"Charles Brown" <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> writes:
> Of course, Rosa Luxembourg committed a logical fallacy
> when she coined the slogan "Socialism or Barbarism"
> because the fact that capitalism in crisis on its way
> to fascism shared certain characteristics with
> barbarism didn't mean that is _was_ barbarism. ( All
> barbarism is white; all crisis capitalism is white;
> therefore all crisis capitalism is babarism). But
> Luxembourg was on point in addressing the mo'
> important rhetorical problem, because any new term
> coined at that time would not have been effective in
> rousing people to action.. That is, a new term then
> would not have had the history that "barbarism" had
> associated with it in people's minds.
The locus classicus for a definition of barbarism in Germany is Immanuel Kant's _Anthropology_, where he attempts a classification of social orders depending on their having or not having freedom, law, and violence.
Barbarism, in this scheme, is the status freedom present, violence present, law absent.
(Republic is freedom present, violence present, law present. And so forth. Curiously, the most desirable order seems to be anarchism: freedom present, law present, violence absent -- anarchists love the passage, of course.)
As an aside, Marx's use of _specious_being_ (Gattungswesen) comes from the same source.
cheers AN ^^^^^^^^ CB: Thanks AN. I was thinking that Luxemburg's idea of ":barbarism" might also be influenced by the term in real anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan's _Ancient Society_ ( savagary-babarism-civilization; these are sort of modes of production ), as that work was known in the Marxist tradition because of the use Engels made of it in _The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State_. Although, Morgan actually gives a somewhat benign connotation to "babarism". Is Marx's "species-being" influenced by Feuerbach's philosophical anthropology ?