History, Civilization, Progress

Murray Bookchin, The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism, pp. 147-183

Bookchin is “negating the negation”. In dismissing deterministic, patriarchal, and white supremacist notions of history, civilization, and progress, critics have gone too far in the opposite direction and opted for a modern relativism that leaves little possibility for understanding History, let alone constituting a revolutionary praxis.

What is History? The “rational content and continuity of events (with due regard for qualitative ‘leaps’) that are grounded in humanity’s potentialities for freedom, self-consciousness, and cooperation, in the self-formative development of increasingly libertarian forms of consociation.” (157) History is what is rational in human development. Humans have of course committed irrational acts, murderous atrocities, and inflicted all sorts of evil upon one another. Yet Bookchin distinguishes between human capacities and human potentialities. And is there a human “potentiality for evil”? Capacities for evil acts do not mean that human potentiality is constituted to produce evil and destructiveness. “Episodic capacities” are not the same as “unfolding potentialities.”

“If our views of social development are to be structured around the differences that distinguish one culture or period from another, we will ignore underlying tendencies that, with extraordinary universality, have greatly expanded the material and cultural conditions for freedom on various levels of individual and social self-understanding. By grossly emphasizing disjunctions, social isolates, unique configurations, and chance events, we will reduce shared, clearly common social developments to an archipelago of cultures, each essentially unrelated to those that preceded and followed it.” (162-163)

Bookchin argues there is a “legacy of freedom” or a tradition of increasing approximation toward freedom and self-consciousness. Civilization verifies this – it is the potentialities of History embodied and partially actualized. It consists of the material, cultural, and psychological advances that humanity has made. The “dialectic of freedom” has emerged and reemerged in recurring struggles for freedom that have expanded freedom and cooperation. There is also a “legacy of domination” yet this, Bookchin argues, is the realm of the irrational. That which defies rational interpretation remains an event, not History in the dialectical sense of the unfolding of humanity’s potentialities for freedom, etc. Progress is the advance of freedom over domination.

“The denial of a rational universal History, of Civilization, of Progress, and of social continuity renders any historical perspective impossible and hence any revolutionary praxis meaningless except as a matter of personal, indeed, often very personal, taste.” (167)

History is an ever-developing “whole”, but not in a predestined or predetermined sense. Nor are humans the tools of the “God of History” that mythically operates unseen and carries out the final self-realization of History. Humans are active agents who may or may not make real their potentialities. There may or may not be an “end of history”, a finality to the historical process, because “History forms its own ideal of [the notions of the rational, the democratic, the free, and the cooperative] at various times, which in turn have been expanded and enriched.” (168)