Andrew Morrison
In this guest blog post, Andrew Morrison (Sheffield Hallam University) explores the significance of natural imagery and metaphor in the work of Raymond Williams and F. A. Hayek, and what they reveal about these thinkers’ contrasting conceptions of freedom and social change in complex societies.
Raymond Williams and F.A. Hayek are two writers from diametrically opposed political positions. However, both employ naturalistic and organic imagery to describe human cultures and processes. In this post, I suggest that their different uses of such imagery reveal much about their very different views on key questions of human agency and freedom.
The comparison of human cultures to natural growth processes has a long history across many areas of intellectual and artistic endeavour. Culture and nature are etymologically linked. As Raymond Williams notes in Keywords, ‘Culture in all its early uses was a noun of process: the tending of something, basically crops or animals’ (Williams, 1983: 87). Romantic writers and social activists made extensive use of naturalistic and organic metaphors to depict society and social processes. A consistent theme of Romantic poetry such as William Blake’s ‘London’ or in much of the writings of William Morris is the contrast between the ‘alien’ civilisation of industrialisation and its more ‘natural’ pre-Industrial Revolution counterpart. Industrialisation debases the human soul through the destruction of the natural world. Natural human growth and development, the exercise of the imagination and of free will, are artificially trapped and distorted by the ‘factory system’ and urban poverty with the consequence that people lose their natural humanity.
From the nineteenth century, early sociologists also drew upon organic analogies to depict society. Here, though, nature was not aesthetically and morally counterposed to industrialisation, as with the Romantics. Instead, organic language was deployed as a means to convey the increasing complexities of advanced industrialised societies. In 1860, Herbert Spencer coined the term ‘social organism’ to capture the notion that societies are very much like biological organisms in that as they grow, they evolve to become more complex. Thus, where a biological organism grows to be multi-cellular with specialised capacities (heart, lungs, liver, etc.), so a society will also develop specialised adaptive functions: divisions of labour, institutions, cultural traditions. Emile Durkheim, writing in The Division of Labor in Society (1893), appears to advance this argument further: the specialised divisions of labour characteristic of advanced capitalist societies produce their own form of natural growth in the shape of ‘organic solidarity’. Societal complexity has the seemingly paradoxical effect of both increasingly atomising individuals while also making them more reliant on each other. This reliance takes organic form through the formation of specialised institutions and laws which emerge as an adaptive response to the divisions of labour. Thus, Durkheim views industrialisation as a form of eco-sphere for the evolution of its own social norms and practices.
Raymond Williams’s writing evolved over the course of his lifetime and his relationship with Marxist theory was a central aspect of that evolution. Two of his seminal works, Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961), were the culmination of a decade-long project to formulate his ideas on culture. These ‘earlier period’ works pre-date Williams’ later, more explicit engagement with Marxism from the mid-1960s onwards, and this is apparent in both publications. In the concluding chapter of Culture and Society and, above all, in chapter three of The Long Revolution, Williams repeatedly equates human society with human biological growth in ways that appear to sideline more conventional Marxian structuralist language of class in favour of organicist imagery. This use of nature and biology as metaphor for society may be seen as an extension of Williams’ more literal use of the natural sciences in The Long Revolution, and particularly the work of the biologist J.Z. Young, whose work on the brain Williams discusses in aid of his argument for an active empiricism wherein all humans creatively interpret their reality. In The Long Revolution, Williams employs a ‘culture as nature’ perspective to make his case for a more democratic, egalitarian society. He argues that the move to a truly participatory society requires a shift away from old oppressive, or ‘dominative’, modes of thinking and towards an idea of culture as natural growth and to a pluralist acceptance of and respect for others,
To know, even in part, any group of living processes, is to see and wonder at their extraordinary variety and complexity. To know, even in part, the life of man [sic], is to see and wonder at its extraordinary multiplicity, its great fertility of value. We have to live by our own attachments, but we can only live fully, in common, if we grant the attachments of others, and make it our common business to keep the channels of growth clear. (Williams, 1961: 337)
This is not, however, a simple process. It is an always precarious balancing act between the needs of the individual and those of society in general. The concept of a ‘common culture’ that is made fully and democratically available to all social groups—a key idea within The Long Revolution—brings together the twin notions of an individual’s ‘natural growth’ and that of the societal ‘tending’ of that growth—the former alone implies simple asocial individualism, the latter alone authoritarian training. A common culture is thus Williams’s attempt to marry and synthesise these polarities into something more harmonious. Finding the correct balance between the individual and society is a central question because each individual person (the ‘organism’) carries or embodies within them the larger ‘organisation’ (society) of which they are a part and which they help to reproduce (114). He elaborates further on the point. Human society provides the ground and conditions in which an individual may grow when the barriers of artificial inequality are removed, but it is the individual who must put energy and effort into their own social growth process to become a full member of that society (115). I suggest that, in elaborating his notion of a ‘common culture’ through his use of organic imagery, Williams can give the impression of having strayed from explicit Marxian analysis. For example, he argues that to understand the relationship between individual and society better, we should cease our use of restrictive structuralist language and think, instead, of society as a continuous, indissolubly related form of ‘organisation’. At the very micro-level, we have the ‘organism’ of the individual who lives within the organisation, which is a continuum of social life encompassing social class and society. To understand this fine imbrication, we need to be able to shift analysis along a continuum from the biological to the social: ‘we are studying forms of organization in a continuous process: the brain, the nervous system, the body, the family, the group, the society, man. There is no real point at which we can break off this process, to isolate an independent substance’ (117).
It is not entirely clear if Williams’s proposed analysis represents a process ontology, one that would seem to offer clear parallels with the pragmatism of William James and John Dewey, or whether this is more akin to a methodological proposal. Certainly, the notion that we have here of process over entity, a process on which we can, at most, abstract certain nodal points for their analytical value rather than viewing them in more substantive, structural fashion, drew much criticism from fellow Marxists such as Terry Eagleton and E.P. Thompson. And, if we leave ontological questions aside, it seems clear there is much here that is redolent of the naturalistic pragmatism of James and Dewey: the emphasis upon growth, agency and the emancipatory potential of society to aid in these, the latter point being one that Williams most particularly shares with Dewey. Williams’ later-period work, such as Marxism and Literature (1977), reflected a more direct engagement with Marxian conceptual language. By contrast, I suggest that his earlier period use of naturalistic and organic metaphors expresses a somewhat different critical language: a very mid-twentieth century form of Romantic critique of capitalist utilitarianism wherein society, when liberated from artificial social constraints, offers the seed ground that will cultivate both individual and social purpose. What Williams is seeking in his arguments for social change is, in fact, what moral philosophers call eudaimonia, or human flourishing and happiness through fulfilment, purpose, and self-realisation achieved by acting in accordance with reason and virtue. We can see this in all his writings, his work in adult education, and in his political activism.
Williams tended to deploy organic and naturalistic imagery in what we may call a transitive sense with an emphasis upon the intentionality of the subject towards the object: we cultivate society, we keep the channels of growth clear. This is all reflective of Williams’ humanistic socialism. By contrast, for F.A. Hayek, ‘culture as nature’ was more clearly intransitive. Following his concept of ‘cultural evolution’, successful and enduring institutions and social practices emerged ‘naturally’ in a way that de-emphasised any notion of an intentional guiding subject. As the name might suggest, this is a concept with neo-Darwinian overtones, and it is consonant with Hayek’s methodological individualism. Individuals or even organisations can have clear goals but not ‘society’. Society is no more than an aggregation of individuals who each have their own intentionality. Social growth emerges unplanned and spontaneously from the actions and interactions of separate individuals or, at most, groups of individuals. For Hayek, this process may best be understood as a form of non-biological ‘natural selection’ in which individuals succeed and institutions survive through a ‘cultural inheritance’ whereby necessary skills and ideas are transmitted through learning and imitation (1960: 53). Cultural values, ideas, and social skills are passed on through traditions and institutions, and it is on this point that Hayek perceives the greatest difference between the political philosophies of empiricism and rationalism.
Hayek argues that rationalist thought (as classically exemplified in the French Revolution) opposes all institutions that have not been consciously designed with a purpose as oppressors of freedom (55). In itself, this is a very broad-brush characterisation of the complexities of rationalist political thought that is open to much debate. However, it is sufficient to note here that it permits Hayek to contrast this with the ‘evolutionary tradition’ of empiricism, the prime examples of which are historically to be found in the Anglophone world and principally in England. For empiricists, freedom is experienced as the opportunity for the growth of undesigned institutions and for organically developed customs and habits because, ‘Paradoxical as it may appear, it is probably true that a successful free society will always in a large measure be a tradition-bound society’ (55). He goes on to argue that the empiricists’ valuing of tradition, custom, and unplanned institutions does not mean that they simply accept these arrangements as being ‘wiser’; rather, for Hayek a respect for the past derives from the necessary limits to knowledge characteristic of complex societies and is based on the view that, ‘the result of the experimentation of many generations may embody more experience than any one man [sic] possesses’ (55).
Hayek’s argument for tradition as a transmitter of important, shared norms and values is central to his cultural evolutionary perspective on the development of a ‘rules-based’ form of social development. For Hayek, the notion of social rules is tied in with his argument that most of the norms or precepts that guide us in our social actions and interactions cannot be expressed in explicit, propositional terms but are, instead, assimilated at a tacit, assumptive level. Hayek asserts that ‘Man’ is as much a ‘rule-following animal’ as a ‘purpose-seeking one’ (1982: 11). In other words, humans act by following social rules that they may not be able to articulate or even understand at least as much as they do in pursuit of explicitly formulated goals. Hayek borrows from anthropology in suggesting that the unintended consequence of this evolutionary, undesigned mode of social practice is,
a process described at first as ‘growth’ and later as ‘evolution’, a process in which practices which had first been adopted for other reasons, or even purely accidentally, were preserved because they enabled the group in which they had arisen to prevail over others (1982: 9)
Thus, for Hayek, useful and successful institutions and social practices survive by a process of natural selection, and what has evolved unconsciously in an undesigned manner is naturally more fit for survival than that which has been purposely invented.
I am inspired by the socialist humanism of Raymond Williams and also that of the historian E.P. Thompson, of whom I am also writing in my book. This will compare the treatment of the concept of ‘experience’ by these two thinkers and that of two politically very distinct thinkers, F.A. Hayek, Michael Oakeshott. Thus, I certainly do not share Hayek’s free market politics. Nevertheless, I would have to concede that his epistemological arguments have much to tell us about the necessary limits to knowledge in modern, complex societies and the challenges this implies for planning and design. Williams too was aware of such limits but, where Hayek’s response was to favour ‘natural’, ‘unguided’ cultural evolution, Williams’s answer to social complexity led him to advocate the cultivation of ‘a participating democracy in which all of us, as unique individuals, learn, communicate and control’ (1961: 118). These very different responses to the same problematic of knowledge reflect the intransitive/transitive distinction between these two thinkers referred to earlier.
Hayek’s social philosophy of tradition raises some concerns for critics, including this present author. The political philosopher John Gray makes the important point that, if moral and political principles are to be seen as the ‘mutable products’ of cultural evolution, then there can never be any universal or ‘transcendental’ justification for them (1980: 124). The consequence, in turn, is that we cannot distinguish explanatory from properly normative approaches to social institutions: that is, we cannot properly know if an institution is justifiable simply because it has been handed down to us or if there are valid principles that underpin its continued existence. This is a crucial point for anyone with a critical view to social power relations. There is a surfeit of examples in British history of institutions and traditions which have emerged and endured due to the weight of exploitative class relations rather than to some underlying social purpose or value. This vital point is conveniently lost amid Hayek’s functionalist sociology. Of course, Hayek’s own rejoinder to this criticism would likely be the argument that individual liberty was the irreducible moral and political criterion against which the existence of all social and political arrangements should be judged.
Anna Galeotti makes a similar point to Gray but in a different way. She suggests that Hayek takes the analogy between cultural evolution and natural evolution too literally to the point where the former is misleadingly seen to share the same properties as the latter. The consequence of this is that because the laws of nature (such as the law of gravity) are not coercive, we can, by extension, say that the ‘uncreated rules’ that constitute spontaneous orders are also not oppressive and thus protect liberty (Galeotti, 1987: 175). She goes on to offer the example of the ‘domestic sphere’, with its gendered division of identities and labour, as a site of social life governed by ‘uncreated rules’ that have produced their own ‘unintended consequences’ as a challenge to Hayek’s presumption that all evolutionary change is protective of liberties. Galeotti argues that, while gendered identities have emerged in an unplanned way, that does not mean that they are all progressive nor that we cannot hold their inequalities up to a critical moral light (176). It seems to me that it is a moot point whether gendered identities are, in fact, a good example of social practices that have evolved through Hayekian ‘uncreated rules’. As an axial social category, gender is subject to organising discourses, ideologies, and hegemonic social practices that are pursued with varying measures and degrees of social purpose and explicitness. Nevertheless, I concur with Galeotti’s more general point on Hayek’s over-interpretation of evolutionism. This tendency towards literalism leads Hayek towards a tautological normativism: the justification for the endurance of an institution or tradition lies in the fact that it has endured. By contrast, Williams insists upon foundational principles in our judgement of society: its capacity to foster a common culture and a participatory democracy.
So, ‘culture as nature’ then. But what metaphorical function does nature serve here? The Williams of The Long Revolution saw society as ‘fertile’ and offering ‘channels of growth’. When tended properly, it would allow for the cultivation of positive freedoms in the best sense of that concept: freedom to. This was the heart of Williams’s socialism. Although Hayek was always careful to distinguish cultural evolution from natural evolution, nature offered him a language to express the view that society is competition and survival of the fittest. On this view, nature becomes a delimiting factor: anything that has been purposely planned or designed is not ‘natural’ or ‘evolved’; it is ‘unnatural’ and ‘artificial’ and thus to be rejected. This is at the core of Hayek’s free market thought and his deep antipathy towards social planning and control: his commitment, in fact, to negative freedoms, or freedom from.
References
Durkheim, E. (2013 [1893]) The Division of Labor in Society (trans. G. Simpson). Milton Keynes: Digireads Books.
Galeotti, A.E. (1987) Individualism, Social Rules, Tradition: The Case of Friedrich A. Hayek, Political Theory, 15(2): 163-181.
Gray, J. (1980) F.A. Hayek on Liberty and Tradition, The Journal of Libertarian Studies, 4(2): 119-137.
Hayek, F.A. (1960) The Constitution of Liberty. Abingdon: Routledge Classics.
Hayek, F.A. (1982) Law, Legislation and Liberty: A New Statement of the Liberal Principles of Justice and Political Economy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Williams, R. (1983) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Harper Collins.
Williams, R. (1961) The Long Revolution Harmondsworth: Pelican Books.
Dr Andrew Morrison is a Senior Lecturer in Education at Sheffield Hallam University where he specialises in the sociology of post-compulsory education. He is also a trustee of the Raymond Williams Foundation. He is currently working on a book provisionally titled Twentieth-Century Political Epistemologies and Politics: Learning from Experience for the Bloomsbury philosophy series. Email: a.morrison@shu.ac.uk
