Noam Chomsky - Wilhelm von Humboldt and Classical Liberalism

classical liberalism asserts as its major idea an opposition to all that the most restrictive minimal forms of state dimension and personal or social life well this conclusion is quite familiar however the reasoning that leads to it is less familiar and I think a good deal more important than the conclusion itself one of the earliest and most brilliant expositions of this position is in ville Homefront humboldt limits of state action which was written in 1792 though not published for 6070 years after that in his view the state tends to quote tends to make an instrument to make man an instrument to serve its arbitrary ends overlooking his individual purposes and since man is in his essence of free searching self perfecting being it follows that the state as a profoundly at a human institution that is its actions its existence are altima CLE incompatible with the full harmonious development of human potential in its richest diversity hence incompatible with what Humboldt and in the following century Marx bakunin Mill and many others what they see as the true end of man and for the record I think that this is an accurate description the modern conservative tends to regard himself as the lineal descendant of the classical liberal in this sense but I think that that can be maintained like an extremely superficial point of view as one can see by studying more carefully the fundamental ideas of classical libertarian thought as expressed in my opinion and its most profound form bye-bye-bye Humboldt I think the issues are of really quite considerable contemporary significance and if you don't mind they what may appear to be a somewhat antiquarian excursion I'd like to expand on them for Humboldt as for Rousseau and before him the Cartesians man's essential attribute as is freedom quote to inquire and to create these are the centers around which all human pursuits more or less directly revolve but he goes on to say all moral culture Springs solely and immediately from the inner life of the soul and can never be produced by external and artificial control houses the cultivation of the understanding as of any of man's other faculties is nearly achieved by his own activity his own ingenuity or his own methods of using the discoveries of others well from these assumptions quite obviously an educational theory follows and he develops it but I won't pursue it but also far more fellows humboldt goes on to develop at least the rudiments of a theory of exploitation and of alienated labor that suggests in significant ways i think the early marks so I mean combo compact continues these comments that I made Leah that I quoted about the cultivation of understanding through spontaneous action in the following way he says man never regards what he possesses as so much his own as what he does and the labourer who pens a garden is perhaps in a truer sense its owner than the lit than the listless voluptuary who enjoys its fruits and since truly human action is that which flows from inner impulse it seems as if all peasants and craftsmen might be elevated into artists that is men who love their labor for its own sake improve it by their own plastic genius and inventive skill and thereby cultivate their intellect and ovale their character and exhaustion refine their pleasures and so humanity would be a noble by the very things which now though beautiful in themselves so often tend to degrade it freedom is undoubtedly the indispensable condition without which even the pursuits most congenial to individual human nature can never succeed in producing such salutary influences whatever does not spring from a man's free choice or is only the result of instruction and guidance does not enter into his very being but remains alien to his true nature he does not perform it with truly human energies but merely with mechanical exactness and if a man acts in a mechanical way reacting to external demands or instruction rather than in ways determined by his own interests and energies and power he says we may admire what he does but we despise what he is for Humboldt and man is born to inquire and create and when a man or a child chooses to inquire or create out of his own free choice then he becomes in his own terms an artist rather than a tool of duction or a well-trained parrot this is the essence of his concept of human nature and I think it's very revealing and interesting to compare it with Marx with his early with the early Marx manuscripts in particular his account of quote the alienation of Labor when work is external for the worker not part of his nature so that he does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself and is physically exhausted and mentally the based this alienated labor that tasks some of the workers back into a barbarous kind of work and turns others into machines thus depriving man of his species character of free conscious activity and productive life recall also Marx's well-known and often quoted reference to a higher form of society in which labour has become not only a means of life but also the highest wanted life and recall also his repeated criticism of the specialized labor which a quote again mutilates the worker into a fragment of a human being degrades him to become a mirror of pertinence of the machine makes his work such a torment that it's essential meaning is destroyed estranges from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in very proportion to the extent to which science is incorporated into it as an independent power robert tucker for one has rightly emphasized that Marx sees the revolutionary more as a frustrated producer than as a dissatisfied consumer and this far more radical critique of capitalist relations of production flows directly often in the same words from the libertarian thought of the Enlightenment for this reason I think one must say that classical liberal ideas in their essence though not in the way they developed are profoundly anti-capitalist the essence of these ideas must be destroyed for them to serve as an ideology of modern industrial capitalism writing in the 1780s and early 1790s Humboldt had no conception of the forms that industrial capitalism would take consequently in this classic of classical liberalism he stresses the problem of limiting state power and he's not overly concerned with the dangers of private power the reason is that he believes in and speaks of essentially quality of condition of private citizens and of course he has no idea writing in 1790 of the ideas of the ways in which the notion private person would come to be reinterpreted in the era of corporate capitalism he did not proceed and I'll quote the anarchist historian Rudolf rocker he did not foresee that democracy with its model quality of all citizens before the law and liberalism with its right of man over his own person both would be wrecked on the realities of capitalist economy whom both did not foresee that in a predatory capitalist economy state intervention would be an absolute necessity to preserve human existence to prevent the destruction of the physical environment I speak optimistically of course as Karl Polanyi for one has pointed out the self-adjusting market could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness I think that's correct humble also did not foresee the consequences of the commodity character of labour the doctrine again in Kalani's words that it is not for the commodity to decide where it should be offered for sale to what purpose it should be used at what price it should be allowed to change hands in what manner it should be consumed or destroyed but the commodity in this case of course a human life and social protection was there for a minimal necessity to constrain the irrational and destructive workings of the classical free-market nor did Humboldt understand the 19-7 in 1790 that capitalist economic relations perpetuate the form of bondage which long before that in fact as early as 1767 see Marvin Gaye had the Clinton to be even worse than slavery writing it is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm laborers to till the soil fruits they will not eat and our maid seems to construct buildings in which they will not live it is one that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying it is once that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him what effective gain has the suppression of slavery brought him he's free you say that is his misfortune these men that have said have no master they have one and the most terrible the most imperious of masters that is need is this that reduces to the most cruel dependence and if there is something degrading to human nature in the idea of bondage as every spokesman for the Enlightenment would insist then it would follow that a new emancipation must be awaited what Fourier referred to as the third and last emancipatory phase of history the first having made serfs out of slaves the second wage earners out of serfs and the third which will transform the proletariat to free men by eliminating the commodity character of labor ending wage slavery and bringing the commercial industrial and financial institutions under Democratic control these are all things that Humboldt in his classical liberal doctrine did not express and didn't see but I think he might have accepted these conclusions he does for example inter degree that state intervention in social life is legitimate if freedom would destroy the very conditions without which not only freedom but even existence itself would be inconceivable which are precisely the circumstances that arise in an unconstrained capitalist economy and he does as in the remarks that I quoted vigorously condemned the alienation of Labor event his criticism of bureaucracy and the autocratic state stands as a very eloquent for a warning of some of the most dismal aspects of modern history and the important point is that the basis of his critique is applicable to a far broader range of coercive institutions than he imagined in particular to the institutions of industrial capitalism though he expresses a classical liberal doctrine Humboldt is primitive individualist in the style of for example Russo Joe Russo of tolls the savage who lives within himself but Humboldt vision is entirely different he sums up his remarks as follows he says the whole tenor of the ideas and arguments unfolded in this essay might terribly reduce to this that while they would break all fetters in human society they would attempt to find as many new social bonds as possible the isolated man is no more able to develop than the one who is fettered and he in fact looked forward to a community of free association without coercion by the state or other authoritarian institutions in which freemen and create and inquire achieved the highest development of their powers back far ahead of his time he presents an anarchist vision that is appropriate perhaps to the next stage of industrial society we can perhaps look forward to a day when these various strands will be brought together within the framework of libertarian socialism a social form that barely exists today though its elements can perhaps be perceived for example in the guaranty of individual rights that has achieved so far its fullest realization though still tragically flawed in the Western democracies or in the Israeli Cuba scene or in the experiments with workers councils in Yugoslavia or an effort to awaken popular consciousness and to create a new involvement in the social process which is a fundamental element in the third world revolutions coexisting uneasily with indefensible authoritarian practice the first concept of the state that I want to set up as a point of reference classical liberal its doctrine is that the state functions should be drastically limited but this familiar characterization is a very superficial one more deeply the classical liberal view develops from a certain concept of human nature one that presses the importance of diversity and free creation and therefore this view is in fundamental opposition to industrial capitalism its wage slavery its educated labor and its hierarchical authoritarian principles of social and economic organization at least in its multi inform classical liberal thought is opposed as well to the concepts of possessive individualism which are intrinsic to capitalist theology so it seeks to eliminate social fetters but to replace them by social bonds not by competitive greed not by predatory individualism not of course by corporate Empire state or private classical libertarian thought seems to me therefore to lead directly to the Terry and socialism or anarchism if you like when combined with an understanding of industrial capitalism

Channel: Chomsky's Philosophy

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Keywords: Wilhelm Von Humboldt (Academic), Liberalism (Political Ideology), Philosophy (Field Of Study), Classical Liberalism, Noam Chomsky (Author), Karl Marx (Author), Political Philosophy (Field Of Study), Libertarian Socialism (Political Ideology), Libertarianism (Political Ideology)

Id: JmbLXl-mlL4

Length: 13min 20sec (800 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 19 2015

Reddit Comments

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Liberalism (in the tradition specifically focused on increasing an individual's freedom --- EMANCIPATION) and socialism are not opposed; the REASONING in a philosophy like classical liberalism is a true example of this process of liberating an individual or class of individuals from oppressive ideology. And that process continues; one outgrowth is socialism, and that is a tradition started by Marx...

https://becomeanamerican.wordpress.com/2015/09/19/what-is-liberalism/