Will Morrisey Reviews

Graham Allison and Robert D. Blackwill, eds.: Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2020.

 

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.

Chantal Delsol: Prosperity and Torment in France: The Paradox of the Democratic Age. Andrew Kelley translation. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2025.

 

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.”