Abstract
Peter Baehr’s challenging book comes almost a half-century after another Canadian sociologist, John O’Neill, called for a moratorium on the artless and often arrogant posturing of sociologists: ‘There is [. . .] a naïve dogmatism underlying the liberal social science conception of understanding which still draws upon the rationalist tradition of Enlightenment unmasking. But there is nothing behind the face of the man who speaks, beyond what else he has to say or how he keeps his silence’ (O’Neill, 1972: 236). As in Baehr’s (2002) earlier study of the metaphors and images that have consolidated the classical heritage of sociological thought, including Max Weber’s master trope of the ‘iron cage’ (or ‘steel-hard casing’: stahlhartes Gehäuse), here his focus is on what he calls ‘the unmasking style’ in social (not just sociological) theory. Noting similar arguments by earlier writers such as C. Wright Mills and Karl Mannheim, Baehr approaches the question of style very loosely as ‘a distinctive way of talking and writing’ and ‘a rhetorical performance’ (2, 9, 11n1; also see Baehr, 2013; cf. Simmel, 1997). He treats the figure of the mask as more than a mere metaphor insofar as it also functions as a metonym – a connected series of figures, techniques, and tropes that often serve as near synonyms for veiling, cloaking and disguising, and that in turn also imply the antonyms of nakedness, clarity or transparency (see also Baehr, 2019a). This inflation of ‘unmasking’ discourse is not confined to social scientists, of course, but is also evident in left and right politics, journalistic polemics, social media debates and popular conspiracy theories, which Baehr notes with considerable annoyance (he has a long list of pet-peeves). These distractions aside, his attention is mainly fixed on the promise and potential of social theory, and his objective is sober and serious: ‘This book offers a cautionary tale, not a heuristic’ (6).
Perhaps the most illuminating of Baehr’s insights is the contrast he notes between the modern theoretical style of unmasking as exposure and accusation and the ancient theatrical style of masking as focalisation and amplification (15–17). The dramatic performers of antiquity used masks to hide their faces and project their voices, and thus as devices for showing and telling the truth through art. The prosôpon – the face or front that Erving Goffman would later examine in real-life role-playing and staged performances (88–91) – then became a model for the persona of the citizen, the bearer of rights, responsibilities, roles, and routines that are essential to a commonwealth (res publica). By the late 16th century, partly in response to the Inquisition, the idea of unmasking would take on its modern form of promoting civic morals and scientific virtue, as in Bacon’s attack on contemporary forms of idolatry and imposture (34n5, 35n23). Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau later launched the ‘opening salvo in the unmasking war’ (17, 42–44) with his moralising crusade to reveal the fears, insecurities, hypocrisies, and aggressions of modern society beneath its mask of polite civility. Unmasking, then, became not just a technique of reason but also a path to freedom: ‘The declared objective of unmasking is to liberate minds, persons and societies from subjection to hidden forces by means of rational enlightenment and political or class action’ (25).
The point where I object to Baehr’s argument lies in how he goes on to attribute the persistence of the unmasking style in social theory not to the dogmatic pretensions of Enlightenment thinkers but rather to Marx, who supposedly forged ‘the Marxian template’ for later generations (3, 50–55). This model for unmasking, he asserts, can be decoded from ‘A Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction’ by the 25 year-old Marx published in the sole issue of Franco-German Yearbooks, which he himself edited before it was shut down by the Prussian censors. Baehr quotes many of the essay’s opening statements, ‘reordered and numbered [. . .] to give them a logical flow’ (58–59), although he does not explain what makes them less ‘logical’ in their original form. Indeed, he takes it as self-evident that Marx aims to violently expose all religion as mere ideology, collective delusion, and false consciousness.
The seventh and most famous of the nine statements that Baehr cites without commentary is actually a paragraph of its own made up of three distinct assertions, which can be further broken up into their components: ‘(7)[a] “Religious suffering is at one and the same time [i] the expression of real suffering and [ii] a protest against real suffering. [b] Religion is [i] the sigh of the oppressed creature, [ii] the heart of a heartless world, and [iii] the soul of soulless conditions. It is [c] the opium of the people”’ (Marx, 1975: 244, 58–59; parentheses are Baehr’s; square brackets are my own; Baehr does not reproduce Marx’s italics). Generations of social theorists and Marxist revolutionaries have skimmed through this passage only to retrieve its powerful final metaphor, usually ignoring the preceding sequence of images as well as its political and economic connotations in the history of British Imperialism (the first Opium War having ended a year and half earlier). A more patient and careful reading shows that here Marx is deploying (or ‘coquetting with’, as he says in Capital) Hegel’s dialectical style of reasoning: after positively acknowledging the real character of religious belief as both an expression of and a protest against actual suffering (Elend), misery, and poverty (7a, i, ii, 7b, i), he offers the counter-point that this emotional outpouring expresses the heart and soul (Gemüt und Geist) of these conditions (7b, ii, iii), which these emotions threaten to neutralise, anaesthetise, and or render oblivious (7c). The negation of this negation, as Marx goes on to say, is the abolition (Aufhebung) of religion, not directly but by abolishing the miserable conditions that require these abstract outpourings of protest and impotent expressions of escape.
If I dwell on this notorious passage in some detail it is to show, first, that ‘unmasking’ in any naïve or narrow sense is far from Marx’s strategy here, insofar as he carefully formulates both the positive and negative functions of religious ideas and beliefs – as a cry of pain and compassion, a plea of protest and resignation, and a call for resistance and flight. Later on the same page, Marx asserts that ‘[i]t is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask [entlarven] self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked’ (Marx, 1975: 244, quoted by Baehr at 52; the figure of ‘larva’ in the German suggests less a ‘mask’ than something that reveals itself or becomes something else in the course of its development). However ‘weaponised’, ‘reductive’, ‘deflating’ or ‘hyperbolic’ Marx’s language is in this particular piece, he is writing as an activist-revolutionary in solidarity with ‘the people’ (and more precisely ‘the proletariat’ in the concluding paragraphs) and not simply as a philosopher-critic looking down on them: ‘clearly the weapon of criticism cannot replace the criticism of weapons’ (Marx, 1975: 251). Like Durkheim (86–88) and Tocqueville (see Baehr, 2019b), he explicitly acknowledges that religions are true in their own fashion not just as social products and cultural symptoms but also in giving meaning to human existence or providing reasons for action, and ultimately by acknowledging something in us that is also ‘more than’ than us.
A second objection to make concerning Baehr’s use of this passage is that it is inaccurate or at least misleading to frame it as the source of ‘the Marxian template’ that is somehow deployed throughout Marx’s subsequent writings: ‘Every significant unmasking technique in Capital and other works finesse this early engagement’ (58), he argues, from the optical analogy of the ‘camera obscura’ in The German Ideology to the ‘sentimental veil’ of the family stripped away by the cash-nexus in the Communist Manifesto and the ‘veiled truths’ of bourgeois statistics in Capital. As Baehr himself seems to acknowledge, there is more than just word play or mere linguistic inversion in Marx’s frequent use of the rhetorical strategy of anti-metabole (or chiasmus), and in his critical deployment of Hegel’s technique of reversal: ‘Marx’s way of turning capitalism, an inverted system, against itself [. . .] is a way of inverting inversion and thereby righting it’ (52; 67n8). From the opening lines of ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, it is clear that Marx’s concern is the modern state and its material conditions and not with religion as such, and nor is he interested in offer anything more than a criticism of the criticism of religion (which he and Engels deal with elsewhere). Rather, Marx’s focus is on the philosophical treatment of the political, social, and economic conditions that give rise to or even require religious ideas, illusions and beliefs.
Although I think Baehr is mistaken in attributing ‘the Marxian template’ to Marx himself (leaving aside Marx’s own assertion that he was not a Marxist), nevertheless he goes on to observe astutely that some later revolutionaries and social theorists have, nevertheless, forged their own ‘unmasking style’ from Marx’s writings, with disastrous or distorting consequences: ‘Since the time of Marx, radical theorists have claimed unmasking as a prerogative of the learned, the cognoscenti of critique’ (116). Although the origins of this enlightened arrogance can certainly be found before Marx, this aspect of Baehr’s argument has a familiar and untimely ring to it, as in his summary of Raymond Aron’s Opium of the Intellectuals: ‘Marx is the faith’s prophet, Capital its scripture, Lenin its saviour, History its god. [. . .] The Communist party is Marxism’s Church (or sect) [. . .], intellectuals [its] scholastic interpreters’ (98). Unlike Aron, Baehr is careful to avoid engaging in clever tu quo que manoeuvres to ‘unmask the unmaskers’ by meeting exaggeration with hyperbole, or to ‘accuse the accusers’ by meeting excess with overkill. His own ‘cautionary tale’ offers reasoned disagreements along with passionate denunciations, but also some ‘alternative resources’ in the form of fictional narratives, sceptical philosophies, and theories of conflictual pluralism (135–143). At its best, this book is an attempt at self-clarification rather than self-defence – ‘While others expose us, we disclose ourselves’ (145) – as well as a humble reminder of our irreducible if lamentable limitations as intellectuals.
