The subject of our session this evening has been a focus of intellectual debate and political passion for at least six or seven decades now.footnote^＊ It already has a long history, in other words. It so happens, however, that within the last year there has appeared a book which reopens that debate, with such renewed passion, and such undeniable power, that no contemporary reflection on these two ideas, ‘modernity’ and ‘revolution’, could avoid trying to come to terms with it. The book to which I refer is Marshall Berman’s All that is Solid Melts into Air. My remarks tonight will try—very briefly—to look at the structure of Berman’s argument, and consider how far it provides us with a persuasive theory capable of conjoining the notions of modernity and revolution. I will start by reconstructing, in compressed form, the main lines of his book; and then proceed to some comments on their validity. Any such reconstruction as this must sacrifice the imaginative sweep, the breadth of cultural sympathy, the force of textual intelligence, that give its splendour to All that is Solid Melts into Air. These qualities will surely over time make it a classic in its field. A proper appreciation of them exceeds our business today. But it needs to be said at the outset that a stripped-down analysis of the general case of the book is in no way equivalent to an adequate evaluation of the importance, and attraction, of the work as a whole.

Berman’s essential argument, then, starts as follows: ‘There is a mode of vital experience—experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life’s possibilities and perils—that is shared by men and women all over the world today. I will call this body of experience “modernity”. To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, “All that is solid melts into air”’.footnote¹

What generates this maelstrom? For Berman, it is a host of social processes—he lists scientific discoveries, industrial upheavals, demographic transformations, urban expansions, national states, mass movements—all propelled, in the last instance, by the ‘ever-expanding, drastically fluctuating’ capitalist world market. These processes he calls, for convenient short-hand, socio-economic modernization. Out of the experience born of modernization, in turn has emerged what he describes as the ‘amazing variety of visions and ideas that aim to make men and women the subjects as well as the objects of modernization, to give them the power to change the world that is changing them, to make their way through the maelstrom and make it their own’—‘visions and values that have come to be loosely grouped together under the name of “modernism” ’. The ambition of his own book, then, is to reveal the ‘dialectics of modernization and modernism’.footnote²

Between these two lies, as we have seen, the key middle term of modernity itself—neither economic process nor cultural vision but the historical experience mediating the one to the other. What constitutes the nature of the linkage between them? Essentially, for Berman, it is development. This is really the central concept of his book, and the source of most of its paradoxes—some of them lucidly and convincingly explored in its pages, others less seen by them. In All that is Solid Melts into Air, development means two things simultaneously.

On the one hand, it refers to the gigantic objective transformations of society unleashed by the advent of the capitalist world market: that is, essentially but not exclusively, economic development. On the other hand, it refers to the momentous subjective transformations of individual life and personality which occur under their impact: everything that is contained within the notion of self-development, as a heightening of human powers and widening of human experience. For Berman the combination of these two, under the compulsive beat of the world market, necessarily spells a dramatic tension within the individuals who undergo development in both senses. On the one hand, capitalism—in Marx’s unforgettable phrase of the Manifesto, which forms the leitmotif of Berman’s book—tears down every ancestral confinement and feudal restriction, social immobility and claustral tradition, in an immense clearing operation of cultural and customary debris across the globe. To that process corresponds a tremendous emancipation of the possibility and sensibility of the individual self, now increasingly released from the fixed social status and rigid role-hierarchy of the pre-capitalist past, with its narrow morality and cramped imaginative range. On the other hand, as Marx emphasized, the very same onrush of capitalist economic development also generates a brutally alienated and atomized society, riven by callous economic exploitation and cold social indifference, destructive of every cultural or political value whose potential it has itself brought into being. Likewise, on the psychological plane, self-development in these conditions could only mean a profound disorientation and insecurity, frustration and despair, concomitant with—indeed inseparable from—the sense of enlargement and exhilaration, the new capacities and feelings, liberated at the same time. ‘This atmosphere,’ Berman writes, ‘of agitation and turbulence, psychic dizziness and drunkenness, expansion of experiential possibilities and destruction of moral boundaries and personal bonds, self-enlargement and self-derangement, phantoms in the street and in the soul—is the atmosphere in which modern sensibility is born.’footnote³

That sensibility dates, in its initial manifestations, from the advent of the world market itself—1500 or thereabouts. But in its first phase, which for Berman runs to about 1790, it still lacks any common vocabulary. A second phase then extends across the 19th century, and it is here that the experience of modernity is translated into the various classical visions of modernism, which he defines essentially by their firm ability to grasp both sides of the contradictions of capitalist development—at once celebrating and denouncing its unprecedented transformations of the material and spiritual world, without ever converting these attitudes into static or immutable antitheses. Goethe is prototypical of the new vision in his Faust, which Berman in a magnificent chapter analyses as a tragedy of the developer in this dual sense—unbinding the self in binding back the sea. Marx in the Manifesto and Baudelaire in his prose poems on Paris are shown as cousins in the same discovery of modernity—one prolonged, in the peculiar conditions of forced modernization from above in a backward society, in the long literary tradition of St Petersburg, from Pushkin and Gogol to Dostoevsky and Mandelstam. A condition of the sensibility so created—Berman argues—was a more or less unified public still possessing a memory of what it was like to live in a pre-modern world. In the 20th century, however, that public simultaneously expanded and fragmented into incommensurable segments. Therewith the dialectical tension of the classical experience of modernity underwent a critical transformation. While modernist art registered more triumphs than ever before—the 20th century, Berman says in an unguarded phrase, ‘may well be the most brilliantly creative in the history of the world’footnote⁴—this art has ceased to connect with or inform any common life: as he puts it, ‘we don’t know how to use our modernism’.footnote⁵ The result has been a drastic polarization in modern thought about the experience of modernity itself, flattening out its essentially ambiguous or dialectical character. On the one hand, from Weber through to Ortega, Eliot to Tate, Leavis to Marcuse, 20th-century modernity has been relentlessly condemned as an iron cage of conformity and mediocrity, a spiritual wilderness of populations bleached of any organic community or vital autonomy. On the other hand, against these visions of cultural despair, in another tradition stretching from Marinetti to Le Corbusier, Buckminster Fuller to Marshall McLuhan, not to speak of outright apologists of capitalist ‘modernization theory’ itself, modernity has been fulsomely touted as the last word in sensory excitement and universal satisfaction, in which a machine-built civilization itself guarantees aesthetic thrills and social felicities. What each side has in common here is a simple identification of modernity with technology itself—radically excluding the people who produce and are produced by it. As Berman writes: ‘Our nineteenth-century thinkers were simultaneously enthusiasts and enemies of modern life, wrestling inexhaustibly with its ambiguities and contradictions; their self-ironies and inner tensions were a primary source of their creative power. Their twentieth-century successors have lurched far more towards rigid polarities and flat totalizations. Modernity is either embraced with a blind and uncritical enthusiasm, or else condemned with a neo-Olympian remoteness and contempt; in either case it is conceived as a closed monolith, incapable of being shaped or changed by modern men. Open visions of life have been supplanted by closed ones, Both/And by Either/Or.’footnote⁶ The purpose of Berman’s book is to help restore our sense of modernity, by reappropriating the classical visions of it. ‘It may turn out, then, that going back can be a way to go forward: that remembering the modernisms of the nineteenth century can give us the vision and courage to create the modernisms of the twenty-first. This act of remembering can help us bring modernism back to its roots, so that it can nourish and renew itself, to confront the adventures and dangers that lie ahead.’footnote⁷

Such is the general thrust of All that is Solid Melts into Air. The book contains, however, a very important sub-text, which needs to be noted. Berman’s title, and organizing theme, come from The Communist Manifesto, and his chapter on Marx is one of the most interesting in the book. It ends, however, by suggesting that Marx’s own analysis of the dynamic of modernity ultimately undermines the very prospect of the communist future he thought it would lead to. For if the essence of liberation from bourgeois society would be for the first time a truly unlimited development of the individual—the limits of capital, with all its deformities, now being struck away—what could guarantee either the harmony of the individuals so emancipated, or the stability of any society composed of them? ‘Even if,’ Berman asks, ‘the workers do build a successful communist movement, and even if that movement generates a successful revolution, how amid the flood tides of modern life, will they ever manage to build a solid communist society? What is to prevent the social forces that melt capitalism from melting communism as well? If all new relationships become obsolete before they can ossify, how can solidarity, fraternity and mutual aid be kept alive? A communist government might try to dam the flood by imposing radical restrictions, not merely on economic activity and enterprise (every socialist government has done this, along with every capitalist welfare state), but on personal, cultural and political expression. But insofar as such a policy succeeded, wouldn’t it betray the Marxist aim of free development for each and all?’footnote⁸ Yet—I quote again—‘if a triumphant communism should someday flow through the floodgates that free trade opens up, who knows what dreadful impulses might flow along with it, or in its wake, or impacted inside? It is easy to imagine how a society committed to the free development of each and all might develop its own distinctive varieties of nihilism. Indeed, a communist nihilism might turn out to be far more explosive and disintegrative than its bourgeois precursor—though also more daring and original—because while capitalism cuts the infinite possibilities of modern life with the limits of the bottom line, Marx’s communism might launch the liberated self into immense unknown human spaces with no limits at all.’ Berman thus concludes: ‘Ironically, then, we can see Marx’s dialectic of modernity re-enacting the fate of the society it describes, generating energies and ideas that melt it down into its own air.’footnote⁹