Pip: A seventeenth-century lens-grinder gets excommunicated for dangerous ideas, and four centuries later a Trotskyist historiography argues he was right about basically everything — welcome to A Trumpet of Sedition.

Mara: freerein61 has been digging into the long arc of materialist philosophy, tracing how Spinoza's monism connects to Marx, to Trotsky, and to the question of what revolutionary consciousness actually means.

Pip: Let's start with the lineage itself — Spinoza, materialism, and how one excommunicated philosopher ends up as the ontological ground of dialectical materialism.

Spinoza, Materialism, and the Revolutionary Lineage

Mara: The post opens with a provocation: that Spinoza has been celebrated precisely by stripping him of what made him threatening. Contemporary scholarship, even sympathetic scholarship, isolates him from the class antagonisms of his own century.

Pip: The post puts it directly — Spinoza's ideas were "dangerous in his own time, and remain dangerous today," because they undermine every ideological justification for hierarchy, privilege, and clerical authority.

Mara: That danger was biographical before it was philosophical. Spinoza's excommunication at twenty-three for "abominable heresies" wasn't theological squeamishness — it was a mercantile-rabbinic elite protecting its position inside the Dutch Republic's fragile tolerance. His material circumstances and his philosophy were inseparable.

Pip: And the post uses Trotsky's method of concrete analysis of concrete conditions to make that case — you cannot read Spinoza's intellectual defiance apart from the class forces that produced the Dutch Republic.

Mara: The philosophical hinge is his rejection of Cartesian dualism. Where Descartes split reality into mind and matter, Spinoza asserted one substance — Deus sive Natura — and his claim that "the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things" anticipates Marx's insistence that consciousness is a product of material conditions.

Pip: So monism isn't a metaphysical curiosity — it's the move that makes a scientific account of society possible at all.

Mara: The post traces this through the French materialists: La Mettrie, Diderot, d'Holbach absorbed Spinoza's monism and turned it into militant atheism. Plekhanov called present-day materialism "a Spinozism that has become more or less aware of itself." Engels simply said old Spinoza was quite right.

Pip: On freedom and necessity, the post draws a careful parallel: for Spinoza, freedom is not free will but the understanding of necessity; for Trotsky, that understanding becomes collective revolutionary praxis — the working class grasping the laws of history in order to transform them.

Mara: The post also does sharp ideological critique of Roger Scruton, whose conservative reading of Spinoza the post calls "the ideological antithesis of Spinoza's rationalism" — admiring the logical rigour while rejecting the egalitarian implications, turning a revolutionary into a philosopher of aesthetic consolation.

Pip: Domesticating Spinoza, the post argues, mirrors the Stalinist domestication of Marx — detaching revolutionary thought from its materialist foundations.

Mara: The conclusion is that Marxism doesn't supersede Spinoza but completes him: his monism becomes the ground of dialectical materialism, his critique of superstition becomes the critique of ideology, and his defence of democracy becomes the defence of workers' democracy.

Pip: Four centuries on, the lens-grinder is still grinding.

Mara: The thread running through all of this is the question of what it means to complete a thinker rather than merely inherit them.

Pip: Spinoza dissolved dualism; Marx dissolved idealism; Trotsky dissolved fatalism. That's a relay race worth following — more next time.

I. Introduction: Spinoza and the Problem of Historical Materialism

Baruch Spinoza occupies a singular position in the history of philosophy: a thinker simultaneously canonised and neutralised. He is celebrated as a rationalist metaphysician, admired as a pioneer of secular modernity, and invoked as a precursor to democratic thought. Yet these recognitions have often come at the cost of stripping his work of its revolutionary implications. Contemporary scholarship, even when sympathetic, tends to isolate Spinoza from the social antagonisms of the seventeenth century and from the radical traditions that later drew upon his ideas. Spinoza’s ideas were “dangerous in his own time, and remain dangerous today,” precisely because they undermine every ideological justification for hierarchy, privilege, and clerical authority.

2.Spinoza’s Life as a Historical Symptom

Spinoza’s biography is not an incidental backdrop to his philosophy; it is a historical symptom of the contradictions of the Dutch Republic. Born into Amsterdam’s Portuguese‑Jewish community  a community of former conversos who had fled the Inquisition  Spinoza was excommunicated at twenty‑three for “abominable heresies” and “monstrous deeds.” The severity of the cherem reveals the political anxieties of a mercantile‑rabbinic elite dependent on the Republic’s fragile tolerance. Spinoza’s ideas threatened not only theological orthodoxy but the ideological foundations of a commercial oligarchy.

His modest life as a lens‑grinder, his clandestine publications, and his sympathy for Jan de Witt’s republicanism all point to a thinker whose material circumstances were inseparable from his philosophical commitments. His attempt to denounce de Witt’s murder as “barbaric”  an act his landlord prevented for fear of reprisals  illustrates the political stakes of his thought. Spinoza’s biography thus becomes a site where intellectual history and class struggle intersect.

Leon Trotsky’s method of “concrete analysis of concrete conditions” is indispensable here. Spinoza’s intellectual defiance cannot be understood apart from the class forces that shaped the Dutch Republic: the rise of a commercial bourgeoisie, the crisis of feudal remnants, and the ideological vacuum created by the decline of scholasticism. Spinoza’s philosophy emerges not as an abstract system but as the rational expression of a world in transition.

3.Monism as the Ontological Ground of Materialism

Spinoza’s rejection of Cartesian dualism is the decisive philosophical rupture that makes modern materialism possible. Descartes’ division of reality into res cogitans and res extensa preserved the theological worldview of the seventeenth century. Spinoza demolished this architecture by asserting that there is only one substance “God or Nature (Deus sive Natura).” Thought and extension are attributes of the same substance; the mental and the physical are two expressions of one reality.

This monism is not a metaphysical curiosity but the ontological foundation of materialism. By dissolving the supernatural realm, Spinoza undermines the ideological authority of church and state. His claim that “the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things” anticipates Marx’s insistence that consciousness is a product of material conditions. Spinoza’s monism thus becomes the conceptual precondition for a scientific account of society.

Trotsky’s dialectical materialism deepens this insight. For Trotsky, the unity of mind and world is not merely ontological but historical: consciousness develops through labour, social relations, and class struggle. Spinoza’s monism provides the ontological ground; Marx and Trotsky provide the historical and dialectical method.

4.Consciousness, the Body, and the Anticipation of Marx

Steven Nadler’s argument is that consciousness corresponds to bodily complexity, citing Spinoza’s remark that “in proportion as a body is more capable… so its mind is more capable.” This insight dissolves the Cartesian “hard problem” centuries before its formulation. Consciousness is not an immaterial substance but the mental expression of a body embedded in causal networks.

Marx radicalises this insight by adding the historical dimension. Consciousness is not only the correlate of a complex body but of a body transformed by labour, tools, and social relations. When Marx writes that “consciousness can never be anything else than conscious being,” he completes the trajectory that begins with Spinoza’s monism. Spinoza provides the ontology; Marx provides the anthropology and the historical method.

Trotsky extends this further. In Problems of Everyday Life, he insists that consciousness is shaped by the rhythms of production, the organisation of labour, and the ideological apparatuses of class society. Spinoza’s insight into the embodied nature of consciousness becomes, in Trotsky’s hands, a theory of revolutionary consciousness: the capacity of the working class to grasp the necessity of social transformation.

5.Spinoza and Trotsky on Necessity, Freedom, and Determinism

The question of necessity and freedom occupies a central place in both Spinoza’s philosophy and the Marxist tradition. Yet the conceptual architectures through which each thinker approaches the problem differ in form while converging in political and historical significance. Spinoza articulates a monistic determinism in which freedom consists in the adequate understanding of necessity; Trotsky, working within the framework of dialectical materialism, transforms this insight into a theory of revolutionary praxis in which freedom emerges through the conscious intervention of the working class into historically determined processes. The comparison reveals not only a deep structural affinity but also the way in which Marxism completes and historicises Spinoza’s project.

Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution provides the conceptual framework for understanding Spinoza’s political significance. Spinoza’s democratic republicanism anticipates the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century, but it also contains the seeds of a more radical egalitarianism that can only be realised through proletarian revolution. Spinoza’s critique of superstition becomes, in Marxist hands, a critique of ideology; his defence of democracy becomes a defence of workers’ democracy; his monism becomes the ontological ground of dialectical materialism.

6 Spinoza: Freedom as the Understanding of Necessity

Spinoza’s determinism is absolute. Everything that exists follows from the nature of substance with the same necessity with which the properties of a triangle follow from its essence. Human beings, as finite modes, are no exception. Our actions, desires, and thoughts are determined by the causal order of nature; the experience of free will is an illusion born of ignorance of the causes that determine us. As the uploaded document notes, for Spinoza “freedom… is not free will but the understanding of necessity.”

This conception of freedom is not merely metaphysical but ethical and political. To understand necessity is to liberate oneself from the bondage of passive affects, superstition, and ideological mystification. Spinoza’s critique of religious authority rests on this insight: superstition thrives where causal understanding is absent. Freedom, therefore, is the achievement of adequate ideas — a rational comprehension of the causal order that governs both nature and society.

Yet Spinoza’s determinism is not fatalistic. The more we understand the causes that determine us, the more we participate in the activity of substance itself. Freedom is not the negation of necessity but its conscious appropriation. This is the conceptual core that Marx and Trotsky will later radicalise.

7. Trotsky: Freedom as Conscious, Collective Praxis

Trotsky inherits Spinoza’s insight that freedom is inseparable from necessity, but he transforms it by embedding it within a historical and social framework. For Trotsky, necessity is not the static causal order of nature but the dynamic, contradictory movement of history shaped by class struggle, technological development, and the global expansion of capitalism. Freedom emerges not through individual rational insight but through collective revolutionary praxis.

Trotsky’s critique of voluntarism and fatalism alike reflects this dialectical conception. Against voluntarism, he insists that revolutionary action must be grounded in an analysis of objective conditions; against fatalism, he argues that these conditions do not determine outcomes mechanically but open possibilities that can be realised only through conscious intervention. The working class becomes the agent through which necessity is transformed into freedom.

In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky writes that “freedom is the recognition of necessity — and the transformation of necessity into action.” This formulation echoes Spinoza but adds a crucial dimension: the transformation of necessity is a historical process, not a metaphysical one. Where Spinoza locates freedom in the intellect, Trotsky locates it in praxis.

8. Determinism Without Fatalism: A Shared Structure

Both Spinoza and Trotsky reject the notion of free will understood as uncaused choice. Both insist that human action is determined by causes that can be understood and acted upon. Both oppose superstition, mystification, and ideological obfuscation. Yet neither collapses determinism into fatalism.

For Spinoza, determinism is the condition of freedom: only in a universe governed by necessity can rational understanding liberate us from passive affects. For Trotsky, determinism is the condition of revolutionary agency: only in a world governed by historical laws can the working class intervene consciously to transform society.

The difference lies in the level of analysis. Spinoza’s determinism is ontological; Trotsky’s is historical. Spinoza’s freedom is intellectual; Trotsky’s is political. Spinoza’s subject is the rational individual; Trotsky’s is the revolutionary class.

Yet the structural affinity is unmistakable. Trotsky’s dialectical materialism can be read as the historical realisation of Spinoza’s monism: the unity of mind and world becomes the unity of theory and practice; the understanding of necessity becomes the transformation of necessity; the critique of superstition becomes the critique of ideology.

9. Necessity and Freedom in Revolutionary Time

The most profound convergence between Spinoza and Trotsky lies in their shared rejection of contingency as the foundation of human action. For both thinkers, freedom is not the assertion of arbitrary will but the alignment of human activity with the causal structure of reality. In Spinoza, this alignment is achieved through adequate ideas; in Trotsky, through the scientific analysis of capitalism and the strategic organisation of the working class.

Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution exemplifies this synthesis. The revolution is not a voluntaristic leap but the unfolding of historical necessity — the contradictions of combined and uneven development — realised through conscious action. Spinoza’s dictum that “the more we understand, the more we are free” becomes, in Trotsky’s hands, “the more the working class understands the laws of history, the more it can transform them.”

10. Completing Spinoza: Marxism as the Historical Realisation of Monism

The comparison reveals that Marxism does not break with Spinoza but completes him. Spinoza provides the ontological foundation: the unity of mind and world, the determinism of nature, the critique of superstition. Marx and Trotsky provide the historical and political realisation: the unity of theory and practice, the determinism of history, the critique of ideology.

Spinoza dissolves dualism; Marx dissolves idealism; Trotsky dissolves fatalism. Spinoza grounds equality in nature; Marx grounds it in social relations; Trotsky grounds it in revolutionary praxis. Spinoza’s freedom is the understanding of necessity; Trotsky’s is the transformation of necessity.

In this sense, Trotsky is the most Spinozist of Marxists — not because he repeats Spinoza’s metaphysics, but because he realises its deepest implications in the sphere of history and revolution.

11 Politics, Ideology, and the Democratic Lineage

Spinoza’s political radicalism emerges directly from his metaphysics. If all humans are modes of the same substance, then no divine hierarchy can justify monarchy or clerical authority. His defence of democracy, equality, and secularism is not an ethical preference but a logical consequence of his ontology. His critique of superstition anticipates Marx’s analysis of ideology: both identify false consciousness as the mechanism through which domination is reproduced.

Jonathan Israel’s argument that Spinoza was the first major modern democrat is historiographically significant, but a Trotskyist analysis must go further. Spinoza’s political thought is not merely democratic; it is revolutionary. It articulates the emerging interests of a class whose ascent threatened the existing order. Ann Talbot’s claim that Spinoza was “as responsible as any one person could be for the revolution in consciousness” preceding the Enlightenment captures this dynamic.

12. The Line of Descent: Spinoza → French Materialism → Marxism

The connection between Spinoza and Marx is not retrospective but genealogical. The French materialists — La Mettrie, Diderot, d’Holbach — absorbed Spinoza’s monism and transformed it into a militant atheism that confronted the ideological apparatus of absolutism. Plekhanov’s assertion that “present‑day materialism is a Spinozism that has become more or less aware of itself” captures this continuity. Engels’s remark — “Old Spinoza was quite right” — confirms that Marxism recognised Spinoza as a precursor.

This lineage is not a chain of influence but a sequence of determinate historical transformations. Spinoza’s nature becomes Marx’s social totality. Spinoza dissolves dualism; Marx dissolves idealism. Spinoza grounds equality in nature; Marx grounds it in social relations and class struggle.

Trotsky’s contribution is decisive here. He insists that materialism must be historical and dialectical, capable of analysing the contradictions of capitalism and the dynamics of revolution. Spinoza’s monism becomes, in Trotsky’s hands, a weapon against both idealism and mechanical materialism. The unity of mind and world becomes the unity of theory and practice; the critique of superstition becomes the critique of Stalinist mystification; the defence of democracy becomes the defence of workers’ democracy against bureaucratic degeneration.

13. Scruton and the Conservative Neutralisation of Spinoza

The uploaded document’s contrast between Spinoza and Roger Scruton is a model of Trotskyist ideological critique. Scruton’s work represents the conservative attempt to reclaim Spinoza by stripping him of his revolutionary content. He admires Spinoza’s logical rigour but rejects the egalitarian implications of his monism. He transforms Spinoza into a philosopher of aesthetic consolation, a thinker whose metaphysics can be reconciled with hierarchy, tradition, and the “sacred.”

This is not an innocent misreading but an ideological operation. Scruton’s conservatism is “the ideological antithesis of Spinoza’s rationalism.” Where Spinoza dissolves the sacred, Scruton elevates it; where Spinoza undermines hierarchy, Scruton defends it; where Spinoza insists that social reality can be understood and transformed, Scruton insists it must be accepted. Trotsky would recognise this immediately as the reactionary function of philosophy under conditions of capitalist crisis.

Scruton’s domestication of Spinoza mirrors the Stalinist domestication of Marx: both seek to neutralise revolutionary thought by detaching it from its historical and materialist foundations. A Trotskyist historiography exposes these operations and restores Spinoza to the revolutionary lineage from which he has been severed.

14. Conclusion: Spinoza in the Age of Global Capitalism

Spinoza’s revival reflects the exhaustion of postmodernism and the crisis of bourgeois philosophy. As the ideological coherence of neoliberalism collapses, the materialist tradition — from Spinoza to Marx to Trotsky — re‑emerges as the only framework capable of explaining consciousness, politics, and social transformation. Spinoza was a revolutionary in the Dutch Republic; his ideas remain revolutionary under global capitalism. Marxism does not supersede Spinoza but completes him.

Spinoza’s monism becomes the ontological ground of dialectical materialism; his critique of superstition becomes the critique of ideology; his defence of democracy becomes the defence of workers’ democracy; his rationalism becomes the rationality of revolutionary praxis. In an era marked by deepening inequality, ideological disorientation, and the global crisis of capitalism, Spinoza’s rational, egalitarian, and naturalistic worldview offers not a relic of the past but a resource for the future. Only Marxism, as the dialectical completion of Spinoza’s project, can realise its emancipatory potential.

Pip: A Trumpet of Sedition opens this week with Spinoza — a seventeenth-century lens-grinder whose ideas were so dangerous they got him excommunicated, banned across Europe, and apparently are still causing trouble in the twenty-first century.

Mara: freerein61 has been busy — the posts this week range from Spinoza's materialist philosophy and its Marxist lineage, to the contradictions inside Hobsbawm's nationalism scholarship and the crimes of the British Empire, to Emily Brontë's social world, and finally to what Hofstadter's paranoid-style thesis actually does to working-class politics.

Pip: A full week. Let's start with the philosophy — Spinoza, materialism, and why Engels said the old man was quite right.

Spinoza, Materialism, And The Marxist Lineage

Mara: The post reviewing Steven Nadler's Spinoza, Atheist frames Spinoza as the foundation of philosophical materialism — the thinker who demolished Cartesian dualism by arguing there is only one substance, God or Nature, and that mind and body are two attributes of the same underlying reality.

Pip: Which means no immortal soul, no divine providence, no miracles — and a seventeenth-century excommunication that described his offenses as "abominable heresies and monstrous deeds" without actually specifying them, which is the institutional equivalent of being too scared to write it down.

Mara: Nadler's specific contribution is on consciousness. The post quotes directly from the Ethics: "In proportion as a body is more capable than others of doing many things at once… so its mind is more capable than others of perceiving many things at once."

Pip: So degrees of consciousness track degrees of bodily complexity — which the post argues anticipates embodied cognition and dissolves the hard problem centuries before Chalmers named it.

Mara: The post then traces the line forward: Plekhanov called present-day materialism "a Spinozism that has become more or less aware of itself," and when Engels was asked whether Spinoza was right that thought and extension are attributes of one substance, he replied simply — "Of course. Old Spinoza was quite right." Marx adds the historical and social dimension Spinoza lacked.

Pip: The contrast with Roger Scruton ties it together — Scruton admired Spinoza's logic but wanted aesthetic consolation, not revolution. The post calls that a difference of class position, not temperament.

Mara: The post concludes that only Marxism can complete what Spinoza began, by grounding consciousness and freedom in the material conditions of social life. On to empire and nationalism — where the same question of class position shapes everything.

Hobsbawm, Empire, And The Limits Of Nationalist History

Mara: The post on Eric Hobsbawm's On Nationalism opens a sustained argument: Hobsbawm's scholarship on invented traditions and national identity is genuinely valuable, but his Stalinist political formation prevents him from drawing the revolutionary conclusion his own evidence demands.

Pip: He can show that Highland tartans and British coronation rituals were largely fabricated between 1870 and 1914 to manufacture deference — and then stay completely silent about Stalin constructing Great Russian nationalist mythology to consolidate the bureaucracy. That silence, the post argues, is not an oversight.

Mara: The post is direct about this: "the most disastrous 'invention of tradition' in the twentieth century was Stalinist nationalism itself — the doctrine of 'socialism in one country.'" Hobsbawm's framework can debunk bourgeois myths but cannot explain why nationalism persists once its constructed character is exposed, because he lacks a class theory of ideology rooted in material social relations.

Pip: David North's essay on Trotsky and Hobsbawm gets named here for targeting what the post calls Hobsbawm's fatalism — the reduction of history to what happened, which retrospectively validates every Stalinist betrayal by insisting there was no alternative.

Mara: The Blood Never Dried, John Newsinger's people's history of the British Empire, runs into a related problem from a different angle. The post credits Newsinger with an unflinching chronicle — the slave trade, the 1857 Rebellion, the Opium Wars, the Mau Mau camps — but argues his SWP background leads him to frame imperial crimes primarily as moral outrages rather than products of capitalism's structural logic.

Pip: The upshot being that moral outrage without class analysis slides naturally into decolonisation rhetoric and identity politics that leave the capitalist system intact.

Mara: The post closes by pointing workers toward Lenin's Imperialism and Trotsky's Permanent Revolution as the analytical tools Newsinger's framework cannot supply. Which connects directly to the next territory — what happens when inner life gets separated from those same social forces.

The Brontës, Class, And The Prison Of Victorian Society

Pip: The post on Deborah Lutz's new biography of Emily Brontë opens a question that runs through the whole piece: how did a clergyman's daughter, largely isolated on the Yorkshire moors, produce Wuthering Heights — and does a biography organised around objects and inner life actually answer that?

Mara: The post quotes Marx directly on Charlotte Brontë and her contemporaries — that they "painted the middle class as full of presumption, affectation, petty tyranny and ignorance" and revealed more political and social truths than all the professional politicians and moralists combined.

Pip: That's the benchmark the post applies to Lutz — and it finds her materialist instincts strongest in her earlier Paperwork essay, which connects Brontë's tiny, concealed handwriting to the cost of paper in the 1840s, rag shortages, and the paper tax not lifted until 1860.

Mara: The post values that work precisely because it grounds artistic practice in economic conditions. But it argues Lutz's thing theory and material culture framework stop short of asking why an exceptionally talented woman had to hide her inner life completely — and the answer the post gives is not personal eccentricity but the societal exclusion of women from public intellectual life in Victorian bourgeois society.

Pip: Emily's privacy was structural, not temperamental. The post extends this to the sisters collectively — the Brontës published as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell because the alternative was dismissal.

Mara: The post also engages Terry Eagleton's Myths of Power as the most comprehensive Marxist reading of the Brontës to date, crediting his argument that Heathcliff's revenge is carried out entirely through property — mortgages, marriage alliances, inheritance schemes — while criticising his Althusserian framework for disconnecting the novels from actual historical class struggle.

Pip: And the SWP's treatment of the Brontës gets a sharp paragraph — reducing three of Victorian England's most complex writers to proto-feminist symbols for identity politics, the post says, diminishes both their legacy and the interests of the working class.

Mara: The post's conclusion is that Wuthering Heights endures because it is, as Paul Bond's review of the Fennell adaptation is quoted as saying, "visceral and astonishing… rooted not just in a brutal landscape, but in a real world of class distinction and savagery that must find reflection in the passions of our daily lives." That framework carries directly into the final segment — what happens when political analysis loses its class grounding entirely.

Hofstadter And The Paranoid Style As Liberal Weapon

Mara: The post on Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics opens by granting the essay a limited concession — it correctly identifies a recurring pattern of conspiratorial politics across American history — and then argues that the framework's real function is to pathologise working-class discontent rather than explain it.

Pip: Labelling millions of people's distrust of institutions a psychiatric disorder is a tidy way to avoid asking why those institutions failed them.

Mara: The post quotes David North directly on Trump's trajectory: "More than any other Republican candidate, Trump has tailored his message to resonate with the intense anger and frustration of tens of millions of Americans who feel quite rightly neglected and scorned by a political system that overlooks their daily issues."

Pip: So the anger is legitimate — the analysis of who is responsible is wrong. That distinction is the whole argument, and Hofstadter's framework collapses it by treating the anger itself as the pathology.

Mara: The post connects this to David North's lecture on the long shadow of history — Hofstadter's shift from The American Political Tradition, written from a genuinely critical standpoint, to the consensus school, which removed class conflict as a meaningful analytical category. The post argues that move served Cold War liberalism's need to delegitimise both McCarthyism and socialist politics simultaneously.

Pip: The revival of Hofstadter in the Trump era gets the sharpest treatment — the post argues it allowed the Democratic Party and liberal establishment to avoid accountability for deindustrialisation, the opioid crisis, and the 2008 collapse by converting a political and economic crisis into a cultural one.

Mara: The post's answer is not a return to the liberal centre but the construction of a revolutionary socialist party — the same conclusion that runs through the Hobsbawm and Newsinger posts, and back to Spinoza's insistence that understanding causes is the only path to freedom.

Pip: What ties the week together is a single question asked four different ways — what does it cost an analysis when it stops at the symptom and refuses the structural cause?

Mara: Spinoza dissolved dualism, Brontë exposed class brutality, and the posts keep returning to the same gap — the political vacuum that fills with paranoia, nationalism, or myth when the working class has no organised alternative.

Pip: More from A Trumpet of Sedition next time.

Eric Hobsbawm was widely recognised within academic and left-liberal circles as an eminent Marxist historian. His notable works on nationalism, especially Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (1990) and The Age of Capital, are regarded as important scholarly contributions to understanding the development of modern nations. Donald Sassoon, a British historian aligned with the social-democratic left and known for titles such as One Hundred Years of Socialism, serves as a fitting intellectual peer to Hobsbawm. Both scholars operate within a ‘Gramscian’ or left-reformist tradition of historical writing, highly intellectual yet ultimately rooted in the political frameworks of Stalinism and social democracy, rather than revolutionary Marxism.

Donald Sassoon’s choice to include Hobsbawm’s views on nationalism mirrors his own political perspective. His book, One Hundred Years of Socialism, promotes social-democratic ideals and provides a detailed history of European leftist parties. Although information-rich, it endorses reformism as the correct socialist method, considering revolutionary ideas extreme. Like Hobsbawm, Sassoon is part of an intellectual faction within a tradition that has focused on managing capitalism rather than overthrowing it for over a century. Quoting Hobsbawm on nationalism indicates a shared political stance: both are products of the post-war European left consensus, which accepted the nation-state, NATO (initially with some reservations), and capitalist democracy. Neither offers an analysis of how nationalism supports ruling classes in the imperialist era, as both lack a perspective rooted in working-class political independence.

To grasp Hobsbawm’s perspective on nationalism, the insights he offers and the limitations he maintains, it’s essential to consider his political background. Hobsbawm was a lifelong member of the British Communist Party, remaining in it even after the 1956 revelations about Stalin’s crimes, when many other intellectuals resigned in horror. As Ann Talbot’s analysis, “Eric Hobsbawm on the Spanish Civil War: an anti-historical tirade,” shows, this loyalty was more than mere organisational allegiance; it revealed a deep-seated hostility to revolutionary politics. In his autobiography, Hobsbawm admits to having the “instincts of a Tory communist,” drawn to authority, order, and subordinating working-class spontaneity to party discipline. He expressed satisfaction at the expulsion of Militant from the Labour Party under Kinnock, and his theoretical journal, Marxism Today, played a key role in shifting Labour to the right, leading to Tony Blair’s New Labour.

Hobsbawm’s view on nationalism is closely linked to the political framework of Stalinism’s Popular Front. When Stalin introduced the Popular Front strategy in 1935, it signified that Communist Parties had stopped pursuing socialist revolution. Instead, it focused on the “national defence” of bourgeois-democratic governments against fascism. This shift replaced the core Marxist principle of internationalism with an alignment to bourgeois nationalism, falsely portrayed as anti-fascism. As Talbot notes, this approach involved defending private property, quelling working-class revolutions, such as in Spain (1936-37), and subordinating workers’ interests to Soviet foreign policy objectives.

Hobsbawm’s political development was profoundly shaped by this tradition, influencing his perspective on nations and nationalism. His scholarly work on nationalism is highly detailed, exploring the “invention of tradition,” the constructed nature of national identity, and the historically dependent emergence of modern nations. However, his framework does not view nationalism as a class phenomenon requiring a class-based explanation. While he documents these elements and provides valuable insights, he does not reach the revolutionary conclusion that, during imperialism, nationalism primarily functions to subordinate the working class to the bourgeoisie of its own nation.

The Marxist perspective on nationalism was first introduced by Marx and Engels, later refined by Lenin in his critique of imperialism, and defended by Trotsky against nationalist distortions. The phrase from the Communist Manifesto stating “workingmen have no fatherland” is more than just a slogan; it signifies a strategic position: the working class is an international group whose interests unite across borders to oppose capitalism. Lenin recognised that, under imperialism, the national question is closely tied to which imperialist power a particular nationalism supports. Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution took this further, arguing that in countries where the bourgeoisie failed to complete their own democratic-national tasks, the working class must seize power and pursue socialist revolution connected to the international struggle. There is no singular “national road” to liberation.

David North’s essay Leon Trotsky and the Fate of Socialism in the Twentieth Century: A Reply to Professor Eric Hobsbawm takes direct aim at the theoretical core of Hobsbawm’s method: his fatalism. Hobsbawm reduces history to “what happened,” dismissing the role of political alternatives, parties, and programs. For him, Stalinism, “socialism in one country,” the very foundation of nationalist distortion within the workers’ movement, was essentially inevitable once the German revolution failed. North shows this is not a materialist analysis but an apology for Stalinism: it retrospectively validates every Stalinist betrayal by arguing there was no alternative.[1]

One of the contradictions at the heart of Hobsbawm’s historiography is that, despite his Stalinist politics, he could produce stunning pieces of history. The Invention of Tradition (1983), edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, is among the most frequently cited works in modern history studies. Its core message is deceptively straightforward yet truly insightful: many traditions that appear ancient and organic, such as Highland Scots tartan and bagpipe customs, elaborate British royal ceremonies, Zulu political rituals, and nationalist mass events, are actually fairly recent constructs, intentionally created for political aims. These traditions aim to foster a timeless sense of national or communal identity, legitimise authority, and generate public support for the ruling elite’s institutions.

Hobsbawm differentiates between “genuine traditions,” which develop gradually and naturally, and “invented traditions,” which are deliberately created, often quickly, to address emerging social needs, especially those caused by industrialisation and the growth of mass democratic politics in the 19th and 20th centuries. He points out that the Scottish Highland tradition celebrated by Romantics like Walter Scott was mainly a late 18th and early 19th-century invention, enforced by the Lowland and English-educated Scottish elite on a Gaelic-speaking population they had largely marginalised. Similarly, the elaborate ceremonies of the British monarchy, such as the state openings of Parliament and coronation rituals, presented as timeless constitutional traditions, were mainly fictionalised between 1870 and 1914, at a time when the British ruling class feared losing deference amid the rise of mass enfranchisement.

This is genuinely valuable scholarship. Hobsbawm correctly identify’s the functional character of nationalist mythology: it serves ruling-class interests by binding the working class to a cross-class “national community” that papers over the real divisions of capitalist society. In this sense, this chapter makes a real contribution by stripping away the ideological veil from some of the most powerful instruments of bourgeois political manipulation.

Ann Talbot’s article, ‘History in the service of ideology,’ clarifies Hobsbawm’s book on the same subject, ‘Nations and Nationalism since 1780,’ which shares the same intellectual background and has become a key reference point in a significant historiographical debate. This debate contrasts ‘modernists who argue that nations and nationalism emerged from modern capitalist conditions, with “primordialists,” who claim that national identity is rooted in long-standing ethnic, religious, or cultural traditions that existed before the medieval era. Hobsbawm was a notable supporter of the modernist view.[2]

This debate goes beyond academia. Adrian Hastings’ primordialist view in The Construction of Nationhood has an ideological purpose: to tie the nation-state to nature and eternity, framing nationalism as an almost innate biological drive. This perspective seeks to subordinate class consciousness to national identity, viewing it as a persistent element of human psychology. As Talbot mentions, Hastings’ lectures were a political strategy, timed to coincide with the rise of Scottish and English nationalisms in the 1990s, aimed at lending intellectual weight to the idea that English national identity is ancient and therefore inherently legitimate. Hobsbawm’s modernist critique rightly identified this as mythmaking.

While Hobsbawm’s descriptive work offers valuable insights, his theoretical framework remains significantly lacking. He can identify that traditions are socially constructed by bourgeois elites, colonial administrators, or nationalist intellectuals, but cannot fully explain why the working class accepts and internalises these invented nationalist traditions. This gap exists because he lacks a solid Marxist theory of ideology and class consciousness, a shortcoming rooted in his Stalinist background. The concept of “invention” functions mainly as a sociology of deception: elites create false memories, and populations accept them. Although this perspective sheds some light, it falls short theoretically for three main reasons.

Marx and Engels argue that ideology isn’t just a set of ideas that can be debunked; rather, it is materially reproduced through institutions like the state, schools, media, churches, and political parties, and interwoven with tangible social relations. The working class doesn’t simply believe in the nation because they’ve been deceived; they perceive nationalism as a genuine force because the capitalist state organises social life around national lines. Workers participate in national labour markets, and social welfare, democratic rights, and legal protections are all mediated through the nation-state. This “invention” endures because real social relations lend it material substance. Although Hobsbawm’s framework powerfully debunks these notions, it cannot fully explain why nationalism persists so strongly once its constructed nature is revealed.

If elites create traditions, it suggests that more educated populations may recognise the invention and disregard it. However, ruling-class ideology does not operate as a simple cognitive mistake driven by false beliefs that can be fixed with better information. Instead, it functions as a form of social consciousness that mirrors the real fragmentation and subjugation of the working class under capitalism. Overcoming this requires organised political effort and the development of a revolutionary party that offers the working class an alternative way of understanding its interests. Hobsbawm fails to provide such a perspective because, throughout his career, he was committed to suppressing revolutionary politics.

The most disastrous “invention of tradition” in the twentieth century was Stalinist nationalism itself. This included the doctrine of “socialism in one country,” the creation of a distinct Russian or Soviet national tradition as the legacy of October 1917, and the alignment of communist parties worldwide with the Soviet bureaucracy’s foreign policy interests. This was a massive, historically destructive fabricated tradition, and Hobsbawm remained a loyal supporter throughout his life. While he wrote insightfully about Highland chiefs crafting tartans to foster Scottish nationalism, he was completely silent about Stalin constructing a Great Russian nationalist mythology to strengthen the bureaucratic caste’s hold on power. This silence is not an oversight but a fundamental limitation of the entire project.

Ann Talbot highlights an important point that goes beyond Hobsbawm’s perspective. The debate between primordialists and modernists, despite its academic focus, conceals a fundamental issue: the nation-state is more than just a cultural or political entity; it also operates as a system of class dominance. As Talbot states, “The nation-state did not fulfil the ideals of the revolutions that created it because the state could not transcend the social relations of its time, those being capitalist relations founded on private property.” The bourgeois revolutions in England, France, and the US, which established the modern nation-state, contained real revolutionary elements—advancing citizen equality, ending feudal privileges, and securing rights. Yet, these revolutions did not eliminate or seek to abolish the class relations underlying bourgeois society.

Hobsbawm can debunk specific invented traditions with great skill. But he cannot draw the socialist conclusion from his own evidence: that the nation-state itself, as a form of class organisation, must ultimately be transcended by a higher form of international social organization — socialism. He cannot draw this conclusion because he spent his political career defending various forms of national-reformist politics, from the Popular Front to Kinnockite Labour.

Hobsbawm’s Invention of Tradition deserves to be read for what it genuinely shows: that the supposedly eternal and organic character of national feeling is a historical, humanly constructed phenomenon, and therefore capable of being superseded. But it must be read critically, with clear awareness of what its author could not say and would not do. The debunking of invented traditions, without a revolutionary socialist perspective, is merely an academic exercise.

“The Jews and Germany”

A Stalinist historian discussing Jews and Germany raises fundamental questions of historical and political significance. Among all topics Eric Hobsbawm could address, the issue of Jews and Germany most clearly exposes the limitations and political crimes of the Stalinist intellectual tradition he embodied. The destruction of Jewish communities in Germany and Europe during the Holocaust was not a mere natural disaster; it resulted from identifiable, analysable historical and political forces. Foremost among these was the failure of the German Communist Party, under Stalinist leadership, to build a united front of the working class against Hitler. Hobsbawm cannot honestly face this reality because doing so would be to condemn the political movement he dedicated his entire life to.

The Class Roots of Modern Antisemitism

A genuine Marxist analysis of Jews and Germany must recognise that class interests drove the emergence of modern political antisemitism in the late 1800s. As David North’s “The Myth of ‘Ordinary Germans’ illustrates, this form of antisemitism was not just a medieval religious legacy but a strategic ideological weapon used by the ruling class. Its target was destabilised sections of the petty bourgeoisie, such as failed shopkeepers, disillusioned artisans, heavily indebted peasants, and worried professionals, whose social positions were being threatened by the rise of industrial capitalism from the 1870s onwards.[3]

The 1873 stock market crash in Germany, along with the high-profile presence of Jewish financiers, bankers, and professionals during a period of rapid capitalist expansion, provided reactionary ideologues with material for demagogic scapegoating. Charles Maurras, a prominent reactionary, plainly explained that antisemitism “enables everything to be arranged, smoothed over, and simplified” suggesting that directing the anger of the dispossessed at Jewish people instead of capitalism was a more effective way to suppress class awareness and reintegrate the proletariat into a “national community” under bourgeois dominance.

The critical point that Hobsbawm, wedded as he is to a culturalist rather than class-based analysis, consistently underweights is this: the most powerful and consistent opposition to antisemitism throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came not from liberal bourgeois opinion but from the revolutionary socialist workers’ movement. As Clara Weiss’s analysis of Mario Kessler’s historical scholarship, The Marxist movement and the fight against antisemitism and Zionism, demonstrates, “the most powerful and consistent critique of both antisemitism and Zionism emanated from the revolutionary internationalist wing in the workers’ movement.”[4]

August Bebel famously called antisemitism “the socialism of fools,” emphasising that it was a misguided form of anti-capitalism. It redirected genuine popular anger away from the capitalist system and onto a Jewish scapegoat. This benefited the ruling class by preventing the working class from gaining a socialist consciousness. Hobsbawm inherited this tradition at least in theory. However, his Stalinist beliefs stopped him from recognising the crucial lesson.

Any thorough analysis of Jews and Germany must address how Hitler rose to power. An honest answer also involves examining Stalinism’s influence. By 1933, the German working class was highly organised, with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Communist Party (KPD) commanding millions of loyal workers and supported by armed paramilitary groups prepared for conflict. Despite this, Hitler ascended to power without confronting significant, organised resistance from the working class. Why did this happen?

Peter Schwarz’s lecture, “The Rise of Fascism in Germany and the Collapse of the Communist International,” offers a clear Marxist perspective. The SPD betrayed the working class twice: first in 1914 by endorsing imperialist war, and again in 1919 by aiding in quelling the German revolution and orchestrating the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. The KPD, the supposed revolutionary alternative, committed an even more significant betrayal under Stalinist influence. Following the Comintern’s “Third Period” policy that labelled “social fascism” (meaning the SPD) as the primary enemy, the KPD refused to form a united front with Social Democratic workers against Nazism. It absurdly equated the reformist SPD with Hitler’s movement and sometimes even collaborated with the Nazis against the Social Democrats. Their shocking slogan — Nach Hitler kommen wir (“After Hitler, it’s our turn”) — reflected not revolutionary conviction but a disastrous passivity driven by Stalinist sectarianism.

Trotsky was the only major left leader who clearly understood what was at stake and what actions were needed. He consistently wrote, warned, and urged the KPD and its workers to form a united front against fascism. There was still time—because he recognised that Hitler’s victory would not only topple a government but also lead to the physical destruction of the organised workers’ movement and, as history showed, the genocide of European Jews. Unfortunately, his warnings went unheeded, and his followers were persecuted as “social fascists” and “counter-revolutionaries” by the very Stalinist machinery that Hobsbawm faithfully supported.

Hobsbawm was a young man in Berlin when Hitler rose to power in 1933. He saw these events firsthand and joined the Communist Party that same year. Because of this, he was directly part of the organisation whose ‘social fascism’ line bears significant blame for the political disaster that ensued. Throughout his historical writings, he never addressed this responsibility seriously or honestly. His autobiography, Interesting Times, covers his years in Berlin with typical eloquence and memoir-style charm. Still, it lacks a genuine reflection on what the Stalinist KPD’s failure meant for the millions who perished as a consequence.

After 1935, Stalin shifted his approach by implementing the Popular Front strategy: Communist Parties were directed to form broad coalitions with liberal and social-democratic groups to defend ‘democracy’ against fascism, abandoning any independent revolutionary goals. This was justified as the lesson learned from Germany. However, as Ann Talbot’s analysis of Eric Hobsbawm’s work on the Spanish Civil War reveals, the Popular Front was not a genuine attempt to address the root causes of fascism. Instead, it was a cynical adjustment to Soviet foreign policy, in which workers’ revolutionary interests were sacrificed to the diplomatic priorities of the Kremlin bureaucracy.

Hobsbawm’s entire political career, from his time in Paris in 1936 to his contributions to Marxism Today in the 1980s, was rooted in the Popular Front framework. This context shaped how he approached topics like “the Jews and Germany.” The Popular Front analysis of fascism, introduced by Georgi Dimitrov at the Seventh Comintern Congress in 1935, characterised fascism as a reactionary, chauvinistic, and imperialist force driven by finance capital, rather than, as Trotsky argued, a mass movement of the petty bourgeoisie mobilised by the ruling class against the revolutionary working class. By separating fascism from its class roots—particularly its emergence from the crisis of bourgeois democracy and the failure of reformism—this definition hindered the ability to derive truly revolutionary lessons from Germany.

The authentic Marxist tradition regarding the Jewish question is much more extensive and rooted in political principle than what either Hobsbawm’s Stalinist perspective or the liberal and Zionist alternatives suggest. As Weiss’s analysis demonstrates, Marx’s 1843 essay ‘On the Jewish Question’—often misunderstood and misrepresented—actually advocates for Jewish political emancipation against the idealist Bruno Bauer, who opposed granting Jews equal rights on pseudo-philosophical grounds. Marx argued that Jewish emancipation is inherently linked to the broader issues of social revolution and human liberation. The socialist movement that arose afterwards—highlighted by Bebel’s anti-antisemitism stance, the Second International’s mass protests during the Dreyfus Affair, and the Bolsheviks’ abolition of the Pale of Settlement and tsarist anti-Jewish laws in 1917—embodied the most potent practical effort for Jewish emancipation in modern history.

The Goldhagen Problem and the Alternative

A helpful way to analyse the gaps in a Hobsbawm-style approach to Jews and Germany is to consider his subtle similarity to the culturalist-essentialist analysis found (in a simplified form) in Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners.” David North’s powerful critique demonstrates that Goldhagen’s portrayal of an undifferentiated “ordinary German” as the bearer of an enduring, eliminationist antisemitism — like the broader liberal Holocaust historiography — frames fascism as a manifestation of a specific German national pathology, rather than as a consequence of identifiable capitalist social forces during a particular historical crisis. Despite expressing horror over the Holocaust, this view ultimately undermines the working class, because if fascism stems from German national character instead of class contradictions within capitalism during a crisis, then the only political lessons are “eternal vigilance” and safeguarding liberal democratic institutions.

Identity Politics and the Left

This 1996 lecture, delivered just before Tony Blair’s landslide election victory, is not primarily a work of historical scholarship. It is a political intervention, a contribution by one of Britain’s most prestigious “Marxist” intellectuals to the British Labour Party’s internal strategic debate on the eve of a general election. As Ann Talbot’s analysis of Hobsbawm established, his interventions were always “timed and targeted with precision.” This one is no exception. Its purpose is to argue that Labour should drop identity politics, embrace a broader “citizen nationalism,” and present itself as the voice of “the nation.” It is, in short, intellectual cover for the New Labour project.

Hobsbawm concludes the essay by lamenting that Labour speaks with a “muffled voice” regarding Britain and the nation. He approvingly cites Thatcher for having had the “strength” to recognise the importance of offering “hope and action to a puzzled and demoralised people” and questions whether New Labour will “make the same effort to restore and transform Britain.” This represents the ultimate goal and the core insight of Hobsbawm’s observations on identity politics, which contain significant substance worth acknowledging before addressing where his framework may fall short.

He rightly states that identity politics arose as a historically specific phenomenon, primarily in the 1960s, rather than being an inherent aspect of human society. He also correctly notes that collective identities are shaped negatively—by opposition to “others”—and are fluid, contextual, and socially constructed, rather than based on fixed, inherent traits. His insight regarding the Orlando Patterson paradox—where people choose their identity groups yet feel as if they had no real choice—is particularly enlightening. These observations are significant, as they foreshadow many issues caused by the rise of identity politics since the 1990s, such as the fragmentation of the left into conflicting “oppressed groups,” the difficulty in addressing the working class as a whole, and the fostering of resentments among different groups of workers.

Hobsbawm’s primary and most critical flaw in his analysis is his explanation for when identity politics arose. He claims it resulted from the “extraordinarily rapid and profound upheavals and transformations of human society in the third quarter of this century,’ describing it as a “cultural revolution’ and a “dissolution of traditional social norms.’ According to him, these changes left people feeling “orphaned and bereft,’ prompting a search for new group identities to replace fractured communities. He endorses sociologist Daniel Bell’s view that the “breakup of traditional authority structures and the previous affective social units—namely, nation and class—made ethnic attachment more prominent.”

This is a sociological account rather than a Marxist analysis. It describes what occurred without explaining why, meaning it cannot suggest solutions other than restoring a “common identity” through (citizen) nationalism. A truly Marxist explanation points to a more precise cause: identity politics arose as a political phenomenon in direct relation to the defeats of the working class — especially the betrayals by the very Stalinist and social-democratic groups that Hobsbawm’s tradition embodies. The working class was fractured not by abstract “cultural revolutions,” but by the Stalinist murders of revolutionary leftists in the 1930s, the alignment of communist parties with Popular Front politics that suppressed revolutionary ideas, the integration of labour bureaucracies into corporate management, and ultimately the rightward shift and capitulation of these parties in the 1970s and 1980s.

When the working class loses its revolutionary political voice—due to betrayals by its parties, trade union bureaucracies becoming tools of class collaboration, or when “socialism” is associated with either Stalinist tyranny or Blairite managerialism—workers, especially petty-bourgeois intellectuals who might otherwise engage in socialist politics, look for alternative ways to express grievances and organise. Identity politics emerges to fill this gap. It is not an inevitable sociological trend; rather, it is a political outcome resulting from the failure of the revolutionary socialist movement. Hobsbawm cannot acknowledge this, as his entire career was spent within organisations responsible for those defeats. Instead, he offers a passive, culturalist explanation: society changed, people became confused, and they gravitated toward identity groups.

I concur with Hobsbawm that the left must adopt a universalist stance. However, true Marxist universalism differs from the nationalistic version; it embodies the internationalism of the working class as a global entity, with interests beyond national borders. The working class is not a mere “identity group” like gender, racial, or sexual orientation groups. It is the only class in capitalism whose social position—producing all wealth while owning none of the means of production—gives it both the interest and the ability to eliminate all class exploitation.

Any arguments Hobsbawm presented in this book should be assessed in this context. The key criterion is not whether his historical research is erudite and well-sourced — which it usually is — but whether it genuinely addresses the crucial political issue: the Stalinist KPD’s “social fascism” stance and its impact on disarming the German working class before Hitler. Ignoring this question in any discussion of Jews and Germany, regardless of other qualities, results in a fundamentally distorted political view. The real solution is not found in detailed academic histories of national development, but in the creation of a revolutionary internationalist party  the very kind of party Hobsbawm dedicated his career to undermining.

[1] Leon Trotsky and the Fate of Socialism in the Twentieth Century: A Reply to Professor Eric Hobsbawm-www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/04.html

[2] ‘History in the service of ideology-Review of The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism, by Adrian Hastings

[3] The Myth of ‘Ordinary Germans,'”, A Marxist critique of Daniel Goldhagen’s 1996 book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.

[4] The Marxist movement and the fight against antisemitism and Zionism- http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/07/03/ajbz-j03.html

“Trump is proceeding now completely illegally. The constitutional framework does not exist for him. He is not restrained by any sort of constitutional norms or legal norms. He is working off of the conceptions which were associated with the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, the so-called ‘state of exception.’ The Führer makes the laws. He has the power. He does with them what he wants.”

David North

“Tocqueville saw that the life of constant action and decision which was entailed by the democratic and businesslike character of American life put a premium upon rough and ready habits of mind, quick decision, and the prompt seizure of opportunities – and that all this activity was not propitious for deliberation, elaboration, or precision in thought.”

Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

“In the eyes of a philistine, a revolutionary point of view is virtually equivalent to an absence of scientific objectivity. We think just the opposite: only a revolutionist… is capable of laying bare the objective dynamics of the revolution.”

Leon Trotsky-In Defence of Marxism

Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay remains one of the most frequently cited analyses of American liberal politics. It’s worth examining carefully because, despite its deeply flawed and class-hostile framework, it contains a valuable insight. Hofstadter accurately notes a recurring pattern in American political history: movements that attribute social grievances to concealed conspiracies—such as Masonic plots, Jesuit infiltration, and Communist subversion. He correctly observes that this tendency has persisted for centuries and spans the entire political spectrum.

However, Hofstadter’s analysis primarily serves as a tool of the liberal establishment to suppress popular discontent. His approach is largely psychological and cultural, viewing ‘the paranoid style’ as a mental disorder, a tendency to perceive enemies and conspiracies. This perspective conveniently avoids addressing a more critical issue: why do millions of people lose trust in official institutions and seek out conspiracy theories?

From a Marxist view, the fundamental causes are social and historical, not psychiatric. Conspiracy beliefs stem from a distorted perception of genuine alienation. Workers feel invisible, unacknowledged, and subjected to uncontrollable forces that influence their lives. Their wages are affected by obscure market forces, and distant financial decisions harm their communities. They perceive their government as serving the rich, their unions as failing, and the mainstream media as spreading misinformation.

When people sense that powerful hidden forces influence their lives but lack the scientific tools of Marxist class analysis, conspiracy theories often fill this gap. The “paranoid style” distorts class analysis that never materialised, serving as a personalised, often racialised alternative to understanding capitalism as a system. Hofstadter, a Columbia University historian, wrote during the Cold War liberalism, in an environment that aimed to discredit both McCarthyism and socialist politics by depicting political “extremism” on both sides as pathological. This reflects the logic of the “vital centre” referenced in Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s 1949 manifesto, which claimed that capitalist liberal democracy was the final, rational stage of history and viewed challenges from the left or right as irrational.[1]

This framework aims to discredit working-class radicalism by associating it with right-wing conspiracy theories, which are viewed as demonstrations of “status anxiety” and psychological projection. Unlike Marxists, who recognise the ruling class and advocate its overthrow, Hofstadter considers such thinking paranoid. The critical point Hofstadter overlooks, due to the limitations of his framework, is that conspiratorial politics arise from a political vacuum. When the working class lacks independent political parties, a socialist press, and revolutionary leaders, and when its official organisations, like unions and the Democratic Party, are fully integrated into capitalism, discontent cannot develop rationally; instead, it becomes irrational.

The Long Shadow of History

Richard Hofstadter plays a key role in the intellectual history outlined by David North in his lecture “The Long Shadow of History.” Hofstadter was arguably the most influential academic historian in shaping the ideological landscape after World War II. North highlights the transition of American liberal and left-leaning thinkers from critically examining capitalism to adopting the “consensus” approach associated with Cold War liberalism.

Hofstadter began his academic journey with genuinely radical ideas, authoring The American Political Tradition (1948) from a critical perspective. However, he quickly became the leading figure of the so-called ‘consensus school’ in American historiography, which asserts that American history is defined more by shared liberal-capitalist values than by class conflict. This shift represents the same intellectual move North describes, removing class struggle as a meaningful category in historical analysis. Unlike progressive historians like Charles Beard, who highlighted economic conflict, Hofstadter framed political radicalism as a result of “status anxiety”, a psychological disorder among declining social groups rather than a rational reaction to class exploitation.

Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform (1955) further discounted the Populist movement as a true agrarian revolt, arguing that it was fueled by status resentment, nativism, and conspiracy theories. This perspective enabled him to restore the mainstream narrative of American capitalism as a benign and progressive system, temporarily sidetracked by the irrational passions of marginalised social groups.

Hofstadter’s most famous essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1964), offers important insights. Initially, it seems to criticise right-wing irrationalism. Still, its underlying goal was to frame all anti-establishment politics as psychological issues, turning serious critiques of capitalism into signs of mental illness rather than rational debates. This view aligned with Cold War ideology, allowing liberal intellectuals to appear rational and objective while dismissing both the socialist left and the McCarthyite right as equally paranoid. According to North, this approach was the simplest option for liberals after they felt discredited by Stalinism, shifting from Marxist critiques of Stalinism and capitalism to a smug, depoliticised centrist stance that considered ideology a mental disturbance.

North’s lecture highlights the social foundation of this intellectual development. Hofstadter and other postwar academics were petty-bourgeois thinkers whose material interests were linked to their roles within capitalist institutions. North notes that this social layer often exhibits traits such as egotism, selfishness, and cowardice, which influence individuals’ participation in this process. As postwar prosperity returned and McCarthyism threatened academic careers, many sought comfort in consensus liberalism instead of engaging in the challenging, risky, and academically rigorous pursuit of true Marxism.

The irony lies in his characterisation of political radicalism as “paranoia” or “status anxiety,” which itself reflects the Cold War era’s suppression of socialist ideas. His work remained within ideological boundaries, effectively supporting them by providing an academic justification for the ruling class’s efforts to delegitimise class-based politics. The phrase “paranoid style” aptly describes Hofstadter’s academic setting, a group of well-paid scholars who genuinely struggled to understand why workers might rightly believe capitalism causes their hardships.

Hofstadter’s Revival

Hofstadter’s essay has seen a significant resurgence during the Trump era, often invoked by liberal commentators to frame MAGA as a form of collective mental illness. This interpretation is even more politically naive than the original. It enables the Democratic Party and the broader liberal establishment to avoid responsibility for social issues such as deindustrialisation, the opioid crisis, the 2008 financial collapse, and ongoing wars, which fuel Trump’s anger. Labelling it “paranoia” is a dismissive stereotype that shields the ruling class from accountability. Hofstadter identified the symptom but wrongly diagnosed it as a mental disorder, recommending liberal rationalism as the remedy.

When Trump descended the escalator in 2015 and eventually won the presidency in 2016 and again in 2024, the American liberal intelligentsia swiftly turned to Hofstadter’s work. His essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, was extensively reprinted, cited, and regarded as essential for understanding the Trump phenomenon. The dominant perspective was that Trump embodies a modern expression of America’s irrational, conspiratorial, and “paranoid” tendencies with QAnon, birtherism, and MAGA mythology viewed as contemporary equivalents of McCarthyism and anti-Masonic movements. Prominent outlets like The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, and many liberal commentators articulated this interpretation with apparent satisfaction.

In March 2016, David North examined Trump’s Super Tuesday surge. He questioned not why millions of workers hold skewed or irrational beliefs, but why the genuine, justified anger of the working class has been directed towards a right-wing demagogue instead of a socialist movement. North stated, “More than any other Republican candidate, Trump has tailored his message to resonate with the intense anger and frustration of tens of millions of Americans who feel quite rightly neglected and scorned by a political system that overlooks their daily issues.”

Hofstadter’s framework aims to discourage this kind of statement. Labelling a Trump supporter as “paranoid” shifts the debate from social and political issues—like deindustrialisation, wage stagnation, the opioid crisis, the 2008 financial collapse and bailouts, and ongoing conflicts—toward alleged mental flaws within the working class. This effectively redirects attention away from objective problems, serving as a strategy used by the ruling class.

North asked , “Why haven’t workers turned left despite all this suffering?” The answer isn’t in their minds but in the deliberate dismantling of political tools that could have offered them a left alternative. The Democratic Party had long neglected the working class. Under Obama, who promised “change,” the administration bailed out Wall Street, expanded drone strikes, deported more immigrants than any previous president, and oversaw the largest wealth transfer upward in U.S. history. Corporate interests co-opted Unions. The pseudo-left, including the DSA, the Sanders campaign, and the NGO-industrial complex, diverted political energy back into the Democratic Party and suppressed it. As North observed: “The essential characteristics of this political milieu are complacency, self-absorption, and, above all, contempt for the working class.”

When the working class has no party, no press, no socialist leadership, and every official institution claiming to represent it has betrayed it, a right-wing demagogue who at least names the enemy (even if he names it falsely) will find an audience. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” is a distorted, nationalist, scapegoating substitute for a class analysis that was never provided. The Hofstadter framework, by calling this “paranoia,” performs exactly the function it is meant to perform: it insulates the Democratic Party and the liberal establishment from accountability.

The slogan “Make America Great Again” fits within a long tradition of fascist-style national mythology. As North notes, “one of the critical elements of all fascist movements is extreme nationalism and the promotion of miraculous cures to capitalism’s problems on a national scale.” Hitler aimed to restore Germany’s greatness after the Treaty of Versailles; Trump seeks to revive America’s greatness after decades of deindustrialisation and imperial decline. In both instances, the “restoration” is a nationalist myth that masks the true cause of workers’ struggles — the capitalist system itself — and shifts blame onto scapegoats such as immigrants, minorities, foreign powers, and “globalists.”

The ideological function of the “paranoid style” revival in the Trump era can be stated plainly: It pathologises the working class rather than analysing the social conditions that produce political irrationalism. It transforms a political and economic crisis into a cultural or psychological one, thereby making it invisible to social analysis and immune to socialist remedy.

It rehabilitates liberalism as the rational alternative as though the “vital centre” of Clinton, Obama, and Harris hadn’t produced the very conditions that generated Trump. Hofstadter’s framework always points back to the defence of existing institutions, existing parties, and the existing economic order. “Extremism” on both ends is pathological; the centre is healthy. This is ideologically indistinguishable from the Cold War liberalism that Hofstadter himself served.

It disarms the working class by teaching workers that their own anger is a symptom of disease rather than a legitimate response to exploitation. Millions of workers who correctly understand that powerful, hidden forces control their lives — that decisions are made in Wall Street boardrooms that destroy their communities, that politicians lie to them, that wars are launched for interests other than theirs — are told their perception is “paranoid.” The Marxist response is to say: your perception is correct, but your analysis of who is responsible and what must be done is wrong. That is a political task, not a psychiatric one.

As North insisted from the moment Trump emerged, the answer to the far right is not a return to the liberal centre  it is the construction of a revolutionary socialist party capable of giving the working class a scientific understanding of its situation and a program for fighting back. Trump is not an aberration from American capitalism; he is its product. He is the political form capitalism takes when its contradictions reach a breaking point, and the working class has been left without a genuine alternative. Defeating fascism requires abolishing the conditions that produce it  which means abolishing capitalism itself.

Hofstadter’s liberal rationalism has never built a single rank-and-file committee, never organised a single strike, never told a single worker the truth about who actually runs the country and why. As an analytical tool for the left, it is worse than useless  it is a weapon pointed in the wrong direction.

[1] Revisiting The Vital Centre by Kevin Mattson- http://www.csun.edu/~twd61312/mattson.htm