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PART 1 PRELIMINARIES Introduction

Karl Marx and ]ohn Stuart Mill were both strong critics of midnineteenth-century industrial society, but their concerns, their range and their large background assumptions and presuppositions and hence their critiques and their prescriptions differ substantially. They were contemporaries who, despite their signicance as the theorists and organisers of very dierent schools and movements, paid little attention to each other. Mill was born in 1806 and died in 1873, while Marx was a dozen years younger, and died ten years after him. They were fellow Londoners for more than twenty years. Mill concentrated on England in his writings, as did Marx after the late forties, although both commented frequently on events in the United States, in Europe, especially France, and Asia, especially India. But they were Europecentred thinkers, and their writings on Asia are not only asides, but treat that vast conglomerate as a backward realm, lacking an independent principle of movement, and hence properly subject to the advanced European powers, which were steadily and, for Marx, savagely drawing it into civilisation. While differing decisively over the character and impact of the intervening powers, each saw Europe and America as treading the path of the world's future, and thus remained children of their own times, despite their universalist pretensions and hopes. Marx and Mill were not only the creators of the classical communist and liberal theories, in which they strove to make sense of contemporary experience and to generalise and predict beyond their own era, but they were deeply involved in practical political life, as pamphleteers and political organisers, though each at times expressed strong distaste for concrete political activity. Like most great social and political theorists, they believed that they lived during a period of social and cultural crisis, and that their theories and their actions could play some part in the process of change and eventual stabilisation. They wanted to enlighten others, to remove impediments to their vision so that they could see the truth and follow it, moving with the forces of history to destroy division, suffering and obscurantism. Each was anti-conservative, refusing, though in quite different ways, to take the existing society as sacrosanct. Their grand theories of human progress were
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Preliminaries developed when English capitalism was at its most vigorous and triumphant, and each of them was very much concerned with current changes in the distribution of economic and political power, and the related social conicts. Naturally theirs were not lone voices, as many of their contemporaries wrestled with the same problems and sometimes came up with similar answers. But Marx and Mill were generally, if not clearer and more precise, at least more profound and more imaginative thinkers than other theorists of industrial capitalism and liberal society at that time. However, it may be denied that there is much point in attempting a comparative study. To take one instance, George Lichtheim has suggested that there is little purpose in contrasting Marx with some representative gure of nineteenth-century liberalism, S. Mill being the obvious example.1 Even were it possible to take Mill more seriously as a social theorist, continues Lichtheim, he cannot be said to have furnished modern liberalism with a working model for everyday political use, whereas the union of theory and practice is the most distinguishing trait of Marxism? According to the argument, Marx was both theorist and historical actor, in whose person system building and revolutionary social currents came together, and this signally failed to happen in the case of Mill. Later in his book, however, Lichtheim describes Mill as the crucial gure in the movement of thought towards collectivism in nineteenth-century England. The crucial gure in this process is john Stuart Mill Marx's contemporary and in a sense his only serious rival, insofar as he is one of the ancestors of Fabianism and welfare socialism generally/3 These assertions contain no serious objection to a comparison of the two thinkers, and the last statement even seems to encourage it. Of course, there may be little purpose in some kinds of comparison between Marx and Mill, and certain particular efforts, consisting of the juxtaposition of a few simplied notions of each, have been articial and misleading. But the enterprise is not absurd or pointless as such. Whether there is purpose to it or not depends on the purposes of the person doing it, and how it is done. Mill clearly did provide a working model - or a series of working models for everyday political use, in the form of goals or political programmes to be implemented. Utilitarianism, the doctrine on which he was trained, and to which he remained half-loyal, was a doctrine which quite explicitly combined theory and practice, seeking to embody right reason in public policy, while often degenerating into a naive concern with improvement. Mill viewed his whole theoretical system as intimately related to politics and practical life. Again, there were signicant nonrevolutionary currents during the nineteenth century. One could say, using Lichtheims terms, that system building and reforming social
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Introduction currents came together in the person of Mill, and it is this which made him a serious rival to Marx. But the rivalry does not depend solely on any shift towards welfare socialism. The conict is between rival doctrines of political change and rival accounts of the realities of capitalism. Mill was the champion of a mode of change, including movement towards political democracy, to which the history of nineteenth-century England approximated. And he himself had a powerful inuence on thought and action in England during the second half of the century. The serious and successful - rivals to Marxs disciples and followers, who at this time were hardly serious rivals to anybody, were the middle-class radicals or liberals struggling for the extension of the franchise and for other political reforms. Preoccupation with revolutionary social currents easily blinds one to quieter social movements and less far-reaching social doctrines. However, to claim that Mills views may be fruitfully examined against those of Marx does not imply that they were equal in political inuence or intellectual power one could, indeed, accept Marxs harsh verdict on Mill, and still undertake a comparative analysis - but only that these are two signicant, striking and conicting theoretical reections of changing capitalist society, and instruments for its transformation.
FACTS AND THE ORIE S

Marx and Mill saw things from different perspectives or vantage points, and offered conicting accounts of their situation. Even to speak of- their situation begs the question, as the situation was and is subject to signicantly varying interpretations, and was altering all the time. They were not disinterested observers of the same facts, nor even persons who saw the same facts and valued them differently, but committed particicipants within a changing society, whose character and tendencies were understood according to conicting criteria and valuations. It is necessary to note, in passing, .the complex structure of most political theories, and the complex relations between such theories and the facts. Conicts within and between political theories take place at a number of levels, which are not immunised from each other, but intertwine, and inuence each other in many ways. There are factual or descriptive or empirical components; logical, linguistic, epistemological and methodological assumptions and habits concerning, in part, beliefs about the appropriate methods of asking questions and nding out answers; moral elements, including standards, evaluations and prescriptions, which express views about man's distinctive excellence or achievement and the nature of the good life; and metaphysical theories, concerning mans relation to the world in general. These factors can be
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Preliminaries distinguished analytically, and broken into logically distinct propositions. But although we can distinguish descriptive and value statements, many terms and notions both appraise and describe - value terms often have a factual reference and factual terms a value connotation, within particular social contexts. And in social theories these elements merge and inuence each other in subtle and complex ways. At the centre of political theories and political outlooks there lie, often merely implicit, conceptions of human nature, conceptions of n1ans needs, wants, interests, purposes, goals and capacities, as they were, are, and ultimately will be. Political theories are necessarily impregnated by values from the very beginning ~ such questions as what is human and what inhuman, what degrades and what ennobles man, what is a failure and what an achievement, and what kind of social order can satisfy him, are not empirical questions, though empirical evidence certainly bears upon them. In the consideration of such questions, judgment or preference and description what is seen are intimately linked. Assessments of the character and of the value of different polities are connected in that accounts of mens motives and concerns, and explanations of why they are grouped together as they are, already embody both a selection and a valuation. Values are not added later, like sauce to a meal, but penetrate the factual analysis itself. To assume otherwise easily leads to grotesque simplications of complex intellectual activities, as in Poppers account of Marx as a moral futurist? a worshipper of future success or might, rather than an intensely committed revolutionary, whose vision of human liberation strongly inuenced his picture of existing social divisions and the forces challenging them. Hence political theories do not differ simply over how existing societies, similarly described, are to be evaluated: differences are built into their explanatory schemes, even when they pose as neutral. In terms of their hidden valuations, certain things are presented as given, and certain options are excluded. The choice of a framework of analysis, which makes certain alternatives seem more feasible or desirable than others, itself depends upon certain selections and values whether or not the conclusions to which it leads support the preferences of its author. Perhaps the greatest difficulty comes with conceptions of human nature, which cannot be measured easily against the facts, or torn out of the broader theories in which they are set. The evidence which is relevant to them is often of a peculiar and complex kind, and they themselves may admit at the very most - only of peculiar and elaborate conrmation or disconrmation. Social and political theories are related complexly to the world of reality which the theorist tries to describe and evaluate, and perhaps to change. What is seen depends upon the goal and the conceptual sys4

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Introduction tem of the observer or observerparticipant, and these in turn depend heavily on the culture and social environment of which he is part. The

seemingly clear-cut and independent facts reality, correspondence

to which, or exact copies of which, are held sometimes to constitute truth - can be organised and arranged in a great variety of ways, to support different accounts and images of life. Observation is itself an activity, and part and parcel of the intention and conceptual world of the observer." Given that particular concepts and categories, rather than others, are used in the pursuit of intelligibility, each mode of consideration becomes, in Whiteheads phrase, a sort of searchlightl The material of experience is selected from and weighted in different ways. Certain factors or forces are regarded as being of crucial signicance (or real or basic or essential) and in terms of these everything else falls, or is thrust, into place. They occupy the centre of the stage while other factors are pushed into the background or excluded altogether. What comprises the relevant facts, though not what comprises mere facts, depends upon a system of classication, conventional or otherwise. Stuart Hampshire has illustrated this point in his account of the different ways in which a liberal and a Marxist will classify and organise events. In argument with a Marxist, a liberal may be startled to nd that actions of his, to which he had never thought to attach a political signicance, in his sense of political, are given a political signicance and intention by his opponent. His opponent distinguishes the domain of politics by a different criterion that reects a wholly different way of thinking about practical questions. That which constitutes a situation requiring a political decision, the extent of the domain of politics, is different for the two men, and each of them, absorbed in his own way of singling out and identifying situations confronting him, will fail to divide correctly the conduct of the other, separating phases of action that constituted a unity in the mind of the agent, and combining into a single action activities that the agent had envisaged under different headings. Nature, like society, can be dissected in many different ways, or subordinated to a variety of ordering principles. In The Structure of Scientic Revolutions, a work which has encouraged the subjectivists and moralists of social theory, Thomas Kuhn has challenged the established, objective status of the natural sciences, primarily through a cogent historical analysis of scientic conict, development and change. Kuhn stresses the crucial role of metaphysics or ideology in creative scientic research, and rejects the view of scientic growth as an accumulation of truths, with myths, errors and unscientic notions steadily thrown on 5

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Preliminaries the wayside as scientists advance inexorably towards more and more complete approximations to reality. Scientists try to force nature into particular, preformed and relatively inexible, conceptual boxes; at certain stages distinct and incommensurable views of nature each roughly compatible with the dictates of scientic observation and method compete with each other; and each species the kinds of entities the universe contains and, indirectly, those which it does not. Each necessarily partial theoretical network which directs fact collection, excludes or fails to take account of a great mass of facts, which
may later illuminate, or transform, the issues under consideration. Scientic fact and theory are not categorically separable, except per-

haps within a single tradition of normal-scientic practice. That is why the unexpected discovery is not simply factual in its importance and why the scientists world is qualitatively transformed as well as quantitatively enriched by fundamental novelties of either fact or theory. During its reign, however, the paradigm or constellation of beliefs, values and techniques shared by members of a given community will be defended against anomalies and paradoxes by a variety of means, and especially, because of its high generality, by subsidiary and intermediate hypotheses and ad hoc elaborations. Thus an historical account of scientic enterprise leads Kuhn to stress the prime importance of theory and methodology, which precedes and is necessary to selection, evaluation and criticism, and to warn us against mistaking a rm research consensus for a body of veried truth. Distinctions and selections which are familiar or natural to us may be to others and, in some circumstances, to ourselves useless or irrelevant or absurd. For example, to adequately describe the workings of a primitive society we ordinarily need different distinctions and causal assumptions, and perhaps different notions of rationality, from those prevalent in the developed Western world. Explanations and the giving of reasons make sense in relation to the agents particular conception of the world. We simply reveal our provincialism when we uncritically classify or explain novel or strange behaviour in our own categories. Any system of classication may act as a straitjacket, limiting the possibilities of analysis and inhibiting the imagining or conceiving of new, or radically different, forms of social life. Language already contains or supports a particular world view, so that as the individual learns it, he tends to take one attitude rather than another to social reality. Consequently, many social critics complain of the conservative effects of language, which, they say, determines a priori the direction in which the thought process moves, and establishes meanings which are themselves tenacious and limiting social facts. The radical competes at a huge intellectual and emotional disadvantage because, with a language tied so 6

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Introduction closely to current and past beliefs, he cannot convey adequately or convincingly his vision of a new world. Systems of classication, aided by languages which tend to freeze the world at certain points, often pretend to a permanent and universal validity, although outside its range things may change remarkably. It is exceedingly hard to break free from accustomed or traditional modes of doing things, and to treat new problems and issues on their merits, so to speak. As the new is always seen rst with old eyes, it is hardly surprising that all sorts of curious compromises, muddles and halfway houses emerge, and that after a theoretical break-through thinkers are amazed at what they had overlooked previously. As Marx wrote to Engels: Human history fares like palaeontology. Even the best minds absolutely fail to see on principle, owing to a certain judicial blindness ~ things which lie in front of their noses. Later, when the moment has arrived, one is surprised to nd traces everywhere of what one has failed to
see.

The impossibility of distinguishing sharply between facts and interpretations, between the acts of perception, cognition and valuation, makes even the categorisation of the differences between rival social theories let alone any resolution of differences - an extremely difcult task. But normally they are not divided from each other, or from the world with which they deal, by a xed and impenetrable wall. The relationship between the facts and political categories, values and goals is ordinarily one of interaction, the precise character and extent of which requires investigation in each particular case. Awareness of the loading or bias inherent in a particular conceptual scheme will enable us to see how evidence is being used, or what is taken to be evidence, and how certain information is liable to be absorbed in-to the theory or dismissed by it. Such an awareness arises from observation of the different ways in which, for example, liberals, conservatives and socialists nd, gather and use evidence. It cannot come from some objective position outside the world. Thus criticism of loading within a social theory
is set, not against a norm of objectivity or completeness, but against

the fact of diversity. The critic of the bias of others cannot himself claim to be outside the area of human subjectivity and selectivity - though he may be outside specic arenas of conict and must recognise that his own social theorising is characterised by the selective perception which he rightly observes in others. His ability to see this is heavily dependent upon the kind of society in which he lives. Because social facts can be interpreted in so many different ways, and because of the diversity of human goals, what is to one man an exceptional and passing case is, for another, a rm indication of things to come. The evidence given in support of radical expectations of change
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Prelim inaries may seem extremely thin, as when an impressive vision of life is supported only by a few examples of kindness or of human solidarity as indications of its own feasibility. A person who values and advocates relationships for society as a whole which are as a matter of fact conned to small groups or communities will be dismissed quickly as utopian. But it remains open as well as essential for him to indicate why most people fall short of his standard, to offer an account of those obstinate and tenacious societal facts upon which the conservative leans so heavily, and to display the foundations and the levers of change. Many critical theorists present history and civilisation as a record of manipulation, repression and malformation, and try, by envisaging the replacement of bad inuences and crippling circumstances, to establish the feasibility, and not merely the desirability, of their social visions. On the other hand, the selections, descriptions, explanations and evaluations of a conservative such as Burke differ immensely, presenting as solid achievements what opponents saw as empty and evil, and as proper safeguards of the common man what others dismissed as sources of repression." What radicals saw as mere custom and contingency, which stood in the way of true or authentic man, was to Burke vital to men, so that its removal would be like tearing the skin
from their esh.

Apart from these differences over values and over what particular cases mean - actually, what they are particular cases of ~ differences arise over the area and the ways in which conrmation of a social theory is to be sought, and the degree to which it can properly conict with existing facts. For some, proof is to be sought in measurement of the theory against certain facts which are regarded as static or constant (at least for purposes of analysis), e.g. in the manner in which classical
democratic theory is frequently measured against the evidence from vot-

ing surveys, and found wanting. Such an approach easily leads to a rejection of the reforming or revolutionising aspect of critical social theory. Theories which are presented as themselves historical forces, elements in a process of change, are sometimes simply assessed against the reality which it is their function to help overturn. Marxism is a theory which is to be conrmed, i.e. realised historically, through political action which both embodies the theory and is assisted and directed by it. Its own existence is a crucial social fact, for it unmasks, it shows the world in a new way, and how the world is seen strongly affects how people act in it. Thus the unblinkered critic-activist, given access to a deeper reality to which the ordinary observer remains oblivious, rejects the existing situation as temporary and imperfect, discerns the grounds of change, and does not leave others as they were. It is easy to show how Marxs general doctrines and beliefs inuenced 8

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Introduction his perception of the facts, e.g. in his discovery of evidences of human potentialities in the present, which his vision of the future supported and which seemed in turn to conrm it, and in the impact of his general conception of the class struggle upon his conclusions about the English proletariat of his own day, and about the likelihood, at different times, of imminent social revolution. Given certain large assumptions about the world, it was easy to discover favourable signs, to depict a class battle as a source and symptom of profound social disintegration rather than as an accident or aberration. Similarly, the adherent of a teleological view of history, or of history as a succession of xed stages, will discover evidence which appears to conrm it, and this is possible because what is evidence is decided largely in relation to that larger view. But the precise relationship between the metaphysical or more general doctrine and particular political doctrines remains to be dened. We are rarely justied in treating the myth or metaphysic or wish as simple father to the fact, as Feuer tends to do in assaulting the Promethean Marx. The forecast of the proletarian dictatorship and the advent of a classless society rested on an extrapolation from the slenderest of empirical foundations, but the minimum of factual evidence was matched with a maximum of Promethean projection. Here Feuer simply invokes a selected version of past experience against a prognosis which rests upon a very different empirical foundation, and which species and recommends a certain kind of future action to conrm it. Future or alternative possibilities cannot be dismissed simply by demonstrating their differences from present fact. Indeed, what empirical evidence can be produced to support the forecast that class societies will continue endlessly into the future? In accepting the common view that the facts of social life and of human nature do not exist clearly and unambiguously, and cannot be seized by a neutral science and organised to form the objective basis upon which prescriptive theory might then build, I am not supporting a principle of unlimited arbitrariness. In stressing that perception is subjective and selective - that, apart from trivial cases, facts enter theories already interpreted, and that only certain facts are relevant to, and perhaps compatible with, our particular purposes - I am not asserting that the facts altogether lack solidity. There is a radical and disquieting, though incoherent, metaphysical doctrine which holds that the world itself is ambiguous or indeterminate, and that the facts are formed or created or constituted by the theorist. Yet any process of verication or disconnnation presupposes facts which are independent of or outside the particular thesis or theory in question. Otherwise its truth or falsity could never be established. It does not follow from the inevitability of preconception or organising principles that theories are untestable by 9

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Preliminaries facts, or by hypotheses dependent upon other facts. Kuhns subversiveness does not extend this far, as paradigms are shattered precisely because of an inability to accommodate anomalies and puzzles, which emerge out of a continuing process of scientic observation. Even Marx, the pragmatic liberals myth-maker par excellence, altered his views in some major respects because of the facts. Feuers argument underrates the continuous interaction between myth or Promethean projection and the facts of experience. The situation being analysed sometimes challenged and altered Marxs beliefs, e.g. his recognition of the possibility of a peaceful change in England and elsewhere though tactics and programmes do not follow unambiguously even from clear-cut analyses of the situation - and his provision of subsidiary hypotheses to explain why history had no.t matched up to his expectations. He was at least aware of the need to take account of developments which clashed with both his political preferences and predictions, even if his characteristic response was to provide special, ad lioc explanations of counterinstances to, or apparent divergences from, his general theory. There was no Damascus road to overturn his fundamental values. Much of the social observation which was hard to accommodate within the preexisting theory lay half-assimilated in his writings, creating potential incoherences within the total doctrine, which eventually fell apart under analysis and under the strain of translation into historical practice. The interaction, both ways, of facts and theories must be kept in mind. For many reasons including their particular origins and backgrounds, their powers, goals, energy and imagination - men focus upon certain things, and this peculiar connement of vision leaves many other things unseen. On the one hand, the lines are not sharply and permanently drawn, so that thinkers, constantly confronted by diverse evidence, as a matter of fact modify and even reject established or favoured theories, and doubt the feasibility of what they once considered possible. But on the other hand theories and especially social theories can rarely be disconrmed simply, for apparently subversive facts hardly ever travel like a bullet to the victim. Evidence which appears to be damning can be accommodated in various ways, and its recalcitrance or anomalous character diminished especially if the theory is of a high degree of generality, or if it contains elements of prophecy, for in these cases supplementary hypotheses are necessary and protective. For example, Marxs general prediction of the breakdown of capitalism is far less subject to counter-evidence - or to falsication than his specic hypotheses about wage levels. But such tolerance, such recognition of legitimate diversity, must end at some point. Acceptance of the resilience of social theory does not extend recognition to the sheer dogmatist or ideologist. They are sworn,
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