[lit-ideas] Re: Communism versus Nazism

  • From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:15:59 -0800

Lawrence wrote

I wanted to respond to [Donal’s] note, but I quickly exceeded the space limits of Lit-Ideas and so posted my response on

http://www.lawrencehelm.com/2010/02/totalitarianism-and-liberal-democracy.html

That presented a problem inasmuch as I didn’t want to mention your name or show that I was directly responding to you on that forum without your permission. So I turned it into a mini-essay.

If you want to reply or take issue with something I wrote, feel free to do it back here.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From the blog. My interspersed comments are marked by •.

Borrowing from pages 397-8 of Consciousness and Society, The Reorientation of European Social Thought 1890-1930 by H. Stuart Hughes, " . . . Lord Russell described the philosophy of logical analysis in its broadest terms as one having 'the quality of science. . . . It has the advantage as compared with the philosophies of the system-builders, of being able to tackle its problems one at a time, instead of having to invent at one stroke a block theory of the whole universe.

• Hughes’ book almost seems to have been written as a pony for some timid member of the nouveau-riche who finds himself invited to a party at the offices of Partisan Review.

• The quotation he provides is from Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy, aimed at a popular audience, and written to make money. In it, Russell seems not only to over-simplify and distort the views of others, but his own.

• This is closer to what Russell had in mind.

• Russell's methodology consisted of the making and testing of hypotheses through the weighing of evidence (hence Russell's comment that he wished to emphasize the "scientific method" in philosophy together with a rigorous analysis of problematic propositions using the machinery of first-order logic. It was Russell's belief that by using the new logic of his day, philosophers would be able to exhibit the underlying "logical form" of natural language statements. A statement's logical form, in turn, would help philosophers resolve problems of reference associated with the ambiguity and vagueness of natural language. Thus, just as we distinguish three separate sense of "is" (the is of predication, the is of identity, and the is of existence) and exhibit these three senses by using three separate logical notations (Px, x=y, and ∃x respectively) we will also discover other ontologically significant distinctions by being aware of a sentence's correct logical form. On Russell's view, the subject matter of philosophy is then distinguished from that of the sciences only by the generality and the a prioricity of philosophical statements, not by the underlying methodology of the discipline. In philosophy, as in mathematics, Russell believed that it was by applying logical machinery and insights that advances would be made. [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/russell/#RWAP]

• So here, I’d like to ask what to what Lawrence means when he writes:

While *that sort of analysis* has its advantages, I would rather focus upon a "block-theory-type" of analysis in regard to the subject. In very broad terms, three major systems competed for supremacy in the 20th century, Communism, Fascism, and Liberal Democracy. These systems fought on the field of battle in hot and cold wars and by the end only Liberal Democracy was left standing

• [A great number of topics and a great deal of analysis on Lawrence’s /part/ have been omitted.]

And yet only a little thought enables those of us who think of themselves as a step or two up from "the last man" to realize that this system which is fostering the "last man" also enables the rest of us to do whatever we like with our "excess time," and "excess money." We might invest some of it in history books and study the two great systems of the last century, Communism and Fascism, which thought they could do better.

• These herrings not be red, but they’re certainly pink. The great totalitarian schemes of Nazi Germany and Soviet Communism are dead. (Arms-makers now make their profits in the Third World.) What you leave out are the social welfare programs of Britain, Western Europe, and the Scandinavian countries. They /have/ done better; and to hold up for our inspection only the flaws of Hitler’s Germany, of and Stalinist, and neo-Stalinist Russia, is no argument that the goals and practices and policies of our present Liberal Democracy could not be improved upon.

Robert Paul
The Reed Institute

Other related posts: