A festschrift organized in four categories: ancient, early modern, and American political thought and politics in literature. Often an elusive subject because it may encompass liberty, virtue, or responsibility with or without stating whether natural right is assumed, denied, or displaced by another dynamic.
Pangle: Socrates presents mastery of the body as essential to an excellent soul. In Xenophon’s telling, the best life is that of the athlete who masters the self-control needed for moderation, a guideline exceeding Aristotle’s middle way.
Cherry: All can participate in the Aristotelian pursuit of justice and equality. To depend on a derived philosophy such as cosmology is an error – better to start with what we know, what everyone can know. The ideal polity is a mixed regime for common advantage, incorporating the wealthy and virtuous among the ordinary multitude. Virtuous actions and political thought differ by individual, are not uniform; wealth-poverty isn’t the sole axis.
Nichols: Aristotle wrote the Politics because experience yields insufficient guidance: political science is the fruition of political life. In seeking for unity from diversity, pure ideas fall short. Humanity is political by nature because its various associations (e.g., families, friends, political communities) all entail participation. Plato treats friends as part of the whole, in contrast to Aristotle’s Ethics which asserts their intrinsic value. Both truth and friends are valuable. In reducing individuals to a class, Plato denies them the diversity of goods they seek. Multiple interests are necessary contributions to the community.
Keys: Augustine observed Rome commanded a disproportionate share of citizen loyalty, at the expense of natural rights. The state’s overreach itself caused grievance. God created mankind as capable of reason and freedom. Humanity itself is a natural right. Dignity and humility must ally for humanity to reach knowledge and justice; these goods depend on reverence.
Schaeffer: Montaigne lowers humanity’s aspirations, a la Machiavelli. We shouldn’t zealously pursue heretics: if it’s natural to deviate from reason, to what degree are men responsible? Contra Aristotle, the Frenchman sees that the ‘value and height of true virtue … lies in the ease, utility, and pleasure of its practice’, which even children can pursue. Montaigne’s Essays are conventionally seen as having evolved during course of composition, but it’s more likely he was nurturing his readers.
Lee Ward: Spinoza thought theocracy did not fit the classical typology of government: it has no balancing power, no universal basis of legitimacy. Having divided authority between the priest and the military commander, such that neither could rule alone, the Mosaic regime created deep social conflict, which naturally led to monarchy as resolution.
Divine law cannot be known prior to revelation, while natural law is immanent, available to all via unassisted use of reason. Mosaic law is unscientific and narcissistic, even if beneficial, because it must always refer to its foundation. It cannot be broken, where natural law allows for default.
In the Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza claims intellectual freedom including free speech is vital to the polity’s success, contrary to conventional views of free speech as license. The Hebrew state was unable to promote freedom: lack of liberty, incoherent basis of political legitimacy and obligation leads to unchanging, rigid views of civil conduct. Further, theocracy’s demands inevitably expand as the means of meeting new contexts. Spinoza sought for a religion consistent with natural rights, a problem because each religion has very particular concepts of its civil contribution.
Sullivan: Montesquieu held ‘the citizen’s liberty depends principally on the goodness of the criminal laws’. He restricted civil authority from the conscience. Divine justice is distinct from human justice; the individual conscience is not to be inspected by human tribunals.
Sacrilege and treason are both conducted via conspiracy. The state’s ‘vague proofs’ are steps toward despotism: action not thought must be the threshold. Speech and though are not answerable in courts of law, but only deliberate acts exhorting treason.
Church: Hegel is the source of criticizing the individual of Locke’s social contract. Though he follows Locke in many (often unrecognized) respects, he denies human goods are inescapably ethical and political. For Locke, the individual has no liberty or indeed identity without exclusive right to property as a product of labor. For Hegel this was merely selfish (i.e., subjective). The main good is freedom, understood as a rational and common. The political community, instead of being instrumental to protecting natural rights, expresses self-realization (overcoming objective alienation) in the scope of Geist.
Ncgorski: The Bible demands obedient love, philosophy autonomous understanding. Strauss’ choice of philosophy is paradoxically an act of faith, since the best way to live might indeed be in pursuit of religion. John Paul II, though calling ‘faith and reason like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth’, asserted but could not prove revelation trumps reason. Interestingly, the duo also shared a Socratic approach.
Lawler: Locke’s understanding of personal identity depends on Christian (i.e., Puritan) understanding of natural right. It reworks of Biblical doctrine in light of what we can know of ourselves through unaided reason: what is natural follows from what is true of the will of the creator. Many features of personal liberation valued by Locke are Christian, for example opposition to slavery, equality of women in marriage, and egalitarian political community. A post-Christian Lockean is a believer in freedom without personal salvation. This attempt to transform God into an uncaring being is at odds with free society based on secure personal liberty.
America is a compromise between Locke and Puritanism, as we see in Tocqueville. Puritans are hypermoral, Virginians amoral. The Puritans could have learned liberty of conscience from the Virginians, mistakenly assigning to the church what is the state’s job. But renouncing religion in the name of science and progress curtails the mind, as per Marilynne Robinson. Tocqueville says modern / technical language works against metaphysical distinctions, draining humans of their distinction from animals
Yarborough: Jefferson believe in man’s teleological progress but probably would not have endorsed progressivism. Croly and Dewey made no use of natural right
Nichols: Gouvernor Morris sees property as the ideal grounding a republican state, where property is the product of labor (rather than inherited). But where others see wealthy vs poor, or property rights versus human rights, Morris sees freedom versus tyranny. As much as Hamilton he saw the potential of a strong national government and so labored at the Constitutional Convention for a modern economy, ending slavery, political parties, and a strong executive.
Alvis: Examines the Constitutional Convention’s debate over the executive office, which considered the Articles of Confederation, a weak (limited) or strong (expansive) position, one or several officeholders, and popular election. The settlement of voting, the electoral college, was very different from Hamilton’s Federalist 10, focused on elites, whereas Morris asserted electors should represent the common voter. Hence it was not intended to curb direct democracy to channel it. The need for an energetic executive was reconciled with limited government that protected individual rights, a problem acute in republics: ‘where law is the product of consent, its lax enforcement would call into question the very principles on which the nation is founded ‘ (Federalist 70). It was to be a ‘republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government’ (Federalist 10).
Schaub: Studies Booker Washington’s appreciation of Lincoln’s statesmanship inpublic addresses and writings. It was an inverted relationship: Lincoln appealed to natural equality to promote the physical liberty of slaves; Washington pitched to the spiritual liberty in pursuit of civic equality.
Emmert: Teddy Roosevelt’s histories, essays, and biographical sketches lead to an account of US history (i.e., statesmanship and constitutionalism) which is broadly grounded in moral and intellectual excellence: courage, moderation, and public spiritedness. Statesman wed common sense to reflections of political forms, the most important being the rule of law underpinned by charter or constitution. Roosevelt opined people need leaders not masters: biography is a form of education for the people in learning to choose elected representatives.
Spiekerman: Brutus is the hero of Julius Caesar, and by inviting us to consider his actions, Shakespeare brings us to ask of the nature of conspiracy. The playwright suggests Brutus and Cassius are refined intellectuals, not ‘men of action’; Shakespeare did not conclude anti-republican forces would not have won but for contingency: he says it was a close call, that the assassins made unforced errors. Hence the famous ‘tide of men’s affairs’ quote in untrue.
Shakespeare seeks to make Brutus attractive to friends of liberty while acknowledging his evident faults, to make the loser attractive to those who want to win, which has been made problematic by the republican failure. Did he see a link between philosophy and political weakness?
Pangle: In Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the narrator displays Averroism based on ‘natural light’ not Christian faith. He seeks to debunk the ‘Christian imperialism’ of chivalry, the militancy of contemporary religion. The work shows how monotheism appears to the philosopher.
Henderson: Tom Stoppard’s critique of utopianism in the Coast of Utopia stems from personal interests and politics being grounded in humanity.
NB: Machiavelli in Discourses: ‘For whoever has a stained conscience easily believes that one speaks of him; one can hear a word, said for another end, that perturbs your spirit and makes you believe it was said about your case’.