Publius [Alexander Hamilton]: The Federalist Number 13.

 

Always, Americans face two questions: the question of regime; the question of the modern state.

By ‘regime’ I mean four things: who rules; by what forms or institutions they rule; what way of life rulers and ruled will lead; and what ends or purposes the rulers intend to secure by those forms and that way. These four dimensions of the regime intertwine. If, for example, a tyrant rules, he will require such institutions as a large standing army controlled by himself for internal policing as well as for conquest, a judiciary dependent on his will alone, and a legislature without independent powers. If a tyrant rules, the way of life will encourage a moral atmosphere of mutual distrust and self-protective secrecy among neighbors, habits of fear punctuated by moments of terror. The ends served by these institutions and this way of life may range from the safety and pleasure of the tyrant to the remaking of human nature itself.

If the people rule, the same thing might happen. The popular majority might tyrannize as well as—maybe worse than—a ‘majority of one.’ Hence republicanism or representative government, a republic (in the American model) of extensive territory and population wherein no one faction may obtain a ruling majority.

The first fourteen numbers of The Federalist address the crucial question of regime—whether a people can truly govern themselves non-tyrannically, by reflection and choice, not accident and force. But they equally address the question of statism.

Modern political philosophers—in England, such men as Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes—sharply criticized feudalism. A feudal society structures itself politically rather like a cinnamon roll: Ruling authority organizes itself into swirls and morsels—an aristocrat here, a city there, with a king mixed in and a network of churches and law courts throughout, each with more or less independent sources of financial support and military power, sometimes overlapping one another but none simply superior to the others.

The statists did away with this. Statesmen organize states along the lines of a wagon wheel, with a central hub of authority and spokes radiating out to the border. Along these institutional spokes resides administrators or bureaucrats, beholden to the center for their appointments and salaries, exerting control over the population, now reconceived as the nation organized into the nation-state. From the center of the state commands and force flow out; to the center, recruits and revenues flow in, far more efficiently than under the feudal order. Wherever a state appeared, neighboring political communities more or less needed to imitate it, lest the wheel roll over them.

For Bacon and Hobbes and their royal sponsors, the best regime for the modern state was monarchy, giving unity of command to the powerful state. Having felt the pincers of monarchic statism, the Founders disagreed, with muskets.

But the defense of the natural rights enunciated in the Declaration of Independence via institutions of political liberty required the strength and unity that only a modern state could provide. Only a state could muster the economic and military strength to defend itself against the surrounding European empires, contemptuous of republicanism.

Publius therefore puts the matter of federal union front and center in his introductory essays. The Founders propose to solve the problem of republican self-government in a dangerous world of centralized, monarchist, imperial states by gathering military powers in a national government under popular control, with carefully enumerated, balanced, separated powers while leaving most domestic authority firmly in the hands of the governments of the several smaller states, where citizens can more readily govern themselves—states equally represented in one house of the national legislature.

In the thirteenth Federalist, Publius warns against disunion by appealing to Americans’ sense of economy. Were we to divide into separate confederacies, the two or three new governments would nonetheless rule extensive territories, larger than those of the British Isles. Instead of one federal government, we would have at least two, with unnecessary duplication of ruling institutions and commensurately heavier expenses per capita. If jealousies arose between these confederacies, commercial tariffs and larger militaries would further degrade prosperity. North America would look more and more like the Europe from which Americans had declared their independence. To those who look askance at a national government, Publius replies, one such thing is better than two or three. To undertake to found thirteen such sovereignties would involve Americans in “a project too extravagant and too replete with danger to have many advocates.”

But can one government—even a carefully limited government—truly govern one such large territory? Publius answers this question in his fourteenth essay, concluding his introduction to the new Constitution.

Robert K. Faulkner and Susan Shell, eds.: America at Risk: Threats to Liberal Self-Government in an Age of Uncertainty. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009.

Originally published in Perspectives on Political Science. Volume 39, Number 1, January-March 2010.

 

Collections such as this raise suspicions in anyone over the age of, say, twenty-five. When has the American regime not been “at risk”? From its beginning, a regime conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal has struck many as a dubious bet. Self-government is hard enough for one person to achieve—but a whole people? In the immortal words of television comedienne Roseanne Barr, “Get real.”

If an enduring regime of popular self-government seems unlikely, books such as this have proven a far safer bet, so long as the regime lasts. Self-government aims at security of life and happiness, but it achieves these good through perpetual insecurity—ceaseless takings of political pulse and social temperature. As Tocqueville said of Americans long ago, suicide is rare, but madness is common as we chart our malaises, real and imaginary.

Then add ambition to the mixture. A new presidential administration has arrived! Will it perchance attend to the counsels of political scientists, a class of citizens whose sagacity and eagerness to advise rivals economists? If anyone points to an “age of uncertainty,” never fear; academia knows what to do and will point the way.

If books such as this one generally illuminate little more than the vanity of human wishes and fears, how might one redeem the genre? Only by assembling writers who can see the perennial through the ephemera. For that task, Robert K. Faulkner and Susan Shell have the proverbial jeweler’s eyes.

“The purpose of this book can be simply stated,” they write, “to set forth and examine the most important dangers confronting America today” (1). The contributors consider a “central theme,” namely, “the corrosion of the liberal constitutional order that has for so long guided the country at home and abroad” (1). The editors organize the book in four layers, beginning with the outer layer, American foreign policy. After that come internal politics or partisan factions; such social divisions as family, class, ethnicity, and religion; and, finally, the core of the matter, the question of political self-government itself.

On foreign policy the editors have selected two eminent foreign scholars who happen to represent two of America’s earliest ‘significant others,’ France and England. Both attempt to describe America as an empire that has failed adequately to moderate itself or to rule its imperial ambitions.

With his characteristic suave goodwill, Pierre Manent addresses “the transatlantic predicament” (15)—the division in geopolitical purpose between Europe and the United States. For its part, Europe has lost its former “prodigious vitality” (18), which derived from the rivalry of nation-states. By the beginning of the last century, European vitality overwhelmed its prudence, with Germany in the lead; by mid-century, a less vital but more sober Europe began to make peace with itself and to frame international institutions intended to tame the continent’s undeniably vital but also life-threatening animal spirits. In some respects, Europeans succeeded too well, and now “approach the world from the standpoint of Doctors Without Borders” (19)—animated by a sort of therapeutic humanitarianism that does its best to avoid the rough but invigorating give-and-take of political life. Manent notes, “The higher legitimacy of Europe has been built on the delegitimization of nations” (19).

Meanwhile, Americans remain political, alert to the toughness it takes to rule, but they have also taken on an imperial mindset. Paradoxically, though, they may be insufficiently political in a capacious, Aristotelian sense. Having won two wars in defense of the regimes of political liberty, America has inclined to think of foreign policy as preeminently a military problem. That is, not only the Europeans, but also the Americans have lost to some degree what Aristotle calls the genuinely political way of life—of ruling and being ruled, of reciprocity. If Europeans tend toward ruling themselves by the peaceful and humane commands of mild-mannered technocrats, Americans rule others by the harsher commands of soldiers, treating longstanding allies rather like noncommissioned officers. Manent does not so much oppose the American policy of regime change—that is, of promoting commercial republicanism as a means of securing greater peace in the world—as he objects to an excessively impatient and ham-handed way of undertaking that policy. He writes, “Neither the conviction of Europe that everything will be fine if only we do nothing (except, that is, for ‘building Europe’), nor the conviction of the United States that everything will be fine if only we follow the American lead, seems to me to be conducive to durable success” (28). For Europeans, self-government will require overcoming complacency (and perhaps timidity); for Americans, self-government will require, more straightforwardly, greater self-restraint.

Niall Ferguson calls America an empire in a more institutional sense. The United States is imperial not only in its willingness, or over-willingness, to deploy troops, but also in exporting its “institutions and culture to foreign peoples” (28). Americans “may or may not aspire to rule; but they do aspire to have others rule themselves in the American way” (34). He asserts that “the very act of imposing ‘freedom’ simultaneously subverts it” (34) and, even when it does not, Americans lack the funds, the manpower, and the attention span necessary to bring it off. The regime of commercial republicanism itself adapts badly to imperialism, as shown by the failure of the Defense Department to implement the State Department’s plan to set up workable civil institutions in Iraq after the successful completion of the 2003 conquest.

Ferguson’s analysis will not do, simply on historical grounds. To start, he defines “empire” too loosely. Empire means rule. This means that the great period of American imperialism occurred before, not after, 1898, when Americans went from sea to shining sea, acquiring vast lands from Amerindians and Mexicans while getting rid of European claims. That was imperialism, albeit the Jeffersonian “empire of liberty”—that is, of republicanism. Americans had no difficulty in seeing that imperialism through to its conclusion. Americans also began to see that real empires need limits; more crucially, they saw how to set their limits, and they did so in the Mexican War. The United States took Mexico City but did not want it. Rather, Americans wanted a friendly regime ruling what they did not want of Mexico, in order to put an end to border disputes and wars. Drawing on Montesquieu’s well-known argument that commercial republics do not fight one another, they installed such a regime in Mexico. This practice has been at or near the core of American postwar policies ever since, including the attempt to reconstruct the former Confederate States of America.

Therefore, it is historically and analytically inaccurate to claim that imposing freedom subverts freedom. It does so only if you do not achieve the right political settlement. Freedom needs a regime to secure it; it needs imposition, or rule. Manent’s France and Ferguson’s England should be happy that the Americans did stick things out in the years following 1945, despite the moderate European advice most memorably on display in that zithering ode to dithering, The Third Man. As for Iraq, the initial failure to move toward a better regime had everything to do with complacency originating in progressivist and historicist assumptions about democratic transition and very little to do directly with the character of the regime of democracy itself.

The section of the book on political factionalism, “Creeds and Parties,” features essays by William A. Galston, James W. Ceaser, and Alan Wolfe. Galston reminds readers exactly of the need for ruling, ruling of a certain kind, in order to secure liberty. “A free society is not a suicide pact,” he writes (71). This does not vindicate Carl Schmitt’s tyranny-justifying claim that, in effect, everything is political. However, everything does need the political as a framework for thriving. Galston observes, “In the contemporary United States…the denigration of politics and the retreat toward private life are far more pervasive and troubling than is the opposing threat of totalizing politics” (72). As Tocqueville noticed, Americans can decline into individualism—a pupating, cocooned life led almost entirely inside the home and workplace, but one from which a mature political organism never quite emerges.

Ceaser’s essay, the most valuable in the book, criticizes the most impressive of recent philosophic attempts to evade the need for rule, the branch of so-called post-modernism that he calls “political non-foundationalism.” Names associated with this doctrine include Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida, (the later) John Rawls, and Jürgen Habermas. Political non-foundationalism hold that liberal democracy is best maintained by renouncing public reliance on a first principle, or foundation, that claims to embody an objective truth—something, for example, along the lines of the laws of nature invoked in the Declaration of Independence. Political life (they contend) should either be neutral toward such principles or exclude them altogether. Tocqueville called Christianity a precious legacy of aristocracy precisely because its claim to truth comes from on high. That, non-foundationalists maintain, is exactly its problem, and the problem with all such claims. Even if, as Tocqueville also argues, Christianity supports the principle of equality, and therefore of democracy, it does so in an undemocratic way and so must be discarded as a source of public judgment, along with much else.

Ceaser ably traces non-foundationalism to historicism, a form of foundationalism. In contrast to the natural-rights and Biblical principles upheld by the American Founders, some Americans in the first half of the nineteenth century began to adapt Hegelianism to democracy. The prominent historian and Democratic Party speechwriter George Bancroft wrote, “The voice of the people is the voice of pure Reason” (81). However, the Democrats before the Civil War rejected a main component of Hegel’s political philosophy, statism. It remained for the Progressives, most notably Woodrow Wilson and John Dewey, to wed progressivist historicism with statism in America. At the same time, Dewey began to decouple historicism from foundationalism by maintaining that foundationalism inclines toward authoritarianism. In Dewey’s formulation, the modern state will become the locus of pragmatic reasoning, eschewing the deductive reasoning implied in taking the laws of nature and nature’s God for one’s guidance. If nothing else, Rorty’s admiration for Dewey is well founded.

Ceaser identifies five defects in non-foundationalism. He does not find these defects in arguments that assume foundationalism to be true but instead raises doubts about non-foundationalism in its own terms, particularly in terms of pragmatism. First, non-foundationalism claims to generate non-authoritarianism, but in fact it has not. Such decidedly illiberal sorts as Heidegger, Jünger, and Foucault reject foundationalism as surely as Rawls ever did. Second non-foundationalism overpromises, claiming that its adoption will lead to social peace. Why, though? Would conflicts over political authority somehow become less bitter if no one believed them grounded in permanent things? Third, for all its alleged pragmatism, non-foundationalism ignores the test of real political life, providing no proof that moral and political foundations cause illiberal practices. Fourth, although non-foundationalism professes neutrality concerning religion and other fundamentalisms, its proponents really “make no secret of their support for secularism over the promotion of religion” (92). If religious people cannot make mention of their own principles when they enter the public arena, does that not disadvantage them fundamentally? Ceaser concludes, “Finally, the doctrine of political non-foundationalism would promote listlessness in the American public” (93). It is hard to imagine Rorty or Rawls risking his life for his country, if “country” is only a term in a language game.

In the last essay on political factionalism, Alan Wolfe warns against “the dangers of conservative populism,” a phenomenon he regards as self-contradictory (96). “Conservatism in power is conservatism without conscience, and since conscience is what conservatives do best, conservatism in power is hardly conservatism at all” (98-99). One must ask, Why not? Why does power preclude conscience? Indeed, Wolfe also taxes recent conservatives in power for their Wilsonian foreign policy without explaining why Wilsonianism lacks conscientiousness, much les why such progressivism is either conservative or populist. He writes, “In contrast to the more whimsical conservatism of William F. Buckley, Jr. [conservative populism] has lost whatever sense of ironic detachment I once displayed as it confronted the paradoxes and problems of modern political life” (113). Wasn’t it Buckley, however, who said he preferred being governed by the first two thousand persons listed in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University? That sounds rather populist to me. It is hard to resist the suspicion that Wolfe likes his conservatives out of power, permanently. Leave the ruling to him, and to people like him, he implies.

The book’s third part consists of four essays: Susan Shell’s discussion of the family in liberal theory and practice, an analysis of the relationship between socioeconomic class and political participation by Kay Lehman Schlozman and Traci Burch, Peter Skerry’s piece on immigration, and a very sensible account of America’s continued success in the management of religious divisions by James Q. Wilson. Of these, Shell digs deepest, describing the transformation of families effected by the arguments of Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. Locke makes the fundamental break with tradition, replacing the aristocratic and Christian patriarchal marriage with natural-rights-based contractualism. This move weakens the powerful families that resist statist centralization of authority while also preventing absolute monarchy in two ways. First, Locke makes the family private, largely beyond state control. He also makes the family “a little laboratory of republican self-government,” wherein the husband, “like CEOs,” make the daily executive decisions, but the wife, “like members of the board,” may “select or fire him” (123-124). In this model, “[t]he essence of marriage, in other words, is not linked to ‘coverture,’ the traditional doctrine that cancels the wife’s separate legal personality on the grounds that man and woman are of ‘one flesh’ of which he is the ‘head'” (124). Parents educate their children with a view toward equal citizenship in adulthood, whereupon parents and children become “civic siblings.”

Not Locke but Kant unintentionally undermines the family, Shell argues, by making autonomy his central moral principle. If, in Kant’s indelible (if indelicate) phrase, marriage is only a “contract for the perpetual use by each party of the other’s sexual faculties” (130), neither Lockean sobriety nor Rousseauian romanticism will survive. Shell calls for reasserting the civic purpose and dignity of marriage—without which, she asks reasonably, what is the point of marriage at all?

Shell makes two dubious moves, both subsidiary to her larger argument. First, she leaves unchallenged Locke’s description of Aristotle’s father as “Cycloptic,” that is, tyrannical. But Aristotle distinguishes fatherly rule from tyrannical rule, the latter being a command-obedience model for the benefit of the ruler and the former a model for the benefit of the ruled. This decision seems like an instance of the modern tendency to collapse distinctions of good and bad rule into one category. Moreover, because the marital relationship serves as Aristotle’s model for reciprocal or political rule, it has much more potential for the regime of republican self-government than Locke admits. Also, Shell describes Tocqueville’s account of the American family as an adaptation of Rousseauian marriage to American “commercial society” (128). However, the clear-eyed and somber young wife Tocqueville portrays owes more to Locke than does anyone seen in La Nouvelle Heloise or Émile. For this reason among many, I tend to resist any very Rousseauian reading of Tocqueville.

The editors save the most comprehensive matter for last. Self-government remains the American theme, and this book culminates with considerations of three aspects of it. Peter Rodriguez considers Americans’ failure to govern themselves, seen in their failure to save their money—”the great risk to the American economy” (220). Indebtedness has not hurt investment because many foreigners who do save invest their savings here, now owning “more than half of the outstanding stock of U. S. Treasury securities” (225). If foreigners refused to lend, however—in response to a steep decline in Asian economic growth, for example—interest rates would go up, or the dollar would decline in value, reducing long-term investment.

Who today manages to combine the lives of gentleman and philosopher with more élan than Harvey C. Mansfield? Here, he contemplates an even humbler thing than political economy—the automatic flush toilet. Political scientists of a certain age will remember the washroom attendant at the Sheraton Hotel in Washington, D. C., where, a couple of decades back, the American Political Science Association held its meetings in even-numbered years. This cheerful man would welcome visitors to “the only place in Washington where everybody knows what he’s doing.” The installation of the automatic flush toilet in most public washrooms ensures that such knowledge will be without any possibility of exercising the modest virtue once associated with it, namely, remembering to flush. As designed by the technocratic followers of Machiavelli, who preferred not to rely on human virtue as traditionally conceived, we need little or no self-government because systems designed by technocrats superintend us so minutely. The technocrat or modern scientist thus embarks on an adventure in which he aspires to replace the providential God with a new, human empire. The rest of us get to sit back and be ruled, for our own good, as defined by the new rulers in consultation with our bodily desires. In satisfying our desires, our rulers deprive us of only one thing: “any satisfaction proceeding from the activity of virtue as formerly understood, done for its own sake” (246).

If bureaucracy becomes overbearing, modernity has more indirect, distracting means of rule. The free market, for instance, “does not prevent you from getting what you want but merely compels you to pay for it”; in so doing, it invites you both to take risks and to minimize them, and thus your virtue, by “using the science of economics,” replete with statistics, graphs, and accounting techniques (247). Representative government, too, “is a fundamental device of rational control,” a form of government that “claims merely to represent the people, never to rule them” (247). Without the responsibilities of real ruling, some virtue remains in the people, but not much.

This means that, insofar as the American Founders wanted to resist Machiavellianism by such structures as representative government, federalism, and laws guaranteeing property rights, they set themselves up for failure. Such devices either augment the modern project or cannot stop it forever.

Hugh Heclo wishes this were not so. The “transaction between the body of the citizens and their governing representatives” has disintegrated (250). The Founders saw that “nothing about the new nation would succeed if the people and their representatives were incapable of relating to each other in a basically wise and virtuous way” (251). Without that, both the people and their representatives will hear “only what they want—rather than what they need—to hear,” and thus fail “to learn about and act on their true interests” (253). In Heclo’s view, “This would mean a self-governing people…losing touch with reality” (253).

With the “massive exception” of the Civil War, the Founders’ architectonic political science worked very well until “roughly the middle of the twentieth century,” when “a new way of doing politics” arose, one “fundamentally destructive of the deliberations hoped for in the republican leadership transaction” (254). this new science of politics at its core consists of “the professional management of political power” (255): the use of marketing techniques in political campaigns through the new media of communications, particularly television; the rise of issue activists; procedural openness, demanded by the activists in order to defeat the old-style ward politicians or bosses; the extraordinary increase in the scope of government operations and concomitant increase in sweeping campaign promises; the political organization of economic and other interest groups that hire professional lobbyists; and, of course, the need to raise substantial funds to pay for all these things.

Initially, Heclo too generously says that “this new system developed gradually, inadvertently, and without malice of forethought” (259), but to me it looks very much like what Progressives and their heirs in the New Deal wanted, although the policy results might not uniformly please them or their successors. “By design”—Heclo writes, generosity fading—”the modern system works at avoiding public interchanges that would lead anyone to a closer approximation of the truth of things,” issuing in “a regime of nondialogue” (259). In this regime, “ordinary citizens learn that being politically knowledgeable consists of being able to unmask the sales pitches to which they are permanently subjected” (262). For their part, our pseudo-representatives act like spoiled children, “both desperate for approval and preoccupied with getting [their] own way” (263).

Only a crisis will break down such a systemic structure. “Only then will we see how many Americans succumb to populist simplicities to wreck the republic and how many behave like the grown-up citizens our Founders hoped for in order to keep the experiment going” (263). No harm in making those the last substantive words in this review. I believe the term of art is ‘formally unfinished….’