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    Marking the Constitution’s Bicentennial

    by

    Richard B. Bernstein (with Kym S. Rice): Are We to Be a Nation? The Making of the Constitution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.

    Originally published in the New York City Tribune, December 16, 1987.

     

    Published by Harvard University Press, underwritten by the New York Public Library, recommended by Henry Steele Commager (“the dean of American historians,” as he is often billed), this handsome coffee-table volume marking the bicentennial anniversary of the United States Constitution can be safely assumed to represent the views of America’s academic establishment. As it does, for better and for worse.

    For better, the establishment no longer subscribes to the crude economic determinism of Charles Beard. Writing in the 1930s, that celebrated ‘progressive’ historian aimed to ‘debunk’ the Constitution by claiming the framers acted in accordance with their own financial interests. His claim fit well with the temper of the American Left at the time, led by a U. S. president who decried ‘economic royalists’ on Wall Street. Professor Forrest McDonald disproved this claim some thirty years ago, carefully researching those interests and contrasting them with the arguments made on the floor of the Constitutional Convention. Insofar as the framers defended economic interests, these were more regional than personal; politics not corruption was their fame, played hard but honorably.

    Bernstein respects the integrity and intelligence of the framers. He calls the Constitution the culmination of the intellectual ferment and political experimentation in the new republic.” As befits a historian, he does better at describing politics than at understanding political philosophy.

    He rightly notices that the Declaration of Independence speaks of the American people, not the people of Massachusetts, Virginia, New York; Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues thereby “nationalized the case against George III.” Bernstein does not adequately connect the principles, as distinguished from the “nationalism,” of the Declaration of the Constitution, despite the Declaration’s clear statement that governments are instituted among men for the purpose of securing their unalienable rights—a point unlikely to have slipped from the minds of the framers. In this oversight too he follows contemporary scholarship.

    Bernstein knows that “In the era of the American Revolution, more than at any other time in our history, ideas dominated our politics.” This fact even leads to a small and amusing design problem: Many of the book’s numerous plates depict nothing more visually striking than old book and pamphlet covers. Unfortunately, Bernstein endorses the regnant historicist or ‘contextualist’ interpretation of those ideas, an interpretation promoted by such scholars as J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner. This school exaggerates the effect of ‘the times’ on great political thinkers and statesmen, overlooking the fact that such individuals themselves form a large part of what we mean when we look back at ‘the times.’ Too much attention paid to ‘context’ typically causes inadequate attention to ‘texts,’ a failure to read the writings of political thinkers with sufficient care, and therefore to judge the actions of thoughtful statesmen who did read with care.

    Specifically, Bernstein calls Montesquieu’s magisterial The Spirit of the Laws a “disorganized, rambling treatise,” which it demonstrably is not. He fails to see that while the principal framers rejected Montesquieu’s preliminary argument on the impossibility of maintaining a republic in an extensive territory, they accepted his final argument for an extended commercial republic. Following Pocock, Bernstein claims that “at the heart of republican thought was a deep concern with public virtue and an obsession with corruption,” oversimplifying The Federalist‘s argument, wherein civic virtue combines with representative and federal institutions, the extended territory those institutions make possible, and the practical spirit of agriculture and commerce to temper impolitic popular enthusiasms. Published work by Professor Paul Eidelberg, particularly his 1974 book, A Discourse on Statesmanship: The Design and Transformation of the American Polity, provides a subtler and more accurate assessment of the framers’ achievement.

    Bernstein’s failure to see the Constitutional significance of the Declaration of Independence, along with his superficial account of the Constitutional order itself, issue in an inaccurate conclusion: That Hamilton’s preference for commercial life and Madison’s preference for agricultural life, reflected in the dispute between northern and southern states at the Convention, eventuated in the severest crisis the American regime has faced, the Civil War. In fact, the Civil War had little to do with issues between financial men and farmer, and everything to do with slavery. Both Hamilton and Madison opposed slavery, although Madison (himself a slaveholder) could never think of a way to divest himself, or his fellow Virginians, of their ‘property.’

    The dispute between Madison and Hamilton centered on politics, not economics. Madison suspected Hamilton, and the Federalist Party generally, of harboring oligarchic ambitions against republicanism itself. Madison expected and wanted commerce to thrive in the United States, but wanted only such commercial activities as in his judgment fostered virtues of industry and honesty similar to those of the agrarian way of life. Far from simply identifying himself with southern agricultural interests, Madison recognized that chattel slavery made white southern gentry into aristocrats, not good republican citizens. These regime-threatening tensions, not the normal and manageable strains between town and country—characteristic of the extensive, diverse republic Madison himself lauded in the tenth Federalist—led to “the crisis of the house divided.

     

    Where Does Political Life Come From?

    by

    Pierre Clastres: Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology. Robert Hurley and Abe Stein translation. New York: Zone Books, 1987. [Published in France in 1974].

    Review originally published in the New York City Tribune, July 4, 1988.

     

    Generally a tedious lot, anthropologists slog through rain forests trying to understand obscure tribes, returning to academia where they preach ‘cultural relativism’ and accuse one another of ‘ethnocentricity.’ As none but a few of their colleagues can actually observe the phenomena they purport to describe, humbug goes undetected for years—viz. the notorious case of Margaret Mead and her swinging Samoans, hostages to mod-lib ideology.

    These efforts might make some sense if anthropologists worked to uncover human nature. Most prefer the intellectually safer but morally more dangerous course of denying that human nature exists at all, thus dismissing their only conceivably raison d’être. Why read anthropology at all?

    Because, despite the self-imposed blinders, at time anthropologists do glimpse human nature, as in the research of Pierre Clastres, late Director of Studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. Clastres undertook the study of South American tribes, not out of some aimless ‘interest’ but to learn something about the relation of human society to politics. He denies that politics, conceived as the exercise of ‘power,’ exists “in man as a natural being.”  Nonetheless, as a political anthropologist, Clastres sought answers to such perennial questions as, ‘Who rules?’ and ‘What is the end of political life?’ Human beings are political, just not in the way ‘we moderns’ define politics. This insight took him well beyond the conventional relativism of his trade.

    Modern political philosophers—beginning with Machiavelli, subtly, and continuing through Marx and Nietzsche, baldly—define politics as coercion, conquest, command, and obedience. Aside from the Incans, whose political regime somewhat resembled the modern authoritarian state, the South American tribes have yet no such experience in their daily lives. In war, yes—necessarily. In peace, no: “If there is something completely alien to an Indian, it is the idea of giving an order or having to obey.” For an Indian, “the political is determined as a domain beyond coercion and violence, beyond hierarchical subordination.” “It is not evident to me,” Clastres writes, “that coercion and subordination constitute the essence of political power in all times and all places.”

    Each tribe has a chief, to be sure. He acts not as a commander; instead, he moderates disputes, distributes his own (not others’) goods, and orates. He remains entirely dependent upon the group, his public speech ritualistic, not dictatorial. He reaffirms traditional ways, issuing no commands. Political power stays within the society itself, whose members prevent tyranny by simply ignoring any chief so presumptuous as to command them. “Most Indian societies in America are distinguished by their sense of democracy and taste for equality.” They allow a chief to command only in times of war. Clastres pauses to tell the comic-poignant story of Geronimo, the North American chief who wasted much of his life vainly urging the Apache to wage war against Mexico. As a wiser chief told a Spanish explorer (in unknowing contradiction of Machiavelli), “I prefer to be loved and not feared.”

    Indians care “to constantly keep power apart from the institutions of power, command apart from the chief.” Clastres admires this solution to the problem of rulership. He does not overlook its severity. “Primitive society… is a society from which nothing escapes, which lets nothing get outside itself, for all the exits are blocked.” The means of blockage are cruel. Tribes initiate young men not by schooling but by torture. Society literally “imprints its mark on the bodies of the young people,” symbolically “inscribing the text of the law on the surfacing of their bodies.” This ferocious egalitarianism teaches, “You are worth no more than anyone else; you worth no less than anyone else.” Coercion, then, does not disappear from these societies; they ‘front-load’ it, reserve it for childhood or youth, counting on the lessons learned then to carry over for a lifetime. If this “prohibition of inequality that each person will remember” prevents tyranny, it also prevents philosophy. It is a “pedagogy” without dialogue; the initiate silently consents. The Thirty Tyrants could not concur, but neither could Socrates. The public rule of coercive state force and the private rule of wisdom are equally impossible.

    Clastres’ observations confound Marxist pseudo-explanations of ‘History,’ particularly those regarding ‘surplus value.’ Primitive societies were not and are not subsistence economies, awaiting much-needed evolution into more advanced types. They are sedentary, not nomadic, thanks to the richness of the landscapes they inhabit. Indeed, the first Europeans in Brazil fretted at the Indians’ conspicuous leisure: “Obviously, these people were deliberately ignorant of the fact that one must earn his daily bread by the sweat of his brow. It would do, and it didn’t last: the Indians were soon put to work, and they died of it.” Pace, Marx: Work is the opiate of the masses. Or, as Clastres writes, “the economic derives from the political.”

    Feminists will find no more comfort in Clastres’ research than Marxists. Men and women perform separate functions, the men hunting and gathering, the women consuming and tending the household. Men are the humans of the bow, women the humans of the basket—one sex the masters of the forest, the other mistresses of the encampment. Taboos match practice: “A hunter could not bear the shame of carrying a basket, whereas his wife would be afraid to touch his bow.” Women sing of pain, anguish; they give birth and mourn the dead. Men sing of their own glory, each one to himself alone, pouring their (highly elevated) sense of themselves into “the hymn of their freedom,” the one activity in which their individuality is not strictly limited by the social laws etched into their skin. ‘Song of Myself,’ indeed!

    Clastres would explain the transition from statelessness to state rule not by some natural or even historical evolution but by the pressures of population density. Tribes in the tropical forests of America range from between forty and several hundred persons. With more people, a society survives only with recourse to the unifying power of a state. Here Clastres succumbs to his own inadequate conception of human nature, which cannot distinguish between animal and human biology. Because he only conceives of speech in terms of command, or solitary song, or prophetic oratory, but never as a means of rational deliberation, Clastres cannot identify the distinctively human characteristics. He cannot see how government develops out of the tribe, naturally—that is, by human nature’s exercise. For this insight one must still read that earlier and greater political anthropologist, Aristotle.

    A sort of latter-day Rousseau, Clastre does not entirely overcome modern thought any more than Rousseau did. He does correct that thought in telling ways, as Rousseau did. Like Rousseau’s, his work stands as a thorough refutation of the utopian dream which combines this-worldly community with humanitarian tenderness.

    France’s Civilizing Mission

    by

    Mort Rosenblum: Mission to Civilize: The French Way. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.

    Originally published in the New York City Tribune, March 18, 1987.

     

    For 2,000 years, the rooster has symbolized France. He rarely stops crowing, for, as Mort Rosenblum notes, the sun never sets on the French Empire, even today. The political and economic character of the empire no longer overawes anyone. But France is “perhaps the only cultural superpower”: “Freed of its colonies, it is the master”—a mastery “based firmly and squarely on illusion.”

    Rosenblum is an American journalist. By illusion, he very nearly means culture, which to be sure is not exactly political, military, economic, or technological. Culture is not tangible, and both the American and the journalist in Rosenblum doubt the reality of the intangible. As an American, Rosenblum undoubtedly knows that American popular culture—its music, movies, even some of its television shows—predominates; however, he means high culture, not low.

    To his credit, despite his apparent materialism, Rosenblum also senses that Voltaire and Rousseau, though dead, are not simply dead, not illusory. He does not see clearly why this is so. Perhaps one might suggest that Voltaire and Rousseau each expresses in an unsurpassed way certain thoughts that reflect human nature. Not the whole of human nature, to be sure. But recognizable parts of it—not illusions or at least not sheer illusions. If, as Rosenblum rightly says, “France adds up to more than the sum of its parts,” his book’s parts add up to less than a whole, because he hasn’t thought through what ‘cultural power’ or ‘cultural empire’ means. The French mission civilisatrice does indeed “project the rayonnement ,” the radiance, “of our culture,” as President Mitterand crows. But what are that rayonnement and the sun that generates it?

    Rosenblum cannot quite say, although he says much, and much of that with wit and sense. (“The French use some English or concepts not readily found in their own language, such as fair play and gentleman.“) He identifies two principal components of Frenchness: realism and illusionism. “In France, power and self-interest are respectable goals,” but one must leaven this hard dough with panache: “One can assume any pose, and command any priority, if it is done with conviction and flair.” Oddly, neither Rostand nor his Cyrano rate an entry in the book, but the shadow of that famous nose falls on every page.

    France’s universalist idealism—from the medieval crusades to ‘save’ Jerusalem to the modern ‘Rights of Man’—receive less emphasis here. Fitting neither the realistic nor the illusionistic frame, but borrowing from the contents of both, it may better explain the attraction of the rayonnement than either. Charles de Gaulle described French collaborators during the war with the Nazis as “realists who know nothing of the realities.” In doing so, he represented the strength of France, neither low-realist nor illusionist. At the time he said that, de Gaulle was scarcely more than a voice on the radio in London, and Hitler ruled continental Europe. But de Gaulle was right. Whether it speaks for liberation or conquest, French civilization owes its appeal to a partly arrogant but partly true insistence that it defends and advances humanity, civilization itself, and not only France. It therefore carries with it its own anti-imperialism, for once a conquered people discover their rights as men and citizens, rights inherent in the humanity they share with their conquerors, they have all the principles they need to end that imperialism—and the conqueror begins to lose the reason he had for his conquest. All that remains is the practical question of whether those ruled are ready to rule themselves.

    History obsesses France, and Rosenblum rightly discusses the history of the French mission. He is wrong to devote only 150 pages of a 450-page book to that discussion, giving over the remainder to rehashes of well-known events and personages in a deadpan style reminiscent of the late American humorist Will Cuppy. Still, there are insights: “Those who defended colonialism as noble, and those who rejected it as immoral, each saw their view vindicated,” but in two world wars “to a large degree, France owed its freedom to officers trained in the colonies.” Rosenblum also sees that French universalism succeeds best against particularisms, tribalisms. It begins to sputter when confronted with any rival universalism; he mentions Islam, but he might also cite American principles and Marxist ideology. (De Gaulle shrewdly tried to undermine the last two by calling them mere disguises for national ambitions.)

    Rosenblum has visited every corner of the French cultural empire, and he never fails to say something informative about each one. At times he has too much to say, as when he allocates twenty pages to a narration of the French destruction of a “Greenpeace” ship interfering with nuclear testing in the south Pacific; the story speaks well for Rosenblum’s journalistic diligence, but adds little to the argument of his book.

    He well describes “the elaborate trompe-d’oeil” by which France ‘decolonized’ many of its African territories while retaining control with ‘advisors’ and ‘technicians.’ The still-colonized former colonies generally prefer this arrangement. In Gabon, Rosenblum asked one citizen, “Don’t you sometimes feel there are too many white faces around here?” “On the contrary,” the man replied, “there are not enough.”

    As for French racism, it of course exists. But French universalism includes toleration, which often mitigates the worst hostility. Regrettably, other types of universalism do not invariably preach toleration. “For Islamic politicians, businessmen, warlords, and terrorists who feel hemmed in by the stern lines of East and West [that mark the Cold War], Paris is a secular Mecca. It is the capital of live and let live—or not.” France has difficulty delimiting its own toleration, and thus falls victim to the intolerance of others. The political fanatics it tolerates within its borders do not always tolerate it, and citizens pay in blood for a too-complaisant ‘realism.’

    Rosenblum optimistically predicts, “It is certain that there will always be a France.” He should be more cautious. When he describes his friends Jean-Claud and Hélène, “both in advertising, world travelers,” as “the best of modern France,” one must worry about modern France. While I am sure these people make pleasant company, rayonnement needs more than globe-trotting publicity types to make it worth defending or heeding. Jean-Claude hopes his son “will have both roots and wings”; one knows not whether to tremble more for the mixed metaphor or the logical confusion that produced it. Rootedness and flight don’t go together, and if the best of modern France assume they do, Frenchness may turn all-illusory, on the way to evanescing.

    The rayonnement of medieval France, the France of the Crusades, uneasily but impressively combined Roman and Christian forms of piety. The rayonnement of modern France is the Lumière, the Enlightenment—quite different from the civic virtues of Rome or the spiritual universalism of Christianity. The Enlightenment replaces patriotism and charity with toleration and public liberality empowered by the scientific conquest of nature. Its power comes from its appeal to comfortable self-preservation elevated somewhat by sentiments of generosity. It attracts, in part because it refuses to command. Its weakness comes from its neglect of politics, of the particular (this country, this regime), its inability to command. Its weakness is its strength, its strength its weakness.

    The prospects for Frenchness may depend upon whether and how the best of modern France can make la Lumière only one part of the spectrum of rayonnement.