THE HEALTH OF NATIONS Part 4 pot

the nat ion as m ind pol it ic 121

as things turned out, determined the subsequent course ofEuropean

history, and then ofworld history.

Nation and pathology

4.56 It follows from all that has been said above that the moral problem

ofthe behaviour ofnations in the twentieth century – in particular, the

evil which has been done by nations acting through state-systems and by

nations at odds with state-systems – is a complex one. We have identified

a set ofpowerful resistances which must somehow be overcome ifwe

are to understand and to deal with the problem:

(1) the indeterminacy oftranscendental philosophy undermines our

capacity to understand the phenomena ofthe nation rationally and

to judge them morally;

(2) the naturalism ofthe humane sciences detaches the phenomena of

the nation from our subjectivity, including our moral consciousness,

individual and collective;

(3) the naturalism ofthe humane sciences renders us passive in relation

to the behaviour (political, economic, technological) ofthe nation,

as passive as a remote tribe cowering before the omnipotence of

Nature;

(4) and yet our minds are full of the overflowing subjectivity of the

modern nation, ofour own nation or nations, and ofother nations;

(5) and the institutional authority ofthe state-systems relentlessly ap￾propriates the phenomena ofnational subjectivity and transforms

them into facts ofpower, instruments ofpower, commodities.

4.57 In short, we feel that we cannot judge the nation and its works,

we cannot control the nation and its works, and yet we cannot escape

the nation and its works.

4.58 To oppose such formidable forces, we have been able to sum￾mon up only a modest array ofintellectual weapons:

(1) the idea that the mind which is involved in the mind politic ofthe

nation is precisely the same mind as the mind which is involved in

individualised human behaviour;

(2) the idea that self-nationising is the same process as self-personising,

forming a subjective totality which feeds on the mind that it feeds;

122 soc iety and law

(3) the idea that, having regard to (1) and (2), there is an indissoluble

moral unity between the nation as mind politic and the person as

mind individualised.

4.59 So it is that we find ourselves in the same condition – but what a

different condition after three such centuries! – as the self-contemplating

Descartes. The best efforts of philosophy, of academicism, of scientism,

ofeconomism and ofstate-power cannot separate us from that first

hearth and last refuge which is our own consciousness. In our immediate

and inescapable experience ofour internal forum we must find the means

to re-experience the public forum. In the communicating of our own

selfwith itself, our most intimate experience, we must find the means

to communicate with, and to cure, the self-communicating nation.

4.60 How to begin? We could try to re-experience, as ifwe were

reliving some personal experience ofour own, the development ofthe

self-consciousness of actual nations. Using, as compass and map, our

own conceptions ofwhat it is to be a person, what it is to be a healthy

or a virtuous person, what it is to be a diseased or an evil person, we

might begin to imagine a way to find a sympathetic understanding of

self-nationing, the kind of understanding which alone would entitle us

to pass judgement on the behaviour ofnations, and to condemn, ifneed

be, the evil that nations do, and to propose therapies for the sicknesses

that afflict nations and those whom they infect with their sicknesses. To

make a start somewhere, we might consider, as a tentative and rudimen￾tary thought-experiment, what is perhaps the most striking instance of

modern times – the reconceiving ofGerman national consciousness in

the nineteenth century.

4.61 Beginning in the period ofGerman Romanticism, Germans set

themselves the task ofrediscovering not only what it is to be human

(a task that they shared with European Romantics everywhere) but also

what it is to be German. They went in search ofwhat Hegel would call ‘the

indwelling spirit and the history ofthe nation . . . by which constitutions

have been made and are made’.35 It was a task made easier by the relative

35 G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind (fn. 27 above), § 540, pp. 268–9. Hegel was disparaging

about the medieval mystifying of Germany’s origins: Avineri, Modern State (fn. 34 above),

p. 229, also at pp. 21–2. Gellner is dismissive, scornful even, of attempts to universalise the

idea ofthe nation, to make ofit a natural and inevitable category ofhuman socialisation.

The idea ofthe nation is a contingent thing, arising in particular ways in particular social

conjunctures. See ‘Nationalism and the two forms of cohesion’, fn. 10 above, passim. ‘The

the nat ion as m ind pol it ic 123

sparseness ofthe information and by the passage oftime, and it was a

task which, for the same reasons, could be, at one and the same time,

an enthralling exercise in dry-as-dust objectivity and a thrilling exercise

in rampant subjectivity. With remarkable facility and with surprising

certainty there could be conjured out ofthe cold northern mists ofa

remote Teutonic past a German selfwhich was heroic and pure and

creative and dynamic and masterful. In such an interesting mirror, it

was possible to see and to judge a German selfthat had somehow, in the

meantime, become petty and and provincial and bloodless and aimless.

It was not difficult to see that Germany was a genetic nation which had

collapsed into a patchwork ofinsignificant nations, together forming

some sort ofshadowy and unsatisfactory generic nation, a nation which

had not remained true to its selfbut which could, perhaps, be made to

become its true selfonce again.

4.62 In the office of official psychoanalysts to the German nation,

the brothers Grimm, whom we may take as symbolic heroes ofa move￾ment which involved countless scholars, including adepts ofthe new

human naturalism, were able by their vast labours to bring up from

the depths ofGerman unconsciousness a German soul which mani￾fested itself uniquely in German language, German folk-tales, German

literature, German art, German religion, and even a German mythol￾ogy.36 In a more Jungian framework, Richard Wagner (once again, a

hero-figure standing for countless German artists and writers) trans￾muted the new consciousness through the magical processes ofart into

something which could return, as all art does, to take on a new univer￾salised life in the depths of German unconsciousness.37 By these means,

German consciousness, at its most articulated and at its most secret, was

changed.

4.63 The German case is merely an extraordinarily open and explicit

and purposeful example of what all nations do all the time, in a much

more disordered way. It raises, as all such cases do, the questions ofwhy

such a reforming of national self-consciousness occurs and what are its

consequences.

great, but valid, paradox is this: nations can be defined only in terms ofnationalism, rather

than, as you might expect, the other way round.’ E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford,

Basil Blackwell; 1983), p. 55. 36 J. Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie (1835). 37 R. Wagner, My Life (tr. A. Gray; New York, Da Capo; 1983), pp. 280, 343.

124 soc iety and law

4.64 In the case ofGermany in the nineteenth century, it seems

particularly perverse that a people should redefine themselves in so ro￾mantic a spirit when (a) German scholars were using the spirit ofob￾jectivity to carry the humane sciences and the natural sciences to the

highest levels attained anywhere in Europe; (b) the Prussian state was

leading Europe in the rational reorganisation ofthe social, ifnot ofthe

political, aspects ofsociety; and (c) German business and industry were

applying the lessons ofthe British industrial revolution to generate an

economy which was rapidly overtaking, in scale and sophistication, any

other European economy.

4.65 Renan drew attention to the essential part that forgetting and

error play in the formation of national consciousness.38 The self-image

may be based on false information about the past and present situa￾tion ofthe nation, and it may, probably must, involve the repression of

much in that situation which is inconsistent with the ideal-self-image.

We may go further and say that national self-consciousness is a form of

private fantasy, a reality-for-themselves of the nationals whose relation￾ship to the reality-for-non-nationals is secondary. However, in the case

of nations, the private fantasy is necessarily a public fantasy. The devel￾opment ofGerman consciousness was as much a matter ofinterest for

other Europeans, especially the French and the British, as was German

material progress. Germans were fellow members of a European society,

a European family, a European nation even, and their state of mind could

not be a matter of indifference to the other members. To a greater extent

with the French and to a lesser extent with the unreflective British, the

development ofa new German consciousness generated modifications

in all non-German national consciousness.39

4.66 In these facts lie the roots ofthe pathology ofnational con￾sciousness.

38 ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’, in E. Renan, Oeuvres compl`etes (Paris, Calmann-Levy; 1947), i,

p. 891. 39 On Franco-German mutual self-nationalising, see Taguieff (fn. 32 above), passim; and

P. Birnbaum, ‘Nationalisme a la franc ` ¸aise’, same volume, pp. 125–38. See also L. Dumont,

L’id´eologie allemande. France-Allemagne et retour (Paris, Gallimard; 1991). Compare Adam

Ferguson: ‘Athens was necessary to Sparta, in the exercise ofher virtue, as steel is to flint

in the production offire.’ An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) (ed. D. Forbes;

Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press; 1966), p. 59. Discussed in P. Gay, The Enlighten￾ment (fn. 10 above), pp. 340ff. For a comparison of British, French and German national

constitutional psychologies, see ch. 7 below.