Table Of ContentAN INTRODUCTION TO MODERN SOCIAL
AND POLITICAL THOUGHT
AN INTRODUCTION TO
MODERN SOCIAL AND
POLITICAL THOUGHT
ANDREW GAMBLE
* © Andrew Gamble 1981
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of
this publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or
transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with
the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988,
or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying
issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court
Road, London WIP 9HE.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this
publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil
claims for damages.
First published 1981 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire R021 6XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
ISBN 978-0-333-27029-5 ISBN 978-1-349-16615-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-16615-2
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
Contents
Preface VII
1 The world and the West 1
1 The meaning of the West and the Western tradition 1
2 The coming of world history 5
3 Western social and political thought 8
4 The Western ideology 12
5 Conclusion 16
2 The state and civil society 22
1 The idea of revolution 22
2 The bourgeois revolution 26
3 The Industrial Revolution 31
4 The origins of capitalism 34
5 The state of nature 41
6 Political economy 45
7 The idea of the state 47
8 Sovereignty 49
9 State and civil society 54
10 The new technology 57
11 The new cosmology 58
12 The new philosophy 60
13 Science and the intellectuals 63
3 Liberalism 66
1 The political revolutions 66
2 The constitutional state 75
3 The theory of popular sovereignty 87
4 The state as an ethical idea 94
5 Conclusion 98
4 Socialism 100
1 The unfinished revolution 100
2 The reaction to laissez-faire 104
3 Rationalism 106
4 Libertarianism 109
5 The origins of Marxism 110
6 The production of commodities 118
7 Accumulation 124
5 Politics and industrial society I:
The national question 130
1 Introduction 130
2 Nationalism 132
3 The anti-Enlightenment 137
4 Gemeinschaft 146
6 Politics and industrial society II:
The social question 151
A NATIONAL LIBERALISM
1 The rise of modern industry 151
2 Order and liberty 154
3 Democracy 160
4 Stratification and elites 168
B SOCIAL DEMOCRACY
5 The new liberals 173
6 Anomie 176
7 The anarchy and waste of
capitalist production 178
8 Equality 181
7 Politics and industrial society III:
The spectre of revolution 186
1 The Russian Revolution 186
2 Engels and the Second International 188
3 Leninism 197
4 Western Marxism 209
5 Conclusion 215
8 Conclusion 218
Guide to further reading 232
Biographies 238
Glossary 254
Index 262
Preface
This book is intended as an introduction to Western social
and political thought in the modem period, and particularly
since the French Revolution. The material that could be
included in such a sUIVey is vast, the need for selection great,
and I am conscious that much that is important has had to be
omitted, and that it has scarcely been possible to deal ade
quately with the thinkers and the theories that appear in the
text. The aim of the book is to encourage all who read it to
read further, both the works of some of the writers discussed
in these pages and the ever-multiplying literature about them.
I have provided a short bibliography which I hope will be
useful for this purpose. Biographical material has mostly been
left out of the text and placed in a separate section at the
end. I have also included a short glossary of some of the more
important terms and concepts used in the book, not in an
attempt to provide final definitions but for reference.
I do not think it possible to stand outside the Western
tradition and pronounce upon its character and its value from
the standpoint of eternity. I have not tried to do so. I have
tried to be objective and accurate in my exposition of differ
ent theories, but the evaluation of them and the selection of
what is important is naturally shaped by the overall approach
I have adopted.
I have enjoyed writing this book and hope it will be reward
ing to read. Many people, teachers, colleagues, and students
of mine have contributed to it, most of them unwittingly. I
give thanks to them all, but especially to Chris and Tom and
Corinna for not complaining too much or too loudly.
1
The world and the West
1 The meaning of the West and the Western tradition
The terms West and Western carry many associations, histori
cal, political, cultural, and geographical. They are often freely
used as though they denoted particular entities, whose reality
is undisputed. But only a little probing is necessary to dis
cover what ambiguities and complexities lurk inside them. To
name only the most obvious, the geographical boundaries of
this 'West' are far from clear. Is it Europe that is intended? In
which case should Russia and Poland be included? Or only
Western Europe? Does Western Europe include Germany, and
Spain, and Greece? And what of Europe overseas, the lands
of predominantly European settlement, particularly the
United States? To limit the term to Europe seems arbitrary
when today the West also denotes a series of military and
political alliances that stretch from North America through
out Europe and the Middle East to] apan and Australia.
Since the geographical definitions can be so confusing,
cultural and ideological definitions are often preferred. Here
the problem is deciding whether there exists a common
'Western' civilisation which can be distinguished from other
civilisations, and whose characteristic features can be obser
ved in many countries. The problem is complicated for us
because we still live in the Western era, the period in which
Western techniques, Western ideas and Western states have
dominated the world as no other civilisation has ever done.
This has encouraged many historians to construct a history
of the West that sees a steady unfolding of Western civilisa
tion over three thousand years from its dual origin in the
Greek and Roman civilisations of classical times and in the
1
2 MODERN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT
religions of the Jews Oudaism and Christianity).
It is an extremely influential history and one that pervades
most accounts of the tradition of Western social and political
thought. One of its most common features is to divide
Western history into three parts - Ancient, Medieval, and
Modern. Ancient history is the classical era up to the fall of
the (western) Roman Empire in the fifth century A.D.
Medieval history is the period that embraces the 'Dark Ages'
after the fall of Rome, when 'barbarians' overran and settled
the former Roman colonies, as well as the history of the
feudal states of Europe up to the end of the fifteenth
century. Modern history covers the period that commences
with the Renaissance and the Reformation in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, then moves through the Scientific
Revolution of the seventeenth century and the Enlighten
ment of the eighteenth century, to culminate in the French
Revolution of 1789 and the English Industrial Revolution
which began in the 1780s. These major events prepare the
ground for the 'European Century', 1815 to 1914, the
century of liberty and progress, during which Western ideas,
techniques, and political rule were spread around the world.
In the twentieth century after two great wars caused a sharp
decline in the status and power and relative wealth of
Europe, the spirit of the West migrates, and the Western
ideology and Western world interests discover a new cham
pion in the United States of America, a nation built upon
European migration, and the first 'new nation' of the modern
world.
The unique path of development taken by the West, which
these histories celebrate, has long been a favourite object of
enquiry for Western thinkers, and there has been no shortage
of attempts to show that the technological and material
superiority of Western states in modern times reflects the
cultural and moral superiority of Western civilisation over all
others. According to some of these epic accounts, Western
civilisation is a unique historical organism which like the
acorn has gradually unfolded all the potentialities contained
within it from the beginning. As many critics have pointed
out, however, such histories assume that the most lasting
values and most important traditions of civilisation have a
special and exclusive connection with Western Europe. They
THE WORLD AND THE WEST 3
have to assert that the values and ideas of classical and
Christian civilisations are preserved and enhanced in modem
industrial civilisation, and indeed that they made this civilisa
tion possible.
Whilst the profound influence of classical and Christian
culture on that of the modern West cannot be ignored, it is a
highly misleading way of looking at the development of the
West and at modern Western thought. It places greater
emphasis on abstract ideas and values, the products of
reflection and contemplation, than on the ideas and purposes
which are embodied in social relationships, the practical ways
in which human beings relate to one another and to their
natural environment. Because intellectual history of the first
type has been so dominant, far too much continuity has
often been ascribed to Western history, so that the important
gaps and breaks are not noticed, and it becomes impossible
to conceive of the process of world development in terms
which are not Western-centred. What also slips from view in
these cultural histories is that the 'West' has no monopoly
even of its own roots. Islam and Russia, both non-Western
civilisations, drew heavily upon classical and Judaic tradi
tions. A Western-centred view of world history too easily
forgets that the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth cen
tury, hailed so often as one of the most important events in
the history of the world, only involved the loss of the
western Empire, which included some of its most backward
provinces. The Roman Empire lived on in the east with its
capital at Byzantium (Istanbul) for another thousand years.
The civilisation and the system of states that were esta
blished in Western Europe in the early modern period (1500-
1800) were undoubtedly distinctive, but its superiority over
all other civilisations was not clear cut. Again, it is easy to
forget what a recent thing Western superiority is, and there
fore to forget in what this superiority consists. In the early
modern period when Europe was beginning to expand over
seas and to colonise other parts of the world, European
civilisation was in many respects inferior to other civilisations,
and those civilisations that were protected by organised state
power were able without difficulty to repel Western intruders.
China and Japan, for example, expelled all foreigners at this
time and closed their horders. Western expansion proceeded
