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In their essay on Herder,1 Adamson, Carlbom, and Ouis set out to defend him against some of his culturalist descendants in right-wing national-ism as well as in current multiculturalism. We tend to agree with them that it is these actual, political interpretations of Herder that constitute the problem, rather than Herder himself, who sought to counterbalance his emphasis on the specificity of nations with Enlightenment cosmo-politanism. The authors also share with us the contention that nationalism and multiculturalism are siblings in intellectual history, sharing basic culturalist ideas that human individuals are culturally determined through and through and are therefore primarily defined by their cultural mem-bership. This idea hypostatizes one feature in Herder that is erroneously viewed as the deepest ontological foundation of human beings, and, what is worse, this interpretation draws fateful political consequences from that ontology, which undermines central modern standards such as the autonomy of individuals, universal human rights, rationality, and, in the widest consequence, democracy as such. To hard culturalists, such ideas are but overblown conceptions of one culture and have no claim for uni-versality. From an Enlightenment point of view, however, it is patently false to say that modernity is merely the parochial product of one single culture. On the contrary, modernity provides the framework that to this day offers the widest known possibility of cultural coexistence. This, of course, comes with a price: the weeding out from your own culture of

1. Gran Adamson, Aje Carlbom, and Pernilla Ouis, Johann Herder, Early Nine-teenth-Century Counter-Enlightenment, and the Common Roots of Multiculturalism and Right-Wing Populism, appearing on pp. 2838 in this issue of Telos.

Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt

Left Behind

Telos 169 (Winter 2014): 3944.doi:10.3817/1214169039www.telospress.com

40 JENS-MARTIN ERIKSEN AND FREDERIK STJERNFELT

notions and practices that are fundamentally at odds with modern, rights-based democracy, particularly notions that grant different political rights to different groups of individuals, such as men and women, believers and non-believers, different races, etc.

So far we appear to be in agreement. However, the authors present an argument against a particular notion in our book The Democratic Contradictions of Multiculturalism, namely, that of the existence of a multiculturalism on the left wing of current Western politics.2 The authors argue that as multiculturalism is indeed antimodern and reactionary, there could be, by definition, no such thing as multiculturalism on the left. We agree that multiculturalism in its hard versions is indeed antimodern and reactionary; but we do not agree that the question of its appearance on the left can be settled by means of a pure definition of concepts as attempted by Adamson et al.: Historically, the left was not mystical or relativist but rationalist and preoccupied with factual exploitation. The battle was fought against ethnicity, roots, and identityi.e., against those who claimed that shared culture would fuse the upper and lower classes. It is indeed correct that what the authors describe here forms an ideal type describing a strong and important current in what has been called the left ever since the French Revolution.

But Adamson et al. commit an error when identifying this ideal type and this strong current with the left as such. It is well known that it was the French Revolution that gave rise to the leftright distinction in the first placeaccording to the seating of the different groups and factions in the National Assembly. But already during the French Revolution, several very different currents competed as to what should constitute leftism, an ambiguity that has only developed and strengthened until this day. Jonathan Israel, in his recent treatise on the intellectual currents within the Revolu-tion, identifies a whole series of positions that are safely left-wing insofar as they are firmly anti-royalist, anti-catholic, and opposed to any attempt at restoring pre-Revolutionary conditions.3 At the same time, they celebrate rather different ideas of the alternativefrom the Brissotins (often called the Gironde) to the many different sects often called the Montagne. The latter comprise Dantonistes, Hbertistes, Robespierristes, Babeufistes,

2. Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt, The Democratic Contradictions of Multiculturalism (New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2012).

3. Jonathan Israel, Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revo-lution from the Rights of Man to Robespierre (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2014).

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and many more. Traditionally, these two currents have been categorized as center-left vis--vis the more extreme left, respectively. But in Israels detailed mapping, the republicanism of the Brissotins, which was over-thrown by the Robespierristes during the spring of 1793, were that part of the Revolution which supported a republican constitution, equal rights for men and women, representative democracy, human rights, freedom of the press, equality taken as equal possibilities and equality before the law, rejection of slavery, freedom of religion, atheism, emphasis on education and enlightenment of the populace. These are all classic leftist ideals, to be sure. But the groups that considered themselves as more leftist than the Brissotins claimed that brand especially because of their more radical economical policies: many of them were proto-communists who literally wanted to cancel all rights of ownership in order to distribute all goods equally, even if by means of riots in the streets, armed power, and eventu-ally despotism to achieve that goal. Moreover, they not only supported complete economic equality. They also supported direct democracy, meaning forcing the National Assembly by using excited masses of poor Parisians to place violent pressure on parliamentary proceedings, and, when they assumed power themselves in June 1793, collecting all power in a small committee that was not elected, because they claimed to possess special knowledge about the peoples needs (so there was no need to ask people).

Furthermore, these groups tended to reject education, knowledge, enlightenment, and meritocracy as merely intellectualist; they cultivated instead a Spartan celebration of the robust virtues and culture of the simple man without any need for enlightenment and education, and with-out any interest in letting his woman out of the kitchen. Instead, they claimed that the Revolution could only persist if supported by a new deist religion, which they attempted to institutionalize during the Terror. As part of their ideology, they developed a nationalist rhetoric, emphasizing La Patrie, the fatherland, just as they refused reason, invoking instead virtue and the will as the basis for the Revolution. To the Brissotins, democratic procedures were central to the nascent Republic, while to the Montag-nards, the important matter was rather special virtuous qualities in their leaders (which, of course, they themselves claimed to possess).

Israel traces the intellectual history of the Revolution of the Brisso-tins to the Radical Enlightenment of Spinoza, Bayle, Helvtius, Diderot, dHolbach, et al., and sees their work continued during the Revolution

42 JENS-MARTIN ERIKSEN AND FREDERIK STJERNFELT

by Mirabeau, Sieys, Condorcet, Volney, Brissot, and otherswhile large fractions of the Montagne favored instead Rousseau as their main influ-ence, with his ideas of nationalism, virtue, simplicity, and populist will. The difference, so Israel, is especially clear in the different conceptions the two groups held of the Volont gnrale, the general will. As to the Brissotins, they stuck to a Diderotian interpretation, according to which the only access to that will is via the procedures of public deliberation and general elections; as to the Robespierristes, they favored a more Rous-seauist interpretation, according to which the contents of the peoples will was settled once and for all but accessible only for certain talented leaders. What was required was only a firm and virtuous leader, like Robespierre, celebrated as lincorruptible, in order to realize the peoples will politi-cally by any means, despotism and large-scale executions of political opponents not excluded.

We provide this paraphrase of central currents in the French Revolution to make the case that as early as the first moment of the leftright distinc-tion, there was considerable confusion as to what it really meant to be left. The Robespierristes, of course, were overthrown by the Thermidorians in July 1794, but by then they had already managed stably to identify their own position as a more radical version of leftism, with complete economic equality as the goal to be pursued even by tyrannyand with a populist-nationalist rejection of the internationalism of the Brissotins.

In some sense, Israel makes a point parallel to Adamson et al.: in real-ity, the Brissotins were the real leftist republicans, and Robespierre was no leftist in any democratic sense of the word and should rather be analyzed as a first prefiguration of what was to come in twentieth-century fascism and totalitarianism. But the tensions born in the Parisian streets around 1790 were not to go away easily. The Western left kept housing many different strands: social liberalism, social democracy, anarchism, syndical-ism, communism, and all their ever-changing hybrids and compromises. In a broad sense, social liberals and social democrats of the Second Inter-national continued the line of the Brissotins, while various populist and communist currents, like those of the Third International, continued that of the Robespierristes. And especially in some of the latter, versions of cul-turalism kept popping up. It is well known how even archetypical fascism, its Italian nationalist variant, originated in the syndicalism of the left; it is well known how Stalinism could assume nationalist features in the doc-trine of socialism in one country; it is also well known how even many

LEFT BEHIND 43

benign social democrats would fashion nationalistic policies, including, in Scandinavia, the Swedish doctrine of the Folkhem (The Peoples Home) and the Danish one of Danmark for Folket (Denmark for the People). Culturalism never really left the left.

This brings us to the present. When we do not hesitate to speak about a left-wing multiculturalism, it is, in the first instance, for the very simple reason that there are many multiculturalists who unambiguously identify themselves as leftists. This already held for the American anthropologists who fashioned the culturalist notion of culture in the interwar period, as we discuss in our book: they certainly saw themselves as leftist protectors of nationless peoples and critics of Western colonialism. The same holds today for the majority of left-wing currents supporting variants of hard multiculturalism. We do not think that all of these people suffer from false consciousness. Nor do we think that they would suddenly be enlightened, if they would only read Adamson et al. and discover their cool conceptual definitions of what leftism really ought to mean. But, what is more, most of these people in fact do support classical left-wing cases such as large-scale economic redistribution (typically seen as the key indicator on the leftright axis), state paternalism, liberation of suppressed groups nation-ally and internationally, etc. Left-wing multiculturalists do not even form a minority; rather, they constitute the very bulk of the broad multiculturalist movement. There do exist explicitly right-wing versions of multicultural-ism, it is true, such as the so-called ethno-pluralists (differing only from the left by claiming that each culture should possess its own territory and remain there), but they remain marginal and have minimal influence as compared with the multicultis on the left.

But, in addition, given the checkered history of more than two centuries of leftism, there is no reason not to see multicultis on the left as the cur-rent heirs of a strong and immanent tradition within the left, going all the way back to Robespierres populism and anti-individualism. The tendency on the left to identify, if not reduce, individuals to simplistic collective categories, such as class, economic position, culture, and ethnicity, has simply been there all the time, and it has been able to merge seamlessly, in different combinations, with other classical leftist ideas such as substantial equality, paternalism (turning into despotism in the extreme), anti-capi-talism, anti-Americanism, anti-bourgeois lifestyle recommendations, etc.

One particular trend here merits mentioning. Ever since the French Revolution, the left has had the merit of opposing imperialism, slavery,

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and colonialism. But again, several rather different consequences have been drawn from this position. One is that these structures of exploitation should be dismantled in favor of the liberation of those individuals sup-pressed by them. Quite another is the blunt identification of those structures with the West as such, giving rise to ideas that the cultures and societies of suppressed, non-Western groups were superior and should be unilaterally supported against Western culture as such. In the latter viewpoint, demo-cratic standards of all sorts would be categorized as just one more feature of a repressive, capitalist Western culture, as the guiding reason why such cultures should enjoy special support and special rightseven, often, at the expense of the individuals living in those cultures. A standard conse-quence of this position is to side enthusiastically with any state, dictator, or culture that happens to stand in some opposition to the United States or other Western powers. The French journalist Caroline Fourest has pre-sented an important hypothesis about this split on the left: she claims that the parting of the ways is determined by which twentieth-century experi-ence is deemed central to leftism.4 If you pick the anti-fascist struggle, you will typically be hesitant to support culturalist claims against the West because this conflict pitched Western countries as the defenders of liberty; if, on the other hand, you pick the anti-imperialist struggle as the finest hour, you may be tempted to take the side of any state or culture oppos-ing the West, celebrating their culture as more authentic and unspoiled by capitalismand thus support multiculturalism as more important than liberal democracy.

Thus, our conclusion is that strands of culturalism have been with the left ever since its very first inception in Revolutionary Paris. This is why we do not hesitate to speak about left-wing multiculturalism. Its recent spread to large swaths of the center-left, all the way from the revolution-ary fringe to the democratic center, is currently one of the most disturbing political facts in the West that is in dire need of analysis. Thus we agree with Adamson et al. that it is seminal, under the current circumstances, to remind left-wing culturalists about their very close ideological rela-tionship to anti-Enlightenment currents such as radical nationalismto convince them that their leftism contains strong reactionary components better left behind.

4. Caroline Fourest, La tentation obscurantiste (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 2005).