In Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler2 there are two intellectuals who are rivals in their affections for Hedda. The one, Dr Jörgen Tesman, her husband, holder of a government scholarship, is a practitioner of cultural history – today one would call it ‘cultural anthropology’ [Eng.] – and the other, who loves Hedda but does not marry her, Ejlert Lövborg, is talented but somewhat dissolute. The husband is a specialist – he writes about medieval arts and crafts in Brabant – while the other occupies himself with the future of culture and society. It is the difference between a research aficionado and a man of spirit; the one keeps purely to registering the facts, while the other is meant to have a view of the future. That does sound a little primitive, admittedly, as there is also the view of the past, the ‘view of redemption’ (Benjamin). Conversely, one can be just as sterile about what lies in the future as with the registering of facts, for example in a mere extrapolation of the here and now, pedantically fearful in contrast to a productive imagination. But the imagination itself can also be afflicted by the spirit of facticity, as in science fiction. A recent parody, ‘The Truth about Hansel and Gretel’,3 shows how the imagination of today can be hampered if it acts as a mere reproduction of facts.
Yet Ibsen’s somewhat crude distinction does offer something for everyday use. It is central to social theory that it goes beyond what is merely existent, merely given. But it must not be simply chorismos against the facts, no blind extrapolation of possibilities and perspectives, otherwise it descends into grotesque, as with the early socialists, with Charles Fourier.4 The attempt to go beyond what is the case while still incorporating the weight of that which is – this is exactly what the concept of tendency is. Tendency, that means theorems about the direction in which society is developing based on its central laws, which already apply here and now. Marx speaks of the tendency of a falling profit rate.5 Whether this is an adequate term for the inner laws of society is a question for another time. But the mathematization of such laws is adequate, in so far as the exchange rate is itself a calculation: the mathematical form of the equation of exchanged goods in a socially prevailing exchange. The mathematization follows deductively from the exchange of equivalents; it is not statistics. This is about the progressive concentration of capital, and hence of the power to control the work of others – at times this is concealed by epiphenomena to a varying degree – and the change in political forms and in the nature of politics resulting from the shift of power into the economy. The progressive concentration leads to anthropological changes. Because there is no smooth congruence, this results in disproportions. Dispositions and behaviours survive in a state in which they are no longer actually demanded by anyone.
This is part of the capitalist calculus, whose goal is for capitalism to retain more after the completion of a production cycle than before, and which leads to concentration, to monopoly. With unregulated experience, this can be observed drastically in the large number of seemingly independent people who live only by the grace of the companies to which they are attached.
We are still operating at the methodological level, where the concern is the categorial constitution of a society and the rules that exist as long as the tendency continues – for example, as long as the concentration is confirmed. Society cannot be imagined without the concept of tendency, because it contains the decisive mediations between what is socially given and the concept thereof, the concept of a nature of society, of what society aims for and what it has stepped up to do. The concept of free and fair exchange, for example: what must it lead to, and what does it actually lead to?
To return to Ibsen’s slightly crude construction in Hedda Gabler, we will not speak of tendency as long as we simply mean business as usual; as long as some faits sociaux6 simply continue and increase, it would be atheoretical, a mere extrapolation and generalization of findings, and would remain in the domain of the factual and mere prophecy. A genuine theory of society does not prophesy; that would be a relapse into that realm of expectable individual facts which theory is meant to rise above. An analysis of this kind appeared in a periodical7 that predicted the economic crisis in 1926/27, and I pointed it out in vain to my father at the time.8 Formulations of tendencies become theoretical only when they indicate something fundamentally new, something that cannot be predicted yet, as opposed to that which is, which is merely existent. Statements about society are the key aspect of theory, provided they are not already in Baedeker. Concentration, for example, is inherent in liberalism, the play of free forces. But one can really speak of a tendency only when one does not extrapolate indefinitely, along the lines of the rabid dog that first draws its tail slightly in, then draws it in more when things get worse, and finally draws it in completely. The tendency towards concentration that is endogenous to liberalism will cause it difficulties in the foreseeable future; people speak today of social market economy, for example, which really means an infinite restriction of liberalism.
Regarding the convergence of the conceptual frameworks of philosophy and sociology: the concept of theory is not tautological but, rather, concerns the new, the non-identical. Theory is only ever attained when, starting from an analysis of the concepts that actually apply to society, it arrives at the definitions which these concepts demand, yet which also differ from them. This marks the boundary between the sterility in Ibsen’s figure of Jörgen Tesman and a productive imagination. Tendency is the ability of theoretical thought to grasp the non-identical quality of a concept within the concept itself. One really expects theory to be not a cupboard with many compartments in which one can store whatever comes along but, rather, a hope of truth, of something qualitatively different. To the extent that truth is something qualitatively different, we are compelled towards dialectic – and this compulsion comes no longer from the concept of absolute spirit but, rather, from the phenomena of today.
The concept of tendency only applies to a constitutively dynamic society, one whose only invariance is its own variability. The state of Plato and Aristotle or the social doctrines of Thomas Aquinas were dealing with civil and, in a certain sense, fully developed urban market societies. The basic principles of civil society – exchange, division of labour, mutual satisfaction of goods, forms of rule in their organization – are discussed by Plato with superb candour.9 When it comes to his uncompromising doctrine of the transcendence of forms, no one could accuse him of betraying the question of truth to the question of its genetic conditions. Theory in an emphatic sense exists only when society is dynamic. Max Weber’s ‘traditionalist societies’10 have no theory. The Norn’s question in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, ‘Do you know what will happen?’,11 would make no sense in a traditionalist society. Nor is there such a thing as theoretical apologetics in feudal society; rather, there is a rejection of theory as such. Keyserling12 says on one occasion, ‘If I thought about how that is, I would not be a count and neither would you.’ We should leave this well alone. Conceiving great apologetic theories for feudalism, as de Maistre does,13 means sinking to the lowest level of rationality and is a lost cause from the start.
Tendency exists only in so far as society is already the totality, the system that is presupposed as soon as one speaks of tendency. Tendency makes no sense in more or less unconnected groups or with markets that are only loosely connected. The underlying laws of society exist only to the extent that there is at least unity in the sector where such laws are alleged to apply.
Conversely, however, we can speak of the whole only in the sense of a tendency. The whole exists only in the sense of a vanishing point. Spencer’s concept of integration14 directly equates the progression towards a whole with the concept of tendency. The fact that concepts such as tendency, totality or theory apply only to a unified society means not only that theory is determined by its object, namely society; it also means that the possibility of theory is not only a matter of subjective reason, of scientific discipline, but also depends on whether the social reality is adequate for a theory in the first place.