REVOLUTION WITHIN THE FORM

FROM PERICLEAN ATHENS TO THE NEW DEAL (TO TODAY)

In my last post (and indeed in my book, The Managerial Class on Trial) I have reviewed how the concept of “democracy” was resurrected and retooled for the ventriloquist purposes of the managerial class in their takeover of power as the ruling class in the early part of the 20th century. Recently, though, I’ve been rereading my doctoral thesis – which, until quite recently, I hadn’t thought about literally for decades (I’ll probably write a post here about it at some point) – and was reminded that that wasn’t the first time the concept of democracy had been strategically redefined. I’ll illustrate this with some quotations from the prefatory remarks of my thesis.¹

The militant democrats of Periclean Athens claimed their historical legacy to derive from Cleisthenes and the reforms he implemented. Despite the fact that Cleisthenes himself could hardly be considered a militant democrat, this view provided a conceptual substance to this newly embraced positive self-description. It was Cleisthenes' reforms – breaking the tribal bonds that had upheld oligarchical hegemony, elimination of all birth and wealth barriers to citizen participation in politics, and the introduction of, almost universal, use of sortition – that served as the demographic and institutional foundations of Periclean democracy. It was the radical nature and militant defense of these aspects of Periclean democracy that distinguished it from all other forms of Greek government – including some who later, diplomatically, called themselves democracies.

If the militant democrats of Periclean Athens saw these historically unique political aspects as the distinguishing characteristics of their polity – for which they were the first to adopt as a substantive-positive appellation the word democracy – then it would Indeed support the notion that this historically specific, narrowly defined, conception has a special claim to the word. This is the conclusion arrived at by Larsen: "for the student of the Greek state this means that, while he may think what he will of Periclean democracy, he should recognize its special claim to the name. He should also recognize that of the many varieties of democracy mentioned by Aristotle [in Politics], only the more extreme – call it debased or perverted, if you will – has a special right to the name. The others, in fact, are perversions which claim a name which really does not belong to them."

Larsen attributes this confusion in the historical scholarship to an insufficiently critical evaluation of the ancient sources. It is well established that throughout the period considered by such scholars as the golden age of Greek democracy there persisted a sizeable, militant, destructive and salient – although, in some ways, highly clandestine - hard-core of oligarchist opposition that attempted over the years, by a variety of means, to sabotage the democracy. What is less well acknowledged is that, following the failure of two attempted oligarchical coup d'etats in seven years (BC 411 and 404), the subsequent appearance of the opposition's dissipation actually reflected a change in strategy. Taking their cue from the democrats' lionizing of Cleisthenes, whose credentials as a democrat were wanting – despite his reforms and their apparent intent – the opposition began to work from within the democracy.

In a phrase Larsen used in a later essay, as "crypto-oligarchs" the opposition undertook the strategy of embracing democracy in rhetoric and, behind the veil of allegiance, seeking to undermine it by extending the parameters of its heritage in such a fashion as to dilute the more radical and militant aspects of its conception. From Larsen's perspective then, those historians of antiquity who have accepted at face value the statements of, later-period, self-acclaimed democrats deriving their heritage from the legacy of Solon's reforms, or Aristotle's taxonomy of democracies in Politics, have only been deluded by the historic strategy of the oligarchical opposition to the authentic democracy.

This strategy of retooling the concept of democracy, used by the managerial class to surreptitiously consolidate its position as the new, emergent ruling class, then we see is a strategy with some considerable pedigree. The language, the explicit political commitments, remain sturdy, while through a cryptic subversion the actual political reality is deviously transformed. I’ve recently stumbled across an insightful essay by someone who personally lived through this transformation of political power exercised by the managerial class in the 1930s. In his 1938 assessment of how all this was taking place, under the auspices of the New Deal, Garet Garret brilliantly characterizes the strategy: a revolution within the form.²

In the same way as Larsen’s crypto-oligarchs – rather than openly challenge Periclean democracy (which hadn’t proved very successful for them) – maneuvered instead to corrupt it from within, similarly Garrett sees the same strategy employed by the managerial class in its consolidation of government power in the U.S. in the 1930s. To openly attack the Constitution, capitalism, free markets and individualism would have been a losing strategy, he observes: these ideals remained popular with Americans. Instead, the concepts were subtly reworked, reworded, in a way that they could appear unchanged, even while the new understandings legitimized the managerial class’s consolidation of government control.

Some passages from Garrett’s essay will provide flavour and insight for what he’s getting at here:

[In the U.S., the scientific revolution]…was peacefully accomplished…by the marvelous technique of bringing it to pass not only within the form but within the word, so that people were all the while fixed in the delusion that they were talking about the same things because they were using the same words. Opposite and violently hostile ideas were represented by the same word signs.

[Quoting Julius C. Smith, of the American Bar Association] this country is drifting at an accelerated pace into administrative absolutism similar to that which prevailed in the governments of antiquity, the governments of the Middle Ages, and in the great totalitarian governments of today? Make no mistake about it. Even as Mussolini and Hitler rose to absolute power under the forms of law … so may administrative absolutism be fastened upon this country within the Constitution and within the forms of law.

if the [revolutionary] propagandist said, "Down with the Constitution!"—bluntly like that—he would be defeated because of the way the Constitution is enshrined in the American conscience. But he can ask: "Whose Constitution?" That question may become a slogan…He can ask: "shall the Constitution be construed to hold property rights above human rights?" Or, as the president did, he may regretfully associate the Constitution with "horse-and-buggy days."

The unique American tradition of individualism was systematically attacked by propaganda in three ways, as follows: Firstly, by attack that was direct, save only for the fact that the word individualism was qualified by the uncouth adjective rugged; and rugged individualism was made the symbol of such hateful human qualities as greed, utter selfishness, and ruthless disregard of the sufferings and hardships of one's neighbors…

The revolutionary mind that did at length evolve was one of really superior intelligence, clothed with academic dignity, always sure of itself, supercilious and at ease in all circumstances. To entertain it became fashionable. You might encounter it anywhere, and nowhere more amusingly than at a banker's dinner table, discussing the banker's trade in a manner sometimes very embarrassing to the banker. Which of these brilliant young men in spectacles was of the cult and which was of the cabal—if there was a cabal—one never knew. Indeed, it was possible that they were not sure of it among themselves, a time having come when some were only playing with the thought of extremes while others were in deadly earnest, all making the same sounds.

This revolutionary elite was nothing you could define as a party. It had no name, no habitat, no rigid line. …What it represented was a quantity of bitter intellectual radicalism infiltrated from the top downward as a doctorhood of professors, writers, critics, analysts, advisers, administrators, directors of research, and so on—a prepared revolutionary intelligence in spectacles.

So it was that a revolution took place within the form. Like the hagfish, the New Deal entered the old form and devoured its meaning from within. The revolutionaries were inside; the defenders were outside.

Garrett didn’t have access to the analytical concept of a managerial class, but he clearly recognized it at work in what he describes as this revolution within the form. The concept’s relevance for us doesn’t end there though. This concept of “the revolution within the form” should be appreciated as an important one for understanding the political dynamics explored in this substack, including the danger of pathocracy (see here). When I’ve spoken of the homology in the modus operandi of the managerial class and the political psychopath (for example, here and here); when I’ve spoken of the pathocratic function of the psychorium (for example, here and here): all this needs to be understood in relation to the revolution within the form. It’s the ventriloquist nature of the managerial class, with their verbal dexterity, that makes them so accomplished at exercising the revolution within the form. Likewise, though, the successful political psychopath too masters this ability to verbally manipulate others. This political genius of the managerial class is like a comfortable old sweater that the political psychopath happily and easily slips into.

And while the creation of the psychorium is essential for the aspiring pathocrat, contributing to the deterioration of social cohesion and social norms, generating a sense of social disorientation that allows the political psychopath to function and even thrive, this isn’t necessarily true of the managerial class. It is only gaslighting everyone else as a means of manipulating them toward its ends, facilitating its maneuvers for power and control. The revolution within the form, for the managerial class, is only a strategy for surreptitiously gaining power. In the process, though, by gradually and cryptically erasing common social understandings, by eroding the social moorings of traditional political wisdom and institutions, members of the managerial class too contribute to the psychorium. And in the process, unbeknownst to them, they lay the ground for the unleashing of pathocracy: an outcome that for many of them would be as disastrous and horrific as it would be for the rest of us.

The potential perils of this managerial class strategy, of a revolution within the form, cannot be overstated. Acknowledging the antiquity of the strategy should remind us of how prone we humans are to its deceits; such acknowledgement though must not blunt our awareness of its ominous contemporary dangers, if captured by pathocracy.

 

1. I’ve removed the original citations, but the sources cited in these passages, for those who are interested, are as follows: JAO Larsen, “Cleisthenes and the Development of the Theory of Democracy at Athens,” in Essays in Political Theory: Presented to George H. Sabine., ed. Milton R. Konvitz and Arthur E. Murphy, 1st Edition (Ithaca New York: Cornell University Press, 1948); JAO Larsen, “The Judgment of Antiquity on Democracy,” Classical Philology 49, no. 1 (1954): 1–14, https://doi.org/10.1086/363716; M. I. Finley, Democracy Ancient and Modern, New edition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press Classics, 2018 [org. 1973]).

2. Garet Garrett, The Revolution Was, 1st edition (Caxton Printers, Ltd., 1944). As a parent myself, notorious for some slightly edgy name choices for my children, I tip my cap to Garrett’s parents.