Chapter 2 Taenarus: The Road to Hell
Descend, so that you may ascend.
— Augustine, Confessions, IV.xii
The close of the feudal Middle Ages, and the opening of the modern capitalist era are marked by a colossal figure: an Italian, Dante, both the last poet of the Middle Ages and the first poet of modern times. Today, as in 1300, a new historical era is approaching. Will Italy give us the new Dante, who will mark the hour of birth of this new, proletarian era?
— Friedrich Engels, introduction to the 1893 Italian edition of The Manifesto of the Communist Party
This book argues that the structure of the first volume of Capital was inspired by Dante’s Inferno, and that attending to this structure helps to reveal Marx’s argument both in its detail and in its overall scope and import. Attention to the literary form of Capital aids in discerning its argument, in part, because the structure of Dante’s Inferno is not only an imaginative plot but also a rigorously constructed poetic embodiment of a moral ontology with both Christian and classical, Aristotelian, roots. This moral ontology—a systematic typology of possible wrongs, which reflects, negatively, the structure of being itself and humanity’s place in that structure—did not disappear with the Middle Ages. It persisted as one current of European discourse through Marx’s day and even into our own, helping to form, among other things, the popular moral economy that has always been a counterpoint and stumbling block to what Marx called bourgeois political economy. In the form of this popular moral economy, the moral ontology systematized by Dante formed one of the crucial funds of ideas and intuitions out of which socialism developed in the nineteenth century.
R. H. Tawney once quipped that, “The last of the Schoolmen was Karl Marx.”[1] As many commentators, friendly and critical alike, have argued, there is more than a little truth to the quip. One of Marx’s earliest texts is a notebook in which he translated and annotated most of De Anima.[2] Had his political commitments and activities not rendered him ineligible for an academic post in any German university,[3] Marx planned to write a book on Aristotle.[4] And there has been a long line of commentators who have followed Ernst Bloch in reading Marx as the inheritor of a tradition of “left-wing Aristotelianism.”[5] Hence, it is reasonable to think that Marx would have found in the Inferno’s articulation of what is wrong with the world a preestablished harmony with his own way of thinking about what is wrong with capitalism.
My argument, however, is very nearly the reverse of this. Marx adapted the Inferno to his own purposes, which were deeply at odds with at least several crucial elements of the moral economy of early socialism.[6] Most prominently, Marx thought the moralism of moral economy to be completely out of place in the confrontation with the capitalist mode of production. The fundamental continuity between Dante’s moral ontology and socialist moral economy consisted in the attribution of responsibility for the wrongs of the world to the choices of individuals. The damned souls of Dante’s poem have made their own Hell, in which they are trapped for eternity. No one is responsible for their sins but themselves. Thus their damnation is perfect and natural justice, and there is no evil in this wide world that is not attributable to one such damned soul
- ↑ Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 36.
- ↑ MEGA, IV.1:155– 82.
- ↑ Marx’s close ties to Bruno Bauer (later severed), at precisely the time when Bauer’s academic career self-destructed over his intransigent and very public atheism, eliminated whatever prospects the younger man may have had (Sperber, Karl Marx, 71– 76).
- ↑ In this planned book, Marx “would refute Trendelenburg’s currently influential interpretation and redeployment of Aristotle. Trendelenburg, he [Marx] writes, is ‘merely formal,’ whereas Aristotle is truly ‘dialectical’ ” (Depew, “Aristotle’s De Anima and Marx’s Theory of Man,” 137; see also McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought, 39).
- ↑ Bloch, The Principle of Hope. This scholarship has tended to be focused on four broad thematic comparisons: on ethics (e.g., Gilbert, “Historical Theory and the Structure of Moral Argument in Marx”; Miller, “Aristotle and Marx: The Unity of Two Opposites”; Miller, “Marx and Aristotle: A Kind of Consequentialism”); on social ontology (e.g., de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World; Meikle, Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx; Pike, From Aristotle to Marx: Aristotelianism in Marxist Social Ontology; Springborg, “Politics, Primordialism, and Orientalism: Marx, Aristotle, and the Myth of the Gemeinschaft”); on the ideal political arrangement (e.g., Booth, Households: On the Moral Architecture of the Economy; Katz, “The Socialist Polis: Antiquity and Socialism in Marx’s Thought”; Leopold, The Young Karl Marx, 237– 41; Schwartz, “Distinction between Public and Private Life: Marx on the Zoon Politikon”); and on philosophy of science (e.g., again, Meikle, Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx; Wilson, Marx’s Critical/Dialectical Procedure, chap. 5).
- ↑ The notion of the moral economy was popularized by Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.” The phrase, however, goes back at least to the 1820s in Britain.