Archives for July 2017

J. E. Parsons, Jr.: Essays in Political Philosophy. Preface by Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. Washington, D. C.: University Press of America, 1982.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Vol. 13, No. 2, 1985. Republished with permission.

 

Parsons sees that liberalism both tends toward and is threatened by historicism. He suspects Mill has this tendency and he identifies Dewey as a victim of it. Nine chapters contain interpretations of writings by eight political thinkers; the final chapter contains a discussion of liberalism’s severest problem, belief as reflected by public consent. As Mansfield writes in the book’s informative preface, all the chapters “take their bearing from the author’s reflections on liberalism.”

The first two chapters concern a pair of thoughtful statesmen who advanced liberalism in Britain. A ‘modern’ “regarded as a prime mover and shaper” of the 1688 settlement, Lord Halifax espoused a restrained Machiavellianism. An “ancient in temperament and philosophy” who espoused Epicureanism, Sir William Temple shared Halifax’s preference for mixed regimes over monarchies. Both men also shared an interest in diluting the religious passions that wracked their country at that time. In practice, the ‘battle of the books’ featured some soldiers on opposite sides who nonetheless collaborated for the sake of civil peace.

The next two chapters concern La Rochefoucauld and Hobbes. La Rochefoucauld views human nature with “Christian (even Augustinian) ‘pessimism'” while espousing a restrained Machiavellianism in politics. “[H]is evident partiality to private virtues exceeds his concern for public ones. In this sense he is a liberal, a lover of privacy.” Christian pessimism goes tolerably well with liberal politics.

Hobbes, who also viewed human nature ‘pessimistically’ if not religiously, prefers public matters to private ones. He too served liberalism, however, by using a doctrine of political sovereignty to attack the religiously based sovereignty of ecclesiastics. It might be added that his version of the modern state affords substantial protection for commercial transactions. The mighty Leviathan’s blood is money, and circulatory problems would kill him.

John Locke is perhaps the first liberal political philosopher easily recognizable as such today. Parsons devotes his two central chapters to Locke’s teachings. He shows the importance of economics to Locke, who “attempts to exorcise the still lingering phantom of theology in economic matters” (the critique of lending money at interest) and, one is tempted to say, in almost everything else. “[C]ivil society must provide for the institutionalization of the right to property in such a way as to make nature, not theological teachings, the guide to survival.” But nature guides Lockean men only so long as it takes to tame religion. Civil rights in the civil society replace the natural rights of the state of nature. Locke confesses that nature has little intrinsic value, that human desire imposes value and human labor realizes that value. “Locke’s homo faber does not seem to be indebted to any other power but the strength of his mind and the force of his labor.” As Parsons observes, Locke follows Spinoza. Locke believes reason “an adding, subtracting and calculating faculty… the organization of consciousness, as consciousness is but the organization of sense experience.” This “nominalist reductionism” yields “relativism as to ultimate truth,” leaving a doctrine whereby only materialism can be certain.

Obviously, thoroughgoing materialism rules out any epistemology but empiricism, and Parsons next turns to Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. “The rational principle subsisting in things is more probably the product of generation than the cause itself of things being generated.” The telling phrase, “more probably,” suggests that radical empiricism yields skepticism. But empiricism always aims doubt more toward ideals than toward itself. Indeed, “the Humean deity tends to resemble Hume as he wished to think of himself”—no skepticism there. Still, materialism exacts its price. Hume believes that instinct is more powerful than reason even in the philosopher. The Humean god cannot be thought thinking itself but only sense sensing itself. The ‘conservative’ Hume contributes to liberalism’s anti-religious enterprise even as he calls into question liberalism’s own rationale.

Mill and Dewey, the subjects of the next two chapters, both attempt to rescue the liberal regime by recasting that rationale. According to Mill, industrial society moves toward stability, liberating citizens “for moral and intellectual productiveness”—”not an abatement of competition but the transference of competition to a higher social and perhaps moral plane.” He turns Hume’s skepticism on relativism itself. But he cannot entirely overcome relativism. Mill insists on “the ultimacy of truth, but not on its completeness or transcendence.” Dewey espouses a full-bodied historicism. He believes all human thought “provisional or circumstantial,” all ideas “plans of action.” He replaces liberalism with a centralized democratism or socialism dedicated to that vague notion, growth. Even growth is a mere hypothesis: “[P]ostulating hypothetical values, none of which is choiceworthy in any definitive sense, can only lead to an infinite regression in regard to the choiceworthiness of any one of them. The fact of this infinite regression precludes the possibility of rational decision.” Dewey’s progressivism lacks a criterion for progress.

The very rationale of modern science, the ‘conquest of nature,’ becomes questionable in the writings of the philosopher who praises science as unreservedly as any philosopher of modernity. Modern liberalism ends in, of all things, faith. The “attempt to rationalize matters which are not amenable to rationalization” yields “irrationalism.” ‘Postmodernism’ beckons.

Given all this, why obey the demi-authorities of the liberal order? Liberals find it difficult to say. In hi final chapter Parsons offers “reasons for civil obedience.” Distinguishing moral, civil, and political obligation as pertaining to family, non-constitutional law and legal procedures, and constitutional law, respectively, Parsons recalls liberalism’s sturdy political root; Americans could justify refusing political obedience only if “the American government could no longer protect most citizens by transforming their right to self-defense into public security.” Liberty should therefore be “understood as forbearance, not license,” and freedom should be understood as “the search for excellence.” But if in modernity the “measure of differentiation” among men has “tended to be” wealth, not virtue, freedom understood as the search for excellence points beyond modern liberalism as understood by almost all of its proponents. Mill without historicism begins to resemble a student of Aristotle.

Bernard Semmel: John Stuart Mill and the Pursuit of Virtue. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Vol. 13, No. 2, 1985. Republished with permission.

 

John Stuart Mill may understand the problematic character of modern reason better than any subsequent liberal. He faults both Jeremy Bentham and Auguste Comte for inclining toward despotism, for misusing reason in ways that undermine liberty.

Semmel reports that Mill’s father impressed upon his son the lesson of a story from Xenophon’s Memorabilia. The Sophist Prodicus relates that the young Hercules met two beautiful young women at a crossroads. Hercules rejected the advances of one, called “Happiness” by her admirers, “Vice” by her detractors. He preferred “Virtue,” who taught that true happiness comes from exertion, particularly exertions in the service of others. According to Semmel, this lesson “shape[d] at the root the character of John Stuart Mill’s liberalism.” Far from choosing the easy way of false “Happiness,” Mill was animated by the “spirit” of “Hercules and the Christian-Stoics of the Renaissance.” “We live by myths, sometimes without being fully aware that we do,” Semmel writes. “The choice of Hercules may be seen as Mill’s personal myth,” a myth he “translated… into a public myth as the necessary basis of a good society.”

To say that Mill lived by a myth is to question—perhaps without being fully aware of it—Mill’s status as a philosopher, as one capable of transcending myth. Semmel never suggests that a third, ‘middle’ way between private vice and public virtue might have been available to Mill. (See Leo Strauss: Xenophon’s Socrates, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972, pp. 35-38). He does not remark that the man who tells the story of Prodicus telling the story of Hercules is the philosopher, Socrates. This confirms Semmel’s own observation that he does not “adopt the approach” of “political theorists and philosophers” in seeking to draw close to Mill’s thought but rather takes the approach of “the historian of ideas.” But if that approach forecloses the possibility that Mill really is a philosopher, then the ‘history of ideas’ turns away from the virtues of history and towards the false satisfactions of mere erudition.

This notwithstanding, Semmel does provide a good introduction to Mill’s principal concerns and to the ethos in which Mill operated. Perhaps without being fully aware of it, Semmel shows that the young Mill was no philosopher but an intellectual who could sympathize, up to a point, with the antics of the Saint-Simonians. Semmel retells the amusing story of B.-P. Enfantin, the “Père Suprême” of the group, who called for a “female messiah” to save women from marriage on the one hand and from prostitution on the other—from both Lady Virtue and Lady Vice. “Enfantin an forty of his disciples retired to a monastic retreat at his Paris estate of Menilmontant, where they took up a celibate life” in anticipation of the feminist redeemer’s arrival. Understandably enough, this austere way of life soon gave way to a more active one. “[C]onvinced that this new messiah would soon be found in a Turkish harem,” they departed on a pilgrimage to Constantinople “Pour chercher la femme libre.” Viewing these incidents from the other side of the English Channel, “Mill’s patience was exhausted.” He “could suggest only that such was the inevitable consequence of a good idea [the equality of the sexes] fallen into the hands of Frenchmen.” Sober Virtue was better loved in England.

To strengthen the case of Mill’s “Stoicism,” Semmel quotes remarks praising the Stoics and criticizing the Epicureans. He omits remarks praising the Epicureans and criticizing the Stoics. In his post-1840 writings, Mill never hesitated to make use of divers allies—as he did, for example, in Utilitarianism, wherein the young Socrates, Epicurus, Bentham, and Jesus are all commended as exemplars of utilitarian ethics. “Mill’s mind was essentially illogical,” the unreconstructed Benthamite W. S. Jevons charged. Alternatively, one might wonder if Mill was a philosopher who had mastered rhetoric. (See Paul Eidelberg: A Discourse on Statesmanship, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974, pp. 402-403). The latter possibility implies an interesting Mill. It deserves more extended investigation by someone who understands the issues.

Meanwhile, we have Semmel’s essay, which says things worth saying about a neglected aspect of Mill. Semmel reminds contemporary liberals of several facts: Mill opposed the practice of paying government debts with inflated currency; he opposed the abolition of capital punishment; he endorsed a wartime government’s right to seize enemy goods in neutral ships; he praised the Swiss practice of universal military conscription. “Mill saw himself countering the tendencies of a weak-willed, commercial, modern democratic society and providing a basis for a virtuous one.” Semmel traces this spiritedness to Machiavelli, perhaps without being full aware of all the issues involved.

Semmel regards the unsystematic nature of Mill’s writings as deliberate, but not rhetorically deliberate. System-building “would merely confirm the tendency toward liberticide” seen in Bentham and Comte. As noted previously, Semmel does not sufficiently reflect upon possible additional motives for apparently unsystematic presentation. However, the avoidance of intellectual despotism and the consequent insistence that the reader think for himself surely explain some of what Mill is about. Intellectual and moral activity guard against tyranny. Passivity does not. “Like the ancient philosophers whom he admired, and their Christian-Stoic disciples of the Renaissance, as well as the moral philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment and the humanists Carlyle and Matthew Arnold, Mill understood that a good society could not long survive the eclipse of a freely chosen virtue.” On the basis of that sentence, Semmel may be said to be wiser than he is learned.

Douglas J. Den Uyl: Power, State, and Freedom: An Interpretation of Spinoza’s Political Philosophy. Assen, the Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1983.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Vol. 13, No. 1, 1985. Republished with permission.

 

“Spinoza’s approach to political issues is decidedly modern,” by which Den Uyl means “scientific or positivistic.” That is, Spinoza’s “fundamental concepts” are “devoid of normative content” although some of his other, non-fundamental “principles” do have “normative content.” This foundation presents a difficulty. Modern science at least appears to begin with the “normative”: an invitation to conquer nature for the relief of man’s estate. At the same time, its proponents insist on ‘realism,’ by which they mean, among other things, the rejection of teleology. What is the relation of the modern ‘norm’ to the modern ‘freedom’ from ‘values’?

In five chapters and two appendices Den Uyl explores the dual character of Spinozist modernity. In the first chapter he discusses Spinoza’s version of natural right. Spinoza regards human law as ‘normative’ and nature as non-‘normative.’ He regards right and power as “co-extensive terms.” “[O]ne has the right to do whatever one can do. Den Uyl claims that according to Spinoza “it cannot be said that the man who acts according to reason is acting more in accord with natural right than the man who acts exclusively from passion or appetite,” but he also sees that Spinoza considers rational men more powerful than impassioned men. Den Uyl does not explicitly draw the conclusion: if right and power are co-extensive terms and rational men are finally the most powerful, then he who acts according to reason does act more in accord with right. Den Uyl claims that Spinoza differs from Hobbes in that Hobbes does not equate right with power but with “right reason”; thus Hobbes was “clearly tied to the older normative traditions.” But if right reason does yield power, then those ties do not bind. “Spinoza’s equation of right and power is perhaps the most novel feature of his political theory. Perhaps—but one might consider not only Hobbes but Bacon, Descartes, and Machiavelli.

Making right and power co-extensive gives “normative” human law a tenuous moral status. In subsequent chapters Den Uyl considers Spinoza’s version of the state, the nature and foundations of political authority, and the relation of power to liberty. Den Uyl somewhat incautiously assumes that any teaching not found in the Political Treatise cannot be Spinoza’s final teaching, even if it is found in the Theologico-Political Treatise. He makes this assumption because Spinoza tells readers that “he will discuss what is relevant to his task in the [Political Treatise] without requiring the reader to consult his other works.” Fortunately, Den Uyl sees that the two books share “a remarkable similarity in their theoretical foundations.” Nonetheless, some readers may wish for a more careful consideration of Spinoza’s literary devices. Although Den Uyl reads Spinoza with intelligence, it is difficult for him to prove his usually stimulating interpretations. Den Uyl may be even more right than he realizes when he suggests that “casting off prejudices is perhaps the most difficult task facing the reader of Spinoza; for it is not uncommon for Spinoza to attach unfamiliar meanings to familiar terms.” To understand those meanings, their context must be considered; to understand a book by Spinoza, its context, namely, Spinoza’s works as a group, must be considered.

Den Uyl’s interpretations include the suggestion that “fear and love are the two basic passions by which one may fall under the authority of government.” Thus “the government has no authority over the reasonable man,” who is “his own master, his own authority.” Thus, the distinction between citizen and slave is rendered problematic by the political philosopher sometimes regarded as the founder of modern liberalism. Spinozist “political authority” is “norm-giving” but “determined by power.” Spinoza’s “is a philosophy of liberty only to the extent that liberty can be equated or shown to be consistent with a theory of power.”

Spinoza reconciles power and liberty by contending that reason liberated from passion and superstition is the source of power. The state is most powerful when acting rationally. Perhaps because reason requires the elimination of contradictions (Den Uyl does not say), peace “is the political expression of reason or rational action.” Because true power aims at, even yields, peace, the Spinozist state allows fairly substantial individual liberty. True power does not concern itself with regulating private vices. Tyranny depends too much on fear instead of “willing obedience to the law”; it is inefficient largely because of its irrational deployment of power.

In Spinoza one sees many of the elements of modern liberalism. Difficulties now well known to us, most particularly those concerning the character of reason, come to light in the writings of this conspicuously daring philosopher. If reason is a means of action instead of the best means of contemplating truth, it seems to be reconciled with politics in a way rejected by the ancients. But if reason is essentially ‘active,’ what can it serve but the body? And does not service to the body eventually corrupt reason and empower the passions? Will such corruption eventually yield the destruction of the liberal order, then despotism?