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Duncan Kelly, "Worlds of Wartime: The First World War and the Reconstruction of Modern Politics" (Oxford UP, 2025)
01:25:30
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A
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B
Hello everyone. This is Ryan Tripp. I'm your host. We're going to be discussing the worlds of wartime, the First World War and the reconstruction of modern politics by professor of Politics at the University of Cambridge, Duncan Kelly. Professor Kelly, welcome to the podcast.
- [02:16]
C
Thanks for having me, Ryan. Very glad to be here.
- [02:18]
B
All right, so let's just dive into it. How did you come to research and write this study? There are ideas in the study connected to reconstruction that you may want to Address, but, you know, by way of introduction, kind of discuss how you came to all this.
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C
Well, it's a. It's been a long time coming, I think I started writing and thinking about this book almost a decade ago. And I was interested, I suppose, in the relationship between art and modern politics on the one side, and the way in which intellectual histories of the First World War, in so much as they were written and presented as intellectual histories, were mostly written about figures in the art world or in the literary world, but less so in the domain of political and economic ideas. And I wanted to ask the question, well, what would an intellectual history of the First World War look like if you took seriously the study of the history of political thought and the history of economic thought and you understood the relationship between politics and economics with as much care and attention to as it were, the contingencies of a world in reconstruction as was paid to those people who were writing or thinking about or practicing art and poetry and literature. Sorry. So I think I came to it because I wanted to try and write what I thought of as a modernist intellectual history of the First World War. And having done that, and having thought about what might be entailed in doing that, I began to try and put together a book that would take ideas seriously in their own time, but also have a sort of contemporary payoff. Because I wanted also to trace the relationship between the First World War and the way it kind of fixed into place a way of understanding politics and economics that was governed by free markets, nation states, representative forms of democratic politics in order to try and figure out why it was so different, difficult in the present to think about doing our politics differently. So I suppose the short version of the answer is Modernism and An Intellectual History of Political and Economic Ideas as a way of framing something different for an understanding of the First World War, but also as a framework that could take you from the past back into the present.
- [04:56]
B
Thank you. So, next question we have, and this is more substantive, you mentioned, I think, and assess to a certain extent the World Crisis 1914-1918. If you can dive into that a little bit and perhaps connect it to the relevance of the so called Kant Wars. You also mentioned the young Old worlds. I know those seem all disparate ideas, but if you can discuss particularly the world crisis, that'd be great.
- [05:25]
C
So this refers to a series of lectures given by the French philosopher and historian Elie Alivi in Oxford in 1929. And Livy was, I think, the first French and certainly the first person from outside of the Commonwealth, I think, at that point, to give the Rhodes Lectures. And he chose as his subject the First World War. And he gave them in 1929. They were published by Oxford University Press the year after. And when I had started thinking about how to begin the book on the First World War, I really wanted to start with him because while he came, as it were, at the end of my time frame for thinking about a long First World War in its own terms, which was roughly from 1870 through to 1930, he came at the end, but he wrote what I took to be a kind of intellectual history of the First World War. And it was one of the first I found and it's been hugely influential, influential among liberal historians in particular, because he very straightforwardly outlined the thought that the First World War was inevitable. Everybody saw it coming and everybody knew. He wasn't blind to world politics and its contradictions. Everybody knew it was coming. The question he raised is, well, what happens to the world if the ideas and the practices that made war inevitable end up being the kind of ideas that stick in the post war period? And this is the sort of question he was trying to ask when he gave these lectures on the First World War in 1929. But he begins by outlining a sort of structure of how to understand the World War as a world crisis, which is kind of interesting, I think. And on the one hand, he's interested in the way in which ideas about war were understood in the build up to 1914 and the direction of travel through which war came to Europe. And he's interested, in that sense, in pursuing a story about the rage, as he calls it, for national self determination that swings from the Balkans through into Western Europe, and the inevitable drive towards populist sovereignty and the inevitable desire for national self determination is a driving force for war coming to Europe from East to West. He also says that alongside ideas about war and national self determination, there's a sense of revolution and crisis that combine at the same time. So when he's thinking about the emergence, the evolution and then the sort of the cataclysm of revolution in Russia in particular, he wants to say that ideas of revolutionary crisis and revolutionary contagion mixed together with these ideas and practices and desires for national self determination and war that together combine to produce a sort of structural disequilibrium. And it's these moments of relative equilibrium in ideas of war and sovereignty or war and revolution, that unite and become forms of disequilibrium, structurally speaking, when in combination. And it's this combination he thinks that leads to a world crisis which is both intellectual and structural. And so part of how he relates these arguments together does connect to what you asked about in terms of this question of the so called Kant wars. And I mean, maybe I can say something about that that's parenthetical, I guess, at least in part, which is to say that the Kant wars, particularly in France, as Alevi experienced them, were a series of arguments about how one could or should interpret the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, the famous 18th century German philosopher. And in terms of a sort of a twin track approach, whether the Kant that was to be revived and understood during the First World War in France was the Kant of the famous essay on perpetual peace. In an essay that Kant suggested that forms of republican political constitutionalism, if you like, were the evolutionary future of a Europe that was becoming increasingly enlightened and increasingly pacific. And so there was this thought that perpetual peace was the future of republican politics. And one side of those interested in intellectual history and the history of philosophy and the relationship between the history of philosophy and contemporary politics in France wanted to pursue the thought that in a time of war one would pursue, if you were a strict republican in France, you would pursue the Kantian ideal. So a League of the Rights of man in 1914, 15, for example, being rooted with reference to Kant's philosophy as the future of a republican form of politics in France, whereas the contrary position was that a kind of Catholic anti Kantianism, if you like, suggested that Kant was an aberration for contemporary French republican politics because Kant was a Prussian, Kant was associated with German or Prussian state worship. And so what you ended up with was this sort of bifurcated position where you had Alai and some of his friends thinking that there was something to be salvaged in a French republican future with reference to a German philosopher, Kant, that could see the world through complex forms of federated arrangements that might lead eventually to republican forms of peace. Or you have the particularly the Catholic reactionary anti Kantian philosophers and publicists who basically think that anything Germanic is tainted and it becomes a propaganda war. So the Kant wars are a subset, as it were, of a much wider propaganda war that's very conventional in terms of thinking about the history and the practice of the First World War in terms of its position, as a lot of people want to call it, as a battle or a war of ideas in the first place, which is Germans worship the state. Prussian philosophy is sort of emboldened the state, as it were, to become the central focus and the highest point of political life, and that state worship has led the world to the brink of this cataclysmic global conflict. So anything that's connected with that is antipathetic to the view of the Allies, or in particular, a view of, in this case, a plausible French republican future. So there's a lot of ideas going along here, but Alaisi's sort of structural and intellectual history of the First World War builds a little bit on some of those debates about the war as a war of ideas. Connects a little bit to this bigger question about the camp wars that you mentioned. But I think I really started with him because he just. He's a fascinating figure who's trying to actually explain, causally speaking, how ideas have material effects on politics in the present. I could say a lot more about that, but that's a very long answer.
- [13:27]
B
You really get to know these people in your study. So what was you refer to Ireland's Machiavellian moment, if you can elucidate that a bit in the context of the Revolution as well as the failure of international socialism? Sure.
- [13:44]
C
I mean, the Irish revolutionary period is one crucial chapter of this book. And I discuss it with reference to the idea of a sort of new form of federal futurism, wherein the Irish revolutionary moment from 1916 and the proclamation of the New Irish Republic by Patrick Purse and others in Dublin connects up with all sorts of other kind of anti colonial, anti imperial forms of futurist politics, connecting figures like W.E.B. du Bois in In America, or Marcus Garvey thinking about forms of Pan African internationalism and so on, or young Asian futurism, some of which we might come to. But putting the Irish revolutionary moment into this sort of futurist form of political imagining also said something important, I think, about how revolutionary forms of politics at this time were trying to rewrite histories in order to open up new sorts of plausible futures. And this is where this idea of the Machiavellian moment comes in, because in part it's as it sounds. I mean, it's a callback to the early modern political activist, author of the Prince Machiavelli, but it's a callback to Machiavelli's worry about standing armies versus citizen militias when it comes to thinking about the Irish revolutionary moment. And so what some people and some scholars refer to as Ireland's Machiavellian moment in this period, 1916, through the various home rule crises and revolution and. And wartime, is an attempt on the part of this, a very multifarious and contingently connected revolutionary generation to Figure out what's wrong with standing armies and why they might want citizen militias to effectively liberate a country for themselves. So if Ireland is going to be liberated, then Irish people are going to have to do the liberating and people are going to have to stand up and be counted, as it were. And this is a form of radical republican local politics where people are taking to the streets and taking over forms of politics for themselves. I think that's the callback to the Machiavellian moment. It's a pursuit of citizen militias against standing armies, because standing armies are the armies of empire as well, which is a very Machiavellian point, but repurposed in this period by the Irish revolutionaries in such a way that they can say, you know, the standing armies, that's the English, you know, there's an anti imperial legacy here that's being overturned in the moment of the Irish republican revolution. And the pursuit and the sort of recapturing of a Machiavellian form of politics is something that's going on here. When they're trying to think about what it means to talk about founding a republic as Machiavelli had been interested in all those years ago, what does it mean to think about founding and maintaining and pursuing a new form of republican rule? And so they're upscaling an old Machiavellian argument. But at the same time there's also another dimension to this, I think, which is the sort of Machiavellian moment that says republicanism requires not only active citizenship and citizen militias, it requires a repurposing of the idea of labor. So in republican thinking about politics, and particularly a lot of scholarship over the last 30 to 50 years, even I think that's been interest in forms of republican political thinking in their traditions and their legacies, have been becoming increasingly concerned with how republican political theory relates to work. So in republican political theory, there's often a straightforward status based opposition between those who are free and those who are not. And often those who are not are referred to with reference to classical sources in terms of their status as slaved or enslaved persons. So free persons versus slaves is a. Is a story that underpins a certain sort of version of republican political thinking. That republican political thinking then renders labor or work particularly important as a status. So who gets to do it and who does the work? How do you repurpose work in a period of socialist and republican revolutionary politics in order to make labor or work the source of freedom rather than enslavement? And this, I think, when it comes to thinking about the Irish revolutionary moment is crucial because you have figures like James Connolly writing about the failures of international socialism in terms of the failure of international socialism to be true to its own principles, as in to defend the shared interests of a community, a global community of laborers. That old Marxist thought, you know, proletarians of the world have no country, they're united by common interest, and they have a common interest in not being exploited. What the First World War does is undercut the validity of that argument for so many radicals, particularly people like Connolly, because they look at what happened in Germany, famously, where the Social Democrats vote in favor of national war and war credits in the Reichstag, and they see this as a failure of a working class party to defend working class interests. So I think there's another version of the Machiavellian moment story here that's about a republican form of politics in particular, that's combining itself with a socialist commitment to the dignity and the value of work and labor that some radicals in Ireland, like Connolly, are trying to embed, sustain, defend, if you like. And this means they have to say that the war is a signal failure of international socialism, but forms of national socialist and republican reconstruction might be able to, as it were, save the day. So again, there's a lot going on behind that question of what, what the Machiavellian moment in Ireland is about. I think first of all, it's the shorthand story about citizen militias against standing armies. And then there's a bigger picture argument about what it means to think about this revolutionary moment as a, as the founding of a new republic. And if Machiavelli is a key figure in thinking about the history and the tradition of republics and republicanism in Europe, how do socialists engage with that and think about the reconstruction of republicanism through labor? So here you've got, as I said, people like Connelly defending the rights and the value of work and trying to pursue a republican revolution alongside a socialist form of anti capitalism so called young movements.
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B
In your study Young Asia, for example. Young Asia, Young Turk. I know Young Germany becomes important later on. If you could address sort of the causes and the contours of these movements, it'd be duly appreciated.
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C
Yeah, thank you. It's a difficult question, to be fair. I think the simplest route to getting to an answer is to think about the way in which the young, or the trope of young, in this case Asia or young Turk movements is building off of a 19th century set of arguments about new republics in Europe, first and foremost trying to use the language of young republics, new republics, young young forms of politics. So using the trope of youth and novelty to try and get beyond a politics that's taken to be old and out of touch and imperial. And this is the way in which the forms of politics that are taken up by the Young Turk radicals between the 1870s and the period that moves into the immediate prelude to the First World War in the Committee for Union and Progress in the Ottoman Empire, and which is taken through by the Young Turks as a. As a way of constitutionalizing and generalizing and trying to think about the formation of a new, useful Turkish Republic prior to 1923, when Kemal takes over. But it's using and updating a 19th century language of republican novelty and republican youth to criticize an imperial structure of politics, the Ottoman Empire and its sultanate as being corrupt and of the old world no longer fit for purpose. And similarly with the figure of Binoy Sarkar in India, who develops the trope of young Asia, and in particular what he calls a young Asian futurism during the First World War, as he's writing about ethics, politics, culture and history, and writing in some surprising places, to be honest, I mean, he's publishing essays on the futurism of young Asia, as he calls it, in the American International Journal of Ethics. He publishes in the American Political Science Review, for example, all of these places during the 1910s and through the First World War, where you wouldn't expect necessarily anti colonial, anti imperial radicalism to find a voice, but his voice and that of the young movements and the Young Turk movements too, find this sort of international audience. And part of what they're trying to do is to say, well, if the world has been brought to what Alevi had called inevitable conflict and war, and in part that's because of European imperialism and Anglo American imperialism particularly, then imperialism is the worldview of the old, and the old needs to be replaced with the new. So in some ways it's again, it's a story about conceptual and political and strategic redescription, taking the language of youth and positing an alternative future, one that is no longer plausibly imperial or plausibly colonial. But there's another element to that which is worth amplifying, I think, in terms of thinking about these youthful movements, is that they also are critical of the ways in which the language and the concept and the idea of civilization and civilization as progress, have shaped and underpinned European forms of knowledge, on the one hand, and European practices of empire and colonial politics on the Other and that's to say from the perspective of a sort of Eurocentric worldview, if civilization and progress is where things are at in Europe, then everything else is backward and underdeveloped in some way or uncivilized. All of those hoary old tropes of 19th century European political and legal thinking where Europe becomes the civilizational apex and everyone else is somehow below it. Some places are on their route towards progress and some places are definitely never going to progress. People like Sarkar, people like the Young Turk radicals obviously reject this form of politics as being straightforwardly high handed and exploitative and with its own sort of malignant history. And what they're able to do by saying that we need a young form of new politics for the future, that's not imperial and old, an old Europe as it were, they need a new old world. But the old world is the ancientness or the ancient quality of the civilizations of the Ottomans and the Indians. So they're able to pursue this thought that radical new forms of politics can be redescribed as young because they're future oriented, they're dynamic, they're anti imperial, but they're also ancient. That's because if Europe thinks its civilization is old and ancient and progressive, then if you really want ancient civilizations then you look to India, you look to China, you look to the Ottomans. So these new old worlds are designed to be, they're designed to make the so called old world look new and they're designed to make the new new world also really, really old. And I think that combination of sort of hyper modern and archaic is constitutive of a certain kind of modernist, anti imperial political view. And that's what I think I found really extremely interesting about the way in which people like Sarkar or Cemal Pasha, some of the other Young Turk radicals, were able to mobilize this sort of anti imperial language and make it make national reconstruction both ancient and modern at the same time.
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B
So I know that the criticism of the Marxian labor of, excuse me, criticism of the Marxian labor theory of value as well as collapse perhaps is significant to your study as connected to the first World War. So if you could engage with that a bit. I know this is a little bit more of a conceptual question or ideological question. I think, you know, touching on the significance would be helpful.
- [28:37]
C
Yeah, absolutely. I think it's well known in this sort of history of socialism that there's, there tends to be a big picture opposition between those who are revolutionary socialists and those who are so called reformist or revolutionary socialists. And this debate usually comes under the banner of revisionism in socialism and social democracy. And it, it's taken to have its sort of beginning point with the publication of the German radical publicist and author Edward Bernstein's essay on the preconditions of Socialism in 1899. And what Bernstein suggests is that the collapse theory of socialism, I. E. That socialism is inevitable because capitalism will collapse, and it's collapse is inevitable because of the inherent tensions between the interests of working classes and the interests of bourgeois classes, or capitalists, or profit making and profit owning enterprises and persons. That the reality of socialism in Bernstein's eye In late 19th, early 20th century Germany is less about this idea of inevitable, inevitable collapse and more about the understanding of socialism as a movement towards the bettering of the conditions of the working classes. And he sees the rise of modern social democracy as a case study in point, or in fact of the increasing welfare and life chances and recognition and rights based recognition through trade unions and so on in Germany of the working classes. And so he thinks that the collapse theory is far fetched and empirically incorrect. And so he thinks that we should understand instead socialism as a movement rather than as a set of abstract theoretical propositions that will necessitate in some preordained future, at some future point. And in making that claim, he is to go back to something we talked about a little earlier. He is interested in combining a kind of Kantian perspective or an ethic. He's interested in providing an ethical foundation to the understanding of socialism, where socialism becomes a form of movement towards a particular goal rather than being focused just on the end point. He sees this in Kantian terms because he sees the story of socialism as evolutionary and adaptive and developmental, rather than necessarily a form of politics that is structured by crisis and renewal and conflict towards an end goal of socialism. And in putting those things together, the Kantian ethical story about socialism as a movement for the betterment of the conditions of the working classes, with a rejection of the necessity of revolutionary politics. He's criticizing also some of the theoretical presumptions then of classical Marxism, one of which is, as you mentioned, the labor theory of value. And that if you take the labor theory of value as straight as a straightforward plank of Marxism, then you're going to end up in all sorts of problems in terms of understanding people's preferences, their desires, their chances, their interests, according to someone like Bernstein and indeed many others, because the labor theory of value suggests that the sources of value through which capitalism operates come from the Activities of workers who engage in production. But according to critics like Bernstein on the one hand, and anti Marxist critics on the other, that sort of labor theory of value that presumes a specific kind of interest or value in the work of production, that adheres to the person of the worker or the laborer is just conceptually and practically and also emotively or incorrect. As in there isn't one thing that adheres to you or me or anyone else as a laborer that can be understood as valued. The value that individuals create through their work and production, on the one hand, is also related to the. The values that they choose to pursue and the choices that they are engaged in, trying to understand, to enact and to to sort of deal with in the world are multifarious. They're not just grounded in labor, they're contingent. They relate to people's, people's wildly varying desires and choices about how to use the resources they have to achieve their ends. And political economists, particularly those who've become known as marginalist political economists, were highly critical of the idea that there was a singular standard or value that adhered to labor in Marxist labor theories of value. They wanted to uncouple labor and production from the determinants of value. And they wanted to say that individuals have wildly different value driven choices about how to use their capital or their income or their bodies and their labor to produce or to get what it is they want in the world. And there's no, there's no unifying theory, as it were, that can encompass all of that. This is, as it were, a market driven, individual preference based model setting itself up in opposition to a sort of holistic and overarching claim from within Marxism about the sources of value. And I think Bernstein is interesting as an embodiment of this, of someone who's in the middle trying to suggest that a politics that just follows pure theory as if it was coherent and determinate, will not understand the empirical diversity of politics in the present and will not understand the fact that different people have wildly different interests and choices and values that determine how they act in the world. And the anti Marxist marginalist economists and critics are also doubling down on that point. They're saying that the labor theory of value can't be a coherent foundation for anything because there is no one overarching theory of value, There are many. And there is no one overarching sort of set of choices that people pursue that can be said to determine their value that is easily comparable across the board. So what you want and how you choose to get what you want and how you value what you want is different to me, is different to someone else, and so on and so on and so on. And this intersubjective preference difference, as it were, forms the foundation of modern marginalist political economy. And it basically wins the battle of ideas over Marxist accounts of the labor theory of value, which seems to a great many people to undercut the validity of Marxism to call, as in if that's the foundation that it thinks that labor is the source of value and that that has a comparative dimension that's easily understandable. If that's wrong, then the foundation of Marxism just falls away. That's what the marginalists think. The irony of this moment that's been going on since the 1870s and continues through into the 1920s and 30s, this continuous critique of the labor theory of value, is that just as Marxism is being sort of dethroned intellectually or theoretically, as it were, it's at its most expansive and successful as a political program and project. You know, radical Social Democrat parties, mass membership parties across Europe, revolutions and the. That are being underpinned by a defense of a certain kind of Marxist account of labor and the value of labor and Marxism as an anti capitalist form of politics taking place throughout the world throughout the First World War. So there's this irony that at the moment of seeming intellectual incoherence, there's massive political traction to a radical Marxist project. And I think the revisionist controversy in the 1880s and 1890s in Germany is emblematic of how someone like Bernstein is trying to steer a path through these extremes. But this again is just a very long answer to the question, because it's quite technical, of what's up with the labor theory of value, as it were. It's the theoretical foundation of Marxism which those critics, those critics of revolutionary forms of Marxism and of Marxism in general are trying to sort of take away or kick out from under the sort of edifice to say there is no foundation here. And if they can win that argument, they think then they can show the impossibility, let alone anything about the inevitability of Marxist forms of politics going forward.
- [38:37]
B
So if you could elaborate a little bit on ideas of the open world versus the closed world. I know that's. That's pretty important for your book.
- [38:47]
C
Yeah, absolutely. Became a sort of running theme for a while I was writing it. And it's a geopolitical commonplace in some respects by people like John Maynard Keynes writing about the economic consequences of the peace towards the end of the versailles settlement in 1919, just as it had been a geopolitical commonplace for writers like Frederick Turner, thinking about the American and indeed the European frontier in the later 19th century. And what both were trying to suggest in slightly different ways was that the 19th century, at least if you were in Europe or America, had been an open century. And what they meant by an open century in an open world was that there was seemingly limitless space to be expanded into, particularly if you were a European or an American imperialist power looking for new spaces and places to colonize, looking for, excuse me, new places and spaces and peoples to conquer, but also looking for extra space to generate extra forms of profit. And the problem that emerges at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century for both Keynes and Turner, and then for figures like Halford Mackinder, the famous historian, geographer, theorist of the pivot state of modern history, which turns out to be in sort of Eurasian heartlands, was that the world was now closed. There was no more empty space. Effectively, that colonialism, that imperialism, the population transfer, the global connectedness, the project of globalization, if you like, in some ways had reached its. Its endpoint, because there was no empty space into which one could conceivably move. So the world had gone from being open to closed. The question they then posed was, well, if that's the case, and our politics is effectively imperial or expansive and expansionary, then what do we do? And this, in terms of geopolitics particularly, or geoeconomics, too, as we might now think of it, sometimes produced a set of arguments about an increasingly financialized and extractive form of imperialism, where if you couldn't literally move into spaces in the world, you could nonetheless sort of sweat their resources increasingly through an increasingly financial form of capitalism. And so the project of globalization reopens the world through reorienting imperialism. And that's the project, at least, that seems to be behind the phrase or the phrasing of what's the problem? Or what's the distinction between the open and the closed world? And because that's the start of the story, it then provided, at least for this book, a way of trying to. Trying to bring people in and bring critical voices into that sort of story who thought that the idea of an open and a closed world was itself an imperialist kind of rendering of how to understand both the space of the world and the forms of global politics. You didn't talk about open and closed or places that were available and places that weren't, because that's an imperialist mindset. And in fact, if you want to think about different forms of open politics towards the future, you want to get away from the idea that something was closed and needs to be opened up through empire. You want to say that empire was the thing that closed down possibilities. And you want to reopen a world that's free for a different kind of political or economic relationship. This is why so many anti imperial, anti colonial writers turn to different forms of nationalism, turned to different forms of federationism, if you like, turned to diasporic forms of politics as a counter to what they see as this basically imperial conceit of a world that was seemingly endlessly open, which has now been closed. And to say, well, the empire always closed the world to those it was who were subject to it. And the point is, how does one reopen the world for everyone else?
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B
So I have to ask, I know this is kind of, if you can address ideas on neoliberalism very, very, very briefly, maybe a couple minutes. I know you're critical of just kind of this reductionist approach, particularly primitivism, or somewhat critical, maybe more nuanced. If you could just really, really briefly approach the neoliberalism, the Lippmann conference, etc, that would be great.
- [44:01]
C
Yeah, I can try. I mean, obviously the emergence of a certain sort of Lippman inspired colloquial Walter Lippmann in Paris as a foundational story of modern 20th century neoliberalism is an argument that has to do with, I guess, the problems of planning and freedom and democracy versus or the way in which, I suppose, people like Lippmann and others moved to a position where they wanted to be able to say that those who were interested in socialist forms of planning and reasoning were effectively antagonistic to freedom. And freedom was a democratic project. And so the neoliberal moment was sort of established as a defense to keep markets open, to keep politics out of market based forms of economics. And I suppose in a way maybe the to to present a view that says democracy and freedom go on one side and planning and unfreedom go on the other. Now I do think that there was a very different sort of story about neoliberalism that was getting going at that particular time in the aftermath the First World War as well, that Quinn Slobodian has rendered rather well known or better known in his book on globalists from a few years ago, which told the story of how the neoliberal project to keep politics out of economics was itself a hyper politicized project in order to generate a sort of sphere of market driven Interaction that could seemingly be free from politics, but which was designed explicitly to keep those countries that were already wealthy and prosperous, wealthy and prosperous, and to keep everybody else sort of under the heel of a form of economic liberalism. The reason I talk about this in the, in the book is to discuss figures like Max Weber and Friedrich Heyek a little bit, and Ludwig von Mises more particularly, as early Austrian and then German critics of socialist planning in and around the First World War. So from the period, roughly speaking, from sort of 1912 through to the early mid-1920s, as part of the developing argument about the place of reason and the place of nature in economic analysis. And so I spend a little bit more time with those figures who are engaged with radical socialist critics of contemporary capitalism during the First World War. And I talk about why people like Mises think that collective action and socialist planning is akin to a form of domestic terrorism on the one side, and why socialism is the abolition of what he calls the natural market economy. In order to show why, it was the case that more pointed socialist critics, some of whom Weber was interested in figures like Otto Neurath in Germany, for example, had suggested that what the war had shown specifically was that there was nothing natural about capitalism whatsoever. And that the opposition then between, as it were, natural market orders and planned and abnormal socialist ones was a misnomer because there was nothing natural about capitalism in the first place. And the war had shown that many other forms of both market and non market based forms of allocation were both possible and indeed necessary in a world in which economies were being closed as much as they were being left open. So that's a bit of a sketch that moves from Lippmann around the place. But, you know, it's not a straightforward story. But the book is mostly about Weber and Mises and a little bit of Hayek and then the socialists who were interested in the socialist calculation debate.
- [48:21]
B
So a pretty obvious important figure in your book is the US President Woodrow Wilson. Can you, and this is kind of a specific question, can you address the racial contours of his Warren state federalism?
- [48:34]
C
Yeah, I can try. I mean, it's a long chapter in the book and it culminates in a contrast between Wilson and the Indian anti colonial critic MN Roy, who writes famously an open letter to Woodrow Wilson, who says, well, Wilson's 14 points that are designed to make a world safe for democracy are designed as principles where there will be peace without victory and peace without indemnities or annexations, and forms of national self determination will be free to evolve and new forms of international cooperation will govern politics through the League of Nations. That's the premise. And that seems to be universal. But Roy suggests, well, if it's universal, then how come you don't apply the same sort of reasoning to places like India where there's a large population who are very interested in clearly being free from imperial forms of oversight and developing forms of national self determination. But Wilson's principles and points don't go quite that far. And in part this is designed to show the exclusionary logics as much as the sort of inclusive internationalist vision of Wilsonian politics in that chapter. And partly that then has to do with understanding how deeply racialized Wilson's conception of both domestic US Federal politics and then international order is. And so I show in the, in the book how Wilson builds a sort of account of the state, the American state, on the back of a particular reading about the American south, about the, about the Civil War, about questions of slavery and enslavement, and about the, the way in which democracy is a sort of rugged and adaptive American dream story that allows for political development through federalism as a sort of interrelationship between the visions of leaders and the development of peoples. But he thinks that racial hierarchy and enslavement were natural and indeed something that was crucial to the evolution and adaptation of the American state. So he seems in part to presume that American exceptionalism is exceptional because it's grounded in a very particular sort of status development and one that flows through the 19th century and one that flows through slavery. And, you know, this is a person who was connected through the American south with, with members of the Ku Klux Klan and who, you know, showed the film that was originally titled the Klansmen in the White House in 1915. I mean, so what I was interested in showing was a way in which the liberal internationalist vision, and this is not an uncommon thought by any means in this scholarship or indeed just in wider public discourse, but how that liberal internationalist vision of a, of an order, you know, where the right people are in charge and experts and American power is leading the world, is also a straightforwardly racist vision or racialized vision. And I think this has been, this was made clear by contemporary critics like Roy from an Indian perspective, but also was straightforwardly obvious to figures like W.E.B. du Bois boys, who I spend a lot of time with in the book as well, who are interested in showing how you can't understand modern American democratic politics and federal politics without the existence of a global color line and without the Existence of a domestic form of racialized exploitation.
- [53:05]
B
So there were debates over kind of Germany's path to democracy, as well as changes in pan Germanism, principally by the war. Can you elaborate a bit on that?
- [53:18]
C
Yeah, I can try again. These are huge questions, which is probably why the book is so long. So there's a lot of discussion of all of these things in rather engaged chapters or involved chapters in the book. But the German path to democracy is pivotal to certain aspects of the discussion because one of the leading tropes present in German political discourse in and through the First World War was that not only was there a distinctive German path to democracy, there might also be what, well, one writer called a certain set of ideas about 1914, where you could. And this was Johann Plenger in Germany. But this was an account that tried to suggest that the German ideas of 1914 signaled the difference between German accounts of politics and democracy in history from radical French and indeed Republican forms of politics. And so when Plang talks about the ideas of 1914, he wants to say that German forms of social and political rule, as it were, are governed by ideas of organization. So German national culture, German politics, German forms of democracy are about organization, administration and a sort of well ordered state. Whereas that can be contrasted with French radical Jacobin ideas of politics that go back to 1789, where politics requires revolutionary rupture rather than organizational adaptation to develop. And so he sets up this very stylized contrast symbolically, as he calls it, the Contrast between revolutionary 1789 versus organizational Germany from 1871 and the formation of the German nation state through to the First World War. And that set of contrasts and that idea or set of ideas about 1914 sparks a wide ranging debate among German public intellectuals. In particular, figures like Max Weber and Ernst Troisch, who are very critical of the idea that there's something distinctively German about modern democracy. And they want to say that democracy is a sort of more general phenomena. It's not to say that there aren't national differences between, say, German politics and French politics or British politics or any other kind of politics. It's not quite that. But there's not a German route to democracy that somehow is so wildly divergent from the French or the British or anything else that it can be bound up with the evolution and the adaptation of something very specific about German national culture. That's what they want to try and move away from. And they want to say that forms of modern democratic politics and democratic forms of state, they share more than they. More than they are divided by you know, certain sorts of things. And by that I mean, you know, these are state forms that need mass forms of politics. They need bureaucratic forms of administration underpinning them. They need certain sorts of leadership selection mechanisms through election and so on. They need to be connected to an international economic organization or network. They need credit and so on. And modern state forms don't come with, you know, intrinsically nationalized properties. That's what they want to say. And so while they're looking at what might be possible within German politics given its political structures, they don't want to say that there's necessarily something, as it were, echt Deutsch, about German democracy. And it's in some ways they're trying to dethrone the thought that there's been an aberrant path to German modernity. It's going back to something we talked about earlier in the propaganda war, the idea that the Germans are basically a nation of state worshippers and that this has led to the First World War. That's the propaganda story from the Allies perspective. And people like Weber and Trulsch and others are trying to roll back against that and say, no, we're all under the same path here. If we're talking about the modern nation state configured through representative forms of democracy with mass electorates, mass bureaucracies, mass armies and so on, everyone's on that path. If we're talking about Europe and Anglo America, so they're rolling back against the propaganda war. But they're also then trying to say, but what would it require in terms of German political reconstruction or in terms of German economic reconstruction to be successful, to be a great power? And then they move into slightly different directions. And so Weber wants to say, you know, if Germany wants the chance of being a great power and to have the chance of great power status, then it needs to reconstruct its sort of political and administrative arrangements to offset the preponderance or the overbearing power of Prussia and needs to become a federal state rather than this sort of national state where Prussia is where an overbearing majority presence. And then in the book, I have a long chapter on Weber's ideas about federalism as a way of determining an answer to what I call his particular German question. But his German question is not a question about whether there's a distinctively German conception of democracy or a. A distinctively German conception of state per se. And he wants to roll back against those ideas. So when the German idea of democracy or the German idea of the state comes in, in public discourse, Then Weber and Schwl and others are interested in pushing back strongly against it. And that's what I talk a little bit more about in the book.
- [59:42]
B
Now, this is a follow up question. Can you, and it's a briefly discuss Carl Schmitt's writings on interventionism, sovereignty, Allied occupation of the Renland, but principally just focus on Carl Schmidt and the significance probably summarizes significance to your book.
- [60:04]
C
In terms of the significance to the book. Schmidt is Schmidt's important for what he says about the occupation of the Rhineland in the aftermath of the First World War and what that means for the way in which he understands the category of sovereignty on the one hand, and the category of international law on the other. And what he wants to suggest, and this is sort of straightforward in most of the scholarship and understanding around Schmidt, I suppose, is that sovereignty is the quality that adheres to the personal persons who are able to make decisions, politically speaking, who have the autonomy to and the power to decide on who constitutes a political friend or an enemy. That's his sort of existential account of what the political sphere is. And the political sphere is the sphere in which sovereignty is made manifest under conditions of occupation. He says Germany is no longer sovereign. So Germany has become in European space, the equivalent of a colony within Europe, so where it's overseen by various European and American constituent parts. And what that means is that something has shifted and something has transformed in the status of European public law. So when it's possible within European spaces for European countries to become effectively akin to colonies, then he thinks that the status of European public law is no longer what it was. Therefore, the category and the conception of European sovereignty is no longer as stable as it once was. But what that means in the particular context of German politics into the early 1920s is the rule through the League of Nations. And rule, rule and oversight by other national states has rendered Germany less than fully sovereign. And that kind of argument pits him against other leading international and domestic lawyers and political writers in Germany who want to try and make what sounds like a very strained argument at the time, that if you understand occupation within the sphere of international law, you might be able to make an argument that says, well, Germany is still a sovereign national state. It's just under a particular form of either warlike or pacific occupation. And those lawyers who I talk about in the book, Karl Heyland and Karl Strupp, who are leading international lawyers in Germany at the time, reject Schmidt's sort of binary position. You're either sovereign or you're not. And they want to say, well, no occupation here in the context of a post war settlement renders sovereignty into a sort of, what they call it, a kind of hermaphroditic category. So it's neither either full sovereignty nor no sovereignty. It's something in the middle. And they're trying to suggest that this is a new sort of order that doesn't dethrone German power per se, but just makes it slightly different. So this sort of pausing of full sovereignty, as it were, has an end point because there's an end to occupation. And when that end comes, Germany will revert to being fully sovereign as once was. But it's still technically sovereign because of this weirdly hermaphroditic structure that they impose upon the relationship between law and politics, then. So in the context of your question, in the context of the book, I discuss what Schmidt says about occupation of the Rhineland in order to show how he configures the relationships between law and politics and sovereignty, and how he thinks that these relationships have changed for Germany and therefore for Europe in the context of post war reconstruction. And I do this as a buildup or a prelude to a longer set of arguments in the chapters in the book around legalism that seem to suggest that there are technical, legal and I suppose, managerial ways of dealing with radical political and economic conflict that might be understood through a process of reconstruction after the First World War and to set Schmidt against that sort of series of worldviews. So the problem of the chapters is about what happens when the lawyers take over or when legalistic arguments about politics begin to have primacy. And the series of debates therein are about different ways in which people try to use the language and the tools and the practices of law to fix politics. And you some people do this with reference to the possibility of plebiscites as new sorts of techniques for managing an uncertain post war reconstruction world. So from the discussion of Schmidt, I move into a discussion of Sarah Wombo, who is still rather little known, but at the time leading American expert on plebiscites, who writes for the Carnegie Endowment volumes on the history of plebiscites. He takes part in plebiscites in Germany and in Latin America, and who forms an interesting counterpoint to Schmidt, I think. So I set up the first of these chapters, or the second of these chapters on legalism, I think, with a discussion of Schmidt on the one side and international law in Germany, and then a defense of a sort of plebiscite as a, as a technique of modern democratic politics that might be developmental and progressive and possible through the work of Sarah Wombo. In thinking about how plebiscites have in fact actually worked in the rhineland and.
- [66:28]
B
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B
Delivery fees may apply there's strains of legalism and strains of realism in in the end part of your book, I did want to a little bit on economic cycles, specifically Nikolai Kondratov and his approach to economic cycles, and quote the socialization of the land. And then we can go into the end part of your book.
- [67:57]
C
Sure. I've long been interested in Kondratiev and had never quite figured out a way of how to write about him. But then he becomes central to a particular chapter which I call Russian Conjunctures in the book. And partly what I'm interested in is tracing how Kondratyev becomes radicalized as a socialist revolutionary, not a Bolshevik, but as part of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in Russia during the First World War. Been radicalized earlier, but as things move into the First World War and particularly through 1916 into 1918, with the revolutionary year of 1917 in the middle, he begins to write about the importance of forms of collective land ownership and this socialized account or engagement with the land that might be required in order to streamline, to modernize and to increase productivity and yield in the Russian Empire, slash Republic, the new Russian state after 1917. So his version of the socialization of the land is as a response to crippling economic pressures in Russia from the First World War. So a decline in food production, almost famine levels of. Well, it practically is famine levels in terms of the limited amount of grain that's being produced and the inability of the state to direct production of grain and to distribute resources, food and fodder and other Resources to a vast and unevenly distributed population becomes the problem that he becomes obsessed with. If you can't solve the food crisis and the agricultural problem in Russia, then you're not going to be able to, as it were, entrench or develop the revolution in any meaningful way. And he takes this as a cue to underline the importance of granting ownership of small farmsteads to peasants. To socialize the land, to think about owning the land and to socialize the land at the same time. So to expand the terrain upon which land ownership can be based on. In the wake of the expropriation of land owned by the royals and the czars and the church, for example, in the wake of the revolution and in both socializing and the project of socializing the land or the socialization of the land and the projects of agricultural reform and the idea of state led development, he thinks that you might be able to overturn or at least offset some of the negative implications of both the momentary crisis of war and famine and encirclement and political uncertainty. But you might also be able to think about the development of new ways of understanding the economy. And that's, I think, the part of your question about conjunctures and cycles. So war and revolution are to go back to where we started with Alevis. They're disruptive to any kind of idea of equilibrium. But you can understand war and revolution and structural disequilibrium, if you like, in the context of longer run periods or cycles of the rise and decline, or periods of prosperity and decline. And he is very interested and sets up an institute, the Conjuncture Institute, and writes in the early 1920s about the world economy and conjunctural research, for example, excuse me, because he's trying to work out what the sort of, what's the word I'm looking for, what the kind of trajectory out of the revolution and out of the war might look like for Russia, depending upon where it sits in this world economic cycle and where the conjuncture sits within these cycles that he's interested in outlining of global rise and decline. So economic crises are moments within which or are boundary markers of these cycles, some of which are long, some of which are short. And he thinks that if you can understand the periodicity of cycles of economic behavior, if you can model economic rise and decline effectively, then you'll be able to know in the conjuncture whether the right course of action is to, for example, increase the money supply or to double down on domestic productivity and a certain kind of Self sufficiency. And that's what I think he's doing, and that's why he's so interesting. He's building on domestic Russian concerns with grain production, with factory work, with the possibilities of modernization and development. He's engaged with, but sort of adjacent and in the end antagonistic too radical Bolshevik forms of national self sufficiency and national self development, first in the context of an unfriendly international order. He's interested in trying to connect the Russian economy back to the international economic order in ways that might be beneficial to it. But to understand how you might go about doing that, you need to engage in this sort of economic research that will tell you about the relationship between the conjuncture and the cycle, so between history and the contemporary. And that is something that then can be measured, can be visualized, can be seen in powerful ways. And this is why Kondrajiev was so influential to a whole tranche in the 20th century of Marxist economic theorists who were obsessed with this question of what's the relationship between the conjuncture and the economic cycle? And whether you're on the upside of a long wave of capitalist development or whether you're in a period of decline. And you can think about things like, for example, global power transitions. That's what Kondratiev and Keynes and others were thinking about back then, that if the new 20th century world is the world where America is the powerful economic and political hegemon and the transition is away from, say, British imperial power towards America, how do you understand that in terms of long waves of cycles of capitalist development? And how do you see that conjuncture, the shift from one regime to another or one power block to another within that context? And I think Kondrajiev is trying to think similarly about just the. The political economy of transition. How do you get from one conjuncture to the next within the context of these cycles that might run for periods of 20 years, they might run for long periods of 100 years, and in between there are all sorts of different sorts of episodes and moments. And I think that's what makes him fascinating. It's a kind of mixture of the domestic and the international. The emergence of the idea of a world economy that moves in cycles as a subject that might be studied, that might have data behind it, and that might be a way of connecting up factories, industrial productivity, measuring inflation rate and so on. This is the start of some of this in a radical Russian context. And it turns out to be hugely influential.
- [76:34]
B
Very different context, kind of shades of Joseph Schumpeter, different approach. So I do want to ask, to kind of close this out, John Maynard kind's his role in your book. Why is he so focused on Malthus, particularly for his reconstruction in Europe?
- [76:57]
C
Good question. And it's a long chapter in the book. I'll try and be brief. But the point I think that Keynes takes from Malthus, that might be of the most pointed interest first of all, is that he thinks that Malthus had a very particular view of political economy as the search for what Malthus and Keynes reading Malthus termed aggregate demand. So he's interested in Keynes, that is, he's interested in seeing Malthus as a, as a figure who did economics in a particular way. He was looking for the relationship between population, subsistence, capacity and progress, as it were. And while Keynes agrees at some points with Malthus emphasis on the problem of population is the problem that needs to be solved, he becomes more interested in the style of Malthus arguments than their content at different points. And so he moves from using Malthus as a foil for thinking about population and quality of leadership or quality of, say, dimensional stock of population, to using Malthus as a foil for thinking about unemployment as a new kind of problem that might be analogous to population but is sort of different. Or from thinking about, from using Malthus and Malthusian styles of argument about political economy, for thinking about why in the 1930s one might want to move towards a politics and an economics of self sufficiency instead of internationalism in the face of Bolshevism, National Socialism, fascism, why self sufficiency might be a more pointed sort of response to those kinds of international threats and challenges. And it comes through an engagement with Malthus as a particular type of political economist because he's not that interested in models, he's not that interested in sort of abstract deductive theorems about how political economy works. He's got this foundational problem that just won't go away that I think Keynes really wants to grab hold of first of all, which is the foundational problem of how much or how easy it is for population growth to be managed when you only have a finite supply of food or subsistence. And that dialectic, if you like, or that tension between population and subsistence provides then a frame for thinking about political economy as a problem space through which you engage with something and the way in which that problem space can be engaged with shifts according to context. So in a fairly cute way, Keynes tries to repurpose Malthus as what he calls the first Cambridge economist in order to show that there's a trajectory that links both him to Malthus and that there's a style of doing political economy that they have in common. It's different from the increasingly technical political economy that's being practiced by some of his contemporaries.
- [80:38]
B
Okay, so what's going on with you next? Do you have any studies you're working on?
- [80:48]
C
Yes, too many probably, but I guess there are three. But one is a general sort of history of political thought from 1848 to 1914. And it's an attempt to go back over some of the work that's been done in this World War I book, but had a slightly different purpose, which was just to set out in a less sort of expansive way, just primarily for students of the subject what the history of political thought looks like from the period 1848 to 1914. Because there hasn't been a sort of general history of political thought of that period for quite some time now. And I've been commissioned to write that for a long time. So that's what I'm doing. First off, I'm also developing some ideas around the relationship between the Anthropocene and both debates about and practices of in the present war time. And that's to say I'm interested in why debates about the environment and the Anthropocene are so enmeshed with the language of war. A wartime for the planet, Wartime to save the planet. There are wars going on everywhere that are wars over resources. And these resources are geared towards thinking about how one might either entrench or move away from certain sorts of fossil fuel alliance. And there are wars over resources that sound both very old and very new. And that I want to write something about why climate politics and Anthropocene style political thinking is so obsessed with the language of war and wartime. But then, the third and final project that I'll be spending most of my time on, I guess over the next five to 10 years, is an ambitious sort of attempt, I think, to try and put together the impact of modernist art on the development of the field of art history, in order to suggest that the languages through which we've come to think about politics, and indeed, to some extent, economics in the 20th century, are themselves built upon the languages that art historians had begun to use to think about how to understand modern art and its implications. So language is about realism and abstraction, questions about representation, questions about interpretation. All of these, I think, have their origin story in disciplines and practices of art and art history. And I wanted to say something about, as it were, the aesthetic origins of the language of politics, modern politics particularly. That's what I'm working on, very broadly put.
- [83:43]
B
Well, thank you for joining us today.
- [83:45]
C
Professor Kelly, thank you very much for having me. And I hope the answers weren't too long.
- [83:52]
B
It was great to the point, particularly for the nuance of prodigiousness of your book. And that book is Worlds of Wartime, the First World War and the Reconstruction of Modern Politics, out now by Oxford University Press. On behalf of Professor Kelly, this has and myself. This has been a production of the New Books Network, the Intellectual History Channel. Please tune in next time.