Die politische Philosophie Ludwig Woltmanns: Im Spannungsfeld von Kantianismus, Historischem Materialismus und Sozialdarwinismus (review)

240 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Die politische Philosophie Ludwig Woltmanns: Im Spannungsfeld von Kant&nismus, Historischem Materialismus und Sozialdarwinismus. By Jt~rgen Misch. (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1975. Pp. 290. DM 48) It is both surprising and unfortunate that the author did not see fit to add a biographical note about Ludwig Woltmann. Surprising, because he himself remarks that Woltmann is virtually forgotten today; unfortunate, because the normally available reference sources barely list him. To be sure, a careful reader of Misch's monograph will find hints here and there. He will learn that Woltmann lived from 1871-1907; that he studied medicine (but not whether he practiced it); that he joined the German Social Democratic Party in which he took an active, if critical, part; that he subsequently left it (but not why); that he corresponded with and met Eduard Bernstein, the noted Revisionist leader; and that he drowned (presumably by accident) at the early age of thirty-six. Equally puzzling is the main title of the book. Admittedly, Woltmann's complex thought is not easy to classify, but politics hardly forms its major theme. In his vision of the good (socialist) society references to the state or political institutions are invariably brief and roundly dismissive. Politics is identified with oppression, with coercive law, for which Woltmann has no use in socialist society. And although he generally supported Bernstein, he could not share his faith in parliamentarianism, since it implied for him a legitimation of politics. Socialism , he argued, was not something political, nor was it the result of a political act. Much to the apparent incomprehension of Misch, Woltmann maintained that socialism can and should be built within capitalism, that the change from private to public ownership of production and distribution should evolve (through cooperative enterprises and other voluntary collective efforts by the workers themselves) rather than be imposed by political means. The most pervasive thrust in Woltmann's thought is ethical, and while the basis of his ethical thinking is profoundly social it is also distinctly apolitical. The subtitle is more accurate; for the major part of the book reports (one cannot really say discusses, notwithstanding the occasional cryptic comment) Woltmann's attempt to reconcile elements of Kantian, Darwinian, and Marxian thought. Of his five major studies, three center on this ideational linkage, whereas his last two books explore the significance of racial characteristics in works of art. Although Woltmann saw his role as that of a mediator between Kantianism and Darwinism, on the one hand, and Marxism, on the other, he anticipated being misunderstood and possibly accused of Marxian heresy. In view of this (justified) anticipation he chose his terminology carefully, painstakingly elucidating the distinct strands in his approach to Marxism. Too little attention, he felt, had hitherto been paid to epistemology, in particular to Kant's epistemology , as an aid toward understanding the principal motive forces of socialism. As a result, socialism came to be viewed in essentially economic and political terms instead of being seen as an expression of man's moral consciousness. It was this mistaken view that led socialists to expect the transformation from capitalism to socialism as an inexorable outcome of the collapse of capitalism as an economic system. Likewise, Woltmann traced much wrongheaded Darwinism to a lack of epistemological discernment in the use of organismic analogies in social and political theorizing and in the treatment of "culture" and "nature" in socio-economic causation . He warned specifically against conflating approaches in which recourse could legitimately be had to Darwinian developmental theory with those in which it could not. Thus, he accepted the applicability of the notion of natural selection in the natural world of plants, animals , and prehistorical man, but he challenged it in the sphere and era of human culture and human history. His sharpest attacks, however, were mounted against those (socialists and antisocialists ) who identified the Darwinian idea of the struggle for survival with the liberal notion of economic competition. Interestingly enough, the intensity of these attacks did not spring from an aversion to competition as such. On the contrary, Woltmann, like Kant, saw in human competition the source of progress and creative achievement. The liberation from the BOOK REVIEWS...