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Rousseau is the first great modern political philosopher discontented with modernity who nonetheless remains a ‘modern.’ He is not Pascal, criticizing modernity in the name of Christianity, or Swift, enlisting in the battle of the books under the banner of the ‘ancients.’

Rousseau rejects the ‘bourgeois’ or post-Machiavellian turn of modern thought. Machiavelli (with Descartes to follow) despised what he called the effeminacy of ‘modern’—he meant Christian—life. The synthesis of ancient ‘idealism’ and Christianity had led (he charged) to an unworldly, castles-in-the-air irresoluteness among the very classes of men who should stand firm and act severely: the princes in principalities, the citizens in republics. The Prince of Peace had unmanned them, and the philosophers hadn’t been much better. As a result, petty ‘city-states’ squabbled at the very center of what had been a world empire. The Augustinian empire of the papacy, neither fully in nor fully out of the world, had corrupted and replaced the real empire of the original Romans. The Prince of Peace must be replaced by the Prince of War and battle-ready citizens.

For Montaigne, Hobbes, and Locke, the practical problem looked quite different. Their Europe was wracked by civil wars. The spirit of Machiavelli had joined with the spirit of Christianity to produce militant fanaticism that was frustrating the very spirit of acquisitiveness Machiavelli had intended to foster. These modern philosophers wanted peace; if not effeminacy, then surely a touch of moderation would be a relief. They emphasized the principle of self-preservation in a world all too inclined to Christian jihadism. For this purpose, the practical, vigorous but unwarlike spirit of the commercial classes seemed a welcome touch of sanity in a world of ambitions inflated by the conflation of manliness and religiosity.

Rousseau understands this. But his heart rebels against it. He is too spirited, too ‘thumotic’ to stomach the halfway-house rule of the commercial classes. Unlike several of the ‘bourgeois’ moderns, he resolutely defends human free will, even if he eventually replaces it with ‘perfectibility.’ Rousseau returns to the manly/spirited origins of modernity, to the Machiavellian polemic against effeminacy and the Cartesian stance of resoluteness. He does so in his own way, however, with an attack on the ‘Enlightenment’ claim that progress in human knowledge will yield, or at least comport with, progress in morality and politics. Although very far from being anti-science, Rousseau does oppose public science, science as a part of public life.

Rousseau begins the second Discourse with a paean to the republicans of Geneva; he appears to harken back to the virtues of antiquity: severe morals, proud courage, martial spirit, all in a country scaled to human governance. (In this he imitates Machiavelli, who appears to appeal to the example of ancient Rome). But Rousseau soon shows a different hand. The human consists, fundamentally, of two principles: the desire for self-preservation and the sentiment of pity. Enlightenment rationalism is too complex to serve as a constituent of any real society; in this it resembles Machiavelli’s ridiculed builders of castles in the air. Mere sentience is the indispensable foundation for peaceful human life. Rationality, which usually serves vanity or amour-propre instead of natural amour de soi, has thus far only impeded decent human life. A thinking man is a depraved animal. What all men—ancient and modern—have called progress is only an elaborate and dangerous reification of vanity. Rousseau rejects ‘histories’ or books (most notably the Book, the Bible) as unreliable guides—vain in both senses of the word—and instead has recourse to nature, which turns out to mean unassisted human reason.

Rousseau (in my opinion unwarrantedly) argues that the original human beings were by nature asocial. He needs this claim in order to integrate spiritedness/thumos in a harmless form as free will, and independence (therefore not the libido dominandi) into his concept of human nature. A social being would not be independent. This rhetorical need results in the contorted discussion of how language arose. Paradoxically, this rhetorical need also results in a possibly self-defeating need to say that much of human nature is mere latency—a set of potential characteristics that emerge by the force of chance events channeling human beings into civilized life. Rousseau’s ‘back to nature’ leads to what we later denizens of modernity might call a historicized nature, a nature that is changeable, manipulable. Of course, what is manipulable is also tyrannizable, unfree. Rousseau himself regards natural freedom as irreversibly destroyed. His life’s work is dedicated not to ‘reaction’ or returning to an recoverable past, but to pushing phony progress into real progress, into the reconstitution of freedom in modern society. He too is thus a ‘progressive,’ a man in need of a future. Like all progressives, he finally must sing, thumotically, ‘Tomorrow belongs to me.’ The very tyranny that results from civilization begins to force men to be equal, again, because (as in Hobbes) under tyranny all men but one are equal, even if (unlike Hobbes) Rousseau wants popular not state sovereignty. Moreover, the reason that led us astray also enables at least one philosopher to think his way back into the natural, and thereby prepare to set a path to ‘progress.’

Such a conception of human nature yields its own monstrosities. In subsequent centuries, we have seen some of them. The Machiavellian, Cartesian, and Rousseauian inspiriting of men to use political means to manipulate course of events in order to reconstitute manliness in some new form, hitherto only latent, has proven overly ambitious, even from a strictly political standpoint. Scientifically, it is by now too late to pretend that human nature is a vague and politically manipulable thing; we know too much about genetics, for example, to suppose that language results exclusively from some train of historical accidents. (Genetics also solves the knotty problem of how to classify orangutans and mandrills, discussed in Rousseau’s Note J.) When it comes to manipulation, it is the scientistic modernity envisioned by Bacon and not that envisioned by the more purely political writers that may prove most formidable.

Kant’s ‘progressivism’ is more straightforward than Rousseau’s because Kant believes he sees a way towards peace that does not jettison Enlightenment rationalism. The crucial difference is that Kant maintains freedom of will and happiness to be dependent upon the capacity to reason; whereas in Rousseau reason attaches to nature, and thus to the realm of determinism, for Kant reason undergirds the realm of freedom. Reason can and must be a crucial public element in a peaceful social order, although not primarily and immediately. Kant can then claim that human “unsocial sociality” is finally good, part of nature’s ‘plan’ to compel human beings to rise above their own laziness and sleepy or unenlightened peaceableness, through centuries of strife, culminating in an awakened or enlightened ‘perpetual peace.’ This historicized nature teaches the recalcitrant schoolboy, man, “that which reason could have told [him] at the beginning and with far less sad experience.” Kant admits that if he is mistaken, and there is no such historical teleology in nature, then nature is “not far wrong in  preferring the state of savages.”

To help prevent that dystopian conclusion, Kant advocated what today’s ‘international relations’ specialists call idealism: the formulation of a republican “international government” of “world citizenship.” This a priori creation of the human mind will function as the goal of enlightened statesmen, the Woodrow Wilsons of the future. (It is therefore quite unlike a Platonic eidos, which is hardly a blueprint for future action.) Again unlike Rousseau, Kant optimistically claims or hopes that rational enlightenment will go with “a certain commitment of heart which the enlightened man cannot fail to make to the good he clearly understands.” In this Kant conflates, as Rousseau does not, goodness and morality. Toward this end, a new kind of philosophical historiography is needed, a historiography that will replace previous histories (including the Bible, as seen in his The Conjectural Beginning of Human History) with a narrative of judiciously selected events highlighting the latently ‘enlightened’ features of all previous epochs.

In my view, Kantian idealism is less practicable, and quite possibly less desirable, than he supposes. The contention that commercial republics—as distinguished from such military republics as ancient Sparta and Rome—do not fight with other commercial republics is sound enough. But the prospect of world government or even “international government” (by which he seems to mean a worldwide federalism) does not portend a civitas of self-governing citizens. Commercial, federal republics have proven their capacity to extend over large territories without losing their republicanism, but a worldwide republic of five or six billion souls strikes me as a chimera. The 300-million-soul version has discontents enough.

 

Jeffrey Reiman: Justice and Moral Philosophy. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1992.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 22, Number 2, Winter 1994-95. Republished with permission.

 

Instability bedevils modern moral philosophy. Whereas Aristotle lends nobility to materialism, ballast to religions, Machiavelli debases the one and poisons the other, yet ends in self-deification. Machiavelli’s morality offers the spectacle of reductive ‘realism’ yoked to overweening ambition. In modern moral philosophizing every Hobbes has his Rousseau, every Hume his Kant, every Hegel his Marx, every Schopenhauer his Nietzsche. With contradictions so acute, syntheses need to be jerrybuilt in unending succession, as hopes for salvation chase an ever-receding horizon called ‘growth.’

Jeffrey Reiman shares the modern philosophers’ materialist naturalism and political atheism. He rejects the irrationalism of the moderns who come after Marx, insisting that “the most important truths of morality can be identified by the natural reasoning faculties of human beings” (ix). Without rationalism, “right becomes indistinguishable from might,” one synthesis that cannot be salvific—at least for morality. Justice is the portion of morality that entails requirements, obligatory force; it therefore both undergirds and enjoys primacy among “other moral ideals” (ix). Morality binds; rational morality replaces that binding that is religion.

Reiman’s investigations discover a tougher version of Rawlsian social contract theory, one well worth considering and far superior to many of its now-fashionable competitors—relativism, the airier Kantianisms, ‘idealistic’ distortions of Marx and democratric distortions of Nietzsche, pragmatisms dappled and motley. Reiman’s theory is not free of problems,, but these issue from modernism itself and are not easy to overcome.

“[A]ll moralities depend” upon the difference between might and right; “if we cannot know this, then we cannot know that the very project of trying to get our fellows to act morally is anything more than just pushing people around” (1). Subjugation is pushing people around, “any case in which the judgment of one person prevails over the contrary judgment of another simply because it can and thus without adequate justification for believing it should” (2). Such justification can only come from reason. Unreasonable beliefs can do nothing in the end but fight it out, appeal to might (if in the guise of providence). The elimination of subjugation is “the inner wisdom of the social contract tradition in moral thinking” (2), a tradition requiring government by consent instead of by force and fraud.

Accordingly, justice is “the set of principles regulating behavior that it would be reasonable for all human beings to accept to best protect themselves against the threat of subjugation each poses to the others” (4). Natural justice applies always and everywhere human beings exist, whether or not they belong to the same civil society; social justice applies wherever people work cooperatively to produce benefits. Justice in both forms requires, involves reasons for restraint—self-restraint and social restraint in circumstances when desires conflict. The need for justice arises on the grounds so forcefully described by Hobbes: Different individuals have conflicting desires and judgments; they act to execute those desires and judgments; therefore, they need a set of principles upon which they can agree, for safety’s sake. “What they do not differ in… is their desire to live according to their judgments, no matter how different”; “only appeal to the principles that it would be reasonable for all to adopt as protection against having their judgments thwarted can answer the call for justification and thus overcome the suspicion of subjugation”(6). As with ‘early modern’ moral thought generally, so long as thinkers do not propose a more ambitious moral program whereby personal safety or “peaceful coexistence” (7) begins to seem a poor substitute for the radical transformation of human nature, collectively (Marx) or in certain individuals (Nietzsche).

In “polic[ing] the border between might and right,” justice’s “task is to determine the things that can be done in the name of other moral beliefs” (8). “Only reason can require in a nonsubjugating way” (8); reason is not only logic, “the capacity to make correct inferences from propositions,” it is also the ability “to size up facts for what they are and what they imply, and to identify the best means to some end, and, in general, to distinguish what we should believe from what we merely do believe” (9). What we call a free or nonsubjugated will is “the capacity to reason about how one should act and to perform an act because this reasoning indicates that this action is what one should do” (10). Justice provides the foundation for all further moral reasoning. Without this foundation, social contract theory floats in the air and can be made to crash—as seen in the many refutations of Rawls. “Justice as reason’s answer to subjugation is unique as a contractarian theory [Reiman observes], because we do not start by characterizing the contracting situation as an imaginary place and then work back to current reality [as seen in modern moral philosophers from Hobbes to Rawls]. We start from current reality and derive the features of the contracting situation from the conditions necessary to pose the question of whether subjugation is occurring currently.” (13) The problem of subjugation entails recognition of the “subterranean political dimension of morality” (14). Reiman never loses sight of the need for individual and political liberty, neither of which implies anarchy. “A true morality spells out the conditions under which human beings may rightly govern other human beings” (14). To Reiman, as to the American Founders, consent always means reasoned assent, assent to coherent conceptual constraints and to the physical constraints derived from them.

Remian believes Descartes to be the founder of modern moral philosophy, the thinker who replaced the “I am” of the Biblical God with the human “I think, therefore I am.” Cartesian doubt replaces faith, as “his own reason becomes a thinker’s highest authority” (25). Perhaps because Reiman does not acknowledge Machiavelli as Descartes’ predecessor, he does not see that Cartesian method replaces human doubt not so much with authoritative discovery as with Godlike production, a willful quasi-creation known because the creator best knows and best rules his own creation. This is so to speak the princely or tyrannical aspect of modern moral philosophy, and it gives modernity its hard-edged carapace as distinguished from its soft and well-fed underbelly.

Be this as it may, Reiman understands Cartesian method as primarily a road to rational assent. Modern social contract theory, inaugurated by Hobbes, attempts to bring this principle of rational assent to politics (27). The problem with Hobbes’s theory is its recourse to a sovereign “whose power is not subject to the rational judgment of his subjects” (32). Locke’s objection, that the sovereign thus becomes a remnant of the state of nature, an agent of war, is vitiated by his recourse to Christianity, a recourse Reiman over-hastily takes to be a sincere “reliance on revelation” previously invalidated by Descartes” (35). This is not the place to squabble with Reiman’s Locke scholarship; suffice it to say that the image of the pious Locke has been seriously questioned by such scholars as Robert H. Horwitz and Nathan Tarcov. The more important question for our purposes here is to ask, “Why did Locke have need for such recourse? If he merely wanted to guard himself against attacks by the powerful and pious of his day (he was not entirely successful), then what does this need (and his middling success at meeting it) tell us not only of his own historical circumstance but of political circumstances always and everywhere? Could it be that rationalism in politics has practical limits, that political atheism therefore has some serious disadvantages, not least of all to the atheist? Or did Locke intend something more by his recourse to Christianity than self-preservation? Could he have viewed with skepticism the likelihood of a general enlightenment or popular political rationalism? His plans for educating the class of gentry differed from his plans for educating others: temporary expedient and first step on the road to universal enlightenment, or permanent arrangement?

Because he takes Cartesian method to be a means of discovery, not of willful production, Reiman can assume that modern moral philosophy aims at an impersonal moral authority independent of the one who makes moral assertions. His equivalent of the state of nature—he calls it “the natural context”—is the state of moral doubt, of “doubt[ing] the validity of claims to moral authority” (42). He distinguishes very sharply between right and might to the extent of distinguishing moral duties or requirements from moral recommendations. An example of a moral recommendation is, ‘Be courageous!’—an imperative that cannot be strictly binding because its enforcement would undermine its very nature as rationally willed risk-taking. This overlooks the morally educative role that force often plays, however. Rigors ‘force’ courage (or cowardice) out of people—the reverse side of the old adage, “Power shows the man.” If your family or country is endangered, is courage not a duty? Sensitive to the moral dimension of political liberty, and far from heedless of the moral dimensions of restraint, including political restraint, Reiman is uneasy with the moral underpinnings of (immediately) non-moral acts such as physical restraint. This comes from his thoroughgoing moral rationalism, his stalwart refusal to accept habituation as a valid moral enterprise. “[T]he Cartesian challenge seems to hurl us into an endless circle: We need political authority because we cannot depend on people’s rational judgments [as in the Hobbesian state of nature], and we can only depend on political authority as if it is subject to people’s rational judgment. The way out lies in showing that we can depend on people’s rational judgments to hit upon the structure of valid moral authority.” (35) There is a ‘low but solid ground’ that is also fully rational, a ground that will underlie a workable social contract consented to by all. Cartesianism requires the sweeping away of all habits, opinions, and conventions, not the rational ascent from them. Cartesianism distrusts habits, opinions and conventions as sources of rational thought, albeit imperfect sources. The modern founding, whether political or ‘intellectual,’ requires a tabula rasa upon which to construct new modes and orders. Reiman may underestimate the willfulness of this project and therefore overestimate its rationality.

Consider, for example, his own recourse to existentialism. Reiman takes it as a fact that human beings have foreknowledge of their own eventual death and that this knowledge “transforms living into a life,” that is, requires us to distinguish between living well and living poorly, goads us to live a life that “compensates for the endless darkness on the other side” (43). This is of course the Aristotelian distinction between mere life and the good life. But it is Aristotle filtered through Heidegger and somewhat the worse for the straining. André Malraux, who spent his life thinking about death in its variety of occasions and senses, concluded that the question of the meaning of life would be no less poignant if man were immortal, although death does give the question some urgency. Life, not death, poses the question. Malraux borrows his most famous novel’s title, La condition humaine, from Montaigne and Pascal; not death but individuality and reason (as defined broadly by Reiman) account for the “natural fact about human beings”: their possession of a “sovereign interest” in “liv[ing] the life they want to live (49). Notice the typically modern voluntarism that now gets into Reiman’s argument, which had subordinated the will to reason. Mistakes in identifying one’s sovereign interest are not objective but only incorrect predictions about what will best satisfy the person as judge of his own desires and author of his actions. “[C]oerced actions cannot really serve my sovereign interest unless I come to embrace them as my own (53). Evidently, reason can identify justice, the moral condition of the rest of morality, but it cannot identify a hierarchy of ends consonant with a human nature or way of life. Citing Aristotle, Reiman declares that “reasoning is being free” and that “reasoning is our being” (58), that the sovereign interest is the “is” that commands our “oughts” (58), the core of subjectivity, the fact that “spans the fact-value divide” (58). Because this reasoning is so to speak situated outside of social and political life (thanks to the Cartesian method, which requires the mental elimination of conventions and opinions), however, the rationality of human nature is foundational only. “As the Greeks well knew, freedom is conformity to reason, not violation of it” (70-71), but the natural scope of reason’s authority is limited to an egalitarian guard against subjugation, against “limit[ing] people in the pursuit of their sovereign interest” (72), self-defined and limited externally only be the requirement that its definition and the actions resulting from it do not interfere with the sovereign interests of others. Reiman senses the problem here, adding that the Platonic virtues (courage, moderation, wisdom, and justice) “amount to the conditions… that best enable everyone to lead the life he judges that he desires” (82). But this may be rather more ambitious, because more egalitarian, than the formulation in Plato, who does not expect a polis full of such prodigies of moral achievement.

Reiman’s egalitarian optimism is at the center of his critique of Hobbes, the victim of his own “assumption of natural moral discord” (87), resulting in the war of all against all. This assumption, Reiman contends, is self-fulfilling. [W]e can undermine Hobbes’ argument if we can replace the assumption of natural moral discord with that of natural moral agreement” (88)—roughly, Rousseau’s project, but with reasonableness substituting for compassion. Only reason provides both the potential solution to conflicting moral assertions and the rigor of requirement morality needs. Other candidates—the sentiment of benevolence, the greatest good of the greatest number, the desire for justice as a means to happiness or the perfection of the individual’s natural capacities, the call for collective self-interest, and the Kantian criterion of universalizability—all lack teeth. They cannot require anyone to desire what he does not immediately desire (and so prevent cheating around the edges). Or, in the case of Aristotelian perfectionism, it presumes a well-articulated, stable human nature that does not exist; human beings, in Reiman’s view, simply do not have essential purposes or functions, only reason, which is instrumental to the individual’s self-chosen and defined sovereign interests. Kantian universalizability is even flimsier: “[A]s if guilt at immorality were no more than regret over committing a logical self-contradiction. Only a philosopher could believe such a thing.” (112).

The reasoning that constitutes morality is more than logic. Moral reasoning recognizes the fact of the sovereign interest not by logical analysis but by the cognitive (not sentimental) act of imagining oneself into other human subjects, all of which equally share a sovereign interest even if each particular sovereign interest differs from one human subject to another. “Morality is reason’s passion” (113), that is, a rational eros that enables us to enter into other human subjects and know them to be beings like ourselves in this crucial respect. “The plurality of persons implies that there are facts one can only comprehend in an undistorted way by identifying with them,” by imaginatively having the “first- person experiences” of other human subjects, by “feeling the sovereignty of the other person’s sovereign interest” (115). To be reasonable involves logic and “acting as far as I can in light of the real nature of the facts,” whose nature, in the case of human beings, can only be approached through imaginative participation in their subjectivity (116). Reiman calls this act of moral reasoning “respect” (116). It is a democratic or egalitarian argument: “Those who, like Nietzsche, think that without God there is no morality fail to see that without God there is still human reason. Without the judge, the jury of peers remains.” (118). But without God or a natural hierarchy, how might one distinguish between, say, a jury of peer and a jury of pears, that is, skulls full of mush that judge Socrates to be their peer? More pertinently because more in Reiman’s terms, why should this imaginative identification with others’ sovereign interests—an identification that, Reiman quickly remarks, does not make those interests one’s own—”make me want to act in light of what matters to us both” (118)? “I endorse the ends of others for them just beyond the boundary of my own ends,” limiting “the imperious claims” of my own sovereign interest (119-120). But why does this induce me to approve of their claims or, for that matter, my own? Why is the “natural equality of all human subjects” seen in the “equal urgency of all the sovereign interests with which I identify (120, emphasis added)? Contentless urgency may not much impress me, particularly if I concede in advance that the various contents are unjudgeable, except insofar as they might tend to subjugate others. “Endorsing the truth of others’ personal imperatives is endorsing the truth of moral right” (124): Yes, but am I not likely to want something more than an assurance that moral right exists in the form of something so indefinite as the results obtained by perceiving the universality moral agency?

With this argument in hand, Reiman revives Kant’s criterion of universalizability. Given the nature of human beings as ends-in-themselves, embodiments of particular sovereign interests, it now makes sense to say that the test of duty is whether or not the maxim of our action can be stated as a universal law without contradiction. I am quite sure that Kant’s categorical imperative cannot be redeemed, even with Reiman’s proviso. It is of course true that the maxim, “Thou shalt not steal,” is a perfectly universalizable maxim. Unfortunately, so is the maxim, “Thou shalt steal.” Reiman argues that to permit stealing would be permit others to steal from me, and this “would bring my will into contradiction with itself” (134). Not at all. To say, “Thou shalt steal,” is not to say, “Thou shalt prevent others from stealing from thyself.” Rather, it is to rival the highest flights of communist morality: “From each according to his inability to protect his property, to each according to his ability to steal.” I have heard that cadets at one of the American military academies routinely steal one another’s hats, and have great sport at it—perhaps a civilized imitation of the plundering Spartan boys were encouraged to undertake. Without endorsing Nietzsche’s suggestions that the war of all against all might be a great and species-improving joy, one can say that it could surely be a logically consistent one, especially given unanimity of respect for sovereign interests. Perhaps too much so: Reiman says, “One can respect one’s adversaries or even one’s enemies without having sympathy for their ends or actively adopting them,” by “making way for the other to promote his ends rather than by actively promoting them oneself” (136). But if the ends of the other make him my enemy, why should I make way? And if his ends are innocuous, why would he be my enemy, or even my adversary? “[R]espect is a certain honor paid to the other’s values because they are his” (136). Why is this a reason to respect or honor something? Why does the mere possession of a “value” require anyone to honor it—even the possessor?

The social contract consists of those principles all individuals would be reasonable to accept, not all those they do in fact accept. The social contract therefore limits our actions “at the point at which all can pursue their sovereign interests to the maximum compatible with the same for everyone” (141-142). It enables human beings to establish what Kant calls the “kingdom of ends,” “the systematic union of rational beings through common laws” (144). The Golden Rule in either its negative or positive formulation is “a nearly universally accepted test of morality” (147), and this fact “answers the Hobbesian challenge: The trust upon which human society is based is well-placed” (153). To borrow one of Reiman’s ripostes, only a philosopher could believe such a thing. It is surely more likely that social trust rests on natural needs for child-rearing, food-gathering, and self-defense from other human societies, rather than on some maxim of morality that real people too often admire from afar.

This abstraction from nature (albeit in the name of nature) leads Reiman to overemphasize liberty. This may be seen in his description of the first of his five “principles of natural justice”: “compatible liberty” (157). Compatible liberty combines noninterference—each allows in others the same degree of liberty he wants for himself—with self-defense against violations of noninterference. One might suppose this prohibits abortion, inasmuch as adults, having once been born themselves, cannot consistently deny that right to others. But, having emphasized the possession of a consciously-held sovereign interest as the foundation of morality, Reiman argues tat only those who have a “caring awareness” of their own lives enjoy the right to life” (165). “The loss of the fetus’s life is not and cannot be the loss of something that matters to the fetus” (166); it has arrived at no sovereign interest and is therefore not a person. Consistent with this, Reiman admits that infants too have no “natural moral right to life” (169), although in their case he generously hastens to think of some social reasons not to allow them to be killed. To claim that a human life is valuable because an individual embodies certain valuable traits, Reiman argues, will not do. We then would have to increase the number of human lives ad infinitum, banning not only abortion but contraception and sexual abstinence. We also could replace an individual with one of equal value, leaving individuals with no protection. Neither of these contradictory arguments withstands a moment’s examination, as it is obvious that the mass proliferation of human beings would result in deaths sooner or later, and there is no precise way to establish that any one human being is of equal value to another. Reiman also advocates euthanasia for “the irretrievably comatose” (169), a point recalling the fact that fetuses and infants are not irretrievably comatose and therefore might well not be treated like those who are.

Reiman’s treatment of the other four principles of natural justice are more realistic. “Private ownership of the body is the nerve of liberalism” (171); hence liberals’ rejection of sumptuary laws, corporal punishment, and invasions of privacy. Of external things, possessions supporting the needs of the body, as long as those things do not injure others’ bodies, are justly protected. The principle of trustworthiness is essential to enabling everyone to pursue his sovereign interest, although it is permissible to lie to an evildoer in order to prevent him from violating the sovereign interests of the innocent. The principle of intergenerational solicitude, obligating us to care for the young and the old, rests on our debt to those who cared for us in childhood and will care for us in old age. Finally, and most impressively, Reiman describes the principle of just punishment, which is sternly retributivist. It combines the lex talionis with deterrence. No sentimental humanitarian, Reiman calls the lex talionis “the law enforcement arm of the Golden Rule” (195)—doing unto others as they have done unto you. Only retribution “can restore lasting relations of mutual respect” between the criminal and his victim by annulling “the criminal’s assertion of authority over”—his subjugation of—”his victim” (193-194).

Social justice poses difficulties that parallel those of natural justice. Society consists of a set of legal, political, and economic structures, “channels into which [the individual] must fit his normally rationally self-interested behavior” (214). These are forms of force, and therefore to be suspected of subjugation. Just social structures are those “it would be reasonable for all people to agree to in the natural context” (213).

Social contractarianism assumes that human beings have the ability consciously to change society. This assumption comport with the modern opinion that “all of nature [is] a great machine to be made over in the service of human goals” (226). Cartesian method applies to society, and reform begins not with thought about existing institution but with thought that escapes these institutions: exposing society-as-second-nature as conventional and changeable, then thinking about how natural justice can best be brought into a social context.

Natural justice cannot be ‘socialized’ intact. Any social contract legislates for a particular society, not all mankind. The restriction imposed by a social contract will go beyond those of natural justice, but, to be just, restrictions must compensate citizens with benefits not available in the state of nature. The negative liberty of the natural condition will be supplemented by the positive liberties of the social condition.

Reiman concentrates on economic structures, evidently regarding the best legal and political structure to be, in most instances, “constitutionally limited majoritarianism” (236) of one sort or another. He finds the currently available economic structures much less satisfactory and discusses them at some length. Neither contemporary capitalism nor contemporary socialism comes sufficiently close to natural justice and avoids subjugation. His “labor theory of moral value” states that “economic distributions should first be considered neither as distributions of goods or money but as distributions of the labor that has gone into producing those goods, to which money then gives the bearer title” (244). The moral dimension here is that labor is “life itself spent” (246), and therefore a major element of each person’s sovereign interest. Capitalism offers freedom of commodity exchange but does not in practice liberate individuals from subjugating social relations. Neither, in practice, has state socialism. Capitalism is “unprecedentedly liberating” in the struggle against nature, as Marx himself admits (257). State socialism has been much less impressive, fouling the environment more while producing fewer goods and poorer services. Socialism would be superior to capitalism “if and when people are actually capable of controlling their political agencies so effectively that public control of property does not become a means of worse oppression than private control” 257). Reiman accordingly endorses a more ‘participatory’ form of democracy than now exists anywhere. This again comports with his Enlightenment egalitarianism.

Reiman weakens his argument on economics by accepting Marx’s absurd theory of ‘surplus value’ (248-249), which claims, in effect, that capitalists do not labor and which ignores the experience embodied in business structures and practices followed by capitalists. Precisely these structures enable capitalism to work better than state socialism. To his credit, Reiman leaves it open as to whether a less coercive economic system could exist.

All existing forms fall short of social justice, which Reiman conceives as a modified form of John Rawls’s “difference principle.” The difference principle holds that any social inequalities are justified only insofar as they benefit the least advantaged. “An inequality is only justified if the shares of the worst off cannot be improved by increasing it” (262). The difference principle wins consent via Rawls’s famous thought-experiment, “the veil of ignorance,” which asks us to imagine ourselves into an “original condition” in which we do not know what our own convictions, abilities, and class will be within civil society; without knowing these things, Rawls claims, we will prudently guarantee our own survival by positing the difference principle as the sine qua non for entering society. Rawls’s argument falls victim to the obvious objection that it assumes each would-be contractor to be rather a mouse, timidly protecting himself against the worst while eschewing the possibility of winning the stake and becoming top dog in a hierarchic structure. The late Allan Bloom laughed that Rawls had formulated a first philosophy for the Last Man.

Reiman sees the point and avoids it by ruling out gambling in the original condition, on the grounds that gambling “undermines the capacity of the contract to yield principles that exclude subjugation,” which is itself excluded by reason (272). Adding the prohibition against gambling to his labor theory of moral value, Reiman redeems Rawls’s theory from its fuzzy egalitarianism. The labor theory of moral value helps to accomplish this end by recognizing that not all labor is created equal: Some people are more talented, more productive, than others, and they are entitled to greater rewards, so long as the rewards they earn also result in a net advantage to their inferiors. That is, a productive individual may require from the les productive a greater amount of labor in exchange for more goods. This will satisfy the less productive person, not subjugate him, if he receives more goods from the productive individual than he did before. As economists and politicians say, it is a ‘win-win’ situation. It differs from the free market exchanges of capitalism in that it permits only the smallest incentive (in return for labor) to the more productive that produces a benefit (return in goods) for the less productive. The revised difference principle is “neutral between capitalism, socialism, and communism”; whichever is just at a given time and place will depend upon the degree to which a society has triumphed over scarcity. Politically, the issue turns on the degree to which a society has triumphed over subjugating hierarchies, the degree to which each citizen’s share in sovereignty (of which wealth is one element) has been maximized.

Despite these improvements, it is hard not to hear the echo of Allan Bloom’s mot. “I am convinced that eventually the worldview of natural science will be accepted as a complete ontology,” that is, “a fully reductive materialism” will prevail (309). As for a major competing “worldview,” Reiman gives it what he takes to be its due: The Jews are indeed a ‘chosen’ people—’chosen’ by nature, “selected because the survival value of mutual trust is greater even than the possession of political power” (311). Naturalism can sustain reverence if we identify “the sacred” with the omnipresent and omnipotent “natural universe itself” (312) (as per Spinoza). But if materialism is true, and trust is the true survivalism, does this not tend to collapse the distinction between might an right by making right merely a more cunning form of might? And if we are to believe the natural universe sacred, does this not mean that, given the Second Law of Thermodynamics, God is dying? Nietzsche’s insistence that God is dead will then by followed by Malraux’s insistence that man is dead, or dying. Both moral judge and moral jury are out, or on the way out, a process surely hastened by a political egalitarianism that mimics the entropy of the cosmos even as it claims to be mastering nature—a nature it calls “sacred.” Spinoza is more consistent; he does not traffic in reverence or respect.

Ontology aside, Professor Reiman has written with considerable intelligence and care, refurbishing social contract theory at a time when rationality, particularly the concept of reasoned assent, is pilloried by posturing opportunists in and out of academia. It is refreshing to hear some kind words for Descartes, Hobbes, and some of the other great founders of modern moral philosophy, men far superior to their supposed critics (and unwitting successors) of today. If there are some problems with the project the first moderns founded, the necessary ameliorations may need to come from sources other than themselves, and much less from so-called post-moderns. Reiman has performed the important service of presenting modern moral philosophy in a most sophisticated manner, integrating moral ‘realism’ and ‘idealism’ more successfully than Rawls.

 

Leon Craig: The War Lover: A Study of Plato’s Republic. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994.

Remarks delivered at a roundtable discussion of The War Lover at the American Political Science Association annual meeting, San Francisco, California, August 29, 1996. Sponsored by the Society for Greek Political Thought and chaired by Professor Mickey Craig of Hillsdale College, discussants included Michael Poliakoff of Bloomsburg University, Christopher Nadon of Trinity College, Mark Blitz of Adelphi University, and Leon Craig of the University of Alberta.

 

This is a leonine book. It is leonine in three ways. It is Leon’s: Who else could have given it to us? And it is both spirited and Straussian.

The most widely distributed commentary on Plato’s Republic is Allan Bloom’s. Bloom’s ruling theme is eros. How can the man of eros, on second sailing, negotiate his ship ‘amidst these storms,’ the storms fomented by spirited or thumotic men—demagogues, tyrants? Bloom’s heuristic challenge, within the academic regimes of his day, was to persuade the mildly thumotic souls of Plato’s professional guardians—some might say custodians—to fall in love again, to look anew with fresh and desiring eyes, to stop defending old assumptions and to open themselves to a Plato who writes very differently than his modern guardians suppose.

Craig’s ruling theme is thumos itself. His challenge is to show how thumos might be an avenue in the soul toward philosophy, not a Berlin Wall against it. If a thumotic man could be a philosopher, what then? Nietzsche? Would not such a man re-try Socrates, and find him guilty of corrupting that noble youth, Plato? Why approach the love of wisdom via the love of war? How?

Professor Craig replies as follows: If “Socrates” means “Sure Strength,” and he is surrounded by men with such names as “Dauntless,” “War-Lord,” and “Bold Fighter,” perhaps the philosopher exhibits thumos as much as eros, and maybe Plato knows that, answering Nietzsche two millennia in advance. Plato, Professor Craig says, is not ‘Platonic’ in the conventional sense; his characters, even if they are ‘types,’ are not abstractions, lifeless forms, but “full-blooded, multi-colored, three-dimensional” (xxviii). And what do real men do when they get together, if not drink, talk, and fight?

One thing they do, or try to do, is rule. They try to rule each other; they try to rule themselves. “He who could be king over himself must learn to think before he laughs,” Professor Craig reminds us (340, n. 25). This, in response to old Kephalos’ complaints about the (for him, exhausting) war of the soul, the psychomachia, whose source may be seen in Socrates’ classification of the “parts” of the soul: logos, thumos, eros. In ruling himself—pace, I. F. Stone—Socrates is neither aristocrat nor democrat but so-crat. That is, he is ruled by wisdom, by sophia, in ruling himself. Professor Craig translates autarches as “self-sufficient.” More literally it means self-ruling. The rule of wisdom is Socrates’ version of the slogan, ‘The personal is the political.’ For Socrates, to be a so-crat is to be an auto-crat. The lack of self-rule or self-sufficiency results in the need for political life among others. If all men were philosophers, there would be no need of external government. Relax, politicians: That will never happen.

Logos, thumos, and eros differ, but they compose a whole, and share a common characteristic, namely, desire—or, if you prefer, ‘Eros’ with a capital ‘E.’ Logos is wisdom-loving, eros (small ‘e’) gain-loving. Professor Craig argues that thumos desires not one but at least two things: honor and victory.

The timocrat or honor-loving man will degenerate, as his virtue need only seem to be splendid in order to be honored. He will ask too anxiously, ‘What will people think?’ and is therefore likely to be corrupted by his mother. (Recall Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Christian re-write of the Republic, Crime and Punishment.)

It is not the thumotic man of philotimia but the thumotic man of philonikia, the man who would win the great contest “that concerns becoming good or bad,” the man who is not tempted by honor, money, ruling office or poetry (608b, reference in Craig, 39-41), who can withstand the blandishments of mom and demos, follow his own course no matter what others may think, withstand public ridicule and scorn. (Marx quoted Dante on that point. I wish he had more rigorously followed it.)

As seen in the Phaedrus, the soul has two horses, two spirited animals within it. Socrates says to the young soul animated by philonikia, put your money on the right horse in the race, the torch-race on horseback. Philosophers are breeders, trainers, and handicappers all at the same time; they know the odds, because they have inside knowledge on the human soul.

Question: Why should this man, this victory-loving man, become a philosopher? Why would he not prefer to become someone like Aristotle’s great-souled man, who demands great honors out of justice to himself, but has no guarantee of receiving them, and may despise the givers?

The answer is complicated by the knowledge that the nikophile has more than one love. He loves victory more than honor, but he does love honor, as well as music, listening, ruling, gymnastic, and hunting. Love too is complex: one kind of love is neediness; another is partiality (as in ‘I like the guy’); yet another is passionate and selfish; another is selfless and friendly. There are some 31 varieties of philia or selfless/friendly love, alone. These include philo-sophia and philo-pseude, the love of lies—the latter being the sort of love a philosopher indulges when he’s getting in touch with his feminine side, as in ‘If truth is a woman, what then?’

Speaking (again) of Nietzsche, Professor Craig leoninely (although in this case perhaps not Straussianly) suggests that Plato anticipates the claim that philosophers want not so much to know the world as to create it, and then rule their creation. Or, as thumotic souls would say when I was a boy, ‘Wanna make something out of it?’ Yes, but Professor Craig: out of nothing? For Hamlet, who would quarrel at a straw, if honor’s at the stake. Surely not in Plato, however? This points also suggests a certain divergence from Strauss with respect to the relationship of thumos to eros (cf. The City and Man, pp. 110-112).

According to Professor Craig’s account, the man of philonikia most assuredly does not become a man of philo-sophia ‘out of nothing.’ Rather, he comes to philosophy by “coming to see the pursuit of wisdom as the greatest challenge of all, one calling for the finest virtues and greatest exertions” (79). As Edward King writes, “My mind to me a kingdom is,” the realm of philosophic autarchy. Milton’s thumotic Satan says, Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven. Socrates rejoins, Better to rule oneself and do it well, than to give way to the pretense of rule over the many.

In the Republic, Plato links thumos and logos in the word thumoeides—suggesting to Strauss that the ‘theory of ideas’ is a rhetorical substitute for theo-logy or god-talk. Speaking of gods: the ring of Gyges story is moral and theological, inasmuch as an entirely invisible person is a god, known only through his voice and his works, insofar as he chooses to manifest either voice or works as his own. Or perhaps an entirely invisible person is also a writer, known only through the voice that comes through his works. Why should such power not lead to tyranny? In a writer, there is no problem, because he can enforce his ‘works only by persuading others that he speaks for a god. But what about those men whose works are more than merely verbal, men who might enforce their works, philosopher-kings?

Why should power not corrupt them, not lead them to tyranny? Glaucon may wish that it would. That it need not, and that the philosophic life is more attractive than tyranny, may be seen in Socrates. Who is Socrates? What is a philosopher, this self-governing, rule-of-wisdom man?

He is, for one thing, a man who sees that the “natural punishment” for a crime is a “disorderly and diminished” soul (182). A disorderly and diminished soul would be either excessively tough or masculine—a warrior without music—or excessively soft or feminine—a lady without gymnastic. Even if truth is not a woman, philosophy is. She must be toughened if she is to govern herself. Shifting to his polemical or war-loving mode, Professor Craig teaches that philosophy is a guy thing. Lady Philosophy is for “real men and mannish women,” not for “women and effeminate men” (232). He soon relents, saying, “the finest psychic regime is beyond either simple masculinity or femininity” (235). The polemical or ‘office of corrections’ point here is that philosophy as a way of life requires not only intellectual strength but spiritual strength—”megalothumos.” In the passage Professor Craig cites, Socrates actually says “gentle and megalothumos” (375c). Professor Craig knows this, and wants only his incautious readers, his excessively thumotic readers, not to know it. Thus he exhibits feminine wiles even as he seems to thump the drum of the wild man.

Speaking of knowledge, if knowledge, as Professor Craig says, is “the root of the political problem” for Plato (260), then self-knowledge must be the root of the problem of autarchy. What is this self, this soul? It exists in sharp contrast to the body; that much is clear. It governs the body, and the reasoning part of the soul governs those parts of the soul that might incline to serve the body. In so doing, logos makes allegiance with the better part of thumos, which then plays the role of good cop, justly governing both the bad-cop side of thumos and the cop-hating and misologistic desires. In the real world outside the city in speech, the world in which soul must contend with bodies, ‘philosopher-king’ means the genuinely self-governing man or woman.

As for the inner life of the philosopher—what he thinks when philosophizing—this leads to Professor Craig’s discussion of such complex Platonic doctrines as the Cave, the Sun, and the Divided Line. Not being a philosopher, and no longer (if ever) the sort of youth Professor Craig wants to address, but only a poor, broken-down, middle-aged man easily exhausted by erotic and thumotic encounters alike, I shall leave discussion of Professor Craig’s treatment of these important issues to my more virile and virtuous colleagues.