Ezra Klein can get a column out of a podcast episode + an insult. He does it all the time! So I figure I can too. My podcast Totalitarians of Western Philosophy is heady dank stuff, and it's dead on the news cycle, as right-wing authoritarianism is spreading around the world, threatening left-wing authoritarianism everywhere. It’s a time of choosing! Admittedly the choices suck.
Perhaps we should have a more positive take on our current political situation, one which would’ve been familiar to the great figures of the hyper-inspiring Western tradition. If woke speech police are squaring off against neo-fascist anti-immigrant motherfuckers all over the world, they’re together realizing the visions of the great political philosophers, our intellectual legacy. These figures didn't agree on much, but they agreed on this: you should do whatever the government is telling you to do, no matter how ridiculous or evil it may be.
I taught political philosophy for 30 years, trying not to notice the ideas at the heart of many of the classic texts. Some highlights (which are also actual or potential podcast episodes):
Plato's Republic (circa 375 BC): The first utopia and the founding work of political theory in the West, it teaches the absolute rule of the philosopher-kings. They’ll rule by lies. This one in particular: we the p-k's are going to tell people they’re randomly matched for breeding, but really they intend to control all reproduction to breed castes of people to perform the various functions of the city: they'll breed soldiers and shoemakers, philosopher-kings and peasants. Unauthorized infants will be killed. Plato has Socrates define “justice” as everyone keeping to their assigned place. Also, during perhaps the greatest efflorescence of art in human history, Socrates recommends total censorship for the purposes of thought control. This contradicts Plato's ethics thoroughly. A real mess, in short, and the most influential book ever written.
Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651): The first clear statement of social contract theory and a fundamental influence on the "classical liberal" thinkers such as Locke, Kant, and Rawls argues that in entering into a commonwealth, people give up all of their rights to the sovereign, who’s constituted as the ruler by their agreement. However, you can’t fail to agree, even if you’re screaming that you don’t agree at all. But since whatever the sovereign does is (allegedly) done by your agreement, if the political leaders punish you, that’s you punishing yourself. If they execute your mom, that’s your own action, because each of us is just a little fleshy chunk of a big old leviathan. Justice for Hobbes means doing whatever the sovereign tells you to do, and pretending to like it.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1821): "All other points of view must vanish. The state must be treated as a hieroglyph of the reason which reveals itself in rationality... The state is the world which mind has made for itself; its march, therefore, is on lines that are fixed and absolute. As high as mind stands above nature, so high does the state does the state stand above physical life. Man must therefore venerate the state as a secular deity." And not just any state: it’s the united German Reich that will bring about man's great destiny of perfect self-consciousness and identity with God! We might have to break a few eggs, though: Hegel thinks wars help make nations healthy.
Karl Marx, "The Communist Manifesto" (1848), and much else: His contemporaries, anti-authoritarians such as Proudhon and Bakunin, referred to Marxists as "authoritarian socialists." They had extremely good reasons. In the manifesto, Marx and Engels give a 10-point plan for the period immediately after the revolution. It's simple. All means of production will be centralized in the hands of the State (Marx was soaked in Hegel). The State will control education, manufacturing, banking, transportation, and all communication. This is a clear formulation of the totalitarian ambitions pursued by Lenin and Stalin, Mao and the Kim dynasty, Pol Pot and Nicolae Ceaușescu, resulting in millions of deaths. Marx argued that if we concentrated all power in the hands of The State, it would "wither away" on its own. This isn’t the most convincing argument in the history of arguments.
Martin Heidegger, the "Black Notebooks" (1931-1970) and much else: One of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century by acclamation, Heidegger was a convinced Nazi who viewed Hitler as the realization of Hegel's vision of the "secret destiny" of the German people. Sending his brother a copy of Mein Kampf as a Christmas gift in 1931, Heidegger described Hitler as a remarkable agent, "the mission and the destiny of Western culture." As rector of the University of Freiburg, he has a hand in removing his own mentor, the great Husserl, from the faculty (Husserl was Jewish). Even after Hitler's defeat, he never clearly repudiated these views. JD Vance appears to sidling down that well-worn Heidegger road.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror (1947): The great phenomenologist and friend of Sartre and Beauvoir worked in the resistance in Paris during the German occupation. He went from there to defending the most “terroristic” of the governing strategies of Stalin, including the purges and forced collectivizations of the 1930s, in which millions died. He resolves to believe every word, for example, of Bukharin's forced confession, and says that the people convicted in show trials and subsequently executed were their own most sincere accusers. In a remarkably fallacious series of arguments, he claims that people like Bukharin were innocent at the moment they committed their alleged crimes (they were doing what the Politburo told them to do), but that the facts changed retroactively when Stalin told them something different. He develops an entire ethics, a metaphysics of time, and theory of truth, in order to make these millions of deaths defensible.
Some of these great philosophers are right, some are left. This difference ought to appear trivial in light of what they all advocated together: irresistible coercive power controlling every aspect of every person's lives. Obviously, that is what we Westerners want more than anything: a government to operate our bodies like marionettes. We've often gotten what we wanted, and are going to be getting much more. Much more philosophy! And many more internment facilities.
Where will Totalitarians of Western Philosophy, the podcast, go from here? My production team and I (that is, I) will be devoting an episode to Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek's astonishing, in which they threaten to conscript every single person into the military and to switch the populations of Shanghai and New York. No one knows why they want to do that, nor does anyone know why people read their books. Maybe it's because they are so connected to the grand traditions of Western political speculation.
Meanwhile, Princeton professor Philip Pettit argues in the tried and true manner that the "fully incorporated state" needs to be "absolute." Our great tradition is really very durable.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell
