The Obsolescence of Political Definitions V. E. McHale
Defense
I am not qualified to translate German, much less technical philosophical texts. However, Kondylis’ insights are criminally underappreciated and of interest to many today as they grapple with the dissolution of liberalism that Kondylis predicted in 1991–1992.
Hopefully, his work will be translated with due care as its centrality is appreciated.
The below is from Planetarische Politik Nach Dem Kalten Krieg, pp. 91–104
The Obsolescence of Political Definitions
In the early days of the failed Moscow coup, one was bombarded by writing wherein the “conservatives” from the KGB and communist party wanted to block the path to a market economy and parliamentarianism. Many outlets that were once marked “Stalinist” or “orthodox communist” were attacked as “conservative,” blithely referred to as such often on the same page that political figures such as Reagan or Thatcher, Bush or Kohl. Thus the naïve reader, who wants to take the printed word at its nominal value, logically infers a common attitude and purpose among the previously named Western politicians and the soviet enemies of perestroika. Common sense could protect the sane man from such an absurdity, but this runs out of answers in the face of the schizophrenia of political vocabulary, proving insufficiently idiosyncratic; he seems to have resigned himself without grumbling. The common retort is that conservatives are defenders of the status quo, whatever that may look like in the particular case, so conservatives living in very different societies, unsurprisingly, advocate very different and even contradictory programs. But if political classifications are not backed by political substance, then these classifications must be grounded in psychological or anthropological factors, common attitudes towards life. Should one, in good conscience, impute the commonalities between Helmut Kohl and the Russian putschists, this interpretational hypothesis brings little light to the concrete situations—because in such situations it is always about the implementation of particular matters or goals thereby defined, in view of the makeup of a national or international collective, wherein the friend-foe groupings are determined by the positions of each agent with respect to these matters and goals. The legitimation of political struggle often takes place by appeal to anthropological presumptions; political analysis, on the other hand, can infer no concrete substance from formal and inherently abstract anthropological constants without falling into bad metaphysics.
The above applies not only to the definition of conservatism—the journalistic and even scientific parlance is no less confused when we turn to the other foundational definitions, where the political vocabulary of the last hundred-fifty years has been contorted. The ambiguity accompanies political—though not only political—ground definitions from the very beginning. This is hardly avoidable, by virtue of the polemical usage of these definitions, though it is different from the lack of reference or amorphism that indicates historical downfall. So long as definitions are living and afforded gravity in the social sphere, they can be positive or negative, narrowly or widely interpreted, varied according to particular strategic or tactical necessities, ultimately, however they refer explicitly or implicitly to an identifiable bearer. “Conservatism” in the 19th century meant primarily the sociopolitical interests of the antiliberal aristocrats and the patriarchal estates who felt threatened by the progress of industrial capitalism. The purveyors of what is called “conservatism” today are advocates for planned economies and dictators in the East, supporters of market economies and parliamentarianism in the West, ecologically motivated guardians of untouched nature, religious opponents of miniskirts… to mention a few. “Liberal” originally referred to a politics that articulated the economic or constitutional agenda of the bourgeoisie, not a petitioner for abortion freedom or the unrestricted right to asylum. That this vocabulary does not bind testifies to its obsolescence. Indeed, politics in the 20th century was largely played out in symbolic definitions that had lost their original historical meaning. This might appear plainly to the impartial observer, but the actors needed the vocabulary of the 19th century for polemical purposes—the long struggle between the Western system and communism contributed significantly to the dissemination of language that had no real parallel in either camp. This is why the emptiness of political language reveals itself just at the end of the Cold War.
The three fundamental definitions in the political vocabulary of the last hundred-fifty years, namely, “conservatism,” “liberalism,” and “socialism,” (or social democracy), embodied three real and unambiguous options for society only at the time of their (incidentally almost parallel) development. Only around 1848 did the aristocracy, bourgeoisie, and proletariat face one another on a single playing field. The triptych dwindled over the 19th century into a diptych, when the already weakened aristocracy largely merged with the bourgeoisie, giving up their patriarchal landownership nolens volens and participating in the capitalist economy and parliament in various degrees and ways. Once the stasis of societas civilis had given way to the dynamism of capitalism, conservatism could no longer discuss the preservation of a God-given and eternal hierarchical order on Earth in a genuine sense. If the notion of conservatism nevertheless remained alive, it was less by to the vitality of its natural social vectors and more the polemical force of its triumphant adversaries. Above all, the left was now ideologically interested in putting down their bourgeois liberal opponents as apostates fleeing their own “progressive” past and heirs to “obscurantist” or “reactionary” positions and practices that allegedly marked the doings of the “feudal party.” “Conservative” was defined as an opponent of the left; “conservatism” was defined by the extent to which something contradicted the left’s objectives, whether or not it actually altered society. Because the left possessed a monopoly on progress by definition, changing society in a direction contrary to the left’s wishes could not be recognized as “real” change. This way of thinking was in force for decades not only in international affairs curricula; the established “progressive” political science and sociology in Germany also helped establish the notion that conservatism is not a historically bound term, but rather a stance that redefines itself in every context. Especially in a time in which philistine discipleship (that is, when all back doors were left open) was intellectually chic, it was emphasized that that the political scientists of the Eastern bloc shared in this belief.
The liberals, for their part, had to appropriate the concept of conservatism when they saw that the original bourgeois sense of liberalism had been eclipsed as its reinterpretation for anti-bourgeois democratic-egalitarian purposes was steadily gaining ground. “Conservative” now referred to the thought and sociopolitical practice of classical liberalism that wanted to explicitly distinguish itself from egalitarian socialist-democratic efforts, which often came with the claim to administer the “real” legacy of liberalism and to bring “genuine” liberal thought to its logical conclusion, in which material equality followed from formal rights and social equality from equal rights. Under these circumstances and in light of this reinterpretation, liberalism would have appeared suspicious to the classical liberals themselves, who thought in bourgeois categories. The great slogans of freedom and equality being propagated by the 17th century in fact allowed extensive interpretation with some goodwill, but it was only in the 19th century that these possibilities were fully appreciated. The originators of the aforementioned slogans thought only of the elimination of the old feudal barriers and hierarchies, while the social inequality that would be the point of contention for later democrats was fully natural in their eyes. They could hardly have imagined that full recognition of natural rights would entail that lords would not be lords and peasants would not be peasants; recall the debates of the 19th century on suffrage to clarify this point. In any case, it came to approve dirigiste tendencies and tendencies toward a social welfare state, drawing on an ethically charged concept of liberalism, bearing in mind the significance of the individual in the liberal framework of thought. Thus it was now of chief importance that the individual should have the protection of the state through state intercession and by this be guaranteed his free and general development. This, of course, was a drastic reinterpretation of classical liberalism’s conception of individualism, but we are not interested in legitimacy here but the fact that it was undertaken and did influence politics in practice. The more mass society shaped by the bourgeoisie converged to modern mass democracy, the closer the association between the concept of liberalism and the partly ethical-dirigiste, partly radical individualist and culture revolutionary tendencies. For apparent socio-historical reasons this linguistic usage only does justice to the situation in the United States, while in Europe the ambiguity remained.
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