Download Essay Notion of Progress

University of Aberdeen
CU 3006: Approaches to Culture
Session 2003/2004
Course Co-ordinator: Phil Withington
Assessed Essay
Consider notions of progress in the work of Karl Marx,
Max Weber, Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault
Andreas Möllenkamp
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Contents
Consider notions of progress in the work of Karl Marx,
Max Weber, Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault ..….. 2
Bibliography ……………………………………………. 5
2
Consider notions of progress in the work of Karl Marx, Max Weber, Walter
Benjamin and Michel Foucault
Although the publication dates of most books and articles, stated in the bibliography, might
suggest that the notion of progress nowadays isn’t very relevant, controversial or interesting, I
will try to show that the idea of progress at least for cultural historians is an interesting topic,
because it is a central concept of human history and cultural development. At the same time it
is a difficult subject, because it contains a set of strong values, beliefs and emotions, that tends
to be expressed rather implicitly than explicitly. Therefore it is even more important to look at
the context in which ideas of progress are expressed and try to examine their (deep) meaning
and contents. Although the idea of progress can already be found in classical Greek and Roman
thought, I will focus in this essay on modern cultural theories; a time in which social
development increasingly becomes subject of interest and at the same time the idea of progress
problematic. I will try to answer which concepts of progress Karl Marx, Max Weber, Walter
Benjamin and Michel Foucault developed and how they differ. We will see that the used
concept of progress depends on the historical cultural context and the relation of the author
towards this context, as well as his intention of writing. Before examining these concepts more
closely, I will have to define in which sense progress is understood here.
In the book Progress and History, the editor F. S. Marvin (1916: 7) starts his contribution with
this description: “One Sunday afternoon he [Marvin] happened to be walking with two friends
in Oxford, one a professor of philosophy, the other a lady. The professor of philosophy
declared that to him human progress must always mean primarily the increase of knowledge;
the editor urged the increase of power as its most characteristic feature, but the lady added at
once that to her progress had always meant, and could only mean, increase in our appreciation
of the humanity of others. The first two thoughts, harmonized and directed by the third, may be
taken to cover the whole field”. I found this worth quoting, because it illustrates two basic
characteristics of progress:
First of all, a definition would have to state, what is about (its subject or content). In the
quotation knowledge, power and humanity are mentioned. Similar to knowledge one could also
state science and technology; equivalent to power could be politics (or the economy). The
lady’s statement finally could be interpreted as a more general (ethical) claim covering the
society or even the whole mankind.
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Secondly, the notion of progress always contains a notion of development (a process). The
example states increase, which simply means more of (growth), but this is mostly meant in a
sense of improvement. As it requires an (ethical) judgement to call something improved or
better, it is important to examine its (or the author’s) underlying value.
As this essay is concentrating on modern cultural theorists that are interested in social
development as a whole and understand progress in this context, I will try to describe which
place notions of progress have in their concept of history and culture.
We will see that they all are influenced by, rely on and review the Enlightenment concept of
progress. Engaging the writings of Kant (1724 – 1804), the history of the Enlightenment is
viewed “as humanity's passage to its adult status”, a “way out” of mankind's status of
“immaturity”, through the vehicle of reason. This journey (or its promise) towards selfrealisation, the maturation of humanity through reason and the labour towards freedom build
the core of its historical concept.
In reviewing this concept of history, Karl Marx (1818 – 1883) became very influential, because
he attacked the dominant German scientific and philosophic idealist tradition with his
observations of the German, French and English economy (industrialisation) and the emergence
of the working-class. He inverted the Hegelian model of the dialectic historical development of
the Geist (the spiritual perfection of a person and whole society) by claiming that it is not the
consciousness (or Geist) that determines the real world, but the base (means of production,
labour) that forms the superstructure (state, politics, way of thinking). According to Marx, man
creates and contemplates himself through the process of labour, and comes to know not only
himself but also his social characteristics in relation to other men. However, man's relationship
to his labour, and therefore his relationship to himself, nature, and other men, has been
disrupted through the development of the division of labour (as a more efficient means of
production) which subsequently led to man's alienation from his own labour. This alienation is
exacerbated further by the development of the capitalist mode of production, in which the
worker is further estranged from his productive labour through the capitalists' ownership of the
means of production. Thus, man's progress toward self- realisation has been obstructed by the
development of capitalism, a system of economic relations that exploits man's labour in the
name of profit and alienates man from himself and each other, most prominently through the
conflict between the bourgeois and proletarian classes. But in Marx's model of history, the
development of the bourgeois class and the capitalist mode of production is a necessary step
towards the type of society where man can once again obtain the basis for his self-realisation:
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communism. The necessity of the bourgeoisie and capitalism lies in its drive for
industrialisation and technological advances, which it furthers in the maximisation of profit.
These developments of the forces of production, a building of man's "capacity", finds its limits
in the relationship of power, the contradiction of domination. Thus Marx qualifies the
Enlightenment belief of self- realisation through his analysis of class conflict, embedded within
the social and economic structure of capitalism. Inasmuch as the maintenance of this
relationship of exploitation requires the complicity of the workers, Marx develops a notion of
"false consciousness" by which a class is unable to recognise in what direction its true interests
(for well-being, freedom from exploitation, and self- realisation) lie. However, through another
illustration of the Enlightenment value on human reason, Marx posits a way out of these
conditions of exploitation and alienation. Through the development of the proletarian's class
consciousness, the use of human reason in grasping the nature and source of exploitation as
private ownership of the means of production in capitalist society, the workers can lead a
revolutionary movement to abolish the capitalist relations of production and initiate the
transition to a classless society. It is the oppressed’s use of reason, connected with Marx's
philosophy of material practice, that can lead to the freedom of humankind. Thus the exercise
and application of human reason as opposed to, for instance, faith in religious salvation, can be
the means for humans to transform their material social conditions and commence the return to
the Enlightenment promise of freedom, which in Marx's view has been hampered and qualified
by the conditions of alienation and exploitation manifest in the capitalist society.
Max Weber (1864 – 1920), although also concerned with dilemmas arising from the
sociocultural and political situation (in Germany), criticised a purely materialist concept of
historical explanations. In his best known work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism, Weber instead presents a (more plausible than throughout empirical) explanation
that the emergence of Western capitalism owed much to the Calvinist pattern of religious
motivation among business owners of that period. In Calvinism and the Capitalist Spirit (1983:
83), Gianfranco Poggi summarises the argument: “No capitalist development without an
entrepreneurial class; no entrepreneurial class without a moral charter; no moral charter without
religious premises.” As the Calvinists believed that god’s wisdom was unfathomable to human
minds, salvation could not confidently be anticipated as a reward for one’s intrinsic merits. In
this insecurity, Calvinist preachers could only offer the suggestion that proficiency in one’s
earthly calling might be assumed to be a mark of divine favour. Their resulting pattern of hard
work, systematical planning and reinvesting profits then led to business success and economic
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growth. Ironically, this unintended consequence of Calvinist theology had in its turn the effect
of making religious motives unnecessary for the subsequent rationalisation of productive
activity. In all Weber’s cultural history writings the predominant theme is that of
rationalisation, the long-term trend in Western societies towards rendering every sphere of
social activity more amenable to calculation. In his increasing desire for mastery over nature to
meet human needs - through the maximisation of control, efficiency, and predictability - man
drives the process of rationalisation. Weber points out, that rationalisation does not proceed
identically and concurrently in every sphere of society, rather each sphere is rationalised in its
own unique direction. In the religious sphere, rationalisation proceeds in demystification and
the elimination of magic through the reasoned development and rational characteristics of
Protestantism, in particular, ascetic material behaviours. In the economic sphere, rationalisation
finds itself in the development of modern bourgeois capitalism, the use of reason in calculation
for the pursuit of profit. In the political (administrative sphere), it has led to the rise of the
bureaucratic form of organisation, guided by reason, objectivity, and efficiency. In the
intellectual sphere, rationalisation has proved itself through the use of scientific methods,
experimentation, and empirical data gathering as theories derived through scientific reason
supplant those previously attributed to magical causes.
This Enlightenment belief of reason and self- realisation, however, is qualified by Weber
through the very process of rationalisation itself. While greater efficiency, consistency, control,
predictability and objectivity may be positive aspects of rationalisation that lead to increased
capacity, the paradox of the relations of capacity and power develops through the negative
results of rationalisation: the iron cage and the tensions between substantive and formal
rationality. Asceticism in a formally rationalised religious sphere can lead to an abundance of
wealth and the possibilities of temptation and abuse of power associated by that wealth,
especially with the power relations created by the greater capacity afforded to greater wealth.
Rationalisation in the economic sphere as evidenced in the Western capitalism has been
characterised by Weber as having reasoned out any "irrational" sentiments that impede the
accumulation and calculation of profit, sentiments such as trust, compassion, camaraderie, and
concern. Rationalisation in the administrative sphere through bureaucracy has led to
dehumanised relationships among personnel bound by objective rules and codes of conduct that
maximise efficiency, minimise subjectivity, and produce consistent, predictable results.
Rationalisation in the political sphere, through the introduction of bureaucracy as the most
efficient organisation for executive implementation of policy, leads to a conflict with human
participation in the form of democracy, as bureaucratic apparatuses are designed to be highly
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resistant to outside influences and external forces, undermining the voice of the demos that
constitutes the people's reign in a democracy. Weber paints a bleak picture of dehumanised
relationships, where love, empathy, and human connectio n are weeded out in rationalised
relations that maximise consistency, objectivity, and efficiency. With this Weber offers a
critique to the Enlightenment appeal to progress and reason, demonstrating not only the
positive effects of rationalisation, but its dark side as well.
Opposed to Weber’s claim that science should not contain (ethical or political) judgements, the
Frankfurt School explicitly allied itself with certain values, claiming that “neutral” positions
have political implications as well (like positivism becoming a close ally of the powerful in
society). Walter Benjamin (1892 - 1940), as an associated member of the Frankfurt School,
wrote especially his later works under the impression of the 2nd World War. Participating in the
approach of Critical Theory of the Institute of Social Research, Benjamin as well as Max
Horkheimer (1895 – 1973) and Theodor W. Adorno (1903 – 1969) especially examined the
drawback of the social and technological “progress”, trying to penetrate the essence of the
society. In their book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1992 [1944]), Horkheimer and Adorno look
at fascism and modern mass-culture to present their critical view on the reigning of reason
(leading to its mystification) and the subjugation of nature under humans’ purposes. As leftwing intellectuals they experienced a very turbulent time during the rise to power of Hitler and
the Nazi Party in the 1930s. Seeing the working-class turn towards fascism in Germany and
being kept in line under the control of Stalin’s dictatorial regime in the Soviet Union, the
Frankfurt School thinkers faced the problem to understand why such a social and political
disaster had occurred. Facing the need of a new kind of Marxist theory, their central claim was
that “there were very intimate connections between the rise of totalitarian regimes (both Fascist
and Communist) and the development of mass culture” (Inglis 2003: 40). Especially the mass
media appeared to them as powerful agencies of social control, resulting in increasingly
regulated, controlled and stupefied individuals. The underlying values of Critical Theory
involve what Adorno and Horkheimer saw as the human desire for happiness, which they
understood to be the desire for a society free of domination (a classless society). Critical Theory
thus is meant as a liberatory way of thinking, based on the hope for freedom from oppression
(Inglis 2003: 42). In his writings On the Concept of history (2003: 392) Benjamin expresses
this in a metaphorical way: “There is a picture by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel
who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is
open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned
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toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe,
which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to
stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from
paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them.
This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of
debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm.”
In this critical tradition, Michel Foucault (1926-1984) seems to add another level of abstraction
by rejecting a scientific discussion about actual progress and what it possibly could mean. In
his works, he rather proposes to treat every topic in the human sciences as a “discourse-object”,
because discourses are the place where the social construction of these topics take place. He
sees all sciences as modes of inquiry that are based on basic (but in fact spatially and
temporally specific) assumptions of universality and (human) nature. As Foucault explains in
his work on discourse, he was not interested in determining the “underlying” causes of
discursive formations, but rather in seeing “historically how truth-effects are produced inside
discourses which are not in themselves either true or false” (quoted in Poster 1982: 128). Thus
Foucault judges all topics of the human sciences (like man, madness, sexuality and like
progress as well) as products of historically contingent discursive formations. Doing so, he
shares the Frankfurt School’s view to see the intrinsic “impurity” of Kantian reason – its
embeddedness in society and culture, its entanglement with power and interest, the historical
variability of its categories and criteria, the embodied, sensuous, and practically engaged
character of its bearers (McCarthy 1990: 437). This desublimation of reason then goes hand in
hand with the decentering of the rational subject. If knowledge is itself understood as a social
product, the traditional opposition between theory and practice, fact and value begin to break
down, for there are practical, normative presuppositions to any social activity, theorising
included. It is in recognising the peculiarly reflexive relation of thinking about society to what
is being thought about that leads Foucault to characterise his genealogy as “history of the
present”. Adopting Nietzsche’s genealogy, Foucault’s way of creating distance from the
practices we live is not that of an “objectivating ousider’s perspective”, but to display their
“lowly origins” in contingent historical circumstances by treating them as the outcome of
multiple relations to force. Foucault is interested in the relations of power as a “productive
network, that runs through every social body”. According to Foucault (1977:114), “power
produces reality, it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth”. Due to his generalisation
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of the concept of power, he sees no sense in Utopianism of a better (classless) society or in a
belief in progress, because this will just change the way of domination.
To conclude this selective history of modern cultural theorists, we see commonly a critical
examination of the Enlightenment’s belief in self-realisation through reason. The attitude of
modernity, not only as possibility for full self-realisation, but also as radical discontinuity
figures itself in the work of each author. For Marx, it is in the development of society and the
economic modes of production which dialectically lead to its revolutionary overthrow and a
reconstituting of society, a radical rupture from pre-existing historical forms. For Weber, the
break is in traditional forms of activity and organisation through their rationalisation, i.e. from
mystical/magical salvation to worldly asceticism, from non-capitalist forms of economic
activity to highly rationalised forms of calculation and profit- making. While this progress has
led to the increase in human capacity, individual and collectively, it has also resulted in a
conflict with power relationships that deve loped interdependently with human capacity.
Therefore, the Enlightenment belief in progress and reason was not a continuous, teleological
development as another Enlightenment figure, Auguste Comte, might portray. Rather,
humankind's development to a state of maturity, in Marx's view necessitated revolutionary
conflict and structural change, while in Weber's view, embodied a growing tension between
rational values of efficiency and impersonal relations versus irrational values of human love,
trust, and compassion. This process of rationalisation then continues to be a critically assessed
theme in the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School and in the works of Michel Foucault.
While the Frankfurt School thinkers (including Benjamin) try to continue the Marxist tradition
in searching for a better (classless) society by their critique of modern mass-culture, Michel
Foucault breaks in his genealogy with any Utopianism, because all social practices (however
they try to hide their entanglement with power) just change the way of domination.
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