----------------- 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]