[A] man ought to be so deeply convinced that the source of his own moral forces is in himself . . . that he never despairs and never falls into those vulgar, banal moods, pessimism and optimism. My own state of mind synthesizes these two feelings and transcends them: my mind is pessimistic, but my will is optimistic. Since I never build up illusions, I am seldom disappointed. I’ve always been armed with unlimited patience – not a passive, inert kind, but a patience allied with perseverance.1
Antonio Gramsci’s words here, written in a letter from prison to his brother Carlo in December 1929, provide useful perspective on the famous slogan, ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’ so often wrongly attributed to Gramsci himself. In fact, he borrowed it from Romain Rolland to describe (in an article in L’Ordine Novo during the Turin general strike of April 1920) the traits of ‘the socialist conception of the revolutionary process’ in contrast with those anarchists who presented themselves as ‘the repository of revealed revolutionary truth . . . letting off steam with the satisfied observation: “We have said it all along. We were right!”’
Gramsci specifically invoked Rolland’s motto in the context of responding to one Italian anarchist who, in a classic misinterpretation of the debate between Marx and Bakunin over the state in the transition to socialism, had repudiated ‘Marx’s pessimism of the intellect . . . “inasmuch as a revolution occurring through extremes of misery or oppression would require the institution of an authoritarian dictatorship”’. While calling for the collaboration between anarchists and socialists in order ‘to work systematically to organise a great army of disciplined and conscious militants . . . ready to take upon itself effective responsibility for the revolution’, Gramsci’s defence of the Marxist case for a revolutionary party aiming at creating a revolutionary state was classic:
The proletarian class is at present scattered at random through the cities and the countryside, around machines, or bent over the soil: it works without knowing why it works, forced into servile labour by the ever-pressing threat of death by starvation and cold. It does group together in the unions and the cooperatives, but through the necessity of economic resistance, not through spontaneous choice, not following impulses freely born in its spirit. All the actions of the proletariat mass necessarily move in forms established by the capitalist mode of production, established by the State power of the bourgeoisie. To expect that a mass that is reduced to such conditions of spiritual and bodily slavery should express an autonomous historical development, to expect that it should spontaneously initiate and sustain the creation of a revolution, is pure illusion on the part of ideologues.2
It is indeed impossible to read Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks without appreciating how far he actually transcended the dichotomy between pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. He did so precisely by applying his stunningly creative intelligence to what really would need to be involved in the creation of a new type of political party, which in homage to another great Italian political theorist who could also be described as a realist with imagination, he called the ‘modern prince’.3 In trying to articulate the form of a party capable of navigating a revolutionary transformation in conditions where the state was deeply rooted in society, Gramsci was doing the very opposite of entrusting it to revolutionary will to usher in the spontaneous transformative ‘event’ that is rather in fashion among some radical intellectuals today.4
Terry Eagleton’s recent book, Hope Without Optimism, acknowledges the ‘voluntarist and even adventurist’ dangers in optimism of the will, but for him optimists are usually conservative ‘because their faith in a benign future is rooted in their trust of the essential soundness of the present’.5 He therefore sees optimism as primarily a ruling-class ideology. Eagleton’s hero is Walter Benjamin who builds ‘his revolutionary vision on a distrust of historical progress, as well as on a profound melancholia’.6 Although Eagleton disinters an obscure essay by Benjamin that expresses the need to ‘organize pessimism for political ends’ this does not in fact go beyond the negativity of countering facile optimism. It leaves us bereft of the optimism we need, intellectually tempered by a sober recognition of the great barriers to positive transformative change, to make whatever positive contribution we can to overcoming those barriers, including in ourselves and our institutions.
In fact, when Eagleton tells us it is ‘irrational to hope for the impossible’ but not irrational to hope even for ‘the vastly improbable’, he is actually appealing to the kind of optimism of the intellect that believes we can contribute to making the vastly improbable a little less so. Defining hope as ‘rational desire’, which Eagleton derives from Aristotle, is in fact optimism of the intellect.7 The intellect is not all abstract reason and positivist empirical calculation. Ethics and imagination are also embedded in the intellect. Optimism of the intellect involves bringing reason, ethics, imagination to bear on how to realize optimism of the will.
What many intellectuals today may find troubling about optimism of the intellect is the credit they fear it may lend to all that has emanated from the ‘age of reason’, with its universalist claims to truth and its evolutionist proclamations of progress. The abdication of so many left intellectuals from the vocation of telling the truth on these grounds was no doubt partly the result of political and intellectual shortcomings on the traditional left. But they have sometimes only generalized what was wrong with the narrow class struggle perspective that crudely labelled truth either bourgeois or proletarian, applying the same type of dichotomy to race and gender, and indeed to any and all asymmetric relations of power.
To insist that knowledge production and claims to justice, whether in the physical or social sciences, or in philosophy and law, are socially situated is one thing; yet to deny all objective validity to the best principles and practices that have emanated from the physical and social sciences, from philosophy and law, is a form of intellectual practice that throws out the proverbial baby with the bathwater.8 As Meera Nanda put it so well in concluding her essay on ‘Restoring the Real’ in the 1997 Socialist Register, epistemological relativism, even when rooted in a proper sense of injustice, can even be ‘antithetical to the cause of justice for “without truth there is no injustice”, only so many different stories’.9 It is the exploited, marginalized and oppressed who most need to go beyond the segmentation of truth, to de-relativize knowledge, science and ethics to secure equality, to realize democracy, to achieve social and ecological justice.
Thomas Dewey published an essay in 1916 simply entitled ‘Progress’ which presented an argument which captured so well, right in the midst of the slaughterhouse of the First World War, what I mean by optimism of the intellect that it deserves to be quoted it at some length:
Some persons will see only irony in a discussion of progress at the present time. Never was pessimism easier . . . [Yet] never was there a time when it was more necessary to search for the conditions upon which progress depends . . . The economic situation, the problem of poverty by the side of great wealth, of ignorance and absence of a fair chance in life by the side of culture and unlimited opportunity, have, indeed, always served to remind us that after all we were dealing with an opportunity for progress rather than with an accomplished fact . . .
Progress is not automatic; it depends upon human intent and aim and upon acceptance of responsibility for its production . . . In dwelling upon the need of conceiving progress as a responsibility and not as an endowment, I put primary emphasis upon responsibility for intelligence, for the power which foresees, plans and constructs in advance. We are so overweighted by nature with impulse, sentiment and emotion, that we are always tempted to rely unduly upon the efficacy of these things . . . [But] since the variable factor, the factor which may be altered indefinitely, is the social conditions which call out and direct the impulses and sentiments, the positive means of progress lie in the application of intelligence to the construction of proper social devices . . . Practically, this is a matter of the persistent use of reflection in the study of social conditions and the devising of social contrivances.10
Dewey very tellingly concluded that what stood most in the way of progress were not the forces of conservatism and reaction but rather the much more common disbelief in the possibility of what he termed ‘constructive social engineering’. Today, this common disbelief is once again the greatest barrier that optimism of the intellect faces. Of course the very term social engineering is liable to send chills down the spines of even most leftist intellectuals today. But should we be so afraid of it? ‘Institutional engineering’ was the term Karl Polanyi used when he insisted against Friederich Hayek at the end of The Great Transformation that democratic planning was not only possible but was actually the necessary condition for realizing genuine individual freedom by connecting it to collective sociability.11
Those who invoke Polanyi’s ‘double movement’ to make a case for lawlike alternations within capitalism between eras of market deregulation and reregulation, and thus hope to promote a return from neoliberalism to the guiding principles of the Keynesian welfare state, fail to register Polanyi’s central contribution to optimism of the intellect, which was to make the case for democratic socialist economic planning not only against neoliberalism but also as a way of transcending the contradictions of the Keynesian welfare state.12 Polanyi was a socialist, albeit more an Owenite than a Marxist, and the understanding of capitalist contradiction played a central role in his thought. Polanyi saw the imposition of barriers to laissez-faire within capitalism, whether in the form of tariffs or in the form of social welfare measures, and whether coming from above, as with Bismarck, or from the pressure of the newly organized working classes below, as producing contradictions for capitalism’s reproduction. And it was the contradictions this double movement actually did produce within late nineteenth-century capitalism which gave rise to what he called ‘the great catastrophe’ of World War and Great Depression in the first half of the twentieth century.
Polanyi initially had hoped that Roosevelt’s New Deal and the state planning in capitalist democracies that underwrote their victory against fascism in the Second World War, and above all the large majority government the British Labour Party secured in 1945, would lay the foundations for democratic socialist economic planning. But he very quickly recognized that the compromises they made with the powerful forces of capitalism, both domestic and international, were reinforcing capital accumulation and commodification even through the construction of the Keynesian welfare state. Here was the problematic double movement again, with regulation and social reform producing the contradictions that would once again lead to crisis, as indeed proved to be so with the Keynesian welfare state by the 1970s. It was amidst the playing out of these contradictions, and the inability of the left to offer a way beyond them via democratic socialist planning, that neoliberalism took root.
Optimism of the intellect does not involve embracing any teleological laws of historical progress. Optimism of the intellect in fact involves being sensitive to contingency in human history, with contradictions and crises not the only variable factors in determining the scope and possibilities of such contingency, but also the capacities of collective human agency as especially crucial variable factors in developing transformative institutional forms. To get to where Dewey and Polanyi, no less than Marx or Gramsci, wanted us to get involves probing the limits of economic and political institutions. And to do this it is also important to pay close attention to such great pessimists of the intelligence as Max Weber on state bureaucracy and Roberto Michels on party oligarchy. This is precisely because we need to identify the actual institutional barriers that lie in the way of replacing the capitalist rationality of market competition with the socialist rationality of collective planning, so we can at least minimize those barriers through articulating the institutional forms that can develop popular capacities for genuinely democratic participation as well as complex representation and administration. The political purpose for this kind of institutionalism is exactly the opposite of validating path dependency, insisting rather on institutional contingency to the end of discovering how to transform institutions in socialist ways.
The need for creating new political parties oriented to developing the agencies capable of this has increasingly become recognized in recent years. The protest movements against global neoliberalism which have punctuated the past two decades, however remarkable and impressive they have been, have also reconfirmed that you can protest until hell freezes over, but without taking and transforming political power you will never change the world. Jodi Dean’s recent book Crowds and Party makes this case very well. But her image of the new communist party as an ‘affective community’ is not enough.13 It needs also to be an ‘intellectual community’ oriented to developing capacities for complex democratic representation and administration.
We need to learn from our failures in this respect. Watching the Netflix five-part series, Rebellion – produced to coincide with the centenary of Easter 1916 in Ireland – brought to mind the famous line written by that quintessential Irish postmodernist, Samuel Beckett: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’14 Indeed, Rebellion’s compelling dramatization of the uprising – and its defeat – ends by pointing ahead to the spark it provided for the achievement of Irish independence six years later, while also reminding us of the compromised nature of that national liberation victory insofar as it failed – like so many others later in the twentieth century – to realize the socialist goals of the 1916 revolutionaries.
Learning from failures is not just a matter of retrospect. It is a matter of how we go about examining and drawing lessons from contemporary events. Just like the reformist Fabian Society stalwarts, Sydney and Beatrice Webb, who came back from Moscow in the mid-1930s saying ‘we have seen the future and it works’, so did too many socialist intellectuals of our time go to Brazil, Venezuela and Bolivia in the first decade of the new millennium and come back with the same message. This lack of critical inquiry is characteristic of optimism of the will. What is needed is a careful, sympathetic probing of the barriers which attempts at transformative change are running up against, and the limits and problems being confronted or evaded, the better to learn from them when we come back and have to face the contingencies of trying to develop the capacities to effect political change in our own countries. Had this been the more common approach abroad to the rise of Syriza in Greece, the euphoria which greeted its election as the first and only new government of the radical left since the global economic crisis began almost a decade ago would have been more tempered – and the emotional screams of betrayal, so characteristic of a frustrated optimism of the will, would have been less common.
Optimism of the intellect is perhaps most needed today to temper the catastrophist pessimism that accompanies the all too credible scientific calculations of approaching ecological disaster. When people try to galvanize us into action on this by saying we have only five or ten years left, they are really asserting their pessimism of the intellect in such a way that suggests that optimism of the will is all we need. In fact we need to confront, and think very hard about how to bridge, the very troubling disjuncture between ecological time and political time. This especially applies to the time it will take to develop the institutional capacities, and above all the democratic socialist economic planning capacity, to fully address the full scale of ecological problems.
Ernst Bloch’s magnum opus, The Principle of Hope, was right to identify the potential for socialism in what he called the ‘utopian intention’ of the human intellect. As in Gramsci’s insistence that ‘everyone is a philosopher’ since in ‘any intellectual activity whatever, in “language”, there is contained a specific conception of the world’,15 this intention could be located in the craftsman’s eye for perfection, in the worker’s experience of alienation when this is denied her, in the glimpses afforded to it by theatre, architecture, painting, literature, and even in a well-crafted essay. ‘In contrast to pessimism, a tested optimism, when the scales fall from the eyes, does not deny the goal-belief in general; on the contrary, what matters now is to find the right one and to prove it.’16
This essay draws on my York University Inaugural Politics Emeritus Lecture, 25 April 2016.
1Antonio Gramsci, Letters from Prison, selected and translated by Lynn Lawner, New York: Harper and Row, 1973, p. 159.
2The full text in English of Gramsci’s ‘Address to the Anarchists’ (which appeared L’Ordine Novo on April 30, 1920) is available at https://libcom.org.
3See Glen Newey, ‘The Getaway Car’, London Review of Books, 38:2, 21 January 2016, pp. 39-42, quoting Muarizio Viroli, Redeeming ‘The Prince’: The Meaning of Machiavelli’s Masterpiece, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
4E.g., Alain Badiou, Being and Event, New York: Continuum, 2005.
5Terry Eagleton, Hope Without Optimism, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, p. 13.
6Eagleton, Hope, p. 14. This is indeed what Benjamin’s most famous metaphor coveys: ‘the angel of history, his face turned to the past and his wings caught up in a storm blowing from paradise and seeing not a chain of previous events but rather ‘one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble . . . The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.’
7Eagleton, Hope, pp. 50-51.
8This was precisely what Gramsci warned against when he wrote that ‘ . . . it is wrong to conceive of scientific discussion as a process at law in which there is an accused and a public prosecutor whose professional duty it is to demonstrate that the accused is guilty and has to be put out of circulation . . . [rather than] that his adversary may well be expressing a need which should be incorporated, if only as a subordinate aspect, in his own construction. To understand and to evaluate realistically one’s adversary’s position and his reasons (and sometimes one’s adversary is the whole of past thought) means precisely to be liberated from the prison of ideologies in the bad sense of the word – that of blind ideological fanaticism. It means taking up a point of view that is “critical”, which for the purpose of scientific research is the only fertile one.’ Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971, pp. 343-4.
9Meera Nanda, ‘Restoring the Real’, in Leo Panitch, ed., Socialist Register 1997: Ruthless Criticism of All That Exists, London: Merlin Press, 1996, pp. 344-5.
10Thomas Dewey, ‘Progress’, The International Journal of Ethics, April 2016, pp. 311-13, 315-17.
11Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Boston: Beacon Press, 1944.
12See, for instance Fred Block and Margaret Somers, The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
13Jodi Dean, Crowds and Party, London: Verso, 2016, pp. 218-19.
14Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho, http://www.samuel-beckett.net/w_ho.htm
15Gramsci, Selections, p. 323.
16Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Vol. One, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986, pp. 445-6.