Confessing Evangelical

Terry Eagleton's essay, The Roots of Terror (see previous post) also has some interesting observations on "absolute freedom", libertarianism, and the "revolutionary" nature of our society.

Prof Eagleton observes that "most states come into being by invasion, occupation, usurpation, revolution and so on", and that "the coming of law and order was neither lawful nor orderly". The French Revolution caused anger among other European states partly because it made "painfully visible" the truth that "without past terror, [there is] no present society".

Eagleton argues that:

Middle-class capitalist societies are particularly shame-faced about the violence that founded them. This is because the middle classes, more than any other social formation, are necessarily committed to peace, stability and security. Without such a framework, capitalism cannot operate.

However, this ignores the fact that "capitalist society itself ... is the most revolutionary formation in human history":

It is eternally agitating, transforming, shattering, dissolving and reinventing – and all this as part of everyday life.

We only have to look at how the constant radical changes in society over the past two centuries - consider for a moment how different the west was only 25 years ago, let alone 50, 100 or 150 - to see that "Continuous Revolution" is not solely a Maoist concept.

But what form does this revolutionary dynamic at the root of modern "middle-class capitalist societies" take? Eagleton answers this question with reference to Burke's contemporary, Hegel:

He, too, was a witness of the birth of the new middle-class order in France; and he, too, spotted something terrifying at its heart. The name he gave to this terror was absolute freedom – or, as he scathingly called it, ‘the freedom of the void’.

Bourgeois society dreamed of a freedom so pure and absolute that it could tolerate no boundaries or restrictions. And this, in a creaturely, constricted world, was bound to present itself as a form of terror.

My jaw dropped when I read that. Yes, a Marxist atheist just made the very Christian and biblical point that absolute freedom in a "creaturely, constricted world" leads to terrible and violent consequences. But anyway, let's move on.

The Jacobin Terror was a powerful example of this, in which "eventually it was the revolutionaries themselves who filled the carts trundling their way up to the guillotine", but the violence of absolute freedom "continues to infiltrate the daily life of capitalist societies":

Absolute freedom eats itself up ... Absolute freedom means negative freedom: a freedom from all restraint, which can see limits only as barriers to humanity, not as constitutive of it. The world is imperilled not by hard-nosed cynics who insist that nothing is possible, but by wide-eyed, ‘can-do’ idealists for whom anything is possible.

We'll pass over the pointless anti-American jibe that follows those words, and move on to Eagleton's description of how this destructive, libertarian impulse manifests itself from time to time:

Most of the time, this ravaging beast called absolute freedom is kept safely caged. It is hemmed in by laws, procedures, obligations, regulations, the rights of others.

Yet the dream of being the only individual in the world (for this is what such freedom would finally involve) never quite fades, given the narcissism of the human species. From time to time, then, this madness, which lurks at the very core of conventional middle-class society, breaks out anew. It is like a lunatic who gives the slip to his keeper and goes on the rampage.

This can be seen in the tendency of capitalism and market forces - whatever positive benefits may come from them - to undermine or destroy the very institutions and social structures that counteract their negative effects and make them bearable: family, community, church, etc. (Hence Margaret Thatcher found it much easier to unleash the forces of the free market than to maintain the "Victorian values" she also sought to promote.)

As Prof. Eagleton puts it in another essay on the same site:

You can’t let market forces rip without a lot of social featherbedding, otherwise you risk too much instability and resentment; but it’s exactly that sort of featherbedding that market forces destroy.