Originally published by Constituting America. May 24, 2013.

 

Lincoln came to the Gettysburg field of the dead and spoke of “a new birth of freedom.” What did he mean by it?

A lot of men killed a lot of other men at Gettysburg during those three days in July of 1863. But that happened more than once in the Civil War: at Antietam, in the Wilderness, at Cold Harbor, and many other places. People remember those places and those battles, too, but not the way the remember Gettysburg.

Maybe because this was the battle? The one in which the Confederate States of American lost not just a battle but began to lose the war? But what did they lose in this battle and that war, and why did they lost it?

They lost militarily, and also lost the way of life they were defending because General Lee miscalculated. He didn’t get his arithmetic right. As we’d put it today, in his heart he wanted to stop ‘playing defense’ and ‘go on offense.’ But he didn’t have the numbers of troops he needed to go on offense. His heart overbore his head. Cemetery Ridge became the graveyard of the Southern regime, the Southern way of life.

General Sherman did his arithmetic right later on, when he made Georgia howl, breaking the Southern regime by destroying the plantations that slaveholders ruled. Before the fighting started, Sherman had tried to tell the Confederates that they had their arithmetic wrong; In Louisiana in 1860 he told Southerners that war is not as glorious as you think; it’s not an aristocratic idyll of knights in shining armor. A year before the presidential election of 1860, speaking in Cincinnati, Lincoln had said that, too: the Northern states have the Sothern states outnumbered, and Northerners will fight no less valiantly than Southerners will do, if it comes to fighting.

Southerners didn’t believe it. At Gettysburg they began to believe Yankee arithmetic. Yankee arithmetic turned out to be arithmetic, simply.

Great military commanders show us something about ourselves, as they make their calculations. they show us that to win aa war you must do a uniquely human thing: counting. You must exhibit your humanity while simultaneously treating men, your fellow human beings, like ciphers in the cruelest of equations. You must deploy the most distinctively human capacity endowed by God, reason, in sending your men, for whom you bear moral responsibility, to slaughter other men as if they were animals, and to risk their being slaughtered by those they intend to kill.

And as the commander of such commanders, as the Commander in Chief of such calculating men, You, Abraham Lincoln, and You, Jefferson Davis, must give a human—that is to say a rational—justification for this military arithmetic, which is amoral in itself. we remember Gettysburg because there it was that Lincoln gave to his fellow citizens exactly such a justification in the greatest American speech ever, in defense of the purpose for which the speaker commanded men to fight the greatest American battle of the greatest American war. America, the country that declared its independence in a logical syllogism, a rational argument whose premise was that all men are subject to God’s arithmetic, that all men are created equal and thus may need to kill in order to defend their right to life and their right to a way of life that is fully human: America and the reason for America were defended by this great action, which Lincoln then vindicated in his great speech .

To understand what Lincoln meant by a new birth of freedom we first need to know what Lincoln meant by self-government. Lincoln once said that self-government “lies at the bottom of all my ideas of just government, from beginning to end.” In some of his earliest public statements, Lincoln defined republican or representative government in America as consisting of “a political edifice of liberty and equal rights” secured by the consent of the governed—a security that rests of the “duty” of any would-be representative of the people to “make known” to “the people whom [he] propose[s] to represent” his “sentiments with regard to human affairs.” Self-government rests on that natural right of the people to justice, but also on the need for government by popular consent in order that justice be done, and on the consequent obligation of the people’s would-be governors to disclose the opinions that will guide them when in office.

But if popular consent and natural right conflict? Is there not a tension in the Declaration of Independence between unalienable right and government by the consent of the governed? Theoretically, one can solve this problem by defining ‘consent’ as ‘rational assent.’ Genuine consent must be rational; it must be founded upon the self-evident truth that all men are created equal. But this theoretical solution scarcely solves the practical, political problem of squaring consent with justice, a problem that will endure so long as self-government exists. Government of the people by the people—popular self-government—might not work out as government for the people, or at least not for all of them, if the majority enslaves the minority.

One of the Founders set down his thoughts on this dilemma in its most dangerous American manifestation. As he prepared a series of essays for publication in 1791, Congressman James Madison wrote a note to himself: “In proportion as slavery prevails in a State, the Government, however democratic in name, must be aristocratic in fact. The power lies in a part [of the people] instead of the whole, in the hands of property, not of numbers.” He drew a telling conclusion: “The Southern States of America,” very much including his native Virginia, “are on the same principle aristocracies.” As an architect of the new Constitution, Madison knew that Article IV, Section 4 says, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” He knew, therefore, that the regime of the American Union contained a self-contradiction—the potential for disunion. With most Americans of his generation, he hoped that the eventual removal of slavery would remove this potentially fatal flaw. In fact many states did put slavery on the road to extinction in that first, founding generation. But his “Southern States” did not.

Slavery denied self-government to a substantial portion of the people living in America. The crisis over slavery threw into hazard republican government itself by raising in practice an old philosophic controversy: To secure natural rights, must government overawe the people, lest they break out into anarchy or coalesce into majority tyranny? Or is a very powerful governments itself a greater danger to natural rights than the anarchy and popular tyranny it prevents? In Lincoln’s words, “Is there, in all republics, this inherent, fatal weakness? Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?” No parchment enumeration of civil rights can eliminate that problem.

Lincoln came to the battlefield cemetery at Gettysburg to say in public what Madison in his prudence could only write to himself. Lincoln again raised the question of popular self-government in speech only after the American soldiers, in a demonstration of military arithmetic, had answered it by their actions. He came to the cemetery, the home of the dead, to talk about the beginning of American political life. In declaring their independence, their self-government, in 1776, “our fathers,” the Founders, “brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Conceived, brought forth: This is the language of childbirth. It is a paradoxical childbirth, associated with fathers, not mothers. Somehow the Signers of the Declaration of Independence were fathers and mothers.

“Conceived” and “brought forth” are from Numbers 11, the King James Version. Moses asks his angry God, “Was it I who conceived this people? Was it I who brought them forth, that thou shouldest say to me, ‘Carry them in thy bosom as a nursing father beareth the suckling child, unto the land which thou swearest unto their fathers?” Americans, the new Israelites, were brought forth from Egypt—the British Empire—and from the tyranny of Pharaoh—George III. Moses or Washington could not bear this burden alone. God tells Moses to gather the elders, and say to the people, “Consecrate yourselves for tomorrow, and you shall eat meat, for you have wept in the ears of the Lord….” The Lord’s Spirit will be upon not Moses alone, but upon the elders. Moses wishes that the Spirit of prophecy were upon the whole people, In America, the elders were of course the Founders; Lincoln, like Washington before him, wished that the spirit of independence, of liberty and equality, were upon the whole people.

The Declaration calls the Americans a people —a people who, like the Israelites, existed before and after their independence. Lincoln described the bringing forth of a new nation; a nation therefore must mean an independent people. This independent people was conceived in liberty. Long before independence, before George III and parliament designed to reduce them to slavery, Americans had enjoyed civil liberty—limited self-government over their own ‘internal affairs.’ The new nation was “dedicated to the proposition that all men were created equal.” In part because Britain had required some colonies to permit slavery and, as recently as 1769, had vetoed a colonial enactment to suppress the slave trade, Americans had not secured the God-endowed unalienable rights inherent in human equality; the slaves obviously had not secured those right, but neither had the free. My violation of your natural equality potentially threatens mine (even if mine seems secure) because in permitting the violation of your natural equality I have in practice contradicted the principle of natural equality. That principle applies to me as well as to you, as a creature of the same species, the same natural rank. By asserting their full, political self-government on the foundation of the principle of natural equality, Americans rejected the principle of slavery even as they tolerated its practice, and for Lincoln as for the Founders this was crucial.

The self-evident truth of human equality enunciated in the Declaration has become a proposition in Lincoln’s formulation. He means not a mere statement but the premise of a syllogism or an axiom of a geometric proof; “the principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of a free society,” he wrote. The nursing fathers of the Declaration held the truth of human equality to be self-evident. But Americans since then, like the Israelites, had disregarded the laws of nature and of Nature’s God. “When we were the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim, ‘all men are created equal,’ a self-evident truth; but when we are grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the same maxim ‘a self-evident lie'”—as one antebellum pro-slaveholding politician indeed had done. The proposition, maxim, or axiom of the Declaration is no less self-evident now, Lincoln maintains, but it is so to fewer people, as too many are blinded by passion, like little King Georges. The loss of the dread of tyrants leads a selfish people to insufferable pride. What they’ve really lost is their fear of God, who created men and endowed them with unalienable rights, and who allows tyrants to serve as the scourge of the wicked. Americans were losing their self-mastery in their chase for mastery over others. To correct them, the war in its action and Lincoln in his speech, his argument, must show how cruel the axioms of moral geometry can be, when violated and when defended against their violators.

The Civil War—the judgment of God upon the new Israelites—tested “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.” Israel old and new are particular nations with universal significance. A republic, a nation dedicated to the protection of equal natural rights, requires popular sovereignty. Constitutional union founded upon popular rights cannot survive an appeal from lawful ballots—the election of Lincoln in accordance with the Constitution—to unlawful bullets, if those bullets go unanswered in deeds and in words. Even as labor is prior to capital, the people are prior to government; only a government that oppresses its people, attacks the people’s own laws, can justly be overthrown by force. The people of Israel escaped Egypt, the tyrannical rule of Pharaoh, but did not thereby release themselves from the law of God. The people of America escaped the British Empire, the tyrannical rule of George III, but had not released themselves from the law of God. Just the contrary: To survive as a republic they had to bind themselves all the more closely to the life-giving, rights-endowing God for, Lincoln explains, “the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon the definition of liberty.” What is self-evident to the sheep is not self-evident to the wolf, which would use the lives of the sheep for himself and, in human clothing, destroy political liberty on the same principle. As the duly elected president, Lincoln must speak and act to prevent the sheep from beginning to think like the wolf, for in doing so they unwittingly collaborate in their own eventual destruction.

The consecration of the Gettysburg cemetery by the people—the consecrating of themselves, for tomorrow, when the war will be over—reaffirmed the people’s dedication to the ‘old’ birth of freedom, to “the unfinished work” of the nursing fathers who brought them forth from Egypt but did not live to see them enter the Promised Land. Such dedication meant that the Spirit of the Lord—for the new Israelites, the once-again self-evident truths of the Declaration—will be upon not only the nursing fathers but upon all the people. The new birth of freedom, witnessed at the Gettysburg field of the dead, meant the emancipation of the slaves—one-eight of the American population—and the full emancipation of free men, including the former slave masters, who had contradicted their own right to rule by claiming a universal truth as if it were a narrow, particular entitlement.

 

Originally published by Constituting America. May 21, 2013.

 

Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in the election of 1860, defeating three other candidates, including two Democrats, with nearly forty percent of the popular vote and an absolute majority in the Electoral College. Democrats had split into two factions Northern Democrats, headed by Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas (who had defeated Lincoln in the Senate election two years earlier) held that the question of admitting slavery into the western territories should be answered by referendum in each territory. Southern Democrats, headed by Senator John J. Breckinridge of Kentucky, upheld the claim most famously enunciate decades earlier by Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina—namely, that property in slaves is an unalienable right, that slavery was “a positive good” for both white masters and black slaves, and that slave owners therefore could keep their slaves wherever in the territories they pleased. Popular sovereignty might not protect, and surely did not posit a natural or absolute legal right to slave property, and could never satisfy the slaveholders. Although Douglas won the nomination of the regular Democratic organization, he won only a single state in the national election: Missouri. The Southern Democrats (who had ‘seceded’ from the party’s convention before the final vote was taken) won ten states, all of them by overwhelming margins.

Upon learning of these results, the southern Democrats attempted to secede from the Union itself, with South Carolina leading the way on Christmas Eve. By the time Lincoln took the oath of office on March 4, 1861, seven Southern states had passed secession resolutions and had founded the Confederate States of America. South Carolina’s argument for secession was typical: Many northern states had failed to comply with the Fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution; ergo, the terms and conditions of the Union had been violated and secession was a justifiable response. Although South Carolina wouldn’t fire on the federal garrison at Fort Sumter until the following month, other federal properties had been seized by the secessionists. “The house divided” that Lincoln had described two years earlier had reached its crisis.

Crucial to understanding the speech is seeing that Lincoln begins with custom and ends with nature. He moves his audience from thinking about custom—conventions made by human beings—to thinking about human nature, endowed by God. “In compliance with a custom as old as the government itself,” he begins, “I appear before you to address you briefly, and to take, in your presence, the oath prescribed by the Constitution of the United States, to be taken by the President ‘before he enters on the execution of his office.'” The oath of office amounts to a promise to uphold a humanly-constructed law, the Constitution; the customary speech that follows the oath ordinarily outlines policies of the new president, policies he takes to be consistent with that oath and that Constitution. Much more famously, Lincoln closes the speech averring that “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” Entwined with but distinct from the sentiments about mystic chords, patriotism, and angels, at the end nature is Lincoln’s final word.

Why? What is he doing, or attempting to do?

By putting custom, convention, and law front and center, Lincoln assured the slave-holding states that he had no intention of interfering with slavery in those states; in this he followed the Republican Party platform itself. On the question of enforcing the Fugitive Slave Clause, he affirmed it as part of the Constitution he had just sworn to obey, saying only that in enforcing the law “all the safeguards of liberty known in civilized and humane jurisprudence” ensuring “that a free man be not, in any case, surrendered as a slave” ought to prevail.

But he also observed that the oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution required him to uphold the federal Union that pre-dated that Constitution. The Union was a convention or custom formally acknowledged by the American colonies in 1774 in the Articles of Association enacted by the first Continental Congress—two years before those colonies declared their independence. The Framers of the 1787 Constitution intended to perfect that Constitution and that Union—a union that had already been called “perpetual” in the Articles of Confederation of 1778. The constitutional union of the American states is a contract; absent some contractual clause to the contrary, no party to a contract can rescind it unilaterally, without the consent of the other parties to the contract. This holds whether the parties are individual citizens or sovereign states. But this was what the secessionists were attempting. Lincoln’s first argument against secession thus amounts to a logical demonstration based upon the character of a conventional agreement or contract that takes the form of a man-made law—which also happens to be the supreme human law of the land.

As seen in South Carolina’s declaration of independence, some Southerners claimed that the contract had already been violated by those northern states which had passed the “personal liberty laws” making it tougher to extradite African-Americans in free states who were accused of being runaway slaves. That argument hinged upon whether secession was a just or proportional response to laws that set a high bar for extradition. because secession seems both a drastic and an ineffective response to such laws (why would secession make it easier to recover runaway slaves?), the main argument of the slaveholders continued to be that slavery was a positive good and that slaveholders were entitled to bring slaves into federal territories—the argument to which Lincoln now turns.

Lincoln’s next argument against secession edges away from convention in the direction of nature. It is an observation about political rule in a republican regime. In republics the people rule through their elected representatives, who commit themselves to the supreme law of the land upon taking office. With respect to the principal issue dividing the house in 1860—Congressional authority to protect or prohibit slavery in the federal territories—”the Constitution does not expressly say” what must be done. This relegates the issue of slavery in the territories to the realm of a political question—that is, to majority rule. The presidential candidate of the Republican Part had just won a majority of votes in the Constitutionally-ordained Electoral College. “If a minority, in such case, will secede rather than acquiesce” to majority rule, “they make a precedent which, in turn, will divide and ruin them; for a minority of their own will secede from them, whenever a majority refuses to be controlled by such minority.” With no legal or even rational limit to such division down to the body of each individual, “the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy.” Only a majority can function as “the true sovereign of a free people.”

“One section of our country believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong, and ought not to be extended.” Slavery, not states’ rights, lies at the foundation of the house divided. Only constitutional majorities can repair this division if Americans would adhere to the political principles of the Founders, which were the principles of republicanism. “This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their Constitutional right of amending it”—and in 1860 neither side had the votes for that—”or their revolutionary right to dismember, or overthrow it.” Lincoln offered his support for a Constitutional amendment to pledge the federal government never to interfere with “the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service.” But as a constitutional officer of the United States pledged to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, he would not countenance a legal right to overthrow that government. What is more, even if Lincoln walked away from his Constitutional duty to defend the Union, the fundamental problem would not end because the United States of America and the Confederate States of America would “remain fact to face,” governed at most by treaties rather than a shared constitution. Why would a treaty on runaway slaves be better enforced than a constitutional law on runaway slaves? Why would two federal governments keep the peace between the sections better than one?

In a speech in Cincinnati delivered in the previous year, Lincoln had warned of the outcome of a sectional war, remarking that Northerners outnumbered Southerners, and were no less valorous. The Southerners supposed otherwise, and fought. Lincoln’s next-to-last argument in the First Inaugural, an argument from prudence, and argument based on practical reasoning, tactfully does not go so far as he had done in Cincinnati. He instead speaks more generally: “Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him, who has never yet forsaken this favored land, are still competent to adjust, in the best way, all our present difficulty.” Prudence, sentiment, and religion having taken decidedly different forms in the slaveholder-ruled states, the war came, and Lincoln’s final argument, or rather allusion, to the better angels of our nature fell unheard. The better angels of our nature adhere to the laws of nature and of nature’s God, but the slaveholders, beginning with Senator Calhoun, had rejected the truths that the Founders had held to be self-evident. Without that standard—that all men are created equal—which Lincoln elsewhere calls the standard maxim of a free society, no other arguments for the conduct of a self-governing citizenry can prevail and the citizenry will depart from self-government and go to war with itself. And that is exactly what happened.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.: After Tocqueville: The Promise and Failure of Democracy. Wilmington: ISI Books, 2012.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 40, Number 1, Spring 2013.

 

Some twenty years before this book was published, Francis Fukuyama earned the distinction of publishing what became perhaps the most refuted American book of his generation. Thinly disguised as an exercise in German historicism (beginning with its evocation of Hegel and Nietzsche in the title) The End of History and the Last Man finally defends liberal democracy as the best practicable regime under modern circumstances in the name of the stubbornness, not the malleability, of human nature. In his central chapter, “The Beast with Red Cheeks,” Fukuyama insists on the stubbornness of stubbornness itself, identifying the crux of political life as thumos—the part of the soul that both wants to rule and needs to be ruled. Even the historicists, he insists inadvertently make ‘History’ dependent upon nature; in a witty reversal, he maintains in effect that he (thanks to Plato) understands historicists better than historicists understand themselves. Hegel’s defense of liberal republicanism institutionally crowned with constitutional monarchs requires a concept of a trans-historical human good. [1]

This defense of liberal democracy founded upon the nature of human beings is precisely what irks Chilton Williamson, who brings natural right and democracy to the bar of tradition and aristocracy. Like many traditionalists, he must answer the question: By what criteria do I select a given principle, thinker, or book for placement in ‘the tradition’?

This becomes clear as early as the preface. In it he cites Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France, an account of a young man’s journeys through the France of the 1990s in search of the remnants of the France of the 1780s and earlier—i.e., France before the French Revolution. By this means he studiously ignores the argument of Tocqueville—otherwise prominently featured—who famously maintained that the Bourbon monarchy and not the republicans or Bonaparte began the centralization of ‘modernization’ of the French state under the watchful eye of Cardinal Richelieu, that so-to-speak Catholic Machiavel. [2] In ignoring Tocqueville’s claim, Williamson can attribute the birth of statism in France to republicanism and democracy, rather than to monarchism or to the peculiar features of French aristocracy.

Williamson divides his book into three parts: “Democracy after Tocqueville,” “Democracy and Civilization,” and “The Future of Democracy and the End of History.” These parts consist of three, eight, and three chapters, respectively. In the first chapter he continues his uneasy relationship with Tocqueville, claiming incorrectly that “Tocqueville was ever at pains to remind himself, as well as readers of Democracy in America, that the subject of his book was American democracy, not democracy as a generalized system of government and society” (4). But quite on the contrary, Tocqueville writes, “I saw the equality of conditions that, without having reached its extreme limits as it had in the United States, was approaching them more each day; and the same democracy reigning in American societies appeared to me to be advancing rapidly toward power in Europe.” [3] And further, “I confess that in America I saw more than America; I sought there an image of democracy itself, of its penchants, its character, its prejudices, its passions; I wanted to become acquainted with it if only to know at least what we ought to hope or fear from it.” [4] Williamson further claims that Tocqueville saw democracy in America maintained by decentralization, religious faith, the civilization of the original colonizers, and their similarity of stock and of language, but Tocqueville there is talking about the republicanism of the Americans—their political institutions—not their social condition. Democracy defined as social equality or the absence of an aristocratic class might support either of two principal regimes: republicanism or despotism. When Fukuyama calls the liberal-democratic regime the “end of history” he means broadly the same kind of commercial-republican regime advocated by the American Founders. It was surely not Fukuyama “who popularized the neo-conservative mantra that democracies do not make war on one another and that universal peace has consequently become, for the first time in history, something more than a fanciful vision” (6). The idea that commercial republics don’t make war on one another dates back at least as far as Montesquieu; among the Americans, Franklin, Washington, and Madison concurred, leaving only Hamilton in Federalist #6 to demur (with a sophistical argument in hand, it should be noted). [5]

None of these scholarly complaints should be allowed to obscure Williamson’s main point in this opening chapter. “For Alexis de Tocqueville, democracy was a political phenomenon, not a faith” (13). Tocqueville (who detested Hegel for his historical determinism) did not suppose that Providence brought republicanism as democracy’s inevitable companion, and that is what Williamson quite rightly wants to say, too. He makes this clear in his second chapter, “The Momentum of Monarchy,” where he classifies Tocqueville among the “aristocratic liberals” (they include Mill, Burckhardt, and Bagehot) who searched for ways to defend liberty in the increasingly democratized social order of the nineteenth century. “Aristocratic liberalism envisioned a society that would be at once free, ordered, and, in the classical European sense of the word, civilized” (34). Just so, though in tracing the origins of aristocratic liberalism to Machiavelli, Williamson overlooks the facts that Machiavelli was no friend of the aristocracy, no classical humanist, and no Christian. Virtù is not exactly virtue. And his centralized state—lo stato—leaves no room for such social and parliamentary middlemen as aristocrats and priests independent of prince or parliament. [6]

In chapter 3, “Democracy’s Forked Road,” Williamson offers a non-Tocquevillian account of democracy as “the rival of Christianity and inherently its enemy” (38). Whereas “Tocqueville thought that the Christian religion and Christian civilization, taken together (and, as far as the thing is possible, separately) constitute the ground for democratic government and the necessary condition for its success,” Williamson maintains that the decline of Roman Catholicism and the rise of Protestant churches oriented toward nations and (to some degree) controlled by states turned Christianity toward a secularism inflected by “the new Promethean science”—effectively a God-substitute (38-45). In the United States, nationalism played out in “Jefferson’s unconstitutional Louisiana Purchase…[which] has been called the death knell of republicanism,” a sound issuing from a bell which continued to toll through the Mexican War, “the War between the States” (by which he apparently means the American Civil War), Progressivism, and the two World Wars (41, 54-55). Today, gripped by “a kind of nationalist mania,” America is neither democratic nor republican” (63). Its rapid democratization in the years after the War of Independence caused it to abandon the Founders’ attempt to establish a republican regime, before the nation-statism produced by that democratization wrecked democracy itself.

What is today’s American regime, then? Williamson begins Part II, “Democracy and Civilization,” by arguing that the two contradict one another. Republicanism requires a “middle-class society founded on an agrarian tradition that does not hold one man’s living at the expense of another man” in a “small-scale community” characterized “by minimum government” by “the consent of the governed” and whose governors are morally and intellectually prominent people”—not at all the Madisonian “extended republic.” [7] Republicanism comports with civilization (77). But the “modern liberal state is identical with the managerial society” described by James Burnham in his 1941 book The Managerial Revolution. This bureaucratic form of government has since been replaced by the even more radical “advanced liberalism” consisting of the self-deification of man and particularly of those men who most successfully pursue the power to remake human societies and their moralities (79). We thus incline toward proletarianized, ethnically mongrelized societies ruled by “statocrats.” Tocqueville “never imagined the rise in America of an activist ideological minority, similar to the French revolutionary class, devoted exclusively to the radical destruction of existing social and political institutions and standing above the mass of the people, whose sole desire is to be left in peace to make more money and acquire more comforts for themselves and whose reluctant and sporadic political involvement is mainly a reaction against government’s intrusions on free commercial activity” (97).

But as a matter of fact Tocqueville did imagine more or less exactly such a thing, regarding it as one of the several wrong turns democracy might very well take. In volume 2, part 4, chapter 6 of the Democracy, “What Kind of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear,” Tocqueville describes “a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government”—”a vast tutelary power”—”is the shepherd.” What is more, “The vices of those who govern and the imbecility of the governed would not be slow to bring it to ruin; and the people, tired of their representatives and themselves, would create freer institutions or soon return to lying at the feet of a single master.” [8] America’s realization of Tocqueville’s dystopia leads Williamson to his central and most valuable chapters: “The Business of Aristocracies” and “Christianity: Vital Spot.”

Whatever one might say of America, the business of aristocracies is most assuredly not business. Williamson regards “Thomistic civilization,” with its blend of “Aristotelian principles” animating “government whose aims was human excellence” and “Christian principles,” as the “presumed ideal” of the old European aristocracy (99). He contrasts Fukuyama’s characteristically modern view, “that the achievement of political and social liberty and economic affluence are the highest aim and responsibility of government” (99). He readily concedes that the classical-Christian ideal was not the real, although he does not admit that the modern ideal has been substantially realized—denying, for example, that human beings now enjoy more political or social liberty than they did under the old regime. But he has a more sublte point to make: Yes, the titled aristocratis were not Aristotelian (or Jeffersonian) a natural aristoi—”aristocrats have not ordinarily been associated with such mental achievement” as “serious intellectual or artistic accomplishment.” But they “have usually proved more or less apt at preserving tradition and maintaining ideals” (107). The problem with modern plutocrats and bureaucrats (“meritocracy’s two faces”) is that they fail to inculcate the heritage of civilization upon which any civitas —whatever its characteristic political regime—depends. Democracy cannot survive without certain intellectual and moral virtues, but modern democratic capitalism wastes the cultural “capital” it did not and cannot produce by itself (108). In America, “whatever one’s opinion of the old [untitled] WASP aristocracy—its culture, values, and ideas—it succeeded for three and a half centuries in preserving and transmitting the tradition that formed it, while exercising an ethic of civic responsibility and noblesse oblige in a society lacking a titled nobility” (108). By contrast, meritocracy “enjoys power and wealth without the corresponding responsibilities that aristocracy and membership in an establishment entail” (110). Aristocracy requires landed wealth—the habits of cultivation not only in the agricultural but in the cultural sense—and this is “impossible in modern capitalist-industrialist societies” (111). This means that “aristocracy is dead forever in the developed world—unless, somehow, modern democracy should prove itself capable of developing during the next century or two, a postindustrial form of aristocracy from the crude materials provided by the plutocratic meritocracy that presently rules it.” “The odds are long against it,” he estimates (112).

Aristocracy hands down culture in the Aristotelian sense of the cultivation of human excellence. Williamson emphasizes that by culture he also means cultus—”religion is a culture,” a set of practices, habits—a way of life marked out by God, not man. But modern state-builders like Henry VIII and the Bourbons wrench that form of civilization into the service of the modern state, as did the Lutherans further east. Following their lead, “seventeenth-century liberalism scarcely concealed its rationalist bias, and liberalism in the eighteenth century flaunted its anti-Christian and anti-monarchical prejudice” (113). The European and American liberals and socialists of today hate “Christianity and its satellite institutions because they represent metaphysical reality which leftists have always despised, denied, and labored tirelessly to overthrow, for the purpose of supplanting it with a synthetic version of their own construction ” (115). Insofar as it really has created such a comprehensive, artificial ‘reality,’ the Left has given us democracy not simply as a social condition or even as a regime but as an ideology —a “false religion” (115). Scarcely better, the modern “political Right” offers Americans “a fusion of small-government-in-theory-and-big-government-in-practice with an aggressive nationalism that is contradicted, theoretically and in fact, by its commitment to global democratization” (116). “The problem with ideological democracy is that democracy is a form of politics, and politics can never be wholly separated from religion.” Any self-consciously invented religion that rigorously separates politics from religions that are “given” rather than professedly invented and then claims for itself exclusive legitimacy as the moral compass of a centralized state will fail to convince even its own proponents, as Václav Havel has reminded us. This may lead to nihilism or to nihilism’s twin, utopianism. Utopianism is finally unbelievable, aiming at “a world without conflict and therefore without politics, which is essentially conflictual” (117)—as seen in the mixed-regime republicanism upheld by “classical political philosophy” (125). So-called postmodern utopianism must collapse of its own unbearable weightlessness, all the while denying that foundations really exist.

Williamson rejects any republicanism founded upon the principles of natural right. Although liberals claim (or have in the past claimed) that they intend to realize and ensure “the natural rights of mankind,” these have served instead as a mask for their atheism (119). The putatively natural right to religious freedom has itself begun to lose its status as a right: “The new democratic state is its own god, and that god is a jealous god” (120). Along with religion, “The Western world has banished classical political philosophy from its intellectual precincts, and modern—democratic—man regards himself as a fully autonomous being, endowed with no fixed nature that he may not alter to suit himself and no fixed role to play in the world. He is, instead, a world unto himself.” (125)  But in “traditional Christianity” under the old aristocracy, “human dignity” derives from “the divine spark each person carries within himself and to his place in the hierarchical chain of being. Such a creature has no need of ‘rights’ or of ‘freedom,’ though certain liberties, recognized over the centuries by both the church and the state, are certainly appropriate to his nature” (123). Such regimes of Christian love contrast fundamentally with modern statism: “Democracy, to succeed, must be more than self-government. It must be the love of self-government, inducing an affection even for government itself. Yet the greater and more expansive government produced by that affection and by engendered trust, in the end produces love’s opposite—hatred of government, and the refusal to cooperate with or tolerate it. There may be no way around this fundamental paradox of the democratic system.” (153)  Jesus of Nazareth understood this: “Christ himself appears to have limited His audiences to five thousand people, while saving His choicest teachings for private discussions with the Twelve” (140. When it comes to the important things, government small enough to sustain personal relations works best for, well, persons. Such government cannot sustain itself under the modern state, especially in its more recent forms. The ideology of progressivism (especially as exercised by the judiciary), with its claim to speak for large and impersonal historical forces; reliance upon information technology (which has not “raised the level of human wisdom in any appreciable degree” [174]); and the Faustian ambition to impose control over nature, including human nature—all result in a decline in prudential reasoning and in “the entrustment of the all-powerful state with sole discretion to determine moral value, which in turn becomes purely a matter of efficiency” (180). Against such a self-divinizing entity, natural right—with its leveling inclination to declare all men equal—is not merely a weak barrier but a wide patch along the road to serfdom. (Or it would be, if modern serfs still enjoyed a personal relationship with the lords of the manor.)

In Part III, “the Future of Democracy and the End of History,” Williamson foresees a rather different world than the one proferred by Fukuyama. He predicts “an age of extreme global instability that will impose a radical need for enhanced political and social order at the national and international level; a need that the eroding institution of the nation-state, to say nothing of ‘democracy,’ will be hard pressed to meet” (196). Already, the trend toward liberal democracy seen by Fukuyama has halted, as many societies neither especially want it nor find themselves capable of governing themselves by it. This is not surprising, if democracy is incoherent to begin with. Founded “on an illusory concept of metaphysics, human nature the essence of the good, and the nature of evil,” the latest version of liberalism—an unstable combination of progressivism and ‘postmodern’ moral relativism, not to say nihilism—simply cannot do what it most wants to do: rule (219). But democracy suffers less from contradictions—as Marx asserted—than from entropy. “Hedonistic, selfish, and narcissistic,” modern human beings can no longer muster anything more than the passive resistance born of resentment; their disillusionment with the modern project in its latter-day form makes the prospects for continued social order uncertain. “Whatever democracy is,” Williamson concludes, “there is likely to be a great deal less of it in the decades and centuries to come” (229). We now live after Tocqueville; after the democratic tendency of modern life has crested, and long after his well-intended cures—the guiding aristocratic prudence, federalism sustaining genuinely political life on all levels of government, civil and political association standing between local communities and the centralized state—have failed.

Williamson thus gives not a rigorous, scholarly account of Tocqueville or a philosophic analysis of the modernity Tocqueville considered as a well-crafted expression of an aristocratic sensibility responding to and often recoiling from the atheism and egalitarianism that prevail in large swathes of today’s world. Like Nietzsche’s aristocrats, he prefers not to argue but to exemplify, judge, and ‘carry on.’ Like most men of sensibility he prefers not to define things so much as to perceive and to appreciate their refinement. Definition would introduce too much abstraction into the nuanced richness of social life and its subtle gradations of rule. As against the simplification introduced by Kantian categories of rights, Williamson upholds traditional (by which he means Catholic, not Orthodox and surely not Protestant) Christianity, going so far as to claim (following Russell Kirk) that the American Founders “did not really believe their own rhetorical flourishes” in the Declaration of Independence, “the intent of which was to impress a world skeptical of the American colonists’ intentions” (174). [9]

Kirk’s claim is insupportable. True enough, the Declaration appeals to “a candid world,” very much including the French monarchy that would intervene military with considerable effect in the War of Independence. But with the exception of Franklin, every important Founder consistently referred to natural rights as the standard for civil rights within the modern state. [10] This can and has been demonstrated at length, although the best demonstration remains reading their writings for oneself.

The problem of the centralized and potentially overbearing modern state requires another definition distinction that Williamson doesn’t quite get right—that between state and regime. In the Aristotelian terms that Williamson and many of us esteem, the regime or politeia consists of four elements: the politeia strictly speaking, which consists of the ruling institutions of the political community; the politeuma or ruling body, consisting of the persons who rule that community; the bios ti, the way of life of the community; and the end, the telos, the institutions, rulers, and way of life serve. [11]  This definition enables Aristotle to offer his well-known regime typology, which includes the regime itself called ‘regime’ or politeia—the ‘mixed regime’ that balances the rule of the few who are rich and the many who are poor. This is the republicanism Williamson esteems—with the caveat that the wealth of the rich be landed, entailing active, prudential, patient care of the soil and the soul and vigilant protection of the persons who work it. As Williamson also stipulates, and as Aristotle remarks, such a regime supports a substantial middle class.

Distinct from the idea of the regime, the idea of the state classifies political communities in terms of their size and degree of centralization. The ancient poleis that Aristotle describes were small in size but centralized; even the regimes with the largest ruling bodies—the mixed regimes and democracies—could fit their rulers into one place at one time in order to deliberate on public concerns. The vast empires Aristotle also saw but did not describe were large in size but decentralized—precursors of the federal states. The feudal monarchies and aristocracies of medieval Europe ruled territories and populations somewhere between those of the ancient poleis and empires but were as decentralized as the latter. The ‘modern’ or Machiavellian state which Williamson excoriates combines impressive size with centralization made possible by bureaucracies staffed by ‘meritocrats’ rather than by landed aristocrats; notice that ‘regime’ and ‘state’ overlap here because no matter what its formal regime the modern state needs bureaucrats trained in a modes sort of virtuosity: efficiency.

Under these modern conditions, the assertion of natural rights makes a good deal of sense. The Declaration of Independence—no mere series of rhetorical flourishes but a logical syllogism in which Creator-endowed and unalienable rights form a major premise—denounced as art of the British tyranny the regime’s attempt to make the empire into a centralized Machiavellian state, the kind of entity that sends swarms of tax collectors to eat out the substance of the republican middle classes.

To this line of argument, Williamson wants to reply: Yes, but the very condition is what I reject—the condition of modern statism and its social foundation, social egalitarianism or democracy. This cri de coeur begs the indispensable question Williamson does not address, namely, the arguable necessity of the modern state, given both the preexisting tendency away from aristocracy and towards social equality and the human fact of warfare, at which aristocrats had long excelled. Once the modern state had proved itself superior to the feudal ‘state’ at raising troops and money to equip them, the decentralized and aristocratic feudal communities were finished. A student of Aristotle might observe with irony that by ignoring the fact of warfare Williamson commits the mistake Aristotle identifies in the thought of Phaleas of Chalcedon, a utopian democrat. [12]

Consideration of war seldom intrudes itself into Williamson’s book, except as an instrument of democratic-nationalist madness or folly. But the very Machiavelli whom Williamson lauds bases his argument upon exactly the requirements of warfare. Christianity—for example, the Catholic Christianity of Pope Julius II and others—worships the Prince of Peace. But the prince who guides himself by Christian principles walks the path to ruin, not salvation. Accordingly, Machiavelli’s prince studies the art of war. The lion and the fox share one salient feature in this regard: They are predators. Once organized (and as Machiavelli foresees) lo stato will destroy the remaining small poleis and feudalism Machiavelli’s state will rival the feudal communities in size yet enjoy centralized rule seen previously only in the polis. Eschewing Christian and Aristotelian virtues alike for virtù, the new statesmen will defeat the old priests and aristocrats, and the new state will defeat the older forms of state. Aristocrats had been the warriors and the priests had been the ones who appealed to God for protection and victory in war; the political authority of such men rested in part upon their claim to protect the people they ruled. By 1776 the modern state had defeated the old regimes and the old states at a crucial part of their own game, even as the Americans were defeating the aristocratic warrior-Indians. [13]  Any attempt to rescue modern life from Machiavellianism must address the question of war. Washington did, as did Publius. But Williamson merely deplores it.

This also points to another lacuna in Williamson’s presentation. Despite his insistence on the importance of religion to any decent political community, and his preference for the Christian Aristotelianism of Thomas as the best theology, Williamson does not acknowledge Tocqueville’s claim that Christianity itself served as the architectonic principle, the forming origin of Christianity. [14]  Only by fully confronting the theological-political question as posed by Machiavelli and (in a different way) by Tocqueville could one begin to form a countervailing strategy against the malign effect of Machiavellianism in principle and in practice. For that task, a noble and humble traditionalism can get us only so far.

 

Notes

1. Francis Fukuyama: The End of History and the Last Man (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), esp. 145-152 and 171-180.
2. Alexis de Tocqueville: The Old Regime and the Revolution, Alan S. Kahan translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), Book 2, chapter 2.
3. Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America, Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 3.
4. Ibid., 13.
5. For discussion see Will Morrisey: A Political Approach to Pacifism (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1996), 1: 6-14. Briefly, Hamilton argues that commercial republics will fight with one another because countries that have commerce with one another fight and countries that are republics fight: an obvious instance of the fallacy of composition. One may respect Hamilton’s intelligence too much not to suppose that he knew what he was doing, namely, deploying superficially plausible rhetoric in his effort to strengthen the federal union.
6. See Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince, comparing chapters 2 and 9; for commentary see Harvey C. Mansfield: Machiavelli’s Virtue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), chapter 12.
7. Indeed, Williamson asserts, the America of the Articles of Confederation was already far too big to sustain genuine republicanism (94-95).
8. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, op. cit., 663, 665. For an extended, learned recent meditation on Tocqueville’s argument, see Paul Rahe: Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), which Williamson himself cites later (215).
9. See Russell Kirk: The Conservative Mind (Chicago: Regnery Press, 1960),82-83; Russell Kirk: “Introduction,” in Robert Jay Nock: Mr. Jefferson (Delavan, Wisconsin: Hallberg Press, 1983).
10. On Franklin see Jerry Weinberger: Benjamin Franklin Unmasked: On the Unity of His Moral, Religious and Political Thought (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 226-227, 232-234, 265; Lorraine Pangle: The Political Philosophy of Benjamin Franklin (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 140-148. On the Founders generally, see Thomas G. West: Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class and Justice in the Origins of America (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997); Michael P. Zuckert: Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). On Madison, see Colleen A. Sheehan: James Madison and the Spirit of Republican Self-Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 83, 142, 153 (this last, incidentally, on the Declaration of Independence, as well).
11. Aristotle: Politics 1275b35-42, 1275a22-32, 1275b18-20, 1276b1-15, 1278b8-12, 1279a23-40, 1279b1-5, 1323a14-23.
12. Ibid., 1267a16-36.
13. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, op. cit., 314.
14. Ibid., 11.