Burned by a Red Hot Stove

[Cricket Versus Republicanism and Other Essays by David Stove (Quakers Hill Press. 2013; 166 pp.)]

The Australian philosopher David Stove, who lived from 1927 to 1994, was the most politically incorrect and also the funniest philosopher I have ever read. He was a master of annihilating criticism who could dismantle an argument by making you laugh at its absurdity. Cricket Versus Republicanism is a collection of short essays and reviews by him, edited by his close friend and student the philosopher James Franklin, and by his son R.J. Stove. In this week’s column, I’m going to give some examples to justify what I have said about him.

Stove favored the free market, but he didn’t share the view held by many free-market supporters that a free economy stems from the Enlightenment. Quite to the contrary, he maintained that the dominant theme of the Enlightenment was equality, and he opposed equality with a passion. As he puts it:

According to Marxist mythology, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was an ideological expression of bourgeois economic interests. The truth is almost exactly the opposite. The more thoroughgoing Enlightenment thinkers were enemies of the institution of private property. This was so even before the industrial revolution—see Rousseau, Godwin, etc. After that revolution, hostility to private property became universal and emphatic among the Enlightened. Marx was perfectly right to regard himself as the legitimate heir of the Enlightenment. By about 1900, a member of the Rationalist Association in Britain, or his counterpart anywhere in Western Europe, could almost as easily have been a Tibetan monk as a free-marketeer. The Enlightenment package—of secularism, utilitarianism, and egalitarianism—seemed to everyone to point in only one economic direction: socialism. Not only did it seem to—it did, and it still does. The reason is simple. The fundamental moral value of the Enlightenment is equality. But what inequality is more cruel or more glaring than that which is inescapable from the free market: the inequality between those who can afford to buy and those who cannot?

But you might object, weren’t Smith, Hume, and other economists and philosophers who supported the market Enlightenment thinkers? In Stove’s opinion, they were exceptions; and he does not back down from his claim that the Enlightenment was hostile to the free market:

[Francis] Fukuyama’s immobilising mixture has in fact been tried once before. It seems extraordinary that he should need to be reminded of this, but the trial that was made of it was actually what produced twentieth-century socialism. Between about 1780 and 1900, the mixture of Enlightenment values and the free market was given its chance in real life. What the result was everyone knows: a virtually universal and unconquerable conviction of the moral and historical necessity of socialism. Among those so convinced was an unusually resolute heir of the Enlightenment named V. I. Lenin. He turned his own country into a gigantic graveyard, and successfully exported his policies to many other grateful countries—feats unknown and unimaginable before this enlightened century of ours. But it is unnecessary to replay this old film any further: this is where we came in.

Stove dismisses Marxism as obvious nonsense, and he has brought to light a quotation that shows Marx realized this himself:

As an item of the intellectual agenda, Marxism is scarcely even a joke. Is the “superstructure” just a “reflection of the economic base?” “You must always distinguish, comrade, between mechanical materialism and dialectical materialism, between Aristotelian logic and dialectical logic… between utopian socialism and scientific socialism.” “Are the Theses on Feuerbach ‘progressive’ or a departure from the standpoint of scientific socialism?” etc., etc. Having afterwards found out what serious intellectual work is, I am mortified to recollect that all this seemed to me to be hot stuff when I was nineteen. (Though even then, I can say in self-defence, certain things, such as Engels on “contradictions in nature”—remember the grain of wheat?—were painfully embarrassing.) No: Marxism is a fearful social-and-police-problem, but so is the drug trade. It is a fearful political problem, but so is Islamic fundamentalism. But an intellectual problem Marxism is not, any more than the drug trade is, or Islamic fundamentalism. Marx himself, unlike his millions of devotees, knew perfectly well what his rubbishy improvisations about “dialectic” etc. are worth. In 1857 he had made certain statements in print about the course of the Indian Mutiny, then going on, and he writes to Engels about these as follows: “It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way.” This quotation is from p. 152, Vol. 40 (1), of the Collected Works (Lawrence and Wishart). It should be pasted over every door in every Arts faculty in the Western World. (Except that it is, alas, a little late for that.)

Marx drew from and reacted to Hegel, and Stove doesn’t care for him either:

But then, people who take Hegel’s pretensions seriously can believe anything. Schopenhauer, whose idealist philosophy was mad enough in all conscience, called Hegel a “charlatan” and a “humbug.” He was, though it is not easy to convey by how much even those words are too good for him.

I said that Stove is the most politically incorrect philosopher I have ever read, and an example of this is his discussion of “racism.” For Stove, the whole thing is a great pretense:

“Racism” is a neologism so recent that it was still not in The Oxford English Dictionary as late as 1971. But it swept all before it once it did arrive. Nowadays, you cannot open a daily paper or a popular periodical without meeting it. You wonder how journalists could possibly have managed without this word until recently. A politician must now neglect no opportunity to pronounce a curse on “racism.” He can probably still remember the very first time he heard the word, yet he must now pretend that he had always had “racism” on his curse-list. Almost certainly, his real feelings towards people of other races are no warmer than those of most of the voters; but he must pretend otherwise, and pronounce the ritual curse whenever a chance to do so presents itself. A more farcical spectacle than this is not easily imagined. Daniel Defoe said that around 1700, most Englishmen were ready to fight to the death against Popery, without knowing whether Popery was a man or a horse. But the spectacle which we present is even more comic, and much less honest. Almost everyone unites in declaring “racism” false and detestable. Yet absolutely everyone knows it is true.

I urge everybody to read David Stove. You’ll be glad you did.