|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
A Qualified Defense
| Article
# : |
12925 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1987 |
1,238 Words |
| Author
: |
Paul Gottfried
Paul Gottfried is a senior editor of the Modern Thought
section of The World & I and author of The Search for
Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right. |
Benoist's critique of imperialism has two parts: one of them intellectually sound and timely, and the other flawed and trite. The stronger part of his critique concerns the leftist sources of European imperialism. Benoist reveals the already half-forgotten record of liberal democratic and socialist support for Western colonial expansion, from the last quarter of the nineteenth into the third decade of the twentieth century. Without the political support and intellectual assumptions of self-styled progressives, Benoist maintains, Western imperialism would have been a far less thriving enterprise. It was those who hoped to achieve universal social and material advancement, from the bourgeois democrats of the French Third Republic to the English Fabian socialists and the mature Karl Marx, who had perhaps the least difficulty seeing the positive side of imperialism.
Benoist piles text upon text to demonstrate the leftist sources of imperialist thinking. He does not claim that there were no grizzled aristocratic officers or other social reactionaries among the advocates of imperialism. Rather he criticizes the theory of Joseph Schumpeter - who challenged Lenin's association of imperialism with advanced capitalism. Schumpeter tried to refute the Marxist-Lenist account of imperialism by introducing an explanation that turned out to be equally dubious. He blamed imperialism (which he assumed was wicked) not on capitalists (whom he defended as soft-hearted democrats), but on a resurgent military aristocracy. Using nationalism to take back power from an overly rationalistic and pacifistic middle class, the military, the church, and feudal monarchy, according to Schumpeter, were the true driving forces behind imperialist expansion.
The Schumpeter thesis, though presented by a defender of capitalism, fits in with modern Marxist interpretations of imperialism. Much of the recent research on the social history of Germany during the Second Empire (1871-1918) stresses the fateful link between the military-aristocratic elite and big business. It is argued, correctly, that members of the old ruling order and the rising Grosskapitalisten were both represented in the German naval league and in various groups that advocated colonial expansion for the German Empire. The discovery that such groups also enjoyed the backing of much of the German working class and even of declared Marxists should have discredited the attempt to link German, or any European, imperialism to any one particular social class. Instead, Fritz Fischer, Fritz Stern, and other prominent historians of Germany point to the popular base of German imperialism in order to show a peculiarly German susceptibility to racist and expansionist
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
