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    The United States Constitution Considered with Multifaceted Superficiality

    by

    Joshua B. Stein: Commentary on the Constitution from Plato to Rousseau. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2011.

     

    The living judge the dead, a safe undertaking, but what if the dead could judge the living? One of the judges Stein selects remains very much alive, namely God, and the constitution being judged isn’t literally alive, even if it remains in operation, so the amounts an assortment of the mostly dead judging the sort-of living. Stein has the clever idea of treating not only God but a range of august humans as judges of the Constitution, thereby “testing the Constitution’s strengths and weaknesses” from the “vantage point” of each. The drawback of this project is that it is impossible for one scholar to do it well. No one (well, God excepted) can know enough about all fourteen authors here considered (in addition to the American Founders and the Constitution) to bring the thing off. Stein himself throws in the towel when it comes to the Koran, bringing in a Muslim scholar to help. And after 330 pages of this, it is dismaying to learn that “we will never know” the original intent of the Framers, anyway.

    On Plato, Stein does see that Socrates does not intend his ‘regime in speech’ in the Republic as realizable on earth. Beyond this, Stein imagines that Plato would object to the Constitutional preamble’s announced intent to secure the blessing of liberty for American citizens, saying that “Plato warns against unbridled liberty and might have been concerned with this intention.” Since the very nature of a political constitution suggests limits on liberty, this complaint falls flat. He rightly observes that the Athenian Stranger in the Laws recommends an established religion, including expulsion of atheists, whereas the Framers recommended neither. On Aristotle, he claims that Aristotle “saw the poor as the revolutionary class,” but in fact Aristotle regarded the rich as just as likely to revolutionize a democratic regime as the poor were likely to revolutionize an oligarchic one, and in either case often for justifiable reasons. He rightly judges that Aristotle would have endorsed the Framers’ aim of securing the property of the moderating, middle class. Cicero would have found the Constitution’s “lack of direction the Constitution provides for how to live a virtuous life” to be “upsetting,” although (Stein might have added) none of the ‘ancients’ would have overlooked the role of education, and the institution of public schools especially, in the early decades of America, to say nothing of the already-substantial presence of churches here. That is, the ‘ancients’ would understand the American regime as they understood all regimes—as rulers and arrangements of offices beyond those mentioned in any written ‘constitution,’ however authoritative.

    Stein addresses the first of two revealed religions in his chapter on the Hebrew Bible. He observes that Israelites themselves saw four different regimes: patriarchic, tribal but unitary (in the desert), “purely tribal,” and monarchic. Both the Israelites and the American Founders clearly distinguished kingship from tyranny, abhorring the latter. The Bible commands against fugitive slave laws, without condemning slavery itself, whereas the U. S. Constitution included such laws while the principles of the Declaration of Independence bear witness against slavery, and the Founders aimed at the gradual abolition of slavery, an aim they could not begin to accomplish in the core Southern states, in contradiction with those principles. Slaves who were Israelites enjoyed much better legal protections than did most slaves in the South, and Stein makes the important point that the harsher Biblical laws governing foreign slaves cannot be used to justify those Africans who converted to Christianity after their importation here.

    One of the most interesting chapters is the one contributed by Islamic scholar Imad-ad-Dean-Ahmad on the Koran. He observes that both the Islamic covenant given by Muhammad to Muslims at Quraysh and the U. S. Constitution’s preamble aim at “a more perfect union.” He also notices that while the Koran endorses “religious pluralism” of a sort, at least as it is extended to Jews and Christians, “he would have disdained the non-establishment clause” of the American document. Indeed, Jews and Christians are protected by Koranic law, but their status is that of dhimmitude, not full civic equality. As for the role of the legislature, under Islamic law it could make laws regarding matters indifferent to religion (speed limits, for example) but nothing beyond that. Legislators would need to accept guidance not by the consenting people but according to the consensus of Muslim scholars. This would indeed prove a check on any “excess of democracy.” Such a check would be needed, as there is no separation of powers in a Muslim regime. As for slavery, “Muhammad would have found the association of slave status with a particular racial group unacceptable”; in this, the Koran permits what might be termed equal-opportunity slavery imposed upon prisoners of war. Republicanism of some sort might be valid, so long as divine law sets the limits; similarly, amendments to a given community’s constitutional law would be licit so long as they did not contradict the laws set down in the Koran. Islamic regimes would not set down native birth as a condition for serving as the executive, only “declared commitment to the source of the [Islamic] law.” Juries at trial would consist of experts in Islamic law, not citizens approved by secular lawyers. Muhammad would concur in the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, but would define it very differently, likely defending “bodily mutilation as more civilized than imprisonment.” Finally, the Framers intended “to secure men’s freedom from other men, not from God,” although it must be added that Allah prescribes a different set of laws to set the parameters of freedom than do Jews, Christians, and the American Founders.

    Catholic Christian thinkers as Stein interprets them would have limited sympathy with the Founders’ regime. The thirteenth-century Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II would have frowned at the notion of separating governmental powers, as “he was the fount of law” and indeed the earthly “equivalent of God.” Stein notes that Frederick’s regime wobbled upon the death of His Excellency; “the vital energy of the center” went with him, whereas the U. S. Constitution “survived without Madison.” Dante Alighieri would equally have disliked the limited powers of the American executive and the fairly extensive powers of the states in our federal system. He also supported the founding of a world government under the governance of a Christian monarch, as the American Founders did not.

    Anti-papal Machiavelli, in contrast, “would have loved” the Constitution. Stein assumes that the “virtue” Machiavelli lauds means virtue in the old Roman sense, which it didn’t; he assumes that the Framers imitated the Roman Republic in their constitutional design, which they didn’t, at least not entirely. Above all, Stein’s Machiavelli would admire the features of separated, balanced powers, encouraging political struggle and breeding “the virtue of struggle,” and he cites John Adams’s Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States as evidence of this. He would have wished the Framers had used religion more—”not that Machiavelli was a believer in the worth of any particular religion”—a bit of political cynicism which might have worried Adams, and would surely have been rejected by many of the Framers.

    And so it goes. Hobbes would have misliked the Constitution; he was a monarchist. Locke and Montesquieu would have liked much of it; they were republicans. Small-government-loving, anti-‘bourgeois’ Rousseau would have disliked it, as he did so many things. No surprises, there. In the end, Stein doesn’t think that the Constitution can be regarded as a coherently-intended document, but only what an earlier scholar called “a bundle of compromises.” It “has worked as well as it has” because “it reflects what he have become, a country which is as multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-lingual as it is, unified by fear that what we have may not be perfect, but content that it is what we have, a reflection of our compromises based on ethnic and political differences.” Tell that to an Islamist, a fascist, a communist, a monarchist (whether Holy Roman or Hobbesian). For all its grand ambitions, this book trivializes the American Constitution and the several thinkers Stein has dragged into commenting on it.

    Philosophy and Just War

    by

    Christopher Coker: Barbarous Philosophers: Reflections on the Nature of War from Heraclitus to Heisenberg. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

     

    Coker takes his title from Rousseau’s complaint about theories of ‘just war’ as philosophers have argued them. (“Barbarous philosopher! Come and read us your book on the field of battle.”) His self-described “big claim” is that, far from being barbarians, philosophers “invented” war, by which he doesn’t really mean they invented it but that they “discovered and clarified” its “nature,” distinguishing limited, rule-governed, purposeful conflict from “warfare” or the unlimited conflict of all against all, driven by passions. “A product of reason,” war aims at security, liberty, and justice. However, in line with au courant ‘postmodernism,’ he claims that for Aristotle and other Greeks “reason itself was in essence political.” That is, he denies the Socratic claim that philosophy consists of an ascent from the cave. “Plato was the product of his age. We cannot escape the times in which we live.” He takes his cue instead from the pragmatist Richard Rorty, who argues that “contexts provided by theories are tools for effecting change.” That is to say, reason doesn’t escape the cave, it builds the cave. Neither nature nor ‘History’ provides meaning to war. Everything is political.

    Coker divides his book into nineteen chapters, the first three being introductory. The following sixteen chapters are organized in seven groups, in each of which he addresses a central question raised by a philosopher:
    1. Why are war and peace so difficult to distinguish? (Heraclitus, chapters 4-7).
    2. Why is war not the suspension of politics, but its continuation in a different form? (Aristotle, chapters 8-10).
    3. Why are mercenaries, many of whom are often professional fighters, so distrusted? (Machiavelli, chapter 11).
    4. Why is competitiveness positive, and competition not? (Hobbes, chapters 12-13).
    5. Why should we do nothing in war that compromises peace? (Kant, chapters 14-15).
    6. Why is the essence of military technology not ‘technological’? (Marx, chapters 16-18).
    7. Why, despite the rules, is war still an art, not a science? (Heisenberg, chapter 19).
    Coker does not limit himself to these philosophers, but ranges widely over the major figures of political-philosophic thought. His sweeping and paradoxical formulations—at times it’s rather as if the brightest English schoolboy in his form has been nipping at the bottle of Nietzsche his elders hid in the cupboard—will worry or annoy scholars who prefer more careful textual analyses. (For example, he tells us early on that Rousseau “believed that human beings were, by nature, sociable and peaceful.” Well, no: Rousseau believes that human beings are by nature peaceful because they are asocial.) Better to read his book exactly as his subtitle suggests: as a series of reflections or meditations on themes found in those texts.

    Why are war and peace so difficult to distinguish? Heraclitus regards the cosmos itself as warlike, distinguishing its flux from sheer chaos, even as philosophers will come to distinguish war from warfare. Flux is constant, but it has a certain discernible order, not to be confused with Hegelian teleology and its ‘cunning of reason’ or immanent dialectical progress toward the ‘end of History.’ Thucydides is closer to the mark, teaching that war is “violent” but also a “teacher.” One thing it teaches is complexity; when a polis goes to war it may anticipate one outcome but it will very often get another. “What the Athenians learned about themselves from the disaster was their almost limitless capacity for self-deception”—or, at least, that’s what Thucydides tried to teach them. War also teaches tragedy, that even heroes have their flaws, issuing in fatal misjudgments leading to unmerited or disproportionate punishment. Both of these points being true, war also teaches that “the quest for security can result in even greater insecurity” or what writers today now call ‘imperial overstretch’—famously, the Athenians’ Sicilian expedition.

    Coker supposes that Plato’s philosophic task was reformist: “to ensure that the social discord that the war had produced within Athens and that had led to Socrates’ death should never break out again.” This means that initially he takes Plato’s Socrates without irony; to Coker, the elaborate education Socrates lays out in the Republic is seriously intended to be implemented in Athens. He is right about one thing, that Socrates teaches “war is not the be-all and the end-all of life; it is not the highest good, or the highest human calling.” Philosophy is. But although he soon and rightly comes around to remarking that the ‘ideal’ regime Socrates describes is part of “a thought-experiment,” he doesn’t understand the dialogue as a defense of the philosophic life, objecting that “the role of reason” as a ruler cannot work because “human beings are not always principled, or consistent—they have an emotional life.” Indeed so: which is why the Athenians executed Socrates and then regretted it. But Coker, following Rorty, supposes that the democratic regime of Athens had nothing to do with the rule of passion. On the contrary, “it just so happens that democracies tend” to keep “the passions in check” and “different principle in balance” “better than most other political systems” because “they channel them in more creative ways.” This is to confuse Athenian democracy with Madisonian republicanism, a confusion Madison himself did not share.

    Coker does better with the Ion, a shorter and simpler dialogue. In that dialogue, Socrates encounters a rhapsode, a memorizer and singer of poems, and argues that the Iliad had “locked the Greeks into” a “perpetual song,” seducing them into “fighting war by the wish to imitate the exploits of Achilles and Hector.” He rejects Ion’s claim to divine inspiration, a point that Coker makes but then blurs by claiming that Plato objects to artists because “they tend to refashion [reality] to suit the aesthetic demands of their own art.” ‘Aesthetic’ isn’t a Platonic term, however. It is squarely the claim to revelation poets make that Plato’s Socrates objects to; Plato’s dialogues are themselves works of art, so that can’t be the underlying problem. Coker goes on to make a pitch for art as evocative of “empathy,” a Rousseauian notion. This, I guess, is how Coker answers his first question, why war and peace are so hard to distinguish. With the right kind of war (there is no right kind of warfare) as depicted by the right kind of poetry or art, we can become empathetic, and therefore less inclined to warfare. He rejects philosophic dialectic as the way to do this because human beings are too emotional to be ruled by reason.

    Why is war not the suspension of politics, but its continuation in a different form? Aristotle answers that “the only merit of war…is to yield a political result.” This is the purpose of statecraft, to establish reasonable or prudent measures to achieve political purposes. (While Coker denies the capacity of reason to achieve theoretical truths, in his pragmatism he proves friendlier to ‘practical reason,’ a sort of reasoning that can stay ‘inside’ the cave. He goes so far as to assert that “our humanity” itself consists “in the use of reason in action.”) “Strategy is the military realization of statecraft.” If it is not so understood, war will become a way of life unto itself, as it has with the Spartans. “But what does it profit a society to win a war if it goes on toe lose the peace that its victory secures?” He praises Tacitus and Clausewitz for continuing and elaborating Aristotle’s insight. This sets up a polemic against the United States, which (he alleges) yields itself to “an incipient desire to destroy what it cannot redeem.” Fortunately, “the American empire is aging fast,” although “there is life in it yet,” and therefore folly and danger, in which its allies (read Coker’s Britain) often make themselves complicit. He concludes his discussion of the relation of war to politics by very sensibly concurring with Augustine that “peace is never final” or perpetual on this earth, prior to the intervention of God, although the momentum of this thought leads him into a foolish account of the Americans’ regime change in Japan subsequent to victory in the Second World War.

    Why are mercenaries so distrusted? Coker claims that Machiavelli takes his cue from Renaissance artists’ discovery of perspectivism, which “introduced the world to the  metaphysical as well as artistic idea of the vanishing point beyond which the world ceases to exist, because it is beyond the reach of our senses.” Such a misunderstanding of perspective could only result from an underlying, radical cognitive subjectivism, however, and Machiavelli is no cognitive subjectivist. The world is very real, indeed; the point is to master it. Coker does get that, remarking Machiavelli’s encouragement of “unlimited” human ambition (an encouragement more than a little rhetorical, since it makes princes into disciples of the prince of princes, Machiavelli). He also claims that Machiavelli teaches that “it is human beings who give the world the form it possesses”: not exactly, but he does urge them to try to reform what they are given. Although he claims that for Machiavelli “human desire is infinite because it lacks a definite object,” he somehow elides Machiavelli and Plato, despite the theory of the ideas or forms, especially the idea of the good, all of which put limits on human desire. This gets him to an endorsement of Quentin Skinner’s misinterpretation of Machiavelli as a civic republican, no friend of princes at all, but this misinterpretation at least enables him to say why mercenaries are distrusted: They are not good civic republicans, and indeed pose a threat to republican regimes.

    Why is competitiveness positive, and competition not? Here he comes to Hobbes. For reasons best known to himself, he makes Hobbes into a philosopher of “historical consciousness,” not a defender of a theory of natural rights. most urgently the right to life. Coker rejects Hobbes’s state-of-nature theory, the notion of nature as a condition of war and indeed (in Coker’s vocabulary) warfare, saying that such a condition isn’t perpetual, only sporadic, in “hunter-gatherer” societies. But Hobbes doesn’t need to claim that there are no periods of peace or rest in such societies, only that they enjoy no security from the threat of the outbreak of warfare. Coker’s real purpose here is to emphasize “the fact that we politicize war” (emphasis in original) in three ways: by lending it “social substitutability,” that is, by redirecting feuding among families to the larger stage of society, thereby diluting motives of personal vengeance; by organizing it, introducing division of labor, fixed walls and ramparts, and logistical planning to the practice of warfare, thus making it into war; and by reducing the percentage of the adult population killed in warfare. In modern times, death tolls rise usually when a regime converts war into something more like warfare, often using it as a cloak for genocide. Changing warfare into war by politicizing it has been a very good thing, and, Coker argues, the more broadly a given population is politicized (as in a democracy) the more limited wars will be. This leaves out a crucial element of the so-called democratic peace theory, namely, that it isn’t republicanism alone (or commerce alone, as capitalists like to say) that prevents war but commercial republicanism—and then only among commercial republics. This is Montesquieu’s argument, but Coker’s chapter on Montesquieu never quite gets to it.

    Coker invokes Kant and Hegel to help him explain why we should do nothing in war that compromises peace. He finds Kant too rationalistic and the categorical imperative too absolute to be of much use in thinking about war. In doing so he loses the sense of war as “an ethical activity.” He does retain Kant’s insistence that “we should respect our enemies,” i.e., treat them as human beings, as ‘ends’ not as ‘means.’ “Once you externalize violence onto the ‘other,’ every tool and tactic becomes justified including torture.” Coker prefers Hegel, who keeps war and soldiering within ethical bounds, especially those associated with honor, “the immaterial things that define our humanity and which define our ground of freedom”—a thought he invests with considerable ontological freight in claiming that ‘History’ “mov[es] from the ‘realm of necessity’ into the realm of freedom'” precisely through this overcoming of material instinct, especially the fear of violent death central to Hobbes’s moral and political philosophy. Coker also endorses Hegel’s valorization of social cooperation via war; war “teach[es] us the contingency of life,” that “history does not come to an end when we die.” If so, then in war men learn to cooperate with one another, sacrifice themselves for one another and for the larger and higher entity, the State, which will survive after they do, and which itself will (even in its own mortality) contribute to the dialectical progress of ‘History.’ Finally, Coker writes that Hegel finds the meaning of human life in this “collective sacrifice”: “History becomes a mythical court of appeal which ante-dates all historicity and demands that every event should be understood as being in accord or not with a human destiny. Destiny is a cultural construction.” Coker thus attempts to make Hegel into a sort of post-modern; to do so he must ignore the Absolute Spirit, which unfolds rationally, according to the laws of (Hegelian) logic, and is no “cultural construction” although it does effect such construction.

    Why is the essence of military technology not ‘technological’? Coker asks Marx, Heidegger, Engels, and Nietzsche. He finds Marx not quite up to the task, as Marx was “a better political economist than he was a philosopher” (a point disputed by those of us who maintain he was equally bad at being both). In this, Coker betrays his roots in British logical positivism, complaining that Marx “imported into philosophy quite unsubstantiated and unsustainable moral factors which told his readers what to aim for”; the distinction between rational, philosophic thinking (logic, ‘metaphysics’ generally) and supposedly emotional, sub-rational moral and political assertion comes to us from A. J. Ayer and his brethren. Nonetheless, “Marx’s genius was to recognize that it is in the nature of war we are what we build“; on these grounds, Marx is a genius insofar as he can be bent to the purposes of postmodernist constructivism. Accordingly, Heidegger is the real hero when it comes to distinguishing military technology from the merely ‘technological.’ The ‘technological’ is the merely instrumental, but the ‘essence’ of technology “is how it changes our relationship with the world as well as our relationship to ourselves.” “We are the technology we use”—a sobering thought for tappers on computer keyboards. Again, associating morality with emotion, Coker associates human purposes with use, with what we do, and with how we feel about what we do. Or, as Friedrich Engels claims, “we produce ourselves through labor.” This fits Nietzsche better than it does Engels, who was as much an aspiring scientist as anyone who ever put pen to paper. Nietzsche’s warrior “finds his humanity in war.” Military technology serves not commodious self-preservation of the body but self-sacrificing spiritedness extending, ultimately, beyond even the nation to “an imagined community larger than the nation—the human community,” to the liberation of the oppressed of that “community.” Speaking of imagination, it takes a lot of it to press Nietzsche into the service of the liberation of ‘the many,’ those long-eared, braying ones whom Nietzsche would see ruled by the “planetary aristocracy.”

    And finally: Why, despite the rules, is war still an art, not a science? For this Coker turns to a scientist, Werner Heisenberg. “Whenever philosophers have claimed access to the truth (whenever they have attempted like Marx to turn philosophy into a science) the outcome has ended in disaster.” Heisenberg comes in handy, here, because for him science itself ends not in knowledge but in uncertainty: the Indeterminacy Principle. According to it, “there are no fixed things, no fully specifiable entities”; causes have no predictable effects, and this is especially true (beyond the realm of subatomic particles/waves) in war, which so easily turns to warfare. “The chance element is inherent in the nature of the quantum system” and does not arise “merely from our limited grasp of all the variables that affect the system.” In modern physics, “energy” is the equivalent of “fire” in Heraclitus. Philosophers have failed to see this because they never get out of the cave, remaining bound by “cultural bias,” time-boundedness, “personal idiosyncrasy,” and the warlikeness or polemicism of (Western) philosophy. Then again, postmodernist pragmatism may well be equally bound by the egalitarianism that the Nietzsche it abuses would have deplored, but I wax polemical and so shrink back, chastened by the dangers of playing with fire. I will venture so far as to suggest that particle/wave theory may not get us very far in understanding chemistry, biology, morality, politics, or indeed much of physics, which remains steadfastly Newtonian in its larger and more concrete manifestations.

    Camus and His Native Algeria

    by

    Albert Camus: Algerian Chronicles. Arthur Goldhammer translation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013.

    Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 51, Number 3, May/June 2014.

     

    Americans of a certain age, who cut their literary teeth on the French Existentialists and quasi-Existentialists fashionable in the 1950s and 1960s, recall that Albert Camus began his life as a French colon in Algeria, by then France’s largest colony. Unlike almost all others on the French Left in his generation, Cams could not bring himself to despise French imperialism or to turn his back on his countrymen. His reward (it should be needless to say) was condemnation and shunning by the Left, condemnation by the die-hard Algerian French on the Right, and embarrassed silence amidst his foreign admirers, who continued to read The Stranger and The Fall but seldom got round to discussing their literary hero’s political deviationism. A few years later, Edward Said gave him the thumbs-down sign—more than enough to ward off a generation of academics. That’s why Algerian Chronicles, which appeared in 1958, found its American translator and publisher more than half a century later. Yet the book remains a testimony to both the strength and weakness of the French moraliste tradition Camus stood for. His measured defense of the French colonial effort in Algeria, his refusal of fanaticisms secular and religious, ‘Right’ and ‘Left,’ set him apart from almost everyone in his day—perhaps most especially from the Existentialists with whom he was too often classed by taxonomists of ideology. His remains a lonely position amidst the self-described ‘postmodern’ Western Left, the regime-changing Right, the neo-isolationist Left and Right, and of course in the North Africa of the past half-century, where military strongmen vie for dominance with Islamic radicals.

    In some ways, however, it is most instructive to situate Camus between the two French statesmen who thought most clearly about Algeria: Alexis de Tocqueville and Charles de Gaulle. Tocqueville wanted to bind Algeria to France; de Gaulle dissolved the bands, but on terms that Tocqueville endorsed in advance. Both combined their classical sense of moderation and justice with the toughest sort of practicality, and saw no real contradiction among these three virtues.

    After three centuries of rather loose Ottoman rule, under which it developed a well-deserved reputation for monarchy spiced with assassination and Mediterranean piracy, Algeria fell to the French in 1830. More than 50,000 French colonizers arrived between the conquest and the year of European revolutions, 1848. Far from amounting to a scrum of administrators ruling a mass of restless ‘natives,’ the French put down roots in Algeria, taking the mission civilisatrice seriously. This colonial imperialism entailed racial dominance to be sure, but also the characteristic French tone in politics and in moeurs—a certain humanity to go with the imperial fist, a form of rule in many ways much to be preferred to the Ottoman misrule and Algerian despotism that preceded it.

    Initially, Tocqueville doubted that “the French genius” was “very conducive to colonization at all.” [1]  “To have conquered a nation is not enough to be capable of governing it,” he advised his countrymen; “after having destroyed their government, we [have] not given them another.” He set out to understand Algeria and to improve French governance there, never losing sight of either the human need for rule by force and civility. Given the disparate political regimes represented in French politics—from partisans of the Bourbons to socialists, each of which would either rule or take a stab at ruling during Tocqueville’s career—he also hoped that an imperial mission might serve to unite the French. Far from a race-theory quack, he advocated racial amalgamation as a means of intertwining French and ‘native’ families. On the other hand, he had no illusions about somehow uniting French Catholicism with Islam; after reading the Koran he concluded that it would not educate souls conducive to the give-and-take of republican political life. “Polygamy, the sequestration of women, the absence of any public life, a tyrannical and suspicious government that forces one to conceal one’s life and keep all affections within the family”: the very architecture of Algeria and of Muslim civilization reflected regimes that left no room for the public square and its debates.

    Recognizing the difference between the mountain-dwelling Kabyles—descendants of Berber tribes—and the valley-dwelling Arabs—the majority of the population—Tocqueville thought that France might rule Algeria by playing the one set of Muslims against the other. Unlike the Arabs, the Kabyles farmed all year round; they merely wished to be left alone, which was fine with Tocqueville, who suspected that France wouldn’t get very far with its project of bringing either of these peoples to French civilization. For their part, the Arabs were semi-nomadic and ruled by military and religious aristocracies—riding, respectively, horses and donkeys. Whereas the Arabs had allied readily with the Ottoman Turks for protection against the neighboring peoples in the region, the French, “having allowed the aristocracy to be reborn” in Algeria after centuries of Ottoman divide-and-rule, must now ally themselves with the Kabyles, subduing them “not with our arms but with our arts”—that is, with the technology that can provide this people with the “material pleasures” that they enjoy. “If their leaders have nothing to fear from our ambition and see that we have simple, clear laws that protect them, it is certain that they will soon fear war more than we ourselves, and that we shall perceive the almost invincible attraction that draws savages toward civilized man at the moment they no longer fear for their liberty. We shall then see the customs and the ideas of the Kabyles alter without their perceiving it, and the barriers that now shut us out of their country will fall by themselves.”

    As for the Arabs, a tougher, more ‘Turkish’ sort of ruling would be needed, but—and here is the crucial claim—”religious beliefs are continually losing their vigor and becoming more and more powerless to battle the interests of this world.” Before that happens, “peace with Christians from time to time, and habitual war, such is the natural taste of the populations that surround us.” this is not to suggest that education of the Arabs could be neglected. “It would be a great imprudence” to assume that Islam will die out on its own: “When religious passions exist among a people, men are always found who take it upon themselves to make use of these and to lead them. Allow the natural and regular interpreters of religion to disappear, and you do not suppress religious passions, you merely cede control to fanatics or impostors. It is already known that there are fanatic mendicants, belonging to secret societies, who have enflamed the spirit of the populations in the last insurrection.” Instead, Tocqueville recommended, let the existing religious authorities, the marabouts, come to see the advantages of rapprochement with the colonists.

    Even with such rapprochement, “because of the social organization of this people, their tribal organization and nomadic life, something we can do nothing about for a very long time, perhaps ever,” French “domination of the Arabs will be onerous.” Therefore, the French must colonize the valuable coastline (particularly reinforcing the capital, Algiers) and effectively use the Kabyles as a buffer against the Arabs while playing friendly Arab tribes against the others—all the while fighting the Arabs hard whenever they prove rebellious. By fighting the Arabs hard Tocqueville means burning harvests: “If we do not burn harvests in Europe, it is because in general we wage war on governments and not on peoples.” Not so in Algeria, where the French must punish depredations of hostile tribes undertaken against the friendly ones.

    Colonization will therefore be indispensable. Families serve as the foundation for political life. Sending soldiers alone won’t do. Moreover, soldiers who spend any considerable time in imperial service “will soon contract habits, ways of thinking and acting, that are very dangerous everywhere, but especially in a free country.” Ever the enemy of bureaucracy, Tocqueville wanted the colonists to exercise a considerable degree of self-government with well-guarded property rights, thereby attracting more of the French to the country. Tocqueville had seen the English demographic conquest of North America, and while he wanted nothing to do with its attendant use of slavery, he did appreciate the weight of numbers.

    Despite the difficulties and dangers, “I do not think France can think seriously of leaving Algeria.” Such a departure would make France seem “to be yielding to her own impotence and succumbing to her own lack of courage” in the “eyes of the world.” Geopolitically, the Mediterranean is “the political sea of our times” and Algeria (along with another French colony, Morocco) dominates the southern border of the entrance to the Mediterranean. If France left, another imperial power would take it for that very reason. “If France ever abandons Algeria, it is clear that she could do it only at a moment when she is seen to be undertaking great things in Europe, and not at a time such as our own, when she appears to be falling to the second rank and seems resigned to let the control of European affairs pass into other hands,” Tocqueville wrote in 1841. This would be de Gaulle’s thinking exactly, 120 years later, but with a very different policy to implement it.

    For most of those years, the French pursued something like Tocqueville’s strategy—propping up the Kabyles, playing Arab tribe off Arab tribe, controlling the coast. But the nationalism that social democratization fostered—and which Tocqueville famously saw and described—intensified among Arabs, even as “religious passions” remained. Among the French Algerians, a dangerous officer corps did arise, applauded by civilian colonists as their protectors against Arab nationalists and Islamic militants. By the early 1950s civil war began; a few years later, the conflict threatened the French parliamentary regime itself.

    Camus stands as an anguished witness to the erosion and collapse of the Tocquevillian—liberal, commercial-republican—hopes for all Algerians, whether of European, Algerian or Berber origin. The Chronicles consists of writings dating from 1939 to 1958, just before de Gaulle returned to power, most immediately to solve the Algerian crisis. “This book is among other things the history of a failure,” the failure not only of the French to rule Algeria well but Camus’s own failure “to inject sobriety into the discussion,” which extremists of several colorations had dominated.

    He begins with an explanation of the moral dilemma faced by any decent person who writes about the crisis at all. Not only is there “a peculiar French nastiness, which I do not wish to compound”—a system of the uncompromising regime-partisan politics dating back at least as far as the 1780s—that makes it hard for one citizen to address another; there is also the way in which the use of torture and terror by extremists among French colonists and Arab rebels alike taints any commentary at all, even the most well-intended. For example, “I am afraid that, by retracing the long history of French errors, I am, with no risk to myself, supplying alibis to the criminal madmen who would toss grenades into crowds of innocent people who happen to be my kin…. When one’s family is in immediate danger of death, one might wish that it were a more generous and just family and even feel obliged to make it so, as this book will attest, and yet (make no mistake!) remain in solidarity against the mortal threat, so that the family might at least survive and therefore preserve its opportunity to become more just.” At the same time, “Can a people survive without being reasonably just toward other peoples? France is dying because it has not been able to resolve this dilemma.” “These errors of both the Right and the Left simply define the nihilism of our times.” The just measure between force and civilization had become deranged, in Europe as well as Algeria.

    In an essay published before the Second World War, Camus excoriates France’s failure to follow up logically on its own ‘Kabylist’ strategy. By 1839 Kabyle children were reduced to eating thistles, and although “the Kabyles thirst for learning and taste for study have become legendary,” and although they never neglected to include girls as well as boys in their schools, and although the stated long-term French policy was assimilation of the Kabyle and French populations, France still maintained segregated and inferior schools for the Kabyles,. Camus also recommends public works, job training, and a reorganized emigration policy to restore economic prosperity to Kabylia. Politically, this “friendly people” should have been granted self-governing communes “under the supervision of a French administrator,” thus accustoming them to a political life consistent with republicanism—”to gain experience in public affairs” by “establish[ing] a small federative republic in the heart of Kabyle territory.”

    In a postwar visit to Algeria, Camus saw “the political awakening of the Muslim masses,” many of whom in Algeria had “spent the last two years fighting for the liberation of France.” By then the policy of assimilation could no longer work, having been resisted before the war primarily by the colonists. The most prominent Arab politician, Ferhat Abbas, nonetheless aspired not to full independence for Algeria but to self-government in confederation with France, under the more than reasonable terms of 50/50 representation of Muslim and French populations in an Algerian assembly. Camus urged French acceptance of this offer.

    But a decade later, after the founding of the Algerian National Liberation Front in 1954, Camus was reduced to writing to the Algerian Socialist Aziz Kessous, observing that “we now find ourselves pitted against one another, with each side determined to inflict as much pain as possible on the other, inexpiably.” While France “continues to get nowhere” in its parliamentary debates over the colony, “Algeria is dying”; “impotent moderation continues to serve the extremes, and our history is still an insane dialogue between paralytics and epileptics.” “The policy of assimilation has failed—first because it was never really tried, and second because the Arab people have retained their own character, which is not identical to ours”; now, the choice for French Algeria is “between a marriage of convenience and a deadly marriage of two xenophobias.” Like Tocqueville, Camus never forgets the geopolitical consequence of a simple divorce: Although the Mediterranean is no longer “the political sea of our time,” it remained an important place where the Soviet empire aimed at extending its sway through the vehicle of Nasserism. (He urges the Arabs to say “yes to  an Arab identity in Algeria, no to an Egyptian identity.”) Therefore, “I urge [Arab militants] to distinguish carefully among those [among the French] who support the Algerian cause because they want to see their own country surrender on this as on other fronts and those who demand reparations for the Algerian people because they want France to demonstrate that grandeur is not incompatible with justice.” Camus points not only to “a law of history”—”when the oppressed take up arms in the name of justice, they take a step toward injustice” toward their oppressors—but also “a law of the intellect”—the West once called it the natural law—”which dictates that although one must never cease to demand justice for the oppressed, there are limits beyond which one cannot approve of injustice committed in their name.” “Each side uses the crimes of the other to justify its own. By this logic, the only possible outcome is interminable destruction.”

    Camus asks “that both camps commit themselves publicly and simultaneously to a policy of not harming civilian populations, no matter what the circumstances” are (Here, be it noted, he departs from Tocqueville’s harsher policy.) “What is at stake is life itself.” Only on such terms, the protection of civilian lives, can the 1.5 million French colonists, the French in France, and the Muslims (“both Arab and Berber”) find some modus vivendi within political structures that enables each to retain its way of life while resisting the imperialist encroachments of the Soviet-Nasserite alliance. Very much like Tocqueville, Camus rejects the historical determinism which maintains “there is no progress without bloodshed and that the strong advance at the expense of the weak”; “such a fate may yet indeed exist, but men are not required to bow down before it or submit to its laws.” He calls on all parties “to work on behalf of liberty against fatalism”—most immediately, the fatalism of Marxian dialectic.

    He acknowledges that “the Arabs claim to belong not to a nation but to a spiritual or temporal Muslim empire.” He rejoins that there is “a no less important Christian empire,” which “no one is proposing to bring…back into temporal history,” whereas “this new Arab imperialism, which Egypt, overestimating its strength, claims to lead and which Russia is using for the moment to challenge the West as part of its global strategy” only serves to aid the attempt “to encircle Europe from the south.” This will do nothing for “the freedom and prosperity of the Arab peoples,” as shown by “the decimation of the Chechens or the Tartars of Crimea, or the destruction of the Arab culture in the formerly Muslim provinces of Daghestan” by the Soviet Union.

    Camus wants France to declare “that the era of colonialism is over,” but with stipulations that guard France as well as Algeria. France “refuses to give in to violence, especially in the forms it takes today in Algeria,” because “it refuses in particular to serve the dream of Arab empire at its own expense, at the expense of the European people of Algeria, and, finally, at the expense of world peace.” France instead should offer “a voluntary federal regime” in Algeria, similar to “a Swiss confederation” embracing “several different nationalities.” However, unlike the Swiss cantonal system, in which each group occupies separate regions, Algeria’s ethnic and religious groups are now mingled. Camus endorses a plan proposed by a French-Algerian law professor who recommended dividing the French National Assembly into two sections: the French would elect representatives to rule the French population both in the metropole and overseas under French law; Muslims overseas would govern themselves under Islamic laws “on all matters pertaining to Muslims alone.” A combined assembly would address taxation, budgets, and national defense—i.e., shared concerns. “Contrary to all French custom and to firm biases inherited from the French Revolution, the proposal would create two categories of equal but distinct citizens”—”a sort of revolution against the regime of centralization and abstract individualism created in 1789, which for many reasons should now be seen as the Old Regime.” But “if your goal is to sever Algeria from France, then both will perish.”

    This avante-la-lettre multiculturalism did not seem plausible to France’s leading statesman, Charles de Gaulle, who by then readied himself to resume the authority he had quit in 1946. [2]  Nor did he suppose that severing the two countries would cause either to perish. Indeed, “Algeria is costing us more than she is worth to us.” De Gaulle preferred “an Algerian Algeria,” as he put it; “the only question that arises is whether this Algeria will be Algerian against France or in association with her.” Such association would entail preferential trade channels, a common currency, free immigration, but no political linkage as advocated by Camus. Under de Gaulle’s plan, French colonists would choose Algerian citizenship, repatriation, or French citizenship in Algeria, with all rights respected; the latter group, along with any Muslims who chose to retain French citizenship, would do so in a self-governing enclave in Algeria, he stipulated. As for republicanism in Algeria as a whole, that regime “will one day exist, but it has never yet existed” there. Meanwhile, each step toward independence must be taken in the French republican way, by popular referendum in both the metropole and the colony. when the Algerian Arabs attempted to win glory by driving out the French by force of arms, de Gaulle brought the weight of the French military against them and was not defeated; when elements of that military rebelled in the name of continued colonialism, de Gaulle rounded them up. The consequent four years of bloodshed agitated all parties concerned, except de Gaulle, who survived assassination attempts by French-Algerian diehards and pursued the kind of ambitious European geopolitical ends that Tocqueville had said would be the only fitting substitute for empire.

    Camus died in an automobile accident in 1960, two years before Algeria achieved independence—a fate that spared him from seeing the destruction of the Algeria he knew and loved. The Algerian state expelled the remaining French colonists and their Muslim allies shortly after independence. (To this day, those Muslim loyalists do not enjoy full citizenship in France.) De Gaulle allowed Algerian perfidy to stand, having freed his hands to continue his foreign policy deigned to establish a republican Europe independent of bot the United States and Soviet Russia, a federal Europe des patries that also preserved the sovereignty of the peoples against the bureaucrats of Brussels. He accomplished the indispensable first step—rapprochement with republican Germany—and the Franco-German partnership forms the bedrock of today’s European Union. But the grander aspects of his design remained elusive, as his fellow European republicans continued to perceive the need for the American alliance and Soviet Russia continued to exercise imperial control over Central and Eastern Europe for another generation. As for the bureaucrats in Brussels, they have had their innings, but the Gaullist esteem for popular sovereignty of nations remains alive and well, too.

    Algeria has endured a more or less nationalist, collectivist, and despotic—that is to say Nasserite—regime in the decades since independence, punctuated by a brutal seven-year civil war between the military rulers and the Islamists in the 1990s, leaving over 100,000 dead. The current strongman, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, independent Algeria’s first minister of foreign affairs, has ruled in the years following the ceasefire, cautiously and skillfully liberalizing the regime while maintaining order; Algeria remains what de Gaulle called it, a country that may see republicanism, but has never yet seen it, in large measure because too many well-organized Algerians with guns do not want it. The time for a federal and republican solution in Algeria might have ben the years right after the Second World War, but that was precisely when the French returned to the practices of parliamentary republicanism that had ruined them in the Thirties. In any event, it transpires that the removal of empire does not solve the problems of faction that imperial rule both fomented and pressed down. Algerians today face exactly the same problems in ruling themselves that the French faced when they were ruling them.

    By 1958, the political dispute between de Gaulle and Camus may be stated as follows: Camus wanted to preserve the French Algerian and Kabyle communities within the Algeria that was their home, and to which they had as much right as the Arabs. To this end he endorsed a federation with metropolitan France, one that would avoid Nasserism and Soviet imperial encroachment. De Gaulle wanted to accomplish these things, but without federation, which he judged politically impossible, given the strength of both Arab-Algerian nationalism and Islamic fervor. He had other fish to fry: founding a stable republican regime in France, which included a strong executive who would prevent parliamentary paralysis and the construction of a new alliance system, not only within Europe but in competition with both American-capitalist and Russian-communist efforts to penetrate the nations then known as the ‘Third World.’ For the latter, and the grandest of all Gaullist projects, de Gaulle could not be seen to continue an imperial policy for France, although associational ties (mostly economic) with the former colonies in Africa were to be encouraged. De Gaulle was French, Camus French-Algerian.

    Each man understood the difference, which indicates a more profound difference between them. In one of the most delightful pieces in this collection, a speech Camus delivered in 1937 titled “The New Mediterranean Culture,” the future Nobel Laureate celebrated “Mediterranean regionalism.” At the time, Mussolini’s Fascist regime pretended to a “Latin” empire in northern Africa. Camus remarked “a confusion between Mediterranean and Latin” owing to the habit of “ascribing to Rome what began in Athens.” Athens embodied “the Western world’s true meaning and vocation”—Athens, with its humanism of the polis, in modernity “the nationalism of sunshine” and not of imperial dominance, a universalism that welcomes a unity of neither force, as under ancient Rome, or of faith, as under the Holy Roman Empire, but of “hope” and of “joy,” which are the very opposite of Roman, German, Austrian “anxiety” and “buttoned up” restraint. The Mediterranean transformed Christian hermeticism and harshness to Catholicism in the original sense of the term, the religion of Francis of Assisi and not of Martin Luther. (“Protestantism, strictly speaking, is Catholicism wrenched from the Mediterranean.”) Islam too has moderated itself as it has moved west, across the convivial, sun-drenched sea. Even the fascism of Rome, noxious though it may be, isn’t the fascism of Berlin. “What Rome took from Greece was not the life but rather the puerile abstraction and reasoning.” He fails to see that it isn’t abstraction that leads to death but life itself; conversely, political life may require killing.”

    “The triumphant zest for life, the sense of oppression and boredom, the deserted squares of Spain at noontime, the siesta—that is the true Mediterranean, and it is closer to the East than to the Latin West. North Africa is one of the only regions in which East and West cohabit.” And of course “Mediterranean men need a Mediterranean politics.” That was the ambition of Camus for France, for Algeria, for the world he loved. To mix cultural metaphors, the envisioned politics of Camus had a touch of the Bohemian—that is to say, of the apolitical. And it is the Catholicism of Francis, not of Thomas Aquinas, that Catholic with an Aristotelian sense of the political.

    Not so, de Gaulle, that admirer of the Latinity of Rome, albeit a republican Rome far removed politically from the monarchist crankiness of his older contemporary, Charles Maurras. Against the anti-Dreyfusards of his youth, the Pétainists of his middle age, the partisans of Algérie française he defeated in his old age, de Gaulle defended Latin mesure and order,the stern, Stoic virtues of the “man of character,” against what he regarded as German extremism, Russian despotism, American commercialism, and the “heavy dough of the English” temperament. On one memorable occasion, he reminded the Romanians—then in the grim tyrant Ceaucescu’s grip—of the Latin civilization they shared with France, as attested by the very name of their country. For this enterprise, for this re-founding of France and this envisioned reconfiguration of the alliance structures of the world, Mediterranean joie de vivre would not suffice, although it might have its place, somewhere in the far south of France. To his friend and ally André Malraux, he contrasted Roman self-government with “Mediterranean restlessness,” and he thought the French habitually exhibited too little of the former, too much of the latter.

    With her characteristic touch of irony, Susan Sontag once called Camus a husband-figure, not a dangerous lover-type. De Gaulle, however, was not only a husband but a father who (like Tocqueville, like all fathers) knew the harsher requirements of ruling. The French regime he founded thus continues to do better than the bankrupt but still talkative Greeks, or the self-lacerating Algerians whom he left in Mediterrania.

     

    Notes

    1. Alexis de Tocqueville: Writings on Empire and Slavery. Jennifer Pitts editor and translator. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
    2. See Charles de Gaulle: Memoirs of Hope, chapter 3 (“Algeria”).Terence Kilmartin translation. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971.