The Blight of Essentialism Hunting
To begin, I quote from this feminist essay on the origins of the wrong turn taken by feminist studies into gender studies:
"from its high point in the late 70s and early 80s—when feminist scholars integrated the insights of the second wave to produce a prodigious efflorescence of writing on motherhood, including Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering, Nancy Friday’s My Mother/My Self, Jane Lazarre’s The Mother Knot and Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking—we have shifted to a curious silence.
What happened to this burgeoning of academic feminist work on motherhood?
Judith Butler happened. After Butler, it became problematic to talk about ‘women’—so we spent all our time deconstructing women and exposing women’s sins. We could describe feminists as bigots, we could attack ourselves and others for ‘false universalizing’ or ‘essentialism’—a period defined by what Carole Pateman called “[essentialist hunting]” ( Interview with Carole Pateman by Steve On, Contemporary Political Theory, May 2010, Volume 9, Issue 2, pp 239–250). But we could not develop a feminist theory of women—especially of mothers—after postmodernism. Talking about women’s experiences in general became taboo. There was an obsessive and often disingenuous focus on ‘marginality’—disingenuous because the same white, middle-class women as always were doing most of the talking, and because marginality cannot be the end goal of a liberation movement. This has resulted in a truly absurd situation: focusing on ‘women’ has become an essentialist taboo within women’s studies."
Interview with Carole Pateman: "The Sexual Contract," Women in Politics, Globalization and Citizenship, Nirmal Puwar and Carole Pateman, Feminist Review, No. 70, Globalization (2002), pp. 123-133
I’m neither concerned with feminist studies nor gender studies here. I am concerned with the zeal for identifying and extirpating essentialist modes of thought anywhere they could be found. The result has been politically and intellectually disastrous, especially for the Left, resulting in a switch from class and socio-economic issues of power and resources to identity and an endless inflation of discourse.
Carole Pateman published The Sexual Contract in the late 1980s. This was the time I finished my first degree and started to specialize in questions of particular concern. I read the latest intellectual fashions in political and cultural theory and was singularly unimpressed by claims to replace socialism with democratic theory, not least because it was couched in language that barely any typical member of the demos could understand. That’s not a patronising put down of the intellectual qualities of common folk. I could barely understand it myself. Investigating further, I was drawn to the conclusion that there was nothing to understand, the jargon-soaked language concealing a poverty of thought. I made the effort to penetrate Lacan and Saussurean linguistics and such like, and found the content to be zero. If there was something of substance being said here, it was not be said clearly, and was as sure as hell exclusive rather than democratic. The language was not accessible; it was precisely the language used by those who sought to insulate their power/knowledge from challenge and check.
When Pateman published The Sexual Contract, the major issue in feminist circles, and in cultural theory generally, was essentialism. The critics of essentialism, frankly, not only didn’t understand what essentialism entailed, criticizing a bogeyman of their own nightmarish imaginations, but failed to see that their emancipatory claims required some form of essentialism to be realized. Pateman expressed her concern that the theorists she described as “essentialism hunters” had overlooked precisely the essentialist the arguments she had made in her works and hence failed to appreciate how these strengthened their emancipatory commitments. Leftist intellectuals were removing the ground from under their feet, leaving their political commitments floating arbitrarily, in danger of being blown in 'awkward' directions.
When I began my period of theorising sometime around 1990, undertaking research at doctoral level in Manchester in 1995, I read Carole Pateman and similar theorists and political philosophers in depth. The key themes of these thinkers were all united by an underlying and often explicit concept of human nature. The essentialist conception of human nature, as a potential which unfolds within specific social relations in history, provided an orienting direction to the philosophical and theoretical work I did at Manchester and after. I was well aware that I was swimming against the intellectual – and political – tide, but I was also aware that I was far from being alone. I also knew that that tide had to be turned, otherwise the result would be an intellectual and political wasteland on the Left and, through cultural influence via the universities and intellectual media, in wider society.
Throughout her work, Pateman expresses her concern to establish democracy as a participatory conception based upon the character of the individuals composing the demos and the provision of spaces and modes for participation. Her argument proceeds from a thoroughgoing critique of the partiality of liberalism. Pateman exposes the liberal ‘story’ of the social contract to be a fiction in its creation, one that is continually re-told to reproduce and entrench a particular political and economic regime through the absorption of potential alternatives in contemporary neo-liberal accommodations. For Pateman, liberalism is an insidious and consistently misleading story in its combination of individualism, libertarianism, and contractarianism. There is no real democracy here, not in its substantive and parliamentary sense. The totalizing effects of this ‘story’ is so comprehensive that seemingly alternative of political theory – republicanism, socialism, communism – seem unable to escape its acidic influence. Alasdair MacIntyre, another contemporary thinker who was an influence on my defence of essentialism against the essentialism hunters, expresses the view that the moderns are all empty free-floating liberals living after virtue:
‘Modern systematic politics, whether liberal, conservative, radical, or socialist, simply has to be rejected from a standpoint that owes genuine allegiance to the tradition of the virtues; for modern politics itself expresses in its institutional forms a systematic rejection of that tradition.’
Alasdair MacIntyre
In response to contractarianism, Pateman asked why individuals would consent to be ruled by others. She examined the ontological bases of such a notion, concluding that the philosophical core of liberal democratic theory is incoherent, providing no plausible answer to the key questions of politics and political obligation. She therefore sought the bases of political community and of democracy itself elsewhere. And, under the influence of Pateman’s work, and the similar work of others, I did likewise. This democratising theme based upon an essentialist metaphysics recurs throughout my own work, whether with respect to notions of a proletarian public and self-managing socialism, investigations of economic democracy and substantive freedom, or the articulation of social ecology and rational freedom as a relational freedom. At the heart of it is a critical engagement with the ontological basis of liberalism and a consistent repudiation of individualistic conceptions of liberty. Part of that concern is an examination of the collective conditions of the individuality, otherness, and difference anti-essentialist thinkers celebrate. They condemn those conditions, involving a revaluation of morality, community, law, and authority as well as notions of common good, as repressive in their implications; I see such conditions as essential to any possible and meaningful freedom, equality, and democracy.
Pateman’s first book, Participation and Democratic Theory (1970), where Pateman established a convincing case against ‘realist’ empirical theories of democracy, showing how they lead to elitist conceptions of liberal democracy. The tendencies to elitism and to the reduction of democracy to a competitive elitism are inherent in this ‘realist’ conception. Once we understand this, we see that the contemporary split between elitism and populism has been a long time in preparation. And it could all have been avoided, had we been prepared to expose the roots of the contemporary crisis in the liberal ontology which falsely separates individuality and sociality.
Pateman took her critique further in The Problem of Political Obligation, where she establishes the case for democratic participation on the part of all, associating, individuals as the basis for a truly free and equal society. Pateman’s model rejects the atomistic conception of democracy which sees citizens as no more than choosing, self-maximising individuals who approach the public realm only to advance and secure their self-interest. The democratic life of a polity broadens and deepens as a result of the psychological and educative effects of participation, becoming rooted in the lives and characters of individuals and the societies formed through practice. In Participation and Democratic Theory, Pateman presents a vision of democracy as something which is consonant with an essential human need for free, creative, and interdependent social activity. Her argument throughout these works is explicitly essentialist and is based on a conception of human nature. Remove that conception and her claims become arbitrary – a point that applies to all other conceptions without essentialist grounding.
I noted, too, the strong influence of Rousseau in Pateman’s work, Rousseau as read through the eyes of Guild Socialist G.D.H. Cole. That’s how her work struck me. I had developed a taste for philosophy through discovering the bookshop of Reid of Liverpool in 1990. I distinctly remember the first books I bought from my first visit to the shop, Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy, Passmore’s book on modern philosophy, Della Volpe’s Rousseau and Marx, J.S. Mill’s Autobiography, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, translated with an Introduction by G.D.H. Cole. Rousseau impressed me most of all, but it was a Rousseau influenced by Cole’s extensive essay in the Introduction. I detected, too, the influence of Mill in Pateman’s argument.
I single out Pateman here as a woman who resisted and rejected the caricature of essentialism in the hands of certain feminist thinkers. I also loved the work of Martha Nussbaum for the very same reason. Nussbaum seems to have had little time for feminist theory, and offered a very strong defence of Aristotelian essentialism. So did I. As for Pateman, her close examination of the classics of liberal thought in The Disorder of Women and The Sexual Contract exposed the progress of an emancipatory politics to have reached a grim impasse that is insurmountable in liberal terms. The crisis of liberalism has been a long time coming. The problem is, given the capacity of liberalism to absorb all alternate political forms, this crisis has become a general crisis. With respect to feminism, liberalism’s capacity to accommodate all progressive advances towards women’s equality within itself seems total. For all the radical rhetoric, there will be no change in fundamental relations. The same point applies to the way that Green politics seems incapable of transcending the liberal frame.
Carole Pateman and the nature of a participatory society, Jeffrey Goatcher. Pages 217-234 | Published online: 08 Aug 2006
I’m less interested in feminist issues than in the caricature of essences, essentialism, and essentialist metaphysics that has characterized this kind of thinking since its inception. In the eighties and nineties, feminism became increasingly anti-essentialist as essentialism hunting became the intellectual obligation of the day. That day became extended over time to all but destroy the Left as a political, social, and intellectual movement independent of liberalism. There are survivals here and there, where theorists remain on nodding terms with 'ordinary' people, but the dominant culture is liberal – and accidentalist, atomist, and anti-essentialist - to the core. As the above articles make clear, the zeal with which many feminist theorists have been hunting out and condemning ‘essentialism’ wherever it could be found has led to almost any argument concerned with human nature – ‘women’ in feminist theory – being dismissed as essentialism regardless of context.
As a result, we are mired in a rights-based conventionalism that is without substantive grounding. The whole sense of Marx’s case for substantive as against formal freedom has been lost. Formal rights conferred by the state do not comprise the full range of rights that individuals might enjoy as an associative citizen public, nor do they guarantee individuals a life that qualifies as “good” in a substantive sense. Individualist rights-based theories are inattentive to substantive freedom and extend an excessive and destructive individualism. Jurgen Habermas is another key thinker whose work I developed to buttress the essentialist conception. He writes that freedom, even personal freedom, is possible only in 'internal connection with a network of interpersonal relationships', in the context of a community that unites each and all, so that 'the freedom of some is not achieved at the cost of the freedom of others'. He therefore argued for the need to establish ‘the conditions of collective freedom' so as to remove the 'potential for Social-Darwinist menace' that is inherent in individualist liberal conceptions of freedom: 'The individual cannot be free unless all are free, and all cannot be free unless all are free in community. It is this last proposition which one misses in the empiricist and individualist traditions' (Habermas 1992: 146).
An individualist liberal conception associates rights with negative liberties, but negative liberties on their own cannot ensure that human beings are able to become who they would like to be or really are (Taylor 1997). A positive conception of freedom begs a conception of the human ontology, so as to be able to conceive of the good life. Rawls specifies a range of primary goods (Rawls 1971), but much better is Nussbaum’s presentation of essential human functions or capabilities (Nussbaum 1992) and Brugger’s accounts of flourishing (Brugger 1996). To criticize prevailing society on account of impairing the human ontology in some way is to have some idea of what the good life for human beings is, which in turn presupposes a conception of human nature. This is a substantive and essentialist conception and cannot be otherwise. Remove that, and there is no basis for an emancipatory critique.
Nussbaum, Martha C. 1992. “Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism.” Political Theory 20 no. 2: 202-46
Essentialism is the view that every entity has a set of attributes that are necessary to its identity and function. Influenced by Nussbaum, my work on essentialism was heavily based on Aristotle. In time, I have come to see how much anti-essentialism is based on a caricature of Plato. Plato is the Elvis of philosophy, the biggest dead while male of all to be slaughtered, the king to be dethroned. Plato's idealism held that all things have such an "essence"—an "idea" or "form". I tend not to develop essentialism through Plato’s Forms. But I have proceeded from Plato’s idealism, and I do see the extent to which Plato’s rich and nuanced arguments are grossly simplified to make for easy rejection.
‘Essentialism hunting’ on the part of those misidentified with the Left, now going by the name of Cultural Marxism, is an intellectual blight with disastrous moral and political consequences. I challenged its anti-essentialism head-on from the first. I saw it as acidic to socilism and Leftist politics, paving the way for the endless slicing and dicing of human beings. I was thoroughly underwhelmed and uninspired by this mode of thought first time around and have absolutely no inclination to re-engage with it. I shall therefore refer readers to the various works of mine where I subject anti-essentialism to extensive critique, setting out the true position of essentialism. I wasn’t alone in this work, but it was easy for me to feel as though I was. I was lucky enough to be in touch with philosophers who knew what essentialism was, took it seriously, and vehemently protested the caricature being projected by those dominant in prevailing intellectual and cultural circles. The anti-essentialists sounded radical and emancipatory, but were in fact siren voices leading the Left into the cul-de-sac it is in today. The fractured terrain of identity politics is their bequest. The commonality and universality which is central to the politics of the Left is nowhere in sight. Universality and commonality are the political and historical basis of the Left, without them there is no Left. Thee most stupid thing the Left could do is supplant universality and commonality with 'difference.' That's precisely what it did. As I presented my case on essentialism back in 2000, I was told that the ‘post’everything crowd will soon be up a creek without a paddle. They are, and have taken a lot of people with them. I’m not one of them.
Norman Geras was a political philosopher in Manchester at the time I was seeking supervision in the area. He wrote the book Discourses of Extremity in 1990, just a few years before I started in Manchester. Much of my early work was a critique of the likes of Laclau and Mouffe. Geras was scathing in his book, delivering a systematic critique of anti-essentialism and warning of the dangers to the Left should it go down this route. I always remember the conclusion to his book:
Argument by caricature and simplification; by easy reduction and intellectual short-cut; by light-minded use of such hackneyed vulgarizations as have already been answered many times over (and as will be seen today for vulgarizations not only by Marxists but by a substantial number of fair-minded, non-Marxist students of Marxism) - this is a dual dereliction. It obstructs fruitful socialist debate. And it reinforces the currently difficult external environment of that debate. It is no fit style for the kind of socialist pluralism we need. In any case, enough is now more than enough.
If that was true in 1990, it was also a conclusion I drew after spending too much time wading through the rank bad arguments of this crowd. After what seemed like an eternity in their mind-rotting company I finished with my own critique of their work in 1997 and moved on to more substantive and more profitable areas. I gave their work so much attention at the time because I feared the damage that these people would do to the Left, at a time of assault on working class politics and material organisations. And so it came to pass.
I wasn’t quite alone. I met Lawrence Wilde, who read my work; he is a strong defender of essentialism in the thought of Karl Marx. Scott Meikle, too, is clear that the essentialist metaphysics which characterizes Marx’s work constitutes the strength of that work, and is nothing at all like the caricature presented. Then there is Terry Eagleton who, in 2003’s After Theory, stated that ‘Anti-essentialism is largely the product of philosophical amateurism and ignorance.’ It really is that simple, for all of the grandiloquent language employed by the anti-essentialists: ‘There is no need to imagine, as many anti-essentialists do, that natures need be eternally fixed. The most dramatic example we have of a nature which is perpetually re-making itself is human nature.’ (Eagleton 2003 ch 5). That’s certainly how I read essentialism in the long line from Aristotle, Hegel, and Marx, the latter two in particular who emphasised human self-creation on the basis of innate potentials throughout history. The idea of fixed, timeless essences is a straw-man on which decidedly average thinkers pursuing a political agenda have built careers on, as well as destroying the bases of a genuine leftist politics.
The political philosopher John O'Neill makes it clear that most of what postmodern thinkers criticize as ‘essentialist’ is not the conception of essences presented by serious philosophers in history but a mere self-authored caricature defended by precisely nobody. (John O'Neill, The Market: Ethics, Knowledge and Politics, London, 1998, ch. 1; Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, Oxford, 1996, pp. 97-104). Anti-essentialism is a quick and easy way to sound profound and radical when one is neither. I read the criticisms of essentialism, and I wonder who on Earth critics have been reading.
I’m glad that more are beginning to see what I had been trying to point out so many years ago; I am less than glad at the destructive impact these intellectual charlatans have had, not so much in science (where precisely no-one takes them seriously) or philosophy (where their impact is marginal) but in social theory and politics, where they have confused, demoralized and divided the Left, presiding over a shift from socio-economic and class issues to culture, identity, and discourse. The identity crisis engulfing the Labour Party is postmodernism’s revenge.
As for this ‘marginality,’ I have in my own work criticized the way that securely tenured professors have made careers out of extolling the virtues of ‘otherness,’ ‘difference,’ and life at the margins. Such people don’t live at the margins, I do. My presentation of essentialism buttressing community and the common good has, on many occasions, been met with criticisms that such notions are repressive in their implications and entail the denial and suppression of ‘otherness’ and ‘difference.’ I have been accused of speaking out of ‘white male privilege.’ I have to savour the irony. I live on the margins and am one of the ‘different’ and ‘other’ people, and yet I find myself being lectured by secure, well-off members of the educational and cultural establishment on 'difference,' 'otherness' and life at the margins. Far from celebrating life at the margins, I can tell such people that it is hard, miserable, and lonely, not least on account of the way in which people on the inside talk over you, talk down to you, and, worst of all, arrogate to themselves the right to speak for you.
Eagleton writes well:
Thinkers like Foucault and Derrida chafe against these equivalences, even if they accept them as unavoidable. They would like a world made entirely out of differences. Indeed, like their great mentor Nietzsche, they think the world is made entirely out of differences, but that we need to fashion identities in order to get by. It is true that nobody in a world of pure differences would be able to say anything intelligible - that there could be no poetry, road signs, love letters or log sheets, as well as no statements that everything is uniquely different from everything else. But this is simply the price one would have to pay for not being constrained by the behaviour of others, like paying that little bit extra for a first-class rail ticket.
It is a mistake, however, to believe that norms are always restrictive. In fact it is a crass Romantic delusion. It is normative in our kind of society that people do not throw themselves with a hoarse cry on total strangers and amputate their legs. It is conventional that child murderers are punished, that working men and women may withdraw their labour, and that ambulances speeding to a traffic accident should not be impeded just for the hell of it. Anyone who feels oppressed by all this must be seriously oversensitive. Only an intellectual who has overdosed on abstraction could be dim enough to imagine that whatever bends a norm is politically radical.
Those who believe that normativity is always negative are also likely to hold that authority is always suspect. In this, they differ from radicals, who respect the authority of those with long experience of fighting injustice, or of laws which safeguard people's physical integrity or working conditions. Similarly, some modern-day cultural thinkers seem to believe that minorities are always more vibrant than majorities. It is not the most popular of beliefs among the disfigured victims of Basque separatism. Some fascist groups, however, may be flattered to hear it, along with UFO buffs and Seventh Day Adventists. It was majorities, not minorities, which confounded imperial power in India and brought down apartheid. Those who oppose norms, authority and majorities as such are abstract universalists, even though most of them oppose abstract universalism as well.
The postmodern prejudice against norms, unities and consensuses is a politically catastrophic one. It is also remarkably dim-witted. But it does not only spring from having precious few examples of political solidarity to remember. It also reflects a real social change. It is one result of the apparent disintegration of old-fashioned bourgeois society into a host of sub-cultures.
Eagleton 2003 ch 1
Perry Anderson’s contempt is as vivid as it is withering. The 'solid (bourgeois) amphitheatre' has yielded to 'an aquarium of floating, evanescent forms - the projectors and managers, auditors and janitors, administrators and speculators of contemporary capital: functions of a monetary universe that knows no social fixities and stable identities.’ (Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 1998, pp. 86 and 85). Eagleton comments that ‘it is this lack of stable identities which for some cultural theory today is the last word in radicalism. Instability of identity is 'subversive' - a claim which it would be interesting to test out among the socially dumped and disregarded.’ (Eagleton 2003 ch 1).
Now that you ask, I will tell you plain, as one of the ‘dumped and disregarded,’ that the anti-essentialist celebration of otherness and difference is neither subversive, radical nor emancipatory: it is a fantasy that arises in the decadence and dissolution of liberal society, a bourgeois indulgence, and a political and intellectual blight.
I wouldn’t underestimate how difficult it will be to turn the tide. The statement of fact, biological or otherwise, will not suffice against a mentality that has made a virtue of jettisoning reason and reality in favour of a cultural and social ‘creationism.’
One reason why this linguistic/culturally constructivist is so hard to resist, let alone defeat, is precisely because it is ideological, and hence immune to facts, reason, and falsification. Hence the seemingly infinite number of people pushing it as hard as people seek to push back. It’s a political push-and-shove which has people denying realities clear to the non-obscurantist out of loyalty to a political position or cause. It’s a modern fideism and, as such, is immune from rationalism. Its proponents genuinely believe they are good people motivated by a good will, and that they are more enlightened and, indeed, morally superior than others. Any popular backlash against their views merely confirms them in their enlightened and superior self-image. The whole process is very seductive, and well-nigh impossible to combat at the level of reason and statement of fact, since it permits its adherents to feel good about themselves and superior to others. Having 'enlightened' themselves into a nominalist madness, they find it easy, indeed ideologically imperative, to dismiss detractors as bigots motivated by an ill-will. The mentality is self-confirming, self-validating, and self-reinforcing, insulated from fact and reason. The proof of understanding is acceptance, obedience, and action. Those who do not accept, obey, and act are dismissed as having failed to understand. This is the old heresy of fideism attached to processes of linguistic and cultural self-creation. This is the reason why debates involving the protagonists quickly degenerate into heated exchanges between the elect and the damned. No dialogue is possible since there can be no compromise on sacred truths. These are non-negotiable. This is the end of a common discourse based on shared meanings and understandings. Truth based on fact and reason has been abandoned for fantastical self-assertions that the barest scrutiny show to be false. It's hard to credit that these people actually believe the nonsense they spout, but the worrying thing is not only that they do, but do so with a religious zeal. That constitutes a genuine threat to the civil peace through the unravelling of social bonds and ties. Language is a means of communication central to processes of socialisation. Corrupt the language and people soon turn against one another.
Essence-hunting is a blight on both theory and practice. It is a blight on society and on radical politics. And mark my words: the so called ‘progressive’ Left is going to make women reap what the (man-hating) feminists have sown.
I shall end with a couple of passages from my critique of anti-essentialism in 1997, Materialist Dialectics : Praxis and the Society-Nature Interchange
“For the Marxists of the academy, 'the economic' determines nothing. There is 'no necessary relation’ between economic position and political and ideological positions. This constant assertion of there being no necessary relation has become the occasion for asserting that politics and ideology truly determine all that there is. The material world, it appears, does not exist until it is defined into existence; it is clay in the hands of the politicians and the intellectuals (Eagleton 1991).
“If the working class has no interests derived from its socio-economic conditions, then there is nothing in this class to resist its being politically or ideologically 'constructed' in various ways. All that resists my own political construction of the class is someone else's. The working class, or, for that matter, any other subordinate group, thus becomes clay in the hands of those wishing to coopt it into some political strategy, tugged this way and that between socialists and fascists. If socialism is not necessarily in the workers interests, since the workers in fact have no interests outside those they are 'constructed' into, why on earth should they bother to become socialists?
“The basic paradox at the heart of post-marxism is quite apparent here. Rejecting Marxism for its epistemological and political authoritarianism, post-marxism nevertheless adopts a particularly assertive and arrogant relationship to social agents. Indeed it treats social agents as a passive piece of clay to be moulded any way whatsoever according to the predilections of the hegemonisers (Eagleton 1991: 214 217). Thus, in relation to the working class and socialism, it seems perfectly elitist and authoritarian to argue that, for instance, once the workers are hegemonised, coopted into a wider political movement, their previous identities, already unrecognised, are now completely submerged within the hegemonic process. Whatever human beings were before being hegemonised bears absolutely no relation to what they have become by being hegemonised.”
And here are links to two works in which I argue the case for essentialism and an essentialist metaphysics.