Political thought

10. Bloom, Giants and Dwarfs (15 April 2024)

by kurto

Essays spanning literary criticism and political thought, insistently making the point that only recovering the origins of one’s ideas, so as to see the real arguments before they calcified, makes one a thoughtful analyst. Some of the things we hold true are so, some are not.

Modern science seeks to explain man by what is not man, not by the soul. It broke with the classics, Swift first noted in Gulliver’s Travels, when it could no longer reason but only slavishly follow process: humanity was sidelined for Cartesian rationalism. But a man is most what he is by result of what he does, by the character of his activity. Schiller thought modernity was characterized by abstract science and also unrefined passions, whereas a good man and conscientious citizen seeks for harmony. But the ‘accidents of life’ force men into customs which cause them to forget the whole. Harmony is not daily but transcendent.

Since Rousseau, overcoming society’s bourgeois has been seen as very nearly the whole problem of realizing true democracy and simultaneously achieving genuine ‘personality’. Rousseau studied the passions to balance them, not to govern them. Yet he sought to reproduce Platonic egalitarianism based on morality, not post-Machiavellian self-interest. He introduced sublimation of the will as a source of higher expression (e.g., the arts); Nietzsche coined the erm; Freud popularized it. In Emile, lessons are separated into layers where philosophy seeks for the whole. Only in the end, in winning Sophia, does the protagonist distinguish between inclination and will; morality is the struggle between these since nature is primary and authority comes from within. Thus balanced can man be free and moral.

The bourgeois as Rousseau popularized them stand between the naturally good and the moral public. Rousseau follows Montesquieu in seeing virtue as a passion (as against the ancients), in believing passion the real power of the soul, in seeing only passion as able to control passion. But Enlightenment sought to connect selfish passions to the rational, dependable civic ones, while Rousseau defended morality versus reason and denied the otherwise desired transition. Consequently while the ancients saw the freedom of the small community as the means to virtue, he made freedom the end. Willing the general will was a new kind of inclination: obedience is freedom! Rousseau looked to aristocratic Sparta and Geneva as models.

To summarize

    Natural Right and History

(pp. 241-242): Strauss thought Nietzsche wrong to assert rationalism was a line of inquiry unbroken from the ancients to contemporary science. The succession of philosophical developments obscures the core questions and their alternatives. To reject historicism is to seek to understand people as they themselves did, not to assert one can know more than the principals themselves.

On Aron: the Cold War was the political issue of the 20th century. The greatest sign of liberal decay was the savaging of the university by people who called themselves liberals. The tyrannies see bourgeois society as the enemy; communism says reason can’t be free, and must be replaced by theory; fascism wants to be replace reason with passion. Both undercut rationalism.

Kojeve saw Hegel as primarily concerned with self-knowledge, the ability for the philosopher to explain his doings. Hegel fulfilled the Platonic-Aristotelian goal of absolute wisdom – without such possibility, all knowledge, science, and philosophy itself is impossible. Thus the end of history, for only at the end can all be known. But if we lack final wisdom, then the matter is to understand alternatives.

Modern state-of-nature theorists (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau) agreed with Plato and Aristotle that nature is the permanent standard, but disagreed on what is natural. John Rawls is an updated utilitarian. Simplifying Hobbes and Locke, uninfluenced by Rousseau or Kant, focused on the satisfaction of desire but not morality let alone virtue, he thought pursuing contradictory social ends presented no problems, but evidenced freedom. Thus he was to intuit equality, dispensing with the question of whether equality is just.

Socrates saw the contest between philosophy and poetry stemming from religion, and more specifically the latter’s connection to fanaticism – a connection present in all artistic ‘cultures’. Culture implies opposition to commercial society (i.e., pursuits based on reason). It stems from the Platonic cave. During the Enlightenment art and religion became subservient to more amorphous culture. Bloom holds up Goethe as able to see the real problem of coming to terms with what is, not first reforming the world to one’s vision.

The

    Republic

attempts to find a regime in which philosophers are not ruled by hypocrites. Paraphrasing Aristotle, we begin with the things which are first to us, in order to reach what is first to nature. Aristotle saw the essence of happiness as virtue; life, liberty, and property are merely conditions favored by the moderns. In politics, teachings (i.e., consensus) reflect what is more powerful in the regime and in turn magnify the regime’s most dangerous tendencies. Yet there’s no reason to compromise public views which are conducive to the general good to accommodate the freedom of fanatical minorities.

The sociology of knowledge is a premise which accepts that which is to be investigated as established, that which is to be proven (by exegesis) as a given. A corollary: in what appears similar, we should look for distinctions.

Most university scientists are sub-theoretical technicians, and most research for commercial purposes. Only the money stops conflict from being apparent. More broadly, the modern university’s divided pursuits is the decisive intellectual phenomenon of the late 20th century (and counting?). The left sees the university as the means to addressing contemporary politics (or even forcing the issue). To assert students have the right to judge their teachers is to convert the school to a marketplace.

17. Klein and Pinos, ed., Burke (30 July 2024)

by kurto

A compilation of passages focused on the French Revolution, statesmanship, and neo-political thought. Burke estimated contemporary Britain (circa 1795) had 400,000 informed citizens, from among a population of 10 million, of whom 80,000 favored the French Revolution. The editors contend radical is natural to man, to be countered by training and education. Burke’s writings tend to confirm O’Brien’s view that he most of all opposed tyranny, that he changed his stance but never his ground. Of note:

• Revolution is the last thought (‘resource’) of the thoughtful
• Prejudice (learned inclination) is trusted and ready in an emergency
• England would never ‘call in an enemy to the substance of any systems to remove its corruptions, to supply its defects, or to perfect its constitution’ (p. 45)
• The press naturally become demagogues against wealth and merit
• ‘Corporate bodies are immortal for the good of members but not for their punishment’ (p. 61)
• Plans benefit from observations of those whose understand is inferior, as a sanity check (p. 75)
• Revolutionary persecution unifies the opposite evils of intolerance and indifference – against all conscience. Moral sentiments, connected with ‘early prejudice’, cannot live long under nihilist regimes
• The foundation of government is not in theoretical rights of man (‘a confusion of judicial with civil principles’) but in convenience and nature – that is, either universal or local modification
• Men often mistakenly feel courage produces danger, rather than the obvious opposite
• When reason of state prohibits disclosure, silence is manly
• The possession of power discloses the true character of a man

8. Rogachevsky and Zigler, Israel’s Declaration of Independence (20 March 2024)

by kurto

Natural rights are surprisingly evident in the Israeli charter, drawn by laborite Zionists; in turn, the Israeli’s contemporary judiciary claims sole competency to interpret the nation’s ‘credo’ from the Declaration, the country having no constitution but only Basic Laws. Hurriedly drafted amid British departure and Arab warfare, the document settled on rights inhering in individuals, not emanating from the state, through David Ben-Gurion’s force of influence.

After the Zionist Action Committee dissolved itself into Moetzet Ha’Am (a People’s Council of 13), Ben-Gurion sought to declare statehood such that Jews would be ‘masters of their own fate’. Mordechai Beham’s initial version combined Anglo-American political thought, as evidenced in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, with Jewish tradition as evidenced in the Torah, entailing fairness, supremacy of reason, the spiritual above material (contra Zionism), and the ethical above the practical. The community’s centuries-long exile maintained fidelity to the this approach, but natural rights were a notable innovation for no signer of the Declaration was born in western Europe or the Anglosphere.

Poorly received, these views were pared back in subsequent versions. Labor Zionism, which holds to the state’s preeminent authority (and origination of rights), progress through material gain, and equality of outcomes, came to the fore. These chimed with Roosevelt’s four freedoms and the new UN charter. It was also important to repudiate the UK’s governance (notably its white paper restricting Jewish immigration (‘ingathering’) – and to enshrine a nebulous democracy. Herschel Lauterpacht’s draft, drawing on nascent, postwar views of international law ,sought to align with UN resolution 181, which envisioned the dual-state solution as well as tests for sovereign capability and sufficiency. Moshe Shertok, a Washington DC lobbyist, sought for American support, which George Marshall opposed for fear of angering Arabs but Harry Truman overrode (albeit on the basis of UN boundaries of November 1947).

Ben-Gurion sought an Israeli state above all: his goals were sovereignty, a Jewish state, and principles of political right. Holding that founding implies disregard for status quo, he surpassed fractious colleagues, for example eschewing the declaration of boundaries as artificially limiting. He located the right to sovereignty in Israel itself, established by its ‘universal significant’ of the Torah, the ‘book of books’. He (unintentionally?) followed Blackstone in viewing rights as pre-existing the state; the state is to preserve these rights. Also, his state was to be more Jewish than democratic.

Menachem Begin’s Revisionist underground came in to ally with Ben-Gurion: more opposed to mandatory rule, he too sought a Jewish state, but was more comfortable with Anglo-American rights.

It’s ironic that the Anglosphere was largely ignored at the height of its postwar influence. In the continuing lack of a constitution, the Supreme Court, which has built up ‘a potent arsenal of normative language to interpret practices (p. 245).

NB: Jefferson’s draft of the American Declaration located rights in mankind’s equal creation, not in the Creator.

11. Strauss, Natural Right and History (19 June 2022)

by kurto

The search for natural right, or the best way for man to live – the aim of political philosophy – has since Machiavelli been corrupted by abandoning nature as the source of right and by ‘political hedonism’, the ennoblement of benevolence.

All knowledge presupposes a horizon in which knowledge is possible, an articulated whole. All social visions of the whole, no matter how different, are the same in that reconciliation leads to knowledge and natural right. We are obliged to seek a standard of judging our ideas, as well as others, and also the competing needs within society. We cannot give a good account of human ends if they are merely desires or impulses. Natural right is the pursuit of understanding what man ought to do.
The quest to know first things is an endeavor to distinguish to naturally be (to be in truth) and to be by convention. Pre-philosophic thought considered the good life the ancestral. Nature was discovered when man understood the distribution of man-made and naturally occurring first things as observable. The discovery of nature established humanity’s capacity to determine its ends – its successes and failures – across history, society, morals, religion. It was a necessary condition for natural right.

But philosophy does not recognize nature as the standard, because philosophy answers to reason not to authority, whether natural (law of nature) or made by man.

To reject natural right is to say virtue, that which is praiseworthy, is positive or man made. Argument against natural right assumes all knowledge is inherent, that no moral effort is needed, only scientific effort. Separately, historicism attacks natural right because justice is seen as mutable. For historicism to be tenable, it must be made evident that there is no continuity in man’s nature, that there is no persistence in metaphysics. But history often concerns the same fundamental themes or problems. Historicism tries to exempt itself from its own critique – to judge of periods without itself being judged – and showing exceptions in a culture or in practice does not disprove historic norms.

Weber thought there could not be genuine knowledge of the ought (values), only the is (fact). The rejection of value judgements undermines objectivity: the historian cannot interpret the past on its own terms whenever past societies thought value judgements were possible. He contended only science or faith were legitimate grounds but left out human reason: philosophy was downgraded. His views abjured the stateman’s golden mean and encouraged political extremism: his approach to social. The secularization of understanding Providence culminates in the view that man’s ways are scrutable to sufficiently enlightened men, that they should be guided by the actual not what ought to be.

(Weber traced capitalism to a late or ‘corrupt’ Calvinism which had made peace with the world, which means Puritanism did not cause capitalism. This was to overestimate religion’s break with ancient theology [i.e., Roman-era Christianity], and underestimate the break with classical rationalism [Puritanism carrying modern views of Machiavelli, Bacon, etc.].)

Socrates’ turning to the study of human things was no rejection of the divine or the natural but a new way to understand all things, and especially human things, as not reducible to the divine or the natural. To discover the whole was no longer the study of roots but of constituent parts of sciences. Philosophy was to ascend from opinion to truth, via dialectic.

In Crito, Plato suggested duty to the city stems from a tacit social contract (which idea comes from Lucretius); but in the Republic, which addresses the best city, the philosopher is obliged to follow the city simply because the city is perfect. Government is not the same as community. The political problem consists of reconciling the requirement for wisdom with the requirement for consent. For egalitarians, consent trumps wisdom, for natural right, wisdom tops consent. The city has to reconcile wisdom with consent, which implies potential for unwisdom.

In retrospect, the historian is to settle extreme actions which were just and those that were unjust or ill-judged. This points up the Aristotelian view of natural right drawn from everyday justice and the Machiavellian view premised on extreme cases of necessity. These may be described as idealism versus cynicism; whereas Thomist natural law is free of ambiguities implied in the spectrum between Aristotle (higher purpose) and Machiavelli (higher urgency), collapsed into a simpler view of the Decalogue. Modern natural law attempts to separate the moral principles from Thomist (Christian) theology, a return to the classics. For example, Montesquieu wanted latitude for statesmanship.

Hobbes was neither public spirited nor concerned with statesmanship: his view of natural law was scientific, accelerating Machiavelli’s turn to modernity. For the classics, the state of nature was life in a healthy civil society, for Hobbes, life antedating society. Death replaced telos, the state did not promote the virtuous life but safeguarded the individual’s natural right. Where Aristotle saw magnanimity and justice as paramount – serving others – Descartes simplified moral philosophy to morality, and Hobbes to justice, rules to be obeyed in order to create peace or at least self-preservation. Justice became fulfillment of the social contract, no longer standards independent of human will; the Decalogue was no longer intrinsically valid. Virtue is but peaceability; vice is vanity of an aggressive soul not a wicked one; the severe virtues of self-restraint lose standing. The privileging of benevolence is political hedonism. Reason of state – peace – replaces the search for the best regime. Later Nietzsche, declaring will to power to be reality, replaced the study of ends with the study of power. The right institutions guarantee social order and much else.

Locke thought that private consciences are private opinions. The desire for happiness is natural right, but no duty is entailed. Then, all social or government power commences with individual right. Hobbes emphasizes right to resist society or government more strongly than Locke. Property right is most characteristic of the latter: property is natural law, natural law defines limits of the state. The poor are enriched when others acquire property, generating benevolence. Madison followed Locke in expressing the first role of government as protecting different or unequal faculties in acquiring property. From this point, nature furnishes only materials, not the results – there are no natural forms or essences. Society was to be built on low but solid ground, taking its bearings from how man lives, not how he should live.
Rousseau, the forerunner of the second wave, returned to the classics but discarded reason in favor of passion, leading to Nietzsche. The Frenchman sought to defend both the city and its virtue and nature; there is a tension. Science is cosmopolitan and the fount of universal philosophy; theoretical science must control civic virtue. As Hobbes put natural right at the service of passion, Rousseau criticized him for locating the law of nature (prescribing duties) as subservient to reason. His duties are instead directly subject to passion: man is by nature good, his passions valid, he is perfectible and so malleable. Further freedom is ‘self legislation’, replacing virtue (restraint). Not virtue makes freedom but freedom makes virtue. By result, modern society must obfuscate the telos of political philosophy. Modern man claims privileged treatment based on sensitivity not wisdom, on compassion not virtue.

Burke: the practical consequence of siding with the ancients in the milieu of modern political events explains the Anglo-Irishman using modern language of natural right, albeit within a classical or Thomist framework. The demos’ claim to political is not a right – the right is good government, and good government not guaranteed by democracy. His remarks on the juncture of theory and practice, surpassing Aristotle, are his most important original contribution; he left no corpus of theory. In both the American and French revolutions, treating the right of sovereignty and the right of man, he questioned the wisdom of exercising legally valid but politically dubious claims. Burke thought history a habit not a precept; analogies are often misleading. In Sublime, he his disagrees with the classics that beauty is perfection of proportion, virtue, order. It is not intellectual but sensual or circumstantial. Likewise, constitutions are not made by a master legislator but must grow. He derides Rousseau’s historicism.

NB: In the Ethics, Aristotle wrote the only serious part of philosophy is political philosophy.
Socrates: universal doubt leads not to truth but into a void.

22. Mansfield, Statesmanship and Party Government (7 November)

by kurto

The philosophic import of political parties was established in 18th-century England, when Burke’s realism bested Bolingbroke’s ‘patriotism’, downgrading statesmanship to a conservative prudence.
In the classic era, philosophers solved the fundamental problem of rich versus poor by mixed government, not party government. The Glorious Revolution settled the contemporary problems of religion and divine right by reconciling warring elements of the ruling class, vindicating not Shaftesbury’s raison d’etre but something between Macaulay’s Whiggism (as represented by William of Orange) and Trevelyan’s prudence (seen in the trimmer Halifax). Burke’s

    Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents

then gave the first justification for party as the best use of talents, harnessing statesmanship to honest conduct by compromising the individual’s discretion and requiring the party’s action to be both defensible and practical. As against Bolingbroke’s disinterested statesmanship, which reached its apex in the 1760s, he sought to remedy the possibility of tyranny: he didn’t actually believe George’s court to be a cabal, but needed to illustrate the defect for which party is the remedy.
Bolingbroke saw James I’s divine right as formerly preempting the country party’s split into Tories and Whigs. Men can know the works of God but not his nature; they can reason a posteriori as to God’s will, but not a priori; they can have knowledge of knowledge which they can’t fully possess. Nature is beneficent because it’s intelligible; but its essence is not understandable, so there must be a God who means well. Bolingbroke straddled ancient and medieval thinkers who supposed beneficence, and modern ones who saw a hostile nature to be conquered. Natural law is obvious in God’s work because men appreciate the benefits of society irrespective of without its contrasts with the state of nature. Averring man’s natural sociability marked his great break with Hobbes and Locke. Hobbes is to Bolingbroke in religion as Bolingbroke to Burke in party: Hobbes had not foreseen the resolution of religious conflict, but Bolingbroke, seeing religion had been solved, thought parties were consequently superfluous. He presumed a society based on truth (i.e., first principles) which expresses intolerance of not truth, and results in lack of partisanship. But politics are not (cannot) be nonpartisan, and parties can be helpful. Bolingbroke saw that parties are groups associated for purposes which are not those of the entire community, and become factions when personal or private interests predominate communal good; whereas Burke followed Plato and Aristotle in praising prejudice (‘noble truth’). Commerce is the foremost example of nonpartisan association; government is nonpartisan when its ends are not happiness but the means of happiness. For example, military policy might serve commerce.
The king and a court of the most able patriots were to be the most virtuous; corruption was the risk. The patriot king required not aristocrats but men of ability, resistance to corruption, the preferment of peace over military glory, and the fostering of commerce. Such a program reduces reliance on statesmanship-cum-virtue: it is the ambition of party beyond tyranny. Bolingbroke and Jefferson firstly sought to replace absolutist / aristocratic statesmanship with party; Burke sought for multiple parties, thinking a group of super-able men of ability, supernaturally virtuous – however unlikely – conferred undue advantage.
Burke thought parties possible in Britain because the great parties of religious conflict and divine right were bygone; only the quotidien remained. Open, established opposition was not a requisite for party government but instead evidence of attenuated great parties, that politics no longer culminated in civil war. (In founding political parties in America, Jefferson capitalized on the success of republican principles, yielding productive, legitimate partisanship.) Yet simultaneously he opposed fomenting general discontent with present good (e.g., pamphlets criticising the constitution) while suggestively promising improvement that might in fact fail. This was nearly Aristotle’s opposition to innovation: since virtue is a product of habitation and innovation disrupts habit, innovation disrupts virtue, even if the outcome is otherwise good.
Burke understood the constitution after 1688 to be mature, no longer needing improvement, and the monarch now being head of state but sharing leadership of government. The king, whose powers rested more on the normative than the statutory, retained the discretion necessarily vested in the executive, provided these were prudentially used – Aristotle’s phronesis. The ‘political school’ (i.e., Bolingbroke’s supporters) were implicitly required to support the king’s ministers because they were appointed by these rulers, whereas Burke saw the Commons as a check on the monarch and his ministers, and so the chief worry was abuse of prerogative. All uncontrolled power will inevitably be abused. Burke’s theory of popular government straddles Bolingbroke, American federalism (the Federalist saw legislators as subject to the Constitution, and so Congress), and modern British constitutionalism as described by Bagehot (responsible to the people).
Burke thought prescription embodies heritage (or tradition), and ‘establishments’ are the artefacts of heritage. Then, British government was to be ruled by gentlemen who defended the establishments and their prejudice: ‘Party is a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed. For my part, I find it impossible to conceive that anyone believes in his own politics, or thinks them to be of any weight, who refuses to adopt the means of having them reduced into practice. It is the business of the speculative philosopher to mark the proper ends of government. It is the business of the politician, who is the philosopher in action, to find out proper means towards those ends, and to employ them with effect. Therefore, every honourable connection will avow it as their first purpose to pursue every just method to put the men who hold their opinions into such a condition as may enable them to carry their common plans into execution, with all the power and authority of the State.’
Burke considered that the patriot king increased the likelihood of tyranny, and sought to redefine party in British politics. His Thoughts disguised counterrevolution against Bolingbroke’s party: ‘When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle’. Bad describes those corrupted by executive (monarchical) prerogative. Party for the sake of liberty doesn’t manifest the true practice of politics. The program of a party is in its history, its rationale for past judgment of public measures, not its plans for the future. Deference goes to the party’s self-understanding, rather than the individual executive. The people are not to be included in government, but to be restrained by government, restraints aiming to preserve equal rights in civil society (as opposed to majority rule, which is arbitrary and likely to forget historic rights amid contemporary events). He opposed ‘responsible’ or opposition criticism as bound to flatter the people, and ‘independent’ criticism as lacking ambition to rule. Party did not require far-seeing statesmanship: there is a tension between prudence and consistency. It is a matter of leaders and led, not Aristotle’s rulers and ruled; though the leaders are of the people and mingle, the better to represent (but not to be delegated). The leaders’ property is a result not of public duty, but duty as a consequent of property. Their role is the cause of what they do, not what they do the cause of their role. Honor is the negation of the false pride of one who tends toward tyranny. It facilitates the association of good men, whereas Aristotle tended to isolate them.
Theories of natural law, being accessible to common sense, tend to elide the Aristotelian distinction between moral (or political) virtue and intellectual (or philosophic) virtue. Burke thought the laws we live by should be obvious at least to gentlemen, because there are natural penalties for their failure, and this makes the Aristotelian legislator unnecessary. He opposed viewing politics as a matter of first principles, but instead prioritized began Roma law treatment of prescription (whereby land was effectively titled when longstanding use could be shown). People remain in society to benefit from civilized liberties. The good for Aristotle is the discovery of reason: in politics, it is the product of the legislator. For Burke, civil liberty is based on natural feeling protected by prescriptive right. Prejudice can be effective only if not subject to first principles. His prudence avoids the legislator’s appeal to first principles. (Bolingbroke sided with Plato and Aristotle in that prejudice does admit of first principles.) The 19th century demonstrated economic progress sparked hunger for political innovation at the expense of establishments.
Mansfield suggests Burke was a deist but did not accept Christian revelation, professing its virtue for political benefit. This deity commanded the laws of nature; human nature trumped determinism and established the bases of moral action, of equality before the law. Natural feeling is love of one’s own. Natural law follows Hobbes, is disciplined by honesty, and is not a final, inevitable point as in Aquinas. Consequently when elites forget their obligations they risk not only their own place but the entire social order. Principled behavior in a statesman is not following first principles but defending establishments and prescription. Great men should recognize that honest men of great families (i.e., aristocrats) ordinarily have first call on ruling, because first principles normally fail in politics. It is natural law that is intended to perfect human nature, the standard from which men draw progress.
The conflict between Bolingbroke and Burke is tantamount to rationalism versus empiricism. Rationalism holds liberty (or the basis of natural law) can be discovered in first principles, in freedom from prejudice. It teaches the necessity of seeking security in society, and seeking truth as the path to peace. Empiricism proceeds directly to prejudice and preservation, until the truth can be known; prescriptive right is an inalienable right. Bolingbroke’s patriot party established a new means of statesmanship; Burke instead substituted prudence, or non-principled conservatism, which admits of multiple parties. He did not succeed in substituting prudence for Bolingbroke’s patriotism: he engendered respectable parties but not the party system, for the modern system tolerates fanatics such as Jacobins and Nazis. Nonetheless, modern statesmanship discards the legislator and thus political thought, and accepts popular guidance (as refracted by popular sovereignty). In demoting statesmanship to guarding against theoretical claims which might destroy the establishments, he made party inherently conservative.
Coda: Contemporary political scientists must focus on action and therefore its limits, whereas historians may be tempted by hindsight. Burke, had he known of class and racial parties, would not have advanced party (p. 23).
Machiavelli: ‘To preserve liberty by new laws and new schemes of government, whilst the corruption of a people continues and grows, is absolutely impossible: but to restore and preserve it under old laws, and an old constitution, by reinfusing into the minds of men the spirit of this constitution, is not only possible, but is, in a particular manner, easy to a king’ (p. 73 footnote: Discourses I)

25. Frohnen, Virtue and the Promise of Conservatism (17 December 2023)

by kurto

Burke and Tocqueville laid down a set of principles, based on Christian natural law and finding virtue in the husbanding of tradition and community, which together constitute a proper philosophy. Its challenge is finding goodness in an imperfect, materialist society.
In Aristotle, virtue ensures rightness of ends; prudence, or practical wisdom in given circumstances, rightness of means. In Augustine, understanding is the reward of faith. In Aquinas, society’s checking base appetites enables development of virtue. Natural law holds society promotes character: conservatives defend regimes which respect customs as promoting individual virtue. The true conservative mistrusts individual reason, finding in prejudice proofs over time which are applicable to current circumstance, finding in custom God’s purpose as well as the nature of man.
Burke and Tocqueville, whose views are elaborately explicated, could oppose common practice while supporting society as it was, defending that which exists without sacrificing commitment to virtue. Burke’s opposition to the abstract really targeted idealization, which not only omits true qualities but also inserts falsehoods, for not only simplifying human nature but also supposing hoped-for but unreal qualities. Idealization equally undermines existing authority posits false ends, the enforcement of which is tyranny. Government is not the teacher of virtue but its guardian, the keeper of tradition, manners, prejudice.
For Tocqueville, individual character and well-ordered liberty could not be imposed but were habitual; he commenced with the individual himself, one step earlier than Aristotle’s family. Liberty depends on social institutions not political character, for laws are the children of custom, which grow upward from the local. In America, local practice prevailed; in England, the laws were good because they were old. Localism and legalism interceded between the individual and the state. Whereas in France, centralization enervated custom. By doing for citizens what they ought to do for themselves, the state enfeebled its residents. Conversely, public service demonstrates independence – what, when how – from egalitarian diktat. Tocqueville sought to recall French rulers to the pursuit of virtue. Tyranny of the majority restricts worthy contributors to social and political life. Such societies will have little true diversity, few great writers and statesmen. The conservative may consider his own society superior, even if others are virtuous.
The conservative affection for the particularistic, up through the nation-state, is not the same as the republican’s requisite service to the state, for public service can take many forms. But Strauss thought Burke’s identifying tradition with wisdom was conflating the good with the existing. Strauss rejected God in arrangements: natural law and philosophy does not require a deity.
Oakeshott saw man’s ability to act properly outside norms as highly limited. Rules are an abstraction of the essential activity, which resists the cataloging of all possible experience. The less to be discussed, the sounder the social basis. Social achievement is taking next steps consistent with what’s already been done. The search for social perfection results in chaos of conflicting ideas which society can’t survive (i.e., the analogy of Babel). But custom itself is rightful, not the container of higher truth. Oakeshott called a artists and philosophers to promote Platonic lies, unrealistically in Frohnen’s view. He could not reconcile himself to the practical role of religion in rightful conduct. Kristol could not identify a pole other than compromised materialism; Kirk was so concerned with the nature of beliefs that he overlooked the sense of good character.
Best as comparative study, though having raised Strauss’ dispute with Burke, Frohnen ought to have studied the paradox of why the contemporary right looks to both Burke and Strauss.
Burke: ‘Whenever we improve, it is right to leave room for a further improvement. It is right to consider, to look about us, to examine the effect of what we have done. Then we can proceed with confidence, because we can proceed with intelligence. Whereas in hot reformations … the whole is generally so crude, so harsh, so indigested, mixed with so much imprudence and so much injustice, so contrary to the whole course of human nature and human institutions, that the very people who are most eager for it are among the first to grow disgusted at what they have done. Then some part of the abdicated grievance is recalled from its exile in order to become a corrective of the correction. Then the abuse assumes all the credit and popularity of a reform. The very idea of purity and disinterestedness in politics falls into disrepute, and is considered as a vision of hot and inexperienced men; and thus disorders become incurable, not by the virulence of their own quality, but by the unapt and violent natures of the remedies.’ Speech of Economical reform
Tocqueville: ‘… It is not the mechanism of laws that produces great events, gentlemen, but the inner spirit of the government. Keep the laws as they are, if you wish. I think you would be very wrong to do so; but keep then. Keep the men, too, if it gives you any pleasure. I raise no objection so far as I am concerned. But, in God’s name, change the spirit of the government; for, I repeat, that spirit will lead you to the abyss. Recollections of the French Revolution of 1848

21. Brogan, Alexis de Tocqueville (12 November 2023)

by kurto

A scholarly but anachronistic biography dwelling on what the 19th-century pioneer ought to have written were he a 21st-century academic. Tocqueville was a brilliant mind ‘trammeled’ by Catholic, aristocratic background; Brogan is regularly unhappy he cannot be conscripted into the march of history, the telos of egalitarianism. Though the author seems to have read and re-read not only major works but surviving letters, it’s sometimes difficult to hear Tocqueville through the academic criticism. The Frenchman’s original identification of problems in democratic political philosophy is dismissed or denigrated.
Fundamentally a Norman aristocrat-cum-19th-century French nationalist, Tocqueville was born to lead as Brogan demonstrates in a thorough telling of his life. Upended by the French Revolution, schooling ‘failed’ to produce bourgeois manners, though his electoral politics in La Manche were painstaking. Primary intellectual influences included Montesquieu, Chateaubriand (source of the US sojourn), Guizot, Mill and to a less extent Pascal. He always opposed Bonaparte as representing tyranny.
By 1830, he had rejected his Catholic Norman heritage, eventually siding with the democratic age, but remained nostalgic for aristocracy. As a budding lawyer, he dealt with émigré / dispossession claims which provoked sympathy but also acknowledgement of the finality of French Revolution. The cataclysm had liberated man of tyranny of class, but exposed liberty to equality of ends. During his US tour he grasped the dynamics of entrepreneurialism and popular self-government, but missed the importance of cotton and didn’t address political parties. Subsequently, as a writer, his great themes became equality, liberty, and the Revolution.
As a politician, though seen by Bourbons (‘legitimists’) as a traitor and Orleanists as a time server (which exposure helped prompt his American sojourn), he most valued independence of party, and further advocated local self-government versus France’s traditional centralism. Liberty entailed the right to call power to account. Though he helped write the 1848 constitution, he opposed Louis Napoleon as tyrannical.
Tocqueville in Democracy in America emphasized the effects of equality, in The Old Regime and the French Revolution of liberty (or its loss). The secret to making men do good is appealing to high purposes. Society’s institutions reconcile liberty and equality. Democratic society (often) may prefer equality to liberty as a security. One of the French Revolution’s notorious legacies was dissolving freedom of association, in contrast with the American tendency of establishing voluntary associations. Having had little experience of politics, ancien French aristocrats had little knowledge of how to avoid catastrophe. ‘The general level of hearts and minds will never cease to decline while equality and despotism are partners’ (p. 567). It’s vital to understand the balance and the trend (tendency) – indicative of his contribution to what’s become sociology.
Brogan thinks Tocqueville a brilliant mind ‘trammeled’ by Catholic, aristocratic background, and considers his understanding of tyranny of the majority his ‘most serious mistake’. The Frenchman is criticized for consulting only American elites while ignoring the middle classes (notwithstanding his official mission of reviewing prisons and, separately, his rough-and-ready travels). He lived through a great epoch of arts but didn’t enjoy it.
He was a Romantic, drawn more to the old order (Old Regime) than the exemplar of the new (Democracy). Tocqueville ‘refused to admit’ the privileged, instrumental role of parties: power is the object of politics, each side pressing its case to have the better claim, not high purpose. His economic theory was antiquated and ‘obsessed’ by concern for property and the consequences of mob rule.
Tocqueville could not ‘admit’ that Algerian colonization would end badly, and ‘tritely’ predicted the US and Russia would predominate a future era. Repeatedly, the ‘game is given away’ when the subject’s conclusions don’t match the author’s. (Relatedly, Brogan dismisses Berlin’s theory of two liberties without explanation.)
In all, a frustrating read. See further Daniel Mahoney in Claremont Review of Books: https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/a-noble-and-generous-soul/

22. Ellmers, Narrow Passage (23 November 2023)

by kurto

The 1980’s ‘culture wars’, abating at Cold War’s end, resurfaced in the late 2010s, latterly the more bitter for the revelation of a Hegelian-Nietzschean split between leftists favoring technocracy (progressives) and latter-day Existentialism (postmoderns). Both strands of thought had already been identified as dead ends by Heidegger and Strauss, whose call for a return to classical rationalism is the main topic. Political thought is not academic but practical, and modern society is rational. When Western academics and government officials lose faith in reason, society is in crisis.

The Philosophes had sought to make reason universal; but the unbridled pursuit of philosophy in government damages the city’s ends (its latter-day myths and gods). What has been lost, as per Strauss’ ‘three waves of modernity’, is the conception of nature and man’s place in it. Inability to test authority by use of reason portends loss of agency, freedom. When social scientists speak of angst, unknowingly they refer to essentially political emptiness, reduced either to soulless technocracy or nihilism. (Foucault, who plays an unlikely role herein, observed power never disappears but takes on new forms, ever-changing because it is not bounded by reason.)

History, properly the imaginative reconstruction of places and events, was often seen by 19th-century intellectuals as a mechanistic process. Historicism failed (and continues to fail) because history is neither rational nor ending; but the view assigns man an uncontrollable place in an inexorable sweep, while isolating him within time. Science, which came on scene with Bacon and Descartes, promises mastery of nature but separates facts from values, and so can’t produce a view of the good. Only the pursuit of political thought free of philosophy of history and historicist determination can liberate the 21st century from nihilism and technocracy (the latter seeming the larger task).

Strauss’ unique contribution is an awareness of the moral-political equilibrium (tension) of philosophy. To become political, to establish conditions for virtuous life, human matters must be elevated to reason; otherwise, all is but a contest of will to power.

Plato’s importance to Strauss is evident. The ancient thought the whole consists of heterogeneous parts which cannot be understood as constitutive; but knowledge of the whole is impossible. His famous analogy of the shadowy cave – an argument for transparent use of reason in government – is reified in Foucault’s portrayal of unaccountable, amorphous sociopolitical elites exercising power (the insight giving rise to an otherwise misleading title). Yet it’s not clear why Plato among Strauss’ many influences is here singled out, just as it’s unclear what ‘narrow passage’ refers to. A bibliography is wonted.

12. Richter, Political Theory of Montesquieu (2 July)

by kurto

An extended survey of Montesquieu’s works and selections from the most famous, notably Persian Letters and Spirit of the Laws.

    Survey
Causes of Rome
Rome fell because wealth became despised by the populace, so the patricians ceded their privileges in hopes of retaining access to power
More states have perished from corruption of moeurs than lawbreaking
Whenever in a republic all is tranquil, the state is no longer free. True harmony includes dissonance
Spirit
Solon divided the classes not to determine eligibility to vote but to hold office
In a tyranny, religion is the depository of moeurs and fundamental laws because the judiciary is unreliable
In monarchies, free speech is not on behalf of truth but because candor indicates power
Since everything human must end, so virtuous government must end, usually when the legislature becomes more corrupt than the executive. In a democracy, first comes corruption, then the laws are no longer executed. Once principles are corrupted, even good laws work against the state. Corrupt republics rarely do great things: only a people with simple moeurs establish societies, cities, laws.
In a democracy, power is the chief characteristic of the people; liberty is its effect, but not the source of power. Liberty is tranquility derived from personal security. However, the greater the apparent advantages of liberty, the nearer the republic is to losing it. First comes the petty tyrants, then the single dictator.
True equality is far from extreme equality. True equality is not that everyone or no one commands; but that we command or obey only equals. Citizens whose condition is so weak may be considered to have no will of their own: they are incapable of taking part in the execution of society’s ends.
Republics succeed in small geographies. In large ones, the state’s resources corrupt officeholders: the public good recedes from view. Sparta persisted because its sole end was liberty.
Harrington explore how far a state’s constitution may carry liberty, but forgot liberty’s essence. As Tacitus observed, it’s extraordinary that corrupt Roman conquerors led Germanic barbarians to solidify those moeurs which led to English constitutionalism.
There are two types of tyranny, the real and violent, and tyranny of opinion, when those who govern institute things contrary to the nation’s moeurs.
Political vices are not necessarily moral vices and vice versa, a reasonwhy laws against the spirit of society are tenuous. Means exist for preventing crimes (penalties), and can serve to change moeurs. To assert that laws or religion do not always restrain society is to overlook that frequently they do. Civility is superior to politeness: the former prevents us from displaying our own vices. The more people in a nation, the more evident and necessary are both.

6. Will, Conservative Sensibility (15 April 2022)

by kurto

Contemporary American political debate comprises an argument between Madisonian conservativism and Wilsonian progressivism. To be conservative is to adhere to the Founders’ classical liberalism, to individualism borne of pre-government natural rights and the spontaneous social order which emerges. The core of its endeavor is promoting political and socioeconomic practices which promote virtuous living. More specifically, the political objective is to restore government based on natural rights, which imply limited government because these rights predate government, which exists to secure those rights. Conservatism faces three core problems: family disintegration, unfunded social benefits, and corrupt political culture, especially in Washington DC.

Since the Enlightenment, the West’s primary political problem has been the tension between self-assertion and self-control. In a plural society, government focuses on minimum moral essentials which can be described as empathy and self-control. Reasoning about the proper use of freedom is liberty in practice. By 1770, the colonials came to see individual rights not a originating in English common law but natural law: Madison wrote the Revolution was only a consequent of changed attitudes over 1760-75. The American project is exceptional in being free of feudal remnants, religion, or aristocracy, in stemming not from social theory but personal liberty – not what government should do, but what it must not do; this American sense of conservativism is incidentally opposed to the UK / continental traditions of duty and hierarchy. The Founding is one of history’s most extraordinary feats of political culture, made possible by general deference to excellence in public life, brought together in Philadelphia. Moreover, founding America on Madison interests was prudent; everyone has them, whereas virtues are difficult to acquire, agree, and sustain.

A society which values individualism expects unequal distribution of rewards. The more complex the society, the more government should defer to spontaneous order. Political economy was shortened to economy at the behest of social scientists touting rigor, yet the core remains allocation of scarce resources. Hayek asserted society advances by the functions it can perform without thinking (i.e., reflexively), contra JS Mill; government is an unequal and corruptible judge. Thus society’s economic regulator is pricing. Whereas JK Galbraith in the Affluent Society saw consumer desires as manufactured by corporate marketing, undermining respect for market equilibria. The effect is to reverse Burke’s view of government’s existing to deal with social wants; government can stimulate wants which it will be duly rewarded for providing. Inequality is not inherently injurious provided there is sufficiency (adequate resources).

Progressives attack individualism, reversing the view of rights preceding government. The democratic (majority) will is the manifestation of liberty; government’s antecedent job is shaping appetites, a European view which conflicts with the Lockean view of natural sociability. Progressivism holds human nature is plastic, is a product of shaping social forces, always becoming and therefore susceptible to steerage (which Will sometimes idiosyncratically calls historicism). Borne of Rousseau, this view is the more man is stripped of his own resources (i.e., of his nature), the greater the government’s possibilities – the very basis of 20th-century totalitarianism. It is Roman, government-made law with no limiting principle. Progressivism’s core text is Charles Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, which aside from asserting the economically determined views of the contemporary politicians, disparages judicial review, and its worldview follows Thomas Dewey’s results-oriented pragmatism. The contrast is cooperative order versus top-down social engineering. Paradoxically, though Progressivism sees no individual human nature, groups (races) possess them. Also, Progressivism feel plural society should not be allowed to carry core cultural views from generation to generation, that is, it is intentionally historicist. The modern presidency is the agent of Progressivism, beginning with Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (who held that checks and balances are absurd) and then to Lyndon Johnson.

Modern Americans talk like Jefferson (‘wise and frugal government’) and vote like Hamiltonians. In contemporary America, 35% of receive means-tested benefits including 50% of blacks and Hispanics; in 1960 the ratio of disabled to employed was 1 in 134, today it’s 1 in 16. Dependency should not be a political right. Conservativism seeks an equilibrium. Human nature makes political claims; government inevitably has a nurturing role, borne of the virtuous qualities, which Will sees as a popular government’s continuing task of education. (Statecraft as Soulcraft was not a prescription but an observation of what government inevitably does: whether to secure individual rights or shape collective outcomes? Will declares he was wrong upon 1983’s publication that the Founders paid too little attention to civic virtues: everyday capitalism promotes good habits such as honesty, politeness which are implicitly virtues.) Virtually the whole of contemporary government has become a corrupting force in a Tocquevillian vein, degrading without tormenting.

Congress must reassert itself via less delegation to administrative bodies, and the judiciary led by the Supreme Court should insist on separation of powers. In the latter 20th century, government services were increasingly less connected with elected officials and more to semi-permanent bureaucrats. In 2016, Congress passed 3,000 pages of legislation, against 97,000 pages of administrative law enrolled in the Federal register, an example of legislative delegation to executive agencies such as the Consumer Protection Bureau – which dangerously funds itself. Congressional atrophy is executive branch hypertrophy. (An aside: stripping the states’ rights to appoint senators (in 1913’s 17th amendment) served to make states administrative extensions of Congress and senators more responsive to Washington.)

Only the courts can preserve constitutional order against the general will. Originalism is meant to defend a fundamental understanding; judicial restraint does not equal securing rights but only deference to majoritarianism. The US constitution specifies not democracy but federated republic. Its fixed purpose is to protect natural rights in changing circumstances. Contra Oliver Holmes, there is no right of majority to embody opinions in laws. Lochner wrongly sought to establish government’s right to prescribe contracts (Bork is majoritarian?); the due process clause should prohibit arbitrary government actions which restrict individual rights.

America’s problem is not wealth determining political power but the opposite. The Depression accelerated America’s dependence on government; the postwar era (including educational subsidies) renewed social confidence; the civil rights movement reinvigorated federal centrality. The New Deal’s break with Liberalism was abandoning the idea that society produces most elements of happiness: instead, government has a duty to provide. Providing for nebulous insecurity added emotional needs and established a permanent tension in the dynamics of free, capitalist society.

Americans are less likely to believe in the destiny of bleak social forces because they embrace individualism. Most Americans are not only patriots who love their country but also nationalists who feel their system is better. Progressives, notably Barack Obama!, disagree.

Pessimism is a check on scientific fatalism, a realistic opposition to prescribed outcomes, a revolt against passive role in predetermined events, a clarifying of what we can and cannot do. Freedom is not universally defined all countries, let alone universally understood relative to other political goods (equality, social cohesion). Totalitarianism rises from claims to certain understandings of history and the necessity of untrammeled action. Hannah Arendt forecast ideology plus bureaucratic social control would produce new, irresistible tyranny, but she admitted the 1956 Hungarian rebellion showed human nature was unchanging in its thirst for liberty.
Religion is helpful to but not necessary for American Conservatism. Christians should be wary of government which goes beyond defending individual rights, because Christianity is concerned with dignity of the individual. Locke said most need religion as a shortcut to wisdom; Christianity was certainly central to the Founders who observed the imperfectability of human nature, that original sin does not vitiate individual dignity, and there are universal moral truths. But the author’s overstates agnosticism as if to demonstrate realism.

Who will want to attend the postmodern university if everything is open to reinterpretation? Why devote scarce resources to obsessing race, sex, class?
Will is at his best identifying the contrasts of Conservativism and Progressivism, and the addition of Hayekian views of spontaneous socioeconomic order are helpful; yet his somewhat idiosyncratic in his views of religion, historicism. While immensely learned, the book should have condensed (or several books): too often it’s a clip job.