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    Thucydides on Politics

    by

    Geoffrey Hawthorn: Thucydides on Politics: Back to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

     

    The reader may safely ignore the sinking feeling he may get upon reading the subtitle. Although Hawthorn offers a few pages on contemporary international politics, he has written no tendentious, ‘lessons-from-Thucydides’ screed. Much more ambitiously, and fortified by careful study of the text, he sets out to be Thucydides’ Thucydides, tracing the historian’s narrative, probing, judging, guessing, arguing with other scholars and with Thucydides himself, always illuminating. Like his philosophic mentor, Bernard Williams, Hawthorn displays a resolutely English intelligence, venturing no grand theories but bringing out defensible arguments from sensible consideration of details mastered. The result is that rarity, a readable commentary on a classic book, teaching readers how better to think about politics and war in and among communities that seek, somehow, to rule themselves.

    What makes politics difficult is the number and complexity of the causes that operate in human life. Explicitly, Thucydides attributes the Pelopponesian War to one main geopolitical cause: Spartans’ fear of the rise of the Athenian empire, backed by its navy. He makes another cause visible, slightly beneath the surface: Two distinct regimes, one oligarchic, the other democratic, distrust one another, each concerned that the other might aid the partisans of its domestic regime rivals. Hawthorn proceeds with caution, however, as Thucydides’ book “has never been easy to read”; a “possession for all time,” its author calls it, but not easily owned by any reader, now or in antiquity.

    “Its subject though is clear. It is politics: men (all men) seeking power over others using it to pursue ends that are sometimes clear, sometimes not, never being sure what the outcomes will be.” Thucydides “allows one to see that politics is rarely admirable but always unavoidable, owes less to reason than we might suppose and allows no practical, moral or constitutional closure”; on the other hand, “at no point can it be said that character does not matter.” Contingencies dominate politics and war, and character matters very much indeed if there are no comforting ‘iron laws of History’ to put one’s trust in.

    In writing his history, Thucydides’ intention “was almost the opposite of that of his most prominent predecessor, Herodotus,” who seeks to preserve the memory of “the great and wondrous achievements displayed by the Greeks and the barbarians, and especially their reasons for fighting each other,” in the Persian War. In writing what he calls his “inquiry,” Thucydides aims not so much as remembrance as usefulness; the usefulness of his narrative derives from its truthfulness, to the historian’s careful measuring of “the distances between what was thought and said and what transpired.” What is more, “Logoi, the accounts people give, their analysis, reflection, calculation and debate, are [themselves] important erga, things done, political acts to be seen as such in the light of others.” Hobbes understood this, remarking that Thucydides’ way of writing “secretly instruct[s] the reader, and more effectually than can possibly be done by precept.” He meant that in presenting both the arguments and the actions, the speeches and the deeds, of the principal statesmen on both sides of the conflict, Thucydides impels his reader toward figuring out the truth of the matter for himself, and so to fortify himself, to take possession of this possession for all time. And given the permanence of human nature and the political life natural to human beings, what has happened in the Peloponnese in the fifth century B.C. “can be expected to happen again or some time in the future,” in “much the same ways,” as Thucydides himself remarks. His alert readers will have readied themselves for that likelihood. Histories too are both logoi and erga.

    Thucydides begins his account of the second Peloponnesian War before the first war, which began in 460. After two invasions of Greece by the Persian Empire, repelled by Greek victories at Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale, Athens formed the Delian League as what we would now call a deterrent against any subsequent Persian ambitions and a defense in case those ambitions re-ignited. The League became the foundation of their own empire, itself founded on the navy it built in defense against the Persians. The Spartans didn’t join the League, their long-term commitment to any alliance effectively prevented by the prospect of a rebellion of the helot class at home. When the Spartans first asked for, and then declined Athenian assistance in putting down such a revolt in the nearby polis at Messenia, the offended Athenians ended the alliance with Sparta; “an open difference first emerged,” Thucydides writes, between the two regimes. The first war lasted from 460 to 445, ending in a treaty which was supposed to last for thirty years. According to its terms, “Sparta was to retain its allies in the Peloponnese and Boeotia and also Megara, all of which were to be self-governing, so long as they did not move to what by this time was coming to be called ‘democracy.'”

    The second war began in 431. The worrisome naval dominance of Athens spurred the Spartans to action, but “there was no ultimate necessity to this,” inasmuch as the Athenian navy might not have been built up at all, absent the Persian threat of two generations earlier. Athens engaged in no provocations under the terms of the treaty. “The Spartans would not appear to have had anything, as he puts it, that they could no longer bear; anything material to fear.” Why, then, did it happen?

    Distinguishing between aitia (the unspoken but real reason for an action) and prophesis (the reason spoken publicly), Thucydides identifies the Spartans’ fear as the “truest” but least openly stated motive for fighting the second war. Other, publicly stated but subsidiary arguments were the arguments of their allies, especially the Corinthians, who disputed quarreled with Athens and one of its allies over influence in a couple of poleis in the 430s, disputes fueled by the Corinthians’ “pride or honor.” For their part, in the course of these quarrels events took the Athenians “further than they appear to have wanted to go,” as an intendedly deterrent show of naval force escalated. Thucydides and Hawthorn concur that the Athenians were at least “in the right by the terms of the thirty-ear peace” in acting to defend one of its allies against Sparta’s ally, the Corinthians, angered at “the repeated indifference” of Athens and its ally “to their standing and honor as a serious power,” and also somewhat ashamed at “having so openly to depend on Sparta,” a dependence belying their claim to be such a power. But “the true reasons” for the war lay in Sparta.

    Sparta’s king, Archidamos, a man “with a reputation for intelligence and moderation,” cautioned that Sparta lacked the naval resources to fight Athens successfully at this time. He called for patient war preparation and an effort at finding more allies. Knowing the character of the Spartan regime, a timocracy or rule of the honorable, he urged them against feeling shame at such a slow and cautious policy, appealing to the honor victory will bring, and observing that the victorious polis “will be the one trained in the hardest schools of necessity.” He lost the rhetorical battle in the assembly of timocrats to an ephor who called decisiveness the “true prudence,’ claiming that the gods were on the side of Sparta and its allies—a ‘prudentialism’ that actually played the Spartans’ love of honor. Nonetheless, in action as distinguished from argument, Sparta sent three separate delegations to Athens, offering peace. It was Pericles, who had established himself as de facto monarch over the Athenian democracy, who persuaded his countrymen to reject the peace offers, correctly observing that Sparta was ill-prepared for war. “A majority of Athenian citizens appear to have been pleased to face war,” as “they believed they had the edge.” We must conclude, then, that “the true reasons” for the war did not lie in Sparta, at least not exclusively. Thucydides and Hawthorn leave this point for the reader to figure out.

    Pericles placed his bet on Athenian sea power, demonstrating it by a couple of minor naval operations against poleis the Corinthians had seized from local rulers. It was in the first winter of the war that Pericles delivered his funeral oration praising soldiers fallen that summer in skirmishes, an oration directed at Athenian farmers forced into the city by the Spartan threat and at Athenians displeased at his reluctance to prosecute the war more vigorously. He needed to make both groups more ardent lovers of the Athenian polis, and he did so by an appeal to the kind of honor that fits the regime of democracy, consisting of pride in material strength; the glory of the fallen; the virtues of democracy itself, including law-abidingness and private freedom; courage in foreign policy; and finally by appealing to a sort of prudence congenial to democracy, Athens’ policy of making friends by conferring favors, not receiving them—a practice that weakens one’s friends. The refutation of Pericles came not in words, of which he was the master, but nature, in the form of a plague, which made death inglorious. Pericles nonetheless mounted two expeditions the following summer; “perhaps he simply wanted to get as many soldiers and sailors out of the city he could afford to,” or (again, perhaps) “he was putting on a show to distract discontent.” In any event, he deflected blame from himself, delivering still another speech appealing now to fear: Though self-governing within, Athens acts the tyrant with foreigners; like all tyrants, they may have been wrong to take power but would imperil themselves by letting it go. He ends with an invocation of the glory of Athens, but only as a coda to a grimmer message.

    This means that Pericles’ de facto monarchy still rested on the democracy. Pericles “was fighting for his political life.” And he did so successfully, thanks to his extraordinary strengths of character and intelligence in “direct[ing] and where necessary distract[ing] the citizens and control[ling] them.” “No other leader after Pericles managed to dominate the city for so long,” as “they were lesser men.”  The later, famously disastrous, expedition to Sicily, an unnecessary and separate war that was “a mistake to have thought of fighting.” Even this was not enough to bring defeat in the Peloponnesian War, which resulted by subsequent factional infighting. “The defeat was an avoidable disaster”; “Athens, it can be argued, could have won.”

    At the beginning of the war, and for years thereafter, neither side could devise a sound strategy for sustaining an attack on the other. Insofar as Pericles arrived at a strategy, it was defensive—to exhaust the invading Spartans on land while commanding the seas. He had no idea as to how Athens might actually defeat Sparta or Corinth. Accordingly, Thucydides presents the several events of the first eighteen years of the war as illustrations of “the circumstance and experience of war in general and its attendant political complications” rather than elements of any grand plan. For example, the 429 Spartan expedition against Plataea, Athens’ ally, “reveals much about the lack of strategic thinking, the problems of distance between the cities and their commanders in the field, and above all, the dangers of relying on allies whose natural first interest was their own.” The Athenian statesmen faced similar imponderables. For himself and his readers, Thucydides evidently commends pondering imponderableness.

    The speeches by Athenian statesmen Cleon and Diodotos on the question of whether to slaughter the Mytilenaeans for attempting to break their alliance with Athens and go over to the Spartans affords Thucydides the chance to examine political speech as action. The passions of fear, anger, and hope not only cause men to divide into political factions, they also “cause men to divide within themselves and slide into self-deception.” In their speeches, both statesmen “deliberat[e] on the politics of deliberation,” Cleon concluding that “the delights of oratory cancel common sense” and Diodotos maintaining that the “haste and high emotion” which saturate political debate, coupled with the audience’s assumption that every speaker advances his self-interest, making democratic Athens “the only city so clever that it is impossible to do good here openly and without deceit.” Getting down to reality, however, both men admit that the democracy does not and cannot rule foreign cities democratically; their dispute centers instead on how to conduct such rule under this circumstance. Cleon advocates slaughtering the Mytilenaeans in order to deter other cities from rebelling; Diodotos advocates sparing all but the ringleaders of the rebellion by pretending that most Mytilenaeans are not guilty and by fortifying the pro-Athenian Mytilene faction. “The difference between Cleon and Diodotos was merely that one was afraid of what might follow if Athens did not use extreme force, the other of what might follow if it did.” Sure enough, the Athenian assembly votes for Diodotos’ policy—but not for the prudent reason he had given. “This was war; ambitions were urgent, nerves were on edge and there was anger everywhere…. One can be struck less by the fact that speech was idle than by the fact that men in these circumstances gave time to it at all.” The war between the two alliances ignited civil wars—that is, regime wars—throughout Greece. In Thucydides’ words, “practically the whole Greek world was in turmoil as everywhere there were rival efforts by the leaders of the populace to bring in the Athenians and by the oligarchs to bring in the Spartans.” Atrocities ensued in this struggle for domination, as “reckless audacity,” “daring without logismos,” and the abandonment of moderation ruled men’s souls. Hawthorn supplements this analysis, writing that it was “the disruption of everyday relations” in wartime that made formerly political disputes so poisonous, converting political rivals into “enemies of an intensely personal kind.” “Civil strife inverts values and subverts the semantics of peace,” by which he means that such words as ‘sincerity’ and ‘moderation’ meet contemptuous dismissal, as men combine cynicism and indignation in a way not seen in normal circumstances. He rightly observes that Thucydides nonetheless does not “follow the mischievous sophists of his time” in denying truth altogether. Thucydides “grip on enduring truths of the human condition remains bleakly sure.”

    By winter 424-423 the Spartans were “in despair,” the Athenians optimistic in light of what Thucydides calls “their current run of good luck.” He concurs with the Athenian statesmen (including Pericles and Diodotus) who understood that hope is “as dangerous, indeed, as despair.” The gods do not compel human beings to acts of folly, nor do “chains of antecedent causes” (what thinkers latterly call ‘History’). For him Ananke or necessity inheres in being bound by what one believes themselves “to be in their own or someone else’s eyes, compelled by the real or perceived power of others, and impelled by their own.” The now-careless Athenians and the now-hesitant Spartans played out this form of necessity in their conflict over the polis at Megara, on the isthmus connecting Attica to the Peloponnese—a ‘geopolitical chokepoint,’ as we now say. Megara has broken with Athens in 446, but in 424 democrats seized rule there; this notwithstanding, the popular party feared the Athenians, who were hardly ‘democratic’ in dealing with their allies. Athenian and Spartan troops confronted one another, Thucydides himself a commander of the Athenians, Brasidas the Spartan general. Brasidas is one of the few Spartan commanders Thucydides respects; he “could be diplomatic” and “he also moved with speed”—neither trait characteristically Spartan. Brasidas also understood supply chains, targeting the polis at Amphipolos, a major Athenian source for the timber they used for the masts their navy depended upon. Upon receiving a desperate call for assistance from the Athenian general stationed nearby, Thucydides had no way to respond in time. “Necessity now descended on Thucydides,” who went into exile for the next two decades. “Had he not,” Hawthorn remarks, “we might not have the text we do.” Meanwhile, the prudent Brasidas proved a mild conqueror, giving other members of the Athenian empire/alliance good reason to consider switching sides. In effect, Brasidas enacted the kind of proposal Diodotos had proposed to the Athenians themselves. But these poleis underestimated Athenian power and resolve, “preferr[ing] to make their judgments on the basis of wishful thinking rather than prudent foresight,” as Thucydides puts it.

    This brings Hawthorn to consider the idea of ‘interest,’ for which no Greek word existed when Thucydides wrote. The Greeks thought rather in terms of a closely connected set of ideas: dunamis or physical power; arche or command; and cratos or rule. Taken together, they amount to aitia or ‘real interest,’ sometimes translated as ‘real reason’ or ‘real purpose,’ a translation Hawthorn rejects as a touch too rationalistic. “The power of Athens’ dominion or ’empire,’ the Athenians had explained in their speech at Sparta (to an audience that would surely have known), enabled them to allay their fears, maintain their honor and pursue their ‘self-interest’ in material gain.” Athenians and men generally must therefore understand where power was (in the authority of custom, law, office, sheer force, even “occasionally in the force of the better argument”), what to use it for (cementing unity at home and among allies, punishing, conquering, deterring, and how to deploy it (alone or in alliance with others). By the year 421, these complex considerations proved so entirely imponderable that both sides agreed to a truce. When it ended the following year, both Cleon and Brasidas were killed in battle, removing the two most effective pro-war statesmen from the principal contending poleis. Athens and Sparta settled on a peace treaty, but their allies, fearing hegemony over themselves would lock into place as a consequent, continued in their restiveness. “For most of the time, political entities in Greece were driven by the wish to rule themselves.” Such a necessity, and such an ‘interest,’ inheres not in the gods or in ‘History’ but in human nature.

    “Political anxiety” and “radical uncertainty” ensued. “All believed that whatever their interests were—and to most, beyond their immediate security, these were not clear—they could not be assured of realizing these without an alliance with at least one other state; and then could not be assured that the alliance they made would not excite opposition from yet another and therefore undermine the purpose they had in making it.” Under such circumstances, no clear strategic thinking came forth, anywhere. Emotions ruled in place of either principled or prudential reasoning. However, Thucydides “nowhere indicates that he himself thought of the emotions, feelings, pathe or pathemata as a class,” neither using the word nor even using an especially rich set of words indicating the variety of emotions. He usually restricts himself to fear, hope, and anger, and inclines to conceive of a ‘tight fit’ between what we would analyze as motive (including emotions), intention, and action: “pre-volitional, pre-reflective commitments to one or another state of affairs, commitments that we can discover in what we and others think of how we and they act,” often covered by the Greek word, eros. Hawthorn doubts that these “commitments” “are those that we might feel now or even immediately grasp,” and gives the example of hubris. To us it suggests pride, especially pride flouting divine or human authority. “For fifth-century Greeks, by contrast, hubris was a deliberative act, the direct and amoral practice of demeaning others for the sheer pleasure of doing so.”

    As seen, above all, in Alcibiades. “Driven by a restless desire for personal power,” “compulsively competitive and prone to jealousy,” supremely confident, “Alcibiades delights in not merely in defeating his rivals but in humiliating them.” The spirit of Alcibiades pervaded the Athenians generally in their dealings with the polis at Melos, a minor ally of Sparta. If the most celebrated speech in Thucydides remains Pericles’ funeral oration, a call for love of country, for taking ‘pride’ in being an Athenian in the praiseworthy sense we use the term today, the most infamous speech remains the Melian ‘dialogue’ of the year 416, goes far beyond the ‘foreign policy realism’ attributed to it by most scholars today. In fact no ‘realistic’ motive spurred the Athenians to take Melos; “it was not particularly rich” and “had little strategic significance.”  Rather, having lost on land to the Spartans at Mantinea, the Athenians wanted “to demonstrate their superiority in moving at sea” by acting and speaking in a manner “directly insulting to the Spartans.” When the Melians dared to reject the Athenians’ demand of unconditional, they were rewarded by the death of all their men and the enslavement of their women and children. Their ‘point’ (as we would say) was that Sparta could do nothing for them. “It was theater, the demonstration to others and oneself of one’s power to demean and an expression of pleasure in doing so.”

    All this noticed, “Not everything in politics in war is necessity, interest, or the thrill of doing down opponents.” There is also “restlessness, a diffuse and unfocused disposition to find something to act against.” Hawthorn regards the Athenians’ ill-fated second expedition against Sicily in 415 as an instance of this; “most of them did not know quite what they had in mind.” Alcibiades fomented such mindlessness, making “his self-flattery theirs.” (“And they were enchanted.”) In the wake of the triumph at Melos, “Athenians were affirming to themselves what Athens could once again be”; they were making Athens great again, to adapt a phrase from the American scene. But in the event they “had propelled themselves to a distant venture the purposes of which had been poorly defined and for which, almost whatever they intended, their own resources were inadequate, local support lacking, the opposition formidable and their leadership uncertain. Only clever tactics and luck could redeem it.” They didn’t, and Alcibiades skipped over to the Spartan side, having decided that Athens must not be allowed to sin even once against demagoguery. And he gave his new sponsors good advice: Defeat the Athenian strategy (it turns out that he could discern one) of encircling Sparta by establishing a military foothold a few miles north of Athens. Meanwhile, in Sicily the Athenians lost and their generals executed. “For the first time, writes Thucydides… the Athenians had in Syracuse come up against a city like their own: a rich and democratically inclined place whose internal divisions they could not exploit.” That, but mostly ill fortune, caused their defeat and humiliation. Moderate General Nicias and vigorous, daring General Demosthenes’ virtues had served Athens well for a decade, but in the new circumstances they failed. Narrowly considered, Alcibiades was right to get out of town. After all, if Fortune’s wheel spun again, “he might return to lead it.”

    The Athenian defeat clarified matters. The politics of the war became “simpler than before”:”The Athenians wanted to save themselves and what they could of their dominion, and the Peloponnesians and disaffected parties in Athens’ subject states wanted to end it.” Ever resilient, the Athenians gathered their wits and, for once, submitted to “good discipline in everything,” initially under a board of elders. It didn’t last, but the disaffection with democracy endured. Ever alert, Alcibiades saw that the Athenians might now be persuaded that they needed him, and let it be known that he would obligingly return if an oligarchy replaced the democracy.  The prominent general and politician Phrynicos prudently supposed that Alcibiades cared no more for oligarchy than for democracy, preferring himself to either, and that Athens’ restive allies didn’t care what the regime in Athens was, only that it oppressed them; in a rare, not to say unique event, Alcibiades found himself out-schemed and his return blocked. Nonetheless, in 411 the democracy collapsed, initially replaced by the oligarchic regime of “the 400” (which included Phrynicos), then by “the 5000,” a regime whose exact nature remains unclear (oligarchy? mixed regime?), but which did not include Phrynicos, who had been assassinated in the meantime. However they might be classified, the “new rulers in Athens believed that they faced a simple choice: Athens had either to get support and protection from Persia or to make a new peace and alliance with Sparta.”

    Before the new regime could do much more than consolidate, Athens sustained another defeat, worse than the one in Sicily: the loss of Euboea, the breadbasket of their empire, located perilously close to the Piraeus itself. But the Spartans as usual exercised caution and didn’t go for the knockout. Alcibiades, who had defected from Sparta to Persia in 412 was reinstated as a general by the new regime at Athens, helped to organize defenses, and the war continued, although Alcibiades took care not to return to the city itself until 407. Thucydides abruptly ends his history with the events of 411; he died in 404. By then the Peloponnesian forces were about to win the war, having finally achieved superiority over the Athenians at sea—”an ironic end” for the ships-proud regime. Still, and as always, “Thucydides allows one to see” that “things could have gone differently until the very last days.” Reality may constrain, but events march forward in no inevitable course.

    Hawthorn situates himself between the stance taken by Jacqueline de Romilly—that the statesmen Thucydides portrays acted according to rational strategies—and that of Hans-Peter Stahl, who claims that the Athenians and human beings generally act according to emotions defying rational understanding. He adopts instead Nietzsche’s view, that thought and action both “are guided by pre-rational commitments,” but that the combination of these three forces “explain what people make happen, which can sometimes be nothing.” Accordingly, Thucydides exhibits a preference for moderation in politics, a resolute search for the best evidence in uncovering what political men did and intended to do, not regardless of what they say but with the knowledge that what they say, however deceptive, itself constitutes a political fact.

    War may be, as Thucydides writes, a violent master, but not an all-powerful one. Tyche or fate does not rule absolutely; the Athenians, for example “were not predetermined to be defeated in Sicily.” “Although all events have causes, these are many and varied, and they and their effects often occur in unexpected conjunctions with others… and except when subject to the unassailable power of another, and sometimes even when they are, people are not bound to act in just one way.”

    For all of these reasons, “there can be no resolution” in political life “and, for reasons we may never know, Thucydides was saved from any temptation to arrive at one.” He may or may not have deliberately left his book unfinished, but it is right that he did.

     

     

     

    Solzhenitsyn’s Legacy

    by

    Daniel J. Mahoney: The Other Solzhenitsyn: Telling the Truth about a Misunderstood Writer and Thinker. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2014.

    Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 52, Number 2, March/April 2015.

     

    Wide-ranging in one sense, Daniel J. Mahoney also has a specialty. He appreciates under-appreciated and much-abused great men, persuading us that we have misunderstood them, and that we can learn more from them than their critics suppose. From the acute, sober intelligence of Raymond Aron—bane of the European Left—to the magnanimous statesmanship of Charles de Gaulle—object of derision and scorn from all sides of the political spectrum, French and foreign—and now the spiritual grandeur of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—reviled as authoritarian and bigoted—Mahoney seeks to vindicate his defendants not as an attorney would do, with facts artfully selected and arguments cleverly slanted, but as a scholar who insists that we pay attention to what thinkers and statesmen actually say. By following their own words unprejudiced by the tendentious charges against them, he guides his readers to understand these men as they understood themselves.

    Regarding Solzhenitsyn, Mahoney avails himself of a signal advantage over most English-speaking readers: He didn’t stop reading him with the last volume of The Gulag Archipelago. He calls attention to the equally impressive works of Solzhenitsyn’s later years: The Red Wheel, that vast and tragic historical novel-as-tapestry which shows how the Bolshevik Revolution was possible, and how it might have been avoided; Two Hundred Years Together, a massive, original, and intellectually courageous account of the tortured relationship between ethnic Russians and Russian Jews, and the ways in which Soviet Communism wounded them both; Apricot Jam and Other Stories, which stands as a refutation of critics who regard Solzhenitsyn as a literarily naïve successor of the literary giantism of the nineteenth century; and “The Russian Question” at the End of the Twentieth Century, his most careful statement of what he means by Russian nationality. Mahoney defends Solzhenitsyn by showing him whole.

    That’s a lot do, as Solzhenitsyn was indeed a writer of Dostoyevskian and Tolstoyan proportions, weaving historical research, philosophic reflection, and spiritual mediation into majestic literary narratives that (paradoxically) begin with the depiction of one of the ugliest tyrannies ever conceived. To discuss such a capacious body of work whole in a book of ordinary length requires an extraordinary combination of comprehensiveness—the ability to see that vast, deep Russian forest—along with the judicious selection of the telling example—the selection of right specimen trees.

    Mahoney divides his study into nine chapters, each bringing out a largely unnoticed dimension of Solzhenitsyn’s thought. The first addresses Solzhenitsyn’s patriotism, routinely misunderstood as nationalism. But Solzhenitsyn’s love of his country is Christian or agapic love, never an uncritical love of one’s own, let alone an excrescence of racial triumphalism. “Patriotism,” Solzhenitsyn writes, “means unqualified and unswerving love for the nation,” but this entails “frank assessment of its virtues and vices.” Or, as Mahoney puts it, Solzhenitsyn replies with an “intransigent double ‘No’ to those who sever freedom from love of country and to those who recognize nothing above the self-assertion of the nation,” and he did so consistently “during the last forty years of his life.” Solzhenitsyn “held Russia to the same demanding standards of ‘repentance and self-limitation’ to which he held all great nations and peoples.” A Ukrainian on his mother’s side, he hoped for “voluntary federation between these two peoples,” and disapproved of Western support for the Orange Revolution. But this did not prevent him from “lament[ing] the absence of true democracy and self-government in contemporary Russia.” “The preeminent political theme of Solzhenitsyn’s during the last twenty-five years of his life was precisely the need to patiently build institutions and habits of self-government from the bottom up.”

    This need to balance patience and resistance in the face of tyranny leads to the second dimension of Mahoney’s reply to Solzhenitsyn’s critics, who assume that Christianity must either be too passive/pacifistic to resist evil effectively in this world or that it must fight back with a spirit of fanaticism to match the excesses of its ideological enemies. A moral and political life animated by Christian love must acknowledge the profundity of anti-Christian ire or hatred. To oppose “radical evil” with “simple decency” will not do. “Radical evil…is not reducible to madness or stupidity. It has… ‘a dense nucleus or core’ which has the capacity to strike out in every direction. Given its power, nothing less than ‘an active struggle’ is necessary to combat it.” Like his political hero, the pre-revolutionary Russian prime minister Pyotr Stolypin, Solzhenitsyn “reject[s] the twin extremes of pietistic fatalism and unfounded confidence in the ability of human beings to remake human society without reliance on God’s justice.” Yes, suffering can be redemptive—as Solzhenitsyn so memorable showed in his novelistic portrayals of his own life in Stalin’s prisons—but “radical evil must be resisted for the sake of the integrity of the human soul.” This is no self-contradiction, Mahoney argues, but “a tension rooted in the structure of moral reality itself”: “Humility and magnanimity, redemptive suffering and ‘the struggle against evil’ are twin manifestations of the soul’s efforts to defend itself against the dehumanizing temptation to choose ‘survival at any price'”—exactly the temptation that modern, ideological tyranny sets before its victims. Vaclav Havel’s justly celebrated claims for “the power of the powerless” reflect the opportunities presented by the rather dispirited, post-Stalinist Marxist-Leninist regimes of 1970s Europe, but against the greater vigilance of Stalin (and before him, Lenin) one might need to choose martyrdom, confident that self-sacrifice under conditions of ‘totalitarian’ tyranny will never quite go unnoticed by those who witness it, and that for the sake of their spirits as well as you own you must resist the tyrant’s temptation.

    It would have been better not to have arried at this extreme. Although moral considerations come before considerations of political regimes, regimes matter, too. It is for the defense of human moral integrity that good regimes are founded. Could the old Russian monarchy have prevented the Bolshevik Revolution? The fault was not so much with the regime ‘in the abstract’ as with the generation of men who ran the government—beginning at the top, with Nicholas II, “a better man and better Christian than almost all his predecessors as Tsar,” but devoid of firmness and prudence, and backed desultorily by the “lethargic class of hereditary nobles” who behaved even worse than he did. The result was the folly of the Russo-Japanese War, in which the most industrially underdeveloped major European power took it upon itself to provoke the most industrially developed major Asian power. Having done unnecessary injury to the prestige of his regime in losing that war, Nicholas went on to display the opposite defect on the domestic front—”avoid[ing] bloodshed at all costs” in his feeble attempts to save his family by sacrificing those “subjects who remained loyal to the monarchical principle.” Nicholas stands as the example of the ineffectual Christian, the opposite of Stolypin, a decidedly effectual one up until his assassination in 1911.

    How then to become an effectual Christian, a living refutation of Machiavelli’s well-known jibes? Mahoney turns to the lessons taught in Solzhenitsyn’s novel The First Circle, the early version of which was published in 1968 but appeared in its full form in English only in 2009, a year after the novelist’s death. Under conditions of modern or “totalitarian” tyranny, the first step is to break the monologue imposed by the tyrant; as Jews and Christians know, even God does not engage in monologue only. Solzhenitsyn does this by the form of the novel itself: the “polyphonic” form, which combines third-person narrative or “objective” monologue with dialogue and first-person or “subjective” monologue. “Novelistic polyphony respects pluralism—the variety of perspectives and voices—while inviting readers to join in the search for the truth.” The novel thus uses a genre familiar to students of Platonic political philosophy to address the question of the regime, the principal topic of Plato’s dialogue of the same name. In response to the Soviet regime, the main character, Volodin, learns first how to withdraw spiritually from the regime while secretly keeping the truth about the regime alive—concealing accurate records of events. He sees that materialism cannot provide an adequate philosophic account of moral life—one free of contradiction because the moral end of materialism, pleasure, equally supports his desire for comfort and the tyrant Stalin’s desire to kill those who would prefer a continued life of comfort. But a being capable of identifying contradictions must have something about it more profound than the desire for pleasure. The good for such a being cannot be satisfied by material pleasure alone. It might be added that Orthodox Christianity enjoys roughly the same relation to Platonism or Neo-Platonism as Catholic Christianity enjoys toward Aristotelianism. Both invite souls to what Mahoney calls “a philosophical Christianity”—one that does not foreclose the life of the mind or openness to the Holy Spirit. Being Christian, this stance also alerts Nerzhin, the second hero of The First Circle, to the dangers of dialectical materialism, “the modern ideology of progress.” Progressivism “conflates moral and technical progress and turns a blind eye to the human capacity for evil”—always a real spiritual force in Christian thought, never a mere excess or deficiency.

    Mahoney’s fifth and central chapter probes this evil more carefully, discussing “Our Muzzled Freedom,” a chapter in The Gulag Archipelago which records Solzhenitsyn’s own encounter with the evil of modern tyranny in Stalin’s prison camp. “The tradition of political philosophy from Plato to Kant and Montesquieu could not adequately account for the strange novelty of totalitarianism,” Mahoney writes, agreeing with Hannah Arendt. The goal of the most characteristic feature of that regime was “to replace the distinction between fact and fiction and truth and falsehood” with an all-encompassing sur-reality designed by the tyrant. And even outside the camps, “Man is supposed to live in an imaginary eschatological time, i.e., the world of socialism, but the nature and needs of real human beings still persist”—human nature has not been overcome, after all. One isn’t supposed to notice that, but does anyway. “‘Our Muzzled Freedom’ is the closest we have to an exact description of the soul of man under ideological despotism”—a sort of “phenomenology” of the new tyranny. Whereas “social science tends to flatten and homogenize the world it theorizes, emphasizing commonalities between ‘systems’ where differences abound,” The Gulag Archipelago shows how this unique “system” affected individual souls. “This was no ordinary regime“—social or political science cannot quite capture it. “Not only did it abolish political life, but it warred on what was most humane and valuable in the Russian past”: “condemn[ing] personhood and the very possibility of moral and political responsibility and accountability”; “abolishing civic friendship and trust and pos[ing] a deadly threat to the integrity of the human soul by imposing a ubiquitous and constant fear on everyone, a mistrust reaching down even into family relations; inviting complicity with this “web of repression” and thus making betrayal routine; making corruption the new nobility and the all-encompassing lie (“The Lie,” Solzhenitsyn calls it) the new categorical imperative; and simultaneously celebrating cruelty against putative “class enemies” while instilling a “slave psychology” that would valorize actions and claims of the real tormentor, the tyrant himself. Crucially, “Solzhenitsyn emphasizes”—speaking from the authority granted him by his own experience—”that we are not totally determined by our political and economic circumstances even under the worst regime.” He bears witness to acts of self-sacrifice in the very prisons and prison camps that are structured on the assumption that human beings are made of nothing but matter. “Only those who have renounced self-preservation as the highest end of human existence can live well in light of the truth”: Both Athens and Jerusalem saw such men, and Solzhenitsyn shows that they existed even under a tyranny worse than any hitherto seen on earth.

    If Solzhenitsyn represents a man of “Jerusalem” who philosophizes, Raymond Aron represents a man of “Athens”—perhaps more precisely of Paris, symbol of what Mahoney calls “the moderate enlightenment” of Montesquieu and Tocqueville—who admires Jerusalem as seen in Solzhenitsyn. Mahoney devotes a chapter to Aron’s response to Solzhenitsyn, contrasting it with Aron’s response to that Parisian enthusiast of what might be described as decidedly immoderate enlightenment or secularism, Jean-Paul Sartre. Aron sided with Solzhenitsyn, not Sartre, on exactly those points contested by the regimes of liberty against the regimes of tyranny: that human nature exists and does not change; that that nature ought not to be obscured by, much less subordinated to ideologies; that Marxism-Leninism did not merely cloak the Politburo’s self-interest but rather underpinned its moral and intellectual outlook, preventing it from understanding the realities it wanted to manipulate; that Sartre’s justification of violence “as a liberating end in itself” played into such malignant fantasies; that Communism did not express the Russian character but perverted it; and finally, that philosophic theories positing historical determinism were mistaken and debasing. “With no other criterion than the truth of History or the pretenses of an ideological part, the militant, whether, Marxist, existentialist, or Christian progressive, had succumbed to nihilism.”  Aron and Solzhenitsyn both “affirmed the free will and moral responsibility of human beings.”

    Himself a secularized Jew, Aron never believed charges that Solzhenitsyn partook of the anti-Judaism of some on the Russian ‘Right.’ Solzhenitsyn’s two-volume study of Russian-Jewish relations, Two Hundred Years of Living Together, published in 2001, “carefully chronicles the deeds and misdeeds of Russians and Russian Jews alike, and pleads for mutual understanding and repentance on the part of both parties.” Respecting mutual understanding, both sides need—in the sense of moral necessity—to make distinctions between those who actually committed crimes and the group that included the criminals. Unlike the anti-Jewish ‘Right,’ Solzhenitsyn rejects the canard that Jews conspired “to bring Marxism to Russia.” Jews “were in no way” the “instigators or architects” of either the Menshevik or the Bolshevik revolutions. Russians “were the authors of this shipwreck,” Solzhenitsyn writes. What is more, such Jewish Bolsheviks as Trotsky “had limitless contempt for the traditions and faith of their fathers.” He observes that the notion of a “small Jewish minority” driving a nation into Bolshevism defies not only the facts but elementary common sense. But (and here is where Solzhenitsyn does criticize some Russian Jews) the younger generation of Russian Jews did play a role in the tyranny that followed a role disproportionate to their numbers. “Nothing is served by ignoring this fact,” Mahoney observes, and further, to do so would be to override the need for repentance on both sides—repentance not only for crimes committed, which were atrocious enough, but also repentance for scorning the wisdom and goodness to be found in abundance in both Orthodox Judaism and Orthodox Christianity. Solzhenitsyn calls for repentance not only by the descendants of Jews who lent a bloody hand to Stalinist repression but by the Russian Orthodox ‘Whites’ who rejected Jewish support in the struggle against Bolshevism; “the anti-Semitic violence tolerate or carried out by White forces during the Russian Civil War fatally undermined the ability of men such as Churchill to rally international support for the White cause” while “driv[ing] non-communist Jews into the arms of the Bolsheviks.” And finally there was Stalin—in the wake of Hitler’s “War against the Jews,” no less—who hatched the pogroms of the early 1950s. No wonder that so many Russian Jews participated in the dissident movement that helped to undermine the Soviet empire in its last years.

    In telling the story of these parallel lives of Russian Gentiles and Russian Jews, Solzhenitsyn distinguishes two groups of people in order to help them understand one another, and to acknowledge the moral principles they share. He gives this procedure of moral reasoning a literary form in Apricot Jam and Other Stories, a late work of what he called “binary tales.” There, he tells two-part stories whose moral content consists of the problem of moral choice itself “in the most difficult of circumstances”—that is, when one must choose between one way of life and another. These are among Solzhenitsyn’s most hopeful writings because in them he takes care to show that even after one has made the wrong choice (as an individual or as a nation) there is still chance for repentance, for moral progress and return to the right way. Solzhenitsyn “never lost hope in his beloved Russia or in the capacity of human beings to renew the human adventure in accord with realities of the spirit.”

    In his final chapter Mahoney returns to the topic of his first chapter, addressing the much-disputed question of Solzhenitsyn’s views of post-Communist Russia, the Russia of Yeltsin and then of Putin. Solzhenitsyn deplored Western (especially American) inability to appreciate Russia’s legitimate interest in the condition of ethnic Russians—the descendants of the Soviet Union’s planned imperial diaspora into the various captive nations—and also its understandable geopolitical concerns about NATO advances into its “near abroad.” However, “he has never been a pan-Slavist” or imperialist himself. While applauding Vladimir Putin’s attempts to strengthen Russian self-respect and his campaign against Yeltsin-era corruption (he didn’t live long enough to witness the now-obvious corruption of Putin’s own cronies), Solzhenitsyn also objected to the tendency to conflate Russia with the Soviet Union, to cater to the political equivalent of nostalgie de la boue. Solzhenitsyn, too, wanted Russian self-respect, but with repentance as its precondition; “a proud patriot,” he found the soul of patriotism in moral responsibility and self-government. Far from endorsing some form of political ‘authoritarianism,’ Solzhenitsyn faulted the Russia of the early 2000s as insufficiently democratic, but insufficiently democratic precisely because its rulers had not yet restored the nation via the path of repentance. He was, it seems, too optimistic about Putin’s sincerity, but as for himself, he never wavered in his admiration for what he called the “highly effective self-governance systems in Switzerland and New England, both of which I saw first-hand.” Self-government “could only really be developed from the bottom up,” and Russian history reminded him of the institutional means of doing so: the provincial councils seen in the nineteenth century. He vigorously opposed tendencies to inhibit vigorous political competition in Russia. Above all as he argued in his 1998 book, Russia in Collapse, for the regime of democracy to prevail anywhere “there has to be a demos, a people, a nation.” But the moral and civic bonds that constitute a people were precisely what the Communists had deliberately severed in their attempts to construct “Soviet Man.” Binding up this nation’s wounds would require statesmanship of Lincolnesque dimensions. It would require a recovery of the very Orthodox Church that the Soviets had decimated and corrupted, a church that served God and neighbor, not the criminal ambitions of tyrants or oligarchs.

    Exactly the book needed on Solzhenitsyn at this moment, The Other Solzhenitsyn will also last, providing as it does an illuminating overview and introduction to his thought first of all by clearing away the formidable load of rubbish that blocks our path to that thought.

     

    ‘Paleoconservativism’ and the American Founding

    by

    Justin B. Litke: Twilight of the Republic: Empire and Exceptionalism in the American Political Tradition. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013.

     

    This lively scholarly polemic takes what is often called a ‘paleoconservative’ view of American political history. American conservatism generally opposes progressivism (latterly called liberalism) in affirming what Russell Kirk called the permanent things—first of all the Biblical God, but also the traditional customs following from God’s commandments and “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” inherent in His creation. Paleoconservatives typically differ from other conservatives in denying universal natural rights, damning these as dangerous ‘abstractions’ tending toward all things violent and French. Professor Litke follows this line, celebrating John Winthrop’s Puritan founding at Massachusetts Bay, downplaying the Founders’ claim that all men are created equal, and above all by charging Abraham Lincoln with a sort of political heresy in emphasizing precisely that ‘abstract’ claim—and thereby derailing the Winthropian-Christian American tradition while preparing for the universalist/imperialist claims of Albert Beveridge’s Progressivism.

    He begins with a factual error, and an important one: “From colonial times up to the turn of the twentieth century, the country’s particular way of acting both domestically and in foreign affairs was fairly circumscribed and inwardly focused.” This is simply and obviously wrong. The period 1791-1890 saw American imperialism at its apex, as Americans moved from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, pushing Amerindian nations and tribes westward at first, then into small settlements where many of them remain to this day, effectively protectorates of their conquerors. It is true that Americans undertook overseas expansion after 1890, but Hawaii and Puerto Rico scarcely compare to the lands acquired before that, and Americans proceeded with their planned relinquishment of Cuba and the Philippines as soon as they had some assurance that no other world power would take them.

    Nonetheless, Litke accurately observes that Progressivism marks a sharp turn away from the principles of the Founders. What happened?

    He begins with “the problem of American exceptionalism,” a phrase Walter Sombart coined in 1906 as he wondered why an advanced capitalist country seemed immune from socialism. Today, Litke remarks, the phrase has two meanings. In its comparative-politics sense, it refers to Sombart’s question. The United States deviates from the pattern of economic, social, and political development expected by Marx, who posits historical ‘stages’ consisting of feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and finally communism, all determined by struggles between economic classes. Since Marxism itself has taken a beating in the past thirty years or so, this meaning of exceptionalism no longer prevails. Rather, exceptionalism now refers to uniqueness. Unlike other ‘advanced’ countries, Americans remain in large measure a religious people, even if their religiosity has declined in the past 100 years. Following from this religiosity, Americans describe themselves as exceptional in three ways, considering themselves as exemplary in proving it possible to follow the Christian way of life in modernity, in maintaining political and social institutions that differ from those widely established elsewhere, and in undertaking a mission to civilize, educate, “or otherwise dominate the world politically or economically.”

    Preliminary to addressing this problem, Litke denies that philosophy understood as the ascent from the cave of custom and opinion is possible. In this he follows such non-Leftist historicist thinkers as Eric Voegelin, Willmoore Kendall, and George Carey, who argue that political philosophy “is a tardy development in the history of a people,” a thing produced out of the customs and opinions of the communities in which it arises. “A purely philosophical method is limited to analysis of particular moments in the life of a people—and late moments at that.” Ideas aren’t ideas in the Platonic or any other sense philosophers defined prior to the very late eighteenth century; rather, they are expressions of “symbols” and “myths” rather than realities above or behind symbols and myths. The claim that philosophizing amounts to a moment assumes what it attempts to prove, namely, that philosophic thought is time-bound or historical. Accordingly, in Litke’s phrase, the judgments of philosophers are really only “judgments of history.” Paleoconservative thought thus combines classical conventionalism with historicist theory, in contradiction to progressivist thought, which combines historicist theory with a vision of a perfected ‘end of history.’ But it shares with the historicism of the Left an egalitarian appeal of its own: Litke seeks “the real political theory of a people,” instead of “merely one person’s political thought,” for “language symbols” “that are not dead letters but sprang forth as active principles of the life of the community.” Not for him the philosophic claim that a thinker can escape the ‘cave.’ The claim also has political consequences; In it one sees the basis of paleoconservative’s hostility to Abraham Lincoln, who understood himself as defending an idea or proposition—that all men are created equal—and not a tradition.

    Litke begins with John Winthrop, the governor of the English colony at Massachusetts Bay and often called “the first American exceptionalist” because he calls for the founding of a “city on a hill”—that is, a political community that would stand as an example to the other, erring, communities in the world, somewhat as the Jewish republic stood to the regimes of the Gentiles. “Winthrop’s writings may stand in for the truth of the way of life”—the regime—”at Massachusetts Bay.” That way of life comported with Winthrop’s aristocratic status, his life in the legal profession, and of course his Puritan Christianity; the colony was no democracy, as the franchise and officeholding were restricted the those approved by the church. Itself a product of British imperialism, it furthered that imperial project in its dealings with Amerindians, claiming the hunting lands of local tribes under the principle of vacuum domicilium and fighting a war against the Pequots, whom they scattered or sent to slavery. Litke never quite gets round to mentioning those last couple of points, emphasizing the intended Christian exemplariness of Winthrop’s intention. Indeed so: Winthrop would never have written the letters George Washington later sent to the several religious congregations in the United States, including Catholics and Jews.

    Winthrop rather intended, first, to carry the Gospel to the New World as a “bulwark against the kingdom of Antichrist which the Jesuits labor to rear up in those parts” and as a corrective to the Church of England, which, as Litke remarks, “seemed to be edging toward rapprochement with Catholicism.” “The notion that America is a ‘redeemer nation’ need not mean that either the Massachusetts Bay Colony or the United States of America becomes an imperial power.” Indeed not, but they both were, as Litke admits, following Winthrop: “The land in New England lies uncultivated while England’s land groans under the pressure to feed its inhabitants. It would only be right to move westward and improve New England’s unenclosed—and, therefore, free and unclaimed—land; doing so is the act of a good steward of God’s gifts in Creation.” By contrast, the slothful, insufficiently devout Virginians suffered from failing to have established what Winthrop called “a right form of government.” The right form of government must have the right spirit, the spirit of agapic love. Although “it is difficult to imagine even a single fragment of society seeking to live today according to his vision,” it “occupied a prominent place in the American imagination in the early days of the Constitution and during Tocqueville’s time” as “the idea of a Christian political order in America.” As in the early Christian Church, mercy and love were to serve as the bonds of this community, thanks to the grace of God. By creating nature, God made distinctions not only among species but within them; human beings naturally divide into an order of rank. But “His spirit of love,” the “bond of perfection,” brings unity whereby men of diverse and unequal gifts form part of God’s overall plan of salvation.

    It is easy to see why this didn’t work, precisely by consulting the Bible. As the epistles of Paul the Apostle show, the early Church had its share of heretics and backsliders. So did Massachusetts Bay, quite apart from those worthless Virginians to the south. The Bible teaches that the Kingdom of God will come only after Jesus’ return and His creation of a new Heaven and a new Earth. Winthrop’s founding may not be utopian (Litke insists it was not), but it was fleeting, and, according to the Bible Winthrop and his associates consulted, it had to be. “We must knit together in this work as one man,” Winthrop urged, but men never do that for long. Winthrop soberly warned against the real danger of such decline, the loss of this Christian example. He depends upon God’s providence to prevent such a calamity; “his theory does not claim to sway history but only to read it and, thus, provide the opportunity to act in accord with it.” The world watches the Puritans, to see if they succeed or fail, he thought. But of course if the world is ‘the world’ in the pejorative sense, then would it not want the Puritans to fail? And would it have heeded their example, had they succeeded? In any event, Litke’s principal claim, that “Puritans were exemplary, not imperial exceptionalists” can only be true if one ignores both their status as a colony and their practice of expansion at the expense of Amerindian hunting grounds.

    Although Litke wants to claim that the conception of the American regime the Framers held “was continuous with the Puritans’ in many ways,” he makes it clear that it wasn’t, even in the decades before independence. The covenantal view of “the political order” remained, “taken for granted” by all Americans; yet, it was no longer “a literal covenant with God.” As he observes, representation no longer means a monarch but a republican assembly, and this means a compact or contract with fellow-citizens—under the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, to be sure, but not with God. As Litke describes the colonial constitutions, prior to the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the 1787 Constitution, “politics is, under these documents, not considered a grant of the king but an activity of the people themselves for the people’s own benefit.” But this is why they begin to think of political life as contractual, not covenantal.

    At any rate, Litke asserts, that the Declaration declares not a revolution but independence. A revolution is a regime change; that being the case, he contends, the Declaration didn’t change the American regime or regimes, which consisted of an alliance of thirteen free and independent states, united only in declaring that independence and in fighting the war under the direction of a Congress consisting of men representing the peoples of those states. This overlooks the Declaration’s clear claim that Americans constitute “a people”—one, not thirteen. It also overlooks the Declaration’s announcement that Americans are changing their government, as indeed they must be, if they no longer recognize the British imperial monarchy but intend to found a federation of republican states. In the name of what did they declare and fight for independence? He claims that although the self-evident truths of equal unalienable rights seem to amount to “universalistic claims” the introductory phrase “We hold these truths…” belies their universality. Litke has confused himself. If I say “I hold that God exists” I may well understand that you don’t, but that doesn’t mean that I am not making a universalistic claim, only that I am not assuming that everyone else concurs with it.

    To his credit, Litke sees that there is no “theory of history” in the Declaration. Providence, yes; ‘history,’ no, not in the historicist sense. The Declaration begins “When in the course of events,” not “When in history” because the Founders are natural-rights men, not historicists. “There is no air of inevitability or notion that this move [i.e., declaring independence]is the last, first, or middle term of any inexorable historical syllogism.” In this sense, the Declaration is not universalistic at all. Oddly, Litke identifies only two places in the Declaration that “speak of God,” although there are at least three, implicitly four. God is creator, lawgiver, judge. He is also a providential God, a Person who cares for His creation. True, “Congress acts on the authority of the people it represents,” but the people’s authority derives from their Creator-endowed, self-evident, unalienable rights, shared by all human beings at all times.

    This falsifies Litke’s claim that under the Declaration the American people only acted as one people, whereas under the Constitution they are to be one people. The American people declared their union both in the Declaration and before it. What they did in ratifying the Constitution was to re-allocate the powers that belonged to themselves by right, subtracting from the powers they had allocated to the several states and adding to those wielded by the federal government. They did so in order to better secure their unalienable or natural rights, which, the ‘federalists’ saw, were insufficiently protected under the Articles of Confederation.

    “The important documents of the American founding have little to say about the place of the American people in history, the universality of their task or aspiration, or the role that God is to play in their polity.” But if ‘history’ means the course of events, the Declaration and other founding documents have plenty to say about Americans’ place in it; only if ‘history’ means a philosophic concept, the unfolding of an ‘Absolute Spirit’ or some other compelling force, do Americans say little—indeed, precisely nothing—about it, inasmuch as they didn’t think in terms of historical laws but rather in terms of the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. Those laws are universal laws, ruling all human beings as such. As for Providence, the Founders are less presumptuous than the Puritans, relying on God’s blessing but not expecting it. “Transcendence and universality have not been abandoned, but they have been separated out of the political sphere, except at it periphery.” Not quite: they have been separated out of the political sphere as its framework, its standard, and (they hope) its guardian.

    As with the Puritans, Litke also claims that the Founders were not imperialists. This is even more obviously wrong than his assertion about the Puritans. Jefferson speaks explicitly about the United States as “an empire of liberty,” and a people’s elected representatives didn’t enact the Northwest Ordinance or the Louisiana Purchase in the absence of  imperial ambition. That their imperial ambition differed from European imperial ambitions by proclaiming an empire of liberty, in which new territories would eventually enter the Union as equal partners with the original states and not as perpetual colonies, demonstrates that the Revolutionary War really was revolutionary, a genuine regime change.

    It is on this dubious foundation that Litke attacks Lincoln’s “derailment of the tradition”—a tradition that even by his own account does not exist in any but the most general sense, on the level of paleoconservative ‘symbols.’ Lincoln (correctly) identifies the juridical origin of the American Union in the 1774 Articles of Association, but Litke is having none of that, mistakenly claiming that Lincoln presents the several forms of the Union—the 1774 Articles, the Declaration, the Articles of Confederation, the U. S. Constitution—as stages in American political development. “These documents do not enact, reenact, or institute the same political order at their respective moments,” Litke rightly observes, but neither Lincoln nor anyone else ever claimed that they do. Nor does Lincoln make the key historicist move, which is to claim that these ‘moments’ form part of an inevitable unfolding of a ‘historical spirit’ immanent in a process or progression. “If ‘the Union’ came before the Constitution, where did the union come from?” Not “from the Articles of Association of 1774,” as Litke says Lincoln imagined, but from the peoples of the colonies. Can the peoples of former American colonies and territories, now states, dissolve the political Union that organizes them as one people? Of course, and Lincoln never denies it. But the various segments of the American people would need to consent to disunion, even as they consented to Union. In 1774 the newly united people of Great Britain’s North American colonies had not declared their independence; they remained subjects of a monarch in the British Empire, as Litke says. “They wanted continued union with the Crown.” But they were nonetheless united in a new “association” under that Crown. That association asserts rights against the regime of which it is still a part. A people might or might not be sovereign.

    “Lincoln is wrong about the United States. The aim of the United States was not at all operatively formulated as a reified proposition until Lincoln did it” in the Gettysburg Address. This is nonsense. The Declaration of Independence enunciates self-evident truths, stated in ‘abstract’ or propositional terms as part of a logical syllogism, with major premises, minor premises, and conclusions drawn from them. If that doesn’t amount to a “reified proposition” (as in a geometric proof or a syllogism), what does? Captive to paleoconservative symbolology, Litke can only look at the “universal or transcendent significance” of the principles or propositions of that syllogism as “a quality previously reserved to the religious sphere in America,” now “infused into the political sphere,” an impetus for a “kind of pseudoreligious mission to be given to government.” “Lincoln is one of the chief sources of what will become the idea of imperial American exceptionalism.” But quite obviously ideas need have no religious or pseudo-religious content; neither Euclid nor Aristotle has recourse to divine revelation. They reason from propositions, as did the Founders and Lincoln, although as political men the Founders and Lincoln also needed to reason practically or prudentially, forming rational policy based on the circumstances before them.

    Litke’s final topic, Senator Albert J. Beveridge’s race-theory variant of Progressivism, accurately summarizes Beveridge’s ambition to see an American empire extending not only to the Philippines but to Latin America. Litke ignores the novelty of Progressivism, pretending that “expansion and aggrandizement of American political power is very different from the American political tradition”; what is novel (except among Southern secessionists and some of the older Manifest-Destiny Democrats like Senator Stephen A. Douglas) is the racial and historicist foundation of this new imperialism. Litke further confuses matters by claiming that Beveridge’s position was more or less identical to that of Theodore Roosevelt, who was no racist and had no interest in permanent annexation of foreign territories as colonies. He wrongly exonerates Woodrow Wilson of adherence to ‘race theory,’ but again attempts to add Wilson’s own quite different historicist ‘liberal internationalism’ to more or less the same category as ideas of Lincoln, Beveridge, and Roosevelt: namely, “idealism.” But Lincoln had nothing to do with the historicism propounded by the German Idealists, and until approximately 1911 (that is, after his presidency) Roosevelt had nothing much to do with it, either. [1] “Lincoln made it possible to conceive of America as something transcendent,” but Lincoln claimed no such thing; rather, Lincoln looked to transcendent or abstract principles or self-evident truths (as the Founders had done), truths which, owing to their very transcendence or abstraction, could never be embodied by any political regime, American or other. The embodiment of ideas as ‘ideals’ forms the core of historicism, which Beveridge and Wilson endorsed (albeit in very different ways) and which Lincoln never, and Roosevelt only sometimes, endorsed.

    Alluding to Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, Litke writes, “The wounds of the Civil War required bandages not previously known because the war presented a problem—a real disunion—that we had not encountered before.” On the contrary, America’s first civil war, the Revolutionary War, saw the appropriation of the property of American Tories and their departure for Canada and elsewhere in the British Empire. What is more, the real disunion which culminated in both wars arose from a fundamental difference: a dispute over what regime would rule the United States. Monarchy or republic? Oligarchy (as in the slaveholding planters’ South and the Senate they controlled for decades) or republic? Binding up the nation’s wounds was a necessary task at the end of both civil wars. In both cases, new ruling institutions were required in order to buttress the new regime: first the Articles of Confederation and then the Constitution in the founding period, then the Civil War amendments to the Constitution and the attempt to enforce the Constitution’s republican guarantee clause in Reconstruction. (Litke is technically correct in saying that “in Lincoln’s presidency there was no new American political order put in place in an official document,” but only because Lincoln was assassinated before the amendments and Reconstruction took effect.)

    “The central question is twofold: first, whether… habits, customs, and institutions [of self-government] may be imposed by a foreign power and, second, whether it is the particular responsibility of the United States to do so. The answer to these questions was formerly settled in an operative no,” an answer supposedly reversed by Beveridge, Roosevelt, and Lincoln, supposedly following Lincoln. The real answer has always been an “operative” and principles “yes,” from the Washington Administration’s efforts to change the regimes of the Five Civilized Tribes in the American South to today. Regime change may indeed be imposed by a victorious power in a just war. The Civil War, World Wars I and II, and several other wars in the course of events involving the United States were just wars undertaken against bad regimes, in many instances regimes which had attacked the United States.

    ‘Paleoconservative’ historicism provides a sober corrective of ‘progressive’ historicism.  Paradoxically, both get ‘history’ wrong. In a conversation with a ‘paleocon’ professor who used a collection of writings for a college reader on “The American Tradition,” I asked, “Who gets to choose what goes into the collection?” He smiled without answering, and understandably so, since he was the editor of the volume in question. Someone always must make the ruling choice, by some set of criteria that amount to ideas, whether they are admitted to be ideas or not. “Permanent things,” indeed.

     

    Note

    1. For a comparison of Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Wilson, see Will Morrisey: The Dilemma of Progressivism: How Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson Reshaped the American Regime of Self-Government. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.