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Historical-Critical Administrative’ Régime Created by Stalin HIMA 14,2_Dictionary_258_270 6/16/06 5:12 PM Page 259 Historical-Critical administrative’ régime created by Stalin. Once more, the self-evident right, indeed A: ta-rì¢ì naqdì. – G: historisch-kritisch. – F: historique duty of Marxists to have a critical relation et critique. – R: istoricesko-kriticeskij. – S: histórico- to their own history and an historical relation crítico. – C: lishi-kaozheng de to their own theories, had to be bitterly As attested by the works of Thucydides and fought for. Under European state socialism Aristotle, the articulation of history and of the twentieth century it was finally during critique began to develop from the ‘Greek the five years of perestroika, the attempt at enlightenment’ onwards, receiving impetus democratisation under Gorbachev, that from both the story-telling traditions of the individuals were liberated from formal popular classes and celebratory poetry in constraints. The collapse of European state the service of the rulers. Greek and Roman socialism ‘promoted an “epistemological philology and the practice of critical editions break” and a stimulus towards historicisa- of the Renaissance humanists provided tion’. This stamped the historical-critical formative elements. However, approaching method with ‘an emphatic actuality’ for tradition as such in an historical-critical way Marxists. ‘Here it is a case of, on the one is an achievement of intellectuals from the hand, the critical (and self-critical) evaluation early bourgeois period, developed in of historical experiences and, on the other, permanent confrontation with censorship the analytical survey, development and and persecution mainly from the religious critical working through of an enormous apparatuses. This connection appears sys- mass of intellectual material (HKWM 1, tematically for the first time in Pierre Bayle’s Preface). Dictionnaire historique et critique (1696) which opened the age of Enlightenment as ‘the 1. After ‘the remarkable rudiments of an actual age of critique’ (Kant). History was historical-critical treatment of the Bible’ in still understood by Bayle as histories in the Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (Lange, I, III.2, sense of oral or written narratives; critique, 285), whose fourth book on the intrigues of as its examination in the ‘natural light of religious institutions is entitled ‘Of The reason’. This rationalism prepared the terrain Kingdom of Darkness’, the ground for for historicism and ‘scientific’ historiography Pierre Bayle’s historical-critical dictionary (i.e. founded upon the critical use of sources). was prepared by, more than any other work, Marxian, and later Marxist historical Baruch Spinoza’s critique of the Bible, materialism attempts to explain history the Tractatus theologico-politicus, published through reference to the mode of production anonymously in 1670 – a genuinely ‘revolu- and reproduction of social life. tionary text’ (Giancotti Boscherini 1985, 23), Just as once Christianity in the course of an ‘organ of political struggle’ (Gadamer becoming a state religion (‘the Constantinian 1976, 19). According to the subtitle, it claims turn’) passed into an ideological state to show that ‘the Freedom of Philosophising apparatus, giving ‘the authoritarian rela- can not only be allowed safe to Piety and a tions iron structures and a centre in their Republic’s Peace: but it cannot be taken away handling of ideas and the transmission of except at the same time with the Republic’s traditions’ (Haug 1983, 6), so Communist Peace and Piety’. Marxism in power underwent a similar ‘Erreurs’ and ‘fautes’ (mistakes) are key transformation. Its ideological apparatuses, categories in Bayle’s historical-critical in their ‘authoritarian controlled arrangement dictionary. He had originally planned ‘un and concealment’ (ibid.) like a ‘Central Dictionnaire de Fautes’. However, the surfeit Administration of eternal truths’ (Havemann of uninteresting mistakes would have made 1971), operated at the apex of the ‘command- the work ‘pedantic’, a consideration which Historical Materialism, volume 14:2 (259–270) © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2006 Also available online – www.brill.nl HIMA 14,2_Dictionary_258_270 6/16/06 5:12 PM Page 260 260 • Wolfgang Fritz Haug led him to a ‘nouvelle Oeconomie’: beginning God as belief’; their struggle would therefore with what can be historically reported, he be ‘a struggle of God against God’ (ibid.). added to this (in the form of footnotes, He appears to sense that the apology for clearly set in smaller type) commentaries, religion was entering dangerous terrain. In corrections, critiques of inherited judgements no way should it be claimed ‘that that which and occasionally philosophical reflections. one believes is untenable: for that means Exemplary is the nineteen-page article on allowing reason for its part to triumph in a Spinoza, at the time slandered and deeply way that would destroy belief’ (§41; trans. hated by clerical ideologists of all confessions. modified). In terms of form: the historical part of the While Descartes had tried to demonstrate article comprises often not more than two the compatibility of science and especially or three lines to a page; the rest is taken up, his own philosophy with religion, Bayle, in in petit, by the ‘critical’ comments. In terms fact, ‘as Voltaire remarks, didn’t openly of content: Bayle indeed names Spinoza’s attack Christianity in a single line, but he Tractatus, using the official obligatory also didn’t write a single line which was not terminology, ‘calamitous’ (‘un livre perni- intended to awaken doubt’ (Lange, I, IV.1, cieux et détestable, où il fit glisser toutes les 11; trans. modified). He indeed maintains sémences de l’Athéisme’); nevertheless, he the appearance that the contradiction presents Spinoza’s personal irreproachability between reason and revelation would be in a thus even better light: ‘c’étoit un homme decided in favour of the latter. ‘However, qui n’aimoit pas la contrainte de la con- the effect was calculated to produce a science, & grand ennemi de la dissimulation’. decision of the reader in the opposed sense’ He concludes from Spinoza’s ethically (398 et sq.; trans. modified). The effect exemplary conduct the possibility of a ‘was one of the greatest which a book can community of atheists living together more have’, both upon the republic of letters as peacefully than a community of Christians. upon the educated in general (399). ‘His ‘Cela est étrange; mais au fond il ne s’en style’, Hettner says, ‘is of the most dramatic faut pas plus étonner, que de voir des gens vivacity, and fresh, direct, bold, provoking, qui vivent très-mal, quoiqu’ils aient une and yet ever clear and rapid in the attain- pleine persuasion de l’Evangile’. ment of its aim; while he seems only to be Leibniz enters into combat against this skilfully playing with the subject, he probes emancipation of moral criteria from religious and dissects it to its inmost depths’ (1894, conviction in his Theodicy. He criticises 48). From here comes ‘the mode of combat Bayle’s historical-critical dictionary ‘where of Voltaire and the French Encyclopaedists’ religion and reason appear to be in conflict and it still continued to have effects on with each other [en combattantes] and where Lessing’s mode of thinking and writing Mr. Bayle made it known that it was his (ibid.; op. cit. Lange, I, IV.1, 11). A trace intention to make reason be quiet after he can be found in Lessing’s judgement of had made it speak for only too long’ (‘Pre- Alexander Pope: ‘He has read over before face’, 35; trans. modified). In the second the material of this and that writer, and, edition of the historical-critical dictionary, without investigating them according to their Bayle added an essay to his presentation own founding principles, kept from each of the Manichean and sceptical positions one whatever he believed would allow itself (which had been reproved ‘by some religious to be best rhymed together in well-sounding bigots’), which, according to Leibniz, ‘was verse. I believe even, in considering his supposed to present the innocence and utility sources, to have undercovered his operations, of his method by means of examples, autho- that I have made some other historical-critical rities and reasons (Theodicy, ‘Introduction’, notes’ (Pope, A Metaphysician!, W 3, 663). §39; trans. modified). Leibniz sees in such Bayle’s historical-critical dictionary a claimed autonomy of reason the beginning opened an epoch in the sense of an irre- of the end of faith. No opposition between versible epistemological break. Kant, for the two orientations should be allowed to example, wished in a review of a work of come about: reason is ‘just as much a gift of Herder that ‘an historical-critical mind [. .].
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