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    Formed for a Statesman: John Quincy Adams

    by

    James Traub: John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit. New York: Basic Books, 2016.

    Originally published in Law and Liberty, July 11, 2016. Republished with permission.

     

    Founders of moral codes and their consequent political regimes say what they want citizens (or subjects) to do. By making certain actions habitual in us, they seek to nurture a certain kind of human being, a model or type embodying the code and the regime founded. This model of what a human being in this regime ought to be must then be imitated, inasmuch as the model will likely be perfect and therefore impossible to embody fully. A Christian will want to know Jesus, but also Paul, precisely because Paul is not the perfect man but the good citizen of the regime of the perfect man. Less-than-holy regimes follow the same logic. In 1946 two Soviet writers on pedagogy published a book translated into English under the title “I Want to Be Like Stalin.” One wants to know “Soviet Man,” the one embodied by the Man of Steel, but one also wants to know Soviet men and women of a lesser order, the successors, the ones who do indeed become like Stalin. What does it mean to perpetuate a given regime, to uphold the model and inducing the next generations to imitate that model?

    In the United States, George Washington served as the model citizen of the republic founded upon the defense of natural rights. (One might add that Benjamin Franklin served as the model citizen-intellectual, which isn’t quite the same thing.) John and Abigail Adams (themselves no mean models) educated their son, John Quincy, to become the worthy successor of the founding generation of the new regime. What does a man formed to defend natural rights look like? James Traub gives us a carefully-drawn portrait of a man “who did not aim to please, and… largely succeeded”—both in not-pleasing and in defending natural rights.

    The Adamses began by refusing to treat their child as childish. Jack and Jill may have gone up the hill to fetch a pail of water, but Mrs. Adams judged the tale devoid of moral content and consequently unworthy of her child’s attention. She kept little Johnny out of public school altogether, where such pointless rhymes were taught, preferring to educate him at home with such helps as Charles Rollin’s Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Macedonians and Grecians. When their beloved family physician died at the hands of the troops of “Pharaoh” at Bunker Hill, mother and son wept together, before turning to the task of melting down the family pewter for bullets.

    As for father John, he interspersed his activities at the Continental Congress with reading recommendations for his son, Thucydides being just the thing for his ten-year-old. Traub rightly observes, “‘The classics’ was not a subject, like geography or history, but rather a lens through which to examine and understand the life around you.” A year later, Johnny accompanied Father on a diplomatic mission to Europe; after getting chased by a British ship and nearly capsized in a storm on the way over, he received one of Mother’s characteristically bracing monitions: “Dear as you are to me, I had much rather you should have found your Grave in the ocean you have crossed, or any untimely death crop you in your infant years, rather than see you an immoral profligate or a Graceless child.” No such misfortune ensued. Upon his return to Massachusetts at age 18, his aunt Mary reported to Abigail, “He is formed for a Statesman.”

    Smartened up and toughened up, Adams proved ready to think about and act in the crises that arose in the aftermath of the American founding—quite literally until his death on the floor of the House of Representatives in February 1848. Traub helps his reader identify five such crises, all interrelated: The French Revolution; the Napoleonic Wars; conflicts leading up to and including the War of 1812 with the British Empire; the rise of New-World republicanism in the face of Old-World monarchism; and the consequences of sectional slavery under conditions of rapid continental expansion.

    Adams’s first important intervention in public debate was the “Publicola” letters, a reply to Thomas Paine’s defense of the French Revolution. In 1791—that is, two years before the Jacobins took control of the French Republic and heads began to roll—Adams argued that the American Revolution was indeed justified on the basis of the principles of the Declaration of Independence, but that the same conditions did not prevail in France. Against Paine, he argued that the mere existence of aristocracy or monarchy did not justify revolution but only a long train of abuses and usurpations committed by such regimes, as suffered by the American colonists in the 1760s and 1770s. Further, no people unused to local self-government should undertake a republican revolution because they will likely commit excesses worse than the oppressions they suffer.

    By the time the Jacobins did take over, President Washington had appointed the now 27-year-old Adams ambassador to the Low Countries; he arrived just as French troops rolled in. The Dutch had hoped for help from Great Britain and the Hapsburgs, in vain; this conquest demonstrated the necessity for military self-defense rather than dependence upon great-power protectors. It also demonstrated the poisonousness of the factionalism that follows such dependence upon foreigners, who play divide-and-rule politics in the countries they ostensibly protect. Traub suggests that Adams’s dispatches on these themes contributed to the thinking of Washington and Hamilton as they prepared his Farewell Address, the two themes of which are America’s need for political union and for well-defended neutrality.

    Generally, the French Revolution reinforced in Adams what he had learned from his beloved classics and also from such experiences as the Shays Rebellion of 1786-87: democratization or equalization as a social phenomenon was a fact in non-slaveholding American states and a strong trend in aristocratic Europe, but in both cases it needed careful management. In the years following, the British aristocracy would prove better at governing this transition than the Continental aristocracies. In his preference for gradualism over violent revolution, and above all in his insistence that people think about democratization, he anticipated Tocqueville, whom he met a generation later, during Tocqueville’s journey through America.

    The Napoleonic Wars that followed from the French Revolution saw Adams as our ambassador to Prussia under the administration of his father. The younger Adams saw what Tocqueville would see, later on: that social democratization could lead to despotism as easily as republicanism. He “viewed France as a revolutionary power bent on dominating the world” with a regime that combined atheism, social egalitarianism, and tyranny. First under the three-man Directory regime, which attempted not merely to master Europe but to gain a foothold in North America by trying to purchase the vast Louisiana territory from Spain, and then under the Napoleonic regime, which succeeded in making the purchase, Adams rightly supposed that France planned to establish a military garrison at the strategic chokepoint of New Orleans, thereby controlling the Gulf of Mexico and extending French control up the Mississippi River. This would have enabled France to set the rules for American commerce out of the rich farmlands of the Midwest and conceivably to contain American behind the Alleghenies. The plan died with the slave revolt in France’s colony on Santo Domingo, and although Adams called Thomas Jefferson’s eventual purchase of Louisiana from France a “direct violation of the Constitution (as Jefferson himself admitted, to a Senate ally), he agreed that the safety of the public is the supreme law. Constitutions exist to secure natural rights, not the other way around.

    The second diplomatic assignment Adams secured from his father, at the Russian court of Alexander at Saint Petersburg, coincided with another crucial moment in European affairs. Adams and the Czar each saw the other country as a counterweight to Napoleonic France, and in the end Alexander broke with Napoleon’s “Continental System,” provoking the war that led to France’s defeat. Adams did everything he could to encourage Alexander’s inclination to independence, and although the Czar made his own calculations, Adams was able to gain Russian help with U. S. commercial shipping on the Continent—that is, with the one kind of foreign relations Washington and Adams had endorsed with respect to America’s dealings with the European powers, and the one most at issue throughout the Napoleonic Wars.

    As a consequence of those wars, British policy aimed at impressing American sailors to service in the Royal Navy and at interference with American shipping to British enemies. Unable to match the Brits on the open seas, the Jefferson and Madison administrations adopted an embargo on British goods, which provoked New Englanders to talk of nullifying federal law and even seceding from the Union. Secession would have served British and general European interests by making North America more like Europe itself, and more like North America when the Indians ruled it: a congeries of dividable states vulnerable to rule from overseas. Fortunately, “the embargo gave way before the Union did,” as Southern senators saw that it wasn’t working.

    That didn’t prevent the War of 1812, spurred by mutual U. S.-British underestimation. Adams participated in the negotiating team that eventually produced the Treaty of Ghent, ending the war, although not because the American negotiators proved especially persuasive. As usual, not diplomacy but the military facts on the ground settled matters; British defeat at Baltimore chastened British overconfidence, as did continued political unrest in France, where the reinstated Bourbons proved unpopular. This Second War of Independence, as many Americans called it, confirmed Adams’s conviction of the indispensability of constitutional union to the defense of natural rights, a conviction strengthened as Adams took charge of the State Department under President James Monroe, just as his friend Czar Alexander (unamused by France’s geopolitical proclivities) organized the Holy Alliance against godless republicanism. Spain was part of that alliance, and the Spanish Empire was by far the largest in the New World.

    That empire and the regimes of the Americas were changing, and Adams’s conception of American geopolitical strategy changed accordingly. In the 1820s, Latin American nations began to throw off Spanish rule and to found republican regimes rather optimistically modeled on the United States. Adams responded with caution, preferring to delay formal recognition of the new republics so as not to provoke European and especially Holy-Alliance intervention in the hemisphere. This was the circumstance behind his famous declamation that the United States did not go abroad to seek monsters to destroy, but, while applauding republicanism in the defense of natural rights wherever it arose, vindicated only its own regime and the rights of its own people. He spoke against the policy of Senator Henry Clay, who advocated what amounted to a reverse Holy Alliance of New World republics to guard against the Holy Alliance. Adams questioned not whether Latin Americans were endowed with natural rights but rather whether they had yet developed the habits of mind and heart to sustain their newly-designed republican institutions. After all, Americans had governed themselves locally for a long time, and yet had found themselves riven by factionalism to the point of disunion. Latin Americans had enjoyed no such long experience in self-government.

    Adams instead formulated what since became known as the Monroe Doctrine. Based on an understanding of the stark regime differences between the Old and the New Worlds, the Holy Alliance and the young republics, the Monroe Doctrine said in effect that we won’t set out to destroy what we take to be foreign monsters if you Europeans don’t set out to destroy what you take to be foreign monsters in the Americas. Traub perceptively remarks that this “marked an end to the fundamental defensiveness of Washington’s message,” inasmuch as it implied a spheres-of-influence division between the two hemispheres. Neither ‘idealistic’ in the Wilsonian sense nor a specimen of amoral Realpolitik, the Adams/Monroe policy guided the United States for the remainder of the century.

    Adams attempted to extend his policy during his own administration, which followed Monroe’s two terms. Simon Bolívar proposed a Pan-American Congress for discussing trade and other hemispheric issues, and Adams advocated that we accept the invitation because Washington’s policy—like all policies, as distinct from moral principles—addressed the circumstances of its time and place. Those circumstances had changed with the regime changes in Latin America. The United States was no longer an isolated republic surrounded by territories ruled by imperial monarchies. But this position proved too much to sustain, given Adams’s rather weak political position in the U. S. (Traub calls it “Adams’s Waterloo”). In addition to continued strong reverence among all Americans for all things George Washington had propounded, Southern Congressmen objected that Haiti might attend, and of course discourse with former slave rebels was for them a possibility to dangerous to countenance. Adams’s advocacy of U. S. participation in the Pan-American Congress gave that great political operative, Martin Van Buren, an opportunity to form an alliance with General Andrew Jackson and Senator John C. Calhoun against Adams, making him a one-term president and establishing a new Democratic Party coalition that would dominate American politics for a generation.

    This, in turn, precipitated the final crisis of Adams’s career, his finest hour as a natural-rights republican. Jefferson had understood American expansion across the continent as a new kind of imperialism: the “empire of liberty.” Unlike colonial empires, which subordinated the colonies to a distant, central government or ‘metropole,’ the American empire would consist of territories intended for organization as equal states within the American federal republic—all of them guaranteed a republican regime under Article IV, section 4 of the Constitution. Adams had supported U. S. territorial expansion to the Pacific as early as 1818, aiming to rid much of North America of Spanish and British imperial rule. However, from that time and for the next thirty years he would oppose the annexation of Texas because it could not enter the Union as fully republican but as a slave state—that is, a state (or worse, several states) dominated by plantation oligarchs. Although he sided with General Jackson in his drive to wrest Florida from Spain, which he regarded as too weak to control cross-border raids by the Seminole Indians, and he insisted on a clause in the eventual treaty with Spain in which the Empire would cede U. S. claims in the far West, Texas was another matter.

    More subtly, in discussing the matter with Senator Calhoun, he learned that Calhoun imagined the principle of human equality enunciated in the Declaration of Independence applied only to “white men.” Knowing first-hand that the Founders meant no such thing, Adams concluded that the institution of slavery had clouded the minds of slave owners. Just as no one expected a man like George III to hold the truths of the Declaration to be self-evident, it now transpired that the new generation of slave owners (unlike the men Adams had known as a young man) no longer found those truths self-evident, either. This made Adams begin to think that the Constitution and the Union it codified contained a fatal flaw: the three-fifths compromise, whereby slave states gained extra representation in Congress based not on the population of citizens but of a proportion of slaves as well. This had seemed a reasonable compromise in 1787, for the sake of Union—that is, for the sake of defending natural-rights republicanism against the divide-and-rule strategies of its powerful enemies. But by the time of the 1820 Missouri Compromise, Adams judged that the terms of the constitutional union had reinforced anti-republican, oligarchic ideas and sentiments in the South, which then used its disproportionate influence in Congress to extend slavery to the territories—as it had not even wanted to do in the Northwest Ordinance territories back in 1787.

    Adams made a startling, one might almost say prophetic, argument, which Traub wisely quotes in full, lest those unfamiliar with the record not believe it. In November 1820, this staunchest friend of the Union confided to his diary that the Union would and should one day dissolve. It should dissolve because the dissolution would prompt a slave rebellion in the South and a civil war between the Northern and Southern regimes. The republican, Northern states would win the war and then abolish slavery. This was the only way slavery would ever be abolished in the United States, given the entrenchment of oligarchy in the South.

    When Adams recovered from his 1828 presidential defeat by Jackson and (so far uniquely among ex-presidents) returned to Washington as a Congressman in 1831,he dedicated the remainder of his life to attacking the plantation oligarchy—he called it the “slaveocracy”—of the South. By then, Southerners had begun to claim the right to nullify federal tariff laws, following the bad example of New England Federalists a generation earlier. On this, Adams supported President Jackson, who let it be known (quite believably, given his temperament) that he would deal harshly with any nullifiers who put their constitutional theory into practice. The eventual compromise on the tariff sacrificed Henry Clay’s “American System” of protective tariffs on manufactures, internal improvements, and the national bank, a price Adams judged too high.

    But Adams saw another opportunity for much bigger moral and political stakes than the American System. Precisely because he could not envision disunion as a prelude to slavery abolition followed by reunion, he could reach out to the new Abolitionist movement which began in the early 1830s. Without going to the extremes of William Lloyd Garrison, he could side with the Abolitionists on many of the major issues relevant to abolition: Texas annexation; the right to petition Congress on the slavery issue; the gag rule, which forbade discussion of slavery on the floor of the House; and the celebrated Amistad case, in which Adams represented slaves who had liberated themselves while on board a ship transporting them from Africa by killing the captain.

    Not only did Texas annexation invite the extension of slavery, it did so under unusual conditions. Most American territorial gains had come at the expense of Indian nations and tribes, many of which themselves owned slaves. But although Mexico had a corrupt and none-too-republican regime, it had abolished slavery in 1829; it was the ‘Texians,’ as they were called—the American settlers who had moved into the area and declared independence from Mexico in 1836—who had reintroduced slavery, which annexation by the United States would now perpetuate within the Union.

    Adams enjoyed better luck in his other anti-slavery campaigns. Traub gives a fine and sometimes funny account of the old man’s ironclad stubbornness, as he bedeviled his slave-state colleagues with every procedural trick in and out of the book to bring the slavery debate to the House floor. And of course in the Amistad case he successfully argued the natural-rights foundation of the Constitution in front of a Supreme Court dominated by Southern justices, including Roger Taney, who would later write the infamous majority opinion in the Dred Scott case. Throughout, he publicly defended the Union while anticipating its eventual temporary and salutary demise.

    By 1844, however, he decided to lay it on the line. At a meeting of black citizens in Pittsburgh, he said, “the day of your redemption… may come in peace or it may come in blood; but whether in peace or blood, LET IT COME.”

    It was one thing for someone like Garrison to say that. For a former president and sitting Congressman to say it was quite another. Challenged to confirm or deny his statement by a Southern Congressman, Adams didn’t even bother to stand up from his seat: “I say now, let it come. Though it cost the blood of millions of white men, let it come! Let justice be done though the heavens fall.” Perhaps for the first time, the slaveholders began to see what they might be up against.

    A few months later, back in his native state, Adams addressed a group of young Whigs: “Young men of Boston: burnish your armor, prepare for the conflict, and I say to you, in the language of Galgacus to the ancient Britons, Think of your forefathers! Think of your posterity.” As many schoolboys then learned, the Scottish chieftain Galgacus rallied the Caledonians to fight Rome in A. D. 83, saying of his fellow Scots, “To all of us slavery is a thing unknown,” and of the Romans, “To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the name empire. They make a desert and they call it peace.” Not only was John Quincy Adams’s father a man worthy of thought, but his son, Charles Francis, headed the Young Men’s Whig Club of Boston, and would later serve as the U. S. ambassador to Great Britain during the Civil War. Thinking of his father and his son, asking his fellow citizens to think of theirs, Adams reminded Massachusetts men that they had fought one empire and might soon fight another—not the republican empire of liberty founded by their forefathers but an oligarchic, slave-based empire now extending into the deserts of the Southwest.

    After Adams died in 1848, during the Mexican War he had argued against, one of the pallbearers at his state funeral, John C. Calhoun, could have no idea that the spirit of Adams would rise and the regime of the South would suffer the lasting burial, less than twenty years later. A member of the Committee of Arrangements charged with preparing the funeral was an obscure Illinois Congressman, Abraham Lincoln.

    The Spirit of the (Democratic) Laws

    by

    Dominique Schnapper: The Democratic Spirit of Law. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2016.

    Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 53, Number 6, November/December 2016. Republished with permission.

     

    Montesquieu directed his attention to the spirit of the laws, considering what he called “the principles of government” underlying legal codes. The principle of republican government is “virtue,” by which he meant love of the laws, love of country, and a preference of public to private interest. By democracy, as distinct from republicanism, Montesquieu’s close reader Tocqueville meant a social condition, equality—defined not as the absence of social classes or of gradations of wealth but as the absence of aristocracy, a class entitled by birth to rule. This social condition in turn engenders habits of mind and heart that incline citizens toward “self-interest rightly understood”—but also toward “virtuous materialism”—the pursuit of material pleasures in a small way. Without the spectacular excesses of aristocratic corruption, virtuous materialism enervates souls, leads them away from public life, from virtue in Montesquieu’s sense.

    Tocqueville famously considers the importance of civil society as a bulwark against the overbearing government of modern, centralized states and also as a counterweight to materialistic individualism. As a sociologist, Dominque Schnapper continues this legacy; while making use of the empirical studies produced by her colleagues, she eschews the sharp dichotomy of ‘facts’ and ‘values’ that so many of them have posited in their attempts to be scientific. While Tocqueville regarded democratic or egalitarian society (whether under republican or despotic government) as the bedrock of modern political life, Schnapper sees discontent with democracy. Some discontented democrats charge democracy with being insufficiently democratic (typically with respect to race, class, and gender) or with being too democratic, too vulgar and pedestrian or ‘bourgeois.’ More deeply, other critics point to tensions or contradictions generated by the democratic way of life itself—what she calls “democratic dynamics.” Like Tocqueville, who urged upon his fellow aristocrats an intention to guide and moderate democracy against its own excesses, Schnapper both describes and warns.

    She starts with Tocqueville’s observation that an egalitarian society will often derive what social cohesion it has from consent—”not on any outside structure religious or dynastic, but on the community of free and equal citizens” who join in “an abstract political society that by means of citizenship transcends the roots and specific loyalties of its members.” Having done so, those loyalties don’t go away, although they are attenuated. Over time, again as Tocqueville predicted, the modern state would take over many of the functions performed by churches and lords of the manor. The risk is that Homo democraticus begins as a citizen but ends as a “beneficiary”—a passive recipient of state-provided support. Moreover, as an ever-more-demanding client of the state, the democrat begins to lose not only civic relations with others but social relations, too. People feel as if they don’t need one another, anymore, and stop “shar[ing] common values and a common conception of the world.” This leads to the condition Schnapper calls “extreme” democracy; it is a long way from Montesquieu’s republican virtue. Such societies can no longer cohere at all, for long.

    Democrats thus succumb to “the temptation of the unlimited.” Whereas Adam Smith remarked that the desires of human beings are infinite and their means limited—hence the need for “political economy”—Schnapper extends this observation to all dimensions of political life. She distinguishes “autonomy”—the virtue of the deliberative citizen—from “independence”—radical self-sufficiency that finds no standard of conduct beyond the individual’s will. (I would have reversed these terms, probably because as an American I associate “independence” with our Declaration thereof, a document which firmly upholds standards of conduct and exemplifies deliberative citizenship. But let’s respect the author’s Frenchness.) “If the individual subscribes only to his own caprice and for his own short-term interest, he will overturn the objective trust that constitutes a basic given of all societal life.” The rule of law and political institutions—broadly defined not only as ruling structures but as a way of life—can only decline into confusion. At the same time dependence on the state increases. As this new way of life engrains itself in the minds and hearts of democrats, it redefines the family into an unstable grouping headed by merely consenting adults, which in turn generates single-parent households among those who choose no longer to consent to initial union.

    The democrat “is obliged to be himself, to assert his freedom by his personal action—a paradoxical imposition indeed,” and one reminiscent of Rousseau’s famous phrase, “forced to be free.” Without any transcendent standard to guide him, but with all around him equally self-assertive, the democrat finds himself mired in “the feeling of his inadequacy, emptiness and compulsion.”

    Fueling this radical egalitarianism or “independence,” modern science promises not only the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate but the conquest of human nature for—what? The conquest of human nature requires the conquest of natural right along with it. The abandonment of human nature as a moral standard yields moral and intellectual instability, as “the democratic individual wavers between the ancient dream of eternal life through science and the catastrophism that, while asserting science’s omnipotence, reverses the idea of nineteenth century triumphant science.” The “transhuman” demi-god fears perishing in some apocalypse, whether “nuclear” or climatological. And even while he lives, he is miserable, as technology and capitalism combine to accelerate life beyond the limits of the democrats’ social nature, which requires the slow growth of mutual trust for the sake establishing and maintaining civic and political association.

    Proceeding from liberty to license, the democrat’s critical habit begins to challenge not only prevailing norms but “the very idea of norms.” He goes from divine right to natural right to historical right to a radical historicism that questions the very existence of right. Even the fundamental sociobiological fact of reproduction begins to quail before the will of “the democratic individual,” who “chooses his or her partner freely”—that is, without reference to norms. Similarly, the act of eating means, as a well-know American fast-food chain so winningly puts it, having it your way, and with 24-hour drive-thru service at that. Cholesterol having accumulated, the democrat will die ‘with dignity,’ after which his self-designed funeral will be followed by remembrances designed by his survivors.

    The social act of transmitting moral and political standards from one generation to the next—the problem Abraham Lincoln considered in his Lyceum Address—cannot function adequately under the regime of extreme democracy, either. Here is where a life lived in France proves highly instructive, given the French-republican insistence, bordering on obsession, with forming citizens by means of education. Under liberal democracy, “The School transformed the members of a small community belonging to a limited world into citizens.” But, having been loaded also with the economic demand for vocational training, French schools have bent themselves out of shape, ill-fitted to combat new, rival communications technologies that challenge their monopoly on French culture and civisme. How will French culture survive if contradictory cultural norms can be ‘ordered up’ by students, like the hamburgers, they consume? When children can ‘outvote’ adults regarding their own education, has egalitarianism not gone a bit far? And how will political representation—that is, republicanism—survive in an extreme democracy, the logic of which is to govern itself by lot, as Aristotle had seen more than two millennia back? In rejecting deliberative intermediaries between his will and governmental decision, will the democrat enhance democracy or only empower the state, his chosen instrument for the delivery of the goods and services he demands? But contradictorily, if the state is a mere instrument, far from the mighty and authoritative being Hegel imagined, then the more that is demanded of it the less it will be obeyed.

    Equality in the public realm drives the quest for individual distinction into the private realm. Simultaneously, in asserting themselves, these individuals make demands on the public realm, on the state, which in turn invites the state to become “a negotiator or a manager, organizing collaboration between structures outside itself,” thereby blurring the “boundaries between public and private.” This only begins the process of erasing distinctions National boundaries, the sexes, public and private, high and low culture, moral and immoral, even living and inanimate, all mix together not in a grand historical synthesis but in an overheated social stew. Because “there is no real thought without distinctions” extreme democracy makes Tocqueville’s gentle remark that democracy “does not favor ‘slow and deep thought'” a gross understatement.

    Socially, this character of “indistinction” shows itself in Tocqueville’s well-known description of “individualism,” by which he meant the narrowing of one’s relationships to a small circle of relatives and friends. Its symbol today is the burka, which “demonstrates the rejection of participation in exchanges among all.” While making herself anonymous, so indistinct as to be invisible, the burka-wearer sets herself apart from all around her, isolated from all. This radical effect of equality contradicts equality, inasmuch as “the hidden woman can see others who cannot see her,” challenging the “reciprocity of social bonds” or, as one might say even more explicitly, social equality itself.

    The final reduction caused by egalitarianism’s indistinction amounts to nihilism. “A society is defined by a conception of the world that gives meaning, by their organization and hierarchy to the important facts of human experience: birth, filiation, marriage, alliance, death.” But a ‘post-ethnic,’ ‘post-rational,’ ‘post-mortal,’ and ‘post-human’ democracy “in which biological or inherited distinctions might be overcome,” a society in which “the reflexivity of all social norms” leads democrats to attempt to construct lives “solely by people’s will” will veer toward the absurd. In it, we read seriously proposals for giving political rights to the great apes—and indeed why stop with them?

    As a social scientist, Schnapper bravely seeks to rescue the discipline from such excesses. Whereas anthropology has made cultural relativism the sine qua non of research—studying such phenomena as ritual torture and cannibalism with calm rather than revulsion—anthropology does not entail absolute relativism, the denial that torture and cannibalism are morally wrong. Cultural relativism as a (so to speak) research technique is one thing, but its extension to the realm of moral judgment quite another. Schnapper recalls the question her father, Raymond Aron, posed to Claude Levi-Strauss: “Are universal judgments on moral behavior incompatible with cultural relativism?” Many have begun to treat them as if they are, and not only professional anthropologists. Against this trend, Schnapper recalls “the classical criticism of skepticism: there is a logical contradiction in the very idea of absolute relativism,” namely, that “in asserting a doctrine, the relativist implies that it is true, that therefore truth exists.” “Like all scientists, the ethnologist believes that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, that the progress of scientific knowledge is, in itself, human progress.” But obviously, “if relativism, no longer relative but absolute, were to dominate the intellectual and moral conception of democratic individuals, which would then be founded on the indistinction of intellectual orders, there would no longer exist any difference between justice and equality, the analysis of society and political involvement, facts observed (even if they are always philosophically developed by the researcher) and value judgments.” This would make it impermissible to do what everyone must do, inasmuch as “normativity is part of the human condition,” and “one cannot think and understand the world, one cannot wish to act on it, without value judgments.” It would be to lay down a prohibition against all prohibitions, permitting only the impermissible. The dynamics of democracy would exhaust democracy.

    Schapper undertakes to counter this radical skepticism or nihilism dialectically, with a critique of universalized criticism, a critique of critique. She begins by observing that any critique must not only compare a particular society to its own principles (invariably finding it, and sometimes them, wanting) but also to other real, particular societies. It is then hard to avoid noticing that “we lie in the safest societies of human history” and “also the freest, most tolerant, and most prosperous.” Complaints about the rise of super-rich ‘one percenters’ and the decline of the middle classes beg for a touch of anthropological dispassion, if not relativism: “The notion that upward mobility was stronger in the past is a myth.” Anxieties about status divergence have grown because our “ambitions have grown.” The working classes have declined as a percentage of the population not because they have dropped into a Marxian lumpenproletariat but because the many have risen into the middle classes, and especially the managerial classes; the social prophet who saw the future that worked wasn’t Marx, it was James Burnham. Statistical studies claiming to show that the numbers of the poor have increased get those numbers by defining poverty upward. But “the poor in 2012 are objectively less poor than those of 1970.”

    “Homo democraticus enjoys freedoms unknown to members of other societies,” even if “the possibility of exercising those freedoms remains unequally distributed.” The real crisis in democracy is a crisis of honor, not material well-being or personal freedom. Economic globalization places working-class men and women “in objective competition with poorly paid workers of poorer societies,” removing the dignity of having a ‘trade’ or a ‘craft.’ The democratic society which honors those who, as the saying goes, ‘reinvent themselves’ as needed or as desired humiliates the single mother that same society has also produced. Not only the prosperous but also the smarter and more ambition reap the benefits. Although Schnapper writes two years before the American presidential primary elections of 2016, it’s easy to see how the condition she describes leaves our political parties vulnerable not only to the appeal of a socialist like Bernie Sanders but also Donald Trump, who avers that the least intelligent among us are also “the most loyal ones.” Thank you, my liege, you are the only one who respects me.

    The humiliation of the outsider looking in also animates the enemy of Mr. Trump’s followers, the immigrant. Immigrants and especially their children, “socialized in a democratic society” assert “democratic claims for equal treatment.” “They are democracy’s children,” but “they have not absorbed [democracy’s] obligations and do not know the codes for living together.” Like all disappointed lovers, they turn to reviling the beloved, at times to the point of murderousness. Resentment resists mere social welfare, which differs from old charity precisely by lacking caritas. The state cannot match its godlike providence with godlike love, the love that turns humiliation into just and honorable humility. Welfare states can feed the bodies but not the souls of its dependents; it is scientific/impersonal, and so cannot heal wounded honor. There can be no Department of Plausible Respect—at least not in a government animated by the principles of social science. “By a tragic ruse of history, the society created to ensure equal dignity for all human beings and their emancipation could become the society of humiliation.”

    “Democracy is not the society of contempt; it is a society dominated by the gap between the democratic individual’s unlimited aspiration to be fully recognized” in his “individuality unlike any other, and the reality of inevitably asymmetrical social relations.” To save his honor, the democrat recurs to “superstitions and conspiracy theories.” Because we live in a radically democratized society, many feel they are ruled by the Wizard of Oz.

    Following her great forebears Tocqueville and Montesquieu, has Schnapper presented us in the end with yet another tale of historical inevitability, based on the dialectical march of the Absolute Spirit or of class warfare or racial conflict, but on an iron logic of democratization? Schnapper thinks not: “Democracies are not fated to be lost because collective destiny is never fated in advance.” Like the real Montesquieu and the real Tocqueville, she urges not resignation but deliberation. When democrats begin to think about their problems, they are no longer simply democratic, and (very much like her father) she makes thinking attractive.

     

    Repoliticizing Political Theory

    by

    Jeremy Waldron: Political Political Theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016.

    Originally published in Law and Liberty, November 17, 2016. Republished with permission.

     

    “Political political theory” is no misprint. That stuttering title well expresses the author’s intention. In the last generation, he observes, “political theory” has become synonymous with considering the moral foundations of political life; the writings of John Rawls and Robert Nozick have framed much of the discussion. ‘Concrete’ their thought is not. By the phrase “political political theory,” Jeremy Waldron signals the need to direct some philosophic attention to the actual operations of political life, particularly the forms, structures, institutions by which we rule ourselves, or are ruled by others. As he rightly remarks, until recently philosophers had thought institutions too important to be left to political scientists.

    A Brit who teaches at New York University Law School, Waldron brings a background in the school of analytical philosophy to his task. This school initially needed persuading that politics (rather than epistemology and ontology) called for serious philosophic attention at all. Whatever one may think of Rawls, he does seem to have accomplished that. Waldron takes the next step in bringing the analytical school around to a fuller consideration of politics, while exhibiting the habit of insisting on careful definitions he has learned in it. As we Americans say, he likes to kick the tires on everything, and in that he belongs not only in the analytical school but in the company of philosophers generally. Had tires been invented, Socrates would have taken a whack at them or, better, interrogated their owners about where they thought they were going on them.

    Waldron devotes the first as well as the last two chapters in arguing for this turn to “political political philosophy,” using the central chapters to show how to think after one has made the turn. He justifies his proposal fundamentally by arguing that political institutions frame not only the way we act in the public square but also the way we think about moral and political matters; if you think all men are created equal, you will not only design institutions that embody that principle but the principles you design will incline citizens toward that notion. Institutions which channel my actions in a way that requires me to take account of your opinions will make me more likely to take your opinions seriously. I may even begin to take them as intrinsically serious. And once I start taking your opinions seriously, I am well on the way to taking you seriously, too, reinforcing respect for the equality principle of the regime. The profound psychic and intellectual damage done to victims of long-established tyrannies teaches the same lesson: political regimes considered as formal structures matter humanly, and indeed philosophically. Waldron reminds us of Montesquieu’s warning, that “a lack of interest in forms, processes, and structures [typifies] a society en route to a despotic form of government.”

    Waldron criticizes that great friend of liberty, Isaiah Berlin, for neglecting institutions. Berlin worried so much about the malign effects of Enlightenment optimism on modern politics that he dismissed the rational design of political institutions as a vain and dangerous aspiration. He failed to consider adequately “the constitutional devices that might be used to uphold the… liberty that interested him.” By contrast, Hannah Arendt appreciated deliberate constitutional design as the “furniture that enables us to sit facing one another in politics, in just the right way”—the way of discussion, the way of politics itself, which Arendt, following Aristotle, understood as ruling and being ruled by turn. Mere assertion of “the Rights of Man” will exhaust itself without institutions that help men and women to secure those rights. By exercising their political liberties, citizens act to secure all the others.

    In this, Waldron wants to find a way for human beings to live together in our vast, modern states, in which extraordinarily diverse human groups pursue “competing and incommensurable values.” Waldron mis-describes this ambition to the American Founders, who grounded their thought in natural right. He may do so because he conceives of nature as mere “animality” and thus in-free. On this view (derived perhaps from David Hume’s ‘Is-Ought’ dichotomy, routinely accepted by philosophers in the analytical school), we need “political convention [to] hold ourselves to one another’s equals.” Waldron thus applauds “Arendt’s rejection of all theories of a natural basis for human equality,” which run “the risk of holding that our natural similarities and dissimilarities are the ones that matter, whether they turn out finally to support the notion of equality or not.” But that of course is not at all what the American Founders thought; it is to confuse George Washington and Thomas Jefferson with John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis.

    To regard natural rights—rights coincident with human nature as such, and therefore true so long as human beings survive—as the moral foundation of the civil rights which enable citizens to secure those natural rights, and equally to acknowledge, as the Founders did, that human nature is flawed that we often put each other in danger with our ambitions and appetites, is to retain Berlin’s skepticism regarding the wilder Enlightenment notions of human perfectibility while also retaining Arendt’s esteem for institutional forms. It is to reject notions of inevitable social and political progress, the ontology of that large basket of philosophic and political doctrines that turn the study of history into historicism, and the desire for progress into progressivism—ideologies that have resulted in ills ranging from the bureaucratic “soft despotism” described by Tocqueville to some very hard despotisms indeed.

    To his credit, Waldron shows little sympathy with the more optimistic doctrines of historical necessity, which have taken hammer blows from philosophers ranging from Nietzsche to Heidegger and those contemporary thinkers who attempt (rather optimistically) to domestic their teachings to the ways of modern democracy. This leaves his political thought eminently sane but unclear as to its ground: If genuinely political life is good, on what grounds can he judge it to be so? He wants to avoid taking a stand on this, probably because he knows that his fellow citizens disagree so sharply on precisely these questions of grounding. He wants them to see something in political life for them, as they so diversely and in many instances contradictorily conceive of themselves.

    Fundamentals aside, the bulk of the book consists of unfailingly astringent discussions of the most important structural features of modern democratic republics. These include constitutionalism (he rightly insists that constitutions not only limit government but empower it to act authoritatively, that is to say with moral as well as physical strength); separation of powers (which he over-optimistically supposes can be established effectively within the administrative agencies of the modern state, which notoriously combine executive, legislative, and judicial functions); bicameralism (he applauds it, so long as the two legislative houses ‘house’ different ways of representing the sovereign people, each capturing perspectives and opinions the other would overlook); “the principle of loyal opposition” (which provides the politically indispensable habit of not needing to take politics as a ‘zero-sum game,’ the impact of hammer upon nail); and representation (he rivals James Madison in his esteem for it). He considers lawmaking—which, in democratic republics, requires institutions that enjoy the widespread support of citizens with deliberative seriousness, consent of the governed, respect for the losers, formal procedures that minimize “mutual misunderstanding” among “people who have very little else in common,” and majority rule, because “eventually decisions have to be made,” and also because majority rule is the way to decide that preserves respect for the equality of each citizen).

    All of this leads to Waldron’s longest and most controversial chapter, a critique of judicial review, which he deems “inappropriate as a mode of final decision-making in a democratic society.” (He regards the prospect of constitutional amendment too dim to be viewed with much seriousness.) To condense radically his carefully-drawn argument, Waldron takes what amounts to the argument of Federalist #84 against a bill of rights and extends it to a critique of judicial review. In one of the most-quoted sentences in that eminently quotable book, Publius affirms “the Constitution is itself, in every rational sense and to every useful purpose, a BILL OF RIGHTS.” No appendages need apply, not only because the key civil rights (including the writ of habeas corpus and the ban on primogeniture) are already included in the body of the Constitution itself, but primarily because the Constitution so structures our political life as to vindicate liberty by forcing ambition (including tyrannical ambition) to counteract ambition, and more, to “refine and enlarge the public views.” If so, Waldron asks, why do we need judges to tell us what the (constitutional) law is? Why can’t we just work it out amongst ourselves? The American Progressives agreed, but unlike Waldron, they imagined that ‘History’ was on their side—which is what makes Waldron interesting, here. He has no ontology, no secularized version of Providence to make everything come out right.

    Given the fact that Publius and other framers of the Constitution did endorse judicial review, what does Waldron have? Once again condensing and perforce oversimplifying his intricate and stimulating argument, I draw attention to two points. First, he argues that “tyranny is tyranny” no matter how we get it, but the majority tyranny we fear from a thorough democratization of constitutional judgment is the least bad form; it features “at least one nontyrannical thing about the decision,” namely, that “it was not made in a way that tyrannically excluded certain people from participation as equals”—this, of course assuming that the decision only affects fellow citizens, and not (for example) a slave population or a colony. Waldron here overlooks Tocqueville’s description of the power majoritarian rule exerts on each individual; liberated from social and political pressure from above, men and women in democratic societies find themselves subject to pressure that surrounds them. ‘Horizontal’ pressure replaces ‘vertical,’ ultimately with more malign effects on liberty of minds and hearts.

    Additionally, Waldron explicitly assumes that disagreement in democratic societies “is not usually driven by selfish interests.” This assumption Publius most assuredly does not grant. Without succumbing to the ontological optimism of the Progressives, Waldron nonetheless does partake a bit of the Enlightenment optimism that his nemesis, Isaiah Berlin, so vigorously scorned. It is precisely the tendency of majorities—whether well-intentioned but conformist, as in Tocqueville’s America, or ill-intentioned as they often are as Publius understands them—to override reason with passion that forms the core of The Federalist‘s defense of judicial review.

    But let’s not end on a sour note. This book deserves careful study, first of all by philosophers, but equally by political scientists and all citizens who enjoy a good argument. And what real citizens, what real philosopher, doesn’t enjoy a good argument?