The Kantian Marxism of Lucien Goldmann

Abstract

This paper explores and criticizes Lucien Goldmann’s Marxist reading of Kant.

The name of Lucien Goldmann is not so well remembered today although like others of his generation – Louis Althusser, Herbert Marcuse, E. P. Thompson – he was a staple of the 1960s era Marxist theory. The debates between New Left and Old Left, Soviet Communism and Western Marxism, and the Young Marx and the Old Marx now seem as distant as the eighteenth-century debates between the noblesse de robe and the noblesse d’épeé. Yet Goldmann is worth another look. ¹

Born in 1913, the son of a Romanian rabbi, Goldmann studied philosophy and economics in Vienna, Lviv, and Paris. During World War II, he found refuge in Switzerland, where he worked as an assistant to the psychologist Jean Piaget. It was during this time that he encountered the work of Georg Lukács that would have a decisive influence on his thought. Goldmann completed a doctoral dissertation on Kant at the University of Zürich that would become his first book before moving to Paris, where he spent the rest of his life. His most influential work, Le Dieu Caché (The Hidden God), published in 1955, was a study of the tragic vision of Racine and Pascal. ² This work, like the book on Kant, was an exercise in the sociology of philosophy that attempted to relate various philosophical views to the social structures of which they were a part. He would later write several works on the philosophy of culture and the methodology of the human sciences. He passed away in 1970.

Goldmann’s work was always controversial. His gruff and at times iconoclastic demeanour was the subject of good-natured or, at any rate, harmless ridicule, yet he always had admirers. In a moving tribute to Goldmann written shortly after his death, the literary critic Raymond Williams found in his method of ‘genetic structuralism’ a useful alternative to the standard Marxian formula of base and superstructure. By emphasizing the priority of the world-view or ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams) that unites members of a group, this method was able to distinguish both what conferred a particular unity on a work of literature or art and what distinguished it from other works produced by other social groups or classes. ³ Another admirer, Alasdair MacIntyre, praised Goldmann’s treatment of seventeenth-century Jansenism as embodying a ‘tragic view of the world’. Rather than viewing moral philosophy as a static body of concepts centred around timeless notions of obligations and duties, MacIntyre found in Goldmann a new model for conceiving the history of moral philosophy as the history of moral conflict. ⁴

Goldmann’s book on Kant was a pioneering effort to establish a direct line of descent from Kant to Marx via Lukács. Originally published in German in 1945 under the somewhat cumbersome title Mensch, Gemeinschaft und Welt in der Philosophie Immanuel Kants, it appeared in French under the title La communauté humaine et l’univers chez Kant in 1948 and was later given a new title with a new edition, Introduction à la philosophie de Kant, in 1967. This was shortened simply to Immanuel Kant in the English translation in 1971. ⁵

The foreshortened English title unfortunately obscures the book’s larger purpose. Goldmann disclaimed writing another specialized study of Kant’s epistemology or moral philosophy but to explore the underlying unity that animated the Kantian system. This unity is to be found in the idea of the ‘totality’ or the individual’s relation to the community. ‘The theme of man and community’, Goldmann announced, ‘is central not only to Kant’s thought but to the whole of modern philosophy’ (21). It is the concept of totality with its synthesis of Kant, Hegel, and Marx that formed the basis of Goldmann’s theory of ethical socialism, which, I believe, remains his chief philosophic legacy. The idea of ethical socialism was associated with the revival of neo-Kantianism in Germany in the years before World War I just as Kant’s views on justice, rights, and perpetual peace have sparked a second wave of neo-Kantianism in the Anglo-American world in the years after the Cold War. ⁶ Goldmann remains an important, if somewhat forgotten, voice in the revival of Kantian political theory. ⁷

The sociology of philosophy

Goldmann begins by attempting to situate Kant’s philosophy within the class structure of the German society of his time. It is this sociological approach to philosophy that marks Kant as a representative of bourgeois thought. By bourgeois thought, Goldmann means three things: first, freedom understood as moral autonomy; second, individualism or the right of complete liberty limited only by the requirement to respect the liberty of others; and third, equality before the law (34).

These three features of bourgeois thought received different forms of expression depending on the degree of social and economic development of their respective societies. For the most developed bourgeois nations, France and England, these ideas received concrete expression in the development of laws and institutions, but in ‘backward’ Germany, bourgeois thought took a notably inward turn. Unable to influence political events, German thinkers of this period withdrew from society and focused with uncommon clarity on the inner life of the individual (42).

Goldmann makes social structure account not only for thought but for the idiosyncrasies of individual biography. It was the inability of the German bourgeoisie to transform its conditions of existence that led Hölderlin and Nietzsche to madness, Heine and Marx to exile, and Kant and Schopenhauer to loneliness and isolation. He even contends that it was the underdeveloped state of its social development that accounts for the absence of laughter and satire in Germany. Making a partial exception for Heine, he asserts that Germany never produced a single comic genius. Why is it, then, that the Jews who possess perhaps the most tragic history of all people have also produced the greatest comics?

The idea that the backward condition of German social development was conducive to, indeed required for, great philosophical achievements had long been a staple of Marxian thought. In his early Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx explained that it was Germany’s failure to produce a revolutionary movement that led to a kind of hyper-development of philosophical thought. ‘In politics’, he wrote, ‘the Germans have thought what other nations have done. Germany was their theoretical conscience’. ⁸ But why should a society with a barely developed bourgeoisie become the torchbearer of revolutionary thought? It would seem more logical from a sociological point of view that German philosophy would share the same fate as German economic and legal institutions.

Goldmann’s definition of bourgeois society, while useful, barely scratches the surface of the concept. The concept of bourgeois society suggests both a certain type of civilization and a certain type of human character. The pillars of this civilization are science and commerce. These form the backdrop to the bourgeois way of life that the eighteenth century described variously as polished, civilized, and refined and which reached its apotheosis in the coffee houses and salons of Edinburgh, London, and Paris. ⁹ The bourgeois represents not only a form of society but a distinctive way of life. To be bourgeois means to be in the middle, a member of the middle class. It is this in-between status that has been the cause of so much restless energy and nervous anxiety that has been the dominant bourgeois characteristic. ¹⁰

In Germany, the term Bürgher never carried the same stigma ascribed to it by Rousseau and Marx. Burgher was always a term of approbation associated with Bildung, a word meaning education but also maturation, culture, and judgement. Bildung and Bürgertum were inseparable. Members of the Bürgertum were typically drawn from the urban patriciate rather than the landed gentry and were conscious of themselves as forming a new social elite different from both the landed gentry and the peasantry. To be a member of the Bildungsbürgertum meant to possess economic independence, often guaranteed by membership in an officially recognized profession or Stände like the clergy, the professoriate, or the civil service. But even more importantly, to be bürgerlich meant to be in possession of the kind of intellectual culture associated with Weimar and especially the magical names of Schiller and Goethe. ¹¹

Kant’s image of the moral life brought this ideal of the bourgeois to perfection. This ideal rests on the worth of a life of self-mastery, the active pursuit of knowledge, and an unflinching acceptance of moral responsibility. Nowhere has this ideal been given a finer expression than in Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good:

How recognizable, how familiar to us, is the man so beautifully portrayed in the Grundlegung, who confronted even with Christ turns away to consider the judgment of his own conscience and to hear the voice of his own reason. Stripped of the exiguous metaphysical background which Kant was prepared to allow him, this man is with us still, free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy… He is the ideal citizen of the liberal state, a warning held up to tyrants. ¹²

Murdoch actually considered this an unattractive picture of the moral life, but I would call it a heroic image of the bourgeois.

Goldmann is unique in that his work is both a contribution to the sociology of knowledge and a serious investigation into the structure of Kant’s thought. All genuine philosophy, Goldmann admits, deals with timeless and immutable problems, but by relating thinkers to their particular social conditions, the sociology of knowledge seems to deny the existence of such problems or at least our access to them. How would we know such problems even existed if our cognitive capacities are limited to our social environment? If Kant’s philosophical system is ‘most representative’ of the backward state of the German bourgeoisie, what enabled him to see beyond the limits of his time and place?

Goldmann’s solution to this problem is to claim, somewhat unconvincingly, that while there exists one true philosophical system, our ability to approach it will depend on the social conditions in which a philosopher lives. Accordingly, the mark of a great thinker will be not to isolate themselves from society but to align themselves with the most progressive class of their period in order to help advance the possibility of truth. This is why, he claims, the great philosophers have not been lonely or isolated ‘eccentrics’ but those who have sought to transform the conditions of existence. In a footnote, he cites Lukács’ distinction between ‘actual’ and ‘ascribed’ class consciousness to argue that the philosopher ‘must be in the vanguard of the group leading the way and making no compromise with the actual given thought of its members’ (32).

The sociology of knowledge assumes the greatness of a thinker can be identified with their ability to articulate the most progressive vision possible under the social conditions of their time, yet such a view ignores the fact that many of the greatest philosophers have often been precisely those who were deemed most untimely or Unzeitgemässe who warned against the ‘progressive’ tendencies of their age. Plato resisted the extreme democratizing politics of his era. Aristotle championed the naturalness of the polis at the very moment when it was being overrun by the universalist ambitions of the Alexandrian empire. Hume and Burke both found reason to resist the experiments in social engineering that were being voiced in the ‘enlightened’ circles of their time. Montesquieu and Tocqueville similarly challenged the dogmas of their age, Montesquieu by championing the traditional role of the intermediary estates against the progressive role of a centralizing monarchy and Tocqueville by finding methods to control the ‘tyranny of the majority’. The idea that the philosopher’s goal is to advance the course of history presupposes an ability to discern an overall meaning or purpose to history, which, as I will argue in the next section, is inaccessible to our finite, limited capacities.

The concept of totality

The central concept of Goldmann’s work is the category of the totality. Although the term is used occasionally by Kant, it is more widely associated with Hegel and his claim in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit that ‘the truth is the whole’ (Das Wahre is das Ganze). ¹³ On this view, knowledge of parts is not real knowledge, but only knowledge that aspires to the whole, of everything that is – God, man, and world – counts as true. The whole is more than the additive sum of its parts – this is the sin of empiricism – but constitutes a fully integrated and coherent vision of reality. In the language of the logician Wilfred Sellars, knowledge of the whole attempts ‘to understand how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term’. ¹⁴

The concept of totality appeared most prominently in the final chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason titled ‘The Architectonic of Pure Reason’. ¹⁵ By an architectonic, Kant meant ‘the art of constructing systems’, that is, making a system out of ‘a mere aggregate of knowledge’. This aspiration to a unity of knowledge takes the form of an ‘organized unity’, which is generated from its own internal principles. Kant writes:

Systems seem to be formed in the manner of lowly organisms, through a generatio aequivoca from the mere confluence of assembled concepts, at first imperfect, and only gradually attaining to completeness, although they one and all have had their schema, as the original germ, in the sheer self-development of reason (A835/B863).

Every philosophy aspires to a kind of totality that in the end takes the form of a single organic whole: ‘Hence, not only is each system articulated in accordance with an idea, but they are one and all organically united in a system of human knowledge, as members of one whole, and so as admitting of an architectonic of all human knowledge’ (A835/B863).

Kant’s term architectonic suggests a plan or planner who is the architect of this system. Until now, he complains, philosophy has been no more than an aggregate of piecemeal discoveries that have developed more or less independently of one another. He calls this a ‘scholastic’ definition of philosophy that aims at no more than ‘the logical perfection of knowledge’. It is the task of the critical philosopher to supply the necessary organizing end or purpose to which the various branches of philosophy are subordinate. This organizing purpose is not something discovered but created by a new ‘cosmic’ conception of philosophy:

But there is likewise another concept of philosophy, a conspectus cosmicus, which has always formed the real basis of the term ‘philosophy’, especially when it has been as it were personified and its archetype represented in the ideal philosopher. On this view, philosophy is the science of the relation of all knowledge to the essential ends of human reason (teleologia rationis humanae) and the philosopher is not an artificer in the field of reason, but himself the lawgiver of human reason (A839/B867).

Kant’s architectonic of pure reason is above all moral philosophy, or, put another way, he seeks the unity of knowledge from the moral point of view. It is the superiority of practical reason – moral praxis – that determines the ‘essential ends’ and ‘the whole vocation of man’. ‘The legislation of human reason has two objects, nature and freedom’, Kant writes, ‘and therefore contains not only the law of nature, but also the moral law, presenting them at first in two distinct systems, but ultimately in one single philosophical system’ (A840/B868). The idea that reason is legislative for both nature and morality is the basis for the unity of knowledge.

The concept of totality remained something of an afterthought to Kant’s system, which accounts for the fact that it is scarcely acknowledged in most conventional treatments of his philosophy. ¹⁶ The term is most widely associated with Hegel and the British Idealists like Bradley and Bosanquet, but it was Lukács who introduced the concept into Marxism. In the second chapter of History and Class Consciousness titled ‘The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg’, Lukács virtually defined Marxism as the science of the totality:

It is not the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation that constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought, but the point of view of totality. The category of totality, the all-pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts is the essence of the method which Marx took over from Hegel and brilliantly transformed into the foundations of a wholly new science. ¹⁷

The novelty of Lukács’ definition of totality was his inclusion of an activist or vitalist element into holistic thought. The principal difference between the Hegelian and the Marxian totality is that Hegel regarded the totality as realized in the constitutional states of Western Europe, while Marx believed that a fully emancipated social order remained a work in progress, something yet to be achieved. The standpoint of the totality, moreover, can only be brought into existence through the revolutionary activity of the working class.

Lukács continues: ‘The primacy of the category of totality is the bearer of the principle of revolution in science’. ¹⁸ By the principle of revolution, Lukács did not mean the activity of the proletarian class itself but of the revolutionary party that alone possesses the ‘science’ of the whole. This revolutionary science cannot be achieved ‘spontaneously’ but must be brought from outside the working-class movement by a cadre of dedicated party intellectuals. True class consciousness is not, then, identical to the thoughts and feelings of actual working men and women but must be ‘imputed’ to them by those with knowledge of their true interests. ¹⁹

The concept of totality is, for Goldmann, ‘the most important philosophical category’ linking together the fields of epistemology, ethics, politics, religion, and aesthetics. Its two ‘principal forms’ are the universe and the human community, but these remain, so far, objects of aspiration rather than existing realities. ‘I do not see this totality as something existent and given’, he writes, ‘but rather as a goal to be attained by action, which alone can create the human community, the we, and the totality of the universe, the cosmos’ (50). Leaving aside the cosmos – I do not understand how we create the universe by action – the question remains: what does Goldmann mean by the ‘we’ or the human community, and what kind of action is required to bring it about?

Goldmann distinguishes his view on the community from what might be described as two false conceptions of the totality. The first is a premise of individualist or liberal thought that begins with the primacy of the individual subject and thus can never conceive the whole as anything more than the sum of its parts. The liberal vision is one that regards life as a perpetual but ultimately fruitless struggle to transcend the limits of one’s own subjectivity. Goldmann includes the names of Racine, Pascal, and Goethe under this category.

The second form of false totality is attributed to organicist philosophies that regard the individual as simply a piece of the collective whole. This form of totality is characteristic of European romanticism – often what Lukács called ‘romantic anti-capitalism’ – that emerged in response to the French Revolution and often looked to the Middle Ages as providing for a more orderly and holistic way of life of the kind depicted in the novels of Sir Walter Scott or the utopian communities founded by Robert Owen. Goldmann takes to task Heideggerian existentialism for its failure to endorse a more dynamic theory of community. He continually faults Heidegger for regarding the world as something ‘given’ rather than as something created (52, 57). ²⁰

The type of totality that Goldmann endorses sounds strikingly similar to what Hegel called a ‘concrete universal’ or what was later called ‘Absolute Idealism’. ²¹ It is one where ‘the autonomy of the parts and the reality of the whole are not only reconciled but constitute reciprocal conditions’ or, as he says again, where ‘the individual is equal in dignity to the community’ and where the community embraces not just a nation or a state but ‘the whole of humanity’ (53, 57). The final union of the individual and the universal belongs to the realm of practice – something yet to be created – and not the Infinite or what remains beyond the realm of human possibility.

Goldmann’s idea of the totality or the human community is used synonymously with the category of universitas. The idea of universitas is drawn from an older mediaeval conception of a corporation, much like a guild or a university, where the members are united in the pursuit of a common project. ²² Goldmann distinguishes a universitas in this corporate and communal sense from the idea of universalitas that he associates with the human condition under bourgeois or capitalist society, where individuals are associated through shared rules or laws but do not necessarily share a common purpose.

Universitas and universalitas represent two contrasting modes of human association: one a genuine community where individuals see their purposes expressed in the people around them and the other a false or ‘reified’ totality where individuals are related to each other as means to one’s own private ends:

The fundamental social relations of men, the relations of production, are those of buyers and sellers of commodities, and only the antagonism resulting from the desire to buy cheap and sell dear is permitted to enter into consciousness. What unites men in spite of everything, the fact that the buyer has no meaning unless there is a seller and vice versa, must appear in spite of and against their consciousness and in a reified form. The fact that production is, in spite of everything, a social fact is expressed only in the prices of commodities. On the stock market, ‘wheat rises’, ‘steel falls’, and so on. Man has disappeared (127).

The distinction between universitas and universalitas is reminiscent of a number of other attempts to categorize modern society. Hegel distinguished between Sittlichkeit and Moralität, the one referring to the customary morality of each particular society, the other to the impersonal rules and moral laws held to be universally valid for all human beings. Ferdinand Tönnies similarly distinguished between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft to describe two competing theories of society: one based on corporate or communal ties and the other on strategic interactions between rational actors. Goldmann admits that due to the conditions of his time, Kant was never able to see beyond the reified conception of society as a contractual relation between consenting adults to grasp the true nature of a human community:

A priori universality is what characterizes given, limited man. To determine its possibilities and its limits is one of the most important tasks of critical philosophy; the totality, the universitas, is today only given on the formal level (space and time) and could find its perfect realization only in a higher, supersensible state, in the archetypal intellect, in the holy will, in knowledge of the thing in itself, and so forth. Kant clearly did not transcend reification, but he described it with precision and defined its limits (128).

Goldmann asserts with great confidence that this striving towards the totality is ‘the authentic destiny of man’ and ‘the fundamental premise of the critical philosophy’ (105), yet the concept seems questionable to me for a number of reasons. The first is that it is highly doubtful that any society or ‘social formation’ – the principal object of Marxian analysis – constitutes such an integrated whole. What strikes the unprejudiced observer is not the unity which all things express but the autonomy or relative autonomy of different activities and institutions. Complex societies represent a culture of separations of the polity and the economy, religion and the state, and the individual and the citizen, not a totality where the parts express the unity of the whole. ²³

The separation of distinct social spheres – or ‘abstractions’ as Lukács called them – is not symptomatic of a false or reified society but of modernity and its culture of complexity. There is not a single centre from which all the spokes radiate. Marx asserted that it was the ‘commodity form’ that constituted the germ cell of bourgeois society, but if we assert that the economic mode of organization is determinative of the other aspects of the social whole, then how is it possible that capitalism has been compatible with such a vast array of different political institutions (monarchies, parliamentary democracies, even autocracies), forms of law, aesthetic styles, and philosophical systems. Modern societies tend to be ‘polyarchies’ in the sense described by Robert Dahl, where power is distributed across multiple sources. ²⁴

The second problem that neither Lukács nor Goldmann ever adequately explains is how it is possible for us – finite, limited creatures – to achieve knowledge of the whole. If the sociology of knowledge is correct that each of us is cognitively limited by the forms of social reality that we occupy, then how can we bootstrap ourselves to knowledge of the totality? This would seem to require a God’s-eye perspective that the sociological point of view will simply not admit. We are each of us, at most, fragments of the whole who can no more grasp the ultimate meaning of history or the universe than a slug or an earthworm can have a total knowledge of its natural environment.

It is safer to admit that philosophy may aspire to a knowledge of the whole but remains necessarily limited not only by social reality but by our own cognitive fallibility. Philosophy may be a quest for universal knowledge, but it will have to content itself with an awareness of our limitations. Philosophy remains an ultimately Sisyphean activity where the end – wisdom or absolute knowledge – perpetually eludes our ability to achieve it. It is the aspiration to totality rather than a finished knowledge of the whole that has always seemed to me what distinguished Kant from Hegel and Marx.

This gives rise to a final problem, namely, how is the totality to be achieved? Goldmann believes that the tragedy of German idealism was its inability to translate its ideas into practice. Kant had imagined that the totality could be achieved through the primacy of practical reason, for Hegel through the working of Geist in history, but it was only Marx who regarded the working class as the heir of classical German philosophy. The proletariat was endowed with a redemptive mission to achieve in practice what hitherto philosophers could at best only imagine. Yet it seems impossible that millions of people dispersed across thousands of industries, across innumerable countries, could be the bearers of such a unified mission. What enables the conditions of the proletariat not only to aspire but to achieve the standpoint of totality?

Lukács’ answer, as noted before, is that the proletariat is unable, by itself, to understand its proper role in world history. This requires the assistance of trained theoreticians and philosophers capable of grasping the whole, that is, who have the correct or ‘ascribed’ revolutionary consciousness as opposed to the actual or ‘spontaneous’ consciousness of the working class. It is the revolutionary party and the party alone that is the bearer of the totality. This is, in the final analysis, more akin to an act of religious faith than the result of critical rationality. As the French philosopher Raymond Aron wrote:

It is not absurd to prefer the authority of a single party to the slow deliberations of the parliamentary system, but anyone who counts on the dictatorship of the proletariat to accomplish freedom misjudges human nature and ignores the inevitable results of the concentration of power in a few hands. ²⁵

In the end, there is a slippery slope from the totality to totalitarianism.

Goldmann’s ethical socialism

Goldmann’s Kant was not only shaped by Lukács but by his affiliation with the Austrian School of ethical socialism. The term ‘Austro-Marxism’ was coined in 1914 by the American socialist Louis Boudin and was later adopted by the members of the school itself. In the debates over the scientific or ethical foundations of Marxist theory, these thinkers – especially Max Adler and Otto Bauer – stressed the ethical value of socialism. The ‘Return to Kant’ movement that was already in full swing by the end of the nineteenth century was an attempt to go beyond the letter of Marx’s writings and dig deeper into the metaphysical and philosophical foundation of his system. According to Leszek Kolakowski in his magisterial Main Currents of Marxism:

The Austrians differed essentially from typical orthodox believers. Not only did they emphasize the links between Marxism and earlier thinkers – especially Kant – whom Marx had not authorized as ‘sources’, but they also saw no harm in using ideas, concepts, and questions that had come to the fore since Marx’s time in non-Marxist philosophy and sociology, especially among the neo-Kantians. This, in their view, was not a betrayal of the doctrine but a corroboration and enrichment of it. ²⁶

This description of the Austro-Marxists fits Goldmann to a tee.

The core of Goldmann’s ethical socialism is his reading or re-reading of Kant’s Categorical Imperative. The originality of his interpretation consists in his effort to push back against the Hegelian-Marxian reading of Kantian ethics as a pure formalism and to defend its actual teleological content. The most famous formulation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative appears in the Foundations for the Metaphysics of Morals and reads as follows: ‘Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’. ²⁷

Kant’s formula for the Categorical Imperative suggests that morality consists in the ability to universalize our principles. Only what can withstand the test of universalization can be deemed moral. Kant’s universalization test requires us to ask a simple question. What if everyone did the same? Is it morally permissible to take out a loan, even if it is necessary to feed our starving family, if there is no chance that the borrower will be able to repay it? Kant would have to argue that if all persons were to do the same, then promises and promise-keeping would become meaningless. Everyone would have their own private conception of when it is permissible to lie and when to keep one’s word, resulting in a kind of moral state of nature.

Kant’s principle of universality was pounced upon by Hegel and Marx as evidence of an ‘empty formalism’, suggesting that the Categorical Imperative was void of any actual moral content. ²⁸ Marx took Kant’s ethic of the ‘good will’ to be evidence of the impotence of the German bourgeoisie of his time. ‘While the French bourgeoisie, by means of the most colossal revolution that history has ever known, was achieving domination and conquering the continent of Europe’, he wrote in the German Ideology, ‘the impotent German burghers did not get any further than “good will”’. ²⁹ Lukács similarly regarded Kant’s ethical formalism as characteristic of the reified structure of modern capitalist society. ³⁰

Goldmann’s reading of Kant departs decisively from the standard Hegelian-Marxist critique by showing that the Categorical Imperative, far from being empty, provides the basis for a new socialist humanism. There is a second formulation of the Categorical Imperative that proves it is a morality of ends or a teleological ethic. This formula reads as follows: ‘Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only’. ³¹ Kant’s second formulation could be described as an ethic of respect because it compels us to recognize the dignity of each and every human being.

Kant’s ethic of respect for persons as such is the foundation of Goldmann’s theory of ethical socialism. This proves that Kant’s ethic was not empty of content but contained a powerful critique of bourgeois society. It is at the core of his critique of market society that requires individuals to view one another as means to profit or advantage. This is a violation of the principle always to treat one another as ends and never as means. Goldmann describes Kant’s ethic as ‘the most radical condemnation of bourgeois society’ and the only acceptable basis for ‘any future humanism’:

Once we realize that this formula condemns any society based on production for the market in which other men are treated as means with a view to creating profits, we see the extent to which Kant’s ethic is an ethic of content and constitutes a radical rejection of existing society. Moreover, no less radically, it lays the foundations for any true humanism in establishing the only supreme value upon which all our judgments must be based. That supreme value is humanity in the person of each individual man – not just the individual, as in rationalism, nor just to totality in its different forms (God, state, nation, class), as in all the romantic and intuitionist doctrines but the human totality, the community embracing the whole of humanity and expression in the human person (176–77).

Goldmann supports his reading of Kant’s ethic by recounting a charming story about a high school student who delivered a passionate speech against Kant. When Goldmann asked what produced this reaction, the student told him that his father was a respected citizen and businessman who, by Kant’s strict standards of morality, would have to be considered an immoral person because he could not possibly regard each of his customers as ends in themselves. Goldmann admits he was ‘astonished’ by this reply but concludes with the following lesson. ‘My young pupil, who had certainly never read a line of Kant had nonetheless perceived the logical consequences of Kant’s thought more clearly than most of the neo-Kantians’ (132).

There is a question, however, over who understood Kant better, the teacher or the pupil. Kant never believed that politics and society could or should be restructured to conform to the Categorical Imperative. He never condemned market society that indeed barely existed in his age. In fact, he regarded commerce as an instrument of enlightenment and increased awareness and sociability between people. ³² Further, Kant remained an ethical individualist for whom morality was a matter of individual conscience and private belief. He resisted the temptation to moralize all social relations. There would always remain a gap between morality and legality. Politics and legal institutions, he believed, would always have to be based on laws backed up by the threat of coercion. In a famous passage from Perpetual Peace, he claimed that ‘the problem of setting up a state can be solved even by a nation of devils (so long as they possess understanding)’. ³³

It is not clear whether Goldmann gave any serious consideration as to how it would be possible to structure a modern economy along Kantian lines. What would it even mean for producers to regard their customers as ‘ends in themselves?’ At most, it would produce the kind of empty virtue signalling that companies engage in when they claim, ‘we care’ about their customers when in fact what they care about is their bottom line. For Kant, ‘ought implies can’. What is beyond our normal human capacities is not obligatory. This led Kant to take a far more accepting attitude not only towards human frailty but of institutions like states, nations, and classes. Can people be expected to make superhuman or heroic sacrifices all in the name of achieving socialism? A morality that requires us to become moral saints is simply not a plausible view of morality. ³⁴

Goldmann makes a far better point in a footnote to the passage cited above. ‘For the benefit of those ‘Kantians’ living in Germany today’, he wrote in 1945, ‘I should like to repeat that this is the formal condemnation of any oppression or humiliation of man, whatever his race or nationality (the sole exception being punishment for individual crimes’ (176). Later, he would ask, ‘How can the enthusiasm for Kant’s ethics professed by so many German academics be reconciled with the Gleichschaltung of such a large number of them at the decisive moments of recent history since 1914?’ (177). This, he adds, will have to be left to the conscience and judgement of each reader to decide.

There is much in this heartfelt passage to admire. I only wish that in the later edition of his book, Goldmann would have found the courage to condemn those fellow travellers, like Lukács and Sartre, who remained complicit in the face of Soviet crimes against humanity. This would have absolved Goldmann of the double standard of being moralistic in condemning the institutions of bourgeois society while remaining silent to or even forgiving of brutal actions carried out in the name of ostensibly ‘progressive’ causes.

Tragic Kantianism?

Goldmann’s Kant is a philosopher trapped between two poles. Is he a bürgerliche philosopher unable to transcend the limits of his time or a socialist philosopher who has grasped the nature of the totality or the objective human ends that constitute a fully ethical society? Which of these two philosophers will win out?

This ‘antinomy’ in Kant’s thought, or, more precisely, in Goldmann’s reading of Kant, is expressed in the final chapter of his book titled What May I Hope For? This references Kant’s famous three questions spelled out in ‘The Canon of Pure Reason’ – ‘What can I know?’ ‘What ought I to do?’ ‘What may I hope for?’ The first, Kant says, is purely speculative; the second, practical; and the third, a combination of the two:

The third question – if I do what I ought to do, what may I then hope? – is at once practical and theoretical, in such a fashion that the practical serves only as a clue that leads us to the answer to the theoretical question, and when this is followed out, the speculative question. For all hoping is directed to happiness and stands in the same relation to the practical and the law of morality as knowing and the law of nature to the theoretical knowledge of things (A805/B833).

This third question concerns the highest good, namely, the union of happiness and virtue. What hope do I have that if I act morally, I may enjoy happiness as well? Can happiness and virtue ever be reconciled?

It was Kant’s speculation on this problem of the highest good that is addressed in both his philosophy of religion and his philosophy of history. To his credit, Goldmann acknowledges the importance of Kant’s philosophy of religion. ‘Why’, he asks somewhat perplexedly, ‘should [Kant] so insistently call himself a Christian?’ (194). The answer lies in the fact that, again due to the conditions of his time, Kant could find no other grounds for hope than in religious belief. To be sure, this did not mean conventional religion with its rites and ceremonies, but a moral faith that denied the ontological existence of God while reducing him to a postulate of pure practical reason.

For Kant, then, all religion is a kind of surrogate for hope. ‘The very essence of religion’, Goldmann writes, ‘lies in belief in the sacred, in certain supreme values, and in the hope of their realization’ (193). From this point of view, even atheistic thinkers like Spinoza and Marx may be regarded as religious. These philosophers can even be said to have ‘deeper religious feelings’ than their theological counterparts because they sought to realize their hopes in actual historical time rather than to ascribe them to a transcendent God. It remains the fault of the religious perspective that the highest good is translated into an object of wish or prayer rather than political struggle.

The second expression of hope is the philosophy of history that turns the highest good into an immanent problem realizable through collective human effort. To be sure, Kant’s Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent outlined the rudiments of a philosophy of history, but in Goldmann’s view, this remained without sufficient weight to replace the philosophy of religion. Kant may have wished for a better world – a society of world citizens united by perpetual peace – but could not imagine the means of translating this vision into reality. Like a biblical prophet, he may have been able to glimpse the promised land but lacked the means of entering it.

Surprisingly, Goldmann undervalues the importance of Kant’s contribution to the philosophy of history. ³⁵ His historical writings may pale in terms of volume in comparison to his formal philosophical works, but they perform an essential function in his completed system. Kant regarded history as a necessary pendant to his moral philosophy. It provides the ground for moral hope that apparent acts of senseless or random brutality may in fact be in the service of some higher purpose. This was especially the case in his treatment of the French Revolution, where he held that revolutionaries were blameworthy for the evils they committed but praiseworthy as agents of historical progress. I quote a passage from Goldmann’s fellow Romanian émigré, Pierre Hassner:

The essential function of the philosophy of history is, however, in interpreting the past, to give hope for the future and thus to support moral action with an encouragement it cannot do without. Kant considered that morality would lose its meaning unless mankind were progressing morally, or unless the progress of the species as well as of individuals were at least not regarded as impossible. Belief in a moral progress transmissible from generation to generation and belief in intellectual and political progress must support and help generate each other. ³⁶

Goldmann maintains that Kant’s philosophy remains fundamentally ‘a metaphysics of tragedy’ because of its failure to grasp how the highest good can be realized on earth. Yet this was not simply a failure of the imagination but a consequence of the age in which he lived. This was due to conditions of political immaturity and the weakness of progressive forces that made all beliefs in a historical future appear illusory or utopian.

It was this inability to translate the ideal into the actual that marks, for Goldmann, the fundamental limitation of Kantian philosophy. The tragedy of Kant was the inability to transcend the individualist framework of his bourgeois point of view:

For the fundamental limitation of man in bourgeois individualist society is precisely that for him virtue and happiness are incompatible. So long as the individual, the I is the subject of action, the search for happiness is not universal but egoistic, and as such, contrary to virtue. The universal remains for him a duty which he can fulfill only in renouncing all content, his sensuous nature, his inclinations, that is to say, in renouncing his happiness. The union of these two heterogenous elements of the highest good thus presupposes a radical change in the community, a qualitatively different universe, the kingdom of God (198).

Goldmann is correct that Kant is a tragic philosopher, but not for the reason he believes. A tragic situation is not one where our hopes go unfulfilled but one where our conflicting desires make it necessary to choose one path of action at the expense of another. ³⁷ Kant’s depiction of morality as a struggle between our higher and lower impulses, our duties and our desires, and our reason and our inclinations is the condition for our humanity. A world without pain and loss, of conflicting values and the need to choose between them, would not be a more humane world but one in which the last shreds of human dignity had been eliminated. Conversely, a world where meaning and struggle had been overcome, a world without ‘blood, sweat, and tears’, a world where our deepest desires had been fulfilled, would not be a morally superior world to the one we now inhabit; it would be intolerably flat and insipid. It would be the world of Nietzsche’s ‘last man’. ³⁸

Goldmann’s reading of Kant’s highest good finds its worldly realization in Marx’s vision of the universal classless society. Kant’s Reich der Zwecke has been translated into Marx’s Reich der Freiheit. ³⁹ Only a crude mind would suggest that Kant was any more responsible for Marx than Marx was responsible for the excesses of communism. Marx would have been the first – or maybe the second – to protest that the atrocities committed in his name were in violation of the principles for which he stood. Yet Marx or his defenders are confronted with a paradox, namely, that it is contrary to the principles of Marxism to argue that the practices of Marxism are in contradiction with its principles. It is extremely un-Marxist to seek the ideals of Marxism standing outside the historical process, which is the final judge. As Hegel maintained, Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht. ⁴⁰

Goldmann’s complaint that Kant failed to arrive at a philosophy of history presupposes that history has a purpose, an intelligible end that can be known by finite, limited beings. It assumes that we can stand above or outside our place in the historical process and grasp its meaning. But how is this meaning accessible? The philosophy of history is not so much an alternative to religion but theology under a different guise. The philosophy of history is simply a secularized theodicy, and like every theodicy, it seeks to explain or rationalize human suffering – bloody purges, pogroms, forced collectivizations – as part of an overall plan or design. The new theodicy ascribes to the historical process the same omnipotent and mysterious qualities that believers have always ascribed to the living God. But the belief that the highest good will be revealed through the historical process has itself proved illusory. The god of Marx and Lukács – the god of History – has proved a false god and Marx and Lukács false prophets. They have both proven, if such proof was still necessary, that the good society will never be achieved by any means other than by our own individual powers of reason and judgement.