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From Ricoeur to Action
Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy
Series Editor: James Fieser, University of Tennessee at Martin, USA
Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy is a major monograph series from
Continuum. The series features first-class scholarly research monographs across
the field of Continental philosophy. Each work makes a major contribution to the
field of philosophical research.
Adorno’s Concept of Life, Alastair Morgan
Badiou, Marion and St Paul, Adam Miller
Being and Number in Heidegger’s Thought, Michael Roubach
Deleuze and Guattari, Fadi Abou-Rihan
Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation, Joe Hughes
Deleuze and the Unconscious, Christian Kerslake
Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New, edited by Simon O’Sullivan
and Stephen Zepke
Derrida, Simon Morgan Wortham
Derrida and Disinterest, Sean Gaston
Derrida: Profanations, Patrick O’Connor
The Domestication of Derrida, Lorenzo Fabbri
Encountering Derrida, edited by Simon Morgan Wortham and Allison Weiner
Foucault’s Heidegger, Timothy Rayner
Gadamer and the Question of the Divine, Walter Lammi
Heidegger and a Metaphysics of Feeling, Sharin N. Elkholy
Heidegger and Aristotle, Michael Bowler
Heidegger and Logic, Greg Shirley
Heidegger and Nietzsche, Louis P. Blond
Heidegger and Philosophical Atheology, Peter S. Dillard
Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction, Michael Lewis
Heidegger, Politics and Climate Change, Ruth Irwin
Heidegger’s Early Philosophy, James Luchte
Idealism and Existentialism, Jon Stewart
Kant, Deleuze and Architectonics, Edward Willatt
Levinas and Camus, Tal Sessler
Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology, Kirk M. Besmer
Nietzsche’s Ethical Theory, Craig Dove
Nietzsche, Nihilism and the Philosophy of the Future, edited by Jeffrey Metzger
Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, edited by James Luchte
The Philosophy of Exaggeration, Alexander Garcia Düttmann
Sartre’s Phenomenology, David Reisman
Time and Becoming in Nietzsche’s Thought, Robin Small
Who’s Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari? Gregg Lambert
Žižek and Heidegger, Thomas Brockelman
Žižek’s Dialectics, Fabio Vighi
 From Ricoeur to Action
The Socio-Political Significance
of Ricoeur’s Thinking

Edited by
Todd S. Mei and David Lewin

Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy

Continuum International Publishing Group
The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane
11 York Road Suite 704
London SE1 7NX New York NY 10038

www.continuumbooks.com

© Todd S. Mei, David Lewin and Contributors 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or
retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-5973-1

e-ISBN: 978-1-4411-5546-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

From Ricoeur to action : the socio-political significance of Ricoeur’s thinking/
edited by Todd S. Mei and David Lewin.
p. cm. -- (Continuum studies in Continental philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-4411-5973-1 (hardcover)
1. Social conflict--History--21st century. 2. Social sciences--Philosophy.
3. Political science--Philosophy. 4. Ricoeur, Paul. I. Mei, Todd S. II. Lewin, David.
HM1121.F76 2012
300.92--dc23 2011036468

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

 Contents

Notes on Contributors vii

Acknowledgements  xi

Chapter 1. Introduction 1
Todd S. Mei

Part One: Capability I

Chapter 2. From Ricoeur to Life: ‘Living Up to
Death’ with Spinoza, but also with Deleuze 19
Pamela Sue Anderson

Chapter 3. From Metaphor to the Life-World: Ricoeur’s

Metaphoric Subjectivity 33
Fiona Tomkinson

Chapter 4. Ricoeur and the Capability of Modern Technology 54

David Lewin

Part Two: Capability II

Chapter 5. The Course of Racial Recognition:
A Ricoeurian Approach to Critical Race Theory 75
L. Sebastian Purcell

Chapter 6. The Long Road to Recognition: Paul Ricoeur

and Bell Hooks on the Development of Self-Esteem 96
Scott Davidson
vi Contents

Part Three: Utopia

Chapter 7. To Think Utopia With and Beyond Paul Ricoeur 113
Vicky Iakovou

Chapter 8. Ricoeur versus Ricoeur? Between the Universal

and the Contextual 136
George H. Taylor

Chapter 9. Turn Around and Step Forward: Environmentalism,

Activism and the Social Imaginary 155
Brian Treanor

Chapter 10. States of Peace: Ricoeur on Recognition and the Gift 175
Christopher Lauer

Interlude
Chapter 11. Ricoeur’s Atemwende: A Reading of ‘Interlude:
Tragic Action’ in Oneself as Another 195
David Fisher

Part Four: The Theological

Chapter 12. The Unsurpassable Dissensus: The Ethics
of Forgiveness in Paul Ricoeur’s Work 211
Olivier Abel

Chapter 13. Examining Canonical Representations:

The ‘Exceptionalism’ of Ricoeur’s
Hermeneutics and the Bid for an Ethical Canon 229
Colby Dickinson

Bibliography 247
Index 259
 Notes on Contributors

Olivier Abel is professor of philosophy and ethics at the Faculté Protestante

de Théologie of Paris (France) and a former student of Michel Henry,
Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricoeur. He is president of the Conseil scien-
tifque du Fonds Ricœur. His books include Paul Ricœur, la promesse et la règle
(Paris: Michalon, 1996), L’éthique interrogative (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 2000) and La juste mémoire, Lectures autour de Paul Ricœur (Genève:
Labor et Fides, 2006).

Pamela Sue Anderson is reader in philosophy of religion, University of

Oxford (UK). Her publications include: A Feminist Philosophy of Religion: the
Myths and Rationality of Religious Belief (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) and Kant
and Theology, co-authored with Jordan Bell (London: Continuum, 2010).
She does research on ethics, feminist philosophy, Continental philosophy
of religion, as well as the philosophies of Kant, of Ricoeur and of Michèle
Le Doeuff. She wrote her doctorate on Kant and Ricoeur, at the University
of Oxford, in the 1980s when she also had the good fortune of meeting with
Ricoeur in Paris discussing how to bridge the ‘analytic’ and the ‘Continental’
divide in philosophy – which was one of his own deepest desires. She is
greatly indebted to Ricoeur for her career in Oxford and research in France,
even though she is often critical of and has moved beyond him in certain
ways, notably in her feminist philosophy of religion.

Scott Davidson is associate professor and chair of the department of phi-

losophy at Oklahoma City University (US). He is the co-editor of the jour-
nal Études Ricoeuriennes/Ricoeur Studies (ricoeur.pitt.edu) and author of
Ricoeur Across the Disciplines (Continuum, 2010).

Colby Dickinson is a doctoral researcher of the K.U. Leuven Research Fund

and a member of the research group ‘Theology in a Postmodern Context’
viii Notes on Contributors

within the faculty of theology, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium)

(http://www.theo.kuleuven.be/page/rgtpc/). His research currently focuses
on the philosophical usage of the term ‘messianic’ in the writings of Walter
Benjamin, Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. He is the author of
­several articles as well as the recent monograph, Agamben and Theology
(London: T&T Clark, 2011).

David Fisher is professor of philosophy, Ruge Distinguished Teaching

Fellow at North Central College (US). His research specializes in ethics,
philosophy of law and the history of ideas. His writings on Ricoeur
include: Doing justice to justice: Paul Ricoeur, Work of mourning, Waiting on
Ricoeur: Ricoeur on tragedy, Ricoeur’s clinamen, Just Ricoeur, and Is Phronēsis
Deinon? He is on the editorial board of the journal of the Association for
the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities.

Vicky Iakovou is lecturer in political philosophy at the University of the

Aegean (Greece). Her main research and teaching interests involve
contemporary political philosophy and the critical theory of the Frankfurt
School. She has published articles in French, Greek and English edited
volumes and journals. Her recent publications include: ‘Totalitarianism as
a Non-State. On Hannah Arendt’s Debt to Franz Neumann’, European
Journal of Political Theory, 8(4), 2009, and ‘Leo Strauss’ Interpretation of
Modern Political Philosophy: The Case of Machiavelli’, Hypomnema, 10,
2010 (in Greek). Ricoeur’s Soi-même comme un autre figures among the books
she has translated into Greek (Polis, Athens, 2008).

Christopher Lauer is assistant professor in philosophy at the University of

Hawaii at Hilo (US). He works primarily in German idealism and the ethics
of recognition and is the author of The Suspension of Reason in Hegel and
Schelling (Continuum, 2010). He is currently at work on a book on
intimacy.

David Lewin is lecturer in philosophy of education at Liverpool Hope

University (UK). His current research addresses the religious and philo-
sophical implications of modern technology. In addition to publishing sev-
eral articles on the philosophy of technology and its relation to religious
philosophy, his first monograph Technology and the Philosophy of Religion was
published in 2011 (Cambridge Scholars Publishing).
 Notes on Contributors ix

Todd Mei is lecturer in philosophy and religious studies at the University of

Kent (UK). His current research involves a hermeneutical approach to
understanding political economy, particularly relations to land and ground
rent as well as the relation between analytic and Continental philosophy.
His most recent book is Heidegger, Work, and Being (Continuum, 2009), and
he has several articles applying hermeneutics to such areas as ancient Greek
philosophy and theories of impartiality. He is currently the director of
European Relations of the Society for Ricoeur Studies.

L. Sebastian Purcell is an assistant professor of philosophy at the State

University of New York (SUNY) at Cortland (US). He has published numer-
ous articles on social and political theory, Latin American philosophy and
phenomenology and hermeneutics. Beyond his interest in recognition the-
ory, his current research has aimed at taking a hermeneutical approach to
logic and mathematics.

George H. Taylor is a professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh (US).

A former student of Ricoeur, he has edited Ricoeur’s Lectures on Ideology and
Utopia (1986). He is co-editor with Francis J. Mootz III of Gadamer and Ricoeur:
Critical Horizons for Contemporary Hermeneutics (Continuum, 2011). His articles
applying Ricoeur’s hermeneutics have appeared in both legal and philosoph-
ical journals. He is the Past President of the Society for Ricoeur Studies.

Fiona Tomkinson is assistant professor at Yeditepe University (Turkey),

where she lectures in the English Language and Literature and Philosophy
Departments. She holds a BA and an MA in English from Oxford University
and an MA and a PhD in Philosophy from Boğaziçi University. Her doctoral
dissertation (2008) was entitled ‘From Ricoeur’s Theory of Metaphoric
Reference towards a Phenomenological Ontology of Metaphor.’ She has
published over thirty articles in the areas of literature and philosophy,
including an article on Ricoeur published in Turkish as ‘Ricoeur’ün Eğrilme
Kavramı’ (‘Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor’) in Cogito, No. 56, October 2008.
She met Ricoeur in Istanbul in 2003 at the conference ‘Why freedom?’ at
Boğaziçi University, where she made a translation of his paper from French
to English in order to assist simultaneous translation.

Brian Treanor is associate professor of Philosophy and Director of

Environmental Studies at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles (US).
He is the author of Aspects of Alterity: Levinas, Marcel, and the Contemporary
x Notes on Contributors

Debate (Fordham, 2006) and co-editor of A Passion for the Possible: Thinking
with Paul Ricoeur (Fordham, 2010). His current work takes place at the
­intersection of hermeneutics, virtue ethics and environmental ethics, where
he is co-editor of the forthcoming Interpreting Nature: The Emerging Field of
Environmental Hermeneutics (Fordham) and Emplotting Virtue: A Narrative
Approach to Environmental Virtue Ethics (SUNY Press). He also publishes in
the area of continental philosophy and theology.
 Acknowledgements

The motivation for this book arose from a conference on Paul Ricoeur that
took place at the University of Kent (Canterbury, UK) on June 23–24, 2009,
and which was in part made possible by a grant from the Kent Institute for
Advanced Studies in the Humanities (KIASH).
The editors would like to thank the blind reviewers for their hard work
and expertise, without which this book would not have been possible:
Pamela S. Anderson, Kim Atkins, Eileen Brennan, Boyd Blundell, Michael
Delashmutt, Farhang Erfani, Greg Johnson, David Leichter, Iain MacKenzie,
Molly Mann, David Pellauer, Robert Piercey, Michael Purcell, Karl Simms,
John Starkey, George Taylor, Brian Treanor and John Wall.
The editors would also like to express their gratitude to Joseph Milne and
Valentin Gerlier for reading earlier drafts of the chapters and to Environmental
Philosophy for allowing us to reprint a revised version of Brian Treanor’s
‘Turn Around and Step Forward: Ideology and Utopia in the Environmental
Movement’ as it appeared in Environmental Philosophy, 7 (2010).
Reprinted by permission of the publisher from The Course of Recognition by
Paul Ricoeur, translated by David Pellauer, p. 69, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, Copyright © 2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard
College.
xii
 Chapter 1

Introduction
Todd S. Mei

Every great philosophy attempts to understand political reality in order to

­understand itself.
Paul Ricoeur1

Consistent with Paul Ricoeur’s overall style of philosophy, his response to

social and political questions employs a form of critical analysis that makes
the interpretation of perceived antinomies and tensions its foundation. For
Ricoeur, conceptual relations are never what they appear to be; and cer-
tainly with social and political philosophy, gaining clarity in understanding
these relations has a direct bearing on the possibility for the actualization of
justice and freedom. Ricoeur’s demanding approach can at first appear
daunting, and, in line with the philosophical hermeneutics of Martin
Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, he shares the concern for the prepa-
ration of thinking before engaging directly in a debate.2 Ricoeur’s reflec-
tion on social and political matters is no exception in this case.
The aim of this book is to elucidate the ways in which Ricoeur’s philoso-
phy provides responses to contemporary questions and problems relating
to social and political being, or as I will refer to it hereafter, the ‘socio-
political’ realm. As I will make clear, one should not anticipate these
responses to be prescriptions for action, but as attempts to explain and
clarify problematic relations and concepts in order to provide for a better
understanding from which action may arise. Philosophy, in this sense, pro-
vides a more informed foundation from which practical reason can deliberate
and, ideally, from which the wise citizen who councils would be not one or
a few, but each and all within a polity (Ricoeur 2007a: 335).
Because philosophy is delimited by historically defined situations – that is
to say, the contingent and sometimes tragic – whatever foundation it pro-
vides remains incomplete. Yet this incompleteness should not be viewed as
a detrimental inadequacy, since the philosopher is not involved in the search
2 From Ricoeur to Action

for certainty, according to Ricoeur, but is ever reflecting on the kind of

­plurivocity of meaning that gives rise to understanding (Ricoeur 1981: 212–
13). For socio-political philosophy, coping with plurivocity is a task of being
able to account for a type of difference that separates individuals not only
because they may not share the same discourse, principles and aims, but
also because their expectations of what constitutes an argument are dispa-
rate. Communication is not readily possible since commensurability is lack-
ing in some significant respect; and this is why Alasdair MacIntyre sees one
of the signs of the failure of modern political discourse as the prevalence
given to ‘protest’ – that is, an ‘utterance’ aimed at others but which makes
sense only to those ‘who already share the protestors’ premises’ (MacIntyre
1984: 71, italics omitted). This ‘gap’ within the field of communication, to
paraphrase Jacques Rancière on dissensus (Rancière 2010: 38–9), can be
seen as the result of the historical development of philosophy itself.
What I propose in the next section is a destructive retrieve of a specific
theme in the history of philosophy. This ‘detour’ will not only enable us to
understand the type of fundamental tension underwriting socio-political
philosophy, but also to see how Ricoeur’s approach contributes a different
and significant understanding of how socio-political philosophy should
conduct its task.

The Detour of the History of Philosophy

The proposed detour concerns the ineluctable dichotomy of appearance

and reality that has been inscribed at the heart of Western philosophy since
Heraclitus and Parmenides, and which Louis Dupré has described aptly in
terms of a dilemma that asks philosophy to either ‘trust’ or ‘lose faith’ in
how phenomena appear (Dupré 1993: 27). Put concisely: appearance is
often identified with the epiphenomenal (and therefore what is false or
illusory) while reality is constituted by what is enduring and true.
Thus, for socio-political philosophy, the dichotomy of appearance and
reality manifests not so much in terms of the criteria of the necessity and
sufficiency of concepts, as it does for metaphysics and epistemology, but
with respect to an ambiguousness in which it is problematic to differentiate
between what is illusory in an ideological sense (appearance) and what is true
in a political sense of providing for the basis of social cooperation via political
institutions (real). Unlike metaphysical and epistemological issues concern-
ing appearance and reality, the non-coincidence at the socio-political level
does not emerge first as a theoretical problem, but as concretely manifested
 Introduction 3

conflicts already taking place, or at the very least, imminent in their arrival.
The world already-in-being is one whose forestructure has ordered and
legitimated relations according to specific values and determinations. The
polity does not begin with equilibrium since there persists a non-coinci-
dence between ideals motivating human koinoinia (belonging-together)
and the conflicts which are generated within the space of the polis that
threaten this koinoinia.
For the philosopher, the emergence of conflict poses itself as the enigma
symptomatic of some kind of misrelation that can potentially be corrected
by reflection or, at the very least, explained by it so that we can cope with it.
The guiding concept of reconciling misrelation, which can be summarized
broadly according to the ancient Greek dike (justice), is the reality towards
which the social and political philosophers aim and which is latent in the
opening of Aristotle’s Politics where the polis is described as ‘the most
supreme of all goods’ (Aristotle 1998: 1252a 5–6). That is to say, despite the
realness of conflict, there is a social and political harmony which is more
real if the human struggle is not to be reduced to vanity. ‘If nothing is rea-
sonable in man’s political existence’, comments Ricoeur, ‘then reason is
not real’ (Ricoeur 1965: 249).
Within the discourse of socio-political philosophy, there nonetheless
arises a commitment to what constitutes what is real and what therefore
should be the aim of a polity’s institutions, its citizens and its practices. This
is, of course, a fragile process since notions of what is real and what really
matters at the political level are often elevated to the category of truth; com-
mitments govern and synthesize practices according to ideals. This synthe-
sis, as Bernard Dauenhauer notes, characterizes the political realm and
paradoxically culminates in a ‘fundamental “lie” that threatens not only
every particular order of truth and what it contains but also the relations
among these several orders’ because it brings to an end ‘the multidimen-
sional dialectic among human performances . . . by establishing a definitive
hierarchy among the dialectic’s constituents’ (Dauenhauer 1998: 23;
Ricoeur 1965: 176). The tension at play in recognizing what is real for socio-
political philosophy therefore involves an implicit danger whereby reflec-
tion can lead to unjust practices through the ethical and/or theological
values it uses to underwrite conventions and institutions.
It is tempting in this respect to want to avoid substantive commitments by
appealing to objective and explanatory structures of reality, such as class
conflict. By looking at so-called real structures and real relations (which
often are described under the terms ‘natural’ and ‘necessary’), one alleges
that one can avoid theoretical commitments which rest precariously on
4 From Ricoeur to Action

ideological convictions. The assumption implicit here is that we can ­identify

or recognize what is real at a basic level of reflection while at the same time
bracketing out more theoretical forms of thought which may be distortive,
or even false. Theory, in this sense, is understood as a form of concealing
activity that misrepresents reality in attempting to take hold of the subject
matter before it. One can in fact trace an acute development of the suspi-
cion of thought within the history of philosophy that is arguably non-existent
in, or, at the very least, immaterial to pre-Enlightenment thought. It is a truism
to associate Marx with this suspicion. But it is important not to overlook
how the dichotomy between appearance and reality takes on a new form in
Marxist philosophy since it is ‘after’ Marx that we tend to imagine, speak
and represent the relation between the socio-political domain and philoso-
phy in terms of his definitions (Mei 2009b: 55–73).
What occurs in this suspicion is a grafting of a philosophical anthropol-
ogy onto metaphysical categories; the pair of appearance and reality
expresses metaphysical categories which provide for the delineation of a
philosophical anthropology. The basic feature of human action retains a
bond to the real while thought’s role is precarious: it can serve action but it
can also be divorced from it. For the philosophers retaining a bond to the
Marxist tradition and the critique of ideology, the detour of thought is not
only unnecessary but fatally flawed since its distorted and distorting nature
is, as Ricoeur notes, ‘engendered at the same level where work, power, and
discourse are intertwined’ (Ricoeur 1974b: 255–6). In other words, thought
is an infecting agent at the most basic of levels of human activity and there-
fore cannot be resolved or dissolved unless it is excised from this base. This
does not mean that thought per se is entirely rejected, but rather the thought
which does not take human activity, or praxis, to be its origin and genuine
concern (Dupré 1966: 178).
Thus, the well-known maxim ‘to change rather than interpret the world’
attempts to evacuate theoretical fields of systematic distortion in order to
reveal ‘the language of real life’ (Marx 1998: 42; cf. Ricoeur 1986c: 77).
More recently, the economist Amartya Sen has argued for an abandoning
of theories of social justice predicated upon notions of an ideal state. Such
theories are insufficient in their ability to mediate between the plurality of
culturally specific and individual points of view (Sen 2009).3 Yet for Ricoeur,
settling on an ‘either/or’ decision between the ideal and the real is not suf-
ficient. The conundrum involved in this tension, from a hermeneutical
point of view, is obvious: the attempt to escape theory involves a theoretical
project. ‘Can we change without interpreting,’ asks Ricoeur, ‘this is the
problem’ (Ricoeur 1986c: 70).
 Introduction 5

If we assume a privileged place for theoria in guiding action, the

discordance between political reality and how our action deviates from this
reality becomes a problem of the sufficiency of any one theory about reality
that is offered by the philosopher. The history of political philosophy, in
fact, is a testament to critical swings in which political reality and the real
are defined in different ways. The pre-modern natural law tradition, stem-
ming from Aristotle and the Stoics, founded itself on a cosmological order
that can be discerned and imitated (mimesis) within the human sphere of
convention (nomos). The turn towards social contract theories during the
Enlightenment relies on representations of the state of nature which per-
form a double role as thought experiment and, more substantively, as the
foundation of a philosophical and social anthropology. Assumptions about
human agency, the requirements for human cooperation and, indeed, the
supposition that the human individual is the elemental ‘building block’ of
community and the necessary origin for philosophical analysis are all deci-
sive.4 What this sketch of the history of philosophy indicates is that for socio-
political philosophy, what is real shifts according to the development of
different (and often competing) theories that interpret the metaphysical
categories of appearance and reality in determinative ways.
There are several ways to view these shifts within a discourse, some of
which include: an inevitable field of conflict in which certain regimes of
truth attempt to legitimate themselves; a quasi-Kuhnian process of theoreti-
cal revolution moving towards better explanatory models; an instantiation
of the impossibility or groundlessness of political philosophy as it makes a
commitment to universality; or an ongoing process in which universal aims
and ends are reinterpreted and refigured according to different historical
conditions. Ricoeur arguably adopts this last view when commenting that
‘the problem of the application of universal norms to singular situations
brings into play the historical and cultural dimension of mediating tradi-
tions of the process of application’ (Ricoeur 2007b: 243–4). Or, as David
Kaplan aptly summarizes, for Ricoeur ‘[t]he historical particular is medi-
ated by the abstract universal, which, in turn, is always understood and
applied in a historical context’ (Kaplan 2003: 5–6). Ricoeur’s attempt to
mediate between the universal and the historical coincides with his under-
standing of philosophy as a ‘considered wager’5 according to which philoso-
phy can never ‘begin at the beginning’ – that is, at a ground zero of
reflection. As one may have anticipated, Ricoeur’s philosophical position is
not amenable to the metaphysical dichotomy of reality and appearance
since there is neither a zero-point nor end-point from which the philoso-
pher can claim certain knowledge about what is real.6 As I propose to
6 From Ricoeur to Action

discuss in the next section, Ricoeur in effect dispenses with this dichotomy
in favour of the play between the universal and the historical.

Ricoeur’s Contribution

What Ricoeur often brings to the history of philosophy is a way of redefin-

ing the trajectories within a debate or problem. As Boyd Blundell has eluci-
dated, Ricoeur is a philosopher of ‘detour and return’ whose approach of
mediation between conceptual polarities is an attempt to reorient our
thinking so that we can explain more in order to understand more (Blundell
2010: 2). For Ricoeur, philosophical tensions express an ineluctable aporia
that drives human understanding. They should not be seen as a motive for
scepticism but understood as something constitutive of our condition in
some way, and therefore productive. ‘Our point of departure will be an
aporia’, writes Ricoeur in relation to the tension between the universal and
history. He continues:

I think it is good to start with this difficulty . . . On the one hand, we have
a series of philosophies which contradict and destroy each other, each
manifesting a changing truth. On the other hand, we are seeking a truth
whose sign, if not criterion, would be an agreement of minds. (Ricoeur
1965: 42)

So the dichotomies that philosophers often describe and inherit may them-
selves contribute to this tension between history and truth.
Indeed, if applied to ancient Greek philosophy, the general dichotomy of
thought and action which has developed distinctly after Marx grossly mis-
conceives the complexity of the different modes of thought involved as, for
example, in Aristotle’s discussion of the intellectual virtues. If one were to
maintain the dichotomy in terms of theoria and praxis, then for Aristotle (or
at least one reading of him) the distinction is much more refined, designat-
ing the specific relation of reflection concerned with mathematics and eter-
nals (theoria) and political and ethical thought and action (praxis). Our
modern tendency to conceive of praxis as human work or production derives
from Marxist readings of historical conflict, readings which lose sight of the
earlier Greek distinctions between thought (theoria), action (praxis) and
production (poiesis). Ricoeur directly challenges any strong opposition
between these ‘three modes of knowing truth’, to borrow a Heideggerian
turn of phrase, according to the expansion of his ethics in tandem with a
 Introduction 7

theory of narrative. For Ricoeur, the interpretative act is also an act of

self-understanding constituting the ‘who’ of praxis. One cannot have an
ethics without this narratively constructed and developing ‘who’.7
With respect to the socio-political realm and the antinomy of appearance
and reality, the heart of the problem lies in the rigid categorical distinction
suggesting that the real is independent of our experience, action and
thought – an attitude which pervades much of traditional epistemology and
metaphysics. While there are significant issues involving the nature of his-
torical understanding, and the role Ricoeur sees distanciation playing in the
appropriation of meaning, it suffices to recall from my remarks above that
the antinomy between appearance and reality assumes a pre-theoretical
posture can be maintained. However, for Ricoeur, the world, as a phenom-
enon of human understanding, already contains and expresses a theoretical
content. One cannot separate the real from our participation in it.
Within the socio-political realm, this is most prevalent in terms of ethical
value since, as Ricoeur observes:

none of us finds himself placed in the radical position of creating the eth-
ical world ex nihilo. It is an inescapable aspect of our finite condition that
we are born into a world already qualified in an ethical manner by the
decisions of our predecessors . . . In brief, we are always already preceded
by evaluations beginning from which even our doubt and our contesta-
tion become possible. We can perhaps ‘transvaluate’ values, but we can
never create them beginning from zero. (Ricoeur 1974b: 268)

The prevalence given by Ricoeur to ethical value and, elsewhere, convic-

tions, allows him to articulate the problem of communication within the
socio-political realm, not as an irreducible conflict, but as a tension whose
pressure calls for a translation between different points of view. To recall
Rancière’s notion of the ‘gap’ in communication, Ricoeur sees this lacuna as
an opportunity for mutual understanding in which meanings and values can
be translated into the language of each other. ‘In this gap between what is
said and what is meant’, comments Scott Davidson, ‘a polysemy emerges in
such a way that one experiences oneself as another’ (S. Davidson 2010: 4).
Within the context of ethical values, Ricoeur notes in the passage quoted
above the impossibility of establishing secure and certain foundational
beliefs as well as how an encounter between two different systems of values
therefore anticipates a process of translation (or ‘transvaluation’) which
attempts to interpret the meanings of the other system. This attempt already
marks a shift in any original position a group might have, for the act of
8 From Ricoeur to Action

interpreting another system of values, by virtue of establishing a compari-

son, entails a revaluation of one’s own. It is important to note that the act of
translation does not involve an appeal to a meta-language acting as a key to
decipher other languages. Ricoeur is clear that translation involves a ‘lin-
guistic hospitality’ that attempts to accommodate the other (Ricoeur 2006:
23). While the need for this process is certainly evident in terms of multicul-
tural exchange and conflict, it can also be seen within the domain of a
society as more or less homogenous. This concerns not just the composi-
tion of societies and how any society, no matter how uniform, is always con-
stituted by unique individuals who share a ‘living’ and changing language
(as opposed to a universal one), but, more importantly, how the life of a
society is dynamic and engaged in translating itself (Ricoeur 2006: 24).
Ricoeur refers to this movement as a ‘living circle’ that forms a productive
relation in which human thought reconstitutes and refigures itself between
the poles of tradition and emancipation (Ricoeur 1974b: 269). This living
circle is one that animates the domain of the political per se.
The pole of tradition, on the one hand, constitutes what Ricoeur describes,
following Eric Weil, as a ‘historical community’ – that is, the concreteness
of lived, political existence derived from ‘accepted norms and symbolisms
of all types’ and preserved in and through ‘the narrative and symbolic iden-
tity of a community’ (Ricoeur 2007a: 330). Tradition is a form of historicity
in which a community enacts an overall practice of living – itself informed
and constituted by the plurality of practices of its citizens and institutions
– and whose attempt to preserve and understand itself in narrative is a form
of mediation of ‘the abstract universal’ in ‘a historical context’, to para-
phrase Kaplan.
The pole of emancipation, on the other hand, provides the critical impe-
tus according to which tradition remains open and therefore living – that is,
a manner of living towards an ideal through which citizens can contribute.
In this respect, the historical understanding of a community is a form of
self-understanding that sees its endeavours as participating and moving
towards emancipation; it is a political course whose hope is freedom. The
dynamic relation between tradition and emancipation culminates, accord-
ing to Ricoeur, as the expressed wish for ‘free discussion’ which engenders
an interpretation of a tradition in relation to a political end for all (Ricoeur
2007a: 335). Freedom, in other words, is the recognition of the autonomy
of the many in and through the historical condition figured by a tradition.
Understanding this circle another way, one can refer to the hermeneutic
concept of ‘retrieval’ according to which a tradition is re-engaged in the
moment of a present historical crisis. This re-engagement of tradition is not
 Introduction 9

undertaken in order to relinquish the past, but to reinterpret it according

to the concern for freedom. While overtones of the Hegelian Aufhebung are
inevitable, what is important to mark here is that the act of interpretation,
which engages with tradition in view of freedom, extends itself to the praxical
dimension. That is to say, interpretation occurs for the sake of understand-
ing ‘better’ so that we can act in a more fitting manner. This is possible,
notes Ricoeur, because interpretation makes any distance between ourselves
and a tradition, which is comprised ultimately by its texts, productive
(Ricoeur 1974b: 259–60).
For the philosopher, then, an engagement with socio-political problems
is a performative exercise constituted largely by a detour through a tradi-
tion and its texts. This performance, furthermore, entails explanatory and
interpretative acts which, while not prescribing action, do not remain
unconnected to the sphere of praxis. As the essential mode of questioning,
philosophy engages with the socio-political domain in order to disclose the
limitations and possibilities of action. What emerges between the elucida-
tion of philosophy and the demand for action is the mediating intellectual
virtue of practical reason (phronesis). It is a capacity presupposed by the
ideal of political participation since it is the exercise of deliberation con-
cerned with ends and values in view of context-specific situations. Practical
reason thus situates itself between the potential universal claim of theory
and the historically singular situation.
This mediation between theory and the historical situation is another way
of expressing the ‘living circle’ of tradition and emancipation – assuming,
of course, that theory, generally speaking and despite whatever critics may
allege against particular theories, is concerned with the well-being of
humankind.8 In other words, the tension between theory and history is pos-
sible only because the wise deliberator (phronimos) is concerned with the
relation between his or her tradition and the affirmation and actualization
of freedom. Ricoeur therefore states that ‘practical reason is the set of mea-
sures taken to preserve or to establish the dialectic of freedom and institu-
tions’ (Ricoeur 2007a: 206; cf. Ricoeur 1974b: 335). Here, practical reason
applies itself in the field of action by attempting to maintain the living cir-
cle, and, again, it is worth recalling that the wise deliberator is potentially
each and all within a polity.
It is important to recognize, nonetheless, that theoretical reason is not
empty. On the one hand, the clarification of the role of practical reason is a
task undertaken by philosophy as a theoretical exercise whose analysis is
assumed outside of the field of practical reason. The philosopher who explains
or champions practical reason does so through theoretical argument. On the
10 From Ricoeur to Action

other hand, the conditions of possibility for practical reason are delimited by
the theoretical in the sense that practical reason will understand its aim within
a larger theoretical framework of goods, virtues and commitments (Ricoeur
1965: 218). This relation, nonetheless, works both ways, since practical reason
can very well provoke theoretical revision in the way the concrete examples
assessed within the field of practice are often anomalies and exceptions
(Ricoeur 2006: 13–14).
Of course, in theory, as it were, the distinction between theoretical and
practical reason is easy enough to maintain, but there are bound to be
strong links between theoretical determinations and types of practical
action. If no mode of thought is value-free, then political allegiance and
commitment remain inherent to philosophical reflection. As Dauenhauer
has shown, Ricoeur’s political thought ‘springs from and fills out his overall
philosophical anthropology’ (Dauenhauer 1998: 2). Nevertheless, one
detects the kind of division between Ricoeur’s philosophical analyses and
his expressly political allegiances as one finds in his separation of philoso-
phy and theology. There is no doubt that a Christian element, as well as a
Christian-socialist element, inhere in Ricoeur’s political philosophy. Yet to
confuse his philosophical analysis with prescription conflates ‘considered
wagers’ with ‘maxims’. Political prescription and effort remain the vocation
of the ‘political educator’ (Ricoeur 1974b: 271–93). As philosophy, what
remains most accessible and drives the movement of history are the philoso-
pher’s analyses and critiques, both of which outrun personal convictions.

Organization and Content of this Book

The ethos of this book is defined by the Ricoeurian endeavour to clarify
philosophical tensions at the socio-political level. The intended outcome of
this ethos is either to elucidate a socio-political problem in a new way, such
that the problem itself can be rethought, or to show how Ricoeur’s philoso-
phy allows for different possibilities of praxis. The chapters of this book
therefore engage with Ricoeur’s work to show how his contributions can be
extended, as considered wagers, in new ways that address contemporary
socio-political problems. While this book is primarily a constructive engage-
ment with Ricoeur, insofar as it attempts to extend the practical relevance
of his thought, it also should be said that this constructive endeavour pro-
duces a critical reflection on lacunas within his work.
To facilitate this endeavour, the book has been structured into five parts.
Capability I addresses the ‘capacity to be’ in broad terms of subjectivity and
 Introduction 11

identity, while Capability II looks more specifically at problematic relations

of race and social esteem. Utopia engages with Ricoeur’s unique contribu-
tion to the understanding of this concept as well as its relevance to the
political, environmental and legal spheres. Interlude highlights an aspect of
Ricoeur’s thinking involving tragedy and how the tragic undermines a sense
of certainty, therefore calling for readers of Ricoeur to see how contingency
figures into both the history of philosophy as well as the task of interpreting
Ricoeur’s works. The Theological discusses the significance of forgiveness in
Ricoeur’s later writings and how Ricoeur’s hermeneutics contributes to the
notion and substance of an ethical canon.
Capability I opens with a reflection on a basic question of philosophical
anthropology and how Ricoeur moves in his later work to found his anthro-
pology on a philosophy of life and capability. In ‘From Ricoeur to Life’,
Pamela S. Anderson examines Ricoeur’s turn to Spinoza’s concept of cona-
tus and how it can be read from his earlier work (i.e. Fallible Man) to his last
meditation in Living Up to Death. Anderson offers both a novel way of under-
standing how capability is not vanquished by death and a way of reading
Ricoeur in terms of immanent transcendence; that is, as a philosopher who
embraces a post-Hegelian Deleuzian spirit in order to believe in this world,
in this life. Given this reading of Ricoeur towards conatus, she then asks
whether or not his philosophy still remains, according to his own descrip-
tion, post-Hegelian Kantian?
Turning to questions of subjectivity and self-understanding, in ‘From
Metaphor to Life-World’, Fiona Tomkinson seeks to develop Ricoeur’s phi-
losophy on subjectivity and ethics by rethinking it according to his earlier
work on metaphor (La Métaphore Vive). Tomkinson proposes that Ricoeur’s
theory of narrative identity, as famously articulated in Time and Narrative
and Oneself as Another, can be supplemented with a theory of metaphoric
identity. Her proposal seeks to break identity from the confines of ontolo-
gies which privilege temporality (and death) by providing an account of
how metaphoricity entails a new way of relating to objects beyond standard
notions of presence.
A socio-political philosophy would be incomplete without taking into
account technology and how it is involved in the development of self-
understanding. In ‘Ricoeur and the Capability of Modern Technology’,
David Lewin seeks to elaborate how Ricoeur’s hermeneutics contributes to
this field. In mediating the impossible choice between the Cartesian foun-
dationalist self and the Nietzschean deconstructed self, he argues that
Ricoeur has provided an invaluable resource to philosophers of technology
who have become mired in a debilitating aporia of modern technology:
12 From Ricoeur to Action

human agents are seen as either wholly active, rendering technology a

neutral application of human desire, or technology is a determining factor
that negates human freedom. As soon as philosophers admit that technol-
ogy represents more than a neutral tool, then the case for genuine human
capability starts to look weak. However, Lewin argues that Ricoeur’s herme-
neutics offers a mediated position between foundationalism and decon-
structionism that relieves the pressure on philosophers of technology to
make a false choice between absolute technical neutrality and freedom on
the one hand, and rigid technological determinism on the other.
Capability II includes two chapters that bring into focus questions
concerning race relations. Both ‘The Course of Racial Recognition’, by
L. Sebastian Purcell, and ‘Paul Ricoeur and bell hooks on the Development
of Social Esteem’, by Scott Davidson, attempt to expand Ricoeur’s philoso-
phy in an area upon which he remained curiously silent. Purcell offers two
analyses, one in critical theory and the other in the theory of recognition
and capability. As a work in critical theory, Purcell challenges ideological
and systematic forms of domination according to the ways in which they
account for and employ political legitimation, identifying specifically how
the voices of marginalized peoples are undercut. Turning to recognition
and capability, Purcell examines how Ricoeur’s work on recognition pro-
vides a framework by which one can make sense of political intervention in
questions of race that avoids the traps of both political liberalism and the
alternative afforded by the politics of difference.
Davidson begins with a clarification of the problem of self-esteem and
elaborates its anatomy through a comparison between Ricoeur and bell
hooks, an American author known for her feminism and critical analysis of
conceptions of race and gender. Davidson considers how a ‘short route’ of
self-affirmation meets with criticisms from Ricoeur and hooks and how they
propose to follow a ‘long road’ instead. Davidson looks specifically at the
nature of self-esteem and how it involves three components of the ethical
life which Ricoeur aptly phrases as the ‘good life, with and for others, under
just institutions’. Davidson correlates these components with a tripartite
structure of self-esteem: esteem for oneself, esteem for and from others
and esteem for and from institutions. The chapter concludes by providing
a basis for a critical turn towards the socio-political realm by offering a sub-
stantial challenge to liberal theories of justice.
Utopia opens with an examination of the concept of utopia and how
Ricoeur contributes to its history of debate and meaning. In ‘To Think
Utopia with and beyond Ricoeur’, Vicky Iakovou considers how Ricoeur’s
analysis of utopia offers resources for its reassessment, against approaches
 Introduction 13

according to which utopia (or utopianism) is inherently linked with

totalitarianism. After a brief sketch of Karl Mannheim’s theory of utopia
and Ricoeur’s debt to it, she examines the three functions of utopia and
how Ricoeur proposes a critical understanding which, while acknowledging
utopia’s pathological aspect, does not reduce it to pathology. She gives par-
ticular emphasis to the relationship between utopia and fiction and to the
status of utopia as an imaginative variation on power. She then focuses on
the question of the polemical use of the notion of utopia, demonstrating
that although Ricoeur underestimates this aspect of utopia, his analysis has
a ‘heuristic force’ which consists in its ability to discern the ground on
which the above-mentioned polemical use arises.
Turning to the perennial antagonism involved in understanding the
universal and historical, in ‘Ricoeur versus Ricoeur’, George Taylor exam-
ines how a tension is involved in Ricoeur’s attempt to mediate between
universalism and contextualism. Although Ricoeur seems to avow pre-
venting either to dominate in his philosophy, Taylor argues that Ricoeur
tends not to give adequate expression to the contextual side, thus overde-
termining the universal. While this appears to defeat Ricoeur’s inten-
tions, Taylor then goes on to show how Ricoeur’s philosophy offers more
comprehensive alternatives. He focuses on the concept of the capacity
for judgement which exists at the practical level of deliberation and
therefore does not call upon or require the universal. This critical devel-
opment of Ricoeur, Taylor concludes, provides a substantial contribution
to the contemporary post-modern discussions of universalism within
political theory.
In ‘Turn Around and Step Forward’, Brian Treanor identifies how envi-
ronmental activism is caught in something of a bind. As environmental
crises become more acute, the rhetoric of environmental activists becomes,
justifiably, more strident and alarming. However, this rhetoric often has
the unintended consequence of alienating the very people it needs to
convince. How then can environmental activists navigate the tension
between being too radical and not being radical enough? Treanor exam-
ines how Ricoeur’s work demonstrates that the socio-political imagination
always exists in the tension between ideology and utopia, between the ide-
alism that critiques and undermines the status quo and the sedimentation
that entrenches it. Treanor argues that the key to an effective, and suffi-
ciently radical, environmental agenda is that it remains true to its utopian
core while at the same time attending to the necessity of ideology and
consensus. The utopian vision ensures that environmentalism remains
fixed on its goal, but it must acknowledge and embrace the fact that it
14 From Ricoeur to Action

must build community and consensus to ensure that its utopian vision
remains relevant.
In ‘States of Peace’, Christopher Lauer situates Ricoeur’s argument in the
final chapter of The Course of Recognition in relation to contemporary debates
on the politics of recognition. While Ricoeur has been criticized for circum-
venting the debate in political theory over whether recognition is funda-
mentally a matter of the right or of the good, Lauer argues that Ricoeur’s
approach represents a productive reorientation of this debate. Instead of
proposing a criterion according to which struggles for recognition can be
resolved, Ricoeur focuses on the gestures by which avenues for mutual rec-
ognition are established in the first place. By contrasting Ricoeur’s account
of such gestures with Fichte’s apparently similar account, Lauer shows how
Ricoeur’s conception of gifts as establishing ‘states of peace’ among com-
batants helps avoid some of the traps associated with the politics of recogni-
tion. This chapter concludes by examining the relation of this conception
to Ricoeur’s more general concern with establishing an ‘economy of the
gift’ and thus to a restoration of Hegel’s project of preserving open-ended
forms of recognition.
As an interlude, David Fisher’s ‘Ricoeur’s Atemwende’ provides a pause
for the book in the sense that he reflects upon an area within the history
of philosophy that constantly poses a challenge to its aim of coherency –
that of tragedy. Fisher explores the impact of Greek tragedy and, through
tragedy, of the tragic in Ricoeur’s understanding of phronesis, as discussed
in ‘Interlude: Tragic Action’ in Oneself as Another. The ‘Tragic Interlude’,
Fisher argues, functions within the context of Oneself as Another as an
‘atemwende’, which is Paul Celan’s term for the ‘breath-turn’ that is poetry.
Positioned between Ricoeur’s studies on ‘ethical aim’ and ‘moral norm’,
the ‘Interlude’ prepares the way for a phronesis instructed by tragedy.
Rejecting the idea that one should treat ‘tragedy as a quarry to be mined’,
Fisher considers how Ricoeur shows that philosophy can still be
‘instructed’ by the ‘aporia-producing limit experiences’ depicted in
tragic texts. Fisher concludes that a deinon phronesis recognizes limits of
judgement in the face of that which is deinon – strange, terrible, uncanny.
Tragedy is not to be sought only in pre-reflective origins of ethical life,
but at an advanced stage of moral reflection which displays a dialectic
between ethics and morality without seeking a final reconciliation in
Sittlichkeit.
The final section on The Theological opens by examining the ambiguous
role of forgiveness in Ricoeur’s work. In ‘The Unsurpassable Dissensus’,
 Introduction 15

Olivier Abel focuses on the tension between forgiveness and its involvement
at both the ethical and institutional levels. Despite Ricoeur’s analysis of for-
giveness in his later work, Abel argues that the role of forgiveness in his
political philosophy is marginal. Respectful of historical dissensus as the
expression of democratic citizenship, Abel attends to the way in which
Ricoeur does not admit forgiveness into the social and political fold since
forgiveness is constituted by an act whose reconciliatory aim is complicated
by context-specific meanings and narratives. Forgiveness can be more accu-
rately understood as a constitutive limit, or horizon, that draws those
involved into a productive relation whose work has yet to be determined by
the victim and transgressor.
Colby Dickinson’s ‘Examining Canonical Representations’ explores the
concept of ‘exception’. Beginning with several recent notions of the ‘excep-
tion’ (e.g. in E. Santner, G. Agamben, S. Žižek and J. Butler), this chapter
develops a ‘hermeneutics of canonicity’ through Ricoeur’s work on myth,
narrative and the tensions said to reside at the centre of the biblical canon.
Dickinson maintains that this hermeneutics allows contemporary accounts
of political representation to open themselves towards the phenomenon of
how canonical representations can be said to generate their own excep-
tions. By turning to Ricoeur’s contrast between Phariseeism and the
Prophetic spirit in The Symbolism of Evil, as well as his later remarks on the
biblical canon, Dickinson shows how the perceivable ‘failure’ to account for
the ‘exception’ at the heart of representation reveals a misreading of the
hermeneutical project and is thus of great interest for contemporary socio-
political theory.
In closing, there is perhaps one more comment that should be made
about ‘the Ricoeurian endeavour to clarify philosophical tensions’ men-
tioned above. While each chapter is directed at a specific problem or ques-
tion in relation to the work of Ricoeur, as a whole the critical engagement
articulated in this book can be seen as a manner of affirming and attesting
to the creative nucleus that informs both our Greek, Hebrew, and Christian
origins and our current historical situation in which these origins are set in
dialogue with difference and plurality. Whether or not we can respond ably
and appropriately to what follows from this kind of affirmation depends
largely on the work of philosophy. Ricoeur once remarked, ‘Human truth
lies only in this process in which civilizations confront each other more and
more with what is most living and creative in them. . . . But this process has
hardly begun’ (Ricoeur 1965: 283). And at the same time, one can add, this
process cannot be refused.
16 From Ricoeur to Action

Notes
1
Ricoeur (1965: 249).
2
See, for example in this book, Olivier Abel’s discussion of Ricoeur’s hesitancy to
enter into the discussion of forgiveness.
3
For an analysis of this in relation to Ricoeur’s philosophy, see my ‘Are Reasons
Enough? Sen and Ricoeur on the Idea of Impartiality’, Philosophy Today (forth-
coming 2012).
4
In relation to modern natural law, see Buckle (1991). In relation to modern con-
tract theory, see K. R. Westphal (2009).
5
I take liberty with joining Ricoeur’s use of the term ‘wager’ and his discussion of
convictions as ‘considered’ in relation to Rawls (Ricoeur 2000: 54).
6
See, respectively, Ricoeur on a post-foundational conception of understand-
ing and an alternative reading of substantialist metaphysics (Ricoeur 1992: 22,
303–17). See also, Pamela S. Anderson (2010: 145).
7
While Ricoeur’s treatment of identity in Oneself as Another is well known, for an
in-depth analysis of the ‘inherently creative’ constituency of the ethical life in
Ricoeur’s work, see J. Wall (2005a).
8
For instance, the debate concerning individualism and collectivism involves at
once the claim that each ‘ism’ benefits society and the allegations that each is
insufficient. Perhaps the most classic discussion of this is in F. A. Hayek (1948:
1–32).
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visit of their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of York
to the colonies of Australasia in the spring of next year. His
Royal Highness the Duke of York will be commissioned by her
Majesty to open the first Session of the Parliament of the
Australian Commonwealth in her name. Although the Queen
naturally shrinks from parting with her grandson for so long a
period, her Majesty fully recognizes the greatness of the
occasion which will bring her colonies of Australia into
federal union, and desires to give this special proof of her
interest in all that concerns the welfare of her Australian
subjects. Her Majesty at the same time wishes to signify her
sense of the loyalty and devotion which have prompted the
spontaneous aid so liberally offered by all the colonies in
the South African war, and of the splendid gallantry of her
colonial troops. Her Majesty's assent to this visit is, of
course, given on the assumption that at the time fixed for the
Duke of York's departure the circumstances are as generally
favourable as at present and that no national interests call
for his Royal Highness's presence in this country."

To manifest still further the interest taken by the British

government in the event, it was made known in October that
"when the Duke of York opens the new Commonwealth Parliament,
the guard of honour, it is directed, shall be so made up as to
be representative of every arm of the British Army, including
the Volunteers. To the Victoria and St. George's Rifles has
fallen the honour of being selected to represent the entire
Volunteer force of the country. A detachment of the regiment,
between 50 and 60 strong, will accordingly leave for Australia
in about a month and will be absent three or four months."

The honor of the appointment to be the first Governor-General

of the new Commonwealth fell to a Scottish nobleman, John
Adrian Louis Hope, seventh Earl of Hopetoun, who had been
Governor of Victoria from 1889 to 1895, and had held high
offices at home, including that of Lord Chamberlain in the
household of the Queen. Lord Hopetoun landed at Sydney on the
 15th of December and received a great welcome. On the 30th,
his Cabinet was formed, and announced, as follows:

Mr. Barton, Prime Minister and Minister for External Affairs;

Mr. Deakin, Attorney-General;
Sir William Lyne, Minister for Home Affairs;
Sir George Turner, Treasurer;
Mr. Kingston, Minister of Trade and Commerce;
Mr. Dickson, Minister of Defence;
Sir John Forrest, Postmaster-General.

AUSTRALIA: A. D. 1901 (January).

Inauguration of the Federal Government.

The government of the Commonwealth was inaugurated with

splendid ceremonies on the first day of the New Year and the
New Century, when the Governor-General and the members of the
Federal Cabinet were sworn and assumed office. Two messages
from the British Secretary of State for the Colonies were
read, as follows:

{34}

"The Queen commands me to express through you to the people of

Australia her Majesty's heartfelt interest in the inauguration
of the Commonwealth, and her earnest wish that, under divine
Providence, it may ensure the increased prosperity and
well-being of her loyal and beloved subjects in Australia."

"Her Majesty's Government send cordial greetings to the

Commonwealth of Australia. They welcome her to her place among
the nations united under her Majesty's sovereignty, and
confidently anticipate for the new Federation a future of
ever-increasing prosperity and influence. They recognize in
the long-desired consummation of the hopes of patriotic
Australians a further step in the direction of the permanent
unity of the British Empire, and they are satisfied that the
 wider powers and responsibilities henceforth secured to
Australia will give fresh opportunity for the display of that
generous loyalty and devotion to the Throne and Empire which
has always characterized the action in the past of its several
States."

AUSTRALIA: A. D. 1901 (May).

Opening of the first Parliament of the Commonwealth
by the heir to the British crown.
The programme of the Federal Government.

The Duke of Cornwall and York, heir to the British crown (but
not yet created Prince of Wales), sailed, with his wife, from
England in March, to be present at the opening of the first
Parliament of the federated Commonwealth of Australia, which
is arranged to take place early in May. He makes the voyage in
royal state, on a steamer specially fitted and converted for
the occasion into a royal yacht, with an escort of two
cruisers.

Preliminary to the election and meeting of Parliament, the new

federal government has much organizing work to do, and much
preparation of measures for Parliament to discuss. The
Premier, Mr. Barton, in a speech made on the 17th of January,
announced that the Customs were taken over from the several
States on January 1, and the defences and post-offices would
be transferred as soon as possible. " Probably the railways
would be acquired by the Commonwealth at an early date.
Whether the debts of the several States would be taken over
before the railways was a matter which had to be decided, and
was now engaging the attention of the Treasurer. The Ministry
would not consider the appointment of a Chief Justice of the
High Court until Parliament had established that tribunal." In
the same speech, the main features of the programme and policy
of the federal government were indicated. "The Commonwealth,"
said the Premier, "would have the exclusive power of imposing
Customs and excise duties, and it would, therefore, be
 necessary to preserve the States' power of direct taxation.
There must be no direct taxation by the Commonwealth except
under very great pressure. Free trade under the Constitution
was practically impossible; there must be a very large Customs
revenue. … The policy of the Government would be protective, not
prohibitive, because it must be revenue-producing. No one
colony could lay claim to the adoption of its tariff, whether
high or low. The first tariff of Australia ought to be
considerate of existing industries. The policy of the
Government could be summed up in a dozen words. It would give
Australia a tariff that would be Australian. Regarding a
preferential duty on British goods, he would be glad to
reciprocate where possible, but the question would have to
receive very serious consideration before final action could
be taken. Among the legislation to be introduced at an early
date, Mr. Barton continued, were a Conciliation and
Arbitration Bill in labour disputes, and a Bill for a
transcontinental railway, which would be of great value from
the defence point of view. He was in favour of womanhood
suffrage. Legislation to exclude Asiatics would be taken in
hand as a matter of course."

----------AUSTRALIA: End--------

----------AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: Start--------

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY:
Financial relations of the two countries
forming the dual Empire.

"The financial relations of Austria and Hungary fall under

three main heads. Firstly, the Quota, or proportionate
contribution to joint expenditure. The Quota is an integral
portion of the compact of 1867 [see—in volume 1—AUSTRIA: A. D.
1866-1867], but is revised every ten years. Failing an
agreement on the proportion to be paid by each half of the
monarchy, the Quota is fixed from year to year by the Emperor
till an agreement is arrived at. Secondly, the so-called
commercial 'Ausgleich' treaty, which provides for a customs
union, postal and telegraphic union, commercial equality of
citizens of one state in the other, identical excise duties,
&c. Thirdly, the Bank Union, by which Austria and Hungary have
a common Austro-Hungarian bank, and common paper money. The
Ausgleich and Bank Union are not essential parts of the 1867
compact; they are really only treaties renewable every ten
years, and if no agreement is come to, they simply lapse, and
each state makes its own arrangements, which seems very likely
to be the fate of the Ausgleich unless the present crisis can
be got over. The proceeds of the joint customs are applied
directly to common expenses, and only the difference is made
up by Quota. But if the Ausgleich falls through, the whole of
the joint expenditure will have to be settled by quota
payments. The joint expenditure goes almost wholly to the
up-keep of the army, navy, and consular and diplomatic
services. It amounts on an average to about 150 million
florins or 12½ million £, falling as low as 124½ million
florins in 1885 and rising to nearly 167 million in 1888. Of
this total the customs revenues have, in the last few years,
accounted for nearly a third, usually about 31 per cent. The
Quota was fixed in 1867 at 70 per cent. for Austria and 30 per
cent. for Hungary, based on a very rough calculation from the
yield of common taxation in the years 1860-1865, the last few
years preceding the restoration of Hungarian independence. On
the incorporation of the so-called Military Frontier in
Hungary, the Hungarian proportion was increased to 31.4.
Hitherto the Hungarians have resisted any attempt to increase
their quota. This 'non possumus' attitude has provoked great
resentment in Austria, especially when it is compared with the
self-complacent tone with which the Magyars dwell on the enormous
progress made by Hungary since 1867. That progress is
indubitable. Hungary has not only developed as an agricultural
state, but is in a very fair way of becoming an industrial and
manufacturing state as well. …
{35}

"On all these grounds the Austrians declare that they can no
longer go on paying the old Quota of 68.6 per cent. The
Hungarians admit the great progress made by Hungary, but with
some qualifications. In spite of the growth of Budapest,
Fiume, and a few other towns, Hungary is still, on the whole,
very backward when compared with Austria. The total volume of
her manufactures is very small, in spite of the rapid increase
of recent years. Hungary is still, to all intents and
purposes, an agricultural country, and as such, has suffered
largely from the fall in prices."

L. S. Amery,
Austro-Hungarian Financial Relations
(Economic Journal, September, 1898).

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1894-1895.
The Hungarian Ecclesiastical Laws.
Conflict with the Church.
Resignation of Count Kalnoky.

In the last month of 1894 royal assent was given to three

bills, known as the Ecclesiastical Laws, which marked an
extraordinary departure from the old subserviency of the State
to the Church. The first was a civil marriage law, which made
civil marriage compulsory, leaving religious ceremonies
optional with the parties, and which modified the law of
divorce; the second annulled a former law by which the sons of
mixed marriages were required to follow the father's religion,
and the daughters to follow that of the mother; the third
established an uniform State registration of births, deaths
and marriages, in place of a former registration of different
creeds, and legalized marriages between Christians and Jews
without change of faith. These very radical measures, after
passing the lower house of the Hungarian legislature, were
 carried with great difficulty through the aristocratic and
clerical upper house, and only by a strong pressure of
influence from the emperor-king himself. They were exceedingly
obnoxious to the Church, and the Papal Nuncio became active in
a hostility which the Hungarian premier, Baron Banffy, deemed
offensive to the State. He called upon the Imperial Minister
of Foreign Affairs, Count Kalnoky, to address a complaint on
the subject to the Vatican. This led to disagreements between
the two ministers which the Emperor strove without success to
reconcile, and Count Kalnoky, in the end, was forced to retire
from office. The Pope was requested to recall the offending
Nuncio, and declined to do so.

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1895-1896.
Race-jealousies and conflicts.
The position of Bohemia in the part of the dual Empire
called Austria.
Anti-Semitic agitation in Vienna.
Austrian Ministry of Count Badeni.
Enlarged parliamentary franchise.

In the constitutional reconstruction of the Empire after the

war of 1866, almost everything was conceded to the Magyars of
Hungary, who acquired independence in matters of internal
administration, and ascendancy over the other races subject to
the Hungarian crown. "On the other hand, absolute equality was
established between the different countries that are not
connected with Hungary. No greater privileges were granted to
an ancient historical kingdom such as Bohemia than were given,
for instance, to the small Alpine district situated between
the Tyrol and the Boden See (Lake of Constance) known as
Vorarlberg. … The representatives of these countries were to
meet at Vienna, and a ministry for 'Cisleithania' was
appointed. That these measures were injudicious is now the
opinion of almost all Austrians. Beust [the Saxon statesman
who was called in to conduct the political reconstruction of
1867—see, in volume 1, AUSTRIA: A. D. 1866-1867; and
1866-1887], created a new agglomeration of smaller and larger
countries, entirely different as regards race, history, and
culture. It is characteristic of the artificiality of Count
Beust's new creation that up to the present day no real and
generally accepted name for it has been found. The usual
designation of Cisleithania is an obvious absurdity. A glance
at the map will suffice to show how senseless such a name is
when applied, for instance, to Dalmatia, one of the countries
ruled from Vienna. The word 'Austria' also can correctly be
applied only either to all the countries ruled by the house of
Habsburg-Lorraine or to the archduchies of Upper and Lower
Austria, which are the cradle of the dynasty. The official
designation of the non-Hungarian parts of the empire is 'the
kingdoms and lands represented in the parliament' (of
Vienna)—'Die im Reichsrathe vertretenen Königreiche und
Länder.'

"Though the Germans willingly took part in the deliberations

of the Parliament of 'Cisleithania,' the Slavs of Bohemia and
Poland were at first violently opposed to the new institution.
They might perhaps have willingly consented to take part in a
Vienna parliament that would have consisted of representatives
of the whole empire. But when the ancient historical rights of
Hungary were fully recognized, countries such as Bohemia and
Poland … naturally felt offended. Count Beust dealt
differently with these two divisions of the empire. The partly
true, partly imaginary, grievances of the Poles were more
recent and better known thirty years ago than they are now.
Beust was impressed by them and considered it advisable to
make large concessions to the Poles of Galicia with regard to
autonomy, local government, and the use of the national
language. The Poles, who did not fail to contrast their fate
with that of their countrymen who were under Russian or
Prussian rule, gratefully accepted these concessions, and
attended the meetings of the representative assembly at
Vienna. Other motives also contributed to this decision of the
Galician Poles. Galicia is a very poor country, and the Germans
 who then ruled at Vienna, naturally welcoming the
representatives of a large Slav country in their Parliament,
proved most generous in their votes in favour of the Galician
railways. Matters stood differently in Bohemia, and the
attitude of Count Beust and the new 'Cisleithanian' ministers
was also here quite different. They seem to have thought that
they could break the resistance of the Bohemians by military
force, and with the aid of the German minority of the
population. A long struggle ensued. … Bohemia is … the
'cockpit' of Austrian political warfare, and almost every
political crisis has been closely connected with events that
occurred in Bohemia. The Bohemian representatives in 1867
refused to take part in the deliberations of the Vienna
Parliament, the existence of which they considered contrary to
the ancient constitution of their country.
{36}
In 1879 they finally decided to take part in the deliberations
of the Vienna assembly. … The Bohemians, indeed, entered the
Vienna Parliament under protest, and declared that their
appearance there was by no means to be considered as a
resignation of the special rights that Bohemia had formerly
possessed. The Bohemian deputies, however, continued
henceforth to take part in the deliberations of the
Cisleithanian Parliament and loyally supported those of the
many Austrian ministers who were not entirely deaf to their
demands. Some of these demands, such as that of the foundation
of a national university at Prague, were indeed granted by the
Vienna ministers. Though a German university continued to exist
at Prague, this concession was vehemently opposed by the
Germans, as indeed every concession to appease the Bohemian
people was."

Francis Count Lutzow,

Austria at the End of the Century
(Nineteenth Century Review, December, 1899).

During recent years, government in the dual empire has been

made increasingly difficult, especially on the Austrian side,
by the jealousy, which grows constantly more bitter, between
the German and Slavic elements of the mixed population, and by
the rising heat of the Anti-Semitic agitation. The latter was
brought to a serious crisis in Vienna during 1895 by the
election of Dr. Lueger, a violent leader of Anti-Semitism, to
the office of First Vice-Burgomaster, which caused the
resignation of the Burgomaster, and led to such disorders in
the municipal council that the government was forced to
intervene. The council was dissolved and an imperial
commissioner appointed to conduct the city administration
provisionally; but similar disorders, still more serious,
recurred in October, when elections were held and the
Anti-Semites won a majority in the council. Dr. Lueger was
then elected Burgomaster. The government, supported by a
majority in the Austrian Reichsrath, refused to confirm the
election. A second time Dr. Lueger was elected; whereupon the
municipal council was again dissolved and the municipal
administration transferred to an imperial commissioner. This
measure was followed by scenes of scandalous turbulence in the
Reichsrath and riotous demonstrations in the streets, which
latter were vigorously suppressed by the police. Some
considerable part of the temper in these demonstrations was
directed against the Austrian premier, Count Badeni, and still
more against the Polish race, to which he belonged. Count
Badeni, who had been Governor of Galicia, had just been called
to the head of affairs, and gave promise of an administration
that would be strong; but several other members of his cabinet
were Poles, and that fact was a cause of offense. He gave an
early assurance that the demand for an enlargement of the
parliamentary franchise should be satisfactorily met, and that
other liberal measures should be promptly taken in hand. These
promises, with the show of firmness in the conduct of the
government, produced a wide feeling in its favor. The promise
of an enlargement of the parliamentary franchise in Austria
was redeemed the following February (1896), by the
introduction and speedy passage of a parliamentary reform
 bill, which embodied an important revision of the Austrian
constitution. Seventy-two new members were added to the 353
which formerly constituted the lower or Abgeordneten House of
the Austrian Reichsrath. The original body of 353 remained as
it had been, made up in four sections, elected by four classes
in the community, namely: owners of large estates, electing 85
members; doctors of the universities and town taxpayers who
pay five florins of direct taxation yearly, these together
electing 115; chambers of commerce and industry, electing 22;
country taxpayers who pay five florins of direct taxation
yearly, electing 131. The number of voters in these four
privileged classes were said to number 1,732,000 when the
Reform Bill passed. The new voters added by the bill were
estimated to number about 3,600,000. But the latter would
elect only the 72 new members added to the House, while the
former continued to be exclusively represented by the 353
members of its former constitution. In other words, though the
suffrage was now extended to all male adults, it was not with
equality of value to all. For about one-third of the political
community, the franchise was given five times the weight and
force that it possessed for the remaining two-thirds.
Nevertheless, the bill seems to have been accepted and passed
with no great opposition. In Vienna, the Anti-Semitic
agitation was kept up with violence, Dr. Lueger being elected
four times to the chief-burgomastership of the city, in
defiance of the imperial refusal to sanction his election.
Finally the conflict was ended by a compromise. Lueger
resigned and was permitted to take the office of Vice
Burgomaster, while one of his followers was chosen to the
Chief Burgomaster's seat.

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1896.
Celebration of the Millennium of the Kingdom of Hungary.

The millennial anniversary of the Kingdom of Hungary was

celebrated by the holding of a great national exposition and
festival at Buda-Pesth, from the 2d of May until the end of
 October, 1896. Preparations were begun as early as 1893, and
were carried forward with great national enthusiasm and
liberality, the government contributing nearly two millions of
dollars to the expense of the undertaking. The spirit of the
movement was expressed at the beginning by the Minister of
Commerce, Bela Lukács, by whose department it was specially
promoted. "The government," he said, "will take care that the
national work be exhibited in a worthy frame, so as to further
the interests of the exhibitors. May everyone of you, its
subjects, therefore show what he is able to attain by his
diligence, his taste, and his inventive faculty. Let us all,
in fact, compete—we who are working, some with our brains,
others with our hands, and others with our machines—like one
man for the father-land. Thus the living generation will be
able to see what its fore-fathers have made in the midst of
hard circumstances, and to realize what tasks are awaiting us
and the new generations in the path which has been smoothed by
the sweat, labor, and pain of our ancestors. This will be a
rare family festival, the equal of which has not been granted
to many nations. Let the people gather, then, round our august
ruler, who has guided our country with fatherly care and
wisdom in the benevolent ways of peace to the heights which
mark the progress of to-day, and who—a faithful keeper of the
glorious past of a thousand years—has led the Hungarian people
to the threshold of a still more splendid thousand years to
come!"

{37}

Writing shortly before the opening, the United States Consul

at Buda-Pesth, Mr. Hammond, gave the following description of
the plans and preparations then nearly complete: "The series
of official festivities will be diversified by those of a
social and popular character. These will be the
interparliamentary conference for international courts of
arbitration; the congress of journalists, with the view to
constitute an international journalistic union; international
congresses of art and history, of actors, tourists, athletes,
etc.; numerous national congresses embracing every
intellectual and material interest of the country, in which
the leading personages of all groups and branches of national
production, the highest authorities in the field of commerce,
industry, communication, etc., as well as those who are in the
forefront of the literary, spiritual, and philanthropic
movements of the country will take part.

"There is activity in all classes of Hungarian society, with a

view to carrying out the ingenious project of the artist Paul
Vágó—the great historical pageant. Several municipal bodies
have already promised their cooperation, while scores of men
and women, bearers of historic names, have declared their
readiness to take part at their own expense. All the costumes
of all the races and social classes who have inhabited this
country during ten centuries will pass before our eyes in this
beautiful cortege. The genius of the artist will call into life
in their descendants the warriors who conquered Pannonia under
Arpad, and, during the reign of Louis the Great, annexed to
this realm all the neighboring countries; all the dignitaries,
both civil and ecclesiastical, who, under Stephen the Saint, King
Kálman, and Mathias Corvinus, spread Christianity,
enlightenment, liberty, and wealth to the extreme confines of
this part of Europe; all the crusaders of Joannes Hunyady, who
drove back the Crescent for a century and thus defended
western civilization against eastern fanaticism; all the
kings, princes, noblemen, and poets of modern times who have
led the nation in her struggle for modern ideas. These
historical figures will be followed by their retainers or
surrounded by the popular types of the respective epochs. To
judge by the sketches of the artist, this pageant promises to
surpass anything that has hitherto been offered on similar
occasions.

"All these festivals will move, as it were, within the fixed

frame of the Millennial National Exhibition, which will cover
an area of 500,000 square meters (5,382,100 square feet) and
consist of 169 buildings and pavilions, erected at a total
cost (including private expenses) of 10,000,000 florins
($4,020,000). This exhibition is divided into two sections,
viz:

(1) The historical section, containing art treasures, relics,

and antiquities of the past, which will illustrate the
political, religious, military, and private life of each
principal period in the history of the nation. …
(2) The section of modern times will embrace everything offered
by similar exhibitions.

Nevertheless, the visitor's mind will here, too, be impressed

with the solemnity of the millennium and the enthusiasm
inspiring the nation at this momentous period of its history.
The programme embraces the national life in all its
manifestations. Not only will the present condition of Hungary
be laid open to general view, but the world will also be
impressed with the great progress Hungary has made since the
reestablishment of her constitution in 1867."

United States Consular Reports,

April, 1896.

By every possible arrangement of facilitation and cheapening,

a visit to the Exposition was placed within the means of all
the inhabitants of the kingdom; and especial provision was
made for bringing schools and teachers to receive the
object-lessons which it taught.

Among the ceremonies which attended the ending of the great

national festival, was the formal opening, at Orsova, of a
ship channel through the rocky obstructions that have been
known since the days when they troubled the Romans as the
"Iron Gates of the Danube."
AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1897.
Industrial combinations.

See (in this volume)

TRUSTS: IN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES.

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1897.
The forces of feudalism and clericalism in Austria.
Austrian parties in the Reichsrath.
Their aims, character and relative strength.
Count Badeni's language decrees for Bohemia.

"In no European country have the forces of feudalism and

clericalism such an enormous influence as they have in
Austria. The Austrian nobility is supreme at Court and in the
upper branches of the Administration. In Hungary the small
nobility and landed gentry exercise a preponderating
influence, but they are a wide class and filled with the
national spirit. The Austrian nobility forms a narrow,
intensely exclusive and bigoted caste, whose only political
interest is the maintenance of its own class supremacy. The
large Protestant element in Hungary has in no small degree
contributed to the success of the Magyars, both in its effect
on the national character and by the secondary position to
which the mixture of creeds has relegated the Church. In
Austria the Church of Rome is all-powerful. The House of
Habsburg has always been bigotedly Catholic: Francis Joseph
himself was a pupil of the Jesuits. The triumph of the
reaction after 1848 was the establishment in 1855 of that
'written Canossa' the Concordat, which made the Church
absolute in all matters relating to education and marriage.
And even though the Concordat was got rid of in 1870, the
energies of the clerical party have been but little weakened.
The real explanation of the whole course of Austrian politics
lies in the interaction of the two conflicts—of reaction,
clerical or aristocratic, against liberalism, and of Slav
against German. …
 "In March 1897 came the general elections, to which a special
interest was lent by the first appearance of the fifth class
of voters. The most striking feature of the elections was the
complete and final break up of the German Liberal party. … The
history of the German Liberal party has been one of a
continuous decline both in numbers and importance. It counted
200 members in 1873, 170 in 1879, 114 in 1885-1891, and only
77 out of a total of 425 in 1897. … Their political theories
are those of moderate constitutional liberalism as understood
on the Continent in the middle of the century—i. e. belief in
the efficacy of parliamentary government, in commercial and
industrial freedom, hostility to military bureaucracy and
clericalism. … The most radical group among them, the
Progressists, an offshoot of the last election, is about as
radical as the ordinary English Conservative of to-day. The
views of the Verfassungstreue Grossgrundbesitz are those of
the English Tory of fifty years ago.

{38}

"Of the fractions into which the Liberal party is now divided
the most important is the Deutsch Fortschrittliche, or
Progressive, which split off from the main body in November
1896. Its chief object was to direct a stronger opposition on
national and liberal lines to Count Badeni. Its 35 members are
almost exclusively recruited from Bohemia and Moravia. They
differ from the German 'Volkspartei' mainly in their refusal
to accept anti-Semitism, which would be both against their
liberal professions and their economic convictions as
representatives of the commercial and manufacturing classes.
The constitutional landowners (Verfassungstreue
Grossgrundbesitz, 30 seats) represent the most conservative
element of the old Liberal party. … The 12 members of the Free
German Union (Freie Deutsche Vereinigung) may perhaps consider
themselves the most authentic remnant of the great Liberal
party—it is their chief claim to distinction. The German
National or People's party (Deutsche Volkspartei, 43 seats)
first made its appearance at the elections of 1885. It
rejected the old idea of the Liberals that the Germans were
meant, as defenders of the State, to look to State interests
alone without regard to the fate of their own nationality, and
took up a more strictly national as well as a more democratic
attitude. It has also of late years included anti-Semitism in
its programme. Its main strength lies in the Alpine provinces,
where it heads the German national and Liberal opposition to
the Slovenes on the one side, and the German clericals on the
other. It is at present the largest of the German parties. …

"Least but not last of the German parties comes the little
group of five led by Schönerer and Wolf. Noisy, turbulent, and
reckless, this little body of extremists headed the
obstruction in the Reichsrath, the disorganised larger German
parties simply following in its wake. The object these men aim
at is the incorporation of German Austria in the German
Empire, the non-German parts being left to take care of
themselves. Both the German National party and Schönerer's
followers are anti-Semitic, but anti-Semitism only plays a
secondary part in their programme. The party that more
specially claims the title of anti-Semite is the Christian
Social (Christlich-Soziale, 27 seats). The growth of this
party in the last few years has been extraordinarily rapid. In
Dr. Lueger and Prince Alois Liechtenstein it has found leaders
who thoroughly understand the arts of exciting or humouring
the Viennese populace. … The characteristic feature of
Austrian anti-Semitism, besides the reaction against the
predominance of the ubiquitous Jew in commerce, journalism,
and the liberal professions, is that it represents the
opposition of the small tradesman or handicraftsman to the
increasing pressure of competition from the large Jewish shops
and the sweating system so frequently connected with them. The
economic theories of the party are of the crudest and most
mediæval kind; compulsory apprenticeship, restricted trade
guilds, penalties on stock exchange speculation, &c., form the
chief items of its programme. …

"The German Clericals and the Clerical Conservatives

(Katholische Volkspartei and Centrum) number some 37 votes
together; but their importance has always been increased by
the skilful and unscrupulous parliamentary tactics of the
party. The strength of the Clerical party lies in the ignorant
and devotedly pious peasantry of Upper Austria and the Alpine
provinces. The defence of agrarian interests is included in
its programme; but its only real object is the maintenance of
the moral and material power of the Church. Its policy looks
solely to the interests of the Vatican. …

"The best organised of the national parties is the Polish Club

(59 seats). It represents the national and social interests of
the Polish nobility and landed gentry. … Standing outside of
Austrian interests, they exercise a controlling voice in
Austrian affairs. The three-score well-drilled Polish votes
have helped the Government again and again to ride roughshod
over constitutional opposition. The partition of Poland has
thus avenged itself on one at least of its spoilers. The
Germans have long resented this outside interference which
permanently keeps them in a minority. … The Czechs are a party
of 60, and together with the 19 representatives of the Czech
landed aristocracy, form the largest group in the Reichsrath.
The Young Czech party began in the seventies as a reaction
against the Old Czech policy of passive resistance. In
contra-distinction to the Old Czechs, they also professed
radical and anti-clerical views in politics generally. … In
1897 the Old Czechs finally withdrew from the contest or were
merged in the victorious party. … Of the other nationalist
parties the most important is the Slav National Christian
Union (35 seats), comprising the Slovenes, Croatians, and some
of the more moderate Ruthenians from Galicia. Their programme
is mainly national, though tinged with clericalism; equality
of the Slav languages with German and Italian in mixed
districts; and ultimately a union of the southern Slavs in an
 autonomous national province. The Italians are divided into 5
Clerical Italians from the Tirol and 14 Liberals from Trieste,
Istria, &c. The Tirolese Italians desire a division of the
Tirol into a German and an Italian part. …

"The most interesting, and in some ways the most respectable,

of all Austrian parties is the Socialist or Social Democratic
party (15 seats). It is the only one that fights for a living
political theory—German liberalism being to all intents and
purposes defunct—and not for mere national aggression. The
Social Democrats hold the whole national agitation to be an
hysterical dispute got up by professors, advocates, and other
ne'er-do-weels of the unemployed upper classes. … Their
support is derived from the working classes in the industrial
districts, and not least from the poorer Jews, who supply
socialism with many of its keenest apostles. …

"Altogether a most hopeless jumble of incoherent atoms is this

Austrian Reichsrath. The chariots driving four-ways on the
roof of the Houses of Parliament are a true symbol of the
nature of Austrian politics. To add to the confusion, all the
parties are headless. Able men and men of culture, there are a
good many in the House; but political leaders there are none.
The general tone of the House is undignified, and has been so
for some time. …

{39}

"On April 5, 1897, Count Badeni published the notorious

language decrees for Bohemia. This ordinance placed the Czech
language on an absolute equality with the German in all
governmental departments and in the law courts all over
Bohemia. … After 1901 all officials in every part of Bohemia
were to be obliged to know both languages. The refusal of the
Germans to admit the language spoken by 62 per cent. of the
population of Bohemia to an equality with their own is not
quite so preposterous as would at first sight appear. Without
 subscribing to Professor Mommsen's somewhat insolent dicta
about 'inferior races,' one must admit that the Czech and
German languages do not stand on altogether the same footing.
German is a language spoken by some 60,000,000 of people, the
language of a great literature and a great commerce. Czech is
difficult, unpronounceable, and spoken by some 5,000,000 in
all. It must be remembered, too, that the two nations do not
really live together in Bohemia, but that the Germans live in
a broad belt all round the country, while the Czechs inhabit
the central plain. There is no more reason for a German
Bohemian to acquire Czech than there is for a citizen of
Edinburgh to make himself master of Gaelic. On the other hand,
every educated Czech naturally learns German, even in a purely
Czech-speaking district. … It must also be remembered that the
decrees, as such, were of doubtful constitutionality; the
language question was really a matter for the Legislature to
settle. The decrees at once produced a violent agitation among
the Germans, which rapidly spread from Bohemia over the whole
Empire."

The Internal Crisis in Austria-Hungary

(Edinburgh Review, July, 1898).

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1897 (October-December).

Scenes in the Austrian Reichsrath described by Mark Twain.

"Here in Vienna in these closing days of 1897 one's blood gets

no chance to stagnate. The atmosphere is brimful of political
electricity. All conversation is political; every man is a
battery, with brushes overworn, and gives out blue sparks when
you set him going on the common topic. … Things have happened
here recently which would set any country but Austria on fire
from end to end, and upset the government to a certainty; but
no one feels confident that such results will follow here.
Here, apparently, one must wait and see what will happen, then
he will know, and not before; guessing is idle; guessing
cannot help the matter. This is what the wise tell you; they