MLK Jr. and Hegel; Tooze Agonistes; America's ‘Homeland Empire’
Reading, Watching 01.18.26
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When the Clock Broke is now available in paperback and can be found wherever books are sold. If you live in the UK, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.
In case you missed it, I had a great conversation with Max Read and Vinson Cunningham this week.
This Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend feels particularly poignant as Americans are putting their bodies on the line to protect their neighbors and stand up to state repression. The practical lessons of King’s life are probably more relevant in the moment, but it’s important to remember he was also a political and social theorist. I’ve long been fascinated by the influence of G.W.F. Hegel on King. As John J. Ansbro wrote originally for the journal of the Hegel Society of America, The Owl of Minerva:
While concluding my research for Martin Luther King: The Making of a Mind (New York: Maryknoll, 1982), I learned that King had stated in a January 19, 1956 interview with The Montgomery Advertiser that Hegel was his favorite philosopher…
At the Boston University School of Theology, King enrolled in a Hegel seminar with Edgar Brightman. King’s notes indicate that Brightman stressed that Hegel’s early theological writings viewed love as the central religious idea. When Brightman became ill in the first month, Peter Bertocci taught the seminar. In my first interview with Bertocci in 1973, he recalled how King “almost took over the class” in his enthusiasm for Hegel’s insight that the master is dependent on the slave for his consciousness of himself as master. As King traced his “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” in Stride Toward Freedom (New York: Harper, 1958), he referred (p. 100) to his study of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Philosophy of History, and Philosophy of Right.
In a 1956 address to the First Annual Institute on Nonviolence and Social Change, King reassured his followers that racial tensions did not represent retrogression and meaninglessness:
Long ago, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus argued that justice emerges from the strife of opposites, and Hegel, in modem philosophy, preached a doctrine of growth through struggle. It is both historically and biologically true that there can be no birth and growth without birth and growing pains. Whenever there is the emergence of the new, we confront the recalcitrance of the old. So the tensions which we witness in the world today are indicative of the fad that a new world order is being born and an old order is passing away.
…
Within the first paragraph of Strength to Love (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), King affirmed that Hegel held truth to be found neither in the thesis nor in the antithesis but in the emergent synthesis which reconciles the two. King used this doctrine to explain some of the basic aims of nonviolent resistance, “Like the synthesis in Hegelian philosophy, the principle of nonviolent resistance seeks to reconcile the truths of two opposites—acquiescence and violence—while avoiding the extremes and immoralities of both” (Stride Toward Freedom, p. 213). King recognized that the partial truth in each of these two positions can be included in an effective synthesis to achieve more social justice, while each of the positions, if considered in isolation from the other, must be rejected as extreme and immoral. He explained that the nonviolent resister can agree with the person who submits to social evils that one should not inflict physical harm on the opponent but can also agree with the person who endorses violence that social evils must be resisted. By appealing to the limited truths in both positions, the nonviolent resister is able to avoid the extremes and pitfalls of nonresistance and violent resistance.
Although many scholars have noted King’s interest and references to Hegel, so far as I know, no one has attempted a deep analysis of Hegel’s presence in King’s thought and practice. Ansbro passes very quickly over what I think is the key thing: King’s “enthusiasm” for the master and slave, also translated “lord and bondsman,” section of the Phenomenology of Spirit. The “master” initially risks their life, showing that they are not merely defined by their animal being. They demonstrate themselves as having “higher values” than life alone, but the form of recognition that the master extracts through violence and domination is ultimately empty and unstable: It’s coerced, not freely given by another self-conscious being. The dominated bondsman achieves a higher level of self-consciousness than the warlike but ultimately lazy master through labor: transforming the world through his activity. The master only knows himself as the dominator of others; the “slave” knows himself as the laboring being, he’s the true author of the world. Non-violent resistance is not just the synthesis between “acquiescence and violence, as Ansbro puts it, but it’s the “risk of life,” the demonstration that there is a cause willing to risk everything for, without domination of the other as its goal. The idea is that dignity and self-respect are possible and not at the expense of others. I think the mistake that the Stephen Millers of the world make is that they ignore the basic anthropological principle here that was evident to King and Hegel: human beings are willing to risk a lot—everything in fact—in order not to feel humiliated and dominated. If you look at the existential core of all of their propaganda, it’s always to fold self-sacrifice back into selfishness: if someone cares for a value beyond themselves, they call that pathological in some way. They only understand violence, that is to say, the risk of life with the promise of domination as its reward.
There’s a profile of historian Adam Tooze in The Guardian that’s garnering a lot of commentary online. In particular, his method of historical interpretation and his harsh judgments on the failures of his fellow liberals in the present moment is generating much chatter. I’ve said this many times, but I do admire Tooze as a historian: I’ve read Crashed, The Wages of Destruction, and The Deluge, and they’ve deepened my understanding of the world a great deal. But I’ve been a little dismayed at his haughty dismissal of the fascism thesis as beneath serious consideration. I think this is for two understandable reasons, one good, and the other, maybe not so good. The first is that the period of his greatest interest in expertise, which forms the crucible of the rise of fascism, Europe from 1914 to 1945, was so incredibly tumultuous and violent that the comparison to the present can only seem like a stretch. Fair enough. But the second reason I think is that Tooze, like many others, associates the fascism analogy with a kind of “sentimental” liberalism that’s failing in its defense of a collapsing consensus:
Tooze is still reluctant to use the word “fascist” to describe Trump’s government, even as he recognises “the possibility of a kind of escalation here towards something truly catastrophic”. Tooze told me that his increasingly lonely resistance to that term has much to do with not wanting to shoehorn the present into the past. When I pressed him on the question, though, he also admitted a frustration with the kind of people who invoke the analogy, and the reasons they invoke it. He allowed that “fascist” might be a useful way to emphasise the radical character of Trump’s rule but said he still didn’t like the way the analogy encouraged the kind of smug moral satisfaction that he came to despise in the Biden administration. He noted that he keeps several models of Soviet T-34 tanks in his office at Columbia to remind himself, and his visitors, that it was not high-minded western ideals like democracy and freedom that defeated the Nazis in the second world war. “If you’re willing to admit that it was the Red Army that beat fascism,” Tooze said, somewhat grudgingly, “then you can have your fascism analogy.”
This seems a bit like a non-sequitur to me. I’m fully willing to grant that the Red Army beat fascism, but, as Tooze knows well, I will point out that they beat it with American steel and trucks. Stalin and Khrushchev both admitted this. Stalin in Tehran: “The most important things in this war are the machines.... The United States is a country of machines. Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war." Khruschev in his memoirs: "If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war. One-on-one against Hitler's Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and would have lost the war. No one talks about this officially, and Stalin never, I think, left any written traces of his opinion, but I can say that he expressed this view several times in conversations with me."
I’m going to be a bit more pointed in my criticisms here. First, this fixation about tanks and Tooze’s Stalinoid remark—”Because comrades, if we were in the 30s, I would have taken you out and shot you”—I think situates Tooze in the Robinsonian tradition, if you will. Like Tooze, Joan Robinson was a Keynesian rather than a Marxist, but she had a certain admiration for the “hard regimes” of China and North Korea and was impatient with Western liberal bromides. She, too, was a left-liberal, but as an economist, proved herself “tougher” than the sentimental democratic socialism of the Western Marxists.
My second pointed criticism about Tooze refers to what one might call his hyper-empiricism. This allows him to deflect any analogy because he knows so much more about the actual details of the given case. He always has an additional fact at his fingertips to falsify the comparison. This is an intellectual virtue turned into a vice. Although Tooze is called in the piece “the Crisis Whisperer,” it’s fair to ask to what extent his concepts have grasped the crisis. As I’ve written before, “polycrisis” seems like an avoidance of conceptualization altogether. Tooze, unlike the unlettered epigones of his position, admits the possible “usefulness” of the analogy. I will go one further: it’s actually predictive. Fascism doubters said Jan 6 was unlikely, then said it was unimportant, then said this regime was weak and would not press its most authoritarian designs, and could not imagine something like Minnesota. But for all its supposed fatuousness and self-dramatization, the holders of the fascism thesis have not been surprised by any of this: this is, more or less, what they expected. That’s why I think the fascism analogy is a progressive research program: the new facts it predicts are being born out in reality. And now I’m going to lay down the gauntlet a bit hard: how does Tooze’s analysis, for all its sophistication, match up to even the crudest versions of the fascism thesis?
