The Day After the Rabblement

On Hegel, Joyce, and Why History Won’t Quite End

When in the course of human events, it becomes evident that men can no longer be considered equal; that, because of the dissolving of a mysterious quality of grace, a species of one-time gentlemen trifurcates into a tier of tyrants, a tier of those clinging to what’s left of the middle class, and a lowly band of rabble, we find ourselves asking, out of a need to stop these people from bothering us, where they all came from.

Who are the rabble? Are the rabble simply the poor? The word has this connotation. And yet, as experience loves to remind us, there is plenty of rabblement going on among those with wads of cash. In our world today, it’s rabble on top, rabble on the bottom, rabble all the way down.

You know who they are. They never stop rabbling. It’s unmistakable. They make rude comments without provocation and get mad if you get mad. They fake tremendous incompetence as a weapon against responsibility. They forget to pay you back and then produce an itemized receipt of what you owe them on Venmo like they’re a CPA. They spend several years philandering and then ask for your salary. They do not return their grocery carts. They nearly kill children at crosswalks as they speed around cars to get to a red light first. They use Klarna to finance their burritos and trigger a widespread economic collapse by defaulting. They cough on you and get you sick, and get mad if you cough near them. They cite the ethereal bonds of “friendship” like they are Sir Galahad to explain why you cannot get rid of them. The rabble is a demonic hermaphrodite, both toxically masculine and toxically feminine: brutishly offensive and prone to hysterical fits of indignation if their behavior is dished back to them. They are all around us, and ceaselessly prevent my brilliant readers from enjoying their profound thoughts in peace!

Hegel knew all about the rabble (in his language, Pöbel), and provided a scientific account of their origins in a section of his Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Hegel thought populations become “rabble” not by lack of wealth alone but by the humiliating lack of an esteemed station in society, which leads them to shirk basic decency. “Rabble” is a category for those who do not feel they have a spot in the archetypes of a Fisher-Price neighborhood mat. At the outset of this section he issued a warning about the consequences of poverty:

It is not just starvation which is at stake here; the wider viewpoint is the need to prevent a rabble from emerging (§ 240)

Hegel then noted that ancient Athens required its citizens to give an account of the way they support themselves. Despite modern states’ tendency to view this as a private matter, Hegel insisted that societies maintain the right to guard against the destruction of individual and family livelihoods, often caused by their “extravagance,” because the prospect of a rabble threatens the very structure of society itself. Society in fact has a duty to prevent this from happening.

The formation of a rabble does not occur solely in the reduction of a segment of society to a state of poverty, but rather in the stripping away of the feeling of dignity from that segment, specifically the “feeling of right, integrity [Rechtlichkeit], and honour which comes from supporting oneself by one’s own activity and work” (§ 244).

In so many words, the rabble feel that they do not have a role, and, in this state of deprivation of ethereal justification, they seek revenge on society by “acting out,” parodying it in various ways: crime, pointless rebellion, vulgarity, and the iconoclastic carnivalesque. Like the “lazzaroni of Naples,” a rabble which is dependent on social welfare can acquire a disposition of frivolity and laziness, which begets an “evil” character of insufficient honor derived from the inability to work yet with an accompanying demand that they be given a livelihood. While lacking the means for subsistence in the state of nature cannot be redeemed for a protest, in society it is an altogether different manner, as a class can assert some kind of injustice has been inflicted on them. And they are not altogether wrong.

When an economy is unregulated, it will inexorably seek to “expand its population and industry,” one by funneling a vast association of laborers and consumers into a single general market and two by greatly multiplying the “means of satisfying these needs.” This “twofold universality” leads to an increase in the accumulation of wealth, which is after all the purpose of economy, and yet this process incurs a “specialization and limitation of particular work” and with that the “dependence and want of the class which is tied to such work.” This vast general proletariat, unmoored from the anchors of traditional professions and regional culture, is thrown into a state of numbness toward civil society because they are no longer able to enjoy its spiritual advantages and its wider freedoms have been restricted to the propertied class (§ 243). These “contingent physical factors and circumstances based on external conditions” result in poverty (§ 241). In the condition of poverty, a class will see the dissolution of “the bond of the family” as well as the deprivation of “the ability to acquire skills and education in general, as well as of the administration of justice, health care, and often even of the consolation of religion” (§ 241).

Hegel granted that men will naturally rise to unequal stations in society, becoming sorted into various Estates—today we call them “industries”—based on their “skills, resources, and even intellectual and moral education” (§ 200). The Estates are important, second only to the family, because even private individuals need to associate with others in particular institutions to link their individual claims to the universal (§ 201). Here is a prime example of his U-P-I syllogism, which powers the whole of his dialectic of politics: if a regime permits the Universal freedom of abstract basic rights, and the Individual freedom of morality, but not the Particular freedom found in the culturing institutions of civil society, it is an incomplete regime and will experience instability until all three are met (same goes with any other combination; the world of Antigone, for example, has the Universal and Particular but no Individuality). While he resisted the notion that inequality could ever be fully eradicated, he thought Spirit’s “right of particularity” should be guaranteed to society’s inhabitants (§ 200). Everyone deserves access to an honor-bestowing station.

Despite the fact that the main problem of the rabble is an emotional one, society cannot hope to alleviate their condition through morality and encouragement, because these are contingent actions and, above all, do not get at the source of the individuals’ plight. Instead, Hegel called for direct government action in the form of administrative programs to right these wrongs (§ 242). In this capacity, the government or “universal authority” essentially takes over the role of the family and attacks not only the objective deficiencies but also “the disposition of laziness, viciousness, and the other vices” which they have been infected with (§ 241).

But if it comes about that the wealthy class, which has formed its position through the dissolution of the middle class, finds itself wholly paying for the needs of the rabble (through “hospitals, foundations, or monasteries”) to maintain their standard of living without subjecting them to work, that regime now stands in contradiction with the “principle of civil society” which necessitates the “feeling of self-sufficiency and honour among its individual members” (§ 245). It can no longer be considered a commonwealth, but only a system of spoils and bribery, with a rabble below and a rabble above. Consider the case of the Roman Empire:

In this realm, [the process of] differentiation comes to an end with the infinite diremption of ethical life into the extremes of personal or private self-consciousness and abstract universality. This opposition, which begins with a collision between the substantial intuition of an aristocracy and the principle of free personality in democratic form, develops into superstition and the assertion of cold and acquisitive power on the one hand, and into a corrupt rabble on the other. The dissolution of the whole ends in universal misfortune and the demise of ethical life, in which the individualities of nations perish in the unity of a pantheon, and all individuals sink to the level of private persons with an equal status and with formal rights, who are accordingly held together only by an abstract and arbitrary will of increasingly monstrous proportions (§ 357).

While Hegel insisted the problem of the rabble could not be solved with welfare payments alone, the notion of work alone buying their and the regime’s way back into the status of civil society is also erroneous, because total employment would lead to “overproduction and the lack of a proportionate number of consumers who are themselves productive.” (In some ways, “the rabble” is the core concept of Hegel’s political philosophy, because it is the rub that explains why history won’t quite end. Overproduction becomes for Marx and Engels the explanation for economic depressions, when too many goods are created without adequate consumption and companies are forced to lay off a workforce that is able and willing to work.) And this is precisely where the “evil” of the system that begets rabbles lies; using the dynamics of free economy as solutions merely exacerbates the problem that is already present (§ 245).

The bare-bones, concrete solution to the problem (i.e. the subpar one already in practice) is colonization and globalization: “the inner dialectic of society drives it—or in the first instance this specific society—to go beyond its own confines and look for consumers, and hence the means it requires for subsistence, in other nations which lack those means of which it has a surplus or which generally lag behind it in creativity, et cetera” (§ 246). The perfect example of the domestic side of this equation is 19^th century England, where pure deterritorialization—the liquidation not only of the corporations and guilds but also of welfare nets and the notions of “shame and honor”—forced the rabble to “beg from the public” as a way to circumvent their “laziness and extravagances” (§ 245).

But Hegel also imagined an ideal solution to the problem: a wealthier, future society that could hold together a happy state of affairs where everyone would have the right of particularity, participation in dignity, without it sliding routinely into overconsumption and ‘rabbilization’—capitalism without the boom-and-bust cycle. “Despite an excess of wealth, civil society is not wealthy enough—i.e. its own distinct resources are not sufficient—to prevent an excess of poverty and the formation of a rabble” (§ 245).

* * *

James Joyce had a different vision. Instead of seeing the dissolution of civil society as a problem in need of utopian correction, he thought these dynamics of modernity were unchangeable. Downfalls and heroic flaws (ἁμαρτία) are endemic to human life. He therefore reasoned that the title of “rabble” does not belong to the downwardly-mobile but to the censors of art, particularly those that try to prevent the daring artist from pulling off the mask of present existence. This unmasking is painful, but is the only way to re-attain the kind of dignified relation to the world that the ancients and medievals had.

For Joyce, the rabble mind thus had to be cured by literature at once realist and mythic, where through a clever refashioning of honored antiquity and a placing of it in the stream of consciousness of contemporary life we would wrest dignity out of the clutches of Mount Olympus and diffuse it through the human population. As he said to his brother Stanislaus:

Don't you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am trying ... to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own ... for their mental, moral, and spiritual uplift.¹

One of Joyce’s first forays into public recognition occurred in 1901. In an essay titled “The Day of the Rabblement,” the 19-year-old upstart condemned the whole Irish literary establishment and in particular the Irish Literary Theatre. But it signifies for our purposes an alternative definition of “rabble,” conjuring up not the lazzaroni but politicized art critics with bad taste, and with that an alternative cure.

He didn’t start out as the Theatre’s enemy. Run by W.B. Yeats, the playhouse had previously staged Yeats’ The Countess Cathleen, which had been called “heretical” by a Catholic cardinal and had been booed by students for perceived “anti-Irish” elements. Joyce, defying the protests, had “clapped vigorously” as the curtains closed.² Now, the Theatre announced its intentions to produce plays from the continent, which piqued Joyce’s interest. He set to work preparing his translations of Hauptmann’s Michael Kraemer for performance. But when he learned that they had instead decided to perform an Irish-language play by Douglas Hyde, and another by Yeats and George Moore drawn from what Joyce called “the broken lights of Irish myth,” he grew contemptuous. In response, he penned the short essay accusing the literary celebrities of succumbing to the demands of the mob.

It boldly opened: “No man, said the Nolan, can be a lover of the true or the good unless he abhors the multitude; and the artist, though he may employ the crowd, is very careful to isolate himself.” He did not deign to inform the reader who “the Nolan” was; he said the “laymen should be encouraged to think” and thought they might track down the reference and read Giordano Bruno’s work. Instead, they speculated it was either an ancient Irish chieftain, Nolan the porter at the Cecilia Street medical school, or Joyce himself. The students turned “said the Nolan” into a catchphrase, and his friends John Skeffington and Hannah Sheehy used the essay’s other lines as butts of jokes. Joyce “wrote [their] dialogue down in an epiphany, perhaps to suggest how in Ireland all things are cheapened.”³

But Joyce’s relationship with Irish culture was complex and by no means reducible to a simple hatred. It is on partial display in the essay: while he calls the Irish “the most belated race in Europe” and says the Irish Literary Theatre had become the “property of [its] rabblement,” his endeavor in the piece was to protect Ireland from this pernicious influence. It is not patriotic to cheer the self-imposed paralysis (his word for what Dubliners captured) of your country any more than it would be right to protect the heroin addiction of a family member. To lift a race’s conscience out of the stupor of delusion and into the light of day, as playwrights ought to do with their characters, is a torturous but necessary advance. To secure the right to do this would be to gain for Ireland the ability to furnish Europe with great artists. This was all the more pressing given the age, the foggy transition between Victorianism and revolutionary modernism, which he described as “a time of crisis” where “the highest form of art has been just preserved by desperate sacrifices.”

This form began with Henrik Ibsen in a “note of protest” and continued in several “heroic” battles by the “stubborn conviction” of artists in several countries “against the hosts of prejudice and misinterpretation and ridicule.” The belligerents were “progress” on the one hand and “commercialism and vulgarity” on the other, with the “popular devil” of commerce having more strength than the vulgar as it has “bulk and lungs” and gilded speech.

While Ibsen, with his stark and uncomfortable realism, advised writers to challenge the pedestrian sensibility of the “trolls,” the Irish Literary Theatre had instead ingratiated itself with it. The effect was an enfeebling of the Irish literary ability to the point that no artist had emerged of equal stature with any of the good Europeans, whether first-rate ones like Ibsen, Tolstoy, or Gerhart Hauptmann, or those of the second rank like Hermann Sudermann, Bjornstjerne Bjornson, or Giovanni Giacosa—plays from whom could have been performed by the Theatre if they did not renege on their original plan.

To Joyce’s further baffled indignation, there was not even a threat of serious censorship in Ireland. There was therefore no need for battle but only a “calm” confrontation with the “forces that dictate public judgement.” The “placid and intensely moral” rabblement viewed writers like José Echegaray and Maurice Maeterlinck as “improper” because the former might involve “morbid” themes or the latter might show a woman “letting down her hair,” ignoring the forest for the trees. Performing these foreign writers was an “absolutely necessary” project because “a nation which never advanced so far as a miracle-play affords no literary model to the artist, and he must look abroad.”

Having relegated propaganda and pornography beneath the status of art in A Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man, it is not likely Joyce thought the mere presence of morbidity and nudity made for good art. The “progressive” element he detected in these works was rather the way they presented life in the intimate way we know it, fully making use of the deterritorialization of modernity while mocking the rabble mind, so we could come to understand ourselves—so a parcel of dignity could be had rather than kept away in the cold moral allegories of the censor.

Yeats, though showing signs of genius, had too “floating of a will” and attached himself too readily to new and inferior fads. Moore, while at one point a worthy challenger to the English novelists, failed to adapt to the changing currents of the modern novel from Flaubert to D’Annunzio (this mention of D’Annunzio’s Il Fuoco, which Joyce considered at the time to be “the highest achievement of the novel to date,” was on the Vatican’s index of banned books and therefore caused the essay to be rejected by St. Stephen’s magazine; Joyce had to self-publish it).

The effect was to Joyce’s desires: he was denounced by an anonymous author in the pages of St. Stephen’s for irreligion, reasoning that the multitude he detested was Catholic, and that, for them, religion would always be more important than artworks which interfered with it. And the author noted that Joyce did not join in on the protests against The Countess Cathleen, also produced by the Irish Literary Theatre, making him no friend of its enemies either.

It is natural to seek peers; but the pioneering spirits who do so are often wounded in the attempt, for they find only beggars of the ideal. Joyce was loyal neither to established artists nor to the mob, neither to the alleged progressives nor the alleged conservatives, but only to art. He concluded the essay:

Until he has freed himself from the mean influences about him—sodden enthusiasm and clever insinuation and every flattering influence of vanity and low ambition—no man is an artist at all. But his true servitude is that he inherits a will broken by doubt and a soul that yields up all its hate to a caress; and the most seeming-independent are those who are the first to reassume their bonds. But Truth deals largely with us.

Unlike Hegel, who saw the rabble as insufficiently socialized, for Joyce both the “cultivated” and “uncultivated” rabble were precisely those who demand the artist conform to society: oversocialized hacks who want artistic productions to contribute to ideological justification through “fetichism and deliberate self-deception” of a culture’s shortcomings. But what is the alternative?

The literary device of metalepsis works as a skeleton key to Joyce’s work. Metalepsis takes up a phrase or expression from a previous work of literature and employs it in a new context. When applied to ancient literature, metalepsis puts frozen canonical characters back into play, like the satires of Lucian or the epics of Milton. It allows a modern author to become ‘younger’ than his vaunted predecessors, borrowing their early innocence and transuming it. This can be done by revealing what is familiar in the ancient, as historical TV dramas do, or showing what is “ancient” about today through parallels. Ulysses performs the latter, but it does not sully antiquity by associating it to the modern because it is written with the highest-caliber lyricism, and its characters are true, even if humorous. It is not Mel Brooks or Monty Python—nothing wrong with them, but they are parodists, and Ulysses is not parody. The book really cannot be described; it can only be understood through experiencing its narration, wherein we witness the unmasking of an absolute beauty behind Dublin without any invocation of what is not authentic to it—no false gods, no LARPing politicisms.

Rather than having the tradition of all the dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brain of the living, making us feel exiled from the true life, metalepsis de-LARPs us, making us see that we live in our own “antiquity,” spreading the honor of the past and salving our alienation like a Pentecost. It brings them down to us and us up to them, just as Saint Francis of Assisi discovered he could teach illiterate, urban laborers theology by visually presenting the story of Christ with unprecedented humanity: not the unreachable God with halo but a bleeding, suffering man.

Borrowing concepts from Vico’s New Science, the Joyce of Finnegans Wake locates the dynamics that produce “rabbles” not in insufficient economic systems but in the very fabric of civilization itself, woven into the natural lifespan of a language and its mythological world. Joyce came to view rabbilization as the fall of the archetypal everyman Finnegan from his ladder, and the reparative work of de-rabbilization through new folklore and faith as his resurrection through spilt whiskey (Irish Gaelic uisce beatha, “water of life”). The fall of a civilization sends us back to the infantile state of ignorance that knows nothing but onomatopoeic murmuring, ready to begin once more the search for the rational knowledge that lies at the end of Spirit’s trajectory (“the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes”), erasing all progress yet allowing for the rebirth of the mythy mind that can cast a laughing dignity on all once more (“Phall if you but will, but rise you must: and none so soon either shall the pharce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish”). U-P-I keeps coming together and bursting apart once more. All this is wrapped into a comic vision, joking in every line, as if to show that nothing in all world history is so heavy as to resist the jig:

And to me also, who appreciate life, the butterflies, and soap-bubbles, and whatever is like them amongst us, seem most to enjoy happiness.

To see these light, foolish, pretty, lively little sprites flit about—that moves Zarathustra to tears and songs.

Joyce’s conception thus permits the end of the end of history. In Finnegans Wake, the whole of Vico’s cycle of the ages (Theocratic, Aristocratic, Democratic, and Chaotic) occur simultaneously, within every line, because Joyce believed the reader of it would by virtue of reading the book ascend above the dynamics of rabblement and gain access to a permanent source of ‘uplift.’ While Hegel bemoaned the appearance of what he called the “rabble,” that hole in the script where those who do not fit into late-stage civil society overturn it into its opposite, Joyce celebrated it as the banana peel on which all corrupt civilization slips and falls back into the godly.

Now the characteristics that Hegel identifies as rabble are also held in abhorrence by Joyce: see Ulysses’ villain Blazes Boylan, or his foe The Citizen, who have no inner monologue “as if coarseness had no consciousness.” But Joyce does not hold the rift in the philosophy of history as the culprit; instead it is the forces of “horsepower and brutality,” which are opposed by the virtues of “brainpower and decency.”⁴ His hero Leopold Bloom is not a member of the rabble, but an ordinary man who “differs from lesser Dubliners in that his internal poetry is continual, even in the most unpromising situations.”⁵ Or as Bloom’s friend Lenehan in “The Wandering Rocks” episode says: “He's a cultured allroundman. He's not one of your common or garden... you know... There's a touch of the artist about old Bloom.”

When his friend Jacques Mercanton noticed Bloom’s artistic nature, Joyce gladdened. “You’re one of the first to say that,” he replied. “Most people have looked down on Bloom. It is like the women who say to me about Marian Bloom, “Yes, that’s the way those women are.” Upon which I stare at a corner of the ceiling.”⁶

1. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 163.

2. Ellmann, 67.

3. Ellmann, 90.

4. Ellmann, 372.

5. Ellmann, 363.

6. Jacques Mercanton, Les Heures de James Joyce, 13.