Salvation by Society

Peter Drucker, The New Realities, 1989

“As long as it does not threaten the Communist Party’s monopoly of power, it’s socialism.” This is the new “party line” preached by Mikhail Gorbachev in Russia and by Xiaoping Deng in China. But this is not a new pragmatism, as the Western press calls it. It is the ideology of naked power (and very old). It totally abjures everything that communism of any kind—or socialism for that matter - ever stood for. It is as if the Pope declared that as long as Catholics pay the Peter’s Pence to Rome, it does not matter whether they believe in Christ or not. Yet no one except a small handful of superannuated party hacks was surprised by Gorbachev’s ideology of power. Everybody else—and especially in the Communist countries—had much earlier lost all faith in salvation by society.

Mr. Gorbachev in Russia, and Mr. Deng and his successors in China, may succeed in maintaining their party’s monopoly of power or even in reviving the economy.  But one thing they cannot restore is the belief in salvation by society, whether through communism or by any other ism. It is gone for good. The belief in salvation by society is equally gone in non-Communist countries. No one — except perhaps the “liberation theologians” in South America—believes any more in the power of social action to create a perfect society, or even to bring society closer to such an ideal, or in fundamentally changing the individual to produce the “new Adam.”

Fifty years ago, such beliefs were commonplace. Not only Socialists but the great majority of political thinkers all over the world believed that social action—and especially the abolition of private property—would fundamentally change the human being. There would be Socialist Man, Nazi Man, Communist Man, and so on. The differences were not over the basic creed itself but over the speed of advance, over which particular action would be most productive. The main argument was over means. Should it be the role of politics and government to remove obstacles to social perfectibility—what today would be called “neoconservative” and sixty years ago was called “Liberal?” Or should government actively create new institutions and new conditions?

The belief in salvation by faith dominated medieval Europe. Revived in the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, it had waned by the middle of the seventeenth century. To be sure, each religious denomination roclaimed—and still proclaims—its way as “the only right way.” But by the middle of the seventeenth century it had become widely accepted that faith was a personal matter. This did not mean that religious persecutions stopped; there were still some even in the nineteenth-century West. And not until the middle of the nineteenth century did political disabilities based on religion totally disappear even in Western countries. But the belief that religious faith could create the City of God on earth had disappeared — or become irrelevant—a hundred years earlier.

The void created by the disappearance of the belief in salvation through faith was filled in the mid-1700s by the emergence of the belief in salvation by society, that is, by a temporal social order, embodied in an equally temporal government. This belief was first enunciated by Jean-Jacques Rosseau in France. Thirty years later, Jeremy Bentham in England worked it up into a political system. It was cast in its permanent form, into a “scientific” absolutism, by the “father of sociology,” Auguste Comte, in France, and by G. W. F. Hegel in Germany. Those two then “begat” Marx. Lenin, Hitler, and Mao were all Marx’s children.