James Ceaser: Designing a Polity: America’s Constitution in Theory and Practice. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, Publishers, 2011.

Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 48, Number 3, Fall 2011.

 

Inasmuch as ‘science’ means knowledge, and knowledge (at least since Adam’s day) begins with naming things, James Ceaser’s first observation may startle. “The modern discipline of political science lacks a single, commonly accepted term to designate the central object of political inquiry.” Political scientists look at “how a society is arranged or shaped with a view to who governs and how power is allocated, for what basic purposes, and to generate what general way of life.” But they name this political thing variously: regime, constitution, for of government, political system, polity. Ceaser chooses ‘polity,’ closer to the Greek word politeia and used by the American Founders.

The problem is even more extensive than Ceaser says. Political philosophers since Socrates have classified the object of their inquiry according to the polity or regime; they also classify political societies in terms of size, centralization, and homogeneity. For example, a polis or ‘city-state’—small and sufficiently centralized to see all of its rulers able to deliberate together in one place—will likely behave in some ways quite unlike an empire—typically, large and sprawling, exacting tribute from its colonies and often heterogeneous provinces but allowing them substantial self-government. Both polis and empire will differ from a feudal political society—larger and less decentralized than a polis, usually smaller and more homogeneous than an empire. Then there is an international community of believers—a church or an ummah; such an organization obviously rules, obviously has a polity/regime, and can be so extensive as to aspire to catholicity, but its true capital city is nowhere on earth, and it may have no specific earthly capital, either. And all of these differ from the modern state: large and centralized, usually aiming at a high degree of linguistic homogeneity. What is the name for this classification? ‘State,’ perhaps—except that lo stato is the term Machiavelli chooses for his large and centralized modern state, designed to replace the polis, the feudal order, and especially the Church as the principal sources of political authority. The Americans founded a polity/regime of democratic and commercial republicanism. They founded a political society intended to avoid the overbearing, Machiavellian stato (seen in George III’s tax collectors sent to “eat out our substance,” as the Declaration of Independence puts it) but still capable of mustering the military and economic strength to resist the modern imperial states and the hostile non-modern Amerindian poleis that surrounded them. The confederation they instituted consisted of a central government with authority that reach in and through the provinces or ‘states’ but in carefully limited, enumerated ways, always leaving some of the self-governing characteristics of townships and countries (the closest thing in modernity to poleis) intact and indeed lively.

More, yet: The polity/regime and (let’s just say) the state are distinct but related. Every polis, empire, feudal society, spiritual order, or modern state will have its polity/regime. But conversely, the form of state may bear upon the regime. For example, the modern state typically comes equipped with a bureaucracy that conveys political commands from center to periphery. If a modern state is a republic, ruled by popularly-elected representatives, it will also have a class of unelected officials or bureaucrats, putatively under the control of the elected officials but in fact quite often constituting a sort of oligarchy or (in aspiration, at least) aristocracy—the few who are the best at taking civil service exams. That is, a modern state will likely become something like what Aristotle called a mixed regime; monarchic, oligarchic, or republican on the one hand, aristocratic/’meritocratic’ on the other. We have no name whatever for the political entity that results from the combination of regime/polity and state. (Here, I’ll go first. Call it a ‘political order.’ But I stand ready to yield to a nomenclature proposed by Professor Ceaser, or maybe Samuel Huntington, or some other distinguished person who ranks higher in the American Political Science Association than I do—a large category, indeed.) At any rate, the Americans combined a political order justly called ‘liberal’—one founded on natural equality and political liberty aiming at the safety and happiness of citizens.

Ceaser’s concentration on the polity/regime turns out to illuminate a lot of the American political experience. Very occasionally his relative neglect of the category of ‘stateliness’ causes him to miss a turn in the road, but this highly instructive book the paths not taken do not make all the difference—just a bit of one, here and there.

He designs the ‘polity’ of his own book in four parts or branches of government: first, political foundations—considerations on the theoretical claims to authority made by rulers and would-be rulers; second, more specifically, the relation of the American Founders to political science, which purports to know things useful to the design of polities that can achieve the rulers’ purposes; third, and even more specifically, the question of modern political conservatism, which seeks to preserve or (as the young Lincoln puts it) perpetuate the polity of the Founders; and finally, the way of life of the American regime under the baleful scrutiny of its enemies, those animated by various forms of Anti-Americanism. Because he begins his section on political foundationalism with a chapter on the doctrine of political non-foundationalism—by its very nature a critique of founding and of founders—Ceaser has carefully prepared his reader for the theme of anti-Americanism he addresses in the conclusion.

The notion of political foundations has found many critics in recent years, famously including John Rawls, Richard Rorty, Jürgen Habermas, and Jacques Derrida. These non-foundationalists veil a radical project beneath such somniferous words as pragmatism and, well, non-foundationalism; they seek “a change in the character of the people” of the societies they examine. “A foundation is a first principle that explains or justifies a general political orientation”; this might be ‘historical’ (a tradition and/or a vision of the future), natural (as in natural right or rights), or religious/faithful (a body of doctrine understood to be divine revelation). Significant, often lethal, conflicts can arise when political orders with different foundations confront one another, but all share a practice of appealing to foundations. Ceaser gives a fine, condensed account of the several major political foundations proposed and fought over by Americans since the Founders established a regime on the foundation of “the laws of nature and of nature’s God,” combining natural-right and religious principles. Although both traditionalist and progressive historical foundationalists have had important advocated in America since the nineteenth century, Ceaser shows that John Dewey introduced a “foundationless” account of “true democracy” that anticipated the work of many of our contemporary anti-foundationalists. (Indeed, Rorty for one explicitly acknowledges his debt to Dewey.) However, later anti-foundationalists often depart from Dewey in rejecting the notion of progress for historical relativism. This leads to a contradiction. “Although non-foundationalists formally reject the Philosophy of History as a meta-narrative, many seem very close to having embraced something like it in fact” as, in their account, “History culminates in non-foundationalism” or “postmodernism.” They are thus unwilling “to entertain the possibility of a new period of thought,” namely, “a post-modern era,” which would lead them to an infinite regress or, more alarmingly still, and infinite progress that could not say why it was progressive.

Ceaser offers “several reasons to doubt the wisdom of embracing” political non-foundationalism. The distinction between foundationalism and non-foundationalism doesn’t tell us what we want to know politically; it makes no distinction “between free societies and regimes of authority.” Indeed, some of the most celebrated non-foundationalists—Heidegger, Jünger, Foucault—have endorsed tyrannies. Further, non-foundationalism presents itself as a solution to the problems of war and oppression; this “extravagant ‘narrative of hope’ would seem to have little to separate it from what used to be called Philosophy of History,” that is, a form of foundationalism. Non-foundationalists give little guidance for concrete political action, their writings being largely untouched by any extensive knowledge of history. The whole enterprise smacks of the lecture hall and the academic press—more likely to bore than to mobilize. It might be added that for all their claims to reject metaphysical realism, non-foundationalists have exhibited a remarkably acute perception of the politics of academia itself, sparing no efforts and achieving notable successes in advancing their careers and those of their students.

By contrast, Tocqueville brings political experience and deep familiarity with political philosophy to his discussion of the American regime. But while the Founders resorted to Montesquieu for assistance in thinking about ruling institutions (especially the commercial republican regime and the confederal state), Tocqueville seems to follow him into a skepticism about the status of natural right and into the beginning of a turn toward “customary history” as both explanation and justification of political action. In proposing the “two-founding thesis”—that the Puritan founders of New England mattered as much politically as the American Founders in Philadelphia—Tocqueville joined Montesquieu in his attempt “to alter the way in which political philosophy entered into and influenced political life.” The two-founding thesis diminishes the status of the Founders as founders, emphasizes “mores” or habits of mind and heart at the expense of the prudential framing of ruling institutions, and questions the importance of the ‘abstract’ doctrine of natural rights. On this last point Ceaser generally follows the argument of Thomas G. West: “Misunderstanding the American Founding,” (Ken Masugi, ed.: Interpreting Tocqueville’s Democracy in America [Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, Publishers, 1991], 155-177), perhaps worrying that appeals to abstract right might often tend to inflame citizens (Europeans and Americans) in ways too much like the spirit of Paris of the 1790s. By adopting Montesquieu’s “Gothic thesis” of the origin of political liberty in tribal Germany, Tocqueville based rights on history not nature and nature’s God. Insofar as Montesquieu and Tocqueville appeal to nature they understand nature as the organic development of a seed of praxis rather than an enduring principle or standard of conduct. It should be added, however, that Tocqueville sees the weakness of liberty precisely in connection with its tribal-Gothic origin. The Indians of the New World who resemble the German tribes described by Tacitus, remind him of European aristocrats: freedom-loving but doomed. To maintain political liberty under egalitarian social conditions (what Tocqueville calls “democracy”) Gothicism will not suffice (Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America, I. ii. 10).

Ceaser’s brilliant and subtle account of the Montesquieu-Tocqueville connection and its application to America does not quite capture all of what Tocqueville intended to do. Tocqueville wants to understand not republicanism so much as democracy; he wants to understand America insofar as it provides the best contemporary example of democracy. By democracy Tocqueville does not mean a polity or a state; he means a social condition characterized by equality. Tocqueville’s first if not final concern, social equality, does not originate in natural right but ultimately in a particular religion, Christianity. And yet Christianity, like “all religions,” does depend “upon one of the constituent principles of human nature,” namely, the hope that springs eternal in every soul. The natural equality of human beings insofar as they are all of the same species, with certain fundamental characteristics in common, was understood by ancient philosophers, but it took Christianity to reveal this equality to non-philosophers, a revelation that undermined social inequality in the long run. In no way does this point about social and political causation make Tocqueville deny the authority of natural right; he makes this as clear as can be in his subsequent study, The Old Regime and the Revolution, in which he explicitly endorses the abstract principles of the Revolution while deploring the lack of political judgment and moderation that animated the politically inexperienced French revolutionaries—quite in contrast to the Americans, who had been governing themselves for generations. But one need not leave the pages of the Democracy to find a defense of natural right in Tocqueville’s denunciation of slavery: “When I see the order of nature reversed, when I hear humanity crying and struggling in vain under the laws, I avow that I cannot find the indignation to stigmatize the men of our day, authors of these outrages” (Tocqueville, I. ii. 10). Tocqueville immediately goes on to write, “I gather my hatred against those who, after more than a thousand years of equality, introduced slavery into the world once again”—certain Christians, as it happens. Thus the Christian Church introduced both social equality and reintroduced slavery, perhaps paralleling its insistence on seeing men as equal before God but properly so as God’s servants. This ambivalent character of the equality Christianity reveals to Christians points to the political ambivalence of social equality, which may issue in republicanism or despotism.

Far from denigrating natural right, Tocqueville wants to protect it by showing how modern, egalitarian societies might go in two main political directions—the republicanism of America or the despotism of Russia. He then shows how citizens and especially statesmen might incline their societies toward the republicanism that protects natural rights instead of the despotism that denies them. With respect to statism, too, Tocqueville also defends the confederalism of the Americans against the centralism of the French, who failed to revolutionize the political centralization their monarchs had established even as they killed the Bourbon king. Tocqueville makes these criticisms of the French in defense of the political life, the life of ruling and of being ruled, of deliberation and civic association, which is the only way of life that reliably obtains the natural rights of human beings who are citizens. While in America the republican regime means “the tranquil reign of the majority,” the majority “is not all powerful”; “above it in the moral world are humanity, justice, and reason,” in “the political world, acquired rights”—both of these “two barriers” recognized by the majority (Tocqueville I. ii. 10).

The nature of human beings who are citizens may be said to be central to the political philosophy of Leo Strauss the final topic of Ceaser’s discussion of political foundations. In the past three decades or so, a parade of ignorant and tendentious mediocrities have attempted to paint Strauss as a one-man axis of evil in the academic and political world, a malign maypole around whom a troubling assortment of scholarly demons and malicious fairies called ‘Straussians’ do their dance macabre. This exercise of pyrotechnic demagoguery, which reached the boiling point in a neo-McCarthyite attempt to ferret out alleged Straussians in the administration of that prominent devotee of natural right, George W. Bush, obviously exemplified the postmodernist talent for emitting rhetorical smokescreens for tactical advantage in academic and bureaucratic infighting. Ceaser wastes little time with the sharp- but short-toothed critics of Strauss, instead pointing to Strauss’s achievement: “the revival of the concept of natural right,” which has been “the greatest and most unexpected change in American political thought since the 1950s.” Strauss regretted that America had lost “belief in its original foundation”—this, not out of forgetfulness but by the design of thinkers like John Dewey, the philosopher of pragmatism at the service of historical progress toward greater and greater economic, social, and political democracy. Dewey rejected nature as the standard of morality, along with god as the creator of that standard, in the names of egalitarianism and individualism. As Ceaser slyly observes (in an essay full of witty formulations) “Dewey was one of the patriarchs of non-foundationalism,” although his progressivism precluded the apparent relativism of the later doctrine. Against Dewey and his epigoni, Strauss’s “great offense against the American academic establishment of his day was not his rejection of science, but, on the contrary, his insistence that any affirmation of the doctrine of natural rights be preceded by a genuinely scientific investigation into the possibility of the theoretical concepts of nature and of natural right. For this act of intellectual impertinence, some have never forgiven him.”

As the Declaration encapsulates the Founders’ understanding of natural rights, the result of their theoretical reasoning, the Constitution embodies their understanding of political science, their practical reasoning. The institutional design or architecture of their regime aims at securing the natural rights invoked in the Declaration. In the second part of his book Ceaser clarifies that design. In designing the ruling institutions of the regime the Founders exercised their reason but also gave both scope and restraint to the spirited part of their souls, and of the souls of their countrymen. The love of fame—ruling passion of the noblest minds—”fundamentally an aristocratic passion” aligned more with ruling than with being ruled, both elevates and endangers a republican polity. Ceaser calls particular attention to the Founders’ refusal to misapply natural science to political life—the sort of thing that both Hamilton and Jefferson (for once in hearty agreement) rejected in the writings of Buffon.

The Federalist insists that “a science of politics cannot start ‘beneath politics'”; it does so at the expense of reductionism. The very regime-building of the Founders proposes in effect an experiment: Can the Americans, residing in the New World—supposedly inferior by nature to the Old, according to Buffon—actually establish “a viable and just republican constitution powerful enough to defend itself”? If so, the scientist Buffon must revise his theory. And in providing that proof, the Founders involve not only themselves but their posterity in a test of honor. The experiment will explain the low in terms of the high; it will inject a dose of Jefferson’s natural aristocracy into the democracy and will do so in favor of the conviction that human beings can act according to reflection and choice, not accident and force—”the dangerous thesis that power decides truth.” Inasmuch as natural science would soon be transformed into natural history and from thence into the ‘philosophy of History’ (Condorcet had already initiated this move), the Founders’ regime established itself in time to confront the regimes of the twentieth century that took the slogan ‘Might makes right’ to the worst depths—the basest reductionism disguised as progress.

A much milder form of progressivism came into political science and American politic in the person of Woodrow Wilson, who took the Founders’ constitutional executive and made him, much more ambitiously, a popular leader who would stretch what he called “the elastic Constitution” to fit what he regarded as an ever-growing, ever-more-moral nation. He would lead that nation with words, his presidency later to be described as “the rhetorical presidency.” Condensing the argument of his excellent book, Presidential Selection: Theory and Practice (Princeton University Press, 1979), Ceaser recounts the history of presidential selection as it was transformed from the Founders’ original intention to the familiar contest between political parties that dominated the American nineteenth century. As in the previous study, Martin Van Buren emerges as the key political scientist here, designing a party system that would permit democracy with a minimum of demagoguery. By “plac[ing] the individual candidate ‘above’ the party,” Wilson and the Progressives replaced the older party system with a system that put a premium on demagoguery literally understood—leading (agagos) the people (demos)—and putting the statesman (politicos) at a marked disadvantage. The statesman’s rhetoric differs from the demagogue’s; “it will seek, as a rule, to calm rather than excite, to conciliate rather than divide, and to instruct rather than flatter.” Ceaser recalls Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Statesman’s Manual, in which the renowned poet of English Romanticism “offered the Bible as the best source for understanding” what he called “the elements of public prudence” by contrasting genuine prophets with the false ones, which Coleridge names “demagogues.” Perhaps glancing at Tocqueville and the “two foundings” thesis, Tocqueville adds that the New England Puritan republics “displayed elements of enthusiasm” that might raise suspicions of demagoguery. (For a careful account of the theologico-political background of Puritan political thought, see Eric Nelson: The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010]). Some of the publicists of the Enlightenment, Ceaser notes, did much the same thing.

Ceaser contrasts this with the statesmanship commended by Socrates and especially Aristotle, who regarded rhetoric as properly a part of political science. The rhetorician must always consider his political situation, Aristotle teaches, vey much in consonance with his insistence on the importance of situation or circumstance in ethical thought. Here Ceaser’s concentration on regimes rather than states leads to a minor glitch. “The greatest changes in the rhetorical situation over the ages…have probably owed more to shifts in the size and nature of political regimes and to revolutions in communications technology than to deliberate efforts to redefine the science of rhetoric,” he writes. But of course a polity or regime, being the constellation of rulers, ruling forms, a ruling way of life, and ruling purpose(s), cannot have a size. He means that states—and with them what I’ve arbitrarily called political orders—have changed, as part of the philosophic ‘regime change’ inaugurated by Machiavelli in his ambition to dominate the bitch-goddess, Fortuna. Ceaser concludes with helpful suggestions on how contemporary rhetoricians might recover the prudent and measured statesmanship Wilson and his epigones have discarded, holding up Lincoln—  who in his great effort to complete the work of the Founders, displayed a rhetoric that could stir a people to thoughtfulness as well as action a rhetoric of constitutionalism and of natural right.

Along with relations between presidents and the people, the Constitution requires relations between presidents and Congress. Here the struggles began in the Washington Administration, pitting the president and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton against their erstwhile ally in constitutionalism, Congressman James Madison. While glad to relocate executive power outside of the legislature (as the Articles of Confederation had done), Madison nonetheless wanted to restrict its exercise to actions derived strictly from legislative acts—the execution of law, and no more. The administration insisted on more discretion than that—as seen, for example, in Washington’s Neutrality Act, which Madison regarded as a usurpation of a logical corollary to Congress’s power to declare war. In practice, President Jefferson would end-run the Madisonian principle he shared by ignoring it (e.g., the Louisiana Purchase, which he judged unconstitutional but necessary) and by the cultivation of personal influence over Congressmen. The Washingtonian understanding was taken up by another former general, Andrew Jackson, and then transformed by Wilson—who coolly argued that Madison was right but asserted that the old Constitution no longer applied and that the whole issue demonstrated why it could not longer apply in the fast-paced contemporary world.

The political conservativism of our own day defines itself against exactly this Wilsonian doctrine of historical progress; Ceaser addresses the question of what conservatism should try to conserve in Part Three. It is well known that there is little agreement here. “Much of the unity that exists among conservatives stems from their shared antipathy to liberalism” as redefined by Progressives—which is to say that ‘the conservative movement’ is a coalition, “more heterogeneous than liberalism.” One anti-liberal heart pumps lifeblood into four conservative heads: traditionalism (as exemplified by the late Russell Kirk and Samuel Huntington), neo-conservativism (more rationalistic than traditionalism), libertarianism (the old liberalism of Cobden and Bright, living in exile among what to it often seem strange bedfellows) and the religious right (founded upon a Biblical faith largely brushed aside by a Progressivism that has followed the secularist Dewey more than the Christian Wilson, in its spiritual orientation). Ceaser argues trenchantly that “conservativism can fulfill the role of being the philosophy of a governing party only if its four heads are properly arranged,” with traditionalism and libertarianism best deployed as matrices for the critique of specific liberal policies and with neo-conservatism and the religious right “charting new courses to steer the nation in the international environment and setting a moral compass.” To cooperate with one another, however, neo-conservatives and the religious right will both need to rediscover the harmonizing sentiments and thoughts of the Founders, the consonance of natural right with revelation seen in the fact that the principal author of the Declaration of Independence belonged to no orthodox religious denomination.

All of these conservatives respect the statesman who last and perhaps best reconciled these conservatives, Ronald Reagan. In considering him, conservatives will again meet their shared political rival, progressive liberalism, whose publicists would dismiss Reagan as a dolt and credit Mikhail Gorbachev with the peaceful resolution of the Cold War.

If the anti-foundationalists attack the American polity in academia, anti-Americans attack it in the real world anti-foundationalists affect not to believe in. The two stances do not necessarily conflict; even as moral and cultural relativism have found use as weapons against traditional beliefs but were seldom deployed against the beliefs of the intellectuals who deployed them, so one rarely sees deconstructionism turned against the politics of postmodernism.

Much anti-Americanism has had nothing to do with postmodernism, however. Foreign politicians often “find it helpful to divert attention from difficult situations or from their own failures by blaming the results of America,” and anti-American resentment comes readily to hand. Ceaser calls this “natural” anti-Americanism. “Theoretical” anti-Americanism has a longer history and is more interesting. “America has become a symbol for something to be despised on philosophical grounds.” Conservative Romantics first plowed this fertile patch: de Maistre, Nicolaus Landau (“the German Byron”), and Heinrich Heine, who called America “the pig-pen of freedom.” For them, America combined the revolutionary dangers of French republicanism with a bourgeois vulgarity all its own. On the ‘Left,’ Condorcet and (needless to say) Marx found in America a convenient symbol of capitalism; on the far ‘Right,’ Nietzsche proved seminal, as his disciple Arthur Moeller coined the term Amerikanertum or Americanness to describe the mechanistic domination of nature for human exploitation—”die Technik” or “technologism.”

In the 1930s, Ernst Jünger and Martin Heidegger “established the framework for contemporary anti-Americanism by transforming the theme of technologism into a fully theoretical or metaphysical view.” Both contended that, while commercial America and Bolshevik Russia embodied technocratic mediocrity, Europe (and particularly Germany) could redeem the human soul against its deadly and deadening enemy, the machine. Heidegger even foresaw and welcomed a ‘Left’ appropriation of his thought to be initiated by a “dialogue” with Marxism. Ceaser observes, “Heidegger’s ideas proved sufficiently protean that with a bit of tinkering they could easily be adopted by the Left,” as the postwar careers of Jean-Paul Sartre, Alexander Kojève, and many others so fully demonstrated. Having been outrun, so to speak, in the race of modernity, European intellectuals could now claim to have moved beyond the modern project itself. Whereas the alliance between America and the republics of Europe defeated the fascism endorsed by Heidegger and the communism supported by Sartre and Kojève, postmodernism might finally sunder that alliance and leave the West vulnerable to its remaining enemies, who remain numerous, various, and more immediately dangerous than the dilettantes of academia.

Throughout his long and prolific career, James Ceaser has brought a ready wit and literary grace to political science, a discipline seldom oversupplied with either. Designing a Polity asks political scientists to think along with the American Founders—to think about politics politically instead of reducing it to the play of sub-political forces. He shows how thinking about politics changes for the better if the thinker does not make reductionist or deconstructionist assumptions. That’s why the Founders could design the polity they left for posterity, and that’s how to understand, continue, and at times reform their work.