Rational Secular State -- Introduction Continued

In some respects, I hear myself arguing that the Marxist state represents a reducto ad absurdem culmination of the 18th century enlightenment project with its valorization of science and the importation of its basic assumptions and methods into the social sphere -- a wholly secular state and, insofar as the conclusions of science seemed to trump and transcend the truths of religion in their immediate material utility, a wholly rational state.  The difficulties with the Marxist project have been well detailed, and conservative thinkers like Hayek are, I think, essentially correct when they tell us that "the uncritical transfer to the problems of society of habits of thought engendered by the preoccupation with technological problems, the habits of thought of the natural scientist and the engineer" tended to "impose ideals of organization on a sphere to which they are not appropriate," and those ideals of organization all required the willing sublimation of the individual subjectivity within the state, a willingness that would come of its own accord with with well planned and executed changes in the material contingencies of existence.  That it did not come of its own accord, that physical forms of persuasion were needed to help along the willingness of the populace, that it itself became an ersatz religion willing to use immoral means against individuals to achieve the moral transformation of the state, gives some credence to Hayek and others insistence on "respect for the individual man qua man," and the romantic notion that puts the private above the public, that for the individual man "the recognition of his own views and tastes [are] supreme in his own sphere, however narrowly that may be circumscribed."  Romanticism emerged as a response to the same 18th century project, and if Marxism represented a reducto ad absurdem culmination of its progressive assumptions, Nietzsche perhaps represents the culmination of the romantic thought.  In broad strokes, romanticism might be described as a reactionary response to science and its sublimation of the human spirit to the material, the individual to the social.  Romanticism in its various iterations has sought to recover divinity in man, not in the traditional sense (though often the romantics, as they aged beyond adolescent rebelliousness, lapsed into one form or another of traditionalism) but rather as a response to the same conditions of existence, the same historical contingencies that had animated Marx.  It was, in part, a reaction to industrial capitalism that to all appearances had suborned the majority of mankind to the condition of a machine, a condition that alienated them not only from themselves, but in its clacking and coal smoke surround, more natural forms of existence, more organic ways of being in the world.  The romantic project, no less than the Marxist project, wished to recreate man, but unlike the Marxist project, the reformation of man would not come from without, but from within -- from what Harold Bloom might call the satanic impulse -- or in the diminished key of a latter day Nietzsche what Rorty might call irony -- the "means to private perfection rather than human solidarity" -- or in Hayek's terms "the belief that it is desirable that men should develop their own individual gifts and bents."

To be continued.