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    Cocteau the Greek

    by

    Jean Cocteau: Past Tense: Volume I, Diaries.  John Howard translation. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987.

    Originally published in the New York City Tribune, September 9, 1987.

     

    Novelist, playwright, filmmaker, painter Jean Cocteau stayed at or near France’s artistic avante-garde for most of his long career. His diary records the confrontation of a predominantly ‘Greek’ mind and sensibility with a radically non-‘Greek’ world. A certain Aristophanic wit whets itself thereby: When he hears that Monaco’s prince claims to find the casino that underpins his country’s economy embarrassing, “I answered that the prince was wrong, that the casino was the last temple. The acknowledged Temple of Chance: a god much more powerful than is imagined in our age of economic planning.” The ancient Greeks saw this more clearly than moderns do, and Cocteau rather likes the older gods—”Gods with nothing terrible, nothing vague about them. Gods who are concerned with human affairs, who marry the wives of men and give them children.” Americans will find him a bit reminiscent of his contemporary, Ezra Pound, who also preferred Hellenism to Hebraism for its clarity of thought and cleanness of style.

    Cocteau is ‘Greek’ both when he looks at art and when he makes it. “To admire is to efface yourself. To put yourself in someone else’s place. Unfortunately so few people (and so few French people) know how to get outside themselves,” escape their own (very modern) individualism or ‘subjectivity.’ From Descartes to Rousseau to Sartre, the French trap themselves inside themselves; when they break out, their politics inclines toward dream-work, the residue of excessive inwardness.

    In his own work, which he always calls poetry though it comes in many genres, Cocteau insists not on ‘creativity,’ as moderns do, but craftsmanship, the Greek technē. Today, he complains, “Whatever is botched and perfunctory is called ‘human.’ The profession, the craft, which consists in fabricating the vehicle by which the human is expressed, passes for an intellectual task from which humanism is excluded. The well-written, well-painted work is ‘cold’…. This is the defense of the mediocre. It has the advantage of numbers on its side.” In his own way, he extends Tocqueville’s insights on democracy.

    Cocteau therefore applauds Matisse, who buys phonograph records to play while painting, but who “stops at Beethoven,” that Vesuvius of emotion whose eruptions thrill mass audiences. Even the diary form itself, the most personal genre, bends to Cocteau’s non-individualistic purposes. He uses it not to confess but to record. Events do not serve introspection, or self-advertisement; they stimulate (often aphoristic) expression of perceptions registering the world instead of the feelings.

    Nor does such poetic expression imply estheticism. “It is likely I would not have devoted myself to poetry in this world, which remains insensitive to it, if poetry were not a morality.” “In a world of disorder, set oneself in order.” Cocteau calls this “acute individualism,” but he means something ‘Greek’: “One’s own equilibrium collaborates with a universal equilibrium whose advantages we shall never know.” Expression of oneself—the disciplined ordering of oneself, not ‘self-expression’—”is what I call an ethic.”

    “What is more hateful than Jules Laforgue and free verse? True freedom must be won within the rules. To escape prison under everyone’s nose.” Such freedom calls for “hard virtue,” not “the soft kind.” It requires not only discipline but intelligence to guide that discipline. Cocteau would “restore to God the intelligence transferred to the devil’s account, especially in the sixteenth century, when the devil took the leading role…. The older I get, the more I believe that it is not only goodness which counts—but a goodness which does not extinguish mind.” Cocteau thus admires Nietzsche’s “diamond edge” in the aphoristic writings but deplores Zarathustra.

    Cocteau departs from the Greeks in at least one respect. While lauding intelligence as integral to morality, he claims to dislike prudence, rather as Nietzsche does. He nonetheless exercises it, in his own way. When dealing with a journalist, “I say a few words which he makes as much noise out of as he can. Whereupon I am held responsible for the noise. This conspiracy of noise has replaced, in my case, the conspiracy of silence. Moreover, the two get along famously together. For noise conceals real work and establishes the reputation for brio which critics confuse with professional conscience.” When he says, “I am a lie that always tells the truth,” Cocteau means that social life imposes masks no poet removes; the poet uses his mask, speaks the truth through it, as Greek actors did.

    Moderns try to dispense altogether with masks. This leads to the comedy of sincere effusion. “Our age is academic and uneducated; everyone is a professor who knows nothing and is eager to teach it to everyone else.” Cocteau sees that “the trouble started with the Encyclopedists,” those devotees of ‘Enlightenment.’ “They told everyone to think. As a result, stupidity thinks—something which had never been seen before.” Unlike any other Frenchman on record, Cocteau rates Gulliver’s Travels over Candide, saying, “Laputa is a very good account of what is happening right now in America and Europe.”

    It is the dogmatism as much as the misjudged egalitarianism of ‘Enlightenment’ Cocteau dislikes. “Don’t close the circle. Leave an opening. Descartes and the Encyclopedists closed the circle. Pascal and Rousseau left it open. One must avoid filling in the gaps. Our age has made this mistake.” Politically, one must avoid the temptation—one almost imposed on prominent artists—to have an opinion. “Our modern terminology is very dangerous; if people can no longer use words like ‘message’ and ‘commitment,’ they doubt their own intelligence; they reach a point where they claim that the refusal of political commitment is a negative commitment.” But the refusal to ‘take a stand’ need not betray opportunism; it may be a very sensible thing to do.

    Cocteau learned this in the harsh school of experience, and it took more than one lesson. He flirted with fascism in the 1930s, then had his brush with Communism after the Second World War. He failed to heed his own advice, yielding to the temptation of petition-signing and remark-making. He tries to explain one of his acts of idiocy: “I once said there is one great politician of our time: Stalin. This had nothing to do with the system [i.e. the Soviet regime]. Stalin refuses all dialogue because he knows that a conversation with fools always degenerates into a dispute.” Yes, but even such degeneracy might be preferred to mass murder. Cocteau evidently shared the illusions (circa 1952) of French intellectuals generally regarding Stalin’s crimes, reports of which only became believable to the Left after Khruschev reported a few of them in 1956. He does offer one sensible political comment: the Americans, he observes in the early  1960s, are giving the Soviets time to strengthen themselves militarily; this will prove ruinous for the Americans. Twenty-five years later, no prudent person could simply deny this prediction.

    He is better on his fellow-poets. “Will the monstrous stupidity of Gide’s Journal ever be discovered?” “It was the child in Gide that I liked. His immoralism seems to me a lot of nonsense. And his Nobel [Prize] is a hoot.” Proust “is very hard in his judgment of snobs and pederasts in order to deflect attention from his own person.” Charlie Chaplin “has [the] childlike fury of humanitarianism,” as he attempts to involve his audiences in his own self-pity.

    Five more volumes of Cocteau’s Diaries await translation, and they make a good introduction to his other works, which, except for the films, do not travel easily overseas. Intelligent ‘Greekness’ may have its limitations, and Cocteau’s version, for all its celebration of hardness, has soft edges (the old gods didn’t always marry the wives of men). But his form of intelligence does put overweening modernity in perspective, often in a salutarily jarring way. Many of us get what we deserve in life, but only a remarkable man metes out what he deserves in his very style of writing.

    ‘Postmoderns,’ Deconstructed

    by

    Stanley Corngold: The Fate of the Self: German Writers and French Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

    Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 15, Numbers 2 & 3, May and September, 1987.

     

    German writers seldom efface themselves. Contemporary French literary critics assert ‘the death of the self.’ North American literary critics assert the apotheosis of the French critics.

    How long can this go on? Pessimists say, ‘Indefinitely,’ but Stanley Corngold is no pessimist. A professor of comparative literature at Princeton, a former student of Paul de Man, and a native of Brooklyn, he comes well positioned and equipped to arraign ‘deconstructionism’ before the bar of common sense. His departure from or overcoming of Brooklyn did not include any foolish attempt to jettison every ounce of Brooklyn baggage. But he knows that Brooklynite common sense will not by itself convince academics, who remain genteel even while assaulting Western civilization and the bourgeoisie—that is to say, themselves. So he writes his critique in ‘Eighties-academic prose. (“My purpose is to institute the modern self as the copresence [‘structure’] of various narratives [‘effects’] of the self which earlier writers have produced.”) He also gives every sign of actually having read most of what the ‘deconstructionists’ and their academic publicists have written—an ascesis more to be admired than emulated.

    Each reader will find his favorite example of this happy conjunction of style and substance, but your reviewer recommends footnote 35, page 244. There Corngold quotes an as-they-say dense passage by Professor Victor Lange on Heidegger (“Historical concretizations of life,” “methodological access,” “suprapersonal presence,” “hermeneutical phenomenology”); with that convincing poker face you prefect only in the old neighborhood, he comments, “It is hard to say this any better.” Truly, Corngold attacks ‘deconstructionism with its own heavy instruments. It is inconceivable that even his most insensible targets will not flinch.

    The poet’s self is Corngold’s topic—”a paradoxical being that must ‘disown’ itself in order to exist.” “Disown” is Hölderlin’s word; he likens poetic self-assertion to the “feeling of the sacred” in ancient tragedies, a feeling that can no longer find immediate recognition, but to which modern readers can carry over their own “spirit” (Geist) and experience. This carrying-over works both ways; the poet’s self carries over into “foreign analogous material,” into what T. S. Eliot calls its “objective correlative,” and the reader’s self carries over, away from itself, to perceive the poet’s intention. Hölderlin is the first of seven German writers Corngold presents, all of whom insist that this carrying-over, though problematic, does occur. The ‘deconstructionists’ claim that the self loses its way (‘shattering’ and ‘diffraction’ are the usual metaphors) among outside ‘structures.’ Attacking the notion of the Cartesian subject, res cogitans, the ‘deconstructionists’ deny the existence of self-knowledge, reject the self as a “coercive authority” and as the basis of autonomous individuality. The self “as the agent of its own development” and the source of poetic making, amounts to little more than a myth.

    Corngold agrees that “the self as particular, the self as self is precisely what cannot be represented in the concept”; the self “cannot at once stand inside itself and give a full description of itself.” The attempt to do so would yield an infinite regress (not knowing when you’ve reached the self’s foundation) or an infinite ‘progress’ (selves followed by super-selves). “Can a self be itself and know that the act by which it is known ‘disowns’ it?” Corngold affirms that it can, thanks to “history,” by which he means narrative. Narrative is an “effect” issuing from but not identical to the self, opposing but not obliterating other selves (including parts of the originative self that the dominant part of that self finds objectionable); the synthesis of these effects approximates “a third term, a project totality” that objectively confirms the existence of both self and other-than-self. “The integrity of the self is established by a style open to the history [here, “history” also means experience] it suffers and perceives—and makes in the stories it tells, with others’ collaboration.” Corngold would defend Rousseau by means of a literary Hegelianism. Rousseau “figures in the carpet of almost everyone of these essays…. He is my eighth ‘German writer.'” Corngold’s German-language writers are Hölderlin, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Mann, Kafka, Freud, and Heidegger, many of whom find themselves subpoenaed by ‘deconstructionists’ as witnesses to the self’s alleged decease.

    Hölderlin teaches that the self’s consciousness of its own mortality, of the most radical otherness, impels it to Bildung, development. This “divided self” does not merely contradict itself, as ‘deconstructionists’ assume. Bildung “turns toward historical and sacred objects and finally toward Nature as that generality enabling, sustaining, and enveloping… particular contacts and negations.” Nature makes the self possible. It also makes self-knowledge possible by affording the self a perspective outside the self. Hölderlin’s “Nature” has nothing to do with stable, Platonic forms; it is as mutable as the self—hence its affinity with the self. At the same time, both self and “Nature” do sustain themselves. Poetic, artful language “assures the permanence [perhaps too strong a word] of relations arresting an eternal ‘slippage’ between signifier and signified.” Language mediates between self and other, thus imitating all-encompassing “Nature.” Corngold does not attempt to prove Hölderlin’s scheme to be rationally sustainable or coherent; a proof of this would require justifying the emphasis on the mutability of which death serves as the most striking example. But he does argue plausibly that Hölderlin makes more sense than the ‘deconstructionists’ do. Corngold shows that Lacan, Laplanche, and Foucault unwittingly imply the existence of the self even in the formulations they use to deny its existence.

    In Dilthey, nature, even nature conceived as mutable, gives way to social and political history. “What must a poetics be in order to sustain the view that the subjectivity of a poet may be authentic and representative of social forces?” Dilthey contends that historical activity includes the study of history, that study makes history, is a praxis. The self ‘objectifies’ itself by political activity, art, and scholarship. “Literature is an institution because it institutes relations of force between acts of creation, reception, and understanding whose thrust is to enter the public order.” But the notion of “force” implies much more than mere history-as-narrative. Predictably, Dilthey brings nature in under the cover of history, saying that statesmen, poets, and philosophers share a “powerful life force of soul,” “energy of experiences of the heart and of the world,” the capacity to generalize those experiences, and “the power of inspiring conviction.” The notion of “historical psychology”—in Dilthey a form of vitalism likely derived from Nietzsche’s writings—implies not only history but technē. Neither Dilthey nor Corngold entirely appreciates this, but the former does write, and the latter repeats, that literature’s “highest function” is “to represent the dignity of the person in the midst of its determination” by ‘history.’

    In the argument between Rousseau and Hegel, Nietzsche incites to war. He rejects the understanding of art as a means of Bildung. If art is Dionysian, the poet’s self becomes more unstable, a field susceptible to possession. For Nietzsche, questioning distinguishes the self from merely determined phenomena. “The self wants itself as a question,”; it “exists as the question of its being and to this extent is self-determined,” as no outside force causes it to question itself. Corngold finds Nietzsche’s conception of the self to be dubious, because Nietzsche appears nearly to identify the self with the body, whose many drives are merely asserted to have a rank. Disorder cannot be said to determine itself. But Corngold adds that Nietzsche’s will to power itself consists of contradictory forces; if the self produces language, an “enterprise of the will to power,” then language, logos, and therefore logic, are not oriented toward discovery but toward overcoming. The self’s self-questioning means not self-doubt but self-overcoming, questioning. “The question of the self must live as an openness, an unansweredness toward being, yet it must bend the world into virtual answers in order to preserve itself as a question.” Nietzsche’s will to power, one might observe, synthesizes part of Rousseauan nature with part of Hegelian history. Corngold dismisses the ‘deconstructionist’ contention that Nietzsche’s texts are “pan-ironic,” noting that “irony can take place only through punctual abrogations of irony.”

    Of the two twentieth-century literary men Corngold discusses, Mann does not interest him whereas Kafka does. The latter’s novels contain “breaks” in perspective—as when Joseph K. is described in the third person, a violation of the novel’s otherwise non-“authorial” point-of-view. Such “breaks” appear to exemplify what ‘deconstructionists’ call the “undecidability” of a text, symptomatic of “the death of the Author.” One might of course suggest that these “breaks” instead reveal the incompetence of the author, but Corngold has a better suggestion. Even as an author, Kafka has a horror of construction, which is one more instance of the mastery or control satirized in The Trial. Kafka objects to perfection of technique, on principle. Therefore, Kafka’s narrator “is as much subject to inauthenticity and blindness as any character”; “like the loopholes in bureaucratic procedures which, as Adorno writes, are the institutional equivalent of mercy, random breaks in narrative consistency grant the hero a sort of merciful liberation from the schematism of ‘character,’ from the privations of an irremediably personal perspective.” Of course, this can only go so far. Kafka is the one who lets the “random” breaks stand. In being allowed to stand, they are no longer random. Corngold does not quite say it, but Kafka cannot avoid presenting us with a coherent self even in his attempts to show mercy to his suffering characters. He cannot really relinquish control, only imitate such relinquishment. He approaches relinquishment of control in fiction.

    Corngold attacks the ‘deconstructionist’ misreading of Freud, describing the interpretive method involved as “the disfigured expression of a will to power bent on masking its own contradiction.” Freud’s texts are not literary. The psychoanalyst attempts to “insert” the reality of biological life into fiction invented by a patient or a writer. To Kafka, such a “cure” would itself cause injury; like Rousseau, who deplores self-interest, “Kafka’s self is defined not by particular interests but by its narrative attentiveness to the products of dream play,” by “indifference to the practical concerns of an aimed empirical consciousness.” ‘Deconstructionists’ call Freud’s texts literary because they do not know what literature is, or perhaps are hostile to it. Although they claim to ‘deconstruct’ in order to liberate readers from authors’ allegedly coercive grip, they in fact coerce texts into saying nothing, the better to fit them into the ‘deconstructionist’ construct.

    Heidegger “joins a tradition subverting the western philosophy of language which normally founds meaning on, and subordinates rhetoric to, grammar and logic.” The “most primordial” character of Heidegger’s notion of Dasein is a resolute return to “one’s ownmost Self.” Whereas Nietzsche begins with self and sees his general principle, the will to power, in it, Heidegger begins with his general principle, Dasein, which “make[s] a resolute return to the Self.” Wherever the emphasis falls, this anti-traditional tradition attributes a cognitive significance to human “moods,” beyond mere “sensation-bound feeling.” From Rousseau to Heidegger, “mood stands for a disclosive power whose reach cognitive understanding cannot attain.” The disclosive power of moods evidently has waned. Corngold’s Germans increasingly perceive that moods are “fragile” and “strange” when one sees them in others, even if they appear strong and ‘authentic’ in oneself; one self/subject cannot often coincide with another if the means of coincidence is mood. Corngold sees that historicism arises from this increased subjectivism, although he does not elaborate on this fact as much as he might—having availed himself of a sort of historicism.

    Corngold would halt this waning of Rousseau’s project before it slides into ‘deconstructionism,’ which he rightly considers an absurdity. “If a text were only a self-deconstructing motion, a play of ineffable differences, a representation of nothingness, it could not weigh heavily enough upon the reader to produce a mood.” For all the formidable doctrine historicists have produced, the basis of their enterprise remains embarrassingly natural—even if so inchoate a naturalness as that seen in human moods. Corngold may concede too much to historicism and also to Rousseau, who at times has been credited with inventing an early form of historicism. When historicism, following subjectivism, eschews dialectic based on the principle of non-contradiction and asserts a “mood”-based dialectic of synthesizing opposites, an effort that eventually ranks rhetoric over logic, it finds such projects as ‘deconstructionism’ hard to resist.

    A scholar might examine this matter by examining Rousseau, Hegel, and Nietzsche with an eye toward the classical reason they attacked and the ‘deconstructionism’ they somehow fostered. Corngold’s “postscript” and “prospect” bring to mind a less elephantine approach. Identifying his own book as a confession of sorts, a confession of the distance traveled between Brooklyn and ‘Germany,’ Corngold indicates a readiness to disown or overcome ‘Germany,’ too. One way of doing this would be to measure the language of Brooklyn against the language of ‘Germany,’ and vice-versa, in order to determine what common sense lacks that ‘Germany’ offers, and what ‘Germany’ offers that common sense can bring down to earth, or even falsify. (Socrates, for example, begins with the language of the marketplace, transcending it only when it deserves to be transcended). Despite the egalitarianism of many aspects of post-Rousseauan thought, this thought betrays a contempt for common sense that yields convolution in theory and extremism in practice. One way to get beyond ‘Germany’ is to return to ‘Brooklyn.’

    Robert H. Horwitz, 1923-1987

    by

    This remembrance of Robert H. Horwitz, whom I met as a student at Kenyon College in 1971, appeared in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 15, Numbers 2 and 3, May and September 1987. Republished with permission.

     

    In his class on modern political philosophy at Kenyon College, Bob Horwitz told a story on himself. He recalled walking along a street in Chicago at night with his friend Herbert Storing, when some youths, out to intimidate, ran directly at two professors. (These were not former students, current or former.) “Storing stood there like a real man,” Bob said, illustrating this by planting his own feet firmly and expanding his chest. Then, his enormous eyes widened in mock terror, he shuffled  few steps to the left, narrowed his eyes in a sideward glance, and muttered, “I got off the sidewalk.”

    He was teaching undergraduates the difference between Aristotelian citizen and Hobbesian man. The lesson worked: I have remembered, and now you probably will, too. But Bob left the teaching unfinished, with respect to himself. Sixteen years later, back at Kenyon for his memorial service, I learned that Bob had won the Bronze Star in World War II. His laugh came back to me then; it always sounded as if Santa Claus had read Machiavelli—not losing his liberality but putting a surgical edge on it. At the service, Bob’s student, colleague, and friend Phil Marcus said, “Bob Horwitz was always more than most saw, until it was too late.”

    Robert Henry Horwitz was born in El Paso on September 3, 1923, and he remained a kind of Texan all his life. He thought big. He talked and acted to back up those thoughts, for the sake of them and the friends who shared them. He didn’t talk or act for the sake of just anybody, having a Texan contempt for “the pusillanimous and the timid, the compromisers, and the like,” as he himself once put it. A student wrote that Bob “knew two things I didn’t: how to have enemies and how to have fun. Preferably at the same time.”

    Bob learned early how to reconcile contraries, or balance them. He grew up in Tennessee, a Jewish Southerner in the 1930s—a minority of a minority, both minorities sometimes embattled. This must have given him a certain distance from, but a nonetheless passionate interest in, the workings of the political order. It surely prepared Bob to appreciate the response made to the political order by a supremely intelligent man, John Locke, whose careful way of writing was to be rediscovered by Leo Strauss. By striking coincidence or providence, Bob’s confirmation statement concerned the relation of John Locke’s thought to the Declaration of Independence. The fruitful tension, the artful contradiction, the occasional outright conflict: Bob learned these not from books or teachers at first, but by experience in a southern prep school, in the European war, at Amherst College, in New York (where he studied piano at the Juilliard School, met his match and wisely married her), and then in Hawaii, where he undertook the Sisyphean task of teaching adult education. He learned the Lockean lesson of tolerance, and of the limits of tolerance—the latter not only in the war but especially in 1948, when Stalin’s troops crushed Czechoslovakia and harshly taught at least one Henry Wallace-style student about the evil of leftist totalitarianism.

    At the University of Chicago, Leo Strauss took Bob’s knowledge, acquired by reconnoitering a wide, sometimes rough terrain, and elevated it so Bob could see the whole all at once and measure its proportions. Strauss taught Bob what philosophy is, and what political philosophy must be, if philosophy is to survive. Bob never forgot those lessons. Out of them he fashioned a life with friends, sometimes in collaboration with fortune’s wheel, as often in conflict with it. With respect to fortune if not friendship, neither the ancient nor the modern stance could quite satisfy Bob. So he assumed either one, as circumstance required and prudence advised. He didn’t lose his balance.

    Almost all the work Bob did during and after his years in Chicago concerned political philosophy’s practical aspect or embodiment, civic education. In his doctoral dissertation he contrasted the ways Aristotle, Rousseau, and Dewey seek to educate citizens in various regimes. He sharply questioned Dewey’s optimistic belief that “growth,” conceived as the infinite expansion of democracy, could overcome the tension between city and man. Bob co-edited two books on modern ideologies, those attempts to make political structure and propaganda cohere with philosophy reconceived as science. Bob had a less than sanguine view of such schemes. He also had too much respect for ‘the common man’ to believe that citizens would sit still for enlightenment. And he knew too much about philosophy to imagine it identical to the propaganda of modern science, or even to regard it as especially well defended by that propaganda.

    Bob particularly deplored the effect of modern social science methods. He was convinced that they narrow and vulgarize the way students conceive of politics, and thus ultimately debase the way politics are practiced. In his contribution to Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics, a book he conceived, he dissected the “scientific propaganda” of Harold D. Lasswell. Lasswell rejected the classical idea of political science as an architectonic art, by slyly subordinated scientific description and prediction to a program of social control by, as Bob called them, “psychologist-kings.” Unlike Socrates’ philosopher-kings, Lasswell’s ruling class was to be empowered only to wither away; the master propagandists eventually will so arrange human life, redo human nature itself through a sort of universal enlightenment, that no politics will be necessary any longer. This strange, simultaneous maximizing of tyranny and anarchy elicited Bob’s vigorous condemnation, and he was struck by the equally vigorous condemnation the Essays provoked in professional journals, then firmly committed to ‘behaviorism.’ Bob went through enemy fire in a different kind of war. He knew that simply to provoke that war, to force social scientism to defend itself on territory not its own, was to win a battle, if not the war.

    Bob did some work that came close enough to the sort of work done by most contemporary political scientists to demonstrate clearly the difference between his understanding and theirs. In the mid-1960s, he published a series of monographs on land use and politics in Hawaii; a student of his in those days remarked that Bob showed how politics determined the use of the land, how “the very trees growing on the watersheds were the outgrowth of the regime.” Now more than twenty years old, these studies are still used by specialists, some of whom might learn from them things beyond their specialty, even as citizens might learn from them an appreciation for how politics pervades even the physical landscape in which they move.

    Bob thought of his political science classes as opportunities for the civic education of his students, who could be depended upon not to have had much of that previously. During his ten years at Michigan State University, he conceived and taught courses on modern ideologies and on political philosophy. He worked with the University’s College of Education to establish courses on civic education itself. He did not confine his teaching to academia, but addressed state and federal legislators, secondary school teachers, military personnel, hospital administrators, Rotarians and Lions; he appeared on several radio programs and, at least once, on television.

    Bob went to Kenyon College to serve as chairman of the political science department. In a letter written shortly before Bob’s death, Robert Goldwin recalled:

    “Kenyon then was probably the best liberal arts college in the country to have virtually no instruction in political studies at all…. Under your leadership, we built the best undergraduate political science department in the country…. It helped that we had a clean slate, but that was only part of it. Your ‘plan’ was the essential element. Before I left Chicago for Gambier [Ohio], I tried to draw for Leo Strauss the little diagram you used to explain your plan for the department: a base of political philosophy; one pillar, our political system; the other pillar, other political systems; across the top, international relations. Strauss showed little interest in the diagram, and when I asked what he thought of Horwitz’s scheme, he said, ‘If there is a plan for the department, it is already better than all the others.'”

    Bob found the right people (among the first and surely the foremost in service to Kenyon, Harry Clor) to teach these subjects. Then he let them teach.

    With Goldwin, he transplanted the Public Affairs Conference Center from Chicago to Kenyon. The PACC annual conferences brought prominent politicians, scholars, and journalists to Gambier to educate (they started out by assuming) and to be educated (they quickly realized). With students he reversed this process, and stretched it out over their lifetimes. Later on, Bob worked with two young colleagues, Charles and Leslie Rubin, to develop a summer course on the teaching of political science, a course that distilled the lessons learned by the teachers at Kenyon during the years his “plan” was in effect. Now some version of that course, “The Quest for Justice,” exists at more than one hundred schools.

    Bob’s scholarly work for the last fifteen years centered on John Locke, particularly Locke’s educational writings. Bob collaborated with Judith Finn on a study of Locke’s artful reworking of Aesop’s Fables; he wrote on Lockean civic education in his anthology The Moral Foundation of the American Republic; and, in what will likely be recognized as his finest work, he wrote an introduction to and an extensive commentary on Locke’s Questions Concerning the Law of Nature, to be published with scholarly apparatus by Diskin Clay and an English translation by Jenny Strauss Clay. Bob discovered missing portions of this manuscript (controversial portions Locke himself had hidden with various friends) and proved that they were intended to form part of the whole. In each of his essays Bob concerns himself not only with Locke’s teaching but with how Locke taught and for whom Locke wrote. Locke was indeed an Aesopian writer whose life, as Bob demonstrates, mirrored some of the labyrinthine character of his writings. Locke’s Questions were prepared for use in the university, where the philosopher addressed future English rulers with the consummate circumspection a theologically sensitive topic deserves.

    Bob described Locke as his hero, and he did emulate Locke in some of his circumspection. But, as he immediately added, Bob was a friend to controversy as Locke was not, confessing that he “attempted to be unfailingly kind and generous in helping his friends, but could never understand the maxim that we should love our enemies.” He saw that Locke’s thought and influence had helped to make such spirited confrontations, civil, but he also wanted to show that Lockean commercial republicanism need not extinguish all spiritedness, especially the spiritedness needed to defend these regimes of tolerance.

    Bob’s final controversy at Kenyon was a defense of civility in its academic form, liberal education. The same kind of ideology he had espoused in the 1940s, studied in the 1950s, and opposed on campus and within the American Political Science Association during the ‘New Left’ days of the 1960s and early 1970s, reappeared in yet another permutation at Kenyon in the 1980s in the forms of feminism and ‘globalism.’ Their partisans wanted to transform liberal education into political education in the propagandistic sense, asserting that “all education is political,” because they saw no difference between rhetoric and a philosophy that is politic. Physically weakened by chronic illness, Bob gave his adversaries a few lessons in politics—both in his sense of the word and in theirs.

    Both Aquinas and Hobbes teach that fear can lead to civility. As a founder in his own sphere, Bob read and taught Machiavelli and regarded it as an open question whether it is better to be loved or feared. I think finally he might have answered, “That depends upon the souls in question.” In some he preferred to inspire fear, simply. In others, fear came first, but led to friendship or at least to respect. A very others needed not to fear him at all—or, at least, not too much. Women students and colleagues had a certain advantage in this, because Bob never lost a degree of Southern courtliness, piquantly mingled with that U. S. Army/University of Chicago brashness. Bob was almost unique among my acquaintances in that I never met a woman who regarded him as an overgrown boy—as most women understandably regard most men. To a woman, they thought him a man, one of them going so far as to write, “You are drawn to the problems that separate the men from the boys.” If I ever discover how he managed this effect, I shall report back for the benefit of men everywhere.

    Nor did men think of him simply as an intellectual warrior, although with us it often began that way: A professor who met him in 1980 recalled, “They told me he was older, he had mellowed, he was no longer as combative as he used to be. This may have been true, but I still found him exhausting.” But it wasn’t long before the laughter came, if you deserved to share it. One of his last students recalled how Bob “would defiantly fire a piece of chalk at a buzzing clock marking the end of class: time was short, and there were many important jokes which still needed telling.”

    For a short time after Bob’s death, some of us worried that his commentary on Locke’s Questions might only exist in notes or in some unpublishable form. We were wrong; the manuscript was discovered, nearly complete, to be finished by several longtime co-workers. So it will be published thanks to both parts of Bob’s life as I knew it: his scholarly passion and his friendliness with those who shared his passion for knowing and his prudent but no less passionate care for the ways we come to know, and to wonder.