Reading, Watching 11.17.24
Hegel and the Mob
Good morning! This is a regular feature for paid subscribers wherein I write a little bit about what I’ve been reading and/or watching. Hope you enjoy!
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I also wrote a book, When The Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, that came out earlier this year about the rise of right-wing populism in America. You might find it orienting in these strange times.
In case you missed it, I have a postmortem essay out in The Nation. I received an astute reader comment that I think brings up a good point. My piece focused on “proletarianization,” alienation, loneliness, and the production of atomized masses, but this commenter pointed out that many Trump voters are quite bourgeois in their beliefs: having a productive form of employment is seen as a virtue and the resent those who are “getting a handout.” They still have middle-class aspirations and values. “I forget who said it, but there's a quote that reactionaries have a culture that mixes rectitude and seediness. The trick is figuring out where the rectitude ends and the seediness begins,” they write. I think one way to approach it is that America is fundamentally a “middle-class nation,” divided between two ideas of the middle class, one based on production and personal ownership, and the other based on fostering social trust and collaboration. They have two different models of how civil society ought to work: work hard and get what’s yours, vs. be normal, be nice, be a virtuous citizen with a mind towards universal improvement. It’s not quite a perfect analogy, but it maps somewhat onto the old division of bourgeois and citoyen.
Speaking of, I was going back through my old notes on theories of the mob and found some passages from Shlomo Avineri’s Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State. Here’s a quote from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that talks about the split of the modern subject:
The same [individual] takes care of himself and his family, works, signs contracts, etc., and at the same time he also works for the universal and has it as an end. From the first viewpoint he is called bourgeois, from the second citoyen.