Categories of Self : Louis Dumont's Theory of the Individual [1 ed.] 9781789203769, 9781571816603

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CATEGORIES OF SELF

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Methodology and History in Anthropology General Editor: David Parkin, Director of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford Volume 1

Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute Edited by Wendy James and N.J. Allen Volume 2

Franz Baerman Steiner: Selected Writings Volume I: Taboo, Truth and Religion. Franz B. Steiner Edited by Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon Volume 3

Franz Baerman Steiner. Selected Writings Volume II: Orientalism, Value, and Civilisation. Franz B. Steiner Edited by Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon Volume 4

The Problem of Context Edited by Roy Dilley

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Volume 5

Religion in English Everyday Life By Timothy Jenkins Volume 6

Hunting the Gatherers: Ethnographic Collectors, Agents and Agency in Melanesia, 1870s–1930s Edited by Michael O’Hanlon and Robert L. Welsch Volume 7

Anthropologists in a Wider World: Essays on Field Research Edited by Paul Dresch, Wendy James and David Parkin Volume 8

Categories and Classifications: Maussian Reflections on the Social By N.J. Allen Volume 9

Louis Dumont and Hierarchical Opposition By Robert Parkin

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CATEGORIES OF SELF LOUIS DUMONT’S THEORY OF THE INDIVIDUAL

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André Celtel

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

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First published in 2005 by

Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2005 André Celtel All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

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ISBN 978-1-57181-660-3 (hardback: alk. paper)

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Printed on acid-free paper ISBN 1-57181-578-3 hardback

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CONTENTS

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Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction

1

1. On Ideological Comparison

4

2. On French Ideology

21

3. On Homo Duplex and l’Homme Total

35

4. On Homo Hierarchicus

57

5. On Structuralism

73

6. On the Category of the Individual

94

7. On German Ideology

121

8. On World-Historical Structures

153

9. On the Category of the Self

173

Conclusion

198

Bibliography

201

Index

209

Categories of Self : Louis Dumont's Theory of the Individual, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Categories of Self : Louis Dumont's Theory of the Individual, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has developed out of a D. Phil. thesis written at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Oxford. I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to my supervisor at ISCA, Dr Nick Allen. Not only did Nick inspire my interest in Dumont in the first place, but I profited throughout from his expertise on the Durkheimian tradition and on the sociology of India. Moreover, Nick frequently emphasised the importance of theoretical, library-based, projects in anthropology and was certainly encouraging of my own efforts in this regard. Professor R.H. Barnes took over my supervision for a brief period upon Nick’s retirement and I extend my thanks to him as well. Two other members of the teaching staff at ISCA have been generous with their time and assistance over the years, Professors David Parkin and Marcus Banks. I am especially indebted to both of them for support and encouragement at a time of personal difficulty. I would also like to thank the office and library staff at ISCA, as well as the many friends I have made along the way, for contributing to an environment that has been enormously fulfilling, both academically and personally. The Economic and Social Research Council funded the M.Phil., of which the D.Phil. was an extension, while the Arts and Humanities Research Board sponsored the D.Phil. proper. I am grateful to both these organisations. I would also like to extend my thanks to Dr Robert Parkin for welcome advice on how I might convert the thesis into a book, and to Professor Michio Nagajima and Yosuke Somohinzo for their many insightful comments. My deepest thanks go to Marcel, Nicola, Samuel, and Jasmine for a sense of belonging, and to Kay, my wife, not only for proofreading the entire manuscript, but for her constant friendship, humour, and understanding. It is to Kay that this book is dedicated – with love.

Categories of Self : Louis Dumont's Theory of the Individual, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest

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INTRODUCTION

Commenting in the 1960s on Bouglé’s Essais sur le régime des castes (1908), Louis Dumont (1911–1998) suggests that one of the reasons why this work had not made the mark it deserved was because it ‘was written in French, while few Indians read French; English is of necessity the main language of these studies’ (Dumont 1980: 43).1 For this reason, many of Dumont’s own publications on India – Hierarchy and Marriage Alliance in South Indian Kinship (1957), for example, as well as many of his essays in the journal Contributions to Indian Sociology – were originally written in English. As for his magum opus, Homo Hierarchicus (1980), Dumont oversaw and assisted in the translation himself. It took almost thirty years for an English version of his extensive monograph, A South Indian Subcaste (1986), to appear due to ‘Dumont’s insistence on the absolute accuracy of translation’ (Madan 1999: 476). Even then, he made the final revisions. As Madan (ibid.: 486) describes the process: ‘It took long – Dumont was not easily satisfied – but the work was done.’ In fact, the majority of Dumont’s publications in English were either written originally in this language or translated by Dumont himself (usually with a named collaborator). Apart from the titles mentioned above, this is true of almost all the essays included in Religion, Politics and History in India (1970), Essays on Individualism (1986), and German Ideology (1994). English translations, moreover, are not always straight renditions of the original but are quite often revisions, modifications, or elucidations of the earlier text. Clearly, then, Dumont’s standards were exacting with regard to accuracy of translation and the presentation of his ideas in English. His ardent desire to reach an Anglophone audience is evident in the admission that, ‘I generally took care to make available in English whatever I produced’ (Galey 1982: 15). Nevertheless, in the preface to

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Categories of Self

one of his publications, Dumont asks the reader to bear in mind that English is not his mother tongue and to pardon any awkwardness or inexactitudes that may occur. He then goes on to thank those who had assisted him in rendering his thought reasonably well into English, in this instance David Pocock and Joseph Erhardy (Dumont 1970: vii). And, in truth, here, as elsewhere, there is little problem with the English per se. Unfortunately, however, this does not automatically result in Dumont being straightforward to read. It simply means that the difficulties one encounters are less a matter of translation or language proficiency than of content and style – the French is just as demanding as the English. Reading Dumont, particularly his later essays, can be a challenging affair. Like his teacher, Marcel Mauss, his style can be turgid, heavy going, and occasionally difficult to follow. Parkin (2003) makes a similar observation when he writes of ‘certain obscurities in the language Dumont chooses to use’, suggesting that Dumont’s explanations are ‘frequently compressed, leaving much to the reader’s inference’ and that his ‘writings do not always lend themselves to immediate understanding, but they can generally be made to yield to careful exegesis’. One sometimes gets the impression that Dumont demands too much of his reader. His articles are often more suggestive than exhaustive, assuming on the part of his audience familiarity with previous works. I certainly know from my own experience that it was only upon a deeper immersion into Dumont’s thought, a more intuitive grasp of his style and general argument, permitting a more ‘careful exegesis’, that I was able to comprehend (at least to my own satisfaction) the significance of much of what I read. I hope in the following attempt at providing an accessible overview of Dumont’s work to convey some of this understanding. When one speaks of structuralism in anthropological circles, one immediately and justifiably thinks of Claude Lévi-Strauss, in comparison with whom all other ‘structuralists’, no matter how different their approach or how enlightening their analyses, pale in significance. This is no less true of Dumont than of the many others – Josselin de Jong, Mary Douglas, Edmund Leach, Rodney Needham, Marshall Sahlins – to whom the structuralist epithet has been applied. In the case of Dumont, the point is forcibly brought home to the reader when considering a number of recent publications relating to anthropological theory. Robert Layton, for instance, devotes a chapter of his Introduction to Theory in Anthropology (1997) to a discussion of the structuralist method. Although stressing the importance of Durkheim and Mauss to the origins of structuralism within anthropology, Layton makes no mention whatsoever of Dumont – I would argue Mauss’s most faithful student and promulgator – while devoting almost the entire chapter to an assessment of Lévi-Straussian structuralism. Sim-

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Introduction

3

ilarly, Alan Barnard’s History and Theory in Anthropology (2000) examines Lévi-Strauss in considerable depth, while ‘Louis Dumont’, we are simply told, ‘developed a distinct but seminal, regional-structural understanding of social hierarchy in India’ (Barnard 2000: 136). This comparative lack of recognition is also reflected in the fact that there are very few full-length publications in English on Dumont. There is certainly not the proliferation of books that one finds on Lévi-Strauss. Of course, there are countless articles and reviews, attempts to apply Dumont’s ideas elsewhere (e.g., Barnes et al. 1985), critical appraisals, and even a number of festschriften (Madan 1982; Galey 1984). One notable exception is Robert Parkin’s recent book Louis Dumont and Hierarchical Opposition (2003). As well as presenting a rather detailed and technical analysis of the idea of hierarchical opposition in Dumont, Parkin’s study traces the background to this concept in the writings of Robert Hertz and Rodney Needham and its subsequent application and modification among what might be loosely called the Dumontian school in France, consisting of, among others, Daniel de Coppet, André Iteanu, Cécile Barraud, and Serge Tcherkézoff. While Parkin is concerned with tracing a theme prior, through, and beyond Dumont, in what follows I am more interested in assessing Dumont’s ‘system’ in its own right. That is to say, I am less concerned with provenance or reception than with the internal structure and consistency of Dumont’s own thought. Not that I ignore provenance altogether. In summing up Dumont’s academic career, Allen (1998: 3) suggests that ‘looking back, one can see Dumont as one branch, perhaps the most central, of the intellectual tradition that runs from Comte and Fustel de Coulanges to Durkheim and on to Mauss, but one should not overlook other influences such as Weber and Evans-Pritchard, or even Talcott Parsons’. It is this former tradition, by far the more significant, particularly his relation to Durkheim and Mauss, that I emphasise here in my attempt to intellectually situate Dumont. I suggest that a degree of consistency runs throughout much of Dumont’s work centred on the ‘category of the individual’, this being understood as an extension of Mauss’s interest in the ‘person’. For this reason, I attempt throughout to situate Dumont’s interest in both ‘categories’ and ‘the individual’ within Durkheimian sociology more generally and to clarify the use of the terms ‘person’, ‘individual’, and ‘self ’ within this Durkheimian tradition.

Note 1.

Bouglé’s study was subsequently translated into English, with an introduction by David Pocock (1971).

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Chapter 1

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ON IDEOLOGICAL COMPARISON

In the course of his short but influential essay ‘World Renunciation in Indian Religions’, Dumont (1980: 270) suggests that, ‘at the outset we can assume that there are two kinds of men in Hindu India, those who live in the world and those who have renounced it’. The secret of Hinduism, he goes on to argue, may be found in the dialogue between these two. Much of Dumont’s work on India, however, and in particular his celebrated Homo Hierarchicus, is concerned predominantly with just one side of this exchange, with those who live in the world. The world inhabited by these men is shown to be pervaded by the fundamental institution of caste. So pervasive is this institution that Dumont (ibid.: 272) feels justified in positing that on the level of life in the world the individual does not exist. It is only upon leaving the world, transcending caste with all its social and familial obligations, in order to devote himself entirely to his own salvation, that the Indian renouncer finds himself invested with a hitherto unknown individuality. And this, in Dumont’s estimation, brings the renouncer into closer ideological proximity to the autonomous individual of the West. Therefore, we have in Hindu India, on the one hand, the man-in-theworld who is not an individual, and, on the other, the renouncer, who is an individual-outside-the-world. As an ideal, a normative value, the ‘individual’ is conceived by Dumont to be the unique product of a long and complex history of Western ideas. As such, the modern view of the individual as self-contained, bounded, existentially complete, is an ideological assumption not shared by traditional or pre-modern societies. In these other societies it is the social whole and not the individual element that is of normative import; order and conformity are ideologically approved, not

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On Ideological Comparison

5

individuality and autonomy: the individual does not exist. Mauss himself once wrote in his celebrated essay on ‘the person’ (1985: 3), ‘let me merely say that it is plain, particularly to us, that there has never existed a human being who has not been aware, not only of his own body, but also at the same time of his individuality, both spiritual and physical’. Are we to understand, then, that in positing the non-existence of the Indian ‘individual-in-the-world’ Dumont diverges from his influential teacher on such a basic and fundamental point? Is Dumont denying the ‘Hindu-in-the-world’ that sense of individual awareness thought by Mauss to be universal? The precise nature of Dumont’s relationship to Durkheimian sociology (and to Mauss in particular) with regard to the concept of the ‘individual’ will be considered in due course. Suffice it to say for the moment, however, that these two assumptions, Mauss’s universal sense of the individual and Dumont’s Hindu non-individual, operate at distinctively different levels: the first is psychobiological, while the latter is essentially sociological. Spanning a period of several years, Dumont on two occasions conducted fieldwork in South Asia and in his early monograph, A South Indian Subcaste, he published one of the most detailed and richest ethnographic accounts ever written on Indian caste.1 Of course, he could not, and does not, deny the Indian man-in-the-world a certain existential autonomy, a degree of self-consciousness, of self-awareness, of ‘I’-cognition, himself as distinct from his neighbour, as opposed to the man of lower and inferior caste. Only in light of such differentiation, in fact, does the institution of caste (and the separation and complementarity it implies) make any sense. It is as value, as socioreligious entity, that Dumont’s Indian man-in-the-world is not an individual. Although existentially aware of his individuality, although ‘I’-cognisant, he is constrained to think and act as a social being. The ‘I’ of which he is at one level cognisant is subsumed at another by restriction and obligation, interdiction and responsibility, by caste and purity and all that this implies. Nascent individuality, in short, is sacrificed to the whole: When we speak of man as an individual we designate two concepts at once: an object out there, and a value. Comparison obliges us to distinguish analytically these two aspects: one, the empirical subject of speech, thought, and will, the individual sample of mankind, as found in all societies; and, two, the independent, autonomous, and thus essentially non-social moral being, who carries our paramount values and is found primarily in our modern ideology of man and society. From that point of view, there emerge two kinds of societies. Where the individual is a paramount value I speak of individualism. In the opposite case, where the paramount value lies in society as a whole, I speak of holism. (Dumont 1985: 94, emphasis in original)

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In the Indian case the paramount value lies irrefutably in the social, holism is the key word – the individual is encompassed in the whole. This, in essence, is the message of Homo Hierarchicus. As in Plato’s Republic, the Indian man-in-the-world is a collective and not a particular being; he is the product of relations. Opposed to this way of thinking is the modern alternative, its polar opposite, which separates the individual from the relation, creating thereby the indivisible human being, the ‘elementary man’, the ‘measure of all things’ (Dumont 1980: 9). If Homo Hierarchicus is concerned essentially with collective man and hierarchy, then much of Dumont’s subsequent work focuses on man-as-individual, as the product of a modern moral and political egalitarianism. These contrasting ideologies, binary opposites if you like, provide the most general frame through which much of Dumont’s anthropology may be understood. Like his teacher, Mauss, Dumont (ibid.: xxxix) believes that each sort of social ‘representation must be grasped where it is fully accentuated and elaborated, where it rises to predominance and not where it is kept, by the prevalence of other representations, in a rudimentary or residual state’. Hierarchy and egalitarianism, holism and individualism, are evident, to some degree, in all forms of society, whether traditional or modern. However, in their most ‘fully accentuated and elaborate forms’ these phenomena are best observed, respectively, in the Indian caste system and in the modern West.2 Here they are intrinsically bound up with the dominant ideology, they are not ‘rudimentary’ or ‘residual’ – homo hierarchicus represents the quintessence of caste, homo aequalis is the ideological sum of modernity. Having, in Homo Hierarchicus, moved from the individualism of his own contemporary milieu to the discovery of another ‘fundamental’ social principle, i.e., hierarchy, in his later work Dumont, the comparativist par excellence, reverses this perspective, utilising his knowledge of India to provide a point of departure from which to consider, objectively, the often implicit ideological underpinnings of modern individualism. The results of this latter endeavour can be found in three principal publications, From Mandeville to Marx (1977), Essays on Individualism (1986), and German Ideology (1994). Each of these works will be considered in subsequent chapters.3 For the moment, if we turn to the glossary of Essays on Individualism, we find a dictionary-like definition of what Dumont understands by the term ‘individual’. A distinction, as we have seen, must be drawn between: (1) ‘the empirical subject, [the] indivisible sample of the human species, as encountered in all societies’; and (2) ‘the independent, autonomous, moral and, thus, essentially nonsocial being, as encountered first of all in our modern ideology of man and society’ (Dumont 1986c: 279, emphasis in original). It is in this second sense, as value, as autonomous moral

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On Ideological Comparison

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unit, that the Indian individual-in-the-world does not exist. In contradistinction to modern culture, permeated ‘by nominalism, which grants real existence only to individuals and not to relations, to elements and not to sets of elements’ (ibid.: 11), the Indian man-in-theworld is a man of caste and social relations. Well, at least he is ideologically so, for, although a large body of ethnographical data is used to elucidate or qualify the main argument, Homo Hierarchicus is essentially a study in Hindu ideology, of the social norms and expectations that govern behaviour at the most general and all-encompassing level. In fact, as much as anything, from Homo Hierarchicus onwards Dumont’s entire sociology might best be conceived in terms of comparative ideology. Turning again to the Essays’s glossary for a convenient definition, Dumont defines ‘ideology’ as ‘a social set of representations; the set of ideas and values that are common in a society (= global ideology)’ (ibid.: 279). Articulating this global set of social values in a Hindu Indian context is the prime concern of Homo Hierarchicus. It is at this global level that the notion of hierarchy really comes into its own since, according to Dumont, hierarchy, or more precisely the opposition between pure and impure upon which it rests, is the fundamental underlying assumption of classical Hindu society, its basic ‘conceptual grid’. The principles of caste, Dumont writes: rest on one fundamental conception and are reducible to a single true principle, namely the opposition of the pure and the impure. This opposition underlies hierarchy, which is the superiority of the pure to the impure, underlies separation because the pure and the impure must be kept separate, and underlies the division of labour because pure and impure occupations must likewise be kept separate. The whole is founded on the necessary and hierarchical coexistence of the two opposites. (Dumont 1980: 43, emphasis in original)

In a typically structuralist manner, Dumont sees this binary opposition between the pure and impure as foundational to Hindu society mainly in an ‘intellectual’ sense: ‘it is by implicit reference to this opposition that the society of castes appears consistent and rational to those who live in it’ (ibid.: 44). ‘Far more than a “group” in the ordinary sense, the caste is a state of mind, a state of mind which is expressed by the emergence, in various situations, of groups of various orders generally called “castes”’ (ibid.: 34, emphasis in original). Preempting, perhaps, a common criticism of the structuralist approach, namely that its success depends as much on the ingenuity of the analyst than on any correspondence with observable reality, Dumont is at pains to point out that his own method is in no way ethnocentric (or,

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Categories of Self

as he calls it, ‘sociocentric’): ‘One may say that the basic ideology is incontestably very widespread and powerful in most of the actual cases: it does not spring from the imagination of the inquirer, and it is not a pure literary or “cultural” matter’ (ibid.: 46). None the less, a common criticism made of Homo Hierarchicus has been with regard to Dumont’s tendency to overestimate the importance of ideology, to stress the normative and ideological at the expense of the actual and empirical. Leach (1971: 14), for instance, suggests that Dumont’s arguments are often ‘autonomous’ of the ‘hard facts of the case’. In a similar vein, Madan (1994: 66) speaks of a ‘cavalier attitude’ to empirical evidence, suggesting that what most distinguishes Dumont’s ‘work from the usual social anthropological discussions of caste is that it does not proceed from fieldwork to a model of how the system works. Instead, it begins with a cardinal explanatory principle – hierarchy – and boldly sets out to build a model thereon, maintaining throughout the position that theory or ideology overrides and encompasses ethnography’. Dumont’s method, Madan explains elsewhere (ibid.: 61), ‘is that of a theorist: he begins with a key idea and then proceeds deductively and dialectically, working out its implications step by step’. However, this is not strictly true. Criticisms concerning Dumont’s supposed empirical reticence require a degree of qualification. For one thing, the key idea – hierarchy – from which Dumont apparently begins his investigations is not simply plucked out of thin air but is crystallised from his own fieldwork experiences. In a recorded conversation with Jean-Claude Galey, his last doctoral student, Dumont reminisces over the periods he has spent in the field and emphasises their importance in shaping his subsequent theoretical position. During the course of the conversation, Galey (1982: 15) explicitly comments on the paradox that, although he had produced ‘one of the most detailed and complete descriptions’ ever written on Indian caste, Dumont is usually acknowledged ‘in the first place as merely a theoretical sociologist’. Moffat, the editor and joint translator of Dumont’s Sous-Caste (the exemplary monograph in question), makes exactly the same point: ‘Dumont the theoretician is well known to English-reading social-scientists; Dumont the ethnographer is not.’ This is an imbalance the long-awaited English version of A South Indian Subcaste aimed at redressing (Dumont 1986b: xiii). Referring to the extensive descriptive materials included in this work, Dumont stresses that ‘without such ethnographic grounding we build on sand’ (Galey 1982: 19). Indeed, in order to fully understand the theoretical position advanced in Homo Hierarchicus one needs to appreciate the successive generalisations or abstractions that lead from Dumont’s first Indian field experience, through his subsequent comparison between North and South Indian, and on to the more readily acknowledged (and criticised) pro-

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On Ideological Comparison

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nouncements concerning the ‘sociological unity of India’ as a whole. Dumont himself describes the process as ‘something like a snowball effect’ (ibid.: 21). It is worthy of note that throughout this ‘snowballing’ process the comparative approach remains constant. Along with Sous-Caste, Dumont’s first period of field research (two years from 1949 to 1950) resulted in the publication of Hierarchy and Marriage Alliance, an attempt to compare the marriage systems of three Tamil-speaking South Indian districts, whose organisation, although admitting a degree of surface diversity, rested ‘on fundamental institutions … common to all’ (Dumont 1983: 37).4 In 1957–1958 Dumont conducted another fifteen months of fieldwork in India, this time in the northern district of Gorakhpur. His initial intention was to produce a study as detailed and polished as the South Indian monograph: ‘it turned out otherwise mainly, I think, because, once assured of the sociological unity of India, I was caught – I was, so to speak, sucked into a whirlwind of more and more general questions, about renunciation, about kingship or dominance, about caste and finally about modern ideology in the West’ (Galey 1982: 20). These more pressing questions were to keep Dumont from writing up his extensive North Indian data. It is now that Dumont ‘the theoretician’, ‘the comparative ideologist’, comes into play. The point here is that the snowballing effect from South Indian to North Indian and then on to pan-Indian comparativism demonstrates that Dumont did not, pace Madan, proceed from a cardinal explanatory principle and attempt, deductively, to fit empirical reality around it. On the contrary, the explanatory principle Dumont eventually arrives at was fashioned through a long-drawnout process of induction. That is to say, the central concept of hierarchy, the notion of homo hierarchicus, is firmly grounded in Dumont’s fieldwork experiences and undergoes a succession of generalisations before it becomes regarded as the umbrella ideal of Indian civilisation, juxtaposed to the individualism of the West. It is with some justification, then, that Dumont (1980: xviii–xix) complains that, among those who have strongly criticised Homo Hierarchicus, questioning in particular its empirical credentials, none have subjected themselves to the ‘empirical discipline’ that he has undergone. Still, Dumont does concede that from an empiricist point of view the primacy given in his ‘book on caste’ to ideas and values, ‘the excessive recourse to abstractions’, and ‘the introduction of ancient texts into the study of contemporary society’ can only appear abhorrent. But his intentions in Homo Hierarchicus are purposefully of a general and generalising nature. How could they fail to be otherwise when Dumont aims at capturing the ‘sociological unity of India’, at positing a ‘general Indian formula’?

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My intention was not to claim that in India there has never been the slightest trace of equality as a tendency or even as a norm, nor to deny the differences between the larger or smaller regions … , nor to fail to recognise more or less modern movements. I meant to isolate the predominant ideological note of a social system in relation to its morphology. (Ibid.: xxi)

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This relationship to social morphology is an interesting and, for Dumont, a particularly important point. Dumont’s claim, stated above, that the basic ideology he takes as representative of Indian civilisation does not derive from the ‘imagination of the inquirer’, and is not a pure ‘literary or “cultural” matter’, begs the question of what he means by the rather curious phrase, ‘a cultural matter’. Surely it would be a good thing if his own representations accorded with the cultural traditions of India. What Dumont (ibid.: xxxv) finds objectionable, however, is any attempt to detach the cultural from the social, to deal purely in representations unrelated to ‘social forms, institutions, and behaviours’. In a programmatic statement in the first volume of Contributions to Indian Sociology, the journal he jointly founded with David Pocock, Dumont and Pocock (1957) suggest that the sociology of India should lie at the ‘confluence of Sociology and Indology’. This idea is reiterated in the following passage from Homo Hierarchicus: Ancient literature has often been neglected, and there have even been protests against the propensity of previous writers to make use of the old Sanskrit texts. No doubt this should not be done indiscriminately, but there is a tendency to exaggerate both the contribution made by observation alone, and the distance between what it reveals and what is provided by ancient sources. (Dumont 1980: 67–68)

The use of Sanskritic material, of Brahmanic texts, could quite easily lead to a ‘cultural’ interpretation, to the presentation of ‘pure ideas’, an unadulterated ‘symbolic analysis’. This is why one needs to approach such literature ‘discriminately’. For Dumont, the criterion by which this discrimination is made relates to a text’s usefulness in elucidating present social realities. It is, then, with social morphology firmly in mind that Dumont selects and makes use of ancient Vedic texts in his own analysis of caste: I have always considered representations in relation to institutions. Let me make this … point explicit. One may imagine an exegesis that would be based essentially on Brahmanic texts, the conceptions of educated men. This exegesis has sometimes been mistakenly attributed to me … . The only texts I considered were texts dealing directly with social relations, and, in the past as in the present, the representations I took as basic related … to

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On Ideological Comparison

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institutions in the broad sense of the term. (Ibid.: xxvi, emphasis in original)

In sum, the ideology Dumont attempts to isolate in Homo Hierarchicus should be conceived as in ‘immediate relation with the most constant and constraining social practice’ (ibid.: xxvi). It is in this sense that one can appreciate Dumont’s claim (ibid.: xxii) that he has ‘always given the last word to observed reality’. Although formulated in classical literature, for example, the social institution of world renunciation is still very much alive today. Similarly, the four classical varnas are ‘not only the historical basement of caste ideology’ but its implicit contemporary support (ibid.: xxvii). The historical past and anthropological present are cross-referential, they serve to elucidate and qualify each other. However, the last word must always remain with the anthropological present, with empirical reality: ‘an ambitious analysis must be given a solid and complete descriptive basis’ (ibid.: xxxv).

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(O)bserved reality = (I)deology + (R)esidue If A South Indian Subcaste and Hierarchy and Marriage Alliance, together with his unpublished North Indian data, provide Dumont with a suitably salubrious ‘descriptive base’, there can be little doubt that Homo Hierarchicus qualifies as the ‘ambitious analysis’. Here, the emphasis is very much on the general, the global or ideological – empirical aspects are to be employed in a ‘secondary capacity’ (ibid.: 37). This is not to say that Dumont operates ‘autonomously’ of the ‘hard facts of the case’, but that he functions at a level somewhat removed from the immediacy of these facts; he complements the empirical at a higher level of theoretical exposition, a global, all-encompassing level. Homo Hierarchicus is concerned with the social whole, with ‘totality’ in the Maussian sense. It presents an abstraction, an ideal-type, delineating the fundamental (and in this sense ‘typical’) characteristics constituting the Indian ideological whole. Dumont readily concedes that social life is not limited to what ideology brings to the fore. Despite his general emphasis on it, we are told that ‘ideology is not everything’. As well as the ‘formal principle’ there is to be found in every whole something else, something which ideology orders and logically encompasses but which it does not explain. Observed social phenomena consist of two components: one ideological, the other residual (o = i + r). ‘Taken overall our object appears like an iceberg: only one part, the easier to describe, emerges into the light of consciousness, yet it is of a piece with another part, more obscure,

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but whose presence we know how to detect’ (ibid.: 38). This other part, more obscure as it may be, is required, in fact demanded, by the observed system for its intelligibility. It provides the underlying rationale of the system, whether explicitly recognised or not. It matters little if the opposition between pure and impure varies considerably from one group to another, if at times it seems to have disappeared altogether; this opposition, the superiority of the pure to the impure, the separation and interdependence this implies, the hierarchy of values it reflects, provides the ideological background to the whole. The system is ‘coloured, not to say structured, in varying degrees, with reference to the global ideology’ (ibid.: xxxvii). Having introduced the basic holistic principles, Dumont proceeds in Homo Hierarchicus to consider forms of behaviour within and between castes in terms of these principles. The traditional division of labour (the jajm¯ani system) is based on hierarchical (i.e., religious5) values rather than on economic logic. Power is ideologically subordinate to status, the politico-economic to the religious. Marriage, similarly, is regulated via the whole, through hierarchy (endogamy, hypergamy, isogamy), as also are rules governing contact, untouchability, food, and vegetarianism. It is in this sense that the ‘individual’ does not exist. The Indian man-in-the-world is a collective being, socially and morally determined at birth, by caste, to play a more or less defined role in the social whole, to derive meaning and recognition in terms of this whole, to be subsumed within it. Of several articles published in a special issue of Contributions to Indian Sociology (1971) detailing the proceedings of a symposium on Homo Hierarchicus, only one discusses, albeit briefly, Dumont’s contention that the Indian individual-in-the-world does not exist. This is Berreman’s (1971) paper entitled ‘The Brahmanical View of Caste’. Broadly conceived, Berreman’s is a Marxist critique. There are, he maintains, ‘fewer exceptions to be dealt with – that explanation of caste is simpler and more in accord with the facts of social life in India – if the basis of caste is regarded as lying in differential power which is expressed in ritual status terms, than if the reverse is assumed’. He accuses Dumont of having ‘been talking with Brahmans’, his theory amounting to ‘a celebration of the rationale for a system of institutionalised inequality’. More specifically, Berreman has four principal objections to Homo Hierarchicus, only two of which need concern us here for their bearing on the status of the individual. These are: (1) The assumption that there is a clear and consistent, universal and fundamental disparity between what the author terms ‘traditional’ or ‘simpler’ societies (e.g., Indian), and ‘modern’ ones (e.g., French, British).

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(2) The limited, biased, albeit scholarly, sources of evidence upon which the arguments are based. (Ibid.: 17, 22, emphasis in original) Under the first of these objections, Berreman (ibid.: 18) questions how Dumont can reconcile firsthand experience in India where, as empirical studies consistently testify, ‘people are as wilful, factionalized and individually variable as people anywhere else’, with his belief that individuals are submerged in the traditionalism of Indian society, that they are submissive and conformist to caste ideology. Such a view, maintains Berreman (ibid.), ‘is a blanket denial of individuality and initiative which reflects a kind of ethnocentrism and condescension no less distorting in its effects than the “socio-centrism” which Dumont deplores’. A few pages later, under the second objection, Berreman claims in an invective on the limited and biased nature of the sources employed in Homo Hierarchicus that those who experience the caste system as oppression are hardly heard from in the book. Yet such a view, he continues, finds ‘ample expression in contemporary social and political events as it has [in] incidents and movements throughout India’s history, from Buddhism to Sikhism to Araj Samaj to neo-Buddhism, all of which relied for their appeal largely on a promise of freedom from the burden of caste’ (ibid.: 23, emphasis added). Paradoxically, Berreman’s ‘wilful, variable individual’ now requires freedom from the burden of caste. And this is precisely the point Dumont is making. Not that caste is necessarily conceived as ‘burdensome’ by Dumont (particularly in the materialist sense implied by Berreman); rather, that it constrains the variability of the human being and does so in such a fundamental way that the ‘individual’ does not ideologically exist. What, then, of the attested defiance, compliance, selfishness, magnanimity, innovation, courage, optimism, etc., the individual’s manipulation and choice among alternatives as they cope with their society and its values, of which Berreman writes (ibid.: 18)? When asked in criticism elsewhere to answer all the questions considered in the sociology of Max Weber, Dumont (1986c: 12 n. 7) replies that his own ‘research lies quite outside the Weberian paradigm’. The individual variability and creativity emphasised by Berreman lies, of course, squarely within this paradigm and, as a result, is not the principal concern of Dumont. While Berreman draws attention to the individual’s manipulation and choice among alternatives as they cope with their society and its values, Dumont functions precisely at the level of these social values. He addresses a different set of questions, namely, those concerned with the parameters within which alternative (empirical) choices must be made and by which their scope is already predetermined. These parameters are holistically defined in

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the Indian case; they are so oriented towards the whole, in fact, that individuality dissolves within them. When, therefore, in his paper on Indian renunciation, Dumont claims that on the level of life in the world the individual does not exist, he employs the term ‘individual’ in a very specific way. First and foremost, it is a sociological usage. It is not biological, psychological, philosophical, or even really religious (although religion is given considerable weight in determining the non-existence of the individual in Hindu India as well as the individual’s permeation, via Christianity in the first place, of the modern West). Within sociology, moreover, we find a characteristic slant: the individual is conceived as the product of social values, of ideology, and not as a creative and intentional agent within society. To borrow Simmel’s terminology, Dumont’s is an individualism of ‘singleness’ as against that of ‘uniqueness’. Where Dumont speaks, for instance, of social ideology, Weber does so in terms of subjective webs of meaning. Weber’s approach offers an alternative sociological perspective (there are of course others, not to mention psychological, philosophical, and religious ones) by which, conceivably, the Indian individual-in-the-world might be said to exist.

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On Ideological Comparison For the moment, however, let us remain with Dumont and at the level of global ideology. When in Homo Hierarchicus Dumont compares the holism of traditional society with the individualism of modern society, he, following Tocqueville (1875), recognises two ‘cardinal ideals’ of modernity that distinguish it fundamentally from the other: namely, equality and liberty. It is in light of these ideals that the modern individual (as value) exists: On the one hand, most societies value, in the first place, order: the conformity of every element to its role in the society – in a word, the society as a whole; this is what I call ‘holism’. On the other hand, other societies – at any rate ours – value, in the first place, the individual human being: for us every man is, in principle, an embodiment of humanity at large, and as such he is equal to every other man, and free. This is what I call ‘individualism’. (Dumont 1977: 4)

We are separated from traditional societies, Dumont (ibid.: 7) tells us, by ‘the modern revolution, a revolution in values’ (emphasis in original), at the core of which lie the cardinal ideals of equality and liberty. What implicit assumptions do we make, then, when we speak of the

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Western individual as just that – an ‘individual’ – in contradistinction to the pre-modern social being? In his excellent study Individualism, Steven Lukes (1973a) describes eleven such assumptions, or as he calls them ‘unit-ideas’. These, in turn, can be divided into two groups: the seven ‘doctrines’ of individualism – the abstract individual, political individualism, economic individualism, religious individualism, ethical individualism, epistemological individualism, and methodological individualism – each of which contributes in its own way to the four ‘core-values’ of individualism – the dignity of man, autonomy, privacy, and self-development. For our purposes, we need only really concern ourselves with the latter four, with, as it were, the aggregate of the doctrines, since these ‘core-values’ constitute the ideological essence of modern individualism and, in so doing, relate in a very specific way to Dumont’s two cardinal ideals of equality and liberty. The first of the four core values identified by Lukes, the dignity of man, concerns ‘the ultimate moral principle of the supreme and intrinsic value, or dignity, of the individual human being’ (Lukes 1973a: 45, emphasis in original). It is, Lukes suggests, the great contribution to individualism of the New Testament and Christianity. The individualin-relation-to-God is the Christian moral imperative, over and above national or other social categories: ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me’ (Matt. 25: 40). While Judaism had tended to conceive of the nation of Israel as the principal concern of God, early Christianity was to maintain that ‘there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all’ (Col. 3: 11). Although de-emphasised throughout much of the Middle Ages (partly as the result of a holistic conception of society firmly rooted in the Roman ideal of res publica), the idea of the supreme worth of the individual was again openly proclaimed during the Renaissance and, in a Christian sense, came to fruition at the Reformation under the auspices of Luther and Calvin, for whom the personal salvation of each individual was of utmost importance (Lukes 1973a: 46). In a more recent manifestation, the ‘intrinsic value of the individual human being’ is an idea enshrined in the American Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948, the latter of which begins by declaring its ‘recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family’. In short, the idea of individual dignity has pervaded a great deal of modern ethical and social thought. Indeed, Lukes (ibid.: 51) grants this core-value the ‘logical status of a moral (or religious) axiom which is basic, ultimate and overriding’.

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Autonomy, or self-direction, Lukes’s second core-value, is the extent:

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to which an individual’s thought and action is his own, and not determined by agencies or causes outside his control. In particular, an individual is autonomous (at the social level) to the degree to which he subjects the pressures and norms with which he is confronted to conscious and critical evaluation, and forms intentions and reaches practical decisions as the result of independent and rational reflection. (Ibid.: 52)

This is an idea evident, for instance, in Luther’s claim that ‘each and all of us are priests because we all have one faith, the one gospel, one and the same sacrament; why then should we not be entitled to taste or test, and to judge what is right or wrong in the faith?’6 In political theory, the idea of individual autonomy became one of the cardinal ideals of the Enlightenment, finding systematic exposition in the likes of Spinoza, for whom a ‘free’ man is an active, self-determining, thinking being, who integrates all his ‘desires and aversions into a coherent policy, the policy of developing his own powers of understanding, and of enjoying his active energies’.7 While the idea of autonomy is widely held in the West to be a moral value, a condition of the individual that should be increased or maximised, it is, according to Lukes (ibid.: 58), absent or understressed in other social situations, in tribal moralities, for instance, or in orthodox communism. The third core-value, privacy, relates to the notion ‘of a private existence within a public world, an area within which the individual is or should be left alone by others and able to do and think whatever he chooses’ (ibid.: 59). This ideological assumption constitutes perhaps the central idea of liberalism, a political philosophy based largely on establishing where the boundaries of this private sphere lie, according to what principles they are to be drawn, and how interference is to be checked (ibid.: 62). According to John Stuart Mill (cited in ibid.: 63), liberalism’s most celebrated advocate, ‘the only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.’ In a contemporary exposition of essentially the same idea (one in fact that makes the contrast with its opposite, ‘groupism’, abundantly clear), David Riesman (cited in ibid.: 65) states, ‘to hold that conformity with society is not only a necessity but also a duty’ is to ‘destroy that margin of freedom which gives life its savour and its endless possibility for advance’. We must therefore give people every encouragement and opportunity to develop themselves (i.e., their private selves) in order to escape from ‘groupism’. Privacy,

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then, relates to a personal sphere of thought or action regarding which interference or intrusion is ideologically prohibited. The fourth, and final, modern core-value identified by Lukes is that of self-development. This ideal was most fully elaborated in a Western context among the early German Romantics, with their stress on qualitative (as opposed to quantitative) individuality and uniqueness (Lukes 1973a: 67). Schleiermacher expresses the idea as the realisation that ‘each man ought to represent humanity in himself in his own different way, by his own special blending of its elements, so that it should reveal itself in each special manner, and, in the fullness of space and time, should become everything that can emerge as something individual out of the depths of itself ’ (ibid.: 68). However, the Romantic ideal of self-realisation need not necessarily be thought of in such solipsistic terms as these. The idea, in fact, enters as an important element into the ethical basis of Marxism. Marx conceived of man as a being possessed of a wide range of creative potentialities, whose own self-realisation exists as an ‘inner necessity, a need’. This inner need can only be realised in a social context. Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his or her gifts in multitudinous directions. In the truly human society of communism the ‘detail worker of today … reduced to a mere fragment of a man’ will be succeeded by ‘the fully-developed individual, fit for a variety of labour, for whom the different social functions he performs are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers’ (cited in ibid.: 71). While the idea of self-development, the fourth of Lukes’s core-values, has varied in expression from pure egoism to strong communitarianism, it is, according to Lukes (1973a: 72), usually granted ‘the status of an ultimate value, an end-in-itself ’. In what ways, then, do the four core-values of individualism relate to the two cardinal ideals of equality and liberty recognised by Dumont as separating the ‘modern’ from the ‘traditional’? Lukes (ibid.: 125) explicitly makes the connection himself: ‘the idea of human dignity or respect for persons lies at the heart of the idea of equality, while autonomy, privacy and self-development represent the three faces of liberty or freedom’. Whether grounded in the Christian doctrine that all men are equally children of God, or in the Kantian argument that we each possess free and rational wills and are equally members of the Kingdom of Ends, the idea of human dignity is invariably equated with that of equality. Freedom or liberty is a composite idea, consisting of the three remaining core-values: (1) autonomy; (2) privacy; and (3) self-development. A person is free: (1) in so far as her actions are her own and result from choices and decisions made as a free agent and not as the result of external or internal forces independent of her will; (2) to the extent to which she is left alone to think and act as she

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pleases; and (3) to the extent to which she is able to shape her life’s course and make of herself the best of what she has it in her to be (ibid.: 127–30). In short, ‘respecting persons [equality] involves treating them as (actually or potentially) autonomous, as requiring privacy, and as capable of self-development [liberty]’ (ibid.: 133). It is exactly this basic ideological respect for the individual that Dumont judges caste ideology to deny. Classical Indian society, unlike its modern Western counterpart, does not presuppose the cardinal ideals of liberty and equality; it does not normatively value the individual. Within the hierarchical world of caste it is the ‘relation’ between elements that is important, not the elements themselves. The last sentence of Individualism reads, ‘the only way to realise the values of individualism is through a humane form of socialism’ (ibid.: 157). Lukes arrives at this conclusion by separating the four core-values of individualism from the seven doctrines pertaining to them. Although important historically in defining the content of the values, the doctrines themselves need no longer be adopted (in fact, several of them must be ‘explicitly rejected’) if the core-values of individualism – dignity, autonomy, privacy, and self-development – are to be taken seriously today. The person for Lukes is a social being, the product of society. The idea of an abstract individual, driven by innate universal wants and desires, upon which several of the doctrines of individualism rest, is utterly unacceptable: Respecting them as persons, in these ways, involves the kind of understanding of both their social and their individual aspects which the abstract view of them precludes. For, on the one hand, such respect requires us to take account of them as social selves – moulded and constituted by their societies – whose achievement of, and potential for autonomy, whose valued activities and involvements and whose potentialities are, in large part, socially determined and specific to their particular social contexts. On the other hand, it requires us to see each of them as an actually or potentially autonomous centre of choice (rather than a bundle composed of a certain range of wants, motives, purposes, interests, etc.), able to choose between, and on occasion transcend, socially-given activities and involvements, and to develop his or her respective potentialities in the available forms sanctioned by the culture – which is both a structural constraint and a determinant of individuality. (Ibid.: 149, emphasis in original)

This passage is interesting for a number of reasons. First, it reiterates the central thesis of Individualism, that the individual is a ‘person’ only in the context of society. The idea of an abstract individual is fallacious. It is in this light that Lukes’s call for a humane form of socialism might be understood. What this essentially amounts to is an attempt to retain the core-values of individualism while, in separating

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On Ideological Comparison

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them from the ‘individualist’ doctrines and ideology upon which they are historically based, situating them within a holistic social frame. As we shall see in the following chapter, a similar idea is expressed in the sociology of Durkheim (of whom, of course, Lukes is the famed biographer).8 A second point of interest concerning the above quotation is its specificity. No doubt, it would be problematic to situate the ideal of respect for social selves, granting their ability ‘to choose between, and on occasion transcend, socially-given activities’, and to develop fully their respective potentialities, in an ideological setting where, as Dumont suggests of India, individual potential and self-realisation are not socially sanctioned forms, where the ‘individual’ does not represent a normative point of reference; where, to put it the other way round, potential and self-realisation are defined in terms of one’s relationship to the whole, to the fulfilment of one’s socially conditioned duty or dharma. Individualism, however, is not an exercise in comparative anthropology. As Lukes (1973a: 158) admits in an ‘afterword’ to the study, ‘it is not (and could not be) value-neutral: it is constructed from within a particular moral and political perspective’. Elsewhere (ibid.: 130) he questions what it is for individuals to make the best of themselves: ‘for the consistent ethical relativist there is the insurmountable difficulty that what counts as human excellence will be a matter of irresolvable moral disagreement’. This is a point with which Dumont would wholeheartedly agree. For him, the most general ideological assumptions dictating what it means to be a human being are fundamentally different in the Indian and Western cases. What Dumont is essentially saying is that the Indian individual-in-the-world does not exist, in the language of Lukes’s elucidation, as an autonomous, private, potentially self-realised entity, possessed of intrinsic worth and dignity: within traditional caste society liberty and equality are not the predominant ideals. The real question revolves around whether in highlighting the normative and ideological as a basis for global comparison Dumont presents an accurate and reliable (albeit generalised) picture of Western and Indian civilisations. Is Dumont’s approach, as some of his critics would have it, so far removed from the intricacies of everyday reality as to exhibit a distorted view of it? Is there a sense in which the Indian individual-in-the-world does in fact exist and, if so, is such a view at all reconcilable with Dumont’s position? To what extent does the Indian renouncer, the individual-outside-the-world, actually resemble the normative construct of the West? These and related questions will be taken up in chapter 4. In the meantime, to say in any given circumstance that the individual does not exist says as much about the theoretical perspective employed as it does about the social conditions

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under investigation. It is the aim of the following two chapters to throw further light on Dumont’s ‘ideological’ approach and on his understanding of what constitutes an ‘individual’ by situating these within Durkheimian sociology more generally, paying particular attention to the considerable intellectual influence exerted on Dumont by his teacher and respected mentor, Marcel Mauss.

Notes 1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

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7. 8.

Fürer-Haimendorf writes concerning this work: ‘It is unique, for no other account of a caste or subcaste provides so full and detailed an account … as well as so penetrating an analysis. … Scholars … of future generations interested in knowing what life in South Indian villages was like in the middle of the twentieth century will turn to this book rather than to any other’ (cited in Dumont 1986b: xiii). With regard to hierarchy, for example: ‘Indian society … appears in this light as the concrete manifestation of hierarchy, and thus teaches us to recognize hierarchy in vivo with its connections and implications. In a word, it makes the idea visible to us’ (Dumont 1980: xvii, emphasis in original). The first two in chapter 6 and the other in chapter 7. We find here an example of continuity underlying diversity characteristic of the structuralist method and a principle we shall return to again and again in our assessment of Dumont. ‘We shall define hierarchy as the principle by which the elements of a whole are ranked in relation to the whole, it being understood that in the majority of societies it is religion which provides the view of the whole, and that the ranking will thus be religious in nature’ (Dumont 1980: 66, emphasis in original). Reformation Writings of Martin Luther, ed. B.L. Woolf, London, 1952, vol. 1, p. 120, cited in Lukes 1973a: 53. S. Hampshire, ‘Spinoza and the Idea of Freedom’, Proceedings of the British Academy, XLVI (1960), p. 213, cited in Lukes 1973a: 54. According to Cladis (1992: 1), Durkheim ‘sought to protect liberalism from egoism, and communitarianism from fatalism, the absorption of individuals into the social mass. The result was a social theory that articulated and promoted the dignity and rights of the individual within the moral idiom of social traditions and commitment to the common good.’ Clearly, this equates to a ‘humane form of socialism’ by Lukes’s definition.

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Chapter 2

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ON FRENCH IDEOLOGY

That Dumont considers himself heir to the Durkheimian tradition is surely beyond doubt. He built upon already well-established sociological foundations, conducting his own analyses of society and culture within a pre-existing theoretical framework. Indeed, he contributed to this theoretical corpus himself. We find statements in Dumont to the effect that Mauss’s teaching provided ‘the source of my own efforts’ (Dumont 1986c: 1), the direction to ‘all my work’ (ibid.: 4), ‘that I owe everything, or almost everything, to the French tradition of sociology. For not only has it nurtured me, my ambition is to extend it’ (Dumont 1980: xlv–xlvi). These are in no way to be conceived as paying mere lip-service either to the French school into which he was educated or to his much admired teacher Mauss. Mauss’s presence, in particular, is discernible throughout Dumont’s entire anthropological career – perhaps unsurprisingly, given Dumont’s admission that his early mentor exerted ‘as great an influence as a religious teacher or philosopher’ (Dumont 1986c: 185) and that ‘faithfulness to Mauss’s profound inspiration seems increasingly to be a condition of success in our studies, his teaching the cardinal organizing principle of our research’ (Dumont 1980: xlvi). Taking this readily attested intellectual debt as a point of departure, this chapter and the following one aim to convey something of the part played by his Durkheimian heritage in shaping what remains probably the most pervasive of all the sociological concepts found in Dumont, that is to say, the idea or, rather, the ‘category’ of the ‘individual’. This is a notion around which much of Dumont’s anthropology revolves: his comparison of India and the West, his juxtaposition of German and French ideology, his study of modernity in general, of individualism, politics, religion, and economics.

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Individualisme versus Individualität By way of an avenue into our consideration of Durkheimian sociology, let us return for a moment to our guide of the previous chapter. The first part of Lukes’s Individualism is devoted to mapping out the way in which the modern tendency to valorise the particular human being was historically absorbed and conditioned within four distinct cultural domains, France, Germany, America, and England. For our present purposes, we need only concern ourselves with the first of these, with France and Germany, since between this pair semantic difference is most pronounced and (in keeping with the Maussian theme of ‘maximal’ representation) comparison is therefore most illuminating. According to Lukes, in its French form the first uses of the term individualisme grew out of a reaction to the French Revolution and to its alleged source, the thought of the Enlightenment. The Revolution was proof that ideas exalting the individual endangered the stability of the commonwealth, the excellence of France, dissolving it into an unsocial, uncivil, unconnected chaos of elementary principles (Lukes 1973a: 6). ‘What’, rhetorically asked Lamennais in 1829, ‘is power without obedience, law without duty?’ ‘Individualism’, he disparagingly replies, ‘which destroys the very idea of obedience and of duty, thereby destroying both power and law; and what then remains but a terrifying confusion of interests, passions and diverse opinions?’1 Around this time, the term individualisme was first employed in a systematic manner by the disciples of Claude Henri de Saint-Simon. The Saint-Simonians shared many of the ideals of the counter-revolutionaries, their critique of the Enlightenment’s glorification of the individual, their dread of social atomisation and anarchy, as well as their desire for the reinstatement of an organic, stable, hierarchically organised, harmonious social order (Lukes 1973a: 6). For them, history was seen as advancing through a pattern of cyclic alternations, wherein ‘critical’ and ‘organic’ periods succeeded one another through time. Critical periods are characterised by disorder, chaos, and confusion; these are times when former social relations are destroyed and everywhere tends towards egoism. Organic periods, on the other hand, are those in which social order and organisation reign, where society functions as a unified and stable whole. The term individualisme was generally employed by the Saint-Simonians to refer to the pernicious and socially destructive evils underlying their contemporary ‘critical’ epoch, whose disorder, atheism, individualism, and egoism they contrasted with the prospect of order, religion, association, and devotion (ibid.: 6–7). Due, in good part, to the extraordinarily pervasive influence of Saint-Simonian ideas in the nineteenth century, Lukes suggests that

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On French Ideology

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the term individualisme has carried in France to this day a pejorative connotation, with ‘a strong suggestion that to concentrate on the individual is to harm the superior interests of society’ (ibid.: 7). The dictionary of the Academie Francaise simply defines the term as subordination of the general interest to the individual’s interest, while Moulin has remarked on a ‘tinge of hubris’, of ‘démesure’, in the French that does not exist in the English.2 In general, the notion of individualisme points in French thought to (actual or potential) sources of social dissolution – although opinions vary as to the origin and nature of these sources. ‘The evil which plagues France’, wrote Louis Veuillot in 1843, ‘is not unknown; everyone agrees in giving it the same name: individualism. It is not difficult to see that a country where individualism reigns is no longer in the normal conditions of society, since society is the union of minds and interests, and individualism is division carried to the infinite degree’ (cited in Lukes 1973a: 9, emphasis in original). It would, of course, be absurd to say that all nineteenth-century French thinkers considered individualisme inherently destructive and evil. In the 1820s, a group of French revolutionary republicans proudly called themselves the Société d’Individualistes (Lukes 1973a: 8). Others conceived of the process as historically necessary, but ultimately false and incomplete. Individualism’s progressive aspect lay in the fact that it afforded a measure of freedom from traditional repression, a welcome degree of latitude in which the individual might personally develop and flourish. In this sense, the individualistic tendency sweeping across Europe was often favourably received as a necessary and indispensable transitional phase. For many, however, once obtained, the achievements of individualism had to be transcended or completed in an age of socialist fraternity. In order that the valorisation of the individual should not end up in out-and-out atomism or anarchy, the extravagances of individualism needed to be curbed, mitigated through recourse to the social whole. Such, to anticipate our argument a little, was more or less the position adopted by Durkheim, who conceived of socialism as a means of ‘completing, extending and organising individualism’, which, in spite of its historical benefits, he, too, identified with the pejorative concepts of egoism and anomie, with the dissociation of individuals from social purpose and regulation and the breakdown of social solidarity (ibid.: 15).3 In Germany, individualism took on another connotation quite distinct from its prominent French usage. It came in general to represent the Romantic idea of Individualität: ‘the notion of individual uniqueness, originality, self-realisation – what the Romantics called Eigentumlichkeit – in contrast to the rational, universal and uniform standards of the Enlightenment, which they saw as “quantitative”,

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“abstract” and therefore sterile’ (ibid.: 18). Simmel, for instance, writes of a new German individualism characterised by the ideal of ‘Individual Self-Perfection’; an ideal strongly opposed to the notion of ‘Individual Egoism’ with its atomised and basically undifferentiated view of the individual. This new individualism is the individualism of difference, the deepening of one’s individuality to the point of incomparability. The individual is here conceived as a specific, given, irreplaceable entity, called or destined to realise his own incomparable image. Ernst Troeltsch summarises the distinction between French and German connotations thus:

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Those who believe in an eternal and divine law of Nature, the Equality of man, and a sense of Unity pervading mankind, and who find the essence of Humanity in these things, cannot but regard the German doctrine as a curious mixture of mysticism and brutality. Those who take the opposite view – who see in history an ever-moving stream, which throws up unique individualities as it moves, and is always shaping individual structures on the basis of a law which is always new – are bound to consider the westEuropean world of ideas as a world of cold rationalism and equalitarian atomism, a world of superficiality and Pharisaism.4

We are faced then with two distinct, culturally specific, ideal-types: the French slant, equating individual with atom, as something outside and threatening to social solidarity; and the German emphasis on individual creativity and self-realisation, which becomes transformed under the likes of Fichte, Schelling, and Schleiermacher into a transcendent theory of state, whereby societies are no longer envisaged as the result of contractual arrangements between individuals, but as ‘super-personal creative forces, which build from time to time out of the material of particular individuals, a Spiritual Whole, and on the basis of that Whole proceed from time to time to create the particular political and social institutions which embody and incarnate its significance’.5 The tension highlighted in France between the individual and society is to some extent ideologically remitted in Germany through the organic (spiritual) unity of the two. We are dealing here, of course, with ideal-types, essentialisations, or as Dumont would say, with ‘dominant ideologies’. Nevertheless, these are informative and useful in their description of the general intellectual background out of which both the French and German sociological traditions emerged. One need only compare Durkheim and Weber, their respective emphasis on the individual as ‘single’ and ‘unique’, for example, to acknowledge the truth in this. Indeed, the more salient aspects of this comparison will be brought to light in a later chapter. For the moment, our interests lie properly with Durkheim and the French sociological tradition. Our immediate objective is to situate Durkheim within the

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France of his day, within the intellectual milieu described above, since Durkheim’s sociology is best understood when set against this ideological background, as both the product of it and a critical response to it.

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A Communitarian Defence of Liberalism Such an in situ reading is more or less the position adopted by Mark Cladis (1992) in a contemporary exegesis of Durkheim. On the whole, writes Cladis (ibid.: 12), Durkheim’s work belongs ‘to a distinctive French narrative, a narrative of struggle and accomplishment, of the Revolution and the Constitution. His arguments are not for all societies, even if they can be applied to many. His is an insider’s argument, for the French, by a Frenchman’. Let us enter this insider’s argument, then, on an unambiguously French note. In 1898 Durkheim published in Revue bleue an article entitled ‘Individualism and the Intellectuals (L’individualisme et les intellectuels)’. The paper was a response to an earlier article, ‘After the Trial (Après le Procès)’, written by the Catholic literary historian Ferdinand Brunetière. The trial in question was that of Dreyfus. In 1894 Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, had been convicted of writing a treasonous letter found in the German embassy detailing secret French documentation. He was sentenced by military tribunal to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. Two years later, information came to light implicating Major Esterhazy as the treasonous letter’s author. The army, renowned at the time for its anti-Semitism, attempted to suppress the new evidence and, even though Esterhazy was eventually tried, he was acquitted within minutes. Upon this acquittal Emile Zola penned his famous J’accuse, a letter written to the President of the Republic, indicting Esterhazy’s judges, the officers in charge of the Dreyfus investigation, several handwriting experts, chiefs of the general staff, and various departments of the war ministry (Lukes 1973b: 332–35; Cladis 1992: 11–14). The ensuing ‘Dreyfus Affair’ Cladis (1992: 13) describes as ‘one of the most important episodes of political controversy in the history of France’. Stances were resolutely taken, both for and against Dreyfus. Anti-Dreyfusards were drawn in the main from the army, the Roman Catholic Church, and the upper bureaucracy, while Dreyfusards consisted of socialists and Jacobins, liberal and moderate Republicans, anti-clericals, and Protestants. Lines were drawn and battle began in earnest. Brunetière was a champion of the political Right. ‘After the Trial’ was a dogged defence of the army and (almost synonymous in Brunetière’s reasoning) of social order, the latter threatened as he saw

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it by individualism and anarchy. Scorn was poured on those ‘various intellectuals’ who had presumed to doubt the justice of Dreyfus’s trial:

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Individualism is the great sickness of the present age. … Each of us has confidence only in himself, sets himself up as the sovereign judge of everything. … The true intellectual is Nietzsche’s ‘superman’ or even ‘the enemy of laws’ who was not in the least made for the laws, but for placing himself above them. … When individualism arrives at this degree of self-infatuation, there is or will become nothing but anarchy.6

The army, in Brunetière’s opinion, was vital for French security, prosperity, and democracy. During the Dreyfus trial, he claimed, people had come to sense that ‘the army of France, today as of old, is France herself ’. The army had been responsible for the excellence of France, it was in its blood that national unity had ‘been formed, cemented and consolidated’. Consequently, those who attacked the army challenged at the same time the very foundations of the French nation. These, in Brunetière’s judgement, were the ‘intellectuals’, persons who, in the guise of scientific authority, advanced individual opinions on all matters, including ‘the most delicate questions concerning human morality, the life of nations and the interests of society’. How can you expect ‘this man, the first person in the world to scan the verses of Plautus … to bend his “logic” at the word of an army general? One does not spend one’s life in studies of that importance in order to think “like everyone else”’ (cited in Lukes 1973b: 337). According to Brunetière, it is in light of such individualistic arrogance, such asocial or even anti-social intellectualism, that the traditional values underlying French society were becoming increasingly threatened and undermined. The historian David Thompson sums up the situation thus: The fact that Dreyfus was a Jew, and that his condemnation led to a wider drive by the authoritarian militarists and clericals to exclude not merely Jews but Protestants and Republicans from positions of military and administrative power, raised the issue in dramatic form. It was a clash of rival absolutisms. … Democracy had clearly to be a social and political order based on common citizenship and civilian rights within the Republic: or else it would be replaced by an authoritarian, hierarchic order, dominated by Church and privileged ruling classes in the Army and Civil Service. French logic interpreted the conflict in these clear terms, and the battle began. (Thompson 1989: 141)

The mantle of the intellectuals, of Dreyfus, and even of individualism, was taken up by Durkheim in ‘Individualism and the Intellectuals’, his measured reply to Brunetière. In his own paper, Brunetière had given little consideration to the facts of the Dreyfus case. He

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aimed his invective, rather, at a more general level, at ‘the level of principles: the state of mind of the “intellectuals”, the fundamental ideas to which they adhere’ (Durkheim 1994: 59). Durkheim, in turn, agrees to conduct the debate in these more general terms. The Dreyfus Affair was, after all, only a superficial expression of a much deeper disagreement. The real issues at stake were more a question of principle than of fact. ‘Let us therefore leave on one side the minutely detailed arguments which have been exchanged from side to side; let us forget the Affair itself and the melancholy scenes we have witnessed. The problem confronting us goes infinitely beyond the current events and must be disengaged from them’ (ibid.: 60). Dreyfus, the ‘subjective individual’ (the minute details of his trial, for instance, even the question of his innocence or guilt), was of secondary interest to both Durkheim and Brunetière. Dreyfus, the ‘principle’, however, was of paramount importance. The situation in France dictated that this be so. Much was at stake. Dreyfus stood, on the one hand, as a threat to order and social hierarchy, while, on the other, he represented a denial of liberty and equality. Either way, Dreyfus (or more properly the collective interests invested in him) posed a potential threat to the stability of France. Durkheim’s position requires some clarification. To suggest he was not (theoretically) interested in Dreyfus as a ‘subjective individual’ is not to say, as some readings of his sociology would suggest, that he lacked interest in Dreyfus as an individual per se. On the contrary, as will become increasingly clear, Dreyfus’s status as an individual is central to Durkheim’s argument. It is as a particular expression of this status, as a unique, subjective, and irreplaceable personality, that Dreyfus is probably marginal to it. At bottom, Durkheim is concerned with the right to be an individual, with liberty and equality, with ideology, not with the subjective expression of this right: ‘science does not describe the individual, but the general’. Although a relatively short article and perhaps among the lesser known of Durkheim’s canon, ‘Individualism and the Intellectuals’ is an exceedingly rich paper and one in which several important theoretical themes can be detected. Throughout his career, Watts Miller (1993: 84) writes, ‘Durkheim has a strong sense of the value and values of collective life. At the same time he endorses the ideals of an essentially liberal, individualist-humanist ethic, the ethic, as he says, of the Principles of 1789, an ethic of freedom, justice and the status and rights everyone has as individual, citizen and “man”.’ One could hope for no better statement concerning these two, the social and the individual, couched in the affairs of France of its day, than Durkheim’s ‘Individualism and the Intellectuals’. At the outset of the paper, a fundamental distinction is drawn between two types of individualism. The

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first, egoistic, Durkheim (in keeping with the mainstream of nineteenth-century France) deplores ‘as an ideal without grandeur that narrow commercialism which reduces society to nothing more than a vast apparatus of production and exchange, and it is only too clear that all social life would be impossible if there did not exist interests superior to the interests of individuals’ (Durkheim 1994: 60). This kind of individualism is the narrow, miserly, utilitarianism of Spencer and the economists. Grounded in individual self-interest, utilitarianism is intimately linked to the dangers of anomie and social breakdown. It reduces society to little more than an aggregate of distinct individuals, driven by private (economic) needs and desires.7 There is nothing in this rejection of utilitarianism to separate Durkheim from Brunetière; both are equally condemning of all forms of atomism. Durkheim, however, detects in France another kind of individualism, one opposed to utilitarianism (the significance of which is anyway on the wane: ‘an enemy … in the process of quietly dying a natural death’), and a type that captures more precisely the intellectual spirit of the day. This individualism ‘has been upheld for a century by the great majority of thinkers: it is the individualism of Kant and Rousseau, that of the spiritualistes, that which the Declaration of the Rights of Man sought, more or less successfully, to translate into formulae, that which is currently taught in our schools and which has become the basis of our moral catechism’ (ibid.: 61). As opposed to egoistic individualism, this other kind might be called ‘moral individualism’, and it is this that Durkheim’s paper rigorously defends against Brunetière’s charges of atomism and anarchy. So far removed, in fact, is this other individualism ‘from making personal interest the object of human conduct, that it sees in all personal motives the very source of evil. … [T]he only ways of acting that are moral are those which are fitting for all men equally, that is to say, which are implied in the notion of man in general’ (ibid.). While Durkheim embraces both Kant and Rousseau as forerunners of moral individualism, he does not do so uncritically, although in this instance his criticism of them is relegated to a footnote.8 None the less, Durkheim’s criticism of these influential forerunners is fairly characteristic and provides an important key to understanding his general position in ‘Individualism and the Intellectuals’. Both Kant (in proposing that one is only sure of acting well if the motives that influence action relate to the quality of man in abstracto, and not to particular individual circumstances) and Rousseau (since his ‘social contract’ constitutes a kind of impersonal average, an aggregate of all particular wills, where individual considerations have been eliminated or neutralised) are interpreted by Durkheim as having advocated a form of ‘moral individualism’. In endorsing influences irreducible to the needs

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or wants of specific individuals, these theories are superior by far to the economic/egoistic individualism of Spencer. Even so – and this is the characteristic criticism – according to Durkheim, both Kant and Rousseau fail to fully grasp the importance of society in expounding their (still essentially) ‘individualistic’ ethics. Rousseau’s, for his part, is perhaps less a crime of omission than of emphasis. There can be no doubt that he possessed, as Durkheim himself admits, ‘a sense of the social nature of man and of the reality of society’. However, Rousseau’s offence was to sever the individual from the social by creating a radical dichotomy between the two. For Rousseau, society is an unnatural state for individuals; natural man is a self-sufficient whole, a ‘noble savage’, whereas social man is a fractional unit. ‘Good social institutions’, we are told, ‘are those which are best able to denature man, remove from him his absolute existence in order to give him a relative one, and transport the self into the common unity’ (cited in Lukes 1973b: 125). There exists in Rousseau, then, a fundamental tension between the individual and the social, between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ man, with the scales tipped in favour of natural man in terms of theoretical and normative emphasis: the ‘social contract’, undoubtedly ‘social’ at one level, is, none the less, drawn up between isolated, pre-social, ‘individuals’. It is in this respect that Rousseau fails to sufficiently grasp the importance of society. For Durkheim, to speak of the thinking, acting, competent, pre-social individual amounts pretty much to a misnomer: if everything is removed from human beings that is derived from society, all that remains is a ‘creature reduced to sensation and more or less indistinguishable from the animal’. If Rousseau’s had been a crime of theoretical emphasis, then Kant’s was surely one of social omission: ‘I have to deal with nothing save reason itself and its pure thinking; and to obtain complete knowledge of these, there is no need to go far afield, since I come upon them in my own self ’ (cited in Collins 1985: 55). What Kant fails to recognise, in Durkheim’s estimation, is that reason itself is neither universal nor ‘pure’, but socially conditioned and contingent. Consequently, since ‘social phenomena are not the work of the isolated individual …, to know what these syntheses consist of … the scholar must observe, since they take place outside himself ’ (Durkheim 1973a: 17). It is in this regard that Durkheim has been famously interpreted to have ‘sociologised Kant’. Whereas Kant expounded a single universal set of categories, inherent in the human mind and a necessary precondition to any conceptual thought, Durkheim is taken to have relativised these categories as the product of particular times and places. While Kant could withdraw inwardly and derive a universal epistemology, Durkheim advocates detached and objective (i.e., ‘scientific’) analysis

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as a means of discerning contingent social facts. ‘The anthropocentric viewpoint’, he avers (ibid.), ‘is no better grounded in sociology than in the other natural sciences’ (emphasis in original). It was suggested above that Durkheim’s criticism of Kant and Rousseau provides an important key to understanding ‘Individualism and the Intellectuals’. This criticism was shown to be characteristic of Durkheim in its emphasis on the social, over and above the individual – a viewpoint clearly evident in the following:

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The mentality of groups is not that of individuals (particuliers), precisely because it assumes a plurality of individual minds joined together. A collectivity has its own ways of thinking and feeling to which its members bend but which are different from those they would create if they were left to their own devices. The individual by himself would never have been able to form anything that resembled the idea of the gods, the myths and dogmas of the religions, the idea of duty and moral discipline, and so on. And what shows that all these beliefs and practices are not the simple extension of individual ideas is that they impose themselves on the individual: proof that they do not derive from him but come to him from a source which is external and superior to him. (Ibid.)

Seen in this socially determinative light, ‘Individual and the Intellectuals’, or more precisely the advocacy of moral individualism therein, is best conceived as an attempt to base an individualist ethic upon a social foundation; that is to say, it amounts, as the title of Cladis’s book has it, to A Communitarian Defense of Liberalism. In this attempt, Cladis (1992: 12) points out, ‘Durkheim did not appeal to universal principles derived from natural reason or from any other tap into an “objective”, ahistorical moral reality. He situated his defense in history – specifically, in France’s history.’ Although in this way relativised, moral individualism is recognised as an important reality of nineteenth-century France. ‘All that societies require in order to hold together’, writes Durkheim, ‘is that their members fix their eyes on the same end and come together in a single faith’ (Durkheim 1994: 64). In The Division of Labour in Society (1984) he had already shown that, as societies became more voluminous, the division of labour more advanced, social differentiation more apparent, the bonds that hold societies together undergo a transformation from those based on similarity of lifestyle (mechanical solidarity) to those based, in a way, on (a specialised, interdependent) dissimilarity of lifestyle (organic solidarity). Underlying this dissimilarity, Durkheim now perceives a common faith, a common point upon which members might fix their eyes. This is the ‘cult of man’, which has for its ‘first dogma’ the autonomy of reason and for its ‘first rite’ freedom of thought:

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The communion of minds can no longer form around particular rites and prejudices, since rites and prejudices have been swept away in the natural course of things. In consequence, there remains nothing that man may love and honour in common, apart from man himself. This is why man has become a god for man, and it is why he can no longer turn to other gods without being untrue to himself. And just as each of us embodies something of humanity, so each individual mind has within it something of the divine, and thereby finds itself marked by a characteristic which renders it sacred and inviolable to others. The whole of individualism lies here. (Durkheim 1994: 67)

Moral individualism, then, far from being an egoistic cult of the self, one to be abhorred and condemned, is in fact a necessary and indispensable bond, a union rooted at the very soul of the French nation. As Durkheim argues, ‘the religion of the individual is a social institution like all known religions. It is society which assigns us this ideal as the sole common end which is today capable of providing a focus for men’s wills’ (ibid.: 70). This is what Kant and Rousseau had failed to acknowledge, ‘they wished to deduce their individualist ethics not from society, but from the notion of the isolated individual’ (ibid.: 73 n. 4). It is also what Brunetière and the anti-Dreyfusards had failed to grasp. A ‘verbal similarity’ had misled them into equating ‘individualism’ with ‘individual’ and, consequently, with egoism and anarchy. From the viewpoint of moral individualism, Durkheim cleverly turns the anti-Dreyfusard argument upon itself. For these ‘literary men’ support of Dreyfus, a single individual, amounted to an assault on the army, on tradition, on the solidarity of France. Such support was considered atomistic, immoral, and anarchical. Durkheim counters with the observation that, in truth, it is when outrages against the individual go unpunished that national existence is put in jeopardy. The individualist, one who defends individual rights, defends, simultaneously, the basic interests of society. ‘Not only is individualism distinct from anarchy; but it is henceforth the only system of beliefs which can ensure the moral unity of the country’ (ibid.: 66).

Sociology, the ‘Science’ of Society Cladis’s contention that Durkheim’s is ‘an insider’s argument, for the French, by a Frenchman’ rings true on several counts. At the close of ‘Individualism and the Intellectuals’, Durkheim declares that ‘if there is one country among all others in which the individualist cause is truly national, it is our own; for there is no other whose fate has been so closely bound up with the fate of these ideas [i.e., the Revolution, the Declaration of Rights, etc.]. We give the most recent expression to it,

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and it is from us that other people have received it’ (ibid.: 69). Durkheim even goes so far as to suggest that the institutionalisation of the individual was France’s ‘historical raison d’être’. In a subsequent article examining the state of sociology in France throughout the nineteenth century, Durkheim (1973a: 21) again proposes that ‘everything predestines our country to play an important role in the development of this science’. Once more, he has in mind here, among other factors, the Revolution, which had sufficiently weakened the hold of traditionalism, of religious, political, and legal institutions, and had made of France a tabula rasa, and on ‘this field laid bare’ an entirely ‘new edifice’ must be raised (ibid.: 22). The construction of this new edifice should be governed by scientific principles, since the only way to solve ‘the difficulties of these critical times’ is the scientific way. Cast in this light, ‘Individualism and the Intellectuals’ should be seen as an exercise in science, in the science of society, in sociology. The answer it proposes to the difficulties of the day, to the pressing need for social stability, to the threat of atomism and anarchy, lay not in a nostalgic lingering after traditions of the past, but firmly within the (scientifically enlightened) present. The task as Durkheim presents it (1994: 70–72) is twofold: first, to secure the moral patrimony of the Revolutionary fathers (freedom of thought, freedom to write, freedom to vote, and freedom to personally develop) and, secondly, to see that this heritage ‘is made to prosper’. Durkheim’s desire to place sociology on a scientific footing (and his subsequent attempt to derive an individualist ethic from the science of society) has important implications for his theoretical view of the ‘individual’. In fact, in this regard Durkheim once again portrays a national characteristic – ‘an insider’s argument’ – if one agrees with Peyre (1964: 31) that ‘preferring the universal generalisation to the particular detail is characteristically French’. For Durkheim, the universal generalisation belongs to the realm of science: only the universal is rational, the particular and the concrete ‘baffle understanding’. With regard to the ‘individual’, this reasoning is clearly illustrated in Durkheim’s notion of homo duplex. Although sociology is the science of societies, of social facts, of consciences collectives, it must nevertheless eventually touch on the individual. In each human being there exists something of society, something of the universal, along with something of the individual and particular. Since it is the ‘science of the social’, sociology need only concern itself with individuals inasmuch as they are members of society. The rest, what they are of themselves, belongs to the concrete and particular, the ungeneralisable; it is this that ‘baffles understanding’ – science describes the social and universal, not the individual and particular. Where, however, the social ends and the individual begins is a moot point in Durkheim – one that we shall take up in the following chapter.

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For the most part, this chapter has been devoted to conveying a more general picture. It has outlined the intellectual and social milieu of the France of Durkheim’s day and considered some of the ways in which Durkheim’s own sociology, in particular his views on the individual, were informed by it. Particular attention has been paid to Durkheim’s theoretical standpoint on the individual since, as will be presently argued, this position was bequeathed, more or less intact, to Dumont, via Mauss. The theoretical stance adopted by Durkheim was taken to be ‘characteristically French’ in its emphasis on the general (or social) over and above the particular (or individual). Thus, even when Durkheim defends individualism against the assaults of Brunetière, he does so from a holistic point of view. Although at every turn critical of egoistic or economic individualism, although loathing the atomism that results, Durkheim shares in a sense a common idiom with these politico-economic heresies. This is what the discussion at the beginning of this chapter on the distinctive ways in which individualism was absorbed within nineteenth-century French and German thought sought to convey. While, in Germany, individualism came to represent the Romantic idea of Individualität, of individual uniqueness, self-realisation, and originality; in France, it took on the more rational, universal, uniform standards of the Enlightenment. Although, then, at one level diametrically opposed, Durkheim shares with utilitarianism, at another, more general level, the legacy of a quantitative, rational, generalistic view of humankind. The individual is not, as in Germany, specific, irreplaceable, called or destined to realise its own incomparable image, but is generalised, undifferentiated, quantifiable; single, no doubt, but not existentially unique. It is this generalised view of the individual that is bequeathed to Dumont. After all, he has already told us that his sociological approach lies quite outside the Weberian paradigm – outside, that is to say, a concern with individual uniqueness, subjectivity, and the existential self.

Notes 1. 2. 3.

4. 5.

F. de Lamennais, Des Progrès de la révolution et de la guerre contre l’église (1829): 17–18, cited in Lukes 1973a: 6. L. Moulin, ‘On the Evolution of the Meaning of the Word “Individualism”’, International Social Science Bulletin, VII (1955), p. 185, cited in ibid: 8. This desire on Durkheim’s part to situate individualism within a holistic framework provides, perhaps, the blueprint for Lukes’s own call for a ‘humane form of socialism’ discussed in the previous chapter. Clearly, both positions are based on a proposed social tempering of individualistic principles. E. Troeltsch, ‘The Ideas of Natural Law and Humanity in World Politics’ (1922), cited in Lukes 1973a: 20. Troeltsch (1922), cited in Lukes 1973a: 21.

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F. Brunetière (1898), cited in Cladis 1992: 11, emphasis in original. See chapters 2 and 3 in Cladis (1992) for a discussion of Durkheim’s case against utilitarian individualism. Such irenic treatment, Cladis suggests (1992: 19), and quite plausibly so, results from Durkheim’s desire to present a unified front among the various moral individualists in order to strengthen his polemic against Brunetière.

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8.

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Chapter 3

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ON HOMO DUPLEX AND L’HOMME TOTAL

Having in the previous chapter presented the general picture, let us now proceed with a more discerning eye. In ‘The Dualism of Human Nature and its Social Conditions’ (1914) Durkheim renders a sociological explanation of what he takes to be the constitutional duality of human beings. Humans, he argues, are by nature dichotomous: two states or classes of consciousness reside within them. But, rather than settling for the traditional religious or metaphysical expression of this duality in terms of body and soul or matter and substance, Durkheim (1960: 337) presents a characteristically sociological alternative: man is ‘a monster of contradictions’ since he is possessed of two (scientifically amenable) antagonistic states, ‘the one purely individual and rooted in our organisms, the other social and nothing but an extension of society’. Rooted in the organism, the first of these states – the embodied, egoistic part of homo duplex – consists, according to Durkheim, of sensations, sensory appetites, vague images, and perceptions. At this level, individuals are connected solely to themselves. Against this isolation, however, stands homo duplex’s higher state of consciousness, conferred upon the bodily substrate by society, consisting of conceptual thought, rationality, logic, and morality. Here individuals are lifted out of themselves and drawn into communion with others. In the transition from the lower to the higher of homo duplex’s conscious states, concepts play a crucial role. Concepts, according to Durkheim, are: ‘the material of all logical thought’ (ibid.: 338); ‘the supreme instrument of all intellectual exchange’ (ibid.: 327); they belong to a superior region of the mind, ‘a region that is calmer and

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more serene’ (Durkheim 1995: 435); they represent a beam that lights, penetrates and transforms sensation (ibid.: 437); they are essentially that which distinguishes humankind from the animal (ibid.: 440). Individual sensations are vague, personal, and incommunicable. It is not possible to transfer the sense of colour or the feeling of hunger from one consciousness directly into another. Communication requires mutual, and therefore external, points of reference:

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Collective representations originate only when they are embodied in material objects, things, or beings of every sort – figures, movements, sounds, words, and so on – that symbolize and delineate them in some outward appearance. For it is only by expressing their feelings, by translating them into signs, by symbolizing them externally, that the individual consciousnesses, which are, by nature, closed to each other, can feel that they are communicating and are in unison. (Durkheim 1960: 335–36)

Such externality is one of two essential characteristics belonging to the concept identified by Durkheim in The Elementary Forms. The other is a concept’s relative stability. Like a bubbling stream, sense representations are held to be in perpetual flux, made up of fleeting impressions and representations of no lasting significance beyond their immediate appearance and disappearance. On the other hand, conceptual thought functions in a sense ‘outside time and change’, beyond the fleeting representations of the senses. As the effect of collective, rather than subjective, causes, concepts are no longer susceptible to individual whim, to the vagaries of uncontrollable psychophysiological processes. Instead, if concepts are possessed of greater durability, ‘this is so because collective representations are more stable than individual ones; for while the individual is sensitive to even slight changes in his internal or external environment, only quite weighty events can succeed in changing the mental equilibrium of society’ (Durkheim 1995: 435–36). We arrive, then, at two essential properties lying at the heart of conceptual thought, in fact, of any kind of thought: externality and durability. What remains now to be considered is the means by which homo duplex is able to move from the fleeting to the stable, from the isolation of the senses to the expansiveness of the concept, from the bodily base to the ideational structure – from the animal to the human. Of course, it is society that renders this transition possible, but can we be a little more specific? In returning to the passage quoted above, one notes that ‘collective representations originate only when they are embodied in material objects, things, or beings of every sort – figures, movements, sounds, words, and so on – that symbolize and delineate them in some outward appearance’. It is this objectification, this con-

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vergence of individual consciousnesses upon a common, external, focal point, which brings about the translation of vague (individual) feeling into concrete (supra-individual) signs. Durkheim (ibid.: 231–32) gives the following illustration:

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By themselves, individual consciousnesses are actually closed to one another, and they can communicate only by means of signs in which their inner states come to express themselves. For the communication that is opening up between them to end in a communion – that is, in a fusion of all the individual feelings into a common one – the signs that express those feelings must come together in one single resultant. … It is by shouting the same cry, saying the same words, and performing the same action in regard to the same object that they arrive at and experience agreement.

In practice this agreement – these socially derived rules – might be centred upon non-linguistic phenomena, upon a non-verbal semiotics. However, in The Elementary Forms at least, it is language that plays the crucial role in ensuring this process of self-transcendence, in substituting vague sensations for concrete thought. It is ‘saying the same words’, much more than ‘shouting the same cry’, that distinguishes humankind from the animal. Indeed, Durkheim states quite unequivocally that concepts are ‘constituted by means of words’ (1960: 327); that ‘the system of concepts with which we think in everyday life is the one the vocabulary of our mother tongue expresses, for each word translates a concept. Language is fixed; it changes but slowly, and hence, the same is true of the conceptual organisation it translates’ (1995: 435). If homo duplex is to ascend to a higher state of consciousness, it is through the acquisition of conceptual thought as mediated, primarily, through the agency of language. Language, sociality par excellence, provides the benchmark of externality and durability that facilitates, indeed demands, the self-transcendence of the psychobiological empirical being. ‘As part of society, the individual naturally transcends himself, both when he thinks and when he acts’ (ibid.: 16).

Durkheim: the Categories of Mind Any discussion of the origin and nature of conceptual or logical thought in Durkheim’s sociology remains incomplete if it fails to take into account, at least summarily, the thorny question of categories. Briefly, the categories in Durkheim are more or less reified concepts, their function ‘is to govern and contain the other concepts’ (ibid.: 441); they represent the lofty and fundamental collective notions

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which dominate all intellectual life, providing the solid frame, the skeleton of all individual and collective thought (ibid.: 8–9). However, and this is where the thorniness comes into play, Collins (1985), among others, has pointed to an inconsistency in Durkheim’s thought as to whether the categories are to be conceived as necessary and universal or whether they are empirically constituted – that is to say, culturally and historically contingent. On the one hand, Durkheim claims, for instance, that the categories:

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Correspond to the most universal properties of things. They are like solid frames that confine thought. Thought does not seem to be able to break out of them without destroying itself, since it seems we cannot think of objects that are not in time or space, that cannot be counted, and so forth. The other ideas are contingent and changing, and we can conceive of a man, a society, or an epoch that lacks them; but these fundamental notions seem to us as almost inseparable from the normal functioning of the intellect. (Durkheim 1995: 8–9)

Yet, on the other hand, Durkheim also holds that: ‘The categories of human thought are never fixed in a definite form; they are ceaselessly made, unmade, and remade; they vary according to time and place (ibid.: 14). What further complicates matters is that these apparently contradictory statements do not appear at opposite ends of Durkheim’s career, so that one might suppose some kind of transition from an ‘early’ to a ‘late’ Durkheim. In fact, these passages are not even from different books or essays, but are found just a few pages apart in the introduction to The Elementary Forms. In attempting to situate his sociology of knowledge, Durkheim seeks to straddle the divide between Kantian apriorism, wherein the categories are logically prior to experience and condition it, and classic empiricism, wherein the categories are constructed through individual experience. It is in view of this undertaking that the above seemingly contradictory statements should be understood. From apriorism Durkheim accepts the belief that the intellect, or ‘divine reason’, transcends experience, that above the immediate impressions of the senses stands another, superimposed, transcendent, layer of rationality. In short, Durkheim accepts the a priori thesis stressing the irreducibility of rational cognition to individual experience. However, obviously unwilling to concur that this ‘superior and perfect reason’ exists as an innate component of the individual mind, Durkheim argues, against apriorism, that, if this is so, how does one account for the widely attested historical and cultural variation in the categories? If the categories are universally and apriori fixed, whence comes this variety? Hence, Durkheim’s second statement to the effect that the categories are made, unmade, and remade.

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As he puts it elsewhere, the fact that the divisions of space vary among societies is ‘proof that they are not based exclusively on the inborn nature of man’ (ibid.: 11 n. 8). On the other hand, while classical empiricism rightly points to the constructed nature of the categories, it is way off the mark in supposing that the artisan of this construction is the particular individual. If such were the case, the categories would be stripped of their most telling characteristics, their externality and relative durability. Thus, we find the kind of statement in the first of the passages quoted above concerning the inseparability of the categories to the normal functioning of the (pan-) human mind. In a sense the categories are both universal (no society exists without a category of time, space, causality, etc.) and contingent (the empirical shape these categories take is open to historical and cultural variation) – a universal template, one might say, into which variable content is poured. Concepts and categories are unequivocally social in origin (‘society cannot leave the categories up to the free choice of individuals without abandoning itself ’ (ibid.: 16)) and this is the root of their universality. To think conceptually is to subsume the variable under the permanent, the perceptual under the concrete, the individual under the social:

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And since logical thought begins with the concept, it follows that logical thought has always existed; there has been no historical period when men lived in chronic confusion and contradiction. Certainly, the different features of logic in different historical periods cannot be overemphasized; logic evolves as societies themselves evolve. But however real, the differences should not cause us to miss the similarities, which are no less fundamental. (Ibid.: 440)

In short, all societies subsume the individual under the social. They all transform vague sensations into meaningful concepts. They all bring into existence another mode of consciousness, the higher of homo duplex’s conscious states. They all open the way ‘to stable, impersonal, ordered thought [i.e., the universal template]’, which, as Durkheim (ibid.: 445) goes on to emphasise, has ‘only to develop its own special nature from then on [i.e., the empirically variable content]’. Underlying the social category is the embodied individual, for the lower of homo duplex’s two psychic states must accord in an obvious and non-arbitrary way with the social configuration constructed upon it: I do not mean that there is nothing in the empirical representations that announces the rational ones, or that there is nothing in the individual that can be considered the harbinger of social life. If experience was completely foreign to all that is rational, reason would not be applicable to it. Likewise, if the psychic nature of the individual was absolutely resistant to social life, society would be impossible. Therefore a full analysis of the categories

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would look for the seeds of rationality in individual consciousness. (Ibid.: 15 n. 18)

One is to distinguish, then, between the individual ‘seeds of reason’ and ‘reason properly so called’. That the pre-social individual possesses a certain sensation of regularity is not to be doubted. But in itself this sensation falls far short of amounting to a category of causality (ibid.: 372). Individual space is not the same as social space. Collective time differs markedly from the subjective experience of time (ibid.: 9–12). The difference between the one state and the other, between the social and the subjective, is never simply a matter of extension. Social time is not individual time writ large, hypertrophied. As the sum total of all individual experiences, the categories are qualitatively different from the individual ‘sense of …’, the whole is greater than the sum of its constituent parts. Logical thought is irreducible to individual sensation. It is Society that moves us from the subjective ‘sense’ to the objective ‘category’, that parcels out space and time into shared and socially meaningful phenomena, that transforms vague regularities into causal connections, that translates the individual and incommunicable into the collective and durable. And, if this is the task of Society, then it has been the role of societies to run with this objectification, to ceaselessly make, unmake, and remake the categories according to the contingencies of time and place. Let us return to homo duplex. Our individuality relates first and foremost to our body, to our sensations and sensory appetites, our temperament, character, and habits. In that it contrives to individualise the social, to imprint it with our individual mark, individuality should not be confused with personality.1 While the former is particular, the latter is generalisable throughout society. While the first relates to the ‘sense of ’, the other deals squarely in ‘categories’. It is for this reason that Mauss (1985: 3) in his essay on the ‘category’ of the person declares his intention as one of demonstrating ‘the succession of forms that this concept has taken on in the life of men in different societies, according to their systems of law, religion, customs, social structures and mentality’. The person is social, while the individual is psychobiological. Indeed, we find prefigured here Dumont’s own two connotations of the individual: (1) as object (the empirical, i.e., embodied, subject found in all societies); and (2) as value (the superimposed social configuration).2

Durkheim: Sociology and Psychology We spoke in the previous chapter of a ‘moot point’ in Durkheim concerning the boundary demarcating the social and individual.

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Clearly, this relates to where the higher of homo duplex’s states of consciousness takes over from the lower. It also bears on the relationship between the academic disciplines of sociology and psychology:

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It is civilization that has made man what he is; it is what distinguishes him from the animal: man is man only because he is civilised. To look for the causes and conditions upon which civilization depends is, therefore, to seek out also the causes and conditions of what is most specifically human in man. And so sociology, which draws on psychology and could not do without it, brings to it, in a just return, a contribution that equals and surpasses in importance the services that it receives from it. It is only by historical analysis that we can discover what makes up man, since it is only in the course of history that he is formed. (Durkheim 1960: 325)

The relationship between sociology and psychology is asymmetrical: the latter receives far more than it gives. But what exactly does it give? Man is man only because he is civilised and it is this civilisation that distinguishes him from the animal. Civilisation belongs to the domain of history/sociology. Subtract this from man and you are left with the psychological realm. By this logic, however, all that remains is ‘the animal’, the impressionistic, the ‘sense of ’. At best, one can determine in the individual ‘the seeds of rationality’, a vague and indistinct substratum. This is why Durkheim criticises Rousseau’s notion of pre-contractual individuals living in a blissful state of nature. For Durkheim, pre-contractual equates to pre-conceptual, since ‘we can say with assurance and without being excessively dogmatic, that a great number of our mental states, including some of the most important ones, are of social origin’ (ibid.). Durkheim (1973: 22) has written of France that ‘we are and we remain, whatever we do, the country of Descartes’. How far, in light of what we have been discussing, would he have agreed with the other’s celebrated maxim, Cogito, ergo sum; I think, therefore I am? In the first place, it would seem closer to the mark in the case of Durkheim to posit the dictum, ‘I am conscious, therefore I am’,3 since, as he avers, ‘in order to think we must be, we must have an individuality’. Consciousness precedes thought and is individual; it belongs to the embodied side of homo duplex’s sensational/conceptual dichotomy. As a corollary, Cogito, ergo sumus would perhaps best capture Durkheim’s slant on Descartes’s famous maxim: ‘I think, therefore we are’. In order to think, not only must we have something to think about, we must also possess the faculties to think with. Both these concerns, the content of and the capacity for thought, are provided for in Durkheim’s account by the social:

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In order to think, we must be, we must have an individuality. On the other hand, however, the ego cannot be entirely and exclusively itself, for, if it were, it would be emptied of all content. If we must be in order to think, then we must have something to think about. To what would consciousness be reduced if it expressed nothing but the body and its states? (Durkheim 1960: 328)

In reply: consciousness would be reduced to whatever is left for the realm of psychology once the sociological, that is to say, all conceptual, categorical, and logical thought, has been removed. It would appear that the role of psychology (‘upon which sociology depends and could not do without’) is reduced to a kind of ethology, a study of animalistic states. Unfortunately, Durkheim is rather vague on this point and fails to provide us with a thoroughgoing critique of the psychology of his day – we are left to infer what we can in this regard from a close reading of his (widely dispersed) reflections on the subject. Having undertaken such a project himself, Lukes (1973a: 16–19) suggests that, in general, despite Durkheim’s insistence on their separate and distinct natures, their particular objects of investigation, it is difficult to find in his writings a clear and definitive demarcation of sociology and psychology. This is no doubt the result of Durkheim’s reluctance to concede any real ground to the psychological – a tendency evident throughout his career in the long-standing debate with Tarde, whose methodological individualism served, in Durkheim’s estimation, to reduce society to little more than an association of individual psychological states. Thus, while Tarde argued that sociology should concern itself with individual ‘belief, desire and imitation’, Durkheim stubbornly held to the view that every time ‘a social phenomena is directly explained by a psychological phenomena, we may be sure the explanation is false’ (cited in ibid.: 306).4 It seems unlikely, however, that the reverse holds true for Durkheim, that sociology might feasibly overstep its mark in explaining away the psychological. Certainly, whatever might relate, as Durkheim understood it, to individuals proper is far outweighed in terms of theoretical consequence by all that society confers upon them. It is in this sense that sociology surpasses in importance the services that it receives from psychology.

Mauss: l’Homme Total In a recent collection of essays offered as a centenary tribute to Mauss (ed. James and Allen 1998), much is made of his concept of the ‘total human being’. In particular, Mauss’s l’homme total is favourably compared with Durkheim’s homo duplex. Mauss’s concept is seen as being

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less prone to closure, theoretically more open and responsive, and less restricted by disciplinary boundaries. While Durkheim’s individual is composed of two antithetical parts, the social and individual, Mauss’s human being is regarded as more existentially complete, as an indivisible whole made up of biological, psychological, and sociocultural characteristics. Gofman quite rightly cites this interest in l’homme total as another example of Mauss’s general fondness for the ‘total’, ‘whole’, ‘complete’, or ‘concrete’. Other instances are the ‘total social fact’, ‘total prestations’, and the ‘totality of the system’ (Gofman 1998: 65). But it is Karsenti in particular who focuses on the notion of l’homme total as indicative of a general shift in Mauss’s sociology, away from the mainly abstract and theoretical concerns of Durkheim towards a more empirical, phenomenological, emphasis on concrete facts. Karsenti even suggests a possible alternative Maussian foundation for French sociology; one better suited to the post-modern stress on immanent, lived sociality, on habitus and praxis. Mauss’s strategy, we are told:

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Is to take his own sociological heritage and reorient it, to weave new relationships between sociology, biology, psychology, history, linguistics, and psychoanalysis, and to open up anthropology in this new space. In this it succeeds essentially by giving itself a new theme: the total human being, in which the living organism, the psychological, and the social meet together, a being whom it now becomes possible, under certain conditions, to study as a complex and complete whole. (Karsenti 1998: 73)

In light of this new complexity, Karsenti suggests that the link between psychology, biology, and sociology needs to be ‘completely reformulated’. No longer, as with Durkheim’s homo duplex, can the psychobiological be bracketed together under the label ‘individual’ and conjointly opposed to the ‘social’. Rather, the concrete human being must be seen as an ontological whole, a totality, ‘open to readings on three registers as distinct as they are solidary’ (ibid.: 80). Hence, Mauss’s triple alliance, the erosion of disciplinary boundaries leading to a more unified, anthropological approach to the study of humankind. True, there is a sense in Mauss in which Society gives way to societies, in which the abstract is rejected in favour of the particular and concrete. True again, disciplinary boundaries are eroded in Mauss’s concept of the total human being, the physical, psychological, and sociological do more or less converge into a unified whole. What is not so clear, however, is the extent to which this unification is the result of a mutual remission of academic boundaries, an equal alliance in the pursuit of lived reality, or whether it has more to do with an inflated view of sociology on Mauss’s part, which allows this

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discipline to subsume the others within its own explanatory sphere. If the inherent antagonism characteristic of homo duplex has been somewhat resolved in Mauss, one might reasonably suggest that this has as much to do with the fact that the individual has been even further dissolved within the social as it has with a more rounded, balanced account of l’homme total’s tripartite interrelatedness. The idea of the total human being is particularly salient in three of Mauss’s essays, each originally presented as a paper to the Société de Psychologie in Paris.5 The first of these (1924) concerns the mutual relations between sociology and psychology as neighbouring disciplines in the human sciences. Having noted a prevailing tendency to consider sociology a mere chapter of psychology (i.e., a collective psychology concerned with interaction between ‘individuals’), Mauss suggests that, if anything, it is the psychologists who should fear the conclusions and encroachments of sociology: Here it is no longer sociology that is in question. By a curious reversal, it is psychology itself. The psychologists, while accepting our collaboration, could perhaps do well to defend themselves. Indeed, the contribution of collective representations: ideas, concepts, categories, motives for traditional actions and practices, collective sentiments and fixed expressions of the emotions and sentiments, is so great, even in the individual consciousness – and we make a very energetic claim to study it – that at times we seem to want to reserve for ourselves all investigations in these higher strata of the individual consciousness. Higher sentiments, mostly social: reason, personality, will to choose or freedom, practical habits, mental habits and character, variations in these habits; all this we claim as part of our province, along with many other things. (Mauss 1979: 9–10)

In fact, Mauss is interested in psychology only in so far as its services are of benefit to sociology. Those aspects of the discipline that fall outside this criterion are judged to be ‘specialised and fundamentally inferior departments of psychology’ (ibid.: 26). Those that are selected are done so on the basis that they deal, not with fragmentary facts of consciousness, but with consciousness en bloc and its relations with the body (ibid.: 13). This, of course, relates to Mauss’s concern with the complete, non-compartmentalised, ‘total’ human being. Of the fields considered relevant to sociology, Mauss highlights four as worthy of particular attention, those of psychosis, instinct, mental vigour, and the symbolic activity of the mind. We need not concern ourselves with the content of these specialist fields here, other than to point out that, although perceived in the individual mind, these psychological phenomena are simultaneously, probably even fundamentally, of social significance.

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In relation to psychological theories of mental vigour, for instance, Mauss suggests that such ideas ‘do indeed assist us. Of course, the social phenomenon always remains specific. But the description of the way it manifests itself in the individual consciousness is made precise and nuanced’ (ibid.: 14). And with regard to instinct: ‘But if such is the share of instinct where individual psychology is concerned, it is even greater in collective psychology’ (ibid.: 17). The same is true also of symbolic activity (‘if what you tell us is true of the individual consciousness, it is even more so of the collective consciousness’ (ibid.: 16)) and psychosis (‘we believe that these ideas have the capacity for enormous development and persistence, and from the way they haunt the individual consciousness we understand better why they are believed when, practised by the group all together, they are verified by the common obsession of the group’ (ibid.: 14)). In short, when the psychological element of Mauss’s triple alliance (physiology, psychology, and sociology) is acknowledged, it is done so from a sociological perspective. The tables have been turned, psychology has become a mere chapter of sociology – a micro-sociology, if you like. In turning now to the other two essays presented to the Société de Psychologie, sociology’s privileged position is clearly demonstrated in the empirical examples of l’homme total considered by Mauss. The first of these (1926) relates to the ‘physical effect on the individual of the idea of death suggested by the collectivity’. As opposed to suicide, which involves clear intent on the part of the subject – ‘the will to cause one’s own death’ – the cases in which Mauss is interested are those wherein death is produced simply because the individual knows or believes that he or she is going to die with little or no intention on the part of themselves. The subject is not ill: he only believes, for precise collective causes, that he is in a state close to death. This state generally coincides with a break in his communion, either by magic or through sin, with the sacred powers and things whose presence normally sustains him. His consciousness is then completely invaded by ideas and sentiments which are entirely of collective origin, which betray no physical disturbance. (Mauss 1979: 38, emphasis in original)

Between the social and the bodily, the layer of individual consciousness – the psychological – is alarmingly thin, almost non-existent. Consciousness is completely invaded by ideas and sentiments of collective origin. As Mauss later puts it, in cases of death by suggestion, ‘the social nature of man very directly intersects with his biological nature’ – even to the extent that the instinct for self-preservation, the most basic of all instincts, is completely disorganised by the collectivity (ibid.: 53).6

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In the first address to the Société, Mauss (ibid.: 10) had assured his audience of psychologists that, despite the extensive encroachments of sociology, they should not be afraid, since ‘we have an out-and-out respect for your frontiers, having a sense of justice, and it is enough that there be an element of individual consciousness, large or small, to legitimate the existence of an individual discipline devoted to it’. Clearly, ‘small’ is the operative word in cases of socially suggested death. But even here Mauss (ibid.: 53) clings to his earlier promise: ‘The psychological link is visible, firm: consciousness. But it is not very strong; the individual who is bewitched or in a state of mortal sin loses all control over his life, any choice, any independence, his whole personality’. What is left for psychology – what consciousness consists of – is difficult to imagine, since little remains after intention, will, choice, independence, in fact the whole personality has been accounted for by the social. It would seem at the very least that what society confers it can equally take away, and that maybe we are left with little more than Durkheim’s pre-socialised individual (minus even an instinct for selfpreservation), a vague expanse of emotions and sensation, a weak and ever weakening sense of self. It is certainly worthy of note that the subject loses control over ‘his whole personality’, that part of him, the moral, rational, logical, the ‘category of ’, that allowed him in the first place to transcend his embodied individuality. We find a similar kind of logic in the third of Mauss’s l’homme total essays, that on body techniques, written in 1934. Each society has its own characteristic method of swimming, walking, sitting, resting, dancing, running, jumping, climbing, eating, drinking, etc. Mauss is not dealing here with individual idiosyncrasies, of course, but with collective traits, with habitus, with socially acquired or learned abilities and faculties. Again, it is the triple viewpoint that is recommended, that of the ‘total human being’, the whole physio-psycho-sociological package. Again, however, the role of psychology is characteristically marginalized: In every society, everyone knows and has to know and learn what he has to do in all conditions. … Hence there is a strong sociological causality in all these facts. … On the other hand, since these are movements of the body, this all presupposes an enormous biological and physiological apparatus. What is the breadth of the linking psychological cog-wheel? I deliberately say cog-wheel. A Comtian would say that there is no gap between the social and the biological. What I can tell you is that here I see psychological facts as connecting cogs and not as causes, except in moments of creation or reform. Cases of invention, of laying down principles, are rare. Cases of adaptation are an individual psychological matter. But in general they are governed by education, and at least by the circumstances of life in common, of contact. (Ibid.: 120–21)

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Generally, except in rare moments of invention, individual psychology is dictated by education, by communal life: it is adaptive, not causal. Thus, Mauss sees the role of the psychologist as relating to the ‘question of individual capacities, of technical orientation’, to the adaptation of the individual to collective demands (ibid.: 121). Once again, the social by-passes, or at the very least appropriates, the psychological in shaping the physiological. In a similar vein, differences between peoples are thought by Mauss to preclude a psychological component: ‘I believe that here, too, whatever the appearances, we are dealing with biologico-sociological phenomena’, with the adaptation of the body to social configurations, with learned and shared techniques of composure, resistance, seriousness, presence of mind, dignity, etc (ibid.: 121). Again, one side of the triple alliance, the social, is very much favoured within the coalition. There is no implied suggestion in all this that Karsenti and others are wrong in exploring new theoretical possibilities and avenues of research, in detecting in Mauss a potential and fruitful shift in orientation for French sociology, a more concrete, existential approach to empirical data. This opening up of new theoretical vistas is perhaps the summun bonum of a post-modern anthropology. Gofman (1998) has described Mauss’s notion of the total social fact as ‘vague but suggestive’, arguing that it is its very vagueness that makes the idea theoretically attractive, that the possibility of interpretation and re-interpretation adds considerably to the heuristic value of the concept. And the same might be said of the ‘total human being’ – this is all well and good. Here, however, we are less concerned with heuristics than with exegetics. We are less interested in what the concept of l’homme total might mean for a post-modern anthropology than with attempting to understand the notion as it appears in Mauss’s own sociology. And in this light, while a move away from the abstract theorising of his uncle is clearly discernible, Mauss’s approach might be regarded as more open, less dualistic, than that displayed in homo duplex, mainly inasmuch as the bodily and psychological are now even further encompassed within the social. If, as Mauss suggests, body, soul, and society are fundamentally mixed together, then this integrity, the totality of l’homme total, is very much a social affair. Not only the whole personality, but even the instinct for self-preservation and fixed expressions of the emotions and sentiments are all socially conditioned. The individual’s slate gets even blanker.7

Mauss: the Category of the Person Michael Carrithers (1985: 235) has suggested that ‘to trespass upon the preserves of psychology and philosophy was one of the fondest

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pursuits of the Année Sociologique’. Mauss’s essay on ‘A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person; the Notion of Self ’ is no exception in this regard. Here we find no mention of l’homme total. Mauss’s audience no longer consists of psychologists, but of anthropologists, and so thinly veiled concessions to the other discipline are dispensed with altogether. In fact, Mauss (1979: 32) has stated quite clearly that, in considering the serious question of the categories of mind, it is not with psychologists, but with historians, that sociologists should collaborate. The categories are sociohistorically constructed, not psychologically given. With this in mind, Mauss (1985: 1–2) situates his essay on ‘the person’ in relation to a distinguished series of previous attempts at analysing, sociologically, the categories of human thought: Hubert and Mauss on the notion of cause; Hubert on time; Czarnowski (unfinished thesis) on space; Durkheim on the notion of the ‘whole’; Mauss on substance; and Durkheim and Mauss on genus or class. These Aristotelian categories were to provide only an initial point of departure for the Année’s sociological quest; other concepts and categories must be uncovered, those belonging to other times and places, to other peoples, before a full inventory of the human mind could be envisaged. ‘There have been, and still are’, affirms Mauss (1979: 32), ‘many moons, dead, pale or obscure, in the firmament of reason.’ In tracing the social history of ‘the person’, Mauss sets out in this densely argued paper to demonstrate that the sacred character of the human person as enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, although fundamental to ‘us’, is in the overall scheme of things a relatively recent transformation (and perhaps a temporary one at that, since ‘human thought moves on’) of a world-historical narrative spanning millennia. As previously remarked, the subject Mauss avows an interest in is that conveyed in a society’s law, religion, customs, social structures, and mentality. This is not the ‘sense of self ’, spiritual and physical, of which there has never existed a human being who has not been aware (for this belongs to the domain of linguistics and psychology), but ‘the notion or concept that men in different ages have formed of it’ (Mauss 1985: 3). What, then, of the self about which Mauss claims to have little to say – the pan-human ‘sense of self ’ that belongs to the domain of the psychologists? It is important to note a distinction here between a ‘sense of self ’ and the ‘category of self ’. The category of self most familiar to ‘us’ – that of the bounded, existentially self-contained ego – is a socially relative construct of modern Western thought. As such, it cannot be equated with a pan-human sense of self. Every human being possesses a sense of his or her individuality (universal template), but not every society values ideologically a category of the person/self

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(socially specific content). Indeed, this sense of self, the conscious individual shorn of all that society confers, relates, no doubt, to the very thin layer of individual consciousness identified by both Durkheim and Mauss. To the domain of psychology it might belong, but, as we have seen, what sociology concedes to psychology is another matter altogether. It is certainly worth noting that when Mauss says he will leave aside this ‘self ’, he goes on to affirm that immense strides have already been made in this area by French, English, and German neurologists. We have noted the way in which Durkheim stressed the need to draw a careful distinction between individuality and personality. The person is social, the product of social values, while individuality is the product of the body, of sensations and sensory appetites. From this perspective, Mauss’s ‘sense of self ’ relates to homo duplex’s lower state of consciousness, to the embodied and individual. It has little to do with conceptual thought, since the concepts and categories that facilitate such thought are social in origin and belong, therefore, to the other side of the individual/person divide. Before leaving Mauss for Dumont, we might note that a convenient bridge between the two is the role of India in the world-historical scheme of the former. Mauss devotes just two short paragraphs in his paper to the subject. India is regarded as the most ancient of civilisations to have been aware of the notion of the individual, aware, that is, of the ‘self ’ (moi), of the conscious ‘I’, of ‘ego’, ‘risen above all psychological illusions’ (Mauss 1985: 13). However, the view taken up and developed in orthodox Hinduism, in the great Brahmanic schools of the Upanishads, for example, as in Vedanta, is that of a composite, if not illusory, self. As Sanderson (1985: 190) interprets Mauss, the earlier discovery of a non-illusory, integral ‘I’ is prevented from developing into something analogous to the Western category of the person by ‘views which recognised it only to reject it as a fiction constitutive of an undesirable worldly consciousness’. It is surprising, given his avowed concern with law, religion, customs, social structures, and mentalities, that Mauss says nothing of caste in this regard. If there is one candidate for preventing the categorisation of the person in India in the way that Mauss envisions it to have come about in the modern West, then surely it is this institution. In glossing Mauss, Allen (1985: 31) is surely correct when he suggests that, although metaphysical theories of the Indian person, in close proximity to European ideas, had existed, ‘they did not come to dominate droit et morale; they were submerged within the encompassing ideology of caste’. Indeed, it is this all-embracing ideology of caste that Dumont makes much of in his opposition between homo hierarchicus and homo aequalis.

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Dumont: the Sociological Apperception We have seen that for Dumont the ‘individual’ is of double import: (1) the universal, empirical agent; and (2) the normative construct of the West. However, a great deal of contemporary sociology in Dumont’s estimation utilises the idea of the individual in the latter of these two senses. Born of a Western ideology, which equates the empirical and normative individual, sociology tends to impose the normative aspect on other societies where it does not ideologically exist. Grounded in the concepts of its own society, a great deal of sociology is sociocentric, displaying a kind of Western mental imperialism; it is unable to grasp sufficiently the concepts and categories of other societies (Dumont 1967: 248). Given, however, that anthropology, as much as sociology, is the product of the West, how might it fare any better in its comparative pursuit? The answer, for Dumont, lies in the notion of a ‘sociological apperception’. Sociology begins in earnest, he writes (1965a: 16), with ‘the perception by the student of himself as a social being, as opposed to a self-sufficient individual’. This idea enjoys considerable currency in Dumont’s early writings (1965b: 16; 1967: 227, 232; 1980: 4–6) and is perhaps best captured in his anecdote relating how a classmate and fellow student of Mauss had experienced, while travelling on a bus, the sudden realisation that he was no longer estranged from his fellow passengers, but that in some fundamental way he was connected to them, in a sense he was one of them. ‘The individual of yesterday’, explains Dumont (1980: 7–8), ‘had become aware of himself as a social being; he had perceived his personality as tied to the language, attitudes and gestures whose images were reflected by his neighbours.’ The source of this experience is traced to the teachings of Mauss. Sociology of a ‘deeper order’ is a necessary bridge between the individualistic mentality of the West and the holistic orientation of many of the societies it endeavours to understand. In light of the individualistic universe out of which it is born, a truly comparative sociology must be deepened by a ‘personal experience’, a ‘revelation’ based on the sociological apperception. Dumont (ibid.: 5) quotes approvingly Marx, ‘It is society which thinks in me.’ This residual apperception of man as a social being provides the sole link uniting our individualistic tradition to those societies which possess a basically collective idea of man. Not only, then, must this apperception be experienced, it should be cultivated and deepened – as far as teaching goes, it should be the ‘a b c of sociology’ (ibid.: 7). In this sense, Dumont’s ‘deeper sociology’ must be seen as a continuation of Durkheim and Mauss’s stance against methodological individualism – a fundamental statement regarding the basic sociality of man – and as the basis of his own preferred methodological holism:

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There are two kinds of sociology distinguished by their starting point and their global approach. In the first place one begins … by positing individual human beings, who are then seen as living in society; sometimes one even attempts to show society as arising from the interaction of individuals. In the other kind of sociology, one starts from the fact that men are social beings, that is, one takes society as a global fact irreducible to its parts – and here it is not a matter of ‘Society’ in the abstract but always of a particular, concrete society with all its specific institutions and representations. (Dumont 1986c: 2)

In Homo Hierarchicus Dumont (1980: 5) criticises the view that sees society as ‘an inevitable material evil running counter to the sole psychological and moral reality which is contained in the individual’. Although obviously very unsatisfactory for the observer of society, this view has infiltrated the social sciences. Dumont complains elsewhere that the deeper perception (i.e., the sociological apperception), without which the statement ‘man is a social being’ is worthless, is none the less ‘a rare commodity’. He even suggests that, if Durkheim were to come back today, the founder of French sociology would have to defend the discipline against a good many sociologists (Dumont 1967: 227). Just as he had once defended sociology against the methodological individualism of psychology, so now Durkheim would have to deepen sociology itself so as to reaffirm the sociality of man. The truth of man as a social being appears as a ‘mystery’, a ‘mystification’ in a society dominated by individualistic representations (Dumont 1965a: 48). It is difficult to communicate the sociological apperception to a free citizen of the modern state, ‘who would be unfamiliar with it’ (Dumont 1980: 5). The great merit of French sociology was to insist on the presence of society in the mind of each individual and, if sociology is to once again loosen its individualistic fetters, this understanding must be firmly grasped and deepened. In a passage echoing Durkheim’s contention that it is civilisation that distinguishes humankind from the animal, Dumont (ibid.) claims that the sociality of humans ‘is so lost from sight that perhaps it is necessary to refer our contemporaries, even if well read, to the stories of wolf-children, so that they might reflect that individual consciousness has its source in social training’.

Mauss and Dumont: the Unity of the Human Mind This insight that individual consciousness has its source in social training might lead, and in some quarters has led, to a thoroughgoing cognitive or epistemological relativism, which serves only to rob

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anthropology of its comparative and generalising basis. Such, and this must be stressed for he has been accused of adopting a similar position,8 is not the case with Dumont. Dumont’s anthropology, as he believes to be true of Mauss’s also,9 is based on an essential recognition of the fundamental unity of the human mind, l’unité du genre humain. In fact, it is only through such an assumption that the sociological apperception makes any sense. In regard to his teacher, Dumont writes:

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There is probably something more in the term ‘to understand’, something … which is always implicit with Mauss – understanding from the inside, that remarkable faculty which springs from the unity of mankind, by which we are able to identify ourselves, under certain conditions, with people living in other societies, and think in their categories, that faculty by which, as Lévi-Strauss says, the observer becomes a part of the observed. (Dumont 1986c: 198)

This identification of observer and observed, of subject and object, Dumont sees as central to Mauss’s attempt at orchestrating the largest possible catalogue of categories of the human mind, not just the Aristotelian ones, substance, class, space, etc., from which the Année sociologique group had started out, but those relevant to peoples of all times and places. ‘There is little doubt, for those who know Mauss’, writes Dumont (ibid.), ‘that “making a catalogue” means nothing less here than experiencing the categories, getting into them, elaborating them into sociological facts.’ So intense was this psychological identification in his teacher, Dumont (ibid.: 197) suggests that what had started out for Mauss ‘as a science finished largely as an art.’ Mauss had internally transcended the categories of his own age and culture and had succeeded in assimilating within himself those of other civilisations, both near and far: For he had been round the world without leaving his armchair, identifying himself with the people he read about. Hence the kind of phrase so common with him: ‘I eat … I curse … I feel …’, meaning, according to the context, the Melanesian of such an island eats, or the Maori chieftain curses, or the Pueblo Indian feels. (Ibid.: 185–86)

Might we even speak here of Mauss’s ‘anthropological apperception’, in a sense similar to the ‘sociological apperception’ important to Dumont? While, by the latter, the individual experiences himself or herself as part of a concrete society, and not a self-sufficient entity, as tied to the language, attitudes, and gestures of others, the anthropological apperception opens this understanding to the rest of the world. At a basic and fundamental level, all humankind is united. Here is the

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common ground, the universal default, that enables the observer to get outside of their own inherited categories and into the thoughtworld of others. Here is the plane, the ‘universal template’, the ‘sense of ’, which (psychobiologically) unites ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘I’ and the ‘other’. That our own categories might be transcended in appropriating those of the other testifies to the fact that we are dealing here with sociological, not psychological, phenomena, with social constructions, not innate capabilities. Underlying these social constructions, underlying sociohistorical variation, however, rests a common humanity – all thought is logical thought as Durkheim put it (and in this he was careful to distance himself from the supposed logical relativism of Lévy-Bruhl). At any rate, such an interpretation fits well with Dumont’s understanding of the French tradition of sociology and of his own part therein. For Dumont, human beings are especially malleable creatures: each society illuminates something of humanity, potentiality here and actuality there, so that ‘the real varieties of men that can be distinguished are social varieties’ (Dumont 1977: 3, emphasis in original). Beneath this malleability, beneath social and cultural variation, exists a common ground, an essential humanness, which facilitates cross-cultural comparison and renders anthropology methodologically meaningful: Ethnology, or more precisely social anthropology, would have only specialist interest if the subject of its study – ‘primitive’ or ‘archaic’ societies and the great civilisations of other countries – revealed a human kind quite different from ourselves. Anthropology by the understanding it gradually affords of the most widely differing societies and cultures, gives proof of the unity of mankind. (Dumont 1980: 2, emphasis in original)

As Dumont sees it, progress in anthropology consists in the gradual shedding of our own inherited categories in order to grasp and better understand the underlying assumptions and categories of others. In fact, if anthropology is to lay any sort of claim to scientific status it is with regard to this ongoing attempt at engendering (as far as possible objective) categories out ‘of a contradiction between our categories and others’ categories, out of a clash between the theory and the data’ (Dumont 1986c: 198). This process is necessarily comparative; the decisive focus is humanity as a whole. According to Dumont (1977: 18, emphasis in original): All forms of consciousness are similar, in the sense that none operates without a grid, through which we take cognisance of the given and at the same time leave out a part of it. There is no direct and exhaustive consciousness of anything. Thus, in everyday life it is through the ideology of

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our society in the first place that we become conscious of everything around us.

Without this social grid of consciousness we lack the ability to be ‘conscious of anything’. Consciousness might exist in itself, in some pure pre-operational form, but it is only through the ‘ideology of our society’ that conscious individuals are able to relate to one another and participate meaningfully in their surrounding world. We are on familiar ground here, since it is through this social grid that consciousness becomes more than the mere ‘blooming, buzzing, confusion’ evoked, as Gell (1998: 9) suggests, by Durkheim’s (we might add Mauss’s) conception of the pre-social individualistic state. In Dumont, as in the others, this fundamental grid is inextricably bound up with the ‘basic categories’, ‘the implicit coordinates of common thought’ (Dumont 1977: 20). It is this very grid, this social apparatus rendering possible conceptual thought, which allows Durkheim’s homo duplex to ascend from the lower to the higher of its conscious states, and which transform Mauss’s ‘sense of self ’ into the ‘category of the person’. But let us give the last word to Dumont: ‘There is indeed a person, an individual and unique experience, but it is in large part made up of common elements, and there is nothing destructive in recognising this: tear from yourself the social material and you are left with nothing more than the potential for personal organisation (Dumont 1980: 6). What is particularly significant here is the fact that it is the ‘potential’ for personal organisation that remains – not personal organisation per se. In a footnote clarifying this statement, Dumont claims that ‘it is well known that “personal organisation” is itself not independent of relationships with other persons occupying defined roles’. To ignore this fundamentally social aspect amounts, in Dumont’s estimation, to a ‘false signification of the self ’. Thus, he quotes appreciatively Arthur Rimbaud, ‘It is wrong to say: I am thinking. One should say: I am being thought’ (ibid.: 344 n. 2b). This statement, this acknowledgement of the ego/self ’s essentially socialised nature, expresses exactly the same idea that was suggested above might be captured in a suitably Durkheimian play on Descartes’s famous maxim: ‘I think, therefore we are’.

Notes 1.

Durkheim is insistent on this point: ‘We say our individuality and not our personality. Although the two words are often used synonymously, they must be distinguished with the greatest possible care, for the personality is made up essentially of supra-individual elements’ (1960: 339–40 n. 6, emphasis in original).

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On Homo Duplex and l’Homme Total 2.

3.

4. 5.

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6.

7.

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Why Dumont subsumes both types under the label ‘individual’ and chooses not to utilise the individual/person distinction can only be conjectured. Certainly, the individual in Dumont’s second sense, as social value, is synonymous with Mauss’s category of the person, in that both are conceived as the unique product of Western thought. However, a major theme of Dumont’s anthropology is to trace the growth of individualism, the gradual realisation throughout the history of Western ideas of the human entity as a moral and sociopolitical indivisible whole, the end-product of which is, of course, the modern individual. It is no doubt for this reason that he prefers to distinguish between two connotations of this term, one empirical and the other ideological, in order to retain the latter as denoting the most basic and fundamental ideological value of modernity: the valorisation of the single element, of the indivisible whole, of the ‘individual’ human being. Strictly speaking, this maxim is illogical. Pure consciousness would have no concept of ‘I’, it would simply ‘be’, since ‘I’ implies introspection and, therefore, conceptual thought, which is outside the realm of the purely conscious. The maxim is employed here only to highlight the fact that for Durkheim it is consciousness, rooted in the organism, that belongs solely to the individual, while conceptual thought (even ‘I think’) is fundamentally social in character. See Lukes 1973a: 302–14, on Durkheim’s ‘Debate with Tarde’. These essays have been collected and translated into English by B. Brewster and appear together with Mauss’s essay on the person in Sociology and Psychology (1979). It is from this volume that citations are drawn. One can draw a parallel with Durkheim here. Initially, in his study on suicide Durkheim seems to present a neat division of labour between sociology and psychology: while the sociologist determines the different social types of suicide, it is the role of the psychologist to examine the particular characteristics that cause one person, rather than another, to kill themselves. Thus, it is assumed that the traits of the ‘suicidal personality’ are formed outside society, in the biological component of the individual. Some individuals, given particular circumstances, are innately prone to suicide, while others are not. However, as Giddens (1977: 273–96) has pointed out, elsewhere in the same study Durkheim attempts to demonstrate how, in fact, the individual type of suicide is influenced by the social type and, in so doing, appears no longer willing to concede that suicidal characteristics are pre-social in origin. The social conditions that were previously considered as simply acting upon suicide-prone individuals are now shown to influence the very production of that suicide-proneness as a complex of personality characteristics. Here, too, then, the psychological layer is very thin. It might be argued that the case has been overstated, that Mauss had no desire to devalue physiology and psychology; and there is probably a measure of truth in this. Mauss himself had a number of friends, or at least respected colleagues, within these other fields and often commented on and drew upon their findings and conclusions. Morris has written of Durkheim that, unlike Comte, he did not ‘express any antipathy towards psychology, and his writings indicate that he was not only familiar with the work of Wundt but also of William James and the British psychologists. … What Durkheim objected to was not psychology as a discipline but the attempt to explain social facts – collective representations such as law, morality and religion – in terms of individual psychology’ (Morris 1991: 248). The same reasoning might be applied to Mauss. None the less, both Durkheim and Mauss can be taken as having pushed their own social explanations beyond the boundaries readily conceded by other neighbouring disciplines and that other branches of the human sciences were possibly right to ‘fear the encroachments and conclusions’ of sociology.

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Quigley (1993: 44) claims that Dumont’s approach inevitably leads to relativism, that it ‘denies the very possibility of comparison, whatever his aspirations to the contrary’. ‘Marcel Mauss has given – as early as 1900 – what is in fact a definition of social anthropology. First, to say “anthropology” is “to posit the unity of mankind”…’ (Dumont 1986c: 206).

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9.

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Chapter 4

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ON HOMO HIERARCHICUS

Allen (2000: 91) has suggested that one can attain a certain degree of coherence in Mauss’s apparently unsystematic thought through focusing on the notion of categories. And this is no less true of Dumont. In fact, it is probably more apposite in the case of the latter, for, while Mauss’s work is ‘scattered, heterogeneous, and difficult to pin down’, while it ‘resists simplifying formulae’ (ibid.), the notion of ‘categories’ provides an unmistakable and explicitly attested background to much of Dumont’s work. Dumont tells us that Mauss taught his students to make an inventory of all the categories, Aristotelian or not, that have engaged the human mind. Each society actualises just one part of humanity’s overall potential, developing the universal ‘sense of ’ in its own particular fashion. Humankind is the sum total of all these potentialities, all these sociohistorical constructions – both past and present. It is with this assumption in mind that Dumont’s study of homo hierarchicus should be understood. Although the Hindu man-in-the-world possesses a sense of his individuality, although he exists empirically, according to Dumont (1980: 272), he has ‘no reality in thought, no Being’. Caste ideology, the Hindu social grid through which consciousness is filtered, does not celebrate a category of the individual/person in the same way as modern ideology does. The particular man of caste has no substance, no ideological patronage, since he lives in a world of relations. What, then, is the normative subject of caste? How is the empirical agent ideologically conceived? What is the corresponding category of thought? According to Dumont (1967: 236), ‘Hindu society is organised around the concept of dharma in a roughly similar way as modern society is organised around that of the individual.’ While in the West the ‘individual’ is the bearer of central values, in traditional Hindu

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India it is ‘duty’ and ‘order’ that are of the utmost importance. It is the notion of dharma, therefore, that provides for Dumont the functional equivalent of the individual in caste society. The normative subject is constituted, not by a single human person, but by a constellation of persons that make up a whole wherein order can still be perceived (the simplest form of which is a pair, the ‘dyadic subject’), ‘because human reality is coterminous with order, not with the individual man’. Instead of an indivisibility (the individual of the West), the normative subject is ‘a totality of opposites, empirically multiple, ontologically one’ (Dumont 1967: 237). The notion of hierarchy is central in rendering the Hindu ‘individual’ insubstantial. Hierarchy provides the conceptual integration of the whole, its ‘intellectual cement’ (Dumont 1961a: 35). In fact, in terms of the smallest functional unit, the dyadic pair, hierarchy is synonymous with the ‘order’ required to guarantee normative recognition. Dumont (1965b: 91) describes this basic unit as ‘a pair of higher and lower empirical agents, complementary to each other in a particular situation’. If A is complementary to B, neither A nor B, taken alone, amounts to an independent entity. Rather, it is the pair taken together, A/B, which constitutes an ideologically significant unit. Hypergamy provides a good example. Here we clearly witness the union of a pair of higher and lower empirical agents that ideologically complement and complete each other in a way that marriage between two autonomous units (i.e., Western ‘individuals’) does not. The hypergamous couple are whole only as a unit (A/B),1 while the ‘individual’ partners (A and B) in the modern equivalent are ideologically complete prior to their alliance; that is, in and of themselves. Dumont notes several other instances in an Indian context wherein the modern individual is replaced, normatively, by the traditional unit or complementary whole. Commenting on land ownership in traditional India, for example, he writes, ‘if we search for an equivalent of the individual, as we do when we ask who is the owner of the land, we find such an equivalent only by associating two or several empirical human agents who, between themselves, enjoy most of the rights implied in the expression of “property”’ (ibid.: 97). The idea of transmigration is similarly thought to attest to the unreality of the particular human being, for here ‘a chain of existences is the equivalent of a single, individual, existence in the West’ (ibid.: 91). In roughly the same way, to speak in the Indian polytheistic universe of an individual divinity is as much of a misnomer as it is to speak of an individual person.2 Like the particular caste and the particular person, the gods themselves have no reality except in relation to others. In Hindu mythology, divine couples are frequent and behind the great divinities

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On Homo Hierarchicus

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can be detected one or more consorts, the pure and the impure, the superior and inferior, each allotted a place in the whole; behind the vegetarian god, for example, lurks the carnivorous goddess. Although the tendency in Brahmanic theory has been to elevate one of these complementary poles, so that one divinity, usually the god, comes to the fore, this amounts in Dumont’s estimation to little more than a ‘substantialistic theory of what is in fact a structural practice’ (Dumont 1980: 270–71). Although invested with apparent substantiality, the individual god, like the individual person, does not ideologically exist. There is, however, one important exception to all this. ‘With us, modern Westerners’, claims Dumont (1965b: 99), ‘the ontological unit is the human indivisible being. In traditional India it is always a whole, whether big or small, an entirety embodying relations, a multiplicity ordered by its inner, mostly hierarchical, oppositions, into a single whole. But let us not forget that over this complex being hovers the great shadow of the Renouncer.’ The individual is absent from all social institutions in Hindu India, bar one ‘momentous exception’ – the institution of sanny¯asa or renunciation. Opposed to the constraining relationships of caste, duty, and social obligation, to what Dumont calls ‘unmitigated holism’, there exists another kind of thought, one that conceives of the individual as ‘Being’, as ‘substance’, as ‘real’ in comparison to the ‘phantom-like’ man of caste. In leaving the social world to devote his existence entirely to his own salvation, the renouncer finds himself invested with a hitherto unknown degree of ‘individuality’. No longer constrained to act and think as a social being, he ‘thinks as an individual, and this is the distinctive trait which opposes him to the man-in-the-world and brings him closer to the Western thinker’ (Dumont 1980: 275).

The Category of Dharma (or the Non-individual) What remains now to be considered is the extent to which Dumont’s categorisation of these two, the ‘phantom-like being-of-caste’ and the ‘individualised renouncer’, is substantiated through ethnographic and Indological accounts – given, that is, Dumont’s programmatic statement that the study of Indian society should lie at the confluence of sociology and Indology. Let us turn in the first place to the study of classical texts. Wilhelm Halbfass devotes a chapter of his excellent book India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding to the place of dharma in the self-understanding of traditional Hinduism. Although there is no traditional Indian word that precisely corresponds to the Western concept of ‘religion’, according to Halbfass (1988: 310) in

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modern Indian usage the notion of dharma has largely assumed this role. Hindus themselves regularly refer to what Westerners call ‘Hinduism’ as san¯atana dharma, everlasting dharma (Bowker 1997: 275). Like religion, the concept of dharma, in its very centrality, its sheer pervasiveness, evades authoritative definition. None the less, Halbfass cites Gonda, among others, in order to establish at least some basic conditions of its understanding: Originally referring to the principle of universal stability, the power which sustains, upholds, and maintains, the firmly established order, this term … in general means the lawfulness and regularity, the harmony, the fundamental equilibrium, the norm which reigns in the cosmos, nature, society, and individual existence. Dharma is the basis for individual conduct … The person who follows the Dharma realises the ideal of his own character and manifests the eternal lawfulness in himself. … As long as a person adheres to his normal behaviour, his individual destiny and task, … as long as his doing and his omissions are in agreement with the normal, traditional, and personally approved actions, goals, and livelihood of his position, his gender, his family, his age-group, so long does he adhere to the Dharma. (Cited in Halbfass 1988: 312)

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Compare this with the following definition of individualism proposed by Alan MacFarlane (1978: 5): The view that society is constituted of autonomous, equal units, namely separate individuals and that such individuals are more important, ultimately, than any larger constituent group. It is reflected in the concept of individual private property, in the political and legal liberty of the individual, in the idea of the individual’s direct communion with God.

On the one hand, the Western, individualistic, society is seen as constituted of autonomous, equal units – separate individuals – that are ultimately more important than any larger constituent group. On the other hand, traditional Indian values stress familial and social obligation as central to one’s religious duty or dharma. In the Indian case, it is the constituent group that assumes utmost importance and not its component parts. From a comparative perspective, the emphasis has shifted from centripetality to centrifugality, from the particular being to the constituent group. Add to this Radhakrishnan’s claim to the effect that, ‘next to the category of reality, that of dharma is the most important concept in Indian thought’3 and we are some way toward recognising, along with Dumont, an Indian ‘category of dharma’ or, if you like, of ‘social personhood’, in contradistinction to the Western ‘category of the individual’.

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In the Dharma´s¯astra literature dharma is associated with varna (caste) and a´ ¯srama (stage of life) to form varn¯ . a´sramadharma, the prescribed duty according to the order of the castes and the stages of life. It is dharma that separates the castes from one another, thus providing the conceptual ordering of society. Subdivided, via varn¯ . a´sramadharma, into a countless number of individual obligations, dharma serves also to integrate the ‘individual’ (i.e., the empirical agent) into his or her immediate social context, formally the family, and beyond into kinship ties, subcaste, caste, and the wider social whole, prescribing for each certain rules and ways of life and excluding them from the way of life of others. To complete briefly the ideological picture, the concept of karma (causality of reward and retribution) serves to rationalise and legitimise the differentiations of varn¯ . a´sramadharma through a logic that exposes one’s present situation as the result of one’s previous actions (Halbfass 1988: 320–23). Such, then, is the ideological lot of the phantom-like man-in-the-world: dharma and karma conjointly unite to ensure his insubstantiality, his essential and fundamental relatedness. There is in fact much anthropological and social-psychological evidence to support Dumont’s categorisation of the man-in-the-world as a collective being (e.g., Kakar 1981; Carter 1982; Fruzzetti et al. 1982; Shweder and Bourne 1984). Even those who disagree fervently with Dumont’s ideological and holistic approach nevertheless attest to the insubstantiality of the Indian ‘individual’. McKim Marriott provides a case in point. Marriott’s approach, as he describes it himself, is ‘ethnoscientific’ or ‘transactional’. He criticises Dumont’s ‘dualistic’ reading of Indian civilisation – secular power versus religious status, rank versus equality, holism versus individualism – arguing that from the South Asian actor’s ‘pervasively monistic cognitions of reality’ such dualities do not exist (Marriott 1976: 113). The concept of dharma, for instance, should not be taken as ideologically external and imposed upon empirical actors (for this is a dualistic interpretation), but as constituted or naturally embodied in the actors themselves (a monistic conception). According to Marriott, dharma is so constituted in terms of bodily substances. The empirical agent is not an ‘individual’, indivisible and bounded in the Western sense, but a ‘dividual’, a materially divisible entity: To exist, dividual persons absorb heterogeneous material influences. They must also give out from themselves particles of their own coded substances – essences, residues, or other active influences – that then may reproduce in others something of the nature of the persons in whom they originated. Persons engage in transfers of bodily substances through parentage, through marriage, and through services and other kinds of interpersonal contacts. (Ibid.: 111)

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By this account, the ‘individual’ is non-existent not so much because social ideology does not recognise a relevant category, but because the empirical agent is dividual, that is to say, materially composite. Marriott has little recourse to dominant ideologies or social categories, caste itself is seen as ‘partly scored’ by the normal round-robin of transactions in substance-codes. Partly scored, however, would imply another part left unaccounted for in terms of transactional theory. Given its prominent role in scriptural literature, given its widely acknowledged doctrinal validity, its pan-Indian observance, it is difficult to conceive of the ideological concept of varn¯ . a´sramadharma as not being normatively implicated in the day-to-day existence of Marriott’s empirical actors, and in all probability his observed substance transactions are the consequence, and not the cause, of caste differentiation. Such, at least, is Dumont’s view:

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One will agree that ‘transactions’ – or rather what I would call prestations – must be consonant with hierarchy, but not that they can be taken as given independently from it and producing it, as if the ranking of castes within a system of castes was the outcome of a game played anew every day, or every year. The washerman, for instance, engages in certain ‘transactions’ and is ranked in a certain manner; how can we think of his ‘transactions’ as independent from his condition of washerman and from his rank as such? (Dumont 1971: 65)

We cannot. The washerman is a collective being; he derives his identity, and his transactions derive their meaning and significance, from the vantage point of society as a whole. Anthony Carter (1982: 120) has made the point that Marriott’s account has more to do with ‘a biological or psychobiological theory of empirical actors’ than it has with South Asian ‘concepts’ of the person. This would explain Marriott’s lack of interest in social configurations, in Indian ‘society’. Of course, avoiding the reification of society is to a large extent what Marriott’s transactional theory is about.4 It is in this sense that dharma is said to be embodied, continually created in the round of daily transactions. Where, however, the idea of dharma, the systematic rules governing rank, commensality, marriage – and all transactions – comes from in the first place it is difficult to imagine. It is surely unlikely that the ongoing daily transactions themselves provide a suitable basis for continuity over time, that the system emerges ex nihilo everyday, like ‘a game played anew’. None the less, the main point here is simply to demonstrate that, in spite of their very different theoretical orientations, Marriott’s account concurs with Dumont’s in maintaining that the Indian individual (in-the-world), as a bounded, indivisible, self-contained whole, does not exist, ideologically

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(in the case of Dumont) and – surely as a result – psychobiologically (in the case of Marriott). In his own paper, ‘Hierarchy and the Concept of the Person’, Carter (ibid.) sets out to ‘examine the nature of personhood in the Indian hierarchical or holistic universe’. Although Dumont’s approach is insightful and merits serious consideration, Carter believes it is incomplete in that it fails to take sufficiently into account indigenous concepts of the person. The fact that in Maharashtra there exist varying degrees of personhood, ranging from non-persons to full persons, is taken by Carter as evidence, contrary to Dumont, that by indigenous representations the individual does ‘conceivably’ – for not all empirical actors are persons – exist. Personhood is a cultural concept and not an inherent quality of the psychobiological agent. Children, for example, do not qualify as persons and, as a result, relatives of a deceased child do not observe death pollution. Once conferred, moreover, personhood can be ‘forfeited’ as a form of punishment (wherein funeral rites and death pollution are symbolically observed for an outcaste offender) or ‘transcended’ (the sanny¯asin performs his own funeral obsequies and is therefore no longer considered a ‘person’) (ibid.: 129–31). In general, personhood is com. pleted, altered, improved, or terminated through a number of san skars or rites of passage, of which in western Maharashtra there are said to be sixteen, ranging from garbhadhana (a rite performed at or before conception) to svargarohana (funeral obsequies). Full personhood is conferred at marriage whereupon a woman ceases to be a blood relative of her father and brother and becomes related in this way to her husband (ibid.: 123). ‘Another way to put it’, explains Carter: is to say that one who has achieved personhood is fully situated in the world of sansar, understood not merely as flux and illusion but as the world . of caste and kinship and all its ramifications. … To be caught up in sansar …, as married persons are, is to be linked with, obligated to, and dependent upon others, especially one’s spouse but also one’s family and relatives and the society generally. (Ibid.: 140)

The fact that full personhood is conferred at marriage, so that the recognised social ideal is one of completion and familial obligation, would seem to accord with what has been shown to be Dumont’s position. Carter (ibid.: 141), however, takes exception: It appears not to be the case, pace Dumont, that personhood is an office that may be held … by ranked pairs of actors, for example a married couple. … While marriage completes two persons or confers personhood upon two actors, it does not create a single office held by two actors. Thus, in theory at least, a man may be completed by marriage to a milkweed plant and may himself participate in the completion of several women.

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None the less, the fact that the man requires completion at all attests to a world-view that does not conceive of him as complete or whole in himself. Whether he marries an appropriately prescribed woman or unites symbolically (for the milkweed is a necessary substitute) with a plant, it is the act of union itself that is of significance. To recall Gonda, to remain unmarried is to deviate from one’s normal behaviour, one’s task or destiny; it is deviant from traditional goals and incongruent therefore with dharma. It takes, moreover, a forced reading of Dumont to conclude that he conceives of personhood as a single office held by ranked pairs of actors. What Dumont says is that, normatively speaking, to be complete a unit requires at least two complementary parts so that order may still be perceived. It is not that these parts combine together into a single person or individual, but that taken as a whole the complementary unit is ideologically complete in much the same way as an individual in the West is complete in itself. Dharma, it should be remembered, is the functional – not literal – equivalent of the individual. While, then, Carter’s point is that, indigenously speaking, each of the empirical agents becomes a person upon marriage, so that the person does normatively exist, Dumont’s point is that in terms of ideological comparison these indigenous ‘persons’ are in no way comparable to ‘individuals’ in the Western sense. Not only do they require marriage in order to become complete, but the social and familial obligations that marriage entails ensures that the personhood conferred is very much that of a social being. In conforming to social rules, to the complementarity of dharma, empirical actors might be persons, but normative ‘individuals’ they are not. Comparatively speaking, they are still the phantom-like figures-of-caste. This is not to say, of course, that they necessarily conceive of themselves as such (although such a view is possible given the widely acknowledged illusory nature of sam.s¯ara). We must always remember that we are speaking comparatively and in terms of social categories. There is sure to exist a sense of moral agency, of personal maturation, of self-development, of fulfilling one’s own destiny, even if this is conceived against a backdrop of familial and social responsibility. This is a major theme of T.N. Madan’s collection of essays, Non-Renunciation: Themes and Interpretations of Hindu Culture. Against the ideal of renunciation, of abandoning society and its obligations, this book highlights the ideas employed by those who remain ‘in the world’. Its overall focus is on ‘subjective meanings’, on the religious significance attributed to everyday existence. According to Madan (1996: 41–42), the Pandits of Kashmir Valley are generally acknowledged to possess an attitude of subdued hostility, scepticism, or even ridicule in relation to renunciation. Their ideal, instead, is that of the householder – a standard

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requiring inworldly discrimination rather than outworldly withdrawal. ‘Translated into the householder’s idiom, renunciation becomes the twin ideals of self-possession and detachment in the midst of worldly involvements’ (ibid.: 3). The Pandits seek neither to transcend the world nor to overindulge in its sensual pleasures. They aim rather to cultivate a mental state that resists both these extremes, one that mediates purposefully between the contrary pulls of asceticism and eroticism, between ‘total indulgence’ and ‘total renunciation’. They resolve, in short, to be in the world but not unreservedly of it. The picture Madan paints is that of a moral agent striving for selfrealisation within the framework of social obligations. A distinction is noted between the ideal of ‘selfhood’ and that of ‘personhood’. Selfhood is the ideal of renunciation, an inward-looking, introspective, withdrawal from society. Personhood, on the other hand, points to an individual’s maturation through the ‘proper performance of social roles … in consonance with dharma’ (ibid.: 21–22). ‘The Pandit seeks meritorious fulfilment in life through the affirmation of family and wider kinship obligations and through willing acceptance of other social bonds which result from the pursuit of generally accepted worldly goals’ (ibid.: 46). Obligation, in this way, becomes a privilege; social duty is the pathway to individual liberation. As Rabindranath Tagore puts it: ‘Deliverance is not for me in renunciation. I feel the embrace of freedom in a thousand bonds of delight’ (cited in ibid.: 17). The good life, then, is a life free from external constraints; not that such constraints cease to exist, but that they are (ideally) so readily accorded with, so internalised, as to lose their apparent externality. The moral perplexity of the Hindu, claims Madan (ibid.: 25), is both ‘intimately personal’ and ‘mysteriously universal’. From the universal (sociocentric, centrifugal) point of view, the individual, the single empirical actor, is consumed within the whole, lost in familial obligation and social constraint: this is the phantom-like figure-of-caste. Viewed personally (egocentrically, centripetally), however, the actor is a moral agent, making (within prescribed limits) moral choices and, in accordance with dharma and karma, striving for an improved station in both this and subsequent lives. At the highest level of moral and spiritual discipline, the duties and obligations of caste might be internally transcended in a ready, even joyous, acquiescence to them; one brings to bear on this world some of the qualities usually associated with other-worldly detachment. It is this second, personal, egocentric perspective that Mattison Mines (1988) privileges over what he pejoratively calls ‘social-scientific’ (including Dumont’s) readings of Indian culture. Despite the consensus among scholars that individualism is devalued in India so that the individual is subordinated to caste and family interests, Mines

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(ibid.: 568) argues that ‘when Indians talk privately about their lives they frequently depict themselves as active agents, pursuing private goals and making personal decisions that affect their lives’. His conclusions are based on an analysis of twenty-three life histories collected from informants in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Mines is critical of the ideological and normative emphasis of social science, which gives ‘esoteric ideology an arbitrary precedence over individual explanation’. ‘Indianists’, he claims (ibid.: 572), ‘have discounted the private voices of individuals because what they say seems banal. But what these voices say is important because it refutes India’s supposed denial of individuation and autonomy.’ What exactly do these voices say, then? According to Mines, social conformity is so emphasised by the ‘collectivist-hierarchist’ view of Indian civilisation that deviation from it should be rare. He points, however, to personal goals (those incongruent with social expectations) and even instances of ‘rebellion’ (active opposition) among his informants as evidence of individual autonomy and self-directed behaviour, which, Mines feels, sufficiently refutes the view of Indian society as one opposed to individuation. However, in highlighting the normative and ideological, ‘social-scientists’ – even the most hardened Durkheimian – would not deny an element of individual agency and autonomy. Durkheim himself conceived of deviance (clearly an ‘autonomous’ rejection of social norms) as an integral, indeed indispensable, component of social life. That Mines wishes to highlight this aspect is all well and good. However, by definition, the acts of rebellion highlighted by Mines only make sense in relation to what is normal, and at this normative level these very acts point as much to a lack of autonomy as to an expression of it. Of the twenty-three interviewees, nine performed one or more acts contrary to the norms of caste, family, and hierarchy. That fourteen of them committed no such acts speaks in itself for a high level of conformity, particularly in light of what the non-conformist acts, the socalled ‘rebellions’, comprised. Three rebellions involved quitting jobs that the persons disliked, three involved love marriages, one act involved a son travelling abroad, and another involved a woman taking a lover. In that all these activities challenged family codes and hierarchical etiquette, Mines is right in drawing our attention to a degree of autonomy and personal determination. What is not so certain, however, is that in so doing he refutes India’s supposed denial of individuation and autonomy. If anything, Mines’s data reaffirm it. Granted, individuals are not social clones, they do not conform as one to social mores. However, as Mines himself acknowledges, the supposed denial of Indian individuation takes place at the level of normative ideology. Demonstrating that, empirically, deviations to this norm

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exist is not the same thing as refuting the validity of the norm itself. In fact, far from refutation, the acts of rebellion highlighted by Mines seem to testify to an ideology that normatively devalues individualism. Choosing to marry the person one loves, travelling abroad, quitting one’s job – everyday occurrences in the individualistic universe of the West – are here conceived as rebellious, as breaches of social etiquette, as uniformly incongruent with dharma. Surely Dumont has a point, in the hierarchical universe of caste ‘human reality is coterminous with order, not with the individual man’. Mines, Madan, and Carter have each in their own way highlighted the role of the empirical actor in Indian society. We have witnessed the indigenous ‘person’ completed at marriage, the ‘moral agent’ striving for social and spiritual equilibrium, and the ‘autonomous rebel’ defying social norms. One might wonder, then, whether it is still appropriate to maintain, along with Dumont, that the Indian individual-in-the-world does not exist. Over the last few pages we have also witnessed a person requiring marriage in order to become complete, an agent whose moral choices are strictly prescribed, and instances of rebellion that tell us as much about the constraining system as about the individual rebel. Emphasising indigenous representations is, of course, a necessary and valid approach to social phenomena. No less so, though, is identifying the socially normative and global and taking these as a basis for cross-cultural comparison. It is Dumont’s contention that the Indian man-in-the-world is not an individual in the sense that his Western counterpart is. That is to say, it is as a normative ideal, a category, that the individual is non-existent in traditional caste ideology. The empirical actor might possess a degree of autonomy, might on occasion deviate from social norms, but the norms themselves are chiefly geared towards the whole and not the individual. Hierarchy and dharma, not equality and individuality, are of normative import. This is what Dumont means in claiming dharma as the ‘functional equivalent’ of the individual in caste society.5

The Sanny¯asin: an Individual in the Making The ideological centrality of dharma might, however, lead one to question (or at least seek to qualify) Dumont’s characterisation of the Indian renouncer as an ‘individual’. That the renouncer leaves society, that he gives away his worldly belongings and performs his own symbolic funerary rites, that he can with due impunity transgress the laws of caste and commensality and is no longer bound by obligations to family and kin, is not in question. Whether in so doing he entirely escapes complementarity and dharma is, however, another matter.6

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Broadly conceived, there are two schools of thought concerning the origins of Indian renunciation. One, associated primarily with Heesterman (1982, 1985), sees the institution as an ‘orthogenetic’ development of the inworldly life, whereby renunciatory ideology is understood to be the final and logical outcome of Vedic theology. The sanny¯asin is thought to have internalised the Vedic fires, performing a ritual sacrifice every time he eats. According to this account, ‘the difference between classical ritualism and renunciation seems to be a matter of degree rather than principle’ (Heesterman 1985: 41). Others, like Olivelle (and, indeed, Dumont), point to a profound conflict between the ideology of the householder and that of the renouncer, which cannot be adequately explained in terms of an orthogenetic development between the two. Thus, according to Olivelle (1992: 21), in proclaiming ‘the path of renunciation, divorced from ritual and society, as the acme of religious life, the way of renunciation posed a special challenge to the society centred Vedic religion, which recognised only one socioreligious role for adult men, that of the married householder with his social, procreative and ritual obligations’. Hindu tradition has always demonstrated an ability to absorb heterogeneous influences and, if renunciation initially constituted a challenge to the Brahmanic way of life, this threat was duly minimised in its assimilation to Brahmanism through the a´ ¯ s rama system. This system aimed to legitimise and circumscribe renunciation by incorporating it within the wider socioreligious whole. In the first instance, since renunciation constituted the abandonment of ritual obligations, only those upon whom such obligations were incumbent were considered as qualified for sanny¯asa. In this way, renunciation was limited to the three ‘twice-born’ classes and particularly to the ritualist par excellence, the Brahmin. Secondly, renunciation was delayed until the latest possible period of a man’s life, after his worldly obligations (the three Vedic debts of studentship to the seers, sacrifice to the gods, and offspring to the fathers (Biardeau 1992: 47)) had been accomplished. As such, the three obligatory a´ ¯ s ramas of student, householder, and forest hermit had first to be negotiated. Whether thought of as an ‘orthogenetic’ development or as an ‘assimilated challenge’, in due course the socioritual norms of Brahmanism came to be applied to the very institution that aimed at their transcendence. ‘What began’, observes Kaelber (1989: 121), ‘particularly in the early Upanishads as a simple description of ascetics who had renounced the world became in time a complicated system of rules and regulations covering virtually every aspect of life’. In this way, Olivelle (cited in ibid.) concurs, ‘renunciation is no longer external or peripheral to dharma, it has become one of its most important areas’. According to the dictates of dharma, sanny¯asins continued to perform activities particular to their state,

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having their heads shaved at assigned times, begging their daily food according to prescribed rules, wearing particular types of clothes or no clothing at all, carrying a begging bowl, bearing a staff, etc. (Olivelle 1992: 59, 64). In short, dharma contrives to regulate its own transcendence, a tendency attested to in the increasingly prevalent concept of moks.adharma, the dharma of liberation. As well as the pervasiveness of dharma, several scholars have pointed to the fact that the renouncer is not altogether free of complementarity either, the other of Dumont’s defining features of the phantom-like figure-of-caste. Romila Thapar (1982: 274), for instance, questions the supposed dichotomy between the householder (as bounded by reciprocity to others) and the renouncer (as denying this ‘major force in Hindu social action’). First, there is the fact that many of those who transcend the world in a quest for personal salvation end up joining a group or order of fellow renouncers, which serves effectively to bring them back into the performance of a social role (this is, of course, particularly true of the monastic disciplines of Buddhism and Jainism, but organisation into groups was, from the end of the first century CE, also an increasingly frequent form of orthodox renunciation (ibid.: 292)). The search for personal salvation, moreover, is not necessarily a selfish endeavour and those who believe they have found the way might return to the ‘world’ in the form of a guru with the aim of enlightening others (ibid). Even those who remain detached and live solitary existences still depend largely upon the householder for their daily sustenance (ibid.: 280). As Tambiah (1982: 306) puts it, while ‘the renouncer’s personal liberation quest of transcending worldly entanglement should always be kept in view, we should not forget the half of the truth that the homeless almsman’s way of life makes contrastive sense in relation to the householder’s way of life’.7 In light of the dharma incumbent upon the sanny¯a sin and his actual (if not ideal) social relations (i.e., complementarity), one might wonder how substantial this ‘individual’ really is. In that they make ‘contrastive sense’, it could in fact be argued that the householder and renouncer taken together form the normative pair or ‘dyadic subject’ – that we are still very much in the world of relations. Brahmanic theory establishes a hierarchy among renouncers determined by the degree of removal from the world and its social norms. At the highest level stands the liberated renouncer (paramaham.sa), whose freedom is total and unconditioned: transcending both the ritual sphere and the realm of morality, he stands beyond dharma (Olivelle 1992: 81). Despite the fact that only a very few at any time have reached this stage of ultimate freedom (for the rest there are rules that regulate their lives and offer a framework within which they develop (Klostermaier 1898: 331)), let us take as a model the paramaham. sa, the

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unconditioned renouncer, symbolically dead to the social world, beyond dharma and complementarity, existing self-sufficiently on what can be gleaned from the forest floor. Do we now have an ‘individual’ in some sense comparable to the normative construct of the West? Dumont (1986c: 25) tells us that the institution of worldrenunciation ‘allows for the full independence of the man who chooses it’. It presupposes another kind of thought that conceives of the ‘individual as being’. The sanny¯asin ‘thinks as an individual, and this is the distinctive trait which opposes him to the man-in-the-world and brings him closer to the Western thinker’ (Dumont 1980: 275). However, how close does even the ideal-typical renouncer actually get? It should in all fairness be pointed out that Dumont himself senses a certain ambiguity in this regard. Having noted that private property is a defining characteristic of the Western individual – while, of course, its absence serves to distinguish the sanny¯a sin – Dumont (1965b: 92 n. 9) adds that:

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The renouncer shows some (important) characteristics of the individual, although he differs from him in other respects. Here again the vocabulary is imperfect, but the perception it is meant to convey, of the situation of the renouncer in relation to the man of caste on the one hand, and in comparison to the Western individual on the other is the main thing. (Emphasis in original)

If, as Dumont maintains, the sanny¯asin is an ‘individual’ in comparison with the phantom-like figure-of-caste, he is in turn a ‘phantomlike individual’ when compared with the normative construct of the West. Not only do very few renouncers escape dharma and complementarity but even those that do approximate only very roughly the Western individual. The very fact that renouncers are conceived as ‘outworldly individuals’ constitutes in itself an important difference. We have already noted the sanny¯asin’s lack of private property, and one might add to this the regulatory proscription against begetting offspring (Thapar 1982: 275). While these limitations are no concern in themselves, since it is these ties that entangle one in the transitory flux of sam.s¯ara, such restrictions point none the less to a fundamental difference between the thought of the renouncer and that of the Western individual. Being outside the world, the sanny¯asin is unable to partake freely of it. We noted above that, according to Carter’s indigenous representations, the renouncer is no longer a social person, that personhood is relinquished in its transcendence. Although via this transcendence the (ideal) renouncer gains a degree of autonomy in no longer having to conform to social rules; in having to live outside society this autonomy is ideologically circumscribed in a manner very much alien to the Western individual. The renouncer’s social death is

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an irreversible state, a sanny¯asin who reverts to lay life is regarded as an outcaste (a c¯an. d. ala) ¯ and is excluded from all ritual and social contact while alive and according to Vr.ddha-H¯ar¯ıta 8, 57, is born a dog after death (Kaelber 1989: 120). Moreover, as Tambiah (1982: 310) points out, in what sense does the Indian renouncer ‘approximate the Western conception of the individual, when his life is dedicated to … the seeking of liberation which destroys any vestige of selfhood as an enduring ontological entity?’ This brings us to the crux of the matter. The renouncer’s thought, which by Dumont’s estimation brings him closer to the Western individual, is still essentially religious in character and this, more than anything, unites him ideologically with the figure-of-caste, as against the secular (political, economic, etc.) construct of the West. Being religious, the renouncer’s thought is still oriented towards the whole – no longer perhaps in terms of a socioreligious hierarchy, but in the desire to relinquish his individuality in accordance with the cosmic order. In this sense, dharma dictates the thought of the renouncer, even the paramaham.sa, as much as it does that of the man-in-theworld. Both the sanny¯asin and the figure-of-caste are conceived, ideologically, as part of a much greater whole. As such, neither of them is comparable to the ontologically, legally, and metaphysically self-contained entity that Mauss describes in terms of a Western category of the person/self and that Dumont calls a modern individual. If anything, comparatively speaking, the renouncer remains closer to the world of thought he has supposedly left behind than to the one Dumont suggests he moves nearer to. Dumont does underscore the fact, however, that the renouncer is an individual-outside-the-world and, as we shall discover, there is a world of difference – two thousand years of historical development in the Western context – between the outworldly and the inworldly individual.

Notes 1.

2. 3.

Cf. Madan (1996: 43): ‘Marriage is crucial for men as well as women, for then alone do they become true householders. Bachelors, widowers and widows are members of households but not gr.hastha themselves and are, therefore, regarded as unfortunate.’ And Khare (1982: 149): ‘It is as much a dharma of womankind to yield culturally proper women as it is of mankind to retain or improve upon his dharma. The point is important since it shows [an] integral conception of the system whereby each upholds the construction of the other rather than being responsible for itself alone’. Compare these last two examples with the personal immortality and unique God in Christianity. Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy I, London, 7th edn, 1962, p. 52, cited in Halbfass (1988): 311.

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72 4. 5.

This is also true of Marilyn Strathern, probably the best-known exponent of the ‘dividual’ principle. See Strathern (1992, 1996, and 1999). Andre Béteille (1986: 122) warns that we should be ‘cautious about characterising a whole civilisation in terms of a single value … and about making such characterisations the basis of a radical opposition between … civilisations’. He also criticises Dumont for adopting an ahistorical approach, for concentrating on the structure of traditional Indian society, ‘leaving unconsidered many of the issues that are of concern in India today’ (ibid.). The Indian Constitution of 1950 sought ‘to put equality in the place of hierarchy and the individual in the place of caste’ (ibid.: 123). Today the individual is ideologically accepted as the basic unit of reference, equality is recognised before the law and in opportunities for public employment. Béteille (ibid.: 124) also admits, however, that ‘Indians themselves often say that the talk about equality in the Constitution, in the law courts, or on political platforms is mainly rhetoric – that there is no genuine commitment to it at any level of Indian society’. And that ‘a great deal of discrimination against the lower castes and against women, enjoying the sanction of custom, if not law, survived the legal abolition of disabilities’ (ibid.: 125). Elsewhere, he writes of ‘revised suspicions that, despite professions to the contrary, what Indians really care about is caste; and caste, one hardly needs to point out, is the antithesis of the individual and equality’ (ibid.: 124). As a secular, political ideal, the egalitarianism encoded in the Indian Constitution sits uncomfortably with a traditional religious ideology that presupposes inequality. It is this traditional world-view – ‘the sanction of custom’ – that Dumont is largely concerned with. The ensuing discussion of orthodox renunciation will be conducted at the level of ideology, since it is at this level that Dumont’s own claims are made. Thus, he admits in Homo Hierarchicus, to having ‘left to others the task of systematically bringing to light the impact of renunciation on society’. See Burghart (1978, 1983) for an alternative account of the relationship between the householder and the renouncer.

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6.

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Chapter 5

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ON STRUCTURALISM

There are two broad themes that this book attempts to develop as it progresses. The first and most important of these is to assess Dumont’s anthropological contribution as a whole, to demonstrate a measure of continuity in his thought based around the notion of ‘categories’ and the concept of the ‘individual’. The second aim is to situate, methodologically, this view of the individual within French sociology more generally and, in so doing, to suggest that Dumont’s interest in the individual functions almost exclusively at the expense of the ‘subject’ or ‘self ’. Both these themes are enlarged upon in this chapter, the main purpose of which is to consider Dumont’s sociology in light of other approaches to history and society inspired by Mauss, namely, those of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Fernand Braudel. Each of these French ‘structuralists’, Dumont included, employs an approach to social phenomena that regards the ‘individual’ as determined by unconscious structures of one kind or another. In order to throw this structural determinism into fullest relief, the case of the subject or self is also (briefly) presented in the guise of Collingwood’s philosophy of history and Sartre’s existentialism, both of which focus almost exclusively on conscious, subjective motives and intention.

The Sociological Apperception and Structuralism Among the more explicit of Dumont’s statements concerning ‘structure’ is that found in an early theoretical section of Homo Hierarchicus (Dumont 1980: 39–42). Here, acknowledging the term’s broad and diffuse usage, Dumont attributes the ‘strict concept of structure in anthropology’ to Lévi-Strauss and heralds its introduction as ‘the

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major event of our times in social anthropology and sociology’. For Dumont, the notion of structure allows the anthropologist to escape from the nominalist tendency to reduce systems to their constituent elements. This is because, from a structuralist perspective, ‘the “elements” in themselves of which the system seems to be composed are disregarded, and only considered as the product of the network of relations; this network would then constitute the system’ (ibid.: 40). Although Dumont does not explicitly say so, it might be assumed that in highlighting a ‘network of relations’ the structuralist method greatly facilitates the sociological apperception: ‘the essential problem for contemporary thought is to rediscover the meaning of wholes or systems, and structure provides the only logical form as yet available to this end’ (ibid.: 41). Structuralism provides a method whereby one might escape the atomistic, substantialistic mentality of the West, and better comprehend the structured, relativistic universe of the other. ‘A phoneme’, writes Dumont (ibid.: 40), ‘has only the characteristics which oppose it to other phonemes, it is not some thing but only the other of others, thanks to which it signifies something.’ Like the Hindu individual-in-the-world, then, or the particular Indian divinity or caste, the single phoneme does not independently exist in any meaningful or substantial way. Meaning is conferred only in relation to others. Structuralism, in favouring the relationship over the element, provides an approach that mediates between the world of substance and the world of structure, between individualism and holism, modernity and tradition. There is, of course, much more to structuralism, in its many forms and guises, than this suggested mediation between two worlds of thought. In general, despite the manifold uses to which the structuralist method has been put, perhaps we can say, without wandering too far from the fact, that common to the majority of its applications can be discerned an emphasis on ‘wholes’ or ‘totalities’ as opposed to parts; on ‘relations’ as opposed to elements; and on the recognition of a ‘deep’ underlying structure, relating parts to the whole, and shaping in a fundamental way ‘surface’ phenomena (see Lane 1970: 11–39). In the abstract, this deep structure is often reducible to a binary opposition,1 providing the two poles, the common structural anchorage, in terms of which surface variation and transformations might be interpreted. It is this underlying structure that gives form and definition to the system, that allows for the transposition of elements into a unified whole. Since it is to Lévi-Strauss that Dumont attributes the strict introduction of structuralism to social anthropology, it is to this influential figure that we shall turn for an exemplary account of the structuralist method, one with which Dumont’s own brand of structuralism will then be compared.

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Lévi-Strauss: Structuralist Par Excellence In his attractive mix of autobiography, confessional, and travelogue, Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss recounts that in his youth he had courted three ‘intellectual mistresses’, geology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. In each of these he had discerned a common methodological premise, wherein ‘understanding consists in reducing one type of reality to another’, so that ‘the true reality is never the most obvious’(Lévi-Strauss 1989: 70). Beneath the apparent chaos and arbitrariness of every landscape, for instance, the varieties of vegetation and agriculture, the vagaries of season and climate, the geologist attempts to locate a master-meaning, to determine age-old geological processes and structures of which surface manifestation is merely ‘a partial or distorted transposition’. In a similar vein, Freudian psychoanalysis seeks to establish beneath the emotional and psychological idiosyncrasies of the particular human being a basic personality structure, common to all, that governs observable behaviour in a way that is ‘neither contingent nor arbitrary’. At another level of reality, the social, Lévi-Strauss’s third intellectual mistress, Marxism, is likewise founded on the recognition of a deep underlying structure (infrastructure) through which surface phenomena (superstructure) are to be understood. Each of Lévi-Strauss’s mistresses aim, in short, at a kind of superrationalism, at a more real reality, if the pleonasm be permitted, that lies behind and determines, in a more or less predictable manner, the empirically given. As a university student, while others among his famous contemporaries – Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir – were beginning to explore the ideas of Heidegger and Husserl and lay the foundations for French existentialism and phenomenology, LéviStrauss remained faithful to the memory of his mistresses. Much later he was to write that, ‘while remaining human himself, the anthropologist tries to study and judge mankind from a point of view sufficiently lofty and remote to allow him to disregard the particular circumstances of a given society or civilisation’ (Lévi-Strauss 1989: 67). Here we see the detachment, the distancing from the particular, the remoteness and objectivity characteristic of Lévi-Strauss. From his mistresses, he had learned at an early age to be suspicious of the particular and immediate. And this outlook inhibited Lévi-Strauss from jumping on the phenomenological/existentialist bandwagon of his student days: Phenomenology I found objectionable in that it postulated a kind of continuity between experience and reality. I agreed that the latter encompasses and explains the former, but I had learned from my three sources of

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inspiration that the transition between one order and the other is discontinuous; that to reach reality one has first to reject experience, and then subsequently to reintegrate it into an objective synthesis devoid of any sentimentality. As for the intellectual movement which was to reach its peak in existentialism, it seemed to me to be anything but a legitimate form of reflection, because of its over-indulgent attitude towards the illusions of subjectivity. (Ibid.: 71)

Before taking leave of Lévi-Strauss’s three mistresses, a word or two might be said concerning his relationship with them. Pace (1983: 27) has pointed out, that in their appropriation, Lévi-Strauss tended to strip geology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism of much of their real content, turning them into purely formal methodologies from which he derived a very general rule. There is no mention, for instance, of class conflict in Marxism, or repression in psychoanalysis. The clear lesson Lévi-Strauss derived from his mistresses is that one must locate behind empirical, observable reality a deeper and more meaningful structure, ‘that the true reality is never the most obvious; and that the nature of truth is already indicated by the care it takes to remain elusive’ (Lévi-Strauss 1989: 70). In order to arrive at this general rule, differences between and within the three disciplines are overlooked and their methods reduced to a common denominator. This is itself a typically structuralist technique – highlighting continuity in difference – and certainly one that informs Lévi-Strauss’s own structuralism. There is, however, another point that Pace touches upon briefly that is more interesting and bears more directly on our present discussion. This is the fact that LéviStrauss not only essentialises, but also tends to ‘dehistoricise’ his mistresses. ‘Unlike the history of the historians’, Levi-Strauss (1989: 69) claims, ‘that of the geologist is similar to the history of the psychoanalyst in that it tries to project in time – rather in the manner of a tableau vivant – certain basic characteristics of the physical or mental universe.’ We are offered the example, from geology, of two green plants of different species, from different geological strata, meeting cheek by jowl at the surface in a favourable piece of soil and thereby bridging a gap of tens of thousands of years, so that suddenly space and time converge; ‘the living diversity of the moment juxtaposes and perpetuates the ages’ (ibid.: 69). While time in the ‘history of the historians’ is immutable, moving forever forwards, time in LéviStrauss’s reading of geology is in a sense frozen, static. Geology presents a tableau vivant, a living, contemporaneous scene upon which the ravages of time might be synchronically discerned, unfolding in an instant an eternal, non-temporal, structural reality.

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The Role of Structural Linguistics If Lévi-Strauss courted three intellectual mistresses as a youth, then later, as an anthropologist, he found in linguistics, or more specifically, in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, another intellectual paramour. Take one of Lévi-Strauss’s homologous green plants; bisect it horizontally across the stem; disregard one half – either, and this is the point, for it makes no difference; hold the other so that its cross-section faces you; and observe. What you will see is a rather complex surface pattern revealed where the cut has taken place. This is a cross-section of the plant’s longitudinal fibres. Make a second cut perpendicular to the first and another cross-section will be revealed. This longitudinal section, according to Saussure (1998: 87), ‘shows us the fibres themselves which make up the plant, while the transversal section shows us their arrangement on one particular level. But the transversal section is distinct from the longitudinal section, for it shows us certain relations between the fibres which are not apparent at all from any longitudinal section’. Notably, the transversal view of the plant is not just distinct from the longitudinal view but is superior in its greater illuminatory potential. Based on this analogy, Saussure argues that linguists must choose between two ‘radically different’ approaches to their discipline. That is to say, they must focus either on simultaneity or succession, synchrony or diachrony, on static or evolutionary linguistics. The opposition between these two is ‘absolute and admits no compromise’ (ibid.: 83); ‘diachronic and synchronic studies contrast in every way’ (ibid.: 89); ‘all notions pertinent to the former and all notions pertinent to the latter are mutually irreducible’ (ibid.: 90); ‘no synchronic phenomenon has anything in common with any diachronic phenomenon’(ibid.) – one gets the picture. What is it, then, about static and evolutionary linguistics that renders them so mutually exclusive? And why does Saussure favour the former over the latter? In his Course in General Linguistics (ibid.: 98) the two approaches are defined as follows: Synchronic linguistics will be concerned with logical and psychological connexions between coexisting items constituting a system, as perceived by the same collective consciousness. Diachronic linguistics on the other hand will be concerned with connexions between sequences of items not perceived by the same collective consciousness, which replace one another without themselves constituting a system.

Two important features serve, above all else, to distinguish the alternative methods. One is the possibility (or otherwise) of recognising a

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‘system’ and the other – related – concerns the collective consciousness through which this system is perceived. Saussure suggests that traditionally linguists were interested primarily in transformations of languages over time, with conducting diachronic analysis along an ‘axis of succession’. Diachrony involves one term at a time; if a new word or expression is to gain currency, it must do so at the expense of other, older, alternatives: one succeeds the other, they do not simultaneously exist. However, for Saussure, it is only by suppressing the past, by ignoring the successive transformation of terms through time, by setting aside etymology, that the linguist can readily enter into the state of mind of the language user. This is because the ordinary language user, unlike the linguistics specialist, is largely unaware of historical transformations; etymology is of little, if any, day-to-day significance. ‘For instance, the word dépit in French used to mean “scorn”; but that does not prevent it nowadays having a quite different meaning. Etymology and synchronic value are two separate things’ (ibid.: 95). Language users operate along an ‘axis of simultaneity’, as part of a given ‘collective consciousness’. For them, the way in which terms and groups of terms coexist in a meaningful, intelligible, synchronic system – the transversal view of the plant – is what really counts. This is the reason why Saussure privileges static linguistics over evolutionary approaches:

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It is clear that the synchronic point of view takes precedence over the diachronic, since for the community of language users that is the one and only reality. The same is true for the linguist. If he takes a diachronic point of view, he is no longer examining the language, but a series of events which modify it. (Ibid.: 89)

Lévi-Strauss: Synchrony and Diachrony Although awareness of the conditions giving rise to a particular synchronic state might help us to avoid certain misconceptions, Saussure (ibid.) suggests that diachrony is of no real significance in itself. ‘One might say, as has been said of journalism as a career, that it leads nowhere until you leave it behind’. It is only when reincorporated into the synchronic system that diachronic processes become appreciably meaningful. We find precisely the same reasoning – indeed, almost exactly the same maxim – in Lévi-Strauss when he writes in The Savage Mind (1966: 262) that: ‘As we say of certain careers, history may lead to anything, provided you get out of it.’ In the same way as Saussure escaped from evolutionary linguistics into static linguistics, from diachrony into synchrony, so, too, Lévi-Strauss forsakes history (succession)

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for anthropology (simultaneity). As Pace (1983: 103) describes it, LéviStrauss ‘brought to the study of culture, the spatial and multi-dimensional mind-set of the chemist, not the temporal and linear categories of the historian’. The ‘phonemic revolution’ had freed linguistics from a traditional emphasis on the evolution of words. Beneath the word was discovered the basic unit of sound, the phoneme, which, although possessing no meaning in itself, when coupled with other such sounds combined to form comprehensible units (syllables, words, etc.). Linguists soon discovered that, of all the potential sounds of which the human vocal apparatus is capable, any given language selects only a very few. Conjectures were made concerning the relationship between these units of sound and the way in which they coalesce into ‘infraphonemic structures’. From here, there was but a short logical step to identifying the underlying unconscious reality of language. All this appealed greatly to the objective, positivistic, side of Lévi-Strauss, for whom linguistics occupied a privileged position among the social sciences, as the only one whose empirical method could ‘truly claim’ scientific status. Since it is independent of the language user, hidden, unknown, there is no question of ‘intention’ or ‘subjectivity’ at the infraphonemic level. Like the linguist at this level, or the physicist at the inframolecular one, it is here, at the hidden, subterranean level of society that Lévi-Strauss hoped to ‘discover the most general structural laws’, to determine ‘the basic identity of empirically different entities’: Like phonemes, kinship terms are elements of meaning; like phonemes, they acquire meaning only if they are integrated into systems. ‘Kinship systems’, like ‘phonemic systems’, are built by the mind on the level of unconscious thought. … [T]he recurrence of kinship patterns, marriage rules, similar prescribed attitudes between certain types of relatives, and so forth, in scattered regions of the globe and in fundamentally different societies, leads us to believe that, in the case of kinship as well as linguistics, the observable phenomena result from the action of laws which are general but implicit. (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 34)

Geology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism, the famed mistresses, might of course be added to kinship and linguistics in postulating ‘general, but implicit, laws’. In the case of geology at least, however, these laws are outside human consciousness – or even unconsciousness – they exist in nature, in natural processes, in millennia of structural change and transformation. True, the geologist can detect certain patterns, he or she can delve beneath observable reality, can construct longitudinal cross-sections and read off, in a single glance, thousands of years of structural development; but the strata themselves, the processes that determine change, are in no way reducible to the human mind.

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For this reason geology is fundamentally different from linguistics, psychoanalysis, and kinship studies. While the geologist seeks to detect and interpret certain, almost timeless, characteristics of the physical universe, it is essentially with basic, non-temporal, characteristics of the psychical kind that these other disciplines are concerned:

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If, as we believe to be the case, the unconscious activity of the mind consists in imposing forms upon content, and if these forms are fundamentally the same for all minds – ancient and modern, primitive and civilised ... – it is necessary and sufficient to grasp the unconscious structure underlying each institution and each custom, in order to obtain a principle of interpretation valid for other institutions and other customs. (Ibid.: 21)

It makes no difference where along the stem the plant is cut, what historical antecedents may lie behind a particular custom; order, the unconscious mental structure, is discernible at every synchronic point. The task of the anthropologist is to sift through the extrastructural material in order to discover the ‘complete range of unconscious possibilities’ for these possibilities are ‘not unlimited’; unpredictable, perhaps, but never arbitrary (ibid.: 23). It is the transversal view that enables us best to determine the full range of these possibilities, to assess surface transformations and structural interrelations, to consider, in short, the system as a whole. Diachrony – the longitudinal view – deals only with parts. What, then, is the role of history in this synchronic scheme of things? Is the study of the past to be thought of as entirely redundant? Lévi-Strauss’s response to this would probably be something like, ‘No, not entirely so’. In the first place, how else can we appreciate what is required and what is artificial in society, what corresponds to a contemporary need and what is an anachronistic survival, included more out of habit than necessity? ‘For to say that a society functions is a truism; but to say that everything in a society functions is an absurdity’ (ibid.: 13). Not everything is of equal synchronic significance and history can help us distinguish that which is essential from that which is relatively inconsequential. What is really being demonstrated here is the maxim that linked Lévi-Strauss to Saussure; to wit, that history (diachrony) may lead to anything so long as one gets out of it. LéviStrauss expresses the same sentiment elsewhere (1966: 253) when he claims that historical facts must to be brought ‘back to the light of day’ if they are to be incorporated into a ‘meaningful totality’. It seems surprising, then, that in his essay ‘History and Anthropology’, which serves as an introduction to Structural Anthropology, LéviStrauss (1963: 21) seems willing to concede much more ground to the other discipline: ‘Even the analysis of synchronic structures … requires

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constant recourse to history. By showing institutions in the process of transformation, history alone makes it possible to abstract the structure which underlies the many manifestations and remains permanent throughout a succession of events.’ The suggestion here seems to be that history has a structure of its own, a diachronic structure, independent of the synchronic point of view. However, in the same essay (ibid.: 23), we also learn that knowledge of synchronic systems ‘provides a logical framework for historical developments’. Far from history teaching us about the present, historical studies should themselves be guided by a proper understanding of the synchronic functioning of the contemporary whole. Nevertheless, potentially at least, history does in time what anthropology does in space: locates and observes underlying structures. It is in this respect that LéviStrauss suggests that, taken together, the two disciplines are ‘Janus faced’, one can ‘achieve nothing’ without the help of the other. However, it should be recognised that when Lévi-Strauss embraces history as a suitable bedfellow for anthropology, it is history of a particular methodological kind; that is to say, the structural history of Lucien Febvre and the French Annales school. Traditional history, the history of the event or of the individual, he readily opposes. While, for Lévi-Strauss, history and anthropology share in the ‘other’ a common subject-matter, one removed respectively in time (history) and space (anthropology), traditionally their methods diverge on a very important point. Whereas history ‘organises its data according to conscious expressions of social life’, anthropology proceeds by ‘examining its unconscious foundations’ (ibid.: 18). The traditional historian is concerned above all with the particular event, the great historic events, the great personalities who have shaped and determined the course of history. What is required of him or her is the ability to empathise, to reconstruct the subjects’ world of thought, to ascertain the other’s conscious motives. There is perhaps no better account of the historian’s method in this regard than that provided by Collingwood in The Idea of History. For Collingwood (1989: 215), ‘all history is the history of thought’, that is to say, the present and critical re-enactment of ‘past thought in the historian’s own mind’. Internal motivations are the bedrock of history; the discipline aims to uncover the conscious reasoning that governs external behaviour. True history provides not so much a description of Caesar crossing the Rubicon, but the insight into Caesar’s state of mind when he does so, an awareness of the self-conscious defiance of Republican law that his action implies. The ‘main task’ of the historian, according to Collingwood (ibid.: 213), is to ‘think himself into the action, to discern the thought of its agent’.

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Is it possible to conceive of a viewpoint further removed from LéviStrauss’s own methodological stance? The structuralist method he endorses has very little to do with the conscious thought of the agent; in fact, it has little to do with the individual agent at all. Like the linguist at the infraphonemic level, in Lévi-Strauss’s view the anthropologist must create models that are completely distinct from the conscious motives and purpose of the people they are investigating. He or she must delve beneath surface phenomena to uncover deeper, hidden, in a sense ‘truer’, unconscious structural realities. ‘In so far’, LéviStrauss (1966: 257) writes, ‘as history aspires to meaning, it is doomed to select regions, periods, groups of men and individuals in these groups and to make them stand out, as discontinuous figures, against a continuity barely good enough to be used as a backdrop.’ If history has any real, intrinsic, value for Lévi-Strauss, it is of a type that reverses this perspective, that sacrifices the part to the continuous whole, the event to the backdrop. History of the traditional kind is only ever ‘partial’, ‘selective’, ‘biased’ – it is never History, but always ‘history-for’. The history of the French Revolution as related from the viewpoint of the Jacobin is at odds with that conceived through the eyes of the aristocrat. Individuals totalise in their own unique and special way the drift of history; for each of us, every day, every moment is inexhaustibly rich in psychical and physical events. The historian can do no more than abstract certain features of this complex, lived reality. The historical fact is not so much given as created, and even then ‘very much more is left out than is put in’ (ibid.). What, moreover, of history’s sine qua non, ‘the date’? Even here we find that a ‘total’ history is out of the question. There are more to dates in the historian’s method than a common-sense linear succession of time, d1, d2, d3. Dates are also members of a class, and they acquire meaning in relation to other such members and in contradistinction to members of different classes: ‘Thus the date 1685 belongs to a class of which 1610, 1648 and 1715 are likewise members; but it means nothing in relation to the class composed of the dates: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th millennium, nor does it mean anything in relation to the class of dates: 23 January, 17 August, 30 September, etc.’ (ibid.: 259). According to Lévi-Strauss, it is fallacious to think of history in terms of a continuous process from prehistory, coded in tens of thousands of millennia, to the ‘historical period’ viewed on the scale of millennia, and then on to centuries, decades, months, daily, even hourly historical scales as we approach modern times. It is a dubious method, he suggests, which moves freely from one level of dating to another, since these levels belong to essentially different genera, they are basically different in kind. The events significant for one code have no

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meaning in terms of another. Coded in the system of prehistory, in thousands of millennia, for instance, what significance does Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon actually have, not to mention the thousands of crossings, before or since, made by individuals of less historical renown? Although potentially of significance in themselves, such relatively small, individual, biographical details are inaccessible to the historian who deals in tens of thousands of years. For Lévi-Strauss, then, historical knowledge is discontinuous and classificatory, each class furnishes an ‘autonomous system of reference’ and corresponds to ‘histories of a different power’ (ibid.: 260–61). At the ‘bottom’ of the scale – one already senses the pejorative connotation – is ‘low-powered’ history; that is to say, biographical and anecdotal history. Although this is the richest in information, detailing shades of character, the twists and turns of individual motives, it is none the less the least explanatory. Individual detail is ‘schematized, put in the background and finally done away with as one passes to histories of progressively greater power’ (ibid.: 261). Consequently, the historian has a simple choice: either sacrifice information to comprehension or comprehension to information. He or she must choose ‘between history which teaches us more and explains less, and history which explains more and teaches less’ (ibid.: 262). Or, alternatively, perhaps preferably, one can opt to ‘get outside history’ altogether, either via the bottom, in the infrahistorical domain, the realms of individual psychology and physiology; or via the top, in evolutionary biology, geology, and ultimately cosmology. Here are the extremes to which history leads if one is willing and able to leave it behind. Ultimately, Lévi-Strauss’s own escape from history is via the bottom, in psychology and physiology, since in the last resort the structures he discerns are the inherent property of the human mind. We shall consider presently an attempt by another distinguished French academic, a historian no less, Fernand Braudel, to escape from history via the top, through ultimate recourse to geology. But why escape from history at all? In Lévi-Strauss’s view, history lacks a specific sphere of reference; or, perhaps more pointedly, the sphere it chooses is of little explanatory purpose. History describes rather than (scientifically) explains. The path to further comprehension is one of almost infinite regress; it leads in the end to the psychophysiological make-up of the individual or, depending upon the route one has taken, beyond humanity altogether, in geology and cosmology. At bottom, history lacks rigour. Unlike linguistics, the only human ‘science’ worthy of the name, history is unscientific. This is not to say that the historian’s method is not thorough, but that at best it thoroughly describes, it is unable to objectively explain. True reality is ‘never the most obvious’

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since it ‘remains elusive’ and can only be detected beneath the surface of everyday existence. Clearly, this is a one-sided, almost anti-historical view of history. In reply, Collingwood would most certainly argue that history possesses a specific field of its own, that historical knowledge is knowledge in its own right, knowledge sui generis, of a particular, irreducible kind. The historian’s realm is that of the conscious motive, the inner logic of an act, and, once this has been sufficiently grasped and understood to his or her satisfaction, the historian’s aim has been accomplished. There is no delving beneath the surface to uncover unconscious psychophysiological determinants, there is no need to search in the natural world for environmental causes. The elucidation of past thought is an end in itself. So we find ourselves at the heart of a very general methodological dilemma. As Geertz (1984: 124) acknowledges, the formulations have been various: ‘inside’ versus ‘outside’, ‘first person’ versus ‘third person’ descriptions, ‘phenomenological’ versus ‘objectivist’ approaches, ‘behavioural’ versus ‘cognitive’ accounts, ‘interpretation’ versus ‘explanation’, or, perhaps most commonly, ‘emic’ versus ‘etic’. Indeed, Lévi-Strauss’s famous polemic against Sartre revolves around this very issue (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 245–69; see also Rosen 1971).2 For Sartre, the ‘individual’ constitutes a given, irreducible, existential whole, which cannot be explained away in terms of biological, psychological, or sociological characteristics. Thus, Sartre rejects any methodological view that conceives of man as the product of natural or social forces. Man exists, therefore he is. He alone bears responsibility for his being. Individuals do not act through the blind forces of nature or the deterministic mechanisms of a superorganic group mind. They possess, rather, an internal logic of their own in the form of a dialectical reason. Human action is meaningful and willed, personally directed towards well-conceived goals. Faced with the practicoinert, those things in one’s perceptual universe – persons, relationships, experiences – that at first sight appear inert or inhibiting, the individual must transcend an existing state of being and replace it with another that is wider, more encompassing, one closer to their true nature of absolute freedom. Each individual assimilates the phenomena around them and unifies or totalises their universe into a meaningful system. For Sartre, this unifying or totalising subject – that is to say, the individual, the ‘whole’ individual as involved in conscious and purposeful action (praxis) – constitutes an irreducible level of reality. The inherent structures of the human mind proposed by LéviStrauss unduly constrain the scope of human choice and freedom central to Sartre’s existentialist philosophy and so they, along with all other forms of determinism, are rejected. On the other hand, the very notion that an appreciation of subjective thought or action might pro-

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vide the basis for serious investigation is, of course, anathema to LéviStrauss. Take, for instance, their respective stance on language. Language, in Sartre’s view, contributes to the weight of human alienation; it limits our existential freedom, since only a small fragment of human experience is renderable into linguistic categories. Wrapping existence up in words places a restriction – unavoidable, perhaps, but none the less regrettable – on our ability to comprehend our basic nature. The multidimensional unity of existential man is threatened by the unidimensionality of that aspect of him renderable into words. In contrast, far from acting as a veneer separating us from our true selves, language, in Lévi-Strauss’s estimation, provides a tool whereby it is actually possible to know and better understand ourselves through comprehending the unconscious structures of the human mind. While Sartre is interested in what people themselves take to be real, Lévi-Strauss is more concerned with things as they appear ‘objectively’. While Sartre’s subjective individuals consciously unify and internalise their world, Lévi-Strauss seeks an objective and ‘unreflecting totalisation’, an unconscious unification, that takes place ‘beyond thought and beneath society’ in the structures of the pan-human mind. Thus, while Sartre speaks of existential choices, Lévi-Strauss’s position remains that ‘necessity reveals itself as immanent in the illusions of freedom’.

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Dumont: Synchrony and Diachrony Some time has been devoted to considering Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, his debt to his three mistresses and to structural linguistics, his subordination of events to structure, his emphasis on synchrony, his theories concerning the psychic unity of mankind and the objective, scientific, quest for the unconscious foundations of this unity. Throughout his career Dumont, too, appropriates the structuralist method, whose introduction to anthropology he attributes to LéviStrauss. We have already seen evidence of this in Homo Hierarchicus, where the whole is given precedence over parts, relations over elements, underlying structure over empirical manifestation. Following Saussure, Lévi-Strauss chooses time and time again synchrony over diachrony. The study of structures through time he begrudgingly concedes to history, or at least he would if only that discipline could divest itself of an overindulgence towards the ‘event’ and embrace more fervently a structural method in keeping with the scientific ideals LéviStrauss envisions for anthropology. Similarly, Dumont is often charged with having, in Homo Hierarchicus, presented Indian society as a static,

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synchronic, whole. The overall caste ‘system’ is conceived as ‘a panIndian institution’ wherein the enormous complexity and diversity of local manifestations of caste are contained within a set of ahistorical holistic properties – ‘a purely structural universe’ – encapsulated in the timeless opposition between the pure and impure. Thus, Béteille (1991: 34) criticises Dumont for holding ‘a “structural” view of Hindu culture against the backdrop of a “historical” view of Western civilisation’. Although this kind of criticism is not entirely unwarranted, Dumont’s account of Indian society is more sophisticated than this simple opposition between structure and history allows. In his writings on India, Dumont discusses the radical shift between the Vedic and classical periods of Indian history, the advent of world-renunciation, the growth and development of Tantra and Bhakti, and the secularisation of kingship. The concluding chapter of Homo Hierarchicus attempts to consider the caste system in light of ‘contemporary trends’. And Dumont has even written a history of the ‘British in India’ (1976). In short, there clearly exists a historical element in Dumont’s account of Hindu culture. As he claims in the preface to the revised English edition of Homo Hierarchicus (Dumont 1980: xxi), ‘it seems to me, at least, that the empirical requirement of the widest possible information and of the recognition of the historical dimension has been met’. None the less, there is also a clear sense in which Homo Hierarchicus functions on a synchronic plane, so that caste society, if it alters at all, does so at an incredibly slow pace. When Dumont resorts to Indology, to ancient texts and tradition, in an attempt to throw light on present institutions, you get a sense of the essential timelessness of things, a collapsing of the present into the past – or, more precisely, the incorporation of the past into the present, since, while acknowledging the potential usefulness of the past to the anthropologist, Dumont (taking his lead from Mauss) eulogises the methodological advantages of studying present institutions: He [Mauss] said it often; the intensive study of the present by the anthropologist, because it is complete by definition – which excludes the arbitrary delimitations of empiricism that slice up the social domain – is incomparable for bringing to light relations, configurations, or structures in the social datum, in contrast to historical data, always fragmentary. Once such a configuration is isolated in the present … one may hope to find something of it in the past. (Ibid.: xxv)3

We find shades here of Lévi-Strauss’s belief that historical studies should be oriented by a proper understanding of the functioning of the contemporary synchronic whole. We also get an almost exact ren-

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dition of Saussure’s analogy of the bisected plant: the present or synchronic (i.e., transversal) view is ‘incomparable for bringing to light relations, configurations, or structures’, while the diachronic (or longitudinal) perspective is ‘always fragmentary’. Despite the attested benefits of studying the present, Béteille is right to point out that Dumont’s study of the West is predominantly historical in character. However, just as he fails to appreciate the extent to which the ‘historical’ informs Dumont’s study of India, so, too, Béteille probably underestimates the ‘structural’ component of Dumont’s investigation of the West. By and large, it is with diachronic structures that Dumont is subsequently interested. These are not the ‘fragmentary’ slices of traditional history, but attempts to capture the social whole, its essential characteristics, as it manifests itself through time, to trace structural continuities underlying surface transformations. As stated in German Ideology (Dumont 1994: 216), these diachronic structures are very much the bedrock of Dumont’s study of modernity:

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If I may submit a methodological conclusion: in my view the study of such general representations requires three conditions: (1) they should be identified through comparison; (2) they should be considered in a long-range historical perspective; (3) the analysis should follow a hierarchical method, going from the global level to the local and not the reverse.

With criteria (1) and (3) we are by now familiar: global (3) comparisons (1) are very much the defining feature of Dumont’s anthropology. It is with regard to (2) that our present interests are focused, since here the emphasis on diachronic structures becomes apparent. If we remain with German Ideology for a while, a few illustrations of this emphasis can be revealed. Near the beginning of the book, Dumont writes of ‘deep-lying cultural, i.e. global, lines of force to be detected in the historical development [of Germany]’ (ibid.: 21). A few pages on, he locates a structural ‘core’ to German culture, a ‘nervous center or DNA, directing, as it were, the ubiquitous reproduction, or recurrence, of contrariety if not of contradiction’ (ibid.: 25). On the next page we are again told of a ‘few basic and/or recurrent structural features’ and the question is raised concerning their ‘unfolding in time’, their ‘chronological sequence’ (ibid.: 26). Later, in defining global ideologies, Dumont conceives of these ‘as something stable that would seem to underlie historical changes’ (ibid.: 199). Elsewhere – in fact, towards the end of the book attesting to the pervasiveness of this theme – Dumont questions whether national ideologies are ‘absolutely impervious to experience and reassert themselves as soon as possible’ (ibid.: 228). More specifically, in terms of the history of ideas, the intellectual

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development of Moritz, the subject of one of Dumont’s essays, is characterised by a ‘deep transformation’ from the pietism of his youth to a later aesthetic of the self, ‘but also a continuation of the initial disposition in its fundamental structure’ (ibid.: 78). Similarly, the relationship between Kant and his three great successors, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, is described in terms of a movement of ‘intensification’, Steigerung, whereby one builds on and outbids the other (ibid.: 30–31). Other examples might be cited (and will be in due course). However, since the purpose of the present discussion is to throw light on Dumont’s structuralist approach by contrasting it with relevant others, let us consider an appropriate model against which Dumont’s use of diachronic structures might be assessed. This is a model, in fact, with which Dumont was certainly familiar, not only because of its academic renown but also since he himself contributed several pieces (e.g., 1961b, 1968) to the journal – Annales. Sociétés, civilisations, économies – around which the school revolved. The framework in question, then, is that provided by the structural history advocated and practised by prominent members of the so-called Annales School. In his historical account of this school, Peter Burke (1990) considers its progression through three distinct stages: (1) the founding period associated with Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch; (2) the middle period under the aegis of Fernand Braudel; and (3) the third generation associated with the likes of Georges Duby and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. As it is Fernand Braudel who explicitly takes up the challenge presented to history by Lévi-Strauss, it is to this influential figure, the sole editor of Annales from 1957 to 1968, that we shall devote the majority of our attention.

Annales History Inspired by Durkheim, to whom Bloch, at least, acknowledged a ‘profound debt’, Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch launched in the 1920s a systematic attempt at highlighting the role of the social and collective in determining the lives of historical agents. The journal they jointly founded in 1929, originally titled Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, set out, as an early proclamation put it, to establish itself ‘on the almost virgin soil of social history’ (ibid.: 22). This ‘new history’, the history of the social, of collectivities, was practised in self-conscious opposition to traditional history, l’histoire événementielle, the history of events. Man in general, not men in particular, became its guiding theme. In time, the Annales journal, not unlike its Année sociologique counterpart, came to provide a focal point for a newly emerging French historical tradition.

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As early as 1939, Febvre had detected a ‘faithful nucleus of young men’ devoted to ‘the spirit of Annales’. Among these was Fernand Braudel, Febvre’s eventual successor as editor on the journal and a figure judged to have been ‘the most important single influence’ throughout the last fifty years of Annales’s history (Clark 1997: 179). Braudel’s position in relation to the event, the subject-matter of traditional history, is clear enough. It would be ‘puerile to deny the reality of events or the role of individuals’, he admits, but to consider these as mere abstractions, as somehow sealed off from their surroundings, is to deny the embeddedness or the ‘intermeshedness’ of social reality. If ‘men make history’, then no less does ‘history make men’. While traditional historians laboured under the first of these maxims, Braudel (1980: 10), in keeping with his Annales heritage, emphasises the second: ‘I remember a night near Bahia, when I was enveloped in a firework display of phosphorescent fireflies; their pale lights glowed, went out, shone again, all without piercing the night with any true illumination. So it is with events; beyond their glow, darkness prevails.’ Ultimately, this prevailing darkness is that of the longue durée, the semi-still, almost motionless, inexhaustible, depths of structural history: ‘This great structure travels through vast tracts of time without changing; if it deteriorates during the long journey, it simply restores itself as it goes along and regains its health, and in the final analysis its characteristics alter only very slowly’ (ibid.: 75). History at this level enquires into centuries at a time, functioning at the point where the static and dynamic intermingle; its concerns are with the constant, almost unchanging, backdrop against which lesser histories flow and work themselves out. For Braudel, this deep-lying structural time, the ground of all other historical times, is discernible in age-old geological structures, ‘a history in which all change is slow, a history of constant repetition, everrecurring cycles’. It has been suggested that the real heroes of his classic monograph, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, are mountains and oceans, landscapes and seas. These are the phenomena that ultimately direct the fate of individuals. The privileged status accorded to them, to the study of ‘geo-history’, is attested to by the fact that Part One of The Mediterranean, some 300 pages in length, is devoted to mountains and plains, coastlines, land routes and sea routes; in short, to man’s relationship with the environment. Rather than the people themselves, or the store of ideas and customs they share in common, it is the climate and the wines and olives that flourish within it – as well as the sea itself – that unite the Mediterranean region into a recognisable whole (Burke 1990: 36–37).

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In this age-old, pedestrian, structural time we arrive at the other extreme through which Lévi-Strauss suggests an escape from traditional history might be made. Like the latter, Braudel considers the history of the event, of the individual, as potentially the most ‘exciting and richest’ in terms of human interest. However, again like LéviStrauss, in Braudel’s opinion, ‘resounding events often take place in an instant, and are but manifestations of that larger destiny by which alone they can be explained’ (Braudel 1980: 4). While Lévi-Strauss seeks this ‘larger destiny’ in the uniform and universal structures of the human mind, Braudel locates it, in the final analysis, outside humanity altogether – in nature, in natural geological processes. In the preface to The Mediterranean he writes:

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I did not wish to overlook this facet of history, which exists almost out of time and tells the story of man’s contact with the inanimate, nor when dealing with it did I wish to make do with one of those traditional geographical introductions to history, which one finds placed to such little effect at the beginning of so many volumes, with their brief reviews of the mineral deposits, the types of agriculture, and the local flora, none of which is ever mentioned again, as if the flowers did not return each spring, as if the flocks were frozen in their migrations, and as if the ships did not have to sail on an actual sea, which changes as the seasons change. (Ibid.: 3)

It is worth recalling that Lévi-Strauss, too, considered geology to have exerted a formative influence on his thought. Yet we have seen that Lévi-Strauss tended generally to ‘dehistoricise’ geological time. For him, the structures of geology are not merely slow but static, presenting a frozen ‘living scene’, a tableau vivant. Time, on the other hand, is the essence of history. ‘It sticks to the historian’s thinking like soil to a gardener’s spade’, says Braudel (ibid.: 77). Time is the ‘complex gauge which we as historians alone know how to handle’ (ibid.: 19). There is little chance, then, that Braudel would agree that diachrony should be made subordinate to synchrony. Historical time, the irreversible, ‘imperious time of the world’, does not lend itself ‘easily to the supple double action of synchrony and diachrony: it cannot envisage life as a mechanism that can be stopped at leisure in order to reveal a frozen image’ (ibid.: 48). And, with greater tenacity elsewhere, Braudel affirms, ‘as far as the language of history is concerned ... there can be no question of perfect synchrony: a sudden halt, in which all time spans would be suspended, is almost an absurdity in itself, or, and this comes to the same thing, is highly factitious’ (ibid.: 39). Consequently, the underlying synchronic structures postulated by Lévi-Strauss are thought by Braudel to succeed ‘only when he launches his models onto the water of the longue durée’ (ibid.: 75). To distinguish between a very slow time and no time at all may be con-

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strued as splitting hairs. But the distinction is important to both Braudel and Lévi-Strauss. In the latter’s estimation, the structures with which he is concerned do not float on the waters of the longue durée, they are not diachronic; they stand outside time, beyond durée, in an atemporal faculty of the human mind, no matter how ‘absurd’ or ‘factitious’ this may seem to others. There is a second – related – issue upon which Lévi-Strauss and Braudel are divided. As a historian, a custodian of time, this is no doubt an issue upon which Braudel would consider himself better qualified to pronounce. We have seen that history in Lévi-Strauss’s evaluation is classificatory and discontinuous and that it is bad practice to move from one class of dates to another, for each of these classes exists autonomously, at a distinct level of reality. For Braudel, the longue durée is just one of hundreds of time spans available to the historian. Although this structural depth, this semi-stillness, serves as the foundation for all other historical times – ‘everything gravitates around it’ – nevertheless, ‘a descent following the onward stream of time is conceivable only in terms of a multiplicity of descents, following the innumerable rivers of time’ (ibid.: 39). Of these innumerable levels at which history might potentially be recorded, Braudel tends to coalesce historical time into three workable frames: the longue durée (geo-history, the history of civilisations, of centuries at a time), the conjuncture (mid-range history, economic cycles and intercycles, social history conducted over ten, twenty, perhaps fifty years) and the event (the immediate, the short term, micro-history, history of the traditional kind).4 Contra Lévi-Strauss, in no way are these historical domains to be conceived as mutually exclusive or in any sense discontinuous. ‘The longue durée, the conjuncture, the event all fit into each other neatly and without difficulty, for they are all measured on the same scale’ (ibid.: 48). This is the scale of time, the historian’s raison d’être. History, for Braudel, amounts essentially to a ‘dialectic of the time span’. In order to fully understand the present, all history must be mobilised: ‘today’s time dates from yesterday, the day before yesterday, and all former times’ (ibid.: 34). Not only is it valid, but for Braudel it is imperative that historical analysis moves between the two poles of the instant and the long durée. Failure to do so risks overemphasising the immediate at the expense of the more structurally durable or sustainable – the latter, as in Lévi-Strauss, being of greater explanatory worth – it risks, in short, rendering history a slave to every passing event and prominent personality. ‘Men’, writes Braudel (ibid.: 20), ‘even the greatest, do not seem as free to us as to our predecessors in history.’ Against Sartre’s existentialism, one is reminded here of Lévi-Strauss’s claim that ‘necessity reveals itself as immanent in the illusions of freedom’.

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Like Lévi-Strauss, Braudel (ibid.: 71–72) hopes to ‘substitute for a disconcerting empirical reality a clearer image, and one more susceptible to scientific application’. For them both, as for Dumont also, to obtain this clearer image recourse is made to the notion of underlying structures. A step must be taken back from the empirical, from individuals and events, in order to better grasp the structural relations between them. For all three, moreover, these underlying structures, when considered in relation to the individual, are generally thought to work at an unconscious or taken-for-granted level. It is by implicit reference to the opposition between pure and impure that Dumont believes the caste system functions as a whole. We have seen LéviStrauss emphasise an objective and unconscious ‘totalisation’ as analytically superior to Sartre’s subjective and conscious unity. Similarly, for Braudel (ibid.: 39), an ‘unconscious history, belonging half to the time of conjunctures and wholly to structural time, is clearly visible more frequently than one would willingly admit’. Interestingly, for both Lévi-Strauss and Braudel, ‘social’ structures are regarded more or less as epiphenomena. In the last resort, the structures discerned by Lévi-Strauss point, as he puts it himself, to ‘a picture of the world already inscribed in the architecture’ of the human mind. Braudel’s longue durée takes the other extreme; the structural time that ultimately determines all other times – conjunctural or social time included – belongs outside humanity, in the natural world. For Dumont, on the other hand, social structures provide an irreducible level of reality in themselves. Dumont is interested above all in ideas, in global ideologies, and these of course are the currency of groups, not of individuals or natural phenomena. While LéviStrauss’s structuralism allows him to seek universals across, in fact beneath, social boundaries, for Dumont it is the boundaries themselves that determine the structures with which he is concerned. While for Lévi-Strauss ‘individuals’ encapsulate in their very being the structures he, as an anthropologist, attempts to locate in the wider world, Dumont’s ‘individual’ is more of a tabula rasa, more malleable: reality here, potential there. Not that this amounts to absolute existential freedom like that envisioned by Sartre. Rather, for Dumont, it is the social alone that determines what is to be realised and what is to remain potential in man. It is here that structural models are to be constructed. It is at this level that cross-cultural comparisons must be made. While, then, each of Lévi-Strauss, Braudel, and Dumont acknowledges an intellectual debt to Mauss,5 it would seem that in delimiting the structures he highlights to regionally specific ‘totalities’ or ‘wholes’, to social configurations – whether synchronic or diachronic – Dumont remains closest (here, as most often) to his Maussian roots.

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Notes 1.

Although, not necessarily so. Dumézil, for instance, focuses upon triadic structures in his comparative analysis of Indo-European civilisation. And Allen, drawing on and modifying Dumézil, proposes a fivefold structure. It might be instructive in this regard to recall that in Homo Hierarchicus Dumont adopts from Dumézil the interpretation of the traditional fourfold varna classification of ancient India (Brahmans, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Shudras), in terms of a succession of binary oppositions: ‘The set of the four varnas divides into two: the last category, that of the Shudras, is opposed to the block of the first three, whose members are “twice born” in the sense that they participate in initiation, second birth, and in the religious life in general. These twice born in turn divide into two: the Vaishyas are opposed to the block formed by the Kshatriyas and the Brahmans, which in turn divides into two’ (Dumont 1980: 67). Thus, instead of a linear ordering, we find the following series of binary oppositions: Brahmans/Kshatriyas/Vaishyas (twice born) : Shudra (once born) Brahmans/Kshatriyas (powerful elite) : Vaishyas (masses) Brahmans (spiritual power) : Kshatriyas (political power).

2. 3.

4.

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5.

It is from Rosen (1971) that much of the material for the following comparison of Sartre and Lévi-Strauss is drawn. In his essay on Mauss in Essays on Individualism Dumont makes the claim that, ‘We may say that Mauss came as near as possible to defining a “whole” as a structure’ (1986c: 194). The three substantive parts of The Mediterranean correspond to these three historical times, each part being an attempt to articulate one aspect of the whole. Clearly, this has been shown in the case of Dumont. For Lévi-Strauss, see in particular his Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss (1987). And, among other references, Braudel claims in reference to Mauss: ‘who better taught us, historians, the art of studying civilisations?’ (1980: 18).

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Chapter 6

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ON THE CATEGORY OF THE INDIVIDUAL

Dumont cast his anthropological net exceptionally wide and for this reason so must we. Having delivered, to his own satisfaction, all that he had to offer by way of analysis on Indian civilisation, he subsequently makes use of the perspective gained therein as a point of departure from which to consider modern Western ideology. Since Indian society was characterised by homo hierarchicus, Dumont proposes as a generic title for his study of modernity, homo aequalis. For the English reader, the results of this investigation can be found in three principal publications: From Mandeville to Marx (1977), Essays on Individualism (1986) and German Ideology (1994). In this chapter we shall examine the first two of these works, for here Dumont outlines in a rather general way the manner in which the individual has become increasingly valorised – or ‘categorised’ – throughout the history of Western ideas. We shall consider the more specific study of German ideology in chapter 7. According to Dumont, the modern configuration of values is atomised in two senses. In the first instance, it is centred upon the individual and not the collectivity. Secondly, it juxtaposes within society certain autonomous realms, namely, religion/philosophy, politics, and economics. Dumont occasionally adds art (e.g. 1970: 32) as a fourth contemporary autonomous ideological realm, but, unlike the others, nowhere does he elaborate upon this idea. One might suppose that the passing allusion to art is included as the modern counterpart to the aesthetic aspect of Mauss’s total social phenomena, since Dumont is essentially interested in tracing throughout time the gradual parcelling out of this traditional holistic world-view into the departmen-

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talised ideological domains of modernity. In its broadest sense, the historical process envisaged by Dumont is straightforward enough: by means of an initial differentiation, out of religion, the all-embracing principle of tradition, arises politics, which in turn gives rise to another autonomous realm, that of economics.

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The Evolution of the Modern Individual 1. The Role of Religion Seen from the most general of perspectives, the modern revolution in values, the ‘individualist revolution’, is characterised by a displacement of the traditional value stress on society as a whole (holism) to an ideological emphasis on the attributes, claims, and welfare of each individual human being, irrespective of their position within society (individualism). No longer is one’s identity inextricably bound up with the social whole, no longer is one conceived, ideologically, as a social person. Each now appears as an individuum of the human species, a substance existing in and of itself, an ideologically self-contained whole. In an article of 1970 Dumont states, in passing, that this individuality arises ‘by the will of God to begin with’ (ibid.: 32). This is a theme he explores much more fully a decade or so later in an article entitled, ‘A Modified View of Our Origins: The Christian Beginnings of Modern Individualism’ (Dumont 1985).1 Against the backdrop of all the other great civilisations known to humanity, the modern ‘individualistic’ West is understood by Dumont to be an exceptional phenomenon. In attempting to account for its origins, scholars have pointed to several moments of significance – classical Greece, the Judaeo-Christian heritage, the Renaissance, the Reformation. For Dumont, it is usually primitive Christianity that provides an analytical point of departure. As against Greek philosophy, preference is given to religion, since religion, according to Dumont (following Durkheim), encompasses the whole of society and relates immediately to action: ‘In the generalisation of the pattern in the first place, and in its subsequent evolution, religion has been the cardinal element’ (ibid.: 94). And so we account for the second part of the essay’s title – ‘The Christian Beginnings of Modern Individualism’.2 What, however, are we to make of the rather ambiguous first part – ‘A Modified View of our Origins’? That this statement precedes the colon, and tends therefore to bear much of the title’s stress, serves only to confound matters, as does the fact that nowhere throughout the essay does Dumont explicitly relate to the manner of this so-called modification – modified, that is, in relation to what? Fortunately, a clue may be gleaned elsewhere.

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Replying to a critic who seems to have misunderstood the overall gist of the paper, Dumont (1982: 89) attempts to establish clearly ‘the general perspective that commands the particular thesis or hypothesis’. Broadly conceived, this general perspective belongs to a comparative anthropology, so that the question of modern individualism’s origins itself emerges as a comparative problem: ‘What I have attempted here is to throw light on that problem from a particular non-modern case of which I have some anthropological experience, namely India. I am convinced that China, Islam or other cultures can similarly contribute to “set in perspective” some aspects of modern culture’ (ibid.: 89). None the less, it is his Indian experience upon which Dumont draws and that enables him to set Western ideology in perspective, to turn, as he sometimes puts is, the comparative mirror back upon ourselves. It is in this anthropological reversal that the process of modification takes place. In turning back the comparative mirror on to ourselves we are empowered to ‘look at our heritage in a modified way’. When considered comparatively, when set in the perspective of non-modern, traditional cultures, new light is thrown on the institutions and ideology of modernity, on the taken-for-granted of everyday experience. For Dumont, this process of modification, this two-way dialogue between ‘us’ and ‘them’, lies at the very heart of the anthropological endeavour.3 In returning now to the essay in question this business of modification becomes abundantly clear: In rough and ready terms, the problem of the origins of individualism is very much how, starting from the common type of holistic societies, a new type has evolved that basically contradicts the common conception. How has the transition been possible, how can we conceive a transition between those two antithetic universes of thought, those two mutually irreconcilable ideologies? Comparison, in the instance of India, offers a clue. (Dumont 1985: 94)

More specifically, it is the figure of the orthodox renouncer, the sanny¯asin’s outworldly individuality, which offers the real clue. The renouncer is self-sufficient, concerned only with himself. He has abandoned the social world – a ‘yawning gap’ exists between him and it – since distance from this world is a prerequisite of spiritual salvation. However, the sanny¯asin’s abandonment of the world is never a neutral affair. In forsaking the world, the renouncer ideologically relativises worldly existence. He may depend upon the man-in-the-world for his subsistence, he may even return to the world as a guru or spiritual leader, but the world itself, caste with all its social and familial obligations, is no longer ideologically meaningful. The sanny¯asin thinks of himself as an individual not a social being and this brings him closer to

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the ideological construct of the West, with the one important difference we noted earlier: while those in the modern West are individualsin-the-world, ‘inworldly’ individuals, the renouncer is an ‘outworldly’ individual, an individual-outside-the-world. Since the modern world-view ‘fundamentally contradicts’ the traditional, since the two are ‘antithetic universes of thought’, characterised by ‘mutually irreconcilable ideologies’, to move from one to the other requires more than a mere shift in cultural perspective. As they are ‘irreconcilable’ world-views, a fundamental break with the past is required to usher in the modern. ‘If individualism is to appear in a society of the traditional, holistic type, it will be in opposition to society and as a kind of supplement to it, that is, in the form of the outworldly individual’ (ibid.: 96).4 Given this requirement, it is the outworldly institution of sanny¯asa that offers Dumont an angle on how the individualistic ideal, the valorisation of the single, context-free, individual, might have entered into Western history in the first place. In order to translate this understanding into a Western context, however, an equivalent form of the Indian renouncer, the outworldly individual, needs to be located. And Dumont finds this exact ‘sociological type’, this necessary and fundamental break with tradition, in and around the teachings and practices of primitive Christianity. Christ’s key message had been that each of us represents an individual-in-relation-to-God and that this tremendous affirmation takes place on a level transcending this-worldly, mundane, existence. In affirming their infinite worth in the presence of God, the first Christian believers, like the Indian renouncer, tended to negate everyday reality, to relativise it in terms of an ultimate value. ‘Sociologically speaking,’ Dumont (ibid.: 99) suggests, ‘the emancipation of the individual through a personal transcendence, and the union of outworldly individuals in a community that treads on earth but has its heart in heaven, may constitute a passable formula for Christianity.’ Perhaps he might have qualified this as, ‘Christianity at its inception’ or ‘for the greater part of its history’, since the process Dumont goes on to describe is one whereby this outworldly Christian community is transformed over centuries into an inworldly institution: ‘the old form and the new are separated by a transformation so radical and so complex that it took at least seventeen centuries of Christian history to be completed, if indeed it is still not continuing in our times’ (ibid.: 94). Although avowedly more interested in religion than in philosophy, Dumont none the less does point to certain aspects of the Greek tradition as important antecedents of the early institutionalisation of Christianity. Whereas Plato and Aristotle had regarded self-sufficiency as an attribute of the polis, of the collective whole, the new Hellenistic schools, the Epicureans, Cynics, and Stoics, viewed self-sufficiency as

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an attribute of the individual and, according to Dumont, this conception had so permeated the world of educated people by the time of Christ that the ground was thoroughly prepared for Christianity’s own brand of individualism. Indeed, this arrangement was further facilitated by the fact that the individualism promulgated by the new Hellenistic schools was itself, like the teachings of Christ, outworldly in orientation; it, too, proposed ‘a thorough dichotomy between wisdom and the world, between the wise man and the unenlightened men who remain in the throes of worldly life’ (ibid.: 96). In the new Hellenistic schools, as in Christianity, accommodation to the world is achieved largely through means of renunciation and self-discipline, through the relativisation, the inferiorisation of worldly values. Take Stoicism, for instance. Although, particularly in its middle and later stages, reconciliation with the world plays an important part in Stoic tradition (the Roman Stoics assumed heavy duties and responsibilities in the world – one need only think of the emperor Marcus Aurelius), still, it would be impossible to deny the essentially outworldly anchorage of Stoic doctrine. The ethic of self-sufficient benevolent calm, of indifference to poverty, pain, and death, the personal identification with an impartial moral cosmic order, that is to say, the very essence of Stoicism, points clearly to this outworldly basis. Although necessarily in the world, the Stoic is not to be entirely of it: ‘He may sigh [with the suffering man]’, enjoins Epictetus, ‘provided his sigh does not come from the heart’. Thus, claims Dumont (ibid.: 97), while ‘the Stoic has returned to the world in a manner foreign to the Indian renouncer, it represents for him only a secondary accommodation while at bottom he still defines himself as a stranger to the world’. The Stoic’s life is lived in accordance with the cosmic order, with the spiritual-cum-physical law of nature, a law that prescribes, on the one hand: ‘submission to the harmonious course of nature and to the role assigned to one in the social system, on the other an inner elevation above all this and the ethico-religious freedom and dignity of reason, that is one with God and therefore not to be disturbed by any external or sensible occurrence’ (Troeltsch 1960: 64, cited in Dumont 1985: 101). This is the model of the world, these relative laws of nature, incorporated into first-century Christianity. In providing an institutional link between Christ’s outworldly message and the inevitability of an inworldly existence, the early Church accommodated itself to the world largely through the Early Fathers’ appropriation of the Stoic idea of natural law. The separate domains of the Stoics, the transcendent and the mundane, the other-worldly and this-worldly, correspond, in principle, to the two basic pictures of man represented in Christianity: man’s consummate condition before the Fall and his

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flawed existence here on earth. According to Christian doctrine, however, earthly and heavenly existences should not be regarded as unconditionally opposed, as mutually and inalienably exclusive. While, for sure, the world is subordinate in terms of absolute value, it is still of relative worth and should not be unqualifiedly condemned, as it tended to be by the heretic Gnostics. On the other hand, and most importantly, the relative worth of worldly existence should never be forgotten. This world must never assume the dignity that belongs to God alone. As Dumont (1985: 103) characteristically interprets the situation, ‘we had best think of the whole configuration in hierarchical terms, for life in the world is not simply refused or negated, it is only relativised in relation to man’s destiny of union with God and outworldly bliss’. According to the principles of the early Church, political and social institutions are not disagreeable in themselves. In fact, if anything, they are the necessary consequence of humanity’s fallen state and are justifiable in terms of the lesser, the inferior of nature’s two laws, that pertaining to mundane reality. While the State and its rulers, like everything else on earth, are willed by God, and in this way gain whatever authority they possess, they are – for the same reason – subject to another, more fundamental, all-encompassing, level of authority: that of God himself and his representative on earth, the Christian Church. The State, in short, is to the Church as earth is to heaven or this world to the other, i.e., relatively inferior. Around the beginning of the fourth century, this traditional division between Church and State becomes seriously blurred in the conversion to Christianity of Emperor Constantine. This momentous event was to bring the Church face to face with the world in a very real and historically significant way. No longer could the Church continue to devalue the State as absolutely as it had previously done. For one thing, the collusion between Church and State heralded a potential end to Christian persecution and, for another, it rendered the Church a richly subsidised institution. In the figure of Constantine the Church had taken a significant step into the world, a truly important moment in the ‘incarnation of value’, the gradual transition from an outworldly to an inworldly religiosity. The next significant development in the ongoing relationship between Church and State identified by Dumont occurs some two centuries later. Around 500 CE, Pope Gelasius constructed a theoretical statement regarding Church/State relations that became quickly enshrined in tradition and abundantly drawn upon thereafter. Having distinguished between sacred authority and royal power, Gelasius, in a letter to the emperor, admonishes the ruler to ‘bend a submissive head to the ministers of divine things’. It is the statutes of the priests which carry the greatest weight, as it is the priests who ‘must render an

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account to the Lord even for kings before the divine judgement’. While others have spoken in this regard of a correlation of duties between king and priest, or of the simple subordination of king to priest, Dumont (1985: 107) cites Gelasius’ declaration as a clear illustration of hierarchical complementarity:

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[Gelasius’] clear and lofty pronouncement is widely treated as stating the juxtaposition and cooperation of the two powers … That it contains an element of hierarchy is somehow admitted, but seeing as moderns are uneasy in that dimension, they misrepresent it or are unable to see its full import. On the contrary, the present comparative perspective should allow us to restore the high stature and logical structure of the Gelasian theory.

This ‘present comparative perspective’ brings India, our modifying standard, into play. In his study of ancient Vedic tradition, Dumont had already identified the very same logical configuration proposed by Gelasius. In both instances, while the priest is subordinate to the king in mundane matters, the king is subordinate to the priest in spiritual affairs, and since priests are superior at the superior level, the allencompassing level of religion, it is they who take precedence in the system as a whole: religious status encompasses temporal power at the superordinate ideological level. Given the very different historical circumstances underlying the Vedic and Gelasian pronouncements, Dumont (ibid.: 108) feels ‘emboldened to surmise that the configuration in question is simply the logical formula of the relation between the two functions’: another indication, if any were needed, of his everpresent structuralism. Gelasius’ hierarchical formula was not to be the last word on the relationship between Church and State. Around the middle of the eighth century, the papacy ceased to conform to this earlier model and began to usurp political privileges itself, first through the transfer of power from Constantinople to the Frankish kings and then through the appropriation of several imperial territories and the claim of political authority over various parts of Italy. Andreas Buss (2000: 11) neatly sums up the situation thus: It is clear that a significant ideological change occurred here, for the sacerdotium, the spiritual function, now sought to rule in worldly matters and had thus entered the ‘world’. The difference between the realms, the sacerdotium and the imperium, was now conceived as one of degree, not of kind, so that the spiritual power, as it was now called, was deemed to be superior to the temporal even in temporal matters.

We have now reached a stage at which the pope assigns temporal power to the emperor, who acts as his deputy. From its humble begin-

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nings at the margins of society, a diminutive community of otherworldly believers, the Christian Church has become absorbed into the world to a degree hitherto unknown and probably unimagined. And, as a corollary, the Christian individual is also committed to the world to an unprecedented degree. What was once an outworldly individuality, similar to that assumed by the sanny¯asin, has become more and more inworldly and substantial in character. Dumont traces one last stage in the Christian ‘incarnation’ of the world. From the eighth century we are transposed to the sixteenth, or more specifically to the Protestant Reformation. Here, in Calvinism, we find what Dumont takes to be the culmination of this millennialong process of worldly appropriation, of Christianity’s plunge into the world. We are dealing here with history, structural history, of the longue durée:

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My thesis is simple: with Calvin, the hierarchical dichotomy that characterised our field of consideration comes to an end: the antagonistic worldly element that individualism had hitherto accommodated disappears entirely in Calvin’s theocracy. The field is absolutely unified. The individual is now in the world, and the individualist value rules without restriction or limitation. The inworldly individual is before us. (Ibid.: 113–14, emphasis in original)

Luther had to some extent already removed God from the world by rejecting the mediation of the Catholic Church. God was no longer available to man by proxy through the intercession of religious dignitaries, through priests and monks. Nevertheless, God was still accessible, indeed more so, to the average believer in terms of his or her own individual conscience, through faith and love. In Calvin, love is largely replaced by reason. God is will and majesty, the individual’s destiny is irredeemably prescribed or ‘predestined’ from above. Each must follow a path alone to meet the fortune decreed for them from eternity. God is distant, other-worldly, and remote. Before the omnipotence of God individuals are rendered completely impotent. Between this world and the other lies an impenetrable barrier. Individuals, no matter how spiritually aware, can never be sure of their personal salvation, they can never piously, unconditionally, forsake this world for the promises of a better world to come. While the Calvinist could never know for sure whether or not they were among the elect, and could do absolutely nothing to sway the decision in their favour, none the less, the certitudo salutis, that certainty of grace considered by Weber an essential foil to the ‘unprecedented inner loneliness’ of predestination, might be procured through the proliferation of good works; for good works, while they could not directly influence salvation, might be interpreted as a sign of God’s grace: surely an evil tree could not bring forth good fruit. Thus, the

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elect relentlessly exercised their will in action, in work (since ‘to work is to pray’) for the glorification of God, and contributed in this way to the implementation of God’s designs on earth. Dumont (ibid.: 115–16) suggests that this rational and focused commitment to all things earthly serves as a necessary condition for legitimating the final and decisive shift from the outworldly to the inworldly individual:

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In effect, until then the individual had to recognise in the world an antagonistic factor, an irreducible alter that could not be suppressed but only subjected, encompassed. This limitation disappears with Calvin, and we find it replaced, so to speak, by his peculiar subjection to God’s will. If such is the genesis of what Troeltsch and Weber called inworldly asceticism, we had best speak of ascetic, or conditioned, inworldliness. … Instead of taking refuge from this imperfect world in another which allowed us to cope, it would seem we had decided that we should ourselves embody that other world in our determined action upon this one.

Here lies, perhaps, the greatest difference between Lutheranism and Calvinism and the reason why Dumont envisions the latter as standing at the end of Christianity’s worldly ‘incarnation’: while Luther still held on to a traditional contemplative participation in God, the unio mystica, Calvin’s is very much an active contemplation, other-worldliness ‘is now concentrated in the individual’s will’ (ibid.: 116). Hence the recession of emotional and mystical aspects in Calvin’s teaching, his dry legalism, the lack of emphasis on the Second Coming. The Kingdom of God is to be built up piecemeal on earth through the determined and wilful efforts of His elect. The world has become sacralised, the individual inworldly, the Church itself, once an important mediation between this world and the other, collapses into the world, representing little more than an association of inworldly individuals, its other-worldliness negated by the doctrine of predestination, by the remoteness of God, the impenetrable barrier which separates humanity from its Creator. As far as Christianity is concerned, inworldly individualism has left its mark. This world is very much the stage upon which each believer plays out their unique individual destiny, seeking whatever solace they can find with regard to an eternal future in their determined action upon the world, with no intermediaries, no confession, no institutionalised package on their side. 2. The Place of Politics Dumont (1970: 32) compares medieval Christianity to a great cloak, the mantle of our Lady of Mercy, all-embracing and socially holistic. Interestingly, the same analogy is employed in Homo Hierarchicus (Dumont 1980: 99) with regard to the notion of purity, which

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Dumont likewise sees ‘rather like an immense umbrella, or as we shall say the mantle of our Lady of Mercy, sheltering all sorts of things’. This similarity is understandable inasmuch as medieval Christendom is taken by Dumont to be closer to the holism of traditional society than to the individualism of modernity. In the essay to be considered in this section, ‘The Political Category and the State from the Thirteenth Century Onward’, Dumont outlines the beginnings of a process whereby medieval Christianity gradually loses its traditional, allencompassing hold over society and becomes, in time, simply one of several other equally autonomous, though interrelated, realms (religion, politics, economics, aesthetics) juxtaposed within society. The essay on the ‘Political Category’ was originally published (in a slightly longer version) in an early issue of Contributions to Indian Sociology (Dumont 1965a). Here, it represents one of Dumont’s first forays into the study of modern ideology and in this format predates the essay that we have just discussed on the Christian origins of modern individualism by over a decade. This is worthy of note, since Dumont (1977: 15) has remarked on the ‘incomplete’ nature of the earlier essay, confessing that ‘it suffers from some shortcomings’, the main one of which seems to be its suggestion that Christian ideology was essentially holistic at the essay’s medieval point of departure (i.e., in Thomas Aquinas). This is contrary to the later essay wherein, as we have seen, individualism is conceived as a central tenet of Christianity from its very inception: it is towards the individual and not the social whole that Christianity is oriented. Consequently, in qualifying his previous argument, Dumont (ibid.) considers the holistic aspect of medieval Christianity only to be ‘true if one looks narrowly at the terrestrial community of Christians’. Although, that is to say, Christian ideology is in essence individualistic (first outworldly and then progressively inworldly), in its terrestrial capacity as a Christian state – throughout most of the Middle Ages, that is – the Catholic Church was very much a holistic institution. One need only think of the traditional division of society into three orders or functions, those who pray, fight, and work (reminiscent of the Indian varna system), to recognise the truth in this. Dumont (ibid.) believes that given this qualification – the recognition that medieval Christianity represents only a relative holism – the ‘initial flaw in the published paper does not distort its description of the progress of individualism, of the birth of the State, and of the political category’. It is in its terrestrial capacity that medieval Christianity might be considered socially holistic and all-embracing. And it is at this level that the Church can be taken as having given birth (through a process of ‘schizogenesis’ (ibid.) or by ‘scissiparity’ (Dumont 1970: 32)) to a new social category, that of politics.

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The essay on the ‘Political Category’ commences with a characteristic opposition and an equally characteristic methodological statement. The opposition Dumont proposes is that between (largely) ancient political theories, in which the social or political whole is primary, and (usually) modern theories, wherein the rights of the individual are basic and determine the functioning of all other sociopolitical institutions. On the one hand, there exist political theories of an ‘organic’ nature, such as Plato’s Republic or Hegel’s ideal state, while, on the other, there are ‘mechanical’ theories such as Locke’s doctrine of political trust or Rousseau’s social contract.5 With regard to his characteristic methodology, Dumont (1986c: 61) writes: ‘To distinguish between the two kinds of theories, we shall ask to which concept the stress of value is attached, whether it is the whole (social) or political body, or the individual human element. We shall speak in this sense of individualism versus holism’ (emphasis in original). Within these structural parameters Dumont’s approach is broadly evolutionary: ‘modern society has evolved from that of the Middle Ages, which certainly at first sight appears to be a society of the traditional type, more like the Indian than like the modern’ (Dumont 1965a: 17). The essay’s point of departure – the chief representative of medieval holism – is the great philosopher and theologian, Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–74). Having been brought up in a Benedictine monastery, then educated at the university of Naples (renowned at the time for its Aristotelian teaching), and later admitted into the Dominican order, it is of little surprise that Aquinas is best known for his systematic attempts at developing and defending a form of Aristotelian Christianity, a subtle combination of philosophy and revelation. In this respect, Dumont distinguishes two important components in Aquinas’s thought. On the level of religion, in regard to faith and grace, each person is viewed as a whole being, a private individual in direct relation to God (i.e., the Christian influence), while on the level of earthly institutions (the terrestrial level that Dumont emphasises later to be the real focus of the essay), each individual is a member of the commonwealth, part of a social body legitimised with the help of Aristotle. This latter Aristotelian-influenced concept of society as a whole (universitas), of which men are merely parts, belongs to a traditional view of the world. Its antithesis, the modern conception, is that of societas, of society as an association or partnership between independent individuals. The historical process outlined by Dumont is one in which a progressively weakening sense of universitas is replaced by an increasingly prominent ideological emphasis on societas. It is with the English theologian and Franciscan monk, William of Ockham (c. 1285–1349), the ‘herald of the modern turn of mind’,

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that this process really gets under way.6 For Aquinas, particular beings are ‘primary substances’, self-subsisting wholes in relation to God. However, alongside these primary beings exist secondary substances, ‘universals’ like genus or species, which operate at another, but none the less still substantial, level of reality. The external world is not merely a disorderly association of atoms or individuals. Intrinsic to the world is an established order, a unifying concept, a system in which particular beings or elements belong and through which they are rendered significant. In view of this belief, the medieval hierarchical ordering of society is taken by Aquinas to be a true reflection of nature and of eternal reason, a natural arrangement: society is ordered along pre-established lines, just like any other phenomenon in nature. For Ockham, there are no such universals, no predetermination in the sense proposed by Thomas Aquinas. This is why Dumont considers Ockham to be the ‘systematic expounder of nominalism, the founder of positivism and subjectivism in law’, the precursor of sociopolitical individualism. While useful conventions, terms such as ‘man’ or ‘animal’ or ‘tree’, in fact all genera or species, have no ontological reality according to Ockham. Even the Franciscan Order, to which he apparently belonged, had no basis in empirical reality; there were simply Franciscan monks scattered throughout Europe. Even today reductionists and nominalists still draw on this fourteenth-century monk’s celebrated principle, known in philosophical circles as ‘Ockham’s razor’, that entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem: entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity (Blackburn 1994: 268). In denying the reality of universals, in rejecting generalisation and unnecessary multiplication, Ockham at the same time rejects or denies the normative implications of universality. In the same way as there is nothing ontologically real about ‘humankind’, so there can be no natural or universal laws pertaining to an ideal human nature. Natural laws are replaced by positive laws, laws derived from the declarations of specific wills – either those of particular individuals or, ultimately, of the will of God. In this way, law becomes an expression of power, the power of its legislator, and although of course it is God who possesses absolute power (plenitudo potestatis), in those areas of life in which human laws hold sway these cannot be derived from divine or natural sources since there is no necessary correlation between the two levels: divine laws and human laws are not born of a common eternal principle, but are derived from separate, independent, types of will. In earthly matters, it follows, no natural or social order exists beyond that upon which human beings themselves have decided. In Ockham, human law becomes positive law, law grounded in empirical reality. This is what Dumont means when he speaks of the medieval English monk as the founding father of the ‘subjective theory of right’:

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When there is no longer anything ontologically real beyond the particular being, when the notion of ‘right’ is attached, not to a natural and social order, but to the particular human being, he becomes an individual in the modern sense of the word. It is noteworthy that the immediate corollary of this transformation is the stress on the notion of ‘power’ (potestas), which thus appears from the start as a functional modern equivalent of the traditional idea of order and hierarchy. (Dumont 1986c: 65)

Throughout much of the Middle Ages this ‘traditional idea of order and hierarchy’ had been embodied in the Catholic Church. The Church functioned more or less at the level of the State and was synonymous with society as a whole. Although papal and ecclesiastical supremacy was at times contested, Dumont believes that a general acceptance of the Church’s superiority even in temporal matters was ‘really the predominant and also the more coherent doctrine of the Middle Ages’ (ibid.: 69). Taking over from the Roman Empire its notion of the absolute jurisdiction and authority of the ruler and attributing these qualities to the pope, the Church came to stand as the supreme dispenser of law, the fountain of all honour – including regal honour – and the only legitimate source of this-worldly power. We are here very much in the realm of tradition: the Church, holistic and all-inclusive, the mantle of our Lady of Mercy, encompasses within itself responsibilities that might be, and subsequently will be, regarded as secular and political. The transition of sovereignty from the medieval Church to the secular modern State (echoing in a sense the substitution of natural law with positive law in Ockham) was ‘a long and manifold process’. One of its major characteristics was the fact that the secular State inherited many of its essential features from the Church, which it supersedes at the global level. It is the State that now becomes the ‘great cloak’, the all-embracing mantle, sheltering all sorts of things. As early as the fourteenth century, Marsilius of Padua had called for the complete authority of civil power and the purely voluntary nature of religious organisation. This line of reasoning Dumont pursues right up to the sixteenth century, to the Protestant Reformation, wherein Lutheran rulers were able to procure high levels of sanctity as guardians of religious homogeneity within their particular region, thereby usurping power previously belonging to the pope. Throughout this period, the idea of natural law also undergoes a concomitant transformation. This concept, Dumont (ibid.: 72) reminds us: can be traced back to antiquity, and to Thomas Aquinas, but it undergoes a deep change in modern times, so that two theories of Natural Law are sometimes opposed, the ancient or classical, and the modern. Between these two, the difference is of a kind we have learnt to recognise by speaking of respectively traditional and modern views.

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According to the traditional view, that of the ancients and Thomas Aquinas, the natural basis of law derives from a social order taken to be in conformity with the universal ordering of nature. Under the initial influence of Stoic and Christian individualism, an emergent modern perspective begins to attribute naturalness to the individual, to the self-sufficient human being, to man made in the image of God and conceived as the repository of reason. Under this new set of assumptions, natural law is increasingly seen as pertaining to a state of nature logically prior to social and political life, a condition anterior to society or the State, that is to say, to the natural condition of the pre-social individual. In contrast to traditional theories, the modern State is no longer thought of as being derived from a divinely ordered universal principle. Rather, the State can only be understood and explained in this-worldly terms, in terms, that is, of the union of the pre-social individuals of which it is composed. Societas, or association, has replaced universitas, or corporate unity. In the transition from one to the other, from tradition to modernity, the medieval hierarchical ordering of Christendom becomes atomised at two levels: on the one hand, following the Reformation, Christendom consists of a number of individual states, the Catholic Church can no longer exact its claim to universal authority, while, on the other, these states are themselves thought to be composed of separate pre-social individuals, no longer ideologically dependent on a pre-established natural order. However, natural law theorists could not do away with a traditional view of the whole altogether, especially with regard to what Dumont believes remained their greatest conceptual challenge – accounting for the emergence of the social or political group while starting from the notion of the isolated man of nature: The main device for this purpose was the idea of contract or compact. After 1600, at least two contracts had to be entered into in succession in order to account for the transition. The first, or ‘social’ contract, introduced the relationship characterized by equality or ‘fellowship’; the second, or political contract, introduced subjection to a ruler or a ruling agency. The philosophers reduced this multiplicity of contracts to one: Hobbes by making the contract of subjection the point of departure of social life in general, Locke by replacing the second contract by a Trust, Rousseau by suppressing the Ruler altogether. (Ibid.: 75)7

Notably, in each of these instances the social whole is thought of in terms of societas, not universitas. As Dumont sees it, society relates at best to ‘civil society’, to the society of the economist and the philosopher, not to the ‘society of sociology proper’, that integral whole into which man is born, which teaches him his language and shapes his very being. Society, in this second, deeper, sociological sense, suffers a

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‘partial eclipse’ with the modern turn of mind. The traditional holistic and religious view of the whole is replaced by a modern political and atomistic view: holism gives way to individualism. In that it announces a ‘total break’ with traditional holistic philosophy, Dumont considers the work of Thomas Hobbes to be highly significant in this regard. Human beings, in Hobbes, are no longer essentially sociopolitical creatures, but exist independently in a presociopolitical state of nature. Dumont points out that it is more accurate to speak of ‘prepolitical’ versus ‘political’ states in Hobbes (rather than the usual ‘presocial’ versus ‘social’), since included in the socalled state of nature are such characteristics as ‘power’, ‘honour’, ‘speech’, and ‘reason’, which are obviously of social provenance and significance. For Hobbes, it is subjection to common rule that transfers man out of the state of nature and into society (the Commonwealth) proper, which again supports a pre- to post-political interpretation. Given this ontological dualism, this tension between a pre-political state of nature and subsequent subjection to the sociopolitical whole, on which side of Dumont’s trusty methodological opposition – individualism versus holism – does Hobbes’s political theory belong? In addressing this question, Dumont claims that Hobbes is neither (wholly) individualist nor (wholly) holist (one might wonder therefore if his break with tradition is as absolute as Dumont had earlier proposed): He thus makes our distinction collapse, but the event is interesting, and strictly characterises Hobbes. There is no doubt that his point of departure is the particular human being, the human individuum. But in the prepolitical stage the life of this being is to be judged negatively: ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. When, following the advice of reason and its own desire for conservation, this being enters the political stage, it lays down a part of its powers. Then man is able to attain security, comfort, and the development of his faculties, but at the price of his subjection. He has not become a self-sufficient individual anymore than he existed satisfactorily as such in the natural state. So it is that, through an approach which seemed to be extremely ‘individualistic’, individualism is brought to heel. The proper life of man is not that of an individual, it is that of a being which is closely dependent upon the State … At the same time, Hobbes cannot be said to be a holist either. In particular the hierarchical ordering of the social body is absent because the State is not oriented toward any end which would transcend it, but is subject only to itself. Ultimately, the Herrschaft model is emptied of its inherent hierarchical virtue and is adopted only as an indispensable adjustment of power. The shell, so to speak, but not its inhabitant, value. Nonetheless, there remains the recognition that equality cannot reign supreme and unencumbered, and that man is a social being – and not an individual – insofar as the political level is concerned. (Ibid.: 83–84)

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What can at least be said for sure is that in Hobbes we have reached a point where politics has replaced religion as the ascendant category within the social whole, wherein, to put it another way, status gives way to power. This Dumont believes must necessarily be the case, since in starting from the individuum one can only pass to the social in terms of a ‘covenant’ and all that atomistic individuals are able to bring to bear on this collective bargaining is their own individual consciousness, their will, force, or power. Power in this sense is the atomistic/individualistic inverse of social/hierarchical status. In place of traditional authority and status, in place, that is, of a holistic ordering of society according to pre-established religious principles, modern ‘contracting’ individuals must forge for themselves a synthetic sense of the whole, a contrived totality fashioned from the common pool of their separate forces or wills. This idea of a social contract, a synthetic whole made up of atomistic elements, is most famously associated with Rousseau. And, although Rousseau’s insistence on individual freedom might be taken as the antithesis of Hobbes’s emphasis on subjection, Dumont points to a number of important similarities between the two. In the first instance, both Hobbes and Rousseau posit a discontinuity between the being of nature and the political being. Both, in accordance with their time, start from what appears to be an extremely individualistic premise and end up with anti-individualistic conclusions. Both are concerned to ensure the transcendence of the sovereign over and above the subject, while at the same time stressing a kind of identity between the two: ‘In sum, both are intent on welding into a social or political body people who think of themselves as individuals’ (ibid.: 86). In Rousseau, it is the people who are thought of as sovereign, since from the individual wills of all issues forth a general will, something qualitatively different from its constituent parts, something over and beyond, disengaged from, while still possessing authority over, the individual subject. What began as a partnership or societas becomes quickly transformed into a corporation or universitas. Indeed, while some have cited Rousseau as partly inspiring the French Revolution (the extreme development of individualism), others comment on the overridingly collectivist nature of his political theory and even see in him a prefiguration of the Nazis’ Volksseele (the epitome of the general will). Given this dual register, it is not unreasonable that Dumont discerns in Rousseau an attempt to ‘reconcile modern and ancient Natural Law, to reintegrate the individual of the French philosophes in a real society’ (ibid.: 91). This emphasis on a real society signifies for Dumont ‘the clearest sociological perception’ on Rousseau’s part, the recognition of ‘the fundamental truth of sociology’, the basic sociality

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of man. It must be remembered, however, that in Rousseau this sociality should never be allowed to impinge upon the ultimate goal of human freedom and liberty within the State, and, if his role as an ideological antecedent of the French Revolution is to be granted, then it is surely in light of this resolute stress on the natural freedom of man. One should not forget either that, in Durkheim’s estimation, Rousseau’s ‘sociological perception’ was still not quite ‘clear’ enough for he failed to fully appreciate the inherently socialised condition of even pre-contractual individuals. We have arrived now at the end of our political journey. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen adopted by the French Constituent Assembly in the summer of 1789 marks, for Dumont, the apotheosis of political individualism. While the French Declaration had been preceded by similar proclamations in several of the American states and was itself a conscious borrowing from America (‘this noble idea, conceived in another hemisphere’ as an official report to the 1789 Assembly put it); in France, the Rights of Man ‘was for the first time made the basis of the Constitution of a great nation, imposed upon a reluctant monarch by popular demonstration, and proposed as an example to Europe and the world’ (ibid.: 92). There is a sense in the Declaration in which the other-worldly, natural, pre-social individual of modern natural law theories is transposed into the social world proper. An inworldly individuality is officially born – not, significantly, in the religious sense, as with Calvin, but very much in the political sense, for politics has replaced religion in shaping the global whole. The process of schizogenesis is complete. The political individual is among us. Before concluding this account of the political category, it might be worthwhile briefly considering the final section of Dumont’s essay, subtitled the ‘The Aftermath of the Revolution: Universitas Reborn’, since this corresponds nicely to the period of French history and social ideology that we discussed in chapter 1 and out of which, it was suggested, Durkheimian sociology eventually arose. Indeed, Dumont (1986c: 99) concurs with our earlier assessment in suggesting that the beginnings of sociology in France were ‘tainted with political reaction’. The Revolutionaries’ unprecedented and absolute affirmation of societas had run its course and the need for universitas began once again to powerfully reassert itself: ‘This is the general explanation for the general reversal of values, from optimism to pessimism, from rationalism to positivism, from abstract democracy to the search for ‘organization’, from the political to the economic and social levels, from atheism or vague theism to the quest for a real religion, from reason to feeling, from independence to communion’ (ibid.: 98). Of course, this search for a ‘real religion’ brings Saint-Simon and his followers to

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mind and no less so Auguste Comte. It is the same search that led Durkheim to stress the social roots of human existence and to conceive of individualism itself as the basis for a new social morality, a new religion of modernity. For Dumont, this ‘rebirth of universitas’, this reactionary or post-Revolutionary stress on the sociality of man, heralds the ‘beginnings of sociology proper, at least in the French tradition’ (ibid.: 102). 3. The Emergence of Economics Just as religion gave birth to politics, so politics gives birth to economics. In this section we shall consider another of Dumont’s Essays on Individualism entitled ‘The Emergence of the Economic Category (A Reminder)’. That this essay constitutes ‘a reminder’ relates to the fact that the economic category had previously been explored by Dumont, and at some length, in an earlier publication, From Mandeville to Marx. In point of fact, the chapter included in the Essays is really just a composite affair, reproducing several sections garnered from the first two chapters of this earlier volume. For this reason, the essay is sometimes difficult to follow, assuming too much of the reader, especially those unfamiliar with the original study, wherein many of the ideas only alluded to in the (extremely) abridged essay are spelt out in much greater detail. In the following account of the economic category, therefore, we shall draw on both these sources; the essay as a general guide and From Mandeville to Marx to flesh out the basic hypothesis. Before embarking on this economic quest, it might be worthwhile issuing a reminder of our own. In dealing with the religious evolution of the individual from an outworldly to an inworldly status, with the subsequent schizogenesis of politics from religion and, presently, with the emergence of economics from politics, it should be borne in mind that we are dealing throughout substantially with the notion of categories. This should be clear from the fact that Dumont’s essay on the Christian beginnings of individualism appears as a contribution to the Carrithers et al. (1985) volume which takes as its starting-point Mauss’s essay on the ‘category’ of the person. In fact, in his own essay, Dumont outlines a process that in many important respects parallels Mauss’s earlier attempt to map the transition from tradition to modernity, from holism to individualism, from personnages (Dumont would say non-individuals) to the category of the person (or the individual). More explicitly, in turning back the Indian mirror on to the West, Dumont aims, in his own words, to examine from a modified perspective ‘the fundamental conceptions of our modern mind’ (Dumont 1977: 14). In contradistinction to traditional thought, modern ideology hangs together around the category of the individual, ‘the best-rooted and

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most central and unanimous of modern values’ (ibid.: 107). It is the ‘individualist configuration’ that provides the basic grid through which modern consciousness is filtered. As an integral part of this configuration, modern economics, like politics, is held by Dumont to comprise ‘a separate compartment of the human mind’ (ibid.: 33), both are ‘deeply rooted in the mental constitution of modern man’ (ibid.: 26). That is to say, the political and economic domains represent ‘categories’ in the Maussian sense. In modern economic theory we are not simply dealing with a complex system of production, distribution, and consumption, with regulative laws of supply and demand. Rather, we are faced with the ‘paramount value of the modern world’, a category of thought, the economic category, which functions at the very heart of the individualist configuration. Having displaced politics, which itself had taken the individualist mantle from religion, the economic category emerges as the epitome of modern individualism. According to Dumont, the birth of this pivotal category can be traced ‘conveniently, and not too arbitrarily’ to the publication in 1776 of Adam Smith’s An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. This book represents the culmination of a longdrawn-out process whereby the economic category slowly separated itself from morality and politics to emerge as an autonomous ideological domain in its own right, based solely on the self-interested behaviour of individuals. Once again, it is the traditional/modern binary opposition that provides a methodological grounding. In traditional societies, what by modern standards would be taken as economic phenomena are deeply embedded within the contexts of kinship, religion, politics, aesthetics, etc., so that the exchange of goods and services is closely tied up with social rights and obligation, with the questions of ownership and access to land. At the opposite, modern, extreme, we find the idealised model of ‘economic man’, homo oeconomicus, the individual decision maker acting solely out of self-interest, ideally disembedded from the social group and unaffected by extra-economic or irrational constraints and considerations. Dumont (1986c: 106–107) describes the same opposition in the following, characteristically more cumbersome, terms: In most societies, and primarily in the higher civilizations, which I shall designate henceforth as the ‘traditional societies’, the relations between men are more important, more highly valued, than the relations between men and things. This primacy is reversed in the modern type of society, in which relations between men are subordinated to relations between men and things. … Closely combined with this reversal of primacy, we find in modern society a new conception of wealth. In the traditional type of society, immovable wealth (estates) is sharply distinguished from movable wealth (money, chattels) by the fact that rights in land are enmeshed in the

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social organization in such a manner that superior rights accompany power over men. Such rights or ‘wealth’, appearing essentially as a matter of relations between men, are intrinsically superior to movable wealth, which is disparaged, as is natural in such a system for a mere relation between men and things. … With the moderns, a revolution occurred in this respect: the link between immovable wealth and power over men was broken, and movable wealth became fully autonomous in itself, as the superior aspect of wealth in general, while immovable wealth became an inferior, less perfect, aspect; in short, there emerged an autonomous and relatively unified category of wealth. It should be noted that it is only at this point that a clear distinction can be drawn between what we call ‘political’ and what we call ‘economic’. This is a distinction that traditional societies do not admit.

In order that the distinction be admitted in modern society it is essential that the subject-matter of economics becomes in some way felt or seen as a separate system in its own right, ‘as constituting in some manner a whole apart from other matters’ (ibid.: 108). Accordingly, the first half of From Mandeville to Marx is devoted to describing the gradual emancipation of economics from politics and morality. Dumont discerns the beginnings of this emancipatory process in the (proto-) economic theories of Quesnay, Locke, and Mandeville, before describing its culmination in Adam Smith, where the contributions of the others crystallise into a clear economic system. The fact that we end up with an economic ‘system’ is of considerable consequence. While theologians and canonists from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century had themselves dealt with a wide array of questions bearing on what we would today call economic matters, Dumont suggests that these ‘economic’ endeavours were only loosely connected and were in no way conceived, or conceivable, in terms of an organised system. Similarly, a little later, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the so-called mercantilist writers tended to combine phenomena that we would today separate out as economic and political. In general, economic phenomena were considered from the viewpoint of the polity, the end goal of economics being the prosperity and power of the State. Under the mercantilists, wealth remained subordinate to power. There existed no clearly demarcated commercial or mercantile ‘system’. At most, Dumont (1977: 35) concedes, we might ‘speak of partial systems in the making’. If a separate economic system were to emerge, it would first have to gain emancipation from politics and at the very least this would require a sense of internal cohesion clearly lacking in canonical and mercantile thought. This inner consistency Dumont sees as having to be necessarily oriented to the good of humanity, since only then would economics be in a position to escape the censure of politics

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and morality: ‘for supposing it was shown that the inner-consistency worked for evil, then again it would have required the politician and statesman to intervene’ (ibid.: 37). A blueprint for such a system is detected in the writings of Quesnay and the Physiocrats, without whom, Dumont (ibid.: 38) suggests, there are good reasons to believe that ‘the Wealth would not have seen the light of day or would have been a very different book’. It is in Quesnay that, for the first time, the economic domain is conceived as a consistent whole made up of interrelated parts. However, as yet, this systematisation is not in itself sufficient to announce an absolute break with tradition. Quesnay’s economic system, although systematic enough, is still heavily circumscribed by a holistic view of society. Land (as opposed to movables) remains the only source of real wealth and landowners continue to wield political authority. The monarch, being first and foremost among these, possesses a right of co-ownership in all land and continues to levy taxes on the basis of this right. At the level of State, moreover, the Physiocrats tended to support a kind of legal despotism. Furthermore, at the most general level, society is portrayed by Quesnay as functioning in accordance with a developed kind of natural law, a preordained order into which all aspects of life are slotted. Thus, the traditional grounding of Quesnay’s thought is twofold: ‘the economic order, or system, depends both upon the body politic and upon a general teleological orientation bearing on all aspects of human life’ (ibid.: 43). Although at one level internally unified, and in this sense modern, Quesnay’s economic system remains embedded within a wider traditional whole: it is from within the traditional world, in accordance with its underlying theory of natural law, that Quesnay attempts to propose a kind of natural economics whereby wealth circulates around the system in a regular and harmonious fashion: On the whole, here is our paradox: the consistency of the domain is ‘explicitly formulated’ for the first time, not by someone who separates it from politics, morality, and religion, but by a man who argues from the overall consistency of the world, including human, or moral, affairs, to the conditional consistency of the particular domain. And I might add: not by starting from the individual agent and arguing in terms of cause and effect, but by starting from a teleological order including and warranting the freedom of the individual agent. No doubt Adam Smith went further than that. We shall have to see how. (Ibid.: 44, emphasis in original)

Indeed we shall. First, however, our attention is drawn to Locke and then Mandeville as early representatives of a trend of thought in which economic individualism begins to loosen its holistic fetters and

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gain supremacy at the social level. This is where economics really begins to strike out on its own and escape from politics (Locke) and morality (Mandeville) on its way to becoming a more or less autonomous domain in Smith. As to the first of these antecedents, Dumont suggests that Locke replaces in his Two Treatises of Government a traditional view of society, according to which economic phenomena are subordinate to and encompassed within the whole, by an account that is centred on property, more specifically, on individual property, and which subsequently reduces ‘politics to an ontologically marginal adjunct to be constructed by men according to their lights’ (ibid.: 49). This emphasis on property as the product of an individual’s labour and person and as the main locus of value points to a singularly modern way of thinking:

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For to base property in goods or labour is precisely to derive a title to extraneous things from what most evidently and actually belongs to the individual, his body and effort – in other words, to take advantage of the widest meaning of ‘property’ (or ‘propriety’) in order to establish the restricted meaning (property in goods), which in turn is equivalent to deriving a juridical relation between man and things, not from the necessities of the social order, but from an intrinsic property of man as an individual. (Ibid.: 52)

In the guise of possession or property, in the individual’s right to ownership, modern individualism makes another important advance upon society. And, while the idea of property in Locke cannot yet be construed in terms of a thoroughgoing, self-contained, economic system, none the less, Locke’s theorizing about individual property can be seen as representing ‘an economic category in statu nascendi, before the umbilical cord has been cut’ (ibid.: 53). What is certainly a significant development in Locke is the fact that this nascent economics is not simply juxtaposed to politics but, in terms of the whole, is shown to be ideologically superior to the political. To employ Dumont’s terminology, the traditional and holistic ‘primacy of relations between men’ has been replaced by the modern, individualistic, ‘primacy of the relations of men to things’ (i.e., property). Although in this way emancipated from politics, in order to ensure its autonomy the economic category needs also to liberate itself from morality or, more specifically, from the general or common run of morality. If it wants to stand alone economics must take on a moral character of its own. An early indication of what this economic morality might amount to, is found in Mandeville’s famous The Fable of the Bees (1714). An extended version of an earlier satirical verse, The Grumbling Hive; or Knaves Turn’d Honest (1705), the Fable recounts the story of a corrupt but prosperous hive – symbolic of human society – which harbours a nostalgic desire to return to a

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previous existence of virtue and integrity. The hive’s desire having been granted, an extraordinary transformation occurs: along with the disappearance of vice and corruption, activity and prosperity also disappear, to be replaced by sloth, poverty, and boredom. Mandeville subtitles his fable Private Vices, Publick Benefits, and it is clear from this and from the overall gist of the poem what the underlying moral is: the (innate) self-interest of human beings, if left unhampered, harmonizes in the end to the benefit of the whole. Like Hobbes, however, Mandeville still acknowledges a degree of governmental control – ‘each Member is render’d Subservient to the whole, and all of them by cunning Management are made to Act as one’ – and as a result remains tied to the traditional world. Nevertheless, the economic sphere is presented as a systematic domain wherein individual selfinterest can, with good justification and to the benefit of the whole, be given free rein. An important moral consequence of Mandeville’s claim that egoistic actions serve the public good is that traditional social morality is taken to be insufficient, or even false. The good of the whole is no longer vouchsafed through a pre-established social order but through the pursuit of individual gain, through self-interest and vice. Since the automatic mechanism harmonising individual interests functions, in the end, for the common good, economics is able to display a morality of its own while rejecting the traditional source of morals, that is to say, the sociopolitical whole. In this way, economics parcels itself off, separates itself from other social matters, and exists in terms of a unique inner morality, with an independent and mysterious logic of its own. The asocial primacy of the ‘relation between men and things’ further usurps the traditional ‘primacy of the relations between men’. As envisioned by Dumont (ibid.: 75), Mandeville’s contribution to economic individualism can be summed up as follows: [Mandeville] himself implies in his argument some equivalence between two systems, the moral and the economic, representing two views of the social system. In the social system of morality, we see the subjects or agents internalising social order under the form of moral rules, each subject defining his conduct indirectly, by reference to the society as a whole. In the economic system, on the contrary, each subject defines his conduct by reference only to his own interest, and society is no more than the mechanism – or the Invisible Hand – by which interests harmonize. It is a mechanism that is not conscious to begin with and that, once discovered, as by Mandeville, will justify the egoistic, asocial conduct of everyone. In other terms, the transition from traditional morality to utilitarian ethics (when fully accomplished) represents the expulsion of the only and last form under which, in the modern world, the social whole still constrained

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individual conduct: the individual is free, his last chains have fallen from him.

And so we arrive at Adam Smith. Here, the respective themes detected in Quesnay, Mandeville, and Locke come together in a more or less systematic fashion, the individual’s chains are loosened beyond all reasonable doubt, homo oeconomicus appropriates centre stage. In short, we arrive at the economic category proper, that ‘central compartment of the modern mind’, that category of thought founded explicitly on individualistic principles, the ‘acme of individualism’, no less (ibid.: 54). In Smith, economics has secured its separation from politics and general morality and stands alone as the most important of all social spheres. The individual has escaped the clutches of tradition: labour and exchange (i.e., individual labour and egoistic exchange) become the principal channels of value. The individual subject, the self-interested, self-loving individual, through his or her own labour and attempt at private gain, works, via the mysterious medium of an ‘Invisible Hand’ (the normative logic of the system), for the benefit of the common good, for the general wealth of the nation. This is a considerable breakthrough for the substantialist trend in Western history, ‘the tendency to stress a single agent or element as a self-sufficient entity, to the exclusion or covert subordination of others – this self-sufficient entity affording the rationale or the vital core of the domain as a whole’ (ibid.: 103). In Smith, economic interests harmonise by themselves (at least in principle, if not in practice) without any external interference; and these interests are first and foremost those of separate, egoistic, individuals. The traditional primacy of the relations between men has given way absolutely to the modern primacy of the relations between men (or rather, between each man (in the singular)) and things. Individual property and possessions, movable wealth and riches, are now the key values and ingredients of society. And, even if in the last resort these individualistic traits are recognised as harmonising for the common good, it would be fallacious to deny that a definite change in ideological emphasis has taken place: that, from a traditional (religious) view of the social whole as situating and defining the individual, we have moved to a world-view wherein the modern (economic) individual shapes and defines the social whole. Thus, concludes Dumont (ibid.: 106): The rise of economics, i.e., the shift in value from one kind of relation to the other, and the full accession of the modern Individual … – the latter prepared and made ready for this last step from long before – are solidary aspects of one and the same phenomenon. On the level of the general

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ideology, this Individual is ourselves, for I do not see any deep modification that has intervened and separated us from him. For all practical purposes we are those who have, with Locke, enthroned private property in the place of subordination, or, for that matter, have chosen to be possessing and producing individuals and have turned our backs on the social whole, because of the subordination it entails, and on our neighbour, at least insofar as he would be superior or inferior to us.

Any attempt to revert to an earlier type, to put an end to the autonomy of economics, to place the economy once again at the service of politics, and politics at the service of religion, amounts in our modern world, a world heavily saturated with the ethos of individualism, to involuntary or imposed subordination and oppression, to an anachronistic disregard of the individual-as-value characteristic of totalitarian regimes (ibid.: 107). In fact, we shall consider one such example in the following chapter’s discussion of National Socialism, which Dumont regards as a ‘disease’ of our times, the imposition of a traditional world-view, a pseudo-holism, on to a basically individualistic modern ideology.

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From Homo Hierarchicus to Homo Aequalis As a pan-Indian institution, the caste system is regarded by Dumont as, above all, a system of ideas and values – a formal, rational ordering – a system in the intellectual sense of the word: caste, in short, is ‘a state of mind’ (Dumont 1980: 34–35). In contradistinction to this traditional mind-set, this pre-modern grid of consciousness which stresses conformity to the whole and fixes irrevocably one’s position within society (dharma), modern thought valorises the ideal of the individual, the most central and unanimous of all modern values. From homo hierarchicus (or the category of the social person), we have arrived at homo oeconomicus, the category of the socially disembedded, self-interested, individual. ‘“The economic” is a major category of our thought’, announces Dumont (1997: 107), ‘and the constraints inherent in our ideology are such that we are not at liberty to decree that, from now on, it will be downgraded to the rank of a servant.’ The individual has arrived and for the foreseeable future is here to stay. So far removed from his predecessor is this economic man, and so different the respective societies to which they belong, in order to fully appreciate the other it is necessary to put aside two thousand or so years of history and to step temporarily outside the Western category of the individual and into the hierarchical category of the social person. It is for this reason that anthropologists, according to Dumont, have to experience and

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cultivate the sociological apperception: ‘sociology [of a ‘deeper’ kind] represents in the guise of a specialized discipline that awareness of the social whole which was embedded in common sense in nonindividualistic societies’ (Dumont 1986c: 102–103).

Notes 1.

2.

3.

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4.

5.

Originally published in English in Religion, 12, 1982: 1–27 (pp. 83–91 of this issue also include a number of comments on the article (Bellah et al. 1982) and Dumont’s (1982) response to them). The essay is also included in Dumont’s Essays on Individualism (1986c: 23–59) under a slightly different title, ‘The Christian Beginnings: From the Outworldly Individual to the Individual-in-the-world’. It is from the version in the Carrithers et al. volume that the citations here are drawn. Commenting on his failure to incorporate Judaism into his analysis, Dumont (1982: 90) admits, ‘it is certainly a grave shortcoming of my essay to leave out entirely Israel. I did so on purpose, because my understanding and even my knowledge is insufficient’. See particularly ‘Comparison Made Radical: The Universal Viewed Anthropologically’ (Dumont 1986c: 181–268). It will be remembered from chapter 4’s discussion of Indian renunciation that there are two broad schools of thought concerning its historical origins. One conceives of renunciation as an ‘orthogenetic’ development of life in the world, whereby through the internalisation of the Vedic fires the renouncer is regarded as epitomising the inworldly life, as encompassing in his being the final and logical outcome of Vedic theology. On the other hand, others have argued that the ideological conflict between the householder and the renouncer is too profound, too basic and fundamental, to be adequately explained in terms of an orthogenetic development between the two. In renouncing ritual and social obligations, the sanny¯asin poses a very real and significant threat to the family-oriented Vedic society. The ideal of the married householder with his social, procreative, and ritual obligations is seriously challenged by the renouncer’s ideological (and actual) transcendence of these ideals. Dumont, of course, belongs to this latter school of thought. For him, the institution of sanny¯asa, or more pointedly the individualism it extends, can only appear in opposition to the holistic ideology that characterises societies, like India, of the traditional type. One form of ideology does not simply develop or evolve into its contrary. A definite fissure is required in order for the other to emerge. Dumont borrows this vocabulary from Weldon (1946). It does not escape his notice, however, that Durkheim had employed the same terms, ‘organic’ and ‘mechanical’, to represent the opposite types of society. For Durkheim, mechanical solidarity is characteristic of traditional societies, while organic solidarity is the product of modern differentiated societies. In accounting for this difference, Dumont suggests, quite rightly, that the terms as employed by their respective authors bear on different levels of society and that, taken together, Durkheim and Weldon’s analyses are complementary: ‘The same modern society that has developed to an unprecedented degree the organic division of labour and the factual interdependence between human beings has also asserted the self-sufficiency of the particular human being on the moral and political level by wedding itself predominantly to mechanical (individualistic) theories of the State’ (Dumont 1986c: 61 n. 2, emphasis in original).

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120 6.

This account of Ockham derives from Dumont (1986c: 62–66) and Buss (2000: 13). With his modifying principle – Indian society – in mind, Dumont (1986c: 79) suggests that the dual nature of modern natural law theories, the successive emphasis, that is, on a contract of association and subjection, results from the modern mind’s inability to ‘conceive synthetically a hierarchical model of the group, and the necessity to analyze it into two elements: an element of equalitarian association, and an element by which this association subordinates itself to one person or entity’.

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7.

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Chapter 7

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ON GERMAN IDEOLOGY

In their ‘Note on the Notion of Civilization’ Durkheim and Mauss wrote as early as 1913 of the sociologist’s need to relate social phenomena to a definite substratum, a geographically determinate group, the largest of which forms the political society: the tribe, clan, nation, or state. The authors go on to acknowledge, however, that some phenomena extend far beyond national boundaries: ‘myths, tales, money, commerce, fine arts, techniques, tools, language, words, scientific knowledge, literary forms and ideas – all of these travel and are borrowed. In short, they result from a process involving more than a determinate society’ (Durkheim and Mauss 1971: 812). It is for such supranational phenomena that Durkheim and Mauss reserve the term ‘civilisation’, which they define as ‘a kind of moral milieu encompassing a certain number of nations, each national culture being only a particular form of the whole’ (ibid.: 811). Although less articulate than the national, civilisations are still locatable in space and time – the Mediterranean, North-West American and Indo-European civilisations providing prime examples. It has already been well established that, for Dumont, tradition is marked by compliance to the social whole while modernity is characterised by the ‘individualist configuration’. As for the latter: Without claiming to be exhaustive, we may take as its general features or architectonic elements the following: individualism (as opposed to holism), primacy of the relation of men to things (as against the relations between men), absolute distinction between subject and object (opposed to a merely relative, fluctuating distinction), segregation of values from facts and ideas (opposed to their indistinction or close association), distribution of knowledge into independent, homologous, and homogeneous planes or disciplines. (Dumont 1994: 7)

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As the parentheses (‘opposed to’, ‘as against’) remind us, there is always a comparative element in Dumont. It is in relation to the traditional that the modern appears consistent and unified, that one can speak of an overall individualist configuration. Within this modern configuration, however, ‘notable differences distinguish, among others, the main nations and languages. Thus the study of the national variants of modern ideology recommends itself ’ (ibid.: vii). It is in this context that Dumont’s examination of German ideology should be understood. The modern has as its leitmotif an ideological emphasis on the ‘category of the individual’. As a supranational phenomenon, a ‘civilisation’ in the Maussian sense, modernity is a whole made up of distinct, yet interrelated, parts. It means something different to be a modern Frenchman than it does to be a modern German or Englishman. Certain aspects of modernity are more predominant here than there. Each nation leaves its own characteristic mark upon the individualist configuration. For Dumont, this mark, this national predominance, best ‘comes forth when two ideologies are globally compared’ (ibid.: 199).1 The subtitle to German Ideology makes this perfectly clear: From France to Germany and Back. Implicit in Dumont’s interpretation of German culture is the recognition of what it means, ideologically, to be a Frenchman. And vice versa. The final essay in German Ideology, ‘French Political Ideology Seen in the Light of an Incipient Comparison of National Cultures’, reverses this perspective, employing an understanding of German individualism to elucidate an important aspect of French political thought. Dumont writes in a preface to German Ideology that the ‘archconcept’ in the present approach is the opposition between individualism and holism. This binary pair, he suggests, had already served him well in a number of domains ‘and it is excessive to present it as the gratuitous product of an author’s fancy’ (ibid.: viii). As we have seen, one of these previous domains, the most general of all, is that comparing the individualism of modernity with the holism of tradition. Now it would appear that the holist/individualist opposition is to provide the framework for the study of modernity itself. Has not Dumont already gone to great lengths to persuade us that modernity is unequivocally founded upon the individualist configuration and that holistic world-views are the stuff of tradition? Are they not two ‘antithetic universes of thought’, characterised by ‘mutually irreconcilable ideologies’, so that to move from one to the other requires more than a mere shift in cultural perspective – nothing less, in fact, than a ‘fundamental break’ with the past? What are we to make now then of Dumont’s suggestion that ‘individualism is unable to replace holism wholesale and rule everywhere in society, … in actual fact it was never

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able to function without an unperceived contribution of holism to its life’ (ibid.: 8)? Dumont resolves this apparent contradiction himself through recourse to the notion of ‘hierarchy’ or the bi-dimensional level of values.2 A hierarchical relationship comprises a whole or set whose defining characteristic encompasses at a superior level of reference that which, at an inferior level, is taken to be its contrary. Dumont (1986c: 119) offers, as an illustration, the biblical account of Eve’s creation from the rib of Adam. As the first created, an undifferentiated human being, Adam stands for the prototype of ‘Mankind’. With the creation of Eve, however, this initial homogeneous state is upset; Adam becomes a male as distinct from Eve, female – the prototypes of the two sexes. Adam, then, is two things at once: the representative of the species (Man) and the prototype of the male members of that species (man). ‘On one level, man and woman are identical; on a second level woman is the opposite or contrary of man’ (ibid.). One of the poles at the lower level of opposition (man : woman) is taken at a more encompassing level to be coterminous with the whole (man = Mankind). Reversals can only take place at the lower level of ideology, where the two poles coexist, as for example ‘when the mother comes to dominate in fact the family in which she is in principle subordinate to her husband’ (ibid.: 253). Accordingly, although individualism defines the modern whole, encompassing its ideological contrary at the more fundamental level, at another, subordinate level, individualist and holist elements coexist. The same rule is applied, but in reverse, in Homo Hierarchicus. On one level, within a given caste, for instance, there may exist a degree of equality and individual autonomy, but the traditional caste system itself is basically oriented towards the whole and not the individual; it is holism that encompasses its contrary at the superior ideological level and gives the totality shape and meaning: That our system of values determines our entire mental landscape can be readily realised from the simplest possible example. Let us suppose that our society and the society under study both show in their system of ideas the same two elements A and B. That one society should subordinate A to B and the other B to A is enough for considerable differences to occur in all their conceptions. In other words, the hierarchy present in a culture is essential for comparison. (Ibid.: 7)

By introducing this idea of hierarchical opposition, of bi-dimensional levels, we are now in a better position to understand how the opposition between holism and individualism may be employed as a methodological apparatus through which to consider modernity. It is at the superior ideological level that the modern and non-modern are

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irreconcilable, that individualism and holism are mutually exclusive ideals. To move at this level from one to the other requires an ‘ideological revolution’, a fundamental shift in values, a monumental rupture as captured in the figure of the sanny¯asin or in the primitive Christian community. For Dumont, a society is in essence either traditional or modern, holistic or individualistic, it does not oscillate randomly between the two. A and B do not coexist as ideological contraries at this global level. They may, however, intermingle at a lower level of analysis. And it is here that holism contributes to the functioning of individualism, that reversals to the dominant ideology may be discerned, that both poles of the binary opposition come into play, that throughout its history the individualist configuration may be viewed as having been ‘combined with more or less contrary notions, values or institutions’ (Dumont 1994: 15).

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German Ideology: Some Preliminary Observations Of the eight essays that constitute German Ideology, five might be taken as representing its core. While Part I offers a general introduction and Part IV heralds the ‘return to France’, the essays in Parts II and III deal explicitly with the German contribution to modern ideology. It is with this middle section of essays that the present chapter is concerned. Its aims are threefold: first, to trace throughout these essays Dumont’s debt to structuralism, the use he makes of diachronic structures, the binary opposition he upholds between holism and individualism, and the role of his other favoured methodological tool, the idea of hierarchy, as a means of mediating this basic opposition; secondly, to consider the nature of Germany’s contribution to modern ideology as conceived by Dumont; and, having in chapter 2 taken Durkheim’s theories of society to be ‘characteristically French’, thirdly, to situate the origins of Weberian sociology within the German intellectual climate of the day. According to Dumont, the German contribution to modern ideology is firmly grounded in the ‘extraordinary blossoming of German thought’ between 1770 and 1830. This period witnessed in full measure Germany’s response to the ideals of the Enlightenment and to the Revolution in France. A common theme uniting the five core essays in German Ideology is the idea of Bildung or self-cultivation, and it is this ideal above all else that characterises for Dumont Germany’s contribution to modern individualism and distinguishes this most sharply from its French counterpart. Each of the more or less self-contained essays deals with a specific manifestation of Bildung as evident in the writings or person of five influential members of the German intelli-

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gentsia, Ernst Troeltsch, Thomas Mann, Karl Philipp Moritz, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Chronological order is rejected in favour of what Dumont calls a ‘heuristic’ approach. Given his interest in global frameworks, he considers it more profitable in the first instance to contemplate Bildung in a mature state, as ‘selfevident’ or ‘lived’, before considering its origins in light of what it subsequently became. Thus, in Part II, ‘Bildung around 1914’, the mature ideal is located in the works of Troeltsch and Mann. It is only then in Part III, ‘The Dawn of Bildung’, that Dumont considers the ideal as defined and elaborated in the thought and life of Moritz, Humboldt, and Goethe. The following assessment of German Ideology will proceed along more conventional, chronological lines, situating the origins of Bildung within German culture before considering its subsequent growth and development. Given that a major theme throughout this book has been to highlight Dumont’s relatively quantitative, rational, generalistic view of mankind, a view inherited from Durkheim and Mauss (and the French intellectual tradition more generally), it is surely worthy of note that here, in the figures of Humboldt, Mann, Goethe, Troeltsch, and Moritz, the subjective individual seems to have appropriated centre stage. As will become increasingly clear, however, these famous ‘individuals’ are very much taken as representative of the whole. According to Dumont, the Bildung ideal characterises ‘the entirety of German culture’ (Dumont 1994: 39). Elsewhere, he writes that ‘on the German side, we shall take the ideology at the level of the great authors, but I see no reason to suppose disagreement on this point between them and the common people’ (Dumont 1986c: 131). To say that the ideal of Bildung in some way represents a global ideology as evident in the works and ideas of the great German authors, an ideal shared and elaborated among the nation’s leading thinkers and cultural élite is one thing; but to extend this to the whole of German society is another, and probably requires much more than the optimistic ‘I see no reason to suppose disagreement’ that Dumont offers here. Throughout the course of German Ideology Dumont does, in all fairness, acknowledge the importance of distinguishing between levels of thought, ‘between a global or primary level of the ideology and other representations, which are less important, less closely bound to the deep identity of the subject’ (Dumont 1994: 201). However, here, as always, the ‘deep identity’ of the individual is conceived as closely bound to the global or primary ideological level. As we have seen, in Homo Hierarchicus the same principle was expressed in the equation o = i + r, where observable reality equates to the global ideology plus a residual element (see chapter 1). In both instances, the Indian and the Western, the primary level of ideology is vital, providing for the basic

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‘identity of the subject’ and relegating other features to an inferior, ‘less important’, ‘residual’ level of thought. Dumont has admitted that his approach lies quite outside the Weberian paradigm and, again, we witness the truth in this. While, for Weber, an individual’s identity is consciously determined from within, for Dumont, one’s identity is imposed, often unconsciously, from without. This basic theoretical difference will be returned to at the end of this chapter when Weber’s theory of personality is discussed in light of the prevailing intellectual climate of his day. This is a climate that Dumont himself highlights in German Ideology, although he has never, as far as I am aware, attributed Weber’s own sociological perspective to it. An inclination towards inwardness and self-development has a long and distinguished history in German thought. A line could be traced back to at least the twelfth century, when a highly individualised form of religion began to emerge, bypassing dogma and church institution, in the individual’s attempt to attain direct access to God. Rejecting rational scholasticism and replacing it with an emotional, irrational, unio mystica, this lay movement was to flourish in the convents of the thirteenth century, reaching a high point with Johannes Tauler (c. 1300–1361) and Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1327). This emphasis on a strongly personal and emotional religiosity was to have a profound effect on Luther, whose debt to Tauler is widely acknowledged (Hahn 1995: 28). Indeed, it is with Luther that Dumont himself picks up the thread: It is impossible not to see a descendant of Luther in the Bildung intellectual. Not necessarily a follower – he may even be an atheist – but a descendant. … As against the Catholic Church of his day, and the scholastics whose thought nurtured his own, Luther appears as someone who has gone back to origins and defines himself, in the manner of the early Christians, as an outworldly individual – or almost so. He reintroduced a gap – we might say a chasm – between the Christian’s relation to God on the one hand, and to the world of social reality and of relationships between men on the other. Faith, and grace, that is, the relationship with God, are of the essence. (Dumont 1994: 45)

Hahn has noted the genuinely revolutionary character of Luther’s ‘Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation’ (1520) and goes so far as to compare Luther’s demands therein to those of the leaders of the French Revolution of 1789 (Hahn 1995: 36). Just as the Revolutionaries fought under the banner of liberty and equality, so, too, Luther sought to liberate Germany from any interference by Rome and to demonstrate the equality of all men before God. In no way, though, did Luther share the Revolutionaries’ desire for political and social reform. Luther’s was a spiritual reformation, as evident in his

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response to the Peasant’s War of 1524–25 (‘Against the Murdering, Thieving Hordes of the Peasants’ (1525)), which, according to Hahn (1995: 37), advocates their ‘severest punishment and exonerated the authorities from any blame in the vicious suppression of the uprising. Freedom, according to Luther, was a matter for the soul alone, no other aspect being worthy of its defence’. Dumont suggests that the apolitical character of the Lutheran Reformation ‘immunized’ Germany against the subsequent repercussions of the French Revolution. What in France was conducted on the sociopolitical stage was pre-empted in Germany in the mind (Dumont 1994: 20).

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Here it is worthwhile to contrast the German and the Western – or, let us say, French – formulas of liberty: on the one side is a spiritual liberty going back to Luther, which leaves the political community intact; on the other side, another liberty, which, though also of religious origin, through the Enlightenment and the Revolution extends into the political realm to the point of appearing to be centred on it, and transforms it into a political society. (Ibid.: 48–49, emphasis in original)

In choosing the Reformation over the Revolution, the German intelligentsia had tended to ‘internalise the debate’, to prevent individualism from ‘directly expressing itself on the political level’ (ibid.: 97). To all intents and purposes, the German polity remained unchanged. In time, via pietism and then Bildung, this Lutheran disposition towards inwardness came to completely infiltrate German culture and, according to Dumont, was as important in Germany throughout the second half of the eighteenth century as the Declaration of the Rights of Man was in France.

The Dawn of Bildung 1. Karl Philipp Moritz The first of Dumont’s essays to be considered in this chapter, ‘From Pietism to Aesthetics: Totality and Hierarchy in the Aesthetics of Karl Philipp Moritz’, not only highlights the importance of pietism to the period under investigation, but serves in its emphasis on ‘totality’ and ‘hierarchy’ to remind us of Dumont’s methodological bias. Of Moritz, we are told that ‘to his credit, for the notion is not as clear in modern culture as one might wish’, he was genuinely concerned with the definition and the implications of the notion of whole (ibid.: 70). The whole in question relates to the work of art, conceived as perfect, complete, accomplished-in-itself. In order that this completion might be attained, the artist or person experiencing the work must subordinate

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themselves to it, they must allow their emotions to be temporarily taken over by the work and, in so doing, sacrifice a limited existence to a much higher one. It is here, in the subordination of man to the work of art, that Dumont holds the notion of hierarchy to be relevant. The supreme value is invested in the ‘beautiful’ and not in the ‘intransitive being of man’ (ibid.: 74).3 The individual belongs to a lower level and is encompassed at a higher one, since ‘the superior realises the inferior by destroying it’ (ibid.: 75). Individuals must renounce their individuality, even the pleasure or delight experienced when creating or perceiving a work of art, in order to be encompassed by the work, to be enveloped in its beauty and move, thereby, from a level of limited reality – that of the individual specimen – to a higher level – that of the species as a whole.4 Dumont suggests that Moritz utilises the notion of hierarchy to allow for the self-realization of man on earth. In introducing a quasimystical stress on levels, the work of art is absolutised as a totality and the individual subordinated to it. To fully realise themselves, individuals must sacrifice their individuality to the whole. Having himself arrived through study and reflection at such an appreciation of the ‘whole’, Moritz resolves ‘never in the individual to lose sight of [it]’. Instead of facing God alone, as the pietist was compelled to do, Dumont (ibid.: 77) suggests that now Moritz ‘is a member of the human community again’: he is no longer an isolated individual (i.e., as a result of the prevailing individualism), but recognises himself as part of a greater whole (the necessary contribution of holism). Dumont points to a general parallel between Moritz’s personal development (from the pietism of his youth to the aesthetics of later life) and the transformation of German ideology throughout the eighteenth century.5 At both levels there exists a gradual secularisation. Just as God is replaced by ‘the beautiful’ in Moritz’s aesthetics, so, too, a religious concern with internal development and self-perfection is, following the Enlightenment, given a secular slant in the ideology of Bildung. 2. Wilhelm von Humboldt While the stress on subjectivity in pietism was often tempered by the demand to destroy or transcend the self, in Bildung, cultivation of the self remains an end in itself. This subjective emphasis is evident in the tendency to translate Bildung as self-education, self-formation, or selfcultivation. Since, however, Dumont takes Bildung to be constitutive of an entire culture, he hesitates in accepting any catch-all definition of the concept, preferring instead to conceive of it as a lived ‘institution’, as embodying innumerable connotations (ibid.: 85). Again, Dumont acknowledges his debt in this regard to Mauss, who, along with Fau-

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connet, had suggested in his 1901 definition of sociology that the word ‘institution’ should not be reserved for political or juridical organisations alone, for ‘what is an institution if not a set of actions and ideas, already in place, that individuals encounter, and that more or less imposes itself on them?’ (cited in ibid.). Bildung, then, for Dumont, is essentially a ‘global institution’, a comprehensive set of values and ideas that shapes and signifies German culture in the broadest and most general of senses. Dumont’s essay on Humboldt is aptly titled ‘Bildung Alive’, for posterity has singled out this figure above anyone else as having embodied the Bildung ideal. Three phases of Humboldt’s life are identified by Dumont: ‘his youth’, the ‘conversion to anthropology’, and the later ‘conversion to linguistics’.6 The concept of Bildung emerges early in Humboldt’s youth. The totality to which Moritz subordinated the individual in the work of art takes on a further degree of immanence in Humboldt: totality is now located in the subject’s existence; life itself becomes a work of art to be moulded and fashioned into an accomplished whole. From the diversity of external influences an internal unity must be forged. Integral to this understanding is Humboldt’s love of Greek classics. In fact, his model of Bildung is fashioned on that of the Greek paideia: ‘To make oneself; to produce from the child that one has been at first, from the imperfectly formed creature one may so easily remain, the man who is fully a man’.7 This cultural borrowing does not go unnoticed by Dumont and its significance is interpreted in a characteristic way. Borrowing between cultures never simply emerges from a chance encounter. It entails, rather, an inner predisposition, the borrowed trait corresponding to an internal need. What is it, then, that impelled eighteenth-century German intellectuals to perceive the individual, following the model of ancient Greece, as embryonic or amorphous, as something to be created or transformed, cultivated or developed in keeping with the Bildung ideal? In addressing this question Dumont (1994: 92) has recourse to the usual methodological apparatus: In the perspective adopted here, the reason is found in the relationship between the holistic foundations of German culture and the individualism of the Enlightenment. The individual of the Enlightenment is obviously present in Germany, as elsewhere, but to some … he appears abstract and lifeless. He therefore has to be transformed, which is possible only by enriching him with everything that was until then posited in the holistic mode, namely, organism, totality, and perfection.

The notion of ‘totality’ is assumed in Bildung as an ultimate end: to create out of the diversity of experience the unity of being; to

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move from ‘unilaterality’ to ‘originality’, from ‘singleness’ to ‘uniqueness’. Dumont sees the individual in Germany as enriched and transformed by everything usually reserved for the whole. At the superior ideological level, individualism has encompassed its holistic opposite, the whole is recognised in its part. In investing the individual with characteristics belonging to the whole, Bildung posits itself as a counterpoint to the abstract individualism of the Western Enlightenment. More particularly, it represents Germany’s answer to the Revolution in France. ‘In this system of representations’, Dumont explains, ‘social or cultural totality and the totality of the person communicate with and echo each other’ (ibid.: 103). The tension witnessed in nineteenth-century France between the social and the individual, the fear of social disintegration, the threat of anomie, the rejection of individualism as the ‘evil which plagues France’, is bypassed early on in German ideology through an organic union of the two. Since the Bildung ideal combines the particular and the total, since it renders the individual coterminous with society, there appears to have been very little difficulty in Humboldt’s appropriation of anthropology – the second of the life stages traced by Dumont – as a discipline through which he might exploit his particular talent of ‘detecting relationships between things usually seen as distinct, in assembling various aspects, in discovering unity in a multiplicity of phenomena’ (cited in ibid.: 110). As this statement suggests, anthropology is here conceived by Humboldt as an objective application of what had hitherto in the form of Bildung been a subjective preoccupation. It is for this reason that Dumont regards Humboldt’s anthropological endeavours as bound to fail. In searching for the ‘internal form’ of a culture based on the model of individual psychology, on the life-force of the Bildung ideal, Dumont suggests that Humboldt makes a similar mistake to that made by American anthropologists: ‘Americans are deeply individualistic. For them society cannot be grasped directly and globally, as Durkheim had attempted to do in France. Society is definitely an aggregate of individuals’ (ibid.: 142, emphasis in original). In short, Humboldt’s anthropology, like ‘American anthropology’, is based on a form of methodological individualism that fails to sufficiently grasp the importance of the social. In the last of Humboldt’s intellectual developments, the ‘conversion’ from anthropology to linguistics, Dumont suggests that a ‘ray of common sense’ penetrates the arrogant cloud of a hitherto individualistic ideology. While sojourning in the Basque region, Humboldt had noticed that the collective identity of the people there was inseparable from an original language:

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Language here allowed – or seemed to allow – unmediated access to the collective character; the individual character of each Basque receded to the background to the point of being neglected. I believe that this is the essential point: language emancipated the researcher from his compulsory reference to the human individual and embodied the promise of an unmediated grasp of the society itself. It substituted a holistic perspective for the individualistic perspective imposed until then by the contemporary civilization, and deeply internalized in Bildung. (Ibid.: 141)

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Is not this new-found appreciation of language, Dumont asks, ‘setting man’s dignity in its proper place?’ (ibid.: 140). And where, it should be stressed, is this proper place? At the point where the ‘individual recedes into the background’, where society comes to the fore. Humboldt has arrived at a kind of methodological holism in close keeping with Dumont’s own sociological approach. In fact, Dumont suggests that despite the ever-present individualism of Bildung, throughout the three phases of Humboldt’s career the notion of social totality is never forgotten – being either implicit in the ideal of Bildung, problematic in anthropology, or present as a given in the totality of language. Once again, individualism and holism are, as a package, ‘constantly present, under various combined forms’ (ibid.: 144). 3. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe As an institution, as constitutive of an entire culture, Bildung fashioned its own form of literature – the Bildungsroman or novel of self-cultivation. And, if posterity has singled out Humboldt as the quintessential figure of Bildung, then in terms of literature this accolade belongs undoubtedly to Goethe’s The Years of Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister, the quintessential Bildungsroman. Dumont’s essay on Goethe is particularly impressive. The close reading he pays not only to the Apprenticeship, but to its prequel (a primitive form of the novel entitled Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Mission) and its sequel (Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, written some thirty years after the Apprenticeship), the transformations he detects and accounts for between the three, and the perspective he brings to his analysis by viewing the works in light of both German and French culture, render the essay a competent piece of literary criticism in its own right, beyond any contribution it might make to anthropology. The first part of the essay concerns Goethe’s famed friendship with Schiller and need not really detain us here, other than to note the significance that Dumont attributes to this friendship. Close to half the essay is taken up in recording the origins and dynamics of the intense relationship between the two influential poets. Goethe is shown to conceive of their friendship as ‘unique in the world’ and confesses that

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without Schiller’s help he would not have been able to complete the Apprenticeship in the manner in which he had. Schiller, for his part, recognises the other’s influence in shaping his ability to surpass himself, ‘to move back so far and in all directions’ the boundaries of his nature. Without wishing to slight the emotional importance of the friendship, Dumont picks up on its intellectual aspect, on the joint commitment to a ‘community of work’. Friendship modified something in the poets’ personalities, it allowed them to transcend themselves, to attain otherwise improbable heights. Dumont even suggests that, if Goethe is the undisputed author of the Apprenticeship, then there exists a secondary author, a kind of subauthor: namely, the pair of friends taken together. Such intense friendships show how insufficient the usual biographical approach is: ‘individualism permeates our culture and leads us to focus our attention on each of the great creators taken individually’ (ibid.: 147). Not enough, claims Dumont, has been done to fully explore the communications, not only between Goethe and Schiller, but also in other close friendships among the German intellectual milieu, Hölderlin, Hegel and Schelling, for example, or Schleiermacher and Schlegel. In focusing on each of these great thinkers independently, one loses sight of the often immense part that others played in their intellectual development.8 This emphasis on a ‘community of work’ that Dumont is quick to highlight in Germany, and of which he clearly approves, is, of course, present a little closer to home, in his own scholarly heritage. One need only read Mauss’s ‘Intellectual Self-Portrait’ to recognise the truth in this. In this personal statement written, it is thought, as part of his candidature for the Collège de France in 1930, Mauss claims that throughout his career collaboration with others had taken up the greater part of his time. He and Durkheim, for instance, had collaborated in almost everything they did: Durkheim ‘even rewrote entire pages of my work’ (Mauss 1998: 31). So close was his intellectual association with Hubert that Mauss considers him his ‘professional twin’. Upon their untimely deaths, Mauss took upon himself the ‘enormous task’ of publishing the mass of unpublished work left behind by Durkheim, Hubert, and Hertz. In fact, he even planned to incorporate their work into his own lectures, so that his teaching ‘would be not only mine, but theirs as well’. In short, collaboration, a true community of work, was essential to the Durkheimian School. Of this communal effort, Mauss most tellingly writes: This sort of workshop requires a considerable degree of self-sacrifice. A laboratory is no good without a leader, but it also requires high-quality members, that is, friends young and old, with hypotheses to work on, lots of ideas, and wide knowledge, but above all, it requires people who are ready

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to contribute all of these to a common fund, to join in the work of the longer-standing members and to help launch the work of the newcomers, just as everyone joins in their work. We formed such a team. It is alive and even reviving. Neither Durkheim nor myself were sparing with our efforts or our ideas. His work would have been impossible had we not devoted ourselves to it without any feeling of self-sacrifice. (Ibid.: 30–31)

One senses that Dumont regrets bitterly the demise of such a communal spirit within the anthropology of his day. He writes pejoratively in one of his Essays of transitory fashions, probably ‘American’ in origin, which ‘challenge the sense of community by rapidly succeeding each other in an ideological and institutional climate of competition which favours overbidding’ (Dumont 1986c: 203). The sense of common purpose is threatened by an individualism that has even pervaded the social sciences. Employing Kuhnian terminology, Dumont writes of an atmosphere in which paradigmatic revolutions are the norm, where little room is left for the calmer periods of puzzle-solving when everyone agrees and works within a common theoretical frame. In a disciplinary climate where each anthropologist seems set on rewriting the anthropological genre, it is unsurprising that Dumont should stress the value of a community of work, of communal effort, of shared aims and endeavours, be it in eighteenth-century Germany or twentieth-century France. The scientific status that Durkheim and the Année group had fought so hard to secure for sociology had presupposed the existence of such a community. ‘Every science’, writes Mauss (1998: 30), ‘is the product of collective work. Made by individuals who partake together in the real world, the science emerges from the facts and ideas brought by these individuals to a single market place. This is just what happened in our effort to create sociology.’ The conscience collective that Durkheim and his colleagues sought to uncover in society was paralleled in the communal spirit and the division of labour within their own academic group. For Dumont, individualism had taken root at both these levels, the social and the social scientific, and he endeavours to challenge it on both fronts: against methodological individualism, methodological holism is upheld; and the individualism of modernity is shown to be unable ‘to function without an unperceived contribution of holism to its life’. But let us return to Goethe. Characteristically, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship is interpreted by Dumont through the binary opposition between holism and individualism (or a variation on it, objectivity : subjectivity; totality : fragment). In the novel, Wilhelm leaves his family home, his father’s plans for him in business, in order to develop himself, to cultivate his own true nature. The harmonious development of his whole personality had been denied him by the specialisation

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required of his bourgeois birth. Only the theatre will allow Wilhelm the freedom granted by right to a nobleman, the freedom ‘to put forward his full radiance just as in the upper classes of society’. It is towards totality, towards wholeness that Wilhelm strives. In due course, however, the young hero discovers, through bitter experience and personal insight granted him by mysterious emissaries of the Society of the Tower (who appear from time to time throughout the Apprenticeship to stir doubt in Wilhelm’s mind concerning his artistic calling), that he lacks any real talent for the stage. By the end of the novel, Wilhelm rejects the theatre altogether, and after further prompting from its representatives, joins the mysterious Society of the Tower himself. Although the social and political aims of the Society are left rather vague, one thing is for sure: the Society is based on a communal spirit and operates with a clear division of labour. Jarno, one of the Society’s emissaries, assures Wilhelm that there is profit for him in knowing how to lose himself in a larger mass, ‘in learning to live for others and in forgetting himself in an activity accomplished as a duty’. Dumont is quick to pick up on the significance of this: ‘Wilhelm, who was running away from society into the theatre, now reintegrates [into] society proper’ (Dumont 1994: 172). Unable to become a whole himself, Wilhelm does the next best thing: he fastens himself to a collective whole, ‘as a limb to its service’. According to Dumont, German and French readers of Wilhelm Meister are likely to view the novel differently, locating it on either side of the opposition between individualism and holism. The French reader will undoubtedly be struck by the stress placed in the novel on inserting the hero into a social group.9 At the heart of the Apprenticeship, one encounters a curvature that brings Wilhelm back to society. Having failed to constitute a whole in himself, Wilhelm aggregates to a collective whole. For the German reader, on the other hand, the social aspect of Wilhelm Meister is secondary, an obligatory accompaniment, ‘which he will be surprised to see others insist on’. German readers see essentially in the novel a ‘problematic of the realization and development of individuality’ (ibid.: 184–85). That is to say, they view the novel as a Bildungsroman, in fact, as the Bildungsroman. Wilhelm has replaced a false relationship to the world with a more real and appropriate one. He has realised his artistic limitations and has continued to develop along more realistic lines – in closer keeping with his ability and potential – by immersing himself in a collective whole. Wilhelm’s incorporation into the Society of the Tower ‘represents the Bildung that he has acquired when the work ends’. Interpreting the novel in terms of his favoured opposition, Dumont claims that not only does ‘individualism receives a curvature, which sends it back to the community’ (ibid.: 186), but an underlying con-

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cern with the social whole is indeed present right throughout the novel, its appearance at any given time being ‘new only in form’ (ibid.: 190). Individualism and holism are constant structural features. Wilhelm continually interacts with his environment and his own singularity is fed through this interaction. In this way, Bildung, the individualism of uniqueness, does not stand opposed to the totality, to holism: the social whole is conceived as an extension, a necessary milieu, for the development of the individual. Here we have in a nutshell the basic theme around which Dumont’s comparison of French and German ideology revolves: while in Germany there exists an organic community, in France one encounters an aggregate society.

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Bildung Around 1914 1. Ernst Troeltsch This sense of an organic community comes across very strongly in a 1916 paper written by Ernst Troeltsch which attempts to define the German idea of liberty in specific contrast to the notion of liberty prevalent in England and France. Published during the First World War, Troeltsch’s article aims to counter enemy propaganda holding liberty or freedom to be the monopoly of Western democracies, by showing that Germany has its own kind of liberty, governed by ‘German history and the German spirit’. This specifically German idea of liberty Troeltsch calls ‘organic liberty’. Here, as in Goethe and Humboldt, individuals do not stand apart from the whole, but identify with it. Liberty arises from a willed devotion to the whole, through ‘discipline, advancement and development of one’s self in a whole and for a whole’. It might be supposed that in working ‘in and for the whole’ individual liberty would, if anything, be diminished. Troeltsch makes it perfectly clear, however, that this is not the case in Germany. Subjects subordinate themselves spontaneously to the whole and do not feel alienated in doing so, for devotion to the whole is counterbalanced by the independence and individuality of Bildung. In fact, Troeltsch insists that both these elements, devotion to the state and cultivation of the self, are necessary ingredients of the German idea of liberty. To separate them, to overemphasise one at the expense of the other, would be a fatal mistake, resulting in an uncritical enslavement to the state, on the one hand, or in a sort of ‘ethereal individuality’, on the other. Dumont points out that this free devotion to the social whole is exactly what Toennies called ‘spontaneous will’ (Naturwille), the characteristic trait of the community or Gemeinschaft, as opposed to the ‘arbitrary will’ (Kurwille) of the individual subject in society (Gesellschaft). It is at this level of Gemeinschaft, of cultural belonging,

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that the individualism of Bildung belongs. In contrast, the individualism of France, of the Revolution, of the Rights of Man, is located at the sociopolitical level, the level of Gesellschaft; one adheres to the group as an equal citizen – society represents division, the struggle of particular interests. The Revolution had dissolved the existing community and had rendered the cultural ‘whole’ ontologically redundant in France. Although society exists empirically, it is ideologically denied – the individual is sovereign. Utilising another of his core methodological tools, the idea of hierarchy, Dumont (1994: 50) suggests that in both cases ‘the level on which the individual is emancipated subordinates the others’ (emphasis in original). In Germany, this relates to the spiritual level, to the culture of the Reformation, to pietism and Bildung. The individual is emancipated in a religious sense, at the level of inner existence, and social and political concerns are subordinate to this level. In France, individual liberty is largely a sociopolitical matter and here it is the interior life which takes second place. Dumont suggests that there is nothing particularly striking in the case of Germany since here the ‘absolute continues to subordinate the rest’. The Revolution, however, reversed this perspective – ‘a fact of huge significance, and yet one that goes more or less unperceived’ – for in France the traditional level of the absolute, namely religion, has itself become subordinated (ibid.). 2. Thomas Mann Like Troeltsch, Thomas Mann also wrote, in his Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, of a German form of individualism, internal in nature, which left largely unaffected the individual’s membership within a national community. The Reflections, too, were written during the 1914–18 war. Summarising their content in a 1923 lecture, Mann claims that: The finest characteristic of the typical German, the best-known and also the most flattering to his self-esteem, is his inwardness. It is no accident that it was the Germans who gave to the world the intellectually stimulating and very humane literary form, which we call the novel of personal cultivation and development. … The inwardness, the culture of a German implies introspectiveness; an individualistic cultural conscience; consideration for the careful tending, the shaping, deepening and perfecting of one’s own personality or, in religious terms, for the salvation and justification of one’s own life; subjectivism in the things of the mind, therefore, a type of culture that might be called pietistic, given to autobiographical confession and deeply personal, one in which the world of the objective, the political world, is felt to be profane and is thrust aside with indifference, ‘because’, as Luther says, ‘this external order is of no consequence’. What I mean by all this is that the idea of a republic meets with resistance in Germany chiefly because the ordinary middle-class man here, if he ever

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thought about culture, never considered politics to be part of it, and still does not do so today. To ask him to transfer his allegiance from inwardness to the objective, to politics, to what the peoples of Europe call freedom, would seem to him to amount to a demand that he should do violence to his own nature, and in fact give up his sense of national identity. (cited in Dumont 1994: 53–54, emphasis in original)

This passage sums up perfectly the German tradition of inwardness and self-cultivation that we have been discussing throughout this chapter: its origins in Luther and pietism, its ‘individualistic cultural conscience’, its unique literary form, its indifference to objective reality, to politics, to the democratic ‘freedom’ of Western Europe. Mann believes that it is more important to Germans to bind themselves in ‘proud obedience’ to the state than it is to seek out the supposed freedom of democracy – service and human dignity are not incompatible virtues. The fact that Mann ended his life as a committed democrat, that in later years his view of politics underwent what appears to be a complete reversal,10 should not prevent us from appreciating the sincerity of his war reflections or from recognising the importance of the German ideal of inwardness contained in them. In addressing this ideal, Mann frequently appealed to the great tradition of German humanism, to Goethe and his contemporaries, to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The main focus throughout is the notion of Bildung, a specifically German idea, elevated most noticeably by Goethe, which, in contrast to the French way, the way of politics, encourages a quietist attitude. ‘The profoundly unpolitical, anti-radical and anti-revolutionary nature of the Germans’, claims Mann, ‘hangs together with the primacy which they have given to the idea of Bildung’ (cited in Bruford 1975: 232). With their country at war, some Germans, including Mann’s elder brother, Heinrich, began to appeal to a universalism that the younger Mann considered to be incorrigibly Western. While Thomas continued to fervently uphold the ideal of German Kultur, of spiritual individualism and willed submission to the whole, these others – ‘Civilization’s literary men’ – were taken to have betrayed Germany in appealing to a cosmopolitan humanitarianism, to ‘civilisation’, ‘democracy’, ‘politics’, and ‘internationalism’. As Dumont (1994: 58) characteristically interprets it, ‘the opposition here is between community and society, or holism and individualism’. The brothers Mann symbolised, personified, either side of this opposition. Thus, Thomas grudgingly concedes, ‘there is no German solidarity and final unity’. In fact, this disquieting tension, this inherent discordance between Kultur and cosmopolitanism, was present to some extent in the person of Thomas Mann himself, relating to what he calls the ‘abyss’ of Germanness. Thus,

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having arraigned cosmopolitanism, Mann confesses in a chapter of his Reflections on ‘Soul-Searching’, that, ‘Oh well, yes, I share it.’ Did he not himself incline toward a less than German literary genre, the social novel? For this reason, Dumont believes it was not so much the presence of a cosmopolitan component in Heinrich that troubled Thomas Mann – since this was perhaps inevitable – but rather the fact that in his brother this universalism was given precedence over elements generally accepted as autochthonously German. In short, the problem revolved around what was specific to German culture and what was borrowed from the surrounding civilisation in which it participated. Of this cultural admixture, Dumont (1994: 64–65) writes, ‘one could say as much of every other subculture of European culture: this is just one particular case of a sociological law which is easy to grasp and verify’. Dumont’s essay on Mann focuses mainly on his ‘nonpolitical reflections’ and says little of the German writer’s later conversion to politics. This is unfortunate, for one could wish for no better example of cultural admixture, of the interaction between German and Western ideology, than that presented in Thomas Mann’s subsequent acceptance of politics and democracy. The many speeches and essays that contain Mann’s widespread, as it were, ‘political reflections’ have been analysed by W.H. Bruford and are discussed in a chapter dedicated to Mann in his classic study, The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: ‘Bildung’ from Humboldt to Thomas Mann (1975). To return to the same speech quoted from above, written some five or six years after the end of the First World War, Mann, having espoused the virtues of Bildung, proceeds to explain what the new postwar form of government, the Weimar Republic, could mean for a troubled Germany. He senses a failure on the part of educated Germans to embrace the ideal of a Republic and traces this to a deeply rooted sense of ‘inwardness’ and a related aversion to politics. Those who held on to a traditional idea of culture could only perceive the democratic republic as foreign to their country’s true nature. Mann stresses, however, quite forcefully, that the Bildung ideal – admirable as it is – is incomplete while it continues to neglect the political dimension. Given the current international climate, Mann argues that the way forward for Germany, the fulfilment of German Menschlichkeit, can only emerge through a unity of ‘state and culture’. What is required most immediately is a feel for the objective, for politics and ‘freedom’. Throughout his political writings in support of the Republic, Mann frequently reiterates this need for a unity between state and culture. He even unfavourably compares Germany’s religious subjectivity with the political objectivity of its Western neighbours. If the passage

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quoted above captured perfectly the ideology of Bildung, then the following one captures equally well the result of Mann’s conversion to politics:

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As a man of this kind I feel how deeply dishonest and life-repressing it is to look down scornfully on the political and social sphere and to consider it of secondary importance compared with the world of the inward, metaphysics, religion and so forth. This way of comparing the respective values of the inward, personal world and the life of society, contrasting metaphysics and socialism, for instance, and representing the latter as lacking in piety and sanctity, as a merely materialistic desire for happiness in a termite society, is not admissible to-day. It is not admissible, in a world as antidivine and bereft of reason as ours, to represent man’s metaphysical, inward and religious activities as inherently superior to his will to improve the world. The political and social is one aspect of the humane. The interest and passion for humanity, self-dedication to the problem of man, sympathy with his lot, this interest and this passion are concerned with both aspects, that of the personal and inward and also that of the external arrangement of human life in society. (cited in Bruford 1975: 254)

Hitherto the German emphasis had been on the ‘personal and inward’. One can assume that from such a viewpoint the Western – or shall we follow Dumont and say the French? – concern with the external ordering of society appears somewhat shallow and superficial, like the comings and goings of ‘a termite society’. Now Mann stresses that Germany must learn from its Western neighbours the ‘art of politics’ or of ‘the possible’, for politics, like art, ‘mediates creatively between mind and life, idea and reality, the desirable and the necessary, conscience and action, freedom and necessity, morality and power’ – one complements and completes the other (cited in ibid.: 257). Mann, better than most, was aware of the huge difficulties involved in Germany’s ideological acquiescence to politics. By and large, Germans lacked the psychological antecedents for embracing the political way. The nation’s culture heroes, Luther, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, had each in his own way placed Kultur above civilisation, self-development above politics. Of Luther, for instance, Mann writes, he ‘was a freedom-hero – but in the German style, for he understood nothing about freedom’ (i.e., political freedom). Just as Luther sought independence from the authority of Rome alone – the freedom to believe – political freedom in Germany had always meant freedom from foreign domination, the freedom to be German, and nothing else. In contrast, the concept of freedom in democratic countries related to a universal and moral freedom, the freedom to be an individual, that was enshrined in civic equality and European unity. For Mann, the heroic age of German nationalism

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belonged in the past. In the modern world, the peoples of Europe could no longer ‘live and prosper in isolation’. The German nation was mistaken in its assumption that one could be an ‘unpolitical cultivated man’. Totality, the only true totality, the ‘totality of the humane’, requires that beside the internal and subjective the social and political play a part. In turning, as was his wont, to the German classics in support of this conviction, Mann interprets Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister as a poetic vision of Germany’s progression from pietistic inwardness to an outward concern with politics, republicanism, freedom, and democracy. Wilhelm was initially concerned with his own personal development, with ‘putting forward his full radiance just as in the upper classes of society’. At the end of the novel, however, Wilhelm’s Bildung culminates in an opening out, an acceptance of the social sphere (the Society of the Tower), of politics, and, by extension, of the state. Mann predicts that, given time, Germany would go through the same development and would acknowledge, like Wilhelm, that to be ‘complete’ a culture must include a sense of political responsibility. Basic to this development, the nation must learn first to accept its relationship with the rest of Europe and look to its neighbours for advice in the, by no means demeaning, ‘art of politics’. Indeed, had not Mann himself pointed the way? Is there not a sense in which his own conversion from subjectivity to objectivity, from Bildung to politics, parallels the transition from the internal to the external world experienced by Wilhelm and that anticipated for the whole of twentieth-century Germany?11

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Max Weber: the Calling and Shaping of the Self The American political scientist Harvey Goldman (1988) has written a long and detailed comparison of the ideas of ‘self ’ and ‘personality’ in the works and life of Max Weber and Thomas Mann. A closely argued and thorough study, the book throws considerable light on the issues we have been discussing. In particular, Weber is shown to have grappled with the same problems of personal and social identity as his famous literary contemporary: Though they probably met only twice, Weber and Mann were engaged from early in their lives in remarkably similar enterprises. Their work was built on shared conceptions drawn from a common intellectual and national heritage. More important, the work of both men dealt with similar questions of personal identity and national self-understanding. Both sought to clarify the notions of self and work that underlay their own lives and the lives of their fellows, both strove to understand the connection between the inner life and the outer world. (Ibid.: 1)

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Like Mann, Weber, too, sensed that the traditional German ideals of Bildung and Kultur were no longer sufficient to effectively shape individual and social purpose in modern times. The far-ranging development of the self emphasised in Bildung – its shaping into a varied and integral totality – was ill-equipped to meet the specialisation demanded of a world dominated by rationalisation and disenchantment. In endeavouring to come to grips with these modern necessities, Weber, like other intellectual contemporaries, Mann, Troeltsch, Simmel, Windelband, critically engaged with the older traditions of German thought in an attempt to develop new social and personal ideals better suited to the increasingly secular and rational demands of the twentieth century. The revised idea of personality Weber formulates underlies a great deal of his sociological writings (including his theories on method) and belongs as much to the German intellectual climate of the day as Durkheim’s stance on the ‘individual’ was shown earlier to be characteristically French. In short, the two discrete ‘individualisms’ identified by Dumont as characterising German (subjective) and French (objective) ideologies are at the root of what later develops into two distinct sociological traditions, one subjectively interpretative and the other far more socially objective. Apart from Goethe and the Bildung heritage, another tradition of thinking about personality emerged in Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that equally contributed to the development of Weber’s thought. This parallel tradition derived from the reflections of Kant on reason as the creator of the moral personality and was more immediately discernible in the writings of the neoKantian philosopher, Wilhelm Windelband. While Goethe and Humboldt had advocated an open attitude of the self towards the world, an unrestricted ‘flowering of the self ’, the Kantian project advocated the domination of self through the hegemony of pure practical reason (ibid.: 120). It is between these two ideals, between duty and development, specialisation and totality, that Weber’s notion of personality revolves. Beside Goethe and Kant, one further element in moulding Weber’s thought deserves a brief mention; namely, the Protestant Reformation. It is essentially upon a sense of personality derived from a particular form of Protestantism – Calvinism – secularised and adapted to the needs of the modern world, that Weber models his own concept of the person, a concept deemed to be far more appropriate to the demands of modern society than the anachronistic models of Bildung and Kultur. According to Weber’s famous Protestant thesis, for modern capitalism to have developed as it did a new kind of person must have existed, a person with the special qualities and capacities for rationalised work. This new attitude towards work Weber immortalises as the ‘spirit of

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capitalism’. Its main adherents were the newly transformed men of the Calvinist Reformation:

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Aloneness, an inclination to ascetic labour, devoted service to a god, selfdenial and systematic self-control, a capacity to resist their own desires as well as the desires, pressures, or temptations of others – these are the qualities all of Weber’s Berufsmenschen acquire through their submission in the discipline of the calling to an ultimate ideal or god. The key to their character lies, first, in the subjugation of the ‘natural’ self and, second, in its transformation and fortification through the discipline of the calling as a unique relation of service to their ideal or god: the self is transformed into a personality in a process of formation that shapes it through a calling and equips it for a calling. (Ibid.: 19)

For the Calvinist, such a ‘life in the calling’ provided a source of certainty in a world plagued by the uncertainties of death and salvation. The doctrine of predestination, which distinguishes Calvinism (and those traditions deriving from it) most sharply from other forms of Protestantism, held that God had foreordained those who were to be saved and those who were condemned unto everlasting death. And that: ‘Man, by his fall into a state of sin, hath wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation. So that natural man, being altogether averse from that Good, and dead in sin, is not able, by his own strength, to convert himself, or to prepare himself thereunto.’12 No individual could know for sure whether or not he or she was one of the elect or could do anything to sway the decision in their favour. Weber suggests that such a belief resulted in an ‘unprecedented inner loneliness’, a deep salvation anxiety, as individuals, without the Church as a source of support or reassurance, were forced to follow their path alone to meet a destiny which had been decreed for them from eternity (Weber 1967: 104). The question ‘Am I one of the elect?’, Weber surmises (ibid.: 38), must have arisen sooner or later for every believer and forced all other concerns into the background. For Calvin himself, this was not an issue – he was without doubt a chosen servant of the Lord and was sure of his own salvation. But what of his followers, what of the mass of ordinary men and women, how were they to arrive at this certitudo salutis, this certainty of grace? For many, the essential self-confidence in being one of the chosen few could be cultivated through the performance of good works for the greater glory of God, since good works, while they could not directly influence salvation, might be interpreted as a sign of God’s grace. Consequently, labour in the material world was given the highest possible elevation. However, so that work might retain its purpose of glorifying God, immoderate consumption and the personal accumulation of riches were harshly condemned. If pro-

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cured, profits were to be put back to work in the form of reinvestment. Here is the famous link between the ‘Protestant ethic’ and the ‘spirit of capitalism’. In seeking to maximise evidence of their calling, the Calvinists developed a disciplined and methodical approach to all worldly affairs. Subjugating their natural self, they sought meaning and purpose in carrying out actions believed to be in the glorification of God. The Calvinist ‘life in the calling’ was a life willed and disciplined, a life geared towards and fortified by an ultimate aim. ‘The God of Calvinism demanded of his believers not single good works, but a life of good works combined into a unified system’ (ibid.: 117). In this way, the unbridled ‘self ’ is restricted and transformed into a dutiful ‘personality’. In his later work, Weber reasons that for contemporary man, too, ‘the life in a calling, fitted for the modern situation, holds out the only hope against the threat of purposelessness, directionlessness, and the meaninglessness of death in a civilisation now unable to draw on more traditional solutions, dominated as it is by the advance of rationalisation’ (Goldman 1988: 19). In its emphasis on a basic character structure, an orientation of the self towards a specific aim, Weber saw in a modern reappropriation of ‘the calling’ a means of overcoming the spiritual and political crises of contemporary Germany. Capitalism, the modern ‘culture of vocation’ (Berufskultur), required at its heart a particular type of person, the modern ‘man of vocation’ (Berufsmensch). Only the transformation of the self into a personality, its limitation and dedication towards a specific aim, could render possible mastery of the rationalised orders and give life meaning and justification in a secular, disenchanted, age. In place of an open attitude to the world, the capitalist self is closed off, dictated by a higher value, by service in a vocation – just as the Calvinist self had gained meaning and a sense of salvation through diligent service to God. ‘The Puritan’, warns Weber (1967: 181), ‘wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so.’ The technical and economic conditions of capitalism, which control the lives of all modern individuals, make a social necessity out of what was once a religious virtue. And it is this need to transform the self into a personality that provides the underlying rationale for a great deal of Weber’s subsequent writings, particularly those on science and politics as a vocation. Personality is created, then, by locating and strengthening a set of constant motives or purposes within the individual, by fashioning a unity within the multiplicity of the self. The Calvinist, alone with God and his own soul, struggled to free himself of all that was ‘creaturely’ within and, through severe self-control, to ascribe his whole being to the task of serving God. The Calvinist response to their Lord was not that of unio mystica, the quietist, emotional, response of Luther, but

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was based on purposeful and determined action, upon a sense of duty towards an objective task in life, on work for the glorification of God. Drawing on this Calvinist model and on the Kantian distinction between the realm of personality and the realm of nature, Weber sets up his own conception of the person against a ‘romantic-naturalistic’ view in which the essence of personality is located in the ‘vegetative underground of personal life’, in the ‘irrational’ forces that dictate mood and feeling, in a kind of naturalistic inner necessity. For Weber, rationality and free choice replace irrationality and nature. At the core of his concept of the person is the idea that action is ‘free’ when it is based on a rational ‘decision’ made according to the actor’s own deliberations and not determined by ‘external constraint or irresistible affect’ (Goldman 1988: 142). In Weber’s own words, ‘“personality” is a concept that finds its “essence” in the consistency of its intimate relationship to certain ultimate “values” and “meanings” of life. These values and meanings have their effect by being forged into purposes and thereby translated into rational-teleological action’ (cited in Portis 1978: 113–14). It is these regulatory values that transform the manifold self into a unified personality. The integral person gains coherence through the consistency of conscious self-appointed values that direct his or her behaviour. In fact, according to Weber, an individual’s inability to either control or understand their conduct is what defines them as a neurotic. For a true sense of identity to be attained, those emotional desires and drives that are incompatible with the individual’s ‘constant will’ must be suppressed. Human beings gain substance through identifying and embodying their ultimate values in action. Although he owed a great deal to him, it is in this regard that Weber diverges most noticeably from Kant. While, for the latter, the self is determined as a personality through the dictates of pure practical reason, through duty to a universal moral law, through submission to the categorical imperative, for Weber, personality is developed through an attachment, not to universal values, but to individual values uniquely developed in the ‘struggle against the difficulties of life’. Personality amounts to a ‘systemisation from within’, a moving outward from a centre ‘that the individual has himself achieved’ (Goldman 1988: 143–45). For Calvin, the principle that determines personality structure, that elevates the self above the heteronomy of conflicting values, is discerned in work for the glorification of God. For Kant, this same law is derived from the necessities of pure practical reason. For Weber, although the personality structure remains essentially the same, the law that transforms the heterogeneous self into a systematic unity, a personality, is derived from the individual’s own ultimate ideal, from

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an ‘inner core’ relating to a ‘central point of view of one’s own’. Here, as Goldman (ibid.: 145) points out, ‘individuation is linked to the discovery of what is unique to the self ’. The origins of this discovery Weber traces to a personal relationship with God, facilitated, in fact demanded, by the Reformation. It is the same sense of individuation that subsequently forges the distinctive characteristics of pietism and Bildung.13 If we return to Dumont’s dichotomy, this individuation relates to the individualism of Germany, of uniqueness, as against the individualism of France, of singleness.

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Two Sociological Traditions: Emile Durkheim and Max Weber In his Short History of Sociological Thought, Alan Swingewood contrasts, in a way increasingly familiar to us, the French and German reception of the Enlightenment and the subsequent origins of social theory within these countries. The French Enlightenment was built around the principles of modern science, the rejection of metaphysics, the separation of facts from values. Generally, the conviction existed – even in the human sciences – as to the possibility of scientific objectivity, that the science of society, as much as that of nature, could be based on a positive and objective appreciation of empirical facts, and not on faith or revelation, intuition or conjecture. In due course, positivism and empiricism became the leading ideals in France, together with a significant portion of scientism, the belief in science as the foundation of all knowledge and the key to natural, historical, and human laws of nature. And so we arrive at Durkheim, who considered ‘fruitful this idea that social life must be explained, not by the conception of it held by those who participate in it, but by the profound causes which escape consciousness’ (cited in Swingewood 1984: 101), and for whom ‘the laws of society are no different from those governing the rest of nature and the method by which they are discussed are identical’ (ibid.). Free will, intention, and individual motives are largely eliminated from this objective and positive social science.14 According to Swingewood (ibid.: 128), positivism ‘foundered’ in Germany because there human activity constituted a realm of unique, not recurrent, law-like processes and society did not exist in any meaningful sense apart from the individuals who composed it and their unique human actions. As Hahn (1995: 57) concurs, ‘there was no room for a … Montesquieu on German soil and the first great stages of the political philosophy of the Enlightenment virtually passed the German scene’. The origins of German sociology were not steeped in a

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long tradition of positivism, as was the case in France. Instead, the major influences on the development of German social thought were philosophers – Dilthey, Rickert, Windelband – and the classical traditions of Goethe and Kant. There were no objective laws governing society and determining the actions of individuals. Dilthey, for instance, argued, against positivism, that the social whole or totality can only be understood through its individual elements and that it was fallacious to assimilate the complexities of human experience to deterministic external processes: ‘understanding’ and ‘interpretation’ are the bedrock of the human sciences. In Germany, Swingewood (ibid.: 145) suggests, ‘totality has been eliminated from social theory; there is no whole, no “essence” to history and society, but a constantly fluctuating culture of meaning-endowing social actions’. Albrow (1990: 37) puts it even more strongly when he writes of Germany that, ‘to refer to “the social” rather than to the “individual” or to “reason” was to challenge the sacred legitimating notions of the society in which one lived’. In terms of social theory, this uniquely German emphasis on the subjective individual filters through into a nascent sociology, ‘methodological holism’ is replaced by ‘methodological individualism’; two sociological traditions emerge, one characteristically French, the other characteristically German. Let us pursue this idea a little further. Giddens (1990: 119) reinforces our case when he points out that, although Weber and Durkheim were almost exact contemporaries, the intellectual climates in which they developed their sociological ideas were remarkably different: ‘The main intellectual influences in which Weber’s work is steeped are as predominantly German as those which shaped Durkheim’s writing are French’. In 1966 Edward Tiryakian had similarly noted that nowhere in their writings does either Weber or Durkheim cite the other or even acknowledge the existence of the other’s work. Although Giddens subsequently (1990: 119 n. 3) corrects Tiryakian on this point, showing that Durkheim mentions Weber in reporting upon the proceedings of the German Sociological Society; if anything, this one exception seems to strengthen the general rule. The fact that Durkheim, despite being aware of it, makes little more than passing mention of Weber’s work shows how different he perceived the respective projects they were engaged in to be. We know from his intellectual biographer, Reinhard Bendix, and also from a comment by Mauss,15 that Weber subscribed to L’Année sociologique and would certainly have been aware of Durkheim’s contribution. Bendix (1971: 283) suggests, however, that since Weber’s purpose was ‘diametrically opposed’ to that of Durkheim, it is probable that the German scholar considered it pointless to pursue an intellectual exchange.

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Bendix believes that Weber and Durkheim are at ‘opposite poles’ as social theorists. He regards their mutual reticence as understandable since, to the extent to which they were actually aware of each other’s work, Durkheim and Weber were so theoretically removed from each other that each had good reason for believing they belonged to ‘different fields of study’ (ibid.: 284).16 Bendix highlights what he perceives to be the monumental difference between the two by emphasising the emergence and distinctiveness of ‘two sociological traditions’. ‘Sociology’, he writes, ‘counts among its classics two scholars whose work manifests an almost complete divergence of method and substance’ (ibid.: 297). For Durkheim, sociology is the study of social facts, of collective causes, which may become manifest through the individual but are in no way reducible to his or her consciousness and actions. For Weber, on the other hand, sociology is restricted to subjectively understandable phenomena that exist only in individual human beings and excludes all those circumstances which condition the individual but which are devoid of meaning insofar as they are unrelated to an intended purpose. This includes the social in Durkheim’s sense, since, for Weber, ‘these collectives must be treated as solely the resultants and modes of organization of the particular acts of individual persons, since these alone can be treated as agents in a course of subjectively understandable action’ (ibid.: 290, emphasis in original).17 As contemporaries, both Durkheim and Weber struggled with similar problems relating to the breakdown of traditional morality and the need for a new sense of meaning and purpose in a changing world. Both turned to religion as a model upon which to base their solutions to the contemporary malaise, not in the sense of a hankering after the past, but in the reappropriation of traditional values and their adaptation to present needs. Against utilitarianism, an ‘egoistic cult of the self ’, Durkheim advocates a form of ‘moral individualism’, a socially derived ‘religion of the individual’. For Weber, it is the Protestant Reformation that provides a model whereupon to base the social and individual ideals he considered necessary for life in a disenchanted and rationalised world. Both theorists, moreover, sought to carve out a specific terrain for sociology and to base the discipline on a rational scientific footing. They both attempted to distance sociology from psychology – in Durkheim’s case, because individual psychology failed to sufficiently account for external social constraints, and, for Weber, because an interpretative analysis of social action does not rely upon an objective knowledge of physical life, but rather on an individual’s own subjective understanding. None the less, Weber still holds that the sociologist must approach social phenomena with as much rigour and objectivity as the natural

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scientist and that a rational interpretation of social behaviour is possible. While Durkheim seeks causes in society, Weber’s causal relationships take place at a level of rational action conducted by rationally motivated human beings. Means are related to ends, causes to consequences, through a ‘constant will’ directing rational-teleological behaviour. From Weber’s perspective, to affirm the uniqueness of individual motives is not to deny the regularity and verifiability of human action (although such regularity is better conceived in terms of ‘probability’ than ‘predictability’). The goal of Verstehen upon which Weber’s sociological method rests is to discern an objective understanding of subjectively meaningful behaviour. In this way the peculiarities of human social existence are acknowledged as a subject for social science without compromising the objectivity demanded of the scientific method (Runciman 1972: 16). The objective and scientific ideals to which both Durkheim and Weber aspired as sociologists, when refracted through their respective national cultures, through the mutually exclusive traditions of social and philosophical thought that preceded them, through immediate problems of individual and national identity, through the very different legacy of the Reformation and Revolution, lend credence to Bendix’s suggestion that modern sociology is beholden to two traditions. Martin Hollis (1977) has outlined two ‘models of man’ in his philosophy of social science, Plastic Man and Autonomous Man. Although the case can be made for a degree of individual autonomy in Durkheim, as much as for a measure of social determinism in Weber, still, by comparison, Durkheim’s ‘individual’ is clearly a close relation of Plastic Man, the vacuous recipient of collective forces, the product of social coercion and constraint, while Weber’s ‘personality’ more closely resembles Autonomous Man, directed by individual motives and self-ascribed values. Indeed, to take the analogy to its logical conclusion, or at least to the conclusion towards which this chapter has been driving: does not Plastic Man relate to the individual of the Revolution, the equal, but not distinct, individual of the Rights of Man, in short, to the individualism of France; and, by the same token, is not Autonomous Man a descendant of the individualism of Germany, of the Reformation, of pietism and Bildung, of the inner life, of subjective growth and development? We discussed in chapter 2 Cladis’s claim that Durkheim’s writings belong ‘to a distinctively French narrative’. Clearly, the same might be said of Weber and Germany. In fact, Albrow (1990: 44) sums up this German connection quite nicely when he writes: ‘Protestantism, German idealism, Luther, Calvin, Kant …: this was the heavy atmosphere which the fire of Weber’s ambition and the cold precision of his intellect distilled into the basic concepts of sociology.’

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Max Weber and Louis Dumont: Structuralism Revisited From time to time throughout this study we have had occasion to reflect on Dumont’s claim that his sociological purpose ‘lies quite outside the Weberian paradigm’. This, it has been suggested, is due to Dumont’s essentially ideological approach, his interest in ‘formative principles’, ‘social values’, or ‘global ideologies’. At such a level of investigation, ‘man’ is essentially ‘plastic’, obviously so, for only from such a perspective does it make any sense to say that the Hindu ‘individual does not exist’. The Indian man-in-the-world is not an individual in terms of the societal rules and values that he embodies; by this criterion, he is a social being. Having situated Dumont squarely within the Durkheimian tradition, his sociological approach was subsequently compared to that of other French structuralists, LéviStrauss and Braudel, and, in so doing, the ‘plasticity’ of ‘man’ was further emphasised in theoretical approaches to history and society that functioned above and beyond the ‘individual’, or perhaps, in LéviStrauss’s case, below and within. There is, however, another way of thinking about structures and even about structuralism where Autonomous Man takes centre stage. Such is the approach adopted by Weber and here, as elsewhere, the difference between French and German sociology is abundantly clear. In her study on caste for the ‘Concepts in the Social Sciences’ series, Ursula Sharma (1999: 11) singles out two early twentieth-century schools of thought that ‘were both to be influential subsequently and represent two markedly different sociological understandings of castes’. These were the schools initiated, respectively, by Max Weber and Célestin Bouglé. As we have seen, it is to Bouglé that Dumont attributes his own approach in Homo Hierarchicus18 and without doubt Dumont is the most cited and challenged representative of this latter school. According to Sharma, Bouglé paved the way for the holistic analysis of caste in terms of its consensual moral and ritual principles. Weber, on the other hand, instigated an approach that focuses upon conflicting interests and the active pursuit and protection of status, honour, and privilege. As opposed to the static, timeless, ahistorical, and socially deterministic picture of caste that Dumont has been criticised (not altogether justly) for presenting, the Weberian approach is thought to allow for a much greater degree of individual and collective agency (see Sharma 1999: 31–58). It might be pointed out that Dumont makes much of the idea of ‘sanskritization’, of ‘the tendency of inferiors to imitate the Brahmans in the hope of improving their status’ (Dumont 1980: 31) and that his view of caste is not as static and changeless as some of his detractors would have us believe. None the less, in emphasising the caste system as a whole, that is to say, in the

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holistic and ideological approach he adopts, Dumont’s structuralism clearly emphasises the whole over the parts; while the structures identified in the methodological writings of Weber consistently take the part as their point of departure.19 Although he readily acknowledges the necessity in the social sciences of utilising concepts that deal with collectivities such as states, industrial firms, castes, bureaucratic institutions, etc. – the importance, that is, of identifying structures that endure over space and time – to be meaningful, these concepts, according to Weber, must be based on the understanding that collectivities are no more than a mode of organising the specific acts of specific individuals, for it is individuals alone that carry out subjective and meaningful action. Clearly, we are far removed here from Durkheim’s belief that, ‘when the individual has been eliminated, society alone remains’. For Weber, when the individual has been eliminated, there is no society. In dealing with collectivities, Weber argues that sociologists should extract from empirical reality models, ideal-types, logical constructions, which make systematic observation possible and against which ‘individual’ behaviour and action might be assessed. Thus, he writes:

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An ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to these one-sidedly emphasized view-points into a unified (mental) construct. In its conceptual purity, this mental construct cannot be found empirically in reality. It is a utopia. (Cited in Portis 1978: 115, emphasis in original)

Weberian ideal-typical structures have no objective reality; they are utopian constructions, an extrapolation from the flux of human activity, the aggregate and accentuated product of individual behaviour. Weber’s approach, in short, is that of the methodological individualist. This is the reason why Dumont, as a self-confessed methodological holist, functions outside the other’s theoretical paradigm. The contention here has been that the deeply held German sense of subjective individualism has infiltrated Weber’s sociology in much the same way as the objective individualism of France has been shown to have infiltrated Dumont’s (via Durkheim and Mauss).

Notes 1. One finds a very similar ideal expressed in the historiography of Fernand Braudel, who suggests that underlying each national configuration may be discerned coherent and fairly fixed recurrent patterns, old and established habits of thinking

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3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

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and acting, ‘deep-seated structural characteristics’ that distinguish nations sharply from one another (Braudel 1980: 12). After all, mental frameworks can also ‘form the prisons of the longue durée’ (ibid: 140). See glossary to Essays (Dumont 1986c: 279) for a definition and pp. 119, 227, and 253 for examples. Also see postface to Homo Hierarchicus (Dumont 1980) and introduction to Essays for a general discussion. See Kolenda (1976) for an attempt to specify the different uses of ‘hierarchy’ in Homo Hierarchicus. And, most comprehensively of all, see Parkin (2003) for a detailed and extensive account of Dumont’s notion of hierarchical opposition. Cf.: ‘Moritz seems nowhere to directly set forth the notion of hierarchy as subordination of the part to the whole, and yet he closely links the two notions of totality and of subordination’ (Dumont 1994: 71). See Mosse (1975: chap. 2) for the importance of the ‘beautiful’ as a means of personal fulfilment, or even salvation, in German philosophy and literature. Dumont (1994: 78) writes of Moritz’s development: ‘we notice a deep transformation from the one to the other, but also a continuation of the initial disposition in its fundamental structure’. One would be hard-pushed to find a better and more concise definition of structuralism than this – on the surface there is transformation, while underneath the fundamental structure remains the same. Again, these stages are underwritten by an underlying structure: ‘we therefore shall have to reduce the apparent discontinuities in his writings by using this fundamental conception [i.e., Bildung]’ (Dumont 1994: 87). And, similarly, ‘we shall then have to show how the apparently disparate scholarly concerns that animate Humboldt’s studies and permeate his writings until the end of his life … are tied to what came before’ (ibid.). See ibid.: 86, 90, 128, 136, 138 and 142, for similar statements concerning the continuity of an underlying structure. Paideia as defined by Marrou, History of Education in Antiquity, 1981: 352 (cited in Dumont 1994: 92). Cf.: Humboldt, who writes that: ‘The true aim of man, prescribed to him, not by a changing inclination, but by eternally immutable reason, is the highest and most proportioned formation of his strengths into a whole’ (cited in ibid: 94). At times Dumont stresses too heavily the fact that modern individualism hinders one’s ability to grasp the collectivism of others. Surely one does not have to have experienced the sociological apperception to appreciate that individuals are influenced by the lives and ideas of their friends. Or, if one does, then this apperception is so commonplace as to appear banal. And, besides, library shelves are full of books of the kind, Goethe and Schiller, 1785–1805: The Story of a Friendship. Cf. Dumont’s suggestion that ‘Americans are deeply individualistic’. Surely, not every American is, just as not every French reader of Wilhelm Meister will see the novel in terms of its social aspect. It is this kind of sweeping generalisation that leaves Dumont open to the charge of essentialism. If one wishes to compare national cultures, then a degree of abstraction is naturally required, but at times Dumont’s use of language seems intent on reifying these abstractions. None the less, he does confess elsewhere: ‘I shall take some liberties with language in what follows. I shall now and then say “the culture does” for “the members or carriers of the culture do”, or perhaps “Germany thinks” for “Germans, according to their ideology, think …” Such expressions I use as a sort of shorthand because the precise formulations would be too cumbersome when frequently repeated. Yet I hope a close examination would confirm that I have not, for all that, reified or personified the entities in question’ (Dumont 1986a, n. 3). Still, even the more cumbersome wording Dumont wishes to avoid repeating – ‘Germans, according to their ideology, think …’ – assumes a high level of generalisation. The line between

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10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

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18.

19.

Categories of Self abstraction and essentialisation (or reification) is necessarily a thin one and, given his concern with ‘totality’ and ‘social wholes’, it is little wonder that Dumont is often accused of the latter. See Bruford (1975: chap. 11): ‘The Conversion of an Unpolitical Man’. Mann, however, is wary of Germany going from one extreme to the other, of ‘totalising politics’ and the state. He is intensely critical of the increasing shift towards National Socialism and of those responsible for the moral and intellectual debasement of the masses: ‘The decisive point is that they [the new young] know nothing about “Bildung” in its higher and deeper sense, about self-improvement, individual responsibility and exertion, and make things easy for themselves instead in the collective’ (cited in Bruford 1975: 256). Bildung is not simply to be replaced by the political, by external considerations, but broadened in order to incorporate (though not uncritically) a political perspective. This is how one arrives at a ‘humane totality’. The Westminster Confession, Chapter IX (of Free Will), No. 3. (cited in Weber 1967: 99–100). Weber himself had a strong pietist upbringing and belonged to the Bildungsburgertum, the class associated with property and culture (Goldman 1988: 15). This is a tendency already noted in chapter 5’s comparison of Lévi-Strauss (for whom ‘observable phenomena result from the action of laws which are general but implicit’), Braudel (who wishes to ‘substitute for a disconcerting empirical reality a clearer image, and one more susceptible to scientific application’), and Dumont (who claims to have located the ‘implicit’, hidden, unconscious underpinnings of caste). When Mauss visited Weber at Heidelberg he saw a complete set of L’Année Sociologique on the shelves. Runciman (1972) reaches a similar conclusion when he writes, ‘It is even possible that the total lack of any reference to Durkheim … should be read as a deliberate and therefore significant refusal of mention’ (p. 9). Elsewhere, he suggests that a statement of Weber’s claiming that the main reason for him being a sociologist at all was to put an end to the influence of collective concepts that haunted the subject could quite feasibly have been directed at Durkheim (p. 11). Thus, Durkheim’s conscience collective, along with any other deterministic factors, psychological, biological, geographical, etc., to the extent that they remain subjectively unknown, are for sociological purposes dismissed, just as the ‘natural-vegetative’ domain is dismissed in Weber’s theory of personality. See Dumont (1980): ‘In a work of this nature, everything depends in the last analysis on the theoretical orientation. … My debt to Bouglé will be obvious’ (pp. xlv–xlvi). And again, ‘I accepted Bouglé’s theory as a starting-point and tried to extend it’ (p. xlvii). Hall (1991: 4) sums up this difference as follows: ‘Unlike theorists like Durkheim, contemporary French structuralists and their intellectual heirs, Weber understood structure (e.g., in the case of the state) as amounting to a “complex of interaction of individual persons” rather than an independent and objective reality. In Weber’s view, any “structure” has to come into existence on the basis of various individual actions, and any existing structure is maintained in the same fashion’.

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Chapter 8

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ON WORLD-HISTORICAL STRUCTURES

‘Are Cultures Living Beings? German Identity in Interaction’. This was the title of Dumont’s Huxley Memorial Lecture of 1985. At the very outset of the paper an answer is given in the affirmative. We are given to understand that cultures are indeed like living beings. This simile, however, does not result from any misplaced reverence for the memory of Thomas Henry Huxley. Dumont straight away assures his audience that his own suggested correspondence between the individual and culture in no way mirrors the social evolutionism of that pioneering scientist and anthropologist whose memory the occasion served to honour and preserve. Instead, cultures for Dumont (1986a: 587) are similar to human beings, since ‘they have a unity of their own, they tend to persevere in their being, and their relation to their environment is vital’. Beyond the first paragraph, this comparison is not again explicitly made. However, the gist of the whole lecture, if not of Dumont’s study of modernity in general, indeed, his entire comparative anthropology, might be taken as an implicit demonstration of this basic assumption – that cultures: (1) are internally unified; (2) persist throughout time; and (3) are externally interrelated. We have already seen that Dumont locates a central core to German culture, a primary system of ideas and values, a global ideology, which distinguishes Germany’s contribution to the modern individualist configuration from the characteristic contribution of other modern nations (principally speaking, that of France). It is in this sense that German culture possesses a unity of its own, a distinctive Germanness if you like. That this cultural unity perseveres through time is attested to by the fact that Dumont interprets the intellectual history of Germany

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from at least 1770 (although this date could be extended as far back as Luther in the sixteenth century) right up to the beginning of the Second World War as being closely bound up with this ideological core, with Germany’s unique sociohistorical DNA. That a culture’s relation to its environment is vital is demonstrated in this instance in the suggestion that the formative period of modern German ideology, those glorious sixty years between 1770 and 1830, is best understood as Germany’s response to the sociopolitical individualism of the Western Enlightenment and to the Revolution in France. In short, the Huxley Lecture presents a provisional account of the research that was to culminate a few years later in the collection of essays on German Ideology discussed in the previous chapter.1 In the lecture many of the themes with which we are already familiar are considered: the German synthesis of community holism and self-cultivating individualism, the necessity of viewing German culture in the light of its Western neighbours, the persistence of ideological structures over time, the importance of the period 1770–1830 in shaping modern German ideology, the legacy of Luther, and so on. There is no need to reiterate all this here. However, along with the above, and most specifically the basic structural themes of individualism and holism, Dumont proposes in the Huxley Lecture ‘to add a third fundamental feature’ to his interpretation of German culture. This is the traditional ideal of ‘universal’ sovereignty, as opposed, that is, to modern ‘territorial’ sovereignty. Like the majority of Dumont’s major themes – the sociological apperception, ideology, hierarchy, holism, individualism, structuralism, comparativism – the theme of universal sovereignty is taken up again and again throughout his writings (e.g., Dumont 1980: App. D, sec. 3; 1986a: 591–92, 602 n.11; 1986c: 130–32, 145–48, see especially chap. 6, 149–79; 1994: 50–52, 62–65). In order to familiarise ourselves with it we shall return in the first instance to Dumont’s essay on Troeltsch, since here the notion of universal sovereignty is central to Dumont’s attempt at situating Troeltsch’s analysis of German culture (particularly his emphasis on the characteristically German ideals of Bildung and devotion to the state) within the political climate of the day. Having outlined Troeltsch’s view on the uniquely German conception of liberty, Dumont concludes his essay by criticising the German author for having omitted from his discussion the exact nature of the State, especially in 1914, to which German individuals spontaneously devoted themselves. ‘However useful his analysis is, it remains fragmentary from this angle. He has taken us as far as he could, it is for us to take up the baton’ (Dumont 1994: 50). In so doing, Dumont suggests that the 1914 state to which Germans willingly acquiesced was a pan-Germanist state wherein the ‘will to dominate’ played an impor-

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tant ideological role. Historically, the subjective individualism of Germany had left the polity more or less untouched. For Luther, as we have seen, freedom was a matter of the soul alone, not of politics: thus he sided with the princes in the Peasants’ War. Thomas Mann was later to identify this unquestioned devotion to rulers as having stamped itself in the course of centuries onto the German mentality, resulting in a generally subservient attitude of Germans to all official authority. Protected in this way from the sociopolitical individualism that had elsewhere (in France and England in particular) dismantled any absolutist pretensions, in Germany the political domain – being considered of secondary importance – was generally accepted in whatever form it happened to take. Thus unchallenged, the German state continued to foster traditions and survivals, archaisms of the nonmodern world:

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The Holy Roman-Germanic Empire was finally succeeded by the Prussian State, and then the German State. And everything looks as if the faithful subjects, comforted to see it always referred to by the same term, Reich or Empire, had noticed no change and had continued to give to the latter State the sort of allegiance that the former had received in the name of universal sovereignty. (Ibid.: 51)

Although through the centuries Germany had been afflicted by political disagreements (e.g., the Lutheran Reformation, the treaties of Westphalia), Dumont argues that these divisions are only really meaningful on a ‘materialistic’ level. ‘Ideologically’ the idea of the German Empire remained intact throughout. For centuries political Germany had led ‘a quartered existence’, torn between territorial belonging as a fact and universal sovereignty as a principle. Once politically unified under Prussia, Dumont (ibid.: 52) claims that Germany became ‘Janus-headed: on the international level it was [one] nation or territorial State among others, while at the level of internal representations it was a resurgence of universal sovereignty’. These concepts, territorial and universal sovereignty, Dumont derives from Henry Sumner Maine who, in his classic study on Ancient Law, had discerned three kinds of sovereignty. Two of these, tribal and universal, are primitive (non-modern) in orientation, while the other, territorial sovereignty, is a modern innovation. According to Dumont, however, even in modern times vestiges of the universal type of sovereignty continue to survive. In a sense all societies take themselves to be ‘the hub of the world’ (Dumont 1986a: 602 n. 11). This is the ‘old ethnocentrism or sociocentrism which exalts us and disparages others’ (Dumont 1986c: 131, emphasis in original). Take the French, for instance, who, naively identifying with the ideals of the Revolution, tended to look upon

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themselves as the ‘educators of mankind’ and to harbour the desire to extend their universalist beliefs to the rest of humanity (ibid.). Nevertheless, despite these universalist remnants, modern nations like France and England had, on the whole, undergone an historic transition from universal to territorial sovereignty: a ‘complicated’ and ‘spectacular’ process, the beginnings of which witnessed the transfer of universal religious values to the level of the particular state or territory, with the king now claiming to be Emperor in his own kingdom alone. Dumont believed that such a process had never taken place on German soil. The ideal of universal sovereignty cherished by the ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German people’ had not undergone such an historic territorialisation. Thus, ‘when Germany was again united under Prussia (or almost so, Austria being left out), the new German State, called in its turn an Empire, simply inherited the vocation to universal sovereignty which had been that of its ancient forerunner’ (Dumont 1986: 591). Prior to this Prussian unification – through periods of fragmentation and political instability – it had been the concept of ‘German culture’ that had safeguarded for the people a sense of their collective identity. And now, as a unified nation, it was this culture, culture par excellence, German Kultur, that many believed was destined to dominate all others (ibid.: 590–91).2 The ‘vocation to universal sovereignty’, the ‘will to dominate’, the ‘will to power’, ‘pan-Germanism’, the belief that the ‘German State had a vocation to dominate the world or to share in its domination, or at any rate to dominate other peoples’, these were the ideals to which, Dumont believed, Troeltsch’s submissive German individuals subscribed. This was the kind of state to which self-cultivating Germans, possessed of a general proclivity to obey, spontaneously devoted themselves. Dumont claims that in recognising this inherent sense of pan-Germanism, this deep and widespread feeling and support for a ‘sort of birthright to dominate other people’, one gains an important insight into subsequent German history from 1918 to 1933 and beyond: ‘For the loss of the vocation to external domination contributed to the lack of deep adherence of the German people to the State of the Weimar Republic, while its reassertion by the Nazis … was widely felt as a revival of true Germanism and its Empire (Reich)’ (ibid.: 592). This a theme Dumont takes up in another of his essays on Germany, one not included in German Ideology, but in the earlier Essays on Individualism, entitled ‘The Totalitarian Disease: Individualism and Racism in Adolf Hitler’s Representations’. As is Dumont’s custom, the essay or ‘monograph’ on totalitarianism focuses mainly on one representative text, Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The analysis of this text is preceded by a general discussion.3 National Socialism, we are told, is a ‘modern phenomenon, a disease, no doubt, but a disease of our own world – and not sim-

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ply an aberration of a group of fanatics, the effects of various historical causes, or the going astray of an entire nation’ (Dumont 1986c: 150).4 Similar movements can be discerned in other modern countries. Hitler himself defined his party as a sort of antithetical copy of the Marxist and Bolshevik movements, wherein socialism (essentially in this context the political orchestration of the masses) was to be put at the service of nationalism, i.e., a pan-Germanist state. It might also be added that Hitler gained a great deal of inspiration from Mussolini’s success in Italy and that expressions such as ‘fascism’ and ‘totalitarianism’ were very much in vogue. As Dumont is quick to admonish, ‘what is essential to understand here is that in German ideology one is never really dealing basically with Germany itself, but always with Germany-in-relation-to-the-rest-of-the-world’ (Dumont 1986c: 151).5 In fact, is not pan-Germanism itself a response, albeit an imperialist one, to the existence of a wider geographical and ideological world?

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The Case for a Diachronic Structure As part of the general discussion prefacing his analysis of Mein Kampf, Dumont attempts to establish a degree of continuity between the ‘remarkably stable’ German ideology of Bildung and state devotion, characteristic of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the post-First World War ideological milieu out of which National Socialism ultimately arose. In locating this ideological continuity we are told that the ‘whole cultural patrimony of national consciousness’ must be called into question. It should be obvious by now that Dumont is referring here to the global level of ideology, to Germany’s sociohistorical DNA. In situating the continuity at this all-encompassing level Dumont hopes to counter the tendency to link Hitlerism directly to German Romanticism or to reject everything in German culture that diverged from the Enlightenment legacy as ‘irrational’ and as having paved the way for National Socialism. These are ‘partisan and mutilating views’ (ibid.: 150) – the implication being that the global approach, the recognition of German culture as a whole and as one variant of modern ideology, is far more ‘total’ or ‘complete’. This is an interesting proposition, since it means that Dumont is now attempting to grasp the ‘whole’ diachronically, as opposed to the synchronic method he advocates in Homo Hierarchicus. In discerning diachronic ‘global’ structures, he aims to capture the social whole as it progresses through time, to determine its deep-rooted, ideological, bias. Although at one level (i.e., internally) they remained ‘remarkably stable’, Dumont suggests that in terms of the wider picture the German

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ideals of Bildung and community holism tended to exist in ‘a precarious balance’, always under threat from the dynamics of Western sociopolitical individualism. In late nineteenth-century Germany, this underlying threat led in intellectual circles to a generally suspicious attitude towards the West, a current of dissatisfaction, a kind of holistic protest against what was perceived as a Westernisation and denaturing of Germany. With the defeat of 1918, matters are confounded. The delicate balance between Germany and the West has been irrevocably upset, and in its place lies a contradiction that, according to Dumont (ibid.: 154), Hitler, among others, will inherit. As to what this ‘contradiction’ consists, we are not explicitly told. From the context and the general argument, however, we can assume that it refers to a situation wherein on top of the traditional anti-Western ideology there is superimposed in Germany a Western-style democratic republic.6 This is the atmosphere, then, in which Thomas Mann, himself having undergone a political ‘conversion’, urged his fellow-countrymen to embrace freedom and democracy, to accept the Weimar Republic, to learn from Germany’s Western neighbours the essential ‘art of politics’. In order to corroborate this proposed ideological continuity between pre- and post-First World War Germany (and to demonstrate that such an interpretation was not foreign to contemporary German intellectuals themselves), Dumont quotes at length from a 1922 essay by Karl Pribram.7 In a particularly instructive passage, Pribram writes of: a movement of self-defence arising from the deepest thought and will of the German people as a whole – and not only from the working class – directed against the capitalistic economic order based on individualism, while individualism itself and its conceptual and economic forms are described as disreputable immigrants from the West, which it is Germany’s great mission to conquer, first at home and then in the world. According to this conception, the struggle against the capitalist order would be the continuation of the war against the Entente with the weapons of the spirit and of economic organization, and at the same time it would mean entering the course leading to practical socialism and returning to the noblest and best traditions of the German people. (Cited in Dumont 1986c: 155)

Thus, a form of ‘national socialism’ was on the agenda as early as 1920. The Weimar polity was viewed by many as the product of an unsatisfactory compromise with the West, a decidedly alien imposition. Pribram’s article points to an alternative spirit of organisation, one truer to the ‘noblest traditions of the German people’. Earlier he had written of a social and economic conception embodied in Prussianism, which, given time, would by itself have brought ‘the idea of

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true socialism to its purest expression’. It is these anti-Western, antidemocratic, ideals, together with a sense of pan-Germanism (‘to conquer, first at home and then in the world’), implied in the Prussian state but temporarily offset or curtailed in the Weimar era, that signal for Dumont an ideological continuity with the past. In truth, however, Dumont’s essay is rather vague on this point, perhaps more suggestive than conclusive, and at times difficult to follow.8 There certainly remains plenty of scope for defining more purposefully his proposed sense of an ideological continuity. A far better work in this regard is the historian Ian Kershaw’s widely acclaimed study on popular opinion in Germany before and during the Third Reich, The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (1987). Kershaw makes no mention at all of Dumont and he is ostensibly little concerned with structural history. Still, we find in Kershaw’s study, in a far more coherent and lucid fashion, many of the traditional themes detected by Dumont – Germany’s difficult relationship with the West, its distrust of liberal democracy, the belief in pan-Germanism, the need for unification, etc. – as contributing to the creation of what Kershaw calls the ‘Hitler Myth’. As the term ‘myth’ suggests, Kershaw’s study is particularly fitting to our purpose since it concentrates mainly on social and political representations. Biographical accounts of Hitler’s life, we are told, fall ‘some way short’ of accounting for the leader’s extraordinary popularity. It is necessary to add to the extensive knowledge of ‘Hitler as a person’ by addressing more closely ‘the image of Hitler as Führer’. This ‘image’, this locus of social consensus, Kershaw believes played a crucial role in the integration of the Nazi system and engendered the support of millions of German individuals who might otherwise have been only marginally committed to Nazism. The concept of a ‘Führer of the Germans’ enjoyed popular championing long before it was fitted to the person of Hitler. Even as far back as the nineteenth century, political notions and mythical visions of ‘heroic leadership’ had made up a distinctive element of völkischnationalist thought. According to a popular legend, the heroic emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who had been sleeping for centuries under the Kyffhäuser, one of Germany’s ‘holiest’ mountains, would one day arise to restore order to the world, to usher in the rebirth of the medieval Reich.9 For many, this imputed blend of military strength, national unity, heroic achievement, and pseudo-religious symbolism was encapsulated in or, better still, projected onto the image of Kaiser Wilhelm II. As one contemporary evangelical theologian put it, ‘in the heart of every German there also lives a clear image of the Kaiser which is the expression and the product of our whole history’ (cited in Kershaw 1987: 15).

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The defeat of 1918, the collapse of the military, the fall of the monarchy and the old order, the coming to prominence of the despised Social Democrats – those earlier defamed as ‘enemies of the Reich’ – served as a severe blow to völkisch-nationalist, rightist, expansionist circles. And the response was reactionary. Previously latent notions of heroic leadership became more and more manifest and converged into a broad counter-revolutionary force, posing an alternative vision to the image of the ‘leaderless democracy’ of Weimar, run, it was suggested, by mere party functionaries, contemptible ‘politicians’.10 According to this counter-vision, leadership should not be derived from constitutional systems, particularly foreign and imposed ones, but must evolve ‘as destiny from the inner essence of a people’. In stark contrast to the miserable compromises of Weimar, the future leader must be a figure of outstanding skill and political strength, decisive, resolute, and bold, a leader whom others could look up to with devotion and admiration. A 1920 text captures this prevailing ideological current in the following way:

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The leader does not conform to the masses, but acts in accordance with his mission. He does not flatter the masses; hard, straightforward, and ruthless, he takes the lead in good days and in bad. The leader is radical; he is entirely that which he does, and he does entirely what he has to do. The leader is responsible; that is, he carries out the will of God, which he embodies in himself. God grant us leaders and help us to true following. (Cited in ibid.: 20)

Even as early as 1920, although yet far removed from the point at which he will be embraced by the masses as the personification of this ‘heroic leader’ ideal, Hitler had begun to assume the title of ‘Führer’ within the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP)). And, following his takeover of the party in 1921, the term ‘Führer of the NSDAP’ was publicly employed in reference to Hitler for the first time. In December 1922 an article in the party’s paper, Völkischer Beobachter, made explicit the claim that Hitler was the Führer for whom Germany had been waiting, and spoke of ‘the joyful certainty’ of Hitler followers ‘to have found something for which millions are yearning, a leader’. In July 1923 Hitler himself declared that salvation could not be found in majority decisions of parliament, but only in the value of personality, and that he saw his own task ‘in accepting the responsibility’. Throughout the next decade, through the failed ‘Putsch’ and Hitler’s subsequent imprisonment, the ‘quiet years’ between 1925 and 1928 following the refounding of the Nazi movement, through internal challenges and growing external support, indeed, right up to his

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final assumption of power in 1933 and beyond, Kershaw paints a picture of Hitler’s gradual and calculated assimilation of the ‘Führer myth’, his adaptation to this deeply held image and collective desire for a powerful leader. Needless to say, the inherent religious symbolism and fervour, perhaps the most telling characteristic of the ‘hero myth’, remained constant in Hitler’s assimilation of it. As Rudolf Heß was to write: ‘The great popular leader is similar to the great founder of a religion: he must communicate to his listeners an apodictic faith’ (cited in ibid.: 28). That Hitler and his propaganda machine were successful in this regard is clear from the many personal statements of devotion to the Leader and his cause, both from high-ranking officials and from ordinary rank-and-file Nazi members, included in Kershaw’s study (see ibid.: 26–31). One ‘Party Comrade’, for instance, employing an obvious biblical allusion, claims: ‘I did not come to Hitler by accident. I was searching for him. My ideal was a movement which would forge national unity. … The realization of my ideal could happen through only one man, Adolf Hitler. The rebirth of Germany can be done only by a man born not in palaces, but in a cottage’ (cited in ibid.: 30). Of course, there were those who utterly rejected the Nazi Party and its ideals. Kershaw spends considerable time outlining three main blocks of rivals, the socialist and communist Left, political Catholicism, and the national bourgeois-conservative Right (see ibid.: 31–47). However, given such varied and often fervent ideological opposition among what was still, in 1932, the majority of Germans, what really needs to be accounted for, Kershaw argues, is how, within a strikingly short time after January 1933, the Führer cult was able to extend its hold over ever-widening sections of the German population and come eventually to be found (to varying degrees) acceptable by the great majority of Germans. In considering this phenomenon, Kershaw suggests three important factors must be taken into account (ibid.: 46–47). First, there was the widespread feeling in Germany that the Weimar political system and leadership were utterly bankrupt, that the nation, divided and damaged by a succession of bitter election campaigns, was in need of a new, dynamic, energetic, and youthful leader, someone who could offer a new sense of purpose and direction, a leader who could unite Germany and rule the nation with an assured hand. Thus, even those who entertained grave doubts as to Hitler’s political ability and integrity were still prepared to give the Nazi leader, already backed by an army of fanatical followers, the chance to restore order and unity to the German nation. Secondly, Kershaw suggests that the gross underestimation of Hitler prior to 1933, as a ‘pyjama character’, a ‘puppet of industry’, etc., became replaced after 1933 by a wholehearted, and equally exaggerated, enthusiasm, when

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within a short period in power the Nazi leader seemed to have mastered an internal political situation previously thought to be beyond his capabilities. Thirdly, and most importantly:

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Hitler embodied an already well-established, extensive, ideological consensus which also embraced most of those, except the Left, who had previously not belonged in the Nazi camp. Its chief elements were virulent anti-Marxism …; deep hostility towards the failed democratic system and a belief that strong, authoritarian leadership was necessary for any recovery; and a widespread feeling … that Germany had been badly wronged at Versailles, and was threatened by enemies on all sides. This pre-existing, wide consensus offered the potential for strong support for a national leader who could appear to offer absolute commitment, personal sacrifice, and selfless striving in the cause of inner unity and outward strength. (Ibid.)

These, then, in Kershaw’s estimation, are the three main factors involved in transforming former ‘lukewarm supporters, waverers, or even opponents into admirers of the Führer and thereby at least partial adherents of the Nazi State’. Of these, the last is taken to be the most important: Hitler’s embodiment of ‘an already well-established, extensive, ideological consensus’. And of what does this consensus consist? A distrust of Western democracy, coupled with widespread contempt for a capitalistic order based on sociopolitical individualism; the belief that strong authoritarian leadership was necessary for German recovery; the need to put the masses to work for the good of the nation and not to succumb to a universal class struggle or the cosmopolitan ideals of the Revolution; the ideal of a heroic leader sent by providence to unite Germany and restore its greatness; the deeply rooted and extensive proclivity to obey, particularly the state, long embedded in the subjectivist ideals of pietism and Bildung, which, Kershaw suggests, helped to prepare the ground among ordinary Protestants for the receptivity to notions of ‘political salvation’ that a ‘genuine’ national leader could offer; the desire to demonstrate from a solid base of inner unity Germany’s outward strength, to challenge and defeat the enemies that ‘threatened Germany on all sides’, to secure for the nation a ‘place in the sun’, to reaffirm the medieval Reich – in short, to realise the long-held ideal of pan-Germanism. It is from a very similar perspective to this – holistic and diachronic – that Dumont advises that the ‘whole cultural patrimony of national consciousness’, and not merely immediate causes or one-sided, partial, explanations, must be called upon when considering the Nazi phenomenon. It is here, at the global level, that an ideological continuity with Germany’s past can be detected, that a diachronic structure, an unravelling of a specific DNA comes into play. In conceiving, thus, of German culture as a whole and, always important, in relation to other

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European cultures, France, England, Italy, Russia, one is better equipped to understand how a small group of right-wing fanatics came in a relatively short period of time to gain favour with the majority of an entire nation. As Dumont (1986c: 159, emphasis in original) puts it, the popularity of the Führer ‘would be incomprehensible if he had not been somehow, on some level, representative of the contemporary German’.

The Usual Suspect: a Common Criticism of Method

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In an article entitled ‘The French Ideology? Louis Dumont and the German Conception of the Nation’ Josep Llobera (1996) presents a rather critical response to Dumont’s structural reading of German history. In the main, Llobera’s criticisms are targeted at Dumont’s methodological shortcomings; they echo the characteristic reproaches of Homo Hierarchicus concerning Dumont’s ‘cavalier attitude to empirical evidence’, his functioning ‘autonomously of the hard facts of the case’. Indeed, the gist of Llobera’s paper can be summed up in its last two sentences, where he claims that Dumont’s ‘approach shows the grandeur, but also the limitations of French structuralism when dealing with complex, historical, European societies. The brilliant insights that are generated do not always stand up to the painful tests of history’ (ibid.:). Dumont’s methodology, we are told: is straightforward, if not simplistic. His basic theoretical tools are the holism/individualism opposition and the ‘hierarchy relation’. At the risk of being unfair, one could say that the articles on Germany … contain, in a nutshell, Dumont’s vision of Germany from Herder, if not Luther, to Hitler. And in that sense they constitute an abrégé of the German national Sonderweg, which is contrasted with the French national path. (Ibid.: 195)

It is unclear what in this assessment risks ‘being unfair’. In fact, the statement captures perfectly Dumont’s own equation of cultures with human beings – that national cultures persist internally through time (Luther to Hitler) and are externally interdependent (contrast with France) – and relates pretty much to his own avowed purpose. What is really at stake, here as always, is whether Dumont’s ‘simplistic’ ideological approach ‘captures in all its richness German national consciousness’; whether, that is to say, ‘the predominance of holism, the idea of universal sovereignty and the introverted individualism of the Reformation’ are ‘sufficient to characterise the dynamics of modernity in Germany’ (ibid.: 201). According to Llobera (ibid.: 204), they are clearly not: ‘intellectual genealogies are important but they should not be confused with fully

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fledged explanations’. The methodology Dumont employs, his emphasis on philosophical and literary texts, ‘determines the types of answers that he is likely to elicit’. And, ‘at the methodological level, one wonders how reliable it is to focus on an extremely small and selective sample of “high culture” texts in order to ascertain the complex developments that culminated in Nazi Germany’ (ibid.: 205). Take the idea of the Volk, for instance. Although stressing its importance in the emergence of Nazism, nowhere does Dumont analyse ‘its multilayered complexity in any detail’. ‘If we accept that national-socialism was a mass movement, then the ideas of a few leading philosophers and literati are not so central; what needs to be accounted for are the beliefs of the masses’ (ibid.). Moreover, while Dumont ceremoniously dismisses attempts to directly link Romanticism to Nazism or to regard the latter as an irrational aberration from the Enlightenment ideal, Llobera (ibid.: 200) suggests that:

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in spite of his caution and denials, there is the implicit idea that the Nazi regime is the logical development of the past ideological history of Germany since Luther, if not earlier (Holy Roman Empire). It would appear as if the German people were prisoners of a closed mind which inexorably led them to the catastrophic totalitarianism of the Third Reich.

Thus, although, in Llobera’s opinion, Dumont explicitly criticises ‘Luther to Hitler’-type explanations, he nevertheless, implicitly and sanctimoniously, exploits this same ‘kind of simplistic intellectual genealogy’ himself (ibid.: 205). Consequently, Dumont’s approach is thought to lack methodological credibility, since only a multilayered historico-sociological model – and not, the implication clearly follows, the unidimensionality of Dumont’s anthropology – can capture the complexities of modern society. In all fairness, Dumont’s essay on ‘The Totalitarian Disease’ is occasionally vague and often difficult to follow (in fact, Llobera considers the whole corpus of essays on German ideology to be ‘complex and even somewhat mystifying’). None the less, Dumont’s underlying premise, stated at the beginning of the essay (1986c: 149), is to correct what he perceives to be a lack of ‘thorough reflection’ into the ‘Hitlerian experience’, which has resulted in it having ‘not yet been mastered in thought’. ‘We have long known a great deal, maybe we know all we need to, and yet we do not understand the thing as a whole’ (ibid.: 151, emphasis in original).11 For Dumont, understanding comes from taking the widest possible perspective, from viewing German culture both holistically and in relation to its surroundings: what is purportedly known must be reincorporated into a recognisable ‘whole’ before it can be fully understood. To this end, Dumont advocates an holistic

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approach, according to which ‘Luther’, as well as all the other ‘individuals’ identified along the way (Goethe, Troeltsch, Mann, etc.), should not be seen as ‘simplistic intellectual’ ancestors of Hitler, but, along with Hitler himself, as representative of different historical stages of German culture as a whole: it being remembered that this ‘whole’ only gains clarity and definition when compared with other ‘national’ wholes. It is not so much a simplistic intellectual genealogy that Dumont wishes to trace, but the whole national consciousness of Germany, the ideological expression and product of its entire history, its specific DNA. In this scheme of things, individual personalities, the works and intellectual products of specific individuals, are only of secondary significance. Real value lies in the individual’s representativeness of the whole. In keeping with his Durkheimian legacy, for Dumont it is the whole and not the part that is important.12 This leads, however, to the most substantial of Llobera’s criticisms. How representative can a particular individual, or a particular text, or even a particular movement be of an entire nation?13 Even in the 1980s, when Dumont was compiling his essays on German ideology and comparing German culture with other national cultures, he was flying very much in the face of anthropological fashion. By this time, the concept of ‘culture’, especially in the sense in which Dumont is characterised as employing it, reified, essentialist, deterministic, homogeneous, had been widely rejected in anthropological circles. Opposed to the reifying of cultures as concrete entities (German culture) that might then be compared and contrasted with other like entities (French culture), a more relational, dynamic, embedded approach had become the norm, one emphasising individual agency and cultural hybridity. Such, in part, was (and still is) the post-modern challenge to modernist social theory. How can one speak of French or English culture as a whole when France and England are multicultural, pluralist societies? In place of what became increasingly conceived as a reified, essentialist, traditional view of culture, a whole plethora of new concepts came into fashion – knowledge, discourse, polyphony, multi-locality, etc. – each emphasising the shift towards a more fluid, often agent-oriented approach.

A Question of Global Culture Yet, if one is to ignore the notion of (global) culture altogether, if one is to focus on the particular at the expense of the general and generalisable, then what is to become of anthropology as a comparative discipline, the discipline to which Dumont devoted the greatest part of his academic career? Surely there are varying degrees of embeddedness,

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the family, the company, the community, town, city, nation, Europe, the West. Surely it means something different to live in France, even as a foreign settler, than it does to settle in Italy or Germany. Surely a Hindu living in England experiences life differently from a Hindu living in India and this difference is partly accounted for by the fact that there is something empirically different about British and Indian ‘culture’, which becomes clearly evident when one is holistically compared with the other. This is not to deny, of course, that within these respective national cultures there exists much cultural diversity, that there are manifold voices, subcultures, discourses. Rather, it is to suggest that, if one takes a step back, if one moves to another level of investigation, these voices begin in a sense to merge – more counterpoint than polyphony – or at least a dominant voice appears, a particular and distinctive national voice – as compared, that is, with other national voices. Even in a transnational world, a world made smaller through communication and travel, through migration and global capitalism, through syncretisation and creolisation, the abstraction ‘national culture’ still provides a useful means of orientation and a level at which anthropological comparison might still justifiably be made. If the world is a gigantic melting-pot, there are still particular, culturally and historically distinct, national ingredients. If we live in a world described variously as post-industrial, post-modern, and post-imperialist, we do not, as yet, inhabit a post-national world (Chen 2001: 103). Thus, as well as syncretism, there is anti-syncretism; as well as pluralism, fundamentalism; as well as modernity, tradition. Is it possible to understand these processes without at least some recourse to the idea of a collective ideological whole, a global culture in the Dumontian sense? As a structuralist, there can be little doubt that Dumont’s central concern is with the ‘deep identity’ of human beings, with the basic underlying structures of personality, with the most fundamental sociocultural categories. Thus, in a sentence that can only sound anathema to the average post-modernist, he characteristically explains, ‘I must here sacrifice diversity in order to throw into relief the main lines of the global phenomenon as they appear in the present [comparative] perspective’ (Dumont 1986a: 595). Reasoning such as this would most probably form Dumont’s response to Llobera’s implied criticism regarding the unidimensionality of his approach, his singular concern with ideology. Rightly or wrongly, depending as much as anything on one’s own sociological convictions, it is Dumont’s belief that one stratum of Llobera’s multilayered complexity speaks, in a sense, for all the others; better still, that this primary layer encompasses all the others within itself at the most basic and fundamental ideological level – it being understood that this

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basic ideology is only ever thrown into fullest relief when viewed against other regional, usually national, global ideologies in the most general of comparative perspectives, a point often overlooked by Dumont’s detractors. When one takes this step back, when one looks at the issue comparatively and not only in terms of the dynamics of a particular society, when one considers, for instance, Dumont’s contention that the Indian ‘individual’ does not ideologically exist in comparison with its Western counterpart, then many of the charges of methodological naivety or lack of sociological rigour made against Dumont begin to wane. In fact, Llobera himself (1996: 206) comes close to recognising this when he writes, ‘Generally speaking, if Dumont’s characterisation of Germany and France in terms of cultural nationalism and political nationalism respectively is by and large correct, it is essentially a rather static definition which fails to take into account historical developments.’ Given the world-historical scope of Dumont’s anthropology, could he really have aspired to more – or should more be expected of him – than that his analyses be correct ‘by and large’, ‘generally’ to the point? That others should fill in the gaps, or even criticise the overall structure, that they should develop other approaches to social phenomena is all well and good, only to the betterment of anthropology as a whole. Of course, at one level, it is wrong to essentialise cultures, to rob individuals or groups of their agency, but, if one moves to another level, a more general and abstract one – the structural level of world history at which Dumont in the last resort functions – then the actions of specific individuals or groups become less and less methodologically significant, even insignificant, to be replaced by the most general characteristics of collectivities.14 Still, their can be little doubt that Dumont emphasises the ‘ideological’ at the expense of, say, the political or economic in his structural reading of Germany history – after all, the title of his collected essays is German Ideology. And Llobera is quite right: at one level there is a sense in which this emphasis on ideas, on high culture, fails to capture all the complexities of the situation. The historian Harold James, who, like Dumont, is also concerned with tracing German identity from 1770 onwards, offers a more cyclical reading of German history, whereby initial attempts at defining the nation culturally (or ideologically) are succeeded in time by an emphasis on politics and then on economics before returning to a stress on cultural factors during the interwar period (James 1989). Perhaps this is an example of the more rounded approach favoured by Llobera. However, in the last resort, Dumont’s study of German history has to be fitted into his wider concern with world-history, with the revelation in values or fundamental ideas that distinguishes tradition from modernity, and with the whole

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modern ‘individualist configuration’. At this level, what is sacrificed in terms of multilayered complexity, in terms, that is, of knowledge, is compensated for in terms of perspective, of (world-historical) understanding.

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The World-Historical Allen (1985: 27) has rightly pointed out that the label ‘evolutionist’ is an unhappy one: one that conjures up now thoroughly discredited notions such as ‘primitive promiscuity’ and ‘primitive matriarchy’. On the whole, it is an appellation from which most anthropologists today would readily distance themselves. Indeed, we saw Dumont do just that in the introduction to his Huxley Lecture. In equating cultures with human beings, Dumont was careful to avoid being tarred with the same brush as Thomas Huxley, perhaps the most famous and resolute defender of Darwinism – ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ – whose main anthropological contribution had been to apply the principles of biological evolution to the study of society. Given its negative connotations, Allen suggests in his essay on Mauss’s ‘category of the person’ that, instead of employing the term evolutionist, it would perhaps be better to talk of ‘Mauss’s world-historical awareness, i.e., his habit of assessing particular cultures or social phenomena against the history of humanity as a whole’ (ibid). At the very least, this negates some of the pejorative implications of social evolutionism, that change is necessarily progressive, that so-called ‘primitive’ societies are morally and intellectually inferior to more complex, modern ones – a basic premise of nineteenth-century colonialism. Although there can be little doubt that Mauss worked within an evolutionary framework,15 he was nevertheless more than willing to question the moral, social, and political values of his own society, to critically evaluate these in light of the historical spectrum of humanity as a whole.16 The ‘Moral Conclusions’ Mauss draws at the end of The Gift are far from affirming of modernity. By and large, contemporary French society is portrayed as having lost the morality of the gift, of reciprocity and solidarity, or at least this morality exists only here and there, in small enclaves, odd traditions, evolutionary survivals. In its place, utility and individuality have taken root. ‘For a long time man was something different; and it is not so long since he became a machine – a calculating machine’ (Mauss 1970: 74). The whole field of modern industrial and commercial law, according to Mauss, is in ‘conflict with morality’. What is required is ‘a return to law’, to ‘group morality’, a ‘putting back of the clock’, a ‘return to the old and elemental’. Mauss sees some indication of this desired

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return in new legislation promoting social insurance and state socialism, in professional groups, workers’ co-operatives, and friendly societies. ‘The theme of the gift, of freedom and obligation in the gift, of generosity and self-interest in giving, reappear in our own society like the resurrection of a dominant motif long forgotten’ (ibid.: 66). Clearly, it is Mauss’s world-historical awareness, his sense of the spatial and temporal relativity of values, that underlies this challenge to the individualistic ideals of his own society. Modern individualism, political and economic, diverges fundamentally from the collectivist, predominantly religious, values that have at most other times and places provided the basic framework for human social existence. It is this same world-historical awareness that informs Mauss’s judgement that the very idea of a single, bounded, self-contained individual or person, an idea so ‘clearly determined in the depths of one’s consciousness’ that it appears innate and universal, is in fact a precarious modern construction, ‘formulated only for us, among us’. In fact, according to Dumont, it is this world-historical awareness, this trace of evolutionary thinking, which enables Mauss to make any of his social, political, or moral cross-cultural comparisons (or evaluations): We may reject evolutionism today, but we should not forget that it was evolutionism that fused the ‘we’ and the ‘others’, civilized and barbarians, into one species. The idea of evolution has worked like a preliminary scaffolding to unite discrete sets before they could be incorporated in a single whole. Now we find that whole is rather shapeless, and we demand a study of differences, as Mauss did again and again. But it would not have been possible to study differences before the basic unity was established. (Dumont 1986c: 190)

For both Mauss and Dumont, it is with this basic assumption – l’unité du genre humain – that anthropology comes into its own, that cross-cultural comparison becomes methodologically meaningful. It is not surprising, then, that Jonathan Parry (1998: 153) claims to have detected in Dumont: a kind of implicit and residual evolutionism taken over from Mauss which finds in the Indian formulation of the relationship between the priest and the king a kind of halfway house along a path of development which leads from an undifferentiated ‘traditional’ world in which religion, politics, and economics are inseparable, to the modern world in which they constitute conceptually autonomous spheres.

This undifferentiated ‘traditional’ world is usually associated by Dumont with such places as ancient Egypt, Sumeria, the Chinese

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empire, and various Polynesian chiefdoms, wherein the king functions simultaneously as chief priest. Although, Dumont suggests, in the remote past the same was possibly true of India, at an early date the priestly and kingly functions became split apart. As we saw in our discussion of Homo Hierarchicus, the picture Dumont paints of Indian society is that of a conceptual system in which a relatively separate politico-economic domain is ideologically subordinate to the allembracing sphere of religion – religion being the fundamental principle upon which Hindu society, like most, if not all, traditional societies rest. In contrast, in the modern West, politics, economics, and religion are equally independent spheres, ‘autonomous, equal realms resembling the juxtaposition of individuals in society’ (Dumont 1970: 33). Dumont sees in the earlier undifferentiated societies ‘a logical and genetical’ precursor to the Indian configuration and, as we saw previously, the latter in turn might be conceived as ‘a logical and genetical’ antecedent of the modern West. That is to say, while the traditional Indian social order is thought to have developed out of something very like the unified conceptual orders of some Polynesian societies, the absolute autonomy of politics, religion, and economics in the modern West emerges out of a situation of relative autonomy characterised by India – Parry’s ‘halfway house’. This is the level at which Dumont, like Mauss, ultimately functions. That is to say, his most general or basic concern is with world-historical structures, with gradual ideological transformations of the longue durée. It is of little surprise, then, that the key subjects of Dumont’s research are cultures or societies as a whole, society ‘as a global fact irreducible to its parts – and here it is not a matter of “Society” in the abstract but always of a particular, concrete society with all its specific institutions and representations’ (Dumont 1986c: 2). When dealing in millennia-long time frames and with worldwide comparisons, one needs necessarily to function as a methodological holist. If anywhere, methodological individualism comes into play at the level of society itself. This seems to be the point Dumont is making when he compares ‘cultures’ to ‘living beings’, in that both are reasonably self-contained and persist ontologically through time.

Notes 1. In fact, in a slightly modified version, the Huxley Lecture serves as an introduction to this book. 2. Elsewhere, Dumont (1986c: 153) suggests that pan-Germanism was the main, perhaps even the only, attribute of the unified Prusso-German State that Germans accepted as genuine. 3. We shall limit ourselves to focusing mainly on this more general discussion. Perhaps all that might be said with regard to his reading of Mein Kampf is that Dumont

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proceeds along characteristic lines: ‘In an attempt to see Hitler’s Weltanschauung as a unity, we shall begin by making a double inventory from Mein Kampf: on the one hand the holistic traits – whether nonmodern or antimodern – and, on the other hand, traits that are individualistic or at first approximation “modern”’ (Dumont 1986c: 162–63). Thus, totalitarianism ‘results from the attempt, in a society where individualism is deeply rooted and predominant, to subordinate it to the primacy of the society as a whole’ (ibid.: 158, emphasis in original). 4. Dumont’s use of the word ‘disease’ brings to mind Durkheim’s distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’ states of society. Totalitarianism is a disease, a pathological social condition, in the modern world. 5. Not only was Hitler inspired by Mussolini in Italy, but Dumont (1986c: 151) also points to a chain of successive outbiddings, which includes a notable Russian contribution:

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Marx inherits the titanic speculation of the German philosophers and intensifies it: instead of interpreting the world, he is going to change it by means of an alliance between philosophy and the proletariat. Hence the ‘professional revolutionary’, Lenin, who goes one step further: Russian populism has proclaimed the possibility of the Russian people’s overtaking bourgeois Western civilization, which leads Lenin to the idea that … the Bolshevik party will be able to skip the capitalist stage of development altogether and lead Russia directly from Tsarism to Socialism. Along comes Hitler, who rejects the Bolsheviks’ ideology but picks up the instrument of power they have forged and combines their party model with a quite different ideology. 6. In fact, this becomes clearer at the end of the essay where, in summing up, Dumont (1986c: 177) writes of the ‘alloying of archaism and modernity’, the adaptation of the traditional German system to modern conditions. 7. Karl Pribram was a German-language sociologist of Czechoslovakian birth. In translation, the paper in question is entitled ‘German Nationalism and German Socialism’ (1922). Dumont seems surprised, perhaps even reassured, to have found in Pribram an author who, as early as 1922, had ‘anticipated my own analysis of [German] ideology in terms of individualism and holism’. That they reached similar conclusions must also have been encouraging, since Pribram too attempts to demonstrate that Nazism is a pseudo-holism, a superimposition of holistic tendencies onto a basically individualistic ideology (see Dumont 1986c: 156–58). 8. Dumont 1986c: 149–58 comes across as particularly difficult, circuitous, lacking in logical progression. At one point we find the statement, ‘Hence we return, willynilly, to German ideology,’ which probably captures as well as anything the essay’s structural inconsistencies. The foregoing summary has necessitated a certain degree of reading between the lines but hopefully remains close enough to Dumont’s intended purpose. 9. Dumont (1994: 22) also makes reference to this myth in support of his notion of pan-Germanism. 10. This is the period in which Thomas Mann was advocating, in the face of considerable resistance, the acceptance of ‘politics’. 11. See Dumont’s essay on Mauss (1986c: 183–201) for more on this distinction between knowing and understanding. 12. One does occasionally come across an exception to this general rule. In his essay on totalitarianism, Dumont (1986c: 159, emphasis added) writes concerning the holocaust: ‘Now there are reasons to think that extermination issued from the will of Adolf Hitler, and that it would not have happened had the leader of the movement by an improbable chance been someone else. Indeed, it had been a fixed idea

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13.

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14.

15.

16.

Categories of Self of Hitler’s at least since 1919 to eliminate or exterminate the Jews, whereas in Himmler himself we can find some traces of reticence: a dreadful example of the role of personality in history’. Nevertheless, it is with general and not personal factors that Dumont, as a comparative ideologist, is necessarily concerned. And it is only to be expected that biographical factors should be sacrificed to sociological ones when functioning at this ideological level. Thus, in the same way as Kershaw sees fit to overlook descriptive accounts of Hitler’s personality in expounding his theory of the Hitler Myth, so it is befitting for Dumont, like Durkheim and Mauss before him, in searching for ideological or global characteristics, to emphasise collective forces rather than idiosyncratic features. In so doing, Dumont does not deny the existence of the latter, but simply functions at a different level of analysis – ‘outside the Weberian paradigm’. Dumont (1977: 18) has himself commented on this dilemma, ‘Here we encounter a difficulty: our material is made up of particular texts of particular authors. How shall we recognize in each text what is social and what is not?’ Whether or not a text is ‘social’ refers to its relationship to the wider ideological whole, to the general configuration of values under consideration. ‘Social’ texts reflect common ‘representations and configurations’, they draw on the ‘ether that tinges the whole scene’. This is the sense in which an individual author might be taken as representative of the whole. It should also be remembered that Dumont was writing of India in the 1950s and that even then his emphasis was on traditional Hindu values. Moreover, in German Ideology it is only up to around 1933 that Dumont’s investigation advances. The case could reasonably be made for a greater degree of cultural homogeneity within these periods than is true today; that the recent shift in theoretical emphasis towards notions of plurality and multi-locality relates as much to the changing nature of the world, as it does to the judged failure of earlier anthropological concepts. In fact, Dumont (1986a: 558) points to something along these lines when he confesses in the Huxley Lecture that in comparison with the eighteenth and nineteenth century ‘our present-day world ideology is a more complicated affair’. This is not to deny that people and ideas have always migrated, that there have always been levels of knowledge, degrees of discourse. It is to suggest, rather, that the latter half of the twentieth century has witnessed a hitherto unknown explosion in technology and communications, in tourism and travel, in worldwide exchanges of peoples, ideas, and material culture. Neither is it to deny, on the other hand, that, even within contemporary pluralist, multicultural societies, dominant cultures still exist, that irrespective of recent global transformations there is still something comparatively ‘English’ about England, ‘French’ about France, ‘Indian’ about India, ‘Chinese’ about China, and so on, a difference steeped in long historical tradition and not easily abandoned at the call of the global tune. See Mauss (1970: 68): ‘The basis of moral action is general; it is common to societies of the highest degree of evolution, to those of the future and to societies of the least advancement.’ Dumont (1986c: 190) writes, concerning Mauss, that his first methodological principle was that there are no ‘uncivilized people’, just people with different civilizations. And, commenting on Durkheim and Mauss’s joint venture in Primitive Classification, Dumont concludes, ‘I perceive a touch of disdain in the approach to primitive ideas, which was quite foreign to Mauss’s factual and sympathetic outlook, and which one is inclined to attribute to the philosopher Durkheim’ (ibid.: 193).

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Chapter 9

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ON THE CATEGORY OF THE SELF

Like Dumont, Sudhir Kakar, in his book The Inner World: A Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India, also discerns ‘a hard-core unity’ in the diversity of Hindu India, a central ideological nucleus that encompasses the welter of distinct regional, linguistic, caste, class, and religious sub-identities and, in comparison with other societies, presents a clear sense of ‘Indianness’. Kakar’s study is intended as a contribution to social psychology, and in it the author attempts to discern ‘the social roles, traditional values, caste customs and kinship regulations with which the threads of individual psychological development are interwoven’ (Kakar 1981: 2). According to Kakar, in terms of its effect on the ‘self ’, this basic cultural core, internalised in the child’s superego, significantly pervades the Hindu’s world-view. In comparing Indian and Western concepts of the ‘self ’, Kakar claims that ‘the maintenance of ego boundaries – between “inside” and “outside”, between “I” and others – and the sensory experiences and social relations based on these separations, is the stuff of reality in Western thought and yet maya [illusion] to the Hindus’ (ibid.: 20). This setting up of strong ego boundaries, what we might call the ‘categorising’ of the Western self, an integral part of the valorisation or categorisation of the modern ‘individual/person’, provides the focus of the present chapter. As a means of initial orientation, let us return in the first instance to a particularly instructive passage previously cited from Dumont: ‘There is indeed a person, an individual and unique experience, but it is in large part made up of common elements, and there is nothing destructive in recognising this: tear from yourself the social material and you are left with nothing more than the potential for personal organisation’ (Dumont 1980: 6). Along with the ‘person/individual’,

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then, at the deepest level of analysis the ‘self ’, too, is fashioned by society, and in Dumont’s opinion, to think otherwise amounts to a ‘false signification of the self ’. Both these levels – ‘person’ and ‘self ’ – are considered in Mauss’s essay on the ‘person’ (of which Dumont’s work on the ‘individual’ should be seen as an extension) – both, as to be expected, from a sociological vantage point. We have seen already that the subject Mauss avows an interest in is that conveyed in a society’s law, religion, customs, social structures, and mentality. This is not, as he is at pains to point out, the sense of self, spiritual and physical, of which ‘there has never existed a human being who has not been aware’ (i.e., Dumont’s ‘potential for personal organisation’), but ‘the notion or concept that men in different ages have formed of it’ (Mauss 1985: 3). In this sense, it is with the ‘person’ and not the ‘self ’ that Mauss is interested. Despite this assertion, Carrithers (1985: 235) has argued that by the end of Mauss’s paper the self (moi), in fact, ‘turns out to be the object of the whole act’. In particular, the self gains prominence in the section detailing Christian notions of the soul and later reigns supreme in the philosophy of the modern West, where it is more or less equated with the idea of the person (personne). The confusion seems to arise in relation to what Mauss means by a ‘sense of self ’. Mauss (1985: 3) writes that he is to ‘leave aside everything which relates to the “self ” (moi), the conscious personality as such’ and will conduct his investigation solely at the level of ‘law and morality’. Therefore, when the self is ‘reintroduced’ in the discussion of India and goes on to be accorded a prominent role in the Christian notion of the soul and finally to triumph in the theories of Western philosophy, Carrithers (1985: 235) conceives of all this as a rather cunning ‘magical trick’. Like Cinderella, apparently left at home, the ‘self ’ ends up as the triumphant belle of the ball. However, and this is where the misunderstanding transpires, it was never Mauss’s intention to leave this ‘self ’ at home. In the very next paragraph to the one in which he maintains that his concern is with law, religion, and customs, Mauss (1985: 3) writes: ‘I shall show you how recent is the word “self ” (moi), used philosophically; how recent “the category of the self ” (moi) …; and how recent even “the respect of self ” (moi), in particular the respect of others.’ Far from ignoring the self, the whole drift of Mauss’s paper is geared towards demonstrating how the customs and law, the dominant ideology of the modern West, in contradistinction to earlier times and other parts of the world, conceive of the self (moi) and person (personne) more or less synonymously. The modern person is a legal substance, indivisible and individual, possessed of moral value. And this, philosophised by Kant and (particularly) Fichte, forms the basis of the Western ‘category of the self ’ (ibid.: 22). The self does not ‘turn out’ to be the object of the

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whole act; it is from the very beginning the centre of attention. In fact, one need only reflect upon the (unabbreviated) title of the paper to appreciate the truth in this: ‘A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person; the Notion of Self ’. What Mauss attempts to demonstrate is how a category of thought that conceives of the human being as an inalienable legal (personne) and metaphysical (moi) entity, although felt to be innate, universal, natural, is in reality a precarious modern construction. Still, if one accepts this interpretation, another of Carrithers’s criticisms becomes relevant. This is the suggestion that Mauss’s essay portrays a far too unilateral reading of human history, one that wrongly equates what Carrithers believes to be the quite separate narratives of ‘self ’ and ‘person’. Thus, while Mauss’s narrative culminates in the modern West in the homogeneous category of the person/self, Carrithers suggests that two separate histories should be disentangled – that it is possible, indeed necessary, to delineate a distinct and irreducible narrative of the ‘self ’ from that of the ‘person’. While personality relates to ‘a conception of the individual human being as a member of a (1) significant and (2) ordered collectivity’, selfhood relates to ‘a conception of (1) the physical and mental individuality of human beings within (2) a natural or spiritual cosmos, and (3) interacting with each other as moral agents’ (Carrithers 1985: 235, 236, emphasis in original). That these notions should not be equated Carrithers believes is obvious enough. Theories of self have their own development, their own inner logic, they are relatively autonomous and might even conflict with or contradict prevailing sociopolitical definitions of the person. We are pointed to a Christian in Nazi Germany torn between his spiritual duty to God and his social obligations to the German state. For Carrithers, this inherent tension, this deep divide between public and private domains, illustrates visibly the disjunction between person and self.

An Alternative History of the Self In the light of this clear disjunction, Carrithers proposes an ‘alternative social history of the self ’. This other history is derived from the writings and life of the German Catholic, Anton Gueth, a slightly younger contemporary of Mauss, who, having abandoned his native Germany, headed East to become a Buddhist monk and was thereafter known as Nyanatiloka. The Western sources that shaped Gueth’s thinking prior to his Buddhist conversion Carrithers (ibid.: 240) sees as dealing ‘almost exclusively, not with the personne as part of a collectivity, but with various views of the moi, the psychological individual in respect of a spiritual natural order’. These include, for

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example, Thomas à Kempis’s Imitatio Christi, the writings of Goethe, Herder, and Humboldt (representatives, as we have seen, of the quintessentially German process of Bildung or self-cultivation), and the individualistic musings of Schopenhauer, later to influence the psychoanalytic theories of Freud. What, significantly, each of these sources has in common is an overriding emphasis on the development of the self, either in relation to God or in accordance with a natural order. Certainly, social considerations are far removed here from the privileged status accorded to them by Mauss. We are dealing, rather, with theories of self, with moi theories, and, as Herder puts it, at this level, in the realm of self-cultivation and spiritual development, society amounts to little more than a ‘net of falsehood’. Ultimate truth is located in the psychophysical individual and not in the social collectivity. Indeed, Carrithers (ibid.: 236) tells us quite explicitly that ‘a view of how individual human beings should interact face to face is not necessarily the same as a view of how they should act in respect of a significant collectivity’. And again, while discussing Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, he is quick to point out that the internalised spirituality advocated in this devotional work fits historically ‘not with Mauss’s and Durkheim’s conception of the collectivity, but with smallscale, face-to-face societies, monasteries or prayer groups’. Moreover, this ideal of the inwardly spiritual individual leads ‘not to thought about citizenship in the state, but to what was later called civil disobedience, to an emphasis on the individual and his conscience in the face of the collectivity’ (ibid.: 241). This is Carrithers’s basic point: modern society is not a homogeneous whole, a single narrative, but is a decidedly heterogeneous arrangement, consisting of many narratives or conversations, even several major ones, and ‘so long as one can take a different view as a mind or soul than as a citizen – so long, for example, as one can object conscientiously to the political order – these conversations will remain separate’ (ibid.: 255). Of course, at one level, Carrithers is right – one’s social and personal existences are not necessarily synonymous. This is similar to the criticism we saw directed at Dumont by Mines in an earlier chapter with regard to the non-existence of the Hindu ‘individual’. In stressing instances of rebellion against traditional values, Mines aimed to show that his Indian informants were as wilful and self-determined as anyone else. At another level of analysis, however, at the global level at which Dumont ultimately functions, it was suggested that these instances of rebellion point as much as anything to an overarching ideology centred upon collectivist – and not individualist – values. And, arguably, at this other level, at the level of global or world-historical structures, the case can reasonably be made for concluding that

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Mauss was not too far off the mark in equating the ‘person’ and ‘self ’ in his ideological reading of the modern West. When Mauss writes that he is to leave aside everything that relates to the ‘self ’, the conscious personality as such, and will conduct his investigation solely at the level of ‘law and morality’, he is not claiming that he has nothing to say about the self as a philosophical construct. The whole drift of Mauss’s paper is geared towards demonstrating how the moral and legal principles valorising the single sociopolitical ‘individual’ or ‘person’ are themselves irrevocably intertwined with a view of the inalienable, private, indivisible, bounded, ego or self. Clearly, it is important to make a distinction here between a ‘sense of self ’ and the ‘category of self ’. The ‘category of self ’, in its Western, bounded form, is a social construct of relatively recent origin. As such, it cannot be equated with a pan-human ‘sense of self ’. Every human being possesses a sense of his or her individuality (this is what Mauss is leaving aside),1 but not every society values ideologically a self-contained category of the self (this is what Mauss is interested in). What then of the two great conversations proposed by Carrithers, the social and individual, the public and private, those belonging respectively, and at times conflictingly, to the person and the self? What of the conscientious objector, the individual torn between the two, the supposed embodiment of their separation? First of all, we can safely say that Mauss, as much as anyone else, was fully aware that his private hopes, beliefs, and desires did not necessarily accord with his public and social responsibilities; that existence has a private and spiritual dimension (however broadly defined) as much as it does a public and sociopolitical one. However, the point Mauss is making is that the self as a philosophical construct, as a category, has undergone a similar process of individualisation, of rendering concrete and bounded, as has the sociopolitical person – at this level, the self and the person do not stand opposed; they are not ideological ‘alternatives’ but different representations of the same reality, two sides of the same coin. Perhaps this line of reasoning will become clearer if we consider the notion of conscientious objection a little more closely and, importantly, from a comparative perspective. We have seen that Carrithers cites the conscientious objector – he or she who rejects from the viewpoint of privately held beliefs the dictates of the political order – as a clear demonstration of the dichotomy between person and self. And this is perfectly reasonable. However, there is another sense, a legal or ideological one, in which the notion of conscientious objection is itself based upon a sociomoral valorisation of the self – on the recognition, that is, of an individual’s personal right not to harm another human being in war. It is society that ideologically permits this choice, that values the self so much that it is allowed to subvert what is normally

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expected of the ‘person’. Indeed, this is the very ‘respect of self ’ that Mauss claims in his essay to be a relatively recent development in the history of humanity. Hopefully, the case will become more convincing if we turn to what might be glossed a ‘pre-modern’ slant on conscientious objection. In world literature, one would be hard pushed to find a better example of reluctance on ethical grounds to become involved in an ensuing war than that provided by Arjuna in the Hindu epic Mah¯abh¯arata. Plagued by doubts and fears as he stood immobilised at the edge of the battle of Kuruksetra, Arjuna experiences an overwhelming crisis of conscience. Should he enter the fray and attack, perhaps even kill, members of his own family aligned with the opposing army, or should he withdraw from the battlefield altogether? It is in this context that Arjuna’s charioteer and appointed adviser, Krishna, expounds the Bhagavad-gı¯t¯a, which essentially encourages Arjuna to fight. Krishna points out that Arjuna has no option but to act, since inaction is itself a form of action. The factors that should guide Arjuna’s choice are an accurate knowledge of his karma and the fulfilment of dharma. As a warrior, it is Arjuna’s dharma to fight – egoistic sentimentality or personal doubt should not be allowed to interfere with this morally prescribed duty. Commenting on this episode in the Bhagavad-gı¯t¯a, Douglas Allen (1997: 9) writes: [Arjuna’s] must be a selfless attitude with no ego-attachment to the results of his actions. Krishna describes many yogas – including karma (action), bhakti (devotion), and jñana (knowledge) – all of which deny that the finite, empirical, separate ego is the permanent self and offer paths to ego-transcendence. In other words, characteristics usually essential to modern concepts of the self are presented in the Gita as defining the constitution of a false or illusory self, and the Gita proposes means for transcending such self-constitutions as essential to spiritual liberation.

In contradistinction to the dominant Western concept of the self, the independent, autonomous, individuated self, that philosophical ‘respect of self ’ of which Mauss writes; as opposed to this, the morality that shapes the dominant construction of the self presented in the Bhagavad-gı¯t¯a – probably the most revered and influential of all Hindu texts – is one that relegates the independent rational ego to an illusory, fictional state, stressing in its place conformity to one’s dharma, to an objective moral code. The bounded, essentially non-social, highly atomistic view of the self that pervades much of Western philosophy, belongs in Hindu ideology to the realm of m¯ay¯a: it is little more than a fiction, something to be transcended or annihilated. It is this view of the self that Mauss claims in his essay to have hindered the develop-

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ment of the Indian self along the same lines pursued by the dominant European model. As Sanderson (1985: 190) puts it: Mauss recognises India as the scene of man’s first formal conception of the self as an individual conscious entity. Seeing that this discovery was not followed by the developments which lead in his evolutionist scheme to the perfection of the category of the person in the minds of Europeans, he seeks an explanation for this failure and finds it in the influence of the Samkhya dualists, Buddhist impersonalists and Upanishadic monists. Since these doctrines belong to the earliest accessible stratum of Indian metaphysics, gaining prominence in the middle of the first millennium B.C., it appears to Mauss that the proper growth of the Indian self was prevented at its birth by views which recognised it only to reject it as a fiction constitutive of an undesirable worldly consciousness.

An Alternative ‘Alternative History of the Self ’

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The remainder of this chapter is devoted to outlining an alternative ‘alternative history of the self ’. That is to say, rather than the ‘alternative history’ proposed by Carrithers, the intention is to present a brief history of the Western self that generally accords with the observations of Mauss and Dumont, one that highlights the progressive ‘categorisation’ or ‘individualisation’ of the self in a philosophical shift from other-worldly metaphysics to this-worldly immanence, from holism to individualism. Robert Solomon’s Continental Philosophy Since 1750: The Rise and Fall of the Self will be employed as a general guide – and we shall commence our journey, as does Solomon, with Rousseau: Strolling in solitude through the lush forests of St Germain during the early adolescence of the modern age, Jean-Jacques Rousseau made a miraculous discovery. It was his self. This self was not, as his more scholastic predecessor Descartes had thought, that thin merely logical self, a pure formality that presented itself indubitably whenever he reflected: ‘I think, therefore I am’. Nor was his the frustrated, sceptical search that led his friend Hume to declare, paradoxically, that ‘whenever I look inside myself, there is no self to be found’. What Rousseau discovered in the woods of France was a self so rich and substantial, so filled with good feeling and half-articulated good thoughts, so expansive, natural and at peace with the universe, that he recognised it immediately as something much more than his singular self. It was rather the Self as such, the soul of humanity. Looking deeply into himself Rousseau discovered the self that he shared with all men and women the world over, and declared that it was good – intrinsically good, despite all of the artifices and superficialities of the social whirl. … What Rousseau discovered – or at any rate raised to the level of first-rate philosophy – was the transcendental pretence. (Solomon 1988: 1, emphasis in original)

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It has been suggested that Rousseau stood as a pivotal figure in both the French Revolution (through his emphasis on the rights of the individual) and German Romanticism (via his elevation of nature and sentiment above civilization and intellect). In chapter 6 we took up the former of these influences, given our concern with the ‘category of the individual’. Now it is time to change register, to take up the other strand of Rousseau’s intellectual legacy, to explore the ‘category of the self ’. First, however, a word or two should be said in clarification of what Solomon means in the above quotation by ‘the transcendental pretence’. Transcendental should not be confused here with transcendent, ‘outside’ or ‘beyond’. It refers rather to the notion of ‘necessary’ or ‘universal’ in the Kantian sense. In contrast to the merely personal or idiosyncratic, transcendental structures are basic (a priori) to all human existence. Thus, the Self discovered by Rousseau, the timeless universal Self, becomes transposed in Kant into ‘the transcendental ego’, the basic (pre-social) source of all human thought and experience. As far as ‘pretence’ goes, Solomon is keen to point out the excesses involved in such an ethno- and anthropocentric view – a ‘universally projective and self-congratulatory’ vision of the self – that assumes the a priori structures of one’s own culture, or even one’s own mind, to be in some sense necessary or universal for the whole of humankind.

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The Rise of the Self in German Idealism Although he does not employ the term himself, in Solomon’s account it is really with Kant (1724–1804) that the philosophical ‘categorisation’ of the self gets under way. While Descartes had identified the self as the rational thinking ego and Rousseau had ‘discovered’ the emotional or emphatic quality of self, Kant tended to absorb both these traditions, regarding the self as the underlying concern of his entire philosophy. While Rousseau’s universal Self was to be felt or experienced, Kant endeavoured, more in keeping with Descartes, to base his own notion of a transcendental self on rational deduction. Rejecting the Humean/empiricist thesis of the mind as a mere receptacle or receiver of external phenomena, Kant insists that it is the mind itself that imposes an a priori fixed and immutable order on nature. It is the ‘transcendental ego’, timeless and universal, that serves as the basic source of all thought, experience, knowledge, and morality. Although derived through the senses, all knowledge of the world must necessarily proceed from the sensual to the realm of the understanding. This is where objects of awareness are transformed into objects of thought, into concepts; where what we see, hear, smell, and feel are systemati-

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cally categorised and relations between them established. It is the transcendental self that mediates between phenomenon and noumenon, between the world knowable to the senses, the world as constituted and experienced by human beings, as filtered through the basic categories of time and space, and the noumenal ‘world-in-itself ’, the unknown and unknowable world outside these mind-imposed forms. If understanding is the application of concepts to sensory experience in order to arrive at knowledge, then reason is essentially the application of concepts to themselves. Reason relates to our ability to manipulate conceptual thought quite apart from any direct experience of the world, as, for example, in logic or mathematics. Similarly, just as there are ‘necessary’ principles of knowledge and reason, so, too, there exist ‘necessary’ laws of morality. Morality is a matter of ‘practical reason’ – each of us is capable of discovering what is right, for each is endowed with the capacity for reasoned thought. One’s duty is never the result of personal choice or circumstance; neither, as more readily conceived, is it the product of social convention: to act dutifully means to act in accordance with objective universal laws. As Solomon (ibid.: 40) puts it, Kant ‘reduces everything of importance to the “inner self ”, in his case the Will, and carefully excludes almost all such factors as upbringing, socio-economic status, health, intelligence, or personality’. This is what Solomon means by the ‘transcendental pretence’. In place of social morality, we are offered a ‘cosmic self-righteousness’, ‘the extraordinary self-confidence that one is in touch with the absolute principle of Goodness’ (ibid.: 40). As Kant famously put it: ‘Two things have always filled me with awe: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.’ This ‘moral law within’, together with the a priori categories of mind, Hume had resolutely rejected in his empiricist flight from metaphysics: ‘whenever I look into myself there is no self to be found’. For Hume, the self amounted to little more than a fiction, an imaginary construct that confers a sense of unity and meaning on what, in reality, is a succession of independent states or experiences. In Kant, however, we are utterly remote from such a view. The transcendental ego stands as both the repository of a priori knowledge and the vehicle for universal principles of morality. Against the scepticism of Hume, Kant postulates an essential core to human existence, a locus of universal epistemological and moral truths. This is a major step in the ‘categorisation’ of the self, in the philosophical valorisation of the ego as a non-illusory, bounded, existentially self-contained entity. Up to this point, however, the self in question, the transcendental self, is still very much embedded in tradition, in a sense of the absolute, in necessary moral and epistemological truths, ultimately, in God.2 Although in Kant the autonomous individual is the key to rational

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and moral existence, the ideal of autonomy itself has little to do with the pursuit of self-interest or individual happiness. Autonomy refers to the rational ability to know what is morally required. Freedom is defined in terms of the human capacity to discern and follow universal laws certified by reason alone. It amounts essentially to an escape from the unpredictability of the senses, a flight from the unreflective, instinctual, and amoral into the rational and universal laws within. In Kant, then, human ‘freedom’ more or less equates to the capacity to follow the categorical imperative: ‘Act only according to a maxim by which you can at the same time will that it shall become a universal law.’ As developed by his disciple, Johann Fichte (1762–1814), however, the concept of freedom becomes far more expansive and expressive. The self is no longer simply a knowing self, but is a fluid, striving self. This striving takes place largely in the realm of thought, in the Romantic play of the imagination, and not solely in terms of reasoned, rational action. It is worth recalling that we dealing here with that period of history believed by Dumont to have witnessed an ‘extraordinary blossoming of German thought’, those ‘sixty glorious years’ between 1770 and 1830. It will come as of little surprise, then, that the ‘Kant’ that took hold in Germany at this time was not so much the rational figure of the Enlightenment but the proto-Romantic that shines through particularly in the third Critique of Judgement’s concern with aesthetics and ‘the beautiful’ as an expression of God’s design on earth. Solomon (ibid.: 46) writes, in a passage that could quite easily have been lifted verbatim from Dumont: To understand the development of Kant’s philosophy in Germany it is essential to think not just in terms of the Enlightenment but also in the imagery of romanticism, which typically presents itself as an antagonist, but which is clearly embraced in the culminating work of Kant’s philosophy. The Enlightenment, while international in its scope and cosmopolitan in its pretensions, was in fact very ‘Western’ – meaning mainly French and English – and failed to fit the ‘Eastern’ aspirations and traditions of the still relatively feudal Germans. England and France had secure empires, but Germany was not yet even a nation. English and French were the recognised languages of philosophy, literature, and the arts, but the German poets and playwrights were struggling to have their language recognised as a legitimate vehicle of expression. The Enlightenment thinkers speculated about the meaning of ‘universal history’, but the Germans were worried about their own history. … The German response to Enlightenment imperialism was a rebellious romanticism.

As we have seen, a key ideal in this Romantic rebellion was the notion of Bildung, of spiritual growth and fluidity – a concept very

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much at the heart of Fichte’s own philosophy. Fichte does away with the universality of the Kantian categories. We are not a priori limited to a single understanding of the world but can apply different sets of concepts when ordering external phenomena: ‘the philosophy one holds depends upon the kind of man one is’. Fichte rejects, moreover, the Kantian distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal, arguing that consciousness alone provides the ground for all experience; it is the self that is absolute and indubitable, not the external world. Experience is created and sustained by the thinking subject; the world is little more than a stage, a testing ground upon which the insatiable ego strives for its own completion (Bildung). We are here at the heart of German idealism. The locus of the absolute has shifted from the noumenal (the extra-sensory) to the conscious subject of experience. The timeless, ahistorical, categories of Kant are replaced by an appreciation of diversity and historicity, by the fluidity of individual and collective life. The transcendental (i.e., necessary, universal) has become far less transcendent (i.e., other-worldly). It is at this point, with Fichte, that Mauss’s evolutionary account of the self draws to an end: It was necessary to have Hume revolutionizing everything (following Berkeley, who had begun to do so) before one could say that in the soul there were only ‘states of consciousness’, ‘perceptions’. Yet he ended up by hesitating when faced with the notion of ‘self ’ (moi) as the basic category of consciousness. The Scots adapted his ideas better. Only with Kant does it take on precise form. Kant was a Pietist, a follower of Swedenborg, the pupil of Tetens, a feeble philosopher but a wellinformed psychologist and theologian. He found the indivisible ‘self ’ (moi) all around him. Kant posed the question, but did not resolve it, whether the ‘self ’ (moi), das Ich, is a category. The one who finally gave the answer that every act of consciousness was an act of the ‘self ’ (moi), was Fichte. Kant had already made of the individual consciousness, the sacred character of the human person, the condition for Practical Reason. It was Fichte who made of it as well the category of the ‘self ’ (moi), the condition of consciousness and of science, of Pure Reason. From that time onwards the revolution in mentalities was accomplished. Each of us has our ‘self ’ (moi), an echo of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which had predated both Kant and Fichte. (Mauss 1985: 21–22)

This is the sense in which Mauss believes the ‘person’ and ‘self ’ to be synonymous in the modern West. The individualised sociopolitical ‘person’ can now lay claim to an equally individualised ‘self ’. However, if, as Mauss would seem to suggest, at this point the ‘revolution in mentalities’ – that transition from tradition to modernity that Dumont

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similarly speaks of in terms of a ‘revolution in values’ – has been ‘accomplished’, its implications are far from being thoroughly worked out. As Solomon (1988: 52) makes perfectly clear, the history of the self does not end with Fichte: It should not be thought, however, that the self that Fichte so celebrates is the individual self, or that each of us creates our own world according to the dictates of our ethics. While Fichte is not entirely clear on the matter, the ego that is ‘absolute’ and the premiss of his entire system is more than personal; it is suprapersonal, possibly equivalent to humanity as a whole.

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Hegel and Marx: From Idealism to Materialism The active, dynamic, idealism of Fichte, together with his elevation of self-consciousness to the ultimate source of all experience, laid the ground for the most influential of all German idealists, G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831). Like Fichte, Hegel found Kant’s notion of noumenon, the essential yet unknowable basis of the phenomenal world, unsatisfactory. In its place, the Absolute, identified as Spirit or Geist, the driving force behind humanity, is shown to manifest itself progressively throughout the course of human history, throughout the slow development towards social self-consciousness, towards human freedom in an enlightened state. This is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth. World history is seen in terms of the gradual expansion and growing consciousness of Spirit, its movement towards self-realisation, toward absolute freedom. Freedom, the teleological purpose of history, is now very much a social affair. Knowledge and morality are not, as in Kant, given, a priori, intrinsic attributes of the isolated individual. Instead, epistemological and moral attitudes are dictated by the Absolute, in its particular manifestation. It is through the shared aspects of culture, particularly through language, that knowledge and morality are fashioned. There is no ‘world-in-itself ’, no external locus of truth; there are no necessary, pan-human universals. There exists instead a multitude of socially conditioned ‘forms of consciousness’. Each culture, each historical epoch, realises just one aspect of the truth. The Absolute is a posteriori, not a priori; it is historically created or realised through time, not universally given at the start. Spirit exists only in terms of its multifarious this-worldly manifestations. Absolute Spirit emerges only through a long history of conflict and opposition, through a ‘dialectic’ driving historical contradictions towards a resolution, a higher synthesis, which in turn becomes contradicted, repeating the cycle over and over again until humanity arrives at ultimate perfection or ‘truth’.

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With Marx all this changes. Hegel is famously turned upside down. German idealism gives way to historical materialism. Marx had learned from the Romantics to despise the fragmentation of life and the dangers of increased specialisation. Like them, he, too, envisioned an ideal where the complete, harmonious person might achieve selfrealisation within the context of a complete, organic, harmonious society. While philosophy had provided the blueprint for this ideal, Marx soon came to realise that the increasingly fragmented capitalist world (and its alienated subjects) could only truly be transformed through revolutionary action, through applied philosophy or praxis: ‘the philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it’. In this regard, Marx borrows from Hegel, and drastically modifies, the view of history as a succession of stages borne along by a dialectical process. In Marx, this process has nothing to do with the unfolding of an Absolute Spirit. Turning Hegel on his head, Marx seeks the cause of all historical, cultural, and social movements in the material conditions of society. History is not driven by a teleological Spirit but by changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the division of society into classes and the struggle of these classes against one another. This is where the real ‘dialectic’ of history operates – in competition, in the very real class struggle over the means of production. This is why ideas alone are insufficient to deliver humankind from its capitalistic fetters, from the bondage of self-alienation. What are required are real, concrete, measures – nothing less than a social revolution: ‘workers of the world, unite’.

The Existential Self 1. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche Unlike Marx, who, while turning Hegel upside down had retained much of his systematic framework, Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophy arose out of an almost complete distaste for Hegel’s systematisation. What particularly irked the Danish philosopher was the abstract nature of Hegel’s Spirit and his seeming contempt for the individual. In Kierkegaard’s view, both Hegelianism and institutionalised Christianity were fundamentally mistaken in undervaluing the concrete individual – both were far too objective, too abstract, too collectivist, too busy spreading impersonal doctrines, which had very little appeal or relevance to one’s inward passions, to everyday existence. Thus, Kierkegaard took it upon himself to rescue the particular human being from the anonymity of Spirit and Church, to save ‘Christianity’ from the falsifications, the embellishments of ‘Christendom’, from the ‘pantheistic contempt for the existing individual’. In general,

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Kierkegaard railed against any external authority that threatened or challenged the authenticity of the inner self. The anonymous ‘transcendental self ’ that provides for Kant the locus of necessary moral and epistemological truths is entirely rejected by Kierkegaard. The only self that has any significance whatsoever is the unique, acting, ethical self – the self dictated by personal feelings and intention alone. The ethical life is a life of individual choice, not of obligation or duty. There are no authoritative rules, categorical imperatives, Absolute Spirit, or objective truths. There is only the matter of one’s own inner integrity, a ‘subjective truth’ for which no external defence or support can be claimed. One is left with the awesome necessity of choosing, without rational guidance, what sort of being to become, which of Kierkegaard’s four life-alternatives or ‘spheres of existence’ to embrace (Solomon 1988: 89–94). The first, and least satisfactory, of these is life as an anonymous member of ‘the crowd’. Here one exists inauthentically, merely accepting and conforming to the opinions, goals, and sentiments of the masses; this amounts to an abdication of one’s true or unique self. The first stage towards self-realisation is encountered in the aesthetic life. The aesthetic person exercises taste and discrimination, he or she does not automatically follow fashion or religiously adhere to public opinion. In fact, the aesthetic person tends to avoid those social or official commitments that might interfere with their personal pursuit of pleasure. Although the aesthete breaks with ‘the crowd’ and goes some distance towards asserting his or her authenticity, nevertheless, he or she remains tied to the desires of the senses. An acute awareness of this bondage leads in some cases to the attempt to live life according to the ethical sphere. Here, explains Kenny (1998: 299): the individual self-consciously takes his place within social institutions and accepts the obligations which flow from them. He gives up the perpetual holiday of the aesthetic life and takes a job. … The ethical person is quite different from the member of the crowd: he takes his place in society not unthinkingly but by an act of self-conscious choice. The ethical stage may make strict demands on the individual, and call for heroic self-sacrifice. Faced with the challenge, the individual becomes vividly conscious of human weakness; he may try to overcome it by strength of will, but find himself unable to do so. He becomes aware that his own powers are insufficient to meet the demands of the moral law. This brings him to a sense of guilt, and a consciousness of sinfulness. If he is to escape from this, he must rise from the ethical sphere to the religious sphere. For this he must take ‘the leap of faith’.

This ‘leap of faith’ is the leap into ultimate freedom, the religious leap into God. At the apex of Kierkegaard’s philosophy stands the religious individual accountable to God alone. Having freed himself from

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the anonymity of ‘the crowd’, from the sway of the senses, and, finally, from the dictates of general morality, this ‘individual’, through a series of existential choices, has succeeded in maximising his personal freedom and lives in the most authentic manner possible. True, God still exists as the overall justification of such a life, as the purpose, the telos behind Kierkegaard’s existentialism – the world is not yet meaningless, ‘absurd’, as it will become with subsequent existentialists. None the less, we witness in Kierkegaard an unambiguous shift from the universal to the particular, from holism to individualism, from social bondage to individual freedom. A great deal of what Kierkegaard stood for was undone in the latter half of the nineteenth century by Nietzsche (1844–1900). In particular, Kierkegaard’s idealisation of the religious life, his high estimation of Christian self-denial, finds little resonance in Nietzsche’s hypercritical philosophy. For the latter, it is the aesthetic life that is favoured – freedom, if anywhere, is to be found in expressive, creative, independent individuals, giving free reign to their emotions, to their intrinsic ‘will to power’. While Kierkegaard hoped to salvage Christianity from the absurdities of Christendom, Nietzsche’s attitude is far more damning: Christianity amounts to a deep-seated debasement of that human ideal that finds its highest expression in purely aesthetic values (Kenny 1988: 301). According to Nietzsche, the history of Western morality should be read as the reversal or ‘transvaluation’ of two distinct moralities. In place of a ‘master-morality’ espoused by the powerful or noble, the ruling élite, one that emphasises strength, bravery, riches, luxury, an overall zest for life; in place of this, a ‘slave-morality’, that of the lowly and disappointed, had gained ascendancy. This ‘slave-‘ or ‘herd-morality’ puts a premium on character traits befitting the underdog, traits such as solidarity, humility, self-denial, tolerance, and benevolence – the Christian gospel of love is among its most exemplary expressions. What motivates Christianity is not a selfless, spiritual piety, but a deep resentment, a spirit of revenge – ‘the meek shall inherit the earth’ – against those who are stronger, happier, more noble, and powerful. Christianity encourages a view of worldly existence as empty and unfulfilling, it points to the vanity of even the greatest earthly accomplishments, the worthlessness of luxury and ambition, the inherent evil concealed in power, wealth, and excessive leisure. In short, Christianity denies, transvaluates, all those things enjoyed by the master class and unattainable to slaves – it breeds contempt, even disdain, for life (Solomon 1988: 115–22). Vulgarity and mediocrity are the modern ideals: modern man is hardly a man at all. Nietzsche’s philosophy is thoroughly this-worldly and individualistic. In his view, to impose a single universal standard, a categorical imperative, is to limit those with the greatest talents and abilities, to

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level out society to the lowest common denominator. Rational universal imperatives deny those inclinations and instinctual promptings that lie at the very heart of what it is to be a human being. Any imposition of universal standards equates to a morality of the masses, of the weak and downtrodden. Opposed to this pitiable levelling out of humanity, Nietzsche encourages a masterly morality, one that places individual excellence and creativity above obedience and social conformity. Christianity, like all metaphysical escape from this world, places the greatest obstacle to the fulfilment of human life. The ‘death of God’ should thus be celebrated, since once again those basic instincts that have always been an essential part of humankind can freely and creatively resurface. The most fundamental of these is the ‘will to power’, the secret of all existence, even of non-human life. Every living thing strives to fulfil its potential, to discharge its essential life-force. In the realm of humanity, the will to power is the power of great souls, of artists, of self-sufficient and self-confident individuals, of a creative and expressive life.3 The ideal of Nietzsche’s ethical vision is realised in the person of the Übermensch, the ‘Superman’ or ‘Overman’. In a sense, this figure represents the quintessence of Romanticism, the total, harmonious, complete individual. The Übermensch is the completely self-realised Being toward which humanity as a whole should strive; although there is no guarantee, no evolutionary certainty, that humankind will ever attain to such great heights: ‘man is a rope tied between beast and Übermensch’. Although human, all too human, we should strive to cultivate a state of mind in which we readily embrace our existence – amor fati. This condition is manifest in the joyful attitude towards the doctrine of ‘eternal return’, the hypothetical test or act of the imagination whereby everything that has happened, and will happen, throughout the course of one’s life must be repeated again and again an infinite number of times. Amor fati is far removed from the passive, resigned response to life cultivated by the Stoics. It is an active celebration of one’s own existence, much more in keeping with the Romantics – the product of a strong, independent, energetic, superior, ‘masterly’ life managed spontaneously out of the creative will to power. Here there are no universal moralities, no necessary truths, no metaphysical holism, not even God. ‘This is my way,’ teaches Zarathustra, ‘where is yours?’ Each masterly individual must forge their own ‘way’ in life; each must uncover their own truth or morality; each must locate their own certainty summoned up from the depths of their own individual being.4 2. Heidegger and Sartre Like Nietzsche, Heidegger (1889–1976), too, sought to escape from the abstractions of traditional metaphysics; he, too, hoped to attain a

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more authentic, inviolate, relationship with the world. In fact, Heidegger considered his own escape to be more resolute, even more extreme than Nietzsche’s. While Nietzsche took the destruction of metaphysics to be his chief philosophical aim, Heidegger sees in Nietzsche ‘the last of the metaphysicians’. Although he attacked any absolutist conception of ‘the world’, Nietzsche nevertheless retained much of the traditional philosophical framework – its inherent duality between the social and the individual, for example. Heidegger presents his own philosophy as ‘the quest for Being’. Western metaphysics, he suggests, had ‘forgotten’ all about being ever since the philosophy of Plato. As a consequence, modern humanity had moved alarmingly away from its ‘nearness and shelter’ – we moderns no longer live in authentic communion with the world. Although interested in ‘Being’ as such, Heidegger’s most celebrated work, Being and Time, focuses more narrowly on what it means to be a human being or ‘Dasein’. Dasein is an intentionally vague, ill-defined concept. It relates to the being of human beings, their ‘being there’, their whole – that is to say, non-compartmentalised – mode of worldly existence. Philosophy, Heidegger learned from his teacher Husserl, should be ‘presuppositionless’, it is wrong to presuppose the existence of a ‘mind’ or even of consciousness: what one discovers initially is not ‘I think’, or even a ‘conscious being’, but simply a kind of brute fact, the fact of ‘being there’ (Solomon 1988: 154). Being is everywhere and nowhere. Everything that exists has being – even inanimate objects, concepts, and theories. However, being itself inheres in nothing; it is not a readily identifiable property, it is not substance as in Aristotle. Being is contingent, relational; it is not the predicate of individual entities but arises out of specific contextual arrangements. It is only through Dasein that being can be comprehended: The being of beings, of other entities as well as of Dasein itself, is not independent of Dasein: theories, questions, tools, cities – all these depend for their existence, and for their mode of being, on the fact that they are produced, asked, used, inhabited, and interpreted by human beings. Dasein is essentially in the world, not simply in the sense that it occupies a place in the world together with other things, but in the sense that it continually interprets and engages with other entities and the context in which they lie, the ‘environment’ or the ‘world around us’. It is, in a way, only because Dasein does this that there is a unitary world at all rather than a collection of entities. (Inwood 1997: 17–18)

Here there exists no Cartesian duality between mind and body, or even the experiential distinction between an inner and outer world. There is simply ‘Being-in-the-world’, a ‘unitary phenomenon’, an essential, or rather an in-essence-tial, holism grounded in Dasein. Dasein is not a

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self-enclosed subject, aware of its own mental states. If this were so it would possess a definite ‘what’, an essence, a determinate nature of its own, and would not require a world in which to ‘be’, in which to ‘stand forth’, in which to fashion its own being-in-the-world (ibid.: 26). Dasein is more potentiality than actuality, ‘its existence precedes its essence’. Unlike all other entities in the world – stones, trees, animals – Dasein’s status is privileged in that it alone is aware of itself and of other beings. Nevertheless, it is not knowledge but practical engagement (what Heidegger calls ‘concern’) that represents Dasein’s basic involvement with the world. Knowledge arises only when we give up our primary ‘concern’, when we detach ourselves from our immediate worldly engagement; it is a step subsequent to Dasein’s natural, spontaneous, being-in-the-world. It is knowledge that organises and classifies, that breaks up the world into individual objects and things, that introduces consciousness of oneself and of other entities. Accordingly, Heidegger turns his back on traditional philosophical concerns with epistemology. The desk in one’s room is for writing on – this is what immediately strikes one about it, not its precise shape or dimensions, its geometrical or physical properties. Indeed, when immersed in composition one hardly notices the desk at all, it becomes inconspicuous, unobtrusive: at best one is tacitly aware of it. Even one’s awareness of oneself as an embodied agent, let alone as a self-contained ego, is far from obvious when one is fully engaged in writing (ibid.: 27–33). Self, body, table, pen are equally inconspicuous. They become identifiable again only if the pen runs out or the desk becomes unstable or a sudden pain directs one’s attention to the body. Now the practical gives way to the theoretical, the ‘ontical’ to the ‘ontological’, the spontaneous to the considered, action to knowledge, unconscious unity to self-conscious differentiation. Dasein’s primary existential structure is its being-in-the-world – a holistic unity that extends to everything, failing to recognise independent entities, even a unique self. The world is not so much ‘out there’ for us – there is no ‘two-world’ metaphysics as in Kant, the phenomenal world cannot be bracketed, set apart – the world itself is very much a part of Dasein’s structure (Solomon 1988: 162). Another of Dasein’s necessary structures is its concern with its own identity, that is to say, its ontological (as opposed to ontical) being. The fact that Dasein is selfconcerned, however, should not lead us to the conclusion that each human being possesses their own intrinsic self. In fact, initially, each of us is not ourselves at all, but a product of a kind of pre-conscious social construction that Heidegger calls ‘das Man’, ‘the they’. Just as our primary, pre-reflexive, experience of the world is holistic, undifferentiated, so, too, our primary awareness of self-in-the-world is of a unitary

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nature, wholly defined by other people, by the social roles we play and the expectations others have of us. We are each part of das Man, a more or less anonymous, holistic, socially conditioned creation. ‘The self of everyday Dasein is the “they-self ”, which we distinguish from the “authentic self ”.’ In introducing this notion of an ‘authentic self ’ we are again on familiar existentialist ground. Dasein is authentic in so far as it makes up its own mind or remains true to its ‘own’ self . It is inauthentic when it simply acts out of a sense of ‘this is what one does’ (Inwood 1997: 22). However, the break with das Man, the origin of one’s authentic self, is not merely the result of conscious reflection but is associated with a specific kind of action, a ‘taking hold’ of oneself, a profound deliberation, an existential resolution. Both authenticity and inauthenticity begin with this ontological challenge to take hold of oneself – the former flees the challenge while the latter openly embraces it (Solomon 1988: 163–64). This ability to take hold of oneself, to make purposeful, life-defining choices, Heidegger calls Dasein’s Existenz, its existential possibilities. When I concede my decisions to others, when I live unreflectively, according to fashion or convention, it is then that I live inauthentically, that I reduce the scope of my possibilities, that I abide in a state of ‘average everydayness’ or ‘fallenness’. This is not to say that I can choose whatever I like, that my possibilities are limitless. Neither is it the case that it is desirable, or even possible, to live authentically all the time. We each share a common language and partake to a greater or lesser extent in shared social practices and expectations. Authenticity need not imply eccentricity, difference for difference’s sake. Eccentric behaviour can quite easily be inauthentic, a contrived individuality, while conformity to standard practices can be authentically chosen (Inwood 1997: 22). What matters to authentic living is that we choose the path to follow and that this choice derives from our own authentic, reflective self. When we neglect or ignore our life choices, when we fail to sufficiently ‘take hold’ of ourselves, it is then that we slip back into ‘fallenness’, into the (ontological) ‘they-self ’. Even though we define ourselves through our choices, we are limited in our range of possibilities by another existential structure of Dasein, what Heidegger calls our ‘facticity’, the fact that we find ourselves (embodied, engendered, historicised) already engaged in a world in which tasks and responsibilities await us (Solomon 1988: 164). None the less, we can still adopt an authentic attitude to our facticity, to our biographical past and our embodied present – not by simply going along with the crowd, accepting common definitions or clichéd responses, but by choosing to embrace one’s existence.

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Clearly, whatever difficulties there might be in defining a bounded ‘self ’ in Heidegger’s philosophy, particularly at the ‘ontic’ level, there can be little doubt that his concerns are overwhelmingly of a ‘firstperson’ kind – one’s experience is rich and expansive, it provides the sole basis for understanding the world, one should therefore strive to be authentic, to act resolutely, to accept life’s possibilities rather than ‘fall’ unreflectively into its supposed actualities. And, if the nature of the autonomous self is hidden, not immediate, downplayed in Heidegger, then it gains renewed emphasis and vigour, almost to the exclusion of everything else, in the existentialism of Sartre (1905–80). As Solomon points out, Sartre’s philosophy is ‘undeniably Cartesian’. Like Descartes, but unlike Heidegger, Sartre posits a metaphysical duality between a free and rational consciousness and a mechanical, physical world. From Hegel, he borrows the terms being-for-itself and being-initself to distinguish between the two. The former is the being of consciousness, the latter the being of things in the world. An unabashed realist, Sartre takes the world-in-itself at face value – ‘it is, it is what it is, and it is as it is’ – he is little concerned with epistemological problems, with how or if consciousness can know the world. Rather, Sartre’s philosophy focuses on how consciousness deals with the (commonsensically given) world and of what this consciousness consists. The answer to this latter conundrum is that consciousness consists of nothing. Consciousness is not, as in Descartes, a definite substance or, as in Kant, a kind of transcendental or universal activity. While the world is full of things, consciousness itself is utterly empty – just ‘like a wind’, Sartre poetically puts it, ‘blowing from nowhere toward everything’. Consciousness is even devoid of a sense of self, an ‘I’, an ego. It is pre-reflective, unselfconscious, totally unaware of itself. It is ‘always reaching ahead of itself in search of the self, which [as in Heidegger] is created only through living, that is by virtue of our actions and our relations with other people’ (ibid.: 174–75). In arguing that it possesses no essence, no universal or inherent content, Sartre frees consciousness from the sway of necessary deterministic laws. Consciousness is not an object for consciousness and is therefore not subject to the categories that consciousness applies to other objects-inthe-world. While Sartre is more than happy to accept determinism in the realm of nature, he prohibits its intrusion into the domain of human affairs. Essentially, there is no essence to human nature: Sartre insists that the individual self has a unique and extraordinary power which he calls ‘absolute freedom’. Human consciousness is free to choose, and with this freedom comes an irreducible and unavoidable sense of responsibility. Although there are no necessary choices, no ‘categorical imperatives’, freedom itself is both universal and necessary, common to all

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men and women and in every conceivable circumstance. The transcendental pretence, in other words, is alive and well in Sartre’s philosophy. (Ibid.: 174)

Like Heidegger, Sartre seeks to reorient philosophy from a concern with abstract questions of knowledge to the matter of our active and emotional engagement in the world. He borrows from the other the idea that ‘existence precedes essence’, or, as he sometimes puts it, that ‘Man makes himself.’ Each of us constructs a self out of nothing, out of absolute freedom, through our actions upon the world, our existential choices: out of ‘Nothingness’ comes ‘Being’. People are never ‘basically selfish’, ‘naturally good’, ‘religious by nature’, or whatever; for they are never ‘basically’, ‘essentially’, ‘naturally’ anything – except, that is, absolutely free. Humans are free to choose what they will or will not become. We are not essentially something in the same way as a tree or a stone is; whatever we become we have chosen ourselves. There is no omnipotent, omniscient, eternal God watching over us and guiding our decisions. There can be no ‘leap of faith’. There is no teleological spirit ensuring that at the end of the day things will work out for the best. There is no teleology at all. The world is meaningless, absurd. There are only individuals and their existential choices. This emphasis on absolute freedom, on the ability, indeed the necessity, the ‘respons-ability’, to fashion one’s own existence, does not of course amount to the obviously fallacious claim that we can do or become anything we choose. Freedom is very much tied to the world, to particular actions and situations, and is limited by the harsh realities of worldly existence. None the less, there is always a choice, there is always the freedom to choose between one or more alternatives. Even a chained prisoner ‘has the freedom to shout or spit at his captors, or to despair, or to make plans for his escape or his future, or to formulate revolutionary philosophy, or to spend his time watching flies on the wall’ (ibid.: 181). Of this list, choosing whether or not to despair seems the most difficult to accept. Are we really so free as to be master of our moods, to hold the key to our emotions? Sartre believes that in a sense we are (and here he finds himself in direct confrontation with Freud, for whom notoriously a great deal of our behaviour is determined by unconscious drives and desires). For Sartre, all mental events and processes, all emotions and desires, are objects for consciousness; they do not abide in consciousness itself, since consciousness is translucent, it has no content (and if consciousness is empty there can be no inaccessible basement, no ‘unconscious’) (ibid.: 185). I may feel annoyed, even angry, at having been treated unfairly by a superior. Still, I restrain myself and respond with a smile. There is always a choice, there is always free will, an undetermined ‘I’. In fact,

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it is through such situations – in the existential choices we make while directly engaging with the world – that this ‘I’ is created and re-created, that out of nothingness emerges being, from the non-self the self. It is in this way that ‘Man makes himself.’ To act otherwise, to deny the essential freedom that constitutes the core of human beings, is to act out of ‘bad faith’ (i.e., Heidegger’s ‘fallenness’). We are what we make of ourselves, we alone are responsible for the kind of being we create. The ‘cowardly’ individual is not cowardly by nature. There is no human nature. Cowardliness is created and re-created through the pusillanimous acts themselves; and, if some people seem to be of a more timid disposition than others, they are still free to ‘transcend’ this timidity, to choose not to be a coward and in this choice, if resolute and persistent, to turn themselves into a more courageous person. As well as being-for-itself (consciousness) and being-in-itself (the physical world), Sartre introduces another category of being that is worth noting since it concerns the self ’s relationship with others. This third ontological category, ‘being-for-others’, supposes that our primary relationships with other selves is one of conflict (‘hell is other people’, as one of Sartre’s characters has it). Each of us wants the other to recognise our independence and self-sovereignty, and so we try to ‘prove’ ourselves to others, to retain our ‘freedom’, either by converting them to our own point of view or by reducing them, through a piercing stare, for instance, to a mere object (a being-in-itself): Human relations, according to Sartre, are a battleground on which each of us tries desperately to preserve our sense of ourselves ‘for ourselves’, against the intrusive manipulations of others. This is not merely Heidegger’s das Man, nor even Nietzsche’s hateful ‘herd’. It is a portrait of the individual as wholly embattled, for whom freedom is first of all an inner recourse but ultimately freedom from others as well. (Ibid.: 191)

The Category of the Self Here is a fitting place to conclude our brief history of the self, for in Sartre the self – absolute and absolutely immanent – emerges out of and strives towards unconditional freedom. For Kant, freedom amounted to little more than the rational control of the senses, freedom, that is, from instinctual drives and impulses, an escape into other-worldly rationality. Unhappy with his predecessor’s metaphysics, Fichte rejects Kant’s idea of the noumenal world-in-itself, arguing that all experience arises out of phenomenal consciousness. The self, though still universal or transcendental, becomes far less transcendent. Now freedom relates to the striving, fluid, organic self, to

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the realm of thought and the free play of the imagination. Hegel takes Fichte’s immanent self-consciousness and gives it both a social and a temporal dimension. Freedom becomes a cumulative affair, the progressive realisation of Spirit throughout the dialectic of human history. Then along comes Marx and turns Hegel’s dialectic upside down. Instead of an abstract Spirit, it is materialistic forces that propel history along. Freedom is very much a this-worldly matter, freedom from capitalist exploitation. Kierkegaard rejects much of what has gone on before him due to its excessively metaphysical and collectivist character. Freedom now has little to do with universal categories, with Absolute Spirit, or materialist history – in fact, with any abstractions whatsoever. Freedom is far more immanent and individualistic. The authentic individual lives according to dictates of his or her own making. From such a perspective, Marx’s call for the ‘workers of the world to unite’ can only appeal to ‘the public’, to the inauthentic masses. The self-realised individual has moved way beyond such communalistic sentiments. Still, ultimate freedom arises from the ‘leap of faith into God’ and the other world creeps back into Kierkegaard’s philosophy through the back door. Even this route is blocked in Nietzsche, who celebrates the ‘death of God’, the end of all metaphysics. Ultimate freedom is now located in the very depths of the individual, in his or her unique will to power, unhindered by any external metaphysical ‘reality’. For Heidegger, Nietzsche failed to go far enough in his attempt to rid philosophy of its metaphysical bias since he retained many of its inherent dualities, that between the individual and society, for example, or between nature and culture. Dasein’s immediate relationship with the world is one of ontic ‘concern’, an unreflective, non-dualistic, beingin-the-world. Ontologically, speaking, however, Dasein must ‘take hold’ of itself, transcend average everyday existence or ‘fallenness’, and resolutely, authentically, decide which of life’s possibilities it will adopt. Sartre stresses more than anyone else this existential choice: man creates himself. He also reintroduces the Cartesian duality between a free and rational consciousness and a mechanical world. While nature is determined, controlled by law-like forces, consciousness, out of which the self arises, is ultimately empty, free. This unconditioned ‘freedom’ extends to the self ’s relationship with other selves – the embattled effort to retain one’s freedom, one’s individuality, captured in the maxim that ‘hell is other people’. We are here far removed from Kakar’s proposed Hindu ‘relational’ view of the self from which we set out, that view of the self which challenges ‘the maintenance of ego boundaries’, blurring the distinction ‘between “I” and others’. Arguably, we have arrived at the philosophical equivalent of homo oeconomicus, the (ideally) socially

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disembedded, self-interested, ‘self ’. Of necessity, the ‘history’ that has brought us here has been of an extremely potted and selective kind. Volumes have been written on each of the philosophers discussed above, and any attempt to trace in just a few pages philosophical developments that have occurred over the course of centuries will inevitably result in a crude and overly simplistic account. Accepting this caveat, however, a general trend can be discerned in the history of continental philosophical outlined above towards a further ‘concretising’ of the self, a greater degree of immanence, a move away from metaphysics, from the other world to this world, from the universal to the particular. If the philosophy of Kant (universal laws), Fichte (Absolute ego), Hegel (Geist), and Marx (historical materialism) is still to some degree anchored in the ‘whole’, in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre, though still very much apparent, the whole is construed negatively, as an obstacle, a challenge to one’s authentic being. To employ as a heuristic device Dumont’s favoured binary opposition, the emphasis has shifted from holism to individualism, from the abstract (however defined) to the particular. At the social level, holism now relates to ‘the herd’, ‘the public’, das Man, the ‘fallen’ or ‘inauthentic’, those who live out their lives in ‘bad faith’. The choosing, self-contained, existential self has gained ideological ascendance: it is one’s own choices that enables one to live authentically, not the dictates of universal laws, religious duty, social convention, or fashion. From this perspective, the history of modernity can be read as a gradual usurping on the part of the ‘subject’ or ‘self ’ of qualities traditionally associated with the whole or Divine. Following the ‘death of God’, that is to say, the rejection of other-worldly metaphysics, ‘mankind’ becomes master of its own decisions, capable of providing the foundation for its own acts and representations (Renaut 1997: xii, 3). Eventually we arrive at the existential self – the culmination of this process, perhaps the definitive ‘category of the self ’ – creating its own world according to dictates of its own design. Mauss (1985: 22) concludes his essay on ‘the person’ with the following statement: ‘Who knows even whether this “category”, which all of us believe to be well founded, will always be recognised as such? It is formulated only for us, among us’, since ‘human thought moves on’. In reality, the reign of the ‘self ’ or ‘subject’ has never gone unchallenged in Western thought. An alternative reading of the history of continental philosophy could equally be presented that emphasises the pessimism of Schopenhauer, for instance, or the psychoanalytic dissolution of the self in Freud. We discussed in chapter 5 the anti-subjectivist position of Lévi-Strauss (‘necessity reveals itself as immanent in the illusions of freedom’) and to this we could add Dumont himself, for

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whom, it will be remembered, failure to recognise the inherently contingent nature of human beings amounts to a ‘false signification of the self ’. Moreover, if the choosing, existential self in some way represents the quintessence of modernity, then a great deal of post-modern thought, having in its turn proclaimed the ‘death of Man’, the demise of subjectivist pretensions, points to the untenability of such a ‘category’: Permeated or even fully constructed by lines of impersonal power, domination, and normalisation (Foucault), by codes whose ability to communicate fully is determined by their own structure (Derrida), by unconscious forces and desires (Lacan), or by economic and social forces (Bourdieu, Althusser), the human subject is held to be anything but transparent to itself. And what the subject does not know, it cannot control. Autonomy disappears, since apparently free decisions turn out to be the effects of these unknown and independent lines of force. (Renaut 1997: xii)5

Notes 1.

2.

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3.

4.

5.

This relates to the ‘very thin’ (i.e., almost non-existent) psychological component of l’homme total or the lower of homo duplex’s two conscious states identified in chapter 3. For Kant, belief in the existence of God is a necessary condition of morality, since in order to be moral one needs to believe in the ultimate justice of the world. Given that the evil appear to thrive (often at the expense of the good), rationality requires, as Solomon explains, ‘a larger picture, an afterlife in which souls survive and receive their due from the divine hand of justice’. In this way, belief in God and immortality can be rationally justified, and religion itself shown to be rational. It could be argued that Nietzsche’s championing of the ‘individual’ actually takes place at the expense of the ‘self ’. Nietzsche has little patience with the notion of free will. Far from raising the self to transcendental or cosmic heights (as in Kant and Hegel) or stressing self-conscious choices concerning an appropriate ‘sphere of existence’ (as in Kierkegaard), in Nietzsche, the ‘subject’ or ‘self ’ is of little significance: one does what one has to do, masterly and slavish temperaments are not achievements but innate characteristics, natural constitutions – one can no more aspire to the other than a leopard can change its spots. ‘Chastity’, for instance, ‘is a virtue in some, but almost a vice in many.’ It is one’s innate character, one’s natural inclinations that determines for each what appears as life-enhancing or lifedenying. The will to power is not based upon rational existential choice, there is little emphasis on a substantial choosing self. Rather, one’s ‘choices’ are determined by one’s drives, impulses, memories, and internal dispositions, by one’s embodied individuality. This relates to Nietzsche’s much touted doctrine of perspectivism – that all truth emerges within a particular perspective – and anticipates a great deal of post-modern thought, i.e., the denial of ‘facts’ and essences, the celebration of plurality and interpretation, the downgrading of reason. See Shweder (1991): chap. 1. Taken from the foreword by Alexander Nehamas.

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CONCLUSION

The range of this study has been vast, although its aims are reasonably moderate. We have followed Dumont in a consideration of Indian, Western, French, and German ideology. Antecedents to his thought have been highlighted in the writings of Durkheim and Mauss and the attempt has been made to disentangle the subtle and often confusing distinctions between ‘individual’, ‘person’, and ‘self ’ within this Durkheimian tradition. Dumont’s methodological holism has been thrown into fullest relief through contrast with the methodological individualism of Weber and others. Along the way, in one guise or another, anthropology, history, psychology, economics, politics, and philosophy have been taken on board. Throughout, the main objective has been to present as reliable and wide-ranging an account as possible of Dumont’s anthropological vision, structured around the notion of ‘categories’ and the concept of the ‘individual’. Admittedly, this account has not been overly critical. If anything, it has been generally supportive of Dumont’s position. But the main ambition has simply been to elucidate, to clarify, to bring to bear an appreciation of Dumont’s oeuvre as a whole in considering each of the specific books or essays taken as representative of different stages of his long academic career. Hopefully, additional light was thrown on Dumont’s theoretical stance in setting his interest in the ‘individual’ against the backdrop of Durkheim’s and Mauss’s concern with homo duplex, l’homme total, and ‘the person’. For each of these thinkers, the fundamental social grid – the basic categories of thought – through which consciousness is filtered is responsible for transferring the ‘buzzing, blooming, confusion’ of the presocial human being into the conceptually refined thought of the socialised ‘person’. Chapter 5’s comparison of Dumont with Lévi-

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Conclusion

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Strauss and Fernand Braudel was aimed at clarifying another important aspect of Dumont’s thought, this time with regard to his use of synchronic and diachronic structures. While Indian society was analysed largely in terms of the synchronic whole, in his subsequent writings on Western ideology Dumont attempts to grasp the ‘whole’ as it progresses through time, so that diachronic structures become the norm. There is a sense, in fact, in which Dumont employs each of the three time frames identified by Braudel: the ‘longue durée’ (i.e., worldhistorical structures (chap. 8) and the millennia-long history of Western individualism (chap. 6)); the ‘conjuncture’ (i.e., mid-range structural history of the kind considered in German Ideology (chap. 7)); and the ‘event’ (i.e., the individual lifespan, the remit of traditional history, as evident in the essays on Moritz, Humboldt, Goethe, Troeltsch, and Mann (chap. 7)). In each case, it is the backdrop, the structure, the relation, the whole, that is of ultimate significance: this is what translates ‘knowledge’ into ‘understanding’, ‘descriptions’ into ‘explanations’. Dumont is notoriously difficult to read – his writings, to recall Parkin, ‘do not always lend themselves to immediate understanding’. If the attempt throughout this book at rendering Dumont’s anthropology generally more accessible has been at all successful, then its intended purpose has largely been served. From time to time, however, the opportunity has arisen to build on Dumont’s insights, to extend his analyses in various directions. This was most obviously the case in chapter 9’s attempt at outlining a philosophical contribution (complementing the religious, political, and economic contributions already identified by Dumont) to the categorisation of the modern ‘individual’. Earlier, in chapter 7, Dumont’s analysis of German ideology was extended to incorporate Max Weber. In so doing, it was suggested that Weber’s sociology owed as much to the German intellectual milieu of his day as Durkheim’s did to post-Revolutionary France; a difference encapsulated in the respective emphasis on the individual as ‘unique’ (Weber) and ‘single’ (Durkheim). A recurrent theme throughout the book has been the opposition between the ‘individual/person’ and the ‘self ’. This might be represented as follows: Individual : Self :: France : Germany :: Revolution : Reformation :: Durkheim : Weber :: Methodological holism : Methodological individualism :: Lévi-Strauss : Sartre :: Annales history : Collingwood

Although some of these pairings fit into the equation better than others, the general impression is clear. It has been suggested throughout that, theoretically and methodologically, Dumont sits on the ‘individual’ side of this divide. That is to say, his interest in the individual and

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individualism, like Mauss’s interest in the person, functions at the expense of the subjective, experiential self – Dumont functions ‘beyond the Weberian paradigm’. When the self is considered, it is done so from the privileged viewpoint of society as a whole – i.e., as a social construction, a category. This self, it should be emphasised, is not the ‘sense of self ’ that Mauss claims to be universal, i.e., the neurological base, the vague, pan-human, psychobiological template. Rather, it is the social edifice constructed upon this – also universal in the sense that every society forms such a construction, but more properly relative in that this construction, this socialisation of the self, differs from one society or epoch to another. In comparison, then, with the bounded self or ego more or less predominant in modern Western ideology, other sociocultural configurations, the Indian, for example, might formulate a relational view of the self, one with weakened ego boundaries, one, for example, where the ‘self ’ might be alarmingly affected, deeply penetrated, by the ‘evil eye’ of others. Elsewhere, the self might be stolen and eaten by witches or leave the body and travel translucently at night. On the other hand, it might be increasingly embodied, to the extent in which an injury to one’s physical being has repercussions for one’s personality.1 Either way, according to Dumont, failure to recognise the inherently socialised nature of human beings amounts to a ‘false signification of the self ’. Permutations of the self are historically and socially constructed. The sense of self of which Mauss writes, the universal template, can be completed in any number of ways, through various ‘categories of self ’. One such construction is the modern ‘category of the self ’, i.e., of the self-contained ‘ego’ or ‘I’, the religio-philosophical complement to the modern sociopolitical ‘individual’.

Notes 1.

See La Fontaine (1985) for a discussion of some of these issues.

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INDEX

NAMES A Albrow, M., 146, 148 Allen, D., 178 Allen, N.J., 3, 49, 57, 93n. 1., 168 Althusser, L., 197 Aquinas, T., 103–7 Aristotle, 97, 104, 189 Aurelius, M., 98

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B

Carter, A., 62–64, 67, 70 Cladis, M., 20n. 8., 25, 30–31, 34n. 8., 148 Collingwood, R.G., 73, 81, 84, 199 Collins, S., 38 Comte, A., 3, 55n. 7., 111 Constantine, Emperor, 99 Coppet, D. de, 3 Coulanges, F. de, 3 Czarnowski, S., 48

Barnard, A., 3 Barraud, C., 3 Beauvoir, S. de, 75 Bendix, R., 146–48 Berreman, G.D., 12–13 Béteille, A., 72n. 5., 86–87 Bloch, M., 88 Bouglé, C., 1, 3n. 1., 149, 152n. 18. Bourdieu, P., 197 Braudel, F., 73, 83, 88–92, 93n. 5., 149, 150n. 1., 152n. 14., 199 Bruford, W.H., 138 Brunetière, F., 25–28, 31, 33, 34n. 8. Burke, P., 88 Buss, A., 100

D

C

Eckhart, M., 126 Epictetus, 98 Erhardy, J., 2 Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 3

Caesar, 81, 83 Calvin, J., 15, 101–2, 110, 142, 144, 148 Carrithers, M., 47, 174–77, 179

Derrida, J., 197 Descartes, R., 41, 54, 179–80, 192 Dilthey, W., 146 Douglas, M., 2 Duby, G., 88 Dumézil, G., 93n. 1. Durkheim. E., 2–3, 19, 20n. 8., 23–34, 35–43, 46, 48–51, 53–55, 66, 88, 95, 110–11, 119n. 5., 121, 124–25, 130, 132–33, 141, 145–148, 150, 152, 171n. 4., 172nn. 12, 16., 176, 198–99

E

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210

F

K

Fauconnet, P., 128 Febvre, L., 81, 88–89 Fichte, J., 24, 88, 174, 182–84, 194, 195, 196 Foucault, M., 197 Freud, S., 176, 193, 196

Kaelber, W.O., 68 Kakar, S., 173, 195 Kant, I., 28–31, 88, 141, 144, 146, 148, 174, 180–84, 186, 190, 192, 194, 196, 197nn. 2, 3. Karsenti, B., 43, 47 Kenny, A., 186 Kershaw, I., 159, 161–62, 172n. 12. Kierkegaard, S., 185–87, 195, 196, 197n. 3.

G Galey, J-C., 8 Geertz, C., 84 Gelasius, Pope, 99–100 Gell, A., 54 Giddens, A., 55n. 6., 146 Goethe, W. von, 125, 131–33, 135, 137, 139–41, 146, 176, 199 Gofman, A., 43, 47 Goldman, H., 140, 145 Gonda, 60, 64 Gueth, A., 175

H

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Index

Hahn, H.J., 126–27, 145 Halbfass, W., 59–60 Hall, J., 152n. 19. Heesterman, J.C., 68 Hegel, G.W.F., 88, 104, 132, 184–85, 192, 195–96, 197n. 3. Heidegger, M., 75, 188–96 Herder, J.G. von,, 163, 176 Hertz, R., 3, 132 Heß, R., 161 Himmler, H., 172, n. 12. Hitler, A., 156–65, 171nnn. 3, 5, 12. Hobbes, T., 107–9, 116 Hölderlin, F., 132 Hollis, M., 148 Hubert, H., 48, 132 Humboldt, W. von, 125, 128–31, 138, 141, 151nn. 6, 7., 176, 199 Hume, D., 179, 181, 183 Husserl, E., 75, 189 Huxley, T.H., 153, 168

I Iteanu, A., 3

J James, H., 167 James, W., 55n. 7. Jong, J. de, 2

L Lacan, J., 197 Lamennais, F. de, 22 Layton, R., 2 Leach, E., 2, 8 Lévi-Strauss, C., 2–3, 52, 73–86, 88, 90–92, 93nn. 2, 5., 149, 152n. 14., 196, 199 Lévy-Bruhl, L., 53 Llobera, J., 163–67 Locke, J., 104, 107, 113–15, 117–18 Lukes, S., 15–19, 20n. 8., 22, 33n. 3., 42 Luther, M., 15–16, 101–102, 126–27, 136–37, 139, 143, 148, 154–55, 163–65

M MacFarlane, A., 60 Madan, T.N., 1, 8–9, 64–65, 67 Maine, H.S., 155 Mandeville, B., 113–17 Mann, H., 138 Mann, T., 125, 136–41, 152n. 11., 155, 158, 165, 171n. 10., 199 Marriott, M., 61–63 Marx, K., 17, 50, 171n. 5., 184–85, 195–96 Mauss, M., 2–3, 5–6, 20–21, 33, 40, 42–52, 54–57, 71, 73, 86, 92, 93nn. 3, 5., 94, 111, 121, 125, 128, 132–33, 146, 150, 152n. 15., 168–70, 171n. 11., 172nn. 12, 16., 174–79, 183, 196, 198, 200 Merleau-Ponty, M., 75 Mill, J.S., 16 Mines, M., 65–67, 176 Moffat, M., 8 Montesquieu, C.L. de S., 145

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Index Moritz, K.P., 88, 125, 127–29, 151n. 5., 199 Morris, B., 55n. 7. Moulin, L., 23

N Needham, R., 2–3 Nietzsche, F., 26, 137, 139, 185, 187–89, 194–96, 197nn. 3, 4.

O Ockham, William of, 104–6, 120n. 6. Olivelle, P., 68

P Pace, D., 76, 79 Padua, Marsilius of, 106 Parkin, R., 2–3, 199 Parry, J., 169–70 Parsons, T., 3 Peyre, H., 32 Plato, 6, 97, 104, 189 Plautus, 26 Pocock, D., 2, 3n. 1., 10 Pribram, K., 158, 171n. 7.

Q Quesnay (and the Physiocrats) 113–14, 117 Quigley, D., 56n. 8.

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R Radhakrishnan, S., 60 Rickert, H., 146 Riesman, D., 16 Rimbaud, A., 54 Rousseau, J-J., 28–31, 41, 104, 107, 109–10, 179–80 Roy Ladurie, E. le, 88 Runciman, W., 152n. 16.

S Sahlins, M., 2 Saint-Simon, C.H. de, 22, 110 Sanderson, A., 49, 179 Sartre, J-P., 73, 75, 84–85, 91–92, 93n. 2., 188, 192–96, 199

211 Saussure, F. de, 77–78, 80, 85, 87 Schelling, F. von, 24, 88, 132 Schiller, J., 131–32 Schlegel, F. von, 132 Schleiermacher, F., 17, 24, 132 Schopenhauer, A., 137, 139, 176, 196 Sharma, U., 149 Simmel, G., 14, 24, 141 Smith, A., 112–15, 117 Solomon, R., 179–82, 184, 192, 197n. 2. Spencer, H., 28–29 Spinoza, B., 16 Strathern, M., 72n. 4. Swedenborg, E., 183 Swingewood, A. 145–46

T Tagore, R., 65 Tambiah, S.J., 69, 71 Tarde, G., 42, 55n. 4. Tauler, J., 126 Tcherkézoff, S., 3 Tetens, J.N., 183 Thapar, R., 69 Thomas à Kempis, 176, Tiryakian, E., 146 Tocqueville, A. de., 14 Troeltsch, E., 24, 102, 125, 135–36, 141, 154, 156, 165, 199

V Veuillot, L., 23

W Watts Miller, W., 27 Weber, M., 3, 13, 14, 24, 101–2, 126, 140–50, 152nn. 13, 15, 16, 17, 19., 198–99 Weldon, T.D., 119n. 5. Windelband, W., 141, 146 Wundt, W., 55n. 7.

Z Zola, E., 25

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212

Index

SUBJECTS A a priori, 38, 180–81, 183–84 A South Indian Subcaste, 1, 5, 8, 11 Absolute Spirit, 184–86, 195 America, 22, 110 amor fati, 188 Annales, 81, 88–89, 199 Année Sociologique, 48, 52, 88, 133, 146, 152n. 15. anomie, 23, 28, 130 Araj Samaj, 13 Arjuna, 178 a-s´rama, 61, 68 atomism, 28, 32–33 autonomy, 5, 15–18, 30, 66–67, 70, 115, 123, 148, 170, 182, 197

B

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Bahia, 89 Basque region, 130 Bhagavad-gı¯t¯a, 178 Bhakti, 86, 178 Bildung, 124–31, 134–41, 145, 148, 151n. 6., 152n. 11., 154, 157–58, 162, 176, 182–83 binary opposition, 74, 93 n. 1., 112, 124, 133, 196 Bolsheviks, 157, 171n. 5. Brahmans, 12, 93n. 1., 149 Buddhism, 13, 69

C caste, 4–13, 18–19, 20n. 1., 49, 57–59, 61–67, 69–71, 72n. 5., 74, 86, 92, 96, 118, 123, 149–50, 152 n. 14., 173 categorical imperative, 144, 182, 186–87, 192 China, 96, 172 n. 14. Christ, 15, 97, 98; see also Christianity Christianity, 14–15, 17, 71n. 2., 95, 97–99, 101–4, 107, 111, 124, 126, 174–75, 185, 187–188 civilisation, 9–10, 19, 41, 49, 51–53, 61, 66, 72n. 5., 75, 86, 91, 93nn. 1, 5., 94–95, 121–22, 137–39, 143, 180 consciousness, 5, 11, 35, 37, 39–42, 44–46, 49, 51, 53–54, 55n. 3., 57,

77–79, 112, 118, 145, 147, 157, 162, 165, 179, 183–84, 186, 189, 190, 192–95, 198 Contributions to Indian Sociology, 1, 10, 12, 103 Cynics, 97

D das Man, 190–91, 194, 196 Dasein, 189–91, 195 dharma, 19, 57–62, 64–65, 67–71, 118, 178 diachrony, 77–78, 80–81, 85, 87–88, 90–92, 124, 157, 162, 199 dignity, 15, 17–19, 20n. 8., 98–99, 131, 137 dividual, 61–62, 72n. 4. DNA (sociocultural), 87, 154, 157, 162, 165 Dreyfus Affair, 25, 27 dyadic subject, 58, 69

E economic individualism, 15, 114, 116 economics, 21, 94–95, 103, 111–18, 167, 169–70, 198 egalitarianism, 6, 72n. 5. egoism, 17, 20n. 8., 22–24, 31 Egypt, 169 Eigentumlichkeit, 23 empiricism, 38–39, 86, 145 endogamy, 12 England, 22, 135, 155–56, 163, 165–66, 172n.14., 182 Enlightenment (the), 16, 22–23, 124, 127–30, 145, 154, 157, 164, 182 Epicureans, 97 equality, 10, 14–15, 17–19, 24, 27, 61, 67, 72n. 5., 107–8, 123, 126, 139 Essays on Individualism, 1, 6–7, 93n. 3., 94, 111, 119n. 1.,133, 151n. 2., 156 ethical individualism, 15

F French Revolution, 22–23, 25, 31–32, 82, 109–11, 123, 126–27, 130, 136, 148, 154–55, 162, 180, 199 From Mandeville to Marx, 6, 94, 111, 113

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Index

G garbhadhana, 63 Geist, 184, 196 Gemeinschaft, 135 German Ideology, 1, 6, 87, 94, 122, 124–26, 154, 156, 167, 172n. 14., 199 Gesellschaft, 135–36 Gnostics, 99 Gorakhpur, 9 Greece, 95, 129 gr.hastha 71, n. 1.

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H habitus, 43, 46 Hierarchy and Marriage Alliance in South Indian Kinship, 1, 9, 11 hierarchy, 3, 6–8, 12, 20nn. 2, 5., 27, 58, 62, 65, 67, 69, 71, 72n. 5., 100, 106, 123, 127–28, 151nn. 2, 3., 154, 163 Hinduism, 4–5, 7, 14, 49, 57–61, 64–65, 68–69, 74, 86, 149, 166, 170, 172n.14., 173, 176, 178, 195 l’histoire événementielle, 88 holism, 5–6, 14, 50, 59, 61, 74, 95, 103–4, 108, 111, 118, 121–24, 128, 131, 133–35, 137, 154, 158, 163, 171n. 7., 179, 187–89, 196, 198–99 l’homme total, 35, 42–48, 197n. 1., 198 homo aequalis, 6, 49, 94, 118, homo duplex, 32, 35–44, 47, 49, 54, 197n. 1., 198 Homo Hierarchicus, 1, 4, 6–14, 51, 72n. 6., 73, 85–86, 93n. 1., 102, 123, 125, 149, 151n. 2., 157, 163, 170 homo hierarchicus, 6, 9, 49, 57, 94 homo oeconomicus, 112, 117–18, 195 hypergamy, 12

I ideology, 5–14, 18–19, 21, 27, 49–50, 53–54, 57, 62, 66–68, 72nn. 5, 6., 94, 96, 103, 110–11, 118, 119n. 4., 121–25, 128, 130, 135, 139, 151n. 9., 153–54, 157–58, 163–67, 171nnn. 5, 7, 8., 172n. 14., 174, 176, 178, 198–200

213 India, 1, 3–4, 6, 9–10, 12–14, 19, 21, 49, 58–59, 65–66, 72n. 5., 86–87, 93n. 1., 96, 100, 119n. 4., 166, 170, 172, n. 14., 173–74, 179 individualism, 5–6, 9, 14–15, 17–18, 21–34, 55n. 2., 60–61, 65, 74, 94–24, 127–37, 141, 145, 148, 150, 151n. 8., 154–56, 158, 162–63, 169, 171nn. 3, 7., 179, 187, 196, 198–200 individualisme, 22–23 individualist configuration, 112, 121–22, 124, 153, 168 Individualität, 22–23, 33 individuum, 95, 108–9 Indo-European, 93n. 1., 121 Islam, 96 isogamy, 12 Israel, 15, 119n. 2. Italy, 100, 157, 163, 166, 171n. 5.

J Jainism, 69 jajm¯ani, 12 jñana, 178 Judaism, 15, 119n. 2.

K karma, 61, 65, 178 Kashmir Valley, 64 Krishna, 178 Kshatriya, 93, n. 1. Kultur, 137, 139, 141, 156

L liberalism, 16, 20n. 8., 25, 30 liberty, 14–15, 17–19, 27, 110, 118, 126–27, 135–36, 154 longue durée, 89–92, 101, 151n. 1., 170, 199

M Mah¯abh¯arata, 178 Maharashtra, 63 Marxism, 17, 75–76, 79, 162 m¯ay¯a, 173, 178 mechanical solidarity, 30, 119n. 5. Mediterranean region, 89, 121 mercantilists, 113 methodological holism, 50, 131, 133, 146, 198, 199

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214 methodological individualism, 15, 42, 50–51, 130, 133, 146, 170, 198, 199 moks.adharma, 69 moral individualism, 28, 30–31, 34n. 8., 147

N National Socialism, 118, 152n. 11., 156–58, 164 Nazi, 109, 159–62, 164, 171n. 7., 175

O organic solidarity, 30, 119n. 5.

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P paideia, 129, 151n. 7. paramaham.sa, 69–71 pietism, 88, 127–28, 136, 137, 140, 145, 148, 152n. 13., 162, 183 politics, 21, 94–95, 102–3, 109–15, 117–18, 137, 138–40, 143, 152n. 11., 155, 158, 167, 169–70, 171n. 10., 198 praxis, 43, 84, 185 privacy, 15–18 Protestant Reformation, 15, 95, 101, 106–7, 127, 136, 141–42, 145, 147–48, 155, 163, 199 Prussia, 155–56, 158–59 psychobiological, 5, 37, 40, 43, 53, 62–63, 200 psychology, 40–49, 51, 55n. 7., 83, 130, 147, 173, 198 pure and impure, 7, 12, 86, 92

R Reich, 155–56, 159–60, 162, 164 relativism, 51, 53, 56n. 8. religion, 14, 20n. 5., 21–22, 30–31, 40, 48–49, 55n. 7., 59–60, 68, 94–95, 97, 100, 104, 109–12, 114, 118, 126, 136, 139, 147, 161, 169–70, 174, 197n. 2. Religion, Politics and History in India, 1 Renaissance, 15, 95 renouncer, 4, 19, 59, 67–71, 72n. 6., 96–98, 119n. 4.; see also sanny¯asa/ sanny¯asin Romanticism, 17, 23, 33, 157, 164, 180, 182, 185, 188

Index Russia, 163, 171n. 5.

S Samkhya, 179 sam.s¯ara, 70 sanny¯asa/sanny¯asin, 59, 63, 67–71, 96–97, 101, 119n. 4., 124; see also renouncer . san sar, 63–64 . san skars, 63 sanskritization, 149 self-development, 15, 17–18, 64, 126, 139 Shudra, 93 n. 1. societas, 104, 107, 109–10 Société de Psychologie, 44–46 sociocentric, 8, 13, 50, 65 sociological apperception, 50–52, 73–74, 119, 151n. 8., 154 South Asia, 5, 61–62 spiritualistes, 28 Stoics, 97, 98, 107, 188 structuralism, 2, 73–74, 76, 92, 100, 124, 149–50, 151n. 5., 154, 163, subjectivity, 33, 76, 79, 128, 133, 138, 140 suicide, 45, 55n. 6. Sumeria, 169 svargarohana, 63 synchrony, 76–78, 80–81, 85–86, 90, 92, 157, 199

T Tantra, 86 territorial sovereignty, 155–56 total social fact, 43, 47 totalitarianism, 156–57, 164, 171nnn. 3, 4, 12. totality, 11, 43, 47, 58, 80, 109, 123, 127–31, 133–35, 140–41, 146, 151n. 3., 152nn. 9, 11 transcendental (structures), 179–81, 183, 192, 194, 197n. 3.

U Übermensch, 188 unio mystica, 102, 126, 143 l’unité du genre humain, 52, 85, 169 universal sovereignty, 154–56, 163 universitas, 104, 107, 109–11 Upanishads, 49, 68 Utilitarianism, 28, 33, 147

Categories of Self : Louis Dumont's Theory of the Individual, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

Index

215

W

Vaishya, 93. n. 1. varna, 11, 61, 93n. 1., 103, varn¯ . a´sramadharma, 61–62 Vedanta, 49 Vedic, 10, 68, 86, 100, 119n. 4. vegetarianism, 12, 59 Verstehen, 148

Weimar, 138, 156, 158–61 will to power, 156, 187–88, 195, 197 n. 3. world-historical, 48–49, 153, 167–70, 176, 199 world-in-itself, 181, 184, 192, 194

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

V

Categories of Self : Louis Dumont's Theory of the Individual, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Categories of Self : Louis Dumont's Theory of the Individual, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook