Agnes Heller: Socialism, autonomy and the postmodern. (Book Reviews).

Simon Tormey

Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2001, pp.220 +x

ISBN 07 1904994-6 (hbk) [pounds sterling]35.00; ISBN 07 1906038-9 (pbk) [pounds sterling]14.99

Agnes Heller was unfortunate enough to be a radical Marxist under Stalinist rule in Hungary; she emerges from Simon Tormey's book as an admirable person and a courageous thinker, trying to revise Marxism and then to develop some alternative, holding on to her early ideals until the end. She was a pupil of Lukacs, and a member of the 'Budapest school', together with Ferenc Feher, her husband, Andras Hegedus, Gyorgy Markus, and Mihaily Vajda. Their work was translated into English in the 1970s and aroused some interest in Western Europe--an interest which, to judge from Tormey's bibliography, is still alive amongst a small group of scholars.

Her father died in Auschwitz and she and her mother survived into post-war Hungary where she eventually joined the Communist Party. She was associated with the ideas of the reform movement and she lost her position after the defeat of the 1956 uprising. She remained in an uneasy relation with the Hungarian authorities and Academy until she and Feher left Hungary for Australia in 1977.

Intellectually, her work can be seen as an attempt to hold together two concepts and two commitments--freedom and equality--that are necessary for a socialist vision but which in practical terms appeared to be irreconcilable. This is certainly what I drew from Tormey's book although I am not sure whether it is quite what he wanted to convey. He takes us through the development of Heller's work in a clear and careful way. In the 1950s and 1960s she attempted to develop a Marxist humanism, critical of Stalin and of the structuralist Marxism that was developing in the West. Her work can be placed in the wider context of thinkers from Marcuse to Lefebvre to Debord but one of the most interesting things about her approach is her concern with the individual: revolution becomes not only or perhaps not at all a matter of historical necessity or social class but of individual actors acting in a moral way. Her starting point is not Marxist economics or sociology so much as Lukacs' aesthetics. In his later work, Lukacs gave primacy to the aesthetic: it is through the work of art that the human being can become truly human, transcending the immediate conditions of his or her existence. If the economic motivation to revolution, the final crisis of capitalism, showed no sign of appearing, the motivation has to come from elsewhere. Heller translates the aesthetic into a concern with everyday life, arguing that a variety of human activities and creations may transcend the immediate and give a glimpse of the universal. She draws a distinction between the particular person and the individual, the latter having some contact with the transcendence of the particular (akin, I suspect, to Habermas's distinction between individualisation and individuation). Thus alienation can be overcome in everyday life, at least for periods, and people can choose to act morally, for the good of all. The individual and the universal turn out to be the crucial categories for Heller throughout her career and she roots alienation not in the production pr ocess but in relations between individuals. It is a form of socialism clearly appropriate to Eastern Europe, where it could be argued that the 'economic revolution' (equality) had already taken place; the revolution that still had to take place was in social relations (freedom). What was needed to bring about change was the quality of 'civic courage', a quality which she attributed to the American sociologist C. Wright Mills and to Che Guevara--individuals who could inspire radical movements by their example.

She continued the attempt to revise Marx into the 1970s, trying to base an ethics on individual needs, since to base an argument on class needs leads to tyranny. This involved stretching her interpretation of Marx to the limit, and in Tormey's view she begins to acknowledge that the real Marx had been lost between the structuralists and the communist apologists.

In her own alternative of radical democracy we can again find parallels to Habermas. In Radical Philosophy, she sets about developing a realist theory of universal values--still working within the problematic of the young Marx. In the way that Tormey puts it, her case for universal values rests on grounds of self-evidence: the more important categories, such as equality, justice and freedom, can be said to be universal in the sense that it would be difficult to imagine an ethical system based on the values of inequality, injustice and slavery. Universal values must be the product of arguments amongst and between free individuals but this cannot be achieved without the abolition of wage labour and collective control over the means of production. In order for values to be argued about and developed there must be common background assumptions and this acts as a limit on the plurality of values that she espouses--particularly since these values should be those of modernity.

At this point in the development of Tormey's account of Weller's ideas, or perhaps of Heller's ideas themselves, I become confused. What happens is that she seems to be grasping to find her own voice independent of Marxism but is not quite able to achieve it. Significant and important ideas appear but they don't quite hang together, something which Tormey himself and other critics point out. She makes some interesting points, for example that needs are not claims for satisfaction but for recognition; she also argues that Habermas's ideal speech situation is over-rational, not taking account of bodies or emotions and the complexity of interpersonal relationships. In a radical democracy we might owe each other a duty of understanding and recognition, but we will not always succeed in fulfilling that duty.

This proliferation of ideas continued while she was in Hungary but for obvious reasons a lot of her work was not published until she moved to Australia, where it was continued. The two conflicting ends of the conflict which I mentioned earlier, freedom and equality, became an attempt to somehow keep and develop what was still useful in Marxism but to break from the overall framework and develop her own account of human freedom. In the end she developed her own idiosyncratic concept of the postmodern, an attempt to view society as the production of human beings allowing choice and freedom but avoiding the conservative and despairing implications of those thinkers whom we usually regard as postmodern. She agreed entirely with Habermas in his critique of these.

In A Theory of History (1982), she criticises the philosophy of history because it cannot conceptualise human freedom, conceiving history as the product of one moving force. However she argues that we still need some orientation to history in order to make sense of it and this involves an open-ended description of history, an attempt to understand rather than to know and predict. Her own understanding works with the idea that there are three different logics that can be identified in modernity, those of civil society, capitalism and manufacturing. The logic of civil society is in fact a double logic: first the universalisation of the market and the exclusive nature of private property and second the negative but equal freedom of individuals--here again the conflict between freedom and equality appears as a contradiction of modernity. Class does not play a part in this, it is only a description of people with similar status, and socialism becomes the full extension of the second logic of civil society--but pri vate ownership of the means of production is incompatible with this. As Tormey points out, this leaves her much closer to Marx than might be expected and it is indeed difficult to see how these two positions might be reconciled.

In her theory of the postmodern she asks what it is to be a good person and it seems to involve taking a critical and thoughtful towards the world; the postmodern is not a sort of society or an ideology, but an attitude. We cannot escape modernity but we don't have to give in to it. We should seek conditions that enable the development of authentic individuality and this is what she hopes will advance the cause of the universal, which is now seen in terms of human decency which seems to involve a radical tolerance of and a care for the other person. These enable the establishment of a situation in which the constant negotiations necessary for a modern radical democracy can take place.

I am not sure how fair I have been to either Tormey or Heller here, whether I have grasped the former's commentary or the latter's complexity. Apart from the particular lines of argument, I found Heller's development of Marxism interesting because it seems to reproduce that of many Western thinkers in response to charges of economic determinism in the structuralist debates of the 70s. It is apparently very difficult now for radicals to think in economic terms, to think seriously about forms of socialist organisation that provide an alternative to monolithic state control and which can protect freedom and democracy without being overwhelmed by the logic of the market.