Lecture delivered at “Novus Ordo Seclorum: The American Founding.”
Hoogland Center for Teaching Excellence Seminar
DeLand High School, DeLand, Florida
June 1, 2004.

 

On Regimes Generally

‘Regime change’ is in the news, these days. American now fights a worldwide war against ‘terrorism,’ shorthand for certain international terrorist groups. The best known of these groups, al-Qaeda, has formally declared war on the United States. Current U. S. policy aims at winning this war not only by preventing terrorist attacks; not only by capturing and killing terrorists and disrupting their organizations. More profoundly, it intends to remove the reasons for terrorism by changing the minds and hearts of those who might become terrorists, or support them. President George W. Bush calls this strategy ‘regime change,’ and has begun to enact it in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Reasonable people might well ask: What is a ‘regime’? And why should we attempt to change one, or more than one?

As it happens, today’s catchphrase invokes the central idea of political science, as it’s been understood since its founding in ancient Greece by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Consideration of the regime distinguishes political science from the other social sciences that came along later: economics, with its emphasis on markets; sociology, with its emphasis on mores and folkways; anthropology, with its focus on ‘culture.’

In contrast to the other social sciences, political science is not a recent discovery. More than two thousand, three hundred years ago, Aristotle understood political regimes—what they are, and why they matter to the life of every citizen, and every subject, in any political association. That such a commonsense understanding of political life has endured for so many centuries and remains a guide for us today suggests humbling thought (humbling, at least, to political scientists): Political science is not rocket science. We’ve known the basics for a long time. Heeding what we already know—that’s another matter.

Aristotle’s book on politics follows his book on morality, the Nicomachean Ethics. Why, we sophisticated moderns might ask, would the study of politics follow the study of morality? Contrast, perhaps?

No, Aristotle isn’t joking. (Truth be told, Aristotle doesn’t joke around, much.) Rather, he sees that morality or ethics, the quest for the good life by human individuals and families, must lead to a consideration of political life. Political associations—the small, independent ‘city-states’ or poleis, as well as the huge, sprawling empires of his time—all seek some human good. Aristotle’s Politics begins with a logical argument: Every polis is a partnership; every partnership is constituted in order to achieve some good; therefore, every polis is constituted in order to achieve some good. This presents a problem, however. Partnerships generally, and political partnerships in particular, really aim at something held to be good, believed to be good by those who rule the partnership. Typically, this is nothing more than their own good—a partial good in both senses of the term “partial.” So, for example, if the few who are rich control the political partnership, the polis will aim at the good as the rich conceive it—very often at the expense of the many who are poor. Conversely, if the many rule the polis, they likely will use their authority to fleece the rich. Although the rulers of the polis may intend to obtain the good, to obtain justice for the members of the polis, rulers typically seek only a art of the overall good of the inhabitants of the polis. Political life thus results too often in frustration, anger, partisanship, factionalism, even civil war; that is, political life all too readily self-destructs, defeats its own purpose, namely, securing the good life.

What to do? Classical political science aims at a rational account of the whole of political life, including the overall good of the political association. Such an account can bring us to understand the partial, partisan views of the good, and then to correct them—to balance and moderate impassioned partisans, making them see the advantages to themselves of a broader, more inclusive view of justice than the ones to which they are inclined.

Aristotle begins by asking what a political partnership or association is. He considers the small polis rather than the large empire; in his day, the polis exhibited all types of regimes, whereas empires usually were monarchies. He analyzes the polis in two ways: first, according to the groups that compose it; second, according to the individuals who compose it. This double focus separates him from many subsequent political scientists, who tend more narrowly to think about political associations as collections of individuals, only, or on political associations considered as collectivities, only, or perhaps of collections of collectivities called ‘interest groups’ or ‘factions.’

The groups that compose the polis begin with the family—the mated pair, their children, and their slaves. The family features the three types of ruling that human beings can engage in: the rule of masters over slaves; the rule of parents over children; the reciprocal rule of husband and wife. Aristotle calls the relationship between husband and wife “political” rule, a matter of mutual give-and-take, negotiation, ruling and being ruled, consent. Only among barbarians, he says, do husbands rule their wives as masters do slaves.

Human life does not stay at the level of the family, however. A family lacks autarchia, literally, self-rule or self-sufficiency. Families seldom enjoy the material means to sustain themselves by themselves. Therefore, families extend, and eventually join with other families to form the wider association of the tribe. Tribes in turn form villages, and villages eventually join with other villages to constitute the polis. There is nothing automatic, ‘organic,’ or inevitable about these developments. Each step involves thought and discussion. Political communities are founded; like money, they don’t grow on trees. Endowed with the ability to speak and reason, to deliberate in common, human beings need the political partnership or association in order to secure not so much mere life, subsistence, as the humanly good life. As speaking and reasoning persons, we need to discuss amongst ourselves what the best possible life is for us, and how we might go about achieving that life. Only the political partnership affords human beings the scope of activities needed to fulfill human nature. Only the polis affords us the fullest autarchia or self-ruling self-sufficiency.

Composed in one sense of groups, starting with the family, the polis also consists of individuals—specifically, citizens, those individuals who actually engage in the reciprocal rule, the deliberation and shared action, that characterize political life. Aristotle calls the polis “the multitude of citizens.” This leads him to ask, Who is the citizen of the polis? And this in turn leads him to consider the different kinds of political partnerships, the regimes.

Regimes make political partnerships what they are. The regime is the decisive feature of political life studied by political scientists and, more importantly, discussed by citizens. Regimes first of all consist of persons. Who rules the polis? An oligarch or a democrat? A king or a tyrant? Whether your monarch is the late King Hussein of Jordan or Saddam Hussein or Iraq will make a big difference in your life, and quite possibly in the timing and manner of your death.

Regimes also consist of structures, that is, of institutions whereby the rulers rule. A man with a tyrannical soul might be rendered relatively harmless, if hemmed in by the institutions of, say, aristocracy or republicanism. In such regimes, the would-be tyrant would find himself ‘checked’—prevented from committing the worst depredations he envisions.

Conversely, a ruler who might be rather mild when wielding limited power might turn tyrant if let loose in a country without well-designed political institutions. Power may not corrupt, but power does show the character of the one who wields it. Well-designed institutions will incline the ruler to show his better side.

This suggests a third aspect of regimes. A given set of rulers and ruling institutions will decisively effect the ‘mores and folkways,’ the way of life of its members. An ambitious young person coming up in an aristocracy, where rulers thirst for honor through displays of military prowess, will be rewarded and punished for different virtues and vices, different habit of mind and heart, different behavioral patterns, than in a country where the leaders admire and possess wealth, where money-making, not war, seems the best way of life. This dimension of the regime, its way of life, tends to produce an ethos, a character, in the citizens, individually and collectively.

Finally the rulers, ruling institutions, and way of life of the regime aims at some purpose, some end, some telos. Regimes are ‘teleological’ or purposive. Part of their purpose is to form a good character (as the rulers understand ‘good’) in the citizens, but the purpose may also go beyond that—typically, to secure justice for its members, whether ‘justice’ is held to mean the advancement of God’s kingdom on earth, security of unalienable natural rights, or the dominance of a supposed master race or class.

After outlining these two modes of analysis—the polis as an association of groups and the polis as an association of individual citizens—Aristotle combines them. Insofar as it exhibits the characteristics of the groups that compose it, the polis will exhibit one or more of the forms of rule first seen in the family: parental, political, or masterly. Insofar as it exhibits the characteristics of an aggregation of ruling individuals, it will be either large or small—that is, it will be the rule of one, few, or many individuals. Aristotle can now do what any scientist wants to do: He can classify poleis with respect to their ‘species’ or regime type.

If one person rules over his subjects in a parental way—that is, ‘for the good of the children’—that regime is a kingship.

If one person rules over his subjects in a masterly way—that is, for his own selfish interests, as if the subjects are slaves—the regime is a tyranny.

If a few persons rule in a parental way, and rule one another reciprocally or ‘politically’ as husbands and wives do, in a household, then the regime is an aristocracy.

If a few persons rule in a masterly way, typically with an eye toward enriching themselves at the expense of all others, even if they rule one another reciprocally, then the regime is an oligarchy.

If many persons rule themselves in the ‘political’ way, then the regime is a mixed regime—’mixed’ because such regimes typically combine several kinds of rule, especially oligarchy or the rule of the few who are rich, and democracy, the rule of the many who are poor.

If many persons rule the minority (typically, the rich) in a masterly way, squeezing them for their money, the regime is a democracy.

Thus there are three good regimes—kinship, aristocracy, and mixed—along with three bad counterparts—tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. Aristotle’s use of the term ‘democracy’ for a bad regime takes some getting used to, at least for us today. He means what we mean by ‘tyranny of the majority.’ Americans old enough to recall the unjust legal discriminations imposed upon ethnic and racial minorities, discriminations now outlawed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, will know the sort of things he means. Although pre-1964 America was by no means a bad regime overall, insofar as the majority oppressed minorities, the regime was bad and deserved to be reformed.

Moving any polis towards the good requires rulers who understand political science in this straightforward, commonsense way. A bad regime will need considerable reform; a very bad regime will justify revolution, that is to say regime change. Unjust persons may also attempt to revolutionize a good regime, bend it to their own purposes, their own (defective) definition of ‘good.’ Good or bad, a revolution or regime change might be violent or non-violent. Many revolutions, including the American revolution, have involved the use of force, but some, like the “Velvet Revolution” of Czechoslovakia in 1989, when the old Communist Party oligarchy gave way to a commercial republic whose first president was the playwright Vaclav Havel, come off without a shot fired in anger.

All of this means that political science, knowledge about politics, is architectonic. Political science classifies political partnerships as they exist in the real world, and also tells members of those partnerships how better to design them so that a more just, more fully human way of life may result. Aristotle gives numerous recommendations with respect to architectonic ‘design improvements’ for every kind of regime, for, as he puts it, “to reform a regime is no less a task than to institute a new one from the beginning.”

Aristotle’s fundamental insights stand through the centuries. In his book The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, political scientist Fareed Zakaria writes that religious beliefs, social customs, and other ‘cultural’ features of human societies do not by themselves determine human behavior: “If you get the politics and the economics right, culture will follow.” Similarly, although the rule of law matters greatly for the defense of civil, political, and economic freedoms, behind the rule of law remains the rule of law makers—the regime. It is of course also true that the ‘cultural’ preconditions of a political founding, the circumstances in which the founders find themselves, will open up some regime possibilities, and at least temporarily foreclose others, and that habituation in ‘the rule of law’ will incline rulers to moderation and justice.

As citizens, then, few things attract our attention more quickly than any proposed change in the basic structure of our regime, or as we more usually say, any change in our constitutional law. After all, what does a documents such as the United States Constitution constitute, if not the fundamental ruling structures of our government and, indirectly, the kind of persons who are likely to hold positions within those structures and wield legal powers at our behest?

Political architecture requires much more than mere blueprints, designs on paper. We call the authors of such paper regimes ‘utopians’—and ‘utopia’ means ‘nowhere,’ or at least nowhere except on a piece of paper. Aristotelian political science seeks political regimes that work not on paper, not the regimes of coffeehouse ideologues, but practicable ruling institutions, designed by and for a politics of prudence. Such politicians deliberate to find ways to move their country toward the moderate center between the vicious extremes of unjust factions.

To find the political center requires even more than prudence; it also requires theoretical reasoning, the discovery of the criterion by which all regimes are properly judged. That criterion is justice, the good of the whole, what classical philosophers call natural right. Natural right is natural because it is discovered by examining human beings in all regimes, and by seeing what characteristics all human beings share, beyond the conventions of those particular regimes. Natural right is right because it consists of those principles that are good for human beings everywhere and always.

What must be good for any being—animal, vegetable, or mineral—is the unhampered exercise of its defining characteristics. For example, once you have observed a red oak—preferably, many red oaks, growing under a wide variety of conditions—you should know some things about what is good for such an organism and what isn’t. You will know that it can’t be good for a red oak to be placed in darkness and left there, to be deprived of water, to be uprooted, and so on. To be a good, a flourishing red oak, the plant needs certain conditions. A good human being, and a good partnership of human beings, also need the right conditions for flourishing, according to their natures.

Won’t individual persons and groups differ in the conditions they need? Yes: What is good for one may not be good for another. Your meat may not be my poison, but sometimes it might be, and it could very easily be my indigestion. Therefore, justice or natural right consists of treating equals equally, and ‘unequals’ unequally. We treats nuns and axe murderers differently (to imagine a rather stark contrast) in accordance with their very different natures. Nonetheless, we do treat them equally insofar as they are human beings and fellow citizens; the nun and the axe murderer, each accused of criminal acts, should receive fair trials, as befits a being that is at core rational, and so responsible for his actions. (If, on the other hand, the axe murderer turns out to be clinically insane, we do not punish but rather restrain and treat, as befits a being not at core rational.) Or to take a more benign example, in school we might justly treat an athlete differently than an egghead, even as we try to lead both to responsible citizenship and gainful employment; different in abilities, they are equally in need of a livelihood, and indeed a life, and so ought to be treated equally in one sense, unequally in another.

 

On the American Regime, Specifically

Between Aristotle’s Athens and the Founders’ Philadelphia, three massive facts intervened, complicating but not dissolving this basic understanding of political communities and of political science. First, prophetic religions with universal claims took hold in large parts of the world; second, the modern state transformed the political landscape of Europe; third, social democratization began to take hold, eroding the old aristocracies.

In Christianity, and later in Islam, political communities saw several promising but also alarming new things: universal religions, pervading many political communities not only one, as did the established civil religions; prophetic religions, their members required to call to account those who ruled locally in the name of God; religions that saw in human beings not merely virtue and vice but holiness and sin, and the consequent need not only for goofd morals and the performance of civic duty but for salvation. How could these new religions integrate themselves into political communities without civil and international war? Although Islam commended war, Christians themselves viewed physical as opposed to spiritual warfare as highly questionable; the very universalist, prophetic, and salvific properties of Christianity seemed to make factionalism both wicked and inevitable.

In Christendom, neither the late Roman Empire nor the Europe of the Middle Ages saw a stable political solution to the latter challenge, a challenge that grew even more acute with the rise of the modern state. As envisioned by Machiavelli and elaborated by Hobbes, the modern state aimed at solving the religio-political problem by centralizing all political authority in one set of hands. In modern states, unlike the ancient empires, politicians or ‘states-men’ could now project power far beyond their capital cities, into the lives of every citizen or subject, in two ways. The technologies provided by modern science empowered militaries to bring state authority farther and faster than ever. Genuinely worldwide empires were now winnable. And the scope of state power could now be sustained institutionally because the new science of politics included the invention of modern bureaucracy, which could keep authority present in the lives of every person in a regularized, routine way. Bureaucracy changed the habits, the ethos, of every modern society; it ‘politicized’ the members of political communities in ways hitherto unseen.

This ‘politicization’ of society under a central state in turn fed the movement toward democratization in society. With the old aristocratic classes weakened and/or co-opted by the state, commoners could now bid for rule. And they wanted to bid for it, so that they could exercise some control over the new, ‘in-you-face’ state. That is, democratization of society under the central state led to the push for democratization in politics.

That very democratization of society, however, could also lead to a vastly empowered form of tyranny. With no armed aristocracy to block them, monarchs could attempt to crush all opposition, ‘atomize’ it in order to subordinate it to the state apparatus. Thus Tocqueville’s startling prediction: Someday the democratic republic, America, and the socially egalitarian but politically tyrannical Russia will each “control half the world.”

Because Christianity drew the attention of Europeans to the intractability of sinfulness, political scientists saw that the regime question, ‘Who rules?’ must be supplemented even more powerfully by the regime question, ‘How to rule?’—that is, to the second element of regime design, the structural or institutional element. If the persons who rule will always be tempted to evildoing, and if the ethos of any political entity will tend toward corruption (owing to original sin), getting the institutions right, ‘allowing for’ sinfulness but redirected human energies toward good ends, sometimes ‘in spite of ourselves,’ will seem a much more urgent risk. The centralizing institutions of the Machiavellian/Hobbesian state only increase this urgency.

You see this in the forty-seventh Federalist. There, Publius cites Montesquieu, a philosopher who well knew the Machiavellian terrain, and who argues that an institutional design flaw—allowing legislative, executive, and judicial powers to be gathered in one set of hands—is the very definition of tyranny. Aristotle would have said it’s the very definition of monarchy, which might be kingly or tyrannical, but the Founders are even more cautious than the prudent old philosopher. Their experience as well as their religion had led them to be.

Hence their argument in the Declaration of Independence. Given the tendency of George III toward seizing legislative and judicial powers to go along with his executive power—evidence of “a design to reduce [Americans] under absolute Despotism”—a substantial plurality of Americans endorsed regime change. Before thinking of regime change anywhere else in the world, Americans enacted it for themselves, and substantial numbers of them died or fell into ruin for it. The exercise of prudence, it turned out, did not relieve Americans of the need for courage and self-sacrifice for one another’s sake.

Regime change, for the Americans, aimed at the conscientious and prudent securing of unalienable natural rights for themselves and their posterity. Prudential regime change does not require only the removal of the tyrannical government. It requires political reconstruction, the founding of a new regime more likely to secure natural right. That was the work of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, a work of architectonic political science aimed at the establishment of just, civil peace among the United States.

The passions of individuals and, even more, the passions of groups necessitate government. Conscience alone does not always suffice to restrain us, and in the words of Publius in The Federalist, “the favorable attributes of human character are all valuable, as auxiliaries, but they will not serve as a substitute for the coercive provision belonging to Government and Law, mildly administered.” Unfortunately, government and law may not be mildly administered because those who administer them may fall into the same passions. The Founders addressed this problem by so structuring the government they constituted as to moderate the passions of the powerful. “The structure of the Government itself” serves as “the only effectual safeguard” against the abuse of power, the possible war by the government itself against the unalienable rights it is intended to secure. This structure, and the social structures it encourages to organize ‘beneath’ it, operate on a principle well articulated by Publius: “The best security for the fidelity of mankind is to make their interest coincide with their duty.”

Because “the experience of the ages proves that with exceptions too few to impair the rule, men can not be held to the performance of delegated political trust without a continued and practical responsibility to those whose benefit it is conferred,” government by consent must occur not only at the time of the founding. Consent must become a means of government.

If justice in practice requires consent, and human vice in practice requires government, government by the consent of the governed raises striking opportunities and problems. Fortunately, human nature is not entirely corrupt. “As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires an active degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualifications in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence,” Publius argues. “Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.” They enable men to govern themselves. Government by consent (that is, by reasoned assent) is self-government. Unlike many writers today, Publius never speaks of ‘autonomy,’ which literally means ‘self-law,’ giving oneself the law. Being a law unto oneself is no way to govern oneself. Reasoning is the natural law, and self-government requires obedience to it, first, with self-made laws coming second, and remaining consistent with it.

Republics had existed before, of course. Publius distinguished the American republic from the others in its use of representation. The practice of popularly electing persons from the people for the purpose of governing the people “was neither wholly unknown to the ancients nor wholly overlooked in their political constitutions.” Some ancient regimes featured an assembly in which the people at large might gather; such institutions tended to fall prey to demagogues who worked on popular passions. Under such passionate circumstances, genuine self-government cannot exist. “The countenance of the government may become more democratic,” Publius allows, “but the soul that animates it will be more oligarchic. The machine will be enlarged, but the fewer, and the more secret, will be the springs by which its motions are directed.”

The impassioned character of popular assemblies made other branches of government seem necessary to the ancients, and officeholders in other branches typically were drawn from the ranks of ‘the few’—aristocrats, oligarchs, who were supposed to balance the passionate ‘many.’ This was the Aristotelian ‘mixed regime.’ In America, representative government allowed all branches of government to fill their offices with ‘commoners’; even the Supreme Court consists of nothing but commoners. There were no titled aristocrats here and no royal family. But neither would—could—there be large popular assemblies on the national level. Representative government enabled America to have an unmixed republic, while avoiding the worst dangers of pure democracy and of republics with overly-large popular assemblies.

In this unmixed republic as designed by the Founders, all American citizen-rulers are elected by their fellow citizens or appointed by such elected representatives of the people. There is no purely democratic branch of government, no Athenian-style assembly,  no element of ‘participatory’ democracy whatever, except in some localities that have the ‘town-meeting’ form of government. There is no national-level ‘direct democracy, either—government by plebiscite or referendum. There is no oligarchic or aristocratic branch, such as the English House of Lords. The American republican government, Publius wrote, “derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people,” and is administered by persons with limited terms, or, if life-tenured, during “good behavior.” Representative government moderates both the strife and the unjust majoritarianism that popular government gives vent to. Elected representatives “refine and enlarge the public views” by study and debate; to this day, the path to respect in the United States Congress is to convince your colleagues that you really understand the topics your committee deals with—whether it be agriculture or national defense, banking or foreign policy. At the same time, owing their election to broad coalitions, representative rarely succeed as ‘one-issue’ candidates. They have every incentive to seek the adjustment of diverse interests.

Representative government thus maximizes the role of reason in politics and minimizes passion. “It is the reason, alone of the public that ought to control and regulate the government. The passions ought to be controlled and regulated by the government.

In addition to being an unmixed republic, America is also a commercial republic, unlike the military republics of antiquity—notably, Rome. Commerce guards unalienable rights by promoting what the Scottish philosopher David Hume calls “parties of interest” and discouraging “parties of principle.” By parties of principle Hume refers primarily to the violent and uncompromising religio-political factions that fought civil wars in early modern Europe. The Founders also recognized this problem; Publius very nearly begins The Federalist with a condemnation of fanatic wars. A regime that guards the unalienable right to property by leaving citizens at liberty to engage in commerce thereby encourages them to direct their attention and energy to a form of peaceful and regulatable competition, a competition that stands not on uncompromising appeals to principle but on negotiable compromises, deal-making. Commercial republicanism fosters an ethos of busy-ness, of material self-interest tempered by reasonable discussion in the civil society of the modern state.

By affirming the unalienability of the right to property, commercial republicanism puts definite limits on the tendency toward oligarchy or aristocracy that wealth brings. This point remains one of the most-overlooked of the Founders’ insights. Free commerce rests on the principle that you are entitled to keep the products of your own labor. Your labor and its products belong to you, not to some lord of the manor. Abraham Lincoln states this principle most forcefully: “Labor being “prior to, and independent of, capital, [it] deserves first consideration in civil society.” To slave owners, liberty means the right “for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor”; for genuine republicans, liberty means the right “for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor.” Slave owning means the enforced perpetuation of dependence by a faction among a people who had declared their independence on the basis of the laws of nature and of nature’s God, and of Creator-endowed unalienable rights. This contradiction could not endure forever, and did not.

Representative government and commerce both make it possible for the American republic to be extensive. With no need to assemble the mass of citizens in one place, with no religious establishment and no requirement of universal adult participation in military exercises to enforce unity of spirit among citizens, the United States government can encompass a large, diverse population on immense territories—unlike the smaller republics of antiquity. Size strengthens stability when stability depends less on force than on reasonable commercial relations. Those factions which do arise can seldom rule; if they rule, they can never rule for long.

Factional rule is also seriously impeded by what Publius calls the compound character of American republicanism. The Constitution famously separates the powers of its government into executive, legislative, and judicial branches, and then balances those powers. this system of ‘checks and balances’ prevents factions within the government (whether or not they represent factions among the people) from seizing control of more than one branch at a time, and also prevents one branch from dominating the others.

The Founders also instituted a federal republic, “a system without an example ancient or modern,” Publius proudly maintains. Federalism lends a political and governmental structure to the constitutional union that commerce provides on the level of civil society. All American ‘states’ must have republican regimes; the people inhabiting these small republics then pool part of their sovereignty in order to set up a system of republics, large and powerful enough to defend itself (and by so doing defend the natural rights it is intended to secure) from foreign and domestic predators. With their right to bear arms guaranteed in the Constitution, the citizens of each state also retain the power to guard themselves from any attempt by the federal government to injure those rights.

The unmixed, commercial, extensive, compound, federal republic, founded upon consent and the rule of law, secures unalienable rights for its citizens. It links those citizens to their government through the practice of representation. The people are sovereign, under the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. By separating government from sovereignty, keeping it with the people, American republicanism prevents Machiavellian statism while retaining the supreme advantage of that statism: its ability to defend itself amidst the dangers of the world. But popular sovereignty can only do so insofar as it recognizes its own moral limitations, namely, its limitation by those laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, the God endowing them with unalienable rights. The structure of the federal and state governments was designed by the Founders to encourage such recognition by frustrating the worst passions and channeling the others into peaceful and just pursuits.

Slavery was the principal flaw in the Founders’ republic, one they had inherited from the original settlers and hoped would disappear in time. Slavery contradicts natural right, and it also contradicts republicanism. That is, slavery violates both the moral foundations and the political structure of the American regime. James Madison saw this clearly. In an unpublished note written during the composition of a series of essays he published in the Jeffersonian newspaper, the National Gazette, in the 1790s, Madison observed: “In proportion as slavery prevails in a State, the Government, however democratic in name, must be aristocratic in fact. The power lies in a part instead of the whole, in the hands of property, not of numbers. All the ancient popular governments were, for this reason, aristocracies, the majority [of their populations] were slaves.” “The Southern States of America, are on the same principle aristocracies,” the great Virginian (himself a slaveholder) admitted. Given the constitutional requirement for republicanism in each state, Madison knew that his observation was political dynamite. That dynamite exploded in the 1860s.

 

 

Walter Berns: Making Patriots. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 40, Number 2, January/February 2003.

 

A scholar writing on patriotism, and not to debunk it: Will wonders never cease? After all, isn’t patriotism a bit of an intellectual embarrassment? How can the love of country, pledging allegiance to the American flag, possibly interest anyone with an education beyond grammar school? Emotion aside—even a Ph. D. might feel something for the old sod—how could patriotism have sufficient rational content to interest a human mind?

Yet highly intelligent men have found American patriotism intellectually engaging: Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, Lincoln. “There was not then,” Berns writes, “as there is now, a division between intellectuals and politicians,” a division that now results in politicians knowing (perhaps blissfully) “nothing about what is goin on in the world of political theory,” and in theorists refusing “to believe it part of their job to promote the cause of republican government” (135). Thoroughly ‘politicized,’ too many intellectuals have no realistic sense of the political. What happened between, say, the Civil War and today, to make this so?

For a model of what thoroughgoing politicization really means, Berns points to Sparta, where there were no intellectuals. Philosophy in Athens and Christianity in Europe compromised the whole-heartedly political way of life in the West, but in time the combination of philosophic precision and Christian devotion led to schisms and wars. The American Founders solved this problem by rejecting religious establishment in favor of allegiance to the American flag, to the republic for which it stands, and, ultimately, to the principle of unalienable human rights that they designed that republic to protect. That is, the Founders invited their fellow citizens to defend a country, a particular place ruled by a particular regime, for the sake of a universal principle, a quality shared by all human beings whether or not they were Americans. As Americans, this group of human beings dedicated itself to the duty of securing universal rights for themselves and their posterity.

In so solving the problem of the tension between particular attachments and universal rights and duties, Americans brought on a new set of problems. How shall these agreed-upon, self-evident rights be secured in practice? (For example, what should be the relation between the one general government and the many small ones?) How far shall America go in defending its republican regime in a world of nations often uncongenial to republicanism? (The French went conquering in the name of universal rights, provoking the extreme particularity of nationalist politics, thereby rendering the French nation’s condition precarious, intermittently, for the next 150 years.) In the last century, America had to face down two tyrannies infected by virulent combinations of the particular and the universal. And in the 21st century Americans must consider how to defend natural-rights republicanism from countries understandably suspicious of what the powerful victor in those confrontations with tyranny might do. If American established itself as a sort of worldwide church militant for natural rights, the defense of natural right might suffer as much as Christianity did, when politicized too heavy-handedly.

Berns writes seven succinct chapters, the first on the thoroughgoing patriotism of antiquity; the second on the division of human devotion introduced by Christianity; the third on the division of human energies introduced by commercialism; the fourth on the educational needs caused by these three phenomena; the fifth on the patriotic poetry of Lincoln, which combined the intellectual grasp of the American principle with the emotional resonance of words fitly spoken; the sixth on the special problem that race-based slavery posed to American patriots; the seventh on the problem of patriotism and the law, especially constitutional law, with respect to the symbolic object of American patriotism, the American flag. Patriotism turns out to be thought-provoking, in part because it provokes. Thinking about patriotism requires us to come to terms with the spirited part of our souls, the part that holds the near dear, and finds the universal in the near, making the near all the more with fighting for.

Contrasting ancient Greece with America, Berns observes that patriotism requires education, and that the Spartans coordinated “every detail” of theirs to the inculcation of patriotic sentiment—even to the extent of suppressing questions concerning the right and wrong of the city’s conduct. Even Athens, whose philosophers did conspicuously raise such questions, never separated something called ‘civil society’ from another thing called ‘the state,’ never separated ‘church’ from ‘state,’ and (in)famously executed the annoying questioner, Socrates. For Athenians, love of country came to mean love of empire and the glory attendant to empire. “The institutions of both Athens and Sparta were ordered with a view to war” (17) to a degree that the institutions of American commercial republicanism never were. American patriotism might decline into individual and family self-interest. Tocqueville worried that it might. In America, the political community cannot be made to seem all-encompassing, and so patriotism will remain limited.

Disestablished, religion moved away from ‘the state’ and was restricted to ‘civil society.’ “[B]y separating the spiritual from the temporal, Jesus not only provided the basis for the separation of church and state, he made it impossible for a Christian to be a patriotic citizen in the ancient sense” (24). For a Christian, God’s City inspires the fullest loyalty, not Rome. No prophetic religion makes a good civil religion; attempts to do so run afoul of confusion between ‘temporal and eternal’—the misattribution (for example) of the vices of the French Old Regime and its visible church to Christianity itself. Americans met this problem not by inventing a new civil religion, as the French tried so implausibly to do, but by making religion civil; by transforming laws against blasphemy into violations not of dogma but of the public peace. By removing religion as a gateway to political power, Americans retained it as a guardian of morals and sundered its dangerous association with the jealous, angry passions ambition arouses. Here, Berns goes too far in claiming that the God of the Declaration of Independence is “Nature’s God,” the god of the philosophers, only. The plain language of the Declaration also refers to the Creator-God, the God of Judgment, and the God of Providence. ‘God and country’ has been an American motto; if patriotism here centers on a particular defense of universal rights, and if those rights are endowed by the Creator of men, there need be no contradiction between patriotism and philosophy, or between patriotism and religion.

What if religion, now at liberty in civil society, meets commercial life, equally at liberty there, and fails to balance this countervailing tendency toward materialism and selfishness? Will not patriotism too dissolve in those solvents? Jefferson supposed so, consequently preferring gun-bearing farmers to the bankers who collected farmers’ debts. And as farm populations decline and the populations of bankers, stockbrokers, and shopkeepers increase, what then? A standing army to replace yeoman militia, to be sure, but a standing army needs citizen support. Berns devotes his central chapter to citizen education.

Jefferson wanted public education controlled locally by parents who in this way would participate (as he put it) “in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day” (65). Participation in government will foster love of the public things, making them one’s own. Given the predominantly religious persuasion of Americans, local control meant religious instruction, the strengthening of moral conduct pointing beyond the self and, under the American regime, toward the self-risking defense of the natural-rights principles the regime defends. “[N]othing in the First Amendment was then understood to prohibit the states from providing religious instruction in the schools,” and nothing did until the 1940s—that is, when the American national state began routinely to overbear local self-government. Berns laments, “Not one of the [1940] Supreme Court jutices gave any thought, any thought whatsoever, to the role of religion in republican government, specifically, the possibility of a connection between religious training and the sort of citizen required by a self-governing republic” (75). Berns associates this self-governing virtue with the modern (specifically Montesquieuian) redefinition of virtue not s the classical moral quadrivium (courage, moderation, prudence, justice) but as the self-sacrificing love of country. It would be more accurate to say that the Founders—Washington being the highest example—esteemed all of those virtues, classical and modern, but Berns’s basic point is sound: Schools wrested from parental control and handed over to secularizing bureaucrats who teach moral relativism may rot the foundations of patriotism. They have not done so, yet, but Berns might argue that our patriotism, though ardent, could be more thoughtful and principled than it is. And if it is not very thoughtful and principled, how distinctively American can it be said to be?

“[D]evotion to a principle requires an understanding of its terms,” and “that understanding cannot be taken for granted” (83). For understanding, one needs, so to speak, Madison first, Madison Avenue second. Among statesmen who understand both the American principles and how to convey that understanding, Lincoln has no equal. The Founders knew that the truths of the Declaration of Independence respecting natural right were self-evident to Americans but not to everyone; they never expected George III to nod soberly in concurrence with his colonists’ strictures and repent. Lincoln saw that the sovereign people themselves might become blinded by the same tyrannical passions, obscuring truths in a desire to maintain slavery or studiously to overlook it. In his wartime rhetoric Lincoln set the sentiments of shared guilt and forgiveness against those evil passions. the new birth of freedom, freedom for every American regardless of race, could result from the new glimpse of natural right that Lincoln’s cleansing and healing rhetoric made possible.

Slave emancipation only began this new life; emancipation was precisely a new birth of an infant liberty, long from being nourished and educated to maturity. Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address as encouragement to the first steps in that education, what would have been Lincolnian reconstruction. That reconstruction aimed at again reconciling natural right with consent; the assassination ended it, and the dynamic of Southern resistance and Northern force continued for a hundred years, ending only when a recognizable modern state, unintended by Lincoln or any other Civil War-era American, an entity needing minimum local consent, moved on the South with Hobbesian rigor. This did secure rights for the descendants of slaves, but the absence of consent did little to enhance patriotic feeling on the other side, instead recasting some of that sentiment into the now-familiar ‘pro-government’ versus ‘anti-government’ struggle.

Insofar as they are formed by the moral-relativist ethos of bureaucratic public schools and by the impassionating appeals of entertainment and advertising, Americans begin to resemble their antebellum forbears in one respect: They begin not to see the natural rights they once held to be self-evident. This time, however, it is not the passion to enslave others but passions of self-enslavement that rightly trouble Berns. Without expecting to see a new Lincoln, one can still provide the materials with which resistance to such passions might be buttressed.

Berns therefore concludes his argument by discussing the Constitutional debate over the American flag—specifically, the Supreme Court’s rulings holding laws that prohibit flag defilement unconstitutional. Emptied of intellectual content by the claim that the legal right to free speech trumps the natural rights that free speech and all other constitutional guarantees are intended to secure, “the flag stands for nothing in particular” (137), except maybe free speech itself. Logically that means that if free ‘speech’ includes flag defilement, free speech is entitled to put n end to free speech—that natural right re alienable by majority (or even Supreme Court-based) fiat. If freedom and/or the will of the Supreme Court trumps logic itself, then speech is chatter, and chatter cannot be desecrated. To this, Berns replies that the flag stands not only for free speech—understood as real, human speech, deliberation, not the mindless expression of the impassioned ‘self’—but for all the natural rights defended by those who live and fight under the flag, and the republic for which it stands. Those natural right are not opinion but truth. Those truths frame free ‘expression,’ not the other way around. The other way confuses libertinism with liberty.

‘Public intellectuals’ are a dime a dozen. Their publicity is an advertisement for themselves, their intellect often ignorant of the conditions needed for a life of the mind. In his long career as a public intellectual of a more sober sort, Walter Berns has called his more celebrated colleagues to greater thoughtfulness. They have preferred to bask in their celebrity. But others have listened, and maybe they have had some good effect, a bit removed from the limelight.

 

This is a response to three papers presented at the Southwestern Political Science Convention, New Orleans, Louisiana, March 30, 2002.

The papers were:
Lee Ward: “Thomas Jefferson on Natural Rights and Empire.”
J. David Alvis: “A Plan for Reform: Herbert Croly’s Critique of American Democracy.”
Patrick J. Bernardo: “Ortega y Gasset on Rights and Self-Government.”

 

The papers before us raise the question of the American regime in the twenty-first century, although none of them concerns a thinker of this century.

The American Founders claim that popular self-government best secures our natural rights. Like Great Britain, America too will be an empire, but one of unprecedented character. This will be an empire of liberty, a place to which men and women will want to immigrate, and never again need to exercise their natural right of emigration. That is the original “promise of American life.”

In so claiming and so promising, the Founders follow Locke in two ways. They are ‘individualists’ in the sense that life, liberty, and property are rights held by individuals. But almost to a man, and also following Locke, the Founders regarded human nature as social. Even in the state of nature, human beings live in families. This natural fact encompasses a moral fact. Jefferson, for example, calls “the natural sense of justice” or “sense of right and wrong” “as much a part of [our] nature” as the senses of hearing, seeing, feeling. Dismissing the spiritual claims of Jesus of Nazareth, Jefferson lauds his moral claims, which contradict the claims of the form of modern individualism stemming from Machiavelli, an individualism tout court which leaves no place for genuine sociality or morality, and therefore with no real place for natural rights.

The natural sense of justice makes popular self-government possible; reason alone would never suffice to rule l’homme moyen sensuel. This natural sense cuts through the conventional claims of aristocrats and monarchs, enabling the people to see and feel their way to self-government.

In addition, this new kind of empire can flourish because the principle of representation extends popular self-government across big places. As Jefferson writes, “No constitution was ever before so well-calculated as ours for extensive empire and self-government.” With such institutional backing, and with the kind of commercial ties commended by Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu, human sociality makes ‘friendship’ among self-governing regions possible; it makes a non-bureaucratic political whole possible, countering the centrifugal human passions sufficiently to allow reason to rule where it would otherwise be too weak.

The natural rights of social animals must differ fundamentally from the natural rights of solitary animals. Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau all deny the sociality of human nature. The Founders depart from their fellow moderns in this. They reconcile individuality and sociality by first seeing that life, liberty, and property are always someones; there can be no life of a community without the lives of the individuals who compose it. Liberty and property, indispensable to life, similarly require individual fulfillment. However, the Founders also see that individuals must defend themselves together; this takes more than calculated contractarianism, although it does take that. The calculating contractarian rescues no one from burning buildings, nor does he give up his life for his friend—much less for his political friend, his fellow citizen, that intimate stranger.

Whatever else they were, the Founders were hardly Croly’s naïve “pioneer democrats.” The Progressives offered a new promise of American life. Seeing the old one broken, injured by artificial persons called ‘corporations’—unnatural bodies—they turn not only from America’s constitutional foundation but from its natural-rights foundation. They turn instead to the subspecies of utilitarianism called ‘pragmatism’ (Croly) or to instantiated ‘idealism’ (Wilson), or to their unholy and unstable combination, dialectical materialism (Lenin). All these progressivisms endorse forms of the ‘leadership principle,’ a principle admitted by the Founders only in military affairs. Croly’s elevation of ‘History’ over natural right and his consequent replacement of statesmanship with leadership is really neither Hamiltonian nor Jeffersonian, with respect to ‘means’ or ‘ends.’ Eschewing an account of natural rights republicanism, Croly instead tells a story, a tale of American political and social development.

But absent natural right, why are the economic and social inequalities the progressives deplore wrong? Why should democracy preserve itself, with or without expert ‘leaders’? Does Croly’s misconception of American liberty as “individual self-determination” not simply find a loud echo in the progressives own grander, collectivized triumphalism? Croly’s historicist vitalism, issuing in his call for “a continual process of internal reformation” —what Trotsky later and more forcefully calls permanent revolution—animates much of twentieth-century collectivism, but in this Croly speaks past the American Founders, not to them. As a historicist, he must.

Croly replies to this ‘why’ question by saying that “the democratic scheme of moral values” is a “religion” of “loving-kindness” (albeit one with technical-administrative efficiency), preparing the American landscape for “the crowning work of some democratic Saint Francis.” “Democracy,” he contends, “cannot be disentangled from an aspiration toward human perfectibility.” Actually, the Founders had rather thoroughly disentangled their democratic republicanism from any such aspiration. Croly takes Jefferson’s Jesus and brings His millenarianism back, this time without a God to back it up. It is the failure of the progressivist promise in all its forms, its lack of sustainable religiosity and statist loving-kindness—the compassion of the cold monster—that brings us to Ortega’s version of the ‘last man.’

Ortega cites Nietzsche, Hegel, and Comte, but not Tocqueville. Yet his problem is the Tocqueville problem. Democracy, a social condition of long gestation, has been born and it is growing. It releases immense energy, “a fabulous increase of vital possibilities,” strength not decadence. But so far it is rather too much like a college sophomore—long on potential, short on actualization. It doesn’t quite know what to do with itself. It’s all revved up with no place to go.

Progressivism is not vital but fatal, Ortega argues, because at bottom it is fatalistic. “We are not launched into existence like shot from a gun.” Our potential can issue either in liberty or in the worst despotism, as Tocqueville foresaw and Ortega sees before his eyes. Our democrats begin to care only for anesthetics and motor-cars. With the new tyrannies, “there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions,” under “the right not to be reasonable.” Genuine liberalism requires the nobility of the aristocrats that democracy inundates. “The great sin of those who directed the nineteenth century” was their “lack of recognition of their responsibilities”—their failure, I should say, to heed Tocqueville. Oddly, Ortega fails to see the threat to philosophy in all this, but he sees the threat to liberty clearly enough. “Modern technicism springs from the union of capitalism and experimental science,” and both capitalists and scientists are mass-men, ignorant of the whole, hermetic and self-satisfied individuals who do not understand the conditions of their own ways of life. Unlike Tocqueville, however, Ortega calls not for an inspiriting recognition of “the natural greatness of man” but for popular recognition of human limitedness.

Unfortunately, like so many European writers, Ortega has only the weakest understanding of America, which he dismisses as “the paradise of the masses.” “America has not yet suffered; it is an illusion to think that it can possess the virtues of command.” Had Ortega never heard of the American Civil War, of Lincoln? He does see that the bourgeoisie can fight, which is the beginning of wisdom in such matters.

On the theoretical level, we need an account of natural right understood as characteristic of a social and political animal. I say “natural” because Kant’s categorical imperative doesn’t work, being too deeply embedded in the Rousseauian wing of the Machiavellian fortress. Specifically, what does it mean to wed Lockean natural rights to sociality and not only to political institutions but to politics as a way of life?

On the practical level, we need a constructive reply to Croly and his allies. The Progressives saw clearly that the American regime faced the challenges of ever-increasing scale and complexity. They failed to show that the American regime as designed by the Founders and amended in the wake of the Civil War could not meet those challenges, but no one has shown that it can, either. The mixture of the original design and the progressives’ design that prevails today has met with challenges from a position more radically to the ‘Left’ than anything the old progressives intended, and the result has been a hash.

In 1650, Europe, having embarked on the nation-state system, the system of the Peace of Westphalia, could consider fundamental political-philosophic alternatives when understanding that system. One was that of Hobbes’s Leviathan, that vast blueprint for the modern state, home of the mass-man. The other was Grotius’ The Laws of War and Peace, which looks at exactly the same political phenomena through neo-Aristotelian eyes. Europe chose the systematic Machiavellianism of Leviathan. Americans may still have the other choice available to them, the choice of self-government. But we will need to start using the old political science of Aristotle and the new political science of the Founders and of Tocqueville if we are to make that choice in the real world, and keep ‘the promise of American life.’