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In the animal, there is an uninterrupted chain of reactions starting with a stimulus like hunger and ending with a more or less strictly determined course of action. In humans, that chain is interrupted; the stimulus is there, but the kind of satisfaction is open—that is, we must choose between different courses of action. We become dimly aware of ourselves, or rather our group, as not being identical with nature. It dawns on us that ours is a tragic fate—to be part of Nature and yet transcend it. We become aware of death as our ultimate fate, even if we try to deny it in manifold fantasies.
The lower an animal is in the scale of development, the more are its adaptations to Nature and all its activities controlled by instinctive and reflex action mechanisms. The famous social organizations of some insects are created entirely by instincts. On the other hand, the higher an animal is in the scale of development, the more flexibility of action pattern and the less completeness of structural adjustments do we find at birth. This development reaches its peak with humans. We are the most helpless of all animals at birth. Our adaptation to Nature is based essentially on the process of learning, not on instinctual determination. Human existence begins when the lack of action by instincts exceeds a certain point—when the way to act is no longer fixed by hereditarily given mechanisms. In other words, human existence and freedom are, from the beginning, inseparable.
From said that the Middle Ages did not suddenly end at one point and modern society come to life at another; rather, it took over 400 years to break down the Medieval World and to free people from the most apparent restraints. The picture of the Middle Ages has been distorted in two ways. Modern rationalism has looked upon the Middle Ages as an essentially dark period. It has pointed to the general lack of personal freedom, to the exploitation of the mass of the population by a small minority, to its narrowness which makes the peasants of the surrounding country a dangerous and suspected stranger to the city dweller, and to its superstitiousness and ignorance. On the other hand, the Middle Ages have been idealized, noting the sense of solidarity, the subordination of economic to human needs, the directness and concreteness of human relations, as well as the sense of security which was characteristic of man in the Middle Ages. Both pictures are right; what makes them both wrong is to draw one of them and shut one's eyes to the other.
What characterizes medieval in contrast to modern society is its lack of freedom. Everybody in the earlier period was chained to their role in the social order. A person had little chance to move socially from one class to another; they were hardly able to move even geographically, from one town or from one country to another; they were often not even free to dress as they pleased or eat what they liked. The artisan had to sell at a certain price and the peasant at a certain place—the market of the town. Personal, economic, and social life was dominated by rules and obligations from which practically no sphere of activity was exempted. But although people were not free in the modern sense, neither were they alone and isolated. In having a distinct, unchangeable, and unquestionable place in the social world from the moments of birth, life had a meaning which left no place and no need for doubt. A person was identical with their role in society; they were a peasant, an artisan, a knight, and not an individual who happened to have this or that occupation. The social order was conceived as a natural order, and being a definite part of it gave people a feeling of security and of belonging. There was comparatively little competition; one was born into a certain economic position which guaranteed a livelihood determined by tradition. There was much suffering and pain, but the church assured the individual of her unconditional love to all children and offered a way to acquire the conviction of being forgiven and loved by God. The universe was limited and easy to understand.
Although society was structured thus and gave people security, it kept them in bondage. It was a different kind of bondage from that which authoritarianism and oppression in later centuries constituted. Medieval society did not deprive the individual of their freedom because the individual did not yet exist. They did not yet conceive of themselves as an individual except through the medium of their social role. Awareness of one's individual self, of others, and of the world as separate entities had not yet fully developed. The historian Jacob Burkhart said that in the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness—that which turned within as that which was turned without—lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven out of faith, illusion, and childish pre-possession, through which the world and history were clad in strange hues. People were conscious of themselves only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category.
It was in Italy that this veil first melted into air. An objective treatment and consideration of the state and of all things of this world became possible. We became spiritual individuals and recognized ourselves as such. There were a number of economic and political factors which were responsible for the breakdown of medieval society earlier in Italy than in Central and Western Europe. Firstly, the geographical position of Italy and the commercial advantages resulting from it, such as the nearness to the Orient and the Mediterranean as the great trade route of Europe. There was also the fight between the pope and Emperor, resulting in the existence of a great number of independent political units. Resulting from these and other conditions was the rise in Italy of a powerful monied class, the members of which were filled with a spirit of initiative, power, and ambition.
The structure of society and the personality of man changed in the late Middle Ages. The unity and centralization of medieval society became weaker. Capital and individual economic initiative grew in importance. A new monied class developed. A growing individualism was noticeable in all social classes and affected all spheres of human activity—taste, fashion, art, philosophy, and theology. Feudal class stratifications became less important; birth and origin were of less importance than wealth. As early as 1231, as Burkhart points out, Frederick II's political measures were aimed at the complete destruction of the feudal state, at the transformation of the people into a multitude destitute of will and of the means of resistance, but profitable in the utmost degree to the exchequer.
The Renaissance was the culture of a wealthy and powerful upper class, on the crest of the wave which was whipped up by the storm of new economic forces. The masses who did not share the wealth and power of the ruling group had lost the security of their former status and had become a shapeless mass—to be flattered or to be threatened, but always to be manipulated and exploited by those in power. A new despotism arose side by side with the new individualism. Freedom and tyranny, individualism and disorder were inextricably interwoven. The Renaissance was not a culture of small shopkeepers and petty bourgeois, but of wealthy nobles and burgers. Their economic activity and their wealth gave them a feeling of freedom and a sense of individuality, but at the same time they had lost something—the security and a feeling of belonging which the medieval social structure had offered. They were more free, but they were also more alone. We have reasons to doubt whether the powerful masters of Renaissance capitalism were happy and as secure as they are often pictured. It seems that the new freedom brought two things to them: an increased sense of strength and, at the same time, an increased isolation, doubt, skepticism, and anxiety. It is the same contradiction that we find in the philosophical writings of the humanists. Side by side with their emphasis on human dignity, individuality, and strength, they exhibited insecurity and despair in their philosophy. This underlying insecurity tends to explain the genesis of a character trait which was characteristic of the individual of the Renaissance and not so present in the member of the medieval social structure: the passionate craving for fame. If the meaning of life has become doubtful, if one's relations to others and to oneself do not offer security, then fame is one means to silence one's doubts. It has a function to be compared with that of the Egyptian pyramids or the Christian faith in immortality; it elevates one's individual life from its limitations and instability to the plane of indestructibility.
In medieval society, the economic organization of the city had been relatively static. The craftsman, since the later part of the Middle Ages, were united in their guilds. Although there were always some who had to struggle hard to earn enough to survive, by and large the guild member could be sure that they could live by their hand's work. The guilds were built on mutual cooperation and offered relative security to their members. Retail and wholesale business were not yet separated. The accumulation of capital was also very slow up to the end of the 15th century. Thus, the small businessmen had a considerable amount of security compared with the economic situation in the late Middle Ages when large capital, monopolistic commerce assumed increasing importance. Tony stated that much that is now mechanical was then personal, intimate, and direct. Previously, economic interests had been subordinate to the real business of life, which was salvation. The relative stability of the position of craftsmen and merchants, which was characteristic in the medieval city, was slowly undermined in the late Middle Ages until it completely collapsed in the 16th century. So some guilds admitted only persons with a certain amount of capital; others became powerful monopolies trying to exploit the customer as much as they could. Many guild members became impoverished and had to try and earn money outside their traditional occupation; many had lost their economic independence and security. The deterioration of their economic and social position was shown by the increasing dissatisfaction, the formation of organizations of their own, by strikes, and even violent insurrections. Originally, the share of each member of a mining guild was in proportion to the amount of work they did, but by the 15th century, in many instances, the shares belonged to capitalists who did not work themselves, and increasingly the work was done by workers who were paid wages and had no share in the enterprise.
While medieval commerce had been mainly a petty, into-town business, national and international commerce grew rapidly in the 14th and 15th centuries. Although historians disagree as to just when the big commercial company started to develop, they do agree that in the 15th century there became more and more powerful and developed into monopolies which, by their superior capital strength, threatened the small businessmen as well as the customer. The indignation and rage of the small merchant against the monopolies was given eloquent expression by Luther in his pamphlet on trading and usury, printed in 1524: "They have all commodities under their control and practice without concealment all the tricks that have been mentioned; they raise and lower prices as they please and oppress and ruin all the small merchants as the pike the little fish in the water, just as though they were Lords over God's creatures and free from all the laws of faith and love." These words of Luther could have been written today. The fear and rage which the middle class felt against the wealthy monopolists in the 15th and 16th centuries is in many ways similar to the feeling which characterizes the attitude of the middle class against monopolies and powerful capitalists in our era.
The medieval market had been a relatively small one, the functioning of which was readily understood. A producer knew approximately how much to produce and could be relatively sure of selling their products for a proper price. Now it was necessary to produce for an increasingly large market, and one could not determine the possibility of sales in advance. It was therefore not good enough to produce useful goods; the unpredictable laws of the market decided whether the products could be sold and at what profit. A spirit of restlessness began to pervade life towards the end of the Middle Ages. The concept of time in the modern sense began to develop; minutes became valuable. A symptom of this new sense of time is the fact that in Nuremberg the clocks have been striking the quarter hours since the 16th century. Time was so valuable that one felt one should never spend it for any purpose which was not useful. Work became increasingly a supreme value; the desire for wealth and material success became the all-absorbing passion.
The medieval social system was destroyed and with it the stability and relative security it had offered the individual. Now, with the beginning of capitalism, all classes of society started to move; there ceased to be a fixed place in the economic order which could be considered a natural one, an unquestionable one. The individual was left alone; everything depended on their own efforts, not on the security of their traditional status. For the poor of the cities, the workers and apprentices, it meant growing exploitation and impoverishment; for the peasants, it also meant increased economic and personal pressure; the lower nobility faced ruin, although in a different way. Large sections of the urban middle class were put into an increasingly bad position. Parts of the middle class were more prosperous and participated in the general upward trend of rising capitalism, but even for these more fortunate ones, the increasing role of capital, of the market, and of competition changed their personal situation into one of insecurity, isolation, and anxiety. Tony said that capital had ceased to be a servant and had become a master.
The medieval market had been a relatively small one, the functioning of which was readily understood. It brought demand and supply into direct and concrete relation. While competition was certainly not completely lacking in medieval society, the feudal economic system was based on the principle of cooperation and was regulated or regimented by rules which curbed competition. With the rise of capitalism, these medieval principles gave way more and more to a principle of individualistic enterprise. Others were not allied in a common enterprise; they became competitors, and often people were confronted with the choice of destroying them or being destroyed. While we have just described one side of the picture, there is also another one. Capitalism freed the individual; it freed people from the regimentation of the feudal system; it allowed them to stand on their own feet and to try their luck. They became the master of their own fate; theirs was the risk and the gain. Money became the great equalizer of people and proved to be more powerful than birth and caste under the feudal system. The limits of people's life expansion had been laid out before they were born, but under the capitalistic system the individual—particularly the middle class—had a chance, in spite of many limitations, to succeed on the basis of their own merits and actions. Humanity had mastered natural forces to a degree unheard of and undreamed of in previous history. Life had ceased to be a closed world, the center of which was people; the world had become limitless and, at the same time, threatening. They were free, but also alone, isolated, and threatened from all sides. Having lost the sense of unity with humanity and the universe, they are overwhelmed with a sense of their individual nothingness and helplessness. These feelings must be alleviated if the individual is to function successfully.
From said that just as in the economic sphere there is no sudden change from one structure to another, there is no sudden change in the theological sphere either. In spite of the fact that the ideas of the Renaissance were not without influence on the further development of European thinking, the essential roots of modern capitalism—its economic structure and its spirit—are not to be found in the Italian culture of the late Middle Ages, but in the economic and social situation of Central and Western Europe and in the doctrines of Luther and Calvin. The main difference between the two cultures is this: the Renaissance period represented a comparatively high development of commercial and industrial capitalism; it was a society in which a small group of wealthy and powerful individuals ruled and formed a social basis for the philosophers and artists who expressed the spirit of this culture. The Reformation was essentially a religion of the urban middle and lower classes and of the peasants. As Max Weber has shown, it was the urban middle class which became the backbone of modern capitalistic development in the Western World.
In the late Middle Ages, in connection with the beginning of capitalism, bewilderment and insecurity arose. The letter of indulgence seems to be a particularly good illustration of the influence of growing capital. Not only does the idea that one could buy one's freedom from punishment express a new feeling for the eminent role of money, but the theory of the letter of indulgence also shows the spirit of this new capitalistic thinking. Clemens VI said that the pope had in his trust the limitless amount of merits acquired by Christ and that he could therefore distribute parts of the treasure to the believers. The practice of buying a letter of indulgence played an increasing role in the late Middle Ages. One of Luther's main attacks was directed against this practice.
From said that certain doctrines of Luther and Calvin are so similar to those of the medieval church that it is sometimes difficult to see any essential difference between them. However, Luther's theology gave expression to the feeling of the middle class which, fighting against the authority of the church and resenting the new monied class, felt threatened by rising capitalism and overcome by a feeling of powerlessness and individual insignificance. Luther's system gave man independence in religious matters; he deprived the Church of her authority and gave it to the individual. His concept of faith, salvation is one of subjective individual experience in which all responsibility is with the individual. There are good reasons to praise this side of Luther's and of Calvin's doctrines, since they are one source of the development of political and spiritual freedom in modern society—a development which, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, is inseparably connected with the ideas of Puritanism. The other aspect of modern freedom is the isolation and powerlessness it brought for the individual, and this aspect also has its roots in Protestantism. Luther assumed the existence of an innate evilness in human nature which directs our will for evil and makes it impossible for any person to perform any good deed on the basis of their nature. The depravity of our nature and its complete lack of freedom to choose the right path is one of the fundamental concepts of Luther's whole thinking. Only if people demolish their individual will and pride will God's grace descend upon them. Godward man has no free will but is a captive slave and servant either to the will of God or to the will of Satan. A justice must be taught that comes exclusively from the outside in, is entirely alien to ourselves.
The peasants as well as the poor in the cities were in a desperate situation; they were ruthlessly exploited and deprived of traditional rights and privileges; they were in a revolutionary mood which found expression in peasant uprisings and in revolutionary movements. Insofar as Luther attacked authority and made the word of the Gospel a center of his teachings, he appealed to these restive masses. But although Luther accepted their allegiance to him and supported them, he could do so only up to a certain point; he had to break the allegiance when the peasants went further than attacking the authority of the church and merely making minor demands for the betterment of their lot. Although Luther fought against the authority of the church, although he was filled with indignation against the new monied class, part of which was the upper strata of the clerical hierarchy, and although he supported the revolutionary tendencies of the peasants up to a certain point, he postulated submission to worldly authorities in the most drastic fashion, even if those in authority are evil or without faith. Nevertheless, the authority in its power is good and from God. God would prefer to suffer the government to exist, no matter how evil, rather than allow the rabble to riot, no matter how justified they are in doing so. A prince should remain a prince, no matter how tyrannical he may be. Remember that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel. People could not be saved on the basis of their virtues but could have certainty of salvation if they had faith. Once people have the indubitable subjective experience of faith, there can also be certain of their salvation; however, they can never become entirely virtuous during their lives since our natural evilness can never entirely disappear. From concluded that while Luther freed people from the authority of the Catholic church, he made them submit to a much more tyrannical authority—that of a God who insisted on complete submission of man, an annihilation of the individual self as the essential condition to his salvation. Luther's faith was the conviction of being loved upon the condition of surrender—a solution which has much in common with the principle of complete submission of the individual to the state and the leader.
From said that Calvin too denied that good works can lead to salvation: "No work of a pious man ever existed which, if it were examined before the strict judgment of God, did not prove to be damnable." There are a number of subtle differences between Calvin and Luther's teachings; one is Calvin's doctrine of predestination. In contrast to the doctrine of predestination as we find it in Augustine, Aquinas, and Luther, with Calvin it becomes one of...
Cornerstones, perhaps the central doctrine of his whole system, salvation or damnation are not results of anything good or bad a person does in their life, but are predetermined by God before they ever come to life. Why God chose the one and condemned the other is a secret to which people must try not to delve; he did so because it pleased him to show his unlimited power in that way. Calvin's God, in spite of all attempts to preserve the idea of God's justice and love, has all the features of a tyrant without any quality of Love or even Justice—a blatant contradiction to the New Testament. Calvin denies the Supreme role of love and says, "For what the schoolman advance concerning the priority of Charity to Faith and Hope is a mere reverie of a distempered imagination."
Although Calvin did not teach that there was any concrete proof of certainty, he and his followers actually had the conviction that they belonged to the chosen ones. Though the doctrine of predestination gave such certainty, the doubt remained in the background and had to be silenced again and again by an ever-growing fanatic belief that the religious community to which one belonged represented that part of mankind which had been chosen by God. It is obvious that this belief represented, psychologically, a deep contempt and hatred for other human beings. For Calvin, there are two kinds of people: those who were saved and those who are destined to Eternal damnation. Calvin's regime in Geneva was characterized by a suspicion and hostility on the part of everybody against everybody else, and certainly little of the spirit of love and brotherliness could be discovered in his despotic regime. Calvin distrusted wealth and at the same time had little pity for poverty. In the later development of Calvinism, warnings against friendliness towards the stranger, a cruel latitude towards the poor, and a general atmosphere of suspiciousness often appeared. Apart from the projection of hostility and jealousy unto God and other people, one other way in which hostility found expression was in turning it against oneself.
Both Luther and Calvin ardently emphasized the wickedness of people and taught self-abasement as the basis of all virtue. Calvinism emphasized the necessity of unceasing human effort; man constantly try to live according to God's word and never lapse in his effort to do so. This Doctrine appears to be a contradiction of the doctrine that human effort is of no avail with regard to man's salvation. The fatalistic attitude of not making any effort might seem like a much more appropriate response. However, the state of anxiety, the feeling of powerlessness and insignificance, and especially the doubts concerning one's future after death represent a state of mind which is practically unbearable for anybody. One possible way to escape the unbearable states of anxiety and paralyzing fear of One's Own insignificance is the very trait which became so prominent in Calvinism: the development of a frantic activity and a striving to do something. Activity in this sense assumes a compulsive quality. The sense of Duty or conscience became a slave driver put into people by themselves; it drove them to act according to wishes and aims which they believed to be their own, while they were actually the internalization of external social demands. It drove people with harshness and cruelty, forbidding pleasure and happiness, making our whole life the atonement for some mysterious sin. It is also the basis of the innerworldly asceticism which is so characteristic in early Calvinism and later Puritanism.
The new attitude towards work was so strong that the middle class grew indignant against the economic unproductivity of the institutions of the church. People were filled with burning resentment against the luxury and power of the wealthy class, including the hierarchy of the Roman Church. Protestantism gave expression to the feelings of insignificance and resentment; it destroyed the confidence of God's unconditional love; it taught people to despise and distrust themselves and others; it made them a tool instead of an end. This new attitude towards effort and work as an aim in itself may be assumed to be the most important psychological change since the end of the Middle Ages. Economic activity, success, material gains became ends in themselves. It became people's fate to contribute to the growth of the economic system, to a mass Capital, not for the purpose of their own happiness or salvation, but as an end in itself. People became cogs in the vast economic machine. This Readiness for submission of oneself to extra-human ends was actually prepared by Protestantism, although nothing was further from Luther's or Calvin's mind than the approval of such supremacy of economic activities. Luther's views on economic problems were typically medieval, even more so than Calvin's; he would have abhorred the idea that man's life should become a means for economic ends. But in their theological teaching they had laid the ground for this development by breaking people's spiritual backbone, their feeling of dignity and pride, by teaching them that activity had to further aims outside of themselves. Once people were ready to become nothing but the means for the glory of a God who represented neither Justice nor love, they were sufficiently prepared to accept the role of a servant to the economic machine.
The structure of the individual actually had much freedom to express themselves in their work and in their emotional life within the limits of their social sphere. Although there was no individualism in the modern sense of the unrestricted choice between many possible ways of life—a freedom of choice which is largely abstract—there was a great deal of concrete individualism in real life. Their burden of work was unequally distributed among the different classes in the social hierarchy, and there was a good deal of exploitation. However, work did not have the abstract character of producing some commodity which might be profitably sold on the market. One worked in response to concrete demand and with a concrete aim: to earn one's livelihood. There was, as Max Weber particularly has shown, no urge to work more than was necessary to maintain the traditional standard of living. It seems that for some groups of medieval Society, work was enjoyed as a realization of productive ability; many others worked because they had to and felt this necessity was conditioned by pressure from the outside. What was new in modern society was that people had come to be driven to work not so much by external pressure but by an internal compulsion which made them work as only a very strict Master could have made people do in other societies. Against external compulsion there is always a certain amount of rebelliousness which hampers the effectiveness of work or makes people unfit for any differentiated task requiring intelligence, initiative, and responsibility. The compulsion to work by which people were turned into their own slave master did not hamper these qualities. Undoubtedly, capitalism could not have been developed had not the greatest part of people's energy been channeled into the direction of work. There is no other period in history in which people have given their energy so completely for the one purpose: work. The drive for relentless work was one of the fundamental productive forces, no less important for the development of the industrial system than steam and electricity.
Only the most successful class of society profited from rising capitalism to an extent which gave them real wealth and power. They could expand, conquer, rule, and amass fortunes as a result of their own activity and rational calculations. This new aristocracy of money, combined with that of birth, was in a position where they could enjoy the fruits of the new freedom and acquire a new feeling of mastery in individual initiative. On the other hand, they had to dominate the masses and to fight against each other, and thus their position, too, was not free from a fundamental insecurity and anxiety. The structure of modern society affects people in two ways simultaneously: they become more independent, self-reliant, and critical, and they become more isolated, alone, and afraid. The understanding of the whole problem of Freedom depends on the variability to see both sides of the process and not lose track of one side while following the other. When one has become an individual, one stands alone and faces the world in all its perilous and overpowering aspects. Just as a child can never return to the mother's womb physically, so it can never reverse psychologically the process of individuation; attempts to do so assume the character of submission. There is only one possible productive solution for the relationship of individualized people with the world: their active solidarity with all people and their spontaneous activity, love, and work which unite them again with the world as a free and independent individual. However, if the economic, social, and political conditions do not offer a base for the realization of individuality in the sense just mentioned, while at the same time people have lost those ties which gave them security, this lag makes Freedom an unbearable burden. It then becomes identical with doubt, with a kind of Life which lacks meaning, and freedom; powerful tendencies arise to escape from this kind of Freedom into submission or some kind of relationship to other people and the world which promises relief from uncertainty, even if it deprives the individual of their freedom.
Thank you. In the fight for freedom in modern history, where the attention was focused upon combating old forms of authority and restraint, it was natural that one should feel that the more these traditional restraints were eliminated, the more freedom one had gained. We fail sufficiently to recognize, however, that although we have rid ourselves from old enemies of Freedom, new enemies of a different nature have arisen—enemies which are not essentially external restraints but internal factors blocking the full realization of the freedom of Personality. We believe, for instance, that freedom of worship constitutes one of the final victories for Freedom. We do not sufficiently recognize that while it is a victory against those powers of church and state which did not allow people to worship according to their own conscience, the modern individual has lost to a great extent the inner capacity to have faith in anything which is not provable by the methods of the Natural Sciences. Or to choose another example, we feel that freedom of speech is the last step in the march of victory in Freedom. We forget that although freedom of speech constitutes an important victory in the battle against old restraints, modern people are in a position where much of what they think and say are the things everybody thinks and says; they have not acquired the ability to think originally, which alone gives meaning to their claim that nobody can interfere with their thoughts. In other words, we are fascinated by the growth of freedom from Powers outside ourselves and are blinded to the fact of inner restraints, compulsions, and fears. We forget that although each of the Liberties which have been won must be defended with utmost Vigor, the problem of freedom is not only a quantitative one but a qualitative one—that we not only have to preserve and increase the traditional freedom but that we have to gain a new kind of Freedom, one which enables us to realize our own individual self, to have faith in this self, and in life.
Channel. This is only the first part of Capitalism, Feudalism, and Freedom. Stay tuned and subscribe for part two.