Will Morrisey Reviews

Book reviews and articles on political philosophy and literature.

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

    Archives

    Categories

    Meta

    Archives for December 2025

    Collecting the War Debt

    by

    Jill Eicher: Mellon vs. Churchill: The Untold Story of Treasury Titans at War. New York: Penguin Books, 2025.

    This review was first published in Civitas Outlook, May 19, 2025.

     

    The story Jill Eicher expertly tells is less “untold” than forgotten, as she herself demonstrates. The controversy over repayment of America’s wartime loans to the United Kingdom and the linkage of those loans to German reparations for the catastrophic damage the Kaiser’s troops inflicted during the First World War spurred newspaper headlines in both countries, from the immediate aftermath of the war until the Great Depression and Adolf Hitler combined to change the subject. Esteem for Churchill during and after the Second World War, along with the Anglo-American ‘Special Relationship’ during the old War, ensured that the dead past stayed dead. By now, the fact that Life magazine’s “Man of the Century” was for a while perhaps the most detested Englishman among Americans will come as a bit of a surprise.

    Wartime loans by the United States to the U.K. began in April 1917, after President Wilson had requested a declaration of war against Germany. Until that time, America had maintained neutrality, hoping to sell merchandise to both sides. But since the powerful British navy blockaded German ports and the German navy could not reciprocate in kind, German strategists adopted a policy of “unrestricted” submarine warfare—not blockading but sinking American merchant ships headed for the British Isles. Although this proved a serious miscalculation—Germans didn’t expect America to be able to do anything effective soon enough to save their trading partners—it very nearly won the war. While the rival armies were stalemated in France, cutting the supplies of food and munitions from the U.S. to the Allies would have won the war for the Central Powers. However, since the Barbary Wars of the early 1800s, the American commercial republic had regarded interruption of its shipping on the high seas—the “great highway of the nations,” as Jefferson called it—a just casus belli.

    With these loans, America became “a creditor nation for the first time in its history.” Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s Andrew Mellon knew all about being a creditor, having been brought into the banking business by his father at the age of nineteen. He “believed in the guiding principles [Alexander] Hamilton established as the financial policy of the American government—balanced budgets and disciplined debt reduction.” But for the most part he didn’t involve himself in politics before or during the war, confining himself to deploring the antitrust legislation advanced by Progressives in both major political parties. His 1921 appointment as Treasury Secretary by President Harding was his first venture in government.

    By the 1920s, in contrast, Churchill was of course a prominent figure in British politics, like his father before him. But by the time American declared war and rescued British finances, he was on the outs, having been sacked as First Lord of the Admiralty after his plan to attack the Central Powers through the Dardanelles Straits ended in catastrophe.

    American businessman, British aristocrat. Two commercial republics, but one democratic, with an influential oligarchic class, the other only lately democratic (the last of the Reform Acts had only been made law a generation before) and with an influential aristocratic class to go along with its oligarchs. In many ways, the intensely private Mellon and the intensely public Churchill exemplified their countries, once enemies and until then scarcely friends.

    Congress authorized the loans to the United Kingdom and the other allies, stipulating that the money would be repaid with interest. To fund $200 million in loans and the costly military effort, Treasury Secretary William McAdoo proposed a tax increase and what he called “Liberty Bonds,” purchased by American citizens. Mellon himself purchased $1 million of these, and his banks purchased another $60 million. By the end of the war, the Allies had bought $7 billion of war materials, mostly from the United States, all on credit provided by the American government, which ended the war with a $20 billion national debt, half of it caused by the loans. The policy worked, militarily; American troops, money, and materiel tipped the scales of the war. The price was economic and recession and inflation, postwar.

    Churchill foresaw the dilemma. In a 1919 article, “Will America Fail Us?” he argued that Americans should forgive their wartime Allies’ debt in whole or very substantially, on two grounds. First, the victorious countries were simply unable to repay, given the war’s devastation and the tariffs imposed in all countries, whose rulers hoped to protect the remnants of national industry. If angry workers turned to socialism, the ‘capitalist’ interest in repayment would ruin the commercial dimension, and perhaps the republican dimension, of commercial republicanism itself. Second, the debts were incurred “in the common cause of the war,” not (as in the case of an ordinary bank loan) in the hopes of turning a profit in business. Churchill proposed a campaign to change public opinion on the basis of an appeal to Americans’ sense of fairness. he continued to insist on this policy during his years as Chancellor of the Exchequer, beginning with his appointment in November 1924 by his future rival, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and ending, fortuitously for himself, a few months before the collapse of American stock prices in 1929.

    The Americans throughout the Harding and Coolidge administrations had their own moral argument, also an appeal to what Adam Smith called the moral sense. A debt is itself a moral obligation. In Coolidge’s laconic formulation, “They hired the money, didn’t they?” This resonated not only with Congress but with the American people, who had invested in good faith in the Liberty Bonds. Mellon and his assistant Treasury Secretary, Russell Leffingwell soon thought differently, although not daring to say so publicly. In Leffingwell’s words, “A good customer is better than an insolvent debtor.” Debt relief of some sort would be necessary to bring Europe back, in the interests of Americans as well as Europeans.

    A London editorial writer quoted Hegel: “Tragedy is the conflict not of right and wrong but of right and right.” (One pinches oneself to think that a century back, not only could an editorial writer quote Hegel but that he could assume that his readers knew who that was.). And so the tragicomic game of debt and reparation collection began, complete with taunts, as the English called Uncle Sam “Uncle Shylock” and the somewhat less literary Americans called John Bull “Sponger.”

    Practically speaking, the weakness of the American position was the public refusal, through two administrations, to admit that debt repayment depended in substantial measure on German reparations. Arguably, Mellon’s one serious gaffe during his tenure was his public pronouncement in 1926 that “all of our principal debtors are already receiving from Germany more than enough to pay their debts to the United States.” He knew this to be untrue, having told a closed-door session of the Senate Finance Committee, “those who insist on impossible terms are, in the final analysis, working for an entire repudiation of the debt.” And he had in fact quietly begun preparing for loan default at that time by running the budget surpluses needed to pay down the national debt owed to American citizens who had purchased Liberty Bonds. In the end, he also managed to collect most of the monies owed, even from the understandably recalcitrant French, on whose territory the Western Front had held at agonizing cost. Churchill didn’t do quite as well, but as one of his friends said, “Winston had too generous a heart to be a hard debt collector.”

    In its feeble attempt to pay at least some of the reparations, the Weimar Republic borrowed from American banks; in effect, American corporations were subsidizing the European Allies’ debt repayments to, well, Americans. The stock crash “revealed that the American payment system for reparations and war debts…amounted to little more than a house of cards,” although it had worked so long as the American economy roared along with the Twenties.

    The Depression saw the Hoover Administration, with Mellon still at his post, announce a moratorium on debt repayment. He retired from Treasury in February 1932, accepting an appointment as Ambassador to the United Kingdom in April. The new Roosevelt Administration tried to revive the debt collection policy, only to see Hitler cancel reparations payments, dismiss the terms of the Versailles Treaty, drop out of the League of Nations, and remilitarize Germany with malign intent. In their turn, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, and Italy defaulted on the remainder of the loans. FDR countered these events decisively—by charging Mellon with tax evasion. (“The jury found otherwise and exonerated him.”) When cornered, distract: FDR may not have known much about economics, but politics—yes.

    “By the time Andrew Mellon resigned as ambassador to Great Britain in March 1933, as was the custom upon the inauguration of a new president, Alexander Hamilton’s founding principles of American government finance…had been supplanted by habitual deficit financing.” As for Churchill, we know the rest of that story, too.

    The Ancient Polis

    by

    John Ma: Polis: A New History of the Ancient Greek City-State from the Early Iron Age to the End of Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024. 

     

    The ancient Greek polis or ‘city-state’ only seems familiar to us, having read the historians, philosophers, and playwrights who flourished within them (well, mostly in Athens, which didn’t always allow its philosophers to flourish). But readers of Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges’s La Cité Antique have glimpsed the alienness of the polis, how entirely unlike modern states, especially modern liberal states, it was. In our time, the open society continues to have its enemies, but in antiquity there were no open societies. Enemies were rival poleis, rival empires, and rival factions contending with one’s own regime no regime asserted liberty in our sense of the word, that is, personal liberty held against the state. No polis justified itself by securing, or at least claiming to secure, natural rights held by individual persons. Whatever regime a polis might have had, it was exclusive. The ancient regime also exemplified religion in the original sense of the word: the binding of the people to divinely inspired laws given to that polis. Religious liberty as we think of it was unknown, even if a few philosophers asserted freedom from religion. 

    In this magisterial study, Columbia University professor John Ma unfolds the history of the polis with particular attention to how its rulers adapted themselves to the pressures of war and factionalism. He defines a polis as a small territory (typically about 300 square miles), ruled by adult male citizens, with an overall population that included slaves, freeborn foreigners, women, and children, all excluded from share in that rule. Although the citizens owned property, their rights to their property were defined by their fellow citizens, or in a tyranny, by the one ruler. “The polis defines itself as commonwealth (koinon), a community (koinonia) of citizens, a constitution (politeia)”—that is, by “the terms that Aristotle explicitly deploys to describe the rise and the essence of the polis in his Politics.” Throughout, Ma inclines toward Aristotle’s understanding of Greek politics (albeit with some qualifications), emphasizing the prudential ways in which it was ruled, while acknowledging the religion-bound character of the polis somewhat in passing.

    But if “Aristotle witnessed” the emergence of the polis, why did it emerge? And why did it endure so long, if at least in attenuated form, from 350 BCE to 400 AD—into the Roman empire?

    Ma begins with the prehistory of the polis. He emphasizes that there was “no clear path of development,” no historically inevitable march, during this time; things might have turned out differently. And in any case, reliable information is hard to find, limited as scholars are to archeology and poetry.

    From 1400 to 1200 BCE, the Late Bronze Age, lands bordering the Aegean Sea featured “palace-entered polities” which controlled large territories and populations, essentially as estates. Rulers determined who would use the land, for what purposes, practicing what Ma delicately calls “the mobilization of labor” for fortifications, places, hydraulic works, and monuments to themselves and the gods. These were warrior polities, “monarchical, hierarchical, bureaucratic”—in many ways “the antithesis of the later form of the polis.” Departing from Aristotle, Ma denies that “the polis grows out of the primitive ‘tribal’ structures”; tribes actually came into being at the same time as the poleis did; these were “interlocking processes.” This could occur because smaller communities existed among the palatial estates as “clustervilles” that stood ready to rise up and expand, asserting self-rule, after the estates collapsed.

    It is only in the late eighth century BCE that the poems of Homer and Hesiod “provide sustained political statements about communities, values, and action.” By then, societies ruled by the aristoi or “best men” and by the basileis or kings (a title descended from the palatial and post-palatial power holders) become visible. These “lordly elements often found themselves in tension with “a strong, explicitly sense of community and public interests.” Rulers remained warlike; “glory and honor [were] obtained by killing and stripping opponents, or by obtaining plunder.” In peace, there was feasting, leisure, luxury, all carried out “in an unflinching theater of distinction.” The lords modeled their lives on the lives of the gods, justifying their rule as saviors of the people from enemies (including enemy gods) and therefore entitled to near-godlike status—ordering religious rituals and judging disputes. Ma warns against confusing these communities with feudalism, which exhibits a relatively stable hierarchy. Warlike competition and the “social reciprocity” of lavish feasts made them far more contested than the feudal states of Christendom. Moreover, the king had no serfs or peasants paying rent to him; he was a landowner ruling a household which included slaves. And he needed to pay heed to the activities of the councils, in which the community met, engaged in religious rituals of their own and upheld a “sense of the common good.” Kings competed with one another in war, parleyed in feasts, but also needed to exhibit “the sense of obligation toward the community.” “Collective opinion” mattered, although the councils themselves met only at the behest of the king. “The world of the Homeric epics is about the city: the community finds its expression in a nucleated built environment, defined by walls, sharing public spaces”—a human artifact that is the setting for norms, obligations, and community power that enforces these things, and which symbolizes them. “This was not yet the polis,” but the materials for the polis are visible.

    To study the polis, one must first turn to the middle of the eight century BCE, when “the first documentary record” of the use of the word appears in the community of Drēros. “The Drerian officials hold power on terms decided by the community, according to permanent, public, known, and stated rules” which have religious sanction; no king convenes the assembly. Among those things ordained by assemblies are tribes; that is, tribes are political institutions, governmental forms, a means of organizing the population. “The working of state institutions probably required the distribution of the population into such groups to ensure an openly fair sharing of power.” Other groups—dining groups (for example, the famous Spartan messes), drinking groups, phratrai, or “brotherhoods,” genē —now appear, and even militaries are reorganized, with ordinary soldiers sharing the spoils of war along with the heroes. War is now understood as rightly waged for the benefit of the community, the defense of that community against foreign powers in conflicts over territorial borders along with political dominance or freedom. Politicians therefore begin to speak of union as clearly as they do today, searching for commonalities uniting town and countryside, town dwellers with farmers. The polis was not only a real place but an “imagined community.”

    The laws now “strive for universalizing force and comprehensiveness, with far-reaching authority within society.” In Ma’s view, this is no longer only religious but rational law, with categories of crime set down in a logical way, including crimes against the polis itself, and with considerations of “how far the law should stay unchanged, how law itself can be changed” in an orderly way. The ‘rule of law,’ as distinguished from the rule of persons, gives rise to a distinction between the law and rulers’ decrees, with the greater authority going to the laws. Laws also bolster attempts at political administration, including the administration of finances. Collection and expenditure of revenues become orderly, too; “the polis was hence a form of political economy.”

    “The most important and durable aspect of the consolidation of poleis and their interaction is the pattern of mutual, self-aware recognition [of other poleis] as peers.” Poleis competed with one another in games in which athletes represented their communities. They erected shrines and held festivals attended by foreigners, as seen in Pindar’s poetry.

    In the following centuries, poleis increasingly prospered, offering the stability that led to increases of population and of settlements. They also inclined toward egalitarianism, if not yet toward democratic regimes, having in many instances replaced the arbitrary rule of “the best men.” True, “the demos, the commons, are never simply the whole community,” but neither are they the elites. The aristoi of course challenged, or attempt to adapt to, these egalitarian trends, often by replacing “aristocracy of birth” with “various forms of competition” intended to establish superiority on the ground of innate strengths of body and (especially) of soul. This ensured the continuation of warlikeness and displays of wealth. But elite ‘pushback’ seldom stayed “the appearance of public institutions and rules for power-sharing, the clear location of legitimacy of power in communal interests and universally applicable rules, communicated to the whole community which they concern”—a communication, it might be added, made feasible by the small size of the poleis. While “in the story of the polis the rich will always be with us, the crucial question, however, is that of the place, and the nature, of these wealth and power elites, once the communities take the developmental path of strong integration that characterizes the polis.”

    Tensions between the many who were poor and the few who were rich (with ambitious would-be ‘ones’ waiting in the shadows, hoping to seize upon disorder and exalt themselves above both) led to conflicts over regimes. As described by Aristotle, regimes consist of rulers, ruling institutions or offices fashioned for their purposes, a way of life, and a purpose or set of purposes for the polis. “One solution to the travails of integration was to consolidate strongly a small group of stakeholders chosen on grounds of birth and especially wealth, and to exclude the rest of the population of the territory” from rule—an oligarchic regime, as in Sparta and Crete. In these poleis, “the restricted group” of rulers must “present itself as the whole community,” often by making a “claim to divine or heroic descent.” “The other, diametrically opposite path was to structure the polis through wide inclusiveness, by the integration of a large segment of the adult male population as citizens, in strict distinction to noncitizens, namely foreigners and especially the enslaved”—a democratic regime, as in Athens. It, too, claimed divine sanction, as when the founder of democracy in Athens, Solon, declaimed: “Our polis will never perish by the destiny of Zeus or the will of the happy immortal gods—for such is the great-hearted guardian, might-fathered daughter,” Athena, “who holds her hands over us.” Thanks to her, eunomiē, literally good-lawness, “makes all things orderly and adjusted, and often lays fetters upon the unrighteous.”

    Enter the “classical” polis, seen from 480 to 180 BCE. It did not begin auspiciously. What Ma calls the “Hundred Years’ War” between Athens and Sparta does indeed resemble Europe’s Hundred Years’ War between the Plantagenet and Valois dynasties, both conflicts drawing neighboring states into the fighting as allies. With the advantages of territorial and population size, Athens began as the hegemon, the lasting traces of which may be seen in “the astonishing ensemble of marble buildings on the Akropolis”—symbols of religio-political authority. In effect, the Athenians had imitated the Persian empire the Greeks had united to defeat.

    Sparta eventually won the war, thanks to financial aid from that empire, enjoying hegemony for the next thirty years only to collapse in its turn, having overstretched. Both Athens and Sparta provoked resistance from smaller poleis, forming coalitions against their oppressors, as “the mounting costs of raw power politics doomed imperial aspirations.”

    These vicissitudes did not break the poleis, however; they reinforced it as a state form. Within that form, Athens famously continued to exemplify democracy, Sparta oligarchy, with various mixtures of those regimes seen elsewhere. In Athens, democracy without any substantial bureaucracy made for “immediate responsive[ness] to popular decisions,” decisions demagogues attempted to sway. As seen in Socrates’ trial, these decisions included judging, not only lawmaking and policy. “The assumptions between democratic practice and its institutional logic were well understood by critics of democracy: Plato attacks the very epistemological basis of mass decision as a principle in his fictionalized portrayals of Socrates.” Not only philosophers but the wealthy felt the pinch, as the latter bore heavy financial burdens.

    Sparta saw oligarchy, “the rule of the few, the better, the rich.” Whereas corruption of the people in Athens took the forms of rhetoric/demagoguery and sophistry from itinerant teachers, the Spartan rulers corrupted the people the old-fashioned way: with money and patronage. Like most oligarchs, the Spartan politeuma or ruling body presented itself as aristocratic/virtuous, claiming to bring “order balance, self-control, and even justice” to the polis. “The few wielded power on grounds of merit,” the few claimed, inasmuch as the rich were too rich to be corrupted or greedy and too smart to make bad decisions. By contrast, “democracy could be portrayed as irrationality and madness.” Oligarchs struggled and often factionalized over the question of whether to require equality among themselves or to establish a hierarchy of merit.

    Whatever regime it established, the polis itself remained and strengthened as attempt at achieving hegemony by one polis or another floundered. In a sense, the polis became the new ‘hegemon,’ universalizing itself throughout Greece in what Ma calls “the great convergence.” “The poleis were all militarized (aligning militiamen, elite troops, and even their own fleets), heavily fortified, and endowed with a strong sense of identity, interests, and continuity.” They were “remarkably successful at playing the long game and achieving freedom”—that is, autarkia or self-rule—in the Hellenistic period. To resist the power of the larger poleis, the smaller ones formed leagues, “uniting autonomous cities within common decision-making processes and institutional frameworks to produce highly effective shared goods on the social, economic, and political fronts.” Disputes between poleis could also be arbitrated by third parties, in “a network of peer-polity interaction.” The Macedonian conquests (350-280 BCE) removed the possibility of hegemony from individual poleis, but the poleis adapted to the foreign hegemon, retaining “a strong sense of identity, interests, and continuity,” backed by sufficient military force to make “the constant exercise of force” against them unsustainable. Moreover, Macedon wasn’t the only empire in the Mediterranean world, a the Ptolemies of Egypt, the Seleukids of Syria, and others competed for influence, enabling the poleis to play them off against each other.

    As poleis increased in number, so did regimes of ‘the many’—some of them democracies, others ‘mixed regimes,’ as Aristotle calls them. Ma attributes this to the increasingly peaceful atmosphere of the great convergence, an atmophere in which the military prowess of oligarchs and monarchs could not thrive because it became less eneessary. “Negotiations and compromise” among and within poleis became the norm, a norm better suited to popular self-government. Politics itself became less sharp-edged, as disputes over regimes faded or, to put it in Ma’s more academic prose, “as a consequence of decoupling of claims to excellence from political domination, association and groups vied for distinctiveness without centrifugality.” Civic life became more political in Aristotle’s sense of the term: reciprocal, a matter of ruling and being ruled in turn. Elites didn’t disappear; they adapted to popular rule by serving the public good as defined by ‘the public’—serving in office and loaning money to the polis during their terms of service, exhibiting evidence of good character in their public dealings, and submitting to public scrutiny of their actions while in office.

    But then a new and more formidable empire forced its way into the Aegean. By the middle of the second century BCE, the Romans had established their empire in the region. Ma asks, “What did Roman control change in the polis?” And “to what extent did polis culture shape the forms taken by the Roman conquest, and subsequently, by the Roman empire?” The answers turn out to be quite interesting because neither conquest nor empire were simple, straightforward things.

    With the Hellenistic period’s Macedonian hegemon broken and the regional Aetolian and Achaian leagues gone, “the poleis recognized that the axis of the world had tilted.” Embassies to Rome were dispatched. Some Greek politicians dragged their feet while others hastened to cozy up to the apparent masters of the new world order. For its part, the Roman Senate did not press matters too closely. Rome had defeated the major Aegean powers but hadn’t really attempted to conquer Greece. As a result, “local ‘liberty” continued under a haze of “negotiation, litigation, boundary-pushing, and consultation.” Ma calls this the “Indian Summer” of the polis as “civic freedom was paradoxically an integral part of Roman provincialization.” It might be added that this was nothing new in ancient imperial practice. Cyrus the Great didn’t mind sending the Israelites back to Jerusalem, didn’t mind if they ruled themselves with their own laws, so long as they paid him tribute while doing so. Ancient empires were impressive in size but not so impressive in their capacity to centralize full political authority over their subjects. Their subjects often were not entirely subjected.

    “It is clear that Roman provincialization in Greece, Macedonia, and Asia Minor coexisted with the general freedom of the island poleis of the Aegean.” This included the perpetuation of more or less democratic regimes there, no longer pressured by “the big regional leagues,” which of course had been centered much closer than Rome. Nor did the prestige of the gentlemen decline, as they continued to support the democracies monetarily. Democrats needed oligarchs and oligarchs needed democrats: politics, ruling and being ruled, continued. And some Romans were impressed; “this world offered a model for Cicero.” “It is worth remembering that the debates of the second century BCE polis, rather than simply ‘Hellenistic philosophy,’ influenced Roman political thought.”

    “Local freedom meant litigating out a situational space of freedom, a bundle of organized privileges within the flow of Roman power,” a matter of “constant hard work” for the rulers of the poleis. Increasingly, Greek politicians “equated freedom with friendship of Rome.” This is what Polybius had feared: a gradual, ‘creeping’ sort of imperialism, a movement from Roman hegemony to Roman empire over Greece. When Athens finally rebelled against Rome in 86 BCE, it was too late. It was Cicero himself who asserted Roman oversight of Athenian finances while proclaiming Athenian freedom: “Never mind—at least they think they have autonomia.“

    In Cicero’s time, Rome itself saw regime change, from the republic to monarchy. “Under Caesar and preponderantly under Augustus, colonies of Roman veterans were installed in the Peloponnese, the norther Aegean, and in Asia Minor.” That is, monarchs, having come to power by military means, prudently saw to it that the soldiers who had boosted them into rule were dispersed and rewarded, well away from the capital city, enhancing Roman influence in the imperial territories. Nonetheless, once again the poleis proved resilient, as their Roman overseers began to adopt the Greek language and “Greek civic ideologies and images.” if the polis requires self-rule to be a polis, self-rule did persist.

    But it persisted in increasingly attenuated form. “The statues of Roman emperors joined the statues of the gods in temples,” their images appeared on Greek coins, and the “ruler cult” flourished, expressing “a communal understanding of dependency before Roman power” and upon the peace it secured. Indeed, “the emperor decided directly on the very existence of a polis as a corporate, recognized entity with institutions.” The emperor appointed provincial governors empowered to issue laws and policies and enjoying judicial authority as well. Greek cities participated in the punishments meted out by the courts, guarding prisoners and providing “the facilities for executions in the arena as gladiators or by wild beasts.” The emperor also imposed taxes, with the responsibility for their collection imposed upon the poleis. “The cities thus acted as instruments in their own exploitation.” With these progressive tightenings of rule, “we are not quite seeing bureaucracy at work, but a routine regular attention from the center, generating the concrete manifestations of the state.”

    The empire still functioned by the process of city petitioning and Roman response to the petitions, so a significant taste of political rule remained. “Even in the Roman empire, the polis never quite forgot its origins as a state, a self-ruling community. On the Roman side, petition and response “allowed the empire to show itself repeatedly, consistently, as a field of rationality, legal-mindedness, and responsiveness,” as “a political rather than an administrative entity.” “Viewed coldly, the Roman empire appears as the end of the line for civic autonomy,” but the Greeks, throughout their history, have seldom viewed things coldly. And, as Ma insists, for the Romans, the poleis‘s “internal political and social order had to be preserved, in ways centered on the continuity of public goods” in order not to kill the golden-egg-laying geese. Thus, “for all the modifications, simplifications, and developments brought about by Roman power, the political life of the Greek city-state remains recognizable from earlier times.”

    Still another regime change took place with conversion of Constantine to Christianity in the third century AD. Gradually, Church bishops replaced not only the existing priests, destroying or repurposing the temples, but also “took over some of the roles of the civic elites”—representing a polis before the emperor, for example. More importantly, the division between the regime of the emperor and the regime of the church wiped out the religio-political character of the polis, as Fustel de Coulanges saw and as Machiavelli deplored. Between Empire and Church, “the status of citizen (politēs) disappears, replaced by a concept of mere inhabitant.” By the sixth century, “the ancient city faded out of recognition.”

    Ma mistakenly takes Aristotle to be an institutionalist, simply, overlooking one of the elements of his idea of the politeia or regime, the Bios ti or way of life. But Ma does not himself ignore that element, pointing to the festivals, associations, and “public performances” in the poleis, as well to the continued importance of public opinion. The public opinion that directed the way of life of the polis was in turn shaped by religion. “The polis was what the polis did, and what the polis did was to worship and honor the gods, through ritual events and material manifestations.” It is true that it is Fustel, not Aristotle, who emphasizes this feature of the polis, but Aristotle’s account is also a defense of philosophy, an activity not always in accord with political religion. The prophetic religion, Christianity, which had suffered persecution along with philosophy so long as the ancient civic religion prevailed, dealt with that religion by pushing it aside. Yet insofar as it then took on civic responsibilities, too, the prophetic religion in turn opened itself to philosophic scrutiny and political tensions. Difficulties persisted.

    Looking back at the polis, Ma admits, as Marxists insist, that the polis had ‘contradictions’ within it, notably the contradiction between the few who were rich and the many who were poor. But he also observes that these contradictions register the diversity of the polis; such tensions occur in an organization of any substantial size. “The polis, as a koinon or participatory community of citizens, is different in nature from predatory extractive states” inasmuch as “revenue-raising activities are directly purposed toward the solidaristic provision of public goods…through investment or redistribution.” It is indeed a ‘commonwealth.’ It typically offered some protection for rich and poor alike. As Benjamin Constant remarked, it was not a liberal state in the modern sense, protecting the rights of individuals against the state. As a ‘closed’ society, it did not welcome foreign immigrants. An of course it rested upon slavery, which enabled citizens the leisure to engage in politics in the first place. But one must ask, what ancient society was not exclusive (except for the empires, which ‘included foreigners by conquering them) and slave-owning? The polis achieved political liberty for many of its inhabitants, which is more than can be said for any type of community previous to it, or of many that followed it.

     

    Does Privilege Ruin Liberty?

    by

    Aurel Kolnai: Privilege and Liberty and Other Essays. Lanham: Lexington Books, 1999.

     

    Modern political thought inclines to associate equality closely with liberty. That assumption needs scrutiny, not necessarily with a view to denying it but with a view to making it more precise, more accurate. Kolnai undertakes this critical task.

    Born in 1900, the Hungarian Jew and Catholic convert Aurel Kolnai witnessed the technologically brilliant, politically catastrophic first three-quarters of the twentieth century. In his excellent introduction to this collection, Daniel J. Mahoney calls him “one of the greatest thinkers of the century to place the restoration of common-sense evaluation and philosophical realism at the very center of his philosophical and political itinerary”—a distinction that makes Kolnai a very rare specimen indeed. He was especially critical of the fashionable ideologies of Existentialism and Marxism, which twisted political life in malignant directions throughout the period, each holding out the utopian prospect of human perfection without God. As Mahoney writes, “Kolnai’s deepest, most original contribution to the understanding of the utopian mind is his recognition of the ‘utterly fundamental contradiction’ at the heart of the ideological enterprise,” which promises “a new world without human alienation and divisions of any kind” while “the attainment of such a new reality is impossible without a radically unprecedented ‘revolutionary’ schism between the old humanity and the new—a schism that cannot ever be surmounted.” Instead of realizing perfection, regimes animated by utopian ideologies crush liberty, murder innocent people, and achieve social equality under conditions of political tyranny because their rulers cannot understand, or stand, that they are not forming new human beings out of formless clay.

    In his substantial 1949 essay, “Privilege and Liberty,” Kolnai takes up the question of aristocracy and democracy addressed variously by Montesquieu, Chateaubriand, and Tocqueville. In the postwar years, with Stalin still securely ensconced in the Kremlin, his regime having made colonies of a half-dozen countries in eastern and central Europe, and Mao completing his conquest of China, the Western commercial republics were on the defensive. Kolnai sees that the moral and intellectual defenses of those regimes were weak because they share the egalitarian claims of the Communists, seen in their mutual espousal of what he calls “the cult of the ‘Common Man,'” “a construct of subversive sophists and seekers for power” who, although “dread[ing] Communism as the blighting tyranny it is,” incline “to submit to it half-heartedly,” lacking any serious argument against the Communists’ stated aims. Communists could stage their claim to power on the right of the “great multitude of people as such, in regard to its rights, interests, welfare, security, perfection, and so forth” to overthrow “Privilege.” 

    Kolnai identifies three fallacies in both Marxism and, crucially, ‘Progressive’ egalitarianism: the notion of class conflict, which assumes that life is a zero-sum game; the notion that egalitarian distribution of goods and services by the state is just; and the notion that the common good is the same as sameness, that “collectivism is only individualism raised to the high power of an absolute monism,” that ‘society’ resembles a person. In both of these ideologies, “Privilege is not merely an ‘injustice’ which favors ‘the few’ to the detriment of ‘the many’ but above all, a symbol of the imperfection of Man as compared with God…a symbol of the ‘irksome,’ ‘irritating,’ ‘humiliating’ transcendence of the Good in relation to human Will.” A comical example of this was the undergraduate in an English class who complained that the problem with God in Paradise Lost is that He has a holier-than-thou attitude. But in politics the mindset of egalitarian resentment can prove lethal.

    Egalitarianism runs up against “the fact that a few or rather, very many men in different ways transcend the ‘common level’ of mankind.” Egalitarians war against reality, even as Milton’s Satan wars against God. In both instances, the rebellion looks like a campaign for liberty but ends in tyranny, however temporary that regime may be. In opposition, Kolnai “propose[s] to envisage Privilege most of all in its close interrelation with Liberty”—indeed, as Montesquieu, Chateaubriand, and Tocqueville saw the European aristocrats as liberty’s defenders against excesses committed by both the rule of the One and the rule of the Many.

    By “Privilege,” Kolnai means distinction: to be set apart from others but not above the laws. He does not mean a hierarchy of ruling offices (the Communists had that) or the sort of ‘Platonist’ regime that veers into utopianism (if taken literally). He means, under modern conditions of ‘statism,’ a civil society in which dissimilar and distinct persons and classes, ‘privileged’ and ‘underprivileged’ alike, participate in civic life, the former as trustees for the latter because their participation occurs on the private or civil-social level and aims at the good of the latter. Such a civil society is reasonable without being rationalist, without expecting reason to rule outright. That is, in such a society, reasonable persons will recognize the limitations of reason as a means of civil-social and political organization—which may indeed be the point of Plato’s Republic.

    Rationalism operates on “the principle of Identity,” the express hostility to anything that is not the same as itself. ‘Identity politics’ homogenizes. (Today, it might be added, what is now called identity politics homogenizes under the guise of ‘diversity,’ with the ‘New Left’ proposing the same egalitarian socialist regime as the ‘Old Left’ of Communism and Progressivism.) “The new Caliph Omar will not content himself with having the library of Alexandria burnt but cause most of the books to be ‘edited’ so as to form ‘future’ chapters in the progressive Koran.” Without confusing human regimes with God’s regimes, Kolnai insists that those who deny that there are some people who by their very nature orient their souls to the cultivation of “a certain set of higher values,” incline also to deny the existence of a holy, that is, separate and superior God. “The ideal of Identity precludes the reality of Participation: in other words, Pantheists or Anthropotheists cannot realize, or live by, their status as children of God.” It is true that “every high value is ‘meant for me,'” no matter who I am, “not only in the sense of benefiting me as a recipient of its causal effects but of perfecting me through an appreciative response on my part,” but it is meant for me as something ‘above’ me, “not as an immanent function of the unfolding of my volitions, needs or capacities.” Privileges persons and classes are not intrinsically better in some metaphysical sense; all men are in “bondage” to “what is intrinsically better than they, tow what essentially transcends their scope yet enters into the constitution of their goal.” As a Catholic, Kolnai identifies the Pope as one whose holiness and fatherliness exists because he serves God. Some persons may indeed by “more saintly personally than the Holy Father,” but they properly approach in with reverence as “the symbol and guardian, not so much of human saintliness as of our corporate super-natural ‘subjectness'” to God. “Hierarchy stands for the submission of man to what is highest in man and higher than man but claiming his attention: ultimately, along with many necessary or completive avenues of approach to God; whereas ‘Emancipation’ stands for the subjection of man to man, and his bondage to what is lowest in him; or again, ultimately, to the Spirit that seeks to destroy him.” While Participation registers “the basic truth that response, not fiat, is the prime gesture of the human person,” ‘Emancipation” and ‘Equality,” in “proclaiming the equal and joint sovereignty of men, speak the idiom of Identity,” “supplanting or, indeed, ‘creating’ God.” In Aristotelian terms, Participation is reciprocal, political in the strict sense, whereas Identity is the principle of a command-and-obey relationship, not merely camouflaged by egalitarianism but animated by it in “a pledge of (sham) perfection”. Egalitarianism intends to override human reality because although human beings are all equally human and equally under God, they are not equally gifted or positioned, and the attempt to make them so requires a decidedly inegalitarian regime to enforce the equality it demands. It “aspires to surmount the individuation, plurality and contingent inequality of men, inherent in the specific imperfection of man and his position in the order of being.” Such a regime “will insist not only on enforcing the allegiance” to itself “but on determining the wills and creating the souls of all”—an ambition that distinguishes modern tyrants from “the comparatively harmless tyrants of old who contented themselves with being obeyed.”

    Communism redefines liberty in terms of egalitarianism. According to the regime of the Soviet Union, real, as distinct from bourgeois freedom consists of the unlimited rule of “the supreme power” because it supposedly “embodies the power of ‘every one and all,'” with the exception of those who refuse to go along, which it deems “outside the pales of humanity.” That is, “government shall be omnipotent” and “it shall represent the identical thought, will and power of all.” Unlike the republican regime as understood by (for example) James Madison, in which elected officials can be voted out of office if their constituents decide that they no longer represent the sovereign people who put them there, modern tyrants lead the people, posing as the vanguards of an unfolding, immanent dialectical process that progressively and in the last inevitably shapes humanity into a homogeneous mass whose constituents will be capable of communitarian life. Because this amounts to a form of Pantheism, “Communism is nothing but the determinate attempt to take seriously, and to actually realize the one true and ultimate Freedom of the Common Man: man’s ‘Freedom from God.'” “Man as such is elevated to the rank of god head” and rightly so, according to the ideology, because “universal Matter” is ultimately identical to “rational humanity”: matter is evolving according to rational, dialectical laws toward a fully rational, communitarian worldwide society. “Man’s ’emancipation from God’ is coined out, as it were, in the concrete scheme of his emancipation from his ‘self-forged chains’: from the ‘natural law’ and ‘moral order’ on the one hand, from the limiting and paralyzing fact of his substantial dividedness and his multicentric will on the other.” After all, “if I recognize any valid law and authority over and above my will…I cannot be God.” But in reality, Communism betokens not liberation but “the self-enslavement of man.“

    As for Progressivism in contemporary liberal democratic regimes, it makes them increasingly less liberal, less free. President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms,” and especially his “Freedom from Want,” amounts to a demagogic appeal to the insecurity of industrial populations vulnerable to the ups and downs of a market economy. What is now called ‘welfare” is thereby made a part of freedom, no longer simply a good; as in the Marxist critique of ‘bourgeois liberalism’ and ‘bourgeois freedoms,’ real freedom is said to be the guarantee of material well-being. Similarly, “Freedom from Fear,” once named as a virtue, courage, now becomes “a boon” citizens can “demand from the State.” “It connotes the suggestion that people cannot be really ‘free’ so long as they are in any sense subject to fear: until, that is, the State has removed all cause for their being afraid of economic insecurity, or even made psychoanalytic treatment freely available for everyone suffering from ‘anxiety neurosis.'” Liberty now means not the “Constitutional State,” a state subject to “checks placed on public power, be it state-power as such or class oligarchy,” but the “Welfare State,” with welfare “including psychic ‘welfare,’ which opens up the perspective of the so-called ‘conditioning‘ of the citizen, and thus involves a tendency running counter even more fundamentally to the original meaning of civic liberty.” “Democracy has progressively come to look upon ‘freedom’ no longer a s a high good in itself, as the signature of the civic status of man, but as a title-deed to ‘real’ goods only, a mere ‘formal’ or promissory scheme which acquires its true value, indeed its actual meaning, by its ‘implementation’ with tangible need-gratifications also to be guaranteed by social organization…to be furnished by public power itself.”

    Madison regarded what he called the “manly and vigilant” spirit of the American people as the final guard of their liberty. But in “the ‘common man’ world of silly matrons, meddlesome maiden aunts, vociferous viragos and literate wenches of both sexes—the world of a Puritanism sunk down to the morasses of pacifism, prohibitionism, psychoanalysis and milksop promiscuity—the ‘opposites interblend'” or ‘synthesize’ “not on the high plane of a tense revolutionary dialectic,” as in Marxism, “but in the sense of a paradise ‘available’ here and now, of an ‘ideal’ society designed to be at once a department store, a brothel and a nursery.” Freedom indeed—as defined by the Common, or perhaps the Last, Man.

    This is why “totalitarian subversion” can “disguise itself under a cloak of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ within the liberal democratic regimes themselves. There is a “totalitarian aspect implicit in Liberal Democracy itself,” as it has been redefined by Progressivism. Only if the liberal democracies rests “on axioms, conventions, traditions and habits…which transcend the liberal-democratic framework itself”—as seen in the Declaration of Independence’s “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”—and “impose certain ‘material’ or ‘objective’ limits on both individual liberty and popular sovereignty, thus helping to maintain a kind of accord among the multiple individual ‘wills,’ between the between the free citizenship of the individual on the one hand, and the ‘General Will,” as monistically embodied in state power, on the other,” can real liberty be secured. One impediment to this security is the historical fact that the original liberalism arose as a response to the “pseudo-Christianity” of Machiavellian and Hobbesian statism; statism preceded liberalism in time, and inclines to usurp it because liberals too often share the philosophic assumptions of the statists, even as they attempt to resist them, just as Progressives today share many of the same philosophic assumptions of the Communists.

    Considered historically, the “root” of political liberty as seen in constitutional democracy lies in “Privilege”—specifically, the privileges of titled aristocrats held against monarchs and only later extended to ‘commoners.’ The extension of liberty to citizens generally does not eliminate privilege or liberty; if anything, it arms it more formidably against the ‘monarch,’ the centralized modern state, ‘the Crown.’ But there is a danger. Aristotle’s politeia or ‘mixed’ regime, in which the few and the many balance one another, may easily become too democratic, too much the rule of ‘the many,’ and then incline toward tyranny “as the all but inevitable ‘next step.'” Kolnai sees one effective way of preventing that from happening, a way unavailable to Aristotle: Christianity, which resists tyranny because it considers all human beings equally children of God, equally persons not to be tyrannized. But “Christian society,” as distinguished from Christianity itself, also faces a danger, the danger of a “humanistic misreading of the Gospel as a promise of man’s terrestrial paradise and perfection (with a stolen flavor of true Heaven about it), as a divinization of man’s abstract ‘reason’ and ‘will’ (a travesty of the beatific vision), as a doctrine of supernatural grace being taken for granted and as a part of man’s natural constitution itself”—in sum, the false, pantheistic assertion of “man’s union with Divinity in the sense of Its expropriation and absorption by the autonomous ‘energy’ of mankind.”

    Obviously, privilege too has its hazards, “necessarily open to abuses,” as is “every form of official power or of professional authority.” Anything that “reduces to making the entire order of society the function of One all-determining central consciousness, the object of One omnipotent arbitrary human will” endangers liberty. That is why privilege must be constitutionally limited; such limitation, but also Privilege itself, so limited, makes Privilege the guardian of liberty. And even then, some abuses will occur: “With privilege existing in society, the freedom of some men will inevitably be trespassed upon and unduly circumscribed of narrowed down by others; with privilege eliminated from society.” Nonetheless, without any privilege “there will be no one possessing any substantial kind of freedom—and capable of using it—at all.”

    In terms of practice, Kolnai remarks that federalism alone does not suffice to guard liberty if all the ruling offices are elective because egalitarianism “always tends to centralization and uniformity.” And so, to take the example of the United States Constitution, it is a very good thing that the Supreme Court is appointed, not elected. Kolnai cites the Catholic Church and independent universities as examples of such undemocratic institutions in civil societies. The Church and the universities share the “salutary mission” of “inoculating the national mind with the seeds of objective value-reference, a vision of things ‘sub specie aeterni,’ of intellectual independence and moral backbone.” Without such institutions, “civic liberty” comes into “mortal peril.” The same is true of private property and its attendant inequalities. “Private property without ‘wealth’ is possible in pure logic but not in social reality.” By ‘socializing’ it, “we can get nothing but a monistic central power tending to omnipotence and compassing the death of liberty.”

    In the same year, Kolnai elaborated on his critique of “the Common Man” in an essay titled “The Meaning of the ‘Common Man.'” The Common Man is common to communism, liberal democracy, and social democracy; if liberals in the West embrace undiluted popular sovereignty they will weaken themselves in their struggle against the communists.

    It is simply not true that “all social superiority as such relates antagonistically to the Common Man.” It is one thing to say that we are all “born equal,” equally human, with certain unalienable rights we all share and properly intend to guard, but quite another to say that this must entail equalization of “material ‘conditions’ or ‘chances'” as well. Such an attempt to perfect civil societies (if indeed equalization of material conditions would perfect them) presumes Godlike power, wisdom, and justice in the human beings who would be in charge of the equalization. This means that imperfect human beings would be in charge of the perfection of everyone else—what gamblers would call a ‘long shot,’ to put it mildly.

    Kolnai affirms that any two men “are presumed fundamentally ‘equal’—which in fact they are in regard to the natural rights of the person as such.” But “once we go beyond the wholesome and Christian principle of a limited equality, formal and material, as implied by Man’s basic dignity and rational nature as well as by the radical transcendence of the person’s ultimate value before God above his social, physical, intellectual and cultural, and even, in a tangible sense, moral, distinctions or shortcomings,” then “we cannot help sliding down the path that leads to the abyss of material equality, with its concomitants of an impoverishing, oppressing, suffocating and deadening uniformity,” seen in actual socialist regimes.

    Socialists will protest, saying that egalitarianism is “hostile neither to the division of labor nor to personal genius, talents or accomplishments, but merely to the social hierarchy of artificial group privileges which perverts the division of labor and stifles rather than brings to fruition personal prowess or merit.” Creativity will flourish, even as acquisitiveness will disappear. Socialism will “liberate genius from the shackles of poverty and the handicap of a humble origin,” enabling “true art, true science, true individuality [to] flourish.” This was indeed the claim of Leon Trotsky in his unintentionally hilarious 1924 book, Literature and Revolution. [1] Kolnai contents himself with irony: “The Common Man, then, is a very mysterious, not to say a mystical fellow, who according to need is admirably fitted even to ascend the highest peaks, inaccessible to a privilege-ridden mankind, of Uncommonness.”

    And then there are some egalitarians without such utopian dreams, who instead endorse a policy of “break[ing] down the high peaks of human worth” while “rais[ing] up the low levels of human existence to an acceptable average standard.” This aspiration rests on “the crude fallacy” that there exists “a constant ‘sum total’ of ‘goods,’ in the all-embracing sense of the term, which can be ‘distributed’ in more unequal or more equal ways.” This ignores the dynamism of real human societies and of reality itself. Peaks will arise, like it or not, and any comprehensive effort to prevent that, or to demolish them when they occur, can only stifle the enrichment of human life. Biology itself, but also “early education and coining influence of the family atmosphere” (more succinctly known as ‘good parenting’) will tell. Aristocracy defined as ‘titled nobility’ once reflected this, if roughly—such terms as ‘titled’ and ‘nobility’ indicate prominence, the fact of being known. Nobility in this sense “represents value intrinsic, distinctively ‘qualitative,’ pervading the essence of its bearer as it were, and as such directly underlying a claim to social prerogative or leadership,” a “quasi-natural, quasi-essential superiority that is necessarily not only in  society but also of society and so far inseparable from an aspect of artificiality not, however, by  or from society” because it “originates in supra-social, quasi ‘entitative’ human value.” This in no way suggests that those who are ‘in the aristocracy’ are less “liable to sin, sickness and ignorance as any proletarian.” It does more than suggest that conventional privileges recognize the existence, in civil society, of the natural inequalities that enrich civil society, in some respects making it civil—differentiated and thereby free from tyrannical centralized rule. “What matters is the humility displayed by society as a whole in accepting and elaborating a manifold pattern of ‘distinctions between higher and lower’ as part of its own vital constitution.”

    Egalitarian ideology does not confine itself to government and relations among socioeconomic classes. It has spread to “the relationships of the sexes and the domain of parental authority.” “Its main theme with regard to the emancipation of women is really the superimposition of artificial similarity upon natural dissimilarity in the place of ‘artificial’ mores shaped in reverent awareness of the natural order and the elemental differences between the sexes which it implies.” As for “the destruction of parental authority, linked with the odd idea of the emancipation of youth” (odd because youth is “a necessarily transitory stage in human life,” unlike sexuality and class), it “strikes even more fundamentally at the root of the concept of a social order pervaded with natural bases of authority” and “is obviously inherent in the drive for totalitarian State regimentation.” 

    Kolnai distinguishes between the “Common Man” and the “Plain Man.” The “Common Man” represents man absent custom, convention—an abstraction who does not exist in actual life. The “Plain Man” is man as most men actually exist in civil societies everywhere—unprivileged but not ‘underprivileged,’ an ordinary guy. He will differ from one country to the next because conventions vary from one country to the next. “He is not the ideologist of his own grandeur”; “the last thing that would naturally occur to him is to abolish ‘his betters,’ in the broadest sense of the term, and to actually step into their place.” And “though it is nothing but vulgar obscurantist mysticism to believe that the ‘plain man’ can ‘govern himself’ better than a Prince and a State aristocracy can govern society, it is indubitably true that a system of government in which the ‘plain man’ as such ‘has a say’ is intrinsically better than government by an esoteric caste of public officials no  matter how well bred, ‘cultured’ and ‘public spirited.'” The “sane sense” of democracy isn’t egalitarianism but participation, “at various levels, of the broad strata of the people in the shaping of public policy,” ensuring that a prince or an aristocrat is “reminded of his limits and of his duty of subordination to the whole of which he is a part.” 

    The only real Common Man, “in the sense of being the Head and Representative of all Mankind,” is Jesus Christ. He is the sole embodiment of the “common good,” being “a universal Cause and End,” the one Person truly “common to mankind.” The Common Man as “molded and formed by the intelligentsia,” however, has no divinity about him, lacking either the wisdom, the justice, or the power to redeem human beings. This is why Kolnai calls “the war against nobility, that ostensibly righteous social rebellion,” actually amounts to a “metaphysical rebellion leveled at something that towers infinitely above kings, dukes, barons, squires, factory owners, generals and admirals, fops or usurers,” its proximate targets. The Common Man so conceived is “a robot sublimized into an angel,” “a man prepared and trained for slavery to that Power which is constituted upon the principle of his claim to sovereignty and in terms of his consciousness of unchecked selfhood” but fashioning “the yoke of a comprehensive scientific knowledge of necessity,” whether socioeconomic (Marxism) or racialist (Nazism). In order to impose such (pseudo-)scientific rule, human beings must be induced to suppose that their good is the satisfaction of their appetites, physical phenomena that can be satisfied empirically. “It is no accident that it should have been Spinoza, the ‘sublime’ and ‘pious’ rationalist, monist, and pantheist, not some unruly voluptuary, not an empirical or materialist epicurean, who first codified with classical rigor the great modern principle of the good defined in terms of the appetite.” The ‘low’ needed to be presented as if it were the ‘high,’ indeed the highest. Spinoza, it will be recalled, was neither a Marxist nor a Nazi but a ‘liberal’ of a new sort. The ‘progressivist’ liberalism he prepared the ground for (it needed the historicism of Hegel to complete it) constitutes “the primal form of the ‘Common Man’ world, instinct with an ‘ideology’ of its own.” And while Progressives typically oppose Communism and Nazism (they do not recognize the children of their own mother-assumptions), they often cannot separate themselves from them with sufficient rigor to really fight them in any thoroughgoing way, as Kolnai had seen in the 1930s, when appeasement of fascism and collaboration with Communism afflicted ‘the democracies.’

    A decade after the publication of “Privilege and Liberty” and “The Meaning of the ‘Common Man,'” Kolnai offered a critique of utopianism, which he distinguished from utopias. Utopias, seen in such literary works as Plato’s Republic and Thomas More’s Utopia, do not exist anywhere and are not intended so to do. “Every utopia suggests a human world (a society conceived as a whole) determined by one unitary and sovereign human authorship: sprung from one human mind with its peculiar vision, scale of preferences, habits of reasoning, and imagination, although calculate to carry a more or less universal appeal”—a world “analogous in some way to Divine creation” and characterized by an imitation of  the “streamlined perfection” seen in the world as God indeed created it. And as in Eden before evil crawled into it, “the things of Utopia are not right as opposed to wrong things but manifestations of the right way of being.” By contrast, utopianism claims that such perfection can be achieved in the postlapsarian world. This ambition rests upon a contradiction: “a Will operating on behalf of the total good, the total needs, the unitary mind of mankind, yet necessarily against most of what men really want and cannot cease to want.” Against this, Kolnai concurs with the German philosopher and follower of Husserl, Max Scheler: “Repentance, not Utopia, is the greatest revolutionary force in the moral world.” [2]

    In the final essays in the volume, Kolnai turns from a critique of egalitarianism from an examination of conservatism, emphasizing “the pluralist trait of all true conservative thought,” thought not to be confused with “the inflexibility of archaic societies” with their lives of “unthinking habit” or, “above all,” the “counter-revolutionary or fascist-influenced conservatism of panic.” Conservatives uphold “public liberty, which rests on the fully realistic multiformity and mutual limitation of authorities, hierarchies and power relations, on the idea not of equality but of equilibrium.” Conservatives know how to defer, never assuming that they ‘know better’ than those ranked above them in society while readily guarding themselves against tyrannical encroachment. Kolnai gives as his example Tocqueville, who “could not have known Marx’s febrile dream of a ‘realization of the human race’—the real totalitarian ideal—or the ‘historical necessity’ of this operation, or of the Marxist vision, as highly revolutionary as it is reactionary, of the future abolition of the division of labor. Yet he saw, with piercing vision and fearful foreboding, the danger that the demand for ‘equal rights,’ with which he completely sympathized, leads with almost logically unavoidable necessity to the demand for an equal level of culture and welfare.” Tocqueville saw that aristocrats such as himself could no longer rule modern ‘democracy,’ but they could still guide it, advise it, temper its excesses. 

    A genuine conservative is an ‘authoritarian,’ not in the sense of unthinking subservience to whoever happens to be ‘in power’ but in the sense of acknowledging the sovereignty of God in the manner of “the great Duns Scotus” and “certain scattered protestant theologians of the present day” (Reinhold Niebuhr, for example?) who define “the morally good as what is in accord with God’s will,” as distinguished from Hobbes and his epigoni, who derive “what is morally good from the will of the state, especially the undivided and unambiguous decree of one man, the monarch.” Conservatives incline to what Anglophone philosophers call an ‘intuitionist’ ethics and “the closely related doctrine of objective value,” against “any kind of ‘vitalistic,’ pre- or antimoral, defiantly immanent affirmation of the primary order,” which denies the transcendent character of what (indeed Who) sets the standard for flawed human beings. “Hegel’s historicist, emphatically developmental ‘dialectical’ theory of ‘absolute consciousness’ has imparted new impetus to the modern extremisms of the Right, but it is an even more important basis for Marxism’s egalitarian and all-human, ultra-revolutionary vision of perfection, which has in our own century legitimized a totalitarian state power which goes incomparably further than any earlier known form of tyranny.” “The more subtle virtue of patience is almost a natural prerogative of the conservative, something which the revolutionary in general—we might venture to add, necessarily—lacks.” Patience fortifies the conservative’s “innermost secret,” the “most puzzling of all virtues, hardest to analyze and to justify, trust in God.” Kolnai “gladly concede[s] that blind confidence is a neither advisable nor praiseworthy caricature of trust,” which “should be bestowed in the knowledge that one can be deceived” by men, including men who claim to speak for God.

    Kolnai refines these distinctions still further, distancing himself somewhat from such sober conservatives as Michael Oakeshott and Jacques Maritain. “Professor Oakeshott is liable to overshoot the mark and attribute to habit, routine, tradition, casual expedients, the ‘skill’ and ‘know-how’ of the experienced and the ‘self-propelling’ virtue of activity once engaged in, both a larger space in human life and a more independent status than they really possess,” “inclin[ing] to underestimate the inherent spiritual stature of man and the intellectual claims it implies,” including the spiritual claim of reasoning. For his part, in his Man and the State, Maritain offers a confused mixture of Catholicism and modern progressivism. This consists of “a synthesis, suffused with all the religious afflatus of the soul, between Christ and the idol of modernity,” between “Christ and His modern caricature,” between “the true Crist of the faith and the substituted Christ of humanism,” “Christ and the Anti-Christ.” This “sentimental and romantic attempt” at “dressing poor Thomas Aquinas in the rags of a laicist apostle of democracy” overlooks the fact that “men only deified the state because they took to deifying man.” (One might also say that Maritain makes Catholicism look a bit too much like the Protestantism of Woodrow Wilson.) 

    Daniel J. Mahoney concludes his Forward to this volume with the just observation that “Kolnai’s conservatism is undoubtedly too European, too attentive—for an American audience—to the role that socially recognized traditional institutions such as monarchy and aristocracy can play in supporting liberty and maintaining the larger equilibrium of the social order.” It is also likely that Kolnai’s hopes in that regard, plausible as they may have been in Chateaubriand’s and Tocqueville’s day, were much wanner in the decades following the Second World War. The European revolutions and the Napoleonic wars wounded the aristocratic class and hollowed out legitimist monarchies, but the two world wars of the twentieth century and the Communist regimes that followed them in Eastern and Central Europe eradicated them as political entities. European conservatives have instead turned to organizing the ‘plain men’ in national organizations that so far have resisted the excesses of Fascism, although Kolnai would worry that populism cannot long resist despotic tendencies.

     

    Notes

    1. See Leon Trotsky: Literature and Revolution (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1971). For a brief and decidedly unimpressed commentary, see Will Morrisey: Reflections on Malraux: Cultural Founding in Modernity (Lanham: University Press of America, 1996, pp.161-163).
    2. This aphorism may well trace back to Scheler’s days as a Catholic, which he later repudiated, adopting none other than the pantheism Kolnai himself decries.