History: Lviv-Lvov-Lwow-Lemberg

The city in eastern Ukraine, now known as Lviv, has had many different names during its history. At the end of the mediaeval era it formed part of the kingdom of Poland, when it was known as Lwow.

It was the centre of the territory then known as Galicia: a flat region dominated by the vast feudal estates of Polish landlords, worked by Ukrainian-speaking serfs, and with a large population of Jews, living in their isolated shtetls.

When at the 18th century, the kingdom of Poland was carved up between the surrounding powers of the kingdom of Prussia and the empires of Russia and Austria, the city was taken by the Austrians, and was renamed Lemberg. It was a thriving intellecual centre, but Galicia was a povertystriken region. Many thousands of Jews left, either emigrating to America, or to seek work in Vienna, where they aroused the alarm and hatred of the young Adolf Hitler. Austrian rule was on the whole benign when compared with the serfdom and anti-Jewish pogroms suffered by Galicia's neighbours over the border in Russia.

After the region was fought over in the First World War and suffered enormous damage, the ancient state of Poland was resurrected at the Treaty of Versailles: Galicia became part of it, and Lemberg reverted to its Polish name of Lwow. Although Poland was nominally a democratic republic, there was in fact gross discrimination against Ukrainians and Jews. But, once again, the people of the region could consider themselves fortunate when compared with those living in the Soviet Ukraine, where hundreds of thousands died of starvation in Stalin's collectivisation campaign and the entire leadership of the Ukrainiann Communist Party was shot in the great purge of 1937-8.

  In September 1939 Hitler launched his attack on Poland, and shortly afterwards Stalin took advantage of this to occupy Galicia. Lwow now became Lvov. Elections were held in which only candidates approved by the Kremlin were permitted to stand. Farms were collectivised and businesses taken over by the state. The NKVD, under Beria, arrested anyone likely to cause trouble, shooting or deporting to Siberia tens of thousands, amounting to between 10% or 20% of the entire population of the region.  

   But the nightmare was only beginning, because in June 1941 Hitler launched his war on Russia. Lviv fell to the Germans just eight days into the campaign. Behind the fornt-line troops came the Einsatzgruppen, who were instructed to comb through the conquered territories and shoot all Jews and Communist agents. By September the slaughter had been extended from killing Jewish men to killing the women and children too. At first, many Ukrainians welcomed the invaders, and Alfred Rosenberg, who was placed in charge of the occupied territories, wanted to build up a collaborationist movement, but Hitler was only interested in turning Ukraine into a vast plantation worked by slave labour. It cannot be denied that some Ukrainians, along with Russians,Lithuanians and others, asssited in the Holocaust: they were known as "Hiwis"; helpers. Many of the most brutal guards at the death camps were not Germans, but recruited from the various nationalities in the Soviet Union.

   What was left of Lviv was reoccupied by the Red Army late in the war, and in the redrawing of frontiers after the war it was incorporated into the Soviet Union: the first time in the city's history that it had been ruled from Moscow. Armed resistance to the Russians continued in some regions until the early 1950s, as Ukraine was subjected to the ruthless administration of two of Stalin's leading hitmen: Khrushchev and Kaganovich. Ironically enough, both were born in Ukraine, though Khrushchev was an ethnic Russian from the Donbass and Kaganovich was Jewish. One oddity of the postwar settlement was that both Ukraine and Belarus were given their own votes at the United Nations. There was no instance of either voting against the Soviet line.

   As with the rest of the Soviet Union, Ukraine drifted into slow decline during the Brezhnev years. Throughout this tedious era, many of the levers of power remained in the hands of the survivors of the old Khrushchev/ Kaganovich Ukraine group: they were known as the "Dnieper Mafia". 

   When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it was no accident that the drive for an independent Ukraine came from Lviv rather that Kyiv.

Political Philosophy: Hobbes's "Leviathan"

 Thomas Hobbes (1588-1697) was a philosopher and mathematician. He spent much of his life in the service of the Great Cavendish family, but was also for a while tutor in mathematics to the Prince of Wales. He also travelled in Europe, and met many of the great intellectual leaders of his day, including Descartes, Galileo and Francis Bacon.

   He was the author of several books in both Latin and English, but is best known for “Leviathan” (1651), where he argues for a social contract leading to absolutist government. The book is long and not easy to read, even when rendered into modern English, so here I am attempting a very short summary of the argument.

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Men are more or less equal as individuals. We are governed by our passions, which lead us to seek liberty and advantage for ourselves and domination over others, and we are in consequence always in competition with each other. Without the restraining power of a sovereign power to impose external restraint, we live in a perpetual war of all against all, civilisation cannot develop, and life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. The only “right” in this "state of nature" is the right to benefit ourselves in any way that seems advantageous.

As well as seeking to benefit ourselves, we are motivated by fear, especially of death, and by the desire for security for our persons and possessions. In the war of all against all, security can never be guaranteed. Ultimately, people realise come to realise this and in order to achieve wellbeing come together to form a Social Contract.

The Social Contract consists of the people agreeing to create a Sovereign, to which they surrender the rights existing in the State of Nature. By this, the people cease to be just a crowd, and become instead a Commonwealth of citizens.

 The Sovereign may be an individual or an institution (e.g. a Parliament), but in any case must have absolute authority; for if sovereignty is divided, natural ambition will mean there is bound to be constitutional conflict. (Hobbes had seen how the conflict between King and Parliament had led to civil war, and he would have read how, in the first century B.C., the Roman republican constitution, with all its checks and balances, had led to anarchy, which was only solved with the creation of an Empire under Augustus).

The Sovereign enacts laws. These laws are the sole guide to what is right and wrong, just and unjust. No-one can claim the right to break the law with impunity. The Sovereign has full rights over our private property, and even over our lives; for if we claim the right to follow our consciences against the decrees of the law, this is no more than conceding that anyone can do whatever they like. (Hobbes denounced the claims of the Papacy to universal sovereignty, and the actions of the Popes under Elizabeth, ordering English Catholics to rise up and depose the Queen).

The Sovereign cannot be charged with breaking the social contract, for who could judge in such a case? Once again, the question would have to be “decided by the sword”.

Although no law can be unjust, laws may be unwise, if the people deeply resent having to obey them. This outcome must be avoided.

However, if the Sovereign has been overthrown and lost all power, there is no longer any obligation to obey the deposed Sovereign (By this argument Hobbes justified his submission to Cromwell in the civil wars)

All men are subject to God; but atheists, disbelieving in God, have no reason to obey God’s laws.   

The anarchic war of all against all is seen today in the relationships between states, where a State of Nature still prevails. Everything is determined by force or fraud: all states attempt to grab whatever they can because there is no international sovereign power to enforce obedience to laws. (Hobbes could have argued for a United Nations sovereign authority, with sufficient powers to enforce peace, but he did not go this far!)

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Hobbes is very modern in a number of ways. He ignored the questions about Natural Law and absolute standards of right and wrong which had preoccupied mediaeval thinkers; and neither did he have anything to say about hereditary monarchy or the Divine Right of Kings. His book was therefore denounced by all sides in his day, and he was accused of atheism and republicanism.

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Questions from Hobbes:-

Was there ever an actual social contract as a historical event, or do we live under a “virtual” social contract? – i.e. it is as if we have promised to obey the government, and in return the government protects our lives and property against criminals at home and foes abroad.

In any case, even if there was an actual social contract some time in the past, why should it bind us here and now? Does the social contract need to be constantly renewed?

Is there such a thing as authority, as distinct from power? Power in the political sense means the ability to get people to obey commands, but authority means the right to issue those commands, with an obligation on the citizens to obey them. A follower of Hobbes might argue that claims to authority are no more than propaganda to persuade the deluded citizens to obey: in reality there is only power, which might or might not be strong enough to enforce obedience.

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Footnote:

For the "state of nature", see my previous post

In Britain ever since the Middle Ages, it has been accepted that the highest sovereign authority is “The King in Parliament”. An Act of Parliament can confiscate private property, sentence someone to death, change the succession to the throne, postpone or cancel elections, etc. In the USA, the Founding Fathers copied the Roman system of checks and balances, and sovereignty would appear to reside in the Constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court.

Political Philosophy: Possessive Individualism; the State of Nature; the Social Contract

 After the Renaissance came the “Scientific Revolution” of the 17^th century and then the “Enlightenment” of the 18^th. Philosophers increasingly based their speculations not on our relationship with God, but on human nature. What are we like, and what motivates our behaviour?

   The picture that emerged was that we are autonomous individuals, ambitious, perhaps a bit selfish, thinking first and foremost of our own material wellbeing, then of our family and friends, then of the wider community and so on outwards, like the rings of an archery target, with ever-diminishing commitment. Furthermore, because there aren’t enough material goods around to satisfy everyone’s wants, we are all in competition with each other for what we can get. This philosophy has been called POSSESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM.

How to keep this individualistic competitiveness under control in a peaceful society?

 

The discovery of America. (This is a particular idea of mine)

Unlike the Spanish explorers, who found the great cities of the Aztecs and the Incas, the British, French and Dutch, landing much further north, found only Stone Age hunter-gatherer tribes, without metals, written language, permanent towns, agriculture or any government beyond the tribal level. Nothing had prepared them for this! There was nothing like it in the Bible, or in what they knew of ancient Greece and Rome, or of Islamic civilization. They began to ask themselves searching questions: Did our remote ancestors live like this? Yes, probably. If so, why don’t we live like that any more? How and why did civilization arise in some parts of the world but not in others?

   The North American tribes were believed to be living in a STATE OF NATURE, before civilisation and government had been invented. But at some stage, our ancestors must have got together and agreed to change things. There must have been a SOCIAL CONTRACT: an agreement to live together under some form of government. Why? Because they believed they would be better off as a result. All the philosophers agreed that life in civilized society was better, with the sole exception of Rousseau, who maintained that civilization was all wrong and the N. American tribes, still living in a state of nature, were much healthier, freer and happier than us! 

 

Questions

Is Possessive Individualism actually correct as an assessment of the human personality?

Hegel was perhaps the first philosopher to point out that people in the past didn’t necessarily think like us. He saw history as a series of giant steps upward, determined by these changes in human consciousness.

Marx believed that human nature was determined by economic circumstances. The vast economic expansion from the end of the Middle Ages created capitalism, and Possessive Individualism was a state of consciousness appropriate to capitalist society. After the coming of Communism, human consciousness would change again, towards co-operation rather than competition.

Mill believed that P.I. was an innate part of human nature, and because of this, Communism was unlikely to succeed.

Darwin’s ideas on evolution, particularly the notion of “Survival of the fittest” were interpreted by some to lead to “Social Darwinism”, where it was argued that it was not only inevitable, but beneficial, that the weak should be exterminated, thereby creating more room for the strong and successful. This led to the ideologies of Imperialism and Fascism.

Prince Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist, thought that P.I. was a natural philosophy for Britain: a small overcrowded island with inadequate natural resources for its population. Russia, by contrast, had almost limitless natural resources, but with a harsh climate and only a small population, where success could only be achieved by co-operation, not P.I.  

Hitler dismissed P.I. as “Jewish philosophy”! This was how Jews behaved! He believed Germans had a superior ideology, based on mutual trust, comradeship and patriotism.

Vladimir Putin presumably sees P.I. as a clear sign of Western decadencen and that he stands for an older and more moral code: the service of Holy Mother Russia

An animal behaviourist would argue that the whole concept has been grossly exaggerated. Humans are essentially herd-animals, like chimpanzees or sheep, not solitaries like tigers or bears. By instinct and desire, most of us prefer to live as part of a group, and this means (especially since the development of human speech) that we both need to and want to get on well with our immediate neighbours       

 

Writers on the idea of a Social contract include:-

Thomas Hobbes: “Leviathan”, 1651

John Locke: “Two Treatises of Government”: written in the late 1670s but not published until after the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688

Thomas Jefferson and others: “The American Declaration of Independence”, 1776. 

 Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “The Social Contract”, 1762. Rousseau’s Social Contract is quite different from the others.

We have already discussed Jefferson: we shall be examining these other writers over the next few meetings