This is the fourteenth in a series of essays on Melville’s novel.

 

The “Young America” movement aimed at speaking and acting for a new generation of Americans, as President John Kennedy would attempt to do, a century later, and as the ‘New Left’ would claim to do, only a few years after Kennedy. The passing of the torch of political authority from the older to the younger raises perennial questions: Will the fire light the way? Or will it burn the holder? Will it go out, causing the new bearer to stumble? Should it be snuffed out, and another torch lit? Should it be used to follow the same path, or should a new path be chosen?

In Melville’s generation, Abraham Lincoln considered these questions in a lecture at the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois. “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions” was delvered and published thirteen years before the publication of Moby-Dick; its author wasalmost exactly the same age as Melville when he published his great novel. Like Melville, the young Lincoln has been said to have had his doubts about religion, although unlike Melville he could later claim to  have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general.”

Lincoln invited his listeners to admire the American “system of political institutions,” which “conduc[es] more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty than any of which the history of former times tells us.” This “political edifice of liberty and equal rights” stands as “a legacy bequeathed us, by a once hardy, brave, patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors.” He understood the duty of his generation of Americans to be the transmission of this legacy, “unprofaned by the foot of an invader,” to the next generation. He found the prospect of foreign conquest remote. But the danger of self-ruin was real, as seen in recent instances of “mob law”: lynchings in Mississippi; extrajudicial execution by burning of a murderer in Missouri. When “the lawless in spirit” become “lawless in practice,” law-abiding citizens will lose their trust in the government intended to secure their liberty and equal rights. If such citizens lose their attachment to the ruling institutions of a republican regime, then “the capability of a people to govern themselves” must come into question. This will give an opportunity to the supremely ambitious men who arise in every generation, men who “belong to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle,” men who “disdain the beaten path” of ancestors to seek glory on any ground other than that taken by men who have gone before them. Only if citizens trust one another, and trust the government they have constituted and perpetuated, can such potential tyrants by defeated.

To reestablish or strengthen that trust, only reason can furnish new pillars for “the temple of liberty.” Those materials can then “be molded into general intelligence, sound morality and, in particular, a reverence for the constitution and the laws”—for what Lincoln does not hesitate to call a “political religion.” The old pillars of the temple were the Founders; the new pillars can only be men and women who emulate them, whose ambition finds its model not in an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon but in George Washington, that supremely self-governing statesman who has earned his status as first in war and first in peace among a people who intend to govern themselves, first of all by ruling their own passions.

When Melville published Moby-Dick in 1851, Americans ruled the middle section of North America from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. If that rule could be consolidated by settlement, if disunion could be prevented, the United States would then amount very nearly to a vast island, with oceans along its eastern and western borders, seas bordering it on much of the North and South. Melville set out to caution Young America, to show his countrymen that the Pacific wasn’t entirely pacific, that ocean waters surround all land on earth with chaos. [1] America’s destiny may not be so manifest as Young America supposes. Is it as bright as they believe, given the real nature of ‘the Pacific’ Americans have arrived at? With Mexico and its ambitions to seize New Orleans defeated, and if the remaining Amerindian nations and tribes are subdued, will Americans enjoy the prosperous peace they have sought in their wars? Lincoln worried that they might not, and those worries crested like a wave in the decade to follow. He saw the possibility of chaos on land, political chaos within the United States, in an intensifying regime conflict between the commercial-republican North and the slaveholding-oligarchic South, worsened by the moral and political conflict between political parties in the North.

For Lincoln saw in Young America—above all in his great Illinois rival, Senator Stephen Douglas—a threat to American self-government as dangerous as that posed by the slaveholding plantation oligarchs of the South. Douglas, Lincoln averred, was “blowing out the moral lights around us” by refusing to navigate the popular sovereignty of the republican regime in America by the constellation of natural rights, the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, which had justified the Founders’ assertion of that sovereignty against the sovereignty of the British tyrant. To argue that the legal status of slaves in the newly-settled territories of the United States may be settled by popular votes in those territories, instead of by appeal to the natural rights to equality and liberty enunciated by the Founders in the Declaration of Independence, overrode the rule of reason, valorized the rule of passion. Law should secure natural rights; citizens should not suppose themselves entitled to vote the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God up or down.

Ahab represents nothing if not the family of the lion or the tribe of the (sea)-eagle. Aboard the Pequod, no one effectively opposes him, as Starbuck dithers, the crew alternately trembles and cheers, and Bulkington stays below deck. With Moby-Dick, however, Melville opposes him, readying his readers to recognize and oppose him, too. To the mighty man, the might-makes-right man, Melville opposes the mighty book. A mighty book needs a mighty theme, Ishmael tells us. But mere might against might will not suffice. Don’t merely ‘enlarge’ your mind, Ishmael advises. “Subtilize it.” Make it more discerning, more reasonable. The way to reasonableness isn’t some ‘system’ of thought, philosophic or religious, but moderation of the soul’s passions. Tempering the passions gives the mind a chance to think instead of only feeling. Ahab suggests that he who feels most intensely, whose feelings overwhelm other less coruscant souls, rightly rules them with a minimum of ‘back-talk.’ Melville writes to make citizens more thoughtful, more likely (among other things) to recognize an Ahab as a tyrant, as a person who may “have his humanities” but will not permit himself to be ruled by them, will not rule others by them, and thereby compromises the humanity of those he rules.

To subtilize the minds of Americans, Melville takes them to sea, where the chaotic dimension of nature must be faced. At sea one meets foreigners, men reared in regimes different from the American regime. Ishmael recalls “gams” or meetings with whaling ships from several countries. The Germans prove inexperienced, therefore lacking in practical judgment or prudence. They haven’t ruled themselves long enough; the ‘nation of philosophers’ and of Kultur may mean well but it cannot do well, as it navigates often unstable seas. The French, too—landsmen, sometime upholders of the Rights of Man, accustomed to life under the centralized modern state—lack experience in self-government. The English do have such experience; what is more, their commercial way of life keeps them sane, but sometimes obscures from them the depths of the oceans upon which they sail so adeptly. As for the American ships the crew of the Pequod meet, they range from the self-indulgent to the compassionate. Which way will Americans take, in their regime?

They will need a modern state of some sort. With a decent regime, that state does provide protection for women and children against human predators; it sends out expeditions, usually for commerce or, as with the America of Melville’s time, expansion of its empire of liberty. Like all manifestations of the “weaver-god,” it needs a framework for production. Given the chaotic dimension of the cosmos, it makes oligarchy difficult unless oligarchy embeds itself into the state’s institutional framework in the form of bureaucracy—a move that wouldn’t happen for nearly a century. Otherwise, as in the novel, the modern state’s regime wavers between monarchy and democracy; under the well-designed framework of the American institutions, that had meant wavering between a strong Congress and a strong presidency. Democracy proves vulnerable to demagoguery and deception, whether religious or political. Founded as a tensile combination between ‘Abraham’ and ‘Ismael,’ the American regime of 1851 saw threats from both Southern oligarchs and restive democrats, neither of which much heeded the moral limitations of natural right. While democrats lauded America’s “Manifest Destiny” to rule the continent, Melville makes “destiny” manifest as a danger, not an inevitable happy ending. A better Young America would understand nature or the chaos-cosmos of the weaver god in a more careful way, soberly interweaving policy, including the policy of expansion, within the work of that ‘god,’ recognizing and avoiding demagogue-tyrants as they arise, encouraging commerce and industry without succumbing to venality. No aristocracy exists to guide Young America, but maybe Melville could. If, as one scholar puts it, Melville set himself the task of “reshap[ing] tragedy for a democratic (and American) audience” [2], as a lesson in much-needed moderation, his hero’s tragic flaw is dominant, his “humanities” recessive to the end. [3] Ahab rules his subjects by demagoguery, self-interest, and force, weapons lying around, as it were, in the commercial and democratic republican regime. Young America must learn to recognize such a man. It will fail to do so if immoderate and also if uncourageous—too timid, like Starbuck, or too rash and given to infect others with rashness, like Ahab. Ahab pits his personality against the impersonal weaver-god, but as John Alvis sees, “Personality is modernity’s substitute for soul” [4]. Melville doesn’t think the soul immortal, in the Christian sense, but he does want Young America to remember the soul, and to take care of it. In this, he wants what Lincoln wanted.

The weaver-god hears no mortal voice as it intertwines life and death. The ancients called this cosmic interweaving force Fate, supposing they saw it behind all the personal gods of their pantheon. Trellised by a lifeless framework, like the God of the Bible the weaver-god respects no persons but only because it is impersonal, not because it is impartial or just. American Transcendentalists were wrong to suppose it benign. American Progressives would make the same mistake. Marx was wrong to expect it to issue in a happy outcome. Nietzsche would be wrong to love it, although his pessimism of strength echoes some of Melville’s thoughts, even as it amplifies them too much. Transcendentalists had chosen the wrong symbolism to depict it; Melville deploys symbolism, too, but makes it compatible with his stern realism. Fate leaves room for chance or fortune, for randomness, also for human custom; despite these severe limitations, human beings can still ply the shuttle, exercise a modest freedom for good or evil. In politics, therefore, revolution or regime change and modest reform remain possible, although they require virtue and good fortune for success. The philosophic founders of modern science supposed that human beings can use their freedom to conquer nature and fortune; Melville thinks not. The ocean is too big. If he could see the technologies of later centuries, he would continue to say that the ocean is too big, pointing to the near-limitless cosmos beyond earth, with its imploding and exploding stars, its snake-spiraling nebulae (with their microcosmic counterparts, snake-stranding DNA), and its overall entropic careening, as an even more decisive refutation of human pretension. If the chaos-cosmos could speak, it too could ask the devastating rhetorical question, “Where were you when I created the heavens and the earth?” Melville provides nature a sort of voice, derived from his experience of the ocean.

Rightly so humbled, human beings may still have self-knowledge and a measure of self-protection if they exercise genuine moderation, not Starbuck’s false moderation. “In all seasons retain a temperature of thine own.” If you don’t, you won’t understand the underlying foundation of the chaos-cosmos, as in your thinking you will finally face the blank wall that tormented Ahab. It need not torment you, as it does him, leading him to ruin. You may never understand how or why human freedom can arise in the chaos-cosmos of fate. The blank wall Ahab finds at the end of his speculative thought defeats doctrines and systems religious or philosophic, but a mind alert to practical matters—how a ship works, how a political regime and a modern state work, and how such things might be made to work better—will find its “inner Tahiti.” Two deformations of Melville’s thought might come from this: pragmatism, which in American thought would put itself in the service of nature-conquest; and Epicureanism, an apolitical withdrawal from one’s country. Regarding the latter, Melville’s Ishmael may be an outsider, but he spins his yarn anyway, and Melville never set out for the territories to live as a hermit. He continued to intervene in American politics, in his subsequent writings.

What will guide practical reason? The chaos-cosmos, nature, may not lend itself to a doctrine of natural right, as the American founding generation maintained, but nature isn’t evil if decently treated. At its generative, original, ‘sperm’ level of being nature is pure, cleansing, offering human beings a natural baptism if not a foundation for a systematic natural religion. Nature affords a place for friendship and fraternity, so long as one doesn’t stare too long in the face of its fire, and so long as one accepts its carpenter-Christ as impersonal, the Christ of the Bible as human, as a man of sorrows.

Leviathan, the king of the proud, combines the bulk of the land with the movement of water; Leviathan’s spout mixes water with air. The `H’ of the word ‘whale’ denotes beholding, beholding the haishim, the fiery `souls’ of atoms postulated by Lucretius. Earth, water, air, fire: nature unites and balances opposites, as does its political equivalent, the modern state, as Mr. Madison saw. Nature is cannibalistic, self-devouring, a matter of life and death. The right way to understand it is with a pantheism of pessimism, a pessimism of strength. Expect little from it; do not be so foolish as to love it; reserve the agapic love Christianity teaches and the friendship-love of citizens for those fellow-humans who need and deserve it. The (perhaps) self-generating chaos-cosmos will kill you, but in so doing it self-regenerates, self-repairs. Cold comfort that is, but warmer comforts, material and soulful, remain to you in the meantime.

Ahab understands some of this, but not nearly enough. To the modern tyrant’s soul, ‘Being’ is alogos, a thing rightly worshiped only in defiance. In the plays of Shakespeare Melville so admired, he would rank with Richard III, not Lear or Prospero. Unlike Richard, however, he has not only political ambitions; unlike subsequent tyrants, he has no ‘ideological’ ambitions. Ahab’s ambitions are metaphysical. He rejects all that is ‘above’ him, navigating only by the ‘horizontal,’ what is around him. In this he partakes of democracy even as he tyrannizes, a practice Tocqueville would have expected, having studied Napoleon. Ahab contradicts himself, repeatedly, having taken the fluid sea as his solid rock. No human being can stand on that rock, much less walk on water and survive. Ahab would have needed to do one or the other, but he doesn’t want to be a man and he cannot be a god. After the fact, Ishmael rightly interprets the typhoon lightning strikes in Biblical terms—specifically, in terms of the Book of Daniel. Ishmael finds in Biblical prophecy cogent explanations of what has happened; he never ‘prophesies’ or predicts, claiming no access to the thoughts of a personal god. Charles Olson rightly understands Ishmael as the chorus for a tragedy in the form of a novel, not as would-be prophet. [5]

Ahab’s days were numbered; he had been weighed, found wanting; his state would split, sundered by the nature it sought to defeat. His regime, too, must split because its sole, a-logical ruler is ‘split’ among his many self-contradictions. Fire-worshipers crave freedom, but in gazing at the fire too long they become only greater slaves to fate, thinking not wisely but too wishfully in obedience to the false prophets they follow. Ahab would ‘save’ himself and even triumph by “pil[ing] on the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down.” Yet there is no reason to suppose that killing the Whale would cure Ahab’s soul; the chaos-cosmos will remain, whatever becomes of its symbol. Ishmael, who shares Ahab’s estimate of the whiteness of the Whale— “the palsied universe…lies before us a leper” —wisely avoids Ahab’s rage at it. Caught up in the general enthusiasm of the crew at crucial moments, and therefore no fit ruler, his soul reclaims its balance for the most part and in the end. Unlike his tyrant-captain, he does not weep over “The Symphony” of the elements, having so much less to regret. He sees that even at its most pacific, the sea-birds who skim the ocean’s surface are as white as the whale. Whiteness dominates the ocean tyrannically only when something or someone roils it. He seldom does.

If our souls are like orphans of unwed mothers, their fathers unknown, then philosophy must take the Socratic turn. That is, if orthodoxy, tradition, can mislead and if credulity can be foolish, so can incredulity. We don’t know enough for either. Ishmael scoffs at religious doctrines, but equally at the pretenses of modern science. Socratic inquiry through examination of orthodoxies and observations of the many human ‘types’ and political regimes is what philosophers can do. As for religious men, Solomon is the one Ishmael esteems, for his practical wisdom in speech and action. And if Socrates and Solomon are the Catskill eagles among men, the average citizen may need to think as the old Manxman does, with common sense. [6] Morally, his exemplar may well be the natural man, Queequeg—natural even to the point of cannibalism, in emulation of all nature—but also courageous, resourceful, adaptable to all regimes, a loyal friend, a wanderer and wonderer, like Ishmael. Ishmael doesn’t follow his friend into cannibalism of the literal kind, but he does argue that in a pantheistic universe we are all cannibals by necessity, himself included—all part of self-devouring, self-regenerating nature in one way or another. The ‘marriage’ or friendship of Queequeg and Ishmael serves as the equivalent of real marriage in Aristotle: the foundation of political life, in this case a pairing of a potential philosopher or (at least) an ‘intellectual’ and a man of courage, the alliance of reason and spiritedness commended by Socrates in Plato’s Republic. 

Wanderers won’t make citizens, but neither will philosophers, entirely. They will always hold fast in their inner core, observing and reasoning about their observations. Like citizens, and like wanderers Ishmael and Queequeg, philosophers will form friendships. They can become political philosophers, not mere isolatoes. If friendly, un-philosophic citizens also learn to recognize the kinds of men who endanger friendship, the tyrants, they can govern themselves. They need to see the virtues of Queequeg and Ishmael, as described by a political-philosophic poet, to strengthen themselves, and to smarten themselves up, for such civic friendship. Most will never be a Queequeg or an Ishmael, but most can learn things from them.

A decade after Melville published Moby-Dick, he and his fellow-Americans saw their own national tragedy, in which Ishmaels and Queequegs, Ahabs, Starbucks, Stubbs, and Flasks, along with many of the other characters in the novel, and some not there, came forward to enact a regime conflict ‘for real.’ Melville acted as the chorus in that tragedy, writing his poems, Battle-Pieces, as the events of the war coursed from beginning to end.

 

Notes

1. In this I depart from Charles Olson’s account (op. cit., 116-119) which takes the Pacific Ocean to be genuinely pacific. Nothing that harbors Moby-Dick can be genuinely pacific. And then there are the typhoons.
2.  George Schulman: “Chasing the Whale: Moby-Dick as Political Theory.” In Jason Frank, ed.: A Political Companion to Herman Melville.  Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013, 71.
3.  Olson makes much of Ahab’s ‘softening’ under the effect of Pip’s spirit (op. cit., 60-63). Ishmael makes it clear that he esteems the compassion Pip evokes—Ahab’s one tear being worth more than all the water in the ocean—but he also observes how Ahab overcomes that compassion with an act of will, as if this were the last temptation of the anti-Christ.
4.  John Alvis: “Moby-Dick and Melville’s Quarrel with America.” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 23, No. 2, winter 1996, 239.
5.  Olson, op. cit., 58. Ishmael is, however, a one-man chorus; he does not represent the opinions of any political community.
6.  Olson sees the Catskill eagle in Ishmael (op. cit., 15) misses the common sense in the Manxman. He must, because he takes the American people to be represented by Ishmael, whereas Melville knows that an Ishmael must always be the exception, not the rule.

This is the thirteenth in a series of essays on Melville’s novel.

 

As Ahab drew nearer the Whale, two gams followed in quick succession. New England’s Puritan founders had modeled their regimes on the laws of Israel; the name of the first ship recalls the early generations of Israel. The captain of the Rachel had not only seen Moby-Dick, he had chased him, losing a boat and its crew to him. The captain’s twelve-year-old son was on that boat. The Manxman now took the cries of the seals on the rocks to have been the cries of those drowned sailors. As in the Bible, the Rachel mourned her lost sons. Rachel’s husband was Jacob; Starbuck just failed to be a ‘Jacob.’ Now, he sought no ally in the visiting captain, nor does Ishmael suggest that he so much as thought of doing so. Starbuck was no founder, lacking the strength to follow his God.

The captain of the Rachel  knew Ahab from Nantucket, knew that Ahab himself had a young son. He implored Ahab to join him in the search, offering to pay for time lost. Ahab refused, with one of his most striking utterances: “May I forgive myself.” Ahab treated himself as God; after all, according to his gospel, he had personality, the ability to judge and forgive, whereas his ‘god’ had none.

Ishmael explicitly likens the Rachel to the Biblical Rachel, the mother of the Jewish people. In the Book of Jeremiah, Rachel weeps for her future descendants, exiled to Babylon by God; God promises to end that exile, in His own time, showing mercy for His chosen people. In the Book of Matthew Rachel’s story is said to have foreshadowed the murder of innocent children by Herod in his attempt to kill Jesus, prophesied to be a threat to his rule; the life and redemptive crucifixion of Jesus reveals God’s mercy not only toward Israelites but to all peoples. Even as he treats himself as God, Ahab put himself on the side of Herod.

Nonetheless, Ahab continued to have his humanities. Having sent the grieving captain on his way, he returned to his cabin and to Pip, his adopted ‘son.’ “Lad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now”—not, to be sure, to save Pip from harm but because Pip, like the captain and his son, could distract him from his mission. “There is in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health.” Compassion, agape, would impede that hunt. Ahab’s sympathy for Pip based itself on the assumption that Pip’s imbecility both came from and symbolized the cold indifference of the chaos-cosmos. But Ahab was now proved mistaken. Pip retained a core not only of sanity but of gratitude and compassion in his own soul: “No, no, no! ye have not a whole body sir; do ye but use poor me for your one lost leg; only tread upon me, sir; I ask no more, so I remain a part of ye,” the one who had adopted him. Pip wept and pleaded, but as with Starbuck so with Pip: Ahab replied, “Weep so, and I will murder thee!” Ahab then recalled a shred of his Quaker Christianity, relenting only so much as to say, “God for ever bless thee; and if it come to that,—God for ever save thee, let what will befall.” That won’t happen; by rejecting his many opportunities to change his course, his regime or ‘way,’ Ahab doomed Pip along with himself. Ishmael comments, “All his successive meetings with various ships contrastingly concurred to show the demoniac indifference with which the white whale tore his hunters, whether sinning or sinned against,” but the telos of the Ahab regime “domineered above” the “gloomy crew.” “The old man’s despot eye was upon them.” [1]

Ahab himself remained in a bondage of his own choosing. “Even as Ahab’s eyes so awed the crew’s, the inscrutable Parsee’s glance awed his; or somehow, at least in some wild way, at times affected it.” Both men stood on deck, day and night, awaiting the appearance of the Whale while gazing at each other, “as if in the Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown shadow, in Ahab the Parsee his abandoned substance”; “both seemed yoked together, and an unseen tyrant driving them.” Distrusting the dispirited crew, suspecting that they might deliberately pretend not to sight the Whale, Ahab commanded that he be hoisted to the top of a mast to serve as lookout. He shrewdly trusted Starbuck to hold the rope that pulled him up, rightly convinced that the First Mate would not allow an ‘accident’ to befall him. It would have been easy for Starbuck to arrange such a thing, but his God remains as silent as Ahab (or Machiavelli) would expect.

If God does not speak in words, does He nonetheless speak in actions? As Ahab perched on the mast, a “sea-eagle” seized his hat and carried it away, dropping it into the sea. Ishmael recalls an omen associated with another intruder-usurper, Tarquin, the fifth king of ancient Rome.”An eagle flew thrice round Tarquin’s head, removing his cap to replace it, and thereupon Tanaquil, his wife”—reputed a prophetess—”declared that Tarquin would be king of Rome.” “But only by the replacing of the cap,” Ishmael recalls, “was that omen counted good. Ahab’s hat was never restored.”

In ancient philosophy, Roman or Greek, the right telos of man and regimes was eudaimonia or the happiness attendant to the full development of human nature. Fedallah was no good daimon, Machiavelli no good philosopher, Ahab no good man. In its final gam the Pequod met the teleologically-named and, given its circumstances “most miserably named” Delight. Moby-Dick had shattered one of its boats, killing five men; captain and crew were burying with prayer the only body they had recovered. After hearing this, Ahab “like lightning” ordered his ship to sail on; his crew must not be permitted to dwell upon death, or God, lest fear of either overcome their fear of their ruler. Ahab imitated the god he has adopted, the electric fire which had caused his harpoon to burn with the fire of a serpent’s tongue.

The tyrant himself had nearly reached the end of the rope of his will. If thoughts of his moral and political responsibilities, his family, and the Biblical God had not deterred him, could natural sentiments reach him? Ishmael describes the “symphony” of nature on the Pacific, as the “feminine” air, “transparently pure and soft,” and the “masculine” sea, with its “strong, troubled, murderous thinkings” blended into an “all-pervading azure” of “a clear steel-blue day.” For a while, “those two seemed one,” as the sun “seemed giving his gentle air to this bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom”—a natural parallel of the spiritual doctrine of ‘one flesh.’ Ahab responded. “The step-mother world, so long cruel—forbidding—now threw affectionate arms around his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however willful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save and to bless.” Nature might ‘save’ the man the Biblical God does not save—save him at least from tyrannical ambition and folly. “Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.” Starbuck approached him, and Ahab offered the most pious man on his ship what amounts to a confession, calling himself a fool, an “Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise.” “Starbuck, let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye.” He told Starbuck to stay on board the ship when next the whale boats lower for Moby-Dick.

At this one moment, Starbuck’s decision not to kill his captain seemed good. Better than dying a tyrant, Ahab might have returned if not to Christianity then at least to natural moral sentiment, to filial devotion to hearth and home—what Aristotle considered the foundation of political life. Starbuck urged Ahab to change course. “I think, sir, they have some such mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket.” “But Ahab’s glance was averted” from his First Mate’s human eye; “like a blighted fruit tree,” Eden’s Tree of Knowledge, “he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil,” rejecting what he acknowledged as “all natural lovings and longings” of “my own natural heart,” recurring to the “handspike” of “Fate.” Not the natural-right philosophy of Aristotle but the fatalism of the Greek tragedians (and of Nietzsche, after Melville) remained Ahab’s North Star to the last. Starbuck left in despair; Ahab caught Fedallah’s eyes, reflected on the water. When Moby-Dick reappeared the next day, captain and crew returned to the hunt.

The Whale “divinely swam” with “a gentle joyousness,” like a Jupiter or Jove of the sea. Nature turns hostile, but need not always be so. Knowing his own fate, Fedallah watched Moby-Dick with “a pale, death-glimmer” in “his sunken eyes; a hideous motion gnawed his mouth,” anticipating the same motion taken by the Whale’s jaw, which soon crushed Ahab’s boat with Fedallah and his ‘tigers’ in it. The ship rescued Ahab and crew, and here Ishmael pays tribute to the Captain’s greatness. Battered and exhausted, “nameless wails came from him, as desolate sounds from out ravines.” “In an instant’s compass, great hearts sometimes condense into one deep pang, the sum total of those shallow pains kindly diffused through feebler men’s whole lives.” “Such hearts” might “in their life-time aggregate a whole age of woe, wholly made up on instantaneous intensities; for even in their pointless centres, those noble natures contain the entire circumferences of inferior souls.” Ishmael’s language recalls the virtue he saw in Jesus, that He was a man of sorrows; if Ahab amounted to an anti-Christ, he was at least an anti-Christ, no Starbuck and very far from a Stubb.

Recovering quickly, Ahab ascertained that no men had been lost and ordered the boat to be repaired. Materialist Stubb joked at the ruined boat (garbling an Aesop fable as he did), earning the Captain’s rebuke, “What soulless thing is this that laughs before a wreck?” For his part, pious Starbuck saw an ill omen in it, drawing a still sharper scolding: “Omen? omen?—the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to man, they will honorably speak outright; not shake their heads, and give an old wives’ darkling hint.” His riposte must have hit Starbuck harder than Ahab knew, as God had indeed failed to answer Starbuck’s plea for guidance when he considered committing tyrannicide. “Begone! Ye two are opposite poles of one thing…and ye two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors!” He would be the greatest isolato of all, the supreme, all-ruling tyrant. As such, he moved again to secure his rule, announcing that the doubloon will go to the man who sights the Whale on the day it’s killed, then assuring his men that if he is the one to see him first, he’ll pay each man ten times the value of the doubloon. This lifted the gloom that had threatened to undermine his rule.

On the second day of the hunt, newly-motivated Stubb exuberantly predicted that Ahab would kill Moby-Dick; he “did but speak out for well nigh all that crew.” “The hand of Fate had snatched all their souls; and by the stirring perils of the previous day; the rack of the past night’s suspense; the fixed, unfearing, blind, reckless way in which their wild craft went plunging towards its flying mark; by all these things, their hearts were bowled along” by the no-longer gentle wind, which “seemed the symbol of that unseen agency which so enslaved them to the race.” They had become fast-fish, not loose-fish. They had achieved perfect unity: “All varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to,” striving “through that infinite blueness to seek out the thing that might destroy them.” Like Ahab’s harpoon, the tyrant-forged unity of the regime cut through the evanescent but natural unity of peaceful air, sea, and sun. Indeed, the wind itself picked up, “rushi[ing] the vessel on by arms invisible as irresistible.” Unlike the American regime, intended to keep the many varieties of citizens checked from their worst passions by setting ambition against ambition, interest against interest, thereby achieving a dynamic balance, Ahab’s crew now fused themselves to Ahab’s will, to one fate.”

At the next lowering, Moby-Dick smashed two of the boats, not before entangling them in their own harpoon lines, like the weaver-god, Fate. He then attacked Ahab’s boat from below, and Ahab’s ivory leg splintered off. Rescued a second time, Ahab remained defiant: “Nor white whale nor man, nor fiend, can so much as graze old Ahab in his own proper and inaccessible being.” But Fedallah had disappeared, dragged under by Ahab’s line; given the prophecy Fedallah had issued and Ahab had believed, this gave the Captain pause. Starbuck took the event for one final chance at dissuasion: “Thy evil shadow gone—all good angels mobbing thee with warnings:—what more wouldst thou have?… Oh, oh,—Impiety and blasphemy to hunt him more!” But to him who denies the personal God, there can be no blasphemy except in the failure to resist, while contradictorily claiming fidelity to the chaos-cosmos: “Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act under orders.” Turning to the superstitious sailors, he took care to sever any connection between Starbuck’s appeal and their beliefs. “Believe ye, men, in the things called omens? Then laugh aloud, and cry encore! For ere they drown, drowning things will twice rise to the surface; then rise again, to sink for evermore. So with Moby Dick….” But of course the same ‘omen’ might as well apply to the Captain himself. Speaking to himself, Ahab saw one of his contradictions, a different and deeper one: “Oh! how valiantly I seek to drive out of others’ hearts what’s clinched so fast in mine!”—namely, the Parsee’s omen or prophecy that he would “go before” Ahab in death, yet must be “seen again ere I could perish.” He vowed to solve this “riddle,” as he would do, on the third day of the hunt.

His ivory leg replaced by the carpenter’s latest, last efforts, Ahab observed the beauty of the third day, calling it “food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks, he only feels, feels, feels; that’s tingling enough for mortal man!” “God only has that right and privilege,” the right and privilege to think. Willfully thoughtless Ahab then thought, speaking a monologue on the wind. It is “a coward wind that strikes stark naked men, but will not stand to receive a single blow. Even Ahab is a braver thing—a nobler thing than that. Would now the wind but had a body; but all the things that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things are bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agent. There’s a most special, a most cunning, oh, a most malicious difference!” The wind can strike but not be struck in retaliation. The wind is like God, exasperating but at times “glorious and gracious,” a spirit. For the moment Ahab’s mind swayed, so to speak, in the wind. But Moby-Dick’s reappearance tore him out of his thoughtful, willed thoughtlessness. This time, not only Ahab but the men on the three mastheads sighted the Whale simultaneously. “Three shrieks went up” from the sailors “as if tongues of fire had voiced it.” Fedallah’s spirit was now in the crew, talking in tongues inspired by an unholy spirit.

As for the Whale, the spirit of fire had risen in him, as well. “Maddened by yesterday’s fresh irons that corroded in him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven.” Upon sighting him, Ahab had bravely denied that Fedallah’s prophecy of doom could come true—that Ahab would die after seeing Fedallah one last time. How could a drowned man be seen again? “Aye, aye, like many more thou told’st direful truth as touching thyself, O Parsee; but, Ahab, there thy shot fell short.” “What is more, he exulted, “no coffin and no hearse can be mine—only hemp can kill me!”

Moby-Dick surfaced, breaching the waves once again with a majestic, warning leap into the air. Pinioned to the Whale’s body by harpoon ropes, Fedallah’s body reappeared with the monster, the Parsee’s “distended eyes turned full upon old Ahab.” The Captain dropped his harpoon, seeing the prophecy fulfilled: Moby-Dick himself was the hearse. But “where is the second hearse?” Ahab demanded, threatening his boat-mates with harpooning if they jumped off their craft. “Ye are not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me.” As the Whale began to swim off, Starbuck watched from the deck of the Pequod: “See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!”

True enough, but when Ahab ordered Starbuck to set the Pequod‘s sails to follow his whale-boat, Starbuck again obeyed. The three harpooneers mounted the masts; while Ahab had chased the Whale, a sea-eagle had carried off the ship’s red flag, which Ahab, seeing it was no longer on the mainmast, ordered Tashtego to replace. Ahab’s boat caught up with Moby-Dick, and when Ahab’s re-seized harpoon struck the Whale, Moby-Dick charged not the boat but the now-nearby ship itself, “smiting his jaws amid fiery showers of foam.” Fiery showers: fire and water, Ahab’s worshiped “Father” and “Step-Mother,” combine in one image. “Is this the end of all my bursting prayers? all my lifelong fidelities?” panicked Starbuck wondered. The answer was yes, as Moby-Dick, “retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice…in his whole aspect,” “smote the ship’s starboard bow,” breaching it with “his predestinating head.” Ahab saw and understood: The ship was the second hearse, the one made of American wood.

Ahab made one last throw with the harpoon of the satanic baptism. This time the snaking hemp rope caught him, pulling him from the boat into the sea. The ship sank, sucking the last boat into its whirlpool. Tashtego, representative of the ‘first’ Americans, at the top of the mainmast, was the last to go down on the American-made hearse. Just before he did, he pinned the swooping sea-eagle to the mast, as it attempted to fly off with replacement flag. The ship, Ishmael thinks, was like Satan, who took a part of Heaven to Hell along with him. “The great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago”—the time of the Flood.

“And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” The Epilogue’s epigram is from Job 1: 14-19, the coda of each of the four messengers who reported a flood of disasters to Job. Ishmael means to be the bringer of bad news to Americans, but why? He is, after all, an Ishmael—a perpetual exile.

He had been thrown overboard from Ahab’s whale-boat during the fight. He ascribes his presence in Ahab’s boat to “the Fates,” who caused him to take the place of Fedallah there. Thrown from the boat, “floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it”—exiled by Moby-Dick, Fate’s agent—he found himself slowly drawn “towards the closing vortex” as the Pequod sank. “Like another Ixion I did revolve.” Ixion is the Ishmael-figure of classical mythology, equally an exile, although for the crime of having pushed his father into a fire. The gods take him up, much to their regret, and eventually he provoked punishment by Jupiter for committing adultery with Hera, attached to a wheel of fire for eternity. The physical wheel of water has its counterpart in the ideational or mythological wheel of fire, both these contradictory elements serving as objects of Ahabian worship. Unlike Ahab, Ishmael escaped the wheel. Queequeg’s “coffin life buoy” reached the center of the vortex before Ishmael could be sucked into it, then shot up as the ship went under, propelled by the resulting jet of water. Ishmael clung to it and survived overnight. He was picked up by the Rachel, the following day. “In her retracing search after her missing children, [she] only found another orphan.”

Queequeg, the man of nature, in effect saved his friend by volunteering his coffin for use as a life-buoy, crafted and recrafted by the carpenter or mindless Christ. Ishmael was saved also by the captain of the Rachel, a man of familial moral sentiment and Biblical agape. Biblically-oriented readers will find in these and so many remarkable events prior to it the hand of Providence. Ishmael does not. Does Melville? Perhaps not, since after all his is the ruling intelligence behind the novel, and we have no way of knowing that he ascribed that gift to God.

 

Note

1. For a comparison of Ahab and Pip with King Lear and his Fool, see Olson, op. cit., 58-63.

 

 

 

Lecture first delivered at the Center for Teaching Excellence, Hillsdale College, July 2006.

 

The challenge of teaching the American Founding is that their political theory was simple—indeed, self-evident—but understanding their actions, their practice, is hard. The notion that no one has the right to murder you, enslave you, or otherwise ruin your life isn’t hard to understand. It’s the way that the Founders acted to secure the unalienable rights of American citizens, and the reasons for their failure fully to secure them that requires intensive study.

The challenge of teaching the Progressives’ re-founding of the American regime is fairly easy to understand in practice. We see their successes all around us in such institutions as the administrative state, in such Constitutional measures as the income tax and the popular election of U. S. Senators, and in our expectation that politicians serve as leaders of their American people. But the political theory animating Progressivism is anything but self-evident. Progressivism breaks radically with previous American political principles. To see this, consider a question I asked students many times, without ever hearing the right answer.

The Declaration of Independence begins: “When in the course of human events.”

Why not, “When in history….”?

Because for the Founders the word ‘history’ did not mean the course of human events. At their time, ‘history’ meant the historia rerum gestarum —the story or account of things that are born and pass away, the story of the course of human events. A ‘history’ was a narrative, a literary genre, and a mode of inquiry.

Philosophy and poetry are also modes of inquiry. Following the well-known imagery of Plato’s Republic philosophy was considered the rational ascent from the cave of conventional opinions, into the daylight of truth. Plato’s Socrates engaged in ‘dialectic’—argumentation governed by logic, which is thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction. The first statement of that principle in Western thought is enunciated by Socrates in that dialogue: The same thing will not do, or have done to it, opposites, at the same time, with respect to the same part, or in relation to the same thing. So, for example, an object might be black and white, or gray, but it cannot be ‘blackwhite.’ You can inscribe a circle in a square or a square in a circle, but you can’t draw a square circle. Philosophic inquiry governed by that principle eliminates false or self-contradictory arguments.

Poetry was understood as an imitation or ‘imaging’ of true things—holding the mirror up to nature, as Dr. Samuel Johnson said, around the same time the Declaration was written. The equivalent of dialectic in poetry is drama, a sort of argument in action: Achilles against Hector, God against Satan, Hamlet against himself.

History, however, put into words what had been seen, in the course of human events. Only then can those events last, be remembered, continue to be inquired into. By writing a ‘history,’ the historian fixes events, holds them in place, making the comprehensible to the intellect, which can understand only that which ‘stays put.’ Like philosophic dialectic and poetic drama, a history also presents conflict. Thus Thucydides tells us that he writes a work “for all time,” after having seen “the greatest war of all time.” He chose a course of events—a massive, violent change—which revealed something great and permanent in human nature, which does not change.

Poetic drama, philosophic dialectic, and political history all aim at inquiring about the permanent things by an ascent from the human-all-too-human conflicts or contradictions we see all around us. All of these genres of writing and of thought comport with the doctrine of natural right familiar to us in the Declaration of Independence, because natural right is a permanent thing. In the American regime, the Founders sought to secure the natural rights of citizens by means of a well-defined, limited constitutional government.

But around the same time the Founders lived, ‘history’ began to be redefined not as the story of the course of human events but as the res gestae —the course of events itself. What is more, philosophers soon began to turn to the course of human events not merely as a source of what human nature is, but as something that constituted human nature. That is, they began to think of human nature—and of all nature—as something not fixed but evolving. According to historicism, man is fundamentally a historical being, not a natural being. Nature itself is historical, constantly changing or evolving; nature has no permanent ‘nature,’ so to speak.

Still further, the early nineteenth century philosophers—the greatest of them was the German, G. W. F. Hegel—looked to ‘history’ or the course of events as the source of moral and political authority. Why? European philosophy had already abandoned religion as a source of moral and political authority. The Enlightenment tended toward atheism. The French Revolutionaries’ appeal to moral authority issued in “The Rights of Man and of the Citizen.” that is to say, by the time the United States Constitution had been ratified, ‘enlightened’ Europeans had rejected divine right as a monarchic myth and substituted for it the natural rights of man.

The problem with deriving moral and political authority or rights from nature, for these European philosophers, was simple. They were materialists. And they conceived of matter ‘atomistically.’ If all nature, including human nature, is nothing but matter in motion, how do you get morality out of that? If human beings are nothing but bodies composed of vibrating atoms, if that’s what human nature is, then there is no ‘ought’ to be extracted from it, no right to be derived from it. for human life to have moral significance it needs a purpose, a telos. But if human nature has no built-in purpose, because it’s nothing but matter in motion, and if there is no God to give Creation a purpose, both natural teleology and religious teleology make no sense Enlightenment seems to result in nihilism, in darkness rather than light.

Further, even as the Enlightenment rejected God and began to reject nature as sources of moral and political authority, it also rejected human laws and other conventions. The Enlighteners were, after all, revolutionaries, dissatisfied with the status quo of existing laws and other conventions. Where would human beings turn for guidance, with all the existing sources of authority now discarded?

Here is where the German philosophers stepped in. Hegel contended that the only possible source of moral and political authority remaining to ‘enlightened’ human beings was history itself. Human history, he said, has been working toward an end, a telos, a purpose, all along, although until Hegel’s time no one had been able to see what that purpose is. According to Hegel, human history is the course of events by which human beings have conquered nature, subjecting it more and more to the human will. The story of the conquest of nature is thus the story of human progress toward ever greater freedom of the exercise of the human will over nature or brute matter. The meaning of ‘history’ or the course of events, its purpose, is that progressively unfolding freedom over nature, through time. Doctrines centered on divine revelation and doctrines centered on nature right now must give way to doctrines we may call, as a group, historicist or progressive. The ‘progressive’ person is, to use the word deployed by both Hegel and Marx, conscious of his place in history’s movement; a leader is conscious of how to hasten history’s forward movement toward the end of history.

To see how radical this philosophic turn to historicism was, consider it in contrast to the teaching of the Bible. the Bible also tells us that the course of events has meaning. God guides the course of events. Theologians call this ‘providence.’ How does providentialism differ from historicism?

The God of the Bible creates the heavens and the earth out of nothing. He then forms an out of part of that creation, earth, and breathes His Spirit into that clay, thus creating man as an image of Himself. Thus God differs radically from all of His creation; He did not make the heavens and the earth out of Himself, extruding them in the manner of an amoeba. Again to use theological language, the God of the Bible is not ‘immanent’ in His creation. The created being closest to God, man, derives his authority over the rest of God’s creation from the breath of divine Spirit that constitutes part of him. But this creature quickly learns that he is not God, whatever the Serpent may whisper in his wife’s ear. More, his Creator issues increasingly elaborate sets of commands which serve as standards for his conduct, standards that do not change until the Creator Himself changes them. Both laws and Lawgiver are ‘above’ man.

Hegel’s historicism is entirely different. Hegel argues that the course of human events or history is not guided by a radically separate Creator-God. Hegel teaches that history is infused with rationality, with what Hegel calls the Absolute Spirit. The Absolute Spirit has nothing to do with God, the Holy Spirit. Holiness implies purity, separation from matter; the Absolute Spirit dwells within matter. Indeed, matter is nothing but a congealed form of the Absolute Spirit. Matter evolves in accordance with a logical pattern. Instead of “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” historicism posits laws of history, laws of the unfolding of the Absolute Spirit.

Each historical epoch has its own spirit. The “spirit of the age” or Zeitgeist is the Absolute Spirit in its current stage of evolution or development. As in a logical syllogism, all contradictions will finally disappear. History behaves logically; the clash of opposites—whether opposing ideas, opposing social classes, opposing races, opposing armies—eventually resolves itself into the end of all historical conflict, namely, a world state that results in peace. History consists, therefore, of a logical dialectic, a set of knowable laws of progress. The dialectic previously understood as man’s rational inquiry into the nature of things—in poetry, philosophy, and history—now came to be conceived as the process whereby human beings, over time, mastered nature while disposing of previous systems of thought (including the Bible) as retrograde mythology.

The scholar Eric Voegelin rightly said that historicism “immanentizes the eschaton.” It puts ‘god’ into creation, into the course of events caused by matter in motion. It fuses the ‘is’ with the ‘ought,’ might with right—on this earth, not in Heaven. What happens is also what should happen, because progress, moral rightness, is built into the historical process itself. In Christianity, a religion of the Creator-God, the eschaton has only been ‘immantized’ on one occasion, so far: in the life and person of Jesus Christ. And that life, on this earth, ended with a return to the separation of Creator from created—with the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, that is, with the return of Jesus to His Father in Heaven. Jesus left behind His assembly or church, but, a Paul shows in his epistles, God’s assembly proves eminently fallible. The Kingdom of God on earth will only begin when Jesus rules a new heaven and a new earth—a new creation. And even that new creation won’t be infused with God, who will rule it as the holy God.

Speaking of ruling, I turn from the moral to the political dimension of historicism. Hegel and his philosophic followers understood moral and political authority to consist of this ever-widening sphere of human freedom or human conquest of nature. Intellectually, the saw the locus of the conquest of nature in modern science, and the powerful technologies that already had begun to bring space and time under ever-increasing human control or mastery. They saw the political locus of the conquest of nature in the modern state. The modern state, which crucially centralizes human control of persons and territories in one location, one capital city, and which then extends its administrative power to its borders by means of a rule-governed bureaucracy, struck historicists as the very embodiment of the modern project of freedom or rule over nature.

This means that the highest form of human freedom is located not in the individual or the family, or in the free enterprise of the people, or in the governmental institutions to which the people elect their representatives, but in the state, especially in its ‘technocratic’ element, the bureaucracy, not elected and at best ‘overseen’ by the people’s elected representatives. So constituted, the state masters nature more effectively than any individual or family can ever do.

Historicism also means that the most ‘authoritative’ things will happen in the future. In taking his moral bearings, a historicist does not ‘look back to “In the beginning,” to the Creator-God. Nor does a historicist ‘look around’ to the nature created by that God. Nor does he look within himself, at human nature. A historicist must rather look forward, forward to the ‘end of history’—to the World State, as in Hegel, to communism, as in Marx, or to the supreme Aryan world empire, as in Nazism. To put it another way men are not by nature angels now, but as mankind evolves, becoming more and more masterful, we will become much more like angels. The Absolute Spirit is working itself out in us.

Politically, this means that historicism requires of politicians not governance in accordance with stable principles but leadership. The leader leads his people into the morally authoritative future. The leader is the secular prophet of a promised land to be built entirely with human hands and brains. Human hands and brains are the Absolute Spirit at work.

The leader himself does not suffice to get us there, however. The prophets of God in the Bible know what to do and where to go because God tells them. God knows what to tell them because he is all-knowing: He knows not only the overall goal but He also knows every step of the way, the number of hairs on every head, every sparrow that will fall. A human leader, by contrast, may know the goal but he cannot know every detail that needs tending. For rule over the details, for effective human providence, he needs bureaucracy—a systematic and centralized administrative state.

Here’s where the American Progressives come in. Historicist ideas entered the United States in the early decades of the nineteenth century through a variety of what might be described as ‘cultural middlemen’—intellectuals who studied German philosophy, translating its ideas to the American context. One of the most famous of these figures was Ralph Waldo Emerson. Later on, an important figure in the American historicist movement was the educator William Torrey Harris, among the most prominent of the Saint Louis Hegelians, who served as President Grant’s Education Commissioner in the 1870s; other historicists settled into positions at major universities.

But the ontological historicism of these disparate figures did not yet advocate statism in America. One of Emerson’s most famous essays celebrated American individualism, and Harris was a Social Darwinist. The movement toward an American statism centered in academia, beginning in the decades after the Civil War. Historicism linked itself to statism earlier in Europe because in Europe statism preceded historicism.

Throughout Europe, universities initially had been instituted by the Roman Catholic Church, an eminently international, not statist, institution. When Niccolo Machiavelli conceived of the modern, centralized state in the early sixteenth century, he intended it as the key institutional weapon against the rule of the Church, and therewith the influence of Christianity. But after Machiavelli’s young, and Christian, contemporary Martin Luther broke with the Church, his followers discovered that states could serve as guardians of Protestant Christianity; only states were politically strong enough, because sufficiently centralized, to resist the international Papacy and its military and political allies. This circumstance in turn made the Protestant universities in the German countries ally themselves with their respective states. That is, by the time the Peace of Westphalia solemnized the modern international system of states in 1648, norther German universities had adapted themselves to statism. And when Bismarck and the Hohenzollern monarchy consolidated most of the many German states into one large nation-state in the middle of the nineteenth century the German universities were structured as appendages of that state. The study of political life consisted primarily not of the study of natural rights and regimes but the study of administration or bureaucracy as the authoritative instantiation of historical and dialectical progress.

German academics set themselves the task of finding scientific methods by which the state might rule more efficiently and thus, in the words of University of Nevada Professor John Marini, to “establish the rational structures whereby organized intelligence, or knowledge derived from the scientific method, would begin the process of solving, progressively, the political, social, economic, and cultural problems of the nation.”  As Marini also observes, the young scholars who established political science as a separate discipline within the American universities typically attended graduate school in Germany in the late nineteenth century, thus absorbing the principles of German social science, the handmaiden of German statism. It is important to understand that the German unification of the states via the institutional structures of the administrative state must have looked especially attractive to young Americans who grew up during the Civil War, not only because such a state promised to end the political corruption associated with political parties and the party ‘bosses’ but because rule by professional bureaucrats looked like an efficient way to bind small and medium-sized states into one big national state—precisely the problem the federal republic of the American Founders had solved only at the cost of a catastrophic war. With this institutional reform came the vast reconstruction of philosophic doctrine mentioned earlier, the move from natural right to historical right. By 1895, John J. Lalor’s Cyclopedia of the Social Sciences classified “Natural Law” under “Fictions”—this, in an article assuring readers that “the sphere of fiction must steadily diminish as that of inductive and positive science advances and as man’s mind becomes stronger, clearer, and more discerning.”

The best known of these young American scholars studied politics and administration as a graduate student at the Johns Hopkins University—the first American university modeled after the German research universities, staffed with professors who had done their own graduate studies at those universities. His name was Woodrow Wilson. He of course went on to the presidency of Princeton University, the governorship of New Jersey, and the presidency of the United States.

As a twenty-year-old undergraduate, one who spent ten years of his boyhood and early adolescence in Augusta, Georgia during the Civil War and the hated Reconstruction, Wilson confided to his diary serious reservations about the American regime of 1876: “The American Republic will in my opinion never celebrate another Centennial. At least under its present Constitution and laws.” The United States is only “a miserable delusion of a republic…founded upon the notion of abstract liberty!”—that is, natural right. As had several of his most prominent Southern intellectual forebears, particularly John C. Calhoun, Wilson admired England’s mixed regime; “the English form of government is the only true one.

Any Ivy League education and subsequent graduate training turned this Burkean Southern conservative into a devotee of ‘Germany.’ In a book written for college students, Wilson engaged in that sub-discipline of political science that would come to be called ‘comparative regimes.’ ‘Comparative’ politics as the Germans conceived it compared the supposedly inherent characteristics of different nations or races. Which ones are the strongest, the most vital, the most likely to win the struggle for survival and domination? Nations and states are organisms which interact dialectically. He distinguished political systems that are “defeated or dead” from “those which are alive and triumphant”—a point any American southerner would find compelling. Because peoples of German origin dominated the world at the time, “it is Aryan practice we principally wish to know.” England remained Wilson’s favorite among the Aryan nations, for its gradualism of development. The United States, insofar as it had any political merit at all, derived it from its adaptation of English institutions. Wilson tried to account for the Civil War not at all in terms of unalienable right or of American republicanism but entirely in terms of “national feeling”—nationalism—itself based primarily upon social and economic differences between the North and the South.

Wilson thus took German historicism and democratized it for American use. The esteem for democracy is the distinguishing feature of American Progressivism. Wilson claimed that democracy, not monarchy, was the final stage of human development. Its “true concept…is inseparable from the organic theory of the state.” Wilsonian ‘democracy’ bears as close a resemblance to Hegelian monarchy as it can, without ceasing to be democratic. “Properly organized democracy is the best government of the few,” representative government. But—and here the Hegelian surfaces—bureaucracy or “civil service” is “but another process of representation.” The science of administration is “the latest fruit of [the] science of politics,” a science “developed by French and German professors.” It “must inhale free American air,” but it nonetheless embodies the Hegelian “spirit of the time,” that is, the current stage of the dialectical development of the Absolute Spirit.”

Thus Wilson presented an extraordinary and revolutionary political agendum as an act of incremental conservatism. He cautiously assayed the political difficulties of his project. Convinced that “the democratic state” as yet lacked the means for carrying “those enormous burdens of administration which the needs of this industrial and trading age are so fast accumulating,” yet mindful that “it is harder for democracy to organize administration than [it is] for monarchy” to do so because public opinion rules democracy, often in a “meddlesome” way, Wilson sought to exercise a new kind of statesmanship to found a new kind of regime.

The new, historicist statesmanship would not so much defend the existing regime as lead the people to new modes and orders of life. “Society is not a crowd, but an organism, and, like every organism, it just grow as a whole or else be deformed.” “Leaders of men” precipitate the “evolution of [society’s institutions” with “creative power”—the most recent example of these having been Otto von Bismarck. The leader is a sort of secular prophet: “He must read the common thought: he must calculate very circumspectly the preparation of the nation for the next move in the progress of politics…. the nice point is to distinguish the firm and progressive popular thought from the momentary and whimsical popular mood, the transitory or mistaken popular passion.” The leader is the good shepherd of the spirit of the age.

Thus the new historicist leadership of progress requires a new kind of prudence. The new prudence foresees the course of events; it is literally promethean. Jane Addams, the prominent Progressive reformer whom Wilson cultivated as a political ally, described herself as “a little uneasy in regard to [Wilson’s] theory of self-government.” He seemed “as if he were not so eager for a mandate to carry out the will of the people as for an opportunity to lead the people whither in his judgment their best interest lay.” There has been no more sensible insight.

This also means that the United States Constitution as written and amended simply won’t do. It is ‘Newtonian,’ not ‘Darwinian,’ aimed at balance instead of growth. It is, as Wilson titled an important essay, “The Elastic Constitution.” A more recent jurist called it “the Living Constitution.”

Ultimately, Wilson contended, the best interest of the people lies in socialism, the logical result of ‘democratic’ Hegelianism. If society is an organism, then “the community” has “the absolute right…to determine its own destiny and that of its members,” for “men as communities are supreme over men as individuals.” While “wisdom and convenience” may require the limitation of public control over economic activity, “limits of principle” upon that control “there are, upon strict analysis, none.” Democracy finally requires socialism. To achieve it, an existing political democracy needs a modern bureaucracy founded by a “leader of men”—a new kind aristocracy, eventually calling itself ‘meritocracy,’ claiming to rule not on the basis of warrior and civic virtues or social and intellectual refinement but on technical expertise.

That is to say, political progressivism appropriates two pieces of the modern scientific project. The dramatic and bold part of that project, the conquest of nature, may be seen in the person of the leader. The mundane, routine, precise, and detailed part of the project may be seen in administration. The popular support for the statist project comes not from natural right form the sentiment of nationalism (eventually to be replaced by an international world state), which registers the vitality of the national organism. In contrast to the Declaration of Independence, progressivism substitutes historical progress for natural right, taking the task of government not to be limited to securing the natural rights of individuals and nations but rather as the much more ambitious task of guiding humanity toward the end of history, the unlimited universal state.

In making these changes, in making a mantra of ‘change’ itself, did American Progressivism actually cost Americans anything valuable? Did it cause us to abandon any of the individual and national rights we secured under the Founders’ regime? Consider the first establishment of a solid structure of Progressive institutions during the New Deal, an establishment prepared by the passage of the Constitutional amendments to legalize the income tax and to require popular votes for United States senators, accomplished a generation earlier. The best description of the administrative state Franklin Roosevelt and his allies bequeathed us was published exactly 100 years before his landslide re-election in 1936. It was Alexis de Tocqueville who coined the term “administrative despotism,” which he described in a famous passage near the end of the first volume of Democracy in America:

“I want to imagine with what new features despotism could be produced in the world: I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all others: his children and his particular friends form the whole human species for him; as for dwelling with his fellow citizens, he is beside them, but he does not see them…he exists only in himself and for himself alone….

“Above these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves. It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living”

“So it is that every day it renders the employment of free will less useful and more rare; it confines the action of the will in a smaller space and little by little steals the very use of it from each citizens. Equality has prepared men for all these things: it has disposed them to tolerate them and often even to regard them as a benefit.

“Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the  most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.

“Our contemporaries are incessantly racked by two inimical passions: they feel the need to be led and the wish to remain free. Not being able to destroy either one of these contrary instincts, they strive to satisfy both at the same time. They imagine a unique power, tutelary, all powerful, but elected by citizens. They combine centralization and the sovereignty of the people. That gives them some respite. They consoled themselves for being in tutelage by thinking that they themselves have chosen their schoolmasters….

“In our day there are many people who accommodate themselves very easily to this kind of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people, and who think they have guaranteed the freedom of individuals well enough when they deliver it to the national power. That does not suffice for me. The nature of the master is much less important to me than the obedience.”

Many of us here today teach civics. To rebuild an active, civic spirit of self-government—as against the passivity of the administrative state—is what we do. We can only do it effectively if we recall the principles and practices of the American Founders, notice the contrast between them and those of the Progressives, then teach that contrast to our students.