In the left’s view, the only role for ideas is to serve as propaganda for a brute power struggle between opposing social collectives. But if that’s all they are, then why bother with them? Hence the de-intellectualization of the left and its inability to produce theories with wide, universal appeal. This collectivist worldview is also the key to the left’s failure to produce works of wide, popular literary appeal. I think it’s interesting to note that here, too, there used to be a book that could qualify as a liberal version of Atlas Shrugged. Ironically, it was Ayn Rand’s favorite novel: Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. In fact it might be more accurate to say, not that Les Misérables was a liberal Atlas Shrugged, but that Atlas Shrugged is a capitalist Les Misérables. Hugo’s masterwork had the epic scale and high drama that inspired a young Ayn Rand, but it was devoted to a squishier, altruist version of social reform. Hugo’s concern was with the plight of the poor, as he described in the novel’s preface. So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age—the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of women by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night—are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless. Ayn Rand described the novel’s theme as “the injustice of society toward its lower classes,” which might sound like a good theme for a modern American “liberal.” And yet, though Hugo described himself as a “socialist,” he was no collectivist. In terms of the content of his ideas, he spoke in terms that today would probably place him on the center-right. Here, for example, was his view on the Communists’ plans for redistribution of wealth: “Their distribution kills production. Equal partition abolishes emulation. And consequently labor. It is a distribution made by the butcher, who kills what he divides.” The important thing about Hugo, however, wasn’t his political ideology, which was more than a little vague, but his literary style. The key to his literary power is his profoundly individualist outlook. Hugo’s work is, at root, a celebration of the power of choice and the individual’s ability to determine his own destiny.
Posted on: Mon, 08 Dec 2014 15:43:45 +0000
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