Americans ratified the 1787 Constitution because it provided a clearly superior alternative to the existing Articles of Confederation, given the political and economic purposes of the most populous section of the country: the eastern seaboard. Opponents themselves admitted that state governments could be unresponsive to the peoples’ attempts at self-government (Wood, Creation, Chapter 10). They could offer no new, better choice. Further, their own position suffered from internal tensions or contradictions. Many of their concerns had either been addressed at the Philadelphia convention or would be assuaged by the promise of a bill of rights.

The Revolutionary War ended in the expropriation of Tories’ property; many left for Canada—perhaps most of those who had been most influential before the war (Wood, Radicalism, 176). Remaining were two types of commercial republicans: commercial-manufacturing ‘nationalists,’ who envisioned an integrated, mercantile economy, and ‘localists,’ who preferred commercial-agrarian economies operating intrastate. Both sides advocated what amounted to commercial republicanism, as distinguished from the military republicanism of the most celebrated earlier republic, that of ancient Rome. But the commercial republicanism of the Federalists was more thoroughly commercial; the commercial republicanism of the Anti-Federalists included admixtures of ‘ancient’ and Christian principles that could not be sustained as political bonds across large, socially heterogeneous territories. The war itself had given mercantile interests a boost, bringing money transactions in place of barter—accelerating capital accumulation (Radicalism, 248). With the decline of religiosity after the Great Awakening of the 1740s—a decline itself precipitated and sustained by increased social diversity—political societies needed bonds of interest to replace weakened religious ties. “American society could no longer be thought of as either a hierarchy of ranks”—as it had been to some extent under the Tories—”or a homogeneous republican whole” (Radicalism, 258).

There could have been a serious split between northern and southern states—that is, between states leaning away from slavery and states where the peculiar institution was securely ensconced. But this split was averted in Philadelphia, with the several compromises devised by the prudent (and exhausted) delegates: the three-fifths clause, the fugitive slave clause, and the slave importation clause. Instead of a division between states, northern and southern, the ratification debate resolved into intrastate debates between eastern and western interests. The best way to see this is to look at the way voters in the three regions—North, South, Middle Atlantic—behaved during the ratification period.

The Middle Atlantic states ratified quickly. Their central location would be an advantage under a more centralized government. Moreover, in terms of both population and territory, three of them—Delaware, New Jersey, and Connecticut (often misclassified as a New England state)—were small states whose worries about being engulfed by their large neighbors had ended with the “Great Compromise” between small states and large states at the Convention. with equal representation in the Senate, they were assured that New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia could not squeeze them with high imposts. A ‘states’ rights’ position cannot be upheld by sovereign states too small to defend themselves; equal representation in the Senate was the best deal for them.

Large or small, the Middle Atlantic states were already full-fledged commercial republics by the 1780s. A stronger national economic and political union was an  obvious advantage for them. A well-organized national military force would protect their coastlines and therefore their international trade. With no Puritan heritage and with religiously diverse populations, no Christian Spartas enlivened their dreams. As for the one large state of the group, Pennsylvanians saw that Philadelphia would remain a major commercial center. Western Pennsylvania, very democratic, localist, and agrarian, opposed the new Constitution and eventually staged the Whiskey Rebellion, but lacked the votes to defeat the Federalists in the eastern section of the state.

The South viewed the Constitution with more suspicion, worrying that western expansion might be sacrificed to trans-Atlantic trade. In 1780 and throughout the first half of the century to come, southerners hoped to consolidate the dominance of commercial agrarianim over the North’s commercial manufacturing and finance by pushing into the west and driving the Amerindians out. They regarded the Jay-Gardoqui treaty with Spain as a sellout of southern interests, putting the right to navigate the Mississippi River at hazard. Would the new, stronger federal government spend money to defend north-Atlantic shipping instead of frontier defense (and offense?) Nonetheless, in the end the east-coast southerners prevailed over the less numerous westerners. In South Carolina, Charleston was a major international shipping point, and its interests carried the day. Virginia had a tradition of self-government, but it was also militarily vulnerable, with its long seacoast and rivers leading deep into the interior. Virginians knew they needed northern help for defense not only from the British and the French navies but from potential rivals in other states, if the Union dissolved. Further, Madison could argue that the Jay-Gardoqui treaty was actually the result of the weakness of the Articles of Confederation government. For defense, a an energetic, strong central government would be indispensable. In the South, Federalists could turn the Anti-Federalist argument on its head. If you really want self-government, independence from foreign nd domestic military threats, your best bet is a strong federal union, especially if you have the guarantees of the Bill of Rights. Union by definition discourages depredations by neighbors; union also makes Americans much more formidable to European powers. For self-government, for the practical enjoyment of states’ rights, a stronger federal union makes more sense than a weak confederation.

New England posed a somewhat different, but still soluble, problem for Federalists. Massachusetts and New Hampshire were as ardent devotees of localism as were the southern states. In addition, they had religious reasons for local self-government. The small republic, they saw, was indispensable in order to maintain the homogeneity needed for the public promotion of personal and civic virtue. The Christian Sparta cannot tolerate ‘Athenian’ laxness. In New Hampshire, for example, religious toleration meant personal freedom of conscience, but decidedly not disestablishmentarianism. The new federal constitution required no religious test for officeholders and in addition countenanced slavery; then as later, muscular Protestantism and anti-slavery moralism were tightly linked. But yet again, eastern, commercial interests prevailed. In Massachusetts, the port city of Boston was heavily Federalist. The central part of the state was just as heavily anti-Federalist, consisting of agrarian democrats in search of debt relief. The far west also wanted debt relief, but had suffered the effects of Shays Rebellion and by now wanted law and order as well. Result: ratification (narrowly) but with support for a Bill of Rights entailing state sovereignty over internal affairs.

New York as usual was in something of a class by itself, with one foot in the Middle Atlantic region, the other in New England. New York experienced some of the tensions of Massachusetts, albeit without the Puritan ethico-religious elevation. Upstate Clintonites—Jeffersonians of the future—opposed downstate Hamiltonians. Hamilton won the debate, narrowly, by arguing for the need for self-defense, still keenly felt after the British occupation of New York City during the war. Absent the mountains of Switzerland, how is the small, virtuous republic to defend itself? Hamilton had the answer: the extended republic of The Federalist, numbers 1-10. And even if the Adirondacks may have seemed a fair equivalent of the Alps, why would downstaters not secede from New York and join the Union, leaving upstaters virtuous and isolated, with British Canada along their border?

Rhode Island too was sui generis. It was a state full of debtors and democrats eyeing a proposed federal Constitution designed to moderate democracy and to prevent debtors from welshing on loans. And so it refused to ratify for several years. Eventually, its good citizens realized (to steal a mot later applied to the sovereign state of South Carolina) that it was too small to be a country and too large to be an insane asylum.

Virtuous but isolated: What is wrong with that? A real Spartan (over even Christian-Spartan, or if you prefer desert-Spartan) might very well ask that question. But most Americans found isolation undesirable because even the sternest Anti-Federalists were finally commercial republicans or what would come to be called ‘liberals.’ They lived in societies that were bigger and more diverse, religiously and economically, than the original Sparta ever was. A glance at Fustel de Coulanges’s La Cité Antique suffices to show the harsh measures needed to sustain a truly ‘virtuous republic.’ Anti-Federalists never had any real intention of taking such measures. There cannot really be a Christian Sparta—at least, not in a community much bigger than a monastery, as the American Puritans learned. Protestants put a premium on the individual conscience. And if you conceive of Christianity in a manner ‘tamed’ if not compromised by Lockeanism, as so many new England and other Protestant clergy had been by the latter half of the eighteenth century, you have decisively left Spartanism behind. Anti-Federalists and Federalists alike regarded government as an invention of prudence designed to secure the natural rights of individuals, and only secondarily as a device of civic education. Commercial-republican mothers, even Christian ones, do not adjure their husbands and sons to come back with their shields or on them; they are more likely to require them to bring home some bacon. Anti-Federalist appeals to personal and civic virtue had considerable power, but it was finally the power of nostalgia, an affection for a half-invented past mixed with dreams of an impossible future, even less plausible than the ersatz chivalry of nineteenth-century southerners, eventually to be gone with the wind.

Anti-Federalists were drawn by too many conflicting ambitions. They wanted the self-government of the states with the security of a more perfect union. They wanted agrarianism but not on self-sufficient farms; they wanted a commercial agriculture which required national and even international markets. Sparta did not adopt a policy of free trade. They wanted self-defense but wanted no standing armies; they wanted the citizen-soldiery of the militia, who were the same people who had returned to their fields when crops needed to be gathered during the Revolutionary War. They wanted a perfect equilibrium of state and federal power, but saw that America under the Articles of Confederation could not effectively govern itself. They wanted to secure natural rights, including the right of property, but could not find a way to prevent the state governments from being seized by rights-abusing minorities. American under the Articles could not continue to prosper economically as the Anti-Federalists (too) wanted it to do.

So they fought the Federalist politically but settled for a reasonable bargain—the 1787 Constitution with a bill of rights appended. As a consolation to idealists, the city on a hill remained standing, an example for the other peoples of the world. But it shone less, was less the New Jerusalem emitting a light unto the nations, more a rational model of popular self-government.

In that fight, it should be added, Anti-Federalists were overmatched intellectually as well as economically, socially, and politically. Anti-Federalists never wrote anything in defense of the Articles remotely comparable to The Federalist. In a civil-social milieu where substance counted more than style, that mattered. The more cosmopolitan, commercial sections produced the more impressive statesmen. The Virginia Anti-Federalist (for example) tried to match Patrick Henry against Madison (educated in the commercial-republican state of New Jersey), Randolph, and Washington. That, too, was an unequal contest. Federalist had the edge on Anti-Federalists, both in quantity of votes and quality of leadership. The representatives of most of the people were persuaded not to want radical democracy.

 

Works Cited

Gordon S. Wood: The Creation of the American Republic. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1972.

Gordon S. Wood: The Radicalism of the American Revolution: How a Revolution Transformed a Monarchical Society into a Democratic One Unlike Any that Had Ever Existed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.

Ralph Lerner: Revolutions Revisited: Two Faces of the Politics of the Enlightenment. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

Thomas L. Pangle: The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Thomas L. Pangle: The Ennobling of Democracy: The Challenge of the Post-Modern Age. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

Lorraine Smith Pangle and Thomas L. Pangle: The Learning of Liberty. Lawrence: University Press of Kentucky, 1993.

Zuckert, Michael: Natural Rights and the New Republicanism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 25, Number 1, Fall 1997. Republished with permission.

 

Does the new science of politics Publius invokes generate a new kind of political regime, a new republicanism? Or is it merely a new way of understanding an ancient republican tradition? Each of these studies illuminates these much-controverted questions.

Ralph Lerner’s gracefully written (and elegantly published) essays invite readers to consider the duality of the Enlightenment, with particular attention to its American variant. Everyone knows the Enlightenment’s esprit de géométrie. Lerner points to the Enlightenment’s esprit de finesse, a spirit his own book does not lack. The political Enlightenment was a revolution that required careful planning. Once established, it did not run itself, like nature as conceived by Deists, but required persistent explanation and defense against “over enemies without and covert enemies within” (vi).

America’s foremost Enlightener was Benjamin Franklin. “Dr. Janus,” as Lerner styles him, effected transparency, remained impenetrable. Even his works, apparently so accessible, need study to be understood. The American Plutarch presented no “exemplary lives” to ape, envy, or resent: “Franklin creates models who themselves eschew imitation and therefore encourage us to think and act likewise” (11)—to rely on, to know, and to govern ourselves. Here is no faux-Lockean selfishness: Poor Richard’s maxims “al seek to connect self-respect with the helping of others.”

There are dangers. Without religious zeal to inflame but also to restrain the self that replaces the soul, how shall self-government really govern, rather than merely affirm and assert, deny and negate? Habits of “industry, responsibility, and civility” (17) need some motor. “By enlisting good works in the service of vanity, Franklin hopes to render self-control attractive. But this is at best a gamble.” (17)  The question, ‘What will the neighbors think?’ elevates and restrains the many who care, but not everyone does.

Unlike the French Enlighteners, the Americans—already experienced in government and no longer obsessed by religion—”chose to be unabashedly prudential” (20). American republicanism is more than merely willful. There is little point in preventing one big Caligula with a horde of little ones. To do so “would only end up substituting one form of manipulation and exploitation for another” (23). “The Americans’ touchstone would be utility,” the standard of “sober republican scrutiny” (28-29). “Every claim to public regard and support thus would be compelled to answer for itself, What good was it?—meaning (more often than not), how would it help to make life more convenient, economical, and safe? This examination process was not to deny that there were other dimensions to life beyond such calculations but to insist that high-sounding claims and grand pretensions confront this consistently deflating query.” (29)

How, then, to form, cultivate, and guide genuine public opinion, as distinguished from public sentiment? In this the “natural aristoi of whom Jefferson and Adams spoke without embarrassment” faced a “delicate situation” indeed (30). Franklin’s secret society or Junto, described in the Autobiography, exemplifies the manner in which the ‘aristocrats’ properly so-called might proceed in a republican regime: “popular leadership called the cues from the fourth row, not the stage” (33).

When taking the stage, such statesmen will retell American history to Americans, “fix[ing] or reform[ing] the people’s predispositions” (60). In so doing, prudent Americans unwittingly revive the spirit of what certain Arab philosophers call kalam or dialectial theology. Sensing that “the threat to the old may come as readily from those who expect too much reason in politics,” too much esprit de géométrie, “as from those who behave as thought they expect too little” (62)—neo-Burkeans, imitating the master’s fulminations against geometers and sophisters?—wise legislators will present their reformation “as a correction of some intervening distortion or corruption and certainly not as a case of their overruling the founding legislator” (62). But the form, as distinct from the spirit, of dialectical theology will very often not appeal to commercial-republican citizens. The “more engaging method might be to tell a story” (65). Lerner devotes a chapter to each of three wise storytellers of commercial republicanism: Burke, Lincoln, Tocqueville.

Burke rows (no first or second sailings in labor-loving modern republics) with “muffled oars”; “he means to make no waves” (78). Facing the furies of the French Revolution and its British sympathizers, he invokes “the principles of the Glorious Revolution and the prudence of its managers,” perhaps augmented by Burke’s own prudence. His evocations of elevating passion never carried him away, in contrast to some of “those modern adherents of conservatism who claim him” (rather too enthusiastically to be really Burkean) “as their spiritual forebear” (81). In Burke’s version, 1688 was “a sort of defensive war” by the nation, changing not the Constitution but only a king (79). This typifies Burke’s kalam: return to the wisdom and experience of ancestors is his refrain, reminding citizens, moderating their “present-mindedness and narrow focus” (86).

Abraham Lincoln invokes not so much the past—after all, the past includes a dangerous if necessary compromise with slaveowners—but the present seen through a sharply-focused, critical lens. Unlike public nuisances or habitual contemners, Lincoln understands “that any speaker who would induce a people to hold a critical opinion of itself must first induce it to trust and have a good opinion of himself,” which it will not have unless convinced that he has a good opinion of them. “He flatters the people and gains their trust, not by catering to their present noncritical opinions of themselves and their affairs, but by bringing them with him, as equals somehow, into the problem of public opinion as such. He takes them into his confidence and makes them his partners in seeking a solution for the problem of popular government. And in this he succeeds. Not the least of Lincoln’s extraordinary political achievements is his success in making general an awareness of the problem of public opinion—his nurturing of an opinion about the signal importance of opinion. A greater achievement, yet impossible without the first, is his persuading many American people to criticize and repudiate the many base opinions about political right and prudence that their base flatterers would have them basely cling to. His kalam is directed against the enemy within.” (90)  Like Burke, Lincoln points back to Americans’ heritage, the founding principles of their Declaration of Independence, as their own. Not incidentally, he points to himself as a true friend of ‘their own.’ “To be sure, the revolution’s central proposition—the capability of a people to govern themselves—can no longer be treated as a matter of doubt. Its truth has been demonstrated in practice; the once ‘undecided experiment’ is now understood to be a success. Yet the work remains strikingly incomplete. Bereft of its ‘noble ally,’ a complementary moral revolution, the grander goal of ‘our political revolution of ’76’ still lies beyond reach. The envisioned universal liberty of humankind demands not only the release of ‘every son of earth’ from the oppressor’s grip but also the breaking of the fiercer bondage of reason to human appetite and passion.” (99). The Old Testament of the Fathers precedes the New Testament, the new baptism, the new birth of freedom “Perhaps the most sublime accomplishment of Lincoln’s kalam is the way he reshapes the debate raging over the extension of slavery in the western territories into a debate over the moral foundations of popular government. In that political world of antebellum America, so rife with political theologians and theological politicians, Lincoln succeeds in avoiding the excesses of each. He neither mistakes himself for the appointed agent of the Lord of Hosts [e.g. John Brown] nor fails into the idolatry of treating the voice of the majority as the voice of God [e.g. Stephen Douglas]. By insisting on making the Declaration of Independence and its principle of self-government animated by equal natural rights the central point of reference, Lincoln is able to occupy a higher but still emphatically political ground.” (102) Slavery, immune to ballots, succumbed to bullets—but crucially, also to the reminder of the reason for the Founders’ bullets, without which ballots would be ineffective.

Tocqueville defends freedom against obeisance to popular sovereignty, but in a different way. Democracy (by which he means social, not natural, equality) can make the individual seem too small, too weak, too isolated. Neglected, democracy recapitulates the atomism of Hobbesian subjection and invites the return of the despotism that imposed it. The French Revolution poses a different problem than the American Revolution. The French Revolution was an act of “truly heroic folly,” and the actors bear no resemblance to “any Frenchman we know,” several decades later (123-124). The very success of the revolution has diminished its inheritors, prey now to administrators and economists. “The self-imposed diminution of mankind, abetted by authorities intent on power for themselves and cozy slumber for the rest, bodes a world dishonorable to the species and fatal to its liberties” (128). Unlike Lincoln, who must humble some of his countrymen, Tocqueville needs to rehabilitate the pride of the French.

Lerner ends with his own, Lincolnian, critique of contemporary conservatism, which “adamantly opposes theory” (133). A statesman’s “quiet allusion to notions of right and perfection that transcend merely national and historic bounds” (133) can raise a people above the pettiness of modern life—the very thing conservatives rightly deplore. Lerner thus quietly points to the need of philosophy in the city, and the inadequacy of its attempted replacement by an historicism valorizing either past or future.

 

The Pangle trilogy offers a sweeping yet sharply focused overview of the American regime—its philosophic origins, its educational foundations, and its moral character.

The Spirit of Modern Republicanism complements not only its successors but its predecessor, Professor Pangle’s justly and widely praised first book, Montesquieu’s Spirit of Liberalism. Because “the culture of the modern West is, in large measure, the result of theory and theorizing” (1), an examination of, perhaps, the two most sober modern philosophers, Montesquieu and Locke, can enlightensmodern political practice.

If the regime built by the American Founders has three main pillars—nature or “Nature’s God,” property, and “the dignity of the individual as rational human being, parent, and citizen” (2)—Locke provides its fully integrated blueprint. Although “the Founders did often seek to portray themselves and their ‘project’ as a kind of culmination of Western civilization,” they also “expressed awareness of their political modernism” (8). (Could ‘modernism’ mean the culmination of Western civilization to the Founders?) Their “emphatic appeal to the God of Nature rather than to the God of Scripture” (24) underlines this modernity. While we their heirs need the massive erudition of Paul Rahe to see the difference between republics ancient and modern, Publius as it were lived that distinction, feeling the tension between the need of security and the classical republican virtues of political liberty, participation, and “hornet-like militarism” (46). Hannah Arendt and J. G. A. Pocock may or may not see the distinction, but they do not clearly present the Founders’ careful recalibrating of the balance among the elements.

Pangle criticizes the Founders for failing to give due weight to the classical idea of friendship, although it is not clear that the peroration of the Declaration of Independence, the collaboration of Jefferson and Madison, and the correspondence of Jefferson and Adams do not afford rich evidence of some sort of friendship at war, work, and play among the Founders. Nonetheless, he shows that the Founders encouraged citizens’ industriousness, utilitarianism, and productivity—commercial virtues, not so much the superb and martial virtues that characterized the ancient republic. A basic and radical egalitarianism, resulting in consent-based representative government securing natural rights, replaces the more recently-conceived polity of classical-Christian virtues. “It would seem that the most theoretically minded of the Framers followed Locke in at least the following decisive respect. They tried to find the surest ground of human security and dignity in a natural, competitive self-assertion: in an individualism that is properly regulated, not so much by deference to tradition and custom, not so much by ‘sentiment’ and conscience, as by reason dominating passion and sentiment through law that expresses indirect—but radical—popular sovereignty.” (127) Does this, Pangle asks, compel the Founders “reluctantly or unwittingly, to subordinate the high in mankind, as they conceive it, to the low” (127)? (One might of course reply that all political regimes, excepting the imagined regime of philosopher-kings or the anticipated rule of the returned God, subordinate the high in mankind to the low.)

In his thirteenth chapter, Pangle turns to the heart of Locke’s political teaching: the space between Locke’s first and second treatises, a space properly filled by the prudent thoughts of Locke’s careful reader. Such a reader Pangle most assuredly is. It is in the exegesis of Locke that Pangle’s firm intellectual finesse comes forth most tellingly. The number thirteen comports symbolically with a certain religious heterodoxy and, sure enough, here Pangle considers Locke’s critique of Robert Filmer, “a masterpiece of forbidding boredom” (137), as an indirect commentary on the Bible. To put it in a phrase (which Locke deliberately never does), Locke replaces obedience with consent, authoritative patriarchy with rational contract. Consent exists between and among humans; one does not consent to the commands of the omniscient and omnipotent God. “Is there any way in which ‘natural freedom and equality’ can be said to express an authentically biblical conception of man?” Pangle asks (139), as he points instead to Hobbes while moving toward Locke’s discussion of property. The right to property sanctions the enterprise of acquisition, a milder Machiavellianism, which resides somewhere due south of a reasonable Christianity. “Locke substitutes for God’s ownership of man the ownership of each individual by himself” (160). Human government replaces the charitable Church at the head of political society (without eradicating it from civil society, as the more radical Enlighteners were wont to do), protecting the property rights that enrich public and private charity, helping to make the widow’s mite become the widow’s endowment.

Lockean morality shares Aristotle’s eudaimonism, but is much simpler, founded upon self-evident perceptions of pleasure and pain. As seen in the scarcity of the state of nature, Nature’s God gives his creatures the most meager materials out of which they “must construct… a rational psychological order and objective rules of social behavior” (181). This is the objectivism of mental abstractions, rather like geometrical forms; no more than Kant does Locke claim to know essences. We know only abstractions, from which we deduce laws, the first of which, as in Hobbes, is the summum malum, the fear of violent death—a master passion rather than a master thought. Virtue and vice derive not from some soul hierarchy but from praise and blame, both founded upon self-preservative passion—as is “admitted, quietly, by the old philosophers themselves (93), in Locke’s opinion. In this sense, a Lockean founding does amount to the culmination of Western thought, as distinguished from Western belief. “The great difference between Locke’s situation and that of Socrates and Plato would appear, then, to be that Locke lives under the dispensation of a religion that is hospitable to reason and philosophy. Or is the difference not rather this: that Christianity, while it is not, nevertheless can be made more hospitable? Is the difference between Locke’s and Socrates’ situation not that Locke is more politic, a greater political philosopher—that he vastly surpasses the ancients in his understanding of how to manipulate and transform popular and priestly religion so as to open it to enlightenment and rationality?” (196) Perhaps: but Pangle also faults Locke for precisely the thing Christianity and Judaism most firmly address, the need to come to terms with the spirited or ‘thumotic’ aspect of the human soul. Pangle sees that Rousseau and Nietzsche fill this need by attempting to ennoble man. (The ‘bourgeois’ moderns want to ‘tame the prince’; the anti-‘bourgeois’ moderns want to ennoble him, sometimes (e.g. Marx) when ‘the prince’ is the people. Machiavelli smiles at all of them, preferring to teach his students to use the man, use the beast, use the lion, use the fox.

Reason does not rule so much as it regulates or intelligently channels the passions. The fox alerts the lion. Such instrumental reason seems incongruent with Locke’s own life, Pangle contends. “[O]ne cannot help but feel that Locke has mysteriously left out of his account of human action his own action as a philosopher” and his own civic-mindedness (269). In a sense, Locke’s famous individualism is not strong enough; it is among the ancients that the philosopher exhibits “a capacity to stand alone” (273). Socialized rationality or utility will not cultivate such character. Only in dialogue with “moral and religious authorities,” Pangle suggests, “can the philosopher demonstrate, to himself above all, why it is proper, why it is right, why it is just, that he devotes himself to a life of uncompromising thought” (274). A too-reasonable Christianity cannot serve as such a dialogic partner, although it will not attempt to interfere with such dialogic partnerships. It is too ready to greet the philosopher with vacuous affability. Jerusalem and Athens should not add up to Miami Beach. (Fortunately for philosophy and Christianity, they do not; “faith retains a stubborn, inexpungable core of resistance to the victory of modern rationalism” [216]).

In conclusion, Pangle writes, “we may rightly assert that what distinguishes American patriotism, in the sense of setting it apart from and above most previous forms of patriotism, is the sternness of its challenge to the minds of citizens old and young. American life does not impose moral tests as harsh as those imposed by earlier, and in many ways nobler, republics; it does not require as frequent or as regular sacrifices of life, property, private liberty, and ease; but it calls each and all of us to an intellectual probity, to an education in the great texts of political philosophy, to a quest for self-knowledge as a people, that is perhaps unprecedented.” (279) With this, Pangle turns to American education.

What if leading intellectuals in commercial republics reject Locke? What if natural right, the state of nature, the social contract, even Kant’s categorical imperative, no longer command reasoned assent? Pangle addresses this problem in The Ennobling of Democracy. Modern higher education in many American universities is now (notoriously) dominated by doctrines collectively known as ‘postmodern.’ ‘Postmodern,’ he writes, means “the state of being entangled in modernity [i.e., “trust or faith in scientific reason” as an authority, not merely as an instrument], as something from which we cannot escape but in which we can no longer put, for find, faith” (3). This does not mean that postmodern thinkers have no faith. On the contrary, they are very often apostles of “philosophic dogmatism” (5).

Pangle readily agrees with postmodernists in finding modern or Enlightenment rationalism inadequate. To remedy this, he points readers not to the intenser Machiavellianism of today but to “the rationalism of Socrates” (6). “By reappropriating classical civic rationalism, we may be afforded a framework that integrates the politically most significant discoveries of modern rationalism into a conception of humanity that does justice to the whole range of the human problem  and the human potential, in a way and to a degree never achieved by modern rationalism” (7). Classical rationalism considers the common good, conspicuously absent from the individualism of many of the moderns and the anarcho-communalism of the postmoderns.

Pangle refers to Machiavelli in his book, but not too often. It is useful to recall the radicalism of the Florentine’s project. In The Prince, Machiavelli advises: Do not be virtuous; do not be vicious; use your virtues; use your vices. Do not be a human or a beast; use the human, use the bestial. Use fox and lion, each according to your own ‘necessity.’ Pull back from all those things by which men define themselves—station, beliefs, thoughts, qualities—and put them to ‘your’ use.

Who or what is this new ‘you’? Evidently he is not the spirit of the Prince of Peace, whose lukewarm friends and hot enemies imperil those who imitate His example. The Prince of War, the man of hot, thumoerotic passion, will for the first time inspire, or rather inspirit, and army of followers who will remain equally hot, equally loyal to the new Prince, even as they may attempt to rebel against him.

The ‘ennobling’ of this new prince, begun by Rousseau and continued by a train of earnest Germans, spiritedly rejects the tamed new prince of Montaigne, Locke, Montesquieu. In so doing, Kant also nobly and ‘modernly’ rejects the eudaemonism, the orientation toward the good, that characterizes classical rationalism. He hopes to convert Machiavellian libido dominandi into the lofty spirit of the noumenal, which—after the ignoble concatenation of phenomena called ‘History’ has done its dirty work—will fortuitiously deposit the reins of government into the immaculate hands of the noumenalists. Meanwhile, “to make happiness our standard is… to surrender our humanity, our freedom and rationality, to… deterministic and historical or merely subjective [i.e., psychological] forces.” “Now,” Pangle asks, “is this true” (12)? He doubts it. In so doubting, he turns first to the latest manifestation of this project, postmodernism.

Among postmoderns, Jean-François Lyotard proves a useful beginning specimen, precisely because he sees the modern core of postmodernism. Postmodernism rebels against Hegelian transcendentalism, a modern rationalism culminating in a (worldly) metaphysic, which in turn encourages dangerous political ‘totalitarianism.’ Postmoderns seek the intensity of existence, an openness to ‘the divine’ nonrationalistically glimpsed. But in so saying, Lyotard refers readers to Longinus on “the sublime.” Sublimity, Longinus says, cannot be maintained unless it “arouses, in and with elevation, sustained critical wonder and rational thought” (28). Lyotard does not follow Longinus down the classical-philosophic path “because his unquestioned historicism convinces him that classical rationalism is but the first step on the way to [Hegelian] life-destroying finality” or “the end of history” (29).

Heidegger takes another, for more impressive historicist stab at overthrowing modernity. If the scientist can be brought to see that his knowledge is within himself—a fallible, mysterious, ‘perspectival’ being—then a neo-religious sense of “awe or dread” at the technological power wielded by this questionable being may free man from his self-bewitchment (38-39). Heidegger is not the first German to look to the East for arms against the monotheistic, rationalist West; one need only recall Schopenhauer’s Fourfold Root or Nietzsche’s esteem for the Laws of Manu. But Heidegger is the first German philosopher who claims that philosophy is finished without having reached any grand culmination, as in Hegel. Unfortunately, Heidegger and his followers (including Richard Rorty, who seeks to tame the Heideggerian prince by yoking him to the Deweyan ox) “appear to have no experience of… Socratic political philosophizing,” whereby science “stands or falls with a relentless dialectical cross-examination of our opinions as to the just” (50). Postmodernism reproduces the thumotic spirit of politics (and sometimes the thumocratic spirit of tyranny) without the governing spirit of philosophizing logos—to say nothing of the governing spirit of Christian Logos.

A tamed Heideggerianism may have an unfortunate practical result: “One possible version of European unity that hovers before us on the horizon” is “a Swedish California from the Urals to the Atlantic,” a Shower Curtain, “administered by a bloodless bureaucratic Areopagus” staffed by listless Last Persons (81). Pangle rejects the Nietzschean ‘cure’ for such anemia as insufficiently guarded against fascism, turning instead to the not-so-Lockean liberalism of Montesquieu. Montesquieu’s thought intersects with the “three reservoirs of human depth—love of country, religion, and art” seen in the newly liberated nations of central and eastern Europe (87). If “the womb of human nobility is reverence” (88), the reconstitution of liberalism may find there resources foolishly and hastily discarded by the older commercial republics.

In so seeking, the new liberals would rethink the liberal understanding of rights. Rights as mere commitments, willed cultural artifacts, depend upon the most ‘tyrannical’ or arbitrary aspect of the soul. To be republican and self-governing, “republican self-government” (43) had better not sing of the triumph of the will, ‘bourgeois’ or ‘noble.’ To govern oneself, as Lincoln saw, popular sovereignty needs principles beyond itself. “To what extent does the republicanism of the Founders declare its independence from classical republicanism, and to what extend does it still hold in reserve a sustaining, if tenuous lifeline anchored in that ancient vision” (102)?

To the ancients, “freedom in the republican sense entails some meaningful degree of self-rule” (106), the rule of the active citizen, ruling and being ruled in turn in accordance with isonomia. (‘Being ruled’ is to “know how to obey—not as a slave, under compulsion, but as a free citizen, animated by an inner and voluntary obedience” [106]). Inner and voluntary obedience at its best is prudent, a teaching Adams and Jefferson restate when they write of natural aristocracy (107), “qualified by the principle of popular consent” (108). What Adams and Jefferson cannot invoke, as the classical republicans would, is civil religion. But they did see around them a prophetic religion whose sects could be brought to tolerate one another and whose convictions could lend what Washington called “indispensable supports” to morality and virtue. (There are, as Washington saw, some souls that can sustain virtue without religious support; the classics understood philosophy as a way of self-governing life that includes a careful refusal to raise questions indiscriminately about the foundations of the city’s laws. To readers modern and postmodern, Pangle offers a tantalizing glimpse at this philosophic life, and of the rebirth of classical rhetoric that it would entail. On this last point, as we have seen, Lerner gives an account of modern examples similar in principle but ampler.)

To the moderns, following Machiavelli, natural right becomes natural rights: security, liberty, and the pursuit of well-defined happiness. Prudence becomes calculation; duty becomes mutual self-defense of self-interest narrowly conceived. Some moderns, however, propose what amounts to a significant widening of citizenship rights. Precisely by liberating the “reasonable, and thus natural, love of gain,” Locke and Montesquieu would enable families (not only individuals) to acquire the necessary economic basis for citizen participation, sharply restricted in antiquity (142). The right to the fruits of one’s own labor—one of the moral scourges of Lincoln’s rhetoric against slavery—significantly and effectively widens the class of citizens.

In the United States, the Founders did not provide for the education of citizens in the federal constitution, although they did thereby provide a structure for the exercise and refinement of citizens’ virtue. Such men as Jefferson, James Wilson, Washington, Benjamin Rush, and Noah Webster moved to establish institutions of civic education In doing so, “they tended to return again and again to two sources for guidance and inspiration: the classical republics and Protestant Christianity” (151). No attempt to reconstitute the ancient polis, or to constitute a “Christian Sparta,” could now fulfill the classical criterion, prudence. Pangle turns to a discussion of civic-educational possibilities today.

He contrasts classical civic education with Locke’s new, ‘privatized’ education of the gentry, which aims at “an enlightened self-interest grounded in rational self-control” (167). Benjamin Franklin, so Lockean in nearly every way, re-‘publicizes’ education; in his academies students will learn rhetoric again, but this time it will be the journalistic rhetoric of which his own was colonial America’s best-remembered example. Jefferson also commends a public-spirited education. “The specific civic spirit aimed at by Jefferson and other educational theorists among the founding generation involved, of course, both a passionate patriotism and a sense of fraternity or solidarity with fellow citizens in past and future generations, as well as the present one; but both the patriotism and the fraternity were of a new sort, deeply plated in the soil of personal and property right of individuals. Love of country was to be love, not simply of the land and people and traditions, but love of the carefully articulated principles of political theory Americans drew from Locke and Montesquieu, mingled with reverence for the heroes who were most clearly dedicated to those specific principles. Care for one’s fellow citizens was to express, not so much selflessness  or even self-transcendence, as the rational understanding that the rights of each depended on the rights of all. (174)

As one of the most notable features of American public education, particularly as conceived by Emma Willard in accordance with Rush’s principles (and Jefferson’s), was the primary education of boys and girls by women functioning as “moral teachers and exemplars” (179). In this sense the equal rights of the Declaration of Independence found their civic expression in relation to women very early on.

Despite the example of Jefferson’s university, American higher education, traditionally the province of male teachers, has fared less well than primary education (which it has often influenced only to corrupt with absurdities). For the reform of higher education and a return to the rational judgment of science, only a return of Socratic common sense and dialectic will do. Common sense reminds scientists of the humble origins of their investigations; dialectic prepares souls for glimpses of the underlying principles or assumptions of scientific thinking. Teaching astronomy is a good, scientific thing, but what if the heavens are impermanent? To consider that question, the student needs cosmology. And to judge whether any science really is good, the scientist needs more than science. These are the concerns raised by Socrates and Heidegger alike. “But the profound meditations of Nietzsche and Heidegger will always be reduced to fashionable chatter unless and until their thought is grappled with at the high level at which they present it”—a level to be achieved only after “a liberal education in the Socratic spirit” (199)—a spirit that is really “Socratic eros” (218).

Lorraine Smith Pangle and Thomas L. Pangle return to the theme of American civic education in The Learning of Liberty. If Americans today are “uncertain” about “what the proper goals of education are” (6), they are only responding to “an outcome of unresolved tensions imbedded in the Founders’ own conceptions of education, of republicanism, and of human nature” (7).

The Founders had to rethink the European-style educations they had received. The Europe of hereditary nobility and established Christian churches habituated men to honor, hierarchy, and the glory of (some) men and God. At its best, as in the writings of Richard Hooker, this education defended young souls against fanaticisms religious and atheistic. At its worst, it did not. In the Founders’ time and place, Anglicanism had become entangled with Toryism. It was from the dissenting Protestants that the revolutionaries found encouragement. Benjamin Rush, for example, evinces a “somewhat incoherent” combination of Christianity and Enlightenment—not therefore bad, but not adequate, either. “The classics might well have criticized the Founders for too quickly and easily assimilating the moral to the expedient in their thinking; the Founders thereby failed to recognize the depth of the attachment that they still felt for nonutilitarian virtue and failed to ponder sufficiently the powerful hold that morality has on the human heart altogether. They thus never fully understood the problematic character of that attachment, and the consequent tendency of man’s moral feelings, when not cultivated by a careful education, to be alternately weak and dangerously explosive. The ancient philosopher might thus censure the Founders for having taken virtue a bit too much for granted, for having assumed that, at least in an attenuated form, it could always somehow be counted upon as a kind of necessary concomitant of political freedom.” (41) This criticism by the classics as voiced by the Pangles is hard to assess, in part because the circumstances in which morality will (or will not) take hold on the human heart have changed so dramatically. The large, modern, centralized state—even in the federal and republican form designed by the Founders—must have a profound effect on an individual citizen’s perception of responsibility, self-government, and ‘identity.’ Did the Founders take too much for granted, or were they doing rather well, given the ‘given’ of Machiavelli’s modern state?

With respect to the classics, the Pangles do unearth a valuable gem in the Roman Catholic writer Charles Rollin, whose The Method of Teaching and Studying in the Belles Lettres was translated into English in 1770 and praised by the ecumenical Dr. Franklin. It is Rollin who commends the study of Xenophon, among others, and it is fascinating to imagine a work such as the Memorabilia being read by college boys in colonial Pennsylvania.

The Pangles’ discussion of Lockean education brings out the increased attention to education Locke requires. If human minds are blank slates, with “practically no mental or spiritual natural inclinations which may serve as moral guidelines” (59), then early childhood education matters more than previous writers had thought. Moreover, human malleability opens new vistas of human perfectibility. “Human beings are by nature almost pure potential” (59), which is of course the Machiavellian point. But in America, this tamed Machiavellianism usually came in baptized form, as in John Witherspoon’s 1765 “Letter on Education.” Christian Lockeanism or Lockean Christianity did not neglect Lockean civility, a substitute for Christian humility and charity that opposes pride without having much recourse to God. With Franklin, American education took its decisive Baconian turn, but one that sought not “to leave classical education wholly behind,” particularly the classical emphasis on developing “the capacities appropriate to an economically independent and politically public-spirited member of society” (89). “Americans turned from the secondhand, ornamental or scholarly, study of classical texts to a reenactment—in a wholly new setting, and with a much-changed script—of a portion at least of the civic spirit those texts depicted” (89).

The greatest of the Founders who was also a great educator was Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was no mere modern ‘institutionalist,’ supposing that a nation of devils might prosper if well channeled. Not only does he provide, in Virginia, for civic education of ordinary citizens; not only does he cultivate the natural aristocrats. He also sees that in a society rid of unnatural aristocratic and monarchic hierarchies “one of the principal aims of the education of the few is to awaken in them a self-knowledge that will allow them to recognize their own dependence, for moral decency and dignity, and in the long run for liberty and security, on the checking and wary watchfulness of the less wise majority of their fellow citizens” (111). No Hegelian bureaucrats, no ‘progressive’ Brains Trusters, no ‘best and brightest’ technocrats could impress the Sage of Monticello. If Jefferson at times relies too much on citizen self-reliance and worries too little about citizen self-restraint, there are less optimistic Founders (his friend Madison among them) to correct him.

New England’s counterpart of Jefferson (in education if not in politics) was Noah Webster. While the Puritans’ The New England Primer, published in 1690, had impressed upon children a lively sense of their own mortality (“In in the Burying Place may see/ Graves shorter there than I”), Webster “makes more attempt to appeal to childhood’s delights” (135), replacing the Primer‘s Calvinist catechism with a “Moral Catechism” that attaches duty to self-interest in an eminently Washingtonian (and later, Lincolnian) manner. Supplementing the Moral Catechism, in 1790, was Webster’s “Federalist Catechism,” packed with wholesome lessons on the new Constitution and the republican government it established—”the first American civics text” (136). The Pangles caution that Webster’s texts serve Adeimantus better than Glaucon; the project of taming Puritan spiritedness inclines him too much to pedestrianism. Liberal education need not apply. Webster is no Virginian, perhaps because New England thumos inclined more to fanaticism than gentrification? As for Jefferson himself, he acknowledged in a letter to Adams that American self-reliance (and democracy, one might add) can go so far as to reject all education not quickly and easily appropriated by just about anyone.

The Pangles carefully discuss Jefferson’s University of Virginia. Academic freedom, yes; absolute academic freedom denigrating the very political foundation of academic freedom, republican government, no. Read the Tory, Clarendon, by all means, but not early on in college, before better principles (including those found in the Declaration of Independence and The Federalist) have rooted. If anything, Jefferson may have been too cautious, “run[ning] the risk of turning burning issues into dead dogma and leaving students with beliefs that are mere opinions” (173). Political sectarianism can easily recapitulate the errors of religious sectarianism.

The Pangles do not neglect non-school institutions that educate: the churches (recognized in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787), the law, political institutions, publishing, libraries. They also cite George Washington as an educator by example: the honored man who deserves honor by living honorably. Republican honor lacks the splendor of aristocratic honor, but it excites more gratitude by its attention to “the practical needs of the people” (244).

On moral education, the Pangles recur to Jefferson, whose notion of the “moral sense” must not be taken as facile confidence in uncultivated human nature. On the contrary, Jefferson warned against romantic novels as profoundly anti-erotic, “numbing… the soul to pleasures of a more rational or a more sublime nature,” leaving the reader “insensitive to the quiet happiness of marriage between good-hearted sensible partners” (326 no. 10). To the Jeffersonian duality of head and heart—a duality proposed, it might be added, in a letter to a married lady who needed a certain sort of encouragement—the Pangles add Aristotle’s tough-minded acknowledgment that virtue does not invariably yield personal happiness. This, I suspect, Jefferson knew well, but preferred not to discuss. Aristotle gives the comprehensive teaching.

The Pangles end their book by reconsidering Franklin in light of his early hero, Socrates. Franklin abandoned the practice of dialectic because it made him too many enemies. This illustrates the difference between most commercial-republican politicians and some philosophers. As for the Pangles, in this book they make more genial company than the harsher Socratics, without dissolving into the oceanic affability of Franklin.

 

Michael Zuckert’s Natural Rights and the New Republicanism is a major work of scholarship that should go a long way toward settling longstanding disputes concerning the philosophic character of modern republicanism. Along with Paul Rahe’s magisterial Republics Ancient and Modern (with which Zuckert engages in occasional friendly controversy), this book should stand as a permanent guidepost to those who seek to understand the dominant regime of our time.

The theme is “Locke’s coming to dominance within those traditions of Anglo-American thought that have come to be called Whig, and about the immense practical and theoretical significance of that event” (xv). With a degree of precision remarkable in one who ranges so widely Zuckert shows exactly how Locke’s philosophy differs from that of his predecessors, and how that philosophy decisively influenced thinkers who came after him.

Zuckert begins by defining the crucial difference between natural and conventional right. The difference is the essential difference between the English Bill of Rights and the American Declaration of Independence. “The English rights are very old, but they are not natural” (11); they are the ancient legal rights of Englishmen. American rights are natural, and bear a striking resemblance to those seen in Locke’s state of nature—that “rationalist mytho-poetic account of the human situation in general” (18).

Locke worked in an England wracked by civil war. The Reformation that had challenged the Christian Aristotelianism of the Roman Catholic Church left England without a clear solution to the theologico-political problem. New and radical doctrines “emerged and vied with each other for supremacy” throughout the seventeenth century (30). James I exercised his royal prerogative to enter the joust, with his Trew Law of Free Monarchies, published in 1598. King James argued for the divine right of kings by advancing a Protestant version of Aristotelian organicism. He held regicide to be not merely criminal but suicidal, the monarch being the head of the body politic. This argument by analogy instances the traditional Christian doctrine of similitudes, which holds that nature and politics are similarly ordered. (Procedurally, this resembles ‘anagogical’ Bible interpretation, whereby Old Testament persons and events are held to parallel and prefigure New Testament persons and events.)

The sobering implication of Jamesian divine right may be seen in James’s appropriation of Aristotle’s master-slave relationship to describe king-subject relations. This “amounted to a relegation of the community to the status of natural slaves” (38). Jamesian patriarchalism amounted to taking the intra-household relationship of parents to children described by Aristotle, ‘writing it large’ across the entirety of a modern state, and putting it uneasy relationship with another intra-household relationship Aristotle describes, the master-slave relationship. Further, the kind conceived as ‘a little God’ departs from Aristotle considerably, when God is conceived as a Creator. In this manner James ‘baptizes’ the philosopher without much regard to such Christian teachings as “the truth shall make you free.” (But evidently with more regard for such Pauline self-descriptions as slave-to-God, with the slave being the English subjects and the ‘God’ being the little king.) Whereas Catholic theologians had moderated the divine right of kings in deference to the diviner authority of the Pope, Protestant writers had no such worries and could wax more severe. Robert Filmer’s thought maximizes this severity by excommunicating the moderating influence of the heathen Aristotle and in effect nearly sweeping aside natural right altogether. After all, “God is not bound even by his own ordinations” (47), civil or natural.

The 1640s saw the rise of parliamentary contractarians, many of them Puritans. Contractarianism replaced the early parliamentary doctrine of “the ancient constitution,” whereby the conventional rights of English king, commons, and peers were said to exist for the sake of “the most comprehensive human good, complete virtue” (56). The dominance of Charles I from 1629 to 1640 “had proven the ancient constitution to be more or less a failure.” circumvented by the king by the grace of constitutionally granted prerogatives, notably the prerogative not to call Parliament into session. In the 1640s, parliamentary contractarians asserted sovereignty not on a natural-rights basis but on the foundation of divine right mitigated by the doctrine of the Fall. the American Founders’ Creator-God endows His human creatures with unalienable rights; John Milton’s Creator-God endows His human creatures with His image. Miltonian Christians derive whatever authority they have from their free obedience, their willingness to act in accordance with their true nature insofar as their fallen nature does not block them from so doing. More radically, according to Zuckert the Americans affirm the Lockean “decision to understand human mortality and needfulness not as a fallen or derivative quality but as the ground for foundation, as the real endowment supplied by the Creator” (92). This is unquestionably true of Hobbes, whose strictures on the summum malum are well known; it is less clear with respect to the Americans. It is an argument Zuckert promises to makever in a subsequent book.

The Stuart Restoration ended parliamentary dominance, temporarily. The controversies of the 1660s centered on a Parliament no longer seeking the one true Protestant politics. By the late 1670s, the Whigs appeared as an identifiable political group. The Whigs played the same role the Puritans had played, but they played it very differently; “more moderate and more rationalist modes of political thought” prevailed (97). But early Whig rationalism was not Lockean rationalism. Whig grandee the Earl of Shaftesbury was Locke’s patron, not his student. The early Whigs looked not to the young Locke, but to the well-established philosophic doctrines of Grotius, recognized by them as ‘the master of Whig thought.’ Grotius appeals to the laws of nature, of nations, and of God as standards beyond the positive law of any nation. Grotius reaches no right of revolution, but he does defend a right of resistance to tyrants.

Zuckert carefully explores Grotian political philosophy, beginning with an illuminating comparison of it with the Christian Aristotelianism of Thomas Aquinas. “Grotius paralleled the achievement of Thomas” by “develop[ing] a Protestant version of the law of nature” (119)—something Protestantism desperately needed, given its unstable tendency to run to uncompromising political extremes. The “entirely undoctrinaire” Grotius’s right to resistance distinguishes itself in its Aristotelian prudence and moderation: “The existence of a right to resistance and of limits on rulers are matters to be ascertained under the constitution or original contract or civil law of each individual polity” (124). Grotius’s natural law emphasizes voluntarism-contractarianism to an unprecedented degree.

Grotius defends natural law against the classical conventionalism of Carneades and the modern thumoerotic appeal of Machiavelli. In order to do so, he nees to show the link between natural and conventional right, describing in turn the jus naturale, the just gentium, and the just civile. According to Roman writers, men share the jus naturale with all animals, the jus gentium with all men, the jus civile with fellow citizens. Grotius redefines jus gentium as law among peoples, ‘international’ law, not as human commonality. Grotian jus gentium thus depends upon will, just as much as jus civile does. Contra Carneades and Machiavelli, human beings are naturally social and political animals; they will not only their individual self-interest but some conception of the common good. Further, human knowledge uniquely lends itself to formulation in speech and action in terms of laws. Humans generalize. Their laws are not akin to the laws of gravity or of instinct. Grotian contractarianism expresses man’s natural sociality. On the other hand, Grotius conspicuously fails to point beyond political and social contract to a transpolitical philosophic quest; on the ‘intellectual’ plane he leaves no place for philosophy as an ascent from the (very wide) ‘cave’ of the human world. He also narrows the classical understanding of justice by failing to commend Aristotelian distributive justice, only commutative justice. Grotius teaches that a coat belongs to the boy who owns it, not to the boy it fits. “Nonobligatory counsels do not qualify as law, even though they may point to what is right or good” (140). Obligation defines law. This is “a drastic shrinkage of natural law” (142). Right is the possession of its holder; here Grotius anticipates Lockean right-as-property. In so doing, he intends to defend natural law against its ‘realist’ critics, ancient and modern, who dismiss it as a castle in the air. The “shrinkage” makes convention no longer contrary to nature but “an obligation derived from nature” (147). “Compact, contract, promise, and related modes of voluntary engagement set the terms for, facilitate, and even make possible much of the social life of beings who are rational” (147). Therefore, “not the socially contentious and ever-interpretable Bible, nor a vague and indeterminate nature, but empirical or historical reality is the locus for searching out most authoritative obligations” (148).

At this point, Zuckert poises to remark the limitations of the less precise scholarship of those who run together Aristotle, Machiavelli, and the Whigs in order to assert the existence of an ‘Atlantic republican’ tradition embodied in Harrington. Zuckert shows that Shaftesbury and other Whigs were Grotians, not Harringtonians.

In his Questions Concerning the Law of Nature, Locke presents “a deep and thoroughgoing critique of the Grotian natural law doctrine” (187). “Where Grotius had daringly said that the law of nature would be even if there were no God, Locke, insists that God is simply indispensable to the law of nature” (188). Building on the reliable scholarship of the late Robert Horwitz and others, Zuckert then shows that Locke proceeds very tortuously but very far toward questioning the existence of God. Further, the more Grotius leans on voluntarism and nature together, the more dubious is his claim to find obligation in nature. Contra Grotius, the law of nature cannot be known from the natural inclinations of mankind. To Locke, by contrast, “not tradition, not innateness or inscription, not self-evident principles of reason, not natural inclinations—none of these constitutes a promulgation of the law of nature” (196), which is “the manifold of effective causes” (203). (If so, where does this leave the oft-asserted Lockeanism of the Declaration of Independence?)

Lockean natural law owes much of its real-world effectiveness to the scope it provides to human executive power, an ‘efficient cause’ that coordinates all the other efficient causes, making them more efficient. Nothing else so clearly links Locke to Machiavelli, and so separates him from Grotius. Executive power in Locke involves deterrence of enemies in the international ‘state of nature,’ a factor that “in effect repeals the proportionality requirement” seen in Thomistic writers and initially asserted by Locke himself. Locke’s state of nature is unsocial, therefore un-Grotian. Human beings are property whose owners and defenders are not gods or kings but themselves. Self-ownership is the true ground of Lockean natural rights. Natural rights are “unalienable,” not in the sense that one has no right to give them away but in the sense that one has that right: According to Locke, I may preserve my life or throw it away, because it is unalienably my property. As for slavery, I may choose to become a slave but I may also revoke my choice.

Labor, not contract, supplies the beginning of property. (If men had needed consent to gather acorns, they would have starved.) Labor resembles the executive power; when it comes to self-preservation, just do it. (One might add: If labor is property and human rights are property, then man is self-created; as Zuckert says, nature for Locke is so inchoate and niggardly that “the divine workmanship” may be said to lack “inherent character.” It “is not a ‘world'” [265].) The invention of money enriches man precisely because money cuts him loose from natural poverty. (Perhaps it is this ‘self-creating’ capacity of money that so exercises those who condemn usury.) The Lockean self essentially resembles the Machiavellian self: acquisitive, executive, utilitarian. As in Machiavelli, “the self must both be present and stand outside any, and therefore all, of its experiences” (281). “Self is emphatically not soul” (281). The self is a concatenation of pleasure and pain, but mostly it is property, “that form of consciousness that posits itself as owner and master of itself,” A Machiavellian “empty center of consciousness that contains all its appearances” (285). This Machiavellian core always threatens to break free of its ‘bourgeois’ shackles. “[T]he Lockean moral orientation is not so unrelievedly bourgeois as it is sometimes take to be” (318).

How could these radical subtleties possibly play into politics in the real world? It is hard to suppose that many political men made it very far down Locke’s labyrinthine pathways. Zuckert reminds his readers that few men had to. A 1709 Whig pamphlet, Vox Populi, Vox Dei, cribbed from Locke, became a bestseller. And of course there was Cato’s Letters in 1723, that brilliantly readable set of essays that manages to mount a spirited polemic in defense of “pacific but not pacifist” commercial republicanism, “public spirited but not public at core” (not unlike a Virginia gentleman, serving his country but longing for his plantation), “egalitarian but not leveling” (319). Cato makes Locke even more immediately and popularly a voice for human freedom.

The Americans partake of Locke, deeply. They remain something more than Lockeans, still attached, to some degree, to the classics and to the Bible. Most of all, they leave room for the prudent implementation of the classics and Biblical principles by citizens not entirely captivated by Locke. These books show how that can be done in academic life.

For more than a century, what’s called ‘liberalism’ in the United States consists of an overlay of ‘German’ or historicist ideas on a natural-rights constitutionalism. Contemporary American liberalism is a theoretical and rhetorical justification of the regime of commercial republicanism, with a substantial, Bismarck-style ‘welfare state’ added. In theory usually and in practice almost always, this liberalism combines two elements. First, there is a respect for such core principles as the equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—which, in the original formulation, are held to be principles held to be universally valid, independent of political or social conventions. Second, there is a congruent set of political and social conventions (“inventions of prudence”), designed to secure the enjoyment of those principles in practice. These conventional agreements typically include the rule of law, culminating in a written constitution; a political economy regulated but not dictated by the national government; and a federal government characterized by the separation and balance of powers. American liberalism esteems self-government—government by consent understood as reasoned assent. The institutions this liberalism favors recognizes the sovereignty of the people, not the sovereignty of government.

More pertinently for present purposes, American liberalism asserts in its fundamental law certain civil rights intended to parallel and secure natural rights. The civil rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights, ranging from freedom of religion to federalism, give practicable legal form to universally valid but perpetually vulnerable natural rights.

American liberalism has been complicated if not rendered incoherent by an overlay of ‘German’ thought. The Hegelian concept of a ‘recognition’-driven historical dialectic—whether based upon class, race, or some other ‘identity’—exists in tension with natural right. German idealism goes beyond the prudential securing of natural rights, conceiving of political ideas as objects of achievement and construction. This constructivism lends itself to social activities defined as movements and to an ‘activist’ and bureaucratic government. In politics ‘from below’ and politics ‘from above,’ self-determination replaces self-government, very often replacing such moral and civic virtues as prudence and moderation with individual and group self-assertion. Utilitarianism, pragmatism, ‘class analysis’ forms of socialism, and nationalism number among these auto-determinist ideologies. All of them have influenced contemporary liberalism in complex ways.

This later form of liberalism may sharpen the tensions between ruler and ruled. American bureaucracy or ‘corporate liberalism’ has an ambivalent effect on citizens and liberal institutions. Statism or quasi-statism in a liberal setting very often secures rights but does so at the expense of the vigorous citizen participation genuine self-government requires. Statism threatens to make popular sovereignty very attenuated in practice, as acknowledged by many prominent historians and social scientists, including Daniel Rodgers, Robert H. Wiebe, David Plotke, Stephen Skowronek, and Samuel Huntington.   Hegelianized liberalism runs up against the Hobbesian paradox: really to secure equality, do we not need one ruler—or perhaps a well-trained few—to make the rest of us civilly and economically equal, and to keep us that way? If so, how secure are we against that one, or those few rulers? Can the Crolyean promise be kept? Can (faux-)Hamiltonian/ ‘monarchist’/neo-Hegelian means really secure ‘Jeffersonian’/popular/democratic/’Whiggish’ ends? And how will such ends transform commercial republicanism, if rights are reconceived as founded upon ‘History’ instead of nature?

 

Martin Luther King

King avails himself of many of he principles and practices of American liberalism. However, his thought changes its emphasis during the course of his career, in part responding to changing circumstances. In the 1950s he spoke and acted as if he expected his movement to bring the South to racial justice ‘Whiggishly,’ by bringing local citizens to solve local problems. By the early 1960s, he turned to the federal government and the nation at large (through skilled use of the news media) in order to force reforms upon white Southerners. (In this, he recapitulates the movement of American politics generally from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.) By the end of the decade, King sounded much more like a radical than a liberal, although it is fair to say that he never sounds illiberal, dictatorial.

Several of King’s major initiatives in the South had a distinctly liberal, even Whiggish, flavor. He demanded voting rights for blacks in order to get rid of the need for statist protection (TOH 198). After winning those rights, he spearheaded a voter registration drive (Garrow, 303). The Southern Christian Leadership Conference-sponsored citizenship schools (Garrow, 309) featured not only the political equivalent of ‘assertiveness training’ but self-criticism by blacks of habits unconducive to freedom (STF 173); self-criticism, insofar as it isn’t the phony, ultimately statist sort practiced in Maoist China, goes well beyond ‘German’ autodeterminism to the original idea of self-government. King engaged in forthright partisanship in defense of civil rights (TOH 303) and in coalition-building with other interest groups (e.g., “If the Negro Wins, Labor Wins,” TOH). His critique of the Vietnam War as a statist act of violence (TOH 233) belongs to the Whig tradition, as inflected by King’s own combination of Christian and Gandhian pacifism.

King repeatedly cites the Declaration of Independence (although he mistakenly supposed that Jefferson mean ‘all white men are created equal’ (WDWGFH 77). Not to be judged by the color one’s skin but by the content of one’s character is of course an excellent restatement of the core Jeffersonian thought. Against race prejudice, King cites Jefferson (and, behind Jefferson, Algernon Sidney) in declaring eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man: This means that prejudice interferes not only with the self-government of blacks but that of whites, as well (STL 11; TMOM 35).

In his much-neglected “An Appeal to the President of the United States for National Rededication to the Principles of the Emancipation Proclamation and for an Executive Order Prohibiting Segregation in the United States of America” (May 17, 1962), King cites the American liberal principle of equality before the law, connecting the current civil rights struggle to the principles of the Gettysburg Address and the Declaration, now to be more fully brought into practice—”a democratic heritage so painfully won” (MLKT 294). “Enforced segregation is but a new form of slavery—an enslavement of the human spirit and dignity rather than of the body”(MLKT 296). By the mid-1960s, however, King’s understanding of the Constitution is decidedly not Jeffersonian but Crolyean; he advocates use of the supreme law of the land and due process clauses to break state laws on segregation. In this document also holds up the example of Woodrow Wilson—a Crolyesque move, to be sure—as an example of presidential leadership (MLKT. 311-312).

This notwithstanding, King does not directly endorse ‘German’ liberalism in principle. Famously, in the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” King presents an old-fashioned American liberal account of the distinction between conventional and natural law. Conventional law is unjust if “not rooted in eternal law and natural law” (WWCW 82). Nonviolent resistance against an unjust conventional al asserts the Thomistic and Lockean right to revolution; King may very well have known that some writers link Whiggism to Thomism. Also in the Letter, King cities the liberal principle of toleration: “Unity has never meant uniformity. If it had, it would not have been possible for such dedicated democrats as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, a radical such as Thomas Paine and an autocrat such as Alexander Hamilton to lead a unified American Revolution”(WWCW 133). that is, in his most famous call for a kind of revolutionary and civil war on behalf of American liberal principles, King eschews political sectarianism and vanguardism, and ignores the historicism or ‘progressivism’ of ‘German’ liberalism.

It is in the means King advocates for fighting this war that he adds something new—although not necessarily something contradictory to—the American political repertoire. Nonviolent coercion is “a weapon unique in history”; “a sword that heals” (WWCW 26). This is in part the theme of Christian warfare—bringing not peace but the sword (STF 32, 67). But he adapts it for specific political purposes as well as spiritual ones. Nonviolent coercion requires a tough mind and a tender heart—the wisdom of serpents and the innocence of doves (STL 1). It is a politically savvy expression of agapic love, the love of redemptive goodwill that is neither erotic nor philiac/affectionate. The significance of nonviolent coercion in America is twofold. It is a means of asserting the right to revolution without the anachronistic means of an armed militia movement, or the self-destructive means of rioting, ‘urban guerrilla’ action, and so on. It is also, perhaps more importantly, potentially a way of solving the core problem of rights-based government, a problem no ethnic group has as much reason to see clearly as African-Americans. How to reconcile the protection of rights with the need for consent” If ‘consent’ means reasonable assent, there is no problem, in theory. But what if the majority of the people are unreasonable, prejudiced? Or what if they are reasonable, but do not assent to the protection of minority rights because they reasonably calculate that such assent might tear the society apart? This problem has been with us since the Founding. Nonviolent coercion depends upon mass support but not majority support. A program of nonviolent coercion can be well designed to swing majority support in its direction. Can nonviolent coercion be the practicable ‘missing link’ between secure enjoyment of rights and the need for majority consent?

King’s political Christianity is decisively influenced by the thought of Gandhi. Although much ink has been expended in showing the influence of Christianity (specifically, Quakerism) on Gandhi’s thought, such exercises are ethnocentric; Gandhi has had far more influence on Christianity than Christianity had on Gandhi. King’s theme of “soul force” overpowering physical force, thanks to “the ultimate morality of the universe” which, in the end, rewards righteous action (TOH 257), comes right out of Gandhian Hinduism.

This is where things get interesting. The theme of the progressive ‘ensoulment’ of the world is of course not only a Gandhian theme but a theme of German philosophy, of idealism, as mentioned above. The bigoted Alabama sheriff “Bull” Connor “didn’t know history. He knew a kind of physics that didn’t relate to the transphyics that we knew about” (TOH 281). This is Gandhian. It is also transcendentalist, and thus a theme of American ‘Germanism’ starting at its source, Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is likely that King came to German philosophy at Boston University, where he studied the Social Gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch, qualified it with the Christian Realism of Reinhold Niebuhr (both profoundly influenced by German thought) and also encountered Hegel—whose dialectic is explained in precisely the terms that would galvanize King’s attention: the master-slave relationship—as well as Marxism and ‘personalism’ or Christian Kantianism (Garrow 64).

Thus, indirectly King does indeed strike many characteristic chords of ‘Germanism.’ He does so more insistently or at least more openly in his later career. The call for a “revolution in values,” rejecting orientation in terms of things and embracing orientation in terms of persons (TOH 241) is a Kantian motif. The emphasis on “psychological freedom” or noumenalism goes with that call, while the demand that “the Negro must rise up with an affirmation f his Olympian manhood” (TOH 246) more nearly resembles such later philosophers in the German tradition as Marx and Nietzsche. (But was Nietzsche an advocate of nonviolence? Consider Nietzsche’s Aphorism 284 in Human, All too Human, “The Wanderer and His Shadow”: “And perhaps there will come a great day on which a nation distinguished for wars and victories and for the highest development of military discipline and thinking, and accustomed to make the heaviest sacrifices on behalf of these things, will cry of its own free will: ‘we shall shatter the sword’—and demolish its entire military machine down to its last foundations.”) King’s worries about technology—that our ends means have outrun our ends, that industrialism and automation are threats (TOH 211), are standard themes of German Romanticism, repackaged in King’s century by Heidegger. They are also quite Gandhian. In fact, the interplay between German philosophy and Hinduism dates at least to Schopenhauer’s The Fourfold Root and may be seen in Nietzsche, as well.

King consistently thinks in the ‘German’ terms of constructivist dialectic (as distinguished form the analytical dialectic of the Greeks). Nonviolent coercion for “social revolution” (Garrow 418) or “social transformation” (TOH 225), for “a change as far-reaching as the American revolution” in opposition to America’s “inner core of despotism” (TOC 17) seen in its persistent racism, depends upon a dialectic in action, a dialectic that exploits the ‘antithetic’ stupidity of a Bull Connor to achieve a desired ‘synthetic’ end. Further, the end itself will be a synthesis of capitalism and communism, the individual and society (TOH 251). This Hegelian constructivism parallels Gandhian/Hindu syncretism (as seen, for example, in King’s relaxed attitude toward Marxist allies, very much in accordance with Gandhi’s example).

Capitalism is materialistic and in King’s opinion tends toward atheism or the worship of the self (STF 25, STL 93). Communism is equally materialistic and atheistic, as well as relativist and tyrannical (STF 73-74). Their synthesis, seen in the social democracies of Scandinavia (Garrow 364), “a modified form of socialism” (STF. 382) enforcing “economic justice” (STF 367), is really a German-idealist ensoulment or progressivist spiritualization that subordinates material means for spiritual ends.

King thereby breaks with the older American liberalism, with its emphasis (seen in the tenth Federalist, in Jefferson’s writings, and elsewhere) on the broad definition of property advanced by Locke: property not only as external possessions but natural faculties. This is the core of self-government in Locke, and King is right to suspect it of materialism; Locke’s emphasis on human property clearly undermines tradition, theistic ideas of the world and indeed of the human mind itself, as rightfully the property of the Creator-God.

King’s revolution would both fulfill American liberalism, the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation, but ‘synthesize’ them into what he conceives as a much grander vision. Pacifism, for example, goes beyond the principles of the Declaration, as King says (STF 18). The only just war is nonviolent coercion. This war must be America’s firstly genuinely civil war, fought within civil society with ‘civil’ or nonviolent methods. It is, however, to be supplemented by the genuinely civil methods of public argument and political organizing. King opposed Jim Bevel’s unrealistic ambition of using nonviolent coercion to overthrow Alabama Governor George C. Wallace (Garrow Ch. 6). “Direct action is not a substitute for work in the courts and the halls of government” (WWBW 42). Nonviolent coercion is indeed coercive, and can too easily comport with decidedly uncivil discourse. Dr. King was an eminently prudent man. He made errors, but never descended to crankishness. Although theoretically problematic, King’s appropriations of disparate and even contradictory ideas were often fruitful in practice. He is easily the most politically successful American pacifist, and one of the most successful American social activists.

At the end of his career, King was increasingly radical, and quite isolated from the Progressive/New Deal type of liberalism seen in the Johnson Administration. Had he been granted a full lifespan, it is impossible to say where he would have taken his thought and his movement. It is reasonable to think that the American Left has missed him—a real link to a genuinely heroic past, and a real link to American religiosity.

 

Malcolm X

Malcolm X’s political thought is a moving target. An autodidact, but much smarter than most, his thought was still maturing when he was murdered. His father was a Garveyite, and Garveyism has a somewhat attenuated but still discernible connection to American liberalism; with its doctrines of self-help and race-consciousness, it might be described as an African-American Whiggism. The Whig theme of anti-statism sounds early in the Autobiography: “If ever a state social agency destroyed a family, it destroyed ours…. [T]hey looked at us as numbers and not as human beings.” (A 22)  This succinctly expresses opposition to a neo-Hobbesian strategy of equality through atomization, and might easily be quoted in a polemic by some latter-day Jeffersonian ‘conservative.’ The Garveyite advocacy of business ownership by blacks, for blacks, echoes the Whig esteem for the self-sufficient farmer (A 275). Malcolm X’s advice to foreign countries sounds much like some of Jefferson’s strictures on the menace posed by British international bankers: “Don’t escape from European colonialism only to become even more enslaved by deceitful, ‘friendly’ American dollarism” (MXS 77).

Malcolm X also has a strong notion of self-government, not merely self-determination. His account of the Nation of Islam’s way of curing men of heroin addiction well exemplifies this (A 260-261). An Islamic man must engage in “no lying or stealing, and no insubordination to civil authority, except on the grounds of religious obligation” (A 221); this is, if anything, more ‘conservative’ than Whiggism. Strict moral self-government translates into political self-government: “Whenever any group can vote in a bloc, and decide the outcome of elections, and it fails to do this, then that group is politically sick” (A 314)—no conflict with liberalism there. His advocacy, at some points, of black separation, as distinguished from the dominance-game of segregation and the hypocrisy of integration, mirrors Jeffersonianism exactly (a 246).

Overall, however, Malcolm X is a firmly anti-liberal thinker. M. S. Handler, author of the introduction to the Autobiography, calls him “a born aristocrat” (A ix), and truer words were never written. If there ever was a man of thumos in American public life, it was Malcolm X. He hadn’t a democratic bone in his body, and this traits remains constant throughout the course of many changes in his life. “I love too much to do battle,” he admits, rightly (A 205). And in a humorous moment: “I do believe that I might have made a good lawyer” (A 205)—lawyers being an aristocratic exception to American democracy, in Tocqueville’s just aperçu. Only a fool would deny that Malcolm X would have made a very good lawyer, indeed.

“More wives would keep their husbands if they realized their greatest urge is to be men” (A 92). “All women, by their nature, are fragile and weak; they are attracted to the male in whom they see strength” (A 93). Islam endorses, but does not bring him, this thumotic and masculine insight (A 226).

On the streets, “Red” followed a kind of aristocrat’s code. “For a hustler, in our sidewalk jungle, ‘face’ and ‘honor’ were important” (A 127). He lived and thought “like a predatory animal” (A 134)—more lion than fox, but not devoid of the fox. “Deep down, I actually believed that after living as humanly as possible, one should die violently” (A 138)—precisely the choice of the warrior-aristocrat, Achilles. (And, given Malcolm X’s wide reading, I should not be surprised if he knew that.) In prison, where he read Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche—critics of ‘Lockean liberalism,’ all—his nickname was “Satan,” a being of pure thumoerotic ‘negativity.’

His conversion to the Nation of Islam simply reversed the direction of these passions. Instead of demonizing himself, he demonized whites (A 163). Satan means ‘enemy’: “Our enemy is the white man” (A 257). At this stage he proposed a sort of revolutionary Mackinderism, or race-based Marxism: Whites are a minority, worldwide, and the Nation of Islam minority within the U. S. minority community could ignite a worldwide revolution (MXS 46; see also A 275). In describing Nation of Islam’s ‘Prophet’ Elijah Muhammad’s hypocrisy, he writes, “I could conceive death. I couldn’t conceive betrayal.” (A 305) Loyalty is the eroticism of the man of thumos.

The turn to a more traditional Islam seen in his trip to Mecca rechanneled his thumos yet again, although this time it also moderated it. Islam is the most thumotic of the Bible-based religions, exalting the warrior simply, and not only the ‘warrior of the spirit.’ “All honoring the same God Allah, all in turn giving equal honor to each other” (A 323, emphasis added). This is a step toward democracy, but it is a democracy couched in ‘aristocratic’ terms—pure ‘recognition,’ with no admixture of ‘bourgeois’ easygoingness. If racism is “psychological castration,” Islam re-masculinizes the world, bringing absolute loyalty and fraternity. It is therefore “the one religion that erases fromits society the race problem” (A 340). This re-masculinizing of the world opposes something fundamental in liberalism, the Lockean strand of which nearly begins with a critique of Filmer’s patriarchalism and, by implication, the patriarchy of the Biblical God. “Human rights!” he exclaims indignantly. “Respect as human beings! That’s what America’s black masses want.” (A 272). Could this dismissal of human rights, coupled with a pure ‘politics of recognition,’ ever be genuinely democratic? Is traditional Islam, with its sha’ria, likely to be democratized, commercialized, or republicanized?

After the widening and deepening of his Islamic faith diluted his racism, Malcolm X “was no less angry than I had been, but at the same time the true brotherhood I had seen in the Holy World had influenced me to recognize that anger can blind human vision” (A 375). I can make no confident guess about the possible fate of this extraordinary man, had he lived. I am willing to bet he would not be chairing Americans for Democratic Actions, People for the American Way, or some other progressive-liberal body. He surely would have attempted to channel the anger of young black men away from crime, drugs, and other means of self-destruction, aspects of life he knew firsthand far better than King did.

 

Concluding Brief Comparison

For most of his career, King publicly stayed within the confines of American liberalism, as it existed in his time. He harbored—perhaps since his graduate student days, perhaps later—radical misgivings about that liberalism, particularly with respect to its commercial character. As long as he did not put his misgivings front-and-center, his movement made remarkable progress, although it is not certain that it could have gone much farther. Would he have been able to think of a way out of the tension between statist liberalism and Whiggish (and Gandhian) localism and self-government generally? It is more likely that he would have become a revered elder statesman of the Left, unable to find a practical counter to the increasingly ‘Rightward’ tendency of the American population at large during the two decades after his murder. He would not have endorsed the violence of the Black Power movement, and in fact condemned it as late as 1967: “The weakness of Black Power is its failure to see that the black man needs the white man and the white man needs the black man” (WDWGFH 52). Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is no substitute for the Bible; “violence will not work” for American blacks (WDWGFH 56).

For much of his career, Malcolm X claimed that violence could work for American blacks, if in conjunction with a worldwide revolution of peoples of color. This strikes me as even less likely than King’s democratic socialism. Unlike King, Malcolm X could point to no concrete achievements other than the strengthening of the Nation of Islam and, at the end, the founding of his own breakaway sect. With maturing judgment, he might have been able to build a new organization, linking it with Islamic groups in other countries. The future of Islam in the United States will be fascinating to watch: How will it interact with commercial republicanism? Malcolm X might have played a major role in that collision.

 

Works Cited

Garrow, David J.: Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1986.

A: Malcolm X (with Alex Haley): The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove Press, 1965.

MLKT: Cain, Alfred E., ed.: A Martin Luther King Treasury. Yonkers: Educational Heritage, Inc., 1964.

MXS: George Breitman, ed.: Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1966.

STF: King, Jr., Martin Luther: Stride Toward Freedom. New York: Ballantine Books, 1961 [1958].

STL: King, Jr., Martin Luther: Strength to Love. New York: Harper and Row, 1963.

TMOM: King, Jr., Martin Luther: The Measure of Man. Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1968.

TOC: King, Jr., Martin Luther: The Trumpet of Conscience. New York: Harper and Row, 1967.

TOH: Washington, James Melvin, ed.: A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writing of Martin Luther King. San Francisco, HarperCollins, 1986.

WDWGFH: King, Jr., Martin Luther: Where Do We Go From Here? New York: Harper and Row, 1967.

WWCW: King, Jr., Martin Luther: Why We Can’t Wait. New York: New American Library, 1964.