Will Morrisey Reviews

Book reviews and articles on political philosophy and literature.

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

    Archives

    Categories

    Meta

    Archives for August 2017

    De Gaulle: Portrait of a Statesman

    by

    Don Cook: Charles de Gaulle. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1984.

    Originally published in Chronicles of Culture, Vol. 9, No. 3, March 1985. Republished with permission.

     

    “The head rules the belly through the chest,” C. S. Lewis writes. Reason cannot rule appetites directly; it needs what the Greeks called thumos, the soul’s “spirited element,” to rule the appetites so that reason can go free. Spiritedness cares for itself oneself and for those like oneself. Refined, it animates patriotism, courage, honor; at its best it animates magnanimity, “greatness of soul.” Unrefined, it animates warlikeness, rage, egoism; at its worst it causes madness. Lewis describes modern democratic ‘intellectuals’ as “men without chests.” Their heads, however well-trained, remain ineffectual. Our intellectuals lack “heart”—not only the compassion they feebly praise but the courage they ridicule, nervously, as machismo.

    Few political men have opposed this dispiritedness. Charles de Gaulle was among the greatest to do so. His latest biographer, an American journalist, describes a man of thumos caught in but also defying, sometimes exploiting, the entropic forces of the modern age. On the force commonly taken to symbolize late modernity, Cook writes that de Gaulle “had not the slightest interest in the question of the control of nuclear weapons, in nuclear disarmament, in a test-ban treaty, in the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, or in any of the treaties that were spawned in Geneva…. He had no interest in think-tank theories about the use of nuclear weapons or the risks of one country triggering another into holocaust. He had only one theory and that was nuclear retaliation.” During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, de Gaulle met American and Soviet representatives. To Kennedy’s envoy, Dean Acheson, he said, “You may tell the President that if there is a war, France will be with you. But there will be no war.” He added, characteristically, “I must note that I have been advised, but not consulted.” With Serge Vinogradov, the Soviet ambassador to France, de Gaulle deployed fewer words but greater irony. As was customary, he opened the meeting by saying, “Well, Mr. Ambassador, I am listening.” Vinogradov ran on about the possibility of the annihilation of France; de Gaulle remained silent. The ambassador continued, and de Gaulle’s silence continued. “At last the Soviet ambassador ran out of things to say. De Gaulle then rose from behind his desk with heavy and ponderous motion, stretched out his hand in farewell to Vinogradove and said: ‘Hélas, Monsieur l’Ambassadeur, nous mourirons ensemble! Au revoir, Monseur l’Ambassadeur.'” [“Alas, Mr. Ambassador, we will die together! Goodbye, Mr. Ambassador.”)

    Thumos serves reason here in two ways: It defends reason against tyranny, including the psychological tyranny totalitarians seek to impose; more subtly, it defends the mind from excessive fear, allowing de Gaulle to see that the Soviets are not likely to risk Moscow for the sake of missile bases in the Caribbean. The complementary insight is de Gaulle’s famous suspicion that the United States might not risk its existence for the sake of France. He told Eisenhower, “I know, as you yourself know, what a nation is. It can help another but it cannot identify itself with another.” De Gaulle accordingly ordered the construction of France’s own nuclear arsenal, forcing any would-be attackers to consider how much they want to risk for the sake of conquering France. Thus thumos and practical reason allied themselves in the service of moderation—or, at least, restraint.

    Thumos defends its own. Even when the schoolboy de Gaulle played with toy soldiers he insisted, “France is mine!” Wounded and captured by the Germans during the Great War, he used his enforced confinement to study the enemy’s language, “return[ing] home from thirty-two months as a POW with a suitcase full of materials for future writings and lectures”—many of which would warn against German military resurgence. In 1919 he saw action in Poland, participating in “the miracle of the Vistula” when Polish troops and foreign volunteers unexpectedly defeated the Red Army and saved Poland from foreign domination. Decorated by the Polish government, de Gaulle evidently regarded Poland as an exception to the perfidious general run of foreign countries. He condemned the Yalta settlement from the beginning and, as late as 1967, visited Gdansk and said, “The obstacles that you think are insurmountable today, you will without any doubt surmount them. You know what I mean.” Poland too had become “his,” and there can be little doubt that he also viewed it as a potential buffer against Russian and German ambitions in France’s neighborhood.

    No tyrant, de Gaulle admired thumos in others. In the interwar period he saw the French colonies in the Middle East and wrote, “My impression is that we haven’t really made much impact here, and that the people are as alien to us—and we to them—as they ever were.” The French must therefore either compel obedience or “get out.” His disband France’s colonial empire, decades later, followed from this recognition of both the strength and the limits of thumos.

    “A statesman is needed.” De Gaulle wrote that on May 3, 1940 to the Third Republic’s last prime minister, Paul Reynaud, who proved unequal to the need. As the Nazis conquered France and his mentor, Marshall Pétain, capitulated, de Gaulle reacted simply to France’s “men without chests.” “I saw treason before m eyes, and my heart refused in disgust to recognize it as victorious.” Not only military and political timeservers but many intellectual luminaries endorsed Pétain; these included Gide, Mauriac, and Claudel. “In those days,” Cook writes, “it was not men of experience or leadership, it was not the intellectuals or politicians or administrators or serving officers who were the first Gaullists and rallied to the Cross of Lorraine. They did not come from the châteaux or the cathedrals, but from the parish churches and the synagogues,, the French of the Paris Métro, the fishing villages, the factories, for whom all was clear and simple.” When de Gaulle founded Free France in London, less than one-sixth of the French then on British soil joined him; those likely to be on foreign soil—businessmen, diplomatic personnel—were unlikely to respond to a simple call to honor.

    By 1941, de Gaulle “had made up his mind that the war would be long, that Britain and the Allies would win, and that his priority from then on would be to claw back everything he could for a victory for France.” The clawing among de Gaulle and Churchill, Roosevelt, and the anti-Gaullist French elements drew blood. Although Churchill quarreled angrily with him (going so far as to threaten, “If you obstruct me, I shall liquidate you!”) de Gaulle found Roosevelt and the French elites more consistently hostile. The American president dreamed of a new, postwar state, “Wallonia,” to be fabricated from “the Walloon parts of Belgium with Luxembourg, Alsace-Lorraine and part of northern France.” Considering various explanations of Roosevelt’s allergy to de Gaulle, Cook finally decides that “there can be no rationale or explanation of what amounted to a personal obsession.” It is surely true that Roosevelt distrusted de Gaulle’s military background, recalling such adventurers as Napoleon Bonaparte and Boulanger; it is also possible that Roosevelt, exemplifying the American liberal’s ambivalence toward thumos, resent a man ‘of one piece,’ a man who at once the liberal’s ambitions but who did not share the liberal’s moral reservations concerning ambition.

    As for the French, during the war de Gaulle contended with the old right (the Vichyites condemned him to death in absentia); after the liberation “it was a struggle between the Communists and the Gaullists,” a struggle de Gaulle won by the spirited expedient of ordering the Communists to the front lines. It was the postwar exhaustion of thumos that caused de Gaulle to resign as prime minister. “Although de Gaulle could be master of any parliamentary debate he chose to enter, he was never cut out for the maneuvers and cut-and-thrust of parliamentary democracy…. It was not his idea of how to run a government.” The French viewed his departure with relief and did not expect him to return. When he did, in 1958, it was of course on his own terms. Foremost among these was a new constitution, a presidential regime that ended parliamentarism while retaining parliament as a separate branch of government. The men without chests, talkers who confused action with the force of inertia, found themselves once more defeated by the man of thumos.

    In previous books, Cook has written extensively on World War II, and sixty percent of this book concerns the war and its aftermath. The chapters on de Gaulle’s founding and defense of the Fifth Republic are well supplemented by Bernard Ledwidge’s recent biography (De Gaulle, New York: St. Martin’s Press), by two excellent chapters in Stanley Hoffman’s Decline or Renewal? France Since the 1930s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), and by Malraux’s Le Miroir des Limbes, parts of which were translated into English as Anti-Memoirs and Felled Oaks (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston). De Gaulle’s constant theme during those years, la grandeur, inspired fear and hatred, admiration and ridicule. Cook does not quite understand de Gaulle’s intention, but he does present the words and actions of a statesman attempting to bring a thoroughly modernized, democratized populace to the unmodern virtues of courage and moderation, a statesman forced to use modern tools for unmodern ends.

    Cook gives the two customary explanations of de Gaulle’s failure to complete his second term as president: from 1958 to 1968, French university enrollments tripled and de Gaulle did not sufficiently anticipate the resulting tensions; in 1968, the Soviets crushed Czechoslovakia’s experiment with civil liberties, thus refuting de Gaulle’s claim that Soviet ideology mattered less than Russian nationality. In both instances, the man of thumos underestimated the power of ideologies. (The French university students were not only numerous; a significant fraction of them had put on ideological costumes, stitching together patches of anarchism, pop psychology, and the teachings of Mao Zedong). De Gaulle rightly considered these ideologies absurd. He wrongly dismissed them as irrelevant to modern politics. That is, he underestimated the power of intellectual absurdity in human life, a power that never lasts at its peak but reappears with the persistence of dandelions. If allied with reason, thumos can rule the appetites. But in late modernity the appetites have themselves made alliance with reason, using reason to build ideologies, distinguished from religions and philosophies by their egalitarianism. And thumos also makes alliance with reason, but now as the dominant partner, serving ambition or ‘the will to power.’

    Statesmen are still needed.

     

    Liberalism and Reason

    by

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

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

     

    A bland, unspecific title covers a well-focused yet wide-ranging set of essays on the problem of modern liberalism. 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 the problem of consent. As Mansfield writes in the book’s informative preface, all the chapters “take their bearings from the author’s reflection 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 the England of their 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—not an ancient and a modern but two moderns apparently separated by another divide, the one between France and England. La Rochefoucauld views human nature with “Christian (even Augustinian) ‘pessimism’ while espousing a tamed Machiavellianism similar to Halifax’s. But his modernity bears some resemblance to Temple’s Epicureanism: “[H]is evident partiality to private virtues exceeds his concern for public ones. In this sense he is a liberal, a lover of privacy.” Hobbes, who viewed human nature ‘pessimistically’ if not religiously, by using a doctrine of political sovereignty to attack the religiously based sovereignty of ecclesiastics.

    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” 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 overthrow 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. But even growth is mere hypothesis: “postulating 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.” What Parson is describing in Dewey is a historicism in which there is no ‘end of History,’ no conclusion to the ongoing historical process. This puts the leaves the very notion of progress in doubt; the impasse of earlier liberalism oriented by natural right returns in the newer liberalism oriented by historical right.

    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.” Nietzsche awaits.

    Given all this, why obey the demi-authorities of the liberal order? Liberals find it difficult to say. In his 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 of self-defense into public security.” Liberty should therefore be “understood as forbearance, not as 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.

    Mill’s Liberalism

    by

    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, May 1985.

     

    John Stuart Mill may understand the moral and political dilemmas resulting from the conception of reason propounded by modern philosophy better than any subsequent liberal. He faults his contemporaries Bentham and 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, 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” but rather that of “the historian of ideas.” One might question whether this “approach” can bring anyone to historical accuracy.

    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. “Enfantin and forty of his disciples retired to a monastic retreat at his Paris estate of Ménilmontant, where they took up a celibate life” in anticipate of this feminist redeemer’s arrival. Understandably enough, the strategy soon gave way to a more active one. “[Convinced that his new messiah would 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 Channel, “Mill’s patience was exhausted.” He “could suggest only that such was the inevitable consequence of a good idea [equality of the sexes] fallen into the hands of Frenchmen.” Sober Virtue was better loved in England.

    To strengthen his case for Mill’s “Stoicism,” Semmel quotes remarks by Mill 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 of Nazareth 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, 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 with being fully aware of all the issues involved. (For starters, Machiavelli was no Stoic).

    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 in-systematic 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 [Thomas] 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.