Book Review: Ruling Illusions: Philosophy and the Social Order

• Author: David Earle Bohn
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/106591297903200213
• Published date: 01 June 1979
• Date: 01 June 1979
• Subject Matter: Book Review

BOOK

REVIEWS

Ruling

Illusions:

Philosophy

and

the

Social Order.

By ANTHONY SKILLEN. (At-

lantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press Inc.,

1978.

Pp.

179.

$16.50.)

In

contrast to the buoyant hopes of the late sixties and early seventies, Skillen’s

book appears at

a

time of increasing pessimism among Marxist scholars

as

to the

possibility of any imminent revolutionary change in the mature capitalist states of

Western Europe and America. IYith Great Britain

as

his case in point, the author

seeks to account for the absence of revolution

by

showing how the ideologies of

statism, managerialism, legalism, and moralism, acting

as

superstructural forces,

justify the status quo by abstracting man out of the actual world of his social ex-

perience and replacing it with

a

false world of idealistic bromides. It

is

Skillen’s

aim to unmask this idealism and

its

accompanying dualisms and thereby weaken

their ability to legitimize the existing system with its “disorder, anarchy, lawlessness,

and violence.”

The resulting analysis

is

predictable. Skillen finds the logical or practical

justifications of the state offered by Hobbes, Handel, Rawls, and others to be based

upon either

a

mythical

a

priori

version of human nature or

a

pervasive ignorance

of the underlying economic and social facts of political life.

He

argues that man-

agerialism does not have

as

its objective

the

enrichment of human labor, but

through industrial statesmanship and psychological manipulation, the creation of

a

disciplined and stable work force suitable for the joyless and unhuman requirements

of the capitalist system. In legalism, Skillen discovers another mediation. The doe-

trines advanced by Bentham, Austin, Mill, Hart, ete., each in its

oivn

way seek to

establish

as

the

“rule

of lad’ the inhuman principles necessary to maintain private

property and the capitalist market. Finally, Skillen condemns the morality of

capitalist society

as

little more than moralism

-

hollow cliehCs

-

long since under-

mined by the relativism of positivist philosophy but, nevertheless, taught in order

to induce the masses to

look

upon their natural and spontaneous desires

as

evil and

so discipline and repress them

as

to create

a

ready, docile, and willing pool

of

labor.

Having made these points, Skillen

argues

that Marxist scholarship has largely

misunderstood the degree to which these mediations could permit capitalism to

adapt and resist essential structural change. They have systematically ignored the

superstructure, assuming it to follow rather mechanically from underlying economic

change. Real understanding of the politics of the modem capitalist society must

go

beyond the orthodox Marxist version of the state. Politics must be seen

as

a

powerful mediation which penetrates every element of social life. In the same way

managerialism, legalism, and moralism must be unmasked and exposed

as

the

powerful superstructural forces within the complexity of existing economic circum-

stances. Only then will it become clear that the reforms offered through these

mediations cannot cure society’s ills and that nothing short of structural change

with

full democratization

of

the system of economic production can generate real

freedom.

Skillen is careful to point out that the mere nationalization of the means of

production

as

now

exists

in the

U.S.S.R.

will

do little more than reproduce the

oppression of the capitalist system in the form of

a

highly spccialized, hierarchical,

and centralized bureaucracy. For Skillep, full democratization of the means of

production would require the dehierarchicalization and despecialization of the

sys-

tem with the infusion of

full

participation at

all

levels. Contradictions among the

workers would have to be approached with the help of Freudian psychology and

Gestalt therapy in which small group discussion and the therapy

of

friendship and

love would help resolve conflict.

In evaluating Skillen’s work, wenote that he is continuing in the tradition of

the Frankfurt school, hlarcuse, and Habermas in his focus on the superstructure

and the importance of mediations. However, he brings very little improvement to

the analysis of the former and in many ways falls below their standard. The work

is very polemical. Its onesidedness seems more concerned with changing the world

than understanding it. Seldom does he recognize his

own

assumptions while he

bombards

as

mythical the assumptions of the scholars he

oppose^.