Eli Sagan's Citizens and Cannibals

Eli Sagan's book, Citizens and Cannibals, is a fascinating theoretical treatise on the meaning of the French Revolution.  Favoring analysis over narrative, Sagan argues that the French Revolution reveals the fault lines of modernity.  According to Sagan, the French Revolution is representative of the anxiety modern men and women feel when they give us Early Modern sources of corporate identity. Following the logic of Marshall Berman's book, All That is Solid Melts Into Air, Sagan maintains that French revolutionaries turned to terror to compensate for the loss of the king, the Catholic church, guilds, and other sources of social and cultural identity. Sagan writes that most people in France accepted the principles of the French Revolution even before it occurred.  Nobles, clergymen, and even the king, all more or less gave up medieval assumptions and joined the bourgeoisie in believing in the rights of individuals and the bourgeois concept of freedom.

According to Sagan, the French Revolution had little or nothing to do with capitalism, which had made few inroads in France by the end of the 18th century, and everything to do with middle class values. The French Revolution was not made by industrialists or great merchants but rather by lawyers. The Revolution was ultimately an expression of a new ethos.  By 1789 most educated people accepted many or perhaps most modern ideas about politics.  Robespierre, for instance, believed in many of the things we believe in.  He hated slavery, favored the separation of church and state, supported progressive taxation, and championed free and universal education.  He believed in civil rights, as they are commonly understood.   Sagan goes so far as to call Robespierre a "moral genius" for his early and eloquent advocacy of so many of the causes we still champion today.  On the other hand, Robespierre, like so many of his contemporaries, hated factionalism.  This hatred was born of a fear that is representative of the widespread fear that accompanied all passages to modernity.

Why was the French Revolution so bloody?  Sagan makes a compelling case that Frenchmen embraced most aspects of modernity but rejected the concept of a loyal ambition.  They believed in individual rights, and Rousseau's famous "general will" of the nation.  What they simply could not abide were factions.  Sagan points out that this suspicion of factions is common even to America's founding fathers.  He also reminds us that France never fully resolved its disgust with factions until DeGaulle renounced the idea of becoming a dictator well over a century later.  With this hatred of factionalism, French revolutionaries were left with no other choice but to annihilate one another.  The stakes were huge:  Girondists knew that they would either kill members of the Mountain, or be killed. Of course, Sagan doesn't let matters wrest there.  He knows that many national histories involved widespread bloodshed, and bloodshed out of all proportion to the struggle for political power.  In France, revolutionaries didn't just kill potential political opponents, but rather killed powerless nobles and other groups.

In the twentieth century, ideological terrorists repeatedly created large groups of people for no reason at all.  The holocaust, for example, cannot be explained by any ordinary logic. The murder of a group of people who offered no resistance to the regime was, strictly speaking, irrational.  How to explain such hysteria?  Sagan offers the plausible argument that Germans, like so many others who encountered modernity, were both exhilarated and terrified by their isolation and freedom. Cannibalism is in a sense the flip side of citizenship.

The logic of modern terror makes sense in a Russian context.  On a narrow level, we see that the Bolsheviks never learned how to deal with factionalism except through radical violence.  On some level, Stalin understood that he would either kill or be killed by political opponents.  Bolsheviks never admitted to themselves that other Bolsheviks had a right to disagree about tactics or ideology in fundamental ways.  The unit of the party and therefore the nation could not be threatened, even if the alternative to disunity was violence.  But more than an explanation for bloody dictatorship, Sagan offers us an understanding of why the Soviet Union embraced violence on such an enormous scale. Sagan offers us an explanation for why there were so many Stalinists in 1930s Russia.  The Russians were hysterical about something.  They required sacrifices to feel better about the earth-shattering, if also exciting, changes they were experiencing.  This is the paradox of the Russian Revolution, a paradox that existed however as early as the French Revolution:  Russians were forging a radical version of equality, but also giving up many of their most familiar sources of social cohesion, including the tsar, the Orthodox Church, the aristocracy, and the peasant commune. How to deal with this level of uncertainty?  Surely violence was chicken soup for the terrified soul.

Dickens, Balzac and Das Kapital

I’ve always been fascinated by the Great Books approach to education—fascinated, but not convinced. At one point does it become useful to study primary sources without the benefit and context provided by secondary sources? I’m afraid I sometimes fall into the category of the young man in the film, Barcelona, who tells a friend that he prefers literary criticism to the work it dissects. Sometimes, you're not equipped for the unmediated experience of reading 1000 pages of esoteric language. For this reason, I am not greatly troubled by my unfamiliarity with the Russian language or indeed with a few of the classics of Marxist literature, in German or any other language. However, I suffer an occasional pang of conscience, most particularly about Karl Marx’s masterpiece, Volume I of Das Kapital.



Like others perhaps, I’ve wrestled with the meaning of the Russian Revolution and Communism in general with very little direct contact with Marx’s work, with the exception of that short and easily digestible pamphlet, the Communist Manifesto, and, only recently, the Eighteenth Brumiare of Louis Bonaparte. I remember a high school friend who put me to shame by referring to her own reading of Das Kapital as well as Adam Smith’s the Wealth of Nations. Yet 20 years later, Das Kapital continues to intimidate me.



Two months ago, I pulled a copy of the book from the shelves of a used bookstore, but put it back, convinced that I’d never be able to get through it. Do I seem unusual? Francis Wheen, who wrote a book called Marx’s Das Kapital in the “Books that changed the world” series, doesn’t think so. Apparently, many other people have avoided the book, including politicians (Harold Wilson said the footnotes on page one turned him off) and even committed Marxists. Wheen believes that they are making a big mistake.



According to Wheen, Das Kapital is a work of literature or at least quasi-literature. It’s filled with erudition but it’s also filled with brilliant prose and real aesthetic power. It’s a satire, comedy, farce, Gothic novel, and tragedy all rolled into one. The bourgeoisie and capitalism in general, are alternately portrayed as extraordinarily vigorous protagonists (a la Marshall Berman’s All That is Solid Melts Into Air) and monstrously destructive and depraved villains. Das Kapital is, Wheen continues, a sprawling treatise on modern economics, but it’s also a creative and multilayered and open-ended encounter with modernity as embodied in capitalism.

Although Wheen demonstrates that the book didn’t make a large splash upon publication, people did, as we know from the course of Russian history, fall in love it. Das Kapital has as much in common with a work by Tolstoy or Dickens or Balzac or Melville as it does with Ricardo or Adam Smith. The art, I suspect, was more important than the dismal science. If revolutionaries were going to overthrow the old order, they needed something worthy enough to put in its place, and communism as described in Das Kapital fits the bill.



Notwithstanding its critics, which Wheen attempts to refute without necessarily endorsing Marx’s analyses, the book is subtle and its dialectics complex (or slippery?) enough to elude any easy categorization. Like great literature, Wheen says that Das Kapital is rich and difficult and all-encompassing, and therefore the book seldom makes predictions about capitalism that can be easily dismissed or proven wrong. All in all, Wheen thinks the book is worth reading, both because it’s a work of art, and because it remains the best critique of the current economic system ever written.