The 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence has attracted some attention. Publishers have issued the predictable spate of exegeses and polemics. Michael Platt stands to one side of the roil, answering the declared result of the Founders’ deliberations with a profound meditation on their work.

This is the first of a two-volume sequence on those deliberations, the second being a consideration of the United States Constitution. Platt therefore begins by stating the intention that animates both books, which is to show how “deliberation discovers design.” This cheerful alliteration refers not only to the design of the two documents considered, not only to the design of the political founding they announced, justified, and began to shape, but to the design the Declaration calls “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Design is conceived, announced, justified, and explained by speech. “Although the American Founding included war…it was achieved through speech” and through the thinking that generates (and is generated by) speech. The Founding saw two kinds of deliberation: formal deliberation in Congress and informal deliberation—the expression of popular opinion during the ratification debate, in state assemblies, in pamphlets and in newspapers. “These deliberations were substantially one deliberation,” conducted from what we now call Independence Hall in Philadelphia to local taverns and street corners.

In those deliberations, the Declaration of Independence holds the primary place, since it set down the self-evident truths that underlay them—the foundation of the Founding. Although those truths have existed since human beings were created, they had never been so clearly “addressed to the whole world,” by saying to it, “Here’s how our deliberation has led us to do what we are doing,” namely, separating ourselves from our Mother Country (our “unnatural mother,” as one indignant American described her). As for the Constitution, it is “our Parthenon,” “spare and smooth as marble,” providing the institutional framework that enables Americans to live by the Declaration’s truths, if they choose to do so. This “sagacious” document is linked to the Declaration, “a marriage almost made in heaven.” The Declaration “inform[s] the Constitution with guards against all tyrants, singular, factional, and multitudinous,” i.e., “kings, bloc, and people.”

Will they choose to do so? “This book began in study and it invites you to join in study. Freedom is always but a couple of unstudious generations away from expiring.” We can no longer deliberate about the Declaration and the Constitution, but we can study them and either accept or reject them as guides for our own deliberations in our own circumstances in an occasionally candid world under the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. We even describe immigrants who become citizens as “‘naturalized’—what a choice word!” Choice, because it “means to recognize Nature and Nature’s God, and abide by them, as you passing through nature to eternity, pursue happiness.” 

By the Declarers’ design, the Declaration consists of seven parts, Platt observes: one devoted to separation; one to revolution; one to prudence; one (“much the longest”) to the charges against George III, “convicting him of tyranny”; one addressing “our disappointing Brittish brethren”; one the literal declaration, the announcement, of independence from Britain; the final one “the signatures of the representatives of the United States in Congress assembled.” Each part issues logically in the next one. That is, the Declaration is in substance and structure a logical syllogism, a point first noted among recent scholars by Carl Becker, as Platt eventually notes, although I would have preferred if he had mentioned him earlier and given it more emphasis throughout. As Platt does insist, the Declarers’ foundation of their declaration upon “truths that will never change” was very much a reasonable thing to do. Mere assertion is endemic to public speech, indeed in speech generally, but it is not really political in Aristotle’s strict sense of ruling and being ruled in turn: assertion bespeaks the desire to rule or perhaps (rarely) to be ruled, but it never exemplifies reciprocity, dialectical interplay, free exchange of thoughts. The Declarers give reasons while they display their reasoning to their fellow citizens, to their erstwhile tyrant, to the world, and to God, whose natural laws they cite as justification for their policy. And Americans themselves want reasons for commands and proposals; they are thoughtful, inclined to the reasonable assent that is consent and to the reasonable dissent that might go so far as revolution. “Such a people,” a thinking people, “is surely able to govern itself,” the Declarers imply to those they address. “The Declarers truly think reason is a human power belonging, with admitted degrees to all members of the species,” beings “endowed by the Creator with reason and the rights that go with it.” It is the rational nature of human beings that enables them to speak and act with civility, politically in the true sense of the word. And there is a Biblical echo: “Treat others as you find that you are already treating yourself would seem to be the governing maxim here.” This bespeaks not only the prudence the Declarers explicitly esteem but “a species of charity as well.” Their much-remarked insistence on the consent of the governed and their “decent respect for the Opinions of Mankind,” most of which the Americans do not govern, comport with both the laws of Nature and the laws set down by the God who created Nature.

“Apparently,” then, the Declarers harmonize reason and Biblical revelation. Who or what is “Nature’s God”? And what, Platt asks, does that apostrophe indicate? The God who created and ‘owns’ nature? Or a god generated by nature? The God “who is known to pious readers of Genesis and deep students of theology as the Creator? Or is this the God that belongs to Nature, that issues from Nature, or personifies Nature, or even the God that really is Nature, as a pantheist such as Spinoza might say? It is hard to know.” But perhaps any of these definitions might be supplied by the reader. “Is it not inclusive,” a “stroke of Statesmanship”? Like all political men, the Founders sought to build alliances, form a coalition.

The Declaration begins, “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them to another….” [1] Evidently, the Americans and the British had at some point ceased to be one people, before independence; independence meant the dissolution of the political bands that had linked them, up until now. Platt counts ten references to “people” in the document and asks what the Declarers meant by that word. The straightforward answer would be the Lockean one: a people is a group of human beings who have established a ‘social contract’ among them. This would imply some sort of deliberation or at least consent, as would be consistent with the other elements of the syllogism. In the course of previous events, this separation had already been effected in their departure from the British Isles—most famously, by the Puritans, who undertook not only a physical but a civil-social separation from their Mother Country, a separation solemnized in the Mayflower Compact. Platt is not satisfied with that explanation, instead focusing on the word “bands” or bonds, which he describes as “stronger and more natural than contracts.” If so, and if they cannot be, simply, political bands, the kind that had linked Americans to Britons, “bands” might mean ties of affection, duty, “solemnized union,” all perhaps “ordained by divine command,” all aimed at “stand[ing] in mutual aid and charity to each other, with no limit in time”—something “more fundamental than will, or choice, or reflection.” They cannot simply be bloodlines, since most Americans were Britons, originally, and some were not, yet all were the American people. Accordingly, the Declarers do not call America a nation, implying a shared natio or nativity. Whatever a people may be, exactly, the Americans consider themselves to be one; their representatives also say that a people is entitled to self-government, a “separate and equal station among the powers of the earth,” ordained by the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. The bands that hold a people together are political in that sense; a people is entitled to rule itself as a body. “It is as if we readers should already know what the laws of Nature entitle a people to do,” which is “a characteristic of something natural,” evidence of which “is already there and available to all.”

Be all of that as it may, the Declarers move to more clearly defined, indeed “self-evident” ground when they move from political separation to the truths justifying the political revolution the separation must entail, the change in their “form of government.” Is this “Separation for the sake of Revolution, or Revolution for the sake of Separation?” To be sure, “in the circumstances, it would be hard to separate them.” Separate yourself from the British monarchy and you will at very least form a monarchy with a different monarch, a different ruler—one dimension of what a ‘regime’ is. [2] And if the people are making this revolution, perhaps they will insist on continuing to rule themselves, without any monarch at all. Even more impressively, “if you are making a change in principles, affirming self-evident truths about human nature itself, that is fundamentally revolutionary.” That is changing not only the rulers, not only the form of government or institutional framework by which the rulers rule, but the telos of the regime, to “secure a regime more conducive to safety and happiness” than the one you have had until now. What would justify such a revolution?

“Whereas in the first section we heard of the relation of a people and the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” the themes of separation, “in the second section we hear of the relations among a person, a government, and God”—themes of revolution, regime change. The equal station a people is entitled to, among the powers of the earth, gives way to a consideration of “a more fundamental equality, the equality of all persons.” The “enigma of a people” gives way to “the reality of a human being,” knowledge of which reality “is clearer and firmer more nearly certain” than knowledge of a people.” [3] Knowledge of human being is “self-evident,” at least to those not blinded by passion or self-interest. Again logically, the six truths enumerated follow from one another in the right order. “All follow from the first,” the equality of human beings, who are all equally endowed with the right to life, then to liberty, then to the pursuit of happiness, since one cannot pursue happiness without liberty and one cannot be at liberty without being alive. These are not, Platt rightly observes, the rights of Englishmen as Englishmen, as subjects of the British Empire; for example, in Sir Thomas More, that play Shakespeare had a hand in, the aggrieved Londoners demand their rights as free Englishmen, not as human beings as such. And although they claimed their entitlement to self-government as a people, Americans did not make that claim as human beings simply. But natural rights, rights inherent in all human beings as such, are “founded in the laws of nature,” specifically, the law of equality in humanness, in ‘species equality.’ “What we have by nature we cannot give away” (they are “unalienable”), nor can it be taken away,” although such rights can be violated, and have been violated by the British regime. (It must be, then, that the existence of Americans as a people, prior to declaring their independence, must rest upon a natural right civilly to associate with one another.)

As Platt also remarks, the Declarers alter Locke’s formulation of natural rights—life, liberty, property—preferring to say life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. “Obviously, the Declarers did not think happiness was a right and thus something a government could ever guarantee,” although government could, indeed must, attempt to secure it for a people, along with their safety. (“To say that a government does not protect an unalienable right is to take away all, or almost all, of the authority it rules by, while to say that a government has not achieved one of its ends may not delegitimize it at all.” Circumstances alter cases.) Happiness will include the right to property but is not the same as the right to property. It is broader than that. In addition to rulers, ruling offices or institutions, and ends, a regime consists of a way of life. The American way of life will indeed consist in part of comfortable self-preservation, “Mr. Locke’s comfortable minimum,” but it also gives scope to “the practice of a trade, the improvement of an art, the accumulation of wealth, the endeavor of research, and the getting of knowledge”—none of these being trivial satisfactions. Americans will not be ‘Lockean liberals’ in the usual sense of the term—that is, “fundamentally needy, not very brave, and rather calculating individuals” associating for mere convenience. At least some of them will pursue lives animated by “sacred honor”—of spiritedness, not appetite. And their fellow citizens, admittedly less spirited, will esteem them for the virtues thereby exhibited. 

In this discussion of revolution, Platt gently and rightly chides those American conservatives who claim that the Americans did not undertake a revolution at all, that they did not make a radical appeal, a rational appeal to the nature of human beings but a traditionalist appeal to English constitutionalism, or to Western civilization. English constitutionalism and Western civilization are not self-evident truths; they are complex realities (at least as complex as the definition of a people). The Declarers declare self-evident truths, using them as the major premises of a logical syllogism. They are rationalists, if not Cartesian or even Lockean rationalists, and surely not the kind of rationalists who imagine that political life can be lived from theory alone, as a set of simple deductions from ‘first principles.’ But a set of simple or at least straightforward, logical deductions from first principles can justify a revolution in “the minds and hearts of the people,” as Thomas Jefferson put it, even if they cannot bring one about in practice, which is the work of prudential reasoning, not theoretical reasoning. That is why “the Declaration that founded America is indeed a Revolutionary document,” even as it is also “prudent and even moderate.” The theoretical principles justify but also limit revolutionary action, as do the revolution’s practical ends.

And then there were the circumstances that further limited what the revolution might achieve in practice. George III had already declared war against the colonies, and he ruled “a mighty sea power,” making the spring of 1776 “a time to deliberate carefully.” As with all revolutions and with all movements toward independence, very much including the revolution of Christianity, “to declare independence would force every citizen of the colonies to choose sides; it would sever families and split neighbors,” bringing not peace but a sword. Prudence (a virtue commended by Jesus as well as Aristotle) must lead one to expect “a war to the finish.” War ends in deaths, and it might have ended in the deaths of the Declarers, as indeed it did end in the deaths of many soldiers under their command. “A time to try men’s deciding souls,” then—a “time for prudence.” (Instead of prudence, Platt prefers “sagacity” for practical wisdom, and that is no mean selection.) Without sagacity, not only might the revolution end in defeat, the Declaration “might be used to justify a program of radical equalization of condition, which cannot be achieved or even approached without destroying liberty” and without killing many more people than a war, even a deadly civil war, as the tens of millions murdered by Communists in the past century so cruelly proved. That is, “where the ends of government are conceived as rights they may fast become the enemy of all good government” (emphasis added). “Without sagacity, everything in human life may become unlimited.” That is why rights entail duties. (In one of his most admirable formulations, Platt distinguishes nihilists from “annihilists.” “A nihilist says of the world as it is, that it should not exist”; Americans saw him, continue to see him, among violent anarchists. “An annihilist says if we destroy the world as it is, the world as it should be will exist”; Communists and Nazis were annihilists, buoyed in their destructive folly by the supposition that ‘History’ is the course of events, and that it is proceeding to a happy ending over the dead bodies of those the storytellers choose to leave behind.)

As the syllogism proves, it has become the duty of Americans to remove the tyrant and to found a new, untyrannical, regime. That is, “the right to self-government is a duty”; “Nature and Nature’s God have endowed men with the duty of governing themselves.” It is one thing to acknowledge one’s rights as a human being; it is one thing to acknowledge a people’s title to independence under natural and divine law; it is another thing to maintain those rights “in the face of armed threat.” Maintenance of rights is a duty to our own nature. And if those rights are endowed by God, is it not also a duty to God? “Perhaps the disjunction” between Nature and Nature’s God,” if God is the Creator-God of the Bible, “is foreign to the Declaration.” “God’s gift of nature obligates you” to a defense of those unalienable rights both as belonging to you and as belonging to others. What others? Surely those who number among your people. And other peoples? Not primarily, as that is their own duty to themselves; nonetheless, we have a duty to respect their unalienable rights, as fellow human beings if not fellow citizens.

“Who should decide to revolutionize or not?” The people through their representatives, the Declaration more than suggests. “Many, including Christ (Luke 14:31) have pointed out” that “it is not wise to go into battle without measuring your forces, which includes their spirit, as Gideon, Miltiades, and Henry V knew to count on.” Genuine prudence will be guided by a concern for the genuine “common good” of the people who undertake the revolution, inasmuch as the achievement of some common evil could not be prudent, must be an unwise thing to do. There are limits to the sacrifices required in the pursuit of the common good. For example, “the right to life cannot be subordinated to the common good”; “no one can require another human being” to “risk, or even to sacrifice, himself, in a fight for the common good,” any more than anyone can force a mother “to sacrifice her life for a child.” Practically speaking, this would prohibit conscription, or at very least leave open the possibility of ‘conscientious objection’ to war, or even a particular war. The question is a notoriously vexed one, since individual human beings require the defense that they can only achieve as a people whose common good includes self-protection from murderous tyrants and their legions. Perhaps, as the American political scientist and decorated veteran of Patton’s army Robert H. Horwitz once suggested, conscientious objectors could be conscripted to Kitchen Patrol, peeling potatoes for the fighters.

The minor premises of the Declarers’ syllogism consist of 28 charges against King George. The American Congress had put him and their British brethren on notice in years past, but “not until the Declaration of Independence do we Americans charge George with being a tyrant.” Those charges define what ‘constitutes’ a tyrant; they are an exercise in regime recognition. A tyrant takes specific actions denying a people their pursuit of happiness, their liberty, and finally their lives—all of which George has done. Since government are rightly designed to respect those rights and to secure the ends of safety and happiness for their people, George has “abdicated government here,” as the Declarers conclude. So have the Americans’ “Brittish brethren,” who have shown themselves “deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity” in their refusal to offer a strong critique of their king’s policy, with a few honorable exceptions (Edmund Burke the best remembered). [4] That is why this became America’s first civil war.

But when it comes to the unalienable human right to liberty, what about the slavery Americans themselves imposed on their fellow human beings? A rightful question, Platt agrees, citing Frederick Douglass’s oration on the meaning of the Fourth of July to American blacks, the former slaves. The injustice of slavery, “though silent, glares in the truth, ‘all men are created equal.'” That truth “convict[s] all slavery silently,” “inexorably, as all truths do,” for “one you grasp a truth, it has already grasped you.” Therefore, again in line with the logic of the syllogism, “a shaft for a King fells a slaver.” Moreover, “it was the increasing Colonial characterization of their mistreatment [as] ‘slavery’ that more and more brought the practice of slavery itself under scrutiny.” All men are created equal. The United States “was not only founded on that truth…but as a consequence had to struggle with that truth.” [5] Platt suggests, “Ask yourself how each of the many practices of tyrant George also describe the relation of a master to his slave.” While you are at it, ask yourself how many of those practices might be found in a country ruled by a tyrannical majority or a tyrannical minority. Americans need to ask themselves such questions because they have seldom if ever tasted the bitterness of tyranny. They would do well to consider an aperçu of Bismarck (no great friend of republicanism), which Platt finely presents: “Fools say they learn from experience. I prefer to profit from others’ experience.”

War against tyranny will require warriors. The warrior spirit is aristocratic-thumotic, not democratic-appetitive, to put the matter in Socrates’ terms. That Americans—and not only the eminent gentry—met this challenge “attests to an aristocratic part in the largely ‘democratic theory of rights declared by the declaration.” Setting an example for their countrymen, the Declarers “are men who aspire to honor and judge themselves by it,” holding honor sacred. They also hold God sacred, relying, as they state, “on the Protection of Divine Providence.” “The God they worship recognizes as a good, present in the best of men a concern with honor,” a concern that should not be considered a “splendid vice,” as Augustine regarded all “the pagan virtues,” but as “something God may smile upon.” God Himself rightly demands honor and gracefully practices humility; for human beings, that is a hard balance to achieve. But did not some Americans achieve it? [6]

In the Declaration, “the four citations of God are designed with exceeding intelligence,” each of them “fitted to the theme of its section”: “God the natural lawgiver goes with separation; God the Creator of man, equal in his unalienable rights, goes with revolution; God the Supreme Judge goes with declaring independence, which will surely lead to war, a war God will witness and judge; and finally, God the Provident goes with the confidence the Declarers have that He will regard their prudence, protect their lives, preserve their fortunes, and honor their sacred courage by rewarding all Americans with victory.” This is because God’s act of Creation entails separation, separation of light from darkness, seas from land, all the distinctions among the kinds of creatures. Independence is Creation’s result, which God judges to be good; and the crown of that Creation, Man, is the “most independent” of all those created, the one created in the image of God. Such independence proves to require constraint, and so God eventually “gives the Law to Moses.” Since we are responsible for obeying His law, “He will judge us” in terms of that obedience. And in the meantime, “he may intervene providentially as a Statesman might to support us.”

The Declarers’ understanding of government as a triune unity of legislative, executive, and judicial powers may be taken, then not blasphemously but respectfully, as an imitatio Dei. “Good government is an image of God,” and, at the same time, God being God and men being men, the three powers of government must never be united in one person, as they are in one Person. Here is a link between the Declaration and the Constitution: “the image of the government brought forth in our Constitution is there in the Declaration.” 

And “how do the people of the Declaration know these things about God?” First, they list the Creator’s existence “among the self-evident things.” “For the men and women of that time, there was only one Creator and one Creation,” and they founded their country “on a thesis in natural theology, that is, in an account (logos) of God (theo) in so far as He is evident to reason (logos), the natural power of man to know.” This is not “supernatural theology” or revelation, which gives us “things know through faith or miracle,” but “natural theology,” based on “things that can be known by reason.” Second, God created all men as equal in their rights. “No mere biologist would say that,” given the implication that man lives “in a graciously dependent relation to God.” Third, those unalienable rights are “specifically an endowment”—not a reward but “the kind of gift that comes to you just because you are the way you are,” a free expression of love. One might add, as the fourth thing to know about God, it is also an endowment in the sense that, like so many endowments, it comes with strings attached; one right is a duty, and all of them entail duties. And as for the regime that secures those rights, it is a republic if you can keep it. “Rights from God do require care.” 

“Fifth, government is to be judged by the divine standard according to how much it secures the unalienable rights given by God and by the ends, safety to happiness, that have been written into the nature of things by Nature’s God.” George III does not meet that standard. Will we? That is, “not only” is “bad government…measured by God, but also…good government is in the image of God.” If human beings were created in God’s image, so too ought their government be, insofar as they govern themselves. And finally, “there is a profound difference between acting in the image of God and acting as God does.” Not only does God unite all three ruling powers in his one Person; not only is He entitled to do so because He is perfect. God also commits acts well beyond the range of human right, including the destruction of whole peoples. The Declarers would not teach, as Plato and Aristotle do, “that the wise man is precisely he who deserves to be entrusted” with Godlike power (emphasis added). No “supremely wise man is so free of vice as to be trusted with the absolute power’s temptation to corrupt absolutely.” It is not that the Declaration excludes the ‘pagan’ virtues; on the contrary, it includes them, “beginning with courage” and going on to wisdom, justice, and moderation, to say nothing of magnanimity. 

For all its merits, by its very character as a declaration, the Declaration of Independence left “much to be worked out.” The first major legislative attempt to work out a sound regime for the United States was the Articles of Confederation, which instituted a government too weak for the tasks a government must undertake to secure a people’s safety and happiness. It was the United States Constitution that provided “a house founded on the truths of the Declaration,” a house strong enough to withstand a serious attempt to divide it, four score and four years after Americans declared their independence. It is to a meditation upon that constitution that Platt will now turn.

Notes

1. Why “the course of human events” instead of “history”? Because the Founders did not think of “history” as the course of events, human or otherwise; for them, “history” meant a narrative of a course of events. For example, the Peloponnesian War consisted of a course of events; its history was Thucydides’ narrative of that course of events. For this point, see “America’s Declaration of Independence” on this website under the category, “American Politics.”
2. On regimes, see “What Is a Regime?” on this website under the category, “American Politics” and “‘Regime’ Defined” on this website under the category, “Philosophers.”
3. Platt presents his readers with a marvelous quote from Gouverneur Morris, who differentiated the French people from the American (and perhaps the British) people thusly: In their revolution, the French “have taken Genius instead of Reason for their guide, adopting Experiment instead of Experience, and wander in the Dark because they prefer Lightning to Light”—a flaw that Morris himself at times displayed, Platt remarks, showing that he “also knew himself” even as “he judged the French Revolution aright.” As an aside, one might recall that Morris’s younger contemporary, Chateaubriand titled his seminal book, The Genius of Christianity; in that as in so much else, he was very French, or at least very knowing when addressing the French.
4. An account of British replies to the Declaration may be found on this website: “The Declaration of Independence: British Rejoinders,” on this website under the category, “American Politics.”
5. “Founders Hamilton, Franklin, Jay, Laurens, Sherman, Dickinson, Mason, Paine, Gouverneur Morris, Samuel Adams, John Adams, and Benjamin Rush (first inspired by Anthony Benezet)” all opposed slavery in word and deed. One might add that George Washington, who gazes mildly but firmly at us from the book’s cover, freed his slaves in his Will, additionally providing them with assistance that would assist their transition to freemen.
6. Platt points his readers to Paul Eidelberg: On the Silence of the Declaration of Independence (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976) as the source of this understanding of the ‘aristocratic’ dimension of the American Founding.

Born in 1917, trained as a jurist, Maurice Duverger began his political engagement as a student at the University of Bordeaux in the late 1930s. He joined the Parti Populaire Français, a Right-wing answer to the Popular Front, the ‘one big Left’ organization of those days. By the end of the war, he had shifted his allegiance to the Left and had founded a political science program at the university, where he now taught. At the end of his long career, he was a member of the European Parliament, where he represented the Democratic Party of the Left, a Marxist organization, originally the Italian Communist Party, which abandoned Lenin’s dictatorship-of-the-proletariat model and almost immediately reinvented itself after the collapse of the Soviet empire. (Duverger himself was defending Stalin as late as 1956, in opposition to Nikita Khruschev’s rather limited set of reservations expressed in his now-famous ‘Secret Speech’ to Party officials.) Political Parties is by far his best-known work among European and American political scientists, sharing with many of them a neo-Marxist analysis of politics. The contemporary school of ‘developmental political science’ derives much of its approach from Duverger.

Marxism presents a problem, as Duverger evidently understands. Marx claims that his socialism, unlike all others, is not utopian/’idealist’ but scientific/empirical. But although in Capital he adduces reams of empirical evidence in support of his theoretical claims about the ‘historical dialectic,’ there remains what Duverger calls “a vicious circle,” as seen in the attempt to understand political parties: “a general theory of parties will eventually be constructed only upon the preliminary work of many profound studies; but these studies cannot be truly profound so long as there exists no general theory of parties.” How, then, to know about such matters as “the evolution of party structures, the number and reciprocal relations of parties, the part they play in the State”? Duverger provides a scientist’s answer. His ‘theory’ won’t be so much a theory, at this point, as a sort of hypothesis, or what he calls a “vague, conjectural, and of necessity approximate” general theory of the parties in the attempt “to introduce objectivity into a field where high feeling and special pleading are the general rule,” along with “a general plan of the field of study.” 

“In recent years the Marxist conception of party as class, taking the place of the Liberal idea of the party as doctrine, has given a new direction to research.” Duverger endorses the “dualism” of class conflict as “very appropriate,” but “there are many more shades of social stratification than this rough manicheism suggests.” The ‘neo’ in his neo-Marxism gives more weight to the mind than Marxists had been inclined to do: “the ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘proletariat’ do not perhaps constitute two classes, defined in strictly economic terms, but they characterize two states of mind, two social attitudes and two ways of life.” This distinction, which hints at one dimension of Aristotle’s definition of a regime, “throws light on certain problems concerned with the structure of parties.” The formula revises Marx only if “states of mind” do not derive more or less directly from socioeconomic classes, if they function as independent variables in one’s explanation of such sociopolitical phenomena as parties. To his credit, Duverger wants to restore the political to the consideration of political parties, although he doesn’t go far enough, as will be seen.

It is therefore helpful of Duverger that he immediately addresses the question of the definition and origin of parties. By a party he does not mean a faction; factions have existed more or less since the beginning of political life. By a party, he means an organization that combines “parliamentary groups” and “electoral committees.” Parliamentary groups came first, followed by the electoral committees; only then did politicians establish “a permanent connection between the two.” Sometimes, a parliamentary group was based upon doctrinal affinities, at other times, a geographical region or a profession. Philosophical societies, churches, military veterans’ associations, secret societies, industrial and commercial groups: all of these types of organizations generated political groupings in parliaments. It wasn’t until the beginning of the twentieth century that such groups arose outside of parliamentary institutions; these were the Socialists. And in England, even one of the major Socialist parties was first organized in Parliament, whereas the Labour Party was organized during the 1899 Trades Union Congress. Since then, most new parties in republican regimes have originated outside the legislatures, although in “countries new to democracy” the older origin story had prevailed, at least until 1950. Obviously, such organizations as the Solidarity movement in Poland began, as the name suggests, as social movements outside of the sham legislature of the Communist regime. 

Duverger identifies three “sociological types” of parties. “Middle-class” parties recruit their candidates from a relatively narrow segment of the population, with emphasis on “outstanding people,” usually members of the legislature; they are decentralized; and they are organized by caucuses. Socialist parties recruit their candidates from a wider segment of the population; as ideologically-animated organizations, they emphasis “political education” of members and crystallize as top-down bureaucracies arranged with branches connecting the center to the periphery of the membership, which simplifies the task of “political education.” In the “totalitarian” (Communist and Fascist) parties, even more centralized and arranged with “cells” ruled by an autocrat or small set of autocrats from the center, the elites impose doctrines upon the rank and file. Duverger carefully identifies “several types of parties” that are “outside this scheme”: the Catholic and Christian Democratic parties of Western Europe, which combine organizational traits seen in the pre-twentieth century parties with traits of Socialist parties; Agrarian parties, which take a variety of organizational forms and in any case are now rare; and the parties formed “around an influential protector, clans formed round a feudal family, camarillas united by a military leader”—as often seen in the non-Western world and in “pre-1939 Central Europe,” often places emerging from imperial rule.  In a “camarilla” party, the ‘big man’ social structure is the understandable basis for any wider political activity, given the structure of societies with little or no experience of ‘modernization.’ Duverger reserves a unique place for the Labor parties because their origin within labor unions and cooperatives has lent themselves to “a pattern of ‘indirect structure’ which will require special analysis.”

A party organization might be “direct”—with no prior organization within civil society, such as a labor union or a church acting as a source of doctrine and structure—or “indirect,” where prior social organization did exist. The least ‘ideological’ of the European Socialist parties—England’s Labour party and the Scandinavian parties—incline toward “concrete reforms,” not doctrinal conformity. Duverger finds some connection between the degree of prior centralization of the state and the centralization of parties, as seen in France. He does not claim too much for this point, however. This is not “a sociological law,” but rather “a basic tendency, combining with many other factors liable to attenuate or invalidate the results.” One reason for this is that “a party is not a community but a collection of communities, a union of small groups dispersed throughout the country…and linked by coordinating institutions.” These disparate groups come in “four main types”: the caucus, the branch, the cell, and the militia.

Caucuses predate the formation of parties in Duverger’s sense of the term. “In Marxist terms they are the normal political expression of the middle class,” seen in nineteenth century Europe: Conservative parties, consisting of “aristocrats, industrial magnates, bankers, even influential churchmen”; and Liberal parties, consisting of “tradespeople and lesser industrialists, civil servants, teachers, lawyers, journalists, and writers.” Caucuses are quite decentralized because both of these types originated in disparate elements of the middle class and, in the case of the Conservatives, alliances with the aristocracy. 

As the term implies, branches are “less decentralized” than caucuses, connected to the trunk, incapable of surviving without the trunk. “The branch is extensive and tries to enroll members, to multiply their number, and to increase its total strength.” That is, it registers social equality, ‘democracy’ as Tocqueville calls it. “In practice you only need to wish to belong to be able to do so.” “The branch appeals to the masses.” It is “a Socialist invention.” Crucially, it is more democratic than the caucus in terms of extension, in terms of membership, less democratic than the caucus in terms of command and control, which is held by a small group in the ‘trunk’ or center of the structure. Catholic parties and Fascist parties have adapted the branch as parts of their organizations, organizing their members along religious and nationalist lines, respectively. Because religion and nationalist cross ‘class’ lines, both of these parties “generally succeed in attracting to themselves some proportion of the working-class masses,” making them serious rivals to Socialists. 

Cells are “a Communist invention.” They differ from branches in two ways. Branches are geographical, local, even if connected to the center; cells are based upon occupations: factory workers, shop workers, office workers, government administrators, and so on. Although in some sparsely populated areas where there are not enough persons in any one occupation to form a cell you might find an “area cell,” “the real cell is the workplace cell which unites party members working in the same place.” In the United States, for example, one would find Communist cells within the public schools, others in the same area but located within one or more factories. 

Finally, there are militias, private armies “whose members are enrolled on military lines, are subjected to the same discipline and the same training as soldiers, lie them wearing uniforms and badges, ready like them to march in step preceded by a band and flags, and like them ready to meet the enemy with weapons in physical combat,” always “ready to hold themselves at the disposition of their leaders.” Duverger cites the obvious examples of Hitler’s Storm Troops and Mussolini’s Shock Troops, many of them veterans of the Great War. “Just as the cell is a Communist invention, so the militia is a Fascist creation,” well-suited to Fascist doctrine, “that mixture of Sorel, Maurras, and Pareto, which affirms the predominance of the elites, of the activist minorities, and the necessity of violence to allow them to conquer and to retain power.” Duverger associates Fascism with middle classes that intend to dominate the working classes “by opposing with force of arms the strength of the masses,” especially in states and regimes too weak to use their own forces to prevent working-class rule. He tends to minimize the ‘Socialist’ element in National Socialism. If he were alive today, he would likely include the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a contemporary example of a party militia, with such allies as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis as militia-based political parties.

Duverger next considers the linkages among caucuses, branches, cells, and militias. This is “essentially a political question and therefore of prime importance” because “the arrangement for linking and relating the primary groups of the party have a profound influence upon its militants, upon its ideological unity, and the efficacy of its action, and even upon its methods and principles.” Here is where the regime comes in, although Duverger does not use that term. He somewhat more cumbersomely remarks that “political articulation tends to model itself upon the articulation of administration in the state,” the “pattern of a hierarchical pyramid coinciding with the official territorial divisions,” combined with the electoral system of the country, which influences the degree to which a party can ‘articulate’ within the ruling institutions. This notwithstanding, Duverger regards the intra-party elements as basic, since Liberal parties are less well-defined or ‘articulated’ than Socialist parties and “most Catholic parties, Communist and Fascist parties featuring an “even more precise, rigid, and strong” ‘articulation.’ It might be remarked that such parties are typically regimes in waiting, however, and so are organized in accordance with the regime type their ‘leaders’ aim to establish. Socialist, Communist, and Fascist parties are proto-regimes, which makes the regime analysis fundamental. The political questions of “prime importance” turns out to be: ‘What kind of regime do you want, and why?’

With regard to linkages among the elements of parties, “there is frequent confusion between vertical linkage and centralization, and between horizontal linkage and decentralization.” “Vertical” and “horizontal” links refer to “ways of coordinating the basic elements of which the party is made up.” “Centralization” and “decentralization” refer to “the way in which power is distributed among the different levels of leadership.” One might expect vertical linkage and centralization to comport with one another, horizontal linkage and decentralization the same, but this is not always so. For example, the French Socialist Party is decentralized but vertically linked, the British Conservative Party centralized but horizontally linked. Moreover, decentralization and centralization themselves come in several forms: local, ideological, social, and federal. A party might be decentralized in some of these aspects, centralized in others. The matter of centralization, Duverger adds, may affect the viability of a given state and its regime. Looking at the United States, with its (then) decentralized parties, he writes: “It is a serious matter that the greatest nation in the world, which is assuming responsibilities on a worldwide scale, should be based on a party system entirely directed towards very narrow local horizons.” At the time Duverger was writing, Charles de Gaulle was making a similar point, criticizing the parties and parliamentarianism generally and advocating a new republican regime with a much stronger executive. 

Given the four elements of parties, membership and ‘leadership’ or more properly rulership must also be considered. Membership varies from party to party, with “the introduction of universal suffrage” fostering “the development of Socialist parties,” except (at the time) in the United States, where socialist motifs have been co-opted by the Democrats within their broad coalition, at the time including civil rights advocates and racial segregationists. “It was the Marxist conception of the class party that led to such massive structures” in Europe, although it must be said that the United States already had very broad-based parties, if not parties according to Duverger’s definition of the term, and those parties fought a civil war over the character of the regime. The Socialist parties “made it possible to free the working class from the tutelage of middle-class parties,” with independent sources of funding, including the funding of newspapers, funding made possibilities made possible by the ‘mass’ character of the parties—again, very much like the structure of the American parties in what Tocqueville had already identified as the world’s “sample democracy.” Showing his Marxist colors, Duverger classifies (in both senses) the Fascist parties as middle-class and therefore “Conservative” parties, although it really makes no sense to say that they were anything other than regime parties intent on overthrowing all of their rivals, including those advocating a return to monarchies with Church establishments. He will argue that Fascist parties “lose their pure mass-party characteristics” over time, but then so did the Communist parties.

Duverger frames things differently, however. Are we “still dealing with true mass parties” or with “a gradual evolution towards a new conception, a third category: devotee parties, more open than cadre parties, but more closed than class parties,” as seen in Lenin’s Bolshevik parties and in the Fascist parties. In both cases (although Duverger seems reluctant to admit it fully, regarding the Communists), we see an elite cadre ‘leading’ a mass membership. “Even within the party” (he means the Nazis but surely also the Bolsheviks and the Chinese Communists) “there can be found concentric circles corresponding to different degrees of loyalty and activity.” In all “mass” parties, participation also may be classified in three circles, the broadest being the electors—who may or may not be ‘card-carrying’ members of the party—followed by the “supporters”—who not only vote for the party but actively advocate on its behalf—and the “militants”—those who organize and operate the party apparatus while formulating the propaganda the supporters mouth and the “general activities” in which they partake. “Insofar as” these “inmost circles” actually represent the outer circles, one can call such parties democratic (as in Lenin’s famous phrase, “democratic centralist”); “otherwise this series of concentric circles is to be defined as an oligarchy.” In terms of legislative/parliamentary institutions, parties are oligarchic to the degree that the inner circles control the elected representatives. In the Soviet Union, notoriously, the Communist Party dictated votes, not the electors. “Measurement of the disparity between electors and members is thus equivalent to measuring the degree of oligarchy which impregnates the systems that we term democratic.” 

The more ‘totalitarian’ parties have “general aims: they provide complete and coherent systems of thought about society; they aim at a total organization of national and even international life.” Some have hit upon the “brilliant idea” of forming “alongside the party…a series of ‘doubles'” or satellite organizations: youth groups, women’s organizations, sports clubs, clubs for veterans, literary clubs, and so on. Such groups bring in non-party members who, with exposure to “discreet propaganda,” may be recruited as new party members.

As for party ‘leadership,’ Duverger rightly considers it “democratic in appearance and oligarchic in reality,” except in Fascist parties, which “are bold enough to confess in public what others practice in secret.” He also notices that parties whose leaders are elected democratically very often do not choose people like themselves. “Country folk do not choose country folk as their parliamentary representatives,” usually preferring lawyers “because they consider them to be more capable of defending their interests in parliament.” By contrast, Communist oligarchs often choose working-class men to join them. In this, Duverger sees a conflict between “two conceptions of representation, one juridical founded upon election and delegation, the other technical and founded upon a de facto similarity between the masses and those who govern them.” He pauses to wish for “a truly scientific democracy,” as indeed a disciple of Marx might do, “in which parliament would be made up of a true sample of the citizens reproducing on a reduced scale the exact composition of the nation,” perhaps some combination of the Athenian lottery and a Gallup poll. 

In sum, by 1951 “two essential facts seem to have dominated the evolution of political parties since the beginning of the century: the increase in the authority of the leaders and the tendency towards personal forms of authority.” This trend, it must be said, has continued, quite in opposition to the hopes and expectations of the eminent sociologist Emile Durkheim, who “saw in the weakening of power and in its progressive ‘institutionalization’ the fundamental characteristics of democratic evolution.” However, it must be said that democracy has, following Durkheim and as anticipated by Tocqueville, also seen a very substantial, concurrent increase in institutionalization—namely, in the formation of ever-more-extensive bureaucracies or ‘administrative states.’ Indeed, Communist ‘leaders’ such as Stalin and Mao have not only decried bureaucracy but purged it, although it usually returns after the pitchfork stops prodding, the modern state requiring some form of regularized rule in order to hold itself together.

Summarizing his hypotheses on political parties, like a dedicated historicist Duverger identifies “three phases in the evolution of parties”: the “domination of parliamentary representatives over the party” is the first phase, a condition “of relative equilibrium” between the two groups is the second, and “finally the domination of the party over parliamentary representatives” is the third. Each of these phases “correspond[s] to a certain type of party,” with the historical trend going from liberal to socialist to communist or fascist. In his own career, Duverger obviously attempted to ride that supposed trend. Other politicians and political intellectuals have done the same.

Parties exist within regimes that feature party systems. There are, of course, one-party systems, but most systems include two or more major parties, sometimes a plethora of fairly small parties. They are all systems in the sense that they all have parts that interact with one another; even one-party systems see interactions among factions within that party. To understand these systems, one must first consider “similarities and disparities that can be discovered in the internal structures of the individual parties that make up the system” and then distinguish elements not merely similar but common to all parties, such as numbers, size, alliances, geographical location. “A party system is defined by a particular relationship amongst all these characteristics,” no matter the number of parties in the system. They are class structure (landed aristocracy versus industrial and commercial capitalists, capitalists versus working class), ideology (which “are never simple epiphenomena in relation to the socioeconomic structure,” as Marx and Engels claimed), and—most important among the technical causes—”the electoral regime.” While it is true that the party system “exercises a vital influence upon the electoral regime,” the reverse is also true. Class structure and ideology are not technical causes, and Duverger regards them as the “most decisive” drivers of party formation itself.

The party system exerts influence on the electoral system in several ways. A two-party system “favors the adoption of the simple-majority single-ballot form” of electoral system, a multi-party system reinforces proportional representation of parties, a one-party system favors party-rigged elections or no elections at all. “The party system and the electoral system are two realities that are indissolubly linked.” And again, the reverse of these causal pathways is also true. Duverger once again cautions his readers that “these very general propositions define only fundamental tendencies; they are far from including all the influences of the electoral system on party systems” but serve “solely as a first working hypothesis.”  

A two-party system can endure only if both parties differ only in “secondary aims and means,” with “a general political philosophy and the fundamental bases of the system are accepted by both sides.” But when the two parties dispute “the very nature of the regime and the fundamental concepts of life,” the conflict “assumes the aspect of a veritable war of religions”—religions themselves being regimes, it might be added. “This is equivalent to saying that the two-party system is inconceivable if one of the two parties is totalitarian in structure.” As a Marxisante thinker, Duverger inclines to dialectical conflict, insisting that “the center does not exist in politics,” but at most consists of a ‘Center-Left’ and a ‘Center-Right.’ “The fate of the Center is to be torn asunder, buffeted and annihilated” because “the dream of the center is to achieve a synthesis of contradictory aspirations,” a power that exists only in the mind never in practice. To foster a relatively moderate, if not centrist, political regime, the simple-majority single-ballot system works best, as it inclines toward two parties, both of which usually need to capture the unstable and contested middle ground in order to succeed in elections. 

By contrast, a multi-party system can endure much sharper regime divisions and ideological conflicts. This system goes well with proportional representation. “Proportional representation” in legislatures “always coincides with a multi-party system: in no country in the world has proportional representation given rise to a two-party system or kept one in existence.” This does not mean that proportional representation gives rise to an ever-increasing number of parties, since ‘regime’ parties, ideological parties, tend to encourage and indeed enforce discipline upon their members, discouraging the habits of mind and heart that lead to schism. 

Single-party systems arise when monarchy meets democratization. (Once again, Tocqueville regards despotism as one possible political outcome of social equality; he had Napoleon as his prime example.) Once in power, however, the supreme party “must conquer the natural passivity of the masses, their fundamental conservatism, in order to win them over to the changes that have been undertaken,” as when Stalin undertook to liquidate the ‘Kulaks’ or wealthier peasants. Further, the party “must overcome the tendency to inertia and conservatism of its own members,” comfortably ensconced in their ruling offices. Duverger denies that the Fascist regimes do this, however, after they have seized power. Fascism, he claims, “does not lay hands on the economic and social structure” of the regime. But ‘laying hands’ on someone or something is one thing, co-opting it another. The Nazis may have allowed industrialists to continue in power, but their ingenuity went into the construction of military equipment and gas chambers. Their efforts were redirected.

“The development of parties has brought about a profound transformation in the structures of political regimes.” The tyrants of contemporary one-party state “bear only a remote resemblance” to previous tyrants, while “modern democracies,” with their “several organized and disciplined parties,” differ noticeably “from the individualist regimes of the nineteenth century, which depended on the personal interplay of members of parliament who were very independent of each other.” If a democratic regime is one “in which those who govern are chosen by those who are governed, by means of free and open elections,” the existence of parties has “greatly changed” them. Parties have inserted themselves between electors and representatives, the people and parliament, since “before being chosen by his electors the deputy is chosen by the party” and “the electors only ratify this choice.” Representatives now receive “a double mandate”—first from the party, then from the electors. Who, then, does the representative represent? After all, “every party system constitutes a frame imposed upon opinion, forming it as well as deforming it.” True, a party system is “the result of public opinion,” but public opinion gets shaped by the party system, “as that is shaped by the circumstances of history, the evolution of politics, and a whole combination of complicated factors amongst which the electoral system plays a dominant part,” along with ballot procedure. So, for example, if I live in a regime with a two-party system, I will likely vote for a candidate whose opinions and policies are somewhat remote from my own, simply because there are only two ‘practical’ choices before me, whereas in a multi-party system I may well find a candidate more to my liking and, on the other extreme, in a one-party system I will have no choice at all—maybe not even the choice of whether or not I vote. Such party-formulated opinion is now “raw opinion,” since “parties create public opinion as much as they express it.” For example, Marxists make much of ‘class consciousness,’ “but class consciousness does not exist unless a party exists to awaken and develop it,” as the higher officials of Marxist parties seek to mold public opinion, granting it leeway only under duress. Duverger goes so far as to claim that parties “give skeletal articulation to a shapeless and jelly-like mass.”

Having exaggerated, he does relent. “Public opinion, electoral system, and party system…form three interdependent terms which are not unidirectional in the influence of each upon the other.” Modify the electoral system and you modify the party system; modify the party system and you modify the way in which opinion will be expressed; modify the electoral system and you will modify “the representation of opinion” in the regime.

Part of the hesitation or confusion arises in his assumption that “the development of parties has burst the bonds of the old political categories inspired by Aristotle or Montesquieu.” According to Duverger, “the classical contrast between parliamentary, presidential, and National Convention regimes can henceforth no longer serve as the pivot for modern constitutional law” because Kemalist Turkey, Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany “were profoundly similar” despite the fact that Turkey initially practiced a National Convention regime, the Soviets a “semi-parliamentary regime,” and the third “a semi-presidential regime.” The real modern distinction is between single-party, two-party, and multi-party systems. That is indeed a real distinction, but there are serious problems with the argument. First, and most obviously, Aristotle is no modern and Montesquieu is. This means, among other things, that such categories as ‘parliamentary,’ ‘presidential’ and ‘National Convention’ don’t immediately fit the Aristotelian categories of rule by the few, the one, or the many, respectively. More significantly, there is no reason why Aristotle would in the least be fazed by modern regimes, whatever the terminology now applied to them may be. He might well need to think carefully about the modern state, an entity he never saw. But Aristotle always looks not only at institutions but at the persons who rule—their number and their virtues and vices. Modern political parties quite obviously lend themselves to his approach. Montesquieu’s system of regime classification, which adapts Machiavelli’s simpler classification (the one, the many—republics are any regime that is not rule of the one), could also readily account for political parties, although he would be profoundly disappointed at the existence of ‘totalitarian’ ones.

Duverger additionally claims that a two-party system in which one party controls all three branches of government makes the existence of those branches a “constitutional facade” for the rule of “the party alone.” That is true if the party is the real regime in such a system, as when a Communist party rules, but in actual republics, which distribute genuine legal protection to minority parties, that isn’t true, or is not true in the same way. Aristotle would easily see the difference because he would consider the real regime, not the paper regime, and for him not only are a regime’s ruling institutions the ones that really rule, not the constitutional facades but the regime itself consists of institutions, rulers (one, few, many and good or bad) but a way of life and a purpose, all what in Duverger’s language should be considered distinct and interdependent variables. 

Duverger concludes with a very important observation, even if is not a simply true one. “The organization of political parties is certainly not in conformity with orthodox notions of democracy. Their internal structure is essentially autocratic and oligarchic: their leaders are not really appointed by the members, in spite of appearances, but co-opted or nominated by the entire body; they tend to form a ruling class, isolated from the militants, a cast that is more or less exclusive.” If so, and if parties moreover “impose a prefabricated mold upon” public opinion, then why do the ways of life and purposes of political parties (in 1951, say, in the United States and the Soviet Union) differ so sharply? “All government is oligarchic,” he claims, following Rousseau. For Aristotle, oligarchy means the rule of the few wealthy men, whereas aristocracy means the rule of the few virtuous men. Meaningful distinctions can be drawn between these regimes and between the four others, distinctions that affect that actual lives of the persons who live under them. Duverger more or less admits as much by conceding that “the Marxist distinction between nominal liberties”—such civil liberties and freedom of speech and of religion, the right to vote, and other ‘paper guarantees’— and “real liberties”—a guaranteed job, economic equality—is “only partly correct” because although “the political liberties recognized by Western regimes remain a formality for a large section of the masses for lack of an adequate standard of living, of adequate education, of social equality or of an adequate political equilibrium,” such formal liberties “may become real liberties,” someday—presumably, if neo-Marxist socialist parties take charge. “All government is by nature oligarchic, but the origins and the training of the oligarchs may be very different, and these determine their actions.” Replace Lincoln’s formula—government of, by, and for the people—with the formula, “Government of the people by an elite sprung from the people.” Unfortunately, this formula would make the regime that featured George Washington and his colleagues inferior to the one that featured Mao Zedong. Similarly, when Duverger writes that “a dictatorship with a single people’s party tending to create a new ruling class is nearer to democracy than party-less dictatorship of the personal or military type which strengthen the feudal powers in their control.” But was the Stalin regime really more democratic than that of Nicholas II? Is one’s local hereditary oligarch, calling himself an aristocrat, really any less democratic than one’s local commissar, commoner though that commissar would be? And, as Aristotle saw, can ‘democracy,’ however defined, at least sometimes be a bad regime?

Many political scientists and political historians have written on Progressivism. [1] Princeton University professor Thomas C. Leonard views the movement from an economist’s perspective that supplements the more usual approach. He takes the first forty years of Progressive thought and practice, 1877 to 1917, the years in which Progressives “founded the modern American university, invented the think tank, and blueprinted and framed the American administrative state,” acting in the convictions that “modern government should be guided by science and not politics,” and that “an industrialized economy should be supervised, investigated and regulated by the visible hand of a modern administrative state.” In the first two centuries after independence, the United States could be described as a ‘liberal’ regime in the sense that it secured the unalienable natural rights of its citizens by institutions conducing to political and economic liberty; the following century and a half saw liberalism redefined as a commitment to a supposedly apolitical governmental apparatus presiding over a libertine, less-than-civil society in what Leonard describes as “an unstable amalgam of compassion and contempt.” While lending “a helping hand to those it deemed worthy of citizenship and employment while simultaneously narrowing that privileged circle by excluding the many it judged unworthy,” Progressive reform “at once uplifted and restrained, and did both in the name of progress.”

The decades of Progressivism saw a quadrupling of America’s gross national product, a doubling of living standards, a massive population movement from farms to city factories, accompanied by increased disparities of wealth and two serious financial crises. America’s population also increased substantially, with the immigration of “polyglot peoples with disparate cultural and religious traditions” who were admitted to meet “industry’s voracious but volatile demand for labor.” By 1910, 22 percent of the total labor force were foreign born, and more than 40 percent of non-farm workers were; nearly 70 percent of the immigrants were “Catholics, Jews, and Orthodox Christians from southern and eastern Europe”—very far from the mostly Protestant and northern European stock which had populated the country in its first century. This led not only to ‘cultural’ clashes but to the most violent labor disputes that had been seen or would be seen subsequently. At their peak, strikes averaged four per day, and in 1894, President Cleveland ordered U.S. Army troops to end a strike by Pullman workers that had crippled the railroad network, then the country’s economic lifeline. Both labor unions and major business corporations organized face off against each other. “The new industrial behemoths were of a scale Americans could barely comprehend, 100 or even 1,000 times larger than the largest U.S. manufacturing firms in 1870.” The leading philosopher of Progressivism, John Dewey, remarked that seldom if ever had “there has been a revolution in all history so rapid, so extensive, so complete.” Dewey’s very use of the word ‘history’ to mean the course of events, not the literary genre, bespoke the revolution in thought that predated the revolution in action. Historicism had replaced natural-rights philosophy in the minds of almost all members of the ‘intellectual’ class. This occurred as university enrollments quadrupled, opening ‘higher’ education middle-class Americans, who could now join the class of ‘professionals’ occupying the institutions of the administrative state, the corporations, the schools. “Progressives did not work in factories; they inspected them.” In doing so with benevolent intentions, they “romanticized a brotherhood [of workers] they would never consider joining,” conceiving themselves rather “as disinterested agents of reform” and “representatives of the common good, uniquely positioned to transcend personal, class, regional, and partisan interests.” They deprecated old-liberal individualism as selfishness while esteeming nationalism; they disliked industrial capitalism and monopoly, seeking to control it by administrative law—setting public bureaucracies against the private bureaucracies, the corporations. “America needed, they agreed, a new form of government, one that was disinterested, nonpartisan, scientific, and endowed with discretionary powers to investigate and regulate the world’s largest economy, as well as to compensate those exploited, injured, or left behind”: the administrative state, whose techniques they promoted with “extravagant faith.” 

While many Progressives were ‘secularist’ devotees of science, particularly of administrative science and social science generally, most were not. The first generation of Progressives came from long-established New England families, often with clerical or missionary backgrounds. “The progressives’ urge to reform America sprang from an evangelical compulsion to set the world to rights, and they unabashedly described their purposes as a Christian mission to build a Kingdom of Heaven on earth” under the ideational rubric of the Social Gospel, which turned Christian evangelism away from spiritual reform to “a scientifically informed mission of social redemption.” As an economist, Leonard understandably points to the formation of the American Economic Association in 1885, a professional organization “embod[ying] the social gospel’s distinctive amalgam of liberal Protestant ethics, veneration of science, and the evangelizing activism of pious, middle-class reformers” such as Josiah Strong, Washington Gladden, Lyman Abbott, and Richard T. Ely. “The good Christian should be concerned with this world, Ely said, not with the next.” For him and for many of his allies, love of neighbor now came before love of God. Among Ely’s students was the young Southerner, Woodrow Wilson, himself the son of a Presbyterian minister. Another Ely student at Johns Hopkins University, Edward A. Ross, argued that “sin was no longer a matter of inborn immorality,” no longer ‘original,’ but a socially constructed effect remediable by social reform. “Ultimately,” like all other Progressives, “the social gospel economists…turned to the state” to implement that reform. “A Kingdom of Heaven on earth could be built without Christ’s return,” they presumed. This initial zeal declined in the period’s last decade, as “the Great War’s slaughter and uncontrolled irrationality mocked the progressive idea of spiritual and social progress through enlightened social control” and the influx of non-Protestant immigrants diluted the New England Protestant stock. As a result, Progressives “recast their evangelical language in a more secular form,” even as they held on to their “evangelical idealism.” This “intellectual gospel” promoted “scientific inquiry as itself a kind of religious calling.” That is, a historicized science at the service of ‘History’ conceived as a course of events leading to ever more social and economic equality replaced natural right as the common denominator of a religiously plural civil society. “For the social gospel progressives at the forefront of American economic reform, science was a place of moral authority where the public-spirited could find religious meaning in scientific inquiry’s values of dispassionate analysis, self-sacrifice, pursuit of truth, and service to a cause greater than oneself.”

Historicism’s philosophic master was G. W. F. Hegel, and many academic Progressives made pious pilgrimages to German universities, studying historicist thought at its intellectual sources. The political-economic branch of Hegelian historicism viewed “state economic intervention” favorably, having implemented “compulsory insurance against sickness, industrial accidents, debility, and old age.” As historicists, German economists denied the existence of “natural economic laws, which they disparaged as ‘English’ economics, a swipe at the classically liberal tendency of political economy in Great Britain.” As the American Ely put it, “the dry bones of orthodox English political economy” deserve to be buried and replaced by “the live methods of the German school”—live in the sense that national economic activity is “historically contingent and subject to change” not only by private individuals and firms but also, and crucially, by the national state. The German economists additionally claimed scientific authority; “they were not mere bureaucrats but an elite uniquely capable of transcending politics and objectively identifying the public good.”

The young Americans wanted to be like them. “At the time of the Civil War, professional social science simply did not exist,” but the young academics quickly changed that in the twenty years prior to the turn of the century. An economics major, impossible before, became the second-most frequent choice among Yale undergraduates, often at the expense of enrollment in the liberal arts courses. Only English held its own. “The first generation of progressive economists had created, essentially ex nihilo, two new and influential vocations in America: the professor of economics and the expert economist in the service of the administrative state.” The administrative state, they argued, was the only institution capable of governing the bureaucracies established by industrial capitalists, the new oligarchs. “Industrial capitalism, the progressives argued, required continuous supervision, investigation, and regulation.” German historicism and its cousin, Darwinian evolution, held “that the individual’s inalienable natural rights were only a pleasant fiction,” that the individual could only be protected by a much larger “organism,” the state, whose ‘evolution’ could be guided by the new scientists. The economist Washington Gladden described “the tradition of respect for individual liberty” in the United States as “a radical defect in the thinking of the average American.” The industrial economy had disproven natural-rights individualism. Indeed, economist Edward A. Ross describe individual persons as “plastic lumps of human dough” rightly formed on the “social kneading board.” In this, Ross followed the arguments of “my Master,” Lester Frank Ward, a sociologist who served on the boards of both the American Sociological Association and the American Economic Association, whom he compared favorably to Aristotle.

Ward made two key assertions: “humanity was the agent of its own destiny”; “society, not the individual, was the proper unit of explanatory account.” Progressives “always gave the whole moral primacy over the individuals it subsumed” since, as Ely put it, the state, which rules society, is “a moral person,” indeed a more authoritative moral person than the corporations. What, then, did “society” want? And who would be charged with knowing what it wanted? “The second question was easy for progressives. The experts were charged with knowing what society wanted.” They were to be the state’s men. And, when it came to the corporations, now judged to be “legal persons” entitled “to some of the same liberties that protected natural persons from the state,” such rights could amount to nothing, given the judgment of the Progressive president of Princeton College, Woodrow Wilson, who dismissed unalienable rights as “nonsense,” and the assertion of Constitutional law scholar Roscoe Pound, who wrote that the protections of the Bill of Rights “were not needed in their own day” and “not desired in our own.” It is almost needless to say that historicism gave the ruling experts the right, indeed the obligation, not only to identify what “society” wanted but to identify what it should want and bring it around to wanting it.

Thus, the administrative state “was to be the great benefactor of twentieth-century economics.” In return, what economists could do for the state was to denigrate “laissez-faire economics” and to lend the state the authority of modern science, now that the authority derived from securing natural rights had been trashed, along with natural rights themselves. With the Panic of 1893 and the Pullman Strike of 1894, American politicians found themselves very much in search of a new source of authority. By 1899, AEA president Arthur T. Hadley could straight-facedly claim that economists served as “representatives of nothing less than the whole truth,” along with the common good; economists thus deserve to be the adjudicators and reconcilers of clashing socioeconomic classes. Against the sober warning of John Stuart Mill in his Principles of Political Economy, who had “warned that government was badly informed, its employees were mediocre and often corrupt, and, moreover, politics continually threatened the reform goals of efficiency and fairness alike,” the Progressives burnished an image of themselves as transpolitical scientists, surgeons of justice. “It was,” Leonard notes, “a bold claim,” adding that “Progressives of all types tended to venerate science, even or perhaps especially when they had little contact with it.” No matter: the ever-enthusiastic Ely borrowed from Thomas Jefferson, calling economists “natural aristocrats.” That was the one way in which nature could usefully be brought back into the debate on the side of what Ross called “intelligent social engineering.”

The administrative state was intended to replace the party bosses and common-law, constitutional-law judges, who persisted in understanding that “bureaucracy was political, too,” a form of politics that had no great regard for republicanism. The older labor union ‘bosses,’ with Samuel Gompers at their head, also viewed the new reformers with skepticism. Progressives viewed themselves unskeptically. New York City Comptroller Herman Metz intoned that while the practical man “knows how and “the scientific man knows why,” the “expert knows how and why.” That is, while science is the ultimate authority, it needs bearers of its Good News, apostles who bring the truth and justice of science not only to the masses but to the state that rules the masses—legitimately, if it ‘follows the science.’ Herbert Croly’s famous formula, that Progressivism brings Hamiltonian or ‘statist’ means to bear in a quest for Jeffersonian ends, turns out to mean not that Progressivism aims at securing natural rights—those putative fictions—but that it puts the natural aristocrats of scientific expertise in charge as the brains of the social organism, an organism rightly subject to evolution under the direction of the natural aristocrats.

With the Progressive (and Republican-Party) Governor Robert M. LaFollette at the helm, Wisconsin became “the first prototype of American administrative government,” appointing University of Wisconsin faculty, including its president and all of its economists, to government commissions. Somewhat fancifully, Progressive writer Frederick C. Howe titled his book on the subject Wisconsin: An Experiment in Democracy and, more accurately, describing the state as a “scientific laboratory of reform,” the American equivalent of Germany.  Wisconsin itself was a “German state,” another fan exclaimed, inasmuch as “so many Wisconsonites were of Teutonic stock,” their ancestors having been refugees from the failed European revolutions of 1848. As John Dewey saw, “Germany had subordinated its legislature to the bureaucracy, which conduced to the real business of government—administration” along Hegelian lines. Hence, as in Germany, state universities were elevated to compete with those old and still too-conservative private colleges dotted along the Eastern Seaboard. It wasn’t until the Wilson administration, beginning in 1915, that the federal government, now thought of as the ‘national state,’ began to establish and fortify an administrative state on that level of government, thanks in large measure to the income tax amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1913. Progressive economists, led by AEA president Edwin R. A. Seligman, “played a pivotal role in laying the intellectual foundation for the US income tax.” As he put it, Americans pay taxes “simply because the state is part of us,” an entity which we have a duty to support, even as we are charged with supporting our families.” Taxes funded federal commissions, some established as early as the 1890s, designed to regulate the corporations. These included the United States Industrial Commission, the U.S. Bureau of Corporations, the National Monetary Commission, the Federal Reserve banks, the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Permanent Tariff Commission (later renamed the US International Trade Commission. “The bulk of the work was done by March 1917, the end of President Woodrow Wilson’s first term, and the eve of the United States’ entry into the First World War. The fourth branch of government was established—an extraconstitutional branch to be sure, but nominally part of the executive branch and overseen by the legislative branch. Previously, “judges and elected representatives, not bureaucrats, made the legal rules governing economic life,” primarily “on the state and municipal level.” But with corporations having made markets national, not only was market regulation nationalized but the administrative state absorbed many legislative, judicial, and executive functions into itself, very much with cooperation of the Progressive president and of Progressives in Congress and, to a lesser extent, Progressives on the Supreme Court. 

The income tax replaced the tariffs as the federal government’s principal source of revenue. This made eminent sense to Progressives. The tariff had been intended as pro-business, as a means of protecting domestic manufactures from foreign competitors. Similarly, “internal improvements” (roads, bridges, canals) were also understood as agents of economic development. “The national administrative state, in in contrast, never purported to be a friend of business. It intended to control business.” To do so, only experts could rule, as legislators “could not be trusted to advance the public good,” given their ignorance of the science of economics and the science of administration, to say nothing of their lowly moral standards and partisan heatedness. As to the judges, they too were incompetent, given their dependence upon legal precedent and their hidebound insistence on upholding “individual liberties, which progressives regarded as archaic impediments to urgently needed improvements in social health, welfare, and morals.” Not to worry: The Revenue Act of 1917 raised income taxes, increased the top level of taxation to 67% of income, taxed large estates “up to 25%,” expanded the “tax base”—i.e., the number of persons required to pay income taxes—and also increased inheritance taxes in an effort to discourage the formation of inherited wealth by a monied aristocracy or oligarchy. The revenues thereby raised were originally intended to pay for America’s intervention in the Great War, but “even after demobilization, federal spending, adjusted for inflation, was more than triple its prewar levels,” so most of the taxes stayed in place at the levels enacted by the Act. As important was the war effort itself, which enabled the national government (in War Industrial Board member Grosvenor Clarkson’s estimation) to bring a “combatively individualistic people into a vast cooperative effort in which the good of the unit was sacrifice to the good of the whole,” proving, as John Dewey had it, that the national economy could be managed as readily as a factory by expert central planners.

Progressives ardently maintained that their enterprise enhanced democracy by wresting control of the government by corrupt machine pols and the corporations that bribed them. The ability of corporations to insinuate themselves into the administrative state, too, was not yet apparent, but such anti-corruption reforms as voter registration in fact “reduced democratic participation, often by design.” For example, disenfranchisement of American blacks in the South was “regularly justified as an anticorruption measure.” Women’s right to vote and direct election of U.S. Senators became the constitutional law of the land; initiative, referendum, recall, and election of state court judges did democratize the regime, in some instances at the expense of republicanism, but “overall voter turnout in the former states of the Confederacy fell to 30 percent by 1904.” Wilson sniffed that black Americans were “a danger to themselves as well as to those whom they had once served,” and evidently that the menace extended to government paper-pushers, as he pushed “large numbers of lack federal employees” out of their jobs. As Professor Ross intoned, “One man, one vote does not make Sambo equal to Socrates.” (It isn’t clear that Ross himself was equal to Socrates but let us not be unkind.) And it wasn’t just Southern blacks who stopped voting. “Voter turnout dropped everywhere.” From 1896 to 1924, voter turnout in national elections dropped from 80 percent to less than 50 percent. “The more egalitarian progressives, such as Jane Addams and John Dewey, wanted more democracy and more expertise,” simultaneously, “but never really figured out how to get both.” With more real power going to the administrators, more commoners shrugged.

The Progressive economists were not among the egalitarians. They “never entertained the notion that expertise could work through the people.” Indeed, “it was high time, Ely said, to abandon the outmoded eighteenth-century doctrine that all men were equal as a false and pernicious doctrine”—a dictum that reveals nothing so much as Ely’s decidedly inexpert understanding of what the Founders meant by equality. [2] “The human rubbish heap,” as he put it, consisted of perhaps twenty percent of American citizens, and most of the remaining majority weren’t all that much better. In Edwin R. A. Seligman’s opinion, an economist should function as the modern-day equivalent of a priest, teaching the people what they should want and then showing them the way, the truth, and the light that would lead them to it. 

Progressive economists viewed markets with suspicion. “Market choices are decentralized, guided by prices, not by command,” leading to “unplanned” outcomes. “This, many progressives argued, was the source of economic disorder and waste.” Large-scale modern industrial corporations are centralized, however, and therefore good, manageable by administrators. Such corporations are, above all, efficient. They require “no cost-increasing transactions with middlemen”; they can arrange “lower-cost financing, provid[e] factory workers with technically superior capital equipment with attendant productivity increases; they often eliminate ‘cut-throat competition,'” inducing industries to constrain both profits for the capitalists and wages for the workers. Finally, big corporation would, they expected, reduce the sharp ups and downs of the market, moderate the jaggedness of the business cycle. Monopoly was bad because monopolists tend to “corrupt politics” (although never, of course, the members of the administrative priesthood), but sheer size wasn’t the problem; it was part of the solution. The capitalists, especially the most successful ones, happily concurred. John D. Rockefeller lauded “modern economic administration,” predicting that “individualism is gone never to return.” 

A priesthood will need a book. The Bible of the “gospel of efficiency” was Frederick Winslow Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911. Taylor argued that management efficiency would bring “labor peace.” Managers must first implement “efficient work techniques, enforced and calibrated by enhance surveillance of worker effort,” then wait for “the explosive increase of productivity that ensued,” which in turn would boost both profits and wages.” What much later would come to be called a ‘win-win’ outcome would eliminate the worst tensions between capitalists and workers, refuting the dire Marxian prophecies of socialists. As things turned out, workers resented being surveilled and subjected to discipline, even if by men who claimed scientific expertise. This hardly fazed Progressives, however, who introduced Taylorism to local, state, and federal government in the form of city managers who controlled budgeting and consolidation of state and local government, eroding the supposedly antiquated separation of powers. This was best articulated by Wilson, who deprecated the old “Newtonian” model of the Founders while praising the scientifically up-to-date “Darwinian” notion of government as an “organism.” And even churchmen got into the (Hegelian) spirit of the thing, with one earnest clergyman “call[ing] on the ‘ecclesiastical engineer’ to make church practices less wasteful.” Meanwhile, schoolgirls were given classes in ‘home economics,’ with the promise of greater efficiency among the homemakers of the future. The founder of that discipline was a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, no less, who invented the term ‘euthenics,’ meaning “the science of producing more efficient human beings by improving living conditions.”

Most ambitious of all the Progressive theories was eugenics. In his seminal book, The Races of Europe, William Z. Ripley announced three distinct racial types: Teutons, Alpines, and Mediterraneans, identified by the shapes of their heads, the colors of their skins, and the heights of their bodies. Teutons were the very best of the breeds, and Ripley “could not disguise his contempt for immigrants without Teutonic blood,” for example those emitted from the “great Polish swamp of miserable human beings,” particularly Jews. Interbreeding with such degenerate kinds could only result in “race suicide,” whereby “future Americans” in the breathless words of the New York Times would become “swarthy.” “Anthropologists worldwide regarded The Races of Europe as a significant scientific advance,” and social scientists embraced it for its potential for giving their hitherto somewhat ‘soft’ sciences a firm biological foundation. “We census our farm animals and test our soils,” Ely observed. “Surely it was no less important to take stock of our human resources, ascertain where defects exist, and apply suitable remedies.” In his words, “we have got far enough to recognize”—historical progress, again—that “there are certain human beings who are absolutely unfit, and should be prevented from a continuation of their kind.” Progressives stopped short of genocide, but forced sterilization was not out of the question.

Efficiency and biological pseudoscience could, at least, rely on measurable criteria, however dubious. But labor relations, and especially the vexed question of wages, were not nearly so amenable to the scientific method. It is to the vexed question of the value of labor that Leonard turns in the second half of his book. Progressives pondered four questions: What was labor getting? How were wages determined? What should labor get? And if they were not getting enough, what should be done and who should do it?

What labor was getting was potentially determinable, although at the time “reliable data on wages, benefits, and hours were sketchy at best and were often misleading or nonexistent.” The second question was also an empirical one, a matter of surveying business practices to determine whether wages were “set arbitrarily, by convention or the whim of the boss,” or whether they bore “some connection to market forces of supply and demand.” The third question was not empirical and therefore not really amenable to scientific knowledge. The same was true of the policy question and the ‘Who should rule?’ question. 

The “ancient and still more fundamental question” underlying all the others was whether labor should be valued as commodities are valued, exchanged for money and other benefits in the ‘labor market,’ or whether it should be determined by what the laborer is—age, sex, race, nationality, class, legal status. “For nearly all of recorded human history, the notion of laborers selling their labor services for wages was nonsensical” since “labor was compelled agricultural toil of social inferiors in the service and under the command of their betters.” Oligarchy, usually calling itself aristocracy, prevailed in society and in politics alike, often in collaboration with, sometimes in opposition to, hereditary monarchy. 

Market exchange or command? “Hostility to trade is as venerable as trade itself.” Moneychangers and moneylenders, persons ‘in trade,’ bourgeois arrivistes aspiring comically to becoming gentlemen: such persons lacked the virtues of statesmen and even those of honest toilers on the land. The term ‘economics’ itself derives not from some Greek or Roman word for trade but from the Greek word for the household, oikos, and the word for law, nomos. Material life was to be ruled, and political life derived from the models of rule seen in the household: political (ruling and being ruled, husband and wife), command for the good of the commanded (parents and children), command for the good of the commanders (masters and slaves). Household being smaller and less comprehensive, less determinant of the common good than poleis, they were nonetheless superior to the market, “the dishonest domain of trade and credit,” hagglers and cheats. In antiquity, the “dirtiest labor” went to slaves, often war captives, market machination to free non-citizens, often immigrants and their descendants. None of these people were entitled to own land; none entitled to a share in ruling the polis. “Two thousand years later” in Europe, “an aristocracy still monopolized land ownership, ruled the polity and the economy, and claimed supernatural bases for its privilege.” As late as the eighteenth century in France, économie politique “referred to the principles of administering a large agricultural estate,” with France itself being the largest of all such holding, ruled by the king with the help of his “skilled administrators.” The vast civil-social democratization manifested in the American and French revolutions finally upended all of that, at least in those countries, with others to follow, quite reluctantly. 

The great theorist of economic democratization, Adam Smith, published his Wealth of Nations in that banner year, 1776. Smith criticized “the ancient prejudice that a persons’ economic and social value was fixed in an immutable hierarchy at birth.” Such hierarchy was both factually wrong (“the loftiest philosopher, he wrote, was no better than the commonest street porter, just better trained”) and “economically destructive,” preventing people “from specializing in the work they did best.” Better to be ‘liberal’—free to find and pursue your “own interest” in your “own way.” Such a civil society could exist only if markets were also free, enabling such “specializing workers [to] relay on others to supply the goods” they did not produce, to exchange your goods for mine. “A free people free to trade was no evil; it was, rather, the means for reversing two millennia of economic stagnation.” Smith applauded the Americans and their declaration of independence not simply from the imperial fatherland but from socioeconomic hierarchy. True, American republican liberty was built for a decentralized, sparsely settled agrarian republic with free land (for white men),” but even such limited liberty far surpassed the European orders, to say nothing of those on all the other continents. What Leonard calls “classical political economy,” by which he means modern liberal political economy, “said the value of a good was intrinsic to it, embodied in it during the process of its production, and in particular, determined by the labor that went into it”—a “labor theory of value” Locke was the first to enunciate, then by Smith, and finally appropriated by Marx for very different purposes. In its Lockean form, it comported with the overall ‘social contract’ by which civil societies themselves originated. Progressives, by contrast, “saw a wage not as the price of a contractual exchange, but as a worker-citizen’s rightful claim upon his share of the common wealth produced when the laborer cooperated with the capitalist to jointly create it.” This meant that “labor was not a commodity” to be determined by market exchange. It should be exchanged for a “living wage” whose level would be determined not by workers or capitalists but by expert governmental administrators—as seen, for example, in laws setting a ‘minimum wage’ for workers.

The Progressives’ stance on the value of labor obviously connects with their scientism. It is scientism that connected the Progressive stance on the value of labor to evolutionary, Darwinian or perhaps neo-Darwinian notions of socioeconomic progress. Although most students associate Darwinism with ‘Social Darwinism,’ the claims of unbridled free-market competition, in fact “there was something in Darwinism for everyone,” and American social scientists selected any number of things but not all things. [3] A Darwinian social scientist might be a capitalist or a socialist, an individualist or a collectivist, a pacifist or a militarist, a pro-natalist or an advocate of birth control, atheist/agnostic or religious. Progressives accepted Darwin’s evolutionism, it being compatible with their historicism. They also accepted Darwin’s argument that human beings originated in a common ancestor, that human beings were one species. His notion of the ‘survival of the fittest,’ borrowed from Herbert Spencer, seemed too harsh to many of them and the claim that evolution was slow, too pessimistic. The randomness of Darwin’s theory also bothered them; surely evolution was progressive, as Hegel had maintained, not merely a series of adaptations to a randomly changing environment. Darwin’s theory was insufficient as an ideational framework for ruling change. For this, they preferred the evolutionism of Lamarck, who argued that evolution was driven by changes in animal behavior—the famous claim that the giraffe gets its long neck from generations of straining toward the leaves near the top of trees. This gave Progressive warrant for campaigning against “race poisons”—such “unhealthy behaviors” as drinking alcohol (hence the Prohibition amendment), “smoking, meat eating, promiscuity,” all deemed injurious to the genetic material of the persons in their thrall and to their hapless offspring. “Socially planned improvements could improve the biological inheritance of an entire generation and all its descendants.” Not gradual but rapid improvement in the human racial stock was not only desirable but possible. Eugenics made sense, whereas nature, insofar as it resisted such efforts, must be conquered or at least hurried along in the right direction. Darwinian natural selection must be eschewed in favor of human selection, human governance of nature. So, for example, competition among corporations was acceptable, so long as it was properly guided by experts in the science of administration. Otherwise, competition would only ‘select’ for traits of “rapacity and cunning.” The liberation of women would enable them to select the biologically fittest men as their mates, unless they preferred those rapacious and cunning rich men. “Progressives said that regulation was the most efficient route to better heredity,” regulation guided by scientist who “will determine who is fittest” while “state experts will select them by regulating immigration, labor, marriage, and reproduction” in a process not of natural but of “artificial selection.” Society, Progressive and indeed socialist Frank Lester Ward insisted, “must protect itself against capitalism’s dysgenic tendencies” and against “wasteful, slow, unprogressive, and inhuman natural selection.”

“When Reform Darwinists,” Progressives, “wished to argue that society, not just the individual, could be purposeful, they portrayed society as an evolved organism, an idea many of them had first encountered as graduate students in Germany,” that is, from Hegelianism’s recent variants. Progressive atheists such as Ely “claimed the state was literally an organism,” not merely in some figure-of-speech sort of way, but so could Social Gospel Christians like Rauschenbusch, who wanted to take the organism and baptize it in a project of what he called “saving the social organism.” “Unlike a machine,” Progressives like Wilson, Ely, and Croly agreed, society “grows and evolves.” The advantage to be gained by this was that “if society really was a person—possessing a mind, interest, and a conscience—then the problem of determining what 75 million people wanted was vastly simplified.” Leonard calls the depiction of “society as an organism…a rhetorical masterstroke,” the “master metaphor of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American social thought.”

As with any bodies, bodies foreign to it might well do it injury. “The social organism had a necessary unity, and it was not an inclusive one.” The Founders regarded immigration as open to “all who agreed to abide by the social contract’s founding principles”—a matter of consent. “But a biological conception of American nationality entailed some kind of evolutionary consanguinity.” No “uninvited parasites or microbes” wanted. Further, the existing racial stock could be improved by artificial selection of the most desirable elements within it. Ward called “the intelligent management of society [to] improve, direct and hasten social evolution” sociocracy. The important remaining question was how to do the selecting. For Croly, it was the national government; for Ely, it was society, for Henry Carter Adams and Woodrow Wilson, it was administrative regulation—for example, laws barring children and married women from work. These divergences notwithstanding, Progressives agreed that “the adverse selection of unrestrained markets could be turned into the beneficial selection of regulated markets.”

Eugenics, a term invented by the English polymath Francis Galton in 1883, became a major element in the Progressive version of the modern conquest of nature. Galton held that “differences in human intelligence, character, and temperament were due to differences in heredity”; that “human heredity could be improved,” rather quickly (“and kindly,” he generously added). Such improvement could not be left to chance, to nature, but “required scientific investigation and regulation of marriage, reproduction, immigration, and labor.” In line with these principles, the American Race Betterment Foundation was founded in 1906, the Eugenics Education Society in England in 1907. Indiana led the way with the first of more than thirty American states to pass a forcible sterilization law, “kindly” being a relative notion. New Jersey Governor Wilson got into the act in 1911, explaining that forced sterilization would eliminate or at least reduce “the hopelessly defective and criminal classes.” Overall, “in the first three decades of the twentieth century, eugenic ideas were politically influential, culturally fashionable, and scientifically mainstream.” Ross applauded, calling endorsement of eugenics “a perfect index of one’s breadth of outlook and unselfish concern for the future of our race,” especially in light of the white-on-white slaughter of the Great War, that “immeasurable calamity that has befallen the white race” because it destroyed so much of humanity’s best genetic material. American colleges and university eugenics courses saw some 20,000 enrollments between 1914 and 1928, and such literary notables as T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, Eugene O’Neill, D. H. Lawrence, and Jack London endorsed the doctrine, with Lawrence adding euthanasia of inferiors to his recommended to-do list. [4] Among American legal notables, William Howard Taft, Louis Brandeis, and Oliver Wendell Holmes regarded forced sterilization as constitutional, concurring with Holmes’s mot, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Taft and Eliot were socially and politically conservatives; eugenics wasn’t only a Progressive hobby horse. The critics were either “classical liberals” or Catholics, erstwhile antagonists who rejected eugenics on the grounds of individual liberty and Christian natural law, respectively. Progressive economists thought of eugenics as thrifty, since “uplift was socially costly” while “eugenics was cheap.”

Leonard carefully distinguishes eugenics from “race science.” Eugenics was a policy, race science the discipline that provided one standard for the policy (others being stupidity, criminality, chronic disease). The standard was a ‘scientifically’ established racial hierarchy, with “Caucasians” at the top, “Mongoloids” in the middle, the “Negroid” race at the bottom, the latter two being drags on white progress. Racial hierarchy was quite compatible not only with Progressivism but with Socialism, making it “possible to bemoan the “idiots and cretins’ among the rich,” as Thorstein Veblen famously did in his Theory of the Leisure Class. In Veblen’s account, “the capitalist was able to exploit everyone else” not because he was genuine superior but because “he had inherited an atavistic, predatory race instinct.” On the other end of the social scale, in the emphatic words of the editorialist at The Survey, a leading journal of social work, “the feeble-minded woman at large is the most dangerous person the state can harbor!” Such inferior human specimens could underbid the capable people. The American Federation of Labor spent part of the union members’ dues on a pamphlet titled, Meat versus Rice: American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism, Which Shall Survive? And in his History of the American People, then-professor Woodrow Wilson warned that white workers, who could not “live upon a handful of rice of a pittance,” could scarcely compete with Chinese workers, “who with their yellow skin and strange debasing habits of life seemed to them hardly fellow men at all but evil spirits, rather.” Jews were no better, their sweatshops “the tragic penalty paid by that ambitious race,” in the words of John R. Commons. Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs took a more comprehensive view: “the Dago,” as he ungently put it, lives more “like a savage beast” than even the Chinese; Slavs, Huns, and other “pagan labor scourges” were no better. In this atmosphere, racial violence festered, free-market competition waned. Hence the minimum wage, which prevented underbidding by such parasites.

“The new discourses of eugenics and race science recast spiritual or moral failure as biological inferiority, making old prejudices newly respectable and lending scientific luster to the argument of critics and defenders of American economic life.” The Social Gospel demi-Christians were fully on board, with the theologian Walter Rauschenbusch as usual leading the way. The “cooperative commonwealth” he envisioned derived from the societies established by ancient Aryans in the forests of Saxony. When Rauschenbusch wrote of “fraternal democracy,” he meant “fraternal” biologically; shared property and social cooperation were “dyed into the fiber of our breed,” the Anglo-Saxons. Capitalism slithered into Anglo-Saxon America from the east and the south of Europe—Jews, Italians, and the like. The equally pious Francis Willard of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union advocated immigration laws to prohibition of alcohol in her efforts to bar “the scum of the Old World” from entering the United States. Only then can we “weld the Anglo-Saxons of the New World into one royal family”—perhaps not so noble a prospect as she supposed, given the character of any number of Anglo-Saxon royals, before and since. Again, conservatives endorsed this stuff, too, as seen in the writings of Columbia political scientist John W. Burgess, U. S. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and historian John Fiske.

All of this culminated in the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, capping immigration quotas at two percent of each nationality’s population in the United States in 1890. 1890 made sense to anti-immigrationists, Progressive and conservative alike, because that was the year when those distressing Catholic, Jewish, and Orthodox Christians from the inferior races of southern and eastern Europe had begun to arrive. In its effects, “It worked.” Immigration from those parts of Europe plummeted by 97 percent. As for Asians (“Mongoloids”), immigration from those nations was reduced nearly to nothing. Progressives peopling the administrative state-imposed literacy tests as a means of identifying and “rigorously excluding the plainly unfit,” as economist Edward Bemis explained. As for those undesirable immigrants and other defectives already here, they could be returned to their homelands, placed in institutions, segregated in remote areas, or sterilized. The administrative state was the indispensable tool for such minute surveillance and enforcement of laws against the ‘unfit.’ 

There were a few race egalitarians among the Progressives, John Dewey being the most important. He rejected the hierarchy proposed by ‘race science.’ But even he backed race-based immigration restrictions on the grounds that the introduction of certain races exacerbated social conflict. “The world is not sufficiently civilized to permit close contact of peoples of widely different cultures without deplorable consequences.” 

The first generations of Progressives are also remembered for what is now called ‘first-wave feminism,’ with its substantial achievement of the Constitutional amendment requiring the states to legalize voting rights for women—’second-wave feminism’ being the era of more exclusively socioeconomic reforms beginning in the late 1960s, including equal pay for equal work, legalization of abortion, and workplace quotas. But first-wave feminism had its share of economic reforms, too, especially in the realm of labor reform, in which “progressive women were at the forefront.” Not equal employment opportunities but unequal protections were their goal, however: “setting maximum hours, minimum wages, and pensions for mothers,” usually expressed “in the language of protection.” “The claim was that women, as the biologically weaker sex, needed (like children) special protection from the demands of employment.” In Muller v. Oregon (1908), the State of Oregon’s law setting maximum hours for women workers was challenged. The state’s Progressive attorney, Louis Brandeis, prepared a brief enabling defendants to argue not only from legal precedent, as had been standard up to that time, but from social science research—the findings skewed, as one might expect, to support the attorney’s clients. Oregon won, at the cost of “playing a dangerous game,” since “if their arguments for women’s inferiority succeeded, they risked inscribing into law the subordinate status of women in the economy and in the polity.” Progressives, including feminists, indeed considered a woman’s place to be in the home, adopting the original meaning of oikonomia, the rule of the household while putting women in charge of it, at least during the day, since men now worked mostly outside the home, returning only in time for dinner. Practically speaking, the argument intended to “return mothers to the home,” reducing the competition for jobs outside it; this would boost men’s wages “sufficiently to support a family.” As for widows and other women without “a male provider,” they would receive state pensions. These claims could be associated with “race progress.” Both Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who detested “the subjugation of women” as heartily as Mr. and Mrs. Mill had done in the previous century, and Theodore Roosevelt regarded motherhood as woman’s “primary and most essential duty.” Those who shirked it were “race criminals,” on the same grounds. The theme of protection for women “ran aground, calamitously,” when the Supreme Court reversed its Muller decision in a 1923 decision that rested squarely on the principles of contract law. This led some feminist Progressives to relinquish the women’s weakness strategy and propose the first iteration of the Equal Rights Amendment. 

The Great War spurred increased statism, in turn bolstering Progressives institutionally, but it didn’t help the reputation of German things, including ideas emanating from Germany. American Economic Association president Irving Fisher observed that the German economists’ willingness to serve ‘the state’ in fact meant subordinating themselves a bad regime, the Hohenzollern Dynasty. However, he bravely continued, America doesn’t have that sort of regime. Herbert Croly shared the revelatory moment, and although his confidence in statist measures was shaken, he remained certain that “expert social engineers” could do good if they worked within civil society, and with popular consent, while avoiding service in state administrations. And so, in the end, “Progressivism reconstructed American liberalism by dismantling the free market of classical liberalism and erecting in its place the welfare state of modern liberalism.” 

Notes

1. For an account of Progressivism by a leading Progressive, see Frank Goodnow: The American Conception of Liberty (1913); for a review, see “Goodnow’s Conception of American liberty on this website under the category, “American Politics,” on this website. For general accounts of Progressivism on this website, see “Educating the American Mind: The Progressives’ View”; “The Progressives’ Presidency,” and “The Progressives’ Critique of the Declaration of Independence,” all on this website under the category, “American Politics.” Among historians, see Arthur A. Ekirch: The Decline of American Liberalism (1955); for a review, see “Liberalism and Statism in America” and B. Anderson: Economics and the Public Welfare: A Financial and Economic History of the U.S., 1914-1946 (1949); for a review, see “New Deal or No Deal: American Economic Policies, 1914-1947.” Both of these reviews are on this website, again under the category, “American Politics.” Important studies of Progressivism by political scientists include Paul Eidelberg: A Discourse on Statesmanship: The Design and Transformation of the American Polity (1974); Dennis J. Mahoney: Politics and Progress: The Emergence of American Political Science (2004); Paul Marini: The Progressive Revolution in Politics and Political Science (2005); R. J. Pestritto: Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism (2005); R. J. Pestritto and William J. Atta, eds: American Progressivism (2008)
2. See “America’s Declaration of Independence” on this website, under the category, “American Politics.”
3. Leonard identifies the ‘Left’ historian Richard Hofstadter as the one who tied the term ‘Social Darwinism’ to “laissez-faire economics.” Hofstadter was polemicizing. In fact, market-oriented thinkers such as Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner were not “particularly Darwinist,” and the socialist Lester Frank Ward was “the most Darwinian of American social thinkers” in that era. What is more, when it comes to Darwin himself, he was indeed influenced by Thomas Malthus’s description of “the struggle for existence,” but Malthus “was a protectionist, a skeptic of industry, and unenthusiastic about immigration”—hardly a free marketeer.
4. As did the Socialist economist, Scott Nearing, in whose 1912 book, The Super Race: An American Problem, lauded the ancient Greeks for killing “defective children,” and deplored the perpetuation of hereditary defects as “infinitely worse than murder.” While killing such “scum” was off-putting to modern sensibilities, civil society could at least isolate defectives and prevent them from breeding more of their kind.

President of Columbia University for more than four decades, President Taft’s running mate during the electoral debacle of 1912, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, Nicholas Murray Butler ranked among the most distinguished Americans of the first half of the twentieth century. He is almost entirely forgotten, partly because he gave his legacy a self-inflicted wound by lauding Mussolini throughout the 1920s and well into the Thirties, seeming to take the strutting mountebank as an Italian version of Teddy Roosevelt. And he only came around to condemning the Nazis in 1938, in the aftermath of the Kristallnacht pogrom. While it is true that many of his most acidulous critics (including the socialist scribbler, Upton Sinclair, a Soviet apologist in the same year) entertained similarly benign impressions of Communism, their folly was no excuse for his. At least, unlike so many of them, he eventually corrected his error, if belatedly. As far as can be determined, he remained an anti-Semitic snob for the rest of his life, as seen in his imposition of quotas on Jewish applicants to Columbia. Imposed in the 1920s, the quotas were only removed when federal law required their removal in 1947, two years after Butler’s retirement.

His friendship with Roosevelt did not prevent him from breaking with the former president, once TR became the candidate of the Progressive Party, on the grounds that both Roosevelt and the eventual victor, Woodrow Wilson, had departed from the principles of the American regime, including the Declaration of Independence’s assertion of the unalienable rights of individuals and the United States Constitution’s republican, as distinguished from democratic, institutions. The short answer to his question, “Why should we change our form of government?” is, ‘We shouldn’t.’ His book is essentially an unusually trenchant political campaign document, published the same year as his futile run for high office. As Americans careened toward regime change, Butler stood astride the Model-T, yelling ‘Stop!’ And honorably so, his subsequent political tergiversations notwithstanding.

Butler regretted that “in the United States the words politics and politician have association that are chiefly of evil omen.” “In the true and broad sense of the word, politics is one of man’s highest concerns, and nowhere should the word have loftier and nobler associations than in a twentieth century democracy.” The fact that it doesn’t proceeds from the “mediocre and second-rate” character of contemporary politicians, who are not fit successors of Publius or Calhoun, Lincoln or Douglas. Their unimpressive character proceeds from the “sadly commercialized” condition of contemporary politics. By this, Butler doesn’t mean the prevalence of political advertising but the fact that “a large proportion of the population is trying to get the government to spend some part of its money taken in taxes upon them, upon their own localities, or upon their special interests.” Where “individuals and communities are leaning upon government,” the “sense of manly independence is being supplanted by a desire to be taken care of” under a regime of “socialism or of what may perhaps be called semi-socialism,” Progressivism. A ‘politics of compassion,” a politics of “unreflecting sentimentality,” can finally cause only “stagnation, paralysis, and death” in the body politic or, alternatively, “disorder, anarchy, and the eventual rule of brute force.” Not slavery, the supposed cornerstone of American constitutionalism as claimed by the Confederacy’s vice president, Alexander Stevens, but its opposite, civil liberty “is the cornerstone upon which our American constitutional system has been built.” 

“The curious notion seems widespread that there exists somewhere and somehow an all-wise and beneficent State or People—something different and apart from individual human beings and not subject to their limitations and defects—which all-wise and beneficent State or People will take care of us better than we can care for ourselves, if only we will give it the opportunity.” Dismissing this as “crude nonsense,” Butler identifies genuine “human progress” not with this progressivist ‘State and People’ formula—which nicely conveys the contradiction between administrative management and democracy—but with the need for “each individual” to raise “his own standard of intelligence and of conduct.” As Butler puts it, “we are now told that the people are either incompetent or unable to choose representatives who will really serve their highest interest,” while at the same time being offered as a “remedy” the “appeal over the heads of the people’s chosen representatives to the people themselves,” in the form of such devices as popular initiative and referendum. But both mass democracy and elitist bureaucracy, somehow combined, conceals that fact that “human society is not and can never be anything more than the sum total of the individuals who compose it,” with “no excellences of its own which are not their excellences,” excellences that need protection by “fundamental law against the attacks and invasions of temporary majorities.” This being so, “the representative republic erected on the American Continent under the Constitution of the United States is a more advanced, a more just, and a wiser form of government than the socialistic and direct democracy which it is now proposed to substitute for it.” Republicanism, not socialism or semi-socialism, an oxymoronic “socialistic democracy,” remains “the chief glory of our American system of government and its most original contribution to political science,” the “true path of progress” for Americans. 

A new regime of socialistic democracy will amount to a revolution “in our political beliefs,” in “our accustomed forms of political action,” and in “our point of view, in our ambitions, and in our aspirations”—that is, in the purpose, the institutional shape, and in the way of life of Americans. Progressives charge that “the representative republic fails really and readily to reflect public opinion” because “these representative institutions easily become the prey of the self-seeker, of the special interest, of the wire-puller” and that “therefore, they must be uprooted, overturned and destroyed.” But “a really progressive movement” would advance “toward differentiation, toward complexity, toward specialization of structure and function,” not toward centralization and simplification. Progressivism “is reactionary”; if implemented, it will erode “those guarantees of civil and political liberty which underlie our whole organized society,” especially the separation of powers. Indeed, the idea of constitutionalism itself erodes, as seen in the state ‘constitutions’ Progressives have enacted, which consist of “an odd and curious medley of genuine constitutional principles and a host of statutes”—where the state university will be located; the salary of the state auditor, and “hundreds of merely incidental details of government that it is now fashionable to put upon the same plane with vitally important expressions of fundamental political principle.” Thus, obscurantism veils the gathering of detailed, administrative rule in state capitals, a strategy Progressives will duplicate at the federal level, if permitted. “Under the influence of” the European revolutions of 1848 instead of our own revolution,” America’s new states in the West “began to turn the fundamental law of our various commonwealths into a huge collection of statutory details.” In those new states also, “we reduced the representative to the position of a mere delegate,” giving him instructions “as to what he is to do when elected,” thereby “reduc[ing] the representative from the high, splendid, and dignified status of a real representative chosen by his constituency to give it his experience, his brains, his conscience and his best service, and made him a mere registering machine for the opinion of the [current] movement” of public opinion, “whatever it might happen to be.” Bureaucratism on the one hand, democratization on the other, all at the expense of the ruin of the republican regime. Legislation by voter initiative and referendum has further undercut republicanism, since “legislation so initiated “cannot be examined in committee, its sponsors cannot be cross-questioned” but “must be taken or left precisely as they project it into the political arena.” All of this takes away what Publius regarded as the sine qua non of republicanism: the responsibility of each representative for his actions. In its stead, “the initiative will result in registering in more or less rapid succession the consecutive emotions of a small proportion of the electorate” who sign petitions to get things on the ballot. Contra Publius, the passions, not the reasons, of the public will prevail.

“Those who believe that nothing in this world is fixed, or definite, or a matter of principle”—historicists—will applaud. Butler dissents, remarking that “the fundamental guarantees of the British and American Constitutions…are beyond the legitimate reach of any majority, because they are established in the fundamental laws of human nature upon which all govern and civilization and [indeed] progress rest.” “Aristotle pointed out that democracy has many points of resemblance with tyranny,” including the “likeness between the demagogue in a democracy and the court favorite in a tyranny.” What Tocqueville calls “a democratic despotism may be malevolent.” Under these circumstances, “the majority will take direct and responsible control of your life, your liberty and your property” and “all that constitutes individuality will have gone by the board,” having “been poured into the great boiling pot of the social whole.” Unlike the executive veto seen in genuinely republican constitutions, referendum does not compel reconsideration of legislation; in fact, it prevents it by promoting “decision without discussion.” 

Along with voter initiative and referendum, Progressives advocate provision for voter recall of elected officials. Although this does not violate “the fundamental principles of representative government”—it does not evade the deliberative practices of elected or appointed officials—it does foment “restless meddlesomeness” rather than “statesmanship.” And “when applied to the judiciary,” recall “is much more than a piece of stupid folly,” falling to the level of “an outrage of the first magnitude.” To those who say that judges should serve the people,” Butler answers with a firm “No!” “The judges are primarily the servants not of the people but of the law,” with the “duty to interpret the law as it is” and not “to express their own personal opinions on matters of public policy” or to express the majority opinion of the moment. Cases before the courts, and especially constitutional cases, “must be decided under the guidance of a fearless and independent judiciary,” a judiciary unintimidated by an impassioned citizenry. Butler cites the leading American socialist of the day, Eugene V. Debs, who asked, rhetorically in his unfortunately titled tract, Appeal to Reason, “Don’t you see, comrades to have in the hands of an intelligent, militant working class the political power to recall the present capitalist judges and put on the bench of our own men?”

As for the executive branch, the power to recall elected officials would be equally pernicious. At the height of Genêt’s agitation, Washington would have been recalled, as would Madison have been, “during the agitation which led to the War of 1812 with England,” as would Lincoln have been, “in the dark days of 1862 and 1863, as would Cleveland in 1893, when he was making his fight for a sound financial policy and system” in the midst of a stock market panic. “Yet, when we get far enough away from the public deeds of these strong men, we see that the particular things which at the time most excited the animosity and roused the passions of large numbers of people, were the very things that made them immortal in American history.” “Every one of them might have been dashed from his high place if the passions of the moment would have gotten at them when those passions were at their height.” The Progressives’ mixture of administrative statism and direct democracy will remove “the desire and interest of public-spirited men to hold office,” “driv[ing] them away from it as with a scourge.” Progressivist policies will lock in the already-existing mediocrity of American politicians.

With respect to America’s political economy, Butler advocates neither laissez-faire capitalism nor socialism, preferring to “lay the collective hand so heavily upon business activity that the individual’s self-interest,” along with his “individual initiative” “shall, if it be possible, be held always subordinate to the common good.” Butler regards “laissez-faire” as a thing whose time “is now passed,” given population growth, the concentration of that population in cities, “the annihilation of distance and time by steam and electricity,” the factory system and the modern corporation—all of which tend “to bring about a real, though invisible, business partnership between the individual and the community,” a partnership all too prone to “the easily demonstrated moral evils of unrestricted and unsupervised competition.” Given these realities, “the era of unrestricted individual competition is gone forever,” having “been taken up into a new and larger principle of [corporate] cooperation.” In contrast, the cooperation seen in socialism does not so much conflict with contemporary social conditions as it conflicts with the even more fundamental fact of “human nature,” which “is not going to change because a new form of economic organization is hit upon.” Under socialism “the natural law which selects an individual for a given task by proved fitness” will be removed and replaced, with “selection by the collective mind” substituted for it. This will “dry up at their source the well-springs of progress,” just as the revolution against republicanism will do. On the contrary, Americans “must have a care that the individual is given the freest possible scope for the exercise of his talents, and that he is protected in the just and honest gains which come to him.” If we “build up a great army of public employees and bureaucrats,” neither economic nor political liberty will survive. 

Given the financial and industrial conflicts of the era (labor violence, for example, had never been as bad, and has never been as bad in the decades since), Progressives agitated for reform in that area, as well. “One trouble with politics and business is the amount of talk about it”; “these torrents of words flow from the serene seclusion of an empty mind,” but meanwhile America suffers in “an industrial civil war” in which “government is at war with the economic forces of the body politic.” Butler identifies three political-economic problems that need to be settled: banking and currency, transportation systems, and large corporations. Hamilton built the first American banking system, which Jackson and Benton destroyed. “The financial troubles and difficulties of the United States began when the principles of Hamilton were forgotten, and the nation started out on the uncharted sea of reckless financial experiment.” President Cleveland upheld those principles, under assault from William Jennings Bryan and the Populists. Although that threat has dissipated, Progressivism has taken up many of its follies. In the field of transportation, railroad networks obviously require some sort of governmental supervision; Butler favors the establishment of the Interstate Commerce Commission, so long as some of its members are railway men, who actually understand the business. As to the corporations or “trusts,” Butler judges that “every attempt to lay down a general rule or a definition of combinations that, by their very existence, are in restraint of trade, has been, and I think will always be, futile” because “economic conditions change almost while we are talking about them, and no nation can carry on a successful and profitable domestic and foreign trade which attempts to draw hard and fast lines and limits, based on present conditions, for the business activity of the future.” So long as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act is interpreted as Senator Sherman intended, as an application of “the old and well-regulate principles of the common law to cases arising within the jurisdiction of the federal courts,” the Act will mean “flexibility, adaptability, reasonableness, public benefit.”

Butler does not want to see the abolition of the “limited liability corporation,” which he deems “the greatest single discovery of modern times, whether you judge it by its social, by its ethical, by its industrial, or, in the long run—after we understand it and know how to use it—by its political effects.” He defines this kind of corporation as “a device by which a large number of individuals may share in an undertaking without risking in that undertaking more than they voluntarily and individually assume.” That is, if the company goes bankrupt, I, as a stockholder, lose my investment but I cannot be sued as an individual for the recovery of any debts the corporation has incurred. Such corporations also achieve “huge economy of scale in production and in trading” while steadying the “employment of labor at an increased wage” and far superior ‘benefits’—disability and old age insurance, pensions for widows. Crucially, the corporation is “the only possible engine for carrying on international trade on a scale commensurate with modern needs and opportunities.” These advantages notwithstanding, corporations also pose threats, namely, control of prices and unfair business practices owing to monopoly or near-monopoly of a given market. Such abuses occur not because corporations are bad in themselves but because “troubles of this kind always arise from individual delinquents”; for this reason, “we need no more law than we now have to get at individuals who commit immoral offenses, dishonorable acts, whether in trade or out of it.” Again, the principles of the common law will do. The criticisms of corporations today are identical to those leveled at co-partnerships in England when they were invented, five hundred years ago; one of the main lessons of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was the futility of attempting to interfere with market forces in order to prevent abuses. What is needed is “an effective campaign of education that will make clear to the great masses of the people what are fundamental economic laws and what is the relation of those laws to the possibilities of statute-making; and then to demand that in the highest public interests constructive statesmanship be substituted for the everlasting antics of political demagoguery.” That is, economic strength may wane if ‘democracy’ impedes the commercial dimension of the democratic and commercial republic.

Such economic education should be supplemented by civic education. In a speech before the National Education Association in 1909, Butler invokes another of Tocqueville’s themes, the “restlessness” of democratic times. He denies that poverty is its cause. Rather, “old beliefs, old traditions, and old customs are giving way before the corroding tooth of time; and as the time-honored creeds, political social, and religious, lose their hold, others equally controlling and imperative do not come forward to take their place,” leaving “immense masses of men” with “almost boundless opportunities for good or evil, but without guiding principles with which to work.” This is a particular concern for educators, since “the rising generation of Americans is growing up without any proper knowledge of the fundamental principles of American institutions and American government,” leaving them prey to demagogues who bring them “to a state of mind in which envy, greed, and hate are elevated to the lofty place which should be occupied by respect and confidence, as well as by political insight, political knowledge, and political experience,” once instilled by “the stern facts” that faced earlier Americans. “There are those among us, some of them in places of responsibility and great influence”—the former president of Princeton, current governor of New Jersey, and current candidate for the presidency of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, among them?—who “call these principles outworn, antiquated, obstacles to popular government.” But what does historicism do, if not effectively “reestablish the time when might made right”? [1] “The carefully built guards which have been put about individual rights and liberties are denounced as fortresses of privilege by those who seek privileges for themselves at the expense of the rights of others,” within the structures of an administrative state. This isn’t only an American problem. “In all parts of the world there are those” who, confusing individuality with selfishness, “would strike at the roots of human individuality and deprive it of the favoring soil in which alone it can grow.” 

Real progress comes with “the development of liberty under law,” the “two words upon whose true and faithful exposition all training for citizenship must rest.” Liberty “attaches to man as a social and political animal,” contradicting “license just as completely as it contradicts and denies tyranny.” Butler takes “the principles underlying our civil and political liberty” to have been “indelibly written into the Constitution of the United States.” This is inaccurate. The American Founders wrote the institutions of liberty into the Constitution, but the principles of the Constitution are written into its Preamble, which in turn serves as a buckle between the Constitution and the principles of unalienable right enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. [1]

Butler reassumes solid ground in noting the importance of a way of life, what he calls “a habit of will by which the individual instinctively conforms his action in concrete cases to the abstract principles in which he professes belief.” He does not mean that civil society is an ‘organism,’ as Progressives were wont to proclaim. “Society as a whole is nothing more nor less than the sum total of the individuals who compose it.” Such concepts as ‘society’ and ‘the state” have “no separate metaphysical” character. “Individual men and women” compose both society and the state. Therefore, “if men’s standards of action be raised, if their citizenship be real, sincere, and vital, then society is already reformed. Nothing else remains to be done.” To the teachers, Butler recommends Daniel Webster’s December 1820 oration commemorating the English settlement of New England, a “remarkable exposition of the meaning of republican institutions as Americans had framed them.” [2] 

In this early speech, Webster links the American regime to “our Puritan Fathers,” and particularly to their quest for religious freedom. “The principle of toleration” enables men “to look at the sternest despotism in the face.” Their emigration from England “was not a flight of guilt,” an attempt to escape the rule of law in their homeland, “but of virtue.” And while it is true that the empire of Britain was and remains superior to those of pagan Greece and Rome, the colonists became restive under its regime. They were settlers, with no intention of returning to England. They esteemed the principle of the consent of the governed in both government and religion. They resented imperial Britain’s insistence on a monopoly of trade. They upheld property rights, not only in the sense of the right to own private property, protected by the laws, but more broadly in the sense of ‘owning’ the country they had settled. These, Webster contends, inclined them to independence from the beginning. This spirit may be seen in “the nature and constitution of [American] society” today: republicanism, “a free system” of government, with a popular base; property rights, with no primogeniture; the rule of law; and limited military expenditures (unlike France, Webster adds); many small, local governments; bicameralism; free schools; and finally, “morality and religious sentiment” as the foundation of all the rest. Looking ahead, Webster argues, Americans must abolish the slave trade, “this inhuman and disgraceful traffic,” and promote literature, especially a literature that reinforces the features of the American regime he has described. Like Butler, here Webster inclines toward Burkeanism, not so much the ‘abstract’ natural rights of the Declaration of Independence. He prefers a sort of traditionalism that is not inconsistent, however, with natural right, telling his listeners, “I hardly know what should bear with a stronger obligation on a liberal and enlightened mind, than a consciousness of alliance with excellence which is departed.”

With respect to economic freedom, Butler’s exemplar is not Webster but Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton understood that “the independence of the United States was only partially achieved when the political shackles which bound the colonists to King George were broken.” Americans still depended upon Britain for its manufactured goods; “the people must be industrially independent as well, if their nation was to endure.” Although there could be only one national capital, there could be hundreds of industrial capitals, of which Paterson, New Jersey was the first. For his pains, “Hamilton was called alternately a monarchist and a thief, a liar, and a traitor,” but the United States owes its “birth to union” to Washington and Hamilton, even as it owes its “birth to liberty” to Abraham Lincoln. Of America’s “five great builders”—Washington, Hamilton, John Marshall, Webster, and Lincoln—Hamilton “was in some respects the most remarkable.” His “genius was not only amazingly precocious, but it was really genius,” as his reports on public credit and on manufactures illustrate; they “belong to the permanent literature of political science.” “In his forty-seven years, Hamilton lived the life of generations of ordinary men.” Hamilton intended to craft a financial policy that “would bind the Union hard and fast,” an industrial policy “that would make it rich, and, within the bounds of possibility, self-sufficient,” and a foreign policy that would guard “the political and economic independence already provided for.” He has succeeded. And while “no man is indispensable” in the sense that “the universe does not hang on a single [human] personality,” without Hamilton “the nation that stood the strain of the greatest of civil wars,” eventually extending from one ocean to another in prosperity, the nation “that is not afraid of permitting individual citizen to exert their powers to the utmost if only they injure no one of their fellows”—that nation would be “very different without “the labor of his life.” 

Hamilton disproves the historicist evolutionism that underlies Progressivism. This theory, initially derived from “observations on earthworms, on climbing plants, and on brightly colored birds,” has now been applied “blithely to man and his affairs.” Evolutionism claims that the “fittest” species survive—those that best ‘fit’ their environment. When the environment changes, some species become extinct, others flourish. But fitness is not goodness; the fittest are not necessarily the best, inasmuch as fitness “has in it no moral element whatever.” This being so, “moral elements, what we call progress toward an end or ideal, are not found under the operation of the law of natural selection, but have to be discovered elsewhere and added to it.” “You will read the pages of Darwin and of Herbert Spencer in vain for any indication of how the Parthenon was produced, how the Sistine Madonna, how the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, how the Divine Comedy or Hamlet or Faust.” Without the sense that “moral consideration must outweigh the mere blind struggle for existence in human affairs,” nothing will stop “the widespread and ominous revolt of the unfit” from killing off the likes of Iktinos and Callicrates, Raphael, Beethoven, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, and yes, Hamilton. The unmoderated struggle for power that evolutionism describes can only result in the confusion of might and right, the inclination to “abolish” God and Mankind. [3] Not the ever-shifting demi-principles of historicism but the enduring principles of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution can and should continue to guide Americans, even as their economic, social, political, and geopolitical circumstances change.

Notes

1. It is likely that Theodore Roosevelt, running on the ticket of the recently formed Progressive Party, now counted among these men, as well.
2. For further discussion, see “America’s Declaration of Independence” on this website under the category “American Politics.” See also Daniel Webster: “First Settlement of New England, The Works of Daniel Webster. Six volumes. Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1851. Volume I, pp. 1-54.
3. Butler here cites Robert Louis Stevenson’s satirical fable, “The Four Reformers”: “Four reformers met under a bramble bush. They were all agree that the world must be changed. “We must abolish poverty,” said one. “We must abolish marriage,” said the second. “We must abolish God,” said the third. “I wish we could abolish work,” said the fourth. “Do not let us go beyond practical politics,” said the first. “The first thing is to reduce men to a common level.” The first thing,” said the second, “is to give freedom to the sexes.” “The first thing,” said the third, “is to find out how to do it.” “The first step,” said the first, “is to abolish the Bible.” “The first thing,” said the second, “is to abolish the laws.” “The first thing,” said the third, “is to abolish mankind.” The fourth reformer, the one who wants to abolish work, cannot work up the energy to say anything more.

If English John Locke was the philosophic father of the Declaration of Independence, France’s Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu was the philosophic founder of the United States Constitution—America’s first ally in peace, even as French soldiers and sailors served as our first allies in the Revolutionary War.

In his 1714 treatise, The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu posed a question to his contemporaries. Democratic regimes could arise in ancient Greece because the small city-states could assemble their few thousand citizens in one place to make decisions. Since large modern states cannot do that, how can the people be heard? 

He answered: with such institutions as representation and separated balanced powers, modern regimes could become sustainable democratic republics. Seven decades later, Publius would make that argument in The Federalist, defending the Constitution during the struggle for its ratification. America, he wrote, could be a new kind of republic, an “extended” republic, large enough to defend against the powerful monarchic empires surrounding it while still enabling the sovereign people to govern themselves.

But how far could the extended republic extend beyond the original thirteen states? Here, too, Montesquieu had a thought—not a question and answer but a warning. The Roman republic had been an empire. As long as that empire extended no farther than Italy, its central institution, the senate, could rule effectively. “But when it carried its conquests further, when the senate had no direct view of the provinces” Rome sent proconsuls to rule them, men who necessarily held legislative, executive and judicial powers, since they rued foreigners, not Romans. This made them resemble the Turkish despots of the modern world; indeed, Montesquieu calls them “the pashas of the republic.” Thus, by extending its empire the Roman republic built a regime contradiction into itself: “A conquering republic can scarcely extend its government and control the conquered state in accordance with the form of its constitution.” Resenting this tyranny, and especially the heavy taxes it imposed. the “subject nations” came “to regard the loss of liberty in Rome” as the precondition of “the establishment of their own” liberty. First, powerful military ruler in the provinces marched on Rome, ending republicanism and seizing power for themselves; eventually, the subject nations attacked the Roman emperors, ending Roman rule itself. [1]

In the summer of 1787, as the delegates sweltered at the Constitutional Convention, addressing Montesquieu’s question about popular self-government, members of the Continental Congress addressed Montesquieu’s warning about republican empires, framing the Northwest Ordinance, which historian Peter S. Onuf calls “the blueprint for a great American empire of continental dimensions.” How could a republic establish an empire without destroying itself in the long run? How could it secure the natural and civil rights of citizens who took the risk of moving into what was then the wild west, the places we now know as Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin? 

Their answer was, we won’t have a colonial empire like Rome or the British empire that was modeled on Rome. We will not keep the western territories subordinate to the original states, as the British had attempted to do with the American colonies. We will instead prepare them to stand up, as the Northwest Ordinance stipulated, “on an equal footing” with those states in the American Union. The settlers will become citizens enjoying civil equality, including guarantees of religious liberty, representative government the rights of habeas corpus and to jury trials. To these political guarantees we will add commercial ties to the rest of the country, ties that property rights foster. Article IV, section iii of the future Constitution reinforced this: “New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union” and “Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States,” with “nothing in this Constitution” to be “so construed as to Prejudice any Claims of the United States, or of any particular State” now in the Union.

Crucially, Congress demonstrated that it understood what way of life comported with republican citizenship. “Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, Schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” Civic education, pervaded by Biblical morality, had already been established in new England when it still consisted of colonies, and New England was where most of the settlers in the Northwest territories would come from. The Ordinance ensured that they would bring their schooling with them. They wouldn’t be bringing their slaves with them; the Ordinance prohibited that. Slavery wasn’t as important an element of the New England political economy as it was in the Southern states, so that would be no barrier to prosperity in the settlers’ new home.

Enacting the Northwest Ordinance was one thing, implementing it another. The prolongation of federal rule, including control of public lands; the borders between future states (Ohio and Michigan nearly went to war over Toledo), the increasingly vexed matter of slavery, which some settlers wanted to introduce, despite the ban; and even the Ordinance’s authority over the settlers, some of whom claimed that popular sovereignty in the future states overrode Congressional law—all of these occasioned bitter polemics between the territories and Congress, and among the settlers themselves. The first settlers didn’t always help matters. As Onuf remarks, “The West that policy makers imagined—peopled by orderly industrious settlers, connected to the old states by common interests and loyalties and busily contributing to the national wealth and welfare—was nothing like the West that already existed,” a region “infested” by “speculators, squatters, and other adventurers” who aimed at “promoting their private interests, defying state and national authority, and entertaining overtures from foreign powers.” More, north of the Ohio River, “hostile Indians remained a formidable presence.” While the Ordinance guaranteed that “the territories would not have to resort to revolution to vindicate their constitutional rights,” what exactly was the constitutional status of the Ordinance itself? Once Congress had sold federally owned lands to settlers, to what extent were those settlers bound to obey the Ordinance, or were they free to enact laws contradictory to its provisions, so long as they enacted nothing that contradicted the Constitution itself?

Onuf emphasizes Congress’s material interest in developing western lands. It had incurred a substantial war debt, and they wanted to use land sales to pay it. But a willing seller needs willing buyers, and “a few false steps could transform the dream of western development into a nightmare of lawlessness, frontier warfare, and disunion.” Only a sound legal framework consistent with American constitutional principles would bring real settlers into the region, persons who could govern themselves, defend themselves against the still-formidable Indian nations, and establish farms and other businesses which could sustain commercial ties with the other parts of the Union. A subsistence economy, similar to that already in place among the Indians, would not suffice. “Unlike the leaders of the Revolution, proponents of union through development sought to mobilize private interest and enterprise, not self-denial and sacrifice, to bring forth a new order”; one suspects that this was because they weren’t fighting a war.

The Founders themselves disagreed on the matter. Surprisingly, James Madison, who argued forcefully for the United States as a viable “extended republic” in the tenth Federalist—published the same year as the Ordinance was enacted—had maintained, three years earlier, that western migration was a zero-sum game, that it would depopulate the original states, weaken land values, and funnel resources away from “that maritime strength which must be [the states’] only safety in case of war.” Expanding the Union too far would endanger it. James Monroe and Rufus King were equally skeptical. Against such views, Benjamin Rush cited the American “passion for migration,” which, far from diminishing the population, had spurred its increase. Yale College president Ezra Stiles, one of the earliest American students of demography, correctly predicted that Americans would multiply in population without necessarily dividing politically; he expected the population to rise from approximately 3 million in the late 1700s to fifty million in the centennial year of 1876. (He was over-optimistic, but the loss of so many young men in the Civil War, which he had no way of calculating some seventy-five years in advance, would have skewed any estimate; the actual population in 1876 was forty million.) In the end, Congress decided to take the risk.

Their first step was the Land Ordinance of 1785. To organize lands purchased from the Indians, Congress sent surveyors from each state to lay out townships of six square miles each, plots of one square mile (640 acres) within each township to be sold for one dollar per acre. The worry was that the land was so fertile that the settlers would not need to be industrious, preferring to live in “semisavage indolence”—forming regimes incompatible with the United States. The price tag for purchase, however, “would block out poor, lazy squatters,” instead attracting “industrious settlers determined to recoup their investment,” all “clustered in adjacent townships” (rather like Thomas Jefferson’s “ward republics”) which could form viable local markets while sustaining and encouraging habits of self-government. By contrast, squatters (Crèvecoeur described them as “no better than carnivorous animals of a superior rank”) would quarrel with the Indians and “drag everyone else into their disputes” while attacking the surveyors and any civilized folk who dared to enter the region. George Washington, himself a surveyor and purchaser of Ohio lands before the Revolutionary War, shared Crèvecoeur’s distaste for the squatters and exerted his considerable influence to shut them out. With orderly settlement, he wrote, “the gradual extension of our Settlements will as surely cause the Savage [Indian] as the Wolf to retire,” white semi-savages along with them. Simultaneously, as Jefferson hoped, in Onuf’s words, that “rational, systematic settlement” would prove an exercise in civic education, an opportunity to found “enlightened communities” throughout the Northwest. The forerunners of the settlers, the surveyors would act not only “as the eyes and ears of potential purchasers but would help produce accurate surveys that would supply information about tree types and soil fertility as well as potential routes to markets,” the connection between knowledge and land values” being “axiomatic.”

The Land Ordinance was necessary to the population of the Northwest Territories, but insufficient. “Policy makers realized that they could only attract orderly and industrious settlers to the Northwest if they guaranteed law and order—and land titles—from the very beginning of settlement”; they needed to establish “effective territorial government.” That would mean temporary colonial governments in each future state, along with the sale of land rights to men capable of promoting sales and of assisting settlers. The Ohio Company of Associates, founded in Boston in 1786 by four businessmen, met the latter need. Allying with William Duer, secretary of the U.S. Treasury Board, the Company purchased 1.5 million acres and established its anchor settlement in Marietta, Ohio. The Northwest Ordinance met the need for government.

That government consisted of a General Assembly, with representatives from any settlement with a population of 5,000 or more; a government appointed by Congress for a three-year term; a secretary appointed for a four-year term, charged with keeping records, including an accurate copy of all laws, a five-member legislative council, and a three-man court. Congress had final approval of all General Assembly members. In addition to this institutional structure, the Ordinance set down what was effectively a Bill of Rights, those rights including religious freedom, habeas corpus, trial by jury, and representative government—civil rights reflecting the natural rights enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, rights governments should secure, according to the Declaration. With the right to representation came the duty to pay taxes as “apportioned on them by Congress,” in the same proportion “as in the original States.”

“This purpose, those ruling offices, and those rulers all contributed to the final regime element necessary” to prepare the territories “for their admission to a share in the federal Councils on an equal footing with the original States: a way of life consistent with republicanism. Hence the Third Article: “Religion, Morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, Schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” The complementary ‘foreign policy’ of the Territory would be that “the utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians, their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and in their property, rights and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress; but laws founded in justice and humanity shall from time to time be made, for preventing wrongs being done to them, and for preserving peace and friendship with them.” As for slavery, “There shall be neither Slavery nor involuntary Servitude in the said territory otherwise than in the punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,” although slave fugitives from other areas “may be lawfully reclaimed” and returned to their ‘owners.’

There was a caveat, when it came to statehood. The segments of the Northwest Territory that were expected to become states needed to meet a population threshold of 60,000, but even after statehood as achieved, remaining federal lands were still to be controlled by Congress and could not be taxed by the states. Ohio was the first to reach the required population. Its Congressionally appointed governor, Arthur St. Clair, a member of the Federalist Party, saw that most of the settlers were Democratic Republicans; his attempts to delay statehood (and thus to delay the seating of what would surely be two additional Democratic U. S. senators), rankled the Jeffersonian Democrats, fervent advocates of states’ rights eager to increase their Congressional majority. When Congress passed an enabling act calling for a state constitutional convention and prescribing terms for the new state’s admission, including a condition that disallowed Ohio from taxing federal lands for five years after they were sold to private individuals. Doubtless in a mood of irony, the Federalists could now accuse the states’-rights Democrats of violating the state’s rights. “What were the constitutional limits off national authority in the territories?”

“In characteristically blunt fashion,” Governor St. Clair described Ohioans as “a multitude of indigent and ignorant people” who were “ill qualified to form a constitution and government for themselves.” By leaving their home states and settling in the Ohio territory, they had “ceased to be citizens of the United States and became their subjects”—and therefore in effect his subjects. This reminded Ohio settlers of the condition of all Americans under the British Crown. However, as Onuf recalls, “the Atlantic states had grown powerful and virtue through protracted colonial apprenticeships”; further, for the moment, Ohio needed the rule of law, which only the federal government could provide. St. Clair wanted Ohio’s protracted apprenticeship to be protracted as long as possible. Needless to say, President Jefferson did not.

Democrats “chose not to deal systematically with the constitutional questions raised by their Federalist opponents,” preferring to rely on their majorities in Congress and in Ohio itself. Such political power led some of the other territories to delay statehood altogether, preferring to allow federal tax revenues to finance their governments—for which, under statehood, they would need to pay themselves.

This comfortable muddle did not address another controversy, the question of states’ boundaries. The Ordinance described the boundaries of the first three states to be formed, the ones in the southern section of the Territory: Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. But Congress didn’t decide whether the northern section would have one state or two, and what their borders would be. For example, in 1787, no one knew “the precise location of Lake Michigan.” More broadly, “the key question was whether or not the Ordinance controlled Congress as well as the people of the Northwest as they set about forming their new states.” After all, the Ordinance was just that—an ordinance passed by Congress. It predated the ratification of the U. S. Constitution, but it could not be said to enjoy the same status. How far, then, did federal control over the states’ boundaries extend, when it came to settling boundary disputes between the southern states and, for example, Michigan, which was still a territory? “The framers of the Ordinance wanted it both ways. They wanted to fix boundaries while retaining the flexibility to provide for unforeseeable contingencies. But these goals could be contradictory.”

For Ohio and Michigan, the border controversy became acute in the mid-1830s. Ohioans wanted Toledo to be part of their state. It was expected to be the terminus of the Wabash and Erie Canal, Ohio’s only access point to Lake Erie. But Michiganders also wanted Toledo. The territorial governor of Michigan and the state governor of Ohio sent troops into the area. President Jackson intervened, sending negotiators, who staved off military conflict. This gave Ohio the time to leverage the power of their Congressional delegation, an option a mere territory could not exercise. “Ohio could also count on cooperation from Indiana and Illinois delegates concerned about the implications of Michigan’s claims for their own boundaries.” This coalition made Michigan’s accession to the Ohio claims a precondition for Michigan statehood. Further, Michiganders had no legal recourse, since as a territory they had no standing before the United States Supreme Court. They could only fall back on the dubious argument that the Ordinance should be equivalent to the Constitution as the “unchangeable and fundamental law” of the territories. Ohioans countered that Congress had reviewed the Ohio state constitution prior to admitting the territory into the Union, and that constitution set the northern border to encompass Toledo. Needless to say, the Congressional delegates from the Ohio-Indiana-Illinois bloc concurred. This argument, and this coalition, enabled Ohioans to get the border they wanted without recourse to any claim that they were “nullifying” the authority of the federal government. Congress somewhat lamely compensated Michigan for its defeat by awarding it what is now known as the “Upper Peninsula”—cold comfort, in both the political and climatic sense. As one Michigan newspaper editor put it, we have given up the valuable southern boundary for a land “fit only for the habitation of white bears, frogs, and tortoises.” Fortunately, Michiganders were sensible folk, reasoning that “the many advantages of statehood outweighed the loss of a few townships.” 

Although the Northwest Ordinance lost its real-world authority to Congress and to the states, it endured as “eloquent testimony to the nearly universal support for the constitutional ideal that had guided the American territorial system since its founding,” including the rightful movement of a United States territory to statehood and the Constitutional rights citizens would enjoy once their territories became states, with the recognition that slavery was an institution unfit for inclusion in any of the states formed from the original Northwest Territory. Michigan achieved statehood in 1837, Wisconsin in 1848, as slave-free states. 

Nonetheless, as slavery became the central political dispute in the United States, it became a topic of dispute even within the five Territory states. The anti-slavery clause itself had been added to the Ordinance at the proverbial last minute, by Massachusetts delegate Nathan Dane, who used language nearly identical to that proposed by Rufus King, in his failed attempt to insert such language in the 1785 Land Ordinance. There was no opposition from southern Congressmen, “the overwhelming majority in Congress”; interested entirely in linking the future states to their states by trade, they “unanimously voted to prohibit slavery in the Northwest.” Southerners also thought geopolitically, expecting the settlers “to provide a strategic buffer for the extended, exposed Kentucky frontier,” then threatened by Indians and the remaining British forts. 

The problem arose later on. Although the confederation of Indian nations and tribes organized by the Shawnee chief, Tecumseh, collapsed with his death during the War of 1812, it did retard American settlement in the intervening years. Could the Northwest compete with other territories without slavery? In Ohio, moral opposition prevailed, although one prominent politician, John C. Macan, did anticipate the ‘popular sovereignty’ arguments of future Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas. Even then, southern Illinois favored the repeal of the slavery exclusion clause; that part of the state would provide much of the support for Douglas’s future campaigns. Both southern Illinois and Indiana were settled in large measure by persons from the slave states; advocates for slave importation argued that “the Ordinance’s authority was contingent, not perpetual,” depending upon “the present will of the contracting parties.” “When the new states drafted their own constitutions, the United States could no longer claim authority under the ordinance to insist on the compacts without degrading the new states to a level of inequality.” These claims went nowhere in the courts, so in 1805, pro-slavers in Indiana, including territorial governor and future U. S. president William Henry Harrison, re-labeled slaves as “servants,” passing a state law titled “An Act concerning the introduction of Negroes and Mulattoes into this Territory.” Only the influx of settlers from free states undermined the Harrisonians and reversed their policy; arguing (as Gouverneur Morris and James Madison had done, a generation earlier) that slavery was antithetical both to natural justice and republicanism, anti-slavery Indianans repealed the Act in 1810. 

In 1820s Illinois, “the slavery question emerged full-blown” in a struggle over whether to call a new state constitutional convention. Governor Edward Coles was anti-slavery but the pro-slavers, emboldened by Missouri’s defiance of Congress in refusing to expunge a clause in its constitution that prohibited the immigration of free blacks, pressed the ‘popular sovereignty’ argument with renewed intensity. While anti-slavery advocates cited the Northwest Ordinance as “a source of moral obligation” that “epitomized the wisdom and foresight of the Founding Fathers”—a “kind of higher law, a guide to right action”—the pro-slavery side appealed to frustration over the relatively slow rate of settlement in the Ordinance territories, in comparison to Kentucky and Tennessee, which had been admitted to the Union a generation earlier. More, “hard times in the aftermath of the 1819 crash emphasized the need for new men, new money, and new crops.” Neither side attempted to ascribe constitutional status to the Ordinance. Nonetheless, anti-slavery citizens won the day, although the arguments on both sides would be reprised thirty years later by Senator Douglas and Mr. Lincoln—the latter with considerably more logical coherence than his predecessors had mustered, basing his claim on deduction from the first principles of the Declaration of Independence. For their part, pro-slavers found their most important ally in U. S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, who not only affirmed that the Ordinance had no Constitutional status in Strader v. Graham (1850) but eventually (and infamously) denied that the Declaration principles had any validity at all. 

As we know, the matter proved too contentious for peaceful resolution.

Note

1. Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws, Part II, Book 11, Chapter 19.

Known in antiquity as Temasek, then ruled by a series of dynasties, renamed Singapora or “Lion City” in the fourteenth century, Singapore has long enjoyed the status of a crucial trading hub in Southeast Asia, given its location along the Strait of Malacca to the east and the Strait of Singapore to the west, not far from the South China Sea. The British used it as an entrepot beginning in 1819, formally adding it to its empire some five decades later. It achieved independence from Britain and federated with Malaysia in 1963, during the last great wave of European decolonization, but the federation was short-lived, ending with a declaration of sovereignty in 1965. Lee Kuan Yew was instrumental in its struggle for decolonization, sovereignty, and in the founding of its regime, which he served as prime minister beginning prior to independence in 1959 until 1990 as the head of the People’s Action Party, the dominant force in Singaporean politics to this day. Singapore’s population is small—6.11 million, 3.66 million of them citizens, most of the remainder permanent residents—but its geopolitical and geo-economic importance far outweighs its physical size. It retains its traditional commercial and financial character while being very far from being defenseless, militarily. 

Lee Kuan Yew was a man who insisted on the need for strength, personal and political. Educated in the law at Cambridge University, which he attended as a scholarship student, he esteemed the rule of law without supposing that it suffices in national or international politics. Indeed, he could sound quite Hobbesian: “Human beings, regrettable though it may be, are inherently vicious and have to be restrained from their viciousness.” As early as 1958, he told his countrymen that humankind “may have conquered space, but we have not learned to conquer our own primeval instincts and emotions that were necessary for our survival in the Stone Age, not in the space age.” He felt sorry for Indian prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, another British-educated founder-statesman, who “faced the agony of disillusionment in his basic, fundamental belief,” as a close ally of Gandhi—a humanitarian if not a pacifist, as his mentor had been. “In fact, power politics in Asia is as old as the first tribes that emerged.” And although “Confucian theory” (Lee was raised in a Chinese Confucian household) claims that humanity “can be improved,” “I am not sure it can be, but it can be trained, it can be disciplined.” He concurs with Friedrich von Hayek, who jabs at “the unwisdom of powerful intellects” like that of the kindly democratic socialist, Albert Einstein, men who believe “that a powerful brain can devise a better system and bring about more ‘social justice’ than what historical evolution, or economic Darwinism, has been able to work out over the centuries.” It may be that widespread political democracy will emerge from many “different paths,” and it is very likely that free markets will emerge in Asia, but “social Darwinism,” competition, will determine the outcome. In the modern world, “the American principle,” individual rights, has prevailed over much of the world, but in Asia, “society takes priority over the interests of the individual.” In that way, if not in its reformist optimism, Confucian theory meets the Hobbesian-Darwinian standard.

Otherwise, “My life is not guided by philosophy or theories”; “I am not guided by…Plato, Aristotle, Socrates.” “Instead, I ask: what will make this work?” “Work” in the sense of whether or not a given action “bring[s] benefits to the people.” “Benefits” suggests some notion of what is good, but Mr. Lee preferred to leave the definition of the good to others. And this is understandable, for two reasons. He was a political man, not a philosopher or a prophet; and he lived in a century riddled with ideologies, ideologues, and vicious ideological ‘projects.’ Why get entangled with all that, a practical man might wonder. He did admire certain virtues. When asked which “leaders” he admired, he cited de Gaulle, Deng Xiaoping, and Churchill. He admired de Gaulle for his courage, Churchill for his strength of will, “verve and determination not to yield to the Germans.” It might be remarked that de Gaulle was an anti-colonialist, like Mr. Lee, and Churchill, though an imperialist through and through, makes the list for his resistance to much worse imperialists; after all, British imperialism brought the rule of law to Singapore and Mr. Lee to Cambridge, where he studied it. As for the central figure, Deng, “he changed China from a broken-backed state,” devastated by the mass purges of Mao Zedong, the ideologue-tyrant, a state “which would have imploded like the Soviet Union, into what it is today” (in 2011), “on the way to becoming the world’s largest economy.” He did this in two ways: he “opened up China to the world in 1978” [1]; and he threatened to shoot 200,000 students who protested the regime in 1989, “because” (as Mr. Lee paraphrases him), “the alternative is China in chaos for another 100 years” [2].

The editors of this collection are interested primarily in Mr. Lee’s thoughts on the long-developing rivalry between Communist China and the United States. Many of the passages are taken from his 2011 book, Hard Truths to Keep Singapore Going, which he wrote after his retirement as advice to the rising generations. They should be assessed in accordance with the circumstances he had observed up to that time. In subsequent years, some of those circumstances have changed.

In Mr. Lee’s estimation, China intends to displace the United States as the principal world power, and “this reawakened sense of destiny is an overpowering force.” At the beginning of modernity, Chinese technological development stagnated due to “arrogance and complacency,” seen in its “refusal to learn from the West.” As late as the 1790s, the emperor dismissed British overtures as offering nothing worth having to China. “The price China paid for this arrogance was 200 years of decline and decay, while Europe and America forged ahead.” And although the Chinese Communist regime has fully accepted modernization (under the rubric of a modern ideology), it still “wants to be China and accepted as such, not as an honorary member of the West.” 

As a firm anti-Communist, Mr. Lee asks, “Will an industrialized and strong China be as benign to Southeast Asia as the United States has been since 1945?” He inclines to doubt it. The countries in that region generally are “uneasy that China may want to resume the imperial status it had in earlier centuries and have misgivings about being treated as vassal states having to send tribute to China as they used to in past centuries,” despite Chinese assurances that they “are not a hegemon.” After all, “when we do something they do not like, they say you have made 1.3 billion people unhappy,” so “please know your place.” Crucially, “the Chinese are not stupid,” as were the Germans and the Japanese in the late 1930s, when they challenged the “existing order” in the world directly. The Chinese prefer to counter the powerful American military with “asymmetrical means,” having “calculated that they need 30 to 40, maybe 50 years of peace and quiet to catch up, build up their system, change it from the communist system to the market system,” and avoid the Russian mistake of putting too much into military spending, too little into civilian technology. “I believe the Chinese leadership has learnt that if you compete with America in armaments, you will lose,” he conjectures in 2005. “So, avoid it, keep your head down, and smile, for 40 or 50 years.” It is possible that they may miscalculate. “Somewhere down this road, a generation may believe they have come of age, before they have.”

As for its neighbors, “China’s leaders want to convey the impression that China’s rise is inevitable and that countries will need to decide if they want to be China’s friend or foe when it ‘arrives.'” In more concrete terms, “China is sucking the Southeast Asia countries into its economic system because of its vast market and growing purchasing power,” a process that will, he predicts, eventually capture Japan and South Korea, as well. China “just absorbs countries without having to use force.” Had the United States established free trade with Southeast Asia in the late 1970s or 1980s, this could have been prevented, as the links to the American economy would now (in 2011) be strong enough to prevent this. As things stand, “China’s growing economic sway will be very difficult to fight.” It does face obstacles, however. China lacks the rule of law. The rule of law spurs economic development by making business conditions fundamentally predictable, fostering the trust needed to engage in commerce. Unlike the United States (and Singapore), China does not welcome “talented immigrants.” And even if it did, Mandarin is hard to learn. Singapore has no such problem, having adopted English as its “dominant language.” Still another obstacle is what Mr. Lee politely calls Chinese “culture,” by which he means its regime, which “does not permit a free exchange and contest of ideas” and consequently fails to make “technological breakthroughs.” Worse still is “the corrosive effect of graft and the revulsion that it evokes in people,” another consequence of “the wrong systems that they have installed, modeling themselves upon the Soviet system in Stalin’s time.” With technological advances and urbanization, a “well-informed” and self-organizing people “cannot” be governed “in the way [they] are governing them now.” But “if they change in a pragmatic way, as they have been doing, keeping tight security control and not allowing riots and not allowing rebellions and, at the same time, easing up” on centralized control in other respects, “it is holdable.” 

Regime change is out of the question. “China is not going to become a liberal democracy; if it did, it would collapse. Of that, I am quite sure, and the Chinese intelligentsia also understand that.” Local governments might safely democratize but not the government in Beijing. “To achieve the modernization of China, her Communist leaders are prepared to try all and every method, except for democracy with one person and one vote in a multi-party system.” They are, after all, Communists, confident that their regime is right. They are also Chinese, knowing their country’s history, with its fluctuations between peace under a more or less despotic centralized government and civil war between provincial warlords and the emperor—a condition that prevailed less than a hundred years ago, which the existence of Taiwan remains a living reminder. “To ask China to become a democracy, when in it 5,000 years of recorded history it never counted heads,” when “all rulers ruled by right of being the emperor, and if you disagree, you chop off heads, not count heads”—well, what are you thinking? 

But perhaps not so many heads will roll as under Mao. “In this world of instant communication and satellites, you cannot have barbaric behavior and say it is your internal problem.” People will talk. The Chinese Communists cannot “be respected in the world community” if they “behave in a barbaric fashion to their own people.” They need not so much a thoroughgoing regime change as the rule of law, a partial regime change. If they do that, their chances of regime failure are only “one in five.”

As for America, it is a “virtual” empire today and will remain so for some time. Military conflicts between “great nations” have become too dangerous (“you will destroy each other”) but economic and technological competition will continue. (Oddly, since Mr. Lee saw both the Korean and Vietnam wars, he does not mention proxy wars, wars between allies of the great nations.) The American regime is well designed for such competition, with its “can-do approach to life,” a mindset that expects that “everything can be broken up, analyzed, and redefined,” if well-funded and energetically pursued. “They have the superior system.” Americans are also entrepreneurs, and although many try and fail, many succeed, eventually. “This is the spirit that generates a dynamic economy.” The American “frontier spirit” enabled them to “enter into an empty continent,” “kill[ing] the Red Indians” and seizing “the land and the buffaloes.” As of the beginning of the millennium, “the U.S. is the only superpower because of its advances in science and technology and their contribution to its economic and military might.” It is also “the most benign of all the great powers, certainly less heavy-handed than any emerging great power.” 

Mr. Lee entertains some suspicions about America’s regime, its “popular democracy.” “To win votes you have to give more and more,” falling farther and farther into debt. “There is a tendency to procrastinate, to postpone unpopular policies in order to win elections,” avoid giving “a hard dose of medicine to their people.” America needs “leaders who are prepared to lead and know what is good for America and do it, even if they lose their reelection.” As a result, not only has the debt increased but the school system has declined, producing fewer “workers who are able to compete internationally.” As in some respects still a son of Britain, Mr. Lee prefers parliamentary republics to popularly elected executives because in a parliamentary system the prime minister is much better known to both the professional politicians and the people. In America, a man can announce, “My name is Jimmy Carter, I am a peanut farmer, I am running for president” and “the next thing you know, he was the president!” Could a Churchill, a Roosevelt, a de Gaulle emerge from such a system, with its media-manipulating image-makers? “Contrary to what American political commentators say, I do not believe that democracy necessarily leads to development.” The Philippines has the American system, and it lags behind Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Even in the United States the regime “has not functioned” since “the Vietnam War and the Great Society.” Since then, America has adopted multiculturalism. But while immigration is indispensable to economic progress so long as the immigrants are fully integrated into the regime’s way of life, “multiculturalism will destroy America.” “So, the question is, do you make the Hispanics Anglo-Saxons in culture or do they make you more Latin American in culture? That is the real test.” That is, it is not only the ruling offices, the ruling institutions, that strengthen or weaken a country, it is also the politeuma, the ruling persons. “If a people have lost faith completely in their democratic institutions because they cannot find people of caliber to run them, however good that system, it perishes” because “ultimately, it is the people who run the system who make it come to life”—to put it bluntly, “the elite.” Elites are formed in the school system. America’s doesn’t work well. 

How, then, will U.S-China relations play out? “The U.S. must not let its preoccupation with the Middle East—Iraq, Iran, the Israelis, and oil—allow others, especially China, to overtake its interests in South Asia,” where it needs to remain “the superior power.” Unlike the Americans, “the Chinese are not distracted.” 

Oddly, and contradictorily, Mr. Lee would sometimes claim that China “is not interested in changing the world,” and “there is no irreconcilable ideological conflict” between the two countries, given China’s recent but “enthusiastic” embrace of free markets. It is likely that he means that China isn’t interested in changing the regimes of other countries (so much as dominating them). However, China’s supposed embrace of free markets includes theft of intellectual property and, as Mr. Lee himself concedes, a very shaky guarantee of property rights for foreign investors and for the Chinese themselves. Adam Smith need not apply, so far as the Chinese are concerned. More reasonably, as of 1997, he judged “the danger of a military conflict” between the two countries to be “low” for “the next few decades,” and he was right, although it isn’t clear how long that danger will stay off the table, as of the year 2026. “The U.S. cannot stop China’s rise,” and “no other country has ever been big enough” to challenge Americans to such a degree as China will be able to do. “The world must find a new balance” by the 2040s or 2050s. 

His policy advice is perplexing. As late as 2011, he recommended that the United States not “treat China as an enemy from the outset,” as that will spur the Communists “to develop a counterstrategy to demolish the U.S. in the Asia-Pacific,” a strategy “it is already discussing.” To press China on human rights, to threaten it with the loss of most-favored-nation status in trade, to “subordinate considerations of China-U.S. relation to an American domestic agenda,” will risk “turning China into a long-term adversary of the U.S.” Mr. Lee continued to cling to the hope that liberalization of commerce would lead to liberalization of China (as distinguished from its democratization, which won’t happen): “The best way to quicken the pace and direction of political change in China is to increase her trade and investment links with the world,” since “then her prosperity will depend increasingly on the compatibility of her economic system with those of the major trading nations” and its “wide-ranging contacts will influence and modify her cultural values and moral standards.” This was the policy of some American strategists during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and it didn’t work then. Why would it work with China?

“China has to be persuaded that the U.S. does not want to break up China before it is more willing to discuss questions of world security and stability.” But if China wants world security and stability on its own terms, and it does, what really is there to discuss? Has the U.S. made Communist China into an “unnecessary adversary,” or has the CCP always understood itself as a necessary adversary of the American regime? Mr. Lee supposed that “America’s greatest influence on China” would be its policy of “playing host to the thousands of students who come from China each year,” who will become “powerful agents of change in China.” As it has happened, it is likely that those students have been agents of China in the U.S. “It is vital that the younger generation of Chinese, who have only lived during a period of peace and growth in China and have no experience of China’s tumultuous past, are made aware of the mistakes China made as a result of hubris and excesses in ideology.” Regrettably, neither the Chinese nor the American educational system is likely to teach any such lessons.

No consideration of the geopolitics of Southeast Asia would be adequate without an account of India and of Islam—specifically, of Islamist radicalism. On India, Mr. Lee is unsparing: “India is not a real country.” It consists of 32 nations, 330 dialects. Its poor infrastructure further impedes political and economic coherence, and its economic strength suffers from the caste system (lack of social mobility saps economic incentive) and from the top-heavy bureaucracy which its founders established as a means of centralizing the government, of holding things together. Most Indian bureaucrats want to regulate, not facilitate business because they have “not yet accepted that it is not a sin to make profits and become rich.” This notwithstanding, “India’s private sector is superior to China’s” because it does “follow international rules of corporate governance,” making foreign investments safer, even if they are over-regulated. Its capital markets are “transparent and functioning” and respectable profits are permitted—again, unlike China. The rule of law prevails. “But it will have to educate its people better, or else the opportunity will turn into a burden.” And it will need to remove more of the vestiges of socialism, which its founders implemented, “mesmerized by the supposedly rapid growth and industrialization of the Soviet Union” and by the recommendations of Left-leaning British economists of the day, notably Keynes.

India is no friend of China and will not likely become one. Unlike the Communist regime, “India is a democracy in which numerous political forces are constantly at work, making for an internal system of checks and balances.” As such, it “does not pose such a challenge to international order as China” and therefore attracts more powerful allies: the United States, the European Union, and Japan. India will not have anything like China’s economic power, but it is likely to have a bigger population by mid-century, with “some very able people at the top.” “India’s system of democracy and rule of law gives it a long-term advantage over China, although in the early phases, China has the advantage of faster implementation of its reforms.” Militarily, the flashpoint between the countries is the Indian Ocean, where Chinese ships carry oil from the Middle East and other raw materials from Africa. “That is where the Indians are a force,” a force the Chinese is countering by establishing ports in Pakistan, India’s longtime enemy, and Myanmar. Since “the contest between the U.S. and China will be in the Pacific and the Indian Ocean…if the Indians are on the American side, the Americans will have a great advantage.” 

In these speeches and interviews, mostly from the first decade of the century, Mr. Lee understandably thinks about radical Islamism as a Sunni Muslim phenomenon, with Iraq as the centerpiece. He also regards it as “the big divide” in the world, superseding the rift between the Communist oligarchies and the democratic/commercial republics. There are now two major conflicts: Muslim terrorists against “the U.S., Israel, and their supporters”; and “militant Islam” against “non-militant and modernist Islam.” These conflicts are unprecedented because “we have a group of people willing to destroy themselves to inflict damage on others”—al Qaeda. “The world is at risk of these terrorists acquiring weapons of mass destruction.” Mr. Lee does not expect them to succeed because “they do not have the technology and the organization to overwhelm any government.” 

He regards Iraq as a key test. “The costs of leaving Iraq unstable would be high.” It has served as “a check on Iran” for many years, and if that check is removed or seriously weakened, the consequences will be bad. A civil war in Iraq would draw in Iran but also the Sunni Muslim countries whose rulers fear Shi’a Muslim Iran. On the other side of Iran, “a Taliban victory in Afghanistan or Pakistan would reverberate throughout the Muslim world” because radical Sunni Islamists “would be seen to have defeated modernity twice: first the Soviet Union, then the United States.” Some sort of conflict will continue because “only Muslims can win this struggle,” with assistance from “strong, developed countries,” including those of NATO. “Muslims must counter the terrorist ideology that is based on a perverted interpretation of Islam.” Ominously, “they are ducking the issue and allowing the extremists to hijack not just Islam, but the whole of the Muslim community.” The Americans, who are not ducking the issue, “make the mistake of seeking largely a military solution.” The terrorists are only the “worker bees”; “the queen bees are the preachers,” all of them would-be martyrs. Non-Muslims can’t do much with them.

By 2012, Mr. Lee was also mindful of the Iranian ‘republic,’ less as a backer of Shi’a terrorists than as a potential possessor of nuclear weapons. “Iran’s nuclear program is the challenge that the world is most likely to bungle. China and Russia are unlikely to enforce UN sanctions, and if Iran feels like they will continue to enforce them, it will be encouraged to continue building a bomb,” which will force Israel “to decide, whether with or without U.S. support, whether to try and destroy Iran’s hardened underground shelters.” An Iranian nuclear arsenal will provoke Saudi Arabia to buy nuclear weapons from Pakistan, Egypt “will buy the bomb from someone, and then you have a nuclearized Middle East,” making it “only a matter of time before there is a nuclear explosion in the region.”

What about Russia? It has “lost its hold on energy resources in the Caucasus and Kazakhstan”; its economy still doesn’t produce much beyond energy and natural-resources exports; its population is declining. “Vladimir Putin’s challenge is to give Russians a hopeful outlook for the future: stop drinking, work hard, build good families, and have more children.” Its far western territories, underpopulated beyond saving, will fall to the Chinese.

Having presented Mr. Lee’s thoughts on the major geopolitical powers, the editors end with sections devoted to the more general topics of economic growth and democratization. “Most failures in the third world were the result of the leaders of the immediate post-independence period, the 1960s to the 1980s, abiding by the theory then prevailing that socialism and state enterprises would hasten development,” a theory “demolished as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union.” The American theory, that democracy and economic growth need one another, is also questionable. “Demography, not democracy, will be the most critical factor for security and growth in the 21st century,” with orderly but not “open” immigration being key to sustaining economies once they have achieved a certain level of prosperity. “Much more active government involvement in encouraging or discouraging procreation may be necessary,” the choice depending upon the quantity and quality of immigrants permitted in a given country. Not just anybody should be admitted to one’s country. America “needs to top up with talent,” and so does Singapore. Israel and the port city of Shanghai both hold populations that are smart and ambitious. “The scholar is still the greatest factor in economic progress” if he eschews study of “the great books, classical texts, and poetry,” focusing instead on “capturing and discovering new knowledge, applying himself in research and development, management and marketing, banking and finance, and the myriad of new subject that need to be mastered,” becoming “inventors, innovators, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs.” Japan got it right, beginning in the last decades of the nineteenth century, “successfully adopt[ing] Western science and technology because they were supple and pragmatic about their language and culture, first from the Germans and the British, then from the Americans after World War II.

Even a self-styled pragmatist needs some standard, else what good do the pragma serve? In the early 1960s, Mr. Lee proposed a clever emendation to Marx’s famous definition of justice, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” From each according to his or her ability, to be sure, but to each “according to his or worth and contribution to society.” This avoids both modern-Western individualism while also avoiding socialist egalitarianism. “It is only when people are encouraged to give their best that society progresses.” But who shall determine what one’s worth or contribution to society is? The government, of course. “A good government is expected not only to carry on and maintain standards. It is expected to raise them.” It raises them, however, on the basis of what the individual can do, his “self-reliance,” not on the basis of government assistance, except for the rule of law. “No society has existed in history where all people were equal and obtained equal rewards,” which would mean that “the lazy and incompetent were paid as much as the industrious and the intelligent,” resulting in “all the good people giving as little of themselves so as not to give more than their weaker brethren.” The right regime is “a form of government that will be comfortable because it meets our needs, is not oppressive, and maximizes our opportunities.” It rests on Confucian principles. The human type fostered by those principles is the junzi, the “gentleman”—one who “does not do evil,” “tries to do good,” exhibits loyalty to his parents and his wife, “brings up his children well, treats his friends properly” and, under the old Chinese regime, “is a good, loyal citizen of his emperor” or, perhaps, in modern Singapore, his prime minister. Modernized, these principles should include three intellectual virtues: “powers of analysis; logical grasp of the facts; and concentration on the basic point, extracting the principles.” Along with these intellectual virtues, “a sense of imagination” will enable you to see possibilities that are realizable but not yet realized. Such a realistic imagination will guard citizens from becoming “pedestrian, plebeian” failures.

For its part, “society should make it worth people’s while to give their best to the country.” In China and other Marxist-Leninist countries, the government so dominates and exploits the people that it retards initiative. In America and other ‘individualist’ countries, the government is too quick to serve the people and their immediate demands. Mr. Lee wanted Singapore to hit the Confucian ‘Golden Mean.’

Notes

1. This was Deng’s “Reform and Opening Up” policy, its core being the modernization of agriculture, industry, the military, and scientific-technological research—the “Four Modernizations” aimed at achieving xiaoking, translated somewhat cumbersomely as “moderately prosperous society.”
2. Mr. Lee rightly identifies this as a statement attributed to Deng. It is consistent with an opinion shared by both men, that some peoples are not ready for self-government along republican lines, although Mr. Lee does not share the Marxist-Leninist utopian claim that the dictatorship of the proletariat will transform human nature and lead to stateless self-government, all in accord with the inevitable unfolding of a historical-materialist dialectic. That is, a tough ruler will order mass killings if they are necessary to preserve civil-social order but not as a stage toward some illusory ‘communism.’ There seems to be no firm proof that Deng actually pronounced this mot, although it is far from inconsistent with his line of thought and therefore is not lacking in plausibility. In the event, Deng did have several thousand persons killed or wounded.

For many years, Professor James Miller of the New School for Social Research taught a course titled “Democracy and Its Discontents,” a play on Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. Chantal Delsol, who teaches philosophy at the University of Marne-la-Vallée, wants to understand the distinctively French way of experiencing discontent in modern democracy—torment amidst prosperity. That democratic republicanism, and that prosperity, seemed triumphant in what the French retrospectively call the “Thirty Glorious Years,” 1945-1975, the decades roughly and not accidentally coinciding with the political career of Charles de Gaulle, statesman of la grandeur. Since then, however, France has been “a depressed country,” despite the fact that “it is so good to live in France,” with its ample social expenditures, its security against foreign attack (nearly unprecedented in its history), its “time-honored and moving monuments” untouched by iconoclastic (im)moralists, and its natural beauty. This paradoxical “malaise” of the French comes from a national “propensity to expect perfection here below—the habit of the ideologue.” Unfortunately, those who expect perfection take good fortune as bad. Nothing seems grand to them.

Undoubtedly so, and de Gaulle himself sharply distinguished La France from les françaises. Democratization among the European nations has led if not simply to globalization at least to Europeanization, to the sentiment that we Europeans are “without relations to any particular group,” residents of countries without borders. Delsol has her doubts about this. “On the contrary,” she insists, “each of us is tied to a homeland, one that he likes with his heart and not just with his mind,” “a particular culture, a history, and a geography.” And this particularity is in fact general, indeed natural—that is, “we humans are made in such a way that the atmosphere of our existence conditions that existence itself.” This gives the homeland a moral claim upon the individuals who live there, but if, simultaneously, “the individual man is dignified,” indeed “sacred according to our beliefs” (rooted in Christianity, even if ‘post-Christian’), ‘we moderns’ hesitate to sacrifice individuals for the sake of the homeland’s survival in freedom—this, very much in contrast with ‘the ancients.’ And even old Cicero saw what Lincoln saw: that the homeland can last only “as long as successive individuals would like it to and would like to protect it.” Do the French still want to sustain France, now that France “finds itself given a ranking” among the world’s homelands “that is now mediocre and ordinary”? Despite de Gaulle’s best efforts, “no one can doubt” “this diminution” any longer. And even grandeur itself “does not get good press” these days, in the democratized and ever-democratizing West. “In our epoch of gentleness and of victimization, one no longer boasts about power, even if it is in the past.” 

Beyond power, there are regimes. “France identifies with its republican state like Russia identifies with its empire or the United States identifies with its freedom.” But in today’s France, “the republican state is losing its substance and is beginning to look like the other neighboring states.” The France that once boasted of being “the eldest daughter of the church” in Europe, recalling the baptism of King Clovis in 496, still “boasts of being the eldest daughter of the revolution,” recalling the French Revolution, which “elevated the Rights of Man into universal principles” in the course of abolishing both the remnants of feudal hierarchy and the reigning statist monarchy. But what is ‘exceptionalism’ in a democratized world in which such a claim spurs only resentment and scorn?

Delsol observes that the Americans were the ones who founded not only a federal republic, a government representing both its constituent states and its people as a whole, but the first modern democracy. She distinguishes republicanism from democracy, in a rather different way than James Madison famously did in the tenth Federalist. Madison defined democracy as a political regime in which the many who are poor (if independent) rule directly, assembling together in one place to do so, whereas republicanism is a regime in which the people elect representatives who assemble in one place to govern the people who elected them. Delsol calls democracy “an anthropology” that “supposes, rightly or wrongly, that all the adults in the city are capable of thinking and expressing the common good”; a republic is “an ideal of communion, which is quite a different thing.” Republics were “invented in ancient, holistic societies”; they are consistent with the “communal and consolidated form” of such societies; therefore, they stand in tension with “modern individualism.” In modernity, republicanism needed to be ‘reinvented.’ French republicanism was founded with the famous slogan, ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’: individual liberty, equality of individuals, and the attempt to establish something like ancient communitarianism in a large, centralized state. “The French, Jacobin republican ideal would have it that the welfare state gives to each person what each needs,” as if France were one big family. This means distribution of material goods but also “spiritual” bonds, shared “communal beliefs.” In modernity as in antiquity, when those bonds weaken, “barbarity appears,” as it did with the Romans, who called it negligentia, “neg-ligence,” “the indifference about, and the disappropriation of bonds,” the spiritual ligatures of civil society. These ligatures can only weaken as the civil and political society expands its territory and population; “one cannot be a friend to all of humanity.” Arguing along the lines drawn two centuries ago by Benjamin Constant, she observes that “the ancients were able to speak of a ‘civic friendship’ only because of the small size of cities, which still were able to appear as large families.” Large modern states attempt to replace civic friendship with compassion, “which has no limits.” But that is not the same thing. “Civic friendship is a virtue, one that consists in having the common good come before one’s own particular interest,” whereas compassion is a sentiment, “a vague lacrimation” insufficiently stern to defend a republic. Whereas “authoritarian” regimes force citizens “to favor the common good” as the regime defines it, republics assume that people will do so freely. Increasingly, they do not: “the republic is hardly compatible with modern individualism,” with societies less civil than before, where “each person” puts on headphones “to listen to their own music in public places without bothering others.” Such demi-citizens “accept less than ever that all must live in harmony,” and if so, “the republican model is probably obsolete.” 

In France, “the contradiction between the republican ideal and the importance of individual wills produces disastrous effects” because it remains “powerful in minds and hearts” but no longer wields the “capacities for [its] fulfillment.” Accordingly, ” a process of unfulfillment is at work,” seen most obviously in the schools, where democratic-republican equality is preached but not practiced, where the virtues needed to uphold republican fraternity no longer prevail in the face of the individualism of administrators, faculty, and students alike. “Is the society inaugurated by Jean Bodin still viable in the era of mobile phones?” The question answers itself. Yet when the ‘country of the [socialist] revolution,’ the Soviet Union, collapsed, ruining the model for many socialists in the West, “the socialist ideal [was] immediately replaced by the resurgence of the republican ideal” in France—communalism in another form. But French republicanism retained the universalism of socialist ideology, its claim “to work for the entirety of humanity and not for a particular group of people.” Insofar as communal republicanism is practicable, it flourishes in societies small enough for citizens to know one another. Modern states have long surpassed that limit. Consequently, “the republican ideal, after having replaced the socialist ideal, in turn, withers in disappointment.” It is not, as per Marx and Lenin, the state that withers away; it is the regime. This is what has led to the mood swings of the French—euphoria one minute, “great bitterness” the next. The sobriety, the common sense, of Madisonian statesmanship makes no sense to them, while Gaullist grandeur seems vacuous, inflated.

As for modern, individualistic democracy, it wants liberty, it ‘celebrates our differences,’ as the saying goes, but it also loves social equality, “and French people are wild about equality.” Delsol remarks, succinctly: “Another contradiction.” In terms of political institutions, democracy’s hostility toward oligarchy and its ruling bodies “intermediate” between the central state and the people readily inclines the French towards Bonapartism, “a French variant of enlightened despotism” wherein “a direct alliance of the supreme chief (be it the king or the president)” prevails. “France prefers monism to pluralism because it fears above all diminutive, nepotistic, unjust, irksome authorities—but it especially thinks that the entire earth must adopt monism, and here you have a form of dogmatism.” With this, a dilemma arises. “Napoleonic discourse re-creates everywhere other entitlements, other hierarchies, and other fortunes”—a “nomenklatura.” This occurs thanks to a lack of foresight, of prudence, the failure to consider, first, that a centralized modern state powerful enough to enforce equality must itself deny equality by its very existence as the pounder-down of inequalities and, second, the failure to recognize that no political problem can be ‘solved’ in the manner of a mathematical puzzle, only meliorated by thought that has been sobered by “trial and error.”

Delsol understandably associates Bonapartism with de Gaulle, who “hated political parties” and “wanted a direct agreement between himself and the people,” which she regards as “the beginning of tyranny.” “De Gaulle hated political parties because they represented diverse opinions about the definition of the common good, which he alone wanted to be the one to designate.” She calls him a “Maurrassian” on this account. [1] This overlooks de Gaulle’s own decidedly mixed evaluation of Napoleon, seen in La France et son armée, in which de Gaulle admires the Emperor’s grandeur while criticizing his ambition, which lacked the indispensable Gaullist (and classical) virtue, mesure. This also overlooks the substance of de Gaulle’s critique of the parties—they represented interest groups and therefore rendered themselves incapable of defending France as a whole in a dangerous world. And it overlooks what de Gaulle hoped would be the capstone of his founding, the revivification of federalism in France; in fact, de Gaulle’s resigned the presidency when voters rejected his proposal to do that, expressing precisely the hostility towards intermediary ruling bodies Delsol has duly noted. She is closer to the mark when she identifies President Emmanuel Macron as a statist, albeit in a technocratic mode alien to de Gaulle’s classicism. Macron “wants to embrace everything and especially not to have adversaries,” a characteristic of “monistic power” or “enlightened despotism” and “a rejection of the principle of uncertainty on which democracy is based.” The dislike of adversarial relations bespeaks an avoidance of dialogue, of debate; to call it democracy, as Macron prefers to do, “is hypocritical; one uses democracy so as to play against it.” “Such a system does not lead to a peaceful alternation” of one ruling party giving way to another, “but to a war of all against all.” That is to say that “whereas Democracy in America had been a true revelation about the democratic system, The Old Regime and the Revolution is a true revelation about France.” The revolution revolutionized the ruling persons and ruling offices of France while leaving “the French spirit,” the French character or ethos, unmoved. “The revolution, whose spirit would be propagated throughout Europe, bursts on the scene first in France because the Old Regime had already erected the outlines of it” by fatally weakening the ‘aristocracy’ or oligarchy and replacing it with a centralized administrative state. Civil liberties “were abolished on a regular basis by the king, who not long after resold them to his beneficiaries.” In a regime that buys and sells liberties, what value do liberties really have, beyond status and cash? “For centuries and even today, a private French company could never be permitted to do what the French state does for example, when it repays its creditors with massive delays, and, to be honest, only when it feels like doing so.” Under state centralization, “the government took the place of God the Father,” holding, in its decidedly secularized providentialism, the lives, fortunes, and honor of its subjects firmly in its grasp while leaving them “the freedom to squabble perpetually about metaphysical questions, which they will not forsake”—forming the French “into inveterate pontificators on all matters that have no reality.” This is what comes from the belief that liberty is “a generous gift from an authority, and not an independent capacity that one would develop opposite it and against it.” It is true that centralization may have been necessitated to united what is now France, but what began as a concatenation of provinces and languages, an “excessive diversity that forced kings to centralize in order to unite” for the sake of defending themselves and the people. And while there have been attempts to move toward a degree of regionalization, they amount only to more localized bureaucracies, as the ‘spirit of the city,’ political life, has had no place in France for a very long time. Throughout the nineteenth century, with Napoleon still remembered by people who were alive in his time, French debates over liberalism inclined toward anarchism, communism, and libertarianism; among the intellectuals, Tocqueville was a rare defender of liberal democracy. The country whose intellectuals valorized liberalism and federalism was Germany, whose tradition of political writings stemmed not from Bodin but Althusius, and although the politicians followed Bismarck, pioneer of the welfare state, then Wilhelm II, then Hitler in a vertiginous descent, today Germany at least calls itself a federal republic under the motto, “Man is older than the state.” 

Delsol encapsulates the French condition nicely by observing that its welfare state is maternal. It takes care of its demi-citizens. “For the United States, the revolution consisted in becoming emancipated from the English motherland and in waiting for the constitution from the founding fathers. The French Revolution was organized around the murder of the king, which was symbolic at first, then real, but subsequently it coalesced around the symbol of Marianne, the mother of the republic.” In practice, this “means the state helps me, the more my initiative diminishes, and the more my initiative diminishes, the more I need the state.” Mama’s boys and girls never grow up.

As for those who obtain state jobs, they satisfy “the French passion for positions of status,” a passion “as old as France itself,” beginning with its aristocracy. The French Revolution beheaded many of the titled aristocrats, replacing them with a new elite: “the ambition of every upstanding member of the bourgeoisie in France was not to become a somebody and make a fortune in business, but to be able to buy a ‘position.'” After that, purchase was replaced by competitive exams, as in China—which is why the French call their top bureaucrats ‘mandarins.’ In the United States, the Tammany Hall ward heeler George Washington Plunkitt warned that civil service reform would destroy patriotism, but not so in France. [2] “Having become an agent of the state, especially at the higher levels, the elite republican citizen nurtures a true love for France,” “serv[ing] it with all his heart.” The only rival to his patriotism is contempt for commerce: “A functionary of the republic is convinced that the private sector is filled with greedy people who think only about money and acquire it by any means possible, whereas he is a poor and virtuous man dedicated only to the common good,” a public servant surrounded by a barnyard full of swine that, if not properly supervised, might at any moment stampede over a cliff.

The problem is that “a society where there are only annuities does not work.” One-third of those employed in France are in government. Apart from its creeping economic sclerosis, this society cannot tell itself the truth about itself. Socrates would say it lacks self-knowledge, but there is little danger of any Socratic soul attracting sufficient attention to warrant capital punishment. “In egalitarian, and thus unrealistic, systems, the elites…always end up simultaneously lying to themselves and exempting themselves from the common condition,” protecting themselves from attack by carrying an ideological shield. “The French national education system, this great drunken vessel,” defends itself at the tavern of public opinion with ideological formulas, pretending that it treats elite families and disadvantaged families equally. Instead of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, the real France practices Envy, sham Equality, and Mistrust. 

Delsol identifies the “anthropological presuppositions” of the French regime. First, elites assume that “subjects are incapable of managing their own affairs without the help of a public authority,” being both venal and incompetent. Second, personal honor, “not to lose face” but “to receive the consideration that is due to you,” continues to animate French souls, a “legacy of the monarchical and aristocratic world.” Those presuppositions foster envy. Third, and contradictorily, the French “clearly prefer equality to liberty”; “their sense of equality extends to egalitarianism,” a spirit that “leads to individualism and materialism” and away from the civic spirit. Egalitarianism and envy ally in the French preference for “state subsidies…over individual generosity,” the anonymity of monies doled out by faceless bureaucrats being less humiliating than anything received by a known benefactor. When fire destroyed part of the Notre Dame cathedral, “French public opinion was concerned only with one thing: preventing patron of the arts from gaining notoriety from their gesture” of financial contribution, “disparaging their generosity, and making them appear like vultures chasing after glory.” No wonder “French society is a society in which mistrust erupts with every step.” Delsol quotes de Gaulle: in France, “each person has a feeling for what he lacks rather than what he has.” Delsol adds that some of this mistrust is justified, as “statism dries up competition and favors corruption.” And so, as the great French novelists rightly describe it, in France “Parisians despise; people in the provinces envy.” Foreigners have not overlooked this, as when Heinrich Heine came through in 1834, conjecturing that the women of the provinces “perhaps seek in Catholicism a consolation for the grief of not being able to live in Paris.”

French intellectuals exhibit the quintessence of Frenchness, producing the finest idols paraded through the cave. “The prestige of the French intellectual begins at the very moment in which the prestige of the clergy fades,” with clerical censorship weakening. As Tocqueville argues, the monarchic, centralized state under the Bourbons had barred the French from obtaining political experience, leaving them prey to utopianism. (Delsol remarks that Solzhenitsyn sees the same thing in Russia.) It is no coincidence that the writer who coined the term ‘ideology’ was a Frenchman, Destutt de Tracy, and that France’s Saint-Simon wanted “to turn intellectuals into a new clergy capable of implementing a politics guided by science,” or that Comte, Fourier, and Proudhon defended autocratic utopias they expected to see realized. And “starting at the dawn of the twentieth century, the majority of French intellectuals sided either with fascism or with communism,” and indeed “it will be remembered that Lenin and Trotsky constantly compared their actions to those of the protagonists of 1789.” Worse still, some of the ideological tyrants themselves were educated in France, the bloodiest of all being Pol Pot, with Ho Chi Minh in his train, when it came to mass murder.

Aside from egalitarianism and statism, the French ideology has redefined liberty as historical progress toward, well, egalitarianism and statism. Both the Left and the Right put their polemics in historicist terms, with the Right differing from the Left mostly with respect to the pace that such progress should take. At the extremes, “both use terror to succeed, because in both cases, it is a question of impossible projects, the work of mad scientists. No one can set the past in stone, no one can remake humanity from the ground up,” starting with the French revolutionaries’ “Year Zero.” That hasn’t stopped ideologues from trying. And even after the fall of Soviet communism, as intellectuals “abandoned their lingering Marxism,” they “are not yet liberals,” as the examples of Foucault and Derrida so decisively prove. Economic and political realities, not a change in “fundamental beliefs,” pushed the intellectuals to these adjustments, rather along the lines of the Ptolemaists who invented ever-elaborate ‘epicycles’ in their defenses against Copernicans.

The abandonment of the intellectuals and their ideologies by the working classes was prefigured, oddly enough, by the experience of Lenin in Russia. When “Lenin came to power, he was convinced of having the people on his side.” He “proclaimed democracy and played along, only to discover very quickly that, while hopes for the downfall of the [czarist] regime were well shared among the population, opinions about the positive goals to be pursued differed.” And so was born the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ defined as the dictatorship of the ‘party of the proletariat,’ defined as the dictatorship of Lenin. Today, with globalization seeing the rise of international elites and nationalist populism, “the two classes that confront one another are no longer the bourgeoisie and proletariat…but the nomadic and the sedentary.” “The French upper classes are, thus, as uninterested in France as he eighteenth-century nobles who spent their lives at the court of Versailles were in their provinces,” where their estates were. The upper classes simply cannot see why anyone would oppose immigration; why, they emigrate all the time.

The secularism of French intellectuals contrasts to a significant degree to that seen in Protestant countries, where the Enlightenment was “rooted in religion” or at least outwardly respectful of it. But French Catholicism “vigorously rejected this modernity” in the eighteenth and even “throughout the nineteenth century.” “For France, Enlightenment was tantamount to atheism,” a stance taken openly by Voltaire and many others. The ‘eldest daughter of the church,’ France is “also the eldest daughter of an atheistic and ideological revolution,” a “fight against Christianity.” Even “with the hundreds of millions of deaths of the twentieth century that are due to two atheistic ideologies, France still considers religion to be the real villain of history.” And while the French do not prohibit religious practice, “it is hounded ironically.” Except for Islamic practice, its practitioners feared.

As for Catholicism, Delsol observes that “the first half of the twentieth century in France was dominated by the thought of Charles Maurras,” whose “thought actually contributed to the toppling of the religion that it claimed to serve.” Maurras wasn’t actually a Catholic at all. He was an agnostic who regarded religion in the manner Machiavelli did: as “an instrument through which power is bolstered by means of the moral and behavioral discipline that it encourages.” The battle against the anti-liberal, anti-democratic Right in the Second World War wrecked the prestige of Maurrasisme, to the advantage of Marxism, “while Catholicism suffered terribly.” Indeed, “Marx and Lacan were studied in seminaries instead of Saint Thomas Aquinas” by seminarians who dreamed of ‘walking part-way with Marxism,’ as the contemporary slogan had it. Today, however, many children of the Baby Boomers have turned to a genuine form of Catholicism; “their religion is anything but sociological.” And these are not the peasants, formerly the most religious among the French; they are scions of “the most educated families,” and “an elite is forming in this crucible.” Beyond Islam and Catholicism, however, what is now “spreading the most” are the cultic religions—the neopagan worship of Gaia, an instance of the pantheism Tocqueville foresaw as the result of democracy. “The new religious conflicts are between the supporters of transcendence and those of paganism”; “ecology is unquestionably the great religion of the coming century.” What is more, one-third of young Muslims prefer Sharia law to French law, and the allegiance of young Catholics to republicanism may not be very ardent. “The United States manages to federate diverse cultures through pride in being American and saluting a common flag. It is necessary to have a link between differences, without which the whole will crumble.” France has no such link. 

Can European unity come to the rescue? Not easily. With or without Muslims (and it is not without them), Europe consists of diverse populations. Language, history, customs divide those populations. Any unified Europe would need to be a federation, a structure of rule informed by the principle of subsidiarity. That principle “pertains primarily to a belief (it is not proven!) that human individuals have a true need to guide their own actions according to their own decisions, even if this means losing efficiency” and the “comfort” efficiency can ensure. Subsidiarity would put local governments “in charge of the public good—and that is not at all French.” When Jacques Delors became president of the European Commission, he ‘solved’ the problem by building a centralized bureaucracy and calling it federal. Once you “use subsidiarity as a pretext for Jacobinism, all you have to do is declare the inadequacy” of the local powers and put the central government in charge of all important matters. Delors was so bold as to say, in a 1999 speech at the Strasbourg Cathedral, that Europe is “a structure with a technocratic feel, progressing under the aegis of a type of gentle and enlightened despotism”—exactly the form of despotism Tocqueville had predicted, a century and a half before.

Meanwhile, “this republican country, haunted by the idea of its unity, is in the process of crumbling into multiple communities that contradict and stand as an insult to its plan,” while it continues to resist European integration, which would cinch in that multiplicity, stripping off the comforting ideological blanket of French unity. While France has in fact integrating many immigrant groups—Poles, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese—these peoples were Catholic. “The question” of how to integrate, how to assimilate such foreigners “became a conundrum when it was necessary to receive Arab-Muslims, who were endowed with a religion, a language, and a culture wholly different from ours.” Technocracy, “built only through the elimination of previous cultural references and the creations of abstractions,” the “deliberate erasure of Europe’s Christian roots,” their replacement by “globalism, multiculturalism, individualism, and unlimited emancipation” (including same-sex ‘marriage’), is the latest attempt to answer the question. Muslims aren’t buying it.

And so, “the French are troubled to see their model,” republicanism, “being erased, with, moreover, the complicity of their elite.” “Since the revolution of 1789, France has been submerged in ideology, first Jacobin, then socialist, and then Marxist. It has literally been permeated with the expectation of a brighter future. This lost hope gives way to a great, bemused emptiness—but for all of this, a lack of realism has not disappeared…. French unhappiness stems from our ideological passion,” which has retarded the development of “common sense.”

Note

1. For a discussion of Maurras, see “The Monarchist Kulturkampf of Charles Maurras,” on this website under the category, “Nations.”
2. See “The Reformer of Tammany Hall,” on this website under the category, “American Politics.”

Every political community needs bonds that hold it together, preserve its union. These include laws, customs, and acts of force. There is also patriotism, love of country, often expressed in the patriotic defense of self-government against foreigners. At the same time, an earlier form of the ‘love of one’s own,’ familial love, can serve as a building-block of the city or as its competitor, as seen in Sophocles’ Antigone. [1] The alliances and tensions between aristocratic families and the centralized modern state inform all of Shakespeare’s ‘history plays.’ Hancock remarks the emphasis the Greeks placed on self-government, the emphasis the Bible places on family. These emphases register in their different approaches to the things transcending the city and the family: the impersonal, first-mover, natural god of the Greeks; the Father-God of the Israelites. “The Christian tradition undertook to synthesize these two orientations toward what is highest, rational order and love, in what Pope Benedict XVI named the ‘personal logos.'” Personal logos in turn leaves room for “moral agency.” But “our Christian response to the ‘woke’ exhaustion of liberalism matters only if Christianity bears something essential of what Pascal named ‘the truth about man.'”

Hancock would “extend Manent’s efforts to affirm the primacy of the practical” by showing that “every understanding of the ‘highest good’ or of ‘heaven’—that is, every conception of transcendence—involves some mingling of what we call ‘the same’—what we affirm as intelligible and in principle present to our articulate experience—and ‘the other’—that which surpasses, while somehow addressing, our understanding and our experience.” This formulation contrasts noticeably with the notion of ‘the other’ in ‘woke’ socialist ideology, wherein it refers merely to human beings who are not ‘us’—not of the same sex, race, nation. Hancock’s ‘other’ is radically ‘other,’ not merely unknown or poorly understood but at least in some respects unknowable by human efforts alone. “What is ultimate,” what divinity is, “must be other than ordinary experience, or it would not be transcendent and would not offer the hope of some condition free of the burdens, the conflicts, the confusions, the tensions, or the simple boredom of our mundane existence.” Yet this “other” cannot be entirely unknowable, entirely removed from “our actual experience, or the promise of such goods would have no meaning or attraction for us.” This goes both for Greek philosophy and Biblical faith, although from different starting points and different results, at least initially.

Hancock of course well knows that what he calls the Christian synthesis of Greek and Jew, a distinction the Apostle Paul describes as having been erased fundamentally by Christ, has been challenged repeatedly. The Straussian scholar Thomas Pangle criticizes biblical transcendence, considering it incoherent, violative of the logical principle of non-contradiction. [2] Considering the story of Abraham’s binding of Isaac, Pangle argues that Abraham either knew that God would reverse his command to kill his son, “so it was not really a sacrifice,” or Abraham did not know that, and was willing to kill his son out of blind obedience. “It seems biblical obedience must either be purely calculating and thus not at all ennobling, or else it is simply mad and humanly meaningless.” Against this, Hancock cites Leon Kass, who writes that “God does not finally require that men choose between the love of your own and godliness,” between fatherhood and the Father of all. God “wants not the transcendence of life but rather its sanctification.” Choose life, the story teaches, but life on God’s terms, not yours; if you do, God will graciously, providentially protect you and yours. Such a God redirects love of one’s own by sanctifying it, by pointing it towards the love of the gracious God. Pangle’s “rationalist teleology,” his ‘Greekness,’ “cannot account for love as a good that enriches the lover only when he releases his rational hold on it, his claim of secure possession,” ‘his own.’ 

Augustine of Hippo makes an early attempt to synthesize Greek and Biblical love. Augustine responds powerfully to the ‘democratic’ aspect of Christianity. “Any true way to the liberation of the human soul,” the souls of ‘the many,’ humans ‘as such,’ “must, at least in principle, be available to human beings as such and not only to a few philosophers.” Admittedly, “there can be no logical objection to the proposition that only certain superior human beings can be raised above the limitations of the human condition.” Rather, the Bible holds that “there is something of eternal significance in human existence itself and not only in the perfection of the rational faculty but something in our humanity as such that must have some eternal significance and destiny,” a “spiritual dignity that does not depend on…being philosophers and…[is]not limited to rationality per se.” Augustine writes, “The Savior took upon himself the man in his entirety.” This means that human souls have not only a nature but an even more important ‘history,’ a story—one that occurs within the larger story of God’s creation of Man, His punishment of Man, and His redemption of Man, “the everlasting salvation of the individual person.” Whereas “Platonists measure God by the standard of human reason,” the Logos that is God encompasses and transcends human logos. Therefore, “philosophy as a way of life cannot stand by itself” finally, at the ‘end of (our) history.’ Because it isn’t only the rational ‘part’ of the soul but the whole soul and indeed the whole man, including man’s body, that matters to God, human bodies too can be saved. Salvation purifies and sanctifies even the corrupted flesh. 

The Protestant theologian Denis de Rougemont distinguishes Greek eros from Biblical agape as two loves that work at cross-purposes. [3] De Rougemont contrasts the erotic love of the medieval ‘romances’—seen, for example, in Tristan and Iseult—with the agapic love seen in Christian marriage. Erotic love waxes, wanes, disappears; marital love is permanent, and therefore not a ‘sentiment’ as ordinarily understood. The twain seldom meet, because erotic loves desires to possess, whether it desires a woman, wisdom, or a Mercedes-Benz. Agapic love aims not at possession but at giving; it is ‘charitable,’ seeking the good not of oneself but of someone else, even as God’s love seeks the good of His creation, to the extent of sacrificing His only Son, Abraham-like, for the sake of redeeming human individuals from their sins, even as he of course ‘saves’ his self-sacrificing Son by the Resurrection; this Isaac, too, must not die. 

Against this account, Hancock places the Catholic stance of Benedict XVI. Citing the first sentence of the first chapter of the Book of John, Benedict considers “the God who is Logos” as the guarantor of “the intelligibility of the world, the intelligibility of our existence, reason’s accord with God, and God’s accord with reason.” “For Benedict,” Hancock elaborates, “God is somehow both continuous with reason or logos as human beings know and experience these ideas, yet also, in some sense, infinitely beyond our understanding.” God’s revelation to John raises another question, however. It is one thing to say that logos is thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction, dividing nature into parts or “kinds” that are distinct from one another, that cannot simply be blended together either in thought or ‘in themselves.’ It is another thing to say that God, the supreme Person, is more than impersonal nature, more than a ‘kind,’ and nonetheless still reasonable—that there is “personal logos.” Personal logos “must be respected as an aporia that reminds us of the partly clear and partly mysterious character of our existence,” a fundamental and permanent problem. And yet this Person commands us, requires us to obey Him as “a touchstone of fundamental practical guidance,” a guidance that we will not comprehend if it is not logical. The story of Abraham and Isaac finds a reasoned explanation in Kass’s exegesis, which offers a rational purpose for God’s unexplained but not inexplicable command.

Hancock’s emphasis on the practicality of God’s guidance recalls him to Manent’s critique of the “hypertrophy of theory” in modernity and the need to discern the logic inherent in human action. “An ultimate, architectonic concept such as ‘personal logos’ is always at the risk of being overtheorized at the hands of ecclesiastical theologians or ambitious intellectuals and thus becoming sterile and instrumental to the authority of one or another system of thought.” One might attempt an Origen-like subordination of “personal” to “logos,” reducing Christianity “to the status of a junior partner to an intellectualist Platonism or Neo-Platonism, with its ruling idea of a rational-impersonal-necessity.” Or one might do as ‘moderns’ incline to do, “embrace the standpoint of the human person, all desires and passions included, and reduce logos to a mathematical construct, projecting an understanding of ultimate reality as a pure object of human mastery for all-too-human ends.” Benedict avoids both of these errors. The word “Eros” “appears only twice in the Bible,” both times in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, never in the New—a point de Rougemont makes much of, it should be added. As Aristotle sees, eros aims at human happiness, the culmination of nature, of human nature, in the fulfillment of the aim of the distinctively human characteristic, reason, as it seeks to know itself and to know the whole, however incompletely. So far, no agape. But it is the seeking or searching quality of eros…that makes possible the synthesis”—a word to be used advisedly, as will become clear—Benedict “envisions with the sacrificial and other-regarding quality of agape” by its longing for the transcendent reality, not nature but the Creator of nature who, as Creator, did not acquire but gave. Neither the noble ethics and politics of Plato and Aristotle nor the ignoble ‘politics of acquisition,’ of material acquisition, commended by Machiavelli for his ‘prince’ can fully satisfy human longing, human eros. Human eros reaches for the agapic Person, God, although it does not by itself know what it is looking for, and hence depends upon the agapic reaching out of that Person for its fulfillment. When God reaches out in response to human eros, He does what He does for Abraham’s intention, sanctifying it. “Eros redeemed by agape elevates individuality to eternity.” Benedict calls this “the true discovery of the other.”

And, now returning to de Rougemont’s theme, marital love, “the unification of man and woman, signifies the unification of body and soul and the transcending of the dichotomy between eros and agape.” Do the married man and woman love one another erotically? Very often so, at least for a while. But do they also love one another agapically? Yes, insofar as they understand their marriage as permanent, an act performed ‘in the sight of God’ and carried on in His sight. In Hancock’s words, “true love honors both the character of the same and that of the other in the human orientation toward the good,” which both receives erotically and gives agapically. Since God and human beings are persons, love can extend both to bodies and souls, to ‘whole persons.’ After all, did not God become Man? Benedict (a German in addition to being a Catholic and a pope) goes so far as to say that with God’s grace eros is not only “supremely ennobled” but “at the same time…so purified as to become one with agape.” This looms as a bit more ‘German’-Hegelian than Christianity actually is. (And, indeed, Hegel regards marriage as an example of what later Hegelians would call the ‘synthesis’ of opposites.) Hancock more accurately describes these loves as complementary, ‘political’ in the Aristotelian sense, with agape as the unequal partner in the mutually loving rule. This rule, being political within the family, can also be politically within the polis, the political community itself. Human choice, human “agency,” is “necessarily moral-political agency,” choice responsible “in contexts always defined by mediated moral law as well as natural necessities.” 

“Moral agency in a concrete community is the essential complement to the idea of love as the gift of the self to the other.” If they fail to acknowledge the “human source” of “our interest in the heavens or the whole,” philosophy and theology miss their calling, “not only morally or religiously but rationally and philosophically.” In philosophy, this is what Socrates understood, and it is why “he brought philosophy down from the heavens to consider politics and ethics.” Hancock does not mean that the human source of theological and philosophic eros can be reduced to the ‘merely’ human, whether it be convention, socioeconomic class interests, ‘gender,’ or any other such category. He rather means that human nature, filtered through such supportive but potentially distorting phenomena, points us to a “higher purpose” than material interests. “First philosophy cannot spare itself the labor of self-reflection, and, thus, of reflection on the human sources and conditions of philosophy.” There will always be “an irremediable gap between what is first in itself and what is first for us, for human beings,” but that does not relieve us of our responsibility to ourselves and to God to bridge it, at least some of the way. “‘Theology’ might be derisively defined as the pretension to speak of things beyond human capacity,” but then philosophy may be defined as “the love of a wisdom we never fully possess.” “The line between the pretensions of theology and the modesty of a Socratic philosophy becomes very fine indeed.” For philosophy to succeed, philosophers must come down to earth; for religiosity to succeed, God must.

Beyond the challenges to knowledge posed by human circumstances, is the human soul itself capable of perceiving truth and, if so, to what extent? Hancock begins to address this question with a discussion of Michael Davis’s commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima. The soul “has a form and limits, a structure, and, if you will, a ‘nature,'” Davis observes; in attempting to know itself, the soul reveals what it is and to some degree shapes itself through, for example, habituation. The soul seeks not only to know itself but to know the world around it, ultimately to know the whole, which includes “the knowing and desiring soul.” The soul is in but not entirely of the world; it differs from the rest of the whole. “This connectedness between the soul and the world is to be understood, Davis proposes, ‘in the end as philosophy.'” This means that some souls are better at knowing than others—better ordered, better ruled internally than others. But if there is, as Davis writes, “a political aspect to the soul” (as seen most clearly in Plato’s Republic) then, Hancock asks, is there not “a political aspect also to philosophy”? Is philosophy not a ‘partisan,’ albeit a partisan of reason? 

If so, then it must be open to critique by Christians, who claim a position beyond such partisanship. “One might say that Christianity attempts to overcome the essential partisanship of classical philosophy” by maintaining “that existence must lie somehow at the heart of being, that the whole would not be whole without its manifestation in human existence.” We are back to Hancock’s gloss on Barney’s mom in The Music Man: what the movie’s producers expect us to see as a comic manifestation of love of one’s own might also manifest love of a person as a person. “For truth and mineness to be reconciled, it would have to be the case that my very mineness, my existence as a person, would have a correlate at the origins of peak of the whole. God would have to be a person…or, let us say, more cautiously, there would have to be something personal about the divine.” (How, for example, could persons arise out of impersonal matter in motion?) Admittedly, “this Christian move is irreparably problematic as well, from a philosophical point of view, because the only ‘persons’ we know are people, and we cannot really know what we are talking about when we say that the Creator and Sustainer of the whole is a ‘person.'” “Christianity wants to hold together the beauty of sacrifice with the good of fulfillment, to hold together the call of otherness and the satisfaction of self-possession. And who can blame it?” Evidently, Davis can, as he regards Christianity as one of the most influential, and therefore most distorting, of the human conventions. Hancock replies that Davis has not “shown the superiority of the Greeks to the Christians (as he would wish) as to have brilliantly traced the fundamental aporia in which we must stand regarding the fundamental question of Athens/Jerusalem.”

Davis intends to answer the question. “For Socrates, he writes, love of oneself means love of whoever draws him out of himself,” whoever his dialectical interlocutor is. At the same time, Socrates will not imitate the interlocutor, make himself into a new ‘self’—precisely the invitation Christians are beckoned to accept in the imitatio Christi. For Socrates, self-rule and self-knowledge inheres not in the imitation of a person but “in fidelity to a kind of primordial and evanescent moment in which the self necessarily produces some ‘image’ of the whole” in dialogue with another. With this, Hancock remarks, “Davis seems to me to have identified very precisely what would be required to establish the supremacy of the classical viewpoint.” But he replies, “Is it not plausible that what draws me out is the personal logos?” That is, why must the impersonal image of the whole be what is drawing me out? “I remain, I confess, more attracted to the possibility of being drawn out…toward the good or toward God, toward the logos of the personal,” toward the Person who is “the ground” of either an impersonal whole or a personal destiny or calling.”

Very well, but then have we not returned to Strauss’s Jerusalem and Athens problem, to zeteticism, to “awareness of the fundamental problems”—another way of ‘privileging’ philosophic inquiry over what many of us take to be divine revelation? True, Hancock concedes, but such awareness “cannot answer for the goodness of those problems.” The modern answer is to brush them aside and to go ahead and conquer nature for our own immediate, material purposes, conceiving of the non-human elements of the world as “the pure object” of human mastery. But how is that “project,” that set of actions, to be seen as good? This is why he again invokes Manent, the “grammar of action,” the “microstructure of moral agency itself.” If action has moral implications built into it, then the conquest of nature must be ‘judgable.’ That grammar, that microstructure, “provides the only touchstone by which we may honor both the love of truth and the truth of love”; it is “our best clue to understanding personal logos, our privileged point of access both to what is high and to what is universal.” For one thing, the logic of action points us back to the actor, the ‘subject.’

“The modern discussion of ‘mineness’—of the soul’s relation to itself—centers on the concept of the ‘subject’ or of ‘subjectivity,'” with its attendant problems of ‘epistemology,’ of self-knowledge and of knowledge of all that is outside itself. Further, is the human subject obligated or simply forced to surrender its agency “to some nonrational power, whether naturalistic or divine”? Hancock contends that “the only alternative to the abyss opened up” by this prospect “is the soul’s acceptance of the mediation of a politics and of a poetry respectful of the mutual dependence between the order of the soul and the order of the whole” since “we can never fully possess ourselves—that is, grasp our subjectivity immediately and transparently,” given our situation within a family and a political community eager to tell us who we are. In pursuing this inquiry, Hancock will consider Tocqueville, Strauss, and Emmanuel Levinas, but “only Tocqueville, I hold, appreciates the appeal of both aristocratic pride and democratic-universalist subjectivity,” honoring both “elevation” and “justice.” 

Poetry, philosophy, politics: these are “the three human possibilities.” (There is also the not-so-human possibility of religion, which has hovered over the argument from the start, often classified by the classical philosophers under the categories ‘poetry’ and ‘politics’ but perhaps susceptible to philosophic management.) Human beings make poetry in the sense that “we cannot exist without acting, we cannot act without imagining—that is, without conceiving purposes.” Conceiving purposes entails “conceiving (however dimly and implicitly) some understanding of the whole, of the way things are, and of our place in the whole among the things that are”—as Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton in fact do. Philosophy “is the natural (albeit rare) extension of this natural interest in conceiving the whole” and of “understanding our place in the whole.” And politics “is the natural (albeit not effectively universal) extension of our awareness that the conventional whole whose authority precedes us can be conceived as an arena of human reflection and choice,” as Publius reminds his readers. “What of religion? We are beings open to—or vulnerable to—the claims of revealed religion because neither poetry nor philosophy nor politics can fully respond to our interest in understanding the whole and our place in it, in grasping what is, and in grasping ourselves.” The classical philosophers, one recalls, puts religion together with philosophy and politics under the rule of prudential if not always theoretical reason. For Christians, however, logos bows to Logos.

If Aristotle’s Politics consists of a sort of dialogue between an oligarch and a democrat, Tocqueville continues that dialogue in the world of the modern state. In terms of poetry, aristocracy concentrates attention of “what is concrete and particular,” thus “reinforc[ing] the meaning of purposive action within a largely inherited world of meaning.” Aristocratic imagination inclines toward the elevated, the mythic, heroic conflicts between demigods and monsters. Democratic poetry is real-worldly, seen first in the nature-poetry of a James Thompson, but finally in down-to-earth human action—not to elevation but to extension, to humanity, to pantheism, to Walt Whitman. In response too aristocratic poetry’s verticality it ‘goes horizontal.’ Courtly love disappears; tender lyrics addressed to real women proliferate, veering toward the vulgar (an old-fashioned term for the people) in soap opera and pornography. But this vulgarization has been preceded by a vulgarization of the whole, which was reconceived as an object of conquest by Machiavelli and Bacon.

Poetry and politics, then, provide a “natural mediation” between human nature and nature as a whole. Christ’s mediation provides a supernatural mediation between them, and between the Father-God behind both. But Christ is not only God but Man, and so can only be understood, insofar as He is Man, by “some natural interpretation of the human.” As for His godliness, “can God’s kenosis or self-emptying escape the negativity of the modern subject/self without drawing upon the natural understanding, upon political poetry, or poetic politics?”

Levinas argues that self-emptying is indeed the foundation of ethics. Levinas is Jewish, so he doesn’t take Christ as the model for this, drawing instead “on a parallel Jewish theme of ethical law as the absolute obsession of the self by the other” which takes “the very constitution of the self or subject” as “the ethical bond to the other.” This amounts to “a radical break with the Western rationalist tradition,” although, as Hancock sees, this makes his thought align with “modern secularism” or wokeness, with its privileging of ‘the other.’ Levinas claims that “consciousness precedes reason, and conscience grounds consciousness.” Conscience produces ethical conduct and “ethics is thus first philosophy,” raising the question not of why there is something rather than nothing but why being is good, “how being justifies itself.” Hancock wonders, how does this respond “to the questions of the basis of knowledge and the purpose of life?” “Can such a primordial ethics either illuminate or guide human choice?” He finds no real answer to those questions in Levinas’ profound-too-profound theory. Levinas may (or may not) have discovered the foundation of freedom, but it is a freedom from which no one could derive any particular action. Levinas therefore substitutes “obsession with the other” for choice. Sober Hancock prefers not to ground ethics on obsessiveness. Further, this obsession is encapsulated in the Jewish proverb Levinas valorizes: “The material needs of the other are my spiritual needs.” But that, Hancock remarks, means that “there is no choice above necessity,” above material choice. Levinas has reconstituted Marxism as a spiritual endeavor. Sure enough, his beau ideal of a statesman is Léon Blum, the kindly French socialist who flourished between the world wars. But “can an expression of progressive idealism be judged apart from a consideration of its conception of the common good?” The obsession with ‘the other’ “cannot evade some reference to the meaning of the world in which human beings find themselves,” and so Levinas “falls back into the technological and progressive or historicist attitude,” a sort of Heideggerianism of the Left. Tocqueville would not be surprised.

Returning briefly to Strauss, Hancock recalls “the fragility of [his] claim “of the self-sufficient happiness of the philosophic life,” with its understanding of the reason-revelation aporia and its difficulty in proving that the philosopher really is motivated by the eros for wisdom rather than the desire for recognition, as Kojève charges. This is especially true since for Strauss there is no guarantee that there is “a God who could verify the philosopher’s purity of heart,” and surely no ‘history’ that judges anything, only an impersonal nature that can limit but cannot observe the inner workings of any human soul. “He hesitates in his dismissal of the biblical critique of aristocratic [that is, philosophic] pride.” At the same time, Strauss resists any coordination of Athens and Jerusalem because “he abominates the modern synthesis,” historicism. This brings Hancock back to Tocqueville, who does want coordination if not synthesis between aristocracy and democracy, calling upon aristocrats to “guide” democracy, moderate it, guard it from its excesses. But Tocqueville, who lived only into middle age and pursued an active political career, did not “propose a comprehensive vision that might hold together and sustain the bonds between freedom and law and divinity.” Building upon the work of Tocqueville, Aquinas, and Manent, Hancock pushes ahead, asking, “What understanding of the whole and of the divine would accord with (while, of course, transcending) the ‘grammar of action’ that has emerged from my reflection on Manent’s understanding of natural law?” and “What vision of God, the soul, and true community would reasonably extend and support Tocqueville’s exquisite equilibrium between the ‘aristocratic’ and ‘democratic’ dimensions of human being” and, what is still more, “What answer to the perennial question of political theology, the question which theory and practice ultimately must converge—that is, ‘Quid sit Deus?’—would honor and account for Strauss’s bracing pagan response to the Christian and democratic subversion of philosophic nobility while remaining open to the biblical truth of subjectivity and universality, to the mysterious, infinite value of the human person under a personal God?”

Large questions beg for a large answerer. Hancock has one ready at hand, Thomas Aquinas. As a student of both Aristotle and the Bible, Aquinas understands “that Providence must be understood as holding open the space of human prudence” under the auspices of what his erudite contemporary follower, Benedict XVI calls “personal logos.” Under the Christian dispensation, rightly understood, “the good must be both in action”—part of its grammar, its logic—and “above it”—superintended by Logos seen as a ‘Who,’ not a ‘What.’ While “real, practical action…must be respected and not sacrificed to the inherent tendency of theory and theology to hypertrophy,” “the nobility of practice, of moral agency, must not assert itself as some absolute and transparent ground of meaning but must be held open to some glorious plenitude that transcends it” along the lines of Tocqueville’s “moral analogy.”

To address these questions, Hancock has recourse not only to moral analogy but to the longstanding Thomistic topic of the analogia entis, the analogy of being. This question initially arose with regard to the problem of how to describe God, the Being who is in some sense beyond our necessarily finite, human terms, a Logos far greater than our logoi. How can we human-all-too-humans say that God is good, wise, just, when we can’t comprehend Him? It is the story of Abraham and Isaac, again. Hancock’s suggestion is to put “moral analogy” and “analogy of being” together, to think of “the essential bond between ideas and practical existence,” morality, at the same time as we think of “the linkage between divinity and humanity.” They are “two approaches to the same fundamental moral, political, philosophical, and theological problem” because “sound morality and politics need the support of some understanding of the whole.” When human beings use their own necessarily limited vocabulary to register attributes of God, they are doing what they must do to think about God at all: winnowing a human meaning, “meaning for personal beings who are embodied agents in the practical world,” from what they hear about a Being whom no one can see and live. 

Hancock traces the problem of the analogy of being to Greek philosophy, to the dichotomy between Parmenides, who claimed that “reality is one, and…plurality and change mere illusions” and Heraclitus, who claimed that “the only reality” is “ever-changing manyness.” Plato and Aristotle would “navigate between these extremes,” locating life between being and nothingness, between stable forms and changing phenomena. Aristotle brings this insight to language, seeing analogy “as a kind of mean between univocity (a word’s meaning is always the same) and equivocity (one usage of the word in question is absolutely different from another)” and identifying two kinds of analogy: one in which “various usages are associated together owing to a common point of reference,” as when we call a human being healthy, a dog healthy, a medical treatment healthy, and so on; another, “the analogy of proportion,” which “involves the comparison of two different proportions, as with numbers and also with words, in metaphors, the proportion usually illustrated by saying ‘A is to B what C is to D.’ In Thomistic theology, there is an analogy of proportion “between the being of God” (‘A to B’) and “the being of creatures” (‘C to D’). The contemporary adept of the analogia entis is Erich Przywara, who argues that an analogy exists between “mutable and finite things” such as ourselves “are grounded in their ultimate essence in something immutable and infinite, which is essentially distinct from them.” Thus, as Hancock straightforwardly puts it, “the creature is the image of the Creator, and thus an analogy of the Creator,” since “God is incomprehensibly beyond all things, yet ‘tangibly present’ in all things.” In terms of things thought, “the paradox extends to the very relationship between reason and revelation, between, on the one hand, a purely natural and rational theology and, on the other, theology understood as dependent upon revelation and grace.” That is, the “natural, rational insight into the character of reality bears within itself the invitation to an openness to what necessarily transcends nature and reason.” That is, the analogia entis means that “the divine is at once in and beyond the natural world of human experience,” seen in the Book of Genesis in the account of God “breathing life” into clay in order to make Man, an act that enables Man by nature to think towards God, even after being expelled from Eden. At the same time, Hancock acknowledges the insistence of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, that the Creator-God’s dissimilarity to His creations must be understood to be greater than His similarity to them—that the analogy must break down at some point. 

But not before performing some indispensable work for us creatures. Przywara is a music man, but obviously no charlatan. For him, “a theology of analogy must remain as much a kind of poetry or music as a self-contained propositional system” which “evoke[s] actual human experiences of one kind or another as natural pointers to supernatural reality” while remaining “ever vigilant against the pretension of theory of theology to favor one pole or the other, the natural or the supernatural, and thus to risk the collapse of the musical tension.” While Przywara inclines toward the esthetic dimension of these “natural experiences,” Hancock argues for “the prominence of the ethical.” For Christians and Jews, humility stands at the center of morality, given the analogy but also the profound difference between Man and God. As analogous to God, Man has been endowed with the capacity to know Him to some small but salvific extent; as undivine beings who may, through theosis, be substantially improved, we must humble ourselves before Him. Our God-endowed capacities give us the basis for a proper pride, really a sort of self-respect, even as we must rigorously attempt to overcome wrongful pride, Satanic rivalry with God. Modern pride, the pride of ‘Old Nick’ Machiavelli, pretends “to transcendence of the common condition of humanity…not based on a positive analogy or continuity between human and divine natures, but on the assumption of a standpoint of absolute otherness” regarding our fellow creatures, whom we set out to conquer. “The boundless and incoherent presumption of modernity is that which somehow claims (at least implicitly) the standpoint of God while pretending to prove”—with its doctrine of materialism—that “human beings are nothing but animals.” Tocqueville draws the “practical conclusion,” the moral and political conclusion that “this modern, democratic age is no time to teach humility” to men inclined to conceive of themselves as brutes; “what we need now is pride,” pride of the right sort, self-respect as beings distinct from other creatures but part of a created whole, a cosmos, that we should not view as a thing to be manipulated regardless of our obligations to it, and to the One who created it. “It remains the case that humility is a Christian virtue.” We “created beings exist not of [our]selves but only through the act of creation,” creation ex nihilo.  

Although “the idea of God’s creation of the world from nothing has, at best, a debatable scriptural basis,” it was crucial as a response to the Neo-Platonist philosophy current in the world of the early Church Fathers. The Neo-Platonists contended that the analogy between ‘divinity’—no Person but “an impersonal first principle”—and the many beings was very tight, indeed. The many beings owe their existence to an “eternal emanation” from the first principle: “from the eternal self-identity of the one, there emanates the logos, and from the logos, the cosmos”; “there is nothing truly new under the sun,” reality being essentially timeless. The Fathers understood the God of the Bible as He manifests Himself there, as a Person both ‘omnipotent’ and ‘free,’ with the power to create everything we perceive, including ourselves, our capacity to perceive, and with the freedom to exercise that power unconstrained by anything or anyone. “To wrest a personal God from the Greek categories of rational impersonal necessity, freedom embraces nothingness,” since pure ‘somethingness’ would entail necessity. At the same time, unlike Muslims, Christians denied that God in his freedom proceeded arbitrarily, that God is pure will. This would leave “human freedom with no standard but will. Not so: God is Logos. He endows his creatures with the capacity to reason, if not with His capacity to reason, His intimate knowledge of the cosmos, of the whole, and of the purposes to which He has intended to put it.

This is what Przywara calls, following Aquinas, the doctrine of secondary causes. God, the Person who is the First Cause, has called human beings into existence while also gratuitously, graciously endowing them with “the power also to be causes themselves.” And so he can tell Adam to give names to the creatures in Eden and to avoid eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Hancock intervenes to remark this as a call, faithfully echoed by Przywara, “to inspire men and women of faith and goodwill to the cultivation and application of their best faculties.” That is, God calls us to virtue, not a call to “service to human beings understood as beings for whom morality and law” merely serve as “temporary necessities on the path of technological and democratic progress,” but as “constitutive of their being.” Those who heard Jesus teach understood humanity as “unthinkable apart from questions of what is intrinsically good and bad, right and wrong,” being descendants of the ‘first parents’ who disobeyed God and knew—knew good and evil not only intellectually but in the intimate, Biblical sense of knowledge. This was no ‘religion of humanity.’ Jesus requires that creatures serve God as well as themselves, even if they conceive of serving themselves as compassionate service to neighbors.

To do this, not esthetics alone but preeminently the natural law “structured according to a hierarchy of natural finalities (self-preservation, reproduction, natural sociality, and knowledge of God)” must be acknowledged and followed. The natural law points human beings not only to the beautiful but also to the true and the good. This points us to practice first, without denying the importance of either philosophic theory or theology. “A truly good and truly beautiful understanding of the analogy between humanity and divinity, I propose, would have to honor both the grounded pride and the sacrificial humility of action,” the understanding that neighbors are intrinsically loveable, creatures of God despite their sins, and therefore worthy of sacrificing for. In so understanding the human condition, we exhibit “the capacity to receive grace,” exercising our natural powers strengthened and refined as virtues (especially the virtues of prudence and harmlessness, which is perhaps analogous to Aristotelian moderation) in the service of supernatural ends insofar as God reveals them. As in Aquinas’ De veritate, “the ultimate end is located in the supernatural, while the right content or substance is in the natural,” the relation of means and ends in which the exercise of virtue is both good in itself, an end in itself, and in service to purposes beyond ourselves. The supernatural incorporates the natural but the natural incorporates the supernatural, as God’s Spirit resides in the human heart, once the heart opens itself to Him. As Aquinas affirms, grace perfects nature by enabling it to achieve a substantial degree of “self-sufficient actualization,” the “prideful classical reason” Aristotle commends, and to open itself to the “possibility of ecstatic,” self-emptying self-sacrifice in imitation of Christ, an endeavor “far beyond the reach” of such reason, no part of Aristotelian ethics.

This dual moral obligation distinguishes classical “achievement” from Christian “participation” in Christlike self-sacrifice. Participation by definition is more than “sheer receptivity in the sense of passivity,” instead implying activity. “The human, natural pole” of the duality follows Aristotle, as Aquinas indeed does, his natural law being “human participation in eternal law,” which is “indistinguishable from God’s being and goodness,” God’s being and goodness being the ground of our own being and goodness, insofar as we have not marred them. We have not entirely marred them; had we, we could not even perceive God’s call to Himself. “There must be some positive content in the human language by which we reference God…or else our doctrines and our praise are strictly meaningless.” With the theologian Thomas S. Hibbs, Hancock finds divine goodness “deeply consonant with the highest human practical virtue,” prudence or practical wisdom, whose divine analogy is Providence. With God, Providence allies closely with techne, art, which cannot fail, given God’s power. Human artistry can of course fail, but it is sufficiently ‘creative’ to produce narration not only of the past but of an intended future which, so long as it is guided by prudence, will not succumb to wrongful pride. That intended future should take “the path of return to God,” and that requires “some understanding” of God as a Person. 

But what is a “person”? To answer that question, I can only begin with myself and the human beings around me. Christian individualism “must not forget” the “political nature of humanity,” since “we gain an understanding of what is good and best for us by imitating the exemplars of human action embodied in the practices of our community,” practices which are at least said to be “oriented to the good as presented in the common good,” beyond my good as an individual. This suggests, as it does to still another Thomist, Jean-Rémi Lanavère, that the political community provides human beings with “the natural mediation” between them and the natural law, itself an instantiation of eternal law. That is, “the rational creature participates in eternal law—that is, in divine providence—not only as a recipient but also as an active, provident agent,” as one ruled but also ruling. “This active participation is the natural law.” It is not only a set of general rules but of attention to particulars; the classical concern with the limitation of law—that its generality does not necessarily do justice to particular circumstances—finds exemplary correction in Christianity’s personal God, who issues general commands but also governs individuals from ‘without’ and from ‘within,’ the latter via justice-oriented conscience and prudential reasoning. “natural law itself is by no means received passively by the human agent; rather, natural law is constituted by human reason, and then fulfilled—not distorted, or compromised—in its particular application. This leads Hancock to “the surprising and marvelous conclusion” that human law, a convention, “is tied more intimately to eternal law, to the divine mind itself, than is human reason in its work of constituting the general principles of the ‘natural law,'” and that human law completes natural law and “human beings are God’s intermediaries in the actual execution of human government.” 

Well, they should be.

Mosaic Law was God’s law given to the Israelites. The new law of grace, which in no way rescinds Mosaic Law for the Jewish people, summarizes the Mosaic Law in the two Great Commandments while graciously leaving Gentiles’ politics, including lawgiving, to the deliberation, decision, and execution of human beings. What Manent calls “archic” prudence “cooperates with God’s providence in determining and commanding what natural law left indeterminate,” instantiating “the responsibility of reason under God.” Rightly understood natural law and rightly conceived and enacted conventional law both serve purposes that are supernatural. Hancock identifies his own purpose as “recover[ing] an understanding of the natural, political beings to whom Christian revelation is addressed and whose nature must not be canceled by the revelation of grace and of a supernatural purpose.” But as he also sees, human beings can “say No to God.” Saying No to God is the definition of evil. The decision for “good versus bad depends upon [the decision for] good versus evil.” “We are by grace alone free to choose freedom and eternal life, liberty under God and the laws.” In this sense, Adam and Eve’s fall from grace was “fortunate,” despite the curses God heaped upon them because it “inaugurated this history of freedom as a divine-human partnership.” (Inveterate bourgeois that I am, I for one would have been content with obedience to God regarding the initial choice, also free, which our first parents made, but I take Hancock’s point.)

Returning to the present day, Hancock asks, “How can Christianity speak to the morality and politics of a definitively secular age,” where “modern societies and states flirt dangerously with totalitarian temptations,” temptations in which slavery disguises itself as freedom? Hancock regards Pascal’s treatment of this question as too anti-philosophic, an attitude he ascribes not only to the great mathematician’s ardent Christian faith but to his modern, mathematical (mis)understanding of the cosmos, which makes the whole as infinite and therefore incomprehensible as a sequence of numbers to which one can always add one more. He regards Strauss’s treatment of the question as finally too philosophic, too rationalist-naturalist, but nonetheless promising because Strauss was Socratic, recognizing “a kind of knowledge of the human soul that begins with a practical awareness of the souls ends” as “the key to whatever partial theoretical knowledge of the whole may be possible.” “By adopting an essentially Cartesian metaphysics,” Pascal “risks abetting Descartes’s technological project,” but as “the Christian virtue,” (and also the Jewish virtue, anav), humility “depends upon some minimal residue of the pride essential to human agency, upon a certain confidence in a heterogeneous order of the whole” that Socrates perceives “in some way analogous to the substantial heterogeneity of human ends.” “As is the case with Descartes’s thinking subject, Pascal’s ‘thinking reed’ remains a wholly unintelligible exception, a speck of mysterious heterogeneity suspended within an otherwise undifferentiated whole.” Hancock doubts “whether this place is indeed a humanly livable one, one that provides sufficient orientation for human action.” Pascal contends that Christian love suffices, but “I have asked whether the supernatural virtue of charity must not shelter or make space for the rule of prudence, the ‘god of this lower world.'” [4] As noted earlier, Jesus Himself thinks so (Matthew 10:16). “Christianity must not attempt to secure the absoluteness of its own elevation by subverting the natural basis of our very sense of elevation.” In Tocqueville’s terms, ‘democracy’ should accept some balance with ‘aristocracy.’ Aristotle is right: the ‘mixed regime,’ duly appreciated on the level of morality as well as politics, really is the best practicable regime, the truly political one that best reflects the relation of God and Man.

Accordingly, Hancock concludes by calling for a “prideful Christianity”—a “purposely provocative and paradoxical formulation.” “The Christian warning against the sin of pride or presumption against God”—genuine evil—must “not be interpreted so as to undermine the natural and necessary confidence in the intrinsic goodness of virtue.” “The archic, initiating, commanding, and thus, in a certain sense, necessarily prideful, character of moral agency is essential to our humanity,” and God’s curses inflicted upon us have not altered that. They have made moral choice more urgent and more knowing. Christians can conscientiously accept “moral and political responsibility understood within the practical frame of our common life.” Such an approach is “‘impure’ both from the standpoint of a pure liberal-democratic theory” as conceived by someone like John Rawls “and from that of a rigorously Protestant or radically Pascalian theology.” (Woodrow Wilson could be said to hover angelically somewhere between the two.) It is nonetheless indispensable for making life in the City of Man propaedeutic to life in the City of God. As Manent sees, the Greeks “understood everything that was essential to understand of human things, and they said it with incomparable sobriety and force,” but “they could not give voice to ‘the inconceivable proximity between human fragility and divine holiness.'” Doubtless recalling Barney’s mom, Hancock quotes Isaiah 49:15-16: “For can a woman forget her nursing child or show no compassion for the child of her womb?”—a moral and divine analogy illustrating the continued, faithful love of God for the human beings He created. Strauss was right to see that “the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns concerns eventually, and perhaps even from the beginning, the status of ‘individuality'”; he was right to imply that individuality traces back to Christianity, just as Tocqueville was right to trace modern democracy to Christianity. Both were right to think that Christianity leaves humanity vulnerable to ruin, to inhumanity, when twisted into the paths of Machiavelli, Montaigne, Bacon, Hobbes, and finally historicism. Hancock simply replies that this is not Christianity rightly understood.

“Only Manent has, I think, in our times, proposed the indispensable task of reconciling or coordinating Christian anthropology with liberal-republican self-government and its insuperably Aristotelian dimension” by “situating the natural grammar of action, with its element of commanding pride, under a Providence that is a friend of human beings as individuals, personal beings of eternal significance.” That is, “grace is not meant to stand on its own without or apart from nature.” If Satan could not utterly destroy God’s Creation, surely human sinners cannot. At the same time, “elevated by grace, virtue rises above mere honor and the boast of self-sufficiency.” The political nature of human beings most decidedly does not issue in political theology, either in the Machiavellian sense of a moralistic cover for Realpolitik schemers or a politics somehow deduced from a “high-minded but apolitical theological system,” as seen in “integralism.” Rather, Hancock “propose[s] to coordinate the deepest premises of the Christian faith, the foundations of our conviction, whether Christian or post-Christian of the ultimacy of love, with our most sober moral and political judgments regarding the necessity and beauty of virtue.”

Notes

1. See “Gods of the Family, Gods of the City: The “Antigone,” on this website under the category “Nations.”
2. See Thomas Pangle: Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
3. For a discussion of de Rougemont, see “The Derangement of Love in the Modern World,” on this website under the category, “Bible Notes.”
4. Hancock cites Joshua Mitchell’s American Awakening as a contemporary Protestant instance of a Christianity neglectful of the need not only for “competence”—a Cartesian-inspired standard—to live in this world but for the ‘pride’ or self-respect that virtue incorporates. See Mitchell, American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time (New York: Encounter Books, 2020). Nor can Yuval Levin’s ‘institutionalist’ and Kantian approach to liberal democracy suffice; see Yuval Levin: American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again (New York: Basic Books, 2024) and Hancock’s critique (pp.249-254). For a discussion of Pascal’s Pensées and of Pierre Manent’s commentary thereon (Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifference: Pascal’s Defense of the Christian Proposition) see “A Sure Thing: Betting on Pascal”; “Pascal on Humanity and Its ‘Justice'”; “The Greatness and Misery of the ‘Self'”; and “Pascal on Christ and His Offer of Salvation,” all on this website under the category, “Bible Notes.”

In the first part of his book, Hancock addresses the serious deficiencies of modern “theory” or philosophy and modern theology, which have culminated in a hyper-egalitarianism that makes moral and political claims dependent upon establishing one’s status as a victim of some oppressive hierarchy. Since ruling itself presupposes hierarchy, these theoretical and theological systems may culminate in a call for no government at all—radical egalitarianism and freedom at once or, as in Marx, an initially powerful statism that will then put an end to itself, ‘wither away.’ Or it may culminate in an incoherent belief that some new hierarchy will itself be equalizing and liberating—a ‘welfare state’ in which apolitical administrators, supposedly apolitical, do not so much rule us but serve us, thereby relieving us of our victimhood. This amounts to an ‘aristocracy’ that, unlike the older aristocracies, justifies itself in term of egalitarianism from which it must obviously exempt itself. Both Alexis de Tocqueville and Leo Strauss vindicate ‘aristocracy,’ by which they mean the need for persons who are capable of acting and of thinking beyond the limits of ‘democracy’ or social egalitarianism, precisely in order to defend democracy against its own ‘totalizing’ inclinations, especially against its tendency to curtail liberty of thought and action in favor of equality, of thinking, feeling, and acting ‘in lockstep’ with increasingly uncivil majorities in civil society. Majoritarianism implies a certain sheer weightiness, a sort of materiality imposed upon the mind. Modern ‘idealism’ is really a pantheism that cloaks materialism in highfalutin talk. Its adepts are a bit like that fast-talking ‘Music Man’ in the movies, a music man who doesn’t know much about the muses but, unlike the movie sophist/rhetorician, often fails to know that they doesn’t know.

In Part 2, Hancock turns from theory and theology to practice, but especially to the relation of practice to theory and theology. Following Tocqueville, he sees that “the contemporary idea of the equal dignity of every unique human individual derives historically from Christian teaching but now must be regarded as an irresistible datum of human experience.” That the idea is irresistible does not make it true, however, nor does any and all definitions of equal dignity faithful derivations from Christian doctrine. “How,” then, “can we articulate some solid middle ground between the complicit extremes of idealism and materialism, the vaulting ambition of cosmic god,” would-be masters of nature, “and the debased realism of needy beasts,” whose mastery, insofar as they achieve it, serves their bodily appetites? Human beings do indeed exercise a degree of “spiritual freedom”; we are not ‘determined’ by matter. But that freedom depends upon sustaining a “natural order of the soul and of the city,” the rule of reason, that is “exquisitely fragile and subject to disruption” by that very freedom, which can choose fine and wonderful things or coarse and disgusting ones—longings and notions “very difficult to reconcile with a  stable moral and political order,” and indeed rejecting stability and order for perpetual change assumed (but only assumed) to be progress.

The Hebrew Bible teaches that “human beings were created in the image of God.” The New Testament promises that Christians can become godlike by the process of theosis. [1]. That is, the Bible finds human individuality, not merely our ‘species-being,’ a thing of infinite value. (Hancock quotes C. S. Lewis: “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses.”) Strauss added an important caveat, however: the spirit of individuality, which is the spirit of modernity, can easily be turned to decidedly unspiritual and unphilosophic purposes, resulting in “the ravages of modern individualism and of the liberationist and identitarian delusions it prepares.” And while Hancock does not simply endorse Strauss’s stated preference for a return to “the spirit of ‘sound antiquity,'” with its ‘aristocratic’ valorization of virtuous civic life against modern individuality, he does acknowledge and endorse Strauss’s point. “There is nothing automatic in the coupling of Christian individualism or personalism with the sense of elevation and noble resignation inherent in classical virtue,” and, beyond the universally shared dignity of creation in the image of God, the worth of a human soul does depend upon the exercise of human virtues, here and now. That is, the “unquestioned authority of the idea of the dignity of every individual is far from simply good news,” even if it is indeed part of the Good News of the Gospels. In early Christianity, “the affirmation of the individual was given ritual structure and moral meaning by authoritative sacraments and commandments and by membership in a visible community of shared vocation,” the ecclesia or Church, the regime founded by Jesus Himself. And with that, Jesus also ensured that Christians would face some version of the same crisis He faced: martyrdom. His regime, the City of God, remains captive and stranger—a foreigner—so long as the earthly city, the City of Man, survives. “Membership in a heavenly city that somehow transcends the hierarchies of this world,” needs to be coordinated “with the practical imperatives of a particular human city,” as Jesus in fact said when he advised His disciples to be prudent as serpents. Under the conditions of ‘this world,’ it is as foolish (in a bad way) to live as if those conditions mean nothing as it is foolish (in a good way) to accept one’s status as a fool in the eyes of the world. Machiavelli will always suppose the Christian a fool, simply; an imprudent Christian will simply ignore him, a prudent one won’t, while knowing that Machiavelli doesn’t see the whole truth.

“Societies need competence” and indeed excellence if they are “to produce the physical and symbolic goods that sustain them,” and individuals need “concrete, more or less determinate standards by which to judge their own and their fellows’ contributions and deficiencies, and no amount of abstract talk about infinite personal worth will supply such needs or such goods.” Strauss (and Tocqueville) are right, too: “Christian love cannot dispense with classical virtue.” There is need for ‘aristocracy,’ and especially for the characteristic aristocratic/classical virtue of prudence, the virtue that mediates between the City of God and the City of Man, as the supreme Mediator, Jesus Christ, insisted.

Hancock astutely calls attention to Tocqueville’s phrase, “the laws of moral analogy,” in this regard. By this, Tocqueville means the connection between moral ideas and moral sentiments, “the natural bond that unites opinions to tastes and actions to beliefs,” the bond between theory and practice, which most emphatically does not mean the erasure of the distinction between theory and practice, the consequence of pantheism. Tocqueville’s example of the rupture of moral analogy is “the extremism of the French Revolution.” Under ordinary circumstances, under circumstances when the laws of moral analogy prevail, revolutionaries would not behead (for example) Marie Antoinette. They would not kill a helpless person. “When our conceptual universe falls out of alignment or loses attunement to what we know ‘in our bones’ as practical agents in the world, then we lose touch with our humanity”; “in imagining ourselves to be theoretical gods”—rigorous and incorruptible enforcers of the Rights of Man—we “become practical (ideological and revolutionary) beasts,” murderers in the name of justice. “Our idealistic abstractions do not remove us from the world of action but commit us to perpetual violence against our natural moral-political condition,” the only limit to that violence being exhaustion or defeat at the hands of some greater force. This “internal contradiction…lies at the heart of the modern democratic or rationalistic,” not rational, “project,” inaugurating an “addictive commitment to revolutionary transformation” incapable of limiting itself. 

Hancock is quick to observe that the laws of moral analogy are not laws in any formal sense, part of some “explicit and universal philosophical or theological system.” Rather, they are a reasonable sensibility that inclines human beings in their actions to “look up to, to defer to, or be aware of the superiority of something above” action, above practice. “Practice must find some realizable guide and compass in theory,” but without thinking of theory or of theology as programmatic, our actions as somehow similar to computer ‘printouts.’ That is, for its part “theory must never betray its practical touchstone,” leading us to imagine that the purpose of action is “some ineffably transcendent ‘ideal'” or “an ever-elusive, ultimately incoherent, and therefore self-undermining idea of ‘progress.'” Theory needs a practical “touchstone” because, first, theory consists of a set of generalizations about human nature as seen not only in human biology and human thought but in human practice and, second, because such generalizations, such theoretical ideas as we derive from such observations must be ‘brought down to earth,’ made consistent with the limits imposed existing circumstances. The worst enemy of practical reasoning is wishful thinking. “As Aristotle and Pierre Manent (one should add Jesus) remind us, the end we seek is always in an important sense in some way always present within the practical means by which we seek it—that is, in the practical habitual dispositions, the virtues, that, for the most part implicitly, shape our understanding of a good life and of a good society.” As Hancock emphasizes, “in an important sense, theory must rule practice, while at the same time practice must rule theory.“

It is important to recall another Aristotelian theme, here. Aristotle locates the origin of political life in the family in the sense that all three forms of ruling, of governance, can be seen there: the two forms of ‘command-and-obey’ rule—parents over children, rule for the sake of the good of those ruled, and masters over slaves, rule for the sake of the good of those who rule—and the one form of what he calls “political” rule—the reciprocal ruling and being-ruled of husband and wife. What Hancock thus suggests is the reciprocal or political rule of theory and practice, both in individuals and cities, the City of Man. He leaves the ruling conditions of the City of God, the mysterious monarchy of a triune God, to the theologians.

Tocqueville agrees with Hegel (whose disciples he otherwise detested) in claiming that “the best minds of classical antiquity were blinded, by the aristocratic conditions of their own societies, to the manifest injustice of slavery, and so were at pains to prove that slavery was somehow authorized by nature”—a “fundamental linkage between Christianity,” which both philosophers take to be opposed to slavery, “and the modern movement of generalizing equality.” In Tocqueville’s own words, “It was necessary that Jesus Christ come to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal,” or, as Hancock elaborates, “beneath the democratic revolution lies the Christian revolution.” Several qualifications to this might be advanced: Aristotle’s idea of “natural slavery” would strictly limit actual slavery; as the Apostle Paul makes clear, Christian slaves are not encouraged to rebel. More important in terms of the discussion at hand, however, is the point that democracy or natural equality, eventually leading to social equality, comes to earth via the teachings and example of a monarch, indeed the supreme Monarch, the King of kings, albeit one who acts ‘aristocratically’ in the role of a mediator between His Father and the human beings formed out of clay and animated with His breath, His spirit, thereby fashioning them in His “image” as beings capable of exercising logos, speech and reason. This divine making is the foundation of human equality and of human inequality, inasmuch as all men are not created equal in physical beauty or intellectual capacity. But in emphasizing the equality of human beings in their ‘humanness,’ Christianity acts monarchically, not aristocratically, monarchy, the rule of the one, and democracy, the rule of the many, being natural allies against the rule of the few. The danger in this is that “democratic ontology is thus fundamentally at odds” with moral analogy, “with the tempering of the abstract idea by the concrete experience, as well as the informing of the concrete experience by the idea that aims to transcend particular experience.” The command to be innocent or harmless as doves and prudent as serpents could counteract this tension, were it more generally heeded. But virtue is difficult, else it would not be virtue, as Strauss’s beloved ‘classics’ knew and taught. Hancock writes, “Christians must find a way to give due support to the pride that is inseparable from the nature of human agency or moral analogy and thus to restore confidence in the natural, mediated goods of practical virtues and bordered political communities.” Put Thomistically, divine grace perfects nature; it does not replace it.

Genuinely moral and political action cannot be determined either from ‘above’ or from ‘below,’ whether ‘above’ means a theory, a god, or the ‘end of History,’ and whether ‘below’ means the earth, the body, or the passions. Genuinely moral and political action presupposes choice, freedom. Such freedom “is an intrinsic good” or “at least somehow points to a good that is good in itself.” This means that freedom is “elevated,” ‘aristocratic,’ not ignoble or slavish. “Freedom is spirited and spiritual; it is associated with human pride and self-assertion” while “at the same time” aspiring “toward an undefined elevation, toward something beyond the all-too-human.” Acting “is central to freedom.” And “this free action is bound up with speaking, reasoning, deliberating,” which is why the document that constitutes the American federal government (for example) guarantees freedom of speech as a sine qua non of political freedom. Finally, political and rational freedom presuppose freedom to “breathe,” to live. “Even the simple and universal gift of life must be defended against those who would act even against the freedom to breathe—that is, against our very survival” as individuals and as political communities. Being rational and political, freedom has limits; it “is not altogether limitless, boundless, or undefined.” It “expresses itself within a meaningful horizon in which there is commerce,” or in Aristotelian terms a political relationship, “between the most elevated and the most common.” “Both voluntarist and lawful,” freedom “is ordered by virtue, and virtue is free.” It is lawful in the sense that it obeys the natural laws of moral analogy. In the Bible, God sets down the laws, enacts his commands; He is a Person (indeed, the Person of all person, the One who endows the many with personhood) who commands laws, which are impersonal but purposive rulers of the many human persons, who are nonetheless free to violate those laws, at least up to a point. To obey the Ruler and His rules, the supremely personal and the impersonal, is to live “a life that is right and good.” “This duality within the highest possibilities of meaningful existence corresponds broadly to the two great sources of the Western tradition, Jerusalem and Athens,” the Creator-God and the laws of nature and of nature’s God. The Creator-God is both eternal (“I am that I am”) and free (“I shall be as I shall be”). The laws He has built into His creation are necessary, unfree. A fully human life will choose to live in terms of both, not one or the other. “The divine must be understood in a way that supports both the lawful quality and the freedom or independence of human action; Providence, the ultimate guarantor of a truth whose face is not turned away from humanity, must be a friend of freedom.”

Two “difficulties” arise respecting such an appeal to an objective moral order. There is the “epistemic” difficulty of knowing that it is and what it is; there is the “substantive” difficulty of how to obey it, how it could be consistent with human freedom, the human capacity to reason. Hancock suggests that while “the moral law must indeed be understood as ‘objective’ in the sense” of existing “somehow above us,” authoritative, ‘better than we are,’ “it must not be understood as simply outside us, as absolutely ‘other’ with respect to our rational and spiritually self-aware humanity.” That is, “the appeal to a higher law is not alien to, but in fact, deeply continuous with, the full, responsible exercise of human agency.” As Daniel J. Mahoney argues, Christianity must “encourage citizens and believers alike to take seriously the full range of one’s political and civic responsibilities,” responsibilities seen in our membership in political communities, organizations with territorial boundaries that need to be defended against assaults aimed at violating the self-government, the freely set limitations citizens impose upon themselves within those boundaries. [2]  Mahoney “reconciles the word of God and moral law with the spiritual needs of humanity precisely because human spirituality is understood to embrace human liberty or the nobility of responsible choice and action” while “divine providence is understood as holding open the space of human prudence,” the guidance “of one’s own natural reason,” self-government. One may hold oneself responsible to, and be held responsible by, the Holy Spirit and His promptings.

Pierre Manent elaborates upon these themes, correcting the “hypertrophy of theory” with the “grammar of action.” That is, he counters what he understands to be the excessively abstract, impractical, utopian approach to politics in contemporary life not with a ‘pragmatism’ that seeks the most efficient path to satisfying self-defined self-interest but with moral and political action infused with prudential reasoning that recognizes the good that is, so to speak, built into human action itself, “the unsurpassable good inherent in action itself.” Such action will also be “holding open space in eternity for this good.” 

What does that mean? Hancock would have helped his reader had he followed Aristotle’s practice of providing examples of such action. Nonetheless, he circles around his meaning sufficiently to afford some glimpses of what he has in mind. This involves a political relationship between the “pride” of prudential reasoning in action and the Christian humility that acknowledges the impossibility of any rational solution to the political problem, absent divine intervention. Following Manent, who follows Aquinas, he eschews the Aristotelian philosophic standard, itself derived from Plato: the founding of “the best city” in speech and the description of “the best soul.” For Christians, the best person cannot be human, even if human beings were not afflicted with ‘original sin.’ What Christians can look to as a standard is the natural law. Very well then, what is the natural law?

The natural law begins with “universal motives” discernible in human beings: the pleasant, the useful, and the upright (the honnête). None of these motives is an idea. Each is actually present in our souls. This includes the upright, which orients itself ‘upward,’ toward nobility, toward ‘aristocracy,’ without itself being outside of ourselves. “Manent sees reason, in our present circumstances of theoretical hypertrophy, as investing too much in speculations on goods, beyond those we actually experience in some way in the practice of moral agency and practical deliberation.” All of these motives take us outside of ourselves; even the experience of pleasure frequently requires us to seek external things that give us pleasure—food, water, even air, which we seek in order to survive but not only in order to survive. Human motives bring human individuals to extend themselves, go beyond themselves. This going-beyond includes (as Aristotle and Aquinas insist) in “enhancing the ‘sweetness’ of social bonds and our interest”—themselves potentially pleasant, useful, and upright—in “our hope for a higher and more complete good.” Prudential and even theoretical reasoning can take us some distance in discerning the object of this hope, but only so far. “At some point, our quest for such a good exceeds the limits of reason, and so we must choose whether or not to let the divine truth come toward us,” to “allow God’s grace to supervene upon our natural practice of moral and political agency.” That is, at some point, having reasoned as assiduously as is possible for me to do, why would I not ask the God whose existence I cannot discover by a rigorously logical proof to show Himself? After all, if He does not exist, what harm in the exercise? I will remain within the bounds of Socrates’ humane zeteticism, carefully rejecting the inordinate pride of modern rationalism. 

Manent holds (in Hancock’s words) that “the divine truth can come toward us only as we assume practical responsibility for the common goods of the real communities of which we are a part.” Christian love (agape, caritas) inheres in the act of taking such responsibility for ourselves but especially for those around us—the sober, unsentimental love of neighbor. “Neither (1) modern rational mastery for the sake of humanity nor (2) the humble Protestant or postmodern abnegation of responsibility for human goods nor (3) classical or medieval speculation on a highest good altogether beyond practice can relieve us of our responsibility as rational, moral, and political beings for the only goods available to us by nature, and thus the only goods of which we can coherently speak—that is, the good inherent in our moral and political agency and inseparable from the very practice of that agency.” Human experience entails action, and action entails an aim, a purpose, “some substantial, actionable understanding of what is good.” That goes for action guided by theology as much as action guided by philosophy. As Hancock ingeniously puts it, “Theology, no less than philosophy, must be respectfully attentive to a certain necessary ‘grammar of action'”; Christians “must humble themselves in order to enter into what might be called the essential pride of human action, the active human contribution to the good.” That contribution, which is the natural law inherent in action, “consists of human participation in eternal law; indeed, the natural law consists of human participation in the active and productive realization of eternal law.” Although there are passages in the New Testament that seem to claim that human souls are little more than rocky battlegrounds for conflicts between far more powerful spiritual persons, demonic and divine, our souls are more than that because our souls think and will, desiring the good, however we may misconceive the good or simply fail fully to apprehend it.

Political life illustrates and ineluctably involves this natural human quest. Life in a ‘city’ or political community centers on the regime of the city—who rules it, what its ruling offices or institutions are, and most pertinently for the purposes of this argument, its purpose and its way of life, all of which incline citizens or subjects to form a certain character, an ethos, both individually and as a community. Inevitably, political life or activity fosters disagreements about specific actions the city might take or indeed about the regime itself. This debate about “the meaning of justice” “constitutes the city.” As Aristotle teaches, the underlying parties in the debate are the few who are rich, the oligarchs, and the many who are poor, the democrats. But the debate cannot be reduced to that conflict, as it involves many claims to rule, including birth, liberty, wealth, virtue, and military valor. Try sorting out all those claims in a coherent theoretical system and you will fail, becoming not a person of wisdom but a terrible simplificateur, an ideologue. What happens in a real city is rather a practical solution, sometimes long-lasting, imposed by politicians or ‘statesmen.’ If the politicians are statesmen in the valorizing sense of the term, the practical solution they arrive at will take account of the reasonable claims of all groups within the citizenry before arriving at their authoritative decision and issuing their authoritative commands. “The judgment or decision that resolves this problem is seen”—seen by the citizens themselves—as neither “derivable from some theoretical principle…nor as an arbitrary act of the will.” In Manent’s words, this “complexity” “holds out the promise of the good” which is “inescapably bound up with the mind’s and soul’s engagement with the plurality of substantive claims that emerge from our natural political existence,” the “practical commensuration of theoretically incommensurable goods,” giving each good its due as ‘its due’ is defined within the unifying regime of the city. “The highest human good, the good actualized in the statesman’s responsibility for the political community, appears thus to consist in reflective or rational responsibility for the practical viability and cohesion and consistency of the irreducible plurality of human goods.” Hancock characterizes the “implicit understanding that graces the practical operation of a good that is common” finds in that commonality a good that is “higher” than (apparently) the particular goods advanced by the citizens. This is the highest practicable good, the highest humanly possible, because there is no theoretical way to make the various particular goods commensurate with one another on the level of theory.

How does this comport with Christianity, which most assuredly does assert a highest good for individuals, namely, the salvation of individual souls? No regime that interferes with the achievement of that good could itself be as good as it might be, although it may provide other substantial ‘this-worldly’ goods. More specifically, how can Christianity ‘play out’ within the modern state, and indeed in the liberal-democratic state, given the origins of the modern state in the political philosophy of anti-Christian Machiavelli? Manent suggests that pre-Machiavellian, Christian Thomas Aquinas would find in “the collaboration of human prudence and divine Providence” a much more solid spiritual and intellectual foundation for the limitations on state action that liberalism insists upon, even as the democratic dimension of liberal democracy inclines toward limitless expansion of state power. Those limitations are enforced, especially in modern republicanism, by enabling citizens to stand up for themselves, to exercise their virtues against statist encroachment. In so doing, the exercise of the classical ‘cardinal virtues’—courage, moderation, wisdom, and justice—point human beings toward a good beyond the Aristotelian telos or purpose—the free exercise of those virtues, bringing human happiness—and toward the good that transcends humanness, the good bestowed by divine grace and seen in ‘theological virtues’—faith, hope, and charity. “Faith as an act of partnership with a universal personal God achieves an eminent expression in the great politics of the providential nation-state, a task that compels the Christian statesman to attend to the partial truths asserted by the major claimants in today’s contest for the soul of civilization.” In effect, such Christian statesmanship would wrest the nation-state from the grip of its inventor, Machiavelli, and his progeny. In this, “the excessive or overflowing meaning of the practical on the one hand”—the “logic of action”—and “of the divine on the other”—the overflowing grace of God—meet in reciprocal action, politically, and “color each other.” Whereas there has been a conflict between philosophy and theology, reason and faith, Athens and Jerusalem, “the good that is at work in both” might enable their coordination against their common enemies—coordination, not synthesis, inasmuch as each endeavor has its own integrity. Thus does Manent invite his readers “to recognize the spiritual good that beckons beyond the visible arena of practical liberalism.”

The common enemy is the conception of nature posited by modern philosophers, notably Machiavelli’s follower, Thomas Hobbes, who defines nature, including human nature, as “radically individuated biological being,” a materialism that somewhat dubiously (as David Hume saw) “reduces to the individual’s boundless assertion of ‘rights.” Since the ‘is’ of a nonteleological and strictly materialist nature cannot really issue in an ‘ought’ of rights, “the governing law of modern liberalism is lawlessness; modern liberalism is a flight from law—a perpetual, obsessive, ever-self-radicalizing flight from law as the essential structure of human action.” But this cannot be true because by nature human action is “archic”—commanding, initiating, ruling, and “always assert[ing] a reason for its rule.” Reasons are debatable, therefore at least open to reasonable discussion, and although only an extraordinarily naive person would expect rational deliberation to predominate in most political debates, the openness to such debate is there and the adjustment of competing demands, many of them irrational and unjust, at least requires some sort of attempt at justifying each claim in terms of the public good, usually as that is defined by the prevailing regime. The honnête has a chance; otherwise, it would have a much slimmer chance. Pleasure, utility, and uprightness are, as Manent writes, “objective components of human nature,” so they will have their say in a liberal democracy. This is the nature that connects the ‘is’ with the ‘ought.’

With respect to uprightness, the noble, its “stability and universality” are “grounded in a dynamic triangular structure of the city, the soul, and the divine.” In the city, nobility makes the virtue of justice possible; the noble and the just are “the two essential dimensions of the “honnête.” Pleasure and utility are likely to be brought to the bar of the honnête, at least some of the time, as seen in the way the spirited guardians enforce the rational judgments of the philosopher kings in Plato’s Republic. The reverse is also at least partly true, as “no person is noble who does not act with some reasonable regard for the plain utility or reasonable interests of his neighbor or fellow citizen.” In the soul, nobility must stand up for itself, become part of the habitual life of the soul, if it is to maintain itself, “preserve the conditions” of the “noble action” it craves—virtue being “the principle as well as the end of virtuous action.” To fortify itself with support from lower and solid ground, “the noble is grounded by the useful, and the useful is ennobled by the noble”—reciprocal ruling and being-ruled. More, “it is because man is capable of elevating himself above the goods of the body and of scorning even life—of which beasts do not have any idea—that he knows how to multiply these same goods to a degree that they cannot conceive of.” And with respect to the divine, “the instrumentality of the noble to justice or the common good…holds the noble open to a higher good beyond the self-satisfaction of the soul as well as the necessities of the city.” Manent follows Aquinas in going “beyond Aristotle in tracing the natural passage from the noble to the supernatural,” in “humbling…the classical, aristocratic pretension to achieve a philosophic transcendence that escapes the gaps and circles of the practical (moral and political) good.” As a philosopher, Aristotle inclines “to identify this ultimate end with purely theoretical activity.” For Christians, however, the ultimate end of practice is to meet a Person, although one’s success in that effort does not depend primarily upon oneself.

Notes

1. See “Theosis,” a review of Archimandrite George Kapsanis: Theosis: The True Purpose of Life, on this website under the category, “Bible Notes.”
2. See “The Humanitarian Temptation,” a review of Daniel J. Mahoney: The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity, reviewed on this website under the category Bible Notes.

Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève: On Tyranny. “Restatement on Xenophon’s Hiero.” Originally published in 1954.Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth, eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. 

Leo Strauss: Spinoza’s Critique of Religion. E. M. Sinclair translation. Preface to the English Translation. New York: Schocken Books, 1965.

In considering Strauss, Hancock initially structures his account in accordance with the philosopher’s dichotomy between ‘Athens’ and ‘Jerusalem,’ reason or philosophy and revelation or religion. He offers interpretations of Strauss’s “Restatement” of his argument against his Hegelian contemporary, Alexandre Kojève, and of the “Preface” to his book, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion.

Hancock begins with philosophy. “Following Hegel,” Hancock writes, “Kojève understands modern secular rationalism as a transformation and fulfillment of Christian universality and subjectivity.” In Kojève’s view, both Christianity and especially its secular rationalist progeny “released the energy of human labor for the service of human needs” by their egalitarian undermining and eventual demolition of aristocracy, of the few who prided themselves on not-working. The mediation of the few between the one and the many disappeared—in this, Christianity might be said to have followed from late-Roman monarchy—and “a universal society of equal recognition”—the first, of all human beings under God, the second, of all human beings in mutually dependent commercial societies—came forward. Hancock finds Kojève to be more sober than Badiou (no high bar, there) and more realistic than Siedentop (ditto) because the egalitarian revolution has and will continue to be ‘low,’ a matter of satisfying “the most ordinary desires of the most ordinary human beings,” and, in the future, there will be no communism but a universal and homogenous state, a “coercive apparatus” that will never ‘wither away.’ Humanity’s “collective life” will be “supported by total technological mastery, the absolute victory of a final, rational tyranny, a prosaic life in which all poetic projections have been banished along with the cruelty of history.” Nietzsche had already decried the ‘last man’ and called for resistance by holding up the possibility of the ‘super-man,’ the rule of a ‘planetary aristocracy,’ universal but radically undemocratic. By Kojève and Strauss’s time, after two of the world wars Nietzsche had predicted and the rule of the leveling tyrant, Stalin, in the Soviet Union and the rule of the leveling administrative state in the United States, the prospects for a Nietzschean aristocracy seemed very poor, indeed. “Resistance to this pincer movement of the one and the all against the natural and limited space of human existence was, I propose, the central purpose of Leo Strauss’s philosophical career.” 

Strauss concurs with Hegel, Siedentop, Baliou (and Tocqueville) in tracing modern egalitarianism to Christianity although, unlike the first three, he does not celebrate it. The Christian promise of freedom (from sin, in God’s regime on a new heaven and a new earth) has become an “all-too-human project [that] has necessarily degenerated into a rational and technological tyranny”; the apparent freedom of universality, of no-limits, can only be countered by recovering “an appreciation of the permanent contours and, therefore, the permanent limits of the human condition,” by recovering the contours of “necessity”—the necessary limits of human wisdom and the necessary limits of politics, of reciprocal ruling and being ruled in small political communities. Both of these limitations are eschewed by the advocates of “absolute transcendence” (the metaphysics of historicism, with its promise of human conquest of natural necessity) and of “formal universality” (the universal and homogenous state, produce and final agent of that conquest). This is the sense in which Strauss valorizes the “realm of necessity.” Hancock claims that this “idea of an eternal realm of pure, impersonal necessity untouched by human concerns is the projection of a very human claim to rule, the mostly implicit horizon of an essentially aristocratic assertion of human meaning.” But is Strauss actually making an assertion, pure and simple? Is his call to a return to nature and to natural right, as against the illusory freedom of worldwide rule, evidence of a sort of ‘will to power’?

Hancock argues that Strauss “tips his hand more than once to reveal the human and political springs of the philosophic idea of a ‘realm of necessity” while encouraging “the pride of philosophers who would not wish to be reminded of their dependence on common moral and political sources of meaning,” appealing to “the pride of philosophers even as he defines philosophy as beyond human pride,” resorting “shamelessly to argument by high-minded presumption or by peremptory definition,” as when he claims that “we must assume that philosophers do not desire to rule” and that they have no concern for the Hegelian-Kojèvian struggle for “recognition.” And while he concedes that a transhistorical conception of philosophy “depends upon the thesis of eternal, immutable being”—above and beyond history defined as the ever-changing course of events—Strauss finally admits that this conception is “altogether questionable.” Moreover, Strauss also concedes that reasoning cannot achieve “subjective certainty,” that “all knowledge is embedded in a social-political context.” He only disagrees with Kojève in upholding “the superiority of an aristocratic over a democratic-universalist social and political frame” for this embeddedness. The aristocratic character of Straussian philosophy makes honor, the aristocratic passion, its engine, while the modern philosopher is “conditioned by an original motive of ‘love’ for human beings,” an egalitarian passion derivative of Christianity.

At this point, it may be helpful to pause and reexamine how Strauss himself presents his argument. In both of these essays, he begins with a specific circumstance in which he lives or has lived. In the Kojève essay, he begins by alluding to the condition of social science in contemporary universities located in the liberal-democratic regimes of the Cold War of the 1950s. That condition is poor. Social scientists cannot distinguish between, for example, kingships and tyrannies because social science is supposed to be ‘value-free,’ entirely descriptive. The rule of the one is the rule of the one; ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are scientifically meaningless terms. Social science is quantitative, not ‘qualitative.’ More, contemporary social science partakes not only of moral but also of historical relativism. Its proponents claim that classical political science, centered on the polis, cannot comprehend the regimes that have arisen since Christianity and modern science appeared; in particular, they cannot understand the modern state.

Strauss demurs. The classical framework may well enable a political scientist to understand present-day tyranny, and not only that it is tyranny, not kingship. Caesarism can be just if it is a punishment for corruption or misdeeds; tyranny is always unjust. It is true that the modern “notion” of philosophy or science, aspiring to the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate, is not the classical understanding, but that doesn’t mean that the classics knew nothing of such a notion. They knew of it and rejected it as unnatural. Nature sets limits on human endeavor. It is the realm of necessity, a constraint on human action. This means that “there is no adequate solution to the problem of virtue or happiness on the political or social plane”—not the modern state governed in accordance with the science of administration or a world state that prevents international wars. Regimes may be good or bad, but their goodness often depends on their legitimacy, the presence of the rule of law; law is imperfect, so the best real states will be imperfectly good.

The distinction between naturally good and unnaturally bad regimes declined under the influence of Machiavelli’s thought. “Machiavelli separates wisdom from moderation,” lauding virtuosity, adjuring the prince to learn how not to be good. Kojève follows in the Machiavellian line. Like Machiavelli, he is a philosopher; he knows how to think and he loves to think. But this begs the questions, ‘What does he think?’ In political science, in political philosophy, virtuosity and love may not suffice. The existence of Stalin in the contemporary world, a tyrant who claimed supreme authority founded on an assertion of scientific knowledge, means that a philosopher, a lover of wisdom, must love Stalin—or else. Tyrants generally view philosophers with suspicion, regarding a philosopher as “a most dangerous competitor for tyrannical rule,” a person too smart for the tyrant’s own good. If classical political science can understand tyrants as such, not only the tyrants they saw in their own time, then a consideration of Xenophon’s dialogue between the Syracusan tyrant Hiero and Simonides, called one of the seven wise men of the classical world, might illuminate the condition of the modern world, in which tyranny hasn’t disappeared but social scientists have prevented themselves from understanding it, blocking themselves from full knowledge, handicapping their quest for wisdom. 

“A wise man does not attempt futile things.” Any attempt by Simonides to moderate Hiero’s regime by transferring his support from the mercenary soldiers to the citizens would be futile, as mercenaries are too dangerous to be demoted. Kojève sees Simonides’ caution as unnecessary because while the wise man understands the honor-loving Master, and might understand the citizens, he does not understand the morality of the slaves, the workers. Masters have their morality; slaves have theirs. Kojève follows Hegel, and to some extent Marx, by maintaining that an alliance between the one and the many can be effected if a wise man brings about a ‘synthesis’ of the two moralities subsequent to their dialectical clash. To this, Strauss replies that Simonides himself is no honor-loving Master who cannot see beyond his own morality but a wise man, the “highest human type.” The philosopher Socrates, for example, is just, not “manly,” honor-loving, ultimately tyrannical, blind to the good of the political community and even to the good of his own soul. And philosophic Socrates is not the only just human type: “Neither Biblical nor classical morality encourages all statesmen to try to extend their authority over all men in order to achieve universal recognition.” This affirms Hancock’s notice of the underlying homology between reason and revelation while it disputes the Hegelian synthesis of Socrates and Machiavelli, the claim that a Machiavellian tyrant can be truly wise. Hegel, following Machiavelli and his English disciple, Thomas Hobbes, “construct[s] human society by starting from the untrue assumption that man as man is thinkable as a being that lacks awareness of sacred restraints or as a being that is guided by nothing but a desire of recognition.” For his part, Kojève “apparently thinks” that force or terror, the threat of imprisonment and death (the king of terrors), “are indispensable in every regime,” including aristocracies, defined by the classics as the rule of the best, the genuinely virtuous; to him, only the “universal and homogenous state” can be just because it alone can minimize (if not eliminate) rule by force by eliminating war among peoples. This regime claim is based, Strauss writes, on an assumption that is untrue. By contrast, the “assumption” that Hancock flags, that “the wise do not desire to rule,” is not necessarily false. Those who are wise do not aspire to rule because that would mean they were ruling the unwise, who will not consent to be ruled by the wise, and the wise do not attempt the impossible. “What pretends to be the absolute rule of the wise will in fact be absolute rule of unwise men”—members of the Communist Party, armed with Marxian pseudoscience, for example. Further, the universal and homogenous state at least seems impossible because it would require “universal agreement regarding the fundamentals,” an implausible condition. Faiths that make universalist claims provoke counter-faiths that make the same claim, leading not to universal rule over a homogenous population but to continued wars. The classical political philosophers deemed it is better, wiser, to limit the rule of the unwise by the unwise with the rule of law as interpreted by “equitable” men, the gentlemen who derived their incomes from landed estates but lived in cities—urbane lives in urban settings.

As for the lover of wisdom, the philosopher, his “only demand on the political men is that they leave him alone.” But, as Kojève sees, “the philosopher cannot lead an absolutely solitary life” because isolation in the quest for wisdom, the quest for “subjective certainty,” might be indistinguishable from madness. Kojève insists that “genuine certainty must be ‘intersubjective.'” Strauss replies that “the classics were fully aware of the essential weakness of the mind of the individual.” Philosophers need friends, but not just any friends. “The friends must be competent men: they must themselves be actual or potential philosophers,” of whom there are few. This is something along the lines of what Thomas Jefferson, no enemy of democracy, called the natural aristocracy of virtue and talent. Since “friendship presupposes a measure of conscious agreement,” and “the things regarding which the philosophic friends must agree cannot be known or evident truths” (philosophy being “not wisdom but the quest for wisdom”), a variety of philosophic ‘schools’ or ‘sects’ will arise, given the diversity of opinions among philosophers. Therefore, even philosophic friendship does not suffice for the philosopher. Like Socrates, “he must go out to the market place,” where “the conflict with the political men cannot be avoided.” He must be a political philosopher, not simply a gazer at the cosmos. This is what has come to be called the ‘Socratic turn’ from previous philosophy. “The whole history of philosophy testifies that the danger eloquently described by Kojève is inevitable.” Inevitability is a form of necessity. 

Kojève is mistaken, however, in his secular-Christian, Machiavellian/Hobbesian/Cartesian/Hegelian expectation of subjective certainty, of a ‘science of wisdom.’ On the contrary, “philosophy in the original meaning of the term is nothing but knowledge of one’s ignorance”; that is the one “objective truth” of which everyone, even a philosopher, can be subjectively certain. “What Pascal said with anti-philosophic intent about the impotence of both dogmatism and skepticism, is the only possible justification of philosophy which as such is neither dogmatic nor skeptic, and still less ‘decisionist,’ but zetetic” or “skeptic in the original sense of the term.” Philosophy “as such is nothing but genuine awareness of the problems, i.e., of the fundamental and comprehensive problems.” The philosopher who persuades himself of having comprehended some certain truth about the fundamental and comprehensive problems is no longer a philosopher but a sectarian. Socrates “never belonged to a sect and never founded one.” He is not depicted in Leonardo’s “School of Athens.” 

Hancock acknowledges the zetetic character of philosophy as described by Strauss while relegating it to the status of an exoteric teaching. Zeteticism, Hancock argues, is “addressed precisely to the pride of philosophers who aspire to transcend pride.” He is addressing modern philosophers, the Kojèves, who claim to have overcome the “fundamental alternatives” with a “powerful synthesis of the radicalized alternatives, aristocratic and democratic, Greek and biblical, the absolute and the universal, the one and the all,” a synthesis originally proposed by the Christian Paul, who averred that for him there was no longer Greek or Jew but Christ crucified. Why, then, attach resistance to such a grand but now ‘secularized’ and dangerous synthesis to an appeal to ‘aristocratic’ prejudice? Because the distinction between the few and the many, the wise or at least questers for wisdom and the unwise slaves to prevailing opinion goes deeper than all the other now (supposedly) synthesized antimonies. To reestablish that distinction is indispensable, fundamental, indeed a necessity if human beings, who by nature are the thinking animals, may continue to exhibit their humanity. 

Hancock argues that Strauss’s defense of an aristocratic quest, the quest of the few who love wisdom and seek it, “seems to culminate in the metaphysical idea of an ‘eternal order’ but finally acknowledges, for the attentive reader, that the taste for such an order is rooted in a practical hierarchy,” in what Strauss calls “the immediate pleasure which we observe when we observe signs of human nobility.” Such an order “anchor[s] his aristocratic pride” in the cosmos itself and requires a defense of that order by philosophers against the conquest of nature, the supposed “realm of freedom,” and especially against that conquest as formulated in the historicist doctrine (indeed dogma) that imagines the universal and homogenous state as the framework of the realm of freedom. On the contrary, all evidence from regimes animated by historicist doctrines point away from freedom, whether political, philosophic, or religious. “In the absence” of the “vertical orientation,” the aristocratic orientation, “the activity of reason cannot avoid being drawn into the horizontal field of universalization and technology,” the realm not really of freedom but of comprehensive unwisdom, of ideological tyranny.

Returning to Strauss, one notices that cites Xenophon as “indicat[ing]” that the philosopher does indeed want honor but only from a small minority or even only from himself. This is aristocratic, to a moderate degree. The difference between the philosopher and the political man is that the political man wants honor from everyone. Kojève claims that the philosopher is no different, motivated by the desire for recognition, honor, not love of wisdom. Xenophon instead observes that the universal desire is not recognition but satisfaction, happiness. The philosopher, however, finds satisfaction only in “the desire for truth, i.e., for knowledge of the eternal order, or the order of the whole.” That makes the philosopher, not the political man, not even the tyrant, the only truly ambitious man. “The political man must reject this way altogether.” He cannot depreciate other men because he seeks their recognition; he therefore must care for human beings as such; to rule them is to serve them. The ruler loves and desires to be loved, by the many, regardless of the quality of the many. Strauss leaves unspoken the obvious fact that the Christian God is precisely a ruler, a lover of men who commands them to love Him. 

Strauss then catches Kojève in an act of rhetorical overreach. Kojève had compared the supposed love of the ruler of the universal and homogenous state for his subjects to the love of a philosopher for truth. A mother “loves her son in spite of all his faults,” and the universal tyrants loves his subjects and the truth that he embodies in spite of all the faults of his subjects and all the unloveliness of many truths. But a mother’s love for her children, Strauss ripostes, is no universal love; it is the love of her own. “The philosopher on the other hand is concerned with what can never become private or exclusive property.” At the same time, “the philosopher cannot help living as a human being who as such cannot be dead to human concerns, although his soul will not be in those concerns”; he has a body and his body has needs, including the need of services of others. But the needs of the body are limited by nature, by necessity. Accordingly, the philosopher will not hurt anyone, nor does he “expect salvation or satisfaction from the establishment of the simply best social order.” Unlike the would-be tyrant, he seeks no revolution. He will offer advice to his city or indeed to foreign rulers (as Simonides does) as a political philosopher, but he does not expect and will hardly demand that his advice be followed. 

In entering the marketplace, the philosopher especially seeks the company of those who exhibit “well-ordered souls.” They resemble the “eternal order” that he seeks to understand, and may someday assist in his quest for understanding that order, unlike “the chaotic souls.” The philosopher seeks those souls not because they serve him but “simply because they are what they are,” unlike the mother, whose love Kojève confuses with mother-love. “The good order of the soul is philosophizing,” and the philosopher would “educate potential philosophers simply because he cannot help loving well-ordered souls,” not because he craves recognition. The ruler, by contrast, is not motivated by the Socratic eros “because he does not know what a well-ordered soul is,” craving recognition indiscriminately, ‘democratically,’ from all his subjects out of “an unqualified attachment to human things as such.” The philosopher does not want to associate with disorderly souls; if he did, he would be a sophist, pretendedly wise. That is, the ‘aristocratic’ character of the philosopher is not simply an appeal to pride. It is based upon a true perception of human nature, which features human beings of varying kinds and degrees of competence and of incompetence, of virtue and of vice. The order of nature is not merely ‘diverse’ in the egalitarian, ‘woke’ sense, but differentiated in the ‘aristocratic’ sense, and every university professor, including Professor Hancock, has seen that, time and again. This means, as Strauss says, that a philosopher’s self-admiration or self-recognition is akin if not identical to “good conscience”—inner ‘science’ or self-knowledge.

Jesus invites the fishermen to become fishers of men. So, too, does the philosopher “go to the market place to fish for potential philosophers,” individuals of well-ordered souls, which he loves. He “must” do so out of philosophic necessity, cognizant not of a need for social recognition but a need for understanding the nature of men. He does not need the best regime in order to philosophize, only the relative freedom of the marketplace, where talk is cheap, even if nothing else is. The rulers, and many of their subjects, regard such talk not only as cheap but as dangerous, at best a distraction from serious business and at worst subversive of what the regime regards as right conduct and belief. “In what then does philosophic politics consist? In satisfying the city that the philosophers are not atheists, that they do not desecrate everything sacred to the city, that they reverence what the city reverences, that they are not subversives, in short, that they are not irresponsible adventurers but good citizens and even the best of citizens.” This “defense of philosophy…was required always and everywhere, whatever the regime might have been.” Notable successes were achieved by Plato, Cicero, Fārābi, and Maimonides. (Strauss does not here name a notable success by a philosopher among Christians.) But Kojève “fails to distinguish between philosophic politics and that political action which the philosopher might undertake with a view to establishing the best regime or to the improvement of the actual order,” instead describing the philosopher as one fighting “a tragic conflict” between his desire to rule and his reluctance to rule. But “for the classics, the conflict between philosophy and city is as little tragic as the death of Socrates.” 

Kojève looks not to the dialectics of discussion but to “the higher dialectics of History” for the solution to the tragic dilemma he thinks he sees. The end of History will be the universal and homogenous state wherein all are recognized, all satisfied. Strauss doubts that the subjects of the universal and homogenous state will be equally recognized or equally satisfied. “Does Kojève not underestimate the power of the passions?” That is, there are two kinds of inevitability at play in the dialogue between Strauss and Kojève. For Kojève, as for Hegel, the dialectical unfolding of the Absolute Spirit, culminating in the universal and homogenous state is inevitable, and will end the tension between the philosopher and the city. For Strauss, the tension itself is inevitable because there are necessary natural limits, including the limits of human nature. This is why he parodies the language of the Communist Manifesto, the historicist call to action par excellence: “Warriors and workers of all countries, unite, while there is still time, to prevent the coming of ‘the realm of freedom.’ Defend with might and main, if it needs to be defended, ‘the realm of necessity'”—that is, nature, the limits nature necessitates, limits that militate against attempts to institute a universal and homogenous state. It is the observation of nature which suggests that “perhaps it is not war nor work but thinking that constitutes of the humanity of man”—thinking, whose purpose is wisdom, not the ‘end of History.’ To instantiate the universal and homogeneous state, everyone will need to become wise. But given the observable limits of human nature, that won’t happen. Even Kojève more or less acknowledges that, as the state that rules at the end of History will, he admits, be a state, a coercive institution, not a seamless ‘classless society’ that remains after the state has ‘withered away.’ 

Seeing “the weakness or dependence of human nature,” the classics thought “universal happiness” impossible. The “best regime” might be established, somewhere, but that would be a long shot, although good regimes were possible; Aristotle considered the ‘mixed’ regime, combining elements of oligarchy and democracy, the best practicable regime if not the best regime simply. In order to make the establishment of the ‘ideal’ regime possible, the moderns had “to lower the goal of man.” This meant that the best regime needed no standard of excellence ‘above’ it; it embodied the moderns’ lowered order of excellence, capable of being ruled by an unwise man, “the Universal and Final Tyrant” who (as if to prove his unwisdom) “presents himself as a philosopher, as the highest philosophic authority, as the supreme exegete of the only true philosophy, as the executor and hangman authorized by the only true philosophy.” (To put the matter in Christian terms, for Kojève, the Universal and Final Tyrant is the philosophic equivalent of the Christ, but for Strauss he is the Anti-Christ.) In “former ages,” when “claims of this kind” were advanced (Strauss is thinking of Christian and Muslim rulers), “philosophy went underground,” accommodating itself “in its explicit or exoteric teaching to the unfounded commands of rulers who believe they knew things which they did not know,” in contrast with real philosophers, who best know that they do not know. Also, in former ages and even in the contemporary world, a philosopher could still “escape to other countries if life became unbearable in the tyrant’s dominions”—as Strauss himself had done, prudently keeping one step ahead of Nazi attacks, moving from Germany to France to Britain and finally to America (and indeed then from New York, along the Atlantic coast, to Chicago, in the middle of the continent). 

Human nature depends upon nature as a whole. “Philosophy in the strict and classical sense is quest for the eternal order or for the eternal cause or causes of all things,” presupposing “an eternal and unchangeable order within which History takes place and which is not in any way affected by History,” that “any ‘realm of freedom’ is no more than a dependent province within ‘the realm of necessity.'” “Being” does not “create itself in the course of History,” as Kojève would have it. If that were true, then the historicists claim that “social change or fate affects being, if it is not identical with Being, and hence affects truth.” (A Marxist once titled his book, Let History Judge.) Strauss is not satisfied that History really judges anything. Human beings can judge, within the limits nature sets on even the most powerful human minds. If, Heidegger-like, we “lack the courage to face the issue of Tyranny,” if we pretend that Nazism had an “inner truth and greatness” despite Hitler’s genocidal depredations, we will be “forced to evade the issue of Being as well, precisely because, like Heidegger, we “did nothing but talk of Being.” In this final observation, Strauss returns to the theme of the beginning of his essay, when he criticized contemporary social science for failing to understand tyranny. What they did, trivially, Heidegger did, grandly, and neither did adequately. Strauss undertook something along the lines of the Socratic turn away from philosophy as ‘natural science,’ urging philosophers and potential philosophers to join with him.

So, Athens. What of Jerusalem? As Hancock rightly observes, “the fundamentally moral-political bearing of Leo Strauss’s defense of classical philosophy indeed lies deeper than his formal openness to the perennial questions of the Western tradition.” In his preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, Strauss again situates himself in contemporary life, this time even more ‘personally’ than he did when alluding to the failings of the social ‘scientists’ who surrounded him at the University of Chicago. In Germany in the years 1925-28, when he wrote this book, Strauss, by his own account was “a young Jew living born and raised in Germany who found himself in the grips of the theologico-political predicament.” The regime of liberal democracy in Germany was new and weak. It had been founded after the failure of the monarchic regime established after Bismarck had united the 37 German states under one Reich. The Weimar Republic took its bearings from an unsteady compromise between “the principles of 1789” and “the highest German tradition,” the medieval tradition stemming from the long-lost Holy Roman Empire, which had been dominated by Germans. The weakness of the Weimar Republic was easily seen: it was “unable to use the sword,” it could not defend justice against the rival gangs of Nazis and Communists that attacked one another in the streets. Liberal democracy itself was discredited when the liberal democracies betrayed their own principles by imposing the Treaty of Versailles, with its punitive measures that struck the German people themselves, not only the monarchy. In the struggle with the Communists, the Nazis won for the same reason Lenin’s Bolsheviks had taken Russia: their leader was stronger-willed, more ruthless and daring, and exerted more power over his followers than his enemies. 

There is a broader explanation for all this, and Strauss avails himself of it on the grounds that “it is safer to try to understand the low in the light of the high than the high in the light of the low” because to understand the high in the light of the low,” to engage in ‘reductionism,’ “necessarily distorts the high,” whereas to understand the low in the light of the high “does not deprive the low of the freedom to reveal itself fully as what it is.” The name ‘Weimar’ “refers one to the greatest epoch of German thought and letters, to the epoch extending from the last third of the eighteenth century to the first third of the nineteenth century”—the epoch whose most distinguished man was Goethe. This epoch had been initiated by Germans’ enthusiasm for Rousseau. As “the first modern critic of the fundamental modern project,” the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate, Rousseau “laid the foundation for the distinction, so fateful for German thought, between civilization”—the realm of Enlightenment rationalism, modern science—and “culture”—the realm of moral and esthetic sentiments. “The radicalization and deepening of Rousseau’s thought by classical German philosophy culminating in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” legitimated under German circumstances not Rousseauian republicanism but a constitutional monarchy “in the hands of highly educated civil servants appointed by a hereditary king.” Elsewhere, Strauss remarks that Rousseau’s claim that human nature is malleable tends to undermine his affirmation of natural right, to make it open to thoroughgoing revision, indeed to the abandonment of natural right for ‘historical right.’ Here, however, he is content to point to another effect of Rousseau’s thought, which issued “prepared not only the French Revolution and classical German philosophy but also that extreme reaction to the French Revolution which is German romanticism” (as seen in young Goethe’s “Young Werther,” later deplored by the mature Goethe). German Romanticism fostered a “longing for the Middle Ages” that “began in Germany in the same moment in which the actual Middle Ages—the Holy Roman Empire ruled by a German—ended, in what was then thought to be the moment of Germany’s deepest humiliation.” The stubbornness of this political nostalgia not only militated against modern, natural-rights republicanism, it “explains why the situation of the indigenous Jews” like Strauss and his family “was more precarious in Germany than in any other Western country.” Medieval Europe was a place where Jews suffered sporadic assaults, pogroms, in the name of theologico-political sentiments fostered by the Catholic Church. “According to liberal democracy, the bond of society is universal human morality, whereas religion (positive religion) is a private affair; in the Middle Ages religion, that is, Catholic Christianity, was the bond of society.” Romanticism held out not Catholic Christianity but nationalism as the social bond; nationalism comports with statism, Bismarck’s project of political unification. German Jews “owed their emancipation” not to the Church but “to the French Revolution or to its effects” in Germany. And it was not until the Weimar Republic that Jews were “given full political rights” there. The Nazi regime founded upon a backlash against German liberal democracy was also “the only regime that ever was anywhere which had no other clear principle except murderous hatred of the Jews”—not, to be sure, in the name of Catholic Christianity but in the name of biological pseudoscience pretending to prove that certain ‘races,’ first and foremost ‘the Jews,’ were by nature not only unequal, inferior, but evil, worthy only of eradication.

Crucially, German Jews themselves had made themselves vulnerable at the time of their emancipation by “becom[ing] open to the influx of German thought,” which was not universalist (whether rationalist or Catholic) but “German essentially.” This made German Jews politically and even spiritually dependent upon Germans who were, however, still unfavorable to Jews, now on nationalist instead of religious grounds. “The German-Jewish problem was never solved,” not even by liberalism. The turn to political Zionism, a Jewish nationalism mirroring German nationalism in its secular/humanist orientation, continued to make assimilation impossible. The subsequent compromise, cultural Zionism, emphasized not the quest for a Jewish homeland but respect for the “Jewish heritage”; it “fell between the sternness of nationalism and the sternness of divine revelation,” in a way paralleling the eventual weakness of the Weimar Republic. 

Admittedly, “human beings will never create a society which is free from contradictions,” whatever historicists may say. “To realize that the Jewish problem is insoluble means never to forget the truth proclaimed by Zionism regarding the limitations of liberalism.” Liberalism distinguishes between the state and society, recognizing a legally protected “private sphere” into which it places religion. But religions distinguish sharply between insiders and outsiders, the faithful and the heretical. If the state cannot intervene powerfully in the private sphere, it cannot protect society from religious antagonisms; yet insofar as the state curtails privacy it curtails liberalism. In reaction to this dilemma, Jewish thinkers, most prominently Franz Rosenzweig, attempted a return to Judaism, not on the basis of tradition, which modern rationalism had so seriously wounded, but on the basis of a “present experience” of God which “every human being can have if he does not refuse himself to it,” the experience of the ‘Thou’ by the ‘I,’ as Martin Buber put it, following Rosenzweig. 

But this too led to a problem. The ‘I-Thou’ experience presents itself as beyond reason. But so does late-modern philosophy, also beginning with Rousseau but intensifying with Nietzsche and culminating in Heidegger. Heidegger rejects the God of the Bible, more or less on Nietzschean grounds. The God of the Bible is a providential god, promising security to His people. In the Bible, God’s grace redeems and perfects nature, including human nature. Heidegger denies that we have any such security. Human life is ‘existential’ precisely because the human soul is “essentially historical,” always changing, without any “unchangeable essence or limits.” For Nietzsche, this can only be answered by the coming not of Christ but of the Superman, the Roman Caesar with the soul of Christ, the synthesis of Rome, which subsumed Athens politically by means of military conquest, and Jerusalem, which subsumed Judaism by means of Christianity. The philosophy of the future is “the outcome of a will,” a superhuman will that is not the God of the Christian Bible. Heidegger urges a similar notion, but with a more decidedly Christian spin: his ‘existentialism’ emphasizes not triumphalism but anguish, guilt, even as it continues to uphold what Heidegger supposed “the inner truth and greatness” of Nazism, namely, its rejection of modern rationalism.

The seduction of German Jews by German thought did not in the end make them seem more German to the Germans but instead made them hesitant to return to Judaism either by the path of Tradition or the path of direct, present experience of God. This is where Spinoza comes in. “Orthodoxy could be returned to only if Spinoza was wrong in every respect.” As a Jew, Spinoza defended not Judaism but modern philosophy and its “new understanding of ‘nature'” as an object to be conquered. That is, he “restored the dignity of speculation” against revelation but on the new, Machiavellian/Baconian/Hobbesian foundation. With the Bible, “he understands all things as proceeding from, not made or created by, a single being or origin,” but entirely unlike the Bible, he “no longer regards this process as a descent or decay, but as an ascent or unfolding: the end is higher than the origin.” ‘God’ is no longer the Creator-God of the Bible but an immanent energy in all things, the god of pantheism. Therefore, the “highest form of knowledge” is not knowledge of the originating One but of the resulting Many. In the central passage of Strauss’s “Preface,” he writes that Spinoza at least “appears to originate the kind of philosophic system which views the fundamental processus as progress,” thereby preparing the ground for German ‘idealism.’ “God’s might is his right, and therefore the power of every being is as such its right; Spinoza lifts Machiavellianism to theological heights,” beyond good and evil.

And this metaphysical stance, Spinoza’s contention that the Many are superior to the One, also favors liberal democracy; “he was the philosopher who founded liberal democracy, a specifically modern regime,” influencing in turn Rousseau and in Germany Kant. He is still a natural-rights thinker of a sort, but one who has abandoned the “strictness and austerity which classical political philosophy shares with ancient law,” including Jewish law, a thinker “free from the classical aversion to commercialism” and from the “traditional demand for sumptuary laws,” giving “the passions much greater freedom” and counting “much less on the power of reason than the polity of the classics” did. This flows from his pantheism. “For whereas for the classics the life of passion is a life against nature, for Spinoza everything that is, is natural.” If nature is to be conquered, then freedom from it consists of the adoption of the new science, the new sort of reason, which will rule against nature. “He thus decisively prepares the modern notion of the ‘ideal’ as a work of the human mind or as a human project, as distinguished from an end imposed on man by nature”—the triumph of ‘freedom’ so conceived, overcoming the limits of necessity. 

Without the Biblical God, there is no need for Biblically-inspired priests. Philosophers and artists can take their place; in this, one sees the origin of ‘cultural’ Zionism and before it, German Kultur. With the pantheistic god and the philosophers and artists who align themselves with It (no longer a ‘Him,’ a Person), “the millennial antagonism between Judaism and Christianity was about to disappear,” as “the new Church would transform Jews and Christians into human beings,” into “cultured human beings” who, “because they possessed science and art, did not need religion in addition.” Freedom, emancipation of Jews could follow from this in a “secular redemption” of mutual assimilation. The new Church requires a new catechism, which Spinoza provides in the form of “seven dogmas which are the indispensable fundamentals of the faith.” These dogmas “do not contain anything specifically Christian nor anything specifically Jewish,” instead undergirding “a society of which Jews and Christians can be equally members, of which Jews and Christians can be equal members.” 

Spinozism differs from the Hegelianism which eventually prevailed, after the several iterations and alterations that philosophers effected prior to Hegel. The constructivist, ‘synthesizing’ dialectical logic of change Hegel introduced was not Spinoza’s logic, which remained rooted in the classical understanding of the principle of non-contradiction, a principle that maintains natural limits to things and does not fire an ambition to manipulate them in accordance with human will or ‘freedom’ as conceived by the moderns. In terms of Judaism as distinct from philosophy, Orthodox Judaism cannot contest Spinozism on its own grounds, which preclude miracles and divine revelation as the Bible presents them. “But the case is entirely different if orthodoxy limits itself to the assertion that it believes the aforementioned things” but does not know them. “For all the assertions of orthodoxy rest on the irrefutable premise that the omnipotent God, whose will is unfathomable, whose ways are not our ways, who has decided to dwell in the thick darkness, may exist.” To believe that he does is to open one’s mind to the possibility of miracles and of the necessity of divine revelation of truths which our intellect cannot reach high enough to grasp. On that foundation, “the orthodox premise cannot be refuted by experience nor by recourse to the principle of contradiction.” This is why Spinoza and the Enlightenment writers who followed him attacked orthodoxy with “laughter and mockery.” But mockery isn’t refutation. “The genuine refutation of orthodoxy would require the proof that the world and human life are perfectly intelligible without the assumption of a mysterious God.” Such a refutation would require the establishment of a comprehensive “philosophic system” whereby man “show[s] himself theoretically and practically as the master of the world and the master of his life,” replacing “the merely given world” with a “world created by man theoretically and practically”—a new heaven and a new earth, to borrow a phrase from the New Testament. Neither Spinoza, nor Hegel, nor Marx, nor anyone else has succeeded in producing such a system, much less in substantiating it in practice. This means that “philosophy, the quest for evident and necessary knowledge, rests itself on an unevident decision, on an act of the will, just as faith.” The “antagonism between Spinoza and Judaism, between unbelief and belief, is ultimately not theoretical but moral.”

In Jewish terms, this moral antagonism fundamentally involves a choice between the austere commands of God and the lax materialism of Epicureanism, an Epicureanism not necessarily made more plausible by investing matter with divinity, by invoking pantheism, by making Epicureanism “bold and active” with commerce, secular republicanism, and the scientific conquest of nature, with modern ‘idealism.’ For himself, in terms of morality, Strauss points not to metaphysics, to speculative origins of Being, but to the real, practical results of the modern project. “In proportion as the systematic effort to liberate man completely from all nonhuman bonds seems to succeed, the doubt increases of whether the goal is not fantastic—whether man has not become smaller and more miserable in proportion as the systematic civilization progresses.” The “belief that by pushing even farther back the ‘natural limits’ man will advance to ever greater freedom, that he can subjugate nature and prescribe to it his laws, begins to wither away,” more surely than the modern state withers away, as Marx and Lenin had promised in their attempts to further the project of freeing man from nature. So far, the philosophic response has been ‘existentialism’—Heideggerianism. But the practical result of Heideggerianism was Nazism, the attempt to destroy Jews (and not only Jews). Mass murder by Nazis and Communists aimed at liberating humanity from the shackles imposed by ‘inferior races’ or ‘class enemies,’ respectively, did not succeed even in their own terms, let alone the terms of any other morality, religious or philosophic. The will to power “was said to be a fact,” beyond good and evil. But that alleged fact led to consequences confirming for Strauss “that it would be unwise to say farewell to reason.” Accordingly, “I began to wonder”—wonder being the initial impetus to philosophizing—whether “the self-destruction of reason was not the inevitable outcome of modern rationalism as distinguished from premodern rationalism, especially Jewish-medieval rationalism and it classical (Aristotelian and Platonic) foundation.” And as for revelation, the command to obey God’s laws and judgments, the initial impetus to such obedience being not wonder but fear of God, this had been seen as the Israelites’ “wisdom and understanding” by the Gentiles themselves, who called the Israelites “a wise and understanding people.” 

In considering Strauss’s “Preface,” Hancock gets right to the heart of the argument. Strauss intends to recover “the primordial unity of Athens and Jerusalem, that he often leaves all but unspoken,” a unity that “now depends upon respecting their difference, even their incommensurability.” Judaism’s “honorable pretensions” to “rationalism,” to the work of classical philosophy, “led it to throw in its lot with modern rationalism, which turns out to be fundamentally irrational because it has tried to provide its own ground and thus has flouted the limits of human nature.” In retreating from the mistaken venture of “modern irrational rationalism,” Judaism has fallen into modern irrationalism, leaving it vulnerable to Heidegger, “who reveals the dark depths of the rejection of the philosophical tradition, the fall into an abyss of death and nothingness,” existentialism. Strauss draws back from all of this. In its stead, he “directs us…to a ground common to the Bible and to classical philosophy,” returning to classical political philosophy and to “the alternative Athens/Jerusalem.” That alternative is indeed a real alternative. Reason is not revelation; wonder is not fear. But the two approaches to wisdom can be seen to be congruent in Thomas Aquinas’ insight: “Grace perfects nature, it does not destroy nature.” That is, “the Bible and the classics agree…on the natural authority of nobility and justice: every noble person is concerned with finding transcendent support for justice.” “Biblical law and classical reason spring from a common root in the orientation toward an eternity that limits and defines humanity; he sees this natural, finite horizon as opposed to the Christian and modern destruction of a finite moral order in favor of the ‘spiritual’ teaching of a ‘transcendent’ or fully open possibility, whether Christian or ‘rationalist.'” His more obvious insistence on the sharp distinction between reason and revelation is “a staged showdown” in which he puts the rationalism of the earlier moderns against the irrationalism of the later moderns (as they prefer to call themselves) ‘postmoderns.’ For Strauss, Hancock remarks, ‘modern’ includes ‘Christian’; the Bible conveying God’s revelation is the ‘Old’ Testament. Christianity radicalized “Platonic transcendence” and thereby inaugurated modernity not only politically (with the seeds of ‘democracy’ or egalitarianism, as Tocqueville maintains) but philosophically, by severing the link between the Creator-God and the human beings he created, which was the Law, placing that link instead in faith in Christ, the new intermediary. But faith is a less firm bond than law. “Christian spirituality” desires “a synthesis of Greek philosophical transcendence with the mysterious God who gave law to the Jews,” and the results have never been good for Jews. Nor have they been good, long-term, for Gentiles, except in the material sense of prosperity, the pleasures of neo-Epicureanism, for those who have avoided ruin in modernity’s wars. Hancock considers “Strauss’s discreet but powerful critique of Christianity” as pertinent to this day, “as the residues of Christian ‘love’ are exploited in a movement of universalization with no content but liberation from law and virtue.”

Strauss’s own choice for the philosophic way, natural right in the classical rather than the modern sense, derives from his judgment that Orthodoxy is a less likely path for moderns seeking a rediscovery of “the rudimentary distinction between good and bad.” That rediscovery is urgent, given the enormities of the previous half-century and the persistence of historicist thought in its Communist form. Without the “horizon of eternity and its inherent recognition of the limits of human action, tyranny can claim the excuse of the highest ideals for the lowest deeds; humans can be tempted to do obviously bad things in the name of universal, transformative ends.” Practically speaking, this means liberal education, where the (very rough) counterparts of the gentlemen still taught the young, and the defense of “liberal democratic constitutionalism as the best possible approximation of a classical mixed regime.” 

Hancock deems this a “fragile strategy,” as indeed Strauss may well have done. Strauss nonetheless “offers the most perspicacious of all critiques of modern rationalism because he never loses sight of the question of the good of thinking and, therefore, of the problem of the relation between the goods of theory and practical goods.” “Serious Christians” should take note of the potential, and indeed long-realized dangers of their faith. But if a Christian “hold[s] on to the promise of a salvation beyond worldly limits while acknowledging the inescapability in this world of both pagan pride and coercive law,” of what Jacques Maritain calls “a tough mind”—one that is “firm and clear”—and “a tender heart”—one that is “soft and open” the beckoning of the Holy Spirit—then our “wrestling with this problem, both in theory and in practice, is not only a moral necessity but somehow an apprenticeship in our eternal freedom”—the spiritual warfare that prepares souls for a place in the regime of God.