----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- 
 
I must protest David Levy's portrayal of Carlyle as a simple-minded  
racist recommending "societies organized along the lines of racial  
slavery".  This was never really an "alternative" form of organization  
of society seriously considered during this time. Carlyle was not a  
political activist nor were his policies seen as "policies", even by  
him.   
 
Thomas Carlyle was a "feudalist" (if such a term can be allowed).  
But he does not pine for old-fashioned reactionary aristocracy or  
pastoral romance. Rather, Carlyle absorbed Goethe's ideas on the  
"natural", in particular the relationship between external order and  
personal freedom. He conceived that the end of human activity is  
activity itself -- the Protestant ethic, secularly enhanced.   
 
For Carlyle, the feudal system's *sole* value is that it is much  
better at assigning a man an activity and thereafter granting him  
the freedom to pursue it in any manner he pleases.  In contrast, a  
market system assigns him no activity, but simultaneously  
becomes the hardest taskmaster of all by forcing him to "serve it"  
by chasing wage labor, profit, etc.  He sees a market society as  
"unnatural" as it forces people to pursue consumption and  
accumulation, whereas people's nature is to pursue activity.  In  
Carlyle's view, the feudal system may be harsh in limiting social  
mobility, but it offers freedom of activity at the individual level and  
the joy of craftsmanship.  In contrast, the market system is  
socially much more progressive, but at the individual level, it forces  
everybody into the unnatural slavery of gain and acquisition.   For  
lack of a better term, I'll call this "feudalist individualism".   
 
Needless to say, his arguments in defense of slavery were not  
logically inconsistent with his general social philosophy, they were  
just taking it to an extreme degree and expressed in an extreme  
tone.  Theoretically, Carlyle saw little difference between a black  
slave in a slave society and a joyous yeoman in a feudal society--  
except that one is loyally bound to his task by chains and whips,  
and the other by tradition and custom.  In either case, the "joy of  
work" is (eventually) achieved.  Add to this the "happy slaves"  
propaganda of the American southerners and their "Gone with the  
Wind" feudal micmicry, add to this his own personal racism and  
gloominess, add his always exaggerated writing style, add the  
urgency of his message and the need to "turn up the volume", and,  
finally, add the pleasure he took in offending the pious and  
sanctimonious evangelical Christians he despised (a "Nuke the  
Whales" sort of glee), and the extremity of his 1849-50 writings  
may be contextually clearer.   
 
But neither a feudal society nor a slave society are being  
"recommended" by Carlyle.  His early flirtation with Saint- 
Simonism, which embraced industrial society (but tried to  
rationalize it) proves that he was not a traditionalist lords-and- 
yeoman feudalist, much less a master-and-slave feudalist.  The  
main issue, the only issue, was the "man-must-work" principle of  
Saint-Simon and Goethe.  How this can be achieved in an  
industrial society, he did not know nor did he have practical policy  
suggestions for.  He was a man of letters.  He wrote to shock.   
 
Although Carlyle is often lumped together with Dickens, utopians,  
socialists and other deplorers of industrial society, his fierce belief  
in "feudalist" individualism sets him quite apart.   But his  
observation of the deplorable effect of industrial society on the joy  
of work was not unique: his arguments, if not his tone, can also be  
found in Smith and Marx and, in modernized versions, in Galbraith,  
Scitovsky, Schumacher and others.  And, if I may add, it was one  
of the underlying sentiments in Seattle and Washington.   
 
Goncalo 
 
------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ 
For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]