Envisioning Power. Eric R. Wolf
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but constituted “a spiritual driving force” (Verburg 1974, 215). Subsequently, as Prussian minister of education, Humboldt channeled the German educational system into Bildung, the schooling of the academically educated elites toward a neo-humanist revival of the classics, including studies in philology and psychology. As the nineteenth century grew ever more nationalist, this fusion of disciplines equipped German nationalists with a new “spiritual” weapon to combat materialism. It also produced a new science of ethnic psychology (Völkerpsychologie), which strove to demonstrate that “the Volksgeist was the unifying psychological essence shared by all members of a Volk and the driving force of its historical trajectory” (Bunzl 1996, 28). This echoed, a half-century later, Destutt de Tracy’s project to establish a science of human ideas, yet it transformed that science from a universal project of humankind into a psychology of national identities.
“Culture” stems from this orbit of German usage. The term was originally processual, being drawn from “cultivation,” or agriculture, and then applied to cultura animi, the cultivation of young minds to aspire to adult ideals. In this later sense it came into Germany in the seventeenth century. There in the eighteenth century its meaning was extended from the development of individuals to include cultivation of the moral and intellectual capacities of nations and humankind (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952, 18–23), The shift in emphasis from “culture” as cultivation to culture as the basic assumptions and guiding aspirations of an entire collectivity—a whole people, a folk, a nation—probably occurred only in the course of the nineteenth century, under the promptings of an intensifying nationalism. Then each people, with its characteristic culture, came to be understood as possessing a mode of perceiving and conceptualizing the world all of its own. For a time ethnologists modified this view by insisting that the components of any one culture were rarely homegrown but rather were assembled over time from many sources and articulated in diverse ways. Yet increasingly, the question of what made the sum of these culture traits cohere was answered by claiming that the aggregates of culture traits from hither and yon were worked into a common totality by the unifying “spirit” manifest in each particular people and in that people alone. Fortified by that inner unity, each separate and distinctive people could resist the universalizing claims of enlightened Reason.
The concept of “society” was transformed in similar fashion. In the first flush of the Enlightenment, people imagined that a new “civil society” would pack off kings and emperors into exile, disband the royally protected social and political corporations, and disassemble the hierarchical arrangements of precedence and privilege. Yet as revolution after revolution leveled gradations and perquisites of rank in one country after another, many began to ask where this process of decomposition would stop and how any kind of integral social order could be restored. How were citizens, now stripped of the robes of status and expelled into the faceless crowd, ever to regain a stake in the new arrangements, a sense of belonging, a foothold in secure and collectively shared values? The search for answers prompted the development of sociology, conceived as a new science able to provide “an antidote against the poison of social disintegration” (Rudolf Heberle, in Bramson 1961, 12). Perhaps social order could once again be stabilized by building up face-to-face social interaction and association in primary groups and by reinforcing these linkages through appeal to common values.
Marx and Engels
This vision of society was challenged from the 1830s on by two kindred spirits from Germany: Karl Marx, a journalist from the Rhineland, and Friedrich Engels, the scion of a family of textile entrepreneurs from Westphalia. They combined in a new way the intellectual tradition of the Enlightenment with critiques of the dissolution of institutional ties, as advanced by conservatives (Bramson 1961, 21). The two friends followed the Enlightenment in the conviction that reason could unmask falsehood and proclaim truth. They believed that employing reason would help uncover the sources of human misery, which—like many conservatives of their time—they located in the emergence of individuals disconnected from any web of mutual rights and obligations through the breakdown of older communal ways of life. They further held that humans could reach a greater realm of freedom through reliance on their own efforts, including the use of reason, without invoking the consolations of religion. They did not think, however, that such a transformation could be accomplished by the force of ideas alone, or that the envisioned change would come about by spreading truthful ideas through education. They insisted that human life was shaped not by the workings of the “Spirit” embodied in reason but through production: human practice in transforming nature to answer human needs, by means of tools, organization, and the employment of “practical reason.” Practice does not merely contemplate and observe the world; it works to alter the world, using reason to further the process and evaluate its results.
Marx and Engels were convinced, moreover, that the prevalence of misery and untruth among humans was due neither to original sin nor inherent human incapacity but to a class society with a social system that severed people from communities and interdicted their access to resources. Under these circumstances, the dispossessed were forced to hire themselves out to members of another class who benefited from this transfer of labor, and who developed rationalizations purporting to explain why this state of affairs was to the advantage of possessors and dispossessed alike. Marx and Engels were to call these rationalizations “ideology.”
By the time they adopted the term, “ideology” had lost the initial meaning of a “natural history” or “science” of ideas that Destutt de Tracy had bestowed on it and had come to mean thought formulated to serve some particular social interest. In 1844–1845, in Paris, Marx took notes on Destutt de Tracy, as well as on the materialists of the radical Enlightenment Paul d’Holbach and Claude Helvetius (Barth 1974, 74, 303). At this time he also noted that “ideology” had been transformed from a positive term into one of denunciation.
Marx and Engels adopted this reformulated concept of “ideology” and connected it with their own analysis of capitalist class society. The term “class” to denote a segment of society was then also new in English usage. It derived from the Latin classics of antiquity, where it designated classes of draftees in the call to arms (Quine 1987, 23). In English usage it first meant a cohort in school. Yet references to “lower classes” appeared in England in 1772; “higher classes” and “middle” or “middling classes” followed in the 1790s; and “working classes” appeared in about 1815 (Williams 1959, xiii). Equivalent terms became popular in France in the 1830s (Hobsbawm 1962, 209). A song called “La Proletarienne” appeared there in 1833, together with a call to arms—“Aux armes, Proletaire” (Sewell 1980, 214). By 1837 Marx was writing to his father about the proletariat “as the idea in the real itself” (Bottomore 1983, 74). In 1845 Engels published The Condition of the Working Class in England (1971), based on two years of experience in Manchester, and in 1845–1846 the two together wrote The German Ideology (“abandoned to the criticism of the mice” and not published until 1932) (Marx and Engels 1976), in which they addressed both their political economic theory of the working class and the issue of ideology. In that work they also formulated their view that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force” (in Sayer 1989, 6).
In this initial axiomatic statement on ideology, Marx and Engels followed the promptings of the Enlightenment to interpret the “ruling ideas” as forms of “interested error,” presented as ostensible truths intended to mystify the people about social reality and thus wielded as instruments of domination over hearts and minds. Unlike other Enlightenment thinkers, however, they did not ascribe this form of “interested error” either to the workings of a universal human nature or to agents of darkness trying to exploit it. For them humans were “corporeal, living, real, sensuous, objective beings,” able to acquire real knowledge of the world by acting upon it, even if by that same token they were also “suffering, limited, and conditioned” creatures (Marx 1844, in Ollman 1976, 78, 80). Mastery of the world through labor, together with the capacity for language developed in the course of laboring together with their fellows, would multiply human knowledge and expand the human grasp upon the world. Practical engagement with the world would produce realistic thought and an “increasing clarity of consciousness, power of abstraction and of judgement” (Engels 1972, 255) while