Part 3 of this essay can found here.
Alexis De Tocqueville (1805-1859)
Alexis De Tocqueville was among the last of a dying breed. He was part of the remnant of the French aristocracy that still existed after the events of the French Revolution and before the advent of French democracy. He was also an anomaly among aristocrats, an aristocrat with a fervent passion for democracy. He spent a great deal of his adult life trying to convince his fellow aristocrats that democracy was inevitable.
Tocqueville’s passion for democracy took to America in a bid to understand America’s underpinnings. All that he saw and heard, he wrote about in his most famous work Democracy in America, published in 1835. What fascinated Tocqueville the most of all he saw in America, was the extraordinary initiative showed by the local populace in solving their own problems without waiting for government. He considered America’s civic virtue to be its greatest strength, but he was concerned that this civic virtue was at risk from two major threats: increasing political centralization and market consumerism. He felt both phenomena created meek populace living in quiet servitude and controlled by remote powers from the political centre. Some observers would say that his fears have been borne out by 21st century capitalism.
Tocqueville felt that local government was extremely important because the habits of the heart, which he felt were the basis of all politics, were formed by people’s everyday experiences. He observed that the great matters of the state like democracy or constitutionalism were for most people, vague abstractions. Civic virtues, he noted, are a set of habits acquired from cooperating with one’s neighbours, learning tolerate differences and reaching solutions to common problems.
Tocqueville also had rather sophisticated views on education. He felt students should be enticed into the pursuit of pure truth by studying subjects like literature and philosophy and not just practical, vocational subjects. Without such a liberal education, he believed progress in the arts and sciences on which practical vocations ultimately depend will be lost. He was however skeptical that civic virtue could be taught. He believed that it could only be acquired by experience.
Tocqueville must have clearly seen the future as there is wide spread recognition today of the perceived lack of civic virtue in countries around the world. One would certainly have appreciated what he thought was the way out of this morass.
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
There has perhaps never been a greater defender of the concept of individual freedom than John Stuart Mill. Mill was also 19th century’s greatest advocate of women’s rights, a position that was still deeply unpopular in Victorian Britain despite Mary Wollstonecraft’s pioneering efforts in that area. He even ran for Parliament on the political platform of the women’s right to vote. Mill presented a petition to that effect in a proposed amendment to a major reform bill being debated in parliament in 1867. He proposed amendment was defeated. It would take another 50 years for Britain to be ready for such a change. He authored a classic feminist text, On the Subjection of Women, in which he made the case for treating men and women equally in all respects and claimed that the exclusion of women from public life and the professions was one of the chief hindrances to human improvement. In his feminist leanings, he is believed to have been strongly influenced by his wife, Harriet Taylor who wrote an influential essay titled The Enfranchisement of Women.
While Mill undoubtedly expended a lot of energy on feminist causes, he most remembered for his thoughts on individual freedom. In 1859, he published an essay titled, On Liberty, which is widely regarded as the most famous and influential defence of individual freedom ever written.
Mill was concerned about the threats to individual freedom from social pressure and conformity. He believed that the rise of mass society might crush individuality and thoughtful dissent, the consequence of which would be to slow or even stop human advancement, which depends on the free expression of ideas. He further believed that the best means of promoting wellbeing was a general policy of allowing the greatest possible scope for individual liberty consistent with the liberty of others.
Mill was a firm believer in open debate and in allowing opinions to be expressed freely so that in the uninhibited clash of ideas, beliefs can be tested to see how they hold under scrutiny. He wasn’t so naïve as to believe that the truth would always prevail, but that it was more likely to emerge under conditions of free enquiry and open debate than under conditions where beliefs were dogmatically shielded from examination and criticism. Human progress, he opined depended on the freedom to criticize and question.
Today, the ICT revolution that has turned the world to a “global village” is testing Mill’s notions of individual liberty and free speech to the limit. The belief in the supremacy of free expression is not self-evident to most of the world. Individual liberty competes with other values such as social harmony and respect. But as the rest of the world increasingly imbibes wester mores and institutions, it will be interesting to see what place individual liberty eventually achieves in the global matrix of societal values.
Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Karl Marx’s name is inextricably linked to Communism, the idea that the means of economic production should be owned by society as a whole and that private property should be abolished. It is therefore very surprising that Marx wrote precious little about how a communist state should operate. What he did write about extensively was capitalism, what he saw as its internal contradictions and its eventual doom, leading to what he perceived would be a communist revolution.
Karl Marx was of German origin but spent most of his adult life in England, having been hounded out of his native Germany and France at the behest of the German authorities because of his radical views. From his English perch, he studied the industrial capitalism of England, France and his native Germany. What he saw was not pretty. Industrial capitalism in Marx’s time was very different from what it is today. Then it was raw, unregulated and brutal. There were little or no labor laws and regulations to protect the most vulnerable and no state-mandated welfare to help the unfortunate. All this led Marx to believe that capitalism would eventually self-destruct, as a result of the violent booms and busts of business cycles and the increasingly desperate condition of the working poor. Marx believed at its heart, capitalism relied on the pitiless exploitation of the poor and powerless by the rich and powerful and thus was an inherently unstable system doomed to implode as the lives of the impoverished majority became unbearable. He further argued that the desire of capitalists to keep the working class’ wages as low as possible was ultimately self-defeating, as it eventually led to there being insufficient demand for capitalism’s products thereby causing recessions and depressions.
Marx’s views on government were similar to his views on capitalism. He felt that government was mainly a tool of the rich and powerful to keep the masses in line. Though it kept up a façade of impartiality, Marx felt that government always acted in the interest of the dominant class. He further felt that government was compelled to resort to propaganda in order to deceive the masses as to the true nature of their material conditions because were the masses to perceive the true nature of their conditions under the yoke of capitalism, rebellion would inevitably follow.
Since considered government/the state to be a handmaiden of capitalism, he believed the state would become unnecessary once capitalism imploded under the weight of its own internal contradictions, thereby ushering the age of communism. In the immortal words of his colleague Friedrich Engels it would just “wither away”.
Fast-forward to today. It was communism that imploded in the late 20th century and capitalism marches on. However, it is a substantially different capitalism for that which existed in Marx’s time, one that Marx ironically helped shape. The 20th century saw the emergence of the welfare state, which helped to significantly soften the harshness of Marx era capitalism. Also in the 20th century, a host of policies were initiated to help smoothen out capitalism’s booms and busts. These are changes that Marx helped to inspire.
Marx remains relevant even in the 21st century. The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008, caused many to remember Marx’s critique of capitalism as did the great Depression of the 1930s. Emerging economies like China and India have been seen to exhibit behavior depicted in his classic text on capitalism Das Kapital. We can be relatively certain that whenever capitalism goes through one of its inevitable busts, the ghost of Marx will be invoked by some observers.
Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948)
Gandhi needs no introduction. You are probably aware of his famous non-violent resistance of British rule which ultimately led to India’s independence in 1947, a heroic act he paid for with his life. What you might not be aware of is that he had already spent 21 years in South Africa preparing for that historic moment. As young man living in South Africa, he would lead non-violent protests and strikes against the racist laws of the South African nation. Even as a young man, he had fully imbibed the principles of non-violence, fairness, justice and equity. On one famous occasion in January 1914, he refused to take advantage of a strike by European railway workers that made the South African government highly vulnerable to being toppled. He had previously planned a strike but called it off once British workers went on strike, saying that it would have been unfair to take advantage of the weakness of the South African government. That chivalrous gesture by Gandhi would later that year lead to the amicable resolution of the issue that had previously led him to decide to embark on a strike. Shortly after that victory, he would set sail for his home country of India, where he would use the same non-violent resistance methods to help India gain independence from British rule.
In developing his non-violent, pacifist philosophy, Gandhi looked mostly to the example of Jesus, found in the Gospels of the Holy Bible, despite his not being Christian. He believed that Jesus had been engaged in active, non-violent resistance against the oppression of the Roman Empire and sought to copy his example in dealing with British rule in South Africa and India. On a secular level, he also believed that capitalism, by stoking man’s lust for wealth, was creating the psychological basis for class and race oppression. This observation would henceforth lead him to embrace asceticism, and voluntary poverty.
A critique often hurled at the philosophy of non-violent resistance is that it is not universally applicable. Gandhi unsurprisingly, thought it was. A common refrain among doubters is “would non-violence worked against Hitler?” On this question, even Gandhi suggested that the Jews resort to mass suicide. Nevertheless, has its notable successes. Other than Gandhi’s independence struggle, the most famous is the civil rights movement of the 1950s-60s led by Martin Luther King. Other notables include the fall of communist governments across Eastern Europe in 1989, and in most cases, it is judged to offer a better path to social and political justice than violence.
Bibliography
- Garrard, Graeme and Murphy, James. 2019 How to Think Politically: Sages, Scholars and Statesmen Whose Ideas Have Shaped the World. London: Bloomsbury Continuum
