich soils around the Mediterranean. The popular historical version in this

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respect the all too smooth and easy way of apprehending history claims Aristotles support of the imperialist adventures of Alexander the Great after the decline of Athens and the rise of Macedonia, just because the former was the tutor of the latter. This amounts in an exampled way to what Nietzsche in his more spirited moments labeled abuse of history.1a As documented by A. E. Taylor, in his classic Aristotle-study, the tutor himself could hardly communicate with his former pupil after the Great Imperialist left his school and embarked on his effort to conquer Asia.1b

The enlightened Spirit When speaking of the belief in Progress during the Enlightenment Era it would be quite proper with an elaboration of what this optimism rested on. The self evident aspect is, of course, the emancipation from religious dogmas which had held Europes peoples in a psychological, cultural and economical iron grip throughout centuries, where the Reformation breakthrough for the vast majority of people didnt mean more than that to toil and labor at least was not a complete waste of energy in favor of an idle clergy. The notion that there goes a more or less straight line from the protestant work ethic to capitalism, as Max Weber contended, has only led to numerous academic blind alleys and desert walkabouts. The corruption of Medieval Catholicism had gone so far that the clergy and other unproductive social strata had deprived people of the fruits of their labor, to the extent that poverty was about to be established as a spiritual ideal. There can never be any culture which can thrive on such nonsense, because it denies the most elemental natural laws. However, the ruling elites of increasingly centralized states in 16th century Europe were hardly interested in a general libertarian movement among the masses, and the extent to which religious creed was still to be employed as a controlling technique is cruelly expressed through the demonology of that specific era. Its

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terror did not only strike confused and misfit individuals who claimed to be allied with evil powers, but even people who labored with timeless and socially advantageous crafts such as botany and herbalogy. As a social critic targeting capitalism it is, of course, rather tempting to draw the line between these aspects of the Reformation and to the irrational aspects of this systems ideologues, but the point is too cheap and I will prefer to stick to fundamental logical contexts. In any attempt to preserve the spirit of the Enlightenment it is of the greatest interest to keep cheap religious points completely out of the actual thematic. What can be stated clearly at this point is that even if poverty never can be a viable ideal, the fact remains that people are spiritual beings with demanding needs of the soul which can never be satisfied through the monetary accumulation spiral and the obsession with symbolic values which have dominated the world ever since the Century of Enlightenment passed into history. Hence, in the historical segment between the restoration of the value of labor in the 16 th century and the hegemony of capital in the 19th century, there lies important cultural tensions in the modernity phases of European civilization; tensions whose outcomes in no way were given at the time when Montesquieu accomplished his classical work, The Spirit of the Laws, in 1748. In looking upon the Enlightenment from a historical perspective it is much too easy to ignore the innovations made by agrarian peoples in their arts and crafts, even if anyone can understand that a persistent and sustainable increase of productivity among these social groups is the very precondition for vital cities, urban economic activities in general, and cultural manifestations of a viable civilization. As among the ancient Greeks and Romans, and all other civilizations, people have been aware that soils may be exhausted and lose their fertility. However, the causes and effects relating to this complex phenomenon were for the first time more fully understood in the 18 th century. More specifically; what could be done to prevent the soil

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from being exhausted of the complex poll of nutrients which the cultured plants need? Among modern historians there prevails a widespread and largely ideological misrepresentation which tells us that the agricultural revolution in the 18 th century primarily consisted in mechanization, on a par with the conventional capitalist logic which rests on the notion that humans in some way or other have to wrest the resources they need from a more or less stingy nature. The fact is that it was a more or less ecological understanding of agriculture which contributed to the above mentioned increases in productivity. An economic historian, A. Birnie, is among those who have pointed to this problematic: Since the earliest times, the progress of agriculture has been hampered by an important physical fact the tendency of the soil to lose its fertility under continuous cultivation. If crops are grown without intermission on a piece of ground, the elements of plant nutrition in the soil become gradually used up, and if the process is continued long enough, the land is stricken with barrenness. 1c

The Agricultural Revolution versus the Enclosure Movement Formerly, the answer to this problem had been fallowing, in addition to clearances of new agricultural land. Both of these responses have negative consequences, economically as well as ecologically. In districts where the availability of grassland and fodder has been abundant, adequate amounts of animal manures have largely been able to outweigh the outtake of nutrients from the soil, as long as the animal fodder had a rich enough complexity. The very best guarantee, however, was developed by observant soil cultivators, in combination with the Enlightenment philosophs, and it consisted basically in trying to copy the succession going on in ecosystems without any human interference. Accordingly, the issue was about crop rotation, cultivation of humus building green manure crops, and

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nitrogen fixating plants (legumes) such as clover, and a balance between animal husbandry and cultivation of plants such as wheat. All of this was guided by an acknowledgement of the importance of the soil for human well being in general, and it was something that no machine in either this or any fantasy world could possibly replace. Already in ancient times the favorable effects of legumes on the fertility of the soil and on plant growth were very well known, but there is strong reasons to believe that the decline of their civilizations apart from the already mentioned distractions of commerce and conquests which Aristotle warned about, and which one of the more responsible pupils of his, Theophrastus, picked up on after the tutors death can be largely attributed to a commercial greed in connection with a new and monstrous focus on large scale plantations (the roman latifundia), and a parallel heavy handed taxation of the farmers, which damaged the focus on the legume crops which need to be cultivated for the sake of the soils in themselves, and without lending an eye to shortsighted economical gains.1d Whether one may be interested in agronomy or not, this acquired knowledge represents Enlightenment at its best, and even the most sophisticated citizen in the even by the standards of the 18th century highly urbanized Paris or London could thank these new insights, based on the rediscovery of the insights of Ancient Greece, for their good opportunity to spend their days exactly in these cities with their so-called high cultural activities. In this connection, it is all too tempting to add that among the ancient Greeks urban life was primarily oriented towards direct political participation, whence the attendants in its democratic assemblies were farmers who lived their daily lives in the countryside and had to travel for shorter or longer distances on a regular basis to conduct their political responsibilities with or without compensation for the loss of labor time involved. What became of the Roman republic, which inherited this legacy, is all too well known in all its tragic megalomania evolving after the assassination of the Gracchis and the abortion of their land reform efforts.1e

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The colonization by the European states and their plundering of societies and cultural riches all over the world, from the Spanish conquistadores on, had among much else brought about the same obsession with silver and gold which had also beleaguered the Romans in their declining phases. Through the 17th century centralization of state power dramatically launched in the wake of the Reformation manifested itself in a mercantilist economic strategy where exactly the focus on these metals was high on the agenda. Hence, the religiously induced Thirty Years War soon developed into a pure economic strife between the big European powers, waging their heavily militarized states against each other. In the shades of this strife the growing Empire on the British Isles could build up its fleet forces which in time were to reach world hegemony. But even before that the British powers that be and its privileged classes had to subdue and discipline an unruly peasantry, which in The English Revolution in the 1640s 2 fought a desperate fight against the inhumane and socially disruptive enclosure movement, which had been in the offing since the 16 th century. It was just about as little philanthropy in the early British wool industry as in Stalins five years plans in the 1930s, and the damages for the agricultural population, and for the food security of the respective populations in these countries respectively, were accordingly appalling. Together these historical examples stand out as beacons flashing warning signals as to how cultural decline and social disintegration regularly follows the authoritarian and centralizing tendencies of state bureaucracies, when these are allowed to become hegemonious.

The Clash over the Oikos and Laissez Faire With the fight for world hegemony which develope d between the European states from the 17th century on, and which had a first culmination in the European Seven Years War (1756 -63), there

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necessarily ensued a tremendously accelerating taxation pressure on the respective countries farming populations tax money that was supposed to finance the build-up of the fleets as well as mercenary armies and abundant court administrations, all in the name of God. One would do well to view the work of the Enlightenment philosophs broadly as a collective, humanistic reaction against the world view and the interpretation of civilization which marked the European courts, and the frivolity they embodied both as regards their willingness to sacrifice their own populations, the members of foreign cultures, and the Earths resources from soils to metals. From the skepticism expressed by Bayle in his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1695-97), through Montesquieus satirical works from the beginning of the 18 th century, until Quesnays Tableau Economique (1758)3 the last one published while the Seven Years War was raging it was clearly demonstrated that the centre of humanism was France, despite its absolutist ancien rgime. As Peter Smith sums up in his research work on the history of London in the 18th century, the dominant imperialist power at the time drawing its strength basically on the heavy navy ships rather than on any superior economic ingenuity the capital was plagued by horrendous scenes at the closing stages of the war. Despite the British victory, or one may with equal sense say, thanks to the British victory (and if such it was, it was a victory over Reason itself), the fruits of the effort included the following dismal scenes: The other side of the picture is dark. Saunders Welch the magis trate told Johnson told that more than twenty people in London died weekly of starvation not directly, but indirectly. Light is thrown on the obscure tragedies of London by a case in 1763 which shocked a community which (justifiably) regarded itself as humane. A prospective purchaser was being shown over an empty house in Stonecutter Street when in two of the rooms three dead women were found, terribly emaciated, and almost completely naked; in the garret were two women and a girl of about sixteen, two of whom seemed to

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be on the verge of starvation, the other (named Pattent) in better case [] It is significant that all the victims should have been women; there can be little doubt that the hardships of the age bore with especial weight upon them. Social conditions tended to produce high proportion of widows, deserted wives and unmarried mothers, while womens occupations were over-stocked, ill-paid and irregular.4 The adoration that many people had felt for Great Britains culture and ruling system, as they had been presented through John Lockes Two Treatises on Government (1690), and which he had followed up with The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) evaporated when the Empire (The Modern Karthago) revealed its true character in the years between 1756 and 1763. Then it became clear for enlightened people that the riches of Great Britain were based on robbery, and that the island, rather than representing a solidly anchored civilization, was utterly vulnerable and completely dependent on cheap raw materials furnished by slave workers whether domestic or foreign. Obviously, the works of the French Enlightenment philosophers did a great deal to weaken the war enthusiasms of the French people during this decisive European feud, so that eventually Great Britain would come out as the victorious part, with a war bargain that impressed Adam Smith to the extent that he claimed in his famous Wealth of Nations (1776) to have outdone the economic insights of the physiocrats and found the receipt for wealth. T his was actually at a time when the Empire found itself in a fresh desperate struggle to maintain its hegemony The American War of Independence. That same year, Thomas Paines Common Sense was published, a work that almost alone won the War of Independence for the former colonies if one allows for the singular heightened morale it induced within the colonies troops and written by a man who had left the Modern Karthago behind in protest against its treatment of its own hard toiling farmers and workers.5a Within the increasingly oversimplifying academic history writing Paines stance has been conveniently succumbed under Thomas Jeffersons

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political agenda during the American War of Independence and the parallel revolutionary developments within the socio-economic structure, as well as the elaboration of novel political institutions fitting the founding of the new republic ignoring the fact that the two of them were galaxies apart when it came to the institution of slavery and its implications for society at large, including the prospects for the republic to thrive and survive. While Jefferson, as a slave owner on his own plantation, found himself unable to break the ties substantially connecting his colony to the British empire allowing only for a superficial political independence from the latter Paine saw the need for a more thorough break with the past in this actual revolutionary historical context. Thus, in his writings one find a general aversion against enlisting history and tradition as guiding lines as regards human orientation towards the future which, however, certainly does not amount to a receipt for neglecting the need for historic consciousness, without which Paine hardly could have written any of his late 18 th century works. As Elisha P. Douglass, in commenting on Jeffersons conduct during the American Revolution, noticed: He fully shared the Whig conviction that the purpose of opposing British imperial legislation was to rescue traditional British rights from the attacks undertaken by an omnipotent and therefore revolutionary parliament. And further: only later, after contacts with contemporary French thinkers, did his horizons widen to include more cosmopolitan sources of inspiration.5b The problem complexes involved in the above analysis are of lasting relevance to the question of to what extent history and its lessons on a general basis may be of avail as tools for orientation in subsequent eras and its socially conscientious representatives at any

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given moment. While the Jeffersonian stance involves a tendency toward sentimental traditionalism, often playing directly into the nationalist perils underpinning a dangerously myopic and antiinternationalist orientation, for Paine as a cosmopolite and an enlightened adherent to human universalism in the best 18 th century fashion history could only inform about previous mistakes and failures to be avoided, drawing inspiration from the works of Montesquieu and the Encyclopaedists in his intellectual tour de force back and forth across the Atlantic in the Age of Democratic Revolutions.

The Central Enlightenment Position of France As regards the central position of France during the Age of the Enlightenment, with Paris as the capital of the universalist Republic of Letters extending from Franklins freedom striving colonies on the North American continent in the west, to the Russian intellectuals and revolutionaries (including Pugachev) during Catherine the Greats reign in the east, historian John H. Mundys analysis of the long term developments is worth reflecting upon: The significance of mans effort was already apparent. The region from the Rhine to the Loire, centering in Flanders, had become the most urbanized section of Northern Europe, presenting the first example in world history of an inland urbanism not based on irrigated river valleys. As we have already seen, part of this region was also the centre of the most widely spread national culture of this age, that of the French.5c In this age, before the establishment of the modern bureaucratically governed nation state, a nation meant simply common cultural traits within a clearly defined geographical entity irrespective of forms of political organization. This was implied in Herders historical

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conceptualization of nations and their uniqueness, as well as his antistatist attitude, and the liberal spirit of the French Encyclopaedists made for a universalism easily adoptable around the Globe; that is until the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. To illustrate the enlightened Europes disillusionment with the modern Karthago it is of the greatest interest to pay attention to the development of Quesnays economical perspectives during the course of the Seven Years War. In his first article for the Encyclopaedia from 1756 Farmers he spoke favorably of following the development of English agriculture towards capitalistic farming. But after the war broke out it seems to have become clear to him that such kinds of agricultural practices had deprived the English farmers, subverted the reproduction of the Earths riches and made the Empire highly vulnerable as far as food security was concerned hence its need to achieve greater control over territories in the colonies and guaranteeing deliverances of agricultural produce from them. What had passed for trade in an Orwellian language revealed itself as war supported plunder. For in his second article for the Encyclopaedia, Corn (1757) it is other principles which shines through such as the central physiocratic concept that all riches stem from the soil, and the logical consequence of this; capital and currency do not have any inherent value. In his main work, Tableu Economique (1758) he draws the conclusion as far as it was possible to do as a minister of the Treasury under Ludvig XVs rule, and let the following words of wisdom go into print: [Were the laws] to abandon the honest peasant to contempt, oppression and poverty, and thereby ruin husbandry; [] to favor the multiplication of law-suits and multiply the terrible tolls of chicane, in order to increase the stamp duties; [] to lower the price of the immediate fruits of the Earth in order to support manufactures; etc.; all these things might be justly considered as so many disorders in manners, omens of ruin, and excrescences of barren expences.6

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Two Diametrically Opposed Concepts of Civilization In conventional positivist history writing there has been an oversimplified tendency to portray the political economists, Smith, Say, Ricardo, et.al., and their theories as a continuation of the physiocrats views indeed, even as vastly progressive compared to the latter. That this rests on an exceptional mystification should appear clearly from the above mentioned facts. In reality the two stands are miles apart a world turned upside down and the consequences were to become clear to anyone who experienced the collapse of civilization in 1914. What has unquestionably contributed to the confusion is that the physiocrats as well as the political economists are talking about free trade. The point is, however, that the latter, in their obsession with silver and gold and other symbolic values seek to transcend the agrarian basis of our civilization, with the necessary effect that their free trade becomes dependent upon warfare, speculation and withdrawal of vital facts from the view of the public all of which was welcomed by Adam Smith in his airy theories presented in what was to become the bible of Capitalism.7 His work is a mix-up of facts accumulated through the Enlightenment, interspersed with clearly dystopian preferences and amoral implications. Among other things he makes a big point out of the favorableness and possibilities of secrecy and speculation as far as economic activities are concerned8, and is not in the least ashamed to point out the favorable economic effects of the Seven Years War for Englands part.9 Nothing could be more off the point for the Enlightenment philosophes and physiocrats. That it is incommensurable with the most elemental democratic principles goes without saying. The endless elaborations of the varying value of gold throughout European history which mars Wealth of Nations, says it all about the focus of Mr. Smith. Quesnay, for his part, was engaged in procuring foodstuffs of the highest possible quality to the people of France, while maintaining the fertility of the soil and to create a solid fundament for the urban

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populations economic activities. His work was about implementing reforms; Smiths was foggy speech. As the reflected reader has understood by now this essay is neither a pamphlet against trade nor industry. It is, however, an attempt to show how the European Civilization could go so far off the rails so as to produce genocide, world wars and ecological collapse. Herein there is, of course, neither any glorification of tyrannical rule theocratic or secular which has had the opportunity to grow in lieu of the anti-humanistic and anti-ecological flipside of the civilization coin. In the same vein as the Roman Empire got its barbarian enemies when it waved goodbye to the inescapable basis of any civilization, the modern European Civilization has got its own enemies within or without. World history has produced several Civilizations. What they all have in common is their ability to conserve the fertility of their soils in a long range manner. From the time of the origin of agriculture in Catal Huyk som 8-10000 years ago the same principles of soil conservation prevailed in the so-called river Civilizations along the Indus, the Euphrates, Tigris and the Nile, the Greek-Roman, the terrace agriculture of the Incas, and in the modern European Civilization and its understanding of the preconditions for building up the fertility of the soil rather than break it down. All of these Civilizations have produced cities accompanied by written language, crafts, industry and trade. The historically conscious philosophes of the Enlightenment gave the impetus to the basic human consciousness of what constitutes the inescapable fundament of Civilization. However, when the moral philosopher and the father of political economy, Adam Smith, tried to parade as a historian, he did the karthaginian work of art to explain the high cultures of the early Civilizations by their ability to sail and navigate on the rivers.10 He does not mention agriculture, and the Incas was not of any major interest to Smith, obviously. If one was to follow the

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logic of Smith it would have to appear as a kind of mystery that no Civilization ever developed in the Antarctic, because there seem to be every opportunity to sail and navigate in its circumventing sea. The commercialization of the soil which has resulted in contempt for the soil in later modern globalized Civilization, and which led to decline and fall of our Roman predecessors, went on in several stages. With its rudimentary beginnings after the Black Death in the middle of the 14th century, this deteriorating process was interspersed with the dissolution of the social and economic structures of feudalism. The necessary and unavoidable overthrow of feudalism was about to be completed during the Enlightenment Era and was for a while pointing towards an organic modernity, when geopolitical and dynastic complications from the Seven Years War on, and until the Congress of Vienna in 1815, included a panic stricken Industrial Revolution which tore apart the ties between town and country, and came to subdue the productive structures of the latter under the needs of the former. While for the physiocrats (as for Aristotle) it had been self evident that the economic activities of the cities rested on the fruits of the agricultural soils, the political economists from the time of Adam Smith on were so blinded by the increases in agricultural productivity and the mastering of the world seas, that they from their theoretical and self serving stances ignored what it takes to keep this productivity at the same high level in the long run. As suggested above this was manifested in Smiths understanding of history, where he embarks on the utopian (in the negative sense of the word) project of aiming at transcending the agricultural basis of Civilization, in favor of trade a temptation which Aristotle had strongly warned his fellows against when he saw that this venture brought the Greek Civilization towards its doom. When the social consequences of this utopian transcending project became clear for everyone in the course of the 19th century, and the many critical voices finally was overshadowed by Karl Marxs, the world didnt fare better than that it was served a double transcending effort in

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the way that Marx took Smiths and the political economists to put it mildly airy concepts of Civilization as his point of departure. If the interest in the fertility of the soil had been utterly denigrated by Smith, it was non-existent in Marx who even found it in proper place to view the manifestations of the political economists as progressive and regard everything that had to do with the agrarian basis of our Civilization as der alte Scheisse. No wonder that modern peasant movements came to view the Marxists as a god forsaken bunch. As it had appeared among other from Montesquieus The Spirit of the Laws, the French philosophes had been apt to reckon England as a social and political guiding force, confronted as they were with their own decadent absolutism. The despotic rule of the sun king, Louis XIV and his stern centralization and militarization of the French state, had been directly threatening towards Civilization. Hence, his successor to the throne, and Head of the Enlightened absolutism, Louis XV was more or less disarmed by the representatives of the Enlightenment, and he had to cope with a role as a paper king. The massive conflict between the two leading powers of Europe just as the world embarked on the second half of the 18th century, contributed to reveal the hollowness in the British Civilization framework and the economic fundament of the country. Adam Smith, who had published his moral philosophy during the Seven Years War, in Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) which in the main represents a philosophical effort to justify self interest and egotism as guiding lines for human conduct stayed in France for the first two years after the war (1764-66), where he sought out Quesnay, and the aftermath of their disputes appear clearly in the latters Analysis (1766), which illustrates the French philosophes disillusionment with the modern Karthago: Faint and false lights have glittered in the darkness, and the natural order has been turned upside down by individual interests, which

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always hide under the cloak of general welfare and make their requests in its name.11 Ever since Montesquieu put the inalienable principle of civic virtue on the agenda of modernity in 1748, it came to put its mark on the whole thinking of the Enlightenment Era, which the above quote from Quesnay witness. However, Adam Smith, on the contrary, went home to the British Isles and penned during the following ten years what was to become the Bible of Capitalism. Starting with exactly the same self interest that Montesquieu as well as Quesnay had found to be threatening towards any kind of Civilization for the ancient Romans as well as in their own times the hidden hand of the market (meaning god or providence for Smith) was supposed to contribute to everyones welfare. Such notions were not included in for instance Thomas Paines Common Sense which was published simultaneously with Wealth of Nations, during the fight of the American colonies for liberation from the British Empire, which at that time was in desperate need of pushing through the glory of trade serving its self interests. Quesnay as well as Paine stood firmly anchored in a household based economic philosophical tradition, where agriculture was the very self evident basis for every kind of value production and the unavoidable basis of civic virtue. As stated by Quesnay: The merchant tries to buy at the lowest possible price, so as to make his gain as high as possible at the expense of the nation; his individual interest and that of the nation are opposed. 12 Thus, in this determining phase of European history, from the Seven Years War until the Revolutionar y and the Napoleonic Wars, there unraveled a clash of Civilizations where two opposed conceptions of Civilization tumbled against each other. The conflict was all about whatever it is that constitutes the economic basis of society and source of well being for its inhabitants, and, in addition, what could be called moral philosophical principles which are to guide the

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individual in her or his economical and political activity. Grossly simplified one could say that on the one side stood the Aristotelianquesnayian perspective, firmly anchored in agrarian society and community oriented standards for human conduct, and on the other side; the karthaginian-smithian view where the focus was directed towards trade and individual gain. The former tends irrefutably towards subsistence economies and long term conservation practices as regards societys natural substrate; the latter points towards short term monetary gain, contempt for societys natural substrate, and imperialism. Consequently, right through this conflict there goes contrasting views on human freedom, basic human rights, and the understanding and legitimating of property, ownership and usufruct. In other words, this strife was about the determining criteria for that civic virtue without which no society can prosper as such, other than juxtaposing it towards a state of permanently antagonistic particularistic interests and, hence, inner dissolution, state of civil war and the need for foreign threats. In his works on moral philosophy and economy Adam Smith had tried to legitimate individual self interest as the guiding line, and even contended that the individual at any time seeks to please everybody else in her or his daily life and work. The obvious potentiality for neurosis implicit in this way to relate to the surrounding world, and to what extent it bears the seed to subvert any authentic human freedom and dignity, was brilliantly displayed by Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792 in her Vindication of the Rights of Women , at a moment when the Great French Revolution was entering its determining stages: If we really deserve our own good opinion we shall commonly be respected in the world; but if we pant after higher improvement and higher attainments, it is not sufficient to view ourselves as we suppose that we are viewed by others, though this has been ingeniously argued, as the foundation of our moral sentiments. 13

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At this historical juncture it had become clear that the liberalism which had been one of the intellectual products of the Enlightenment in its fight against the authoritarian and rigid social, political and economic structures was about to be splintered. Its political and economical aspects were torn apart, and they have ever since operated in a mutually antagonistic relationship. To what extent the ideologues of political economy themselves contributed to the subversion of the philanthropic content of classical liberalism, appears clearly from the magnum opus of the father of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789). In this work he follows up Smiths morality of self interest by contending that virtue must be based on a calculus of pain and pleasure. It has become clear by now that with such a point of departure any meaningful understanding of and eagerness to preserve the principle of civic virtue, will erode. Indeed, it will be tantamount to maintain that it is a child in its third year who should put the moral standard in place in any given society, like the whole personal growth period of the individual has nothing whatever to do with the building of character ( paideia). As long as such a state of mind is allowed to rule there is not the slightest chance of reinstituting civic virtue. Quite to the contrary it results in very meager conditions for human rights, democracy and an ecologically sustainable society. With the moral premises penned by Bentham it is no surprise that large parts of his work revolves around jurisdiction and punishment and that the social ideal that he envisioned, Panopticon, was supposed to maintain a structure compared to a prison under firm surveillance. (!) That this whole project has passed under the etiquette of liberalism in more than 200 years tells nearly the whole story about the warped range of freedom under capitalism. Just as little as there is a democratic core in Smiths philosophy, one cannot hope to find any such in Benthams work either, and he states that:

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We must first know what constitutes the dictates of legislation, before we can know what constitutes the dictates of private ethics.14 (my italics. A. H.) Exactly where the judiciary power remains surely is a core issue as regards to what extent a society can be considered democratic. Within an authentic democracy this power of giving the laws rests with the people themselves. Thus, it is interwoven with the ethical standards of the individual belonging to that respective society. The fictional dichotomy between the dictates of jurisdiction and a private ethics is only meaningful as long as the actual society consists of those who commands and those who obeys. As long as the individual is torn off from the legislative work, one cannot neither expect any reflected or solidly anchored ethical consciousness nor conduct from her or him, while those social agents who have monopolized this power have free opportunity to use it for their own self interest. Around 50 years before the political economists claimed the freedom to ridicule the whole of the liberalistic tradition, Montesquieu recognized as one of its founding fathers emphasized that: There must be a more extensive code of laws for a people attached to commerce and the sea than for a people satisfied to cultivate their lands.15 Indeed, this conviction was surely no result of any patriotic or nationalistic rhetoric for Montesquieus part, who had used a whole lot of energy in directing attention at failures and disgraces in his early 18th century French society, but on the contrary based on his historical insight in general, and especially on his consciousness of the reasons for the decline and fall of the Roman civilization. The development of the European civilization after the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars pay witness to the fact that Montesquieus encouragements were heeded in any meaningful way. Under the formula free trade (laissez faire) the accelerating globalization

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process was sooner to get the opportunity to make exchange of goods between peoples and nations into a continuing strife for world hegemony where corporate agents were given free hands in their right to plunder the Earths resources and practice their cannon boat diplomacy towards resistant cultures and societies who preferred otherwise. From being a means toward securing peoples well being in any given country, trading activities had been transformed into an end in itself, and Adam Smiths vision that all humans are merchants was increasingly considered as a natural law.

The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars The myth of free trade in the modern world and the opportunity to let it pass uncensored as conducive to Civilization in general, rested originally on the fact that it could be poised against the reactionary Napoleonic empire and its tactics in the form of the Corsicans continental blockade in the same vein as it has later received legitimization by poising it against state worshipping and totalitarian experiments with a planned economy. Without the craze of Napoleon it is hard to envision that the rich traditions and the exhilarating progressive hopes on the part of humanity as a whole, could be replaced by such a blatant form of irrationalism which came to dominate European history throughout the 19 th century in the form of economic speculation, obsession with symbolic values, hazardous industrialization, nationalism, and ultimately a novel and unprecedented imperialistic feud and quest for world hegemony. The entire Enlightenment tradition in general, and especially the French Encyclopaedia, had concerned itself with a vehement struggle against superstition, for openness and honesty in political and economic ventures, and the proliferation of public knowledge which was regarded as universal. It was essentially a philanthropic

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phenomenon, and was at the same time strongly biased towards an ecological sensibility. The old and decadent European courts at the end of the 18th century represented the opposite contempt for the honest peasant and an obsession with silver and gold. When the North American colonies, with their social structure based on what was essentially an egalitarian yeomanry, had their final blow at the British stewardship during the 1760s on the basis of commonly recognized principles such as no taxation without representation and ridicule of unproductive imperialists efforts to earn a fortune through ingenious schemes like the Stamp Act a whole lot pointed towards the end of monarchy as a form of government. George III and his English parliament had showed off their true faces for an entire world, and in the course of just a few years lost the prestigious and principled fight over the basis of sovereignty and the sources of riches; a living public government and a fertile soil. In this context the French Bourbon monarchy paraded as the last frontier of absolutism, a fact that contributed to the complex double dealing which went on between the British and the French authorities during the last few decades of the 18th century. Simultaneously as they were old enemies and stood on each separate sides during the American War of Independence, they had a common interest in keeping the lower social strata at bay. After long and patient waiting on Quesnays reform work and the Enlightenment spirit in general to bear fruits and be further elaborated on, there occurred violent eruptions among the French peasants after the French royal succession in 1774. 16 At the outset Louis XVI had consented to certain reforms, but thereafter the new monarch gradually tried to tighten his grip on things, a development that for instance led to the dismissals of the two economic reformers, Turgot and Necker who had stated their aims to elaborate on Quesnays formulas for economical life. Naturally, the development in France appeared as a threat against the courts and the upper classes especially the nobility and the clergy in England as well

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as on the European continent. Furthermore, instead of abiding by reason and heed the demands for reforms raised by their respective populations, they embarked on that line of plotting against a French people in revolutionary upheaval which will have to bear its share of responsibility for the revolutionary terror regime from 1793 on and all the way to Napoleons subsequent transgressions. Thus, Thomas Paine expressed the public indignation over the royalist plots: What, in the name of heaven, are Bourbon kings to the people of England? It is better that the people have bread.17 A quite specific reason for the English upper classes and their king George III to subvert and defeat the Great French Revolution, was the explicit aversion and criticism that revolutionary citizens like Condorcet and Paine uttered as regards slavery and slave trade one of the grossest maladies produced by the modern European civilization. Another reason was the general upheaval against the vested notions with respect to the concept of property, in the widest sense, and against the commercialization of labor and soil, that ran along with the new democratically oriented focus on principles of usufruct and on the human rights agenda. The huge property concentrations which had driven large masses of people into misery and desperate yearning for livelihood in the growing cities, were harmonizing poorly with the Declaration of Human Rights from the new, independent United States and from the revolutionary French people who first and foremost was out to achieve the right of usufruct to the land and guarantee the right of each man to the fruits of his labor, with the common good as a guiding thread. It has been a lot of talk about the difficult conditions endured by French peasants in the years up to the Revolution. The fact is that these conditions were not even slightly better among their contemporary English farmers in the same time period. The difference between them probably consisted mainly in the fact that the former had great hopes for improvements in their conditions and gained considerable

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support in their struggle for dignified existences. When the English authorities in sheer fear of Revolution introduced their Speenhamland-Act in 1795, to resolve the situation for the most needy on the English countryside, it was done on the premises of the old upper classes and based on their particularistic interests. The Speenhamland-Act contributed to maintain a huge army of reserve workers which could easily be utilized by the rapid wave of industrialization. At this stage the Revolutionary Wars between the Republican France and her monarchist European enemies played out its dynamics, and the revolutionary ideals in themselves ended in a macabre theater. The royalist plotting between the regime of Louis XVI and its dynastic collaborators in the European courts, in a way pulled down the curtain for the century of Enlightenment. When the French revolution was going through a determining stage, and the plotting was revealed by the French revolutionaries, the urge for revenge ran off with the citizens of Paris, while the villagers already were about to reap the fruits of their early struggles. The chaos and terror following the execution of the king and queen, and the subsequent wave of sympathy that the European monarchies could surf on in the wake of these blunders, sealed the fate of the Revolution. How it would have developed if the suggestion that the king and queen should be sent to the United States for education, as Thomas Paine and others proposed, no one will ever know. However, it is not farfetched to figure out that the days of monarchy would have been gone for good, Napoleon would have stayed back home in Corsica, German nationalism only an innocent fable, trade would have stayed only a means towards securing necessary supplies instead of becoming an end in itself, Europe would have seen democratic principles anchored in a sustainable stewardship of the soil, et cetera -- that is to say, a natural proliferation of the spirit and reform work of the Enlightenment Era. The way it all developed reactionary forces and commercial war profiteers could draw their own self-serving fortunes out of the

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circumstances, and in this way set the standard for the industrial development already for a long time under way thanks to the agrarian revolution. It went on all along without any popular control. When Turgot went ahead with his reform work under the enlightened absolutism of the 1770s, he had great visions about the betterment of the lives of the public for instance through public schooling which was supposed to lift the great majority out of ignorance. The libertarian spirit that Turgot and the other encyclopaedists represented was abhorrent to the royalists and the privileged classes. They understood very well that public schools in the spirit of the Enlightenment philosophes would not have served very well as disciplinary institutions for the French state apparatus, nor for the English one. When such public schools finally and fully were put on the agenda in post-Napoleonic Europe throughout the 19th century, it was regrettably not critical thinking in the spirit of the Enlightenment that was high on the schedule, but on the contrary memorization of biblical verses. Somewhat higher up in the educational system most common people were made familiar with Edmund Burkes upper class condemnation of the Great French Revolution, while for instance William Godwins reflected perspectives on its ideas, events and course18 which consequently to a large extent were withheld from the minds of the common women and men. Such a juggling with the European spiritual heritage, which in such a way has accentuated the reflections of a conservative upper class fellow and parliamentary Whig instead of the thoughts of a free thinking radical, demands its price. As far as the limitations of Burkes philanthropy is concerned it is enough to refer to his designation of the public as the swinish multitude. The success that his work, Reflections on the Revolution in France subsequently eventually was to receive, was facilitated only through the tragic turnout of the Revolution and the following Napoleonic turmoil. No essay writer who would have opted for remarks such as the swinish multitude would even be counted as a possible essay author for the French Encyclopaedia, and the choice of words were a warning

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about the dismal prospects for the lower social strata irrespective of their vocational specificities in the century that lay ahead. The common reactionary climate in Europe after the Congress of Vienna, also set the standard for the new economic ideals. The painful birth of Capitalism was undertaken, not by the help of philanthropy but rather as a result of industrial war mobilization and highly commercialized war profits. Thus, the superficial patina of humanism in which Adam Smith had tried to cloak his work in 1776, was evaporated by the time his political economy was followed up by David Ricardos Principles of Political Economy and Taxation in 1817. In this work, global economic unbalances and rich nations exploitation of poor is a firmly settled matter: No point in political economy can be better established than that a rich country is prevented from increasing in population, in the same ratio as a poor country, by the progressive difficulty in providing food. That difficulty must necessary raise the price of food and give encouragement to its importation.19 Thus, importation of cheap food is developed into a precondition for the civilized Europes well being and prosperity, and it is understood that riches are acquired on other peoples cost. Hence, the theoretical framework of political economy r ests on a cynical recognition of the global unbalances in those days unbalances that the rich countries (in Ricardos sense) themselves have contributed to shape. The myopic, amoral character of political economy and its connections with various nationalisms, becomes woefully clear. As with Smith the inherent anti-ecological character of their economic views is revealed, in this instance when Ricardo sets out to explain the life values behind political economy: Water and air are abundantly useful, they are indeed indispensable to existence, yet under ordinary circumstances, nothing can be obtained in exchange for them. Gold, on the contrary, though of little

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use compared to air and water, will exchange for a great quantity of other goods.21 So, what becomes more natural for the political economists than to go for gold as value measure standard, and the figure out how much work there will be to mine it? The same frame of mind goes to show in their view on agriculture, for instance, wherein productivity is thought to rest on the most powerful machinery. The whole mindset is marred by the neurotic character of the Industrial Revolution. In the chapter dealing with Thomas Malthus Essay on Population, which Ricardo by the way applauds quite indifferent to the general anti-humanist character of that work it appears to what extent the soils of England already (1817) was about to get exhausted of its fertility as a consequence of the capitalist monocultures. However, in contrast to Quesnay and the physiocrats the political economists never saw the connection that is to say that the soil and its diverse microbiological life forms need to be fed if its fertility shall remain. Instead, they did their best to ridicule this emphasis on physis, which in the spirit of Aristotle found expression among the physiocrats, and set out as champions for a hazardous social development where the conservation of the soil was to be operated on the premises of industry and trade in short, an ecological impossibility. The narrowing and warping of the concept of human freedom following the utopian project embarked upon in the wake of Modern Karthagos victory over Modern Alexander that is, the attempt to transcend the agrarian basis of civilization carries further dystopian germs pointing towards the collapse of Civilization in 1914 and its aftermath. The political economists made labor and soil into commodities and contended that the unrelenting exploitation of the both of them were central elements for the fulfillment of human freedom. The class wars throughout the whole of the 19 th century speak loudly when it comes to the first half of the concept of freedom and those

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struggles were often motivated by the reaction against the dehumanization present in enforcing village peoples to become proletarians. As regards the self appointed freedom to deal and weal with agrarian property and soils and, hence, gamble with the basis of Civilization the political economists embarked on a war against the very natural laws they wanted to utilize. If it is one aspect which restricts human freedom more than maybe anyone else, it is exactly the conservation of soil and the unavoidable need to keep and, in the best of cases, enhance its fertility. As a result of Smith, Ricardo, et.al. and their moral philosophizing and economic paradigms and the standards they set for the European Civilization at the opening stages of the 19th century the whole of the ardent toil through the preceding century for elevating basic human rights were annulled, and the framework for a meaningful human freedom almost impossible to define. Freedom to exploit labor and freedom to ravage the soil those two transgressions which at no stage in history have carried tasteful, civilized fruits seemed to prevail when the reaction set in in the early 1800s. In this way the political economists made their contribution to the development which included the overshadowing of the basic and adequate domains of individual freedom free exchange of opinions, political participation and the protection of a creative private sphere.

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Chapter V

Romanticism, Nationalism and Political Reaction

AS a stage of romanticisms reaction against the rule oriented aesthetics of neo-classicism, with the latters focus on beauty, form fullness, harmony, symmetry and the objective good taste, there occurred new concepts of the sublime in the course of the 18th century. The very concept alludes to the elevated, overwhelming and mind-blowing, and in this way it is connected with the new view on literature, music, pictorial arts and nature, as it appeared in the romanticists (and their forerunners) critical attitude towards the overall view on these subjects during the Enlightenment era. It was especially the Enlightenment philosophes views on nature, as a mechanical phenomenon which human beings were thought to be able to manipulate and control according to its own whims that were challenged by the romanticists, who certainly reduced the complexities of Enlightenment sentiments and the philosophes range of insight into a stereotypical image that served their assault, conveniently ignoring for instance Nicholas Saunderson and John Hunters ideas of evolution within species put forth in the first half of the 18th century and the 1780s respectively, as well as the origins of microbiology and biochemistry among the French encyclopaedists and the extent to which these Enlightenment sentiments had anteceded their own emphasis on the organic, dynamic and wild in nature and in human beings confrontation with natural forces. Coupled with the new view on the sentiments and imagination, in addition to similar views on geniality and originality among artists, notions of the sublime was to represent one of the defining characteristics of the romantic movements throughout the latter part

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of the 18th century and throughout the whole of the 19 th century and into the 20th. Moreover, postmodernism may even be reckoned as a continuation of the protracted romanticist period, especially insofar as it joins in the chorus of denouncing the universalistic and rationalist ideals of the Enlightenment with the astonishing overemphasis on the Dionysian versus the Apollonian cultural traits in our own era, paving the way for moral nihilism in the worst possible sense whether it be in cynical arms trading, human trafficking, child labor abuse, rain forest logging, deep sea petroleum drilling, chemical experiments with poor peoples health, and so on in short, business as usual within capitalism of 2012. The resurrection of Christianity and the religious yearning for eternity often coupled with the utterly irrational oceanic feeling dissected by Freud amidst the fatal collapse of our Civilization at the outset of the 20th century was, furthermore, coupled with the sublime, and this concept is recognized among the writings of the various romanticist philosophers and writers in general, most conspicuously among the so-called Jena circle in Germany who elevated art and religion above philosophy and ethics and thereby invited a late comer in the Enlightenment camp, G. W. F. Hegel, to a perpetual debate with themselves in which he elaborated a highly original frame of Enlightenment orientation closely akin to the ancient Greek way of viewing ideas and concepts as more real than the actually existing phenomena in which they were enmeshed. In this way he made a lasting contribution to the progressive notion of transcendence which may be considered as a basic foundation of the entire utopian tradition; that is, ideas, hopes and envisioning of society as it potentially may look like, divested of destructive irrationalities One of his major contributions in this respect is the distinction between Aktualitt and Realitt, in which he drew on the Romanticists more vague notions of Being as Becoming and, hence, laid the foundation for modern dialectical thinking in relation

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to cumulative processes within sciences such as history, biology and psychology.1

From Neo-Classicism to Romanticism It was Louis XIVs court poet and neo -classicist, Boileu, who in the latter half of the 17th century almost unknowingly came to stir interest in the sublime within literature through his translation of Longinus work from ancient times, Peri Hypsos. Longinus work was concerned with rhetorical measures, but the concept was later to encompass even the view towards nature, for instance through the British authors Dennis and Addisons works during the course of the 18th century. Addison touched upon the sublime in his essays for the important periodical in that actual period, The Spectator, an periodical magazine which fed the emerging bourgeois public sphere with the most modern views on art and spiritual life. With the publication of Edmund Burkes Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful in the 1750s, the subject was firmly put on the agenda of the day. For Burke, the sublime was connected with the overwhelming impressions that natural phenomena makes on human beings that is, when they are observed from a safe distance, such as is possible within the world of art a sort of terror struck pleasure, so to speak. According to Burke, this was due to the fact that the strongest sentiments that humans can experience are those which may cause pain and fear, and hence threaten their self-preservation. Immanuel Kant added new aspects to our understanding of the sublime when he, in his work on judgment, resumed the previous disputes with respect to this theme. Kant distinguished between the mathematical sublime (the without comparison big) and the dynamic sublime (the power of nature), but contended that both of

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them were so called ideas of reason, indeed, ideas that evolves in mans inner life and can only be discharged by the impression of outer events. Hence, for Kant its all about the state of mind that we are put in when we are confronted by nature in all her grand manifestations (if we ourselves remain in safety) or the way in which it is reproduced in literature, pictorial arts and music. There are, for instance, clearly sublime aspects in Samuel Taylor Coleridges poem, The Ancient Mariner (the overwhelming sea), Caspar David Friedrichs paintings, which portray the lonely human being in a wild natural setting, and in music, for example within Beethovens symphony, Eroica, which is considered as the breakthrough for romanticism on the musical scene, and especially in Haydns The Creation. In addition, the German Sturm-und-Drang literature in the 1770s, with Goethe in a central position, constituted a central link in this break with neo-classicism, and fed into the romanticists emphasis on the sublime within literature. The ambiguities of the era including the tensions between rationalism and aestheticism permeating much of 18th century debates, often in a fertile manner, but eventually catastrophically largely eliminating the former from the social, economical and political scene are illustrated in the elaboration of nationalist sentimentalism at the cost of enlightened universalism, as the consciously internationalist Republic of Letters faded into history only to be defeated once more in the course of the subsequent century, as the internationalist wor kers movement (The first and the Second International, or IWMA International Working Mens Association) didnt fare better than succumbing to nationalism as the respective proletariats of the Western nation states turned their back on their own farmers and directed their frustrations and alienated energies toward conjured-up enemies across the borders, manipulated by the newly developed mass media. On a broader cultural basis the concept of the sublime came to be connected to a highly problematical aspect of western civilization,

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namely megalomania. By being almost obsessively preoccupied with the immeasurably big in art and in its views on nature and natural phenomena, western man tended to avail himself of his technological know-how by means of a kind of maximum impact evaluation of their success in implementation. The ecological small-scale communitarian view has always been a minor albeit radical opposition group throughout modern Euro-American history, at times substantially reinforced by anthropological studies in the late 19th and throughout the 20th century, but nonetheless ruthlessly overrun by the monstrous developments of world wars intermixed with economic globalization, showing the real face of the purportedly benevolent principle of laissez faire on an unhampered world scale by which I do not intend to deny the authentically civilizing effects of regional and popularly controlled markets throughout the centuries of European civilization, from ancient times to the modern era, after the initiation of the principles of free trade by the physiocrats, especially Quesnay and Turgot. This contest between man and nature, propelled forwards by the dizzying notions of the sublime, and the related promethean and nemesis ridden conquest-of-nature attitude (manifested through accumulating ecological crises such as mass extinction of species, humanly induced climate chaos, desertification on a vast scale, dead ocean basins, and so on), subverted the old organic ties within communities as well some of them potentially largely libertarian in character, others highly patriarchic and repressive. The libertarian aspects were shown for instance in certain aspects of the guild system such as quality control of products, equitable prizing, and mutual aid among artisans as well as artisanal political radicalism of the revolutionary era, 1789-1848. These social forces also tended to develop the most humanistic technologies of the era, avoiding the disheartening alienation which haunted the emerging industrial proletariat a few decades later and right into World War I. As David Thomson once commented on European civilization after Napoleon:

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The growth of technology has continued to revolutionize European civilization in all its aspects. 2 It is on the basis of the above delineated context that one not without a significant amount of sorrow and regret has to admit that Europe, in the course of the 18th century, came to inherit the least desirable aspects of the Enlightenment as well as of the Romantic era; more precisely the instrumental attitude towards nature and humanitys natural environments, at the cost of the ideals of freedom and the elevation of reason in general, which came to be perpetuated from the former era. From the latter Europe inherited nationalistic parochialism, political conservatism and a rebirth of religious dogmas, in the form for monarchical restoration and reinforcement supported by the reinvigoration of the clergy rather than the refreshingly dialectical processes of consciousness manifested through the poems of Byron and Shelley which to an increasing extent came to leave its numerous marks on Europe throughout the whole of the 19th century and until the outbreak of the First World War. With the hindsight of a century or two and viewed in the context of the immense challenges that will confront humanity in the course of the 21st century it is tempting to direct attention to the visions for the European civilization proposed by Peter A. Kropotkin, for instance in his Fields, Factories and Workshops (1899). Herein, European communities appears in a balanced relationship with their natural surroundings, availing themselves of efficient, small scale/human scale technologies; a portrayal which fits well into the favorable images of long time dignified historical roots all the way back to the classical Greek era and for example Aristotles emphasis on the limits of the city and the case for decentralization and confederalism as opposed to tyranny and imperialism. Kropotkins perspectives sound like a follow up on P. J. Proudhons unambiguous assertion whose truthfulness is difficult to disapprove

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that a solid estate of farmers constitutes the main substance of any civilization. In reality, the theory and practice of agronomy represents the binding tie between humanity and nature and the basis of subsistence for our species independently of time, and it needs to be preserved and constantly re-developed so as to facilitate the adaptability of our species to the ever changing conditions of nature. In view of todays climate crisis this last point takes on an acute importance. Rapid changes in climate previously unheard of throughout recorded history, and phenomena such as drought in south-eastern Great Britain threatening the crops of farmers and the future of agriculture in such areas, call attention to new ecotechnologies, regionally adapted and sufficiently humble and adaptive man-in-nature techniques, intelligent utilization of bioregional microbial life forms in food production preventing loss of harvests caused by erratic and unfavorable weather and ecologically oriented innovativeness in general. The ecological humanism of Kropotkin reflecting the criticism and suspicion towards an industrialization on headlong collision course with the natural environment as it germinated among some of the romanticist poets in many ways summed up the tensions as well as the potentialities of Western Civilization in the era immediately preceding the fateful collapse after September, 1914, to the huge shock of every thinking inhabitant of the continent and its surrounding islands, although it had clearly been warned against by writers such as H. N. Brailford in his The War of Steel and Gold (1913).

Romanticism a Reactionary Phenomenon? For quite a while throughout the 19th century it was commonly supposed that romanticism represented a wholesale counter pole to the Enlightenment, and that the romanticists took a hostile position towards everything that the latter represented. This picture has

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become slightly more nuanced among historians recently, and there has been recognized several crossing paths between the two intellectual directions. However, it is clear that there is a whole lot which distinguishes them from one another, and if one chooses to focus on the basic optimism on behalf of the prospects of future progress and human reason inherent in the Enlightenment tradition, versus romanticisms point of departure in the literary romances of the Middle Ages and the resurrection of religion, one could certainly find plausible reasons to denounce romanticism as a reactionary cultural expression. However, I would suggest that this picture represents an oversimplification, and in this essay I venture to show why. First and foremost, it is of the highest importance to notice the drastic social and economical changes that Europe underwent in the 19th century. The enormous growth of populations, the rapid industrialization and urbanization, the development of immense military apparatuses, and the emerging mass society a threatening phenomenon in any social or historical context, and as most famously portrayed in the historical writings on Roman civilization with respect to the causes of the downfall of their republic and the rise of a parasitic Empire. However, at the outset of the 19th century, it was the new economy industrial capitalism which dominated all other aspects of society. According to David Thomson: Economic life took on a ruthlessness, a spirit of inhumanity and fatalism, that it had not known before. 3 In this context most of the romantic poets and artists in the early 19 th century represented a humanitarian and philanthropic stance towards the miseries of the human masses flocking into the growing and increasingly industrialized, polluted and, indeed, literally suffocating cities. In addition, their criticism of the economical dynamics of capitalism, which they following the teachings of their early

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philosophical mentor, William Godwin strongly condemned with regards to such abhorrent novelties such as the senseless abuse of child labor in factories. The onslaught of massive industrialization was attacked by Byron in his poem of appraisal to the Luddites, and the generally instrumental attitude toward nature was reflected upon in his and Shelleys revolutionary poetic interpretations of the Prometheus myth as is also a thematic in Mary Shelleys classic horror novel, Frankenstein; A Modern Prometheus. However, the above mentioned poets and authors belonged to a minority among the European Romantics, who turned increasingly conservative, and even reactionary, throughout the 19th century. Hence, I will initially take a look at certain traits and authors which point in the direction of reactionary elements within romanticism, and then modify this picture by pointing towards progressive aspects of this spiritual movement, especially in its early stages. That romanticism was to acquire more reactionary overtones towards the end of the 19th century, not least through its connections with panGermanism and German national socialism all the way through World War 2, may serve as an explanation why romanticism have been considered as singularly reactionary among many intellectuals in our times. Among the social traits which resulted from the scarcely favorable cross fertilization between the potentially dangerous aspects of the Enlightenment and Romanticism respectively, it was the politically insidious nationalism that were to produce the most dramatic and dystopian expressions before 100 years had passed since the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The rapidly developing nationalist movements reactions against everything French herein the rationalism, cosmopolitanism and universalism of the Enlightenment were strong already prior to the 1860s and 70s unification of the fragmented Italian and German states; hence, in the regions where totalitarianism was to find breeding ground early in the 20 th century.

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Even before the rise of fascism in these countries, the working class movements of virtually all European nation states had almost overnight bid farewell to their proud internationalist ideals, and complied to enrolment in the military paraphernalia of their respective authorities naively apt to buy into the dehumanizing portrayals by the war propaganda toward the common men, women and children from the neighboring country. The curtain had literally gone down for European civilization, and Max Horkheimer is fully justified in characterizing the events of the former half of the 20th century as a negatively cumulative process which he labeled the Eclipse of Reason. 4 Against this tendency toward increasing conformity and manipulated and alienated masses of people previously unknown to the modern world anarchism in its various manifestations represented the most uncompromising and thoroughgoing alternative to, and criticism of, the prevailing tendencies in European societies when we are dealing with mid 19th century events and tendencies. It was the ideas of confederalism recurring within the anarchist movement, with references to incidents and periods in history in which they had been prominent and more or less successful such as during the Delian League in ancient Greece and in the Parisian sections during the Great French revolution, not to forget the organizational ties between the towns of the Middle Ages throughout several European regions such as Flanders and Northern Italy, the Hanseatic League before it succumbed to piracy, and so on. The revolution of February in 1848 and its dismal outcome had been foreseen by Proudhon, who for some time had been arguing against plunging thoughtlessly into revolution in a situation in which town and country found themselves in an increasingly hostile relationship, and in which an alliance between farmers and workers in itself a basic precondition for the success of the confederal alternative envisioned by Proudhon was way out of sight. Hence, the conservative turnout of the farmers votes in the spring of 1848 came to be decisive for the defeat of the

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revolution and the fatal ascendance of Napoleon III to the throne of France, considering his contributions to the imperialist contest of the Mighty Five building up during the latter part of the 19 th century between Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia a sinister contest pointing straight towards the collapse of European civilization in 1914, from which it is safe to say that the world has not yet recovered. Those who want to put romanticism in the reactionary camp may draw support for their views by pointing at works by E. Burke, de Maistre and A. Mller, in which those authors criticizes the Great French Revolution both as far as its ideals and their implementation are concerned. For these authors the Revolution had its philosophical roots in the Enlightenment philosophes (especially J. J. Rousseaus) ideas about public sovereignty, natural rights and a social contract as well as Montesquieus preferences for republicanism and Diderots irreverent and notoriously sceptical attitude, and they contend instead that human existence must be anchored in tradition, religion, the State and the Sovereign (the ruling class) quite the opposite of the democratic principles which at a certain stage had manifested themselves in the American as well as the French Revolution. In time, the above mentioned conservative and/or reactionary thinkers were followed by among others the historian Herder, the poets Coleridge and Wordsworth, the novelist Chateaubriand, and several others. The latter romantics had nourished high hopes for the revolutionary outbreak which indicates an initially progressive and democratic frame of mind but in disillusionment they turned against the Revolution when it degenerated into blind violence, terror and bloodbath from 1792-93 on. They came to doubt the power of human reason to contribute to the improvement of the world, and turned instead towards the inner aspects of human life. In this way one could say that their romanticism became depoliticized a

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development which subsequently turned into bolstering reactionary forces at the cost of progressive and democratic ones. When the romanticists around 1800 partly as a result of the work by the Jena circle member, Schleiermacher, Reden ber die Religion once again turned the attention towards Christianity, this was initially not done without quite some hesitation. It is very likely that the most repressive aspects of religion were very clear to them, and Novalis gives expression to this scepticism in his work Christendom oder Europa, where he explicitly states that his attempt at reviving Catholicism will proceed in a liberating manner for humanity. This focus upon human liberation was put so firmly on the agenda by the Enlightenment philosophes among them Montesquieu, Benjamin Franklin and Diderot and by the revolutionary people of France, that it was impossible for the early romanticists to avoid paying attention to this issue. Hence, it became a central theme all the way through the revolutionary waves in Europe in 1848-50, and feeding into the birth of early socialist thought as well, overlapping at times with the agendas put forward by political liberalism most conspicuously in the works of Thomas Paine, who did not live long enough to experience the full effects of the alienated lives of the new industrial proletarians. It was precisely in 1848 that the one of the romanticists who has been connected most closely with the reactionary political and social currents, Richard Wagner, published his work, Kunst und Revolution, while at the same time taking part in the revolutionary events in Dresden. However, it soon appeared that he did not have any radical and progressive political program in mind with his revolutionary urge, but rather the arts. At that moment it was nearly 30 years since G. W. F. Hegel died, and with him the European Enlightenment project withered away, leaving only echoes in the isolated voices of anarchists like Proudhon and Kropotkin, in addition to subsequent cultural critics. For Wagner, however, it was

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art not philosophy or society that should be revolutionized so that man could be free and whole. Thus, we see an example of the apolitical stance of the romanticists a stance that was to be exploited rapaciously by reactionary social forces. What largely explains this lack of nerve in formulating clear political principles among many of the Romantics, is their love of fragments, the ineffable and the mystic. A writing style that carries such traits is poorly suited to the formulation of political programs, and may, on the contrary, be easily appropriated to reactionary spiritual mind sets and xenophobic cultural nationalism. Of course, there are no necessities involved in this process, but the fact that it happened prior to the World Wars in 1914 and 1939, speaks for itself. Admittedly, the Nazis had to warp Beethoven as well as Wagner and Nietzsche to be able to draw on those minds to back up their own quest for power and worse. However, it goes without saying that they could not draw anything other than disgust and trouble from the works of probably the most well known German of them all Karl Marx (!) When trying to show that romanticism had its progressive, liberal and even socialist sides, the natural state of departure seems to be J. J. Rousseau. Even if his concept, the general will, may be considered as politically authoritarian, this is counterbalanced by that thoroughgoing emphasis on the freedom of the individual which runs like a red thread throughout for instance Du contrat Social and Emile. Moreover, the principle of a peoples sovereignty was to achieve decisive importance in the writing of the new constitutions in the United States and Europe from the latter part of the 18 th century on, so to the extent that Rousseau may be considered as belonging to the early romanticist tradition, his works alone should be able to outweigh the notion that romanticism in the 18 th and early 19th century was singularly reactionary.

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Much the same can be said of Herders philosophy of history, with its strong emphasis on the popular agendas, in combination with Herders critical attitude towards the State as an institution. The perils of making reactionary points out of Herders ideas can be located in his accentuation of the national aspects, although for Herder it all meant a highlighting of a fertile diversity and a uniqueness of various peoples character, rather than any kind of agenda for antagonistic and aggressive nationalism. Indeed, Herder, too, is standing firmly in the tradition of political liberalism but, as for Rousseau, he should be considered as a pre-romantic, that is to say, as one of the forerunners of romanticism, writing well before the French Revolution. However, even as we move into the era of high romanticism we find liberals and some of them even with socialistic sympathies. Madame de Stel and Victor Hugo in France, Guiseppe Mazzini in Italy, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron in England, and Pushkin in Russia are all names that tower high in the intellectual history of Europe and among the common denominators of their work is the vast amount of energy they displayed in fighting political oppression and social injustice. Some even took part in revolutions and campaigns for liberalistic and socialistic reforms of the early 19 th century society. At this stage it was the so-called Holy Alliance between Prussia, Austria-Hungary and Russia which represented the reactionary forces, and several of the romanticists took an active part in the popular and liberal opposition against the Restoration of absolutism which was aimed at by this Alliance in the wake of the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Even before that Madame de Stehl had fought against repressive aspects of Napoleons regime, so it is evident that the fight against repression of the individual and limitations in personal freedoms were high on the agenda amongst many prominent romanticists most notably in the early stages of that intellectual movement and that, initially, this fight were without any strong nationalist bias.

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In addition to this struggle against oppressive governments and state apparatuses came the critique of Capitalism which nearly all of the romanticists could agree about. However, their ways departed when it came to figuring out alternatives. Some of them sought back to what they reckoned as the more moral economic structures of the medieval era; others moved in the direction of utopian socialism. Novalis could properly be considered as a representative of the first view, while Coleridge and Wordsworth with their vision of Pantisocracy points in the direction of the latter. If one was to take a look at one of the pioneers of the socialist tradition, Charles Fourier, one can see that in his imagination of the collectivist, but libertarian oriented phalanx there were obvious romanticist traits, among other things in his vision of reconciling the individual with community and vice versa, as well as coping with the new sense of alienation resulting from the new structures of the production apparatuses involving unheard of degrees of specialization and socalled division of labor. However, in this era tremendous changes rolled over Europe, and they did not go in any utopian socialist direction. Indeed, as Karl Marx states in his Early Writings: All wealth has become industrial wealth, wealth of labor, and industry is fully developed labor, just as the factory system is the perfected essence of industry, i.e. of labor, and industrial capital is the fully developed objective form of private property. 5 During the early stages of The Industrial Revolution, when Marx penned these words, it was easy to be exhilarated over the immense increase of productivity among the emerging industries. It was easy to be dazzled by the thoroughgoing way in which they transformed European communities and states. Ironically, however, the young Marx whom in the same works of his younger days dedicated substantial space on the phenomenon of alienation, were eventually himself among those who confirmed and strengthened this modern phenomenon. By elevating the factory system, with its extreme form

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of division of labor and stunningly narrow specialization within the structure of the production processes, combined with its reduction of nature and human labor to mere economic resources, to the perfected essence of labor, the involved human individual is divested of its spontaneity and creativity and thereby its ties to and affinity with the natural environment. These ties had been cultivated for hundreds of years precisely through organic forms agriculture and numerous forms of craftsmanship, both of which were pushed on the defensive by the new industrial capitalism. Today, we know for certain that it is not any astounding degree of quality production which lies in the end of this development, but on the contrary planned obsolescence and a host of ecological problems and life style diseases. Hence, for the factory system to achieve its dignified position, which according to Marx and his acolytes, as already mentioned, should be considered as the perfected essence of labor, a veritable revolution of values was necessary. This turmoil occurred in the wake of The Industrial Revolution, and it brought European civilization away from standards based on quality and towards a purely quantitative calculus mode of measuring value. As a result of this turmoil one of the main characteristics of European civilization since the age of the Rennaisance cities in the 13 th century, the guild system with its attending to the quality of the crafted products identified with civic virtue and personal dignity was thrown overboard right in the front of the Romantics, who responded negatively to the implicit moral decay in this turn of events. Viewed in the light of Enlightenment perspectives on progress, which first and foremost was focused on the spiritual perfectibility of man and the concomitant reasonable and liberating ways of production, this turn away from quality based criteria will not qualify as progress in any meaningful sense of the term. The Romantics responded in their uniquely individual ways to this degradation

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some of whom by turning their backs on the urbanized and industrialized world altogether, represented by certain tendencies in for instance Keats and Wordsworths poems. Others, as Byron, wrote poems of tribute, already mentioned, to the Luddites who smashed industrial machinery in a desperate attempt to save their artisanal ways of life.6 Obviously, it is convenient and comforting to ridicule the Luddites along with Byron in this respect, and one would do so in perfect accordance with the Marxist view on progress, which it, undoubtedly ironically, shares with the bourgeois world. However, in the light of what we know now about the consequences of quantity worship and massively wasteful forms of production and consumption, threatening the overall ecological systems of balance on this planet, it seems more appropriate to direct attention to another variety on the Romanticist stock, namely the so-called utopian socialists first and foremost, Charles Fourier. In his model for the good society he tries to integrate some of the new techniques of industrial production within an overarching value system focused on quality of life as well as production, precisely in an effort to avert the alienation and dehumanization which industrial capitalism entails. For our purposes it is the philanthropic, liberatory and largely ecologically oriented spirit permeating his works, rather than curious details of his principles and schemes, which deserves attention. Probably no other representative for the romantic era, 1785-1840, embodies the testimony of its diversity and complexity more convincingly than Fourier. The overwhelming challenge for Fourier and his like, however, was that Europe had left behind the times when thoughts and ideas, indeed, philanthropy in a general sense, represented the determining forces for social developments. Old virtues were discarded in the wake of the ill-fortuned French Revolution and the misadventures of a certain Corsican, while human traits which formerly were considered abominable vices such as greed miraculously were reincarnated as virtues for the

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mutated humanity in the form of homo economicus. For this novelty in the long heritage of our species the traditional safeguarding of the qualitative aspects of life even within the economical sphere was to be considered as a drawback according to the transformed notion of progress. Illustratively, fourierism found its most attentive followers, not on the European continent or in Great Britain, but in the United States, which in its own special way was embarking on an immense social experiment unhampered by inherited titles and traditionally founded prestige. On the British Isles as well as during their periods of exile on the continent Byron and Shelley were untiringly occupied on a philanthropic basis on behalf of the well being of the unhappy new proletariat in the overcrowded and unhealthy cities, most dramatically expressed through their poetic tirades against PM Castlereagh and his deployment of military troops against peacefully demonstrating workers, most notably the so-called Peterloomassacre in 1819. Shelleys Song, to the Men of England contains the one revolutionary slogan after the other, such as Weave robes not to let the idle bear, forge arms in your defense to bear. 7 The prominence of these two British poets and their unrelenting struggle for the cause of the oppressed, justify another modification of the current view of the entire Romantic movement as a reactionary phenomenon. On the other hand the politically and morally progressive features in poets like Byron and Shelley were those they inherited from the Enlightenment, and not those which we most commonly identify with the Romanticsespecially not on the European continent. Hence, it can be justifiably argued that it is rather the tendency among many Romantics to withdraw from society, to tone down the importance of the social questions, and to elevate notions of an afterlife and the supernatural often in combination with an obsession with the sublime in natural forces, wherein a kind of human sense of inferiority is sought compensated for by the megalomania of the technocratic and nationalistic oriented

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representatives within the political and economic life of the period which pulls the weight of the scale in favor of the politically reactionary position. This position was heavily enforced by the notoriously celebrated philosophy of Kant, who introduced the dubious epistemological notion of the sublimity of war and thereby elevated it to the position of an aesthetic phenomenon but at the same time disqualified himself from full blown membership in the camp of Enlightenment philosophers who were apt to consider it exclusively as highly costly by any standards and justifiable only on the basis of noble ideals and high ethical standards.

The Central Role of Art in Romanticism As a consequence of their disillusionment with political engagement in the outer world in the years around 1800, there ensued a new and open search among the romanticists as regards the world of art. The reaction against the objective standard of neo-classicisms notions of the good taste, gave a boost to the free, creative expression within literature (drama and poetry) as well as within picturing art and music. Art came to be called the alternative empire of imagination, that is to say, an arena where the creative individual could roam while waiting for the Napoleonic empire to pass into history. The reaction against neo-classicisms articulated emphasis on the rational and analytical offered room for a new individuality and subjectivity within the various domains of art and in this connection the romanticists were able to utilize the liberation of the individual that resulted from the Great French Revolution. At the same time art became a sort of sphere of freedom, amidst the political reaction that set in through the first half of the 19 th century. Friedrich Schillers work from the 1790s, On Mans Aesthetic Education, was to receive great importance for the romanticists high

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evaluation of art as forms of expression. As Schiller saw it, philosophy in the 18th century had produced a schism within humanity a dualism and it was to be the role of art, in its role as play, to unify the species once again. As the romanticists emphasized, art could be able to supply the world with fresh spirit and soul, after being disenchanted by the mechanistic world view of the Enlightenment philosophers. Schiller also delineates a kind of social utopia in his work, which he calls the aesthetic State, where human freedom plays a quite central role. However, he admits that this ideal State will only be realized among a few chosen people an artistic elite and this points in the direction of the avant-garde among the art theoreticians of the romanticists (for example Coleridge8), in contrast to those who put the emphasis on mass culture and popular culture like Wordsworth did, or the common man radicalism of Shelley. Friedrich Schlegel threw some light, for instance in his periodical, Athenaeum, on the German romanticists views upon art and its proper place and function in society. Often, he utilized the fragment genre in his works; a quite conscious choice to the extent that he was convinced that it was impossible to grasp the whole once and for all. He was also famous for his retorting to irony as a tool in his miscellaneous writings, as an answer to what he conceived of as lifes tensions and dynamics, between the timely and the eternal, the individual and the community, and so on. When he was criticized for writing in Athenaeum essays that were impossible to understand, he wrote On the incomprehensible to his defense, and he contended that it is a good thing that not everything is being understood because this fact mirrors the eternalness and mystique with respect to life on Earth. In England P. B. Shelley wrote In Defense of Poetry in the 1820s, a few years after his wife, Mary, had published the romanticists ecological manifesto, Frankenstein. Percy wrote his Defense as an

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answer to a countryman who had claimed that poetry belonged to a bygone era. The poet P. B. Shelley protested that poetry is truer than any form of writing, and thus repeated Aristotles contention more than 2000 years back in history. Shelley singled out the poets (among them Shakespeare and Milton) as more important than the philosophers throughout history, and concluded that poets are the unrecognized law givers of the world. As Fr. Schiller had done a few decades earlier, Arthur Schopenhauer also pointed to music and gave it a central place in human life. The big pessimist Schopenhauer describes in his magnum opus, The World as Will and Idea9, how human existence consists in a tedious struggling with subsequent satisfaction and boredom. It is Schopenhauers parallel to Kants Ding-an-sich, the archaic will, which drives forth this dynamic, and to Schopenhauer music is one of the roads to salvation from the trammels of this world. According to Schopenhauer music may bring us a rest within the archaic will an allusion to the nirvana principle within Buddhism, which played some part in the development of Schopenhauers thought.

Nietzsche, the Ancient Greeks, and Christianity Towards the end of late romanticism Friedrich Nietzsche published his breakthrough work as a philosopher, The Birth of Tragedy.10 It is the Greek dramas which trigger Nietzsche to write this work, and he compares the vital culture of the ancient Greeks with what he conceives of as a fatigued and impoverished contemporary German culture. The central concepts, Apollonian and Dionysian, appears in The Birth of Tragedy in Nietzsches pointing to the Greek tragedians, Sophocles, Aischylos and Euripides balancing of the two principles, where the Apollonian represents beauty and fullness of form, and the Dionysian stands for the passionate and the overwhelming. Nietzsche contended that the Dionysian principle had

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been ignored within the cultural sphere of the west since the days of Socrates, and that there was an urgent need to bring it back into the light. He found it represented in Wagners music (for instance in Niebelungenringen, and held for a while that his operas had the potentiality to save the anemic German culture. Nietzsche lost his illusions about Wagner when the latter once again searched in the direction of the life negating Christianity with his work Parsifal. Nietzsche himself kept his high thoughts of arts throughout his life, and he contended that it was only art which could serve as an alternative to the objectivity fixations of religion and science. However, it is his multifarious perspective oriented view which may be considered as the most important heritage after Nietzsche today, especially within the humanities. The main problematic with Nietzsches diversity of angles is, of course, the tendency for ethical relativism to follow suit which it obviously has done in the century or so since Nietzsches death. In addition, his obsessive quarrel with Christianity seemed rather to strengthen the latter than breaking it, following Nietzsches own famous dictum. These confusing tendencies go a long way to explain the reason why we tend today to speak of the Enlightenment as a thing of the past, rather than a continuously ongoing process. With the event of Darwins scientific discoveries and their heated interpretations for various self serving purposes the entire trust of European civilization lost all sense of direction. The developments within mainstream academic circles, increasingly reduced to wage laborers for the best paying corporations, finished off the promises of Nietzschean perspectivism with its high premium put on intellectual credibility and integrity reducing the Enlightenment tradition to a special topic for alternative nerds. In concluding these perspectives on Romanticism as a period in time as well as a spiritual and artistic movement, it can be contended that for many among the Romantics, who expressed themselves considerably more vaguely than directly reactionary thinkers as de

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Maistre and Burke, their fate was to end up in the reactionary camp more because of what they did not express as of that which they actually expressed in their poems and other writings. More precisely it is, as indicated above, the lack of taking a stand in the new and immense social questions which accredits them with de Maistre and Burke as their ideological leadership. Measured against these high class statesmen and disheartened by the massive intellectual silence, rambling and bohemian Byron and Shelley, who took sides unambiguously within the ranks of the radicals and politically progressive, did not get the joy of experiencing an upper hand in the debates of the few decades they lived through in the early 19 th century. However, with the passing of time they have come to tower high within the European literary canon, where their poems, lyrical dramas etc. stand as living memorials of the historical fact that even a naturally backward looking and nostalgic movement such as the Romantic possessed its part of powerful, progressive elements championing the sparks of human freedom inherited from the previous era. Consequently, maybe the most progressive elements to be found in their various literary expressions are the direct outcomes of the turbulent times of the Age of Democratic Revolutions, namely the general sense of the unfulfilled potentialities which were hampered by the united forces of reaction among clergy, money mongers and monarchists alike, but nonetheless gave the impetus to the modern revocation of dialectical thought processes for better or worse, as illustrated by the utterly polarized elaboration of Hegelianism by totalitarians on the political Left as well as the extreme right. Consequently, too, like all phenomena and processes which are denied the full, spontaneous and creative actualization of their potentialities, romanticism was soon stripped of its initial ideals and prospects of freedom, and eventually fell prey to political quietism and reaction, like seeds falling on barren rock or sand. Liberalism died with the reactionary turn during the first half of the 19th century supplanted by the New Traders and their cannon boat diplomacy, borrowed money and recurrent bankruptcy,

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encouraging Marx in his sage seeing prophesies to forecast the imminent doom of the entire economic experiment.11

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Chapter VI

Imperialism versus Universalism; Use and Abuse of Science and Technology, 1850-1945

AMONG the decisive turning points in modern European history the dismal fate of the Paris Commune of 1871 is presenting itself as one of the most pivotal, and as one of those whose alternative outcome may have changed subsequent Europe substantively and led it benevolently away from the fatal track it had embarked on aggressive nationalist agitation, immense military reinforcement, and an imperialist scramble for parts of the world wherein surplus capital could be invested, new markets for outlet of manufactured export goods established, and inexpensive raw materials could be obtained at the costs of indigenous lower -level human types in short, the dismal world which Joseph Conrad illustrated in his pessimistic and largely autobiographical novel, Heart of Darkness (1899). Regarding the collapse of Western Civilization as related to the abuse of science and technology in the service of imperialist adventures a parallel effort to Conrads (originally a Pole) description of his disheartened experience with the trading West was made by the so-called Ritualists to build upon Nietzsches bold and biting criticism of the downward spiral that he witnessed around him in the latter half of the 19th century. Illustratively, their method was an interdisciplinary one, combining several fields of scientific investigation, including history, anthropology, and philosophy including its logical branches. As noted by Robert Ackerman in his introduction to one of the publications issued by the Ritualists, Francis Macdonald Cornfords From Religion to Philsosophy, in that fateful moment for Western Civilization indeed, for humanity in its entirety [the] primitivization of the Greeks amounted to rocking the classical boat in a serious way, and the Ritualists and their ideas

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were at the center of controversy until all intellectual work was swept away by the war.1 In his classical study, Cornford emphasizes the continuity within Greek thought and culture during the 1st millennium B.C., in opposition against the all too simplistic and popularized view of a sudden and/or abrupt break between the archaic and the classical eras around 600 B. C. the time of Solons political reforms in a democratic direction, co-occurring with Thales innovative philosophy of nature. However, the stress on this stress on continuity in a somewhat burkean vein obviously presented itself in connection with the modern effort to understand and explain the process of changes occurring in those forming centuries regarding the birth of our precious Civilization, encompassing the initiation of the natural sciences, political philosophy, and all the way down to directly democratic institutions at the very basis of society that is, ethically subordinated to the oikos sphere, and involving such crucial issues taken by the citizenry at large regarding the issues of war and peace, distribution of productive surpluses, and so on. To pose the problematique in one single question: What in fact happened between Solons democratically inspired reforms ca. 600 B. C. and the exhaustion of the ancient Greek civilization by the course of the 3rd century B. C. as reflected in the desperate writings of Epicurus and Theophrastus, as well as in the works by Aristotle himself? It is easy to forget that those 2-300 years back then represent a time span in our own era stretching back to the European Seven Years War in the mid 18th century before nationalism, before capitalism, before industrialism, and so on just to illustrate the time perspective we are dealing with on this occasion. Thus, a convenient compaction of that mass of time will only preclude our historical sense and, hence, distort the possibilities of an adequate understanding of the birth of our own basic cultural orientation and ways of cognition in short, the foundations of Civilization, from soil management to prudent seed selection, as well as conservation of natural resources in general as well as what is often vacuously labeled high culture and its philosophical and historical underpinnings.

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Allowing for a historical leap into our own era, in 1871 as in the previous French revolutions revolutionary Paris became isolated from the surrounding world and, most importantly, found itself on a collision course with the French agrarian population, whose supply of the necessary means of life in the form of grain and animal proteins was absolutely indispensable for the citys inhabitants, which exceeded a million by good margins whether revolutionary or not in 1871 as well as in 1789. The French peasantry had ended up en masse in the conservative or even reactionary camp partly as a consequence of the particularistic proletarian direction adopted by the main bulk of the socialist movement since the days of Fourier and Proudhon. No peasant, farmer, gardener or land laborer in a general sense in the whole wide world will ever rest subserviently and obediently to the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the class based parochialism of the industrial and alienated proletariat goes a long way to qualify the modern worlds working class movement as an unwitting helping wheel on the wobbling wagon of capitalism. Heroic as was the Communards attempt to establish anoth er kind of social order based on confederalism and solidarity (potentially also with the agricultural population and people of other nationalities), and concomitantly combat Bismarcks pan-Germanistic grandiosity and ambitions in the direction of imperial hegemony, they lacked real opportunities to succeed as long as they on a par with the Spanish republicans who fought Francos fascist rule in the 1930s were unable to attract sufficient allied forces so as to withstand the tango between general Thiers obedient soldiers and the Prussian army. What actually occurred to the European civilization in the second half of the 19th century, was the crossing of a kind of Economical Rubicon: From being primarily agrarian societies in which trade and industry are based on agriculture, indeed, proceed on the premises laid down by agricultural interests and concerns, foresight and conservation, the initiation of a highly uncertain and untested

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social and economic experiment was launched in which agriculture to the contrary suddenly was supposed to proceed on the premises staked out by industrial and trade related agents. This makeover is in itself a receipt for imperialism simply for the reason that the denigration of the degree of self-reliance in the fields of basic products (food, clothing and building materials) necessarily implies an aggressive quest for the cheapest possible wares in these economic fields in distant and underdeveloped parts of the world. A crucial turning point was reached in the early 1880s, accompanying the fate of the Paris commune and the outcome of the FrancoPrussian War, in relation to the agricultural question. While natural scientists inspired by Darwin, and equipped with microscopes, disclosed fundamental secrets concerning soils and crop productivity, represented by Frank and Kamienskis discovery of the mycorrhizal symbiosis between fungi and plants, and Hellriegel, Wilfarth and Beijerincks documentation of nitrogen fixating bacteria living in a similar symbiosis with the roots of legumes (clover, peas, beans, and so on), abuse of the modern scientific-technological apparatus ran wild in the bombardment of Alexandrian people and soils in the early 1880s by the British Empire. Thus the latter once again confirmed the adequacy of its nickname as the Modern Carthage. Viewed from a more comprehensive historical perspective the experiment is potentially catastrophic, to the extent that industrialized countries are accumulating populations of far greater size than may be fed in an eventual instance of overwhelming financial crisis in which the currency markets break down. However, preceding such a degree of dystopianism European civilization had to endure two intimately and mutually connected collapses in the form of the two first so-called total wars; the First and the Second World War, prophetically envisioned by Herbert Spencer in his remark toward the end of the 19th century: We are in the course of re-barbarization.

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The Dismal Omens Evaluated on the basis of the barbarian traits unfortunately established during the initial Industrial Revolution from the late 18 th century on, it is no wonder that the second main phase of that revolution occurring approximately at the entrance of the 20 th century was dressed up in an even more sinister clothing; the military-industrial complex, which has haunted Euro-American civilization, shaken its economic fundament and to such an alarming extent mismanaged its account in the globes Bio -bank during the elapsed century since then, was rapidly taking shape. Coupled with a mass society of the arrogant metropolitans, analyzed by sociologists such as Georg Simmel1, and nationalist jingoism, the consequences in the form of genocide and mass destructions proved unavoidable. The total war erupting in 1914 was a definitively novel creation in the recorded history of humanity, and it established a breach with any former ethical limitations placed upon the conduct of war. By the means of apparatuses of propaganda ingenuously facilitated by the latest technological innovations within the printing press etc., humans belonging to the enemy nation(s) were demagogically dehumanized in the same manner that African slaves and indigenous peoples formerly had been subjected to. Social Darwinism was propelled in extreme directions and notions of race intermingled with the nation state. Up against this veritable arsenal of reactionary currents the idealistically international principles of solidarity among the working class movements failed miserably in its self-proclaimed responsibility on behalf of humanistic visions. Materialist consumerism had largely supplanted the focus of the early socialists on the good life in a spiritual and ethical sense, such as is exemplified in the writings of Godwin, Paine, Fourier and Owen, and this new and disconcerting orientation proved decisive with respect to the high degree of support that the working classes of the respective countries displayed toward the military dispositions of their governments, directed against foreign peoples and nations, in

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the expectations that ones own nation state would eventually prevail in the coming war and thereby achieve a certain degree of control over the world market and the flow of goods. The parallels between the early stages of industrialization and the new impetus toward 1900 are striking in a general sense. The former was dominated by the cotton industry and the corresponding gigantic importation of cheap raw cotton, procured through the massive exploitation of slave labor, while the latter was marked by an intermingling of steel and arms production largely encouraged by a similar process of dehumanization toward the others. The universalistic view of humanity championed by the Enlightenment and its cosmopolitan Republic of Letters seemed hopelessly relegated to a dim and distant past. At the moment when the various European nation states entered the two contesting alliances in the years leading up to the First World War, the lasting ideological tendencies of pan-Germanism and panSlavism, etc. were endowed with military reinforcements of hitherto unknown lethal impacts. As pointed out prophetically by H. N. Brailsford a few months before the outbreak of the war: Alliances, like armaments, are rather symptoms of a universal insecurity, than the means of building up a permanent peace. The group system stands condemned by its practice.2 As regards the very outbreak of the Great War in September, 1914, it is the infamous shots in Sarajevo which is conveniently mentioned in the popularized historical narrative of the disheartening events. However, a politically motivated assassination, even in the feverishly conflict ridden Balkans, is not a sufficient explanation of why a world war of such monumental and barbarous proportions broke out and was allowed to ravage the world for more than four years. As if to further mystify the problem complex the assassin in Sarajevo has been titled a Serbian anarchist and nationalist. This amounts to a contradiction in terms because of the simple fact that anarchism in

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general is at loggerheads with the nation state as such, a fact that is plainly reflected in the statistics of anti-militarism in the modern world; among the war resisters refusing military draft and recruitment at any moment and within any geo-political context, anarchists always represent a considerable portion of the involved activists, which certainly was the case during the two world wars in the first half of the 20th century. The war resisters and pacifists were hopelessly outnumbered and after four years of previously unheard of atrocities of warfare there were immense challenges confronting the peace conference in Versailles in January, 1919, where the victorious powers (except Russia which had gone through a socialist and, soon, predominantly Bolshevik revolution in 1917) were represented. Hence, at the meetings were the president Woodrow Wilson from the United States, prime ministers Lloyd George from Great Britain, Clemenceau from France and Orlando from Italy. Each and one of them came to the conference with utterly diverse points of departures, expectances and demands that were far from being harmonized. As to illustrate the initial tendencies toward a near communication breakdown even among the victorious allies, Clemenceaus laconic remark when informed about Wilsons thirteen points for establishing a new era of peace, speaks for itself: Thirteen points? Even the good Lord didnt come up with more than ten!

Der Kriegschuldfrage However, what they actually were able to agree upon was the so called kriegschuldfrage, and they pointed their fingers at Germany as the main responsible agent behind the causes for the outbreak of

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World War 1. Consequently, there was a demand among all the participants at the Versailles conference that Germany was to pay huge war reparations to the different countries. How large these reparations were to be, however, there were major disputes about. The French demands towards Germany were the sternest ones, as a consequence of the immense damages caused by for instance the trench fighting and also as a consequence of the old hostilities between the two countries since the French-Prussian war of 1870-71, and Frances fear of German unification and expansion in general. The United States and Great Britain were more moderate in their demands for war reparations, and laid more stress on the issue around the German economy and the point that it should not be totally strangled because of concerns related to the international market and world trade. As commonly acknowledged the German economy had expanded vastly from the unification and towards World War 1, and had become a central agent in the Second Industrial Revolution and consequently also in world trade.

Nationalist Dealing and Wheeling President Wilson took the initiative to a League of Nations which was supposed to deal with disturbances and conflicts between the various powers and secure world peace, and, moreover, build a world where the conditions for international trade were sorted out. Wilson adhered to laissez faire and active U. S. involvement in international affairs, but it went to show that he did not have any substantial support in Congress. Throughout the 1920s and even more in the 1930s there was a protectionist kind of foreign policy which was adopted, in the United States as well as in Europe. Thus, the U. S. went in an isolationist direction as far as foreign policy was concerned and did not

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participate in Roosevelts League of Nations neither did the Soviet Union because it was excluded as a result of its communist ideology and social structure. Germany was from the beginning excluded from the League, but received membership as a consequence of the democratic Weimar republic in the course of the 1920s, before the Nazis (NSDAP) withdrew the country from the League after their accession to power in 1933. The international economic conditions, as well as the interior economy in each of the respective countries, came to be marked by international loans and Germanys payment of the war reparations. Germany lent huge sums of money from the U. S. after the materialization of the Dawes Plan from 1924 onwards, and these means were ear marked for the payment of the reparations. Formerly Great Britain as well as France both had a huge debt to the United States, debts that they had concluded while the World War 1 was still going on, to cover the costs of the very war operations. Consequently, there were immense imbalances between the respective countries, and the protectionist tendency served to intensify matters even more. One effect was that Germany never got the opportunity to pay down its debt in the form of export goods to the U. S., who obviously protected its own businesses and its huge home marked. Nor did other countries get admission for their products in the American market, and the debts was demanded paid back in gold so that most of this metal soon was stored in the United States. Surely, this served to weaken the relevance of the gold standard as a currency regulating measure. Following the difficulties within the international economic structures, even political crises and ideological strife occurred. In Italy the fascists ascended to power in 1922 with the support of the Italian king, in the wake of parliamentary chaos, economic turbulence, militant strikes and worker campaigns, followed by attacks from fascist combat groups (fascio di combattimento). The

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fear of bolshevism was on the rise and the fascists exploited this fear among moderate and conservative segments to gain influence and power. The economic problems in the country were tentatively solved through the idiosyncratic Italian corporatism which was supposed to bring the class wars between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to an end, and bring them together in one common interest. When the economical crisis struck even Italy in full force early in the 1930s and unemployment rose dramatically, Mussolini labored on the statistics instead on the actual unemployment, and for a while he succeeded in convincing the surrounding world that everything was all right in Italy. Among Mussolinis solutions were military build-up and conquests in Eastern Africa, in addition to strong involvement on General Francos side in the Spanish Civil War and Revolution from 1936-39. As a consequence of the failures of the League of Nations, such as the fact that quite pivotal international powers didnt participate in its deliberations and operations, in addition to the fact that the whole organization was lamented from the German side because it was wholly identified with the victorious powers, the conditions were poor for conferences between states and for diplomacy in general in the time between the two wars. The situation was to worsen further as one country after the other went from being parliamentarian democracies to dictatorships and one party States. Instead of General Assemblies in the League of Nations, such that was concocted in the United Nations after World War II, there came to be signed several separate agreements between the various countries. In 1922 the Rapallo Treaty was signed between Germany and the Soviet Union; it was based on military mutual aid, and hence contrary to the spirit and decisions of the Versailles treaty. However, since neither Germany nor the Soviet Union was members of the League of Nations, it was an issue that was very hard to deal with. The Rapallo-treaty was a link in the secret German military build-up which was embarked upon at an early stage in that country after

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WW1, partly without the knowledge and consent of the Weimar politicians. That this could happen was a result of military agents and institutions constituting a so called State within the State in the aftermath of that first total war. In 1924 the above mentioned Dawes Plan was drawn up and it involved huge American loans to Germany, and they were meant to contribute to the rebuilding of German industry and payment of the war reparations. The Locarno Agreement in 1925 was mainly about French-German issues with respect to German land concessions after the war, in Alsace/Lorraine, the Ruhr, et cetera. The Agreement gave rise to a wave of optimism throughout Europe. However, in Germany it was met by intense hostility by the nationalists sentiments which distanced themselves from the Weimar Republic (even as they took part in it), and they based their mass support on the anger over the humiliation that Germany had suffered because of the war defeat and the dictates of the Versailles treaty. The Briand/Kelloggs Treaty in 1928 is the closest one gets to an international treaty in the mid war era, due to the fact that 65 nations consented to abstain from war. However, the vagueness of the treaty clearly reveals the huge difficulties in achieving mutually obliging treaties. It also goes without saying that with the growth of dictatorships throughout Europe, headed by cynical state leaders, neither written nor oral promises were possible to trust. This appears more clearly in the wake of the war than under the turmoil of that era, and no one could doubt that Chamberlain himself was quite convinced that he had contributed to safeguarding world peace after his meeting with Hitler just a few months before the outbreak of the war. When pointing at the main causes behind the outbreak of World War 2, the arrow is inevitably directed against Germany, due to the fact that this countrys aggression against Czechoslovakia and Poland in 38 and 39 respectively, in addition to Anschluss with Austria a

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short time before that, hardly could be recognized as anything else than aggressive and expansionist acts which threatened world peace. Viewed in the light of the Versailles treaty there is a clear connection between the two World Wars, and after the fact on could reasonably contend that it would have been wiser if one had viewed the kriegschuldfrage after World War 1 with some more nuances to the picture. In fact, its start in the Balkans were a result of AustriaHungarys declaration of War against Serbia, in spite of Germanys effort to get the old, rotten Empire to accept Serbias concessions, followed by an intense mobilization on the Russian side. However, the fact remains that Germany actually attacked France and even violated Belgiums neutrality.

Political Polarization When Germany was given the main responsibility for World War 1 they would have reason to blame their Kaiser, Wilhelm II, and, moreover, their military elite. Prior to the Great War Der Kaiser had conducted so foolishly in diplomatic settings, for instance during the Morocco crises in 1905 and 1911, that the German people even spoke of disposing of him altogether. They probably should have done so, because on his abdication with the war defeat the whole responsibility for the war was placed on the newborn Weimar Republic and its democratic experimentation. Parliamentary democracy will very often involve frequent changes in office, and more or less governable coalitions between parties that is, a seeming chaos. Such a chaos may very well be acceptable if the economy is strong. However, with the crash at the New York stock markets in 1929 and the subsequent economic depression spreading all over the world a crisis that struck Germany especially hard the whole fundament of the Weimar Republic was undermined. Unemployment rose enormously and there surged up a steadily more bitter ideological polarization within political life, represented by a

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large communist party on the far Left and the nationalists/national socialists (the Nazis) on the far Right. The fear of communism grew day by day, especially among the leaders of industry, who by the side of military segments, the Gestapo and the storm troopers in SA and SS embodied the main collaborators with Hitler and his closes circle in the NSDAP. As the case was in Italy, fascism blossomed but in a Nazi version in that vacuum of power which occurred when the parliamentarian parties did not manage to come to terms and create governable coalitions because they were too deeply stuck in their own particularistic interests. Up against this strife the Nazis directed the foggy notion of the Arian Race and the German People, and the Third Reich was based on a tribute to the collective feelings of a wounded people wounded and humiliated through a war defeat followed by the harsh verdicts of the Versailles Treaty. However, it should not be forgotten that it was only 1/3 of the German people who gave their support to the NSDAP in any of the elections in the mid-war era, and that Hitler and his collaborators would not have achieved much without retorting to cheap and dirty tricks.

The Formation of Blocs versus Popular Front M ovements Just as before World War 2 there were in the 20s and 30s to develop blocs among the various European states. Ever since the signing of the Versailles Treaty in 1919, Poland had been allied with France as part of a corridon sanitaire towards the communism of Soviet Russia. There was also an understanding that Great Britain would join forces with France in the case of German aggression. On the other side the Rightwing totalitarians found together in the Berlin-Rome axis in 1936, concomitantly with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and Revolution. This struggle was to illustrate two things: Firstly, how huge impact ideologies and contests between those had begotten. Secondly, it appeared clearly how

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overwhelming the war fears that spread throughout England and France really were at the time. Hence, while Italy as well as Germany entered the Spanish Civil War on the fascists and Francos side, it was eventually the Soviet Union who took part on the Spanish republicans side when France as well as England opted for a neutral position partly in fear of being drawn into a grand war against the axis powers, and partly because their state leaderships did not want to be identified with the radical Spanish movements (especially the anarchists and the trotskyists) who struggled for the Spanish republic. The power demonstrations shown off especially by the Germans during The Spanish Civil War frightened the few remaining if even superficially democratic powers in Europe, and on top of that came the fear for a communist world revolution staged from Moscow. In this tense setting, with the polarization of political life involved, many of the reasons behind the lack of nerve that marked France as well as England prior to the German aggression from 1936 on was manifested. However, it remains a fact that the decisive opportunity to avoid another World War was wasted in the years of the strife on Spanish soil; a fact lamented by responsible foreigners and volunteers like George Orwell, who wrote the following comment on his sides military capability during the pivotal conflict: It seemed dreadful that the defenders of the Republic should be this mob of ragged children carrying worn-out rifles which they did not know how to use.3 The failure by the liberal western powers, Great Britain, France and the United States to get involved on the side of the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War, in which Europes first major confrontation with fascism unfolded, implied such horrendous effects as those depicted by Orwell in the quoted lines above. Once again, innocent young people came to be sacrificed on the altars of the pretentious Industrial Civilization, on equally cruel terms as

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those which haunted the children exploited for cleaning the factory chimneys in the early phases of industrialization. Having said that, Orwell emphasized the courage and generous ardor with which the Spanish republicans including anarchists and socialists (of the libertarian varieties) together with volunteers from other nations (like Orwell himself) showed in their heroic struggle for freedom, international brotherhood and solidarity. Needless to say, however, with rusty weapons and lack of training in the use of arms even the most self-sacrificing and ardent revolutionary soldier comes out on the losing side, especially when confronted with fascist enemies heavily equipped with the newest and most advanced weapons of the age, and disciplined even into blitzkrieg-attacking formations of air force units. Indeed, rather embarrassing for the stronghold of liberal Europe, Orwell goes on to state that: it was at least inherently likely that the British Government, which had not raised a finger to save the Spanish Government form Franco, would intervene quickly enough to save it from its own working classes.4 The Fascists victory in Spain in 1939 gave both Mussolini and Hitler gas on the tank and moral strength in their quest for expansion. Pan-germanism had long and firm roots in the history of the German people, who apart from Germany itself was spread throughout vast tracts of land in Eastern Europe. Hitler and his NSDAP played on the nationalism and pan-germanism among these enclaves of German peoples, and received telling support from them. This illustrates one of the most problematic aspects of nationalism as a phenomenon, and the threads reach back to the German nationalisms feeble start in the Napoleonic era. The German nationalism grew from a point of departure in the resistance against universalistic Enlightenment ideas and French revolutionary visions (in the warped fashion of Louis Napoleon), including universal human rights, a fact that may serve as an explanation of the racism

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and chauvinism of German nationalism as it were to unfold towards World War 2.

The Despotic Soviet Union When the above has been said about Germanys role it cannot be concealed that the totalitarian Soviet Union under Stalin also showed off aggressive and expansionist tendencies, and that this colossus State, after their mutual treaty of non-aggression with Germany in 1939, grabbed its part of Poland. For a long time the Soviet Union had, on the basis of the Komintern (the 3 rd International), plans ready-made for a worldwide communist revolution, where Soviet Russia itself was supposed to take a leading role. From many camps and constellations there were tendencies to a hopefulness of a rather cynical character, as to the expectations that the various powers and social agents would demolish each other, so that a third part would come out victorious in the end. Thus, in Great Britain and France there were hopes that Germany and the Soviet Union would tear each other apart in an ideological and geopolitical strife in Eastern Europe (cf. pangermanism vs. panslavism). The Soviet Union, and communists in many other countries, had similar hopes that the Nazis, who they reckoned as the last stage of Capitalism, and the other capitalist countries would weaken each other so much through another great war, and that this in effect would pave the way for a communist world revolution. And even if the communists in the German Reichstag from time to time were involved in fist fights with the Nazis represented there, they still found it timely to vote on the basis of tactics together with the Nazis against the Social Democrats, who they nourished a stern hate towards because of their brutal repression of the Spartacist-insurrection of 1918.

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Everything Went Wrong Thus, the lack of well functioning democracies and international assemblies which could have prepared the ground for civilized conduct and respectful diplomatic relations, became instrumental in the run up to World War 2. The rapid unification of Italy and Germany at the end of the 19 th century, had not given any room for the long term and patient construction of democratic institutions, and when these at first existed they proved easy to abolish for social agents who may be favored by that. Thus, it is hard to envision that something like it could have happened in a country like England, for instance, with its elaborated parliamentarian institutions throughout several hundred years. Moreover, at the economic level it is easy to see that the growing protectionism, which had accelerated already from the 1880s on, contributed to increasing the degree of tension and the mutual power strife between the states, and that this besides the crack in 29 gave especially Germany huge problems. After all, Wilsons intention with the League of Nations had been that the particularistic interests of the various countries were to come in the second place, but his high ideals obviously got slim chances for materialization during the mid-war years. The stagnation in world trade contributed to the favoring of arms industries and arms trade as a receipt against economic problems, and, combined with fascist and Nazi ideologies which even glorified warfare, conquest and violence, these facts resulted in fatal consequences for humanity for the second time in scarcely two decades. The economic crises in the mid war period, including overproduction of wheat of poorer and poorer quality, attest to how far off track the increasingly globalized economy had already come. The futile attempt at transcending the agrarian basis of major European societies, which implied abandoning a substantial content of the two basic elements in any civilization; a historical consciousness and the ability to learn from previous mistakes and

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malaises, and the long term planning view and foresight with respect to the conservation and ecologically sound utilization of natural resources this neglect tend to transfer present discordances and maladjustments onto future generations. The post war oil boom and the consequent climate crisis reinforce this general picture, including the myopia of statecraft representatives and corporate agents in the Age of Globalization.

A Traumatized Mass Society The overwhelming ascendance of mass society on the arena of western civilization during the first half of the 20 th century, was a precondition for albeit not the complete explanation of the two total wars fought on a world scale, and the consequent almost inerasable trauma they inflicted on humanity. As Jose Ortega y Gasset concluded already in 1930: As the masses, by definition, neither should nor can direct their own personal existence, and still less rule society in general, this means that actually Europe is suffering from the greatest crisis that can afflict peoples, nations, and civilization.5 By the onerous efforts at restoration after the Second World War two major issues loomed large on the agenda for the western state leaders who stepped forwards as the victors of the wars: The first a nd foremost concern was to prevent a new, economic post-war crisis similar to the one which occurred after the conclusion of peace in 1918. This objective was secured through the Bretton Woodsnegotiations (attended for instance by John M. Keynes) and the Marshal plan. Secondly, it was of major importance to reestablish the respectability of liberalism as a political ideology as well as the deliverer of basic premises for economic life, which even succeeded in filtering into the policies of the social democratic dominated

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Nordic countries. The two above mentioned measures, together with the Truman doctrine, contributed to this effect, and a main factor of its historical and political context was the reinforced communist state of Soviet Russia as a member although not an integrated and revered one of the victorious alliance. The obvious problematic concerning such an approach is its superficial and stork resembling character, however understandable it may be or irrespective of the number of apologists it may have drawn. It simply fails to confront the glaring and dismal facts maybe because they were too overwhelming for the ordinary citizen at the actual time. I am referring to the permanently threatening and inherently fascistoid character of mass society, the unhampered violence in the ruthless strife between the various nationalities of the world, and last but not least the immense pressures left by half a century of obsession with war and war production on the ecological systems of the Earth. The pulverization of moral standards embodied in the two total wars, is succinctly summed up by Gassets pitiless diagnostic of the ominous character of modern day mass culture and its threat towards civilization in any meaningful sense of the term, including its obsession with rights as separated from duties and obligations in short, from the civic virtue without which any designation of political ideals and structures becomes vacuous: What, by a word lacking even in grammar, is called amorality, is a thing that does not exist. If you are unwilling to submit to any norm, you have, nolens volens, to submit to the norm of denying all morality, and this is not amoral, but immoral. It is a negative morality which preserves the empty form of the other. 6 The outcome of the mainstream response to the challenges confronting humanity in 1945, was a paradoxical combination of a mass society which apparently had come to stay and which by itself excludes manifestations of the principle of civic virtue in the individual citizen, and hence precludes even the functioning of an

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authentic democracy and a modern variety of individualism, in which everyones purchase power and display of status symbols had taken the place of classical character building processes. An individualism based on consume hedonism and narcissism came to represent innovation in the social domain, and it lingers as far away from the ancient Greek paideia or character building ideals as the direct democracies of the Greeks are distinguished from the oligarchic, corporate political structures which passes under the outworn rubric democracy throughout the post war era and into our own time more or less approaching what an astute citizen of ancient Athens was prone to denounce as mobocracy, ever vigilant as to the prospects of the return to tyranny which Athenian city states so painstakingly had rid themselves of through the course of the centuries previous to the Periclean era.

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Chapter VII

The Civilization that Could Have Been; Post-War Efforts at Retaining a Living Earth

WITH the collapsing civilization as of 1914 striking like a blow from outer space in the western world after a century of more or less continuing peace in Europe generally, there came a push towards a new Enlightenment Era in the wake of the dominance of romanticism from the end of the Napoleonic wars onwards. The blame for the outbreak of war in September, 1914 has conveniently, and in an orthodox manner, been put on a Serbian nationalist, who was even labeled an anarchist (!) connecting anarchism with terror per se in an Orwellian manner. Nothing seems more natural for the present writer than to start this essay with one of the grand old men of anarchism; Peter A. Kropotkin. For, in contrast to his possibly more famous Russian companion, Mikhail Bakunin, who spoke vehemently in favor of pan-Slavism throughout his life, Kropotkin was an uncompromising internationalist and cosmopolite who abhorred national conflicts and wars possibly more than anything on Earth. With his Ethics; Origin and Development (1921) he made the scene for what proved to turn into a veritable second Enlightenment, towards the end of his long life in the service of a sane utilization of scientific and technological knowledge achieved within fields as disparate as biology and the history of literature, geography and general historical research all of which were permeated by a singular philanthropic orientation, a

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sharp observing mind, and an unflinching struggle for justice and human freedom.1 The so-called second Industrial Revolution at the turn of the century, previous to the violent eruptions between fellow Europeans in 1914, shortly resulted in repercussions East of the Elbe that is, on the vast continent under Russian control. Czarism had been gradually on retreat after a century of pressure from the narodnik as well as other populist and underground socialist movements, and eventually undergone reformation through the Revolution in 1905, following the humiliating defeat in the Far East; the shocking Japanese victory in the war between the Russian colossus and the seemingly tiny islands along the Asian Pacific coast. After the war defeat, when czarism was virtually finished, as testified through the dysfunctional war lines as well as the rotten civil infra-structure, the path towards social revolution in 1917 was ready made. The above mentioned movements were comparatively well organized, measured by the communication level in the actual context, resulting in coordinated, albeit spontaneous rebellions by vast segments of the rural Russian population most notably in the Western parts of the continent and probably best documented in the Ukraine region in which the Makhnovich movement held the lines for quite a while, as presented in Volines The Unknown Revolution and P. Arshinovs History of the Makhnovich Movement; both of them highly readable narratives of the tragic events and absolutely necessary for a proper understanding of more famous episodes during the Russian revolution such as the Kronstadt sailors and the Petrograd workers uprising, the Bolshevik suppression of which echoed around the Western world in the early 1920s. All of these spontaneous revolutionary expressions among the Russian public, and the indignation felt against a revolution which was being betrayed by state worshipping authoritarians in regimented party discipline, were summed up by leading anarchists such as Kropotkin and Emma Goldman. As irresistibly concluded by the latter:

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No revolution can ever succeed as a factor of liberation unless the MEANS used to further it be identical in spirit and tendency with the PURPOSES to be achieved. Revolution is the negation of the existing, a violent protest against mans inhumanity to man with all the thousand and one slaveries it involves. It is the destroyer of dominant values upon which a complex system of injustice, oppression, and wrong has been built by ignorance and brutality. It is the herald of NEW VALUES, ushering in a transformation of the basic relations of man to man, and of man to society. 2a In the context of World War, with Germany representing the primary aggressor possibly inspired by the unfortunate dictum espoused by Nietzsche that the aggressor is always in his right militarized industrial complexes inevitably developed all over Europe, eventually resulting in the departure of the Russian authoritarian revolutionary, V. I. Lenin, from his exile in the degenerating Austrian-Hungarian Empire, by train through Eastern Europe and into the heart of a Russia in revolutionary upheaval. This intentional plotting by the German authorities, manifested through this act of cowardice and slyness, turned out to be fatal for the promising peasant reconstruction of the Russian mir communities after the downfall of czarism by undermining the economic foundations of the originally invincible peasant soldiery spread over the entire Eastern front lines well armed and in a victorious mood after the long awaited, and finally successful, revolution. The Bolshevik developments in the subsequent period of the Russian revolution in the First World War era, has largely overshadowed the popular and agrarian roots of this major turning point in European history, and produced immense confusion among historians and with respect to public opinion in the West as regards the myths and realities pertaining to the 1917-revolution.2b As maybe the one person who had awaited a rising and revolt among the Russian people all his life all the way to abandoning his own aristocratic title and privileges at a very early date in his life Kropotkin could hardly believe his

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own senses after his return to Mother Russia after long years in exile in Western Europe, confronted with the utter disorganization and inhumanity of the Bolshevik party officials which resulted in mass starvation and complete breakdown regarding elementary services and logistics. As he wrote to V. I. Lenin in March, 1920, from his grass roots orientation towards revolution in general. If there is one quote deserving more than a couple of lines on the basis of its value of clarification, demystification and prophesy it is the following: Such construction from below, it would seem, would be best undertaken by the soviets. But Russia has already become a Soviet Republic only in name. The influx and bossism of party men, predominantly fledgeling Communists (the ideological old-timers are mainly in the larger centres), have already destroyed the influence and creative strength of these much-vaunted institutions, the soviets. At present it is not the soviets which rule in Russia but party committees. And their constructive ability suffers from all the inefficiencies of bureaucratic organization. To escape from the existing dislocation, Russia must rely on the creativity of local forces, which, as I see it, can become a factor in the building of a new life. The sooner this is understood the better, and the more will people be inclined to adopt social forms of life. If, however, the present situation is allowed to continue, the very word socialism will become a curse, as happened in France with the idea of equality for forty years after the rule of the Jacobins. 2c Needless to say, these wise words from the grand old man were never heeded though the Bolshevik bandits never dared to harm the writer physically. Supposedly, they may have figured that the torture of witnessing the abuse of the ideals of socialism was more than enough to finish off his life soon enough. He died the following year.

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After the complete collapse of Western Civilization in its core zone in 1914-18, turned to be repeated only half a generation later, intellectuals and humanists everywhere posed the inevitable questions regarding the economic and social basis of the whole enterprise, and the eventual possibilities of restoring the once promising civilization as it had manifested itself, notably in the 18 th century. The degree to which Western Civilization had disintegrated by 1914, and entailed a schism across the Atlantic, is plainly illustrated by the simple fact of ubiquitous nationalist romanticism in Europe permeating the various populations from farmers and proletarians all the way up the social ladder to intellectuals and politicians (with a few honorable exceptions) while the descendants of emigrants from these mother countries in the United States still was preoccupied with enlightened universalism. From the defeat of the internationally oriented Paris Commune in 1871, right up to the hitherto unheard of bloodshed and mass destruction on the European continent in the fateful total war, the notion of a common humanity endorsed so wholeheartedly by the encyclopaedists and among those who identified themselves with the Republic of Letters in the 18th century faded rapidly through the imperialist strife, most infamously exemplified by the horrendous scramble for Africa, which led to the two Morocco crises and the Fashoda episode, entangling the European nation states in a nexus of conflict which exploded through ignition by a simple assassination in a peripheral corner of the continent. To illustrate the point of dissonance between the New World across the Atlantic and the worn out Old one, the latter of which had succumbed to irrationalism within economics as well as philosophy, the intellectual culture in the former produced in depth studies of the Enlightenment tradition such as Max Pearson Cushings Baron D Holbach; A Study of Eighteenth Radicalism in France.3a The grave historical irony in this juxtaposition is that while DHolbach is considered as one of the founders of modern bio-chemistry and hence for the entire scientific basis of the agricultural revolution in cooperation with

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scientists from other corners of Europe such as the Swede, Johann Gottschalk Wallerius (whose works DHolbach translated into French for publication in the great Encyclopedie), aiming at its beneficial avail to all of humanity, European nations in 1914 were preparing for the initiation of chemical warfare against their fellow human beings situated at the wrong side of the border. No wonder that Americans hesitated for quite a while before meddling with the inferno in Europe. In the Enlightenment spirit of the post war era, scientist and humanist, Erwin Schrdinger, among others, tried to establish an ethical standard for the application of scientific and technological achievements which he considered to be the minimum criteria if this civilization was to be restored and reestablished on a more solid foundation than was the case in the half century or so previous to the double collapse. In the same vein as an Enlightenment inspired effort to restore the dignity of Western thought R. G. Collingwoods The Idea of Nature, a collection of writings by the versatile European intellectual published posthumously in 1945, represents an honorable effort at drawing the torn threads of European civilization together again by his discussion of its various perceptions of the natural world from the ancient Ionians on to the evolutionary biology developed from the days of Darwin onwards, including the vitalist life philosophies of thinkers like Henri Bergson.3b Kropotkins love of agrarian cultures and traditions was continued throughout almost the whole of the 20th century by the agronomist William A. Albrecht, and The Albrecht Papers4 fits naturally into the list of works which will have to be included in this kind of essay, if one excludes the respective political stances taken by these philanthropists and humanists. Lewis Herbers (pseudonym for Murray Bookchin) did at a quite early stage throw a searchlight upon the looming ecological crisis, as described in his early works, Our

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Synthetic Environment (1962)5a approximately concomitantly with Rachel Carsons chilling classic, The Silent Spring (1962)5b and Crisis in Our Cities (1965)6, and is obviously deserving a seat in the front row here. Edward Hyams Soil & Civilization7 is as indispensable reading today as when it appeared and received far too little attention in 1952. The fact that the emerging ecological crisis was addressed at the highest political level in the United States, for example through Secretary of the Interior, Stewart Udalls The Quiet Crisis (1963)8, with an introduction by president John F. Kennedy, attests to the Second Enlightenment impression one is gathering from a research on the post war intellectual culture, in the period before the military-industrial complex which previous American president, Dwight Eisenhower eagerly warned against shortly before his abdication, raised its monstrous head once again and splintered the responsible intellectuals into fractions of largely dubious strains as we approached the 1970s. So, the question remains: How and why was the new enlightened mood in the post war Western cultural sphere so thoroughly neglected and withdrawn from public consciousness, as we entered the second half of the 20th century, instead of accumulating into a reinforced humanism ecologically oriented and democratic in its core values as well as institutionally? There seems to be a pattern in this culturally degenerative process, that is, in this decline into a mediocre bliss of bread and circus: Initially, there inevitably occur scientific discoveries and their subsequent publication by serious agents in the literary sphere. Then these breakthroughs are popularized to a certain extent. The final stage in the degeneration process is represented by their complete vulgarization through the mass culture industry business and reduced to a form of entertainment which strips the content of the initial hard working scientists labor of any responsibility for the wider public to heed and act upon the alarm calls. The final outcome is the fading away of invaluable knowledge and civilizatory self-consciousness, just like

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the news in the overall media landscape; happenings the one day, gone with the night sleep before the start of the other. Thus, an accumulated cultural snoring dwarfs subsequent efforts at elaborating on the initial contributions in the direction of rectifying the mistakes and failures; an insidious process which obviously gathers overwhelming force and momentum with the simple fact of rapid increase in population in the respective societies, like a runaway train on auto-pilot. Already before the second collapse (i. e. the Second World War), G. V. Jacks and R. O. Whyte had documented the scale of ecological destruction by the war machinery and the military-industrial complexes, in their work, The Rape of the Earth (1939)9a. In the previous year, geographer Carl Ortwin Sauer delivered his speech at the Eighth Social Science Research Conference of the Pacific Coast, San Fransisco; Theme of Plant and Animal Destruction in Economic History. Consequently, there was every reason to be well informed about the risks involved with respect to another military catastrophe regarding life on the Earth in the widest sense, including the aspects of human resource management of fragile ecological systems. As everyone knows, their warnings were not paid the least attention to by the men of power at the time and another blow towards the biosphere became the result of their ignorance. Thus, the immense intellectual tour the force by Werner Jaeger; Paideia; the Ideals of Greek Culture (1939)9b, in which he delivers to modern Europe the received wisdom from the ancient Greek civilization as a last effort at appealing to reason, responsibility and restraint among the militarized European nations in the mid War era, ended up in dusty bookshelves instead of becoming common reading among the European public in schools and higher education. The common mental apparatuses and the mechanisms of psychological repression allowing for this kind of historical non-consciousness as well as its foundation in economics and culture was the central themes in Roderick Seidenbergs Post-historic Man; An Inquiry (1950), and to

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illustrate the scope of its content and implications for the post-war generations to come, Seidenberg started out his book with the following quote from Waldo Franks Chart for Rough Water: The collectivizing trend of society under machine production, whether that society calls itself democratic, Fascist, or socialist, is irrevocable.9c In 1950, Seidenberg took an optimistic stance as regards the potentialities of automation. However, that was before the development of planned obsolescence into a highly prioritized branch of economical engineering from the 1950s onwards and escalating towards the end of the century and into the present one, causing our species to produce mountains of garbage on an annual basis deposited in the oceans, on the land, and even out in space. Most disturbingly, this planned obsolescence extends into the very cultural sphere; a civilization killing phenomenon which in itself justifies an essay such as the present one. Thus, insofar as a non-historical stance is the commonly accepted behavior in our day-to-day business and mode of existential orientation, we will be deemed to repeat the mistakes of yesterday, only in a magnified scale tomorrow. The ancient Greeks or rather their own technocrats under the veil of the promethean Titans treated so extensively upon in the above mentioned work by Werner Jaeger (some 1200 pages), were repeatedly punished by the gods for their greed. The content of the punishment: soil erosion and barren rocks in regions where plant and animal life once flourished. The ultimate effects are visible in the Mediterranean area in our own day. In his grave frustration with respect to the previous generations total lack of taking responsibility for the living conditions of the next generation, biologist Fairfield Osborn summed up his judgment of their behavior and the state of the Earth in his classic, Our Plundered Planet (1948)10. This book received wide attention in the United States, which had been drawn into two

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successive hazardous imperialist adventures, primarily by Germany in its efforts to materialize the age old ambition of establishing pangermanism over the whole of Europe and beyond at the cost of Enlightened Universalism. As Robert M. Hutchins, president of University of Chicago for almost two decades, wrote in his Citizens Creed review in 1948: Our Plundered Planet is more than a book. It is a creed. It is dedicated to all who care about tomorrow. As an educator I am interested not only in tomorrow but in the day after tomorrow. As an inhabitant of the planet Earth, and as an inheritor of the kingdom thereof, I am also interested in yesterday and the day before yesterday and in the outrageous and reckless behavior of my ancestors and it seems that you and I have inherited a plucked goose.11 On the front of the book cover, the message couldnt have been more to the point after the military escapades of the first half of the century: With disturbing clarity this book points out that we are more likely to destroy ourselves in our persistent and world wide conflict with nature than in any war of weapons yet devised. In author Edward Seavers review in the same year, students of the era got the following message: Make no mistake about it: this is one of the most important books of our time. Beautifully written and brilliantly argued, Fairfield Osborns work has put squarely before us the key question of the century, the question that must eventually overshadow all others. It is nothing less than this: do we want to survive as a nation and as a civilization? It is not a theoretical question. Time is pressing us for a practical answer, and upon that answer depend the lives of the generations to come.12

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The immense challenges confronting humanity on a global economical scale after the two World Wars, launched a veritable scientific revolution within micro-biology in Eastern Europe, that is, in Western Russia as well as Poland and the Czech republic. The highly valuable research work done by the scientists who chose mycorrhizal-symbioses as their main field of study, has been duly demonstrated in the massive bibliography, Mycolit, 1758-1991, edited by James M. Trappe and Michael A. Castellano.13a On the broader cultural level at the interface between society and nature and with a reconstructive approach, three related works by seemingly disparate authors could be mentioned in this context: Simone Weils The Need for Roots, dealing with the efforts at reconstruction and cultural restoration in post war France, and the general uprootedness which represents the gravest threat against any kind of ecological sensibility among individuals and communities alike. Carl O. Sauers Seeds, Spades, Hearths, and Herds; The Domestication of Animals and Foodstuffs, which is a basic manual on the economic and ecological foundation of civilization, includes chapters on humans and their ecologically dominant position and the responsibilities involved, as well as historical documentation of detrimental effects by human communities on their ecological surroundings when such responsibility has not been heeded. Hans Jonas collection of essays, The Phenomenon of Life; Toward a Philosophical Biology , represents a thoroughgoing criticism of the tendency to reduce life into mathematically controllable matter on the premises of Newtonian physics, and includes essays on the meaning of metabolism and on philosophical aspects of Darwinism, as well as a thought provoking essay on the animal senses.13b Within the field of social analysis and critical theory, Max Horkheimers Eclipse of Reason (1947)14, Theodor Adornos Minima Moralia (1951)15, and Herbert Marcuses Eros & Civilization (1955)16 published in the same year as Tom Dale and Vernon Gill Carters Topsoil and Civilization17 -- appeared as a kind

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of final warning to those who still had not got the message. They are like beacons lightning up the intellectual culture of this vibrant period. The same must be said about Hannah Arendts The Human Condition18, published in 1958. The encyclopedic and massive work, Mans Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (1956)19, edited by William L. Thomas, Jr., Carl O. Sauer, Marston Bates and Lewis Mumford, is indispensible reading for anyone interested in the intellectual culture of that Era, and of major relevance for responsible people today, who may still have the energy and capabilities needed for restoring and keeping human societies at least at a semi-civilized level. E. A. Gutkinds Community & Environment (1953)20, Vance Packards The Waste Makers (1961)21 and Lewis Mumfords many works22 from early in the 20th century onwards may well have been too heavily digestive for their time, to the detriment for us today, not to mention for our ancestors. Seen together these works go a long way to explain and highlight the problems of the modern world as far as ecology and economy matters problems that we are confronting to an even more urgent degree today, more than half a century later. As regards the challenges confronting the modern individual with respect to keeping up with the all too rapidly proceedings of societies without any meaningful direction, the plagues involved in this process was thoroughly treated by Dr. Hans Selye in his classic, The Stress of Life (1956).23 In addition, G. D. H. Coles brilliant seven volume work, A History of Socialist Thought (1953-58)24 is indispensable reading for every single critic of capitalism in our time. With his The War of Steel and Gold (1914)25 the exceptional and radical journalist H. N. Brailsford anticipated the coming of World War 1. Throughout several decades imperialism had raged in Europe, with the bombardment of Alexandria in 1884 as a major warning of what would lie ahead. The Prussian war machine was

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reaching new heights under Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm, while the warnings of Nietzsche and others were largely ignored and even abused. As portrayed by George Perkins Marsh in his pioneering work, Man and Nature26, published in 1864, man had conquered nature, and in Man and his Conquest of Nature (1912)27, Marion Isabel Newbigin described the scene in the following way: With this wealth all the necessities of life can be bought, so that it seems as if all the old needs had gone forever.28 Indeed, optimism ran high at the time when Titanic ran into the ice symbolically, a couple of years before the collapse of the entire European civilization. Greed and nationalism hand in hand, paralleled by distasteful social Darwinist ideologies ruled the scene, while backward or reactionary ethnic groups or radicals within the European countries themselves were singled out as the ones to blame for the shocking malaise of modernity. Industrialization had become an end in itself, resulting in the enforced evacuation of women on a mass scale from the oikos sphere29, and for instance in the Nordic countries there were few who acknowledged the words from the Norwegian statesman and left liberal, Christian Michelsen, when he posed the provoking question whether it was wise politics to abandon agrarian society and replace it with an unhappy and alienated proletariat. Michelsen was also largely alone in his warnings against the raging imperialism threatening world peace and docile allowance of huge amounts of British and German capital into Scandinavia and especially Norway where the waterfalls gave singularly favorable opportunities for heavy industrial experimentation. The price that had to be paid for the waves of the industrial obsession throughout the 19 th century was, apart from the two civilization collapses in the form of two world wars, the destruction of the agrarian basis of western civilization and its great

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achievements throughout centuries especially the agrarian revolution of the 18th century, resulting from the proud Enlightenment Era. These are traits of modern history which are intimately connected. In this brief bibliographical essay I will touch upon the social historical and political context which lay underneath the thinking and perspectives of the various authors, but keep focus on the texts themselves simply because I want to emphasize their continuing value.

The First Collapse of European Civilization; 1914 The tremendous eruptions of imperialism from September, 1914 onwards became the object of many disputes, also among the political Left. When the working class movements, and the major Labor and Social Democratic Parties bowed their heads and enrolled under their respective state leaders and let their members join the armies to fight their fellow workers and farmers in the neighboring countries with whom they had been co-organized within the 1. and the 2. International, Kropotkin and Lenin clashed in a dispute concerning loyalty, the role of the State and the revolution. Kropotkin returned to Mother Russia to live there for the last years of his long life after the revolution seemed to be accomplished but was highly disillusioned by what he witnessed in his home country. His disappointment is documented in the letters that he exchanged with Lenin in the years following the revolution in 1917.30 With his Ethics; Origin and Development,31 published posthumously in 1921, Kropotkin labors through the entire philosophical tradition within the western cultural sphere which constitutes the basis of his anarchist thought, from the ancient Greeks on and until his own time.

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Throughout all of his life Kropotkin had been a proponent of enlightenment and progress, and then he had to face the dismal sceneries consisting in the collapse of the whole civilization project in which he had taken such an eager part through his miscellaneous writings within sciences such as geography, ethnology, biology, history, as well as politics and the social sciences. Although criticized by Marxists for his stance after 1914, I will contend that Kropotkin was right in his support of the Entente during World War 1. Germany was clearly to blame for that war, too, with the attack on France being prepared several decades in advance in the form of the so-called Schlieffen plan. How could the working masses of Europe clash into a war of mutual annihilation unprecedented in European history? That is a question still largely unanswered, but it was a main reason for Kropotkin in his writing the manuscript published as Ethics just a few months after his death. The causes of World War 1 is touched upon by Kropotkin in this work, but he makes his case by pointing to the internationalist character of European civilization where no one can claim any hegemonic position or supremacy to the detriment of other nations, hence, a critique of any kind of aggressive nationalism or imperialism which had torn Europe apart in the years between 1914 and 1918. Thus, he took sides with that part in the conflict which the common imperialism of the era aside had not pushed for military conquest, direct aggression and mass mobilization. The last few years of Kropotkins life became in this way singularly tragic, starting with the collapse of European civilization and then proceeding with the highly unfortunate turn of the Russian revolution following the Bolshevik take over.

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Chemically Warped Agriculture and an Industrial Civilization Furthermore, it was during the years immediately following World War 1 that the agronomist and defender of the basis of our civilization, William A. Albrecht32 started his research work with respect to what later on came to be known as ecological or organic agriculture, the latter denomination being employed in the United States and the former in Europe. While Albrecht, as well as Kropotkin, recognized a certain potential for industry to render agriculture more efficient and productive, none of them envisioned that this crucial craft and science were to be reduced to some kind of mining practices, as Albrechts British colleague, Albert Howard 33 (who, moreover, received his wisdom from his tenure as a British Department of Agriculture official among the Indian farmers, whom he was supposed to convert into the chemical and simplistic NPK illusion) described it in the late 30s and early 40s. Howard soon reached a comparatively wide hearing among British soil conservationists, among other Lady Eve Balfour, who penned her experiences with gardening and farming in The Living Soil34. The vital importance of maintaining the fertility of soils was of crucial concern for all of these philanthropic and eco-activist writers. For Albrecht this turned out to be a lifelong study which did not end before his death in 1974, whereupon his pupil and colleague, Charles Walters35 took up Albrechts legacy and continued the struggle partly with the organization, Acres U.S.A. in companionship with a host of other activists and scholars around the world. Quite early on, Albrecht forwarded the warning that the decreasing level and quality of proteins and trace elements in grains and vegetables produced solely by intensive chemical fertilizing, resulted in metabolic and degenerative diseases in animals as well as human beings. Another effect has been that western man to an increasing degree has been forced into a diet consisting to an excessive extent of animal proteins, taking a heavy toll on the Earths organic as well

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as inorganic resources. Additionally, when the quality of soils diminish, so does the quality of animal health and the meat they produce. Today, 40 years after Albrecht passed away, we see the really disturbing effects of such malpractices, for instance when it comes to the question of antibiotics in animal produce which has become so overwhelming and out of every proportion that this pharmaceutical substance no longer has any effect on quite a lot of diseased people, causing grave concern among medical staff the world over. Albrecht, by the way, was granted the honor of writing the introduction to Lewis Herbers Our Synthetic Environment (1962)36, which picks up the thread from the research work of the former. The collection, The Albrecht Papers, is a veritable gold mine for everyone who is occupied with organic agriculture, either as producers, consumers or both. Indeed, the latter has become the case for quite a lot of people lately, as horticulture seems to grow in importance and impact all over the world due to the present food crisis. As regards the proper place of human beings in the web of life, their nourishment, and their ability or lack of such to tend to these ecological cycles in a successful way, Albrecht put forth the following warning around 1950: In the last ten years the fertilizers share in crop production, in contrast to that of virgin fertility, increased from 20 to 25 %. This says nothing of the thousands of tons of fertilizer materials beside the mixed fertilizers used on our soils. Even then, the total food production has not increased since 194437 In other words, we have a long way to go in this respect, with approximately 1 billion people around the world starving daily. Unfortunately, the way to go has not become shorter in the years that have passed since Albrecht penned these words almost half a century ago. As regards Albert Howard, we would do well to remember that he was sent off to India by the British Empire with the intention to teach the Indians the art of industrialized agriculture, but was

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converted by the natives and went back to England to live the rest of his life devoted to the cause of ecological agriculture employing his pen, as well as agricultural tools and composting equipment. Furthermore, Howard came on early with documenting the symbiotic relationships in the soil, which conserves its fertility over an unlimited period of time, for instance the complex and advanced mycorhizza relationships between hyphae of fungi and plant roots which contributes to a highly efficient nutrient uptake, especially of phosphorus and micronutrients among the vast majority of green plants including the vegetables in our fields and gardens. Thus, later research has shown that 80-90 % of all green plants are dependent upon these symbiotic relationships which to an alarming extent are threatened by the chemically warped and industrialized agriculture. Moreover, in his work, Soil and Health, he touches upon many of the themes which Albrecht, Howard and Herber as well as microbiologists, ecological agriculturalists and horticulturalists in general concerned themselves with throughout the 1950s and 60s.38

Philosophy and Enlightenment The year before the Nazi take over in Germany Ernst Cassirer published from his refuge in the United States the highly informative work, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment39, obviously of little avail to the German people and, hence, for the world at large at the time of its publication. In his work, Cassirer labors through the whole body of the philosophy and scientific progress of the Enlightenment Era during the 18th century, viewed within the context of social history. For Cassirer, it is the whole of the western European continent which stands out as the core area of the Enlightenment especially France, Germany and Great Britain. In the same vein as Cassirers classical work, we find Horkheimer and Adornos Dialectic of the Enlightenment40. The promises of a new

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Enlightenment in the immediate post WW2 years achieved fuel by the publication in France of Volines historical magnum opus on the 1917 events in Russia and the Bolshevik takeover; The Unknown Revolution, which clearly elucidates that the role of the Bolshevik Party during the revolution was anything but progressive. 41 The individual works by the members of the Frankfurt School/Institute for Social Research; The Eclipse of Reason42 (Horkheimer) and Minima Moralia43 (Adorno). Marcuses Eros & Civilization44, in addition to Hannah Arendts The Human Condition45, deserve to be mentioned in this context, as works which brilliantly elucidate the complexities of the libertarian project of civilization criticism which was to receive such an acute attention throughout the 1960s, and the widespread discontent with an industrial civilization apparently and disturbingly on autopilot towards oblivion. While Cassirer, in 1932, still nourishes some optimism on behalf of western culture, the events of the 1930s and 40s resulted in immense difficulties in this respect for Horkheimer and Adorno. In his Eclipse of Reason Horkheimer attacks the subjectivist turn which had been on the rise since romanticism supplanted Enlightenment ideals from the early 19th century on a tendency which, moreover, has reversed the whole philosophical tradition since its beginnings in ancient Athens, with Plato and Aristotle as the most important forefathers. As pointed out by Adorno in Minima Moralia, the subjectivist turn had caused objective standards for human conduct to wither away indeed, it had come to be perceived as repressive with fatal consequences for morality and human solidarity. As far as literature goes, Adorno presents the following slightly euphemistic critique of its version of modernity: So folly becomes an epidemic: insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction: The fulfillment of persecution-fantasies springs from their affinity to

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bloody realities. Violence, on which civilization is based, means the persecution of all by all, and the persecution-maniac puts himself at a disadvantage only by blaming on his neighbor what is perpetrated by the whole, in a helpless attempt to make the incommensurable commensurable46 In Eros & Civilization, Herbert Marcuse draws a more optimistic picture of western civilization by the way of turning Freuds psycho analytic theories into an object of philosophical dissertation. The sublimation of the instincts underpin this optimism, which Marcuse does very well to underpin on the precondition that one accepts his (and Freuds) premises for the role of the human instinct s and the potentiality of human beings to gain a certain degree of control and sublimation in this respect. Tailored to this optimism are, illustratively, Friedrich Schillers 18th century Enlightenment perspectives on the play impulse, which Marcuse con nects to the new reality principle which will have to be achieved if the human liberatory project is to be fulfilled and, one may add, if humanity shall be enabled to avoid another dive into utter barbarism. It is not hard to understand why this work was to achieve such an immense importance within the counterculture which grew throughout the 60s. However, it would be highly unjust to blame Marcuse and his work(s) for everything that went wrong within the same counterculture. The hippies simply turned out to be too immature for this task, and they did not understand the Orwellian turn of hedonism which was to mark this movement in its latter stages. 47 Hannah Arendts contribution to the intellectual heritage of the post war era is uncontested. Several of her works are worth mention in this context, but the present writer is of the opinion that The Human Condition, published in 1958, stands out as a singularly well written and important work from this era. Her biting critique of the modern phenomenon within the production process planned obsolescence had to be silenced because of the sole reason that a

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widespread elucidation of this shameful trait of modernity would have resulted in a standstill of the whole capitalist economic machinery in the 60s. As pointed out by Arendt, it is an affront against any kind of human logic and notion of good common sense that the durability of a product is shorter than the time span it takes to produce it.48 It is an affront against the whole of our cultural history and the toil of our ancestors that there are produced commodities that contain built-in flaws, so that they will break down within a profitable time scale, just to keep commercial exchange up at an artificially high level. Surely, as pointed out by Arendt in her criticism of Marxism and its affiliation with corporate capitalism as regards the modern dimensional and reductionist economic compass, and its obsession with quantities and mass production: Emancipation from labor, in Marxs own terms, is emancipation from necessity, and this would ultimately mean emancipation from consumption as well, that is, from metabolism with nature which is the very condition of human life.49 It is a very fragile economy which operates from such a morally warped platform to say the very least. In fact, the ultimate consequences have turned out to be as reasonably informed people are aware of today the efforts to colonize Space as humanitys only chance of survival in the long term perspective. One may reasonably wonder what kind of knowledge and equipment should possibly facilitate the success of such a venture after the ravage of Gaia.50

Ecology and Public Health In the wake of two world wars optimism as regards the future of western civilization was at low ebb. The world moved rapidly into a Cold War and the spirits were on the defensive, especially in the

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west. In the Eastern bloc there was a more optimistic spirit, especially within the natural sciences, where microbiological research gave reasons for new hopes which largely passed unnoticed in the West. Eventually, it was Bretton Woods and the establishment of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) which dominated the news headlines, in addition to the communist coup detat in the Czechoslovakian republic in 1948. The same year Fairfield Osborns work, Our Plundered Planet, was published a book which seemed out of place to those who had endured great human losses in the previous wars. However, someone had to pose the issue at stake clearly: The collapse of civilization had not only hit heavily upon members of our own species; it had also ravaged our planet ecologically, and it was this threatening scenario that Osborn set out to portray in his pioneering work from 1948. How long the general public is supposed to proceed blindfolded largely by a self-serving bread and circus mainstream press only future generations will be in a position to give a retrospective exact answer to. Four years later Edward Hyams, who in a quiet protest in the aftermath of the world wars withdrew to a rural way of life to grow his own food in addition to studies and research, delivered his splendid work, Soil & Civilization. In this work, he portrays how intimately human well being at all times has been connected with the soils that feed us all a fact that has been largely mystified in modern times, in which an impersonal market is contributing a veil on this vital fact. Hyams shows, for instance, how the ancient Romans inherited the rapacious economy from the Carthage Empire, just to ravage their own soils and put their entire civilization in the balance. Hence, the declining stage proceeded, and the Romans were never again able to recover. Quite to the contrary, they succumbed to imperialist adventures and exploitation of far away peoples and their soils until their whole social framework became too top heavy and non-administrable and in the end crashed completely in the confrontation with Germanic barbarians who easily could gain

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control over Rome in the year 476 just to launch the long dark ages in Europe. Following the logic of Hyams, the fact that the impoverished Roman agricultural soils were no longer suited to produce the high quality wheat the staple food of the Roman legions containing the essential amino acids methionine and lyceine (the importance of which with respect to animal metabolism was emphasized by Albrecht at a very early stage in the previous century) goes a long way to explain the downfall of the entire Roman Empire.51 Thus, ecology was put on the agenda early in the 1950s, and in 1956 the monumental work, Mans Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, was published, edited by William L. Thomas, Jr., Carl O. Sauer, Marston Bates and Lewis Mumford. This work, consisting of some 1200 pages, contains every little thing one may have wished to know about the impacts of human activities on this Earth at the time. The work is based on actual facts gathered from around the world, and as for instance E. A. Gutkind one of the many contributors put it: What driving power is behind this lopsided development? It is the same lack of balance which pervades our life n general. One function work is paramount, and all other activities of our functional as well as of our personal life are subordinated to this devouring obsession. Work means industry, and industry means industrial buildings, districts, and countries. This one-sided overestimation of one function has created the urban deserts, has upset the fertile relations between urban and rural life, and has debased human dignity to the level of a soulless machine. The human scale has been lost in the turmoil of an illusory progress toward the great knowhow 52 The issues of nature conservation and public health went on hand in hand for the above mentioned authors, and this was certainly the case for Lewis Herber (Murray Bookchin). Already in 1952 he had

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written The Problems of Chemicals in Food, a pamphlet which subsequently was to be included in his pioneering 1962 work, Our Synthetic Environment. In this work Herber elaborates on the whole array of the damaging consequences of air and water pollution, chemical additives in food, reduced fertility of soils, etc. on public health.53In 1965, this work was to be followed up by Crisis in Our Cities, in which for instance the problems due to air pollution in and around the megalopolis areas was thoroughly analyzed. Even the issue of global warming was preliminarily touched upon in the above mentioned works, that is, more than half a century ago. 54 Thus, the fact remains that there are no reasons whatsoever to consider the problems of our own age as new or surprising. They have been mapped out in the minutest detail throughout many decades now, and nothing should justify the ignorance in face of these issues which have grown increasingly severe during the last three or four decades. As regards the need for a multidisciplinary approach towards the problems of modernity and the dangers of academic specialization with respect to the vistas of solving them in a coherent and humanistic manner; issues addressed by other thinkers such as Marcuse in his Eros & Civilization, E. Agres words in his contribution to the work; Value, edited by R. Lepley are worth considering in the their fullest meaning: What makes civilization possible is the fact that useful arts and fine arts, pure science and applied science and so on all down the line do not inhibit and nullify each other but on the contrary stimulate and fructify each other.55

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The Prospects Ahead Obviously, there are no reasons to believe that the ecological challenges that confront humanity will be solved in any coherent and lasting way unless this heritage from the above mentioned pioneers within ecological thinking and consciousness are recovered and heeded. It will be of no avail to picture the present ecological disturbances as news as long as they have been addressed by responsible people for more than half a century not to say 150 years, if one is willing to include G. P. Marshs wake -up call in his 1864 work, Man & Nature.55 The first move in the right direction may be to bring these authors works back into the common knowledge works penned since the latter mentioned one and even dedicated to the memory of his work. The motivation behind the present essay was a slight hope that the works mentioned herein could still be recovered from their near oblivion, and its brevity in no way does full justice to their lasting importance and invaluable insights. A collection of essays like the present one would have been regrettably incomplete unless an attempt was made to recover their work from such oblivion. It cannot be a coincidence that almost every environmentalist today has heard of Henry David Thoreaus Walden; Life in the Woods which represents a retreat and a romantic attitude amidst the germinating severe ecological disorders from the 1850s onwards while academics within the natural sciences very often are unaware of George Perkins Marshs simultaneous pioneering work, which represents an honest effort to address the problems at the time. The time for burying our most valuable senses below ground is obviously passed, as we are confronted with ecological dislocations such as a near ice free Arctic, drought on the British Isles as well as on Africas Horn, floods in Asia which wipes out entire communities, lifeless marine environments, sea mammals going belly up filled with tiny plastic particles, an Amazon rain forest which self ignites and is devoured by forest fire, and so on.

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In his work, The Meeting of East and West, F. S. C. Northrop in 1946 challenged the division of the world between an Eastern and Western hemisphere as regards the necessary policies to be adopted if the world community was to be able to address the malaise of modernity in the light of two world wars and an imminent ecological crisis: The time has come when these ideological conflicts must be faced and if possible resolved. Otherwise, the social policies, moral ideals and religious aspirations of men, because of their incompatibility one with another, will continue to generate misunderstanding and war instead of mutual understanding and peace.57 These words ring as true and important today as they did a lifetime ago, and the present generations would do well to pay attention to the words of wisdom penned in those immediate post-war years by Mr. Northrop as well as all the others who inspired this essay.

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Chapter VIII

Modernity and Individualism

WITH the causes, developments, and outcome of the Great French Revolution, and the following battle among the leading European powers by the start of the 19th century, the foundation stone was laid for a quite new social dispensation. All the way through the 19 th century it became clear that the revolutionary ideals liberty, equality and fraternity could not easily be materialized ab novo. On the contrary, the old repressive structures, feudal vestiges and judicial privileges were replaced by the more unveiled economic exploitation, which in time came to be regar ded as a kind of natural law as a consequence of the approaches of social Darwinism. What has been called homo economicus had been born. The social turmoil within the European nation states throughout the first of the century of breakthrough for modernity, with the revolutions of 1848 as the strongest indicator of the general social fermentation that European society experienced in this era, called on an intensified reflection upon social developments. With Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels announcing socialisms development from utopia to science, and from the entire bourgeoisies point of view their drawing up of the disturbing inferences from their analyses, presented for instance in The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Capital (1867), there surged forth a new wave of social analyses under the auspices of a new profession; the social sciences. However, before that could materialize the smoke from the Paris commune of 1871 had to fade away. In addition, in an epoch when industrialization was seen more or less as an end in itself not to say viewed as the very indicator of progress for human society one had largely to repress the early warnings about the possible impacts of

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human conduct as regards the deteriorating natural environment in certain central regions, such as these facts were presented by G. P. Marsh in his pioneering work, Man and Nature (1864). In this essay on the social sciences, modernity and the implications of the new individualism, as it has unfolded concomitantly with expanding geographical and social mobility and with meritocracy as a recognized guiding star I will take as a point of departure Ferdinand Tnnies (1855-1936) and his use of the conceptual pair Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft, which he introduced in 1887. The context within which Tnnies analyses unfolded the intensification of German nationalism, the build-up of Kaiser Wilhelms and Von Bismarcks military industrial complex, and the disciplining of the working classes into a mass party (by the way, in accordance with Marx receipt) is of vital importance to remember in such an examination of Tnnies analyses and tools of analysis as he applies them on modern society.

Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft Fundamentally, the nation building projects in the 19 th century represented strivings on behalf of the ruling elites in the direction of giving the individual a new existential basis in the wake of the undermining of the old, organic ties between societys members and of the thoroughgoing paternalistic social structures which Tnnies regarded as the essence of Gemeinschaft societies. The new existential basis was, according to Tnnies, being replaced by the new instrumental affinities as they were expressed through class society and its new accentuation of the clear cut economic life conditions of the individual, which he considered as expressions of the developing Gesellschaft society. In his analysis of this developmental process and determining phase of western civilization Tnnies used the concepts Wesenville and Krwille

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concerning the orienting compass of the individual in the two above mentioned normal type societies. Even if Tnnies poises the two different types of societies against each other in a mutually antagonistic duality, he directs attention towards traits of the former which may be found in the latter and vice versa, but in this respect as idiosyncratic phenomena which manifests the rule. In this context it may be well to remember that the old paternalism is largely reproduced in the various nationalisms as well as in the mass parties which grows with unprecedented strength at the beginning of the 20 th century, while one finds historical examples of Krwille acting among the numerous peasant revolts in typical Gemeinschaft societies from the early Middle Ages on and until the Great French Revolution. Tnnies was disturbed by the societys tendencies to dissolve into fragmentation and by the atomization of the individual, as consequences of the division of labor and its vocational specialization and focus on increased productivity alone, and thus he stands out as an early representative of the critical tradition which has from his time on concerned itself with the negative aspects of an individualism which to an overwhelming extent focuses on the economic aspects of life in a vulgar and reductionist sense. However, in his analyses there were no signs of a glorification of Gemeinschaft society, such as quite a lot of the central agents of romanticism had tended towards at the start of the 19 th century. His perspectives on authority in any society direct attention towards ideals of leadership among the ancient Greeks: Among three of its forms one may single out: The dignity of age, strength and wisdom. 1 This is counterpoised against an exercise of authority which draws on fear which for Tnnies represents the combination of honor and respect which may degenerate into awe for pater familias figures, and which for Montesquieu had stood out as the trademark of despotic rule some 150 years earlier. To what extent this problem complex was to

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receive the greatest relevance in modern times became obvious for everyone of those who experienced the collapse of western civilization in 1914 and its sequel in the form of totalitarian regimes and escalated militarization. The disturbances which hit western civilization in the first half of the 20th century gave the cultural critics within the social sciences an altogether different point of departure for their analyses than the one confronted by theoreticians like Tnnies, Georg Simmel, Max Weber and Sigmund Freud. The belief that progress went on in an undisturbed way after all, which all of the above mentioned thinkers to some extent had lingered on to, was largely shaken by the time the rebuilding process was started in the wake of World War 2. However, the one-sided emphasis on technological know-how, social regimentation and economic productivity as criteria for estimating progress as such was still perpetuated through the dynamics of the Cold War. In this context the scope for self reflection and cultural criticism was narrowed in the opening decades after 45, with the fateful consequence that vastly important issues and contributions to the social debates in that era drowned in the big McCarthyist wave. This reaction hit thought provoking works such as E. A. Gutkinds Community and Environment, Daniel Bells Work and its Discontents; The Cult of Efficiency in America, Erwin Schrdingers Science and Humanism, Hannah Arendts The Human Condition, and above all the monumental and encyclopaedic Mans Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, edited by William M. Thomas, Jr. and his colleagues.2

Consume Hedonism The veil which in the wake of The Cold War was swapped around the social and political debates will have to meet a certain searchlight when the consume hedonist individualism which sprang up with the

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new individualism of the 1960s is to be investigated in from a historical angle. The already mentioned D. Bell, who with his Work and its Discontents (1956) had made his contributions to inspiring the countercultural movements of the following century in EuroAmerican societies, produced with his book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) his explanation of the material and cultural orientation of western society as well as its countercultural expressions. From his stance within American sociology Bell concerned himself with what he labeled the double bind of modernity, the cultural expressions which it gave rise to and which parameters for individual expression it represented. Briefly his analysis circled around the tension between the delayed satisfaction which is built into the capitalist way of production, underpinned by the work ethic and the ever expanding ideal of immediate satisfaction of needs for the individual member of society in its role as consumer, propelled ahead by a cultural life wherein the urge to create something new had become an end in itself, and wherein a cultural avant-garde achieves the right to establish its own agenda because the traditional bourgeois world view, in Bells opinion, had run its course. In his analysis Bell contends that cultural life is the most dynamic component in our civilization3a, and, hence, that in this respect it surpasses technology, but he is also emphasizing the tie between the two aspects of society such as they unfold through the communicative possibilities of the mass media. Consequently, the impacts of technology are also singled out because the growing automation of productive activities leads to a post-industrial society, where traditional class consciousness is superseded by individual preferences. In this way the individual happens to be standing fairly isolated in a quite novel and unprecedented sense in her or his relation to their social context, at the same time as the cultural ideal of the eternally new offers a kind of receipt for lack of historical consciousness. Thus, Bell analyses the void in which the

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individual happens to find itself, and he finds it to be filled through consumption of this hyper productive societys flow of commodities material as well as cultural. Hence, the self realization of the individual proceeds as an expression of life style and personal cultural taste, in overt materialistic veins that blast the ideals of frugality that formerly distinguished the bourgeois cultural elite. The fact that cultural expressions are becoming objects of consumption in this idolization of the perpetually new is, for Bell, put on a par with the disturbing fact that the vastly expanded productivity in the 20th century to an ever increasing extent was coupled to the phenomenon of planned obsolescence. As regards the origins of this phenomenon within modern engineering, in connection with the speculative trends within the capitalist economic system, Werner Sombart elaborated on the distinctions between the physiocrats and the political economists when he stated that: By calculation I mean the tendency, the habit, perhaps more the capacity, to think of the universe in terms of figures, and to transform these figures into a well-knit system of income and expenditure. These figures, I need hardly add, always express a value, and the whole system is intended to demonstrate whether a plus or minus is the resultant, thus showing the undertaking is likely to bring profit or loss.3b When viewed in the light of the modern financial crises and the food crises reckoned by the United Nations Food and Agriculture agencies to be a constantly recurring phenomenon throughout the rest of the 21st century there hardly need to be emphasized that any sign of sound economy is lacking from the present capitalist system, as compared to the origins of laissez faire among the French physiocrats in the 18th century namely Francois Quesnay and his pupil, Turgot, who influenced Adam Smith in his foundation of political economy and in his own efforts drained economy of its basic link to natural and human resources, only to turn it into various

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speculative efforts as indicated by Sombart in his analysis of capitalism. Furthermore, Bell touches upon general themes within cultural criticism such as mass society and alienation, and in this connection he mentions the book, The Lonely Crowd, by D. Riesman, one of the most popular works within sociology in the 1950s. Riesman portrayed very well that the emancipation of the individual which had been hailed among the greatest assets of our civilization really had its dark sides, in that it at the time produced a character structure where the individual lacks self discipline and self motivation. Without such pillars there are evidently many other traits which are necessarily undermined, something that Bell for his part described as the burning out of the radical political will.4 If one, with the concept radical, in this context views it in its original meaning; to search for the root causes of the problem, this burning out contains an anemia within the very political system, with the implication that basic democratic principles are endangered. This dismal picture is glaringly contrasted with that elevation of the individual which pervaded the bourgeois humanism of the 19th century, and which at that time was poised against the collectivism of the working class movement. Bell adheres this turn of events to the fact that the ideals of the cultural elite in the post war era has been directed towards the irrational, Dionysian and even apocalyptic instead of that cultivation of the rational, Apollonian and orientation towards progress which was cultivated in the previous century, and singles out the glorification of the aesthetic dimension of existence in the present as the cause of the separation of the individual from any meaningful context and historical frame of understanding. The modern variety of hedonism receives great attention in Bells work, and he contends that every new, rising social force begins as an ascetic movement5, without touching upon the transformation that the conventional understanding of hedonism has undergone since

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ancient times, and the fact that asceticism and hedonism for Epicurus really was one and the same thing.6 I will return to this problem complex towards the closing stages of this essay.

Modern Individualism a Malaise? The ambivalent character which the emancipatory processes on behalf of the individual was to embody within western societies after the dissolution of the traditional Gemeinschaft structures, resulted in the sociological and psychological sciences in addition to expansive studies in social anthropology which contributed to putting the existential conditions under modernity into relief. In the years between the world wars the monumental work, The Making of Man7 was published, and among its contributors were Sigmund Freud and Margareth Mead, and the topics encompassed the whole specter of cultural expressions in a number of pre-industrial societies. More specific studies appeared in the 1950s, among them Dorothy Lees Freedom and Culture8, which portrays tribal societies which by far were in possession of the repressive character which often had been ascribed to them, occasionally with the intention to serve as an excuse for western imperialism. In Paul Radins The World of Primitive Man9a the respect for the individual is even singled out as one of the main traits of what he provokingly describes as aboriginal civilizations. The contrast to the modern mass individual discussed here is rather overwhelming indeed. As Erich Fromm concluded in his 1941 analysis of modernity in his classic study, The Escape from Freedom: In the mechanisms we have been discussing, the individual overcomes the feeling of insignificance in comparison with the overwhelming power of the world outside of himself either by renouncing his individual integrity, or by destroying others so that the world ceases to be threatening.9b

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In the Hegelian Charles Taylors work, The Malaise of Modernity (1991) an attempt is made at drawing up nuances in the largely polarized picture of modernity. On the one hand positivist social theoreticians have routinely subscribed to the view that developmental processes can only move in a linear upward direction, parallel to expanding productivity, technological know-how and social techniques of administration, at the same time as doomsday prophecies have been raining down from environmental activists as well as culture conservatives. The merciless verdicts from the latter camp have very often been directed towards the isolated individual, who in addition to a widespread sense of disempowerment in confrontation with social developments is burdened by a heavy sense of guilt in the midst of the modern malaise, to use Taylors expression. In a sense Taylor tries to restitute the hopes for the future by pointing at the dangers as well as the potentialities of modernistic individualism, and he directs attention towards the challenges as well as the possibilities which lingers on in an increasingly obfuscated and impalpable human community. Where social scientists such as Richard Sennett had thrown a light on the tyranny of intimacy and the death of the public sphere, and Christopher Lasch made his devastating attacks on the culture of narcissism, Taylor retorts to a more constructive and non -defeatist point of departure by taking a look at what kind of potential that may rest in modern mans understanding of self-realization and its corresponding ideal of authenticity. Already in his work, Hegel and Modern Society (1979) Taylor had touched upon this problem complex from a historical point of view: Central philosophers in the western cultural sphere such as Montesquieu and Hegel had concerned themselves with the ethical ties that forms individual and community into well functioning syntheses; for the former the denominator had been virtu and for the latter Sittlichkeit, and according to Taylor this is still the great challenge for social development in our times. 10 In relation to

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Sennets discourse on the tyranny of intimacy and the pollution of the public sphere, which Hannah Arendt also had touched upon besides other problematic traits of modernity in her The Human Condition (1958), Taylor makes some suggestions as to how the confusion of the private and the public may be sorted out. In this respect he draws a distinction between the weak versus the strong evaluations which the individual makes each day, where the former relates to pure taste preferences without public interest, while the latter alludes to moral standards without which no society may function well unless they are made into objects of conscious and public reflections. Three watchwords in this context are the moral clues; respect, duty and dignity. The ambivalence of the individualism of modernity, such as Taylor describes it, produces a relativism which instead of resulting in the building of everyones character, quite to the contrary is undermining the potentiality of authenticity. To abstain from discussing ethical issues has in a conventional postmodernist vein been conceived of as mutual respect, which according to Taylor (and this writer would certainly agree upon that) rests on a grave misunderstanding. Thus, the highly needed restoration of a public sphere must begin with an analysis of language and its usages. His point of departure in this matter is the dark sides of modern individualism, consisting in a self centricity where lack of social involvement and empathy towards other peoples living conditions reveals itself, in an unfortunate combination with a purely instrumental application of human reason. However, Taylor does not retort to any cheap moralization towards the individual in his analysis of this problem complex, but points rather towards the powerful mechanisms in social life which urges us into the hegemony of instrumental reason11, and in this context he refers to Max Webers early analyses of the impacts of bureaucratization on the scope of action which remains for the individual when it comes

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to taking social responsibility. Still, he insists vehemently that we are not bound on hands and feet in this cultural dead end road. Like Daniel Bell did in the latter part of his The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism12, Taylor, too, touches upon the framework and content of democracy in the modern world, and sketches out the kind of premises which must be in place if this kind of governance is not to degenerate into the shallow state that Tocqueville feared already in the middle of the 19 th century, according to which it appeared as simply a faade outside an omnipotent and authoritarian government stripped of popular control. However, where Bell did not in the least nourish any hopes that a participatory democracy could contribute to liberate the individual from the treadmill of consume hedonism, Taylor for his part contends that it is exactly a living political culture which is the road ahead if the loss of meaning within the individualism of modernity is to be corrected, and he makes an appeal to this case by referring to the meaning of our dignity as citizens in a classical republican spirit. For such a living political culture to flourish it is demanded that the moral sloppiness which, as Taylor contends, is no specificity belonging to our age alone such as it asserts itself through the misunderstandings of subjectivist relativism and the vague discourse, is confronted in the form of articulation of ideals in the public sphere. It is in this sense that the focus on authenticity in our age, according to Taylor, may be understood in the form of a creative potentiality, rather than be taken for granted as nothing more than a malaise in the form of its consume hedonist and narcissistic forms. What Taylor is drawing up is largely quite the opposite of the culture of idolatry (or, rather, copycat culture) when he refers to Herders encouragement to the individual in the direction of recognizing its own original way of being13, and in this context points to dialogue and mutual exchange with the social surroundings as preconditions for such a development.

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The controversial French sociologist, Michel Maffesoli, has after thoroughgoing analyses of various modern social movements drawn the conclusion that as long as people are together they dont care what they are up to.14 To the extent that this description covers the situation one may infer that Tnnies paring of concepts, as far as human community organization goes, to a certain extent has been transcended, and that the atomization of the individual has resulted in a desperation of belonging and identity which countervails independent thought and reflected choice of values. There are undoubtedly numerous examples of negative communities in the form of national chauvinism, religious mass hysteria, etc., but apart from the fact that Tnnies analyses represent an important contribution to the understanding of the turbulent age in which they were conducted, his use of concepts like Wesenswille and Krwille may still be considered as useful tools in todays globalized world and the massive challenges that confront humanity, especially with respect to the conservation of natural resources and endangered ecosystems. The problem complexes relating to the distribution of responsibilities, duties and burdens and what kind of community framework they are going to be situated within will doubtless gather massive importance in the decades ahead. Another crucial aspect in this connection is the very preconditions of human freedom. Tnnies described the hierarchical structures in the old Gemeinschaft society and the nexus of caring and authority of the traditional paternalistic relationships pervading the whole social fabric, and he suggested the potentiality for liberation which may rest in the developing Gesellschaft orientation in his day. That the latter also represented a janus faced organizational structure was revealed with the example of political mass parties and their role in aggressive nationalist campaigns of mobilization leading up to World War 1. These kinds of developmental tendencies show in the most unambiguous way that history does not proceed in a linear and steadily ascending manner, where new and better paradigms

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replaces wholly outdated ones, but that what confront us are cumulative processes in which there at any moment exist tensions between actual facts and potentialities, and in which human choices play a crucial role. Starting out from Tnnies analysis of authority one may indeed ask: What, in fact, represents the alternative to blind obedience? With the background of the violent eruptions of fascism and militarism, the representatives of the Frankfurt School presented their contributions to the analysis of the authoritarian personality, but they did hardly foresee that the so-called Foucaults pendulum through the counterculture of the 1960s would bend over into the diametrically opposite direction, for instance such as it came to be expressed through the slogan of the hippies; Never trust anyone older than 30!

Planned Obsolescence This fact draws once again attention towards Daniel Bells culture analysis and the neurotic adoration of the perpetually new which predominates within modernity. In previous times the imagination of inventive souls toyed with the thought of a perpetuum mobile machine which it was hoped would make the lot of humanity less burdened by the daily toil for survival. This variety of philanthropic labor has been replaced by economic mechanisms in which the maximizing of human needs represent the new compass for the overwhelming majority of people in the western world, to the detriment of lifes more spiritual and intellectual aspects. The result is a throwaway society which, apart from producing waste in huge amounts that by far exceeds the capacity of nature to recycle into new resources, also fosters a lack of historicity that strips modern man of the highly needed sense of contrast in relation to the reality in which one finds oneself. It is in this context that Bell employs the label hedonism in his description of the cultural flip side of the coin in relation to the cult of efficiency that he found in his

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analysis of the double binding of modernity. That hedonism in our time is associated with a striving for the satisfaction of insatiable needs, understood as an adequate way of achieving happiness, is worthy of a separate study in itself. For the epicureans of antiquity, however, the case was quite the opposite; happiness and pleasure were for them only achievable to the extent that one managed to limit ones needs to a minimum, because only such an orientation was commensurable with the minimizing of pain and suffering in life. If one was to take Bells analysis of the double binding and the grievances it produces in modern women and men as a point of departure, it will be possible to understand how asceticism and hedonism have ended up as counterpoised phenomena, while, alas, they were complementary aspects of life in the ancient world. Thus, for Epicurus the ascetic stance contributed to the peace of mind which represented the mental counterpart to the pleasure or hedonism which rested on the absence of bodily pain.15 As long as the pursuit of happiness must be said to be a common human drive, and furthermore is used as a justification of the glorification of productivity at any costs as the surrogate for religion, so to speak, for modern man such a clarification of concepts may be in place here. To what extent do economic structures of production, patterns of consumption and cultural forms of expression contribute to the satisfaction of the individuals pursuit of happiness in the mod ern age, viewed in the light of the burdens of ill health related to stress, pollution and the whole host of life style diseases confronting us today? The tendency to conceive of social problem complexes and challenges from a technological viewpoint where altogether different perspectives would be proper, was thoroughly criticized by Charles Taylor in his The Malaise of Modernity. In the twenty years that have passed since its publication one will have to say that the issue has acquired increased actuality. His encouragement to the individual in the direction of the articulation of ideals in the public

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realm as a way out of the narcissistic quagmire of modern individualism, to use Laschs terminology, has achieved a new meaning with the proliferation of the internet and the so-called social media. Can the democratic deficiency and the political apathy or negligence which Taylor warns us against be redeemed through the information and communication technology? Is cyberspace a full blown and viable substitution for face-to-face as the public spheres preconditions for the human interrelationships and their exchanges, where the revitalization of ideals of civic virtue may blossom in a new and modern context? Or does this new technology embody just another cultural pillow which in the long run reinforces the anemia and fragmentation of social and political life?

The Hazards of the Globalized M arket The escalating march of globalization within the world economy and, hence, the corresponding proliferation of ever more impersonal market relationships, accordingly represents a growing pressure against the three moral pivots respect, duty and dignity. Among its consequences is the fact that unsuspecting and otherwise ethically responsible customers in one part of the world unwittingly and uninformed on a daily basis consume products which are manufactured at immense human and environmental costs in another part of the world. Admittedly, ideals of ethical trade and short travelled food has been put forth in the public sphere, but a whole lot remains to be achieved before such standards may be elevated into the category which Taylor calls strong evaluations. The immoral character of the economic system as such contributes to the lowering of for instance the above mentioned instances into questions of personal taste (Taylors weak evaluations), and, hence to the ease with which the individual may so easily endure the injustices inflicted upon especially people in the third world countries unless the agents in the marketplace happen to end up in

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the searchlight of the highly selective and chock oriented mass media because of obviously outrageous conduct. However, there is no doubt that Taylors accentuation of respect, duty and dignity contributes to elevating the consciousness concerning these and similar issues, and that it represents an indispensable correlate to the agenda of human rights such as it has been framed since the latter part of the 18th century. For, indeed, what are formal and universal human rights worth if there are no parallel duties to respect and heed them? Obviously, not even the paper on which theyre written. Moreover, it is on the basis of such a perspective that the classical, republican ideals of civic virtue, which played such an important role for Montesquieu in his analysis of what constitutes the guarantee against the decline and degeneration of societies into despotic forms of rule, still are highly relevant in our own era however unpopular and non-modern they may seem within cultures largely programmed towards the spirals of presumably insatiable needs, and where the reins are largely limited to the Weberian, bureaucratic iron cage. As regards the way in which the modern Western, industrialized Civilization was gradually and rapidly breaking down and disintegrating in the wake of the total War era from 1914 onwards, 1950s existentialist thinkers such as Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, Hans Skjervheim and R. D. Laing concerned themselves with the tendencies toward ubiquitous communication breakdown already dealt with by George Orwell in his nightmarish novels written in the previous decade. Their efforts represented a last stand defensive guerilla warfare on the intellectual level on behalf of literate civilization as against the mass society playing directly into the hands of fascists of various sorts from war traders to speculators in food stuffs and public health; in short, corporate capitalism in all its ugly business as usual logic among the ruins of a once living Earth

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full of promises for a potentially intelligent species such as Homo Sapiens. In his pioneering social psychological work, Self and Others, R. D. Laing addressed the evils of a spectator normalcy developing from the modern misunderstood comforts of a toy technology world represented by television broadcasting, totalitarian surveillance techniques, telecommunication abuse (replacing the face-to-face dialogue which constituted the crucial element regarding the birth of democracy in ancient Athens, as well as during the Age of Democratic Revolution in the 18th and early 19th century), and so on. In the chapter Confirmation and Disconfirmation R. D. Laing includes the following quote of Martin Buber: In a human society, at all its levels, persons confirm one another in a practical way, to some extent or other, in their personal qualities and capacities, and a society may be termed human in the measure to which its members confirm one another. Obviously, the indispensable human need for confirmation regarding acquired faculties and a decent behavior in favor of society as a whole, can hardly be satisfied through watching TV commercials or hanging up the phone instead of solving communication problems in a civilized manner. The banality of the truths about the tristesse of a wretched civilization has played straight into the hands of neoreligious adventurers and barbarians of various sorts in chillingly striking parallels to certain events and developments in the era leading up to the fall of the Roman civilization in 476 A.D. The convenience of a War on Terror after decades of commercialized mass killings of civilians, broadcasted prime time and hugely profiting war traders in every nation and sado-masochists in any kind of uniforms and decorations may well prove to represent the final self-destructive mental repression of the absolutely necessary selfreflecting and critical investigation of an immoral core within economics as well as politics, academia as well as journalism,

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reducing the efforts by responsible people at attaining fair trade and sustainable utilization of non-renewable as well as renewable natural resources to some kind of mental distortion. An ugly and truthful description of a society lost in space and b ereft of any concept of nisus is presenting itself to us, even to the extent of scientists considering emigration from a used up Gaia/Telus to a phantasy Gaia/Telus 2.0 as a viable solution to the malaise or quagmire in which this hubris ridden, albeit once promising, civilization has sunk as we witness the self-ignition of the Amazon rain forest and even Siberian tundra forests burning down to dust, while the mass media reports that city life is safe and sound.

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Chapter IX

Ecology and Economics the Urgent Need for a Reunion


IN a world situation in which the U.N. has concluded with the presence of a permanent food crisis throughout the rest of the 21st century and hunger and starvation plaguing increasing numbers of people the very conception of land tenure in its authentic agricultural sense is withering away in a highly untimely manner, as it is being replaced by a stupendous agglomeration of urbanized hunters and gatherers, whose primary tools in the developed world are credit cards and plastic bags, representing the majority of the worlds population expecting and demanding cheap meat on the dinner table as a matter of course, one would do well to pay attention to Earth scientist James Callan Gray Walkers observation in his thought provoking Earth History that the largely onedimensional meat eating Acheulian cultures in pre-history [] were extremely conservative, preserving their way of life with little change for tens of thousands of generations. Presumably, their manipulative, cognitive, and organizational skills were low, because of biological limitations, so their rate of cultural evolution was correspondingly low. And further: Their reliance on a diet of big game meant that fewer Acheulians could be supported in a given area than had been the case for the Australopithecines.1a Thus, an ecological and evolutionary handicap may have been survivable in an epoch in Earth history in which no cities whatsoever was to be found anywhere, and the numbers of these

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human predecessors didnt exceed those of, say, the present world population of moose (Alces alces), hyena or vultures. Today, however, the handicap is definitively species threatening, as synthesized animal proteins are tentatively and secretly introduced into the cynical food industry and utterly impersonal supermarkets conveniently (again) kept aloof of public responsibility, debate, consciousness and decision making. Needless to say, obviously, the reader who perceives the opening lines of this essay as a screaming wake-up call has got it right. As we approach the 150th anniversary of the publication of George Perkins Marshs pioneering work, Man and Nature (1864)1b, during the most turbulent phase of industrialization within Western civilization symptomatically co-occurring with the American Civil War the ecological viability of the overall structure of this industrial civilization (which may eventually prove to be a veritable contradiction in terms) is as shaky as ever. In the above mentioned publication, which was completely overshadowed by the war news in the very same manner as the strongly intensified consciousness in the 1950s and 60s regarding ecological dislocations was dwarfed by the military escalation of the Cold War Marsh addressed humanitys immense potential for influencing and altering the natural environment. Already at that historical stage in the mid 1860s Marsh displayed very good reasons to contend that it is not the Earth that creates human beings, but the other way round. Hence, the purpose of his book was to raise the awareness of the perils as well as the prospects of the utilization of human powers, and to advocate caution and foresight in the way human societies interact with its ecological matrix. This ethically responsible stance was counterpoised to the unforeseen, and often highly detrimental, consequences of a singularly instrumental and industrial approach towards nature in a general sense. Among the topics addressed by Marsh were loss of biological diversity, irreversible soil erosion and climate change arguably the severest

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threats against the balance systems of the biosphere on which the well being of higher life forms as our own depends. In the environmental debate of the present day to the extent that any such exists at all which proceeds at the mercy of shock oriented mass media, there is an increasingly peculiar tendency to portray the problem complex outlined above as news. Well, the issues have obviously been around for quite a while, and to those who happen to be better informed the mainstream press agencies clearly appear to have been sleeping at the wheel at least for a generation or two. The failure of the all round educators of the citizenry, which we ordinarily suppose newspapers and broadcasters to be, to address the crucial issues in an informed and balanced manner, leaves the environmental battle ground open for exploitation by a wide array of ecologists of various sorts from mere eccentrics and acolytes of neo-primitivism to outright ecofascists. To the average and law abiding citizen the picture appears as incomprehensible and absurd to an utmost degree, with its common nonsensical fluctuations between apocalyptic vistas and a form of sentimental ecology which leaves a frail basis for future optimism and scope of reconstructive human conduct. The alienation of vast masses of people from the material and physiological preconditions of their lives and well being, paralleled by the ever increasing power of manipulation at the hands of technocrats and bureaucrats, reinforces the political disempowerment of the citizen in the present era. The so-called globalization of the worlds markets have left communities at loggerheads with, or disentangled from, their respective ecological zones (which have been termed bioregions) and their productive potential in the full sense of the term. As we enter a stage of history marked by a foreseen and permanent food crisis accentuated by dramatic climate change threatening highly vulnerable monoculture crops developed on a megalomaniac scale the extent to which we are on

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a dead end road as regards ecological viability as a species is illustrated by the proposed solution of synthesizing animal proteins in food factories. This desperate measure, by far exceeding the most nightmarish frankensteinian visions of sensible ecologists throughout the ages, is less abominable by the way in which we aesthetically approach the issue, than by the fact that it pushes food production further into an abyss of insufficient nutritional standard, paving the way for exacerbated degenerative diseases already connected to industrialized forms of food production. 2 By ignoring the way in which essential micronutrients such as minerals and amino acids are proceeded and produced by the actions of microorganisms in ecological systems in ways that have evolved through billions of years and which may not readily be supplanted by human ingenuity in the laboratory the old story of hubris and nemesis is written large, albeit not yet in the prime time evening news.

Our View of Nature The problem complex outlined above is ultimately tied to the way in which we contemplate Nature, natural phenomena and our stake in the web of life. As regards microbial life forms, which constitute the ecological basis of every higher species, the ordinary popularized version is one of horror if thematically treated with at all as illustrated by the arsenal of pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides enforced upon industrial food producers of the modern era by multinational corporations within the chemistry industry, allied with government officials parading as ministers of agriculture. On the other hand, the extensive research which have been conducted on benevolent and largely indispensable symbiosis between microorganisms such as nitrogen fixating bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi, has scarcely received any popularization at all.

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In the main, Nature is overwhelmingly perceived in its sublime version alternately as awe inspiring sceneries or as organisms which embody threats of some kind of other to our own existence. The role of heroic Man becomes in this context a caricature of Prometheus of the ancients a member of the Titan family whom in the Greek myths were repeatedly punished by the gods for their greed and avarice. The notion of conquering nature becomes a Sisyphus play leaving humanity suspended from any creative and sustainable interaction with the ecological matrix of which he is deemed to be a part either as rolling the stone heedlessly and repeatedly up the hill, or, alternatively, potentially bringing the minerals to its avail in a more meaningful and intelligent manner. The need for enlightenment with respect to natural phenomena not least in their evolutionary aspects is most pressing in a world which regrettably succumbed to a renewed obsession with religious creation and revelation myths in the wake of the abuse of the encyclopedic spirit by Napoleonic imperialism. In fact, the notion of creation by a supernatural power, extrapolating human aspirations to omnipotence, goes a long way to explain the extent to which human productive systems are based on either ignorance, neglect or both. Leaving aside the implicit hope that t here exists an otherworldly life to which life on Earth is only a preparation, the time perspective included in the various religious creation myths is as perilous to our ecological viability as well as to the bedrock foundation of civilization as such in our own era as it was among the Ancients. When one has no awareness of the time, for instance, required in the building up of a fertile soil not to mention the evolution of the extreme biological complexities conducted in the interface between edible plants and their growth medium (soils of various complexions) by microorganisms the authentic riches, literally speaking, of this world are readily wasted in favor of a million in the bank. In agriculture this implies that soils are exploited as in mining in the same way as was conducted by the

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Carthaginians in Northern Africa in the Roman era, leaving an expanding Sahara in their wake. Indeed, there are no unrelenting mechanisms involved in mans interrelationship with the land we are not deemed to use it up as predetermined by an alleged original sin. However, as long as agriculture is viewed as some kind of industry or mining, rather than as a complex craft involving geographically attuned scientific research, the odds that our present civilization goes the same way as for instance the ancient Mesopotamian, Greek or Roman ones, are rather low and the common denominator is erosion, first and foremost of the fertile top soil layer, which is easily lost but takes the above mentioned non clockwise time perspective in the building up process. To put it bluntly, last years money surplus in the farmers or, more often these days, agribusiness incorporations bank account, is paid off by the invalidation of the soil resource for the next generation and into an unforeseeable future. So, despite the vast amount of actual knowledge accumulated internationally3 throughout the modern era with respect to sustainable food production, the brute dynamics of an economics as if oikos didnt matter undermines these achievements of our civilization and manifests itself in practices as primitive and short sighted as that of the ancient Carthaginians. It is an interesting issue why the location of the advanced cultural traits within European civilization were seated along the inner sea, rather than along the coastline as was the case in the ancient Mediterranean basin among the Greco-Roman peoples. The heavy clay soils consisting of ocean floor sediments making up the agricultural premises from Portugal in the South to Bergen and Trondheim in the North could not be utilized for effective farming until the scientific aspects of the primary production within these various societies were fully understood from the Enlightenment era onwards, including the complex bio-chemical explanations which were embarked on by Johann Gottschalk Wallerius and Baron dHolbach, in addition to the microbiological investigations by Du

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Monceau in the 1750s. These scientific agriculturalists successors, mainly in the Eastern part of Europe, including the advanced Russians Kamienski and his colleagues, made the Promethean idea of conquering Nature by the heavier and heavier ploughs simply counterproductive. The alluvial soil sediments along the inner sea along the Seine, the Rhine, the Thames, the Moldau, the Danube, and so on did not demand the same extent of horse power and heavy steel tools as the denser ocean floor sediments. Hence, these bioregions along the river systems developed at a much earlier stage in European history into the European civilization as we came to know it with the main centers of Paris, London, Prague, Stockholm, and so on. In these more easily utilized soils lighter in weight and annually fertilized and renewed by floods agricultural surpluses were obtained, and cities with highly cultured crafts, arts, architecture, and so on could develop from the High Middle Ages onwards and join into a network of urban confederacies and networks of trade, as for example the Hanseatic League, from the 14th century onwards. While the main cities of this important tool for the development of a common European culture traditionally has been restricted to London, Bergen, Lbeck and Novgorod, it was nonetheless connected to the wider network of trade with other and more politically motivated regional and confederal forms of association further South in the effort to resist the centralizing and stifling efforts at political and economic control represented by the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy. The fact t hat the early Reformation efforts by Wyclif in the London region in the late 14 th century reached into the Eastern European sphere, including Bohemia, through his contact with Jan Hus and his followers, attests to the way in which ideas as well as goods were exchanged to a far more effective extent than is commonly acknowledged when were dealing with the so-called Dark Ages. In fact, these ages were dark only

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in so far as trade was disrupted, science and technology stifled, and exchange of ideas in general suppressed by the irrational forces represented by greedy feudal lords and a power hungry clergy more often than not serving the germinating monarchies in the centralizing tendencies which eventually made the nation state, rather than the visions and hopes engendered by the Communards of 1871, the dominant political organization on the continent finally to undermine the potentialities of the Republic of Letters and throw Europe into the abyss of World Wars and civilization breakdown in 1914 and 1938-40. The efforts at transnational organizations in the post-war era, then, has not only been necessary as a means to avoiding further catastrophic clashes between the former Enlightenment allies across the continent; regrettably they have been warped by the confusion between the respective organization of a commune and a confederacy, with their links to the Greek poleis and the Delian League, and a nation state and a union of nation states the latter of which is more in line with the Roman republican form of political organization. In any case, the need for decentralization is obvious if modern Europe shall once again be able to restore its once promising agricultural civilization, and contribute to addressing such crucial issues in our time such as the food crisis and the climate crisis, as the world prepares for 10 billion people in 2050, while the known weather conditions around the Globe are rapidly changing and becomes more and more unpredictable from year to year. The intensity of spontaneous adaptability needed in such a context is in itself a strong urge towards close observations on natural phenomena by citizens who know their respective bio-regions and ecosystems by heart; when to sow and reap, what and where, while being able to adjust to sudden changes and irregularities from year to year. These challenges are real and pressing and they will demand the very best of our ecological insights and techniques for primary

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production if we are to survive as a species, not to say if we shall retain our precious western civilization in the century that lies ahead.

The Political Implications of an Anti-Ecological Economy In 1992, there was published a largely ignored book in the Worldwatch environmental alert series, How Much is Enough?; The Consumer Society and the Future of the Earth 4, in which the above mentioned problem complexes was addressed in a succinct, albeit unpopular manner unpopular in the sense that it represented a veritable wake-up call regarding the way in which planet Earth is being devoured by our own, sharply split and alienated, species; notably by headless overconsumption of non-renewable natural resources in the so-called developed countries, as well as by reducing even renewable natural resources into the former category through the lack of an ecological and evolutionary time perspective needed within eco-systems for their viable re-creation. Within the context of the present anti-ecological economic structures on a global scale, domestic politics in the advanced capi talist nations essentially boils down to mass contests for the loot from the perpetual scramble for Africa that is to say, the Global South in general. Following from the destruction of age old local and regional markets by globalized mass production and advertising, the lasting potentialities of economic ingenuity focused on localized production and distribution only limited by the obligate attention which must be paid to the sustainability of the ecological systems involved in the processes of production and consumption has barely been recognized. Without the issues related to the stewardship of the ecosystems and bioregions which we inhabit, politics becomes a sinister and hollow power dance an anemic public sphere in which the meaning of the classical political spirit, manifested trough the civic virtue of the citizenry, loses all possibilities for fulfillment.

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Mass political organizing without the consciousness of the above mentioned economic malaise, hardly falls short of fascism or totalitarianism of a postmodern variety, if one wishes to reserve the former term for a distinct phase of European history. The totalitarian implications of this structure are briefly summarized in the lack of fundamental moral considerations in the daily operations of society, so essential to the classical Greek democracy, and the profound pulverization of responsibility resulting from mass party organizing. Both aspects are related to the missing focus on the ecological implications of the narrowly one-dimensional economic workings of an immoral global market, which are intimately connected with the exploitation and suppression of the vast majorities of the peoples of the Global South. Nevertheless, politics roams on in the craze for a higher share of the loot, including strikes among relatively well off employees, in the quest for status symbols as a sign of gods grace or related irrationalities. The only way in which politics may be re-colonized by ethics in any substantial manner when warped by such an immoral economic framework, is by resorting to a well tried remedy direct economic action on the productive side. Historically, this has for the most part entailed cooperative efforts based on self-management and decentralization sometimes in revolutionary social contexts such as the collectives during the anti-fascist struggle in Spain in the 1930s, or in the Makhnovich movement in Russia two decades earlier, not to mention the efforts conducted during the Paris commune confronted by the combined forces of the Prussian army and general Thiers troops in the turbulent days of 1871, the tragic (to say the least)5 outcome of which largely determined the fate of European civilization and the subsequent headlong rush into the First World War. This does not necessarily amount to a revolutionary calling on an overall scale in the present era. The chaos and confusion which will eventually result from an abrupt breakdown of the infrastructure of modern nations, are little likely to produce creative and

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reconstructive responses a lack of promise which leads our attention instead to the need for substantive reforms introduced from below, or at least under the pressure from public direct action in the same manner as moved civil servants at favorable periods in history to heed the demands from their countrys inhabitants. The most striking example in modern history is the transition from mercantilism to physiocracy and idealized free trade in the 18 th century, before the potentialities of that era was undermined by the militarization of the economy from the European Seven Years War onwards. As an omen of the wrong turn taken at this turning point in European history through the British victory by the muzzle over the brains of France, there was tumultuous rioting in Lo ndon during the war years because of popular discontent with the priorities of the government and the consequent economic dislocations to mention ample parallels to the Occupy Movements around the world this year. Whether or not modern popular protests will result in reforms or revolutions remains an open question largely dependent on the brains and wits of men and women in power positions. In our own era the above mentioned tendencies are perpetuated by the military industrial complexes which run their production apparatuses as if massive warfare on a 1942-scale was going on incessantly since the Second World War even encompassing the stunningly disillusioning principle of planned obsolescence. This brings the very notion of progress into the balance, and hence the survival of civilization. Any society which loses its sense of advancing to ever more spiritually sophisticated levels aiming at the perfection propounded by enlightenment philosophers such as Helvetius, Condorcet and Godwin is moving in the downward spiral and tends to perceive old vices as virtues and vice versa. An example to be cited in this context is the subversion of the traditional puritan ideal of frugality which, under the influence of cheap mass production introduced through war time assembly line techniques, was toppled and replaced by the extreme opposite namely the

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notion of waste as satisfaction and its ideological facilitators. 5 Considering the fact that there hardly exists waste, in the popular sense of the term, in nature only recycling of resources the present level of alienation of economic structures from its authentic oikos is almost self-explanatory. Indeed, it goes a long way in explaining the prolific mental illnesses which disables a veritable portion of modern populations. The lack of vital amino acids and micronutrients from modern food sources influences the metabolic processes in human bodies, inflicting serious harm to what medicals have termed the IQ of the body. Severe alienation seriously damages health! (while tobacco smoking, by the way, may be utilized as a nausea limiting habit). Obviously, the meaning of politics in such a context necessarily takes on a different character from previous eras. Thus, the prospects of a liberatory politics must necessarily take into account such serious public health issues, lest the very notion of politics as well as freedom is lost altogether in Orwellian Newspeak of a previously unknown caliber to the extent of including dementia as liberation and ignorance as bliss.

The Earth as the Garden of Humanity In view of the provoking notion that man has made the Earth, indeed that we have entered a genuinely new era in Earth history distinguished by the marks left on it by human activities, the obvious need occur which relates to the astonishing responsibility conferred upon us by this ambiguously prominent position that is, the need for an ethically oriented metabolism with Nature in the widest sense, entailing the wide varieties of economic interactions among ourselves and between us and the natural environment. We can no longer in the least degree indulge in economic ventures steeped in an archaic slash-and-burn-mentality, barely quasi-civilized in its lack of historical insight and long term conservation schemes. The record of failings and contra-productive innovations as regards human

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economic interactions with its ecological surroundings throughout History, is undoubtedly as long as the list of successes. From the fall of the Mesopotamian civilization in all probability caused by land clearances in the mountainous areas to the north in which the rivers Euphrates and Tigris develop, resulting in erosion of soil particles on a mass scale and the consequent silting of the elaborate irrigation installations necessary for practicing agriculture on a large scale in the ancient Mesopotamians respective bioregion5 to the Dust Bowl in the American Mid-West in the 1920s and 30s and similar immeasurable losses of fertile top soil up to the present, the lessons to be learned are of astonishing proportions. So the question remains: How do we cope with the responsibility connected to our position as rulers of the Earth? No doubt there is fully enough scientific knowledge available for making the adequate dispositions in most of the various ecological settings that confront human societies, including the variables connected to dramatic climate change and the challenges it poses for the aspect of planning. There is, moreover, every reason to believe that the knowledge regarding microbial-soil-plant relationships will be pivotal with respect to human opportunities for maintaining social structures that resembles the characteristic of a civilization. The productivity of different growth media (various soil types) is, however, as yet only tentatively understood, and various techniques related to microbial inoculation of plants and field soils in combination with green manure and mulching operations have proved highly efficient on what, until our own time, regularly has been termed unproductive soil.6 Hopefully, the reader altogether unfamiliar with food production excuses me for focusing to such a seemingly disproportionate degree on that side of the oikos-complex. I claim to be justified in my approach mainly on the basis of two vital facts: Firstly, it is the Earth and its soils which constitute the very basis of our existence, including the time perspectives involved (referred to above). Secondly, reports from UN food and agricultural organizations

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during the last decade have pointed in a rapidly increasing degree toward the likeliness of a permanent food crisis in the decades ahead. Both underpin the need for developing ecologically sound and locally based food systems, involving a substantive percentage of the inhabitants of cities and villages on a global scale. Indeed, it is safe to say that the wet dream of a perfect state of laissez faire definitively dried up with the monopolization of food production and speculation in agricultural produce poisoning the global market(s) by the mid 19th century. Furthermore, every decisive democratic movement or revolution in history have been facilitated through the involvement of independent farmers, often labeled the yeomanry from the entry into the democratic world by the ancient Greeks, to the democratic revolutions in the North American states and in France in the 18th century. So one is obliged to ask: What becomes of democracy without this historically integrated part? Can democracy be maintained by societies in which the overwhelming majority of the population is basically reduced to consumers considering the degree to which a democracy rests on the readiness of citizens to claim and conduct responsibility for the proceedings of a community, that is to say, in acknowledgement of duties as well as rights? For quite a while a central demand by the political Left has been the right to work. This Marxist oriented stance with its highly limiting conceptions of human beings metabolism with Nature, and even denigrating view of agriculture and rural ways of life should be contrasted to the richer humanistic urge towards conducting meaningful work. From the above it would appear that contributing to absolving, or at least minimizing, the onslaught of a permanent global food crisis throughout the rest of the 21 st century stands out as a relevant ingredient of the latter perspective on the work issue.

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Possible Remedies for the Disintegration of Oikos Considering the huge debt in what has been termed the bio-bank through the separation of money values and currencies from their resource foundations, qualitative changes with respect to the way in which economies are measured seem unavoidable. This will obviously include an evolutionary time perspective in planning processes and a focus on the organic aspects of the meaning of growth, development and progress admittedly implicating an Enlightenment perspective on the latter pillars of Civilization, which centered on the spiritual side of human faculties and their application. Based on historical material which attests to the role of local and regional markets in creating a fertile atmosphere for democratic values, confederal principles of organization, tolerance, and freedom of thought and expression 7a, it would seem appropriate to include a revitalization of such economic structures in the dual campaign for public empowerment and ecological restoration. From this perspective the need for locally based and resource founded currencies, involving the evolutionary time aspects, would have to emerge as an outbalancing force against the current dominance of evaluation based on the gold and oil complex. Politically, this vista naturally involves communalism and confederalism of which there exists ample historical evidence from most parts of the world. However, in the context of massive social disintegration as an approximately universal phenomenon, the reversal of this downward spiral calls for a regenerating process which have to contend with a starting point located at the very low ebb. In other words, it will have to go to the roots of this disintegration and reorganize our very metabolism with nature our way of work, production and consumption. With a view towards the immense tasks involved, as well as the social atomization which beleaguers the individual in mass societies in every area and setting, the inclusion of the elemental principle of economic cooperation (i.e.

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self-managed cooperatives) stands out as a viable starting point underpinned by similar historical examples as those regarding local and regional markets.8 While at the same time retaining the independency of the individual participants, cooperatives reinforce the creative powers of the latter, and through cross fertilization with each other these economic institutions are highly favorable for the development of democratic sentiments. And without deep seated democratic sentiments the mere institutions once labeled democratic at their initiation are merely empty shells sucked dry by the disruptive processes undermining the execution of civic virtue among the public at large. The reverse process is very likely a slow and intractable one and, thus, cannot simply be institutionalized by official decrees. It will have to follow spontaneous paths emerging along the way which may prove or disapprove the ventures embarked on, and in either case at least provide valuable experience for future efforts. The organizational tissues of economic cooperation have the asset, as compared to political institutions, in their higher susceptibility for organic development and, consequently, more lasting achievements. Furthermore, they create a sense of independence, competence and collective strength without which a zoon politikon is barely crawling on its knees. For, after all as Benjamin Franklin aptly observed in the days of Democratic Revolutions a Ploughman on his legs is higher than a Gentleman on his knees.7b The political demands which will ensue from a revitalization of cooperation and mutual aid in the economic sphere, may eventually encompass the protection of biotopes and bioregions against corporate exploitation, the introduction of local currencies, and the formation of public assemblies at the municipal level. To judge from what happened in ancient Greece at the institutionalization of classical democracy, where this political process followed a protracted period of economic development based on cooperative efforts, colonization and regional trade, there is no reason why one should expect an absence of such a

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relation between cause and effect in our own era. The fact remains that the invention of the principles of democracy in Athens was not one of theoretical schemes elaborated on in advance. Quite to the contrary, they developed on a spontaneous basis amidst a general economic and political crisis.7c Among the political issues which one would expect being addressed in the public assemblies at an initial stage, the relationship of the local communities and their respective reemerging market structures to the global level of human interaction will be of major importance. By focusing on the potentialities for development of their respective facilities for primary production, each well situated community and region will contribute to the alleviation of the hardships among underdeveloped parts of the world by refraining from usurpation of the latters raw materials and soils. Thus, the vilest scramble for loot, as Joseph Conrad depicted the imperialist strife prior to the First World War, perpetuated into the present historical stage under various veils, would finally succumb to the materialization of the Human Rights declarations issued as conclusions of the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries ideals pronounced in days of optimism unwary of the setbacks which lay ahead. The delay is still up to every new generation to circumscribe and it will certainly not be shortened by nationalistically limited political claims on the consumption side by the post -agrarian and even postindustrial regions. Hence, as regards the potentialities of cooperation in the affluent parts of the world, the stress should properly be put on innovating and ecologically sound production, while the underprivileged parts of the world justifiably will highlight healthful consumption for a considerable period of time. Only when the basic issues of distribution of the material means of life have been addressed, there would be favorable conditions for embarking on the massive tasks of reclaiming deserts, reforesting strip mined mountains, and the like. As regards the restoration of ecological equilibrium in our oceans, which may well prove to be the most

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crucial one, a trend in the right direction will be implied in vigilant and responsible soil management procedures preventing soil particles, nutrients and biocides from leaching into marine environments, while at the same time providing essential nourishment for increasingly ecologically oriented community members.

Agribusiness and its Essentially Anti-Evolutionary Perspective and Anti-Ecological Conception of Riches

Time

To get a slight grasp of the vast period of time which has elapsed since humanity made its first endeavors into horticultural and agricultural practices, the need for a time perspective essentially different from our day-to-day orientation and personal memory immediately presents itself. We are talking about some ten thousand years or more, and the development of our cultured plant varieties has followed side by side, indeed, often in close symbioses with the micro floristic and micro fauna environments in the respective growth substrates (mainly the various soils of the Earth). At least 80 % of all green land plants, including our agricultural varieties, are known to form growth stimulating root associations with mycorrhizal fungi. Some are entirely dependent on them for successful growth and reproduction. Viewing these simple, albeit largely underestimated, facts against the most widely adapted practices within present day agribusiness, the picture is altogether disheartening. Soil compaction caused by heavy machinery and excessive soil intervention in combination with starvation of organic matter in an increasing percentage of agricultural soils, following consequently upon the highly simplified NPK-formula for growth and maturation of cultured plants which has prevailed since the time of the Second Industrial Revolution from the late 19 th century on, present a veritable ecological malaise in itself with which future generations will have to cope. Regrettably, the valuable work which

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was done with respect to soil microbiology and ecological growth conditions, especially since the early 1880s, was submerged by the deluge of promethean conquest of nature visions fostered by the entrepreneurial and narrowly business-minded new economic elites, who had as little restraint towards exploiting human beings down to small children as towards an industrially biased usage of natural resources. According to John Larsen, Sabine Ravnskov and John Nygaard Sorensen: In the early phase of AM [abuscular mycorrhiza] research (1960s 1980s), researchers focused on plant nutrition and tried to promote the commercial use of AMF as bio-fertilizers for plant production. However, this approach did not fit into modern agriculture with its intensive use of fertilizers and pesticides. More recently, other plant benefits, such as increased stress tolerance, have become important arguments in favor of AM integration.8 The finely attuned and complex processes occurring in the substrates that we depend on for our very existence as one among the advanced present species, simply sailed off above the frankensteinian technocrats self-satisfied heads. This cultural tragedy is a bi-aspect of Georg Simmels more general concept of the tragedy of culture, pronounced at the beginning of the 20th century, which involves the overwhelming challenges confronting the individual with respect to attaining a wellfunctioning appropriation of developments within the various cultural spheres of modern civilization. For our purposes it is relevant to add the reinforcement of the promethean side by main strands within historical writing. The highly sensitive and vigilant innovators and early scientists who added up to the Agricultural Revolution and the economic take-off during the 18th century, could hardly have imagined the way in which their sentiments were to be misrepresented by their historiographers some three or four generations onwards. In officially recognized history works for

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higher academic purposes, agriculture is now consequently presented among the industries. Viewed within the above indicated evolutionary time perspective, however, there is every justification for reckoning agriculture rather among the crafts, arts or sciences or, indeed, a combination of these. Confronted with the immensely complex organic processes going on where riches are produced, to use a physiocratic terminology, the machine operations of mechanical causation cherished since the days of Newton definitively reach their limitations. As regards the history of scientific research there is hardly a single educated individual who has never heard of Newton. But how many in the world today are familiar with the pioneering work of Wallerius within bio-chemistry and de Monceau within microbiology, both of them duly represented in the 18th century French encyclopdie? Based on the above facts, it is safe to conclude that the discrepancy in the amount of information on the former as compared to these representatives of the Enlightenment on the European continent, hardly is accidental quite to the contrary, they are among the fatal prejudices accompanying a civilization in demise. In the aggressively profit oriented soil mining agricultural practices prevailing in our industrial civilization, the long term implications of soil treatment are simply anathema. Furthermore, the generations succeeding ours will not have the recourse to forgiving us for not knowing better; the contribution of soil degradation to the decline of civilizations has been treated critically since the time of Aristotle. 9 The knowledge that originally productive soils may easily decline in fertility through detrimental soil treatment, was well established in Europe since the days of da Vinci, who also launched some of the very first notions of evolution in the modern sense of the term. The interest in civilizations, understood as a general concept, reached a peak during the Enlightenment era; the universalistic orientation of which allowed for a rich cross fertilization of ideas and scientific knowledge. Chronicles of Asian civilizations along the great river

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basins were absorbed in Europe by such outstanding intellectuals as Montesquieu in the early 18th century, and we can only regret that the subsequent eras have not heeded his recommendations and advices in certain vital respects.10 The causes of the decline and fall of the Mesopotamian civilization are also representing an alarm bell resounding ever since for those who have retained attunement to its frequency; the way in which the ancients elaborate irrigation systems were silted by the yearly depositing particles flowing down from the deforested mountainous areas to the north, and no longer could be cleared by the slave population, is summing up in few words the perils ever present towards human civilization ventures. Key words, on the other hand, for a successful civilization in a wider time perspective are: Long term planning and conservation, historical consciousness, and humane treatment of the members of society.

Megalomania versus Bio-Regionalism Estimated from the alarming rates of urbanization during the past two centuries, clustered around specific traditionally commercial areas and with immense ecological impacts on the web of life in which even metropolitans eventually are embedded, the notion that we have long since entered an age of megalomania readily appears. Implicit in the spirit of megalomania is the notion that the Earth is entirely within reach of a human engineering orientation and unambiguously susceptible to our ever so myopic purposes. As referred to above, the ancient Greek legends tell that, in the drama between the decisive forces of existence, the Titans (including Prometheus) had repeatedly been punished by the gods for their greed. Thus, the Titans oft celebrated prudence, in other words, was overwhelmingly one-dimensional. It is only by way of old vices turning into virtues that the critical treatment by the romantic poets and literates (especially Lord Byron, Percy Byshe Shelley and Mary

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Wollstonecraft Shelley) of the Promethean myth and their mocking presentation of his character, fail to be recognized within present day literary criticism.13 In an ecological sense, megalopolis represents greed in its highest potency; the turning of one of the species of a niche into an utterly self-absorbed parasitic organism. We can stand the occurrence of parasitism in organisms which we commonly regard as simple; the recognition of the disconcerting fact that our societies may deteriorate into such a category belongs to the core of existential despair that has haunted humanity throughout the modern era, and even occasionally descended into outright misanthropy. The preference of monocultures and regional economic specialization around a highly limited utilization of bioregional potentialities, is a basic characteristic of the prevailing structures of globalization which result in ominously vulnerable economic bases for communities on a world wide scale. Equally disconcerting is the fact that the grossly industrialized production of cereals during the last few decades has confronted massive reductions in harvest quality as well as quantity because of plant disease related to fungicide resistant swamps (or, rather, highly adaptive microbial fungi) such as the so-called Rust varieties. It is the latter kind of imbalance in soil environments which the beneficial mycorrhizal fungi invariably tend to counter under natural conditions, i.e. where application of toxic substances as well as man inflicted soil compaction and other detrimental disturbances do not occur. The only reasonable thing for humanity to do in its ventures into agriculture is to strive towards replication and reinforcement of the processes which characterize such undisturbed soil environments. As long as the varieties of different soil types and their responses to human activity present the known magnitude portrayed in scientific literature during the past half century or so, our responsibility towards the living systems of this planet and the well being of future generations makes our existential freedom into a mandatory one the mandate being connected to the maintenance of the eco-

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productivity of the bioregions in which our communities are situated. Paralleled by the need for respecting the biodiversity of our natural environments, is the need for a revival of well rounded and authentically individualized citizens as the heart and soul of democracy. The responsibilities alluded to above, in combination with the ethical imperatives towards to the Global South, may well be the most plausible ideological foundations from whence a revitalization of the classic republican notion of civic virtue will arise if revocable at all. In social contexts where community ties are utterly fragmented, and the notion of the common good is often way out of reach under the present technocratic regime ruled by experts, the ecologization of our day-to-day relationship with our natural environment and a common aim towards increasing the extent of self-reliance of local communities regarding staple products, may equally well be the most effective way of improving public health and well being, which in itself represent underestimated economic and cultural assets for any society aspiring towards civilization. After all, every known civilization at its respective apexes was highly self-reliant, while the occurrence of trade was only supplementary in regards to the total product consumed within the oikos. Correspondingly, the decline of previous civilizations has been related to their tendency in the end to transgress the rules of a self-reliant oikos, becoming obsessively preoccupied with foreign conquests, warfare or trade, or any combinations of these. The lessons from past civilizations represent some of the main keys in future efforts to prevent our own troubled civilization from oblivion, enabling us instead to enhance humanistic ideals and deepen our ecological understanding.

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Chapter X

Civic Virtue versus Corporate Self-Interest The Decisive Battle of the 21st century

UNTIL fairly recently primary progressive focus for humanity as a whole was to provide adequate means of subsistence for the vast majority, in order to emancipate the individual from material scarcity and toil, so that he or she may be able to take an active part in the formation of society and fulfill their potentialities as fully developed human beings according to the standards of the actual time period. This was a part of the political program of the Enlightenment Era, manifested through publications such as the French Encyclopaedia. Obviously, the distribution of benefits and burdens within society, and the control of the means of production the issues which among radicals throughout more than two centuries have been labeled as the social question have varied with different social structures and historical epochs. This distribution varies in its character from a fairly egalitarian profile in the early phase of human existence, in various tribal societies, to an immense accumulation on the part of a few privileged strata in cultures as for instance the Aztecs and the early civilizations in Mesopotamia and Egypt. However, the capitalist stage stands out as the most uneven when it comes to the distribution of the means of subsistence, and one in which the vast majority has had to bear the burdens, while often being impelled to sacrifice their lives in an effort to achieve the benefits on behalf of a tiny minority. This inequality remains an affront to reason and even common sense to this very day making way for the resent Occupy movements around the western world. The form that this inequality acquires surely takes on a different character from the early stages of capitalism some 200 years ago, when the social

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question fomented militant artisanal and workers movements which fought for their economic and political demands in revolutions, general strikes and other forms of mass mobilization against the brutalizing effects of capitalism at that stage in history. The working class struggles in the western world, which undoubtedly was the cradle of that economic system, subsequently bore fruits in the form of raised living standards and of determining importance for the continued existence and expansion of capitalism to this very day increased purchase power among the vast majority, at least in the western world. Without denying the fact that the tendencies to a novel poverty among underprivileged people in industrialized countries, it is safe to say that direct material need and general scarcity to an increasing extent has been relocated to the mass of people in the so called Third World or the Global South these days even reinforced by the utterly immoral Land Grabbing resulting from the present food crisis, which will accompany our species for decades to come. The Third World populations are held in an iron grip in which they are forced to deliver raw materials to the industrialized world (including the aggressively expanding China), rather than being left an opportunity to embark on projects by means of which they would be able to feed their own and develop their own competence and industries. As everyone knows, this development is enforced by supranational organizations like the World Bank and the International Money Fund in concordance with multinational companies operating within trades like mining, agribusiness, etc. and in a weird companionship with the more or less autocratic regimes in the countries targeted for exploitation even though their dealings are portrayed by neo -liberal taletellers as some kind of natural law. Demands of nullification of debts on behalf of poor countries have hitherto been turned down by the above mentioned supranational organizations, which in itself testify to capitalisms inherently immoral character and grotesque consequences. As for the hopes of leftists and ecologically oriented individuals, NGOs and popular organizations for radical change in

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the direction of a libertarian, rational and ecological society on a global scale, they will largely depend on their ability to develop determined and well organized grass roots movements precisely in the western world in which a cult of consume hedonism now prevails and on these movements capability to materialize into lasting and vital counter institutions to capitalism, corporate power ensembles, the nation state and transnational institutions like the European Union. In view of todays social, economic and ecological crises it seems rather appropriate to pose the following question: Why is the present political agenda to such an overwhelming extent marked by the prevailing astonishing degree of apparent consensus and obedience towards the power apparatuses in the western world not to say in the world at large and why is it that we witness so few attempts by broader social segments to achieve new institutions which may confer upon the public a new empowerment with respect to taking back power and control over the direction that society takes? Have the hierarchical social structures of today to such an extent been reified into a hierarchical sensibility, that these facts in combination with the hedonist consumerism of mass society are having a numbing impact upon the inborn and inherent drive in every human being to try to influence the direction that society takes and to have a stake in the decisions which concerns its development, potential progress, and future happiness? And another question which poses itself in this context is: How are the very terms development, progress, and happiness defined by the commoner in the street?

Capitalism and Growth for Its Own Sake In pre-capitalist eras in tribal societies, in the Classical world, the Middle Ages and early modern times up to the revolutionary and

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Napoleonic wars the interaction between man and his natural surroundings, and the ecosystems that support the whole web of life, was preoccupied with the provisioning of the means of subsistence, and only secondly was there ever a question of acquiring surpluses for accumulation. To the extent that hoarding was involved, the surpluses were largely intended to meet the needs of the whole population notably the inhabitants of the early cities, such as was the case with the granaries in Europes middle ages. A considerable part not to say all of the towns of the Middle Ages had such provisions for distribution in times of failing crops, starvation and hunger, and they were quite often administered and tended to by highly democratic assemblies. Hence, the surpluses were redistributed to the citizens in equitable portions as their needs may have dictated. Moreover, this kind of management was an instance of a community oriented economic system which also reached into the countryside, where it could take the form of common lands, communal grain mills, saw mills, and so on. At these stages of social development, there were attached strict taboos on individual economic gain with some exceptions during the fall of the Roman Republic and in the declining stages of the Roman Empire and to the extent that the accumulation of riches, capital and resources in general took place, the processes were based on land grabbing campaigns like the Enclosure movements in Britain from the 16 th century onwards.1 Merchants who happened to earn fortunes on their voyages and trading activities in city ports and other regional markets were obliged to invest their earnings in landed estates, just to escape the taboos and convictions of the community at large against the accumulation of money gains. The contrast between these pre-capitalist epochs and the present globalized capitalism is stunning. From being associated with the strictest taboos within the framework of predominantly pre-market societies, traits such as monetary self-interest and personal economic gain have been turned into a fully acceptable, indeed, natural drive

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among our species, accompanied by the designation of capitalism as a natural law. In this context, Karl Polanyis description of thi s drastic overturning is quite striking, in the way he addresses the issue in his work, The Great Transformation.2 Admittedly, one should not suppress the fact that humanity, during its 200 years of capitalist development, has achieved an immense growth in economic productivity and, hence, laid the foundations for a society in which material uncertainty and scarcity is done away with in a great many regions of the world at least superficially and at the present stage. However, as long as the same economic and social system has led to an ever increasing accumulation on behalf of a tiny fraction among us whether in the form of capital goods or real estate, monopolization and undemocratic social structures its development has not turned out favorable for the vast majority of the global populace. The paradox which rests in the lack of consistency in the relationship between the rhetoric of progress, democracy and civilization, portrayed by todays mainstream vocational politicians, bureaucrats and economic elites, and the alarming poverty among underprivileged people in the western world as well as the great majority in the Third World, is especially illustrious. Thus, more is to be demanded than slogans of relegating poverty to history if the termination of this social vice is to be achieved once and for all. The question remains whether it would be possible at all to reform capitalism (understood in the widest sense as an economic system based on currencies, exchange of goods and accumulation of capital) in such a way that it can turn into an economic system which meets basic economic needs among the majority of the worlds populations, viewed in the light of the vast amount of struggles which have been launched by trade unions, political parties and social democratic governments for approximately 150 years. The very term capitalism belongs to the rather ill-defined ones in our era, largely due to the dichotomizing effects of the monopolization of economic alternatives by the Marxist tradition. Moreover, on top of all this come the

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overwhelming and in the worst of cases irreversible ecological despoliations produced by capitalism during its history unavoidable consequences of an economic system obsessed with the rapidest possible profits at the cost of human welfare and ecological integrity, which already in the late 1930s was summed up by Carl O. Sauer with the words on behalf of the western world that we have not yet learned the difference between loot and yield. 3 The above mentioned warped conditions concern the direct human and ecological consequences of globalized capitalism, which has turned growth for its own sake into a sort of mantra. We are not here talking of growth in any organic sense, but rather of a process which fosters the inorganic by undermining ecological and human diversity, turns human beings into labor tools and passive consumers, and plunders this fertile planets initially rich webs of life. It is a growth which, as already alluded to, has as its main goal the facilitation of economic gain among individual entrepreneurs heading gigantic corporations very often in businesses which directly are threatening life on this planet in its entirety, such as petroleum industry, arms production and genetic modification. The democratic control over these businesses is virtually zero and, in view of this fact, all talk about proliferating democracy in the Arab world and the East in general becomes utterly vacuous. In fact, it is all about an effort to camouflage the self interest behind getting access to the natural resources in these areas and thus nothing more than imperialism redressed and recycled, staging a scramble for Africa 2.0. Improved economic conditions for the public at large, in the western world as well as in the Third World, are to be considered as more or less wayward paraphernalia of economic growth, and even in the best of cases they favor only a tiny minority seen from a global perspective. I Norway one has been so overwhelmingly privileged as a result of the oil adventure that a fairly numerous part of the

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populace certainly by the help of redistributing mechanisms has been able to reap the fruit of whatever growth has taken place, even though economic inequality is increasing also over here. The equalization that social democracy in this country attained in the first decades following World War 2, is about to be reversed, concomitantly with the increase in public poverty resulting from the neo-liberal ideology and its grip on political parties which traditionally have belonged to the Left and despite the fact that these parties have obliged themselves to the tending of the Welfare State and maintain their rhetoric to this end, if only not to lose their share of the electorate. Accompanying this developments there are several forms of alienation going on which leave their mark on the living conditions of the citizen; apart from the minimum of influence on her or his working places (despite all the rhetoric to the contrary), it is mainly the overwhelming political disempowerment which stigmatizes the personality of the citizen in our own age and leads to an increasing sense of isolation and lack of community to identify with and influence in any constructive and creative manner aspects of modernity which certainly have taken on a largely universal character.4 This palpable sense of being suspended to the sideline politically and/or socially will have to be considered as a vastly underestimated factor as regards the mental as well as physical health of every citizen. In this respect all the formulas of psychotherapy and other kinds of modern treatment prove largely inadequate, unless they at the very least contribute to the understanding in the respective patient of how this disempowerment and alienation influences his or her health.5 As regards economic activity these days it is mainly preoccupied with the enlargement of short term economic gain for the single entrepreneur. It is not questioned whether the actual businesses in themselves actually are of vital avail to the public at large, or whether they are ecologically sound and responsible and contribute to the enrichment of natural evolution in a wider and long term

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perspective. Neither are the kinds of substantial needs people may have addressed in any meaningful way. Quite to the contrary, everyone is free to employ without scruples the most aggressive sales techniques in order to maximize profits, and hence contribute to the creation of new and constructed needs ever so often. In a hazy society in which people rarely have time to communicate, even in their closest relations, and in which the social media have become substitutions for face-to-face dialogue, it is self-evident that there will be a shortage as far as reflecting on basic material needs and their adequate satisfaction goes not to say a tremendous decline in literacy and even a sort of modern analphabetism. The focus is largely turned onto what the Joness got and an obsession with not lagging behind in the social and material race, and most of all to keep up with the pace of consumerism and its frequent irrational demands in the warped sense of progress in our era. As a twin companion of aggressive marketing techniques, lobbyism such as it proceeds within parliamentarian and republican political systems alike is no guarantee for democracy whatsoever. In fact, the matter is quite to the contrary and the disturbingly high level of corporativism it involves has been of great concern to historians and sociologists since the opening decades of the 20th century. Within this social and political structure it is obviously the particular interests with the largest amount of economic resources which get their way, very often camouflaged as satisfying the need to create new employment or save the prevailing one an argument which has been retorted to time and again to justify one disputable business after the other. One of the most grotesque examples of this happened in Germany, where there were concerns about the many accidents on the Autobahn and talk about reducing the speed limits. The story goes that the leading executives within the prosthesis industry protested vehemently against this (!) True or not, the fact remains that the very logic of capitalist production and distribution eventually will lead to such

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utterly dismal and immoral outcomes, as is demonstrated by the steadily more sophisticated techniques of planned obsolescence as an engineering tool utilized within mass production. In any case, I am afraid the list of such horrible instances would be overwhelming was there ever to be conducted an encompassing analysis of the matter. 6

Material Superfluity and Consumerist Hedonism in the Western World With the overblown productivity of capitalism there opened up in the decades following World War 2 new vistas in the direction of achieving a state of society in which economic scarcity was done away with, which eventually would have drastically reduced the toil of labor for the common citizen. In turn, this would have liberated time and energy for each citizen to acquire a far more rewarding life than what traditional wage labor and the 8 hours day (which once was a radical socialist demand) entails for the vast majority. The scarcity which for centuries had been employed to justify economic exploitation and hierarchical social structures, and on which orthodox Marxism had based its analyses, seemed increasingly to be perpetuated more in the form of myths than reality. Already towards the closing of the 19th century Peter Kropotkin, in his works Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories and Workshops7, had suggested that the duration of the work day could be reduced to a fraction for all members of society, and even be reorganized into a variegated, individually gratifying and meaningful content, without infringing on the availability of material goods for society at large. The traditional bourgeois reality principle and the protestant work ethic were later to be challenged anew through works like Herbert Marcuses Eros & Civilization8 and Murray Bookchins Post-Scarcity Anarchism9, to be followed up by the growing countercultural movement in the 1960s and 70s. As mentioned by Bookchin in one of his essays from this period, more and more people found out that

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they could live satisfied lives simply by reaping the scrap from the capitalist feast, and instead concentrate their energy on political and cultural interests (were they not to succumb to drug related life style experiments), instead of wearing themselves out in futile working routines regimented by a dehumanizing and exploitative economic system.10 The material superfluity struck everyone and everywhere in the affluent western world leading for instance to the news that shoplifting acquired epidemic proportions, as Bookchin summarizes in his review of this era.11a However, in this process in which the well known pendulum swung from a widespread subscription to the economic imperatives of increasing productivity and focus on conventional wage labor as the central aspects of life and into the counterculture of the 60s and 70s and its increasing orientation towards life style oriented and consumerist hedonism, one is able to detect the limitations of this semi revolutionary era when it comes to the possibilities of achieving lasting social change in the direction of a libertarian, rational and ecological society. Every historical epoch has its limitations economically as well as ideologically and the late 20th century is no exception from this rule. It is quite understandable that the emphasis on consumption begun to reach an utterly disproportional scale in the advanced stage of capitalism and mass culture throughout the century and especially in the aftermath of World War 2. After all, new markets and increased exchange of goods is the essence of the inherent need within this economic system for expansion, whereas lasting balance and responsible and equitable distribution is out of the question. On the other hand, it is an equally dismal fact of history that the so-called counterculture was unable to form persistent political and social counter-institutions, and that the New Left for its part largely became atrophied into orthodox and authoritarian parties a fact that contributed vastly to their alienation from the public at large. The kind of optimism revealed by Ivan Illich in the

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following quote from his late 1960s writings tells a whole lot about what was lost from the potentialities of the counterculture: We can only live these changes; we cannot think our way to humanity. Every one of us, and every group with which we live and work, must become the model of the era which we desire to create. The many models which will develop should give each one of us an environment in which we can celebrate our potential and discover the way into a more humane world. 11b Some 40 years ago there may still have seemed to time for such an innocent optimism apart from the fact that the planet already at that moment was largely plundered, as Fairfield Osborn put it in the wake of World War 2. The environment which Illich alludes to and the individuals respective location on the surface of the Earth has since then deteriorated further (leaving Ebenezer Howards Garden City movement as a long gone dream), notably to the extent that even basic protein nourishment is expected to be provided synthetically. So, what kind of human potential will have the slightest possibility of realization within such a context, remains a very open question indeed if there will not occur an immediate ecological awakening and a massive revival of the kind of vision expounded by Howard and his colleagues more than hundred years ago. Instead of paving the way for a new public sphere, in which every citizen would be able to materialize her or his own potentialities and gratify their needs as homo politicus, the left radicals and countercultural movement throughout the 1970s became once more obliged to live out their lives in the private sphere extending into the party apparatuses apart from fulfilling their obligations as homo economicus in their respective work arenas, struggling to keep up with the Jones the very essence of a dehumanizing mass society.

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The above mentioned tendency was reinforced by the one dimensional focus among social democrats on economic aggrandizement on increased living standards and material welfare often at the cost of issues like the need for reviving time honored standards of quality production, political participation among the public in the basic formation of society (cf. demands for direct democracy) and hence also in the democratic control of productive and natural resources. Apart from the fact that social democracy, in those countries where it has been in a position to play a determining political role, has contributed to a more equal distribution of economic fortunes among the inhabitants of the respective countries (especially in Scandinavia) a fact that should not be ignored the agency of the social democratic parties have also more sinister and unfavorable sides. As long as their policies since World War 2 have not challenged capitalism in any substantial way, they have largely contributed to legitimizing this economic system, paved the way for massive bureaucratization and disempowerment, and reduced citizens into consumers, electorate and tax payers exclusively. Moreover, the bureaucratization and topdown structures and attitudes have, in combination with the consume manic orientation of the individual through electoral propaganda, TV-commercials and the mass media in general, also led to an increasing adherence to extreme populist parties on the political Right. The emphasis on private economic consumption without regard for long term resource balances divested of ethical and political aspects concerning central issues such as the quality of the products consumed, the individuals autonomous self-definition of its own needs, and community control over production and distribution of goods and burdens easily turns into a dead end track where society is operating like a train on autopilot. Fundamental questions are not discussed, means are turned into ends, and the directionality of society disappears. Concomitantly with political disempowerment,

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consumerism and mass society has a tendency to undermine the individual not only as homo politicus, but also as a basically creative being. Mass culture, passivity and a mentality of on-lookers are spreading and reinforcing the elitist structures and the hierarchical sensibility for which oligarchic institutions have laid down a seemingly solid social basis. Neither have hierarchical and top heavy labor organizations, which in the previous century happened to outnumber their anarcho-syndicalist opponents, had anything else to offer than to further adherence to narrow economical particular interests among the specific vocational groups, only interspersed with a rhetoric of solidarity with the poor and underprivileged of this world. Amidst the material abundance there continually prevails a looming and threatening economic insecurity, resulting from the fact that the vast majority of people have been divested of the control over the political decisions which pertain to her or his economic concerns, as well as over social developments at large. Economic crises and oscillating conjunctures may at any moment occur and in such instances strike harder the lower down the social ladder one moves measured according to the conventional monetary income ratings. Due to the lack of democratic institutions in which one would be able to influence social developments in a direct and responsible manner, and thus to have an impact on the distribution of goods, benefits and burdens, many people relate to the executives of the state banks as if they were the shamans of the modern age on whom the hopes for the future rested. Their conjectures and prognoses rest on a projection of status quo into the future, and in this way reflect the so called self-regulating mechanisms and the hidden hand of the global market, in which political influence and control by the public is reduced to an absolute minimum. Indeed, they belong to another planet let us say Mars, where everything is barren and inorganic already more than to the living Earth which deserves a moral, ecological, community oriented and confederal economy,

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based on an authentic oikos and an empowered demos, in which markets retain the once civilizing effects they entailed as long as they were subsumed under ethical and ecological considerations as for instance in the cradle of western civilization, Ancient Greece. 12 In societies which contrary to 18th century Enlightenment philosopher Benjamin Franklins advice has sacrificed human freedom in order to attain somewhat more economic security, we find that there is very little left of both. In both cases the explanation is to be sought for in the general public disempowerment which has been consolidated through the elitist and hierarchical political and economic system which we try to endure at the present stage. However, such a system is a highly precarious one, as overwhelmingly testified by history, and the power apparatus whose self interest it is to maintain and elaborate it further becomes increasingly dependent upon retorting to dirty tricks in order to bring about some sort of consensus, consent and togetherness within the economically privileged nation states and continents. Among those tricks is the well known and often temporarily successful attempt to conjure up images and nightmares of foreign enemies and threats to the Nation, for all they are worth. In combination with the fear of losing the material well being which at enormous costs has been achieved through the toil and suffering of previous generations, the fear of foreign powers and the phenomenon of terror conducted by fundamentalists, come to occupy a large part of the public attention thereby removing the focus on the need and the opportunities for taking back the control over social developments. Indeed, quite to the contrary these factors contribute in the short term to the peoples sense of being ever more dependent upon central authorities and an army of experts, with presumably superhuman and magical abilities to cure societys vices. The hope, on the other hand, rests in the eventuality that this disempowerment becomes unendurable and, as such, gradually becomes demystified, addressed and rectified by wide segments of people, sustained by a

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new enlightenment and well organized campaigns for a direct democracy, and that a revitalized citizenry slowly and unremittingly overcomes the traumatic experiences with authoritarian forms of planned economy which mushroomed in the 20 th century. This seems to be the only way in which the universalized, dehumanizing and anti-ecological market economy and its infamous hidden hand may be divested of its hegemonic role so that it no longer possibly can be considered as a natural law. The globalization of the world economy, which primarily is directed towards meeting the needs of multinationals for cheap labor, raw materials and expanding markets, is about to cause an unprecedented cultural homogenization and ecological destruction maybe beyond repair, in addition to entangling the vast majority of people into a nexus of disempowerment, poverty, endless toil and denigration. The struggle, on the other hand, against these dismal prospects is marked by a lack of popular organizing in the western world, paralleled by nationalist parties and movements in the Third World, which frequently rest on orthodox and outdated Marxian analyses. The attempt to rewrite Marxs analyses and critique of capitalism to fit the present state of affairs, is not favorably positioned to achieve constructive counter-institutions to the globalization of corporate capitalism. The tendency among todays leftists to hail state leaders such as Hugo Chavez for his efforts to nationalize the Venezuelan economy, will have to be considered as reactions on the part of the Left resulting from a starvation of good news. Historically, such schemes for nationalization may have resulted in a somewhat more equal distribution of economic assets and goods, but at the same time produced highly authoritarian social structures and led to the formation of new social and political elites, apart from being overwhelmingly oblivious to ecological concerns in most cases. To view the populations of the Third World as the new proletariat in the lack of such a class consciousness in t he industrialized or post-industrial world simply in the futile attempt

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to reconcile theories of yesterday with the present realities, will only result in a mystification of the struggle for radical social change in the 21st century, as well as in wrapping the historical context in which Marx himself developed his economic analyses and political theories in an obfuscating and opportunistic ideological veil. Such kind of historical numbness is the very least we need in the present critical global situation. The ongoing struggle against the global hegemony of corporate capitalism and the further plundering by multinationals of this planet and their exploitation of the worlds poor and underprivileged, has in the recent decades been headed by various grass roots movements in the so-called developing countries in the global South, represented by the regular organization of World Social Forum, later to be accompanied by the Occupy movements in the west. Obviously, this struggle cannot be won exclusively by peop le in those developing countries. Parallel movements for direct democracy and community control over the economy in the Western world are wholly indispensable if the socially warped and ecologically disastrous tendencies are to be reversed and steered into a constructive direction. The vistas for these movements may, if they lead to a broad popular control over social development and the economic dispensations in various areas of the Third World, entail an alternative path for the whole of humanity. One can detect the possibilities for a more organic development based on direct public participation in the decision making processes, in combination with the utilization and refinement of local and regional resources, coordinated through confederated municipalities, villages, cities and wider regions a so called bottom-up organizational structure on an ever widening scale. Hierarchical social structures and top heavy political systems may in this way be challenged and attacked at the root, and the parallel movements for a libertarian, rational and ecological society in the West and in the Global South would be in a position to enrich and complement each other. Hence, one could

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foresee the eventuality of achieving a public understanding of humanity as a united and universal humanitas in a nonhierarchical world free of oppression and material need, thereby producing a kind of confederal globalization from below.

Eudaemonism and Universalism the Need for a Dynamic Synthesis In pre-capitalist stages of the human project of liberation the pendulum swung between various hedonist movements and dispensations on the one hand and ascetic ones on the other. The former emphasized a disproportionate satisfaction of all the desires of the flesh more or less as an end in itself and as a road to emancipation. Under social conditions marked by economic scarcity such a stance necessarily limited their agenda to elitist sects and movements. Their aims were rarely in a position to become succesful, hence they remained primarily at the level of imagination and became the object of detailed literary adventures and utopias. The ascetic tendencies which deserve a place in humanitys historical liberatory project were socially more oriented towards the actual limitations of social and economic reality and less utopian and they took as their point of departure the prevailing material scarcity by proposing that the road to liberation entailed giving up bodily pleasure and instead directing attention towards the spiritual aspects of life. To put the issue in a wider contextual scrutiny it is worth noting that for Nietzsche, in his unrelenting lamentation of what he considered the modern anemia of western civilization, the ascetic position was a main target of reproach for his analysis of the alleged decline.13 However, a certain degree of undue dichotomizing was one of the characteristics of his mode of thought, bringing him into an almost obsessive quarrel with Christianity instead of taking his point of departure in the Enlightenment era and its prospects for human progress and ascendency towards perfection.

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Apart from their emphasis on egalitarian and mutual social structures within their movements the hedonist and ascetic tendencies throughout the pre-modern era had very little in common. Moreover, it would not be very meaningful to try to rank them in view of their various achievements and promises. However, in the light of history, the former will have to be considered as having more strength, vitality and progressiveness of vision. While the ascetic tendencies and their approach largely embodied an acceptance of the unequal distribution of wealth, in addition to their susceptibility to the myth that nature as such is stingy, the hedonist ones represented challenges to both of these trends. Hence, they paved the way and laid down the foundation work for the socialist and anarchist movements which were to leave their definitive mark on the 19 th and in part the 20th century. The social question, concerning the control over societys economic productive forces and the distribution of wealth, attained a main focus among these modern movements, and maxims like from each according to his or her ability, to each according to his or her needs was thoroughly debated and circulated among the working classes.14 However, the diversity of opinions within the socialist movements were immense and may be illustrated by the fact that while Marx considered the demand for the eight hour workday as progressive, Kropotkin a couple of decades later on figured, as mentioned above, that a fraction of this duration would have been adequate to satisfy the basic needs of everyone. While Marx and his economistic social analyses largely prolonged the conception of nature as stingy as intractable matter which human societies with their centralized and bureaucratically administered industries had to conquer and subdue in order to divest it of its scarce resources, Kropotkins works are ripe with a view of nature as fertile and generous, and overwhelmingly apprehensive of human technological innovations to the extent that these were of a decentralized kind, formed in a human scale and subject to the

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influence and control of the actual citizen, including farmers, artisans and manual laborers in general. Kropotkin also repeatedly stressed the need for a combination of brain work and manual work for human beings to reach fulfillment, while Marx was apt to divest the workers of the tools and capability of the former. In todays polarized world in which one part of humanity the populations of the Third World and underprivileged people in industrialized or post-industrial countries are living in utter poverty and material need, while large segments of people in these rich countries and the elites in the former countries, are living in vast material abundance, the libertarian Left is confronting novel challenges when it comes to creating the basis for radical social change in the direction of reason, liberation and ecological responsibility. Globalized capitalism has a grim tendency to reduce everything even aspects of our most intimate and personal sphere into commodities, and to reduce rich organic structures into polluted and lifeless debris. It has proved to be economically highly productive (as understood according to the conventional assembly line logic which, however, hardly harmonies with productiveness seen in an evolutionary and basic material sense cf. the phenomenon of planned obsolescence already discussed in the former essays), and at the same time undermined the organic web of society, disturbed the ecological balances of the Earth, pulverized community spirit and reduced us to freewheeling individuals who are more or less successfully manipulated into believing that freedom and happiness may be achieved through the consumption of mass produced commodities indeed, that this metamorphosis of means into ends constitutes the essence of democracy and thereby destroying any meaningful sense of value in the process. We are at present in a situation where the hedonist stance in the form of consume hedonism can no longer play any progressive role, more specifically among the materially well off populations in

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the industrialized or post-industrial countries. The pleasure which may be obtained through the consumption of mass produced goods will in any case be overshadowed by the disempowerment and alienation that we experience at the political and economical level. The dehumanization implied in this entire process leads unwittingly to the further escapism into consumerism on other levels of life, and obliviousness towards scarcity and need among people among the utterly underprivileged groups of our species, destroying human lives in an immense scale exemplified by the humanly produced (through so-called green house induced global warming) heavy drought and famine on Africas Horn. In the industrialized, or even post-industrial, countries we are marked by this warped and unjust social structure on a daily basis; people in the Global South (or the Third World) dream of having a share in the abundance, without any preconceptions of the backside of the coin. On top of this dehumanization there follows our bad conscience as a result of this abundance which dont absolve because of the widespread disempowerment confused by the myths that we live in democratic societies and hence have chosen to live like we do. Thus, there are many concepts which stand in need of definition suggesting a new Enlightenment just to secure that the concerned citizen will become able to address the issues involved and take an active part in the creation of a new public sphere where community development is discussed and formed, and political decisions are made in face-to-face assemblies. Due to the lack of penetrating recognition of the causes behind the social and ecological crisis of our time, there have popped up a wide array of life style oriented responds to these grave issues. Among those is the focus of deep ecology on what is being labeled voluntary simplicity, hence, a modern variety of the ascetic attitude, with the main difference that in its modern outfit it originates in privileged social strata. It entails to a large extent a reflexive reaction against consumerism and over-consumption, and

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takes on an apolitical stance towards our modern crisis by blaming rationality (especially western), science and technology for our present malaise. An analysis and critique of capitalism as such and more profoundly, of hierarchy and exploitation are non-themes within deep ecology, a dismal fact that go a long way to explain the tendencies towards anti-humanism, misanthropy and insensitiveness towards the worlds poor which have erupted in the name of deep ecology during the past two or three decades. To moralize over the lifestyle of the individual and appeal to ethical consumption within the framework of an inherently amoral not to say immoral economic system like globalized profit maximizing capitalism, is in the best of cases producing confusion and in the worst of cases it becomes utterly reactionary. The possibilities for taking an active part in the formation of society and community development, the economic structures and priorities, and the ecologically responsible designs that are needed and in this manner define ones own needs as fully realized human beings through genuine character building processes belong to the democratic demands which have to be met if society as a whole is not to disintegrate into an authoritarian, repressive and barbaric dystopia. The history of philosophy has rather often been marked by incompatibilities between human beings essence on the one hand and their existence on the other. Thinkers like Hegel and Marx are representatives of the former stance, while existentialists like Kierkegaard and Sartre have taken up the fight for the latter. Briefly stated, the essence philosophers put the emphasis on the commonly human traits when it comes to production, cognition, etc. and the human community at large, while the existentialists focused on the individual and its presumably autonomous life among the masses. As regards the essentialism of Hegel, and its potentially totalitarian implications, note the following bombastic exclamation from his Ivory Tower: the knowledge of essence is firmly established as superior to empty knowledge14 On whose

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mandate anyone can claim to overrule the knowledge attained by others as empty whether it be that of farmers, artisans, sculptors, fishermen, or others which certainly has legitimized anything from the Moscow Processes in the 1930s, via Holocaust, to Maos cultural revolution and the mass slaughters they involved not to mention later efforts at totalizing human existence in the name of politics the question can only be answered by way of the means chosen by Alexander the Great in antiquity; by consulting the Oracle.15 A kindred parallel to this duality is to be found in the polarization between universalism (a rational social order, etc.) and eudaemonism (the pursuit of happiness). Of causes which I will soon touch upon I will contend that today on the basis of the lections of history there remains a need to transcend both of these extremes and unite the viable elements in both of them into a new synthesis. Postmodernism has in a multitude of ways given us the opposite due to its tendency to strip the universe of any coherent meaning and directionality, at the same time as an uncritical attitude towards the social dislocations produced by capitalism results in narrowing the opportunities for the individual to experience happiness into a question of purchase power in an highly impersonal marketplace. The autonomous or, rather, atomized individuals search for happiness within the framework of the existing social system, has in several ways been depicted as a human right, and it sure is comfortable to effortlessly subscribe to such an abstract and vague right. However, the question remai ns whether the traditional concepts of happiness is much too narrow and insufficient, to the extent that the citizen or villager is bereft of their opportunity to creatively form their own communities and undertake qualitatively enriching production. Without the presence of the above mentioned criteria, existence becomes highly limited, vacuous and anemic; the

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sense of community evaporates, and the notion of existential meaning as such is dramatically challenged on a day-to-day basis. In our time we paradoxically witness that the individualist happiness industry with all its glossy magazines and commercials reach ever so new heights. If the preconditions for humanity at large to achieve genuine happiness really were at hand, one would not have thought it probable that the mass publications and TV media would pay such a disproportionate attention to the issue. The combination of the largely undefined and hollow conception of happiness on the one hand, and an increasingly authoritarian, one dimensional and homogenous society on the other, in which political and economical power is concentrated on fewer and fewer hands, bears testimony to the fact that we are at best finding ourselves in an entrenched social state. In the worst of cases we are confronting utter reaction and fascist tendencies, represented by corporativism and the whole paraphernalia of statist power. The more energy the individual will have to spend under such conditions on pursuing the achievement of this vague and scarcely defined happiness, the more does she or he tend to adapt to status quo instead of using more time and energy on changing society through well directed and organized political activities. Instead of being active citizens, people are reified into masses, and automatically simplified and regimented into passive consumers, tax payers and electorate. As regards universalism and the struggle for a rational social order, which has been the main project for the Left in its critique of capitalisms irrational, repressive and anti-ecological consequences, we witnessed in the previous century that the project of the Left indeed was in a position to produce utterly reactionary and dehumanizing results as well. One need only mention the Soviet Union under Stalin and China under Mao, who in their own way contributed to rendering criticism of capitalism into an almost impossible venture for the most part of the 20 th century. Such

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criticism became an immense challenge, and all the more momentous as regards the unorthodoxy of campaigning for a viable third way for humanity that is towards a libertarian and ecological socialism.16 Despite all their mutual differences eudaemonism and universalism, as schematized above, share the tendency to perpetuate the pacifying and disempowering of the individual in their respective manners, and thereby subverts the living web in a vital and pulsating community. Since we at present happen to find ourselves in a situation where at least in the rich, industrialized or post-industrial (imperialist) countries consumerist hedonism and its companion eudaemonism rules and puts its strong mark on the prospects and choices of the public, the challenge for todays left libertarians is to set some beacons afire which may enlighten and guide the public on its way towards a new public sphere which may serve as a basis for the re-empowerment of the individual. Capitalism has to be challenged unless it shall be permitted to rage on and subvert the preconditions for complex life forms including humanity on this planet. However, for this project to be successful there is the absolute demand of such a movement that it does not once again degenerate into reprises of historical blind tracks in this respect.

Ethical, Social Psychological, and Ecological Cases for Direct Democracy To conclude this essay I will briefly touch upon some humanistic arguments for a direct, participatory democracy. On the one hand, the particular interests which splinters todays society and make it impossible to materialize the opportunities to build an authentic and global human community need to be addressed in a thoroughgoing and challenging way, while on the other hand the common human and ecological stakes which are at present gravely threatened, stand in need of coordinated efforts to reverse the hazardous trends facing

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our species and the ecological integrity of the entire planet. This planet can no longer withstand being reduced to a toy ground for cynical corporate agents in a basically immoral globalized market. The fact that a few multinationals are about to grab their share of the world in order to achieve short term economic gain, represent a dramatic threat against any meaningful concept of democracy as well as against the ecological balance systems of the Earth. From the point of view of the individual these facts represent the disempowerment which in the long run deprives it of any notion that it is positioned and able to influence its own life situation, the development of society in general, and the future of the Earth. Hence, by being simultaneously told that representative democracy and parliamentarianism constitutes an authentic democracy, while the historical roots of democracy in institutions based on popular assemblies run by directly democratic bodies which still represent a viable alternative to todays disempowering social structures the confusion among the general public becomes highly complete. One is over again reminded that one bears the responsibility for the present social, economic and ecological crisis, but simultaneously denied the institutional fundament for addressing these urgent issues. The resulting malaise is not likely to produce anything but depression on a vast scale underpinning the businesses of the pharmaceutical industry and their deliverance of Somas to the public and the only possible options left for addressing and rectifying the situation seem to go by way of directly democratic institutions and a vehement insistence on quality production in all aspects of life, representing ethical and humanistic challenges to the malevolent techniques of planned obsolescence which contribute to the plundering of our planet. As insisted upon by social psychologist, Erich Fromm, in his introduction to Ivan Illichs Celebration of Awareness more than four decades ago:

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human radicalism questions every idea and every institution from the standpoint of whether it helps or hinders mans capacity for greater aliveness and joy.17 A crucial precondition for the demand for direct democracy to be successful in the long run is the observation that every single adequately functioning citizen is capable of addressing and tending to their own flourishing and welfare, and hence to form their communities in a rational and ecological way. Indeed, humanity cannot be viewed as split in two different types of beings those who rule and those who are being ruled among whom the former represent a tiny, exclusive minority. The hierarchical sensibilities which have underpinned the present oligarchic and elitist social structures have deep historical roots. However, history is full of examples of efforts to equalize these structures and establish egalitarian and largely non-hierarchical ones in their place. One of these examples is the ancient Greek polis, whose popular form of democracy despite all its failures and shortcomings remains a lasting tradition which has inspired subsequent radical democratic movements, and which even today may be revitalized and expanded to suit the demands of our own age. Etymologically, there are interesting facts which illustrates the gap which has opened between the founders of our civilization and our present anemic culture. For instance the word idiot, which has its origin in ancient Greece, has gone through a dizzying transformation. For the ancient Greeks the term was used with respect to citizens who, despite the fact that they had a legitimate and constitutional right to participate in the public assembly (ecclesia), kept away from the decision making processes which continually went on there. Thus, an idiot was a private person a person who did not take part in the common good of society, but clung to his own particular interests to the detriment of the community at large. In our own age, under representa tive democracy and parliamentarianism, and of course under theocratic and despotic governments as well, the institutional foundations are

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laid down for reducing the vast majority among humanity to, precisely, idiots (!) in the sense that this majority is not expected to participate in the formation of society and attend to the common good, but rather live isolated and atomized private lives and leave the decision making to professional politicians, who in their turn develop their own particular interests and become annexed to the corporate executives and succumb to bureaucratic rigidity. It is in such a conceptual context that one must understand Rousseaus contention during the Enlightenment era that popular sovereignty cannot be represented.18 The ancient Greeks conceived of the direct political participation among the citizens as an essential part of the formation of their characters (paideia), which constituted the citizens (whom in that era were limited to native males, albeit mandated by the women in the oikos sphere) as moral agents in society and their participation in the ecclesia was one of necessity, and hence limited to the most minimalistic degree rather than seen as some kind of career opportunity. It lies close at hand to contend that wit hout precisely such a participation, any focus on ethics tend to be considered as a strange, repulsive and meaningless attempt at guardianship by various executors of authority in their denigration of the dignity and self respect of the many (passing under the label paternalism throughout history). The inevitable result has been that most people in such a context, as a spontaneous and natural reaction, distance themselves from politics as well as ethics, and instead try to achieve the above mentioned vague and hollow happiness within their narrow private spheres within the frameworks of whatever social system may persist for the time being. The road for the individual to freedom, responsibility, creativity and happiness rests in this authors view upon the establishment of social institutions based on direct participation among the citizenry in political life, to the extent that we remain zoon politikon. It is within these libertarian institutions that the individual would be able to lay down the

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foundation for his or her existence as creative and ethically conscious beings in the fullest meaning of these terms in which the focus in a liberatory way may be drawn away from consumption of mass produced and mediocre commodities and towards creating quality in all facets of life. Viewed from such a perspective it makes some sense to consider the formation of society as the highest possible form of art, in which everyone should have an equal stake and which would eventually establish a rock solid basis for the development of the ethical standards of the individual as well as for her or his aesthetical abilities and ecological sensibility. This leads us to the need for reevaluating the traditional economistic perspectives of the orthodox Left and its tendency to reduce human beings as such into homo economicus at the cost of the ethical, aesthetical and ecological aspects of life. Such a reevaluation does not imply that one has to ignore economic conditions pertaining to production, distribution, consumption, etc. It means rather that economic issues are subordinated to the political and hence ethical and ecological domain in the form of a new public sphere in which these issues should be addressed and decided upon in a democratic manner. In this manner ethical questions would again be raised to its honorable position in society and develop into something qualitatively different than questions of personal taste in an impersonal, atomizing and dehumanizing market. As regards societys economic and technolo gical priorities, the question of why would be posed before the question of how, as E. A. Gutkind pointed out nearly sixty years ago.19 Instrumental reason would once more be located within its proper sphere, subsumed under ethical and ecological considerations, rather than tainting rationality as such by representing the plundering mental equipment of corporate capitalism. Situated within its proper context and limitations even instrumental reason may be restored to dignity, notably through engineering directed towards the research and

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construction of eco-technology and installations based on renewable energy. As preliminary steps towards building dikes against the dismal developments we are witnessing, and the huge challenges which lay ahead, we need counter-institutions which can represent a counter power to the institutions and hegemony of globalized capitalism and, first and foremost, we need a new Enlightenment to encourage people to reflect and act upon the situation. Rather than absurd encouragements in the vein of ethical consumption within the overwhelming framework of an immoral economic system, we will have to take the first steps towards an ecological economics in which human interaction with the respective ecosystems which constitutes its framework, is based on an economic production and a use of resources which aim at satisfying authentic human needs accompanied with the enrichment of the natural environment and the consequent fostering of evolution, like we are intellectually positioned to do as advanced products of this very evolution. Such a communalization of the economy, through decentralization, direct democracy and confederalism, would represent a decisive contribution in the direction of harmonizing communities rural as well as urban regions and humanity as a whole with the ecosystems and bioregions of which they are parts and produce a new and much needed sensitivity towards the natural world. We would become in a position to develop complementary, non-hierarchical and organic social relationships as a prolongation of the parallel relationships and structures of this kind that we encounter in ecosystems and the biosphere at large. Our primary focus would be to become creative beings in the fullest sense of the term, freed from crippling material need and economic scarcity on the one hand and senseless consumption on the other, empowered through a liberatory globalization from below in the form of democratic and confederal assemblies based on direct participation from authentically individualized citizens who occupy ourselves with the common good

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as a question of dignity and pride which we would find natural and appealing to do because of the simple fact that we would no longer posit personalities which are warped around particularistic economic concerns.

Future Prospects May We Still Draw Lessons from History? The road ahead will, however, be a long and windy one. The present confusion after generations of newspeak has come to identify parliamentarianism with democracy, with all its grave implications for the implicit understanding of the human psyche and the individuals social compass and other means of orientation in an increasingly complex world. The overall dismal and ominous effect is the creeping and expanding degree to which responsibility is pulverized and deferred to future generations in the form of looming crises the full extent of which we wont even be able to imagine. In the present malaise the other social question concerning mass society which has been treated upon by independent intellectuals from time to time since the days of Proudhon and Nietzsche, is fortified with the power apparatuses of the state as a major backbone. The principal profiteers of the process remain the mass manufacturers who may comfortably exploit the urge for consumption created by the existential void in the politically disempowered member of a social mass. As regards parliamentarianism and its social and psychological implications and long term effects, Elias Canetti juxtaposed its institutional framework to civil war in his Crowds and Power (1960) in the following way: War is war because the dead are included in the final reckoning. Parliament is parliament only as long as the dead are excluded. 20

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The problem is, however, profoundly more disturbing than is conveyed through his catchy play with words, as long as the processes involved unrelentingly entail the abdication by the individual party representative of his or her ultimate integrity as a citizen, similar to the mechanisms involved when the electorate presented its simple yes or no decision at the ballot box. The physical death of the party representatives is never at stake in functioning parliament decision making processes, as Canetti rather ironically presents to us as our solace. Nevertheless, the kind of mental abdication involved in the representative system implies that there are souls for sale in this political bazaar. A considerable element of a human beings soul is traded off by placing the e thical load on the other whether present or future in a way that makes the parallel to the casualties in a civil war disturbingly dismal. Apart from the immediate associations to the title of a famous Gogol novel, the whole issue demands radical reforms and resolutions, lest complete chaos and collapse will constitute our contribution to the generations ahead. The whole degrading process depicted above was foreseen and feared by liberals in the 19th century, who politically and culturally represented the direct heirs of the Enlightenment. For historians today to describe the growth of party systems simply as democratization, makes as much etymological sense as a prison guard telling the convict who is taken to the guillotine that he is about to have a shave. As regards the ordinary party representative, Canetti succinctly informs us that: Each is convinced that right and reason are on his side. Conviction comes easily [!] and the purpose of the party is, precisely, to keep his will and conviction alive.21 In fact, it takes nothing more to wipe away and reduce to oblivion the whole essence of the concept of paideia, which for the ancient Greeks was so intimately intertwined with their pioneering

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democratic ideals and institutions indeed, a Greek participant in the ancient ecclesia could hardly have imagined any kind of democratic life without it. To them democracy was something that one does, so to speak, rather than a thing (read: an institution) that simply and permanently is. Thus, it was constantly in need of being cultivated like a fragile plant sprout through the close attention paid by the polis (community/municipality) member on the execution of civic virtue informed by the vistas and hopes nourished on behalf of the community at large. To the extent that it weakens or fades way entirely through the pursuit of disproportionate and warping selfinterests and/or pulverization of responsibility for the overall direction that society takes little or nothing is left of once upon a time established and proclaimed institutions than empty shells, which are ruthlessly swarmed by parasitic corporate agents who freely may display a character trait which was transformed from a vice to a virtue in the course of the 19th century: greed. A close study of the whole problem complexes involved in this malaise of modernity, to borrow the Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylors phrase, has pointed the present author in the direction of confederalism and direct democracy as the only substantial, long term and viable solutions on a political level, paralleled by sufficiently volatile and well rounded economic or vocational orientations among the majority of the citizens of which the latter aspect is too comprehensive and complex to be elaborated on in this essay. Both of these aspects, however, point back to the roots, if one prefer, or maybe rather along another expanding circle completed for humanity, according to which the most precious lessons of history are thoroughly absorbed and digested by the vast majority among our species. The lessons, however, could undoubtedly and preferably have been materialized in political wisdom at a much earlier stage; Enlightenment philosophes such as Montesquieu and Rousseau did their best to bequeath the hard earned fruits of their respective life time studies: For the former, his stern

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conviction respecting the indispensability of high ideals of civic virtue in a democracy or a republic in general and for the latter, the reasoning which states the case for public sovereignty and its non-representative essence. Both based their insights partly on their studies of ancient Greek and Roman history and the respective emergence and downfall of their cultures; subjects which constituted such an integral and, not least, anti-nationalist part of the work conducted by the so-called Republic of Letters in the long gone Enlightenment era of the 18th century.

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Notes
Chapter I: Alluvial Soils and Civilizations in History
1

See Peter A. Kropotkin: Fields, Factories and Workshops (1899: London: Freedom Press, 1985), especially chapter 2; The Possibilities of Agriculture.
2

See Henri Pirenne: Early Democracies in the Low Countries (1915; New York, Evanston, and London: Harper Torchbooks, 1963).
3

See Edward Hyams: Soil & Civilization (1952: London: John Murray, 1976).
4

See Rattan Lal, John M. Kimble, Ronald F. Follett and Bobby A. Stewart (eds.): Soil Processes and the Carbon Cycle (New York: CRC Press, 1998), in the series Advances in Soil Science.
5

See for example Diderot & DAlembert: LEncyclopdie; Agriculture (Paris: Inter-Livres, 2001).
6

Chantal Hamel and Christian Plencette (eds.): Mycorrhizae in Crop Production (Binghamton: Haworth Press, 2007).

Chapter II: Turmoil in Medieval Europe


1

H. H. Scullard: From the Gracchi to Nero; A History of Rome, 133 BC to AD 68 (1959: London and New York: Routledge, 1982. Originally published by Methuen & Co., Ltd.), pp. 311-312.
2

The collected surviving works of Aristotles largely forgotten pupil, Theophrastus, was published in the encompassing Loeb Classical Library, edited by G. P. Goold, by Harvard University Press,

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Cambridge Massachusetts/London, England, during the First World War.


3a

John H. Mundy: Europe in the High Middle Ages, 1150-1309 (London: Longman Group Ltd., 1973), p. 112.
3b

Ibid.

3c

P. Boissonade: Life and Work in Medieval Europe; Fifth to Fifteenth Centuries (New York: Dorset Press, 1987), p. 195.
4

For a further study of these heroic struggles by the common people against their monarchical usurpers and the idle classes in general (most notably the clergy and the land owning aristocracy, see Perez Zagorin: Rebels & Rulers, 1500-1660; Society, States and Early Modern Revolution (2 vols.) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), vol. I, pp. 145-158, chapter 6: Religion, the Reformation, millenarianism. The continuum between these early democratic movements and the possible remaining alternatives to the present global malaise, has been drawn up by one of our neglected poets and historians, Kenneth Rexroth, in his Communalism; From its Origins to the Twentieth Century (New York: The Seabury Press, 1974; and contextualized within the libertarian tradition by the present authors main tutor, Murray Bookchin, in his The Ecology of Freedom; The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (Palo Alto: Ramparts Press, 1982. Re-issued by Black Rose Books in 1991); and The Third Revolution, vol. I: Popular Movements in the Revolutionary Era (London: Cassell, 1996). A general historical survey of the High times (depending on the readers epistemological orientation) is to be found in John H. Mundys Europe in the High Middle Ages, 1150-1309, edited by Denys Hay (London: London Group Ltd., 1973). Ironically, the latter scholarly work was printed in Hong Kong (presumably by not too well-paid Asian typographers). To the credit of the hard working historian,

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Mundy, he did not place the economic context and foundations as a footnote towards the end of the book
5

C. Warren Hollister & Judith M. Bennet: Medieval Europe; a Short History (1964: New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002), pp. 382-83. My italics. A. H.
6

Johan Schreiner: Middelalderen; Tusen rs grotid, in Aschehougs verdenshistorie; fra antikken til vre dager, vol. II (Oslo: Aschehoug & Co. [W. Nygaard], 1953), edited by Arne Ording and Thorleif Dahl. P. 439. My translation. A. H.
7

Hollister & Bennett: op. cit., p. 343.

The all too common notions that Cromwell made the English Revolution of the 1640s, and that Lenin completed his plan for a Russian Revolution in 1917, leaves history itself a meaningless and deadly boring subject to any living soul still alive and kicking around the Globe.
9

Bennett & Hollister: op. cit., p. 338.

10

The richly documented developments on the British Isles at this memorable turning point in European history can be sought out by any interested reader, most notably in the eminently scholarly works by journalist and historian Henry Noel Brailsford and professor Laurence Stone (Princeton University) on this subject. See for example Brailfords The Levellers and the English Revolution (1961: Nottingham, U. K.; Spokesman, 1983). The 17 th century context was clearly perceived and analyzed by Brailsford, while the editing and introduction by neo-Marxist Christopher Hill in the 1960s and beyond is simply totally out of place in the effort to draw a straight line between Gerrard Winstanley (who wrote in a revolutionary mid-17th century context of overwhelmingly agrarian English societies threatened by the so-called enclosure movements

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and their aim at forced industrialization, and V. I. Lenin who literally crushed the initiators of the 1917 revolution in Ukraine; the Makhnovich movement consisting of mir (traditional Russian village) peasants, which is simply absurd and has been a cause of huge confusion within the radical Left. This introduction by Hill, which was written in the context of the thatcherite hijacking of British economy and politics in the early 1980s, is the response of an old radical to the horrendous dismantling of the entire social structure in the society he belonged to and which Maggie Thatcher simply ridiculed by the remark. There is no such thing as a society; there are only individuals. Lawrence Stones The causes of the English Revolution, 1529-1642 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1972), which, according to the review by John Kenyon in The Observer, represents one of the most brilliant exercises in historical analysis we have, an intellectual tour de force, and a model of its kind, is obviously basic reading for any student of the respective time period with its comprehensive economic, political, cultural, religious and philosophical contextualization.
11

See for example Henri Pirennes Early Democracies in the Low Countries; Urban Society and Political Conflict in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (1915: New York, Evanston & London: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1963), with an introduction by John H. Mundy.
12

For a further confrontation with the tragic turns at modern turning points in history, the reader will either have to close eyes and ears and dream on or, alternatively, wake up and consult the world around him or herself, and the rich literature documenting these trends in the varied scientific fields developed and hopefully maintained by global efforts at sanity amidst a highly precarious stage in the Earths history not to mention the possible survival of our own species in a time perspective exceeding the next cheap meal or this years bank account registration.

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13

A. E. Taylor: Aristotle (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1955), p. 9.


14

Any testimony to this fact apart from the printed matters collected in the French Encyclopdie (1751-1772), is highly unnecessary. The outbreak of the European Seven Years War in 1756 tore the contributors apart along national lines, and proved devastating to the Republic of Letters and hence to the entire European Civilization. As regards the pioneering work on agriculture and the scientific foundations of the agricultural revolution necessarily preceding the industrial one the largely ignored works by Du Hamel du Monceau (1758), included in the grand French encyclopaedic venture, as well as Johann Gottschalk Wallerius discoveries of basic bio-chemical foundations of the developing soil science (from 1761 onwards) of the promising era translated into the French language and popularized among the advanced Republic of Letters by Baron DHolbach, and the further developments continued in Russia during Catharinas reign through Lomonosovs The First Principles of Metallurgy and Mining (involving the mineralogical aspects of the Earth sciences) and Komovs comprehensive agricultural textbook in 1782 the basic principles necessary for the cultivation of the main crops within the hemisphere of European Civilization were duly laid down. Altogether, these works represent the foundation of modern soil science a unique achievement in world history irrespective of the respective achievements attained by earlier civilizations. In 1786, Achard is reported to be the first discoverer of the possibility, and eventual utilization of draining peats for agricultural purposes by his isolation of humic substances from this organic substrate by the use of alkali land on the European continent still largely unproductive for human well being and economic thrift the more fertile were the soil substrates, which were subsequently turned into productive agricultural acres of land to the benefit of the entire Civilization project, including the resulting increase in productivity which made

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headway for urbanization and industrialization in the 19 th century. In 1797, Vauquelin made an important breakthrough in the science of mycology and composting, to be further elaborated by Thomson in 1807. The process was completed by Thaer in 1809 through his for the time being theoretical description of plants and its relation to humus nutrition (the way in which plants grow and develop roots and so on), while the exclusively chemical orientation (the so-called NPK formula, later to be proven as catastrophic as regards long term soil conservation and productivity) came into being only by the 1840s at a highly unfavorable stage in European history for the utilization of new scientific discoveries. The missing link bet ween the two disparate approaches is to a certain extent represented by Braconnots early attempts in 1807 and 1819 within a possibly even more socially and economically unfavorable context regarding the venture of a universalistic scientific approach celebrated by Diderot & Co. For the very few readers expected to dive into this foundation of our once promising European cultures, and the concomitant decline of an entire world economy, they may consult the grand survey of mycological literature from the days of du Monceau onwards in Trappe & Castellanos Mycolit, 1758-1991 (if they are lucky enough to obtain a copy of it at all through laborious searches in second hand book stores around the Globe), and in the singularly decent example of scientific writing in the post-war Era possibly equaled only by W. A. Albrechts work in the United States from the immediate post WWI years onwards until his death in the early seventies by a representative of the elite nations in the East regarding these vital topics, M. M. Kononova at the Academy of Sciences in the U. S. S. R., notably the V. V. Dokuchaev Soil Institute, whose work Soil Organic Matter; Its Nature, Its Role in Soil Formation and Soil Fertility (1960) subsequently to be hailed in the West and translated into the English language by ph. D.; T. Z. Nowakowski and B. Sc. G. A Greenwood at the enduring agricultural experiment station at Rothamsted, United Kingdom, and

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published by Pergamon Press (Oxford, London, New York and Paris in 1961).
15

The tradition of singling out enemies for persecution within the Roman-Christian legacy has been described by W. M. McGowern in his book, From Luther to Hitler, which was published in the postWorld War era.
16

The literature documenting these revolutionary events are of an immense scope and with highly incongruent approaches, and will need entire lifetimes and often beyond by the student to entangle the details of. As regards the final tragedy within the tradition, culminating in the Russian Revolution and precluding the efforts by the Spanish revolutionaries to defeat fascism in Spain in the mid-war era (1936-39), the reader would certainly profit from a study of how a revolutionary movement developed during a century or so in front of the climax stages in 1917 in Russia, in Franco Venturis Roots of Revolution; A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia (1952: New York: The Universal Library, Grosset & Dunlap, 1966, by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf). The original was published in Italian in 1952 under the title Il Populismo Russo by Guilio Enaudi Editore. When it comes to the actual revolutionary events and the largely obfuscated and hidden facts the reader will have to consult the works by Voline: The Unknown Revolution (1947: Montreal: Black Rose Books Ltd., 1990). The first English translations appeared in the 1950s, published by The Libertarian Book Club in New York City and Freedom Press in London. The Black Rose publication includes biographical study of the author by Rudolph Rocker. Voline also covers the preliminary and culminating turn of events during the 19 th century, before covering the dramatic revolutionary situations 191721, which were in further detail elaborated on by P. Arshinov in his History of the Makhnovich Movement, 1918-1921 (London: Freedom Press, 1987), and the actual printing done by the co-operative

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Aldgate Press. The original was published in Germany in 1923, and the first English translation in the United States in 1974. A highly important documentation of the tragic turn of events, possibly destroying the entire socialist tradition, is to be found in The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1971), published to the memory of the 50 th anniversary of the death of Peter Kropotkin. The papers included in this publication include eye witness reports as well as the exchanges between the anarchists and the Bolsheviks most notably Kropotkins effort to stop the Bolshevik betrayal of the Russian Revolution. The actual events which proved to undermine the entire Bolshevik venture of a kind of new imperialism in the name of anti imperialism the so-called Communist International, which was supposed to be the Third International after the failures of the two previous ones in the 1870s and 1914 respectively illustrate the hopeless and utterly misunderstood idea of commanding and decreeing revolutions anywhere and in any historical, present and future context. The Kronstadt events and the strikes among the Petrograd Workers, which proved to alienate the entire Russian population from the rest of the world for quite some time to come, was documented in Ida Metts The Kronstadt Uprising, 1921 (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1971), with a devastating introductory criticism of Bolshevism by former trotskyist, Murray Bookchin, who joined the anarchists as a result of the turn of events. A first hand observation documentary of the disbelief among the Russian revolutionaries is to be found in Emma Goldmans My Disillusionment in Russia (1925: Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith/Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1983), with an introduction by Rebecca West and a biographical sketch of Emma Goldman by Frank Harris. Alexander Berkmans The Bolshevik Myth was published in the same period and excerpts from his observations of the disillusioning experience is to be found in the above mentioned collection of anarchist perspectives, The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution. Peter A. Kropotkins insisting, albeit polite (I would say

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too polite) addresses to V. I. Lenin just before his death in 1921 can be consulted in the same anthology, as well as in P. A. Kropotkins Selected Writings on Anarchism and Revolution , edited and introduced by Martin A. Miller (Cambridge, Massachusetts/London, England: The M. I. T. Press, 1973). Max Nomads Apostles of Revolution (New York: Collier Books, 1961) is obligatory reading for any person who may ever happen to label him or herself as a revolutionary mainly because of the nuanced and sharply analyzed portraits of revolutionary leaders in the 19 th and 20th century. Even more recent work on the popular resistance against the Bolsheviks and their state party apparatuses and the rapid bureaucratization after their take-over, is Nick Heaths The Third Revolution? Peasant and worker resistance to the Bolshevik government (The Kate Sharpley Library, 2010).
17

The historical and philosophical implications of this degenerative tendencies within European societies and their immense importance with respect to the very possibility of attaining/retaining civilization in a general sense, are among the topics addressed in Alisdair MacIntyres After Virtue (1981: Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984).
18

This Enlightenment classic was written in 1770, shortly before Turgot was removed from office at the court of Louis XVI. See Turgot: Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Riches (1770: BiblioLife, LLC, 2010). This English translation of his Reflections is a reprint of the Macmillan publication, New York/London, 1911. His successor, Jacques Necker, as the economic advisor to the French court was fired in the same manner after trying to appease the peoples discontent, and the toiling multitude among the third Estate simply took what they needed by sacking the hoarded luxuries of the idle classes, burned the archives and lit the fire among the salt of the Earth in Paris the artisans and other discontents. These developments are lucidly presented in Peter A.

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Kropotkins The Great French Revolution (1909: Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1989), with an introduction by George Woodcock. See especially chapters I-V.
19

For an elaboration on the conflicts between the different conceptions of economy as a science, see the essay European Civilization; From Belief in Progress to Germs of Dystopia in the present collection. A general survey of the history economics as a scientific venture and its different modes of analysis is to be found in Joseph A. Schumpeters History of Economic Analysis (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1954), in co-operation with Oxford University Press, and edited from manuscript by Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter. Among the efforts to convey the meaning of the French liberals to the English speaking world was made by Arthur Young in his classic Travels in France & Italy During the Years 1787, 1788 and 1789 (1792: London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd./New York: E. Dutton & Co., 1892), with an introduction by Thomas Okey, in the publication series, Everymans Library, edited by Ernest Rhys. Conceptions of pre-capitalist economy in general are discussed in George Dalton (ed.): Tribal and Peasant Economies; Readings in Economic Anthropology (New York: Garden City, 1967), on behalf of The American Museum of Natural History. The headlong ventures into disasters necessarily resulting from the abuse of the physiocrats original principles of laissez faire, are elaborated on by Jane Jacobs in her Cities and the Wealth of Nations; Principles of Economic Life (1956: New York: Vintage Books, 1985), originally published by Cambridge University Press; and Dark Age Ahead (New York: Vintage Books, 2004).
20

The extensive historical research done internationally on the atrocities committed in the name of western spirituality with respect to the persecution of this immensely complex diversity of individuals simply devoured by authoritarians and justifiers of state centralization all over the European cultural domain and even

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reaching colonies in Northern America at a belated stage, after the Enlightenment had largely finished the craze off in Europe is available to anyone with a good and strong stomach and interest in the subject. A simple typing of the words witch hunts or demonology in the search engine Bookfinder.com will be helpful to the interested reader.
21

The themes pertaining to this universal aspects of lasting civilizations throughout history from the early beginnings some 10000 years ago in Catalhyk in modern day Turkey, are among those treated in another essay in this collection. See Alluvia l Soils and Civilizations in History.
22

These lines are printed on the frontispiece of the recent publication of Quesnays 1758 work, which he accomplished amidst the devastating war. See Francois Quesnay: The Economic Table (Honolulu, Hawaii: University Press of the Pacific, 2010).
23

Frederick B. Artz: The Mind of the Middle Ages; A Historical Survey, A.D. 200-1500 (1953: Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 449.

Chapter III: The Enlightenment


1a

Gerrard Winstanley: The New Law of Righteousness, in Leonard Hamilton (ed.): Gerrard Winstanley; Selections from his Works (London: Cresset Press, 1944), p. 20.
1b

John Herman Randall: The Making of the Modern Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 375.
2

Eduard Herriot: Diderot (Copenhagen: Martins Forlag, 1951), p. 9.

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Palmer, Colton & Kramer: A History of the Modern World (New York: McGraw Hill, 2007), p. 305.
4a

See Alexander Pushkin: History of the Pugachev Rebellion (Norfolk: Milner and Co. Ltd., 2000); volume 14 in his Complete Works issued by the above mentioned publisher and translated from the Russian by Paul Debreczeny.
4b

Dorinda Outram: The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 114.
4c

The education of Adam Smith during his stay in France in the years leading up to the devastating war by his French tutor, Quesnay, simply proved useless with the course of the war events. The nationalist turn of events during the war destroyed the internationalist and universalistic venture of the entire Enlightenment movement and its Republic of Letters which had spread throughout the world during the first half of the 18 th century. To be ascertained of this development, the interested reader will have to consult the respective works by Montesquieu, Quesnay, Turgot and Smith in addition to make avail of his or her reason and common sense. The rioting in London during the war years resulting from the immense war expenses and consequent lack of basic means of subsistence, was described by M. Dorothy George in her London Life in the 18th century (New York: Capricorn Books, 1965), and the development of the thoughts of the laissez faire originator, Quesnay, has been treated upon by Ronald L. Meek in his The Economics of Physiocracy; Essays and Translations (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1962).
5

For an excellent introduction to Hegels philosophy, see Herbert Marcuse: Reason and Reolution; Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (1941: NJ: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1983), originally published in Great Britain by Oxford University Press.

266

Sidney Hook: From Hegel to Marx; Studies in the Intellectual Development of Karl Marx (New York: The Humanities Press, 1958), p. 74. (My italics. A. H.).
7

Thomas Paine: The Age of Reason (New York: Dover Publications, 2004), preface.
8

Frederick Copleston: A History of Philosophy (New York: Doubleday, 1985), vol. 6, p. 2-3.
9

Ibid., p. 47. Randall, p. 381.

10

11

Ernst Cassirer: The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979), ch. Iii
12

Herriot: p. 16 Palmer, Colton & Kramer, p. 302.

13

14

J. J. Rousseau: The Social Contract (New York: Modern Library, 1950), p. 94.
15

Randall, p. 382.

16

Murray Bookchin: Re-enchanting Humanity (London: Cassell, 1995), p. 149.


17

Dixon Wecter: Introduction to Benjamin Franklins Autobiography, in Larzer Ziff (ed.): Benjamin Franklin; Autobiography and Selected Writings (New York: Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1959), pp xii-xiii. (Italics added. A. H.) The studious reader may find a more comprehensive collection of the works of this representative of the American Enlightenment par excellence in Benjamin Franklin; Autobiography, Poor Richard, and Later Writings (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc.,

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1987), compiled and with notes by J. A. Leo Lemay and sponsored by Daniel and Joanna S. Roses contribution to the Guardians of American Letters Fund, established by The Library of America to ensure that every volume in the series will be permanently available, to quote from the title pages. One is obviously tempted to comment on the irony of the need for private persons to keep the Enlightenment spirit alive in our own age.

Chapter IV: European Civilization; From Belief in Progress to Germs of Dystopia


1a

Any person with an intent to investigate historical developments, and the sources of explanation of events and turning points in this respect, would do well to keep Nietzsches The Use and Abuse of History (New York/London: Macmillan, 1957) close at hand and in his or her mind. This rather obscure work by the anti-nationalist German philosopher was translated into English by Adrian Collins and originally published in that language in the Eighteen volumes collection of his work, edited by Oscar Levy (London, 1909-13). As regards the abuse of Aristotle which started with the pedantic Catholicist theologian, Aquinas, in the 13th century Europe and which amounted to the near obliteration of the whole Aristotelean, and hence scientific legacy, after the failure to make avail of him after the Protestant Reformation, even modern publications have contributed to the intellectual mess. In a publication of David Humes empirically orientated Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) a work within the Enlightenment legacy which was largely destroyed during the Seven Years War (1756 -63) during which even the entire laissez faire economics was warped by another Scotsman, Adam Smith (see the present essay). Hume collaborated closely with among others the French Encyclopaedist Baron DHolbach (who popularized Johann Gottschalk Wallerius close

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study of Nature and its complex biochemical processes, and is recognized as the founder of the scientific basis of the agricultural revolution), and was obviously influenced by the scientific and philosophical legacy from Aristotle onwards. In a 1989 publication by Prometheus Books, New York, Humes largely atheistic orientation is located within the Platonic tradition, according to the presentation on the book cover. With such ridiculous obfuscations the very study of philosophy itself becomes essentially meaningless, apart from the effects it have produced in the process of wiping out the connection between the birth of Western Civilization in ancient Greece and the modern one.
1b

See A. E. Taylors classic, Aristotle (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1955), chapter One.
1c

A. Birnie: An Economic History of Europe, 1760-1930 (London: Methuen & Co., 1930), p. 14. See also the agrarian historical study, The Agrarian Revolution in Northern Europe, 1750-1880; Nitrogen, Legumes, and Crop Productivity, by G. Chorley, published in The Economic Historic Review, Second Series, volume XXXIV, No. 1, 1981.
1d

Theophrastus was confronted by the overwhelming challenges of a declining Greek civilization as was Aristotle and the accompanying exhaustion of the Mediterranean soils. After he took over the responsibilities of administering Aristotles academy, at the Lyceum, he subsequently wrote extensively on the cultivation of plants and its preconditions. His works on botany and agriculture were published in English translation in the excellent series of The Loeb Classical Library in 1916 and reprinted by the Harvard University Press in several editions from 1948 onwards, with the original Greek text included. See Theophrastus: Enquiry into Plants, 9 vols. (Cambridge, Massachusetts/London, England: Harvard University Press, 1990). It is supplemented by On the Causes of Plants, which may be appropriately seen as the beginning of

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scientific agronomy. These texts by the ancient scholar treat upon a vast array of topics, from soil conservation to the medicinal properties of herbs.
1e

A highly readable account of the actual era of Roman civilization is to be found in H. H. Scullard: From the Gracchi to Nero; A History of Rome 133BC to AD 68 (London/New York: Routledge, 1991), originally published by Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1959.
2

See especially H. N. Brailford: The Levellers and the English Revolution (1961; Nottingham: Spokesman University, 1976), Ch. XXI.
3

Montesquieu: Persian Letters (1721; Oslo: Thorleif Dahls Kulturbibliotek, 1998); Fr. Quesnay: Tableau Economique, eng. Translation The Economic Table (1758: Honolulu, University Press of the Pacific, 2004).
4

M. Dorothy George: London Life in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Capricorn Books, 1965), pp. 171-72. A collection of historical studies conducted, illustratively, from the 1920s onwards.
5a

Two brilliant biographical studies are J. Fruchtman, jr. Thomas Paine; Apostle of Freedom (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1994), and H. N. Brailsford: Shelley, Godwin and their Circle (London: Williams and Norgate, 1913).
5b

Elisha P. Douglass: Rebels and Democrats; The Struggle for Equal Political Rights and Majority Rule During the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), p. 290. (My italics. A.H.)
5c

John H. Mundy: Europe in the High Middle Ages, 1150-1309 (London: Longman Group Ltd., 1973), p. 113.
6

Quesnay: The Economic Table, p. 153.

270

Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations (1776; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd., 1981).
8

Ibid, p. 163. Ibid, p. 196. Ibid, p. 124.

10

11

Quesnays Analysis, in R. L. Meeks: The Economics of Physiocracy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1962), p. 163.
12

Ibid, p. 164.

13

Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792; Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1989), p. 143.
14

Jeremy Bentham: An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1780; Mineola: Dover Publications, 2007), p. 322.
15

Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws (1748; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 289.
16

Well documented by P. A. Kropotkin in his The Great French Revolution (1909: Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1989), Ch. I-V.
17

Thomas Paine: Agrarian Justice (1795; New York: Freethought Press Association, 1946), p. 6.
18

William Godwin: Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (179; Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1985), p. 266.
19

David Ricardo: Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817; Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1996), p. 259.
20

Ibid, p. 17.

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Chapter V: Romanticism, Nationalism and Political Reaction


1

See G. W. F. Hegel: The Science of Logic, which was written at the time of the Napoleonic wars, and its conclusion and immediate aftermath (1812-16); translated into English and republished for example in William Wallace, ed. The Logic of Hegel (London: Clarendon Press, 1892). If one allows for enough generosity to abstract somewhat Hegels own zeitgeist tendencies to glorify militarism and warfare (already elevated to an aesthetic phenomenon by Immanuel Kant and permeating the whole of the European continent previous to the Peace of Wienna in 1815), his celebration of dialectical thinking and logical categories is nourishing brain food for any student irrespective of time and place.
2

David Thomson: Europe Since Napoleon (London: Penguin Boooks, 1990), p.117.
3

D. Thomson: op. cit., p. 116.

See Max Horkheimer: The Eclipse of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).
5

Karl Marx: Early Writings (Harmondsworh: Penguin Books Ltd., 1975), p. 345.
6

Lord Byron: The Collected Works of Lord Byron (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), p. 99.
7

Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Collected Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), p. 359.
8

See Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Selected Poetry and Prose (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1951).
9

Arthur Schopenhauer: The World as Will and Idea (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957).

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10

Friedrich Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy (London: Penguin Classics, 1994).


11

The mid 19th century salto mortale within the liberal tradition dating back to the works of Montesquieu and Quesnay, who challenged the rigid mercantilist economic approach of the preEnlightenment era was aptly portrayed by Robert C. Brinkley in his Realism and Nationalism, 1852-1871 (New York: Harper & Row, 1935), in the admirable publishing project, The Rise of Modern Europe, with historical analyses dating back to the preReformation era and all the way to the outbreak of The Second World War. Brinkley referred to an observation made by Walter Bagehot that there had occurred a change in commercial practice that accompanied [that] development of banking. He distinguished between the Old Trader and the New Trader. The Old Trader took pride in doing business with his own money, the New Trader worked with borrowed capital. While long-term credit was building railways, steamships, and factories, and short-term credit was financing the movement of raw materials and manufactured goods in increasing quantities, the steady influx of gold from California and Australia broadened the metallic base of financial operations. We are accustomed to see the remedy for each financial difficulty in the arrival of a shipload of Australian gold, said a witness before the English bank commission. Obviously, no sane economy can function on the basis of the whole specter of Klondyke crimes, as popularized by Hollywood for general entertainment in the modern era as if it all was some kind of surreal joke. After all, neither gold nor the mathematical deciphering it may produce on this or that bank account produces anything of basic value for human well being, and by far for the notion of social progress which occupied the spiritually motivated Enlightenment scientists and philosophes, who studied the foundation of civilization thoroughly and exactly came up with the above mentioned condemnation of mercantilism and its obsession with the accumulation of silver and gold alike

273

exemplified by the ruinous adventures of the Spanish empire across the Atlantic.

Chapter VI: Imperialism versus Universalism; Use and Abuse of Science and Technology, 1850-1945
1

Robert Ackerman; Foreword to Francis Macdonald Cornfords classic study of the birth of Western Civilization; From Religion to Philosophy (1912: N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), originally published by E. Arnold, London. My italics. A. H. ).
2

See Georg Simmel: The Conflict in Modern Culture, and other essays (New York: Teachers College Press, 1968).
3

H. N. Brailsford: The War of Steel and Gold (London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd., 1914), p. 22.
4

George Orwell: Homage to Catalonia (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd., 1938), p. 22.
5

Orwell: ibid. p. 147

Jose Ortega y Gasset: The Revolt of the Masses (London: W. W. Norton & co., 1932), p. 11.
7

Gasset: ibid. p. 189.

Chapter VII: The Civilization that Could Have Been; Post-War Efforts at Retaining a Living Earth
1

Peter A. Kropotkin: Ethics; Origin and Development (New York: Tudor Publishing, 1924), was published posthumously and is, regrettably, largely unknown even among leftists of the libertarian

274

camp. Among his numerous works within the fields mentioned, his Russian Literature is probably the best introduction ever written on that topic encompassing vivid portraits of the rich legacy of 19th century Russian poets and novelists, who had to develop an extraordinary ability as intellectuals coping with the Czarist repression. As a biologist he was among the few who had the courage and balance of judgment to defend Darwin against insidious attacks from religious fanatics as well as his so-called bull-dogs (T. H. Huxley and co.), who warped the hard working evolutionists discoveries in the most horrendous and ridiculous manner, first in his review of Darwins pioneering works in The Nineteenth Century, and subsequently in his own work on the subject, Mutual Aid; A Factor in Evolution. As a geographer he collected evidence and examples of human ingenuity within agriculture and technics, both in his home country and elsewhere; most notably presented in his Fields, Factories and Workshops. His The Great French Revolution is a remarkably well documented survey of the complexities and ups and downs of the years 1789-94 in the heart of Europe, including a relatively rare among historians of the events analysis of the outbreak of the tumults among the peasantry, which set the spark on fire; his perspective being consequently that of the common man, whether as artisan or farmer, baker or journalist. Another of his historical works is The State and its Historic Role, in which he develops his anti-authoritarian and federalist principles against the centralizing parasitism of bureaucratic state power and its dehumanizing effects in short, the essence of anarchism understood as a commitment towards social progress and human perfectibility in the best Enlightenment spirit, like a Diderot or Condorcet incarnated a century or so later.
2a

Emma Goldman: My Disillusionment in Russia (1925: Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1983), p. 261.

275

2b

On the Eco-Warriors during the Russian Revolution and its precursors, see The Unknown Revolution by Voline (1947: Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990); Roots of Revolution; A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia , by Franco Venturi (1952: New York: The Universal Library, Grosset & Dunlap, 1966. First publication in Italy); The Kronstadt Uprising 1921, by Ida Mett (Montral: Black Rose Books Our Generation Press, 1971); and The History of the Makhnovist Movement, 1918-21 by Peter Arshinov. (1923: London: Freedom Press, 1987).
2c

Letter from Peter A. Kropotkin to V. I. Lenin, printed in Paul Avrich (ed.): The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1973), in the series Documents of Revolution, with Heinz Lubasz as general editor. Pp. 147-48.
3a

See the highly informative study by Max Pearson Cushing, delivered as a doctoral disputation in political philosophy to the political science department of Columbia University two months before the violent eruptions in Europe, Baron DHolbach; A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France (Lancaster, Pa.: The New Era Printing Company, 1914). Among the pioneering works by DHolbach, apart from his translations of the works by simultaneous scientists such as Wallerius Minralogie, ou description gnerale des substances du rgne mineral and Hydrologie, ou description du rgne aquatique, devises par classes, gendres, espces et varieties, avec la manire de faire lessai des eaux (1753 and 1759 respectively), the ones which deserve special mention here are: Letters to Eugenia on the absurd, contradictory and demoralizing Dogmas and Mysteries of the Christian Religion, published in the original French in 1768 and in English translation by H. M. Dubecquet in New York, 1833, and System de la Nature, ou Des Loix du Monde Physique et du Monde Moral (1770). It goes without saying that DHolbach was perpetually persecuted by the French

276

authorities for his writings, like several of the other well known encyclopaedists.
3b

See Erwin Schrdinger: Science and Humanism; Physics in Our Time (London: Cambridge University Press, 1951); lectures on the human situation seen from a physicists angle in the immediate post WW2 years; and R. G. Collingwood: The Idea of Nature (London: Oxford University Press, 1945).
4

See Charles Walters (ed.): William A. Albrecht; The Albrecht Papers 1918-74 (Raytown, Missouri: Acres USA).
5a

See Lewis Herber (Pseudonym for Murray Bookchin): Our Synthetic Environment (1962: New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1974). Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York; an edition which contains an introduction by William A. Albrecht.
5b

For a thoroughgoing treatment of the hazards as regards human biochemical experimentation with the microbial foundations of life on Earth, see Rachel Carson: The Silent Spring (London: Hamish Hamilton, Ltd., 1962).
6

See Lewis Herber (Pseudonym for Murray Bookchin): Crisis in Our Cities (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1965).
7

See Edward Hyams: Soil & Civilization (1952: London: John Murray, 1976). Originally published by Thames & Hudson, London).
8

See Stewart Udall: The Quiet Crisis (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963).
9a

G. V. Jacks and R. O. Whyte: The Rape of the Earth; World Survey of Soil Erosion (London: Faber and Faber Ltd.. 1939).

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9b

See Werner Jaeger: Paideia; the Ideals of Greek Culture; Volume I: Archaic Greece and The Mind of Athens; Volume II: In Search of the Divine Centre; Volume III: The Conflict of Cultural Ideals and In the Age of Plato (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939-44). To quote from the opening lines of Jaegers work: Paideia, the title of this work, is not merely a symbolic name, but the only exact designation of the actual historical subject presented in it. Indeed it is a difficult thing to define; like other broad comprehensive concepts (philosophy, for instance, or culture) it refuses to be confined within an abstract formula. Its full content and meaning become clear to us only when we read its history and follow its attempts to realize itself.
9c

See Roderick Seidenberg: Post-historic Man; An Inquiry (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1950). The militaryindustrial complex warping the technological potentialities referred to by Seidenberg was acknowledged by U.S. presidents such as Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy during the actual time period, documented for example in Kennedys introduction to the early 1960s publication, The Quiet Crisis. (See note 54). Illustratively, the land and population which eventually turned out to be victimized on a par with the Jews during the Second World War the Japanese after the horrendous nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has stood out as representatives of a qualitatively different approach to the durability of manufactured goods and technical devices, considered to be among the preconditions for civilization as a matter of pure logic and common sense. See for example The Human Condition, by Hannah Arendt, referred to below.
10

Fairfield Osborn: Our Plundered Planet (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1948).
11

Review by Robert M. Hutchins in Citizens Creed, 1948.

278

12

Review by author Edwin Seaver, 1948.

13a

See James M. Trappe and Michael A. Castellano (eds.): Mycolit: A mycorrhiza bibliography, 1758-1991 (Department of Forest Science, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, U.S.A., and United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, Corvallis, Oregon, U. S. A., 1991).
13b

See the translation of Simone Weils LEnracinement (1949); The Need for Roots (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1952); Carl O. Sauer: Seeds, Spades, Hearths, and Herds; The Domestication of Animals and Foodstuffs (1952: Cambridge, Mass./London, England: The MIT Press, 1969), originally published by American Geographical Society; and Hans Jonas: The Phenomenon of Life; Toward a Philosophical Biology (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1966), a collection of essays written between 1950 and 1965.
14

See Max Horkheimer: Eclipse of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947). Reprinted repeatedly, and recently by The Continuum Publishing Co., London, 2004.
15

See Theodor W. Adorno: Minima Moralia (1951: London: NLB, 1974), English translation. The original edition was published by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt/Main, in the former West Germany.
16

See Herbert Marcuse: Eros & Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955).
17

See Tom Dale & Vernon Gill Carter: Topsoil & Civilization (Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955).
18

See the probably closest effort one may encounter as regards a modern example of philosophy in the classical spirit, from Aristotle to Montesquieu; Hannah Arendts The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).

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19

A comprehensive encyclopaedic summary of the human condition and the state of the Earth in the post war years was published in the aftermath of an International Symposium conducted by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, under the title Mans Role in Changing the Face of the Earth , edited by William A. Thomas, Jr. and co-edited by Carl O. Sauer, Marston Bates and Lewis Mumford (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956).
20

See E. A. Gutkind: Community & Environment (London: Watts & Co., 1953). By the same author the interested reader may consult some of his other works, such as Revolution of Environment (1946) and The Expanding Environment; The End of Cities, The Rise of Communities (1953), both long out of print but still available through second hand book stores via bookfinder.com.
21

For a masterly journalistic treatment of the ugly character which recycled capitalism had developed by the mid 20 th century, see Vance Packards The Waste Makers (New York/Toronto/London: McGraw-Hill, 1961). This wake-up call was followed up by Packard one year later in his The Pyramid Climbers (1962), published by the same company, in which he addresses the lack of ethics in corporate and bureaucratic leadership. These works have been conveniently withheld from public attention in the subsequent years, but may still be purchased from second hand book stores through the already mentioned search engine, Bookfinder.com.
22

See for example Mumfords works What I Believe; An Essay in Living Philosophies (1930); Technics & Civilization (1934); Air Affairs and Green Memories (1947); and The Conduct of Life (1951). Long out of print, these works may conveniently be purchased through the search engine Bookfinder.com, connecting up to second hand bookstores around the world. Technics & Civilization was admirably republished as The Future of Technics & Civilization by Freedom Press, London in 1986.

280

23

See Hans Selye: The Stress of Life (1956: New York: McGrawHill, 1978). This valuable work was reprinted as paperback editions in 1976 and 1978.
24

See G. D. H. Cole: A History of Socialist Thought, 5. Vols. (London: MacMillan, 1953-60). The final, and highly important, volume on Socialism and Fascism was put together by Mr. Coles wife, Margaret Cole, after he had passed away, based on his notes and manuscripts for this volume.
25

See another piece of brilliant journalism presented in book form, historian Henry Noel Brailsfords The War of Steel and Gold; A Study of the Armed Peace (London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd., 1914).
26

The modern environmentalist/ecological movements were to a large extent launched through geographer George Perkins Marshs pioneering work, Man and Nature (1864: Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965). The resulting publication from the above mentioned international symposium on Mans Role in Changing the Face of the Earth was dedicated to the memory of George P. Marsh.
27

See geographer Marion Isabel Newbigin: Man and His Conquest of Nature (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1912). This ingeniously hidden work has been admirably republished in paperback edition by Pranava Books, Delhi in recent years. Other works by Newbigin include Modern Geography, as well as her contributions as editor of The Scottish Geographical Magazine.
28

ibid. , p. 131.

29

The complexities involved in these processes, and their implications for Western civilization as a whole, were admirably addressed by Helen Deutsch in her classic, The Psychology of Women; A Psychoanalytic Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York: Grune

281

and Stratton, 1944-45). The second volume is in its entirety reserved for the role of motherhood.
30

Fortunately, Kropotkins exchange of letters with W. I. Lenin after his return to Russia in the years immediately following the 1917 revolution were recovered in Martin A. Miller (ed.): Peter A. Kropotkin: Selected Writings on Anarchism and Revolution (The Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Cambridge, Massachusetts/London, England: The M. I. T. Press, 1970).
31

P. A. Kropotkin: op.cit.

32

William A. Albrecht: op.cit. A popularized version of Albrechts vast insights is to be found in The Albrecht Papers, Volume 1-4, edited by Charles Walters: William A. Albrecht: Soil Fertility & Animal Health (Austin, Texas: Acres, U. S. A., year unknown).
33

Among the pioneering works by soil scientist Sir Albert Howard, written after his conversion to ecological/organic agriculture by the Indian farmers and his subsequent return to Great Britain, the interested reader may consult his An Agricultural Testament (London, 1940. Recent editions by Other India Press, Goa, India from 1996 onwards), and The Soil and Health; A Study of Organic Agriculture, in the praiseworthy publications by the U. K. Soil Association, Culture of the Land; A Series in the New Agrarianism, edited by Norman Wirzba, Georgetown College, Kentucky, and with a new and informative introduction by Wendell Berry.
34

See Lady Eve Balfour: The Living Soil (London: Faber & Faber, 1943). Republication text by The Soil Association, U. K., 2006, in the series, Organic Classics, edited by Philip Conford, printed and bound by York Publishing Services. www.soilassociation.org.
35

As regarding the economic misconceptions involved in the illusion of monetarism, Charles Walters summed up his frustrations with the

282

downward spiral of Western civilization and its economic foundations in Unforgiven; The American Economic System Sold for Debt and War (Austin, Texas, Acres, U. S. A., 1971). The previous works by Mr. Walters include Angry Testament, A Farmers Guide to the Bottom Line, Raw Materials Economics, and Weeds, Control Without Poisons, all of which was published during the desperate times in the post war era as far as the effort to restore Western Civilization is concerned.
36

Lewis Herber, op.cit. Most unfortunately, Mr. Albrechts introduction was removed in the Harper Colophone edition issued in the 1970s.
37

C. Walters, Jr, (ed.): W. A. Albrecht: The Albrecht Papers, p. 493.

38

Microbiologists around the world would profit immensely by consulting James M. Trappe & Michael A. Castellano (eds.): MYCOLIT: A mycorrhizza bibliography, 1758-1991. This invaluable work establishes an incomparable standard for ethics in science and its application in the modern era, and represents an expression of the recent development of professional associations such as The Union of Concerned Scientists, preoccupied with the all too rapid changes in the Earths balance systems, including our precious atmosphere. The relevance of microbiology, in addition to the highly productive potential of mycorrrhizal symbiosis in food production, is reinforced by the fact that mycorrhizal fungi produces the glycoprotein, glomalin, in the soil, a chemical compound which fixes carbon dioxide from the air. The complexities of soil ecology and its importance in todays situation may be gathered from for example S. E. Smith and D. J. Read: Mycorrhizal Symbiosis, 3rd edition (New York/London/Burlington (MA)/San Diego: Academic Press, 2008); and Marcel G. A. van der Hejden & Ian R. Sanders (eds.): Mycorrhizal Ecology (Berlin Heidelberg, Springer Verlag, 2002), which constitutes vol. 157 in the series Ecological Studies.

283

39

See Ernst Cassirer: The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, English edition (Princeton University Press, 1951), originally published in German in 1932 by J. C. B. Mohr in Tbingen. This work is still of major value to any student of the history of ideas, and it contains insights which may easily pass unheeded in an era of consume hedonism and mass manipulation. Note the date of the German publication and the fact that Cassirer himself barely escaped from Germany after the Nazi takeover in 33.
40

See Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno: Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Social Studies Association, Inc., 1944), originally published in German. The English translation was published in 1972 and has been repeatedly reprinted as paperback editions, for example by Continuum, New York, 1993. Both Horkheimer and Adorno had to follow the example of Cassirer as regards a new basis of residence after 1933, and sought refuge in the United States.
41

As regards the effort to root out totalitarianism from European civilization in the immediate post war era, Volines The Unknown Revolution (1947) is indispensable reading. The grand work has been admirably republished, for example by Black Rose Books, Montreal, Canada in 1990.
42

M. Horkheimer, op.cit. T. W. Adorno: op.cit. H. Marcuse: op. cit. H. Arendt: op.cit. T. W. Adorno: op. cit., p. 163. See the essay, Modernity and Individualism in this collection.

43

44

45

46

47

284

48

H. Arendt: op.cit. In this context, see especially chapter 17. H. Arendt: op.cit., p. 131.

49

50

The liberation from Gaia, which is the logicall y resulting project from this kind of economy, has resulted in rather absurd suggestions of solutions to its failures, as for example presented in James Lovelocks The Vanishing Face of Gaia (New York: Basic Books, 2009), in which he advocates synthesized animal proteins as an alternative way of human nutrition (p. 132 ff.). Considering the documentation by W. A. Albrecht and his colleagues of the failures of modern husbandry and grain production in facilitating satisfactory proteins and amino-acids for healthy human metabolism, such a receipt cannot be considered as anything less than a program for unrelenting extinction of our species, however slow and painful the process may turn out to be. The ancient Greek tales of Hubris and Nemesis is the adequate accompanying literature to such a theatre macabre.
51

See The Albrecht Papers, vol. 2, chapter 11; The Problem of the Proteins.
52

See E. A. Gutkinds contribution to Mans Role in Changing the Face of the Earth; Our World From the Air; Conflict and Adaptation (Chicago, 1956).
53

The single fact alone that this work has been among the hardest ones to be obtained from second hand book shops, is in itself a testimony to one of the great illusions in the modern era; namely the notion that we are belonging to an enlightened age. The work is virtually forgotten, never reprinted after the scandalous Harper Colophon edition which ignored W. A. Albrechts masterly introduction to the original Alfred A. Knopf publication and still it contains insights which even specialists within the various fields treated upon either do not acknowledge or pay adequate attention to.

285

54

See Lewis Herber (pseudonym for Murray Bookchin): Crisis in Our Cities; Air Pollution, Water Contamination, Physical and Emotional Stress Death, Disease, and the Urban Plague, with an introductory comment by former Minister of the Interior, Stewart L. Udall, author of The Quiet Crisis (Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1965).
55

E. Agres: The Value Economy, in R. Lepley (ed.): Value; A Cooperative Inquiry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), p. 46.
56

The pioneering work by George P. Marsh, which laid down the foundations for environmental protection campaigning, nature conservation organizations, and ecological thinking generally in the modern era, was elaborated on and received new expressions for example in the 1905 work by Nathaniel Southgate Shaler: Man and the Earth (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The University Press, 1905), which treats upon subjects such as the exhaustion of metals, the problems of maintaining soil fertility, the fragile ecological balance of the oceans, and the general attitude of man (or humans) towards the Earth. In France a pioneering work on environmentalism and ecological responsibility, including early warnings of the grave rupture which was about to manifest itself between man and nature in the years leading up to the First World War, was written by Jean Brunhes in 1910. The work, Human Geography, include a chapter on destructive human exploitation of the environment, and plant and animal devastation by human activities. It was translated and published in English in 1920 by Rand McNally & Co.
57

F. S. C. Northrop: The Meeting of East and West; An Inquiry Concerning World Understanding (New York: Macmillan Company, 1946), preface.

286

Chapter VIII: Modernity and Individualism


1

Ferdinand Tnnies in Dag Osterberg, ed.: Handling og samfunn; Sosiologisk teori i utvalg (Oslo: Pax, 1990), p. 73.
2

See e.g. E. A. Gutkind: Community and Environment (London: Watts & Co., 1953); Erwin Schrdinger: Science and Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951); Daniel Bell: Work and its Discontents; The Cult of Efficiency in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1956; Hannah Arendt: The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958); and William M. Thomas, ed.: Mans Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1956).
3a

Daniel Bell: The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976), p. 33.
3b

Werner Sombart: The Quintessence of Capitalism (1915: New York: Howard Fertig, Inc., 1967), p. 125. Emphasis added. A. H.
4

Ibid, p. 45. Ibid, p. 82.

See for instance Epicurus: A Guide to Happiness (London: Orion Books, 1996).
7

V. F. Calverton, ed.: The Making of Man (New York: The Modern Library, Random House, 1931).
8

Dorothy Lee: Freedom and Culture (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1959), especially the chapter Individual autonomy and Social Structure.
9a

Paul Radin: The World of Primitive Man (New York: Henry Schuman, Inc., 1953), p. 11.

287

9b

Erich Fromm: Escape From Freedom (1941: New York: Avon Books, 1969), p. 208.
10

Charles Taylor: Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 84.
11

Charles Taylor: The Malaise of Modernity (Concord, Ontario: House of Anansi Press, 1991), p. 7.
12

Bell: The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, p. 204. Taylor: The Malaise of Modernity, p. 47.

13

14

Michel Maffesoli: The Contemplation of the World; Figures of Community Style (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
15

Frederick Copleston: A History of Philosophy (New York: Doubleday, 1985), vol. I, p. 406.
16

R. D. Laing: Self and Others (1961: Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 98.

Chapter IX: Ecology and Economics the Urgent Need for a Reunion
1a

James Callan Gray Walker: Earth History; The Several Ages of the Earth (Boston: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, Inc., 1986), pp. 185186.
1b

C.f. George Perkins Marsh: Man & Nature (1864: Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1965).
2a

See for example Lewis Herber (pseud. for Murray Bookchin): Our Synthetic Environment (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), and

288

James Braily & Patrick Holford: The H-Factor Solution; Homocysteine, the Best Single Indicator of Whether You Are Likely to Live Long or Die Young (New Jersey: Basic Health Publications, 2003).
2b

For a study of the human impacts on the ecological degeneration in Northern Africa, the interested reader may favorably consult J. A. Allan (ed.): The Sahara; Ecological change and early economic history (1978: London: Menas Press, Ltd., 1981). The collection of essays in this highly important publication is based on the papers presented at a seminar at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, October, 1978.
3

For a prominent example of ethically applied scientific research, see Trappe & Castellano: Mycolit 1758-1991 (Corvallis: Oregon University Pr., 1991).
4

See Alan Thein Durning: How Much is Enough?; The Consumer Society and the Future of the Earth (London: Earthscan Publications, Ltd., 1992), published in association with The International Institute for Environment and Development and the World Wide Fund for Nature (UK).
5

For readers inclined towards historical consciousness, see Stewart Edwards: The Paris Commune, 1871 (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1971) and Prosper Olivier Lissagaray: History of the Paris Commune of 1871, translated from the French by Eleanor Marx (1876: St. Petersburg, Florida: Red and Black Publishers, 2007). I would suggest reading Lissagarays account first, as representing the fresh impressions of that momentous event in European history, and then consult Edwards historical analysis in a centurys retrospective which had to digest two world wars and a largely spoilt European Civilization.

289

Documented at an early stage by Vance Packard in his The Waste Makers (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1962).
7a

The reader concerned with this topic is likely to be considerably stimulated by consulting E. Hyams Soil & Civilization (London: Thames & Hudson, 1952).
7b

Benjamin Franklin: Autobiography; with Selected Writings (New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, Inc., 1959), p. 220.
7c

The best accounts of classical Athenian democracy, and its challenges and developments, are to be found in Moses I. Finle ys works, notably in his The Ancient Greeks (Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, Ltd., 1975, revised edition), originally published by Chatto and Windus in 1963. As regards the enduring viability of anarchist principles of organization, a good introduction is to be found in Murray Bookchins essay On Spontaneity and Organization (1979), in the collection of essays published as Toward an Ecological Society (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980), p. 249 ff.
8

A good introduction to applied microbiology for agricultural and horticultural purposes is Chantal Hamel & Christian Plenchette (eds.): Mycorrhizae in Crop Production (New York: The Haworth Press, 2007). The quote is from J. Larsen, S. Ravnskov and J. N. Sorensens contribution to that important book, chapter 4; Capturing the Benefits of Arbuscular Mycorrhizae in Horticulture, p. 124.
9

See e.g. M. I. Finley: Democracy Ancient and Modern (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973); R. Hilton: Bond Men Made Free (New York: The Viking Press, 1973); and H. Pirenne: Early Democracies in the Low Countries (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).

290

10

The history of the modern cooperative movement is treated extensively in G. D. H. Coles A History of Socialist Thought, 5 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1953-58).
11

See especially Aristotles Politics, translated into English by William Ellis (New York: Prometheus Books, 1986).
12

Consideration of Asian cultures and civilizations is included in Montesquieus Persian Letters, and his several central conceptions regarding civilization is found throughout his magnum opus, The Spirit of the Laws (De lesprit de lois) 1748: (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). For a modern analysis of ancient Civilization in the respective region, see the excellent work by Marc van De Mieroop: A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000-323 BC (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), in the series Blackwell History of the Ancient World.
13

The reader interested in the romantics attitude toward a hazy industrialization at the outset of the 19th century and its detrimental social and ecological consequences, would find it represented in poems such as Byrons Song for the Luddites (1816), Prometheus (1816), When I roved a Young Highlander, and the Prayer of Nature (both 1807), as well as in his mock ep ic and last literary work, Don Juan (-- 1824). Percy Shelleys attempt to rectify the faults and vices of the ancient Prometheus figure and his modern manifestation was penned in his lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound (1819), while Mary Wollstonecraft Shelleys horror novel, Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus, was published in 1818, and repeatedly republished since then. A good introduction to the Romantics in general is to be found in Warren Breckmans European Romanticism; A Brief History with Documents (Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2008), in the Bedford Series in History and Culture.

291

Chapter X: Civic Virtue Versus Corporate Self Interest; The Decisive Battle of the 21st Century
1

As for resistance against this degenerative social and economic process, see H. N. Brailfords classic historical work on the English Revolution in the 1640s, The Levellers
2

See Karl Polanyi: The Great Transformation; The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, with a foreword by Joseph E. Stiglitz (1944: Boston: Beacon Press, 2001). Originally published by Farrar & Rinehart, New York. Despite its many valuable insights in the processes leading to a wholly market dominated economic system, his work is marked by the conventional statist perspectives which prevailed among the Left at the time of its writing. Hence, it is of less avail to us as regards suggestions for economic alternatives than the ideas presented almost a century earlier by for example Pierre Joseph Proudhon, who included decentralism, mutualism and confederalism in his vistas for a future democratic and ecologically viable society. See for example his criticism of capitalism in The Philosophy of Misery; The Evolution of Capitalism System of Economical Contradictions (1847: La Vergne, USA: Kessinger Publishing, 2010); De la Justice Dans la Rvolution (1870: Charleston: BiblioLife, 2010); and Iain McKay (ed.): Property is Theft!; A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology (Edinburgh, Oakland/Baltimore: A. K. Press, 2011).
3

Carl Ortwin Sauer: Land & Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965), p. 154.
4

See the essay Modernity and Individualism in this collection.

For alternatives within mental health care, see the works of David Cooper, for example The Language of Madness (1978: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1980).

292

First edition published by Allen Lane. Cooper dedicated the book to the first Revolutionary. In each of us.
6

As for ventures into the barbarous logic of capitalism, see the overview by David Lester: The Gruesome Acts of Capitalism (A.K. Press, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2007).
7

For those who may be interested in these subjects, the following works by life-long anarchist, the former noble Russian, Peter A. Kropotkin (1842-1921), The Conquest of Bread and the quintessential work on meaningful work, Fields, Factories and Workshops, will be worth while reading.
8

For a philosophical analysis of Freuds psychoanalytic theories and research, see the work by a leading figure at Institute for Social Research in the post World War II era, Herbert Marcuses Eros & Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955).
9

This subject was treated upon extensively by modern anarchist, Murray Bookchin, in his 1960s and 70s essays, collected in PostScarcity Anarchism and in the effort to popularize his ideas and thought, Remaking Society, both of them available from Black Rose Books, Montreal, Canada, and A. K. Press, Edinburgh, Scotland.
10

ibid. , p. 189. ibid.

11a

11b

Ivan Illich: Celebration of Awareness; A Call for Institutional Revolution (1969: Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 17. My italics. A. H.
12

For a highly valuable work on the political and economic structures of the Ancient Greek era, see the brilliant works by historian, Moses I. Finley, for example Democracy; Ancient and Modern. (1973: London: The Hogarth Press, 1985).

293

13

A subject which occupied moral and existentialist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche to an almost obsessive extent, and articulated for example in his Genealogy of Morals (1887: New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2003). It is easy to start speculating on whether Nietzsches opponents clinging to an outworn and reactionary Christianity retorted to nasty means in their efforts to silence his fierce criticism, ultimately resulting in his mental illness towards the end of his life. After all, where reason ends, violence begins as always.
14

G. W. F. Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807: London: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 329. Translation by A. V. Miller. (My italics. A. H. ).
15

For a thoroughgoing analysis and discussion of the complexities and ambiguities of dialectical thinking including its potentially dangerous traps Jean Paul Sartres little known writings from the 1940s onwards, collected in Critique of Dialectical Reason, 2 vols. (1960: London: Verso, 2004), the original French edition published by Editions Gallimard, Paris, under the title Critique de la Raison Dialectique.
16

For those who may be somewhat worn out by 200 years of economic misconceptions, see the historical documentation of the endless list of alternatives offered throughout the actual era; historian G. D. H. Coles 5 vols. research presentation, A History of Socialist Thought, especially volume 1; The Forerunners, 1780-1850, volume 2; Marxism and Anarchism, and volume 5; Socialism and Fascism, 1931-39.
17

Erich Fromm: Introduction, in Ivan D. Illich: The Celebration of Awareness; A Call for Institutional Revolution (1969: Harmondsworth: Penguin Education, 1973), p. 10. Illichs wo rk represents the Enlightenment tradition in an exemplary manner rather out of tune with the zeitgeist of the period as he addresses

294

topics such as the indoctrination by statist institutions of learning as well as the totalitarian implications of a technocracy run away on auto-pilot, far beyond democratic control. For a reconstructive approach to pedagogy and technology, se for example Illichs other works; Deschooling Society (New York: Harrow Books, 1972), and Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), both published in the series; World Perspectives, vols. 44 and 47 respectively.
18

Succinctly concluded by 18th century philosopher and musician, Jean Jacques Rousseau in his The Social Contract: it is clear that this contract between the people and such and such persons would be a particular act; and from this it follows that it can be neither a law nor an act of Sovereignty, and that consequently it would be illegitimate.
19

See an early attempt at developing a social ecological analysis of the modern human condition and suggestions towards its improvement, E. A. Gutkinds Community and Development (1953).
20

Elias Canetti: Crowds and Power (1960: New York: The Noonday Press; Farrar, Straus and Giraux, 1984), p. 189.
21

ibid. , p. 189.

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