‘Lyndon LaRouche As a Precursor…’: Report from Panel 2 of Berlin Schiller Conference, July 12

July 18—The headline above is the title of a very thought-provoking speech given by Jerome Ravenet, a French philosopher and university professor, who spoke on Panel 2 of the Berlin Schiller Institute conference. His basic thesis, the late statesman and physical economist Lyndon LaRouche’s placing human creativity at the heart of a productive physical economy, is the way to overcome a concept of the economy, in which man becomes a wolf against man, which has been dominant, in the so-called “modern” period, since the emergence of the financial oligarchy in Venice, and leading later to the emergence of the monetarism of the City of London and Wall Street satrap.

“Lyndon LaRouche showed that a complete diagnosis of the economy required a rethinking of its anthropological foundations, a rethinking of political economy based on the representations of the human being that condition it. He highlighted the ‘rival’ logic of the dominant paradigm of economic ‘reason,’ where … the possession of a good by some implies its deprivation for others. The modern language of financial economics is therefore one … of depredation in human relations: It can be defined as a language of power … designed to justify all the means of prevention and constraint, including military force, that legitimize the domination of some and the submission of others.”

We summarize more of what Ravenet presented:

Indeed, it was the social rise of this financial oligarchy that inaugurated modernity in the world’s cities, first in Venice and Genoa, Italy, then in Amsterdam, Holland, before continuing on to the City of London and much later New York's Wall Street. … The rising financial oligarchy has certainly liberated capitalist forces from their submission to the masters of the past, but the modern world it has engendered has not freed itself from the very model of domination.

In the early 16th century, the Machiavellian figures of the lion and the fox prefigured this modern theory of a paradigm of violence. In the 19th century, the Hegelian dialectic of master and slave gave it the accomplished form of an emblematic parable. Freedom is neither joy nor harmony, but only struggle and conquest, war and combat--such as the all-too-famous geopolitics (born with Harford Mackinder in the 19th century) or monetarist economics (of the Chicago school's Milton Friedman in the 20th century).

"Yet, we see that Lyndon LaRouche and his physical economy make a complete break with this dominant knowledge. … If the paradigm of modernity has consisted in the martial affirmation of its universalist pretensions, from the conquest of the New World in 1492 to the Wolfowitz Doctrine in 1994, then the LaRouche Doctrine is anti-modern. For LaRouche opposes the paradigm of rivalry with the promise of creativity. He underpins his hope with a rereading of ancient, Renaissance and post-Renaissance authors ranging from Plato to Schiller and Nicholas of Cusa.

Spinoza, like Leibniz, was a radical critic of the paradigm of power in the 17th century, and a profound theorist of potency. Against power, which is merely a force to prevent and coerce, Spinoza’s Ethics had distinguished the concept of potency (potestas) as a force to exist and produce effects, sensible in a desire to live (conatus) that reason, according to its strengths, can make flourish. Although LaRouche did not mobilize Spinozism, he does use the idea and concept of potency—not only in his dialogue with the physical sciences—but to philosophically ground his approach, for example through the concept of “successful survival” developed in his text In Defense of Common Sense (1989).

Moreover, we know that Spinozism’s theory of power implies a hierarchy of three modes of knowledge, culminating in “rational intuition.” Yet, LaRouche never ceased to criticize empiricism and logical-deductive reason as inferior or limiting modes of knowledge, to emphasize the superior fruitfulness of a “creative reason” placed at the service of a “common sense”: he exalted this intelligence capable of seeing with the eyes of the future, of immediately grasping the arrangements or compositional relationships likely to help life prosper.

It is not my purpose here to examine whether these theses make LaRouche an eligible author for the venerable tradition of “philosophia perennis” that Leibniz discussed in his correspondence with M. de Rémond in 1714. We need only point out that it was this rational intuition that enabled Spinoza, like Leibniz and Lyndon LaRouche, to diagnose the deadly effects of the languages of power in the instituted knowledge of their time, to anticipate the superior efficacy of relations of cooperation over relations of domination, in other words, to grasp the difference, in nature and value, between the two paradigms—of power and of potency.

This is undoubtedly why LaRouche was able to anticipate and encourage as early as 1996, the initiative for a “World Land-Bridge” that prefigured the New Silk Roads project, formalized by Beijing in 2014. For the power of common sense creates fruitful forms. By uniting forces that power divides and relying on the principle of “least action” to multiply their effects, this enlightened power reaffirms the rights of life.