Did Foucault Revolutionize History?

Philosophy

With the pretext of analyzing Foucaultâs contribution to history, the paper is an essay on the philosophy of history. It is shaped, fundamentally, as an answer to the historian Paul Veyneâs essay, âFoucault Revolutionizes History â and his assertions on Foucault and historical methodology; Veyne claimed Foucault to have revolutionized the discipline of history thanks to his singular gaze and his profound skepticism. The paper counters Veyneâs assertions on both Foucault and Veyneâs historiography and seeks to provide a concept of history that is more nuanced and conscious of the human sciencesâ ontology and duties. To do so, the paper en-gages with a number of historical currents, thinkers, and concepts, which shape historical inquiry.

Open Journal of Philosophy 2011. Vol.1, No.2, 84-89 Copyright © 2011 SciRes. DOI:10.4236/ojpp.2011.12014 Did Foucault Revolutionize History? Cody Franchetti Modern European Studies, Liberal Arts Master's Program, Columbia University, New York City, United States. Email: firstname.lastname@example.com Received October 15th, 2011; revised November 14th, 2011; accepted November 20th, 2011. With the pretext of analyzing Foucault's contribution to history, the paper is an essay on the philosophy of history. It is shaped, fundamentally, as an answer to the historian Paul Veyne's essay, "Foucault Revolutionizes History" (1978) and his assertions on Foucault and historical methodology; Veyne claimed Foucault to have revolutionized the discipline of history thanks to his singular gaze and his profound skepticism. The paper counters Veyne's assertions on both Foucault and Veyne's historiography and seeks to provide a concept of history that is more nuanced and conscious of the human sciences' ontology and duties. To do so, the paper engages with a number of historical currents, thinkers, and concepts, which shape historical inquiry. Keywords: Philosophy of History, Historical Methodology, Nominalism, Hermeneutics, Michel Foucault, Paul Veyne, Marcel Gauchet. Introduction In 1978, Paul Veyne, historian, friend, admirer, and confidant of Michel Foucault wrote a famous and controversial essay entitled "Foucault Revolutionizes History". In it, he claimed Foucault to be a new kind of historian-one who by "stripping away the veils"1, managed like none other to "peel away the banalities and notice that there is more to explain"2 than what was previously understood about a period. Though brilliant, Veyne's reading of Foucault offers only a partial view of him whose thought is more heterogeneous than Veyne's understanding; Foucault invariably wished to defy classification and disparaged any attempt to apply it to him. Foucault was first and foremost a thinker rather than a philosopher, I'd venture to say, for his thought was not resolutely systematic and presented a number of aporias, some of which I shall discuss. Yet his thought and its implications for historical practice, as well as Foucault's own, valuable excursions into history itself, indeed offer fertile cues for historical enquiry. On the other hand, whether Foucault actually was a historian is a question that ought to be considered; it is bound to polarize its enquirers; and it is fated to be especially captious for those who see in Foucault a messianic figure who turned history on its head with his methodology, even though as we shall see, Foucault himself was not necessarily mindful of the true nature of his methodology. But answering the question of whether Foucault was, say, a Febvre, a Bloch-the initiator of a new, veritable historical school-is luckily not the task of this paper. Instead, by examining Veyne's assertions, Foucault's own works, and by finding out whether his was truly an ex-novo historical practice, this essay shall attempt to appraise whether Foucault 'revolutionized' history-and if so, how. Discussion Veyne's argument for Foucault's originality rests chiefly upon three points. The first is that Foucault was both an empiricist and a profoundly skeptical thinker "who believed only in the truth of facts never in the truth of ideas."3 This, according to Veyne, allowed Foucault to avoid the pitfalls of relativism and historicism-to pierce through the "banalities" of the "vague and noble terms"4 often used by other historians to portray an age, and to display "people's practices as they really are."5 The evocation of Ranke's famous dictum ("wie es eigentlich gewesen") by a modern historian like Veyne is surprising: Ranke was the embodiment of the great German historical school of the nineteenth century, which sought to reconstruct the past empirically by working exclusively from original documents and archives: "Ranke ended by holding that it is not science to extract modern history from anything less than the entire body of written evidence."6 The limitation of writing history solely on empiricist principles was archly described by Jaques Barzun: "It had been a delusion to suppose with Ranke and his school that history had become scientific: it had merely become blindly exhaustive about past politics: it produced what was wittily called 'biennial history'-a lifetime of research to furnish an account of two years in a bygone era, preferably remote."7 In fact, the conceit that the past can be scientifically reconstituted 'as it really was' has long been abandoned by historians; yet, Ranke represents a giant step in the history of historiography and remains a paradigm for any historian. Be that as it may, Veyne finds in Foucault's skepticism-an empiricist stance-that fundamental quality, which according to him enables Foucault to circumvent other historians' incomplete ambiguities. Of course, we must establish whether Foucault actually was an empiricist, or whether Veyne is projecting his own vision of history onto his admired colleague. The second attribute, which according to Veyne propels Foucault 's historical capacity farther than other historians, is nominalism . Veyne's argument is essentially that the belief in universals hampers an historian's understanding of a period in its uniqueness. "In short, in any given era the set of practices gives rise, on a given material point, to a unique historical countenance in which we think we recognize what is called, in vague terms, historical science or religion; but what takes shape at that same point in another era will have its own unique and very different 4Veyne, 1997: p. 15 5Veyne, 1997: p. 156 6Acton, 1886: p. 16 7Barzun, 1974: p. 5 1Veyne, 1997: p. 156 2Veyne, 1997: p. 156 3Veyne, 2010: p. 1 C. FRANCHETTI 85 countenance and, conversely, a countenance vaguely similar to the earlier one will take shape at a some other point. This is what denying the existence of natural objects means: across the ages we do not encounter the evolution or modification of a single object that always appears in the same place."8 A few pages later, Veyne drives the point to its paroxistic locus: "there is no concrete trans-historical truth"9. We shall have to examine closely the value of sober nominalism as opposed to its deceitfulness when relied upon excessively. Lastly, Veyne considers Foucault's concepts of 'practice' and 'discourse' as completely new domains for historical invest tigation: "The Foucault-style genealogy-history completely fulfills the project of traditional history; it does not ignore society, the economy, and so on, but it structures this material differently-not by centuries, peoples, civilizations, but by practices."10 This statement shall also need to be examined to determine whether these concepts were new or whether they were already intrinsically part of other historians' understanding-albeit under a different name. These are in synthesis Veyne's arguments for Foucault's revolutionizing history. Let us first look at whether Foucault was in fact an empiricist; Veyne's impassioned reading of him is certainly slanted in that direction. Foucault displayed positivist leanings when he wrote that understanding historical change, "is a question of what governs statements, and the way in which they govern each other to constitute a set of propositions that are scientifically capable of being verified or falsified by scientific procedures."11 This extract comes from an interview in June 1974, when Foucault, under the spell of Nietzsche, especially his philosophy concerning genealogy and power, had turned his interests to relations of power on the broadest terms. During this period, he looked to forge a historical method that incorporated these concepts and seemed intent upon systematizing his view of history. "Good historical method requires us to counterpose the meticulous and unavowable meanness of these fabrications and inventions [ideals, poetry, religion, etc.], to the solemnity of origins."12 Here Foucault's move was to adopt Nietzsche's conceit that ideals did not have an origin-they were not born out of a volcano-but were rather manufactured in the great 'factory of the human mind' at some point or another (as propounded in Genealogy of Morals). Foucault found Nietzsche's distinction between Ursprung (origin) and Erfindung (invention) extremely valuable: that religion and poetry, for example, did not have an origin but were invented allows, in Foucault's view, to examine these domains with a certain degree of empiricism, because the advent of, say, poetry, with its "curious idea of using a certain number of rhythmic or musical properties of language"13, can be situated at a certain point in time (with the collective evidence we have) thus allowing for a scientific-and possibly reassuring-view when penetrating the historicity of these domains. However, I'm afraid that this is the extent of Foucault's authentic and legitimate empiricist enterprise. But Foucault claimed an empirical stance as early as 1966, in The Order of Things: "History from the nineteenth century, defines the birthplace of the empirical, that from which, prior to all established chronology, it derives its own being. History becomes an empirical science of events and that radical mode of being that prescribes their destiny to all empirical beings, to those particular beings that we are."14 This creed-an empirical Weltanschauung, where we ourselves are 'empirical beings' -is not to be taken at face value, at least not in The Order of Things, for two fundamental reasons. The first is that if this book is empirical in its outlook, too many empirical inaccuracies litter its "scientific" postulations. I shall provide but two examples. The Order of Things, fundamentally, deals with the gradual but inexorable disappearance of the law of similitude that governed language during the Renaissance. Foucault charts the substitution of representation in place of similitude (in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), which in turn was subverted in the nineteenth century: general grammar; the realist, naturalistic vision of life-life and work; a bourgeois life whose imperatives are a realistic perception of existence, which is encumbered by the weight of finitude; all contribute to representation's demise. And so, Foucault states that, "What came into being with Adam Smith with the first philologists is a minuscule but absolutely essential displacement, which toppled the whole Western thought: representation has lost the power to provide a foundation No composition, no decomposition, no analysis into identities and differences can now justify the connection of representation."15 The appearance of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation in 1818 and its increasing success during the second edition of 1844 and its resounding triumph of its third, in 185916 discredits Foucault's argument that representation 'lost the power to provide a foundation' or that there was a disconnect between representation and thought in the nineteenth century altogether. A second example I wish to give of an 'empirical' falsity in the book, which is 'scientifically verifiable' is Foucault's statement that "until the nineteenth century, analyses of language show little change. Words are still investigated on the basis of their representative values, as virtual values that prescribes one and the same mode of being for them all." In Germany, Herder, whom Foucault never even mentions in the book, profoundly changed the study of language, annihilating the hegemony of the French language by declaring language's adjacency to national culture, and, therefore, intimating all languages to be equal, by studying language in its own accord; in England, William Ward, in 1765 and 1777, published what is considered the first modern book of grammar ('natural grammar' as Foucault would call it) whose influence can be traced to modern linguistics17, and, Adam Smith himself wrote in 1761 an important treatise on the origin and development of language. Clearly, the investigation of language in its own principles and rules, divested from its 'representational value', had started well before the nineteenth century and quite significantly so. The second and most flagrant evidence that The Order of Things, as well as Foucault's thought in general, cannot be considered empirical, is its underlying hermeneutical stance. It is my contention that Foucault was in reality a hermeneutic thinker: an unequivocal, magnificent example of a hermeneutic approach may be found in the following passage, again from The Order of Things, "Literature becomes progressively more differentiated from the discourse of ideas, and encloses itself 14Foucault, 1994: p. 219 15Foucault, 2000b: p. 238-239 16A connection with Schopenhauer's late success may be found in the dramatic weakening of Hegel's influence after the revolutions of 1848. 17See unpublished dissertation by Pankhurst, J. (1966) William Ward's Essay on Grammar: a Critical Account and an Assessment of its Relevance to Eighteenth and Twentieth Century Linguistics. London: London Univer8Veyne, 1997: p. 171 9Veyne, 1997: p. 171 10Veyne, 1997: p. 171 11Foucault, 2000b: p. 114 12Foucault, 2000b: p.7 13Foucault, 2000b: p.7 C. FRANCHETTI 86 within a radical intransitivity; it becomes detached from all the values that were able to keep it in general circulation during the Classical age (taste, pleasure, naturalness, truth), and creates within its own space everything that will ensure a ludic denial of them (the scandalous, the ugly, the impossible); it breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations, and becomes merely a manifestation of language which has no other law than that of affirming-in opposition to all other forms of discourse-its own precipitous existence; and so there is nothing for it to do but to curve back in a perpetual return upon itself, as if its discourse could have no other content than the expression of its own form; it addresses itself to itself as a writing subjectivity, or seeks to re-apprehend the essence of all the literature in the movement that brought it into being."18 This extraordinary passage, which describes the scission between language and literature in the nineteenth century, when the literary works of writers became testament to literature's independence from language-to which it was hitherto fused-and were thus irrevocably engaged in a discourse, which literature started undertaking about itself, is a modern hermeneutics tour de force. Modern hermeneutics, which is based on Schleiermacher's idea of the 'circle of understanding' (Zirkel in Verstehen) is employed with great élan by Foucault: to understand and interpret-the hermeneutic act, in fact-creation of literature as an independent domain, Foucault uses the 'circle of understanding' by mediating between the part and the whole, and, the whole and the part, in a constant gyrating motion, which produces understanding, and, ultimately, as Hans Georg Gadamer would say, truth. And there is indeed a great deal of truth in Foucault's observation about the newfound, autonomous position of literature in the nineteenth century. So the empiricist viewpoint does not encapsulate Foucault's thought after all despite his stating the contrary. In fact, in the same year that The Order of Things was first published, a seemingly different Foucault said that the human sciences "are caught, as it were, in a double obligation, a simultaneous postulation: that of hermeneutics, interpretation, exegesis."19 This statement, if confronted with that from 1974 where Foucault insisted on the need that scientific procedures be employed to detect historical change, as well as the affirmation of empiricist methods, are countered endlessly by the performance of hermeneutics throughout The Order of Things. This gives rise to a crucial aporia: a choice must be made between hermeneutic and scientific knowledge, for a hermeneut cannot be an empiricist. This was demonstrated most powerfully by Gadamer in Truth and Method; Gadamer revealed hermeneutics to be an ulterior form of knowledge bearing truth outside Method-the indefeasible foundation of natural science. It is obvious that we ought to recognize that Paul Veyne's fancy that "[Foucault] this supposed sixty-eightist, was an empiricist"20 is untenable on this contradiction alone. It seems to me that Foucault's putative strict empiricism may be put to rest. Foucault's inaccurate appraisal of his own epistemology should not detract from The Order of Things' stature; after all, Walter Benjamin spoke of the often occurring author's delusion: "as if the creator were, just because he created it, also the best interpreter of his work-this has been called 'empathy', in an attempt to provide a disguise under which this fatal, pathological suggestibility masquerades as method."21 The Order of Things remains an enormously fascinating book, one of the cardinal books of the second half of the twentieth century, and a book whose insights and cues easily assign Foucault into the Pantheon of the great cultural figures of his period. We should therefore not unduly worry whether Foucault's estimation of his own work was faulty; nothing is diminished by it. Next, we come to Veyne's nominalism and his belief that this perspective invigorated Foucault's historical capabilities substantially. Marcel Gauchet fulminated Veyne for his extreme nominalist position; in an article called Le nominalisme historien. A propos de "Foucault révolutionne l'histoire" de Paul Veyne, Gauchet noticed a radicalization of Veyne's nominalism in describing Foucault's merits. Gauchet did not concern himself at all to assess whether Veyne's labeling Foucault as a nominalist was legitimate, and ignored Foucault all together (quite tellingly, as we shall see later). He did concede, however, that nominalism has its own, rightful place in the process of writing history: "history [is] the emergence, the advent of forms than cannot be explained, except by missing what matters in them, that is, what these forms have that is incomparable. From this comes the necessity of the historian's nominalism, the only position that can adequately open him to the inexplicable singularities of a process of permanent innovation."22 But he finds Veyne's nominalism "in flagrant contradiction with the demands of his pretended nominalism"23, because "Veyne does refrain from abolishing things that do not exist"24. Gauchet thus sees in Veyne an exaggerated nominalism, blinded to real historical understanding: "The nominalist shall always be deceived by the illusion of realism, which is always more nominalist than he."25 Gauchet's criticism of Veyne is significant for our purpose, because Foucault was a nominalist, but not as extreme as Veyne. Gauchet expounded brilliantly on the value that the disbelief in universals may have in historical enquiry. But the fruits of sound nominalism are not new: Herder had already "set a universal historical worldview against the Enlightenment's teleological view of history to acknowledge that each period has its own right to exist, in its own perfection."26 But more importantly, Gauchet's warning that an exclusively nominalist outlook has serious drawbacks for the historian is sensible, I think. It is a fact, as Fustel de Coulanges said, that "History is not the accumulation of facts and events of every sort that have been produced in the past: it is the science of human societies"27 and as such, one must be aware that, contrary to the nominalist position, there are constants in human nature-vanity, rapacity, the wish for a better position in society, lust, love: some human traits are without a doubt trans-historical. And the historian who disregards human essences shall not set them against the period that he is studying-which is of course exemplary and unrepeatable-thus 22["l'histoire qui est le surgissement, l'avénement de formes qui ne saurient s'expliquer, sauf à manquer ce qui compte en elles, à savoir ce que'elles comportent d'incomparable. D'où le nécessaire nominalisme de l'historien, seul à meme de l'ouvrir adéquatement aux singularités inexplicables d'un processus d'innovation permanente."] Gauchet, 1986: p. 403. 23["en contradition flagrante avec les requisitions de son prétendu nominalisme."] Gauchet, 1986: p. 414. 24["Veyne ne se contente pas d'abolir des choses qui n'existent pas."] Gauchet, 1986: p. 414. 25["Le nominaliste sera toujours pris en défaut d'illusion réaliste par plus nominaliste que lui."] Ibid, p.411. 26Gadamer, 2004: p.198 27["La storia non è l'accumulazione degli avvenimenti d'ogni tipo che si sono prodotti nel passato: essa è la scienza delle societá umane."] Bloc, 2005: p. 71. Marc Bloc cited this formula in his last, scattered papers on history, written just before being shot in 1944 by the Gestapo. 18Foucault, 1994: p. 300 19Foucault, 2000a: p. 263 20Veyne, 2010: p. 2 21Benjamin, 1977: p. 53 C. FRANCHETTI 87 finding his compass of vision considerably diminished by such heedlessness. The third and last point which Veyne envisions as a completely novel mode that Foucault pointed us to for a superior understanding of history (or in Veyne's own words 'structuring history'), is 'practices': "I tried to do a historian's work by showing the simultaneous practices and the transformations that accounted for their visible changes."28 But, as it turns out, a number of great historians who preceded Foucault had had the very same concept in mind. Marc Bloch's The Royal Touch (1924) was one of the first history books not to be confined to a single period, since, as one of the founders of the Annales School, he developed the famous concept of 'la longue durée'. Bloch's approach, like Foucault's, was highly interdisciplinary and the book was concerned with the practices spanning for centuries of those who believed in the thaumaturgic properties of kingship. He frequently spoke of 'collective representations', a concept which clearly abuts with Foucault's 'practices'. Thus, Foucault's concept of practices was not new. And yet, his application of it in one of the greatest themes in European history-the rise of the modern state is of striking consequence: "the state effectively entered into the reflected practice of people at a given moment, the way which, at a given moment, the state became for those who governed, for those who advised governors, for those who reflected on governments and the action of government as they saw it, was without a doubt not the absolutely determinant factor in the development of the state apparatuses, which in truth existed well before-the army, taxation, justice-but was absolutely essential, I think, for the entry of all these elements into the field of an active, concerted, and reflected practice that was, precisely, the state. We cannot speak of the state-thing as if it was a being developing on the basis of itself and imposing itself on the individuals as if by spontaneous, automatic mechanism. The state is a practice. The state is inseparable from the set of practices by which the state actually became a way of governing, a way of doing things, and a way too of relating to government."29 At the end of the book, Foucault further advocates that "it must be possible to do the history of the state on the basis of men's actual practices, on the basis of what they do and how they think."30 So although Foucault's idea of 'practices' applied to historical understanding may not be original, it is used here with driving force. Foucault's latter quote displays a startlingly close resemblance to 'mentalité', a concept which also had a distinguished antecedent: Erwin Panofsky. Panofsky's Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism first introduced a broader, hermeneutic view of iconography, which until his book, was an approach that attempted to uncover a world-view of a culture by studying the symbols and images of the art of a period. In the book, Panofsky saw a parallel between Thomas Aquinas's scholastic philosophy and the appearance of Gothic architecture: they both arose at the same time and around the same place (Paris). As Peter Burke aptly described, "the connection he discussed [was] not in terms of the 'spirit of the age' but, more precisely, in terms of the spread from philosophy to architecture of what he calls a 'mental habit', or habitus, a cluster of assumptions about the need for transparent organization and the reconciliation of contradictions."31 In short, Panofsky was focusing on the mentality of a period (or mentalité). This concept shall bridge us to other aspects of Foucault that Veyne did not discuss but which are considered fundamentally Foucaultian qualities and thus ought to be examined. So far we have seen that some of the traits, such as 'practices' which Veyne thought Foucault possessed, were not new and thus not 'revolutionary', and, that Veyne assigned to Foucault a strict empiricist's point of view erroneously. That Foucault was a nominalist may be certainly granted to Veyne, but we have also seen, I hope, that a sagacious historian will follow the nominalist view without excess. Foucault's epistemology, therefore, was different from what Veyne claims. We shall now look at a few other concepts that are unquestionably-and indissolubly-associated with Foucault's thought: 'episteme' and 'discontinuity'. I ended the section of Veyne's list of Foucault's purported revolutions in history with Panofsky's concept of mentalité as somewhat similar to 'practices', because I think that the concept of mentalité may have been the germ-idea which gradually swelled to 'episteme'; Foucault was surely acquainted with mentalité through the Annales School, which absorbed it in its own vocabulary and epistemology.32 Clearly, episteme is a far richer concept than mentalité, for it is "the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems "33 and is thus considerably more wide ranging, allowing for a deeper understanding of all the interrelations of a period. For example, Foucault's tracing in The Order of Things of the gradual loss of representation's significance through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries until it spoke no more to the modern man, is an instance of this greater and deeper perspective when compared to Tim Blanning's roughly similar explanation for the baroque's impenetrability to our modern eyes, "the dominant culture was representational That is perhaps why later ages, more attuned to secular literalism and humanist understatement, have often found the confident resplendence of the baroque uncongenial."34 In this instance, we can confidently agree with Veyne that in contrast to Blanning, Foucault 'peeled away the banalities and noticed that there was more to explain' instead of referring to historical awareness 'in vague and noble terms'; 'secular literalism' and 'humanist understatement' sound as adorned but hollow statements next to Foucault's pertinent, audacious yet precise metaphoric language throughout The Order of Things. If, as I see it, Panofsky represents an important station in the development of episteme, then we ought to consider that he, too, was not the sole historian who tried to look through the eyes of a period's knowable possibilities. Ortega y Gasset had written in 1935 that "The diagnosis of any human existence, whether of an individual, a people, or an age, must begin by establishing the repertory of its convictions. It is man's beliefs that truly constitute his state."35 The epistemological landscape is a familiar one-and it is not far from Foucault's own. There was however an earlier, eminent historian whom I consider Foucault's antecedent in many respects, although their similarity may not be at all evident. Johann Huizinga was a historian who was part of the revolt against rationality in the human sciences, the nineteenth century revolt that was commenced by Helmholtz and Bergson, which sought a non-empirical approach to history, in the belief that history is an essen32For a brief but indicative description of the ambiguous relationship between Foucault and the Annales School, see Burke, P. (1990). The French Historical Revolution. Stanford: Stanford University Press. (especially p.103) 33Foucault, 2010: p. 191 34Blanning, 2007: p. 458 35Ortega y Gasset, 1936: p. 283 36Weintraub, 1966: p. 228 28Michel Foucault, 2000a: p. 292 29Foucault, 2007: p. 276-277 30Foucault, 2007: p. 358 31Burke, 2008: p. 13 C. FRANCHETTI 88 tially humanistic pursuit. Huizinga believed that "history is a cultural form and fulfills a function in culture."36 He was an exponent of what is now referred to as 'classic cultural history'37, and envisioned "the ultimate object of the historian [to be] culture as a whole, the broadest historical object. His knowledge consists of cultural forms and functions. The historian's basic question should always be concerned with the place and function of the separate subject in the broader cultural context."38 And he often repeated that "culture exists only as a whole"39. He even had the idea, which was quite unheard of at the turn of the century-and well before anthropology and sociology had been lain in the toolbox for successful historical enquiry-to write a history of the seven deadly sins. Huizinga was astonishingly 'modern' in his view about the kind of history that ought to be written: "If someone could write the history of vanity, he would command over half of cultural history."40 Forty years later Foucault wrote The History of Madness, focusing on how the concept of madness was envisioned from the Reanaissance to modernity, or, in 'function of the separate subject in the broader cultural context'-just as Huizinga envisioned such kind of history to be written. But what seems to me to be the extent of Huizinga's affinity to Foucault, is not merely a kind of history-making that he pointed at but did not do: "The great divide in the perception of the beauty of life comes much more between the Renaissance and the modern period than between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The turnabout occurs at the point where art and life begin to diverge. It is the point where art begins to be no longer in the midst of life, as a noble part of the joy of life itself, but outside of life as something to be highly venerated, as something to turn to in moments of edification or rest. The old dualism separating God and the world has thus returned in another form, that of the separation of art and life. The Renaissance had managed to free itself from the rejection of all the joy of life as something sinful, but had not yet found a new way of separating the higher and lower enjoyments of life; the Renaissance wanted an unencumbered enjoyment of all of life. The new distinction is a compromise between the Renaissance and Puritanism that is at the base of modern spiritual attitudes. It amounted to a mutual capitulation in which the one side insisted on saving beauty while the other insisted on the condemnation of sin. Only after the Puritan worldview lost its intensity did the Renaissance perceptiveness to all the joys of life gain ground again; perhaps even more ground than before, because beginning with the eighteenth century there is a tendency to regard the natural per se as an element of the basically good."41 Minds, views, practices, theories are all encompassed into an overarching gaze that is not confined to a period but is rather focused upon an idea through the various ages-that of the fracture between beauty and its negation-which in turn illuminates historical periods with a new perspective: such a passage easily might have been from The Order of Things. Finally, I should like to examine briefly Foucault's concept of 'discontinuity'. How novel was it really and did its employment change historical thinking? As to its originality, discontinuity cannot be ascribed to Foucault, since it was Georges Canguilhem, who introduced the concept of discontinuity to Foucault. Nevertheless, Canguilhem profited little from it, since he did not much avail himself of it in his work. Foucault's historical thought on the other hand, is inextricably tied to the notion of discontinuity; and many epigones have exaggerated Foucault's own attachment to it, hence the abutment of Foucault to Structuralism, which Foucault insistently rejected. "My problem was not at all to say 'Voilá long live discontinuity, we are in the discontinuous and a good thing too,' but to pose the question 'How is it that at certain moments and in certain orders of knowledge, there are these sudden take-offs, these hastenings of evolution, these transformations which fail to correspond to the calm, continuist image that is normally accredited?' It was these different regimes that I tried to identify and describe in The Order of Things."42 Foucault's elucidation is significant, because too much has been made in the name of Foucault of the concepts of continuity and discontinuity. It is for this reason perhaps that Marcel Gauchet didn't concern himself with Foucault in Veyne's essay on him; he may have found that Foucault's historical lens were too heavily clouded with these concepts, which according to him were misleading: "Two perspectives have normally been regarded as incompatible: the uniformity of human development and the existence of radical discontinuities within it. The word 'uniformity' does not mean continuity and does not mean that the same imperatives and ends have always prevailed everywhere. Conversely, discontinuity does not necessarily involve an irreducible plurality of instances and configurations, each one uniquely and impenetrably closed in on itself and the result of the world's unpredictable vagaries."43 For Structuralists, and other obdurate defenders of discontinuity, Gauchet's point is hard to shake off. I am inclined to agree with Gauchet about the relative meaninglessness of discontinuity per se because of Huizinga's memorable words about the same issue, "The image of the transition of a period to another is that of a long succession of waves rolling onto a beach, each of them breaking at a different point and a different moment. Everywhere the lines between the old and the new are different Anyone seeking in a transition a total unity of spirit capable of being stated in a simple formula will never understand it in all its expressions."44 These words capture beautifully the pitfalls of seeking both a single, encompassing discontinuous aspect in history. However, it must be stressed that Foucault used the concept of discontinuity with much more parsimony, care, and nuance than some commentators have attributed to him; and to the extent that he did so, he is to be heeded, for in the hands of Foucault the analysis of intellectual discontinuity produced fertile results, from The Order of Things to History of Madness. Conclusion I have tried to investigate if and to what extent Foucault revolutionized history; and a few key points seem to have emerged. Let us start with Paul Veyne, who first proclaimed Foucault to be a revolutionary historian; we have seen that his essay is heavily slanted and offers a reading that is not completely faithful to Foucault's thinking. Firstly, Foucault was not the originator of the qualities that Veyne perceived to be unique in Foucault, for Ortega y Gasset, Johan Huizinga, Fustel de Coulanges, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and others, were precursors to Foucault's broad, interdisciplinary outlook, born 37As opposed to the 'New Cultural History' (NCH). The name appeared in the late 1980's, but Foucault was a foundational figure of NCH. (See Burke, 2008: p. 51-76) 38Cited in Wintraub, 1996: p. 231 39Cited in Weintraub, 1996: p. 231 40Cited in Weintraub, 1996: p. 233 41Huizinga, 1996: p. 40-1 42Foucault, 2000b: p. 114 43Gauchet, 1999: p. 15 44Huizinga, 1959: p. 282, 286. C. FRANCHETTI 89 out of a classical cultural preparation and an idiosyncratic vision of the human sciences. Secondly, Veyne did not always describe Foucault's thought accurately nor did he truly isolate its greatest merits; Foucault, as we have seen, despite his own declarations to the contrary, was not a strict empiricist. I would define his historical approach as a rare admixture of skepticism and hermeneutics. Such a combination allowed him to write books which from a strictly historiographical point of view are hybrids. The Order of Things, for example, recalls Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: they both trace an idea in history, while illuminating the period(s) they examine, without giving emphasis to individuals as agents in history, yet accentuating the deepest recesses of human cognizance in an epoch. Whether there was ever a man who has revolutionized history by himself is questionable; yet Foucault has left an indelible mark on the historian's craft: he has provided alternate ways of looking at it. We may certainly speak of and refer to 'Foucault's gaze'-a highly original slant on the issues he concentrated on, and, an example of sincerity. The seeds of his thought, thus, even that that is not devoted to historical issues, can be sown to fructify a kind of historian, who is "able to experience a violent, direct interest in things for their own sake."45 From a strictly historical perspective, Foucault has his merits and his faults. His books contain cues for rich historical enquiry that must be carried on; a book like the first volume of the History of Sexuality-his most 'historical' work-is an exemplary study of the bourgeois ethos of the nineteenth century that few have penetrated as deeply. On the other hand, in the few pages about medieval law, in his lecture "Truth and Juridical Forms", the paucity of Foucault's knowledge of feudal law is flagrantly evident if we confront his observations with the equally succinct, yet magisterial and enlightening pages of Maitland's essay "History of English Law"46; Foucault's concepts of episteme and discontinuity seem at times mere instruments of his ambition for all-encompassing historical statements. And so, Foucault did not revolutionize history. He did, however, modify our assumptions on how one might think about history. And yet, Clio wears a dress whose pattern is so varied, that, without a doubt, Foucault is permanently emblazoned on her serried vest. References Acton, J. E. E. (1886). German schools of history. The English Historical Review, 1, 7-42. doi:10.1093/ehr/I.I.7 Barzun, J. (1974). Clio and the doctors. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Benjamin, W. (1977). The Origin of German Tragic Drama. London: NLB. Blanning, T. (2007). The Pursuit of Glory. New York: The Viking Press. Bloc, M. (2005). Scritti sulla storia come scienza. Rome: Centro di Ricerca. Burke, P. (2008). What is Cultural History? Cambridge: Polity. Michel Foucault, M. (1994). The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Press. Foucault, M. (2000a). The Order of Things. In J. Faubon (Ed.), Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, New York: The New Press. Foucault, M. (2000b). Truth and Power. In J. Faubion (Ed.), Power, New York: The New Press. Foucault, M. (2007). Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1977-1978. New York: Picador. Foucault, M. (2010). The archaeology of knowledge; and, the discourse on language. New York: Vintage Press. Gadamer, H. G. (2004). Truth and method. London: Continuum. Gauchet, M. (1986). La nominalisme historien, A propos de "Foucault révolutionne l'histoire", de Paul Veyne. Social Science Information, 25, 401-419. doi:10.1177/053901886025002005 Gauchet, M. (1999). The disenchantment of the world. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Huizinga, J. (1959). The problem of the renaissance. In Men & Ideas, New York: Meridian Books, 243-287. Huizinga, J. (1996). The Autumn of the Middle Ages. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Ortega y Gasset, J. (1936). History as a system. In R. Klibansky (Ed.), History and Philosophy, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 283-322. Veyne, P. (1978). Foucault revolutionizes history. In A. I. Davidson (Ed.), Foucault and His Interlocutors, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 146-182. Veyne, P. (2010). Foucault: His Thought, His Character. Cambridge: Polity. Weintraub, K. J. (1966). Visions of Culture. Chicago: Chicago University Press. 45Huizinga, 1959: p.287 46See Maitland, F. W. (1957). History of English Law. Historical Essays. London: Cambridge University Press.


Philosophy

There is hardly any theme in Karl Marxâs theoretical corpus that has garnered as much traction as his theory of fetishism. Ever since Marx introduced the term into his critique of political economy in Capital, fetishism became a field of theoretical force, creating its own gravitational center toward which the interest of later generations of historians, social theorists, and political activists has been pulled. While much ink has been spilled on the specific content and theoretical scope of fetishism in Capital for over one and a half centuries, young Marxâs initial exploration of the term rarely enjoyed critical attention. This is especially true in regard to the period from his early journalism in the Rheinische Zeitung (1842â43) to his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.

Young Marx on Fetishism, Sexuality, and Religion Revisiting the Bonn Notebooks k A A N k A N G A L There is hardly any theme in Karl Marx's theoretical corpus that has garnered as much traction as his theory of fetishism. Ever since Marx introduced the term into his critique of political economy in Capital, fetishism became a field of theoretical force, creating its own gravitational center toward which the interest of later generations of historians, social theorists, and political activists has been pulled. While much ink has been spilled on the specific content and theoretical scope of fetishism in Capital for over one and a half centuries, young Marx's initial exploration of the term rarely enjoyed critical attention. This is especially true in regard to the period from his early journalism in the Rheinische Zeitung (1842–43) to his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Marx's earliest usage of the term fetish dates back to 1842, in a polemic against the anti-democratic power division of the Rhenish Province Assembly in Prussia. There, Marx mockingly described the privileges of the noble estates in the assembly, likening their provincial protection to deification. That the entire Rhine province was subordinate to the private interests of the noble estates was, according to Marx, similar to creating "gods for itself, but as soon as they are created, it must, like a fetish worshipper, forget that these gods are its own handiwork."1 In the same year, Marx was also involved in a quarrel with Karl Hermes, a Roman Catholic cleric and opponent of Young Hegelian politics of philosophy and religion. Hermes had launched a campaign against the public presence of Young Hegelians in German journals, including Marx's Rheinische Zeitung. In his response, Marx tore Hermes's attacks to shreds, taking on the latter's arguments one by one, including Hermes's employment of the term "fetishism." Marx argued that Hermes was wrong to believe that "'animal worship' is a higher form of religion than fetishism." In truth, zoolatry would "degrade man below the anKaan Kangal is an associate professor at the Center for Studies of Marxist Social Theory in the Philosophy Department of Nanjing University. His work on Marx's Bonn Notebooks won the 2019 David Riazanov Prize. He recently published the book Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). monthlyreviewarchives.org DOI: 10.14452/MR-074-05-2022-09_5 46 imal" and "make the animal man's god." "Fetishism," he added, "is so far from raising man above his sensuous desires that, on the contrary, it is 'the religion of sensuous desire.' Fantasy arising from desire deceives the fetish-worshipper into believing that an 'inanimate object' will give up its natural character in order to comply with his desires. Hence the crude desire of the fetish-worshipper smashes the fetish when it ceases to be its most obedient servant."2 Again in 1842, Marx took on a recent policy in Rhineland, which made collecting firewood in local forests an illegal activity. Peasants who were charged with wood theft were "obliged to compensate the forest owner for the lost value at a price estimated by the forester himself."3 Marx ridiculed the criminalization of peasants' traditional customary rights to access the local forests in favor of the interests of the private forest owners. The savages of Cuba regarded gold as a fetish of the Spaniards. They celebrated a feast in its honor, sang in a circle around it and then threw it into the sea. If the Cuban savages had been present at the sitting of the Rhine Province Assembly, would they not have regarded wood as the Rhinelanders' fetish? But a subsequent sitting would have taught them that the worship of animals is connected with this fetishism, and they would have thrown the hares into the sea in order to save the human being.4 In his 1843 critique of G. W. F. Hegel's philosophy of right, Marx spoke of fetishism when discussing the political backwardness of Germany in comparison to other European nations. Germany may have witnessed a series of theoretical revolutions in its philosophical tradition, but they hardly contributed to the waves of political revolutions and real struggles storming through its French neighbor. Far from enjoying the fruits of the ongoing revolutionary progress in Europe, Germany would first have to go through a period of decadence before entering a stage of political emancipation. This would result, in Marx's opinion, in a painful historical experience, just "like a fetish-worshipper suffering from the diseases of Christianity."5 Finally, in his 1844 Manuscripts, Marx employed the term for the first time in the context of political economy. Building an analogy between theology and economy, Marx likened the Protestant degradation of "Catholic paganism" to the inferior mercantile-monetary system from the perspective of "enlightened political economy." Completely unaware of the "subjective essence of private property" (labor), the proponents of the mercantile system have taken "private property as a purely objective being for man," hence appearing to later political economists as "fetish-worshippers." Marx believed that "fetishism" applied to the mercantilist view Y O U N G M A R x O N F E T I S H I S M 47 of private property, as it took wealth to exist "only as an object" and "reduced" it "to a very simple element of nature."6 Elsewhere in the same manuscript, Marx returned to the fetish theme, this time defining it in William Shakespeare's aesthetic terms (found in Timon of Athens), from the perspective of the contemporary political economy: Those nations which are still dazzled by the sensuous glitter of precious metals and therefore make a fetish of metal money are not yet fully developed money nations. The extent to which the solution of theoretical problems is a function of practice and is mediated through practice, and the extent to which true practice is the condition of a real and positive theory is shown, for example, in the case of fetish-worship. The sense perception of a fetish-worshipper is different from that of a Greek because his sensuous existence is different. The abstract hostility between sense and intellect is inevitable so long as the human sense for nature, the human significance of nature and hence the natural sense of man, has not yet been produced by man's own labor.7 Marx's initial preoccupation with the fetish theme is well-documented, but the first occasion that drew his attention to fetishism-as well as the early sources that informed his conception of the term-is less noticed in past scholarship.8 Young Marx came to delve into fetishism at a time when he was completely foreign to, and unconcerned with, political economy. As a fresh philosophy graduate in 1841, he was asked by the Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer to contribute a chapter to the latter's volume, Hegel's Doctrine of Religion and Art. Marx began working on his piece as early as December 1841, but then decided to publish it as a stand-alone article in Arnold Ruge's journal, Anekdota. Calling this text first "Treatise on Christian Art," then "On Religion and Art, with Special Reference to Christian Art," and finally, "the article 'On Art and Religion,'" Marx spent the first half of 1842 composing this now-lost treatise. In his own words, he was "drawn into all kinds of investigations which will still take a rather long time," for "the article on religious art...has steadily grown into almost book dimensions." It was this treatise that prompted young Marx to explore the fetish theme in depth for the first time.9 We do not know much as to what Marx may have argued in the treatise, but we do have a rough idea about the scope of his investigations, thanks to the notebooks that he left behind. These notebooks, called the Bonn Notebooks, contain a group of excerpts that he had assembled while working on the treatise. The excerpts encompass a wide range of artistic and religious themes, from early Italian Renaissance art to the religious-aesthetic traditions of ancient Greece and Egypt and the religious 48 M O N T H L Y R E V I E W / O c T O B E R 2 0 2 2 and anthropological chronicles of India, Persia, Africa, Siberia, and North America. Within the framework of the treatise, Marx made use of seven sources in total, the last five of which were devoted to fetishism and idolatry: Carl Friedrich von Rumohr's Italian Investigations, Johann Jakob Grund's The Painting of the Greeks, Charles de Brosses's On the Worship of Fetish Gods, Karl August Böttiger's Ideas on Art-Mythology, Christoph Meiners's General Critical History of Religions, Benjamin Constant's On Religion, and Jean Barbeyrac's Treatise on the Morals of Church Fathers.10 While the excerpts are not accompanied by Marx's comments, they provide some clues as to his attentional patterns, signifying what he considered relevant and noteworthy. Marx's excerpts from de Brosses open with the latter's definition of fetish: "objects of worship [of ] certain Divinities that the Europeans call fetishes, a term coined by our traders in Senegal from the Portuguese word fetisso, which means fairy, enchanted or divine thing, or giver of oracles; this from the Latin root fatum, fanum, fari."11 De Brosses, in Marx's excerpts, depicted fetish worship as an economy of exchange whereby the worshiper offers gifts or makes sacrifices to the deities in order to achieve desired outcomes. For example, Marx transcribed his claim that a "new Fetish is first overloaded with presents, with a solemn promise to honor it as a cherished patron." The fetish artifact is taken seriously by the worshiper as long as it is believed to embody a cluster of promises that meet the worshiper's expectations. In this vein, the following remark by de Brosses was important to Marx: when the natives of central and western Africa need rain, de Brosses wrote, They place empty vessels before the altar; if they are at war, they put swords and spears there to ask for victory; if they need meat or fish, they place bones there; in order to obtain palm wine, they leave at the foot of the altar the small knife used to make incisions in the tree; with these marks of respect and confidence they believe that they are sure to obtain what they ask for; but if some misfortune occurs, they attribute it to some just resentment on the part of their Fetish, and all their efforts turn to finding the means to appease it.12 De Brosses's catalogue of fetish objects was not limited to inanimate objects. It also included a group of animal species, one of which was significant enough to catch Marx's attention. In this regard, Marx took note of de Brosses's portrayal of the ancient Egyptian sacralization of cats: "If the house were to catch fire, [Egyptians] would hasten especially to save the cats from the blaze; this makes it greatly evident that the worship concerned the animal itself, which was not considered a mere emblem."13 Meiners's book on the history of religions was another theoretical resource that Marx thoroughly studied. Heavily influenced by de Brosses's Y O U N G M A R x O N F E T I S H I S M 49 account of fetishism, Meiners had ambitiously extended de Brosses's catalogue of fetish objects to cover religious sexuality. When taking excerpts from Meiners's book, Marx focused in particular on Meiners's chapter, "History of Phallus and Lingam," which was placed under the general heading, "History of Fetishism." Anticipating Sigmund Freud's account of penis envy, Meiners viewed fetishist phallus cults as a symptom of "impotent men or barren women or prospective spouses [who] have chosen the phallus as their fetish, or sorcerers and priests [who] have recommended the phallus as a fetish to one and to the other." Marx, in his notes, appears to have paid special attention to the phallus fetish in various cultural geographies, from India and Egypt to Greece and medieval Europe. Concerning an Indian phallus rite, for instance, Marx noted Meiners's observation that "Indian brides sacrificed their virginity to feelingless priapium." In the more recent Indian tradition, it was not uncommon to witness Indian kings who were "not allowed to have intercourse with the bride...until she had dedicated her virginity to the deity."14 The sublimity attached to the fetishized phallus in the Indian rites was important enough to Marx to excerpt the following passage in full: Married women from the sect of yogi pilgrimaged to a naked gigantic penitent who accepted the worships of the pious under the shade of a tree near Surat [in India]. The priapium of this penitent which seemed to belong more to an ass than to a human being was pierced at the foreskin and tamed, as it were, with a golden ring. The young women fell down in adoration before the mighty priapium, took it devoutly in their hands and kissed it, receiving the blessing of the yogi. The yogis are the most ardent and at the same time the most sacred worshippers of the lingam. Contrary to the positive attachment to the phallus cult of India, the Romans, Meiner noted, "honored and crowned the ass for protecting [the virgin goddess] Vesta from the violence of priapium." Marx transcribed his claim that medieval Europe was not foreign to this phenomenon of priapism, as "barren women honored a St. Guerlichon [a priapic statue]... in Normandy St. Giles and in Anjou a St. René.... Even in modern times, the sacred Cosmo and Damiano were dedicated to Isernia in the Neapolitan phalli and priapii. Priests offered for sale at the holy festival whole baskets full of waxed priapii. The buyers dedicated the priapii to the saint after having kissed it devoutly. This festival was abolished only in 1781."15 It is quite striking that in this narrative, the phallus object emerges not only as an artifact of worship, but also as a commodity to which religious meanings were attached. Yet it was Constant, rather than Meiners, who discussed fetishistic religion in broader commercial language. 50 M O N T H L Y R E V I E W / O c T O B E R 2 0 2 2 While Marx closely attended to Constant's approach to the Indian lingam cult, Constant's redefinition of fetishism seems to have also been significant for Marx. For example, Marx was drawn to Constant's account of religious sexuality in Indian rites. Constant explained the Indian phallus cult as part and parcel of priestly corruption that aimed to exploit religious sentiments of ordinary believers: the "lingam becomes a sacred object...when a solemn ceremony has confined the god within the newly sculpted idol."16 It was, according to Constant, "not the religious sentiment that forced...the daughters of India to engage in lascivious dances before the Lingam; it was the priests of this obscene divinity." This priestly exploitation could be found also in "female Babylonians" who "prostitute[d] themselves," or "Syrian women" at the ceremonies of Adonis at Byblos who "offered the sacrifice of their chastity. Peoples subjected to priests passed from abasement to license, and from orgies to despair.... The phallus was planted on sepulchers, and the same phallus was drenched in blood."17 Marx did not fail to notice that Constant captured the religious motivation behind fetish worship in terms of a "commercial exchange that man establishes...with his god." The fetishist "looks to see if this god has adequately acquitted itself of the engagements he supposedly contracted. And if the balance does not square, the worshipper abandons or punishes the deity, strikes it or breaks it, consigns it to the flames or the deep." Constant's condemnation of fetishism stemmed from his belief that fetishism "reduced" religion to "commerce" and "profitability." Counterposing "disinterested...sentiment" on one side, and egoistic "interest" on the other, Constant went on to argue that religious adherents move "from one fetish to another, always seeking a more faithful ally, a more powerful protector, a more zealous accomplice.... The fetish is a greedy, egotistical being allied to a human being as egotistical as it is, although weaker. The sacrifices it rewards only refer to it. The duties it imposes consist in victims, in offerings, and in expressions of submission- agreed-upon currency that will be required in the future. It is payment demanded by the fetish for the protection it accords."18 These interconnections between commerce, religion, and sexuality were also present in Böttiger's historical documentary of religions-another theoretical source of Marx under the influence of de Brosses. One chopped sentence transcribed by Marx mentions the "Gaditanic girls" who worked as female prostitutes in Spain at the time of the Roman kingdom. When excerpting this designation from Böttiger, Marx must have thought of a previous excerpt where Böttiger made a remark on Alexander the Great's directive to reconstruct the Belus Temple in Babylon, a well-known location Y O U N G M A R x O N F E T I S H I S M 51 for sacred prostitution. Marx also took into account Böttiger's list of examples of sacred prostitution from other geographies. For instance, Marx excerpted Böttiger's depiction of hieróduloi, temple slaves who served a "great Asiatic goddess of nature" in the Pontus region near the Black Sea and in Cappadocia of middle Anatolia. In Marx's excerpts, he writes that the hieróduloi were involved in "quaestus meretricious [prostitution] and consecrated whore trade." Marx's excerpts from Barbeyrac do not gravitate towards fetishism and the phallus cult, but revolve around the sexual morality of the early church fathers, which starkly contrasts with what later Christians considered sinful seductions of idolatrous pagans. For example, Marx concentrated on monotheistic ideas of virtue, which discourage believers "from satisfying...the desires of the flesh" and warn against "unlawful marriage." Excerpting a quote from Pseudo-Justin's De Resurrectione, Marx singled out the early Christian interpretation of immaculate conception: that a person can come into being "without human intercourse," and that God "overruled the procreation associated with unlawful lust." Contrary to pagan idolatries that occasionally elevated sexual rites as part of their worship practices, early Christians distinguished themselves by keeping their morals away from both procreative and desire-driven sexuality. Regarding this comparison, Marx reproduced a quote from Ambrosius's Exhortatio virginitatis, as quoted by Barbeyrac: "When a young girl loses her prime through the consummation of marriage, she loses what is hers when strangers unite with her. The truth, then, is what we are born as, not what we are transformed into...remaining in virginity and in celibacy brings one closer to God."19 To this end, Marx transcribed Origen of Alexandria's interpretation of the ascetic's own castration "for the sake of the kingdom of heaven." In addition, Marx quoted from Clement of Alexandria's Stromata, which pointedly expressed what the early Christians considered to be the sexual and moral degeneracy of polytheistic communities: As "idolatry is the division of God from the one into the many, so fornication is the apostasy from one marriage to many."20 As previously mentioned, the Bonn Notebooks do not say much about Marx's own conceptualization of fetishism, but they give an idea as to what Marx found relevant across religious and anthropological contexts. In his writings, young Marx almost invariably employed the term fetishism negatively, emphasizing the subordination-either deliberate or involuntary-of the fetishist to the overwhelming power ascribed to the worship object. For young Marx, fetish signified the blockage of supersensible human faculties by the dazzling glitter of objects of sensuous desire. By 52 M O N T H L Y R E V I E W / O c T O B E R 2 0 2 2 projecting supernatural qualities into natural entities or inanimate artifacts, the fetishist attempts to establish a relationship of exchange with superior powers, whom he holds accountable for sustaining an economy of gifts and sacrifices. This economic aspect of fetish worship is significant insofar as it indicates that, when introducing the concept of fetishism into political economy for the first time in his 1844 Manuscripts, Marx did not solely transfer the term from a religious to a non-religious field. Rather, this points to a homology: while Marx's sources singled out an economy of exchange in fetish practices, he traced a fetishistic, quasi-religious pattern in the political economy of money and private property.21 It is telling that in his Comments on James Mill, Marx drew on the similarity between money as a medium of exchange and Christ as the mediator between humanity and God. A monetary medium attains power through an exchange relationship, just as Christ attains power over believers and their God. In his comments, Marx writes that this "mediator must become a veritable God, since the mediator is the real power over that with which he mediates me. His cult becomes an end in itself. Separated from this mediator, objects lose their worth. Thus they have value only in so far as they represent him, whereas it appeared at first that he had value only to the extent to which he represented them."22 Interestingly, Marx returned to the force of the monetary medium in his 1844 Manuscripts, reframing its potency through sexual tropes. If money can be used to buy everything and appropriate all objects, it can become seen as "the object most worth possessing." As Marx wrote: "Money is the pimp between need and object, between life and man's means of life."23 He then elaborated on the reciprocal relationship between money and its owner: That which exists for me through the medium of money, that which I can pay for, i.e. which money can buy, that am I, the possessor of the money. The stronger the power of my money, the stronger am I.... I am ugly, but I can buy the most beautiful woman. Which means to say that I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness, its repelling power, is destroyed by money.... [Money] is the visible divinity.... It is the universal whore, the universal pimp of men and peoples.24 Recall that, in these manuscripts, Marx defined fetish as a material reification of magical qualities into the natural properties of corporeal objects. He came across this sort of phenomenon earlier in his readings, as recorded in the Bonn Notebooks. He carefully considered Catholic worship of saintly relics, condemned by Protestants either as fetishism or idolatry; the cult of Indian lingam, Roman Priapus, and the Greek phallus worship, categorized by Meiners, Böttiger, and Constant as fetishism, and by early Christians either as paganism or idolatry. Y O U N G M A R x O N F E T I S H I S M 53 Significantly, the interconnections between fetishism, sexuality, and religion resurface, if only in passing, in a footnote to Capital, volume 1. The reference does not appear in the famed section of the first chapter titled "Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret," where he speaks of the "fantastic form of a relation between things"-a relation that appears both in the world of commodities and the "misty realm of religion," but in the subsection "Hoarding," found in chapter 3 ("Money, or the Circulation of Commodities").25 There, Marx reproduces a short passage from a 1503 letter from Christopher Columbus, in which the latter refers to gold as "a wonderful thing! Its owner is master of all he desires. Gold can even enable souls to enter Paradise." The parallel between Columbus's fascination with this dazzling precious metal and young Marx's account of the mercantilist fetishization of private property, gold, and money is obvious. Mirroring his earlier views on money as a universal medium, Marx again discusses the convertibility of everything into money: "Everything becomes saleable and purchasable." He goes on to examine the Catholic fetishization of sacred relics. He observes that these objects lose their power once they become subject to monetary exchange: "Nothing is immune from this alchemy, the bones of the saints cannot withstand it, let alone more delicate res sacrosanctae, extra commercium hominum [consecrated objects, beyond human commerce]." In a subsequent footnote, Marx reminds the reader that throughout European history, thieves had robbed monasteries in order to sell their relics, turning religious objects into money. Echoing the Bonn Notebooks, he moves on to the subject of the ancient temples, particularly in Greece, which "served as the dwellings of the gods of commodities. They were 'sacred banks.' With the Phoenicians, a trading people par excellence, money was the transmuted shape of everything. It was, therefore, quite in order that the virgins who at the feast of the goddess of love gave themselves to strangers should offer to the goddess the piece of money they received in payment." The subsequent footnote is reserved for a quote from Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, beginning "Gold! yellow, glittering, precious gold!" Once again recalling his 1844 Manuscripts, a first-chapter section on fetishism explores the nature of the "fetish character" and the "illusions of the Monetary System"; that is, the misconception of gold and silver not "as a social relation of production, but in the form of natural objects with peculiar social properties." That this fetishism receives the epithet of "magic of money" in the second chapter brings to mind Marx's notes on de Brosses regarding the etymological origins of the words fairy, enchanted, and divine thing.26 54 M O N T H L Y R E V I E W / O c T O B E R 2 0 2 2 Young Marx's notes on magic, drawn from excerpts from Böttiger, reveal a nuanced distinction between the magic of money and the magic of religious fetish objects. Fetish and magic, unlike money, do not figure in Böttiger's account as an impersonal universal medium. In fierce religious wars, for instance, one could see that in the "war campaigns of the Persian monarchs, Persian fire worship and magism fought with fire and swords the opposing fetish worship and idolatry," as in the cases of Xerxes in the fifth century BCE (against "the idol in the Belus Temple in Babylon" and "images of gods" in Greek temples) or the Persian kings in the sixth century BCE ("Cambyses against the Egyptian paganism").27 The social and political status of magic and fetishism/idolatry was relative and interchangeable in this context, depending on their native or foreign origins. For example, the "Greek was just as annoyed by the barbaric sounds of the magic formula" of the enemy as by "the deformities of the deities who ruled in that magical realm.... For the Greeks and Romans, this demonic magic game has always been a crime against their fatherland religion or at least an object of contempt." The Romans were hostile to "astrologers and magicians," going so far as to forcefully expel and exile them. The magical powers of foreign fetish/idolatrous objects were not denied by native populations, but they were perceived as a threat to the domestic monopoly on religious beliefs. In Capital, the same language of magic stands out in Marx's characterization of "fetishes endowed with a will and a soul of their own," "dazzling to our eyes." One remarkable difference between Marx's early and late conceptions of fetishism is that, while in the earlier period he approached the phenomenon of fetish from the perspective of an external observer, his later writings are those of an internal observer as the fetishization of money emerges within the contemporary mode of capitalist production. In his later works, Marx was concerned not with fetishism as such but with "fetishism peculiar to the capitalist mode of production" as it "arises from the peculiar social character of the labor."28 This brings us to the Latin, rather than the Portuguese, etymological origin of fetish: factitius, that is, human-made, manufactured, fabricated, the product of a human hand.29 This definition does not appear in Marx's excerpts from de Brosses, but Marx, in both is early and later works, was clearly familiar with it. In the aforementioned 1842 mockery of the Rhine Assembly, Marx drew on the amnesia of fetish worshipers who create gods for themselves, but as soon as they are created, the devotees forget that "these gods are [their] own handiwork." Similarly, in the 1844 Manuscripts, he distinguishes the mercantile reduction of property and wealth to the natural properties of material substances (precious metals) Y O U N G M A R x O N F E T I S H I S M 55 from the later viewpoint of "enlightened political economy." This was, for Marx, similar to both the Catholic condemnation of polytheistic religions and the Protestant condemnation of Catholic relic worship. Following this line of reasoning, he found it appropriate "to call Adam Smith the Luther of political economy." The same analogy reappears in Capital, in which Marx weaves together the treatment of "pre-bourgeois forms of the social organization of production...by [later] political economy" and the treatment of pre-Christian religions by "the Fathers of the Church."30 In the case of the early church fathers, Marx's excerpts in the Bonn Notebooks-the Barbeyrac excerpts in particular-reveal that Marx's repeated references to diachronic downplaying of an earlier period in history, from a later point of view, was partially informed by religious sexuality. While Marx does not explicitly articulate every single aspect of fetishism in his later theorizing, re-reading the sections on fetishism in light of the Bonn Notebooks gives a different valence on, and provides new insights into, the theoretical-historical background of his conception of fetishism. Notes 1. Karl Marx, "Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly: First Article. Debates on Freedom of the Press and Publication of the Proceedings of the Assembly of the Estates," in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 1, (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 147. 2. Karl Marx, "The Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung," in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 1, 189. 3. Robert Nichols, "Crisis and Kleptocracy," in Daniel Bensaïd, The Dispossessed: Karl Marx's Debates on Wood Theft and the Right of the Poor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021), xiii–xiv. 4. Karl Marx, "Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly: Third Article Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood," in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 1, 262–63. The first two sentences are taken from Charles de Brosses's book on fetishism, to which I will turn in a moment. 5. Karl Marx, "A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction," in Karl Marx, Early Writings (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 253. 6. Karl Marx, "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts," in Marx, Early Writings, 341–42, 344. 7. Marx, "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts," 364. For a recent analysis of Marx's usage of the Shakespearean term glitter (Glanz), see Christian A. Smith, Shakespeare's Influence on Karl Marx: The Shakespearean Roots of Marxism (New York: Routledge, 2022), 39, 160–65. 8. See, by way of comparison, Mikhail Lifshitz, The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx (London: Pluto Press, 1976), 35–39, 58; Margaret A. Rose, Marx's Lost Aesthetic: Karl Marx and the Visual Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 61–69; Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The History and Theory of Fetishism (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2016), 103–13; Hartmut Böhme, Fetishism and Culture: A Different Theory of Modernity (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 244–48; William Pietz, "The Problem of the Fetish, I," RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9 (1985): 5–17; William Pietz, "Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx," in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 119–51; Roland Boer, Criticism of Earth: On Marx, Engels and Theology (Leiden: Brill: 2012), 177–84; Rosalind C. Morris, "After de Brosses: Fetishism, Translation, Comparativism, Critique," in The Returns of Fetishism: Charles de Brosses and the Afterlives of an Idea, ed. Rosalind C. Morris and Daniel H. Leonard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 191–204. 9. Bruno Bauer, "Bruno Bauer an Arnold Ruge. 6. Dezember 1841," in Der Redaktionsbriefwechsel der Hallischen, Deutschen und Deutsch-Französischen Jahrbücher (1837–1844). Band 2: Der Briefwechsel um die deutschen Jahrbücher um die deutsch-französischen Jahrbrücher (Juli 1841–Januar 1843), ed. Martin Hundt, (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 890; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 1, 382–89. 10. Karl Marx, "Exzerpte zur Geschichte der Kunst und der Religion (Bonner Hefte)," in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2) (Berlin: Dietz, 1976), 293–376. 11. Charles de Brosses, "On the Worship of Fetish Gods; Or, A Parallel of the Ancient Religion of Egypt with the Present Religion of Nigritia," in The Returns of Fetishism, 48; Marx, "Bonner Hefte," 320. 12. De Brosses, "On the Worship of Fetish Gods," 48–49; Marx, "Bonner Hefte," 321. 13. De Brosses, "On the Worship of Fetish Gods," 70; Marx, "Bonner Hefte," 323–24. 14. William Pietz writes in a footnote that "for late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century historians of ancient religion including Robert Payne Knight, J. 56 M O N T H L Y R E V I E W / O c T O B E R 2 0 2 2 A. Dulaure and Meiners, phallicism and fetishism were distinct phenomena." In Meiners's case, Pietz is mistaken, as Meiners categorizes priapism as a form of fetishism. See, by way of comparison, William Pietz, "Fetishism and Materialism," 134, fn. 44; Christoph Meiners, Allgemeine kritische Geschichte der Religionen. Erster Band (Hannover: Helwingische Hof-Buchhandlung, 1806), 251–52. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own; Marx, "Bonner Hefte," 336. 15. Marx, "Bonner Hefte," 335–36. 16. Benjamin Constant, On Religion: Considered in Its Source, Its Forms, and Its Developments, trans. Peter Paul Seaton Jr. (Carmel, IN: Liberty Fund, 2017), 216; Marx, "Bonner Hefte," 352. 17. Constant, On Religion, 50, 375; Marx, "Bonner Hefte," 355. 18. Constant, On Religion, 126–27; Marx, "Bonner Hefte," 347–48. 19. Marx, "Bonner Hefte," 330, 334, 369–70, 854–55. 20. Marx, "Bonner Hefte," 374, 861. 21. Here, I am drawing on the conception of homology as depicted in Devin Singh, Divine Currency: The Theological Power of Money in the West (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), 17-22; David Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580–1680 (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 17, 52. 22. Marx, "Comments on James Mill," in Early Writings, 260–61. 23. Marx, "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts," 375. 24. Marx, "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts," 377. 25. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1990), 165. 26. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 176, 187, 229, 320, 330; de Brosses, "On the Worship of Fetish Gods," 48. 27. Marx, "Bonner Hefte," 330. 28. Marx, "Bonner Hefte," 330–31; Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 165, 187, 1003– 46; Iacono, The History and Theory of Fetishism, 74. 29. For the etymological origins of fetish and fetishism, see William Pietz, The Origin of Fetishism: A Contribution to the History of Theory, PhD diss. (Santa Barbara, CA: University of California, 1988), 49–135. 30. Marx, "Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly," 147; Marx, "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts," 342; Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 175. MONTHLY REVIEW FOUNDATION is pleased to announce an award that will support the publication in English of a series of Monthly Review Press monographs concerned with the political economy of imperialism. Winning authors of unpublished manuscripts in English or any other language will receive $5,000. Where the award is granted to books already published in languages other than English, the $5,000 will be applied toward translation costs. For more information, please visit https://monthlyreview.org/baran-sweezy-memorial-award Y O U N G M A R x O N F E T I S H I S M