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It took Marx over twenty years to follow through on these intuitions, which he first formulated in the early to mid-1840s. In the 1850s, in exile in Britain, he discovered Dante’s ''Divine Comedy'' and hit upon the idea that his critique of bourgeois political economy had to take the form of a descent into the modern Inferno. Casting the proletariat as the pilgrim, he took upon himself the role of a Virgil, guiding the revolutionary class through the evils of the modern world in such a way as to reveal capital itself as the guilty party, the sinner trapped in a Hell of its own making, incapable of salvation. This katabasis would, simultaneously, constitute a proper culmination and criticism of socialism itself, revealing the ways in which its moralism derived from and supported the very world it sought to combat. | It took Marx over twenty years to follow through on these intuitions, which he first formulated in the early to mid-1840s. In the 1850s, in exile in Britain, he discovered Dante’s ''Divine Comedy'' and hit upon the idea that his critique of bourgeois political economy had to take the form of a descent into the modern Inferno. Casting the proletariat as the pilgrim, he took upon himself the role of a Virgil, guiding the revolutionary class through the evils of the modern world in such a way as to reveal capital itself as the guilty party, the sinner trapped in a Hell of its own making, incapable of salvation. This katabasis would, simultaneously, constitute a proper culmination and criticism of socialism itself, revealing the ways in which its moralism derived from and supported the very world it sought to combat. | ||
Marx wanted to publish a work that would be ''both'' a systematic treatment and a thoroughgoing critique of ''both'' the capitalist mode of production and the political economy that reflected and justified it. He wanted to do so, in part, because he thought that the existing socialist theory botched the job by oversimplifying and misidentifying the issues facing the workers’ movement. Marx was convinced that capitalism was not a simple problem, amenable to simple solutions, and that the “solutions to the social question” circulating and competing for attention within the workers’ movement—cooperative colonies, people’s banks, monetary reform, nationalization of land—were so many mirages and distractions along the path to real emancipation. Marx’s fourfold literary mission—depiction and critique, of practice and of theory—required a literary armature to support it. And Marx’s sense of the scope and systematic nature of the problem required of him that he find a mode of presentation that would allow him to keep the various moments distinct from one another and properly interrelated. These multiple demands go someway toward explaining why Marx was so slow in writing ''Capital''. They also suggest why Dante’s poem, despite its moralism, would have been an attractive resource for Marx. The ''Inferno'' presents the reader with a | Marx wanted to publish a work that would be ''both'' a systematic treatment and a thoroughgoing critique of ''both'' the capitalist mode of production and the political economy that reflected and justified it. He wanted to do so, in part, because he thought that the existing socialist theory botched the job by oversimplifying and misidentifying the issues facing the workers’ movement. Marx was convinced that capitalism was not a simple problem, amenable to simple solutions, and that the “solutions to the social question” circulating and competing for attention within the workers’ movement—cooperative colonies, people’s banks, monetary reform, nationalization of land—were so many mirages and distractions along the path to real emancipation. Marx’s fourfold literary mission—depiction and critique, of practice and of theory—required a literary armature to support it. And Marx’s sense of the scope and systematic nature of the problem required of him that he find a mode of presentation that would allow him to keep the various moments distinct from one another and properly interrelated. These multiple demands go someway toward explaining why Marx was so slow in writing ''Capital''. They also suggest why Dante’s poem, despite its moralism, would have been an attractive resource for Marx. The ''Inferno'' presents the reader with a descent through a systematically ordered underworld, in which the evils encountered early on are symptoms and presentiments of the evils encountered further along, in which description, diagnosis, and castigation go hand in hand, and in which scatological name- calling and eschatological first philosophy are necessary complements of each other. | ||
This first chapter will move from this “would have been” to a more solid basis upon which to erect the argument of the book. It will canvass the evidence that Marx was well-acquainted with Dante’s poem and that ''Capital'' and the ''Inferno'' bear enough resemblance to warrant suspicion. It will also indicate a precedent; Marx, on at least one other occasion, used a literary source as a model for one of his own works. Finally, it will turn to the context within which Marx, in 1859, first suggests a parallelism between Dante’s ''Inferno'' and his own critique of political economy. By the time Marx wrote ''Capital'', there was a significant tradition of socialists couching their criticisms of modern society in infernal terms. Most importantly, Marx’s nemesis, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, had cast the revolutionary task as one of escaping from an inverted underworld. Marx picked up on and developed this metaphor into an itinerary for his critique of political economy. In sum, this chapter builds the case that Marx had the motive, the opportunity, and the history to rewrite the ''Inferno'' as a descent into the modern social Hell of capital. | |||
=== The Elements of the Case === | |||
The plausibility and value of reading ''Capital'' as a modern ''Inferno'' can only emerge from the reading itself. Nonetheless, some readers will want assurances up front that this is not a purely imaginative or speculative endeavor, and a scholar is honor bound to respect this reasonable demand. The following review of the documentary evidence—which establishes that Marx could have modeled ''Capital'' on the ''Inferno''—is meant to provide such assurance. | |||
There is a certain immediate resemblance between Capital and the Inferno: both are explicitly figured as descents into the depths, descents that reveal what is wrong with the world, and that trace that wrong back to its origin. This resemblance has suggested to others that Marx’s project in Capital is akin to Dante’s. We know that Marx was well acquainted with Dante’s poem, and that he was reading it during the time when he was formulating and composing Capital. He cites all three parts of the Commedia, both in Capital and in other works contemporaneous with its composition. From the testimony of those close to him, and from his own hand, we know that Dante was among his favorite poets during this time, his exile in London. We know that, at least in part through the study of | |||
Revision as of 09:39, 2 July 2024
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 or another. The sum of evils is equal to the sum of evil deeds, performed by responsible souls. Despite all of the distance separating them from Dante, many early socialists retained the Christian notion that “disorder in society” is nothing other than “moral evil,” caused by “our passions and our ignorance.”[7] We are all free to educate ourselves about the workings of society and the demands of justice and thereby to eliminate the ills befalling us. Even those, like Robert Owen, who proclaimed the formation of character by circumstances, and inveighed against the doctrine of individual responsibility, thought that ignorance alone stood between the current state of social bedlam and a new moral world in which we will be able to freely form the circumstances that will form the character of the next generation.[8]
To Marx, this moralizing and individualizing tendency in socialism simply transferred to the secular world the modes of thought developed by Christian theology, applying “humanized” Christian moral categories to the social world. From as early as 1843, Marx was critical of this sort of secularization. He claimed that “this state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world.”[9] In other words, it is because the social world takes a certain form that a certain form of religion arises within it; hence, the secularization of religion in the form of a humanistic morality is bound to replicate the mystification that the humanist decries in religion. If “religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, . . . [and] its moral sanction,” then the secularization of that religion in the form of a humanistic morality will be the same.[10] Far from having a critical purchase on the world as it exists, this morality will merely supplement it.
If Dante’s poetic tour of Hell has a special resonance with the socialists’ moral criticism of the modern world, this is because Dante was, in Engels’s words, both “the last poet of the Middle Ages and the first poet of modern times.” His moral ontology is not merely a relic of the Aristotelian Middle Ages, but a harbinger of the new world of capital. As Marx says in Capital itself, “Christianity, with its religious cult of man in the abstract” is the faith most appropriate to “a society of commodity producers.”[11] Dante’s moral categories are the original and highest poetic expression of a religion born of exchange relations, of which the morality of the early socialists is merely a rough knock-off. Marx wants to criticize the world that gives rise to such a religion and such a morality. In order to do so, he has to show, among other things, that the ills that religion and morality attribute to the free actions of the human soul—that is, to “the human essence” as an “abstraction inhering in each single individual”—can only properly be attributed to “the ensemble of social relations.”[12] The responsibility that religion and morality hang on the individual, Marx places on the form of society as such. Marx’s critical theory of modern society, therefore, must show how the dynamics of that society give rise both to the ills socialism is concerned to combat and to the illusion that those ills are the moral responsibility of individuals.
It took Marx over twenty years to follow through on these intuitions, which he first formulated in the early to mid-1840s. In the 1850s, in exile in Britain, he discovered Dante’s Divine Comedy and hit upon the idea that his critique of bourgeois political economy had to take the form of a descent into the modern Inferno. Casting the proletariat as the pilgrim, he took upon himself the role of a Virgil, guiding the revolutionary class through the evils of the modern world in such a way as to reveal capital itself as the guilty party, the sinner trapped in a Hell of its own making, incapable of salvation. This katabasis would, simultaneously, constitute a proper culmination and criticism of socialism itself, revealing the ways in which its moralism derived from and supported the very world it sought to combat.
Marx wanted to publish a work that would be both a systematic treatment and a thoroughgoing critique of both the capitalist mode of production and the political economy that reflected and justified it. He wanted to do so, in part, because he thought that the existing socialist theory botched the job by oversimplifying and misidentifying the issues facing the workers’ movement. Marx was convinced that capitalism was not a simple problem, amenable to simple solutions, and that the “solutions to the social question” circulating and competing for attention within the workers’ movement—cooperative colonies, people’s banks, monetary reform, nationalization of land—were so many mirages and distractions along the path to real emancipation. Marx’s fourfold literary mission—depiction and critique, of practice and of theory—required a literary armature to support it. And Marx’s sense of the scope and systematic nature of the problem required of him that he find a mode of presentation that would allow him to keep the various moments distinct from one another and properly interrelated. These multiple demands go someway toward explaining why Marx was so slow in writing Capital. They also suggest why Dante’s poem, despite its moralism, would have been an attractive resource for Marx. The Inferno presents the reader with a descent through a systematically ordered underworld, in which the evils encountered early on are symptoms and presentiments of the evils encountered further along, in which description, diagnosis, and castigation go hand in hand, and in which scatological name- calling and eschatological first philosophy are necessary complements of each other.
This first chapter will move from this “would have been” to a more solid basis upon which to erect the argument of the book. It will canvass the evidence that Marx was well-acquainted with Dante’s poem and that Capital and the Inferno bear enough resemblance to warrant suspicion. It will also indicate a precedent; Marx, on at least one other occasion, used a literary source as a model for one of his own works. Finally, it will turn to the context within which Marx, in 1859, first suggests a parallelism between Dante’s Inferno and his own critique of political economy. By the time Marx wrote Capital, there was a significant tradition of socialists couching their criticisms of modern society in infernal terms. Most importantly, Marx’s nemesis, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, had cast the revolutionary task as one of escaping from an inverted underworld. Marx picked up on and developed this metaphor into an itinerary for his critique of political economy. In sum, this chapter builds the case that Marx had the motive, the opportunity, and the history to rewrite the Inferno as a descent into the modern social Hell of capital.
The Elements of the Case
The plausibility and value of reading Capital as a modern Inferno can only emerge from the reading itself. Nonetheless, some readers will want assurances up front that this is not a purely imaginative or speculative endeavor, and a scholar is honor bound to respect this reasonable demand. The following review of the documentary evidence—which establishes that Marx could have modeled Capital on the Inferno—is meant to provide such assurance.
There is a certain immediate resemblance between Capital and the Inferno: both are explicitly figured as descents into the depths, descents that reveal what is wrong with the world, and that trace that wrong back to its origin. This resemblance has suggested to others that Marx’s project in Capital is akin to Dante’s. We know that Marx was well acquainted with Dante’s poem, and that he was reading it during the time when he was formulating and composing Capital. He cites all three parts of the Commedia, both in Capital and in other works contemporaneous with its composition. From the testimony of those close to him, and from his own hand, we know that Dante was among his favorite poets during this time, his exile in London. We know that, at least in part through the study of
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ Proudhon, What Is Property?, 191, 186.
- ↑ Claeys, Citizens and Saints, 115– 19.
- ↑ Early Writings, 244; MEGA, I.2:170; italics in original.
- ↑ Early Writings, 244; MEGA, I.2:170.
- ↑ Capital, 1:172; MEGA, II.6:109; MEGA, II.7:58.
- ↑ Early Writings, 423; MEGA, IV.3:20– 21.