- Email: [email protected]
National past, socialist future
Pergamon
History of European Ideas, Vol. 19, Nos 1-3, pp. 293-299, 1994 Copyright @ 1994 Elscvier ScienceLtd Printedin Great Britain. All rights reserved 0191-6599/94 $7.00+ 0.00
NATIONAL PAST, SOCIALIST
FUTURE
VINCENT GEOGHEGAN*
I would like to address the question of ‘the end of socialism’ by looking at the early historical experience of the ideology. In particular I want to discuss a cluster of problems associated with the relationship between socialism and pre-existing national identities. The term ‘national identities’ will not simply refer to that sense of nationality so successfully cultivated by nationalism, but to a whole range of identities-class, religion, gender, etc.-which emerged in the modern era of the nation-state. The problems can conveniently be divided into those of universalism and those of particularism. Universalist problems flow from the elements of socialism which stress rationality and essentialism, where ‘lived experience’ and specificity are possible casualties; particularist problems, on the other hand, include the co-option, divisiveness and marginality which can result from emphasis on the experiential and the distinctive. Universalism and particularism are, of course, to be distinguished from the universal and the particular, the unity of which remains the goal of any credible social theory. Although the universal and the particular traditionally form a dualism in the history of philosophy, theproblems of universalism and particularism should not be so viewed. Universalist problems are replete with theoretical error, social insensitivity, imaginative failure and sheer hubris, whilst particularist problems, although not always lacking these negative elements, are much more the result of the complex, frequently hostile political and social field in which socialism has found itself. Historical context is also clearly vital in the precise pattern of the emergence of these problems-the universalist temptation, for example, will be especially alluring in times and places where the specific and the distinctive (in conservative notions of ‘national tradition’, for example) have ideological hegemony. Furthermore the paper is not neutral: it is sympathetic to the impulses underpinning the particularist set of problems, since it is this dimension which has been dangerously understated in the history of socialism. In so far as there is a conclusion, it is to suggest a slightly tongue in cheek alternative question to the ‘end of socialism?‘, namely in what real sense can we speak of socialism ever beginning? Universalist and particularist problems have beset the ideology from its earliest phases. To illustrate this, and also to provide a focus for the broader discussion, two historical case studies will be presented: the attempt to introduce socialism into Ireland in the first half of the nineteenth century; and the conflict between two socialist utopian works, those of William Morris and Edward Bellamy, at the end of that century. In the Irish example, the failure of Owenism to engage with national identities left it virtually defenceless against O’Connellite *Queen’s
University, Belfast, Northern Ireland BT7 INN, U.K. 293
294
Vincent Geoghegan
nationalism, whilst a subsequent attempt to meld socialism with nationalism effectively submerged the former in the latter. In the case of the battle of the utopias, Bellamy’s Looking Backward gained a wide but ultimately narrow following by abandoning memory and history, while Morris’s re-injection of these dimensions into News from Nowhere lent itself to parochialism. Universalist problems have emerged in the wake of the undoubted need for socialism to establish general legitimacy, characterised by a desire to show that socialism can transcend mere sectional interest and embody the universal needs and aspirations of humanity. Historically, universalism in socialism has inadequately theorised the horizontal and vertical axes of social life. Work on the horizontal axis has been most developed. The notion of class was a major achievement, but it was often underpinned, and consequently undermined, by naive essentialist theories of human nature which predicated wildly optimistic and premature scenarios of socio-political unity and harmony. Analyses deploying categories of gender and ethnicity have exposed many of the inadequacies of this form of universalism. Even less satisfactory has been the work of the vertical axis. Many socialists have assumed a universal time, a shared temporal space, in which a universal or ‘rational’ discourse can flourish. Ernst Bloch has been a notable critic of this type of approach, with his claim that ‘not all people exist in the same Now’,’ and his trenchant analysis of ‘noncontemporaneity’. Alternative ideologies, notably conservatism, nationalism and-for a while at least-fascism were much more successful in utilising these two axes. There are good historical reasons for the universalist temptation in early socialism. Intellectual, political and technological rationalism seemed to be at the forefront of the battle against the old order. The fog of obscurantism and ignorance, the division of privilege, the drag of outmoded institutions were to be replaced by, and with, an enlightened, united humanity. To some extent it was the enemy who determined the mode of its opponents’attack. As Terry Eagleton has noted: ‘If the given social order defends itself in Burkeian fashion through ‘culture’-through a plea for the values and affections richly implicit in national tradition-it will tend to provoke an abrasive rationalism from the political left’.* In so far as socialists succumbed to this temptation, the strengths of their opponents were obscured. Owenite socialism brought to Ireland a theoretical basis too weak to support its lofty ambitions.3 Owen himself lectured to the Irish gentry in 1823. Invited in the midst of a major rural crisis, he spoke of environmental determinism, without displaying the slightest grasp of the complexities of the Irish environment. Ireland was distinctive for Owen only in terms of its degree of ignorance and unhappiness, which could be removed by elite social engineering. The period of ‘elite socialism’ associated with this type of approach generated isolated and limited experiments.4 The emergence of an Owenite ‘artisan socialism’ in the Dublin of the early 1840s revealed the utter inadequacy of Owensim. The simple dualism of ignorance versus knowledge was no match for the deeply rooted nationalism of O’Connellism and the socialists were hounded from the streets of the capital. Later in the 1840.5, Irish socialism developed a more sensitive approach to nationalism, but in this case the problems of particularism manifested themselves.
National Past. Socialist Future
295
Particularist problems arise from the laudable desire of some socialists to ground their ideology in the actual experience of people, in the real sources of value and belief, in the messy diversity of empirical existence, and without recourse to unilinear, abstract, universalist models of the individual and society. The resulting problems include: co-option, where socialist values are submerged into, and neutralised by, stronger identities and ideologies; incompatibility, where socialism is unable to meld with other identities, due to deep differences, and remains an alien, dissonant partner; divisiveness-socialism succeeds in establishing major linkages but does so at the price of alienating significant minorities; marginality-socialism finds itself linked with a minority. These kind of problems haunt the first attempt in Irish history to combine socialism and nationalism. In 1849 and 1850, in the wake of the Famine, and the defeat of insurrectionary nationalism, the Irish Democratic Association and its newspaper, The Irishman, produced a synthesis which could plausibly claim to be the earliest ancestor of Irish socialist republicanism. The central claim was that Ireland required both independence from Britain and a social revolution. Independence without socialism would be an illusion, and socialism was not possible without national separation. The brief life of this movement demonstrated the particularist problems which were to bedevil Irish socialist republicanism-and indeed still do. The dangers of co-option were ever-present. Compared with Owenite artisan socialism, which never gained more than a mere handful of activists and supporters, the Irish Democratic Association attracted large numbers to branch and public meetings. This popularity owed far more to the nationalist dimension of the organisation, however, than it did to socialism. The large meetings more often echoed to the call for the return of the exiled martyrs than it did to the call for socialism. The spectres of incompatibility and divisiveness were also present. At the ideological level, the problems of distinguishing and reconciling ‘class’ and ‘nation’ are apparent. On some occasions a strict class analysis ruled out any help from the possessing classes; at other times members of all classes were seen as potential backers of the national struggle. ‘Orangemen’ were sometimes deemed ‘volunteer mercenaries of an alien tyranny’, only to be described elsewhere as ‘Orange brothers’, part of the project of uniting ‘men of every class and religious persuasion in the resuscitation of our common country’. The analysis also raises the possibility of an alternative, marginal synthesis of unionism and socialism, or of unionism with something worse. Our second case study is the conflict between two late nineteenth-century socialist utopian works: Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and William Morris’s News from Nowhere.5 Bellamy’s work, the earlier of the two, displays many of the features of universalism, both in terms of construction and reception. The text itself contains a radical and self-conscious rejection of history and memory. The new world envisaged by Bellamy constantly stresses its novelty. The old corrupt world has been left far behind. The hold of history has been destroyed, the new people resolutely face forward. The one major exception to this rejection of the past is the absorption from the old society of a highly centralised administrative and industrial complex. This reveals the deeper level of continuity underlying the trumpeted discontinuity between past and present. The move from old to new is
296
Vincent Geoghegan
portrayed as a smooth, seamless transition. In this conception, the past is in no way stimulating, shocking or threatening to the new society. The past is thus neatly packaged and disposed of. Thus the past in LookingBackwardis both very different and reassuringly familiar. Furthermore, Bellamy entrusts his chief protagonist in the tale with the task of overcoming memory. This character, a product of the old world cast into the new, finds salvation by transcending his personal memories. He is literally saved from his past, and is thus at one with the broader social consciousness. Bellamy’s work is a classic universalist fantasy. Its attack on the past is an attempt to sever humanity from its historical determinants. It elevates the new being, rational, universal, forward-looking. Historical particularities, be they social, political or cultural, are seen as a potential drag on the new nature, pulling it down into the mire of division and irrationality. As such it had an undoubted, but ultimately limited constitutency. It struck a chord in both American and Europe and sold immensely well. Part of its appeal to European socialists lay in its partial filling of the vacuum created by Marxism, which spoke of transformation, but whose confused stance on ‘utopianism’ prevented it from addressing itself adequately to the nature of that transformation. Unfortunately such universalism thinks it has overcome the past, but has in fact blinded itself to positive aspects of the past, and chained itself to negative ones. Its boundless optimism is based on ill-considered history. Anti-modern, historicist forms of right-wing radicalism colonised the abandoned space. The various currents which fed into fascism could pick at will amongst the abandoned material of history. As Bloch noted of this tendency within Marxism: ‘when . . . vulgar Marxism had forgotten the inheritance of the German Peasant Wars and of German philosophy, the Nazis streamed into the vacated, originally Mtinzerian regions’.6 Dystopian writers such as Huxley, Orwell and Zamyatin realised that the modern autocratic state feared the liberating values of the past and sought to control all access to it, by deriding and destroying history, and circumscribing memory: ‘History is bunk’ says Ford, in Brave New World. Morris’s News From Nowhere was written as a rejoinder to Looking Backward. This is usually portrayed as the Englishman’s rejection of the regimentation and centralisation in the American’s vision. Whilst it is undoubtedly the case that Morris was repelled by these aspects, the deeper level of contestation is on the terrain of history and memory. Though Morris, like Bellamy, points to the novelty of the new world, he significantly obliterates the essential line of continuity between capitalism and socialism which so emphatically characterised Bellamy’s work. The comforting familiarity is gone-a much greater root-andbranch transformation has occurred. Thus, whereas Bellamy’s newpeople have a complacent, uncreative approach to their past, Morris describes a society with a nuanced, creative sense of history. In particular the inhabitants of Morris’s new society lack a comprehension of, and empathy towards, the utterly alien ways of the capitalist past, but do display a sympathetic understanding of earlier, more authentic, periods. The philosophy of history which underpins this conception draws on two elements: firstly, a reworking of that Second International commonplace-the Engelsian hypothesis of the return of primitive communism at a higher level in future communist society; and secondly, a grafting of this
National Past, Socialist Future
297
‘revivalism’ on to a medievalism which long predated Morris’s turn to socialism. Three main forms of the return of the past can be observed in the new world of News From Nowhere. First there is a selective treasuring of the past: whereas most of the ugly buildings of capitalism have been pulled down, for example, the architectural heritage of olden days is lovingly preserved, and fourteenth-century buildings are particularly praised. Secondly, there is a parallel revival of the best values of earlier ages: the people of the new age naturally produce beautiful things which suggest the best of other ages and societies, but which do not slavishly copy them. A final form involves the championing of Bellamy’s other fear, memory, in combination with history. Morris posits an ingression at both the individual and societal level of child-like qualities, and draws a parallel between individual and social childhood. Projecting his own childhood memories, and validating the use of such memories, he develops the notion that communism is in some respects a second childhood of humanity. Morris saw the crucial importance of historical grounding. He realised the dangers of simplistic, linear theories of history and biography. He recognised the values embodied in specific historical cultures and personal memories, and realised that these had not been exhausted. His problems lie in the realm of particularism. Whilst Morris’s vision did gain a following, this was sociologically, numerically and ideologically limited. In particular it failed to generate that goal of many late nineteenth-century socialists-an extensive and deep socialist culture. As Chris Waters has shown with respect to the Clarion Handicraft Guild, a body influenced by Morris’s ideas, membership was confined to the skilled working class, the lower middle class and professional craftsmen, and the aesthetic tended to submerge the political.’ The immensely complicated structural and ideological factors governing British working class responses at the end of the nineteenth century would always have made the establishment of a socialist culture extremely difficult; as it was, socialists were signally unsuccessful in reading these realities. Morris, to his credit, correctly realised the importance of historical traditions to the working class, but, as Ross McKibbin has pointed out: empirically this class history revolved round notions of crown, parliament and nationality. This in turn allowed Iabourist responses to emerge but made far less likely the socialism of Morris. The sheer, uncompromising specificity of his vision was clearly problematic. The historical tradition he invoked not merely possessed a quirky subjectivity (witness his dismissal of all neo-classical art, including Wren’s masterpeice St Paul’s) but was dissonant with the lived experience of the vast majority of his revolutionary agency-the British working class. Marginal, even in an English context, his vision was so enmeshed in the specifics of the English past and culture, that it was in grave danger of seeming parochial to people from other traditions. Bellamy’s vision, on the other hand, which bore fewer overt marks of its specific birth, would, by its very abstractness, command a wider (if never wide enough) audience, According to Terry Eagleton, ‘it is part of the embarrassment of bourgeois ideology that it has never been able to reconcile.. . the particular and the universal’.9 The same, alas, could be said of socialism! Hegel’s sophisticated attempt to reconcile the two recognised that the natural immediacy of the family
Vinten t Geoghegan
298
was in a dialectical relationship with the egoism of civil society. Socialists have all too readily universalised an undoubtedly correct perception that individuals in their most intimate and meaningful relationships favour altruism and cooperation. In the nineteenth century, for example, the pious rationality this entailed (rational recreation, temperance, puritanism, ‘respectability’ etc.) was one-sided since it ignored the equally important needs of excitement, competition, etc. As McKibbin demonstrates, part of the explanation of why gambling was so popular amongst the working class in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was because it endowed ‘working men and women with intellectual initiative and spontaneity’ and ‘it allowed physical and emotional excitement’.‘O Eagleton’s reference is to Marx’s analysis, notably in On the Jewish Question, of the flawed attempt of bourgeois ideology to reconcile the irreconcilable elements of bourgeois society. The capitalist utopia of citizenship offers the formal equality absent from real relationships. In the sphere of universalism, socialism also has deployed illusion. There are the utopias of the ‘final push’, which maintains that either objective conditions will so change that the stubborn particularity will act according to plan, or that enlightened leadership, be it Owenite or Leninist, will transform the revolutionary subject through reeducation. There is the formal utopia a la Bellamy where the hardness of particularity is made malleable by an act of naive imagination. There is also the utopia of ‘actually existing socialism’, where the party/state proclaims the unity of universal and particular, but where, graphically illustrated by Yugoslavia and the U.S.S.R., real particularity, in the form, for example, of the complex dynamics of nationalism, festers away beneath. In the realm of particularism, on the other hand, grounding in the particular is at the expense of the universal, be it the nationalist co-option of socialism in Ireland, or the marginality of a radicalised ‘Merrie England’ in late nineteenth-century Britain. Vincent Geoghegan Queen’s University, Belfast
NOTES 1. E. Bloch, Heritage of Our Times (Oxford, 1991), p. 97. 2. T. Eagleton, The ZdeoIogy of the Aesthetic (Oxford, 1990), p. 26. 3. See Geoghegan, ‘The Emergence and Submergence of Irish Socialism 1821-1851’, in G. Boyce, R. Eccleshall and V. Geoghegan (eds), Political Thought in Irelandsince the Seventeenth Century (London, 1993). 4. See Geoghegan, ‘Ralahine: An Irish Owenite Community 1831-1833’, International Review of Social History, 3, 1991. 5. I give a more extensive account of this matter in Geoghegan, ‘The Utopian Past: Memory and History in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and William Morris’s News From Nowhere’, Utopian Studies, 3 (2), 1992. 6. Bloch, Heritage, pp. 139-140. 7. C. Waters, British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture 1884-1914 (Manchester, 1990), pp. 173-74. 8. R. McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class (Oxford, 1991).
National
Past, Socialist Future
299
9. T. Eagleton, ‘Nationalism: Irony and Commitment’ in T. Eagleton, F. Jameson and E. Said (eds), Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature (Minneapolis, 1990), p. 3 1. 10. McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class, pp. 123,244: on rational recreation and related themes see Waters, British Socialists.
History of European Ideas, Vol. 19, Nos 1-3, pp. 293-299, 1994 Copyright @ 1994 Elscvier ScienceLtd Printedin Great Britain. All rights reserved 0191-6599/94 $7.00+ 0.00
NATIONAL PAST, SOCIALIST
FUTURE
VINCENT GEOGHEGAN*
I would like to address the question of ‘the end of socialism’ by looking at the early historical experience of the ideology. In particular I want to discuss a cluster of problems associated with the relationship between socialism and pre-existing national identities. The term ‘national identities’ will not simply refer to that sense of nationality so successfully cultivated by nationalism, but to a whole range of identities-class, religion, gender, etc.-which emerged in the modern era of the nation-state. The problems can conveniently be divided into those of universalism and those of particularism. Universalist problems flow from the elements of socialism which stress rationality and essentialism, where ‘lived experience’ and specificity are possible casualties; particularist problems, on the other hand, include the co-option, divisiveness and marginality which can result from emphasis on the experiential and the distinctive. Universalism and particularism are, of course, to be distinguished from the universal and the particular, the unity of which remains the goal of any credible social theory. Although the universal and the particular traditionally form a dualism in the history of philosophy, theproblems of universalism and particularism should not be so viewed. Universalist problems are replete with theoretical error, social insensitivity, imaginative failure and sheer hubris, whilst particularist problems, although not always lacking these negative elements, are much more the result of the complex, frequently hostile political and social field in which socialism has found itself. Historical context is also clearly vital in the precise pattern of the emergence of these problems-the universalist temptation, for example, will be especially alluring in times and places where the specific and the distinctive (in conservative notions of ‘national tradition’, for example) have ideological hegemony. Furthermore the paper is not neutral: it is sympathetic to the impulses underpinning the particularist set of problems, since it is this dimension which has been dangerously understated in the history of socialism. In so far as there is a conclusion, it is to suggest a slightly tongue in cheek alternative question to the ‘end of socialism?‘, namely in what real sense can we speak of socialism ever beginning? Universalist and particularist problems have beset the ideology from its earliest phases. To illustrate this, and also to provide a focus for the broader discussion, two historical case studies will be presented: the attempt to introduce socialism into Ireland in the first half of the nineteenth century; and the conflict between two socialist utopian works, those of William Morris and Edward Bellamy, at the end of that century. In the Irish example, the failure of Owenism to engage with national identities left it virtually defenceless against O’Connellite *Queen’s
University, Belfast, Northern Ireland BT7 INN, U.K. 293
294
Vincent Geoghegan
nationalism, whilst a subsequent attempt to meld socialism with nationalism effectively submerged the former in the latter. In the case of the battle of the utopias, Bellamy’s Looking Backward gained a wide but ultimately narrow following by abandoning memory and history, while Morris’s re-injection of these dimensions into News from Nowhere lent itself to parochialism. Universalist problems have emerged in the wake of the undoubted need for socialism to establish general legitimacy, characterised by a desire to show that socialism can transcend mere sectional interest and embody the universal needs and aspirations of humanity. Historically, universalism in socialism has inadequately theorised the horizontal and vertical axes of social life. Work on the horizontal axis has been most developed. The notion of class was a major achievement, but it was often underpinned, and consequently undermined, by naive essentialist theories of human nature which predicated wildly optimistic and premature scenarios of socio-political unity and harmony. Analyses deploying categories of gender and ethnicity have exposed many of the inadequacies of this form of universalism. Even less satisfactory has been the work of the vertical axis. Many socialists have assumed a universal time, a shared temporal space, in which a universal or ‘rational’ discourse can flourish. Ernst Bloch has been a notable critic of this type of approach, with his claim that ‘not all people exist in the same Now’,’ and his trenchant analysis of ‘noncontemporaneity’. Alternative ideologies, notably conservatism, nationalism and-for a while at least-fascism were much more successful in utilising these two axes. There are good historical reasons for the universalist temptation in early socialism. Intellectual, political and technological rationalism seemed to be at the forefront of the battle against the old order. The fog of obscurantism and ignorance, the division of privilege, the drag of outmoded institutions were to be replaced by, and with, an enlightened, united humanity. To some extent it was the enemy who determined the mode of its opponents’attack. As Terry Eagleton has noted: ‘If the given social order defends itself in Burkeian fashion through ‘culture’-through a plea for the values and affections richly implicit in national tradition-it will tend to provoke an abrasive rationalism from the political left’.* In so far as socialists succumbed to this temptation, the strengths of their opponents were obscured. Owenite socialism brought to Ireland a theoretical basis too weak to support its lofty ambitions.3 Owen himself lectured to the Irish gentry in 1823. Invited in the midst of a major rural crisis, he spoke of environmental determinism, without displaying the slightest grasp of the complexities of the Irish environment. Ireland was distinctive for Owen only in terms of its degree of ignorance and unhappiness, which could be removed by elite social engineering. The period of ‘elite socialism’ associated with this type of approach generated isolated and limited experiments.4 The emergence of an Owenite ‘artisan socialism’ in the Dublin of the early 1840s revealed the utter inadequacy of Owensim. The simple dualism of ignorance versus knowledge was no match for the deeply rooted nationalism of O’Connellism and the socialists were hounded from the streets of the capital. Later in the 1840.5, Irish socialism developed a more sensitive approach to nationalism, but in this case the problems of particularism manifested themselves.
National Past. Socialist Future
295
Particularist problems arise from the laudable desire of some socialists to ground their ideology in the actual experience of people, in the real sources of value and belief, in the messy diversity of empirical existence, and without recourse to unilinear, abstract, universalist models of the individual and society. The resulting problems include: co-option, where socialist values are submerged into, and neutralised by, stronger identities and ideologies; incompatibility, where socialism is unable to meld with other identities, due to deep differences, and remains an alien, dissonant partner; divisiveness-socialism succeeds in establishing major linkages but does so at the price of alienating significant minorities; marginality-socialism finds itself linked with a minority. These kind of problems haunt the first attempt in Irish history to combine socialism and nationalism. In 1849 and 1850, in the wake of the Famine, and the defeat of insurrectionary nationalism, the Irish Democratic Association and its newspaper, The Irishman, produced a synthesis which could plausibly claim to be the earliest ancestor of Irish socialist republicanism. The central claim was that Ireland required both independence from Britain and a social revolution. Independence without socialism would be an illusion, and socialism was not possible without national separation. The brief life of this movement demonstrated the particularist problems which were to bedevil Irish socialist republicanism-and indeed still do. The dangers of co-option were ever-present. Compared with Owenite artisan socialism, which never gained more than a mere handful of activists and supporters, the Irish Democratic Association attracted large numbers to branch and public meetings. This popularity owed far more to the nationalist dimension of the organisation, however, than it did to socialism. The large meetings more often echoed to the call for the return of the exiled martyrs than it did to the call for socialism. The spectres of incompatibility and divisiveness were also present. At the ideological level, the problems of distinguishing and reconciling ‘class’ and ‘nation’ are apparent. On some occasions a strict class analysis ruled out any help from the possessing classes; at other times members of all classes were seen as potential backers of the national struggle. ‘Orangemen’ were sometimes deemed ‘volunteer mercenaries of an alien tyranny’, only to be described elsewhere as ‘Orange brothers’, part of the project of uniting ‘men of every class and religious persuasion in the resuscitation of our common country’. The analysis also raises the possibility of an alternative, marginal synthesis of unionism and socialism, or of unionism with something worse. Our second case study is the conflict between two late nineteenth-century socialist utopian works: Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and William Morris’s News from Nowhere.5 Bellamy’s work, the earlier of the two, displays many of the features of universalism, both in terms of construction and reception. The text itself contains a radical and self-conscious rejection of history and memory. The new world envisaged by Bellamy constantly stresses its novelty. The old corrupt world has been left far behind. The hold of history has been destroyed, the new people resolutely face forward. The one major exception to this rejection of the past is the absorption from the old society of a highly centralised administrative and industrial complex. This reveals the deeper level of continuity underlying the trumpeted discontinuity between past and present. The move from old to new is
296
Vincent Geoghegan
portrayed as a smooth, seamless transition. In this conception, the past is in no way stimulating, shocking or threatening to the new society. The past is thus neatly packaged and disposed of. Thus the past in LookingBackwardis both very different and reassuringly familiar. Furthermore, Bellamy entrusts his chief protagonist in the tale with the task of overcoming memory. This character, a product of the old world cast into the new, finds salvation by transcending his personal memories. He is literally saved from his past, and is thus at one with the broader social consciousness. Bellamy’s work is a classic universalist fantasy. Its attack on the past is an attempt to sever humanity from its historical determinants. It elevates the new being, rational, universal, forward-looking. Historical particularities, be they social, political or cultural, are seen as a potential drag on the new nature, pulling it down into the mire of division and irrationality. As such it had an undoubted, but ultimately limited constitutency. It struck a chord in both American and Europe and sold immensely well. Part of its appeal to European socialists lay in its partial filling of the vacuum created by Marxism, which spoke of transformation, but whose confused stance on ‘utopianism’ prevented it from addressing itself adequately to the nature of that transformation. Unfortunately such universalism thinks it has overcome the past, but has in fact blinded itself to positive aspects of the past, and chained itself to negative ones. Its boundless optimism is based on ill-considered history. Anti-modern, historicist forms of right-wing radicalism colonised the abandoned space. The various currents which fed into fascism could pick at will amongst the abandoned material of history. As Bloch noted of this tendency within Marxism: ‘when . . . vulgar Marxism had forgotten the inheritance of the German Peasant Wars and of German philosophy, the Nazis streamed into the vacated, originally Mtinzerian regions’.6 Dystopian writers such as Huxley, Orwell and Zamyatin realised that the modern autocratic state feared the liberating values of the past and sought to control all access to it, by deriding and destroying history, and circumscribing memory: ‘History is bunk’ says Ford, in Brave New World. Morris’s News From Nowhere was written as a rejoinder to Looking Backward. This is usually portrayed as the Englishman’s rejection of the regimentation and centralisation in the American’s vision. Whilst it is undoubtedly the case that Morris was repelled by these aspects, the deeper level of contestation is on the terrain of history and memory. Though Morris, like Bellamy, points to the novelty of the new world, he significantly obliterates the essential line of continuity between capitalism and socialism which so emphatically characterised Bellamy’s work. The comforting familiarity is gone-a much greater root-andbranch transformation has occurred. Thus, whereas Bellamy’s newpeople have a complacent, uncreative approach to their past, Morris describes a society with a nuanced, creative sense of history. In particular the inhabitants of Morris’s new society lack a comprehension of, and empathy towards, the utterly alien ways of the capitalist past, but do display a sympathetic understanding of earlier, more authentic, periods. The philosophy of history which underpins this conception draws on two elements: firstly, a reworking of that Second International commonplace-the Engelsian hypothesis of the return of primitive communism at a higher level in future communist society; and secondly, a grafting of this
National Past, Socialist Future
297
‘revivalism’ on to a medievalism which long predated Morris’s turn to socialism. Three main forms of the return of the past can be observed in the new world of News From Nowhere. First there is a selective treasuring of the past: whereas most of the ugly buildings of capitalism have been pulled down, for example, the architectural heritage of olden days is lovingly preserved, and fourteenth-century buildings are particularly praised. Secondly, there is a parallel revival of the best values of earlier ages: the people of the new age naturally produce beautiful things which suggest the best of other ages and societies, but which do not slavishly copy them. A final form involves the championing of Bellamy’s other fear, memory, in combination with history. Morris posits an ingression at both the individual and societal level of child-like qualities, and draws a parallel between individual and social childhood. Projecting his own childhood memories, and validating the use of such memories, he develops the notion that communism is in some respects a second childhood of humanity. Morris saw the crucial importance of historical grounding. He realised the dangers of simplistic, linear theories of history and biography. He recognised the values embodied in specific historical cultures and personal memories, and realised that these had not been exhausted. His problems lie in the realm of particularism. Whilst Morris’s vision did gain a following, this was sociologically, numerically and ideologically limited. In particular it failed to generate that goal of many late nineteenth-century socialists-an extensive and deep socialist culture. As Chris Waters has shown with respect to the Clarion Handicraft Guild, a body influenced by Morris’s ideas, membership was confined to the skilled working class, the lower middle class and professional craftsmen, and the aesthetic tended to submerge the political.’ The immensely complicated structural and ideological factors governing British working class responses at the end of the nineteenth century would always have made the establishment of a socialist culture extremely difficult; as it was, socialists were signally unsuccessful in reading these realities. Morris, to his credit, correctly realised the importance of historical traditions to the working class, but, as Ross McKibbin has pointed out: empirically this class history revolved round notions of crown, parliament and nationality. This in turn allowed Iabourist responses to emerge but made far less likely the socialism of Morris. The sheer, uncompromising specificity of his vision was clearly problematic. The historical tradition he invoked not merely possessed a quirky subjectivity (witness his dismissal of all neo-classical art, including Wren’s masterpeice St Paul’s) but was dissonant with the lived experience of the vast majority of his revolutionary agency-the British working class. Marginal, even in an English context, his vision was so enmeshed in the specifics of the English past and culture, that it was in grave danger of seeming parochial to people from other traditions. Bellamy’s vision, on the other hand, which bore fewer overt marks of its specific birth, would, by its very abstractness, command a wider (if never wide enough) audience, According to Terry Eagleton, ‘it is part of the embarrassment of bourgeois ideology that it has never been able to reconcile.. . the particular and the universal’.9 The same, alas, could be said of socialism! Hegel’s sophisticated attempt to reconcile the two recognised that the natural immediacy of the family
Vinten t Geoghegan
298
was in a dialectical relationship with the egoism of civil society. Socialists have all too readily universalised an undoubtedly correct perception that individuals in their most intimate and meaningful relationships favour altruism and cooperation. In the nineteenth century, for example, the pious rationality this entailed (rational recreation, temperance, puritanism, ‘respectability’ etc.) was one-sided since it ignored the equally important needs of excitement, competition, etc. As McKibbin demonstrates, part of the explanation of why gambling was so popular amongst the working class in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was because it endowed ‘working men and women with intellectual initiative and spontaneity’ and ‘it allowed physical and emotional excitement’.‘O Eagleton’s reference is to Marx’s analysis, notably in On the Jewish Question, of the flawed attempt of bourgeois ideology to reconcile the irreconcilable elements of bourgeois society. The capitalist utopia of citizenship offers the formal equality absent from real relationships. In the sphere of universalism, socialism also has deployed illusion. There are the utopias of the ‘final push’, which maintains that either objective conditions will so change that the stubborn particularity will act according to plan, or that enlightened leadership, be it Owenite or Leninist, will transform the revolutionary subject through reeducation. There is the formal utopia a la Bellamy where the hardness of particularity is made malleable by an act of naive imagination. There is also the utopia of ‘actually existing socialism’, where the party/state proclaims the unity of universal and particular, but where, graphically illustrated by Yugoslavia and the U.S.S.R., real particularity, in the form, for example, of the complex dynamics of nationalism, festers away beneath. In the realm of particularism, on the other hand, grounding in the particular is at the expense of the universal, be it the nationalist co-option of socialism in Ireland, or the marginality of a radicalised ‘Merrie England’ in late nineteenth-century Britain. Vincent Geoghegan Queen’s University, Belfast
NOTES 1. E. Bloch, Heritage of Our Times (Oxford, 1991), p. 97. 2. T. Eagleton, The ZdeoIogy of the Aesthetic (Oxford, 1990), p. 26. 3. See Geoghegan, ‘The Emergence and Submergence of Irish Socialism 1821-1851’, in G. Boyce, R. Eccleshall and V. Geoghegan (eds), Political Thought in Irelandsince the Seventeenth Century (London, 1993). 4. See Geoghegan, ‘Ralahine: An Irish Owenite Community 1831-1833’, International Review of Social History, 3, 1991. 5. I give a more extensive account of this matter in Geoghegan, ‘The Utopian Past: Memory and History in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and William Morris’s News From Nowhere’, Utopian Studies, 3 (2), 1992. 6. Bloch, Heritage, pp. 139-140. 7. C. Waters, British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture 1884-1914 (Manchester, 1990), pp. 173-74. 8. R. McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class (Oxford, 1991).
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9. T. Eagleton, ‘Nationalism: Irony and Commitment’ in T. Eagleton, F. Jameson and E. Said (eds), Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature (Minneapolis, 1990), p. 3 1. 10. McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class, pp. 123,244: on rational recreation and related themes see Waters, British Socialists.