131214840-Carl-Schmitt

Page 54
coming eclipse of the sun. But the rationalism of Marxist theory has another side, more
important for the concept of dictatorship. This rationalism does not exhaust itself in a science
that intends, with the help of natural laws and strict determinism, to produce a method that
would be used to turn the laws of nature to mankind's advantage, as, for example, a technique
is bound to an exact natural-scientific method. If that were the scientific in socialism, then
the leap into the realm of freedom would only be a leap into the realm of absolute
technocracy. It would have been only a remnant of an earlier Enlightenment rationalism and
another example of the attempt, much favored since the eighteenth century, 4 to produce a
politics of mathematical and physical exactness, with the sole difference that the powerful
moralism that still dominated eighteenth-century thought would be given up theoretically.
The result must be, as with all rationalisms, a dictatorship of the leading rationalists.
The philosophically and metaphysically fascinating aspect of Marxist historical philosophy
and sociology is not its similarity to natural science, but the way that Marx retains the
concept of a dialectical development of human history and observes this development as a
concrete, unique antithetical process, producing itself through an immanent, organic power.
It changes nothing in the structure of his thought that he shifted this development into the
area of economics and technology. This is merely a transference that can be explained in
various ways: for example, psychologically, from an intuition about the political importance
of economic factors, or systematically, from the attempt to make human activity the master
of historical events, the master of the irrationality of human fate. The "leap into the realm of
freedom" can only be understood dialectically. It cannot be undertaken with the help of
technique alone. Otherwise one could really demand of Marxist socialism that instead of
political action, it would do better to invent new machines. It might be conceivable that in the
future communist society, new technical and chemical discoveries might be made which
would again alter the foundations of communist society
Create PDF with PDF4U. If you wish to remove this line, please click here to purchase the full version