Faustian development visions to eradicate natural disasters have been replaced by anti-Faustian risk cosmopolitanism. Yearning for human freedom is being replaced by scepticism of human freedom, a theme Berman wanted to pursue further (Berman 1988 [1982]: 10). Goethe’s 1774 poem Why was deep insight given to us? feared humans losing meaning in their existence (Goethe 2005: 30–33). If Goethe’s Faust captures the European spirit of earlier centuries, what is the European spirit today and what future does it offer for humanism? This book re-engages with its vision of a establishing a free land and free people towards contributing to rekindling European humanism.
Our approach is loosely ‘understanding which consists in “seeing connections” ’ (Wittgenstein 1953, para 122: 49). We make historical cultural connections to explore the rise of humanist modernity and its demise in Europe. Wittgenstein’s philosophical ‘seeing connections’ was a plea for humanist philosophising and the humanities. His thinking was influenced by Goethe and Spengler’s writings on morphology (Beale 2017: 59–80; Monk 1999). He questioned attempts to model the humanities or government on the natural sciences. The humanities had distinct concerns related to human meaning which the natural sciences could not address. Here we follow what has been described as an interpretivist approach concerned with human meaning, endorsing plural methods and diverse sources of knowledge. In this at least, we sympathise with Mephistopheles’ advice to Faust’s student warning against absolutist theories or methods:
To docket living things past any doubt
You cancel first the living spirit out:
The parts lie in the hollow of your hand,
You only lack the living link you banned.
(Goethe 1808 ‘Faust’s Study’ iii in Wayne 1949: 95)
Our historical interpretivist approach, an approach concerned with cultural meanings and values, addresses the hollowing out of European humanism and humanist modernity (Berman 1988 [1982]: 5). We are interested in how matters crystalised in particular ways eroding humanist belief in human agency and jeopardising people realising a home in the world (Arendt 1953: 78; 1968 [1950]: xv; 1994b: 328–60). Here our approach differs from an influential strand of interpretivism, which is sceptical towards human freedom; emphasises language, culture, environment, and social norms over people; and downgrades individuals as active creators of, and actors in the world. Historical developments and individual acts are not inevitable, and predetermined by certain causes, but contingent upon a range of factors, including the understandings and interpretations of leading actors in the unfolding of events (Jaspers 1997 [1913]: 537–8). Humans escape being imprisoned in life processes wholly determined by biological necessity through their capacity to make things, as the political theorist Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition explored (Arendt 1998 [1958]: 236). As toolmakers, humans not only ease their labour and enhance their security but create enduring objects and a humanised world. Yet human labour and human creation require validation that is more than utility; our activity needs to be meaningful. We give value and derive meaning in our lives and communities from the myths or narratives we tell of our hopes and fears, our successes and failures (Arendt 1998 [1958]: 236). Meaningful stories of our words and deeds help us make sense of the course of our lives. Moreover, we have the possibility of history-making, that is, some possibility of acting freely together and acting anew beyond received patterns of behaviour and renewing or establishing new forms of political community. We are not condemned to natural history simply following biological cycles of life and death or closed cycles of violence and revenge, notwithstanding our mortal biological existence (Arendt 1998 [1958]: 9, 96–97). Meaningful individual stories and collective histories give us the courage to act without certainty and confront human sufferings, failures, and misdeeds, in ways that allow humanity to contest or forgive each other, and then move on and act anew in the future. Recovering human meaning is a prerequisite for revitalising human possibilities, and the Faust legend is one such cultural resource opening up human history to new beginnings.
In our citation of the works of Goethe and others, we affirm cultural remembering against an abstract de-humanising cosmopolitanism. Such a technique was deliberately practiced in the dissident poetry of Eastern Europe against totalitarian amnesia. The New Europe of cosmopolitan empire represents technocracy over democracy, scientism over humanism. In its different forms, scientism is the governance of societies according to natural science models, and the political uses of sciences have implications for political freedom and scientific freedom (Beale and Kidd 2017; Djilas 1972; Monk 1999). Evolving transnational governance within the continent and beyond involves eroding national belonging, and independent national political and legal traditions (Bickerton 2012), and cultural historical forgetting from the common law system of north-west Europe to the socialist self-management system of south-east Europe. The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk wryly observes the redundancy of European national languages and humanist traditions under a ‘monoglossia’ of transnational technocratic governance ‘positivistic training planners object to the humanities in general, and the concept of literary and artistic education in particular. They see clearly that reading Faust costs entire days, while War and Peace delays the reader for several weeks’ (Sloterdijk 2013 [2005]: 260).
We seek to analyse the leading ideas of the New Europe against the past ideals expressed in the Faustian European spirit. The New Europe we refer to is not that of Eastern Europe versus Western Europe. Instead we mean the post-1989 New Europe and its emerging model of cosmopolitan empire in contrast to the former European ideal as a family of free self-determining nation states, an ideal traceable back to the Greek independent city states in the classical ancient period, and in the modern period to the Dutch republic whose history inspired Goethe’s work. Some of the new historiography deconstructing national histories and their colonial wrongs is ironically invoked to legitimise cosmopolitan empire of today against national self-determination, while its expanding transnational governance has its own neo-colonial relations and inhumane ramifications.
This book is focused on the rise and fall of European aspirations for national development to provide material prosperity and prevent natural disasters. European models of transnational governance are crystalising in forms retreating from the humanist European spirit of freedom, the pursuit of knowledge, and openness to historical change. To the earlier key moments of cosmopolitan thinking identified by the sociologist Ulrich Beck (1944–2015) (Beck 2006: 45), we may add Beck’s own form of risk cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan empire (Beck and Grande 2007). Beck gained the status of a leading public voice in Germany, and his ideas have strongly influenced European thinking on transnational governance. Beck’s studies are compelling in their analysis of globalisation, the erosion of nation states, and their critique of reductive profit-seeking economic models, neglecting the social and environmental harms of their economic activities (Beck 1992 [1986]). Beck sought transnational governance to curb the power of nation states, national interest, and majoritarian democracy to oppose neoliberal economics and support environmentalism. Nevertheless his analysis equivocated over whether he was describing or prescribing a future where people no longer enjoyed the political freedoms and material securities of home and faced a precarious, homeless and migratory future (Beck 2016). The transnational governance of risk cosmopolitanism, and its attack on national independence, has its own serious costs, which are ironically leaving people more exposed to economic exploitation and insecurity. The new millennium has witnessed an ironic convergence of Beck’s risk cosmopolitanism driven by environmentalism and the neoliberalism he opposed in today’s resilience governance, which encompasses security, development, and disaster management (Duffield 2018).
Beck’s model of ‘world risk society’ essentially opposed human venture (Beck 2006) and wanted to restrain human activity whose outcomes were unknown. Risk-averse cosmopolitanism is diametrically opposed to the Faustian endorsement of human deeds. However, without new human deeds venturing into the unknown, progressive social change is stifled. Goethe imagined building sea defences and reclaiming new land for cultivation. Risk cosmopolitanism is counter to engineering bold visions of inland paradises or the faith in common action involved to realise such
